Adjusting the contrast of an androgynous face makes it look feminine (high contrast) or masculine (low contrast).
- Mel Gibson
"It would take place in ancient Egypt, be performed completely in hieroglyphics, and consist of 117 minutes of a slave being beaten to death."
Mash-up made from Stephen Fry's audiobook readings. The scary, scary thing is that I know the original context of a lot of those samples. :(
[T]he results showed said it was possible to discover clues about what people were like simply from the music they liked.
Almost 38 percent of hip hop devotees and 29 percent of dance music fans were more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the last five years compared to just 1.5 percent of country music fans.
Not such a surprise, given that most people I've seen "dancing" to hip-hop are already having sex by some definitions, and a night out for a dance music fan involves a seething mass of drunk/drugged friends jumping up and down together in a darkened room. An opera fan, by contrast, will be sitting next to Great Aunt Millicent and watching a fat man in a penguin suit; that this is less likely to lead to a passionate encounter is actually something of a relief.
Research shows that the female brain naturally releases oxytocin after a 20-second hug. The embrace bonds the huggers and triggers the brain's trust circuits. So Brizendine advises, don't let a guy hug you unless you plan to trust him.
(Creepy.)
In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media. The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don’t have to. The waist is nipped, the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a "boob job" in "The Playmate Book" has to do with Miss April 1965, but, like hair coloring, breast enlargement underwent a change of meaning, and hence of design, in the seventies and eighties. At first, its purpose was to correct nature, and fool people into thinking that this was what nature made. But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice—a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates' breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward. Other features look equally doctored.
We are most likely a nation of sluts, engaging in frequent intercourse with a multitude of partners. The mere fact that none of it is remembered is no reason not to embrace it. Rather than clinging to puritanical sexual ideals, it is time that we as a nation opened our arms to the constant orgies of anonymous strangers that go on in every city and town across the country.
If I have kids, I'll give them stuff like "The Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping with Chicks" and "The Big Book of Bondage". They'll be so embarrassed they'll beg for a textbook about contraception...
Finally, we have the Ordinary flavored condom, which I think is the wild card here. Ordinary what? An ordinary condom? Latex flavor? If so, does that really count as a flavored condom? Or perhaps Ordinary means what we all really hope it means.
Well, not quite -- but:
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job -- including in the sex industry -- or lose her unemployment benefit.
Suicide: the philosophy of it, how to decide it's right for you, how to make it look like an accident; as well, of course, as how to actually do it...