Tag Archives: sex

Larry Craig and restroom etiquette

This week the ACLU decided to stick their oar in regarding the vexed question of whether Larry Craig should have been prosecuted for soliciting gay sex in a restroom stall in Minneapolis Airport. Their logic was interesting. There is apparently case law in Minnesota to say that one has an expectation of privacy when in a bathroom stall, even if the stall is in a public place.

Therefore, the ACLU argue, it is entirely legal to have gay sex in the stall of a public toilet in Minnesota, since you’re doing it in private. Therefore, they conclude, the police had no reason to charge Larry Craig with lewd conduct; he was merely expressing an interest in pursuing perfectly legal private toilet sex in a public restroom–or to use what I gather is the technical term preferred by enthusiasts, ‘cottaging’.

Now, I don’t know whether it will stand up in court (ho ho), but it seems to me that the expectation of privacy pretty much ends once you stick your hand under the partition and wave at the guy in the next stall. Larry Craig wasn’t being spied on; he drew attention to himself. The ACLU’s decision to support Craig seems strange; I can only assume that they are trying to be fairer than fair.

What I find more bizarre, though, is the claim from many right-wingers that liberals would all have been defending Larry Craig if he was a Democrat. Maybe I’m out of touch. Perhaps they’re right, and the ACLU are merely speaking for all liberals in defending the right to cottage.

Well, I’m going to leap out of the toilet stall here and now, and declare that as a liberal, I am not in favor of cottaging.

See, when I go to the bathroom, I have only one kind of job in mind. I just want to find a clean toilet, perform whatever regrettable business is required, wash my hands, and be out of there. I do not want to be solicited for sex by a politician, not even if it’s Barack Obama. In fact, if Dennis Kucinich’s wife snuck into the men’s room, I still wouldn’t be interested. When I’m looking out for Number One, or Number Two for that matter, I don’t want a conversation. I don’t to make eye contact, let alone any other kind of contact. In short, I do not want to know that the rest of humanity exists. I just want a quiet, private moment to myself.

And that’s under the best of circumstances; because if it’s an airport restroom, I’m not going to be feeling at my best. I am not going to be feeling sexy. Although I may be about to take a ride on a jumbo, I’m not going to be interested in yours. While I’m always excited to get a glimpse into a cockpit… You get the idea. In the airport, you can pretty much guarantee I’ll be tense, tired and irritable. Sex of any kind will be the last thing on my mind.

OK, so you’re a Republican and you want to pick up guys for anonymous sex? Go to a gay bar. If the lavatory stall thing is such big turn on, I’ve got a radical idea: hang around a lavatory stall at a gay bar. You’ll be far less likely to bother someone who doesn’t want to be bothered.

In fact, if there’s enough pent-up demand, someone will probably start an exclusive vacation resort that offers toilet stall bridal suites, perhaps with nice padded seats and a ventilation system that can dispense a range of exciting fragrances. But in the mean time, your local gay bar will have to do. Life is harsh.

See, it’s all about context. Things which are perhaps appropriate in one context, may not be appropriate in a different context. Just because it’s appropriate to lie naked in a harness and get fisted at a private S&M club, that doesn’t mean we have to consider it appropriate in other similarly exclusive venues, such as the NorthWest Airlines executive lounge in Lindbergh Terminal.

Context, OK?

Smarter people get less sex

From a neat blog posting summarizing some research on sex and intelligence:

By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.

The bar chart of results from a Wellesley college survey is amusing, with the percentage of students who are virgins ranging from 0% for the Art students, up to 83% for the Mathematics students.

The only mystery is why the figure for Computer Science students is only half that for Mathematics. My guess is that it’s because Wellesley is a female-only college, and female computer scientists can basically get on the Internet and find any number of desperate male computer scientists to hook up with.

Also:

…another revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!

So the hypothesis is that smarter people have a lower sex drive. Obviously there are going to be exceptions, however.

Summary: It’s bad

The American Psychological Association (APA) set up a task force to “examine and summarize the best psychological theory, research, and clinical experience addressing the sexualization of girls via media and other cultural messages”.

The report has now been published.

However, I note that there were no men on the task force, and apparently no men were invited to comment (according to the document). It seems statistically unlikely to me that all the experts in the field of media effects on children are female. If a task force made up entirely of men produced a report on (say) the effect of violent media on teenage boys, and took no comments from women, I suspect that the report’s credibility would be questioned. Will this report get the same reaction?

Public displays of affection

For our second day in Hamburg, rothko had arranged a German scrapbooking meetup. We got the bus into Harburg, then got onto the S-bahn to head into the city at around noon.

Just after we boarded the train, a young couple got on. I’d guess that they were in their 20s. He had short dark hair and looked as if he’d been awake for a couple of days; a slight sheen of sweat, disheveled clothes and a good dose of stubble. She was thin and tall, with red-streaked dark hair and various piercings. She was also clearly extremely drunk.

He sat down facing the same direction as us, one row ahead in the carriage. She swayed uneasily after him, dropped her bag on the seat in front of him along with a bottle of unspecified liquor, and then sat astride him, facing us. As the train started moving they began making out. After a few minutes she struggled with her belt and jeans for a while, and before long it was clear to everyone in the carriage that they were having sex.

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Jason Fortuny update

Ironic quote:

You are sending me direct contact information that is sensitive. I protect your privacy in the following ways: (1) I will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever; (2) I will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides e-mail in the regular course of business; and (3) Your information is stored behind network address translation and a software firewall.

That’s Jason Fortuny’s privacy policy, as stated on his web site before his prank.

At least one marriage has been ruined by the prank. I’m not going to name or link to the victim, for obvious reasons. Again, if you really want to know, read Fortuny’s web pages; he seems delighted, as it turns out it was someone who had thrown him out of an online community for previous anti-social behavior.

Lots of people seem to be focusing on a few of the victims who were married and cheating on their wives, like that justifies humiliating all the others.

Meanwhile, Fortuny has started scrubbing his contact details from his web site, removing references to past clients and employers, and deleting his résumé from the web. Perhaps he’s worked out that a reputation for hoaxing people and posting private e-mail to the web isn’t the best career move for a system administrator.

It also seems to me that Fortuny’s posting of sexually explicit photographs on the web places him squarely under 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements. Clearly he hasn’t complied with the law and obtained 100+ model release forms, and that could result in up to 5 years of jail time if the authorities choose to make an example of him.

I’ll end with another nice quote from his LiveJournal:

“I’m just going to quickly and quietly say that the refugees in New Orleans are human trash who don’t deserve to live.”

—Jason Fortuny

It’s nice to know the TrollJournal abuse team are so relaxed about the whole thing. Publishing public information may be grounds for dismissal, but linking to illegally published private information from your journal is just fine, apparently. If only I’d known, eh?

The asshole bar is raised again

A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.

The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.

Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.

You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.

There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.

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Waiter, there’s sex in my violence!

Let’s have a quick fact check here:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is rated M by the ESRB, meaning it is rated as unsuitable for anyone under the age of 17. The rating label notes “Strong Sexual Content”.

The game features a mission where you rescue a prostitute who is being raped and murdered by two johns. It allows you to have sex with bikini-wearing prostitutes in your car, accompanied by bouncing suspension, steamed-up windows and explicit sound effects. You can also kill the prostitutes with a chainsaw afterwards, if you so wish. Or, you can wander into a strip club, watch the dancers on stage, then go into the back room and pay money for a private lap dance, depicted in 3D polygons.

None of that was a problem for the ESRB when they issued an M rating. However, if you modify the game you can make it show a scene where two adult characters have fully clothed, completely consensual sex, with no money changing hands, no exploitation, and no violence.

That’s apparently a horrendously damaging image, which means the game should have been rated for people 1 year older—because the difference between an AO rating and an M rating is that AO is for 18 and older, whereas M is for 17 and older.

As a sidenote, 17 year olds in America can have actual sex with real human beings in 43 states in the nation; I’m assuming they can legally do it with the lights on, perhaps even after taking their clothes off.

One of the previous installments of GTA featured a length lesbian S&M scene. Meanwhile, the (reportedly awful) game BMX XXX features topless women riding BMX bikes while their breasts jiggle, and full nudity; it’s rated M. No problems there.

So those are the facts. Now the House of Representatives has voted, almost unanimously, for the FTC to investigate whether Rockstar Games deceitfully misled the ESRB in order to corrupt America’s 17 year olds, rather than only those 18 and up.

Well, that’s money well spent. Thank goodness we don’t have any more important problems that need attention.