Vatican defends pope condoms stand, criticism mounts

The Vatican on Wednesday defended Pope Benedict's opposition to the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS as activists, doctors and politicians criticised it as unrealistic, unscientific and dangerous.

I can't believe this is still even an issue. Yeah, even for the Pope and the Catholic Church.

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How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX

Today’s teenagers are starring in the reality show of their own lives and doing all they can to make it as dramatic as possible.

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In today’s world of fast information and access to all areas, too many - particularly the young - are having to up the stakes to chase their particular dragon and get the high they crave.

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Monkeys Practice World's Oldest Profession

More evidence that other primates might not be so different from humans: after researchers taught seven capuchin monkeys to use currency, they soon paid for sex.

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For Better or Worse, Sex in Space Is Inevitable

Weddings in space could be right around the corner, and experts figure the inevitable cosmic consummation will be just around the next corner.

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Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High

But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

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In 2050, your lover may be a ... robot

Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades. And they do not mean simply, mechanical sex.

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"There will always be many millions of people who cannot make normal satisfactory relationships with humans, and for them the choice is not: 'would I prefer a relationship with a human or would I prefer a relationship with a robot?' -- the choice is no relationship at all or a relationship with a robot."

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Oral sex blamed for throat cancer rise

No one understands the precise reason for the increase, though experts suspect it's linked to changes in sexual practices that emerged in the 1960s and '70s. For example, oral sex is a known risk factor for HPV-related throat cancers, and studies have shown that people who have come of age since the 1950s are more likely to have engaged in oral sex than those who were born earlier.

What? I am going to have a hard time believing that humans rarely engaged in oral sex prior to the 1960's.

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LA obscenity case nauseates some potential jurors

Ira Isaacs readily admits he produced and sold movies depicting
bestiality and sexual activity involving feces and urine. The judge
warned potential jurors that the hours of fetish videos included
violence against women, and many of them said they don't want to serve
because watching would make them sick to their stomachs.

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"There's no question the stuff is disgusting," said Diamond, who has
spent much of his career representing pornographers. "The question is
should we throw people in jail for it?"

Um. No.

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Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex

How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think.

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Experts say sex abstinence program doesn't work

Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.

The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.

People are supposed to have sex, not abstain from it.

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Masturbation may prevent prostate cancer

Frequent masturbation may help men cut their risk of contracting prostate cancer, Australian researchers have found. It is believed that carcinogens may build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly, BBC News reported on Wednesday. The researchers surveyed more than 1,000 men who had developed prostate cancer, and 1,250 men who had not. They found that men who had ejaculated the most between the ages of 20 and 50 were the least likely to get cancer. Men who ejaculated more than five times each week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer.

Read more, then go masturbate.

Sperm From Skin Becoming a Reality?

In as little as 5 years, scientists may be able to grow eggs and sperm from ordinary body cells, an international consortium of scientists and ethicists announced in a consensus statement yesterday. The technological advance could be a boon for infertile couples as well as for research on reproduction, providing policymakers don't ban the tools, the group says.

Last year scientists announced that they had learned to turn back the clock on body cells (ScienceNOW, 20 November 2007). By inserting a select group of genes, they were able to convert skin cells into pluripotent stem cells (PSC)--cells capable of developing into any type of body tissue. This capability has opened up a whole new world of research--and it's brought closer to reality the possibility of generating embryos from gametes (i.e., sperm and eggs) grown in the lab, bypassing the need to collect oocytes from women.

Fascinating.

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Sex and Financial Risk Linked in Brain

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it's all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn't have to be sex - it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

"It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," Knutson said. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

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Unzip American Sexuality and What Do You Find? Tech

It turns out that Americans are not nearly as Puritanical, frightened, angry or perturbed as the religious groups and politicians waging the war on sex would have you believe.

We’re not even terribly bothered by the notion that technology has become an integral aspect of sexuality. In fact, "love and let love" is a much more widely held philosophy here than is generally assumed.

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Over and over again, Alexander's subjects told him that the internet had opened their eyes, dispelled their fears, given them new avenues for pleasure, and provided support as they figured out what they really wanted from sex.

Read more, then go have sex.

France's sordid housing crisis

Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the phrase you are looking for is contre services - when a room in an apartment is offered, sometimes "free", in exchange for services.

Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent - cleaning the apartment or washing clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property.

But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering on the perverse. "Sex twice a month," is one blunt demand. Another asks for someone "open in spirit and elsewhere".

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Sex for rent is the extreme end of an extreme problem which is catching swathes of France's most vulnerable people - the young and the poor - in its grip.

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Spitzer's E-Escort Plight Shows Workings of Prostitution 2.0

Archived copies of the site show it presented visitors with a menu of women, complete with photographs in which female bodies are on display, while their faces stay out-of-frame or are digitally obscured. The site ranks the prostitutes from one to seven using sparkling, animated gif diamonds. Hourly rates went according to the assigned ranking -- seven diamonds being the highest and most expensive.

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"For example ... the Emperors Club charged $1,000 per hour for a three-diamond prostitute and $3,100 per hour for a seven-diamond prostitute," the FBI said in an affidavit. "The web site offered the Emperors Club's most valued clients 'membership' in the 'Icon Club,' a status which allowed the clients to access restricted areas of the web site and permitted them to schedule appointments for illegal prostitution services with the most highly-ranked prostitutes whose fees started at $5,500 per hour."

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1 in 4 Teen Girls Has Sexual Disease

At least one in four teenage girls
nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million
teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group.

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Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring

The wiretap captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room, according to an affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan. The person briefed on the case and the law enforcement official identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat, today made a brief public appearance during which he apologized for his behavior, and described it as a “private matter.” He did not address his political future.

Of course the attention given to this idiotic move by Spitzer will be way out of proportion to it's actual importance.

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Internet Pushes Polyamory to Its 'Tipping Point'

Polyamory is just the kind of thing you'd expect in an era of love without borders, where time and distance no longer prevent us from finding true mates, and when no one has to live alone with their kink, desire, fantasy or love style -- because someone, somewhere shares it.

Read more. Love many.

Teen sex advice podcast gains popularity

The 28-year-old mother of three speaks from experience, and her video podcast, the Midwest Teen Sex Show, is attracting thousands of viewers.

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