Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Tease: The Future of Sex is Coming


filed under: Podcast: Future of Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment


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I’m headed to Europe today and thought I’d tease you for just a moment before boarding my plane with the future of sex.  It’s coming.  Here.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Sex Drives Tech Part #4479227: First Mobile Phone Novel Award Goes to Prostitute Love Story


filed under: Erotic Elite, We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Japan is home not only to some of the first erotic literature in narrative form (the classic pillow books written during the years 990-1000), but to the first mobile literature. The first mobile novel, Deep Love, a series of stories about a school girl prostitute, was published in Japan in 2003. This week, the first mobile novel award, out of 2,375 entries, has been presented to a “pure love story between a schoolgirl prostitute and a host club gigolo”:

Towa, the pen name of the author, received 1 million yen and the right to publish “Kurianesu,” her story about unlikely love.

“I received lots of advice from readers along the way and I’m sure the story would have been different if I had done it alone,” Towa said upon receiving her prize.

Writer Yuzuki Muroi praised Towa’s work and urged her to write more.

“Neither of the main characters are exactly types that society tends to admire, but the more you read about them, the more appeal they have. Characters are really important for novels. Even fiction needs a touch of reality to make it accessible to readers. I’d like to see more of the world this author creates,” Muroi said in a prepared statement.

(thanks, Warren, you techperv)

Monday, November 27, 2006

Body Hacks: [rootlock@mulabandha] man comeharder


filed under: Sex Hacks by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Don’t hate on Tantra just for its unfortunate aesthetics — or rather, the unfortunate aesthetics of some of the web designers of its Western devotees¹. As a technology of pleasure, Tantra has a lot to offer the determined orgasm engineer. Learning to modify one’s ‘unconscious’ physical responses is fundamental to both sex science and to yoga practice, and to that aim, mula bandha, the root lock, can be explored as a basic body hack suited for bodies of all kinds.

I’ve scoured the Tantric web so you don’t have to, and decided, rather than point to something overly obscure, to instead share this more timely (as in, written this year), in-the-field approach, found in the Indigo Lotus community at Tribe.net:

For those of you saying, “What the Hell is MULA BANDHA?” Mula means root and Bandha means lock. You engage the Mula Bandha by gently lifting up the pelvic floor from the perinium and drawing in and up on the lower abdominals (below the navel). It can be a gentle contraction, more like a sense of awareness and stability in the pelvic muscles or it can be a stronger engagement for heavy lifting or defying gravity. Mula Bandha helps stabilize the pelvis and supports the back, it also gets you in touch with your root and the Kundalini energy that resides at the base of the spine. You can strengthen your Mula Bandha with Kegal exercises. Gaining control of your pelvic muscles not only helps with bladder control, posture and strength, but can help to develop, maintain and control sexual energy.

Translation: Those muscles that spasm and flex when you come? You can train them. You can train them (and likewise, your orgasms) like any other muscle: for strength, flexibility, endurance… and you can even do it under your clothes. You can do it right now.

And as always, for extra credit: a long, thorough, perhaps obsessive (but well-done, really) essay on the Westernization of Tantric technologies and practices and their emergence in pop culture, by Michael Winn, here excerpted on the evolution of Western Tantric ‘gurus’:

Nik Douglas, who met Rajneesh in India before he was famous, told me his main recollection him was of a “nice professor type who wanted me to set him up with intellectual Jewish girls who would fuck”. This suggests an early stage of trying to reconcile his sexual and intellectual identities. Rajneesh was later touted as the “sex guru” by the media because he told his followers to have as much sex as they could possibly tolerate until they no longer desired it. This was his novel application of a traditional Tantric principle of using ordinary desire to obtain enlightenment.

[1]dear internet, please stop putting such terrible pastel photos next to every article on male multiple orgasm, okthxbye. Or I will force you to write your sex guides with a basic Unix shell command file open in another window and run your XXXML past the WC3 for compliance.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Mind-Controlled Vibrators


filed under: Do It for Science by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Hitachi, makers of the oft-adored “Cadillac of Vibrators” (pictured, and available for home delivery today), the Magic Wand, tease the ever-loving fuck out of the collective sex toy watching world by unveiling a technology that allows one to turn devices on and off with one’s mind.

There’s a bit of vibrator urban myth that goes like this: every few years, there’s a major panicked retail run on the Hitachi Magic Wand (full disclosure: this isn’t product placement, kids, I just happen to have been actually sexually hacked by this thing), as a result of a vague rumor that the folks at Hitachi, who have such a loyal following that they don’t even need to put photos of smiling women on the boxes, are about to pull the product. Stories swirl about of secret stockpiles of the Hitachis in Japan that will surely go for hundreds, thousands even, once Hitachi, literally, pulls the plug.

brainsbrainsbrains

So it’s not a tremendous shock that the company that brought us the Magic Wand (and, other useful things, too, I’m sure) isn’t going to market this new tech with any overtly smutty leanings. Us fans, of course, already have a mean case of the wheels turning over the possibilities for using our brainwaves for powering orgasms.

(Which, arguably, we’re already doing. But how hot is that CAT scan?)

Hitachi promises a consumer model available by 2011.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

ASSIGNMENT: Redesign 1000 Genders


filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

The project is called 1000 Tiny Sexes, but really, they’re talking about gender. That’s fine with me. No one has to take Women’s Studies 101 just to make good art (no matter what they told you in school).

Yes, unicorn can be a gender.

1000 Tiny Sexes. Submit a tiny sketch of a completely new gender. A gender mash-up. A gender collision. A gender beta release. No assembly required. Safety glasses recommended. All you need is a pencil and, maybe, a mirror. (Or a research partner or two or three.)

Submission guidelines excerpted below:

Want some food for recombinant gender art thought?

Kate Bornstein’s ‘Gender Aptitude Test’: “Would you like to know more about your own gender and how it’s been affecting your life? Just how freewheeling and open are you when it comes to the subject of gender and sexuality? Here’s a series of questions that will give you a good idea of exactily where you stand when it comes to gender.”

Intersex Society of North America: “devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.”

Wikipedia: Genderqueer: “Genderqueer is a gender identity. A genderqueer person is someone who identifies as a gender other than “man” or “woman,” or someone who identifies as neither, both, or some combination thereof. In relation to the gender binary (the view that there are only two genders), genderqueer people generally identify as more both/and or neither/nor, rather than either/or.”

transmissions, by Dean Spade, of makezine (no, not that one - his came first, O’Reilly): on bathroom uprising and the politics of biology, sex, surgery, and health.

Confluere: offering trans/genderqueer buttons. “Fuck Yr Gender” today.

keep looking »