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Monday, October 8, 2007

The Moaning Lisa: Arthacking the wii with 200 womens’ orgasms

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

Created by Matt Ganucheau, as presented at Arse Elektronika, orchestrated by Vienna-based art/tech rabblerousers monochrom (you remember them, from the Future of Sex “Sex Hacks” salon), video by sex hacker supreme, qDot.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

A Patch to “Cure” Low Sex Drive

filed under: Do It for Science, Sex Hacks by Irene Kaoru | 3 Comments

We love Irene Kaoru so much we’ve invited her to contribute to Sexerati. Be on the lookout for future pieces from her!

A new patch from Procter and Gamble has been announced, designed to cure women of their low sex drives. Sort of. The transdermal testosterone patch is called Intrinsa, and it will not, the BBC points out, be marketed as the “female Viagra” but rather will prescribed in the UK on a very limited basis and marketed as a solution for low sex drive experienced as a side effect of surgery.

This can be cautiously celebrated but raises about a thousand questions immediately.

All reports I’ve read emphasized that the drug will not be easy to get and really only for women who have experienced loss of desire after ovary removal. If, as P&G has claimed, millions of women are reporting “distress” over their lack of sexual desire, wouldn’t it make sense to make this patch as widely available as possible so that women could decide if they want it or not? After all, if the patch is the boon to frustrated women that it sounds like it could be, surely there are many women with low libidos who would welcome its effects. Perhaps it makes sense to keep the drug relatively under wraps because of some horrible side effects or potential for birth defects–something that needn’t be a concern when dealing with ovary-less women? But according to Australian researcher Susan Davis, director of research at the Jean Hailes Foundation in Melbourne, testosterone is quite safe, and any effects would cease “the moment you stop wearing the patch”. Testosterone therapy has already been available in Australia and Canada for a couple of years; perhaps the US will soon catch up.

The slowness with which the pharmaceutical industry has been able to provide female alternatives to the popular Viagra may betray a mixed institutional attitude toward the issue. On the one hand, a conservative government continues to fear and deny female sexuality, a conservative social climate gasps at the word “vagina”, and a recent much-discussed book claims that women simply don’t like sex as much as men do. (All I’ll say about that one right now: Pish bloody posh.) On the other hand, “sexual dysfunction” has now been diagnosed in more than 30 million American men and has become a multimillion-dollar business, and the pharmaceutical industry must be collectively drooling over the money it could rake in, if only it could come up with an equivalent for the other half of the species. Cultural prudery, conservative politics, or ignorance about women’s sexual needs aside, the potential for squeezing oodles of dollars out of women by targeting their sexual insecurities is a wet dream for companies like P&G.

What I wonder most is whether libido-boosting drugs and hormone therapy will become a positive or negative thing for women. What I wonder most is whether the current pharmaceutical focus on chemicals used to right bodily wrongs simply misses the bigger picture, and if, in the long term, it will leave women as cold as before and more confused. While male physical arousal is external, easily gauged and can be separated from emotional desire, female sexual arousal is not so easy to track, especially given that many women consider their sexual satisfaction on a continuum of intimacy and pleasure, rather than a binary “orgasm or no orgasm” manner. As noted by the Kinsley Institute, female sexual satisfaction and libido is often dependant on intimacy and emotional comfort with a partner, and convincing women via advertising blitz that they are dysfunctional and need to be medicated may in itself have a negative impact on how women see themselves and how they feel when they fuck. Surely some of those men buying Viagra would benefit from learning to explore their own physical satisfaction in more subtle ways, instead of believing that sexual success has something to do with being able to hammer nails with your penis and that sex itself consists only of putting a penis inside a vagina.

The thing that gives me pause about the slew of sex enhancing drugs available is the fear that the prevalence of such drugs will encourage more empty interactions and more physical insecurities, when instead, sex can be considered creative physical exploration and not just a penis in a vagina. A sex life aided by medication might potentially be a smarter, more fulfilled sex life, but not if the medication itself gives us an excuse to stop communicating and thinking. Perhaps the most forward-thinking sexuality is not the most chemically augmented, but the most open-minded.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

“She Chews, She Scores!”: The Next (Unneccesary) Thing in Birth Control Pills

filed under: Sex Hacks, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Lux Nightmare | 5 Comments

So I’m a very busy woman, right? And I know there are some days when I’m running down the street, cup of coffee (well, in my case, chai) in hand, when my birth control alarm goes off on my cell: and the first thing that comes to mind is, “Damn, if only I could chew my pill instead of just swallow it!”

Well, maybe not, but that seems to be the scenario that the makers of Femcon Fe, the world’s first chewable OCP, have in mind. Because apparently, the solution to a busy schedule is having a pill you can chew rather than swallow.

Now, personally, I would think that having to chew your pill would actually take more time out of your day (especially since you have drink 8 oz. of water after chewing the pill, to assure that all the residue gets into your system). But hey: I’m not going to argue that too hard, because having more options for birth control is always a good thing.

But, uh, can we get back into the labs and start working on that male pill? Or shot? Or something? Please?

[NB: For the curious, Femcon Fe is spearmint-flavored. That’s right: spearmint.]

[Ed.: in the interest of full disclosure of our editorial process…

…]

Thursday, February 15, 2007

The Future of Getting Sex Done

filed under: Podcast: Future of Sex, Sex Hacks by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

What’s worse than letting the workaday world get in the way of making time for sex? Letting the ways we manage our sex lives take more of our time than time spent having sex.

This week’s Future of Sex (appropriately, this week’s late Future of Sex) offers up a few simple suggestions for how to best get sex done, putting some of those tricks of the self-organization-scheme fetishists out there to a hotter purpose.

Click To Play

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Chronicle, All Up In Our Emerging Tech Business

filed under: Dating 2.0, Sex Hacks, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

There’s few things I can thank the San Francisco Chronicle for when it comes to increasing the value of the luxe side of my love life. The same could be said for O’Reilly Publishing, copyright-holder apparent to such things 2.0 — just no Sex Hacks there, and not too likely to extend Sexerati a Foo Camp invite any time soon (we’ll just never know what the smart kids do with their Segways come nightfall).

So it was like a love parade, a love commotion, a love-is-no-longer-a-battlefield this morning seeing the Chron’s front page, pointing to a pleasant, possible mashup of the mushiest kind:

Well, then — what do we heart most about Love 2.0 hitting the nigh-mainstream?

Aside from our ongoing coverage of the same since our inception?

Or that, before my morning coffee even had me ambling past a yellow newspaper box (like Bloglines, but it costs a quarter and there’s no del.icio.us links built-in), I had already seen Nick Douglas’s Twitter mock-protest about the Chron’s limp love-rage?

(And, oh! for the days when saying ‘the Chronicle‘ only set my heart a-flutter if it was likely a nod to some juicy thing on teacher/student relations in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and not my now-hometown rag.)

Or maybe it was that I could find an image of a newspaper box with the paper in question (thanks, bovinity!) — even though there’s one right behind me as I write this, I left my camera at my apartment — on Flickr in the number one search result for “Love 2.0″ ?

No, it’s just that we can so immediately, wirelessly, relatively anonymously wish you all the best, bluest, diagonally-lined, user-generated love, ever. Here’s hoping you keep yourself compliant and that your content doesn’t get scraped up too much in the process.

If it does?

Love comes calling with rounded corners today.

Maybe it all won’t hurt so much, now that it’s the future.

keep looking »