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Believe It Or Not, One of the Best Sex Advice Columns is Brought to You By... Detroit

Brian Fairbanks — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:03:00 GMT

The Detroit Free Press has always been one of our favorite parts about the Motor City. It's only natural that their sex advice column would do what no other paper does-- actually have intelligent conversations, many of which don't necessarily pander to the readers who just want a giggle-ready piece of entertainment.

This week, the Press tackles real topics like Viagra for women, lopsided boobs, and lies and the lying liars who tell them...

The column is hosted by the great and amusing Isadora Alman, who wrote that book "Doing It: Real People Having Really Good Sex," which is hidden in your bookcase behind the Charles Dickens box set. She's a certified sexologist (I'd love to have been at that meeting) and has done some psychotherapy, which helps when people ask you questions like this (emphasis added):

Dear Isadora: Why can't the drug manufacturers find something that will work on women the way Viagra does on men? For that matter, do Viagra and the other pills like it ever work for women?
Answer: Viagra does seem to work for some women. The reason is that it sends blood to engorge the genitals. Where that creates an erection on men already feeling desire, for women it simply sends blood to the area, which can feel like arousal to some women, but doesn't for most. Viagra and its like do not affect desire in men either, just the ability to have sexual intercourse. Because most women always have that ability (excluding painful conditions such as vaginismus), creating desire is what's complicating the creation of a magic pill. For many more women than men, the desire for sex is bound up in relationship issues and beliefs about appropriate behavior, and there can be no magic pill to deal with those psychological factors.
Dear Isadora: Is there any way to tell for sure whether your partner is lying to you?Answer: For sure? No. There was a rumor that one could tell always when a certain politician was lying. It was whenever he moved his lips! In all other cases you have to rely on what you know of the person's record of truth-telling...
Dear Isadora: My daughter's breasts are beginning to grow and they are coming in lopsided. Are they likely to even out when she is through maturing? She is 11, by the way. Isn't that early?Answer: Young women are maturing much earlier these days. The average age for first menstruation in the 19th Century was around 16; now it is 12. Better nutrition is one probable cause. If you look carefully at your own body, you will see that things that come in pairs are not exactly equal. ...

What do we think about her view that, for women, "the desire for sex is bound up in relationship issues," etc.?

You can read her full responses to these questions here.

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Sloppy Seconds: Because Breast Milk is Cheaper Than Cow's Milk?

Emily Farris — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:33:00 GMT

HBO is developing a new show called "Women's Studies." And we all know what that means. [AfterEllen]

Author JG Ballard, perhaps best known for his book "Empire of the Sun" is dead at 78. [Yahoo!]

If Pulitzer Prize winners are being laid off, is there any hope for us? [Portfolio]

Tennis star Andy Roddick married his girlfriend Brooklyn Decker on Friday. [People]

Though we never had the fear ourselves, we've always understood why certain kids were afraid of the toilet. Now kids everywhere have even more reason to steer clear of the porcelain sucking machine after a three-year-old got her foot stuck in the handle of one (how that happens we don't know) and firefighters had to rescue her. [Telegraph]

Grey's Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo is preggers. [Us]

Food made with breast milk is all the rage these days. Maybe it has to do with the price of cow's milk going up? Anyway, the newest breast milk product is cheese. A recent art exhibit in London featured the product. [APP]

Related:

Which Would The Hipster Rather: Breast Milk Cupcakes vs. Cow Milk Cupcakes?

Breast Milk: To Suckle Or Not To Suckle

[Image]

Jack Kerouac's New Year's Resolutions

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Jack Kerouac is dead, so obviously these are what we call "vintage" rules to live by. (In fact, this coming year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Beat Generation writer's death, which was due to cirrhosis of the liver.)

And while these chunks of wisdom, taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose (or, at least, the style of rapid-fire modern prose he invented and brought down with him), are geared toward writers, they are words to live by in 2009-- so says us:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

True, we don't understand half of what he says, but everyone can take a line or two and run with it. The man who once wrote "I want to marry my novels and have short stories for children" would have turned 86 this past year.

Via Wikipedia.

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Sloppy Seconds: Blake-Fielder Civil Escapes (More) Prison (Time)

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Patrick Dempsey didn't dig the doc firing on Grey's Anatomy. Perhaps he knows something we don't about ABC's true motives?

This guy will either be dead or a legend by 27.

Eddie Izzard made the really dumb decision, as he is not a US citizen, to donate to Obama. He made an even dumber one when he admitted to doing so on CNN.

Michael Crichton died of cancer, a battle which was kept entirely private.

Who gave 50 Cent a reality show? Jesus Christ. Well, at least it's a positive show for a change.

And Amy Winehouse's husband ("Blakey," we think his name is) was released from jail after a year of hell... or, if you're married to Amy Winehouse, womb-like bliss.

10-Year-Old Boy Is the Lone Protester of Nude Sunbathing

Obama and McCain Supporters Bring Out the Worst In All of Us

While You Were Sleeping: Amy Winehouse's Scientology Cure

While You Were Sleeping: Minnie Driver Pops Out A Future Celebrity

Newly Released Files Reveal: Julia Child Was A Spy!

Brian Fairbanks — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:35:00 GMT

The National Archives has just released contents of this country's WWII-era OSS files. The OSS, you may remember, started as the Office of Strategic Services and eventually morphed into that Alias show. Several celebrity names were mentioned in the documents, the most interesting being your favorite kook in the kitchen...

Walter Mess, who handled covert OSS operations in Poland and North Africa, said he kept quiet for more than 50 years, only recently telling his wife of 62 years about his OSS activity.

"I was told to keep my mouth shut," said Mess, now 93 and living in Falls Church, Va.

The files provide new information even for those most familiar with the agency. Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society created by former OSS agents and their relatives, said the nearly 24,000 employees included in the archives far exceed previous estimates of 13,000.

The newly released documents will clarify these and other issues, Cunliffe said.

"We're saying the OSS was a lot bigger than they were saying," he said.

Besides our man in North Africa, we have to thank Julia Child, movie star Sterling Hayden, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and thousands more:

Child's file shows that in her OSS application, she included a note expressing regret she left an earlier department store job hastily because she did not get along with her boss, said William Cunliffe, an archivist who has worked extensively with the OSS records at the National Archives.

The OSS files offer details about other agents, including Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, major league catcher Moe Berg... John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt; and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. [AP/Yahoo]

Unfortunately, the news stories don't relate exactly what Julia (and the others) did for the OSS? We'd love it if she turned out to have been a badass assassin like the Daniel Craig James Bond or a kickass cleaner/sweeper or whatever it's called-- you know, like the Julia Stiles character in the Bourne movies. Any ideas?

Related:

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Crush of the Week: Gemma Arterton, James Bond's Rebound Girl

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Doris Lessing Be Trippin'?

Brian Fairbanks — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Doris Lessing, whom Scanner Emily desires to be when she grows up, is my favorite of all living Nobel Prize-winning authors with too much time on their hands. With the brain of a god and the mouth of Joe Pesci on a bender, she never fails to make the news anytime she even so much as shops.

Lessing recently gave an interview, the transcript of which is being picked up all over, during which she said she believes that if Barack Obama is elected, he will be assassinated.

"He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would kill him," Lessing said on Saturday [according to the Independent.] She did not specify who she believed would kill Obama.

J.D. Regent, a commentor on Jezebel, worries about the same thing:

Literally every time I've been in a public place showing election coverage, someone in the room has said out loud, "that man's getting assassinated." And I must say, listening to the call in shows on C-Span, (two sample calls: "I don't consider Barack Obama a black man, I consider him a MUSLIM." "Barack Hussein Obama spells his middle name the same way as Saddam Hussein. Why doesn't the media cover that?") I'm inclined to agree it is a risk.

Do people really talk about this stuff in public? Talk about a social faux pas.

It should be noted that there were two public attempts, if you recall, on Bill Clinton's life early in his Presidency, and he was barely half-black. That being said, this kind of thinking is paranoid at best, and perhaps counterproductive if anything. Here's what Doris would have to say about all this if she wasn't the one doing the talking:

"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases, think for yourself."

[Photo: The Daily Mail]