Birds do it. Bees do it. It's just that these days in India it may be a little harder to watch online images of human beings doing it.
Sex is often a slightly thorny subject (well, maybe except in France). However, varying attitudes around the world to varying sexual practices mean search engines must adjust their positions accordingly.
So it may sadden some to hear of a Guardian special investigation that appears to have unearthed evidence of Microsoft and Yahoo search engines complying with a new Indian law offering severe punishment for the display of "lascivious" content.
I know one man's lascivious is another man's oblivious. But this law, based on a 150-year-old statute (section 292, if you have your Indian penal code tucked about your person) specifically targets access to obscenity.
A picture from Ramoji Film City in Andhra Pradesh. It is the world's largest integrated film studio complex.
(Credit: CC Shashi Bellamkonda/Flickr)It helpfully defines obscenity as "any content that is lascivious and that will appeal to prurient interest or the effect of which is to tend to deprave or corrupt the minds of those who are likely to see, read or hear the same."
It's a nice word, corruption. One that often seems to have the words "government" and "politician" wrapped around it. Still, we're talking about sex here. Specifically, the vaguely pornographic kind.
The Guardian investigation suggests Microsoft and Yahoo have already taken steps to avoid the rather stiff punishments. If a search engine (or, indeed, Internet cafe) isn't careful about what sites it makes available, its officers might face three years in jail and a fine of up to 500,000 rupees (just over $10,000).
Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo's search engine, and even the Yahoo-owned Flickr have reportedly ensured that the safe search facilities on their sites cannot be disabled, something they also do in the pristine territories of Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
I do not intend to suggest this new law will encourage more Indian professionals to seek employment in Silicon Valley. And I cannot imagine that Indian moral fiber is anything other than sturdy and cleansing. I just sometimes worry when politicians seem to have nothing better to do than to interfere in people's most private affairs.
The Indian media is, according to London's Times, sometimes a little slow in reporting the sexual peccadilloes of, well, politicians--even when their indiscretions are widely known.
Perhaps that will change in reaction to this law.
This week, for example, an Indian television news channel ran footage, allegedly of the 86-year-old governor of the Andhra Pradesh state in bed with several women to whom he was not betrothed. While the governor immediately resigned, you might wonder how it is that this footage was not deemed "lascivious."
Some of you might wish to suggest that the "law is an ass." But perhaps it's best to first search Bing and check whether "ass" might have lascivious overtones in certain parts of the world.
Sometimes a man can be betrayed by his wife in a good way.
A 61-year-old woman from Bridgend, Wales, had been married to her husband, for almost 20 years when, according to a court report from the Telegraph, she noticed a curious message on their computer at home.
She focused and realized that the message had been sent by an underage girl to whom her husband had been sending messages in a chat room. The message was of a sexual nature and included her husband's original message to the girl.
Perhaps some spouses would have been so stunned as to not know how to react.
This woman was different. She decided to use another computer in a different part of their house. She then entered the same chat room her husband had been using, posed as a young girl and made contact with him.
(Credit:
CC James Jhs/Flickr)
The prosecuting lawyer told the court: "Her husband had no idea but soon he was chatting with his own wife, believing it was a 14-year-old girl."
The woman didn't merely get written replies from her husband. He also used a Webcam to film himself for their supposed mutual pleasure.
Still, the court heard, she didn't confront him. Instead, she went straight to the police and the British National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
The man, who has grown-up daughters, only discovered that it was his wife who had betrayed him when interviewed by the police. He was given a three-year community order. He was also banned from having any contact with children under the age of 18, a ban that holds for both the real and the online worlds.
After the case, the woman, who is now divorcing her husband, told the Telegraph: "I did the right thing and I don't regret it. Now I just need some time to think and put all this behind me."
However, she was indignant that her husband did not receive a more stringent penalty. She said: "I thought the judge would be a lot harder and that he might go to prison."
Sometimes, we never even know those closest to us. Or sometimes we do, and then one day, they just change.
I'm sorry to be mentioning sex again. But I have some survey findings that might just interrupt your own cogitations about the meaning and function of life.
The fine and upstanding folks at Retrevo.com, which, I believe, is a site where you can buy various sorts of electronica with which to record your most public and private moments, decided to survey today's under-35s.
And what appalling people they seem to be.
Indeed, Retrevo's findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one's own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the "leading thinkers in the radical tech community" who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: "The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will."
I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: "I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever."
But where would we be without the current version of sex? No governors of South Carolina dancing the Argentine tango. No jokes about presidents and cigars. And not anyone telling us that, indeed, we are the best.
What a dull thing the future might turn out to be.
Which brings us back to the current state of concupiscence and Retrevo's discovery that 36 percent of people leap on to Twitter or Facebook immediately after conjugal behavior.
Not just once or twice, but "often." What can they possibly be tweeting? What words and phrases can their Facebook updates possibly enjoy? "Jeffrey H. has just got some"? "Melissa J. is in flagrante"?
Or perhaps something as very basic as "Tracy T. is single"?
My gob is quite simply smacked at the idea that people must trumpet their intimate behavior within seconds of its climax. I do, however, have more interesting information.
Apparently, men are twice as likely to broadcast to their social network immediately post-flagrante than are women. This despite women allegedly being the majority on most social networks.
And if you are one of those who believes that iPhone users are deeply narcissistic nabobs, then please consider this most disturbing piece of news: iPhone users are three times more likely to tweet or Facebook post-coitally than are BlackBerry users.
I find myself so completely shaken by this data that I feel an inordinate need to lie down for a period of some months.
Has this social-networking nonsense so completely gripped our very beings that we are nothing other than newscasters of our own ridiculous subjectivity?
My girlfriend says she'll let me know what she thinks about this, but first she's got a few tweets to send.
Prince Philip is the tall chap who married the queen of England, enjoys making beautifully inappropriate comments, and feels intimate contact with his television might be necessary in order to make it work.
In a revealing interview, only some of which seems to have appeared on the Buckingham Palace YouTube channel, the prince laid bare his electrical dysfunction, one that many might, secretly or not, actually share.
His interviewer, a rather well spoken chap called Kevin McCloud, brightened up the pages of London's Times newspaper with some of the prince's heartfelt words.
Perhaps the most elegant of the phrases turned by the 88-year-old prince was: "To work out how to operate a television set, you practically have to make love to the thing."
It has never been my habit to wonder about the conjugal behavior of the regal.
However, once one's mind goes quickly beyond boggling in order to consider how one might make one's plasma pulse race, one begins to appreciate that many people do find it rather difficult to grasp even 10 percent of their gizmos' workings.
Of course, the prince's imagery is so disconcerting that I wonder just what actions came immediately before the creation of, for example, Prince Charles.
However, Phil the Greek, as he is sometimes known in pejorative circles, will no doubt receive some sympathy for his giddy criticism of technology's grave new world. Why can't things be just blindingly simple, especially for those whose eyes are not quite what they used to be?
Not satiated with his criticism of televisual operations, the prince turned his mind and, one feared, his devilishly seductive eyes, toward the Web.
"The Web sites I've seen are so awful it's untrue," he told McCloud. "They're so unfit for purpose I'm surprised anyone tolerates them."
Surely he has a point. There are so many ill-designed sites on the Web that one's eyes sometimes water with pain. However, given the prince's somewhat outre position on the subject of televisions, many will find themselves caught in the uncomfortable posture of now considering which Web sites the prince has, um, actually visited.
Please might readers suggest something appropriate, as I fear my own thinking has been addled and muddled by the prince's highly colorful imagery.
Let us be frank. Frank will do anything for sexual pleasure. So will Harry, Dilbert, and Freddie. Yes, and perhaps even Mao.
I have come to this revolutionary conclusion thanks to a story that will undoubtedly go down in legend--if it didn't already start there.
You see, a number of reports from across the world are suggesting that the Web in China is being stressed to distraction by Chinese men searching for a very particular sexual distraction indeed--Chako Paul City.
Should Chako Paul be less familiar to you than, say, Chaka Khan, might I tell you that legend has it that Chako Paul City is in Sweden. And it is populated mainly by lesbians.
Well, when I say "is," I really mean "isn't."
However, the male population of China has allegedly got it into its collective hollow head, and perhaps its collective nether regions, that there is, indeed, a Swedish city with 25,000 women and no men. This knowledge seemingly has encouraged them to search madly for ways of espying this singular place.
According to The Australian newspaper, which, might I say, is a rather serious publication, Chinese Internet providers are being swamped to paralysis by the sheer volume of men choking for a taste of Chako Paul.
The rumor is that Chako Paul City was created in 1820 in the deepest, darkest, and most uncut woods of northern Sweden. The founder is said to have been a widow who loathed men more, perhaps, than she must have loathed sunshine.
The city is said to be guarded by two blond women, who keep men from scaling the ramparts of its medieval castle.
This all sounds like ten tons of bunkum to me (especially as most Swedish women are, well, brunettes), but not, allegedly, to men who crave the fantasy of 25,000 blond women frolicking in the woods.
Claes Bertilsen of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions seems to think that anyone who has been inclined to swallow this tale might have been smoking rather wacko tobacco.
He told the Swedish news organization, the Local: "At 25,000 residents, the town would be one of the largest in northern Sweden, and I find it hard to believe that you could keep something like that a secret for more than 150 years."
I find it hard to believe that anyone might think you could guard a city of 25,000 with just two blond women--who may, according to this rampant rumor from the ramparts, turn out to be lesbians.
You see, the Local quotes the Chinese news service Harbin News as declaring that many of Chako Paul's inhabitants turned to homosexuality "because they could not suppress their sexual needs."
There is also the quite colorful suggestion that most of the inhabitants are employed in forestry (no, never) and that many have, according to the Xinhua news agency, a "thick waist belt full of woodworking equipment."
I am not sure how many more days that Chinese Internet providers can cope with their male population's enthusiasm for these Swedish logger lesbians.
If indeed they are truly struggling with the phenomenon at all.
However, just in case, I can only hope that the women of China slap the men of China firmly about the ears and solar plexus before the world's most important nation grinds to an undignified and unwarranted digital halt.
Grady Judd, the sheriff for Polk County in Florida, has followed in the anti-Craigslist footsteps of Cook County, Illinois, counterpart, Tom Dart.
In a sweep imaginatively titled "Operation Hot Date," the sheriff's forces arrested 28 women for allegedly advertising prostitution services on Craigslist.
The Smoking Gun quoted the sheriff as declaring that the site is still a "one-stop shop for all your prostitution needs."
I was not aware that there are other shops that require several stops to achieve similar ends, as it seems that local newspapers and other Web sites seem to offer ads of a rather similar nature to those on Craigslist.
(Credit:
CC Acloudman/Flickr)
However, the sheriff accused the site of "facilitating prostitution" and suggested he is extremely gung-ho to take legal action against Craigslist.
The Smoking Gun, while mentioning that some alleged pimps were also rounded up in "Operation Hot Date," also focused on the suggestions that two of the women who allegedly arrived for assignations with undercover policemen were pregnant and that a third had fur-lined handcuffs.
However, some might find it more interesting that six of these women are smiling in their mugshots.
Could they perhaps have felt that there is a certain sense of futility in such police action?
We are all insecure.
Our noses are too big, too small, too pointy from the side. Our hair is too thin, if it exists at all.
And as for our ability to please a member of our target gender in the bedroom, well, admit it, we are all a bit freaked.
So a highly caring and simultaneously enterprising man called Chris Alvares has released an iPhone app that scores us objectively as we strive for sexual Kilimanjaro.
It's called Passion. And its heart is very simple.
In the hard sell at the Apple App Store, Alvares lays it on the line: "Passion works by using all of the iPhone's distinct features such as the microphone, accelerometer and many others to determine an accurate score."
The microphone? The microphone?
"All you have to do," the sweet talk continues, "is to start the application, put your iPhone on the bed, in an arm band, or even in your pocket and have inter*****e, it is as easy as that."
Goodness, that is easy. If a little on the clinical side.
This is the passion fruit flower. I prefer to keep decorum around here.
(Credit: CC Nganguyen/Flickr)While I wouldn't wish to comment on, or even discover, what anyone does while they are having inter*****e, I wonder just how comfortable it might be with an iPhone stuck in your pocket.
Come to think of it, the pocket of your what exactly? Don't most people, other than men in movies, remove their clothes for this activity?
And the "arm band" presumably refers to the sweaty thing you wear in the gym. Lordy, can that really add to the, um, passion of it all?
The words on the app itself are also strangely heartstopping. You know when the app is ready to score when it shows the somewhat schoolteacher-ish words: "You may start having sex."
Then there's the scoring system. You are scored on three basic parameters: duration, orgasm, and activity. And, just like many video games, when you are finished you are asked to submit your score or, um, "try again."
The app itself, which costs $4.99, has not yet been rated at the App Store.
Alina Percea, 18, needed to pay for a computing degree.
So, perhaps in an attempt to prove how significant computing is in modern life, she auctioned her virginity on a German Web site.
However, unlike Natalie Dylan, the American who claims to have secured bids of $3.7 million for the privilege of deflowering her (although no deeds seem either to have been signed or done), Alina did not attract offers in quite the same region.
The best bid she managed to secure came in at 8,800 pounds, or just over $13,000. The bidder, a 45-year-old Italian man, came through at the last minute by doubling the leading price.
Which was charming of him, so much so that Alina has now chosen to reveal details of how the deal enjoyed closure.
You will be moved to hear that she did, indeed, enjoy it. She was flown to Venice to meet her fairly decent proposal.
The Daily Mail quoted her as describing her first impressions: "At the arrivals lounge, a man came over, smiled, handed me a box of chocolates and said: 'Welcome to Venice.' He looked much younger than 45, short, but nicely dressed, with dark hair, green eyes and a kind smile."
(Credit:
CC Zoonabar/Flickr)
So it all started, as memorable days should, with a pleasant surprise. Alina admitted she was hoping for something of a "Pretty Woman" scenario.
The man took her site-seeing in Venice and didn't happen to mention whether he was single, married or just a little odd. He had booked them into a five-star hotel for the consummation of the transaction.
As for the act itself, well, Alina says they had sex just the once (after all, he was 45) and apparently had breakfast the next morning "just like any other couple."
Oh, and for breakfast, Alina had a morning-after pill.
Forgive me if I didn't mention it, unprotected sex was part of the deal. Of course, the gentleman had a certificate to prove that he was STD-free.
May I leave you with one final twist to a story that neither Danielle Steel nor Mills and Boon nor Stephen King would have dared even to outline?
Alina would like to see her benefactor again. And she promises that if he agrees to see her, she won't make him pay. I think she means "not for the sex, anyway".
Isn't it lovely how the Web can sometimes create the perfect conditions for romance to have a chance?
I once used to live in an apartment in London that had previously been something of a bordello.
It was a very nice apartment. However, it was extremely disconcerting to receive late-night calls from strange men wondering if Hermosa was available.
But this was but a mere twinge when compared with the discomfort of a woman from Norwalk, Conn., who also allegedly began to receive phone calls of a somewhat perplexingly sexual nature.
She described these communications to CBS 2 this way: "Men calling, looking for a good time. And I said, 'You got the wrong number.' I hung up the phone, got another call, another call."
She claims that a few men even came to her door. Finally, a man told her about a Craigslist ad that featured her name, address, and phone number. It was a "Sex Partner Wanted" ad.
Her first thought was, she said, that it must be a certain pharmacist.
This anonymous lady had, allegedly, walked into a CVS Pharmacy in Norwalk to pick up some medicine. Her visit appears to have ended with her telling the pharmacist that she would file a complaint for bad service. "He was acting strange, had this peculiar look on his face," she told CBS 2.
The sexually interested parties allegedly began calling to arrange sexually interesting parties the very next day. So the alleged victim put two and two together in a firmly deductive way and suggested to police that perhaps the pharmacist had used the CVS records for nefarious purposes.
After months of investigation, police have charged Jonathan Medina, 38, now a former CVS pharmacist, with harassment and computer crimes. He is, allegedly, on the run after leaving the state of Connecticut. Police believe he may now be in Washington state.
The use of Craigslist for deception of this kind seems to be becoming more prevalent. This month, Margery Tannenbaum, from Hauppauge, N.Y., was arrested for aggravated harassment after she allegedly placed an ad to lure men and then redirected the calls to her neighbor's house.
Her motive is alleged also to have been revenge after an argument between her daughter and the neighbor's. Both girls are 9 years old.
One might be forgiven for wondering whether Craigslist, which this week decided to eliminate its erotic-services section and police a new adult-services section more closely, has become a hall of mirrors for the more twisted aspects of the human psyche.
Perhaps your teen is one of those who, when exposed to the movie "The Exorcist," begins to twirl her head around, declare she is the devil, and vomit green pea soup.
Well, then you will be one of those not surprised by research, from the University of Pittsburgh, that suggests any teen who listens to the bulk of 50 Cent is more likely to partake of sex early and often.
I am being unfair to Fitty. The academics looked at other musicians whose lyrics they deemed to include a "power differential"--that is, one of the sexes declaring its bodily dominance over another. Something you will probably not find in, for example, a Jennifer Lopez ditty. (Although "Let's Get Loud" surely suggests serious antisocial tendencies)
Brian Primack, an associate professor at Pittsburgh, gave an interesting example of a degrading lyric: "After you work up a sweat, you can play with the stick."
When I first heard this little couplet, from 50 Cent's "Candy Shop", my immediate reaction was "field hockey." However, the Pittsburgh team is convinced that "high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior."
It's also worth noting that some rap lyrics are, to the researchers, not degrading. They cite "Baby I'm Back" by Baby Bash. Whose allegedly nondegrading lines include: "I wanna be stronger than we've ever been, I'm here to cater to you."
Is there anyone who hears the word "cater" and doesn't think kitchen scene in "Fatal Attraction?"
The academics are very careful not to suggest that the music causes rampant teen nymphomania. They limit themselves to showing the link between degrading lyrics and increased teen sexual activity. But they do point out that they analyzed around 300 songs, of which one-third had sexually explicit language, the majority of that language having degrading elements.
I am a touch skeptical of these results. And it is not merely because every single piece of social science research that has ever been performed by any academic institution leaves me wondering whether I have just listened to a duet between Roland Burriss and Joe the Plumber.
You see, I am not sure most teens of any generation are all that bright. I'm not sure how often they get even the broadest meanings of many songs.
Think of all the supposedly mature and, no doubt, sexually active folks who thought "Puff the Magic Dragon" really was about a mythical creature called Puff. So shouldn't we wonder whether teens are driven by words or merely by the thumping beat that raises their heart rates and brain impulses beyond the control of any public jurisdiction?
I asked one of the world's foremost psychologists what parents should do if they examined their teen's iPod and found lyrics of unsound sexual power relations.
"Download Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' for them," was her reply.
I have no idea what she meant. But one thought keeps reverberating around my head--if in doubt, ask yourself this question: Did Bristol Palin really listen to 50 Cent?
