If this is the first issue you’ve seen in awhile, a misconfiguration of our newsletter software was dropping some people off the list. We've fixed it, so welcome back.

The police vice squad raid on the building where we held our classes led to the shutdown of our live campus. For more on that, see our Class Dismissed article in Sex in Review. We now depend upon our Virtual Campus sales to keep us going until we can find a new facility. Our need to increase sales of the Virtual Campus can be a good deal for you, as we are now offering a special incentive. Buy a copy of the Erotic University Campus this month from this special page, and we will throw in a copy of The Guide to Erotic Games (a $19.95 value), the most comprehensive guide to adult games ever published, featuring over 350 games. You’ll also get a three month subscription to Erotic Games Online, plus a year long subscription to Sex in Review.  You’ll also get 30 minutes of viewing time on HotMovies.com. Your purchase helps keep our educational mission going.  Offer good only during the month of April. Order now!

We've slighly changed the format of the newsletter, with bigger type, and we replaced the events calendar (readily available on sexinreview.com) with a listing of the new things added to the Virtual Campus each month.

-Jeff Booth
 

ICANN Can’t
Stating that it did not want to be in the content control business, ICANN once again voted against establishing an .xxx domain name. Some conservatives were against the idea because they felt it would legitimize adult content, while free speech activists were concerned about how it would be regulated and whether it would create a ghetto for adult content that could then be easily filtered out by ISPs.

FSC Loses Big
The Free Speech Coalition faced a huge loss when Federal District Court Judge Walker Miller rejected most of their arguments against the government’s 2257 record keeping law. Even when losing, they won a lot, since the poorly written law had many sections that were almost impossible to understand the exact meaning of, and even minor violations could result in five years in prison. The court did force the government to clarify most of those grey areas. Still, it is a bad law whose primary purpose is to give the government tools to go after adult producers, and does little towards what it is supposed to be about- keeping children from appearing in porn films. The only time that underage performers have appeared in adult films is when they used government issued ID that had an inaccurate birth date. The 2257 requirements do not address that, and creates mountains of complex record keeping requirements. One of the big wins is the ability to redact personal information such as a driver’s license number and home address when records go to secondary producers. Before this, identity theft and stalking threatened anyone who appeared in an adult production, as these records were not protected and it was mandated that they be sent out to adult web site owners and others who distributed the content.

A Big Win
It is always about “protecting the children”, but the real purpose of laws like the Online Child Protection Act is to limit what adults can view and read. This 1998 law has been in legal limbo as it went through the courts, but it was just struck down by Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. He agreed that online filters did a much better job of protecting children from online adult content than the law did, stating “Even defendant's own study shows that all but the worst performing (software) filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web.” The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison. Besides the fact that harmful to minors is not spelled out, and that there is no such thing as community standards on the Internet, since it is global, there were other problems. Credit card companies do not allow you to use their cards merely as ID, and many kids have their own credit cards. There is no technology for proving your age online- it would require some mandated governmental identity solution- something the government is not going to do. It also would have no impact on content that originated in other countries. It was a dumb workable law that should never have been passed in the first place. Look for more of the same to be passed in the future.

Texas Stomp
The Texas City Attorneys Association is commissioning a $100,000 study in an effort to link adult video and novelty stores to crime, decreased property values and other negative secondary effects. It is not so much a study as a justification that they hope can be used around the country to shut down adult businesses. These types of studies have a history of being poorly done since the results are already predetermined, and contrary evidence, such as bars having a higher incidence of problems than adult businesses, is ignored.

Obscene Firing
One of the reasons that two of the eight U.S. Attorneys were fired in the growing scandal may have been their reluctance to go after pornography. Brent Ward is head of the Justice Department's obscenity task force. He was also involved in the attack on obscenity in the Ed Meese Justice Department. Back then they did not win many obscenity prosecutions, but by dragging out the cases and using a multi-jurisdiction tactic that the courts found improper, they could financially drain companies and put them out of business even without winning. Ward e-mailed Attorney General Gonzalez’s chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson in a rage about two of the U.S. attorneys, Las Vegas's Dan Bogden and Phoenix's Paul Charlton, because they did not prosecute obscenity cases he had brought them. It would not have mattered to him if the cases were winnable, something a prosecutor normally is supposed to consider. Both attorneys were fired.

Keroack on the Road Again
Dr. Eric Keroack, Bush’s appointment to head the Health and Human Services’ 280 million dollar Office of Population Affairs, has resigned from his post. It was not his lack of qualifications or the fact that he has worked actively for an organization that strongly opposed birth control even though his new position put him in charge of birth control programs for poor women. Nor was it the fact that he refused to clarify his position on birth control, which from his record is something he strongly opposed, along with sex education. Being unqualified for a job has rarely been a problem for this administration, but apparently what they did not need is another scandal. The state of Massachusetts’ Office of Medicaid has taken official action against Keroack’s private practice there, leading to his resignation.

McCain Trips Over Condoms
I know we’ve been picking on presidential candidate McCain lately, but he makes it unavoidable. When asked by a reporter whether the U.S. should fund contraception efforts in Africa through the distribution of condoms to help prevent the spread of AIDS, McCain had no answer. He claimed he had never thought about it before, and demurred to the expertise of fellow Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, where he said “I look to people like Dr. Coburn.” See the editorial in this issue for more about why Dr. Coburn is the absolute worst choice for getting advice about sexual issues. Finally, McCain asked an aide to look up what his stand on the issue was. Can we be charitable and chalk this up to old age and not a willingness to say anything he thinks will get him the Republican nomination?

Gummy Sex

Even in school, districts where real sex education is mandated, schools can still bring in abstinence only lecturers with little in the way of teaching credentials, health training or any adherence to curricula. In many cases, sex education is being outsourced to local religiously based Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which have an anti-sex, anti-birth control, anti-abortion agenda. They also have a very poor track record of providing accurate information, according to a study by Representative Henry Waxman. Federal and even state funding is pouring into these CPCs (to the tune of well over $40 million this year), Some citizens of Virginia are fighting back by holding meetings and publicly criticizing school assemblies where abstinence only self-described Christian do things such as dangling a cinderblock over a male student's genital area to show how condoms are ineffective against HIV. Do you have to teach misinformation with nonsensical stupidity? Apparently. They also do things such as having the kids all share the same stick of gum to show how STDs spread. The tape game has students put tape on their arm and then note that it is now less sticky- showing how once you've been used you won't be quite so attractive anymore and no one will want to stick with you. There is also the laxative game, where kids are given the choice of several pieces of chocolate candy, one of which is a laxative, to show the uncertainty of knowing if someone has an STD. The ones full of shit are the untrained fanatics they allow into the classroom.

There is always something new on the EU Virtual Campus. Here is the latest for April.

Commons: On the lawn of the Commons is a video player. Click on it to view a 40's era take on nudist camps titled the Nudist Racket.

Student Union: There is a new film addition to the showings in Ellis Auditorium. The special feature is a French stag film called Song of the Butterfly. It dates from the late 1920's.

Library: This month's feature gallery is X-Libris, a look at erotic bookplates, also known as ex-libris. These typically were commissioned by book owners to personalize their book collections, and erotic designs for erotic book collections were very popular. It includes 20 examples by one of the most prolific designers of bookplates, erotic artist Franz Von Bayros. There are also dozens of examples from other artists.

Visual Arts Department:  The Ambiguously Erotic gallery features ambiguous or metamorphic art. Used as a political statement during the French Revolution, with a resurgence of popularity in the early 19th century, these drawings typically consist of numerous nude and often copulating figures that when viewed as a whole make up an image of something else. Most popular is the portrait of a famous person made from nudes.

Recreation Center: Inside the mystery trunk is Trumpet, a printable game board for a sexy game for 2 to 6 players. In drawer 2 is a collection of "salacious swifties," based on the word play of "Tom Swifties". Drawer 3 has a very tricky jigsaw puzzle. Drawer 4 has a collection of sex oriented logic problems. Drawer 5 features a rather unusual optical illusion. Drawer 6 has "Getting to Know You", a game for couples.

A new study in California notes a strong generational difference on gay marriage. Two political scientists, Gregory Lewis of Georgia State University and Charles Gossett of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, analyzed two decades worth of Field Polls on the subject and found that older Californians are much more likely to oppose gay marriage. Those born in the decades of the 70’s and 80’s are more than twice as likely to support gay marriage than those born before 1940. These results concur with a Pew research Center study that found that support for gay marriage increases with the youth of the respondents.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated three key patents on human embryonic stem cells. Scientists have complained that these patents made doing their research much more difficult.

A new study published in BJU International states that men in their fifties are more satisfied with their sex lives than men in their thirties. Other results from the study include that sexual satisfaction peaks for men in their twenties, and then apparently peaks again for men in their fifties. Male sexual function does diminish over time, but apparently that does not lead to less sexual satisfaction.

Researchers at UC Berkely published findings in the Journal of Neuroscience indicating that a chemical in male sweat, androstadienone, can cause higher sexual arousal and an elevated hormone level in women. This the first evidence of scent influencing hormones, although the link has long been suspected.

Laura Sessions Stepp’s new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, uses an oddly selected but extremely small sampling of affluent college age and high school women to make the claim that female promiscuity is on the rise and that it is creating a generation of women who do not care about love. She believes that women need to marry younger and focus less on their careers, otherwise, they will end up lonely because they traded it all away for promiscuity and ambition.

She writes for the Washington Post Style section, which does not really give her credibility in the science department. Still, she claims that women don’t really like the sex and the bar scene (it’s more a guy thing), and repeats the thoroughly debunked theory that having sex too many times with different partners depletes the female body of its ability to produce oxytocin, which makes it harder for them to bond later in life. This is the made-up science straight out of the anti-sex agenda, and by repeating it, you completely destroy your credibility.

In fact, she ignores or dismisses legitimate scientific research such as studies showing that the divorce rate is lower for people who marry later, or psychology professor Laurence Steinberg assertion that most college graduates don’t become serious about committed relationships until their middle to late 20s. She believes that women in college need to get serious about relationships now, despite the fact that most college students have little free time for serious relationships, and that hooking up is a way to explore their sexuality and become more experienced.

She wants to bring back the double standard where men pursue and women are pursued. Her advice, believe it or not, is that women should learn to bake, as men can not resist baked goods. If only I were making this up.

She claims that women are not naturally sexual aggressors, which seems to fly in the face of an awful lot of contrary evidence. It just goes back to the old argument that can be used anywhere to dismiss anything you don’t want people to do: “You only think you like that, but you are fooling yourself.”  In fact, she says just that, but the real fool is an author who tries to tell others that the way they experience their lives is false and less legitimate than the author’s view.

Who is John McCain’s Sex Advisor?

John McCain could not have picked a worse person as his personal advisor on sexually related issues. The guy he chose, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, is one of the worst anti-sex nutballs in national elected office. While he is a doctor, he apparently slept through classes on both medical ethics and how scientific research works. He consistently holds extremist out of the mainstream opinions on everything having to do with sex.

Coburn opposes abortion, even in the case of rape, and has called for the death penalty for abortion doctors. He condemned NBC’s showing of Schindler’s list because it encouraged “irresponsible sexual behavior”. He made the scientifically unsupportable claim that breast implants make you healthier, and then single-handedly blocked the 2006 Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act. Apparently, the real solution to breast cancer is not research, but for women to get bigger breasts

He is a leading opponent of birth control, and wants to allow health insurance companies to opt out on paying for birth control on moral grounds. He believes in teaching only abstinence and not birth control or safer sex to our youth. He put political pressure on the National Institutes of Health to do a condom study, and then when their reported results showed that condoms were very effective in preventing the spread of disease, he misstated the study and said that condoms don’t prevent the spread of HPV, something the study did not say. He also claimed that the FDA overstates condom protection against disease and cervical cancer. Then he tried to get warning labels put on condoms. He sponsored a bill to require minors to wait five days and have their parents notified before receiving contraception, which would dramatically reduce access to birth control. He also introduced an amendment to a bill that would prohibit the FDA from testing, researching, developing, or approving any drug that induces an abortion, which is even more restricting when you understand that he considers common birth control methods such as the IUD and Depo-Provero to be forms of abortion. He opposed the FDA’s decision to make Plan B available over the counter, and criticized the FDA’s research.

Coburn is one of the most notorious homophobes on the Hill, who believes the gay agenda is America’s greatest threat and is leading to the destruction of America and is the rationalization for abortion and multiple sex partners. He falsely accused schools in southeast Oklahoma of having so many lesbians that they would only allow one girl at a time into the bathrooms.

There is also serious evidence to indicate that in private practice he sterilized a 20 year old woman against her will and illegally billed Medicaid for the procedure. And most to the point, when Bush appointed him as co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, Coburn stated, “I will challenge the national focus on condom use to prevent the spread of HIV.” This is the guy McCain gets his advice from on HIV and sexual issues?