October 2011

HPV Alert! Stop! Breathe.

Recently people have been alerted to new facts about the Human Papilloma Virus, known as HPV, a sexually transmitted virus known to cause cervical cancer in women and other cancers, predominately in women but also in men. HPV really represents a cluster of over 100 viruses, most of which are not cancer causing. But now we know HPV can cause heart disease in women, also, and that both men and women are facing HPV strains that cause oral cancer (mouth, throat, tongue, tonsils). More information can be accessed at websites such as the Center for Disease Control, the National Cancer Institute, and the UK-based Mouth Cancer Foundation.

Increasingly, pre-sexual girls are accessing one of the proven preventative inoculations, such as Gardasil, parents protecting their children much like they would from from measles and mumps. There is now a new urgency for all pre-sexual adolescents, not just girls anymore but all boys as well, to get the anti-cancer vaccine.

Much like the onset of the AIDS epidemic, HPV seemed to arrive on our doorstep, incognito and caused by behaviors people enjoy, even crave.

The  era of AIDS started with people losing their lives thinking they were bewitched, the etiology hidden, and its spread seemingly chaotic. Eventually researchers drilled down adequately to identify the risks involved in certain behaviors: engaging in unprotected sex with an infected partner, sharing intravenous needles with an infected partner, or receiving a transfusion of infected blood. Researchers are desperately seeking a vaccine and recently have made encouraging progress toward that goal.

HPV infects the epithelial cells of skin and mucosa, such as the vagina, penis, and anus, and now its transmission orally has been proven indisputably. We are at the stage now where researchers are identifying risky behaviors, and a public health campaign has begun to ensure every pre-sexual boy and girl has access to preventive vaccination. Everyone who engages in oral sex, gay and straight, must consider oral sex a potential danger zone, and we have to learn to protect ourselves and others, again.

All I am saying is this cancer causing virus shouldn’t take us by surprise like HIV did. Let us be vigilant, and do our part to make sure pre-sexual girls/women and boys/men receive their life-saving HPV inoculations. Let’s talk about it wherever we are. Thank heaven, we now have advanced research and technology. We will survive.

 

 


VenusPlusX Job Openings (10/24/11)

Join us in our mission aimed at ushering in “The New Age of Sexual Freedom” – a world free from the global culture of racial, sexual, and gender oppression and violence driven by governments, religions, corporations, and social customs.

You can view the job openings currently available at VenusPlusX here. Some are based in DC and others are not dependent on geography. Take a look for yourself or forward this on to friends who may be interested.

VenusPlusX is a great place to work, where self-starters are rewarded for innovation.

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: Disconnect

How did where you were raised affect what you were taught about sex, and the kinds of conversations you had about sex? What role did religion play in what you were taught or what you talked about? How have you overcome any negative ideas about sex — or even just ignorance about sex? Who should have the ultimate responsibility to ensure that young people receive an education in sexual matters that may affect their relationships and their health?

Your answers are important to us. Write them in an essay, a poem, or a song, or express them in an original work of art or a response video, and we will thank you with a free VenusPlusX t-shirt.

Video by Tiye Massey.

TRANSCRIPT by David Kreps

So like my family is very traditional. They’re Muslim and they’re South Asian. They grew up in Pakistan and came here in 1980. And they never talked to us about sex because they they only spoke to us about marriage, and said that you, when you reach a certain age, you’ll get married, and then you’ll have kids. So sex was never really spoken about, it was more like they were more concerned like about the type of relationship that I would have. I mean there’s a real disconnect between reality and what my parents taught me, and what my parents taught my siblings and my brother. I remember once I was trying to explain to my little brother what a period is. And my aunt, my mom’s sister, got really upset and she said that, ‘That’s just because you’re American, that you’re, that you’re talking to him about that.’ I’m like no, I think I think he should know about it. I think he should know that this is what many people experience. And it does directly impact him because he lives with four women.


What is the Kingdom of Heaven?

Aphrodite, god of Love

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español The Name of God has been a subject of superstition and speculation throughout human history. Much confusion has arisen from an inability to imagine a deity of sufficient power, presence, and knowledge to consistently satisfy all humanity’s putative requirements for a god to satisfy. We have revealed that the single word “Love” is the best description of absolute deity. We have also shown that the existence of Love makes possible the activation of a divine function best described and named as “Truth”—the finite function of deity that creates Goodness and Beauty. And this active god of the finite universe is the true meaning of the phrase The Word of God.

Hermaphroditus, god of Truth

With these names we have abandoned an ancient idea of Judeo-Christian pastfathers that envisioned god as a blend of an elderly patriarch and the fiery demon of Mount Sinai, who, according to myth, personally consorted with the legendary Moses. We have also abandoned the image of the broken body of a blameless human murdered by barbaric crucifixion being in any way representative of the active face of deity at work creating the finite universe. We have suggested that classical pagan images (Aphrodite and Hermaphroditus) can equally well portray the true meanings of the upholding of Love and the creativity of Truth, who is the “son” of Love—the active response to the desire to do good to others.

Humans have been equally obsessed by the idea of a perfected world, a “heaven” that exists in some transcendent reality or in the distant future, where everything “has gotten better.” One of the key ideas of religions is the notion of survival of death to be repersonalized in such a world. Like the name of god and the word of god, this idea has been burdened with so many myths, misconceptions, and total misinterpretations as to be rendered fantastic and absurd to the rational mind of modern humans. It is time to set aside this antique jargon, which imparts a false sense of sanctity and, like the other common terms we have explored, leads to serious misunderstanding, miscommunication, and impairment of spontaneous personal growth.

At its root, the experience of the Kingdom of Heaven is the experience we have previously described as salvation from uncertainty. The core function underlying human behavior is the constant need to decide what to do next. Many functions of this sort are fully (heartbeat) or partially (breathing) automated, and we are unconscious of these. There is a stream of consciousness in which our self-identity must constantly make more-or-less conscious choices of action. Again, many of these are obvious and merit little attention; however, there arise occasions on which higher mind functions must be invoked when no guidance or contradictory guidance comes from lower mind functions.

Finally, such choices may reach a level of importance that requires recognition of personal responsibilities to others and analysis of personal abilities to address those responsibilities. This is the domain of moral choice, a living theater in which, regardless of our self-opinion or our rhetoric, we demonstrate the values that motivate our lives, that define the nature of our souls. When we feel unable to reach a decision, or find ourselves faced with a deep moral conflict, we are actually face-to-face with a choice that will strengthen or weaken our attachment to certain ideals and ideas in ways we cannot anticipate, and may rightly fear should our choice be an inappropriate one.

And this is the great uncertainty from which every wise and caring person seeks salvation. For many it is simply ignored or reduced to the final conscious moments before death. Such only seek salvation from death and may obtain whatever afterlife may be available to them. But the individual who lives a life of obedience to Truth, a life of supreme integration, finds that they know what to do and often simply do the right thing automatically, and this is true salvation from moral uncertainty as well as the key to understanding of one’s permanent role in the universe—the recognition that one’s mortal body becomes an avatar for an immortal soul obedient to truth in the expression of love. Experience of the Kingdom of Heaven, however, is not just about an inner state of confident salvation, but about the results in one’s life as one constant reaffirms that state, for the result is a coordination of one’s own actions, even relatively mechanical actions, with the actions of one’s environment, so that everything either works better or works for the good. In a free and truth recognizing society everyone appreciates this motivation toward cooperation and unity of purpose, while tolerating all constructively diverse expressions of personal will.

Personally entering this state is far easier than making sense out of my attempts to explain. John Mark recalled that Jesus taught:

Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of Heaven. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of Heaven as a little child, he shall not enter therein. (Mark 10:14-15)

The point is that openness, acceptance of truth, freedom from cynicism and skepticism, freedom from myth and superstition—all natural attributes of the child untutored in the delusions and fears of the past fathers—are the necessary human attitudes for the achievement of true happiness, the realization of complete sanity, and the progressive perfection of the human state as we enter and progress through the New Age of realized love, truth, goodness, and beauty; of liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all.

 


Wartime Sexual Abuse — of Men and Boys

“Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s,” says Stewart M. Patrick, a senior fellow at the DC-based, non-partisan think tank The Council on Foreign Relations, writing for The Internationalist. His recent report was widely circulated this summer on the startling 22% of males and 30% of females who have been sexually assaulted as a terror tactic and weapon of war used throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lisa F. Jackson’s award-winning documentary,  The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, likewise offers disturbing data on this nascent crisis. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution condemning rape as a weapon of war.

Rape is always a crime of opportunity wherein the victim is not targeted based on appearance, gender, or behavior but because he or she is simply available. War only enlarges and magnifies the politics of this violence.

The male rape epidemic has affected men in Bosnia, El Salvador, and many other war-torn nations, and in the androcentric world, focused on men, the image of a weak man has not been sympathetic.

How will this male-on-male rape be incorporated in and be fairly addressed by the United Nations, the individual state, and/or Non-Governmental Organizations? Patrick addresses this question and encourages you to take progressive action for these victims.

 

 Adrianna Midbama contributed to this post. The full article appears below.

Stewart M. Patrick’s, “Stopping Wartime Sexual Abuse – of Men

Today, I would like to draw your attention to a disturbing phenomenon ignored by the foreign policy community but all too common in global conflict zones: The pervasive sexual abuse of men in war.

Women, of course, bear the main brunt of wartime sexual violence—as they always have. Last December, my CFR colleague Mark Lagon hosted a sobering meeting with the eminent legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon. Now the special gender adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Mackinnon in 2000 argued the path-breaking legal case Kadic vs. Karadzic — about mass Serbian rape of Bosnian women — which for the first time established mass rape as an act of genocide. Over the past two decades, international attention to rape as a weapon of war has been growing. Documentary filmmakers have often been in the forefront. In 2006 Lisa F. Jackson traveled to DRC to interview thousands of rape victims, and their perpetrators. Her resulting film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution-condemning rape as a weapon of war. Several of my CFR colleagues — including Laurie Garrett, Isobel Coleman, and Matthew Waxman — have spoken and written eloquently on the scope of such atrocities and the need to hold perpetrators accountable.

At the same time, as the Guardian reported on Sunday, the United Nations (UN) and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) “barely acknowledge” the pervasive sexual violence against men that occurs in modern war.

The article documents the terrible suffering of a Congolese refugee who was captured by rebels and raped multiple times per day, and watched countless other men be similarly brutalized. 22% of men in Eastern Congo reported being victims of sexual violence, compared to 30% of women. One victim reported the crime to police, and was laughed at. A doctor in whom he confided merely gave him Panadol (a local equivalent of Tylenol). He described:

Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s.”

The violence, and the disregard, is global. 80% of Bosnian males imprisoned in concentration camps and 76% of El Salvadoran male political prisoners report sexual abuse. Yet, of roughly 4,000 NGOs addressing wartime sexual violence, only 3% mentioned male victims (and usually only in passing).

Read: U.S. trade policy; is America AWOL?

International institutions are also falling short. They should be lauded for attempting to address mass violence against women during wartime, but the protection and outreach must be extended to all victims.

The Guardian quoted one refugee who sought help from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was told “‘we have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.’” Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict counters that UNHCR does assist both men and women, but that women are “overwhelmingly” the victims. Emerging studies, however, suggest sexual violence against men is more widespread than commonly acknowledged.

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that some countries do not criminalize sexual abuse of men, as this report (PDF) by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documents. International humanitarian law criminalized rape in the twentieth century, but “prosecution was nonexistent” during the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its Rwandan counterpart (ICTR) included rape in the category of crimes against humanity, war crime, and genocide, but abuse against women earned harsher punishment than abuse against men.

However, Lara Stemple of the University of California’s Health and Human Rights Law project also notes that:

“There are dozens of references to “violence against women” — defined to include sexual violence — in United Nations human rights resolutions, treaties and agreements, but most don’t mention sexual violence against men.”

The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution.”

“Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates ‘female’ with ‘victim’, thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability.”

I recognize that this is not an easy subject for men, in particular, to acknowledge. But we all need to shine the spotlight on such suffering to underscore that sexual abuse, no matter the gender of the victim, is abhorrent—and that perpetrators must be held to account. And the world needs to provide legal resources and psychological support to men who demonstrate the courage to come forward in reporting such crimes, despite the social stigma so often attached to their plight.


Running Out of Time (video)

We were really impressed with this video which brings into sharp relief some of the dissonance and hypocrisy of American politicians’ sweeping calls for democracy and equality abroad, through the UN, in the US Congress, and from the White House.

They take seriously the populist rebellions in repressive foreign nations, at least the ones that might be useful to the US, but our political leaders dismiss 0r only limply support the successful “Occupy” movement in our midst that is already altering the national conversation of government’s role. The effectiveness of this movement is scaring them because it flips the paradigm in favor of the people, the 99%, and makes those who advocate for the 1% an endangered species that will soon be extinct.

Another good example of this is last February’s remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed at Ugandan lawmakers poised to enact their heinous “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.” She said, “Gay rights are human rights.” But our own country’s commitment and ability to protect the human rights of its own citizens, especially those of sexual minorities, falls so short.

Not long ago, I explained how sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms because the ability to experience sexual pleasure and orgasm it is the single, pluralistic, shared reality of everyone on earth that gives each of us a taste, a feeling, of what freedom feels like. It is our internal drive to cooperate with each other in seeking more and more freedoms. It is our collective bodily guarantee that promises mutual respect for individual autonomy, that makes full equality an inherited right. This is primal and precedes the laws of men, and no law can attempt to diminish personal sovereignty without losing credibility and honor.


 

What is the Word of God?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español In my recent post What is the Name of God? I explained that one must recognize two concepts of deity. One is the absolutely perfect omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity (the omni-cubed god), whose acts in infinite space and eternal time are necessarily uniform and invisible, who putatively makes possible and upholds everything that is or can ever be. We recognize that Love is the best descriptive name we have for this deity. Though no physical image can embody all this represents, an image of Aphrodite/Venus, the classical god of Love, provides a convenient symbol.

Aphrodite, god of Love

The second deity is the agency of both cause and necessity in an evolving universe of space and time. This is the god that creates and shapes the development of finite reality. This is the ongoing expression of the fully integrated deity that in some Transhumanist visions of destiny (Frank Tipler‘s Omega Point or Martine Rothblatt‘s Terasem or the Supreme Being of The Urantia Book) stands at the end of time as a fully integrated mind encompassing all prior consciousnesses of supreme value in the universe, and reaching back through time to assure its own emergence. From the viewpoints of origin rather than destiny, this is the ongoing expression of the creative power that gives rise to all events and occasions that come into being and develop their destinies towards a final supreme culmination in evolved perfection.

John Zebedee was the youngest of Jesus’ inner circle of male disciples (the 12 apostles of Christian legend). He called himself “the disciple Jesus loved best” and much has been made over the exact meaning of this statement, especially in view of Jesus’ other close male associations (John the Baptist, Lazarus, and the youth John Mark, who came to play a major role in the spread of Jesus’ vision in both Rome and Egypt). In any case, of the four authors of the “canonical” legends of Jesus’ life, John Zebedee seems to have most fully grasped the transcendent nature of the divine power he believed incarnate in the human Jesus, as reflected in this opening of his biography of the Jesus he knew and recalled.:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (KJV John 1:1-3)

And that pretty well sums up the nature of the finite deity I have identified with the descriptive name Truth. Love is the desire to do good to others. Truth is the power of effective action that takes the inspiration of Love and accomplishes Good and makes Beauty. John identifies the Word as the aspect of total deity represented to earthborn humanity by the person of Jesus as he writes:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, … full of grace and truth. (KJV John 1:14)

Though no physical image can embody all this represents, I have suggested that the meme of Hermaphroditus, the classical divine two-sexed child of Aphrodite/Venus and Hermes/Mercury, may provide another convenient symbol for the reality of cosmic Truth as the supreme finite deity, the coordinator of Goodness for the creation of Beauty. I submit that such an image more fairly symbolizes the physical cosmic Truth, the genuine Word of god than any conventional image of a cruelly murdered divine avatar.

Hermaphroditus, god of Truth

Most assume that Truth knows no gender. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Truth must encompass all genders, all sexes, and all possible actions, manifestations, and phenomena that are Good manifestations of Love, even objects of Beauty.

The classical deity Hermes/Mercury is the god of action. In Hermaphroditus, the powers of the god of Love are united with the god of action to embody an objectively androgyne deity able to shape action through will, through Word, to the service of Good. And this same Hermaphroditus is naturally portrayed as androgyne. I have explained in my rather long paper, Why We Are All Transgender, why the cosmic forces that govern our planet and commune with our persons are perceptible as intergender, transgender, or pan gender influences—that is, having the nature we recognize as androgyny—the combining of masculine and feminine forms of conventional gender expression.

Thus the meme of Hermaphroditus serves as an image of Truth, reminding us of the need to acknowledge the unification of all dual things, to transcend meaningless dichotomy, and to function both as a receiver and giver of True Love in all its forms. Furthermore, this meme represents a genuine cosmic reality that, even today, breaks out in the intergender impulses of people most sensitive to the intuitive appreciation of the full character of Truth and its potentials for expression in human lives. And that sensitivity is the great liberator that has always given us the true leaders of society, the Lesbian, the Gay, the Bisexual, and the Transgender, who seek to incarnate the nature of Truth.

Though Truth is a deity of action, finding expression of the desires of Love in doing Good and making Beauty, Truth is also the True Will of Love. Truth is the singular expression of the True Will, the Word, of God to our universe. Thus, Truth is the best descriptive name for the deity of finite time and space, and this deity is the Word of Love to our universe, the expression in time and space of the will of Love.

 

What’s Hot Right Now (10-11-11)

Arse Electronic Wrap-up, Occupy Everything, New National Campaigns, plus 

We’re back from 2 weeks on the road, participating in and filing blogs on Atlanta’s Southern Comfort Conference and then from San Francisco for Arse Elektronika.

Arse Elektronika is a production by Monochrom, an Austrian collective of futurist artists describing themselves as “an art-technology-philosophy group” and “an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism.” They have been producing the European version of AE for many years and are now in their fifth year bringing this parallel one to the United States. This week’s list gives us a special chance to highlight some stuff that impressed us.

A converted church on Mission Street in San Francisco was one of the three venues over the four days of Arse Elektronika. It houses the Center for Sex and Culture run by the dynamic Carol Queen, a colleague of ours at Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Carol was in Berlin while we were there but her wonderful staff brought the important work of the Center to the attention of a crowd most eager for a  sex-positive future.

The last day of Arse Elektronika was held at one of the country’s biggest hackerspaces,  Noisebridge. If you are ever in San Francisco, it’s an experience not like any other. Here is Jack’s brief video walk-through to give you a taste.

Ned and Maggie Mayhem should be atop your list of things to Google. For one, their unveiling at Arse Elektronika of their PSIgasm (that’s Pounds per Square Inch, pronounced P-S-I-gasm, or sci-gasm for short) will not go unnoticed. It uses sensors on an engineered dildo to measure internal bodily reactions to orgasm, such as temperature, heart rate, and contractions. As one of the first legitimate, fully engineered entries into the nascent science of teledildonics, it deserved all the attention it received.

And, a shout out to author-rac0nteur Chicken John and his legendary warehouse for the opening night of Arse Elektronika. The same weekend, he launched his new book, (volume 1) Book of the IS, Essays by Chicken John on Engineered Disperfection. Congratulations, Chicken John.

Back home in DC this week we are participating in and have started writing about the new force of change — #occupy, #occupydc, #occupytogether, et al, and the long planned “October 2011” occupation of DC known as #stopthemachine and the October 15 International Mobilization trending #globaldemocracy. Working together we can reshape our world to serve all of humanity, not a few swindlers.

I’ve already attended several of the general assemblies and will soon be reporting out specific objectives being moved forward by numerous action committees that have formed on Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, working hard to press their demands to the financial, governmental, and religious decision-makers to force a new inclusive way of conducting human affairs. One person articulating this movement especially well is highly acclaimed Sally Kohn through her her “Movement Vision Lab.”

This new movement started on Wall Street and appears to have to courage to do all it can to dispense with that which is old and bad/useless and join what is good to what is new and good to reshape the world. And, DC-based Code Pink is once again being saluted here for its masterful on-the-ground orchestration of this unfolding revolution; one that sooner or later will force American politicians to pay attention to the things important to the people, as the rest of the world looks to America to define liberty.

This represents a historic shift that taps into the long struggle for economic and social justice on the shoulders of all who have laid down their lives for universal freedom. Give thanks that we have now crested the first hill.

We’re tagging the Southern Poverty Law Center that sets the standard to identify and disclaim hate groups such as the Family Research Council and the Oath Keepers, two of hundreds across America. According to the Center, all hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Because of this the Center is just as dedicated to teaching tolerance and other forward and positive programs. Please check out their website‘s resources, contact its local volunteers, and if you can contribute.

And we are so pleased today to see the joint announcement of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s partnership with one of our fave organizations, Truth Wins Out, coinciding with National Coming Out Day.

Finally, we have to give a big COLD thumb down to the Chicago Board of Trade, papered this week in big white sheets spelling out the words, We Are The 1%. That’s cold.

 

Arse Elektronika: Come for science!

Jack Diehl, Alison Gardner, and Dan Massey contributed to this article.

VenusPlusX attended the Arse Elektronika conference in San Francisco (September 29 – October 2), hosted by the Austrian “art-technology-philosophy groupMonochrom. This energetic collective has run the European AE for many years, and this is the fifth year in a row they have brought its parallel to San Francisco. The call for entries last February gives some insight to what unfolded.

This year’s theme was Sex and Technology. It was hard to know what to expect from the schedule of four days of programming over three different venues, with intriguing titles like “Phallic Home Economics,” “Make your own Mind Controlled Dildo,” and “It’s Wankie Time!” But we are not complaining, we had to see it.

The entire conference had a natural leftist perspective, expressed in the sub theme, “Screw The System.” Kink was commonly understood, appearing quite abundantly in many presentations and all over the walls of the San Francisco Center for Sex and Culture, one of the 3 venues. Technology, the Internet, and hacking were also well represented. The last day of Arse Elektronika was held at one of the country’s biggest hackerspaces, Noisebridge. (Here is Jack’s brief video walk-through of Noisebridge.)

The first night was at author-rac0nteur Chicken John‘s legendary warehouse, a multi-media opening introduction made up of summaries of the previous 5 conferences in San Francisco, previews of talks to come during the following days, lots of high jinks, and some very enjoyable entertainment from “song a day guy” Jonathan Mann (who has made a song everyday for the last 1,000+ days.)

What Does It Mean To Love A Machine? (buy for $1)
Until The Vulcans Call (free download)

The presentations were extremely wide-ranging, and showed the creativity possible as a new age of sexual freedom emerges. Each one incrementally stretched the group or “hive” mind in real time.

Among the dozen+ offerings, we heard from Kitty Stryker in her frank talk, “Sex Work, Disability, and Stigma”  and Maymay presented “A Class Analysis of Social Status in the BDSM Scene” (also available on YouTube). David Fine, who vaguely describes himself as “a Sex Robot from the 25th century” spending his time in our era guiding technology in useful, or at least interesting, directions, brought us his reimagining of the Mindflex kids’ toy (available on Amazon) which he modified to activate a vibrator, simple and perhaps the first attempt we’ve seen to apply an EEG headset  to a sex toy; The future possibilities are endless.

Most expressive of the intersection of sex and technology, though, is the impressive work and activism of Ned and Maggie Mayhem.  Their  PSIgasm (that’s Pounds per Square Inch, pronounced, sci-gasm) is one of the first legitimate, fully engineered entries into the nascent science of teledildonics. As they describe it . . .

PSIgasm was conceived in 2010 by an HIV prevention specialist and an experimental physicist, both of whom moonlight as queer porn performers and are active in the Bay Area sex positive scene. The project revolves around measurement devices that can be used as sex toys, simultaneously getting people off and monitoring physiological responses correlated with arousal and orgasm.

PSIgasm

Considering themselves citizen scientists, the Mayhems prompted the assembled to start thinking about other commercial grade sex toys that might emerge and use their application and the sensors they’ve engineered in this device, and the ways that data on your heart rate, anal contractions, other statistics recorded during orgasm will prove beneficial.

Besides the PSIgasm project and being so damn cool, the Mayhems are HIV and sex educators, and among many useful things for society that they advocate for, they  campaign to empower others to produce and star in ethical and sex positive pornography to escape financial hardship. The pair are coming to DC in March to participate in the Momentum conference, and hold other events we will be promoting soon. For now, they are headed to the next phase of substantial testing and data collection for the PSIgasm under their slogan, “Come for Science.”

Overall, we assert that the teledildonics field hasn’t received the attention it deserves. These breakthroughs will lead to better and safer sex practices and extend to people often excluded from traditional social connections.

The toys being made right now are mostly DIY (do-it-yourself), and have very little financial backing. Technology will continue to be applied to sex, and as society grows out of its strangling sexual repression and we move further into an interconnected world, there is no doubt in our minds that the future of teledildonics will be exciting. Want to contribute yourself? Check out The Sex Prize, a new competition announced at this year’s conference challenging entrants to develop open source teledildonics software for f#^king machines. Entries will be judged by a Turing Test, meaning your program has to preform so well that it is indistinguishable from a human operator. With countless people willing to test such devices, we can’t wait to see what people come up with.

This Revolution Will Not Be Privatized

One of the best signs at the Occupy Wall Street‘s ongoing protest that is spreading like wildfire across the country right now said, “This revolution will not be privatized.” Well, what do we actually mean by that?

In the last 24 hours, Occupy Together has increased by almost 200 more cities, up from 749 to 928 cities, including Washington, DC. Wildfire. It’s about effin’ time. A movement like no other that has been 40 years in the making by my clock.

This week, Occupy Wall Street’s NYC General Assembly issued an official declaration. This is the American people standing up for the U.S. Constitution and the egalitarian principles it represents, here and abroad.

This is and always has been a public matter, of the people, by the people, and for the people, our joint struggle for universal pluralism, expressed by true democracy, not what passes for democracy today. It’s definitely not what the Values Voters Summit 2o11 speakers and politicians will be talking about tomorrow at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. They are billed as “upholding traditional values” and “protecting America” while they spout hate and homophobia and seek more and more draconian limitations on our constitutional rights. We’ll be outside there to call these bozos out, will you?

Occupy Wall Street and Occupy DC came together in irresistible solidarity yesterday with Stop The Machine, a 4+ day, long-planned event focusing on ending the wars, the killing, the corruption, and corporate greed that is ruining human lives and the natural environment. The mood of the crowd was summed up by one speaker at the microphone last night (paraphrased), “The economic collapse is good news because it tells us that this system is finished. The CEOs and politicians responsible should be jailed. No election in 2012, we need to start from scratch and never again allow class and race determine who can survive. Our environment has been ignored and we have a chance to fix it but that is not possible under this system.” He went on to say, “Nothing short of revolution is acceptable, an end to biggest police state (America) ever created. Like past successful revolutions where the people were pit against enormous odds, we will end this system once and for all.”

Yes, the meek will inherit the earth.

Liberty? Justice? Equality? Love? Truth? Freedom? Who will keep them alive if not us?

If not us, who will put an end to the coercive systems we have allowed our government to wield against its own people and innocents abroad? When will we stop the state-sponsored murders and corruption America has spawned? And who if not us can replace them with the voluntary associations of autonomous individuals? We can do it. We can envision a better world and make it a reality. We have ideas and we have skills.

Asking for the end of repressive government systems, such as War (the only thing to justify massive spending budgets and expand economic slaves to fill body bags without end) will be replaced by something better. It’s not anarchy, but anarchism that oversees the progressive ecology that replaces bad policy and legislation, all repressive, coercive systems, with something better. That something better focuses on helping the most number of people, not just the elite. This is the essence of progressive improvement of civilization.

Reproductive choice is a good example. Activists have worked and are working dutifully and passionately to extract this human decision from the grips of the state, religions, corporations, and even entrenched social customs. We know that it is private choice between a woman and her doctor, that’s it and that’s all it should ever be, a completely voluntary association.

To change our current system, to Stop the Machine that oppresses the 99% who wish to live in peace on a clean planet, we engage in envisioning, articulating, and advocating for better ways to do things, built to serve all of humanity, not a small global gang of greedy and bullying busybodies that stand in the way of all happiness. All of these movements, Rebuild the Dream, Occupy Together, and Stop the Machine are the spirit of Madison,Wisconsin, to the nth degree, and we applaud them. Power to the people. The truth will set us free.

At VenusPlusX, we have pointed out before that sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedom because it brings to every human’s heart and mind the physical, mental, and spiritual “feeling” of freedom that no one can assail or strip. It’s a bodily guarantee that we carry inside us. Each person experiencing sexual pleasure or orgasm, for the first time or throughout a lifetime, knows in both heart and head what freedom feels like. Everything we do, our search for our own happiness, tries in some way to recreate a bit of that dynamism inherent in sexual pleasure because we know what we are looking for, that feeling of at-one-ment, peace, joy, and satisfaction, the drive to move forward towards a better life.

Right now many movements are coming together in force to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. We are doing this without uniformity (not needed) but with passion for a newfound unity of purpose, long overdue.

Wildfire.