"Effectively it's a museum about everything, everywhere, ever": The New Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archeology

Sylvia Plath, front-doors, humanity, Totem poles, objects made 1.8 million years ago, Captain Cook, death, sex in Ancient Rome, snakes and ladders and other things in the Cambridge University Anthropology and Archeology Museum's collections.

Porn Sells (my Blog)

Ever since I posted about photoshopped playmate bunnies in December my blog's audience has increased tremendously. "Kill stretch marks" and "playmate bunnies" are now among the top key words with which people land on my blog. I'm very flattered obviously by all this extra attention, but since I'm not much of a porn expert and actually tend to think porn doesn't really exist, except as a joke people amuse themselves with like wearing hats or collecting stamps, that realization was fascinating to me.

Earlier this month, my fascination experienced a breakthrough when the week I spent in nyc was the week New York magazine's special Porn issue came out. The magazine had three stories on the topic - one on the recent 'arrival' of the web in the industry, a second on how this open to all free content is affecting teens and a third on how porn is decreasing men's libido.

From the first I discovered new astonishing websites and also that Montreal didn't only give Arcade Fire to the world but also the three geniuses behind Brazzers, pornhub, xtube and extrememetube (among many more excellent sites). Apparently they are the people behind the revival of the MILF in porn. Great you say? well they didn't stop at that achievement. They also made millions by making platforms for free porn - free to watch, free to post, free to make, free to stop, free to zap, free to collect, etc. The old porn millionaires hate them, but many thank them, like Liz, 30, who claims "I get excited making them [porn videos], posting them and seeing how people react to them." (p.88)

The second wasn't as exciting. Alex Morris talks to young girls who post images of themselves online, but have boyfriends who may or may not know about this but that anyways are their boyfriends only online because boys don't assume in real life what they are online or something. Basically Morris seems as confused as the 14 year olds he's interviewing except he doesn't post sexy images of himself online. Frankly I'm not convinced facebook has shattered teenage angst at its core: when I was 14, there was no facebook and boys would say things that they knew nothing about but had the terms for, all while looking at boobs, and then would call us to talk about homework. 

The third was about male porn watchers having libido decreases. That could be really bleak or not so much. When I was in Egypt a few 14 year old boys groped me and a friend in Alexandria. It was funny and punishable by Allah. There's three ways to read the situation: either they associated white females to the western porn they saw on xtube so they groped us, or they were frustrated that they couldn't wank off to real girls so they groped us, or they were just very confused teenagers so they groped us. Hopefully those kids marched to topple their government and got their cherry popped in the process and/or wank off to xtube videos guiltlessly. Maybe their libido is so low now they can actually go on date without the extra sister or female cousin to look out for his female date.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Green Porno

Sigmund Freud came up with a few ideas. Including one - later coined death drive - with which he revised his key notion of the pleasure principle. It goes more or less like this: At first Freud thought all humans innately acted upon a unique and repressed sexual drive (a drive to live and reproduce), he called the pleasure principle; a little later - after WW1's trench victims came back with their vivid trauma dreams and his daughter Sophie died - he proposed the more nuanced idea that human beings actually are ruled by a sex drive as well as the more self-destructive death drive directed at one's own organic end. 

As Rossillini demonstrates (wearing a few coloured leotards) seems like insects act out on both drives quite well:

The male bedbug stabs (death drive) his female counterpart in the abdomen to ejaculate (pleasure principle) in the wound. It is through her blood stream that his semen reaches her ovaries.  

To reproduce (pleasure principle), the praying mentis male gets his head eaten (death drive) before copulation is done by his female counterpart's 180 degree rotating head.

There isn't much sex for bees - it's hard to know where the pleasure principle and where the death drive begin or end. The Queen, only female bee of the colony who gets to do it, does it once, in mid air and lays eggs for the rest of her existence, while the 'lucky' male bee (drones) looses his penis (the ovipositer) in the process and immediately dies from the loss.

Fixing Playmates and the Birth of Viagra

December 1992's playmate, aka Barbara Moore, is on sale for an estimated 1,500 - 2,500$. Among the many lots, the centerfold prints showing post-production comments on the Playmates' sexy poses seem like the most interesting pieces being auctioned off at Christie's December 8th "The Year of The Bunny: The Playboy Collection" sale.

While unsurprisingly most of the Playboy memorabilia for sale offer a pleasant array of cookie cutter sexuality and generic eroticism (in this case: here's Barbara about to make you a creamy smoothie) these footnoted photographs offer powerful cues  for a better sex-life. Women, own up to it:
- "better curve" (Dec 1992 Playmate)
- "smoother" (All Playmates)
- "slimmer here slightly" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "accentuate nipples" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "kill nipple" (Jan 1995 Playmate)
- "kill stretch-marks" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "diminish stubble" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "kill out veins" (March 1996 Playmate)
- "fill with similar skin" (August 1995 Playmate)
- "kill line bellow lip" (August 1995 Playmate)

And how did the pharmaceutical industry come up with Viagra?