Look what I found on Twitter! This strange case, fought through the French Courts, won the complainant £160,000 compensation for his unwanted drug side effects. It appears the drug he was prescribed for his Parkinson’s disease caused him to become a sex and gambling addict. There’s a full article from The MailOnline where you can read all about it here.
VelvetTripp
Bisexuality day poster
Unashamedly copied and pasted for all of us bisexuals today! Hope it’s been a good one for you.
While we write predominantly about fantasy, sex, erotica and occasionally humour, we do recognise there are serious social problems around sexual coercion and exploitation. One such problem is that there are women who are trafficked as sex slaves. The latest news report on this comes from the BBC – ‘Trafficked – sex slaves seduced and sold‘, a piece about the sex trafficking trade in Mexico where women from all over Latin America are recruited and sold on, often into the US. One place in particular, the semi-rural small town of Tenancingo, is reputed to be based almost entirely on the economy of sex trafficking.
The BBC site has a series of short video news and interview items and is tagged ‘Viewers may find some of the video content disturbing’. Yeah. And not in a good way.
If the content isn’t available where you are, the story’s been reported by a number of other sources: in the US, try The Takeaway and Jezebel. The same story, in Spanish, is at BBC Mundo (the BBC Spanish language world news site); also in Spanish, it’s in Vanguardia, La Policiaca, Animal Politico and Zolaco Saltillo.
This isn’t, obviously, the only place where sex trafficking happens. And if you look back at news sources over the last couple of years you’ll also see that in some parts of the world, young boys are similarly treated.
Much as people have fantasies and act them out, and much as fantasies can be extreme and involve sex slavery, the actual slavery of unwilling victims is evidently more common than any of us might like to think, and a serious social problem.
If you haven’t spotted this yet, it’s a movement not just to relaim the word, but as Boston organiser Siobhan Connors says, “is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It’s to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality… essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way.”
It came about as a result of a senior police officer in Toronto advising female students to “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” (Yes, he’s since been disciplined).
I’ll hold off on a long moral rant about how something like SlutWalk shouldn’t even be necessary in today’s society, because evidently it still is necessary.
Links: BBC website report and SlutWalk Toronto Blog Page.
Universities have changed since we did our degrees… There’s a report on the BBC website (Northwestern University sex toy show ‘disturbing’) about a ‘motorised sex toy’, which sounds like it was probably a fucking machine, being demonstrated in during a psychology lecture on human sexuality.
The particular topic was human sexual arousal and female physiology. Apparently ‘About 100 students observed the proceedings … Attendance was voluntary and students had been warned what to expect’ and ‘Student feedback for this event was uniformly positive’. The demonstrator was quoted as saying “We had fun with it. I’m an exhibitionist.”
It does raise some interesting questions. Is there a reason, apart from university administrations being concerned about their PR, why students on a human sexuality course shouldn’t be able, voluntarily, to be exposed to such ‘teaching material’.
One can’t assume university students, who are adults, would be completely innocent in such matters anyway. Whether the demo added to their knowledge and understanding is something that probably can’t be assessed from a distance. However it’s plausible that it would have informed students not just about female physiology and arousal, but the whole issue of ‘sex toys’ and given them some insight, too, into the nature of exhibitionism. Presumably the main embarrassment factor for the university is the fact that it’s all become a public issue.
It is the role of univeristies to teach, and human sexuality is relevant to a range of courses from psychology to sociology to biology and medicine to art and literature. There’s always new ground to break and sometimes barriers have to be crossed in order to do it. In the 70s and 80s it was often considered necessary if daring to use actual pornographic images in lectures about pornography and eroticism, the psychology of sex and other topics. In lecture terms, a picture is often worth a thousand words. It’s also been known for toys such as vibrators to be shown to students (though probably not ‘demonstrated’) and for actual prostitutes to be invited to speak at seminars and lectures on prostitution and sexuality. Reportedly in some places and at some times, couples have actually fucked for students to observe and make notes.
Outside universities, plenty of feminist groups and others have done things like invite women to inspect their own genitals and those of other women in minute detail, and this has often resulted in women having greater self-confidence and a sense of empowerment.
Is there a ‘freedom to teach’ or ‘freedom of knowledge’ issue here? What specific issues are there about the nature of knowledge and methods of its acquisition? If a fucking machine demo is acceptable, how about other sexual practices? Bondage? Spanking? Needle play?
And finally, given that universities in the past have been engaged in all sorts of things they haven’t wanted to be public knowledge, from accepting donations and grants from dubious sources to ethically problematic research across a wide range of disciplines, isn’t demonstrating a fucking machine a relatively unimportant issue?
Thoughts and comments welcome!
Great news! I’ve just proofed one story for publication in March with Xcite books. The story is called Tropical Paradise and will appear in a collection called ‘Sex At Work’! That was the contract I thought was so amusing last week! Then there’s another collection called ‘Wanton Women’ coming out in June. I have another story that will be in that, called ‘Go Find Yourself’, with the same publisher. My first story with them was ‘Tooth Fairy‘, in their ‘Lust Bites’ collection, so that will be three stories with this publisher. Great!
I’d better get on with the next story then!
deliciouslydeviant 