Spankometers -God save the Queen

London learns how to love at new sex academy

The hottest new attraction in the throbbing heart of London opened its doors this week: Amora -- The Academy of Sex and Relationships, dedicated to looking at love in a new light.
Stereotypical Britons may be all stiff upper lips and cucumber sandwiches rather than sexually open, passionate lovers, but this visitor attraction promises to get themout of their shells.
"We consciously differentiate ourselves from a museum: we are about sex today andtomorrow, not in the past," Amora's founder and chairman Johan Rizki told AFP.
"The Amsterdam sex museum is sleazy; New York's is rather boring," added the Frenchman, New Yorker and Harvard Business School graduate.
Nestled between Leicester Square and the famous electronic billboards of Piccadilly Circus, Amora is a world away from the busy London streets surrounding it.
Visitors descend the stairs to a backdrop of seductive whispers from the red wallsand are offered an aphrodisiac cocktail on entry.Three years in the making, Amora uses visuals, interactive displays and sound to explore and explain relationships and sexual behaviour.
There are touch screens, hands-on exhibits -- including dildos, model vaginas, and fake breasts and testicles to show how to check for potentially dangerous lumps -- as well as video screens, hand-held audio guides, life-size models, computer animations and wall displays to educate and excite once inside.
Visitors discover seven zones blending knowledge with entertainment, covering aspects of sexual relationships including the chemistry of dating, erogenous zones, fantasies, techniques and sexual health.
"My idea was to create somewhere for talking about sex, but in a very fun, interesting, up-to-date way," said Rizki.
"No-one before has ever brought love into a physical space where it is accessible to people. We have sex therapists where people can go and ask questions and there are workshops and academics host debates," said Rizki, touting the venue as "the most emotive visitor attraction in London."
All the displays are penned by one of 30 experts -- including academics, medical doctors, relationship councillors, psychologists and sex therapists -- and come with a safe sex message.
Inside the Sexplorium section, a young pair with their arms around each other watch a video clip on using sex furniture. In the Fantasy and Fetish zone, a laughing couple test their strength on the spankometer.
Londoners Chloe and Hannah, both 18, rushed to the academy. "We saw it on television and thought we'd come down. We like doing different things," Chloe told AFP.
Hannah -- who like her friend preferred not to give her last name -- found some of the plaster casts "eye-popping."
A young male visitor in shorts said: "For me it's very important that young people have all the information they need about sex, so they can decide."
Amora is intended to be a hub for sex education and enlightenment. Visitors become part of its Internet community and an exhibition will tour Britain.
School parties have already asked to visit, Rizki said, and will be able to explore the health section -- complete with its gory pictures of sexual disease sufferers -- the gallery-cum-seminar room and the library.
Rizki, who made his wealth in investment banking and hedge funds, said he recruited investors strictly from the finance and health sectors -- deliberately ruling out those from the pornography industry.
"My first drive is making the world a sexier place and helping people pick up a few tips and tricks that can make a difference to their lives," the investor said.
"I've always been attracted by 'how-to' things."
But, critics might ask, how will the seven-million-pound (14-million-dollar, 10-million-euro) academy ultimately go down in the the land of make tea, not love?
"In Britain, there is a desire to learn, and to learn about love. Shops like Ann Summers (a well-known sex toy and lingerie shopping chain) and broadcasters like Channel Four here have brought sex into the mainstream, using down-to-earth language," said Rizki.
"If it can be timely somewhere, it can be timely here.
"People are attracted to things around sex. The British public is a lot smarter than the way it has been portrayed."
Not everyone is completely convinced.
"One problem is that we've glamourised sex to the extent that ordinary people feel uncomfortable when they don't live up to their imagination," said Kaye Wellings of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"If the sex academy does that it's a shame," she told The Guardian.
"We talk about love in an entertaining way," Rizki said. "There are no taboos. We don't take a stand, but we ask you, is it for you?"
There are plans to open an Amora in Paris, Germany and the United States.
Amora costs 12 pounds (24 dollars, 18 euros) before 5:00 pm and 15 pounds from then on until midnight, seven days a week. Students and the elderly get a discount.

While the official cause of human sexuality remains debatable...

Report: Sexuality less varied in women

Report: Sexuality less varied in women
While the official cause of human sexuality remains debatable, one Michigan State University scientist has said women typically are more sexually flexible.
Neuroscientist Marc Breedlove told The New York Times that his research has found that men typically maintain an attraction to one specific gender, while women tend to be more flexible regarding their sexuality.

"Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible," Breedlove said.

The neuroscientist added that the prevailing approach to sexuality in the scientific community appears to support the formation of male sexuality before birth.

"I think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life, probably before birth," Breedlove told the Times, "whereas for females, some are probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life."

"The Situation is Dismal"

Survey: 40 Pct. in Japan Not Having Sex
(AP) -- The secret behind Japan's plunging birth rate? A record 39.7 percent of Japanese citizens ages 16-49 have not had sex for over a month - up 5 percentage points from two years ago - according to a survey published this week by the Japan Family Planning Association.
Among married couples, the rate was only slightly lower, at 34.6 percent.
"This is very bad news for the country's birth rate, and something the government needs to look into urgently," said Dr. Kunio Kitamura, the family planning association's director.
The survey comes amid concerns over Japan's faltering birthrate, which fell in 2005 to a record low of 1.26 births in an average woman's lifetime. The decline has stoked fears of impeding tax revenue shortfalls and labor shortages.
"The situation is dismal," Kitamura said. "My research shows that if you don't have sex for a month, you probably won't for a year."
Kitamura partly blamed stress from busy working lives.
A decline in physical communication skills in an increasingly Web-based society was also a factor, he said.
The association said it handed out survey forms to 2,713 randomly selected people, and received responses from 636 men and 773 women in November 2006. It gave no margin of error. In a similar poll taken two years ago, 35 percent reported having no sex for a month.
Japan came last in a 29-country study of sexual satisfaction published by the University of Chicago last year, with a mere 25.7 percent of lovers expressing satisfaction in bed.
The country was also in last place among 41 nations in a 2005 poll by condom manufacturer Durex, with people having sex just 45 times a year compared to a global average of 103.

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Hung Like a Harvest Mouse? (more rodent sex )

Scientist says, "Everything is relative."

Promiscuity is common among female rodents, leading to competition between the sperm of rival males over who fertilizes the eggs. It now seems that possessing a longer penis may give males an advantage in this competition, according to new research to be published in the March issue of The American Naturalist.
Dr. Steve Ramm, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, compared the relative size of the penis bone in several mammal groups: "The data for rodents seem pretty clear cut. Species where sexual competition between males is most intense also tend to have the longest penises. But, interestingly, a similar pattern was not detected in either primates or bats."

Understanding the reasons for these differences will require a better understanding of the precise mechanisms through which male rodents benefit from longer penises, something which comparative data alone cannot address.

Overall, the rodent with the longest penis bone relative to its body size in the study was the Western harvest mouse, Reithrodontomys megalotis. "Everything's relative of course," explains Dr. Ramm, "so although big for its body size the penis bone in R. megalotis is still only 7 to 8 mm long. I don’t think the phrase 'hung like a harvest mouse' will be catching on any time soon."[read on...]

Things We Learn From Rat Sex

Scientific American Mind: Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race
Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race
By David Dobbs
For years the story on rat sex has been this: the male seeks above all else to ejaculate quickly, and once he has done it with one female, he is eager to move on to new partners. The female, meanwhile, seeks to extend the sex encounter through "pacing." A new study finds that if pacing is slow enough, the male will prefer that familiar partner to someone new. The wait, it seems, makes the female more attractive.

"It's an awful lot like what we were taught in high school," says Concordia University psychologist James Pfaus, who co-authored the study with Nafissa Ismail, the graduate student who conceived it.
The experiment made innovative use of standard research devices called pacing chambers, which are cages with dividers having either one or four holes big enough to let a female rat through but too small for the larger male. Thus, the female can join or leave the male, allowing her to significantly lengthen her arousal and, studies have shown, her chance of pregnancy. But the mating rituals last longer in the one-hole chambers, because the male, eager to get at the female, often sticks his big head in the hole, blocking her only passage back to his side and delaying her return.

The researchers let 20 couples mate in one-hole chambers and 20 in four-hole chambers. Then they placed each couple, along with a novel female, in a larger, open area. Among males from four-hole chambers, about half preferred their familiar mates. Among males who mated more slowly in the one-hole chambers, 80 percent preferred the familiar partner.

Driving this behavioral dynamic is, as always with rat sex, some neurochemical reward. Boston University biologist Mary Erskine notes that "sexual preferences come from chemical rewards, and we can be sure there are some here." Sexual climax, in fact, unleashes a flood of pleasure-producing hormones and neurotransmitters, such as testosterone and dopamine. Pfaus speculates that the higher level of arousal created by the longer wait generates a stronger release, and a more substantial reward, thereby enforcing the preference.

"Whether it's simply a stronger dose of the usual chemical rewards or some in addition, we don't know," Pfaus says. "But something is making this sort of mating more rewarding to the male or rewarding in a different way."

Rat sex, Rat sex
I've had a lot of that sex.
Get'im in the sack sex
Line 'em up, 'mon back sex.

Cute whiskers and a big pink tail
Show me who's boss
I might make your bail.

Big rats, little rats
Shady, non-committal rats
waiting for acquital rats,
Gimme-just-a-little rats.

Come on over baby
You don't have to stay,
But if you want me in there
Get yo big head out' the way!

Exploring the Mind-Body Orgasm

Exploring the Mind-Body Orgasm

By Randy Dotinga| Wired
02:00 AM Jan, 10, 2007

Armed with MRI scanners and willing volunteers, a hardy band of sex researchers is exploring the long-misunderstood organ that's at the center of human sexuality -- the brain.

Three of the leading lights in sex research have compiled several decades' worth of knowledge into a new book called The Science of Orgasm.

The authors are Rutgers University professor emeritus Beverly Whipple (who helped popularize the "G-spot" in the '70s), Rutgers psychology professor Barry Komisaruk, and Carlos Beyer-Flores, head of the Laboratorio Tlaxcala in Mexico.

In a Q&A with Wired News, Whipple and Komisaruk discussed what we're learning about the eternal mystery of the Big O.
read on

Global O

My first inkling of the Global O project. http://www.globalorgasm.org/
I must have been (be) a canary in a mine in another life.
I'd lay odds it won't be a petit mal. Perhaps a petit mort.
Can't hurt to try.