When did the middle finger become offensive?

Thanks to Cory Silverberg for passing this via twitter

By Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine, Washington

An American television network has apologised after pop star M.I.A. extended her middle finger during Sunday night's Super Bowl halftime show. What does the gesture mean, and when did it become offensive?

A public intellectual, expressing his contempt for a gas-bag politician, reaches for a familiar gesture. He extends his middle finger and declares: "This is the great demagogue".
The episode occurred not on a chat show nor in the salons of New York or London, but in Fourth Century BC Athens, when the philosopher Diogenes told a group of visitors exactly what he thought about the orator Demosthenes, according to a later Greek historian.
The middle finger, extended with the other fingers held beneath the thumb, is thus documented to have expressed insult and belittlement for more than two millennia.

'Phallic gesture'
Ancient Greek philosophers, Latin poets hoping to sell copies of their works, soldiers, athletes and pop stars, school children, peevish policemen and skittish network executives have all been aware of the gesture's particular power to insult and enflame.

"It's one of the most ancient insult gestures known," says anthropologist Desmond Morris.
"The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture. It is saying, 'this is a phallus' that you're offering to people, which is a very primeval display."

During Sunday night's broadcast of the Super Bowl, America's most-watched television programme of the year, British singer M.I.A. extended the finger during a performance of Madonna's Give Me All Your Luvin'.

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Callenge our thinking

SEXAUL ACTIVITY AND SEXAUL SATISFACTION ARE NOT THE SAME THING:

Here is part of a posting from one of my favourite bloggers Cory Silverberg from about.com.

Below he gives some insight into sexual health statistics but also about our beliefs about desire and satisfaction. Have a read.

A study published this week in the American Journal of Medicine challenges some of ways we tend to think about and talk about sex and aging, and as importantly, challenges the dominant medical frame on sexuality, which focuses on dysfunction rather than satisfaction or pleasure.
The study asked just over 800 women aged 40 to 99 to respond to surveys about their recent sexual activity, overall sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire. The women were not representative of the general population, they all came from suburb of San Diego and have been involved in a longitudinal research project called the Rancho Bernardo Study which began in 1972. So the findings shouldn't be thought of as highly generalizable, but instead as an interesting snapshot of one group of women in one place at one time.
The women were asked if they had engaged in sexual activity in the past four weeks. In this study sexual activity was described as including caressing, foreplay, masturbation, and penile-vaginal intercourse. In analyzing the data the researchers divided the women into four age groups, each with about 200 women in them. Here are some of the basic findings of the study:
50% of the women reported having had sex in the previous 4 weeks and 80% of those women were living with a partner/spouse.
40% of all respondents said that they never or almost never felt sexual desire, and 30% of women who were having sex said they felt low, very low, or no sexual desire.
64% of all respondents said they were moderately or very satisfied with their sexual relationship.
64% of women who had sex in the past 4 weeks reported being aroused most times, almost always, or always.
67% said they achieved orgasm most times, almost always, or always; women in the youngest and oldest groups reported the highest orgasm satisfaction.
These findings highlight how slippery statistics are. After all, if I chose to tell you that 40% of women over forty years old said they almost never felt sexual desire you'd probably feel bad for those women, right? But of those women 67% who were actually having sex almost always had orgasms, 64% felt aroused and were satisfied with the sex they were having. So which number matters most?
This is the problem with quantitative research; it can never answer that question. But this study does give us a lot more to think about. For example: GO HERE TO READ MORE

Number of partners??

This is one of those things that is talked about in so many situations. School rumours and workplace reputations are built around this. Gendered ideas of love and fidelity come in to play. Couples and jealousies, religion and poltitics. Its all there. Cory Silverberg in his post 'Number of Sex Partners' has a great discussion about this. It may give you some really good conversation points with the young people that you work with when they bring this stuff up. Go here to see Cory's post on about.com.sexuality.

Good question

Recently I was working with some young women. We spoke of many things around sexuality and diversity. I was explaining that orgasm doesnt have to be the number one - be all end all- to sex play. As we were discussing why we have been conditioned to believe this , one of the young women asked " Well how can I tell if Ive had an orgasm, I enjoy sex but I dont know if I have ever had an orgasm"

I won't go into our discussion here but suffice it to say that if this question was asked of her friends the reponse would probably be something like " If you've had one you would know". This response is not true and is a sure way of shutting down the conversation.

Below is a response by one of my favourite bloggers ( Cory Silverberg) to the same question he received. What do you think?

If you only do one thing for your sex life, try and stop yourself whenever you are comparing your sex life to someone else’s. It’s not easy, but in the long run I promise you’ll be much happier, and think of all the time you’ll save by getting rid of all those anxious moments. Also, you never know if someone is describing something accurately, and, regardless, it doesn’t matter. Your sex life is all that matters, and possibly the sex life of the people you’re having sex with.

If you do two things for your sex life, you should make the second thing an effort to masturbate more. Sex educators don’t refer to masturbation as the “cornerstone of sexual health” for nothing. The best way to explore your sexual response, including what orgasms feel like, is to do it on your own first, before you get one or more than one person involved.

As for how to tell if you’ve had an orgasm or not, there isn’t a test you can take. After all, orgasm is not just a physical experience, it happens in your body, your mind, possibly even your spirit. And there is no single definition of orgasm. So what would the test measure? However, there are some tell tale signs of what we could call an orgasmic response:

• Increased heart rate and blood pressure
• Increased muscle tension
• A flush of your skin
• A release of tension followed sometimes by a feeling of deep relaxation

But you might experience one or several of these things and not “feel” like you had an orgasm.

So how can you tell if you’ve had an orgasm? Most people would probably respond by saying “you’ll know when you’ve had one”. This always sounds a little condescending to me though, and if you’ve never had one, how could you know?

Instead I would just ask you whether or not the sex play you’re having is pleasurable. Does it feel good? Does it feel like something you want to do more? Are there times during sex when you want to say or do something but you hold yourself back? Holding back is one way you might be reducing the pleasure you’re feeling, including orgasms.

Trying to figure out if you’ve had an orgasm can also be a dead end, because if you’ve had one, does that mean you stop exploring other ways of feeling good or having orgasms? It’s a cliché, but a true one, that sex is about the journey not the destination. Focusing on orgasm is like driving down a one way street that stops at the river. If you focus instead on sexual pleasure, on how you respond and what you can feel, you don’t have to stop at the river bank; you get to jump in the river and float with the current, and you never know where you’ll end up.

Intercourse - a terrible teacher

I discussion that I find really useful. The following is from Cory Silverbegs sexuality blog on about.com

"The belief that sex - "real sex" -- always includes intercourse, that intercourse is in fact the goal of all sex, is one of our most counterproductive sexual beliefs. It serves all sorts of repressive and exclusionary functions, but from a learning and sexual growth perspective, it doesn't do any individual a lick of good. Intercourse is a terrible teacher. Almost every other kind of sexual interaction offers better and more varied opportunities to learn how to communicate verbally and non-verbally with a partner; how to read your partner's body and touch them in a way that communicates your intentions, and how to open up to feeling a partner's touch. Intercourse is great, but it's no way to learn how to have sex, and you waited a long time to have it and now think that once you've had it your done, you're missing out.

I agree with Cory. We need to challenge the notion that intercourse is the be all and end all. Go here to read more.

De bunking sexting

One of my favourite blog writers ' Cory Silverberg' from About.com:Sexuality has a different perspective on sexting than the one I posted in video form 2 weeks ago.

Here is what he says:

"My favorite not for profit sex tech organization ISIS was featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today responding to the recent rash of media coverage about teens sending naked pictures of themselves and each other over their mobile phones and the smaller but scarier series of charges that local cops have laid on teens engaging in this behavior (about two dozen teens in six states). In some of the cases teens are being charged with producing and distributing child pornography.
The activity has been called “sexting” a term that as best as I can tell was made up by an adult who’s never done it. It doesn’t even sound like a word anyone under the age of 30 would use. I’d love to know the derivation of it, because even the use of the word “sex” in the term suggests it was made up by someone who either disapproves of it or wanted to get people’s attention by using it (something catchy for headlines).
The piece is decidedly sex-positive and framed around the idea that what is fueling interest in this activity is fear about teen sexuality and technology. It included results from a survey of teens that found only 20 percent of teens acknowledged sending “nude or semi-nude” pictures online or through their phones."

Go here to read more

what do I know about your genitals?

I enjoy reading the Sexuality Blog By Cory Silverberg, One of his latest entrys starts like this.

'Writing about sexual anatomy is one of my least favorite parts of writing about sex. Each time I sit down, as I did a few days ago, and begin to write something about the way the foreskin works or what the urethra looks like I get a shiver down my spine. It’s not that I don’t love human genitalia. I mean it might be more accurate to say I have love for genitals than to say I love genitals directly. Either way, I’m not squeamish or conflicted about these body parts. My point is not that I don’t like my own, my loved ones, or complete stranger genitals. The point is that I don’t like writing about them.
After all, what do I really know about your genitals? Aside from the most mundane large scale generalizations, what can I really say about your genitals that won’t clash with your own experience of them? This is a problem for anyone writing about the body (above or below the waist) but its one we don’t talk about much.'

If you read this blog ( which is also linked at the side bar to yourt right) you will come to a 'link' that describes a way for you to take your own guided tour of your genitals. Go on and have a try.