Humpjones

Posted Jun 10, 2008 14 comments

After an article on vomit porn—and a long hiatus to party like a dying god and exterminate rational thought—I think we should start over with a simple question: is anything obscene anymore? They’ve been making schiesse porn for decades now over in Germany.  We haven’t covered the phenomenon of squid porn yet, but rest assured, seafood sexuality will be explored in due time.

Still: internet pornography is everywhere, and we’re about to witness the political awakening of a generation that grew up in a world where porno is normal.  There are more adult bookstores per capita in the alleged “Bible Belt” than anywhere else in the United States.  Major corporations are making good money off pornography, thanks to satellite TV and hotel pay-per-view.  Porn stars are celebrities, if not royalty—all in all, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that America has become a sexually permissive culture. 

Unfortunately, that’s completely motherfucking retarded.

The Cambira List as Skeleton Key

Paul Cambria is one of the main attorneys for the largest pornographic production companies in the United States, and he was about 5 feet away from his client, Larry Flynt, when the Hustler publisher was shot by a sniper in front of a Georgia courthouse.  That was in 1978, but it’s mighty interesting to remember why Flynt was shot—it wasn’t for split beaver shots, it wasn’t for offending Christians—it was over inter-racial porn.  There are still millions of Americans, and not just in the deep South, who find nothing more offensive than a black man having sex with a white woman. 

Paul Cambria is just a footnote to Flynt’s attempted assassination, but he’s at the center of a more recent controversy in the porn industry—it’s even named after him.  After George W. Bush got elected in a blatantly corrupt fashion (the first one, not the 2nd one) the porn industry bigwigs had a meeting to discuss how to avoid another Meese-style crackdown.  What they came up with is a list of truly naughty sex acts, a guideline of What Not To Do in order to avoid prosecution.  It’s called the Cambria List.

And you know what, kids? Nearly 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, somehow, inter-racial sex was on that list.  Even more telling was the specific wording: “No black man-white woman topics”—in other words, white men can fuck black women all day, every day, but if a black dude touches a white woman, you’re begging for a lawsuit.  Also dangerous: any gay sex, any fisting, food used as a sex object, coffins, and girls sharing the same dildo.  (That last one was probably inserted by a toy manufacturer, don’t you think?)

I should emphasize: the list was not a random selection of what some executives found to be personally icky, it was based on three decades of legal experience and exhaustive research into what had triggered obscenity charges in the past—so the list is really a look into the mind of the American legal system.

Highly Defective Primates

Thanks largely to the work of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson—both architects of the Christian Coalition, the driving force of politically active right-wing Christianity in the USA—a great many of our elected officials are among the very stupidest people in the entire country.  Seriously, if you believe that the earth was created by a god named Jehovah around 6,000 years ago, you shouldn’t even be operating motor vehicles, let alone making decisions that affect an entire nation.

And yet.  Somehow, someway. 

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again here: we still live in the Dark Ages—don’t fucking kid yourself, human.  Don’t get me wrong—the future gets better every single day.  But it’s also a slow, iterative process, and there are powerful forces keeping people stupid...look no further than the miracle of public education.  Although millions of kids who are just turning old enough to vote have grown up being barraged by silicon titties and double penetration, they’re still calling anyone they don’t like a “faggot”—and they still can’t read too good, you know?

Am I being pessimistic?  Should I take heart, knowing that although millions of grown-ups want to make it illegal for a black man to have consensual sex with a white woman, their kids are going deaf listening to Young Jeezy and calling each other nigga?  Is this progress?  Should I be more enthusiastic? 

This beer is for Robert Mapplethorpe

Now, that was a real damn Artist....Robert Mapplethorpe, yes sir.  He pushed the envelope harder and farther than any mere pornographer ever did or could—and best of all, his work is beautiful.  Here at Hump Jones, I don’t kid myself for second...this will only ever be bad writing about good sex. 

And yet.  Somehow, someway.  I feel compelled to carry this man’s torch.  Is anything obscene anymore? The jury is still out on that one, but rest assured: if it’s out there, we’re gonna find it, right here at Hump Jones Dot Com. Some delicate mix of psyhosis, hubris and alcohol poisoning compels me to keep the search alive, to find those soft fleshy pressure points in the Global Brain and keep pushing until the twitching stops. 

I think that’s a pretty reasonable goal for an artist to have.

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Filed in: Zeitgeist

Posted May 21, 2008 11 comments

Men would like to believe that we exist because we held the Universe down and punched it in the face until it submitted, then gave us a whole planet to be Badass upon.  Sadly, this is not that case.  We exist because women are somewhere between sentimental and stupid.  They could have killed us off decades ago, and they still might.  (At the risk of being called a cock traitor, I’d go so far as to say they definitely should.)

Artificial Insemination was the first blow to the Purple-Headed Empire—but that was a mere warning shot, my friends.  Back in 1992, very quietly, a group of scientists announced a phenomenon that few humans are aware of to this day: the hands-free, imagery-induced orgasm. That’s right, there are women out there—thousands, if not millions, of women—who can actually think their way to an orgasm.  Dig:

Subjects were women who claimed that they could experience orgasm from imagery alone. Orgasm from self-induced imagery or genital self-stimulation generated significant increases in systolic blood pressure, heart rate, pupil diameter, pain detection threshold, and pain tolerance threshold over resting control conditions. These findings provide evidence that orgasm from self-induced imagery and genital self-stimulation can each produce significant and substantial net sympathetic activation and concomitant significant increases in pain thresholds.

And the conclusion is a truly classic nugget of scientific understatement:

On this basis we state that physical genital stimulation is evidently not necessary to produce a state that is reported to be an orgasm and that a reassessment of the nature of orgasm is warranted.

Oh no shit?  Really?  Huh.  How about a re-assessment of the penis?

Okay: A Re-Assessment of the Penis

As long as we’re talking about “thinking outside the box” as far as dicks are concerned, it’s hard not to mention the independent researcher Dr. Lorena Bobbitt, who reached some fairly radical conclusions about the role of the wang in modern society.  Her thesis—get this, it’s a doozy—was that the trouser snake was actually an autonomous creature who needed to be liberated from the context of the male body, and released into the wild...apparently via being thrown out of a car window while the vehicle was moving.

Her husband and/or research subject, John Bobbitt, managed to get his severed member re-attached, and famously did a couple pornos with some chicks who really hated their jobs that day.  Over in China recently, things did not go so well:

Surgeons at Guangzhou General Hospital said it took 15 hours of microsurgery on the unidentified 44-year-old man to attach the 4-inch organ donated by the family of a younger brain-dead patient.

In their report due to appear in next month’s journal European Urology, the doctors said after 10 days, the man, who had been injured in an accident, was able to urinate normally, but he was unhappy with the operation.

“Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” said Dr. Weilie Hu.

Sounds like a horror movie, I know.  This severed penis talk, it must be making all two of our male readers uncomfortable, so let’s crank it up notch with something even worse.

THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN LOSING YOUR DICK

Yep, let’s take a look at pregnancy.  First of all, I would like to hand the fellahs out there the single greatest pickup line of all time, the most diabolical and manipulative possible reason to get a woman from the bar into your bed.  Ahem. Recent studies—several of them, actually—have concluded that promiscuous women are statistically much more likely to give birth to healthy babies.

�Scientists have developed many theories to explain why some female animals have multiple sex partners: whether it�s trading sex for food and protection, dealing with infertile males, or avoiding the negative effects of inbreeding in species that can�t recognise their relatives,� team leader Dr Diana Fisher said.

�Another theory is that mating with multiple males would result in sperm competition. This means that males with the strongest sperm are more likely to become sires and father better quality offspring. Until now, this theory hasn�t been demonstrated convincingly.�

Of course I’m distorting the hell out of this research, but I’m also fully qualified to do that.  Pregnancy data is full of fascinating statistics, and all of them can be used out of context to great effect at a bar near you.  Here’s some ammunition to start with:

The most popular day for babies to make their entrances? It�s still Tuesday, which boasted more than 13,000 births on average in 2003. That�s about 16 percent more babies than on any other day of the week. Saturday is the slowest day, with an average of about 7,500 births (in part because doctors don�t schedule c-sections and inductions on weekends).

36 percent of American babies are born to unmarried mothers, which is why God knocked down the twin towers in New York City (like you didn’t already know that).  Boys still outnumber girls—by 1049 male babies for every 1000 chicks—so the bar scene will not be improving anytime in the forseeable future, especially since that ratio has apparently stayed the same for as long as humans have been compiling statistics.  The US has been seeing a steady increase of twins, premature births, and cesarean sections, though.

By the way, if any of these useless factoids actually get you laid, send me an email, I’d love to hear about it.

Further Reading for Curious Primates

Check out the archives over at “Reuniting”, full of sex science source material.

Also, enjoy the supremely weird and info-packed website of Dr. Newman K. Lin, Taoist Sex Science Master. (All the good info is on the left menu.)

11 comments

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted May 19, 2008 5 comments

There’s been a lot of redundant research in the news lately—do we really need a study to tell us that images of hot naked women reduce a man’s ability to make rational decisions?  Apparently we did. And somehow...the world is a better place.

What’s been much more interesting—at least to an over-educated pervert such as myself—is the recent rash of studies that completely subvert conventional wisdom about human sexuality.  The human brain is a very strange thing, and neurological “facts” get overturned every 3 to 5 years these days, so of course all this new information might have an expiration date.  Just the same, it’s the only new information we have, so let’s start sniffing the panties of modern science.

Dirty Pictures Make You Go Blind

“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,” David Zald, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, said.

They called it “emotion-based blindness”—further proof that all scientists should give me a call before they name anything, ever again.  What’s especially interesting about the Zald experiments is that gory images had the exact same effect as erotic images—either way, the brain can’t process any visual input immediately afterwards.  For instance, at this point in the article, there’s two sets of tits on the screen—are you having a hard time concentrating on the words?

“We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can�t get through,” Zald said. “It appears to happen involuntarily.”

This parallels another recent study, funded by ad companies, into the effectiveness of sex in television advertising.  Their findings were surprisingly complex: first of all, men are more likely to remember an advertisement if it contains sexual imagery, but women were less likey to remember that same ad.  More curiously, any form of advertising that was playing during the commercial break of a TV show with lots of sexual imagery would be less likey to be remembered by either sex.  In other words, if you’re going to use titties to sell cars, do it during the evening news, not Baywatch.  It remains to be seen wether or not this study will lead to less gratuitous sexuality bullshit on TV, but my fingers are not exactly crossed, you know?

Human Brains: Hardwired for Porno

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses.

As subjects looked at the slides, electrodes on their scalps measured changes in the brain’s electrical activity called event-related potentials (ERPs). The researchers learned that regardless of a picture’s content, the brain acts very quickly to classify the visual image. The ERPs begin firing in the brain’s cortex long before a person is conscious of whether they are seeing a picture that is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

But when the picture is erotic, ERPs begin firing within 160 milliseconds, about 20 percent faster than occurred with any of the other pictures. Soon after, the ERPs begin to diverge, with processing taking place in different brain structures for erotic pictures than those that process the other images.

Like most research into visual processing, this also raises some fairly disturbing questions about the nature of “free will” when our brains know things before “we” do, but let’s just gloss over that for now.  What’s signifigant here is that this study was done with women, and it’s pretty safe to assume the results with men would be at least around the same, if not even faster and more attuned to the porn.  Perhaps men have evolved an entirely separate neural pathway for exposed nipples and split beaver shots—but I leave that kind of speculation to the professionals.

McGill University also did a recent study that throws a classic “Gender Gap” issue into serious question—namely, the arousal curve.  Common sense (at least for those of us who get laid) holds that men get turned on much, much faster than women do.  This is why men are subjected to the frankly offensive ritual of “foreplay” instead of just penetrating a woman and ejaculating ten strokes later....you know, like the Good Lord intended.

Anyways, the new science of “thermal imaging” has finally seen some logical application in the bedroom and the results have people in lab coats scratching their heads.

“Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,” said Dr. Irv Binik, psychology professor and founder and director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital, which is part of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

Previously, sex researchers have measured arousal with instruments that require genital contact and manipulation. Binik focused thermographic cameras on his subjects’ genitals while they watched a montage of material from pornography to horror movies to The Best of Mr. Bean to Canadian tourism travelogues to provide a base of control data.

(The article never clarified if Mr. Bean was supposed to be arousing or part of the control data, but I sent them an email so hopefully we’ll find out.)

Much More to Cum

We’ll keep exploring the sticky frontier tomorrow—meanwhile, keep emailing me weird porn and good news stories, I definitely appreciate the help. 

5 comments

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted May 16, 2008 13 comments

Is your dick big enough? Do women you sleep with tend to wake up in the emergency room? Do you lose consciousness every time you have an erection? Can you club a baby seal to death with your flaccid penis?  These are questions that humanity faces, here in this brave new millennium.  This is what you need to know.

On page 22 of the March 2007 issue of Maxim, there’s a remarkable little blurb I’d like to share with you beautiful people.  Ahem:

Q: Do “male enhancement” products actually do anything?

A: When we asked Dr. Steven Lamm [from NYU’s school of medicine] he didn’t beat around the bush: “That’s a flat no.” While he acknowledged that implants can affect width, when it comes to length you’re simply out of luck: “It is just really hard to make the penis longer, OK?” He suggested instead dropping some pounds: “For every 30 pounds of weight loss there is an increase in the appearance of your penis of around one inch.” Or just buy the red sports car already.

Considering at least 5-10% of the Maxim advertising income is from those same “male enhancement” products, my hat is off the editorial staff for demonstrating the presence of actual testicles.

BUT YET—the industry marches on.  How? Why? Don’t these products offer you total satisfaction or your money back?  Of course they, do, human—that’s just sociology at work. See, most sociology experiements are funded by advertising companies, and they publish it publicly because they know most of you can technically read, but are much too lazy to actually learn.

Let’s take a look at the invisible hand of conformity for a second—after all, in a country where nearly 80% of men over 18 state they worry about the size of their penis, you know there’s something horribly wrong.  Logically, you’d expect around 49% of them to be worried, right?  Right?

Over at the Brainsturbator library, we’ve got a book you should probably read if this question seriously interests you—yeah, I know, here goes nothing:

Edwin Bernays—“Propaganda”

It goes a little something like this: if I tell people that my product has been around for years, and that we guarantee customer satisfaction and offer a full refund, and that we’ve had less than 1% of those customers ever ask for the refund—it’s already too late for rational thought.  I just completely defined the context and parameters of the Male Enhancement Universe, and all further calculations you make will be within the cage I just built for you.

Because what happens if it doesn’t work? What’s wrong with you? Why are you in that less than 1% of total failures with such defective cocks that not even my amazing product can save you?

Advertising is a great business to be in—you get to install industrial-grade insecurities in children and then exploit them for the rest of your customer’s meaningless lives.  Nevermind the transparently obvious fact that women are just desperate for affection and security—guys still believe that their girlfriend of 2 years is about to walk out on them because she’s not bleeding every time they have sex.

As a side note, please observe the location of the man’s left hand in that photograph.  Effective ads are all about subtlety.

But you’re smarter than all this—you know damn well your penis is not only big enough, it’s too much for this Universe to handle.  You are Pan Incarnate, you are a lion on the African plain and your bellowing orgasm-roars are heard from Johannesburg to Cairo. You are Zeus giving Europa more than she bargained for, you are Jehovah deflowering the Virgin Mary because you felt like it.  Meditate on that and spend your money on more important things, like beer.

Go get ‘em. 

13 comments

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted May 13, 2008 14 comments

Personally, I can think of nothing as throbbingly sexy as hundreds of people in a big room, all having intercourse in sync and following instructions that are shouted at them by some guy with a bullhorn.  Yes sir, that is entertainment, that is smoking gun proof that Japan remains the same inherently surperior culture they always have been.  In the United States --- Texas, specifically --- they have gang-bangs, hideous staged rituals where a single female athelete (known affectionately as “porn stars") will copulate with hundreds of men.  In most cases, these men have literally come in off the street.  They shuffle around with their pants around their ankles and numbers stapled to their Nascar T-shirts.  There is nothing as empty as a gang-bang, but yet a mass banging is somehow not only palatable, it is truly delicious.

This is pornography that was staged, recorded and paid for by the Rev. Sum Myung Moon himself.  Although I just made that accusation up, if it were true it would be one of the more sane things he has done in his lifetime.  Perhaps pornography is offensive to the sensitive reader, and all this windowgazing is distasteful for the ethically minded, but there is nothing as obscene as the fact Moon had himself coronated as King of the World --- not only that, he did so in Washington, DC and it was attended by hundreds of congressmen and federal officials.  Moon has a very cozy relationship with the Bush family, owns the Washington Times, and is among the richest men on the planet.  He also stages mass weddings in giant Asian sports stadiums, which is why I suspect he’s jacking off to this exact movie, right now, somewhere in Budapest.

Fun fact: everyone naked in this movie was paid about $10 american.  If you want to understand how to manipulate any given mass population, there are really only two places to start.  The first is looking at the past century of local history, the second is to get about 20 copies of different local pornography magazines.  (German and Japanese porn are both particulary abundant lines of study.  As to why this is, we’re not supposed to talk about that on this site.)

Could you have sex in a room with over 500 other people, plus a camera running? Can you piss when you know people are watching you?  A note to reader: looking too closely at sex, or death, lead you to the same uncomfortable grey zone.  Talking about what you see there will get you labeled a pervert, a criminal, and a Very Bad Person.  This is just paranoia and superstition, though, because all the good stuff is contained in that grey zone and you will learn more about yourself and your fellow humans by staring intently at that spot than you could learn anywhere else.  We are created and we will shall be destroyed, and in the meantime, hot damn the sex is sure fun!

What happens to monkeys who are given orgasm buttons?  The “switch” for an electronic implant embedded within their brain, which can trigger an orgasm response every time the circuit is tripped?  In a related question, why is it that statistically, any amount of TV watching you do will increase weekly, always tending towards the national average of 6.3 hours per day? When you smoke a bowl or a cigarette, when you have a coffee or a beer, do you want another one?  Maybe this is stretching, but: is there any way to be “sane” or “mentally healthy” in a culture where sex is taboo and death is entertainment?

But fuck philosophy, right? The real issue here is, who are these people?  Who is that dude with the camera?  Who was walking around with a clipboard taking notes while this movie was being shot?  Humans adapt to anything eventually.  Millions of people work in slaughterhouses, walking through ankle-thick pools of blood and fat on their way to the lunch room for break.  Watching people have acrobatic sex for hours on end is “going to work” for some of us.  (More amazingly still, many humans are even lawyers.)

There are no easy answers, but there is a world full of pornographic options for you to pursue while you rationalize all this away.  When you’re settling back into the emptiness of life, the endorphins released by orgasm make the transition much easier.  Although there is no universal panacea, no perfect remedy, and no dubbed version of this movie yet, I still give three thumbs up for “500 Sex”.  Look for it.

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