Band of Thebes

You: and Your Sex Schedule

detail from Jacques Réattu, La vision de Jacob, 1792

As we close the first quarter of 2013, you should be having at least your 50th orgasm of the year. Tonight is the 89th night, so climaxing only once every other day is not enough. Step up your game. If somehow the scoreboard shows you need a few more to reach 50, well that's your bar talk / grindr chat for tonight. You're welcome.

Dr. Oz says you need 200 orgasms a year for optimal health. Spread them out. The last thing the world needs is you procrastinating and running around like a crazed teenager trying to have 149 orgasms on December 31. This fact comes from his New Yorker profile, but there's loads more in Dr. Oz's YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger [Kindle].

Publishing can help. They may be killing the literary gay novel but, even in the age of free tumblr porn, picture books are forever: French athletes (Dieux du Stade: Gods of the Stadium), American jocks (Masculinity), Eastern European twinks (Paradise Found: Bel Ami), beautiful men (Luminosity), hung tops (Supersized), power bottoms (Rock Bottom), bears and cubs (Fur: The Love of Hair), rough trade (Brutal Truth), seedy drawings (Just So Horny), kitsch physique paintings of the 40s and 50s (The Art Of George Quaintance), and rediscovered vintage nudes (Uncovered: Rare Vintage Male Nudes).

Fatter and Stupider, But #1 in Self-Esteem

WALL-E nailed it: In the future, no one walks; they just sit and eat and watch the screen.

In 1995, no state had an obesity rate of 20%. Now, no state doesn't. The new study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports the worst is Mississippi with 34.4%, the best is Colorado with 19.8%. Nine of the ten fattest states are in the south. Nine of the ten thinnest less fat states are politically blue. The Wall Street Journal, of all places, discusses the link between obesity and poverty.

The FY2011 federal budget cuts $833 million to nutrition programs for children and families. Guess what we spend annually on air-conditioning our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq? $20 billion.

The Mayo Clinic says one's average daily intake should be approx. 2,000 calories and 44 to 78 grams of fat. On Burger King's site, the total for the biggest burger sandwich, large fries, a large shake, and dessert is 2950 calories and 144 grams of fat.

A couple weeks ago America learned that only 12% of high school seniors are "proficient" in history. I probably wasn't alone in imagining that, awful as the widening gap is, at least our smartest smarties is like reely supersmarts, rite? Wrong again. "The top five percent of our students, our very best, rank 23rd out of 29 developed countries," according to Waiting for Superman. The documentary also reports the one area in which U.S. students rank #1 is self-esteem. Watch the clip.

Two nights ago Rachel Maddow reeled off an alarming number of broke counties that are switching to four-day school weeks, not by choice, but because they can no longer afford five days of schooling. Currently twenty-one states allow the shorter option, and it's already in effect in more than 120 school districts, mostly rural. Getting a three-day weekend every week won't make those kids smarter. It will make them fatter.

All Night Relay for Life

Relay for Life went from 6:00pm to 3:00pm "because cancer never sleeps." The 193 runners/walkers raised $83,851 (American Cancer Society) or over $86,000 (Facebook). Either way, we collected more money than Fairbanks, whose population is seven-fold our 5,000. If you're wondering why the photo is so dark, it's not because I went at 1:00am, a lively time of cookouts and campfires; it's because it was cloudy and drizzling. The high school track was encircled with hundreds of luminarias, each one colorfully inscribed, many in tribute to a someone who survived or succumbed to the disease. Below, midnight last week.

Bad Gay News: 18yo Dead; 20, 21yo To Be Executed; Orgasm Illness

Lance Lundsten, an openly gay 18 year-old student at Jefferson High School in Miltona, Minnesota, died over the weekend. Initial reports called it a suicide. Now, according to Lance's father, the coroner says Lance "had an enlarged heart and died of a coronary edema." Friends say Lance was bullied. His funeral is planned for tonight.

Pink News is reporting that two young men in Iran -- Ayub, 20, and Mosleh, 21 -- have been sentenced to death by stoning for having gay sex together. Their execution may be as early as Friday. Advocating on their behalf is complicated by the country's "culture of shame. The families won’t defend their loved ones from this brutal punishment,” according to Soheila Vahdati, an independent human rights defender for Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Iranian Queer Organisation based in San Francisco. The pair filmed themselves having sex, and the footage was found on their cell phones.

The Los Angeles Times posts a brief article about POIS, post-orgasmic illness syndrome. Apparently some men are "allergic to their own semen, developing a mysterious flu-like illness after they have an ejaculation, Dutch researchers reported Monday. The condition has been documented since 2002. Symptoms include feverishness, runny nose, extreme fatigue and burning eyes, which can last for up to a week."

U.S. National Sex Survey: 7% of Women, 8% of Men "Other than Hetero"

In the most comprehensive national sex survey conducted since 1994, scientists at Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion found that seven percent of American women identify as lesbian or bisexual, eight percent of men identify as gay or bi. Naturally, occasional same-sex activity is higher; fifteen percent of American men 50-59 report having ever received oral sex from another male, thirteen percent of men over 40 say they have given oral sex to another male. Fourteen percent of women in their 30s say they have ever given oral sex to another female. Hours of fun to be had from studying their graph below. (Nearly twice as many men in their 50s getting topped than men in their 30s?) According to the data, black and Latino men report significantly higher rates of condom use than do white males. Many more stories and stats from the survey here and here. 

A recent study in the UK by the Office of National Statistics found only 1.5% of the people surveyed identified as L, G, or B, and 95% identified as hetero. 

The US study is based on responses from 5,865 people. The UK study surveyed 450,000 people.

HHS Votes 9-6 To Keep Lifetime Ban on Gay Male Blood Donors

On Friday, the HHS Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability voted to ignore all the progress in screening capabilities and keep in place a 1985 lifetime ban on all gay male blood donors who've engaged in any sexual activity since 1977. A heterosexual male who has unprotected sex with an HIV-positive female prostitute must wait one year before giving blood.

For months John Kerry has been campaigning to reverse the law. Even the stodgy Red Cross wanted the gay ban lifted, as did the American Association of Blood Banks and America’s Blood Centers.

As Dailykos's Chris Love writes: "The HHS panel’s decision to keep the ban in place doesn’t just bar sexually active gay men from donating blood.  The deeper effect of the ban’s retention is that gay men (and the LGBT community in general, even though this specific policy applies solely to gay men) will continue to be stigmatized and seen as something other than normal, something dangerous to fear. This discriminatory policy, along with DADT and DOMA and many other anti-gay laws on the books across the country, only serves to feed homophobia and bigotry."

Lesbians Smoke More than Gay Men Do, Both Much More than Straights

A discouraging new report from UNC Chapel Hill confirms earlier findings that gay people are almost twice as likely to smoke than are straights. The numbers come from compiling forty-two studies of smoking habits:

37% of lesbians smoke    18% of straight women smoke
33% of gay men smoke    24% of straight men smoke

The Los Angeles Times quotes the report's lead author as saying, "Likely explanations include the success of tobacco industry's targeted marketing to gays and lesbians, as well as time spent in smoky social venues and stress from discrimination." Read UNC's full press release here.

Steven Lansburg takes on the NPR coverage of the report in his Slate column:

In other words, Varney implicitly assumes that gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that smoking is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly. A more inquisitive reporter might instead have raised the obvious question: What good reasons might gays have to smoke more than other people?

"Good reasons to smoke" ought to be a self-canceling phrase yielding the null set, but you can read Landsburg's thoughts on the subject here.