San Francisco - Peace demonstrations haven't helped much. Nor has arranging naked bodies into peace signs.
So now veteran anti-war demonstrators Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell are hoping that a "Global Orgasm For Peace" can finally bring an end to conflict in the Middle East.
The idea for the ultimate "Make Love Not War" action is for people around the globe to have an orgasm on December 22 and to focus their moments of pleasure on world peace.
"The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during it and after it," said Reffell, 55.
"Your mind is like a blank. It's like a meditative state. And mass meditations have been shown to make a change."
The event is timed to coincide with the winter solstice - the shortest day of the year - and with the holiday season's traditions of "peace on earth".
Sheehan, 76, who is no relation to anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, previously made headlines when she started the naked protest group Baring Witness, in which thousands of people across the US arranged their naked bodies into peace signs and anti-war slogans in order to protest the war in Iraq.
Sheehan believes that the new initiative will be more successful. The group's website is already attracting more than 26 000 hits and explains that the goal is to "effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy, a Synchronised Global Orgasm".
For those who doubt the effectiveness of such tactics, Sheehan explains that "the combination of high-energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers".
The idea may sound crazy, but what is there to lose? Even if peace on earth remains unattainable, participants will at least have the satisfaction of making their earth move. - Sapa-dpa
London - A mysterious syndrome in which men come down with a flu-like illness after an orgasm may be caused by an allergy to semen, Dutch scientists said.
Men with the condition, known as post orgasmic illness syndrome or POIS and documented in medical journals since 2002, get flu-like symptoms such as feverishness, runny nose, extreme fatigue and burning eyes immediately after they ejaculate. Symptoms can last for up to week.
Marcel Waldinger, a professor of sexual psychopharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, published two studies which suggest that men with POIS have an allergy to their own semen, and that a treatment known as hyposensitisation therapy can help reduce its impact.
“These results are a very important breakthrough in the research of this syndrome,” Waldinger said in a telephone interview. He said the findings “contradict the idea that the complaints have a psychological cause” and show that an auto-allergic reaction to semen is the most likely cause.
Although it has been documented in scientific papers since 2002, post orgasmic illness syndrome is largely unknown among family doctors and experts say many men who suffer the condition feel ashamed about it and confused about what is wrong.
Waldinger said while the syndrome is probably rare, it is likely that many men who suffer with it do not know it is a recognised condition and so do not come forward to doctors.
For these studies, Waldinger and colleagues analysed 45 Dutch men who were diagnosed with the illness.
“They didn't feel ill when they masturbated without ejaculating, but as soon as the semen came from the testes...after that they became ill, sometimes within just a few minutes,” Waldinger said.
Thirty-three of them agreed to undergo a standard skin-prick allergy test using a diluted form of their own semen. Of those, 29, or 88 percent, had a positive skin reaction indicating an auto-immune response, or allergic reaction.
In a second study in the same journal, Waldinger's team decided to try treating two of the volunteers with hyposensitisation therapy - a well-known technique for treating allergies, also called allergen immunotherapy, which repeatedly exposes the body to small but gradually increasing amounts of the allergen over several years.
In the POIS therapy, the men were given skin injections containing their own semen, at first in an extremely dilute form, and then in gradually less diluted forms. The study's results showed that after one and three years respectively, the men showed a significantly reduction in their POIS symptoms.
“It's a very slow process. It is used for all sorts of allergies and can sometimes take up to 5 years,” Waldinger said. In the light of the first results, his team have now started several more POIS patients on hyposensitisation therapy. - Reuters
Meg Ryan is struggling to find suitable movie roles now she is in her 40s.
The 44-year-old actress - best known for her scene in When Harry Met Sally when she faked an orgasm at a table in a restaurant - claims some audiences are turned off by her "perky" persona now she has got older.
She revealed to Easy Living magazine: "Some people get upset if you are interested in being perky and you're over 40, but others want you to be that."
Meg, who adopted a baby girl from China earlier this year, admits she is struggling to break free from the shackles of her Hollywood stereotype.
She added: "I don't think you can win any way with this image. No one should shrink to fit the idea someone imposes on them. It's not what being a human being is about."
Shortly after adopting her daughter, Meg decided to change her name from Charlotte to Daisy.
She said: "I already had to change her name. I thought she was a Charlotte and she's just not, she's a Daisy."
Meg - who also has a teenage son, Jack, with ex-husband Dennis Quaid - picked up her baby from the US consulate in January after an eight-day stay in China to prove her suitability to be parent.
The notorious Hollywood lothario - whose conquests include Madonna, Julie Christie, Joan Collins, Faye Dunaway, Britt Ekland, Jane Fonda, Melanie Griffith, Daryl Hannah, Goldie Hawn, Bianca Jagger, Diane Keaton, Linda
McCartney, Elle Macpherson, Diana Ross, Carly Simon and Barbra Streisand - used the term to explain a sexual climax to his youngest daughter, seven-year-old Ella.
Beatty's wife, Annette Benning, revealed her husband's unusual terminology to Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing, Kathy Griffin and Christy Scott Cashman on set of their new movie The Women, which they are
currently filming in Boston.
A source told the New York Post newspaper: "Annette mentioned during rehearsal that her daughter Ella had asked what an orgasm is and Warren explained, 'It's a sexual sneeze.'
"Before he married Annette he must have been suffering from chronic hayfever!"
Beatty, 70, and Benning, 49, have three other children - Kathlyn, 15, Benjamin, 13, and Isabel, 11. - Bang Showbiz
New York - The male-female orgasm gap. The sex lives of 14-year-olds. An intriguing breakdown of condom usage rates, by age and ethnicity, with teens emerging as more safe-sex-conscious than boomers.
That's just a tiny sampling of the data being unveiled on Monday in what the researchers say is the largest, most comprehensive national survey of Americans' sexual behaviour since 1994.
Filling 130 pages of a special issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the study offers detailed findings on how often Americans have sex, with whom, and how they respond. In all, 5 865 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, participated in the survey.
The lead researchers, from Indiana University's Centre for Sexual Health Promotion, said the study fills a void that has grown since the last comparable endeavour - the National Health and Social Life Survey - was published 16 years ago. Major changes since then include the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the types of sex education available to young people, the advent of same-sex marriage, and the emergence of the Internet as a tool for social interaction.
Dr Dennis Fortenberry, a paediatrics professor who was lead author of the study's section about teen sex, said the overall findings of such a huge survey should provide reassurance to Americans who are curious about how their sex lives compare with others.
“Unless, like al-Qaeda, you feel there's something abnormal about the American people, what these data say is, ‘This is normal - everything in there is normal.’”
The researchers said they were struck by the variety of ways in which the subjects engaged in sex - 41 different combinations of sexual acts were tallied, encompassing vaginal and anal intercourse, oral sex, and partnered masturbation.
Men are more likely to experience orgasm when vaginal intercourse is involved, while women are more likely to reach orgasm when they engage in variety of acts, including oral sex, said researcher Debra Herbenick, lead author of the section about women's sex lives.
She noted there was a gap in perceptions - 85 percent of the men said their latest sexual partner had an orgasm, while only 64 percent of the women reported having an orgasm in their most recent sexual event.
One-third of women experienced genital pain during their most recent sex, compared to 5 percent of men, said Herbenick, citing this as an area warranting further study.
The study, which began taking shape in 2007, was funded by Church & Dwight Co, the manufacturer of Trojan condoms. Questions about condom usage figured prominently in the study, but the researchers - during a teleconference - insisted the integrity of their findings was not affected by the corporate tie.
Among the findings was a high rate of condom usage among 14- to 17-year-olds. Of the surveyed boys who had sexual intercourse, 79 percent reported using a condom on the most recent occasion, compared to 25 percent for all the men in the survey.
However, the sample for that particular question involved only 57 teens in the 14-to-17 age range. That's far smaller than the thousands involved in latest federal Youth Risk Behaviour Survey last year which calculated condom use among sexually active high school students at 61 percent
Fortenberry nonetheless found the new findings encouraging.
“There's been a major shift among young people in the role condoms have in their sexual lives,” he said. “Condoms have become normative.”
Another intriguing finding - rates of condom usage among black and Hispanic men were significantly higher than for whites. The researchers said this suggested that HIV-Aids awareness programs were now making headway in those communities, which have relatively high rates of the disease.
The lowest condom usage rates were for men over 50 - and the researchers said this was worrisome, raising the risk for disease since an increasing number of older adults had multiple sexual partners.
Other notable findings:
- While about 7 percent of adult women and 8 percent of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the proportion of individuals who have had same-gender sex at some point in their lives is higher. For example, 15 percent of the men aged 50-59 said they had received oral sex from another man at some point.
- Among adolescent boys, only about 2 percent of the 14-year-olds - but 40 percent of the 17-year-olds - said they had engaged in sexual intercourse in the past year.
The survey was conducted from March through May of 2009, with the assistance of Knowledge Networks, among a nationally representative sample of adolescents and adults. Once people were selected to participate, they were interviewed online; participants without Internet access were provided it for free.
The researchers said the 1994 survey was compiled through in-person interviews, while the new method - collecting data over the Internet - may help make respondents more comfortable about discussing sexual behaviours.
Dr Irwin Goldstein, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, noted that the new study came more than 60 years after Alfred Kinsey - also based at Indiana University - published his groundbreaking report, “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male.”
“Just like then, these papers contain material that is avant garde and often considered off-limits,” Goldstein wrote in a forward to the study. “At a time when we can have nudity on HBO but cannot use the names of our genitals on the evening news, there remains a need to continue research on sexual health.”
QUESTION: I enjoy sex, but have suffered from the same problem all my life and really want now - at the age of 47 - to do something about it. To put it plainly, it takes me a long time to reach orgasm. Half the time I just tell my partner that I’m fine, when I actually feel both embarrassed and frustrated. I experienced exactly the same difficulties when I was young and during my ten-year marriage, so it’s got nothing to do with my age. I can tell it perplexes my boyfriend, who prides himself on being a considerate lover. I’m worried he’ll lose patience with me.
ANSWER: I do not mean to sound trite, but the phrase “a watched kettle never boils” comes to mind. Isn”t it true that whenever you concentrate on how long something takes to happen, the world perversely slows to a snail’s pace?
You are so sensitive to the notion that you’re taking ages to reach orgasm it’s impossible to tell whether that’s really the case.
After all, there’s no internationally approved timetable for these things. What you regard as an embarrassingly long time to reach ecstasy may be someone else’s short - or normal.
Those few who can attain this state of pleasure on a hair-trigger may well envy you the capacity to enjoy a lengthy session in bed.
You say you “can tell” your boyfriend is perplexed by what’s happening - but perhaps what really troubles him is your extreme sensitivity to the issue.
It seems clear that every time you have sex you put yourself on a stopwatch, which must stop you losing yourself in the moment.
Having good sex is all about uninhibited pleasure and letting go, so of course it’s hard to tip over the brink if you’re feeling uptight and judging yourself.
It’s quite normal for women to take longer to reach orgasm than men, so why beat yourself up?
Many of the women I know defer all thoughts of having reaching this state during “quickie” sex, but that doesn’t mean they’re not feeling fulfilled.
You somehow need to re-programme yourself; at the minute you’re so focused on your destination that you’re giving little heed to the pleasure of the journey.
If you’re taking great pleasure in having sex with your boyfriend, why judge things by the number of orgasms scored?
It’s time to concentrate on this less. You need to talk to your partner and tell him you’ve got yourself into a tizzy and you’d like to make this less of an issue. If it happens, great, but if it doesn’t, it’s no big deal.
It’s imperative you talk to your partner in any case. If he truly thinks his sexual prowess is being called into question (although I rather doubt it, since I think this is a projection of your own fears), then he needs to hear you say that it’s not the case.
But, more importantly, if you want to move forward you need to enlist his support.
He needs to know not to push things when you’re feeling too stressed or self-conscious.
In that scenario there’s nothing worse than the super-attentive lover who refuses to give up while you feel more and more defective.
He’s got to learn - as much as you have - that you can have incredible, emotive sex without having an orgasm.
Show your partner the triggers you use to reach your highest state of pleasure.
Our sexual pleasure is not as centred, as men’s, around one erogenous zone, so women can prove far more diverse in the ways we respond to stimulation. I am sure your partner already knows what works for one woman may be anti-erotic for another.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, why don’t you flick through a sex manual together?
There have been some good new additions to the genre in recent years.
James McConnachie’s The Rough Guide To Sex (part of the Rough Guide travel series) is a user-friendly, non cringe-worthy volume, full of interesting information and tips; it dispenses with the idea that there’s one “normal” way to make love.
In the end, however, I suspect this is all about permission.
You need to give yourself a big green light to have sex in the way that best suits you.
Your partner will only lose patience with you if you continue to judge yourself so harshly about your orgasm timescale - it’s never fun to go to bed with someone who’s fretting rather than frolicking.
The truth is, people tend to take us at our own estimation.
If you can learn to think of yourself as a sexy woman who’s good in bed, then I am sure he will, too.
