Papa don't preach

LIPSTICK, cheap jewellery, drink bottles and household detergents – what does this list say to you? To most folks, it reads like a pretty mundane collection of everyday objects. To more exciteable souls, these items all come dripping with hidden sexual meanings.

Since time immemorial, humans have been obsessed with sex and how to get it. Unlike in the animal kingdom, however, sex among we two-legged creatures quickly became subject to social, religious and cultural mores. There is always someone telling us when and with whom we should be getting jiggy. As a result, some sex practices get shoved under the carpet, others go underground. To gain access to them, you have to know the secret code.

That’s the fearful fantasy anyway – that a dangerous sexual undercurrent is constantly throbbing under just under the surface of society. This fear recently exploded into a furore over so-called ‘shag bands’ apparently doing the rounds in Irish and British schools. Parents were suddenly alerted to the ‘real’ meaning of the plastic multi-coloured bracelets popular with teenagers and children.

Rather than the cheap fashion accessories they appear to be, each coloured band supposedly signifies a different sexual activity ranging from French kissing to full-blown intercourse. If a boy ‘snapped’ one from a girl’s arm, she had to succumb to the activity that band represented.

Parents, naturally, freaked out. They could well believe their 9-year-olds were being indoctrinated into a sex craze because, as Carol Platt Liebau writes in her book Prude, “an incremental but aggressive sexualising of our culture (has created) a status quo in which almost everything seems focused on what’s going on ‘below the waist’.” Even though pop stars Avril Lavigne and Pink sport these bracelets as a style statement, it was possible they meant more than that.

The shag band reports have been doing the rounds for some time. In the States, they are called jelly bracelets and in the early Noughties – or should we say, Naughties – were banned from schools in Marion County, Florida after a few students divulged their “secret meaning” to adults.

Outside of that incident, it’s up for debate whether kids were aware of the sex symbolism of the bracelets before they read about it in the papers or on the internet. In the 1980s, I had no idea how risqué Madonna’s Like a Virgin was until my mortified father demanded I stop singing it at the top of my voice around the house. (Incidentally, it was Madonna who first popularised the jelly bracelet and I decked out my entirely virginal arms in them as a tribute. Who knew I was sending out sex signals at the age of 8?)

The shag band phenomenon is the latest in a line of everyday objects apparently gaining currency as a sort of sexual token. In the 1970s, it was the ring pull from a can of Coke. Offer a broken one to the object of desire and they had to return the favour with a kiss. Manage to take the tab off intact, and the prize was much higher. Beer bottle labels came with similar smutty innuendo. An intact label peeled carefully from a bottle was supposed to entitle the bearer to sexual recompense. It all sounds a little convenient and as Barbara Mikkelson of the hoax-busting website Snopes.com says, “wishful thinking codified into belief”.

Still, it didn’t stop down-with-the-people princess Oprah giving weight to one urban legend by allowing mention of it on her chatshow in 2003. In a debate on oversexualised young people, one contributor spoke of ‘rainbow parties’. Oprah’s well-to-do Middle America audience listened with their mouths gaping to how young teenage girls would slather on brightly-coloured lipstick and then give oral sex to any number of boys at secret sex parties.

The ‘rainbow’ referred to the different coloured rings of lipstick left on the boys’ genitals as proof of their conquests. If you’re having trouble picturing it, think of a Fruit Pastilles ice lolly with its stack of differently-coloured flavours.

As it turns out, the legend of the rainbow parties was shortly debunked by investigative reporters who couldn’t find one group of teenagers to admit, even off the record, that such activities were widespread. The same had been the case with the so-called ‘non-virgin clubs’ – no explanation needed – of the 1950s.

So our teenagers may not be half as devious as we think but there have been other groups who have made widespread use of sexual codes. Gay culture, for example, had to get around the fact that for a long time to signal your homosexuality was an illegal act. The Hanky Code, or flagging, sprang up in 1970s New York to signify sexual availability to another man – it is even referenced in the 1980 movie Cruising when Al Pacino’s straight character is heckled for wearing the wrong colour handkerchief to a gay bar. The roots to the code are believed to go right back to San Francisco just after the Gold Rush when gay men would wear blue hankies to square dances to identify themselves on the ‘gaydar’.

Adulterous sex is another area that has traditionally required its share of signals and subterfuge. When my mother, who lived in London as a young woman, would see boxes of OMO washing powder stacked neatly in Irish shop windows she used to give a little chuckle. She had always been told by her English friends that a box of OMO in the bedroom window of a house signified to a lover in the time before mobile phones that the ‘Old Man’s Out’ and the coast was clear for a rendez-vous.

There is of course the modern difficulty of trying to crack the sext code of your husband or wife’s texts to their new close friend (the number ‘8’ is often used to signify oral sex though, if that helps). But love letter-writing paramours went to great lengths to conceal their affairs. Invisible ink, invented by Socrates, reactivated when held to the heat of a candle flame or fire was a crafty way of reading between the lines.

And just as parents might sit kids in front of a DVD while they head off for an “afternoon nap”, Tsar Alexander II and his mistress Katia had a personal code for sex in their letters: an otherwise nonsensical word, ‘bingerle’. In 1871, Katia wrote: “I saw in your eyes that you wanted to throw yourself at me to forget everything and enjoy our bingerle.” Well, quite.

Even the censorious Victorians found a way to express their hidden desires: they literally said it with flowers. The red rose, of course, denoted true love but if you received a bunch of gardenias from a suitor, his intentions were slightly less honourable: gardenias stood for ecstasy.

Sexual codes are everywhere now from subliminal ones in advertising to the overtly sexual lads’ mag at the supermarket checkout. As such, it’s easy to read sauce into everything we see. Shoes, we are told by Leora Tanenbaum in her book Bad Shoes, can signify sexual availability in women if they are high enough and pointy enough. Then again, women seen smoking in the 19th century were seen to be of loose moral standards. Perhaps sometimes a kids’ bracelet is just for fashion – and a woman’s shoes are just for fun.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/is-your-teen-sending-secret-sex-signals-2235874.html

Addicted to love

'Love rats'.... I just can't escape my past in the world of tabloids...My feature in today's Irish Independent on sexual addiction. Forget bad jokes about Tiger Woods - there's something in it.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/sex-addiction-a-real-ailment-or-just-men-behaving-badly-2043467.html

Once upon a time, adulterous spouses were branded 'love rats'. Now the term 'sex addict' is being used with increasing frequency to describe chronic cheaters.

But is 'sex addiction' a real disorder, or is it just an excuse used by men (and some women) who have been caught behaving badly?

Golfer Tiger Woods is the latest celebrity to check in to a sex addiction clinic - he was recently photographed outside the grounds. Woods is paying around €45,000 for six weeks of treatment. Is his stint in rehab an act of contrition or an exercise in damage limitation?

The concept of sex addiction tends to enter public consciousness only when a high-profile figure has been caught in the throes of infidelity. It carries the distinct whiff of a publicity stunt designed to save a reputation and a career.

The cynicism extends to the medical community. There is no general consensus that too much sex can be classified an addiction in the same manner as the abuse of cocaine or alcohol.

"The use of the word 'addiction' is still controversial in that context," admits Eoin Stephens, director of training for the Irish Centre for Sexual Addictions. "In the medical profession, they prefer to keep the word purely to describe addiction to substances."

The traditional view would be to bring excessive sexual activity under the umbrella of compulsive behaviour. Stephens would argue that using the word 'compulsive' brings its own problems.

"It brings obsessive compulsive disorder to mind," he says, "But the things people get compulsive about aren't intensely mood-altering. The textbook obsessive compulsive behaviours would be things like someone feeling the need to wash their hands repeatedly, or turn on and off a light a certain number of times.

"Addiction to having sex is compulsive self-rewarding -- each time it is a 'hit', a buzz. OCD I would call compulsive self-protection -- it's not rewarding, it's something the person feels they need to do to preserve the status quo."

So if it's not a form of OCD, does that necessarily imply that the desire to have excessive amounts of sex falls under the remit of an addiction?

The director of the Pine Grove clinic in Mississippi where Tiger Woods is currently trying to mend his ways is one of the strongest advocates of branding sex addiction as a definite disorder. Dr Patrick Carnes heads up a growing industry which claims that sex addiction is as real as an addiction to cocaine or alcohol -- and can be treated as such.

Carnes believes that up to six pc of the US population suffers from sex addiction. A high sex drive doesn't make you a sex addict, he says, but he does outline a range of excessive behaviours which he believes mark one out. Excessive time spent on sex that impacts negatively on your family, career and mental health is a warning bell.

Colin O'Driscoll is principal psychologist with the Forest clinic in Co Wicklow which specialises in addiction treatment. He absolutely believes that sex addiction exists, and says the last two years have seen a rise in approaches to the clinic from people who believe they are out of control. Some women have made enquiries, he says, but most of their clients have been men.

"We would classify it as a behavioural addiction," says O'Driscoll. "That means that it is not a case of being addicted to an external substance. However, it is similar to other behavioural addictions like gambling, where the person might be gambling to zone out rather than deal with bad memories or to emotionally compensate for something. They are behaviours that lend themselves to escapism."

'Some people play it down and laugh and say, 'If I was to have an addiction, that would be the one to have'. We see that people are suffering and their families are bearing drastic consequences as a result of their behaviour and that is genuine."

O'Driscoll is correct to say that there isn't much public sympathy for the sex addict. Several films and TV shows have used the sex addict as the punchline to a joke. In Blades of Glory (2007), Will Ferrell's lustful character attends a sex addicts' meeting which ends with the 'patients' hooking up in the bushes outside. Sex toys were given out as promotional gifts at the premiere of Choke (2008), a film about sex addiction.

There remains this nagging feeling that sex addiction is the affliction 'du jour'. A few years ago it became trendy to call oneself a chocaholic or shoe-aholic. In the 'because we're worth it' climate it was a badge of honour to be indulgent to the point of claiming an addiction. Similarly, the idea of too much sex evokes whispers of a guilty pleasure, of something that's a bit . . . well, naughty.

Eoin Stephens agrees that the legitimacy of the label is questioned when it's used by people to describe a habit or passion. "It can be abused," he says. "But when the reward lessens and that struggle -- 'I wish I hadn't spent all that time or money on doing that' -- increases then the addiction has taken hold."

America, whose population tends to be more outspoken and self-analytical, has been most free with the term. Z-list celebrities can be seen scrutinising their sexual patterns on the VH1 programme, Sex Rehab with Dr Drew.

We have a tougher time believing that Irish people could go down that line but, says Stephens, Ireland has spawned its own particular context which encourages sex addiction. "When you look at our history, up until 1993, Playboy was illegal here," says Stephens.

'In the space of a few years, lapdancing, telephone sex, easy access to internet pornography all mushroomed. That won't turn everybody into a sex addict but a move from low availability to high availability, and the historical repression of sexuality in this country, makes these seem all the more exciting and subject to overuse and abuse." Ireland has its own branch of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which takes referrals from treatment centres. The treatment of so-called sex addicts is modelled on the 12-step type programmes familiar to AA clients.

"Although," says Colin O'Driscoll, "abstinence is easier to promote with a substance like drugs or alcohol. You can imagine how complicated it would be for an alcoholic to be told, 'You can have one glass of whiskey a week'.

"It's much more complicated with a sex addiction because it's very like overeating -- they have to learn to engage with the process at some stage again but in a controlled way."

So while Tiger Woods might still be practising celibacy in his stay at Pine Grove, his hope will presumably to have a 'normal' sex life again.

"Do I think Tiger Woods is a good example of what I would call a sex addict?" asks Eoin Stephens. "I would be curious if this is the first time he's been caught.

"Or if he has promised to stop several times before but hasn't been able to, showing that it was definitely a case of being out of control."

As opposed to taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to a fit, famous, rich young man who finds himself frequently away from home, one presumes.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-stars-who-loved-too-much-2043468.html
THE STARS WHO LOVED TOO MUCH
* DAVID DUCHOVNY The former X-Files star became the butt of his own joke in 2008 when he announced that he had "voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction". At the time he was playing a sex-obsessed writer on the TV show Californication.
* RUSSELL BRAND The comedian bad boy (right) wrote in his memoir, My Booky Wook, that he received treatment at the Keystone Centre in Pennsylvania for sex addiction. "One day," he wrote of his treatment, "I had to write a victims' list -- a litany of the women I'd wronged as a result of my sexual addiction. I felt like Saddam Hussein trying to pick out individual Kurds."
* michael douglas Douglas became one of the first A-list celebrities to be linked to sex addiction but has since said that his reasons for going into rehab were misinterpreted. He said: "Around 1990, I voluntarily went into rehab because I was drinking too much and some smart-ass editor said, 'Oh, another boring story about an actor going to rehab. Let's give him sex addiction'."
* eric benet Musician Benet, Halle Berry's ex-husband, was reported to have gone into sex addiction rehab in 2002 but he later told New York magazine, "In retrospect, it's not what I would label my situation."
* woody harrelson He once admitted openly that he was a sex addict and said: "Monogamy is one of the most confusing things about getting married. I don't understand marriage in the traditional sense." He has been married now for 12 years.

Ah here love, you can take a pill for that

A new tablet is being hailed as the female answer to Viagra -- the latest step in an age-old hunt for the female libido. Susan Daly reports

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/could-this-new-pill-really-turn-every-woman-on-1956054.html

Male desire, the joke goes, is a simple on-off switch while female desire is a whole control desk of dials, knobs and buttons.

The complex nature of the female libido has hitherto been resistant to the simple popping of a blue pill.

Attempts to create a 'pink' version of Viagra, specifically aimed at women, were abandoned in 2004.

But now there's lots of excitment surrounding a new pill developed in a German lab that could actaully be on sale within two years.

It's interesting that the latest much-trumpeted discovery of a wonder drug for female desire works on the brain rather than the body. Viagra worked for men on a mechanical level, boosting the flow of blood to the penis.

This new so-called 'desire' drug, a compound called flibanserin, triggers the production of dopamine, a chemical in the brain which stimulates desire.

How strange that it should have taken this long for scientists to work out what so many of us already know: desire, for women, often begins in the mind.

Hormonal imbalances can also play their part in a flagging libido -- a boost of testosterone has been found to help reawaken a woman's sex drive -- but really, the biggest sexual organ is the brain.

It's taken a long time to get to this realisation. Historically, mankind has experimented with some very strange concoctions in the misapprehension that all it takes is for a woman to ingest one magic ingredient and -- hey presto -- she's on fire.

The word 'aphrodisiac' has feminine connotations, named as it is for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Legend had it Aphrodite held the sparrow to be sacred and the ancient Greeks considered the sparrow to be a lustful creature, in the same way as we now view rabbits.

Sparrow brains might not have a place on the menu of a modern dinner a deux but Grecian women were encouraged to feast on them to increase their sexual potency.

The Chinese believed in the aphrodisiacal properties of the spit a bird used to bind its nest together (bird's nest soup, anyone?); the Byzantines favoured a cake made of honey and donkey milk. Cleopatra got herself in the mood by taking a bath in cardamom, a herb that heats up body temperature.

We talk about fashion victims and suffering for art, but for the ancients the real danger came in pursuit of passion.

An infamous aphrodisiac for women in Roman times was Spanish fly -- really a beetle which secreted an acidic substance called cantharidin. Ground up into a powder, it was secretly slipped into a woman's food in the hope that it would make them burn with lust. It made them burn alright.

Cantharidin is a poison that causes inflammation of the urethral tracts when the unlucky user goes to the toilet. That burning sensation was confused for sexual stimulation. Love hurts, but should it really cause gastrointestinal bleeding and kidney failure?

Aphrodisiacs were to increase a woman's pleasure, sure, but in as much as the end result for society would be more sex equals production of more children.

So you'll often find that traditional aphrodisiacs targeted at women had the correlating benefit of being fertility-boosters.

Mandrake root was supposed to be sexy because it resembled the apex of a woman's thighs, but it is also an effective fertility aid in the Biblical story of Rachel and Leah.

If you think things have moved on a great deal post-JC, consider this news story from Germany in 2006. German police officers were offered a €7 discount on a herbal aphrodisiac for women called Femi-X. They would also receive a free DVD with sex tips.

Andreas Schuster, the police chief in Brandenburg, the province surrounding Berlin, told a German newspaper that he hoped it would help improve the birth rate among Germany's ageing population.

"We all want more children," said Schuster. "The Brandenburg Police is prepared to do its duty. Perhaps this pill will be helpful in this regard." The response from Schuster's female officers is, sadly, not on record.

Whatever the motivation behind the search for female stimulants, it's still not to this day entirely clear what it is that women want.

One recent scientific study concluded that women are turned on by the scent of breastmilk; another reported the arousal of a majority of women who had been shown videos of bonobo apes having sex.

At the other end of the scale, you have the urban legend that green M&Ms are an aphrodisiac, or the survey carried out by a website called handbag.com that a woman feels most up for sex after a night wearing a certain pair of black Christian Loboutin stilettos.

An Italian study published in the internationally respected Journal of Sexual Medicine last year found that a glass or two of red wine significantly intensifies a woman's sexual pleasure.

This boost in libido was linked to the physical and mental relaxation afforded by a moderate amount of alcohol.

That association links in with some traditional aphrodisiacs like roses or patchouli oil (which might go a ways to explain its popularity with free-loving hippies). These scents are meant to be relaxants along the lines of a mild sedative.

It implies that a low female sex drive is simply blocked by inhibition or, worryingly, suggests that the human race would be having a great deal more sex if women would just, well, loosen up a bit. But there is something to be said for taking a multi-platform approach to a woman's pleasure centre.

John Hoberman of the US National Sexuality Resource Centre records this conclusion made by a South African doctor over 30 years ago: "A good meal, a bottle of wine, and a good film of her choice, are often excellent aphrodisiacs."

For some women, fantasy is a powerful aphrodisiac (yes, yes, lie back and think of Clooney).

For others, according to Henry Kissinger and Napoleon Bonaparte, it's power. Women "belong to the highest bidder", said the little man from Corsica. "Power is what they like -- it is the greatest of all aphrodisiacs."

But for my money, the greatest male philosopher on the deep-seated source of female desire must be Hulk actor Eric Bana who said that the way to his wife's heart is through the dishwashing. "I'm good around the house," he said.

"Housework is a bigger aphrodisiac to women than a set of abs."

At the very least, it's easier than trapping sparrows.

- Susan Daly


Despite the focus having historically been on enticing women into bed, there have also been a plethora of love potions aimed at men with increased stamina as their goal.

Casanova, for example, was said to breakfast each morning on 50 oysters to feed his sexual prowess and fortify him for the day's sexcapades.

The Aztec ruler Montezuma drank 50 -- evidently a magic number -- cups of hot chocolate a day in order to service his harem of 800 women.

Chinese legend has it that the 'Yellow Emperor' Huang Ti girded his loins over 4,000 years ago with a special potion made from 22 herbal ingredients. Non-royal males later made do with the honey-based drink of mead to increase their sexual stamina upon marriage (after which presumably the 'honeymoon' was over?)

But sometimes a man can get too much of a good thing. The Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus wrote of a wild orchid called satyrion which, when dried and ground to a powder, formed the basis of a drink which allowed a man to perform 70 acts of intercourse in a row. Excitable males all over Greece seized upon the plant to the point that it was eaten to extinction. Shame that.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-way-to-a-mans-heart-1955937.html

Make fudge, not war

Now when I say cooking is better than sex, I mean in an EVOLUTIONARY sense. Allegedly.

From today's Indo...

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/why-cooking-is-better-than-sex-1912427.html

Why cooking is better than sex. . .
A new book claims it's what happens in the kitchen -- not the bedroom -- that has made humanity evolve. Susan Daly reports

By Susan Daly

Wednesday October 14 2009

A survey of women last year declared that chocolate was better than sex. A victorious sports captain might describe winning as better than sex. For sleep-deprived new parents, eight hours of kip can be better than ... You get the idea.

Indeed, sex might not be the force that binds men and women together. According to a Harvard anthropologist, the main shaping force of human social behaviour is: cooking.

Richard Wrangham, in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, says that the turning point in our evolution into modern men and women came when we first thought of throwing a bit of meat on the fire.

Archaeology normally dates the birth of cooking back to 200,000 BC when the first evidence of charred bones and hearths appeared. Wrangham, however, goes back 1.9 million years to find what he says is the point at which humans started to perform rudimentary cooking.

It is that moment at which our ancestors' bodies evolved into Homo erectus, with smaller digestive systems, jaws and teeth and bigger brains. The reason for these changes, says Wrangham, is that we had learned to break food down by cooking it, freeing up all that energy previously used chewing and digesting to increase our brain power.

There might be something in this. Nutritionist Aveen Bannon says that a raw-food diet -- although somewhat in vogue these days -- can be a very difficult one in which to balance all your energy and nutritional needs.

"It can be phenomenally high in fibre, and so takes a lot of digestive work," she says. Indeed, chimps spend around six hours a day chewing their raw foodstuffs into submission.

"It takes lots of planning and dedication to make sure that you are getting all the calcium, iron, vitamins and minerals that you need from such a diet."

A famous research project called the Giessen Raw Food Study found that a raw-food diet can't "guarantee an adequate energy supply".

The release of energy from raw food takes a lot longer to permeate the human body than cooked food, says Bannon.

There is no doubting that cooking food freed up time and energy for our ancestors to evolve. More controversial is Wrangham's contention that the first human 'marriages' were about food, not sex. The discovery of cooking, he says, led to relationships between the sexes that were "primitive protection rackets".

Men protected women from animals and other creatures attracted by the light and smell of the cooking fire. Women in return slaved for them over a hot cooking pit.

Is this the real truth behind the old chestnut, 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach'?

"Over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners," Wrangham says. "I'm saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further."

Dr Abdullahai El Tom of the Department of Anthropology in NUI Maynooth, is an expert in the anthropology of food. He agrees that cooking food helped advance society by widening the choice of what was edible.

"But it was not the foundation of society," he insists. "It makes a wonderful story but it should be seen more as an addition, among many other things, to human society as it evolved over time."

As for the assumption that women were immediately chained to the primitive stove, Dr El Tom is not convinced.

"The original cook would not have used tools at all, it would have been very simply cooking by roasting and I don't know how he could prove that women had to do it." In fact, he points out mischievously, "look at the barbecue in summer, you will find men dominating them still."

However, food is still a major part of how we construct our social selves. Dr El Tom believes how we eat is as important to our sense of identity as how we dress. Food is very indicative today of where we are headed.

'Society is becoming more individualistic and our use of food asserts that," says Dr El Tom. "The communal stage, where families mostly sat down to dinner together, is coming to an end. There is a transformation in the way we approach food, even down to the family that sits together but serves three or four different meals at the one table."

Where food used to augment the family relationship, it is now more likely to be a cohesive force among friends (the new family?) or to impress your status by meeting at a particular restaurant.

Yet the romantic dinner survives as a cultural motif. Cooking for someone for the first time can be a very intimate gesture. This might hold an echo back to a time when it really mattered to a husband that he could come home to a meal cooked by his wife.

But be warned, gentlemen, women have evolved to the point where they no longer desire to be the only ape in the kitchen.

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/fifty-ways-to-feed-your-lover-1912426.html
Wednesday October 14 2009

Richard Wrangham contests that cooking, not sex, was the initial binding force between humans. Whatever the truth of why our ancestors paired off, the twin imperatives of food and sex have become culturally intertwined.

Oysters, chocolate and asparagus are a byword for sensual pleasure. This menu, drawn from the chefs at www.eatsomethingsexy.com, suggests a few new ways to your partner's heart ...

STARTER: Spicy garlic shrimp

Why? The ancient Greeks used to feed garlic to Olympians because it was purported to improve stamina. Scientists have recently found that the chemical substance behind the distinctive whiff of garlic, far from being a turn-off, is also present in female sexual secretions.

Ingredients: 400g peeled shrimp; 5 tbsp olive oil; 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes; 3 cloves garlic, crushed; sea salt.

Method: 1. Add the pepper flakes and garlic to the olive oil and leave to infuse for an hour.

2. Heat oil in large skillet on medium-high heat, adding shrimp and cooking 2 mins each side.

3. Season and serve on crusty French bread.

MAIN: Wild mushroom risotto with seared scallops

Why? Often overlooked by romantics in favour of the oyster, scallops are high in phosphorus and iodine. Iodine deficiency has been documented as reducing sex drive. Mushrooms are lauded by several South Pacific cultures for their aphrodisiacal qualities on women.

Ingredients: Two tbsp olive oil; 400g scallops, crescent-shaped muscles discarded; salt and pepper; 1 shallot, minced; 1 garlic clove, minced; 200g assorted mushrooms; 1 tbsp thyme leaves; 1 tbsp chopped parsley; 2 bay leaves; 1 cup arborio rice; half-cup dry white wine; 4 cups chicken stock, heated; 1 tbsp butter; handful grated parmesan cheese.

Method: 1. On medium heat, cook the shallot and garlic in 1tbsp oil in large, deep skillet, stirring for 5 minutes. Add mushrooms and herbs and cook for about 10 minutes. Season.

2. Add the rice and stir 2 minutes to coat with the oil; the grains will turn opaque. Season again. Stir in wine and cook 1 minute.

3. Pour in 1 cup of the warm stock and stir until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Stir constantly and add stock, 1 cup at a time, until rice has absorbed all liquid.

4. Sprinkle scallops with salt and pepper and brown on another pan over medium-high with 1tbsp oil. Remove after 2 minutes.

5. When risotto is cooked, fold in the butter and cheese, top with the scallops and drizzle with olive oil. Serve hot.

DESSERT: Bananas in hot fudge

Why? It's all about the banana. Potassium and B vitamins are bananas' gift to healthy sex hormone production. The banana is an important aphrodisiac in Central America and India (where it is offered as a gift to the fertility gods) and in Islam, the banana, not the apple, was the forbidden fruit in Eden.

Ingredients: 2 bananas; 375g condensed milk; 450g castor sugar; 100g softened butter; 1tsp vanilla extract

Method: 1. Freeze the peeled bananas overnight.

2. Put butter in saucepan over medium heat. As it melts, add condensed milk, sugar and vanilla extract.

3. Gently stir the mixture around until the sugar dissolves. Still stirring, bring the mixture to a rolling boil and then turn down the heat.

4. Keep cooking the fudge mixture while stirring at low heat (8-10 mins). Do not stop stirring or it will caramelise too quickly.

5. Serve lengthway slices of the frozen banana to dip into the still-liquid hot fudge.

Drink. Girls. F***.

Drinking is fun, sex is fun - is it really that hard to imagine that the two are frequently intertwined?

From Monday's Irish Independent

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/why-women-need-a-drink-before-they-have-sex-1910737.html

Half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets -- a very sobering statistic, writes Susan Daly

Monday October 12 2009

An ex-boyfriend and I were 'seeing' each other for about a month before we had our first date. How's that, you ask? Well, I used to jokingly tell people, we had to go on an official date in broad daylight to make sure that we liked each other sober.

I don't consider myself to be a drunkard, but the reality of Irish relationships is that many of them are kickstarted by the social lubrication of a few drinks. In the case I mention above, we were work colleagues and the more Americanised culture of going on dates had yet to take firm grip in Ireland.

If anything, it felt more normal at the time to confirm an attraction over post-work drinks than to organise a stiff meeting under the clock at Clerys.

With that model of Irish romance in mind, it's difficult to be shocked by the new survey that found that half of its female respondents preferred to have sex with alcohol on board. The survey was conducted among 3,000 women in the UK, on behalf of a female hygiene company called FemFresh.

As such, it's neither an academic nor an exhaustive study but it does throw up plenty of food for thought, especially as the Irish social scene is aligned with the British style of pub culture.

"In other European cultures, meeting in coffee shops might be more popular, or wine bars where you might eat a tapas or two with a glass of wine," says HotPress sex columnist Anne Sexton, "but in English and Irish social life the pub is our first port of call. Pub culture doesn't encourage sober interaction."

There may be more to the results, however, than the fact that our socialising normally coincides with alcohol. Some 6pc of the women surveyed admitted they had never had sex sober. That's a pretty grim statistic, one you might normally associate with people who had severe drinking problems.

Recovered alcoholic Eric Clapton, for example, once revealed that he did not have sober sex until he was in his 30s. Last year on the Celebrity Rehab programme in the US, model and actress Amber Smith admitted she had reached the age of 27 without ever having sex while sober.

Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis revealed that there was a direct link with high rates of alcohol dependence and an increased number of sexual partners -- 41pc of frequent bingers indulged regularly in unplanned sex, while this happened to only 8pc of occasional drinkers.

Heavy drinking leads to reckless and unsafe sex: that's a given. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and disables a neurotransmitter in the brain which normally causes us to conduct ourselves with reason and rationality.

It's the finding that at least half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets that is more complicated.

The folks at FemFresh made a bit of a leap from their findings to state: "These results are a clear indication that British women today are severely lacking in confidence. The fact that alcohol plays an integral role in their love lives shows that women are looking for a boost in self-esteem when it comes to their bedroom antics."

Substitute 'Irish' for 'British' and is that a fair portrayal of our sex habits? Are Irish women too shy and body conscious to let loose without booze? Anne Sexton agrees that negative body image is a huge element of it. "It is recognised that in the western world, most women have body-image issues. We start to be critical about our bodies from about the age of eight and that definitely has an impact on our comfort levels about being naked with our partners."

Susie Orbach, who wrote Fat Is A Feminist Issue 30 years ago, has published a new book called Bodies which argues that women are racked with "body anxiety". We are bombarded on all sides by images of perfect models and celebrities, diet products and weight loss reality shows. It isn't a stretch to suggest that many women need some Dutch courage to reveal their un-airbrushed, wobbly reality.

Aside from the body-image issue, Sexton believes that our social confidence is also shaky. That goes for men too. Sexton lived in Ireland until she was eight years old, before her family moved to South Africa.

When she returned to live in Ireland eight years ago, she says she was surprised by the amount of casual sex that was happening among people "really off their heads with drink".

It's not that we're all alcoholics -- it's just that adults in their 30s still suffer from a certain amount of discomfort around the opposite sex and alcohol has become a normalised tool to overcome that.

"You see with the newer generation that boys and girls mix easily but with people in their 30s there is not a huge amount of genuine friendship going on across the gender barrier. If there is a mixed group it's normally couples. There is a nervousness around sex and alcohol lubricates a lot of sexual action. That's why the one-night stand has become popular. You go out, get drunk, have sex and leave before you have to confront the fact that you have had sex with this person."

A personal ad which was posted on the free website gumtree.ie last week shows that some people are actually turned off by the prevalence of drink on the dating scene. The ad was titled: Genuine male looking for lady who enjoys sex without alcohol. The 29-year-old poster explained that he had just moved to Cork and was "looking to meet sexy lady who can enjoy all of lifes (sic) sexy wonders without alcohol".

But most of us don't get blotto to have sex, all of the time. Scientists say there are perfectly sound biological reasons why women like a glass or two to make everything look rosé in the bedroom. Research in the respected Journal of Sexual Medicine last August showed that a glass or two of red wine is good for a women's libido.

Dr Nicola Mondaini, who led the Italian study, said that while drink could have a negative effect on male sexual performance, a moderate amount significantly intensified the sexual pleasure of women.

Women are not necessarily self-medicating themselves with plonk in order to get it on with their partners. As Anne Sexton points out, our busy lives often mean we have just a small window of relaxation time.

You are not likely to mix yourself a G&T while cooking the dinner and bathing the baby. The glorious moment when you get to sit down with a glass of Rioja at the end of the day is going to coincide with possibly the only alone time you and your partner might get.

But if you're having a drink because you find you no longer desire your partner at all, says Sexton, that's another matter. "There are not many relationships that will survive that, drink or no drink."

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/a-tipple-before-bedtime-1910738.html
Drunken sex is a comedic staple for film and TV makers -- although the female characters who have it frequently end up paying a high price ...

KNOCKED UP: A beautiful TV presenter, played by Katherine Heigl, puts on her beer goggles for some clumsy fumbling with layabout pothead Seth Rogen.

While Rogen's character is thrilled at playing outside his league, Heigl's wakes up hungover, horrified and -- in the best tradition of unsafe drunken sex -- pregnant.

SEX AND THE CITY: Lawyer Miranda feels so intimidated by her handsome new date that she tries to bolster her confidence about her own looks with a series of double vodka martinis.

She drags him back to her apartment, waking in the morning to a splitting headache and a note on her hall table from her date advising her to seek help for her drinking problem.

21: Even beautiful actors have turned to the bottle to get the courage to strip off. Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess revealed that they both got drunk before filming steamy sex scenes for casino movie 21 last year.

"We decided to have a couple of drinks, loosen up and go for it," Kate told People magazine. "It was brilliant for about half an hour," added co-star Jim. "As we continued to drink... it just became messy and sloppy."

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: Javier Bardem plied both Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall with fine Italian wines and cognac in the last Woody Allen movie.

Hall's character Cristina resists temptation but Johansson's Vicky sways drunkenly to his hotel room -- only to get sick on his bed.

The sexual gulf war

Orgasms and the sexual proclivities of OAPs are slightly surreal topics of conversation to have with a stranger at 9am but that's what happened when I got Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt on the phone for an interview...

Saturday August 01 2009

They say men and women are from different planets, but if Bettina Arndt's research is anything to go by, most couples are light years apart in bed. SUSAN DALY talks mismatched libidos with the Australian sex therapist.

ADRIENNE dreads the "creeping hand" groping across the marital bed to check if she's in the mood for love. Rachel says, "I feel like I'm enduring sex most of the time". Megan's friend tells her husband to "Hurry up and get it over with". Unsurprisingly, he now has erectile problems.

Women want less sex than men, says Bettina Arndt, and couples spend their lives negotiating who gets what, how much of it and how often. Arndt (59) is Australia's most prominent sex therapist and the women quoted above are three of the 98 people she persuaded to keep sex diaries for six to nine months.

If The Sex Diaries, the book based on the chronicles of her male and female subjects, is representative, then we're all treading through a sexual minefield. For every couple that records joyful physical intimacies in their diaries, there are 10 describing hugely mismatched libidos.

Adam (36) has only had sex twice in six years of marriage. Once on his wedding night, when his wife fell pregnant with their first child, and on the night when his second daughter was conceived. His wife won't speak to him about the sex drought, so he's thinking of turning to prostitutes, but can't justify spending the money. "It takes milk from my babies' mouths, if you can understand," he writes.

Craig has not had sex with his wife for five years. "The last time we had sex she obviously did not enjoy it, and she got up the instant I had finished to go and wash any trace of me off her. Her manner and extreme reaction made me feel like I was dirty and worthless."

Another man made the mistake of telling his wife after yet another rejected advance that he would not ask again -- she would have to initiate sex the next time. That was eight years ago, and he's still waiting. Yet another is trying to keep a spark of intimacy alive in his marriage to a wife who suffers from severe OCD: they have agreed to have sex once a week, at 9.15am exactly every Sunday.

There are sad men lamenting the loss of the early passion of their relationships, and women who wish they felt desire -- but don't. While there are a few reversals of this state of play in the diaries -- where the woman has the higher sex drive -- Arndt believes that this is just how it is with men and women. She's very sure of herself when I ask her about the generalisation.

"I tried to spell it out in the chapter called The Search for the Elusive Pink Viagra," she says in her frank Australian accent. "I think there is something biological there that means women have a more distractible, fragile libido.

"Evolutionary psychologists argue that we are supposed to be mothers, and mothers aren't meant to be bonking all the time. We might be in the bedroom, but we have an ear to the door."

Men, she says, are the complete opposite -- they use sex as a form of relaxation, a way to sweep away the worries and arguments of the relationship. "Men are able to use it as a distraction. That's a big gulf there. They can perform in all sorts of adverse circumstances. They can have sex with people they don't even like, for goodness' sake!"

Arndt doesn't exactly offer quick fixes, but she is fond of the phrase, 'Just do it!' It puts the onus on the partner with the lower libido to have sex even when they don't feel like it. Once they decide that sex is on the cards and put themselves in a positive mindframe, they will enjoy it, says Arndt.

This nugget of advice, which is at the heart of Arndt's book, sparked outrage in her native Australia, where The Sex Diaries is currently a bestseller. "I was expecting that," says Arndt. "Did you see that I mentioned the internet blog that started with, 'F*** you, Bettina Arndt'?"

She says she is not advocating women having unwanted sex forced on them -- a return to the days before marital rape was criminalised. She paraphrases Michele Weiner-Davis, whose book The Sex-Starved Marriage is one of a range of studies and works referenced in The Sex Diaries, when she says: "Desire is a decision. You have to put sex on the 'to do' list."

She was so affected by some of the heart-breaking diaries written by the sexually-frustrated men, she is putting together a book based on their experiences, The Male Sex Diaries. "This is not about sex, getting your rocks off," says Arndt. "It's about yearning to be wanted by the woman they love. I had a man tell me the other day that he'd had no sex in 16 years and he is still there in his marriage because he loves his wife. He was joking about the gulf war -- the 16 inches in bed between them feels like thousands of miles."

Arndt is past caring what her critics think. A clinical psychologist who specialised in sexual therapy, she carried out ground-breaking sex studies. By the age of 23 she was advising Australians on sexual issues. "Sex was such a great area to work in. There had been so much ignorance and discomfort around it."

She attracted a ban from live TV and radio for two years for speaking on radio about masturbation. "Back in the early 70s, Australia was a more conservative place," says Arndt. "That was too much for the censorship authorities. They never spelled out what exactly I had done and people thought I had used four-letter words! It was these nervous middle-aged men ready to push the button." I can only imagine what reaction she might get with a similar subject in Ireland, even today.

Born to parents who fled Nazi Germany, she was widowed at a young age with young children and is divorced from her second husband. "I've learned a lot through life itself and the things that have happened to me," she says.

Arndt says the feedback from men and women who say The Sex Diaries reflect their own lives far outweighs the Outrageds from Brisbane. "One woman told me that she was sitting in the car with her husband driving and listening to me prattling on the radio about the book. As soon as she got home, she ran into the house and sent me this email. Sitting next to him and knowing that this was their problem, and neither of them saying anything, it was excruciating."

But if, as Arndt seems to contest, a drop in libido as a relationship progresses is a biological and therefore natural event, should women (and the occasional man) be worrying if they're not swinging from the light fittings every night? Yes, she says, because apparently we are conditioned to think that desire needs to come first for sex to happen. "I've had a lot of response from women saying I know I might not feel like it, but I know when I relax, I will enjoy it. I'm not saying suffer through unwanted sex, but it's not a big ask to just make the effort."

How much effort is enough is debatable. I was far from turned on by the celebratory tale in Arndt's book of young parents Shirley and Luke, who ended up having sex while her husband held their crying baby. They weren't going to let parenthood ruin their sex lives, no way! I had reservations too about a woman called Antonia (58) who gets up at 5am to do the household chores, makes her husband a cup of tea afterwards, comes back to bed to have sex with him -- every day -- and gets back up to go to work. And her husband, to be honest, comes across as a bit of an ass, who has about a tenth of Antonia's workload but makes nasty comments when she is too tired to have sex twice in one day.

A frequent contention of Arndt's male diarists is that women are harder to please in bed. One man amusingly speaks about pleasing his partner being as difficult as "a blind man in the dark searching for a black cat that isn't there". A chapter describes some particularly nasty male sexual habits, which must have contributed to the lack of desire in some of the women. "When foreplay is bad," says Claire (32), "I feel like skipping it altogether." A wife recounts her husband's hatred of kissing her: "He doesn't like kissing -- he says I'm stealing his air."

It begs the question: where's the pleasure? Arndt points to the example of Michael and Heather, both in their 60s and still enjoying a passionate sex life. They have even kept a calendar of their sexual activities for the past 23 years, each day marked with enigmatic symbols. A green square marks a mutual orgasm -- there are plenty of those -- green lines denote a 'serious' cuddle, and four interlinked circles means they had sex in their Audi car.

"That couple are what I call my juicy tomatoes," says Arndt.

The Sex Diaries: Why Women Go Off Sex and Other Bedroom Battles, by Bettina Arndt, is published by Hamlyn and is in bookshops now

PANEL: Pillow Talk - Tales from the bedroom.


THE SELF-CONFESSED 'GROPER'

Clive (48) has been married for 22 years. He and his wife make love once or twice a fortnight, while he would love it twice a day.

"I try hard not to exceed allowable limits; to sense her mood. I wonder whether us men are sometimes the more sensitive sex. We seem to have a lot of practice at it. Grope too much and you'll be 'off sex'. So you must do it carefully.

"It's almost like being a young man and trying to work out how far your girlfriend will let you go before the shutters come down, she crosses her legs and says 'NO'. I know that a caress won't get me any sex. It's more like, 'I love you, I'm desperate for you. Just touching you is a connection from me to you. I'm still here. I still adore you. Hullo! Where has she gone, this lover I married?'"

THE LONG-TERM SEXLESS MARRIAGE

Arthur (63) has been married for 37 years. He and his wife haven't had sex for 15 years.

"I wake up before her. We have to get up soon and go to work. I reach out -- she leaps out of bed and says, 'I have to go to the toilet'.

Me: 'When you are finished come back and make mad, passionate love to me.'

She: 'Ha ha!'

Two minutes later she does come back, dressing gown over nightie. I persuade her to cuddle into me. It's pretty awkward and not at all sexual."

THE NEWLYWEDS

Kevin and Amanda, both in their early 30s and together a year, are still in the 'limerence' phase of their relationship, when the initial cocktail of chemicals inspires lust in a new couple. One of their special rituals is a quickie at the kitchen sink.

"Eventually we make it to bed, hot with the expectation of what is about to happen. I can actually feel my heart rate go up as I get into bed, in anticipation of Amanda's touch. We make love a second time and it is just incredible. I feel so high when I make love to her; it must be like being on drugs. I feel like I am in a place when I am untouchable, invincible almost."

SEX VERSUS THE HOUSEWORK

Mary (42) has been married to Peter for four years. It is a second marriage for them both. Their sex life has ground to a halt over arguments about housework.

"I'm working a full five-day week, 6am to 6.30pm. I come home, usually to cook (because he cannot and will not cook; at least, not reliably).

"Occasionally, he might put himself out but it's generally, 'Let's go to Subway', which I end up spewing about because I don't want the kids learning to rely on takeout and I spend a fortune each pay day stocking up with fresh foods and meats.

"My weekends are guaranteed: all day Saturday cleaning the house itself, then Sundays attacking the ironing.

"Yes, he does 'do the washing', which consists of putting the washing into our 10kg washer/dryer and putting the finished dried washing into a pile on the lounge floor, where the dog promptly lies all over it. Now, if he took the clothes out straightaway and hung them up or folded them, life would be sweet.

"But, he piles them load on top of load, so by the time I get to them, I've got steam-dried, cardboard lumps covered in dog hair and he wonders why I'm so bloody ungrateful and why that night I'll knock his block off when he wants 'it'."

- Susan Daly