Mr. Pinup

Ignoring the prohibition of nudity, Muslim artists—many of them women—are now defying religious tenets by painting naked models in pinup poses.

One of Hanan Tabbara’s most provocative sketches is a charcoal and pastel drawing of blood pouring out of a woman’s vagina. She made it after a close friend was raped, and later uploaded it as her Facebook profile picture. For two years now, the 20-year-old, political science student from Brooklyn has been drawing nudes. “I’m aware that it is prohibited but it doesn’t bother me,” Tabbara says.

While the Koran does not specifically ban nude art, the almost universal opinion of religious leaders is that Islam forbids it. However, a handful of Muslim artists have been daring to depict nudity. “This leads to moral consequences that are against Islam,” says Imam Shamsi Ali, the leader of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. “There is no justification to say it is allowed in the name of art.”

The prohibition principally stems from the taboo against entertaining sexual thoughts that a naked figure might provoke. In this light, Imam Ali also explains that it is “not desirable” for Muslims to view nude paintings, even if they are considered masterpieces. “Islam sees the harms of such exposure outweighing its benefits,” he says. “An artist can have an important message in his work without drawing nudes.”

via The Rise of Islamo-Erotica – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.

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The casual sex backlash is here. Even so-called sex-positive feminists are starting to express their shame and regret over past one-night stands, says Jessica Grose in Slate. This is sure to cause many conservatives to rejoice, but I suspect the report of hookup culture’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

Don't get me wrong: Grose, a writer I greatly respect, makes an intriguing and provocative argument. She offers up plenty of evidence of recent cultural shifts for our consideration. For example:

Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis was put in jail. Christina Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and had a baby. She’s been replaced on the pop charts by 19-year-old virginal chanteuse Taylor Swift, who sings chaste love songs about Romeo and Juliet. Paris Hilton is rarely in the tabloids and we haven’t seen her nether regions in years. Finally, the fictional Carrie Bradshaw is wed and living a New York domestic fantasy.

via Sexual shame is so hot right now – Sex – Salon.com.

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You could be hearing Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams in a whole new way, if you happen to be in New York on March 5. The Pinchbottom Burlesque is organizing “Naked Girls Reading Science Fiction.” (NSFW pic below the fold.)

The event takes place at “the plush and decadent upstairs lounge at Madame X in Greenwich Village,” and costs $25. Among the readers is Nasty Canasta, who has been known to dress up as a naughty version of both the fourth and tenth Doctors from Doctor Who. (We we wrote about the Pinchbottom Burlesque previously — link includes NSFW pics.) Tor.com attended one of their previous events, devoted to banned books, and wrote:

via Let A Live Nude Girl Read Science Fiction To You – Books – io9.

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You need Flash to see the Feature Video

…we invite them into our circle to personally see Blazom from the inside.

New York, NY (PRWEB) January 15, 2010 — Blazom House and its applications capitalize on a pinup format that offers a never ending line of models featured in ongoing issues of Blazom applications. Two initial applications lines are out on the market tonight: Blazom Sexy Girls and Blazom DUMI. Their launch signals Blazom’s entrance in the worldwide gaming marketplace with distribution through the iPhone App Store.

Interact with Blazom model Heather Backstrum that lets you play a role in the action…

Interact with Blazom model Heather Backstrum that lets you play a role in the action…

First off the line was the Blazom Sexy Girls (BSG) application (iTunes link). Its interactive format allows the Blazom models to participate in creating clean yet titillating games in the issues featuring them. Showcasing their good looks and flirtatious characters, the girls give entertaining and sometimes comical exhibitions in an interactive format with the users. The debut of the first issue starring model Heather Backstrum was just launched recently.

Not stopping on the BSG release, the first issue of the Blazom DUMI line was released this week to customers. The DUMI game is a sexy twist to the well loved game Simon.

via Blazom invades the iPhone Premiering Seductive Interactive iPhone Apps.

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Having an orgasm used to be so arduous and difficult, it’s no wonder many old people have never had one, or if they have, they seldom talk about it or tell their spawn about having one. In times of yore, before YouTube videos and electricity, rubbing one out was akin to deciding to make a trip from New York to San Francisco in a covered wagon. You could get halfway there, but if something broke down and it was winter, you might have to eat something horrifying to make it out alive. With your pants down, bandits could attack you at any moment. There were vibrators, but they were made of wood and powered by pedaling, or frightened rodents running in little exercise wheels. Everything had to be done by hand. There was no lube until 1910, so if the friction didn’t kill you, fire was always a concern. You had to use corncobs as freshwipes. People had to make their own amateur porn.

The horrors of the past are mostly behind us. Now that we’re more civilized about our sexuality, we no longer have to suffer achieving orgasms through primitive methods, carving our dildos out of root vegetables or whatever porn starlets did in caveman times. Now we have technology. Now we have plastic. We have batteries. We have bandwidth. And fortunately, we have handcuff keys.

And this has all changed the way we, er, come together. And not necessarily for the holidays. Sex toys are now, for many people, life-changing items. When I idly asked the Twitter and the Facebook what sex toys had changed people’s lives, I didn’t expect the overwhelming response; now that people are more sexually sophisticated they’ve traded shame for sexual savvy, and over a hundred people stepped right up to volunteer to me which toy, when used with amour, made their view of the world a little brighter.

via Sex Toys That Will Change Your Life / Violet Blue: Can a sex toy change your life? For many, the answer is yes.

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NEW YORK – Donald Trump has said Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, (pray-ZHAHN’), can retain her crown.

Trump, who owns the Miss USA pageant, made the announcement Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York City.

The 21-year-old Prejean failed to reveal before last month’s Miss USA pageant that she had posed in her underwear as a teenager.

via Trump says Miss California USA can retain crown.

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Those out-there thoughts you have when you’re in bed with your guy? The racy fantasies that float through your head at the gym? Find out what’s normal, what’s not and what’s worth sharing with him.

Almost every woman alive has been to group sex therapy. It’s called cocktails with friends, and it involves dissecting everything from bedroom dry spells to Mr. Took Two Minutes. But be honest—aren’t there some things you just won’t say, even after the second martini? “Generally, women share stuff that they feel is pretty normal, to get reassurances that friends have had similar experiences,” says Ian Kerner, Ph.D., a sex and relationship counselor in New York City. “But anything that’s morally or culturally taboo they’re not going to discuss, because there’s seemingly no benefit, only the risk of embarrassment.” Thing is, it’s good—and helpful—to get perspective on risque sex thoughts and cravings, too. So we asked readers to open up about theirs, and then we got top experts to make sense of them all. Is your secret in here?

via “The Sex Secret I ve Never Told Anyone” Sex Love & Life: glamour.com.

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New York City is expensive, and like a lot of young women I was only one bad circumstance away from “barely managing” to “broke.”  That bad circumstance for me was a very messy breakup with an abusive boyfriend.  I swept him out of my life for good, which was a great thing of course, except that I was stuck with a pricey apartment and NO extra money to cover everything.

So I got a part time job in retail.  Fine, except for the fact that working in advertising in New York means that you can never count on getting out of the office at, say, 5 o’clock.  In order to succeed, you need to devote 100 percent of your life and time which often means working late nights and weekends.  And my boss at the part time job wasn’t too happy about me not being reliable when I would have to call in to say that I was stuck at the office working on a big new business pitch or something.  Not that I blame her.  So I thought, what kind of part time job can I get where I can make my own hours and make some decent money?

via When worlds collide – call girl or career girl? – thegirlnextdoor – Open Salon.

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

via Book Review – Histories of Sex and Censorship in New York City – Review – NYTimes.com.

Dr. Kate is an OB/GYN at one of the largest teaching hospitals in New York City and she answers your medical questions here once a week. To ask her your own question, click here.

A patient in my office last week confessed to me that she’s worried she’s hurt herself from too much vibrator use. She asked me how common vibrator-induced injuries were…and I had no idea. Searching throughout my usual (and not-so-usual) references didn’t yield much information, either. Apparently, sex toy hazards are not a common area of research or publication (go figure). So the advice I could give her (and everyone else) is based mostly on common sense:

via Dr. Kate: Bad Vibrations | Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between..

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