No-Frill Thrills: The Rise of Minimalist Sex Apps

In January of last year, Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko had an idea to break their sexual dry spells the way they solved many of their other problems: with an app.

"We wanted an easy way to find sex, basically," says Sidorenko. But the two friends (who describe themselves as "pomosexuals") were too impatient to use the available dating apps on the market, all of which required them to spend hours flirting with potential flings via chat or text message before getting a date and, possibly, sealing the deal. They knew there were horny people around them looking for sex — and nothing more — but had no way of figuring out where, and who, they were.

"We thought it would be cool to use an approach like Uber," Sidorenko says. "Where you basically create the request, and you get a car pretty soon. We thought it would be cool to have something like that to find a sex buddy."

San Diego mayor in sex harassment settlement talks

SAN DIEGO — Settlement talks in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Mayor Bob Filner are underway as petitions circulate to recall the former congressman who has been besieged by allegations from more than a dozen women.

Attorney Gloria Allred announced Monday evening that she and her client, Irene McCormack Jackson, spent the day in mediation at a downtown office building, where Filner was spotted by a TV crew entering earlier in the day.

Allred wouldn't say whether Filner's resignation was discussed nor whether the mayor was present. She said the mediator, former federal judge J. Lawrence Irving, asked that no one make comments while talks continued.

Filner is facing a recall effort prompted by the cascade of sexual harassment allegations that also led the entire City Council and many leading Democrats to call for him to step down, including U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Filner has vowed to remain the leader of the nation's eighth-largest city and said he would return to work Monday after completing an intensive two-week therapy program. His lawyers said he also spent one week in outpatient counseling.

Before going into therapy, Filner vowed when he returned that his "focus will be on making sure that I am doing right by the city in terms of being the best mayor I can be."

But he wasn't seen Monday at City Hall, where a few dozen Filner supporters rallied outside, engaging in heated arguments with opponents.

"The mayor coming back to City Hall is the wrong message," Councilman Kevin Faulconer said Monday. "There is no way that he is able to move any type of agenda forward."

Faulconer said the mayor needs to "quit dragging the city of San Diego through this. He needs to resign. He needs to go get the help that he clearly and desperately needs."

Faulconer was later seen entering the building where Filner was spotted by KFMB-TV in San Diego. The councilman referred questions to the city attorney's office, which declined to comment.

Allred said she and her client would not be returning Tuesday.

Steve Erie, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, said Filner's resignation must be part of the settlement discussions. Filner would benefit from waiting it out, Erie said, since his pension would spike after serving a year, which would be in December. He also may be trying to shed financial responsibility for the lawsuit.

"As long as he doesn't resign, he has leverage," Erie said. "So stay tuned."

McCormack was the first to go public with harassment allegations. Since then, his accusers have included a university dean to a retired Navy rear admiral. Some contend he cornered, groped and forcibly kissed them.

Filner, 70, served 10 terms in Congress before being elected mayor in November. The feisty liberal has long had a reputation for berating employees and has been dogged by rumors of inappropriate behavior toward women. But nothing in his past approaches what has surfaced in the past six weeks.

Questions also have risen over his spending and a trip to Paris. At least four agencies are investigating Filner: the city attorney's office, the state attorney general's office, the Sheriff's Department and the U.S. attorney.

City Council President Todd Gloria said the city's daily operations have been running fine without Filner but the city needs a leader to set policy.

"Those of us who have called on the mayor to resign know he is not being effective at this time," Gloria said.

Filner's spokeswoman Lena Lewis and lawyer James Payne did not respond to calls.

If Filner should resign, Gloria would step in as acting mayor.

The recall petition drive started Sunday. Organizers must collect 101,597 signatures of registered San Diego voters by Sept. 26. If the petition has fewer than that, the recall campaign will have 30 more days to circulate a supplemental petition to gather additional valid signatures.

If enough signatures are validated by the city clerk, the petition will be presented to the City Council, which must schedule an election within 60 to 90 days.

The more sex you have, the more money you make

If it sometimes appears that some people are just lucky — have lots of sex, and a well-paying job, too — you might be on to something, according to a new study from theInstitute for the Study of Labor at the University of Bonn.

Previous research has found that happiness — no surprise — tends to increase with the frequency of sexual activity. There’s been little study of how the libido relates to wages, though. This new data comes exclusively from the Greek population in 2008, so take that for what you will. But assuming the Hellenes are at all reflective of humanity writ large, results suggest that wages and sexual activity rise together.

The researchers controlled for urban and rural residence, various personality traits, gender, education and belief in God (which tends to be negatively correlated with sexual activity). They found that, for Greeks between the ages of 26 and 50, one standard deviation of increase in sexual activity corresponded with a 5.4 percent increase in wages. Married men having no sex receive lower wages by 1.3 percent, and there’s no difference in the wage returns for sex for gay and straight people.

Now, that doesn’t mean that having more sex will automatically make you earn more. The authors write that high levels of sexual activity are likely an indicator of good health, which also tends to correlate with higher earnings.  It’s also possible that causality runs the other way: Earning more makes you more sexually attractive. Either way, a Marginal Revolution commenter summed up the situation well: “It has always been apparent that sex is good: Now we have statistical confirmation! That’s great.”

America's First Sex Manual Has Some 'Interesting' Thoughts On Virginity, Same-Sex Marriage And Female Pleasure

On the internet, there are seemingly endless resources for information about sex -- for better and for worse. But where did Americans get their sex education way, way back in the day? It turns out they read Aristotle's Complete Master-Piece, In Three Parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man, a sex manual published in Boston in 1766.

via Internet Archive

This "sexy" book was originally published in England in 1684 and then reprinted in the United States 82 years later. A copy of the guide, which Open Culture reports was written by William Salmon (not, in fact, Aristotle), a self-proclaimed English "Professor of Physk," was put up for auction in January of this year after a 200-year-long ban in England.

According to Open Source, the book was one of the most widely circulated publications regarding sex and reproduction in North America at the time, but it certainly lacked scientific basis for many of its claims. For instance, Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull's book specialist, Cathy Marsden, told HuffPost UK in April that the book warned readers that if a woman became pregnant out of wedlock, she might give birth to an infant covered in hair or Siamese twins.

via Internet Archive

The manual's stance on topics like virginity and marriage also reflects the Puritanical era in which it was written. According to Booktryst, Aristotle's Complete Master-Piececontends that virginity is, "the boast and pride of the fair sex," that marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman, and that any sex outside of this context fills "the world with confusion and debauchery, has brought diseases on the body, consumptions on estates, and eternal ruin to the soul, if not repented of."

Interestingly, some parts of the book are shockingly progressive. Marsden told Open Culture:

Sex after a heart attack: why many avoid it

After going through the experience of a life-threatening heart attack, many patients are justifiably terrified of having another — perhaps one they won’t survive — and some avoid sex for this reason. If their doctors took the time to discuss the resumption of sexual activity, however, women recovering from heart attacks have reported in a new study that they’d be far more likely to return to their former sex lives.

Unfortunately, very few cardiologists broach the topic of sex, especially with their female patients, according to research published last week in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers extensively interviewed 17 female heart attack patients and found that very few of their doctors discussed resuming sex unless the women asked directly for guidance.

“These patients told us it would be easier to overcome their fears of sex after having a heart attack if their doctors gave them more information,” said study co-author Stacy Lindau, a gynecologist at the University of Chicago Medicine who specializes in treating sexual dysfunction in people undergoing cancer and other medical treatments.

“Even providing just one sentence of counseling on this issue is so much more than saying nothing and can have a real impact on patient outcomes,” she added.

The new study builds on previous research also conducted by Lindau involving 1,900 heart attack patients who were surveyed about their sex lives after leaving the hospital. That study published last year found that only one-third of women and slightly less than half of men received hospital discharge instructions about resuming sexual activity. Those who didn’t get any advice were 44 percent more likely to report a year later that they still hadn’t resumed intercourse.

The American Heart Association issued landmark recommendations in 2012 advising cardiologists to discuss the resumption of sexual activity with heart attack patients. In the majority of cases, the panel of experts concluded, a heart patient’s risk of having a heart attack during sex was no greater than the risk faced by their peers of the same age without any heart problems.

A number of factors could explain why physicians and nurses fail to follow these recommendations, said Elaine Steinke, a professor of nursing at Wichita State University in Kansas who helped write the 2012 recommendations. “Medical providers may feel embarrassed or not view it as important enough information to include in a conversation before a patient is discharged from the hospital.”

But, she added, doctors can easily fold it into any recommendations they provide on physical activity. The Heart Association guidelines said the stress to the heart during sex is equivalent to climbing two flights of stairs.

New recommendations concerning the specific type of sex counseling doctors should provide are set to be released by the association on Monday.

In the new study, some participants mentioned that their sexual activity was less frequent but that their physical intimacy with their partner — all were in committed relationships — had increased since their heart attack.

Others said having sex after their heart attack was life-affirming and helped them regain a sense of normalcy.

But many also had more fear and anxiety about how their bodies would handle the exertion, getting worried if their heart starting racing during foreplay. Spouses worried too. One woman said she had to convince her husband that she “wouldn’t die in bed.”

Another said she didn’t resume sex because she lost her libido, a side effect she attributed to the antidepressants she started taking to manage depression following her heart attack.

“Any sort of invasive procedure on any part of the body has the potential to affect someone’s sexual function,” Lindau said. “If a healing wound is painful, patients will be more protective of that part of the body and avoid putting pressure on it, which may require new positions for sexual intercourse.”

While cardiologists may not want to delve into this much detail with their heart attack patients, they should make referrals to health care providers who do, Lindau emphasized.

“We’ve seen from this study and previous ones that patients — especially women — who aren’t counseled about sex after a heart attack are less likely to resume it,” Steinke said. “These findings are a call for health care providers to do more. They must make this part of a routine practice.”

Teen Held as Sex Slave at California Pot Farm, Authorities Say

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13 Sex Secrets Men Don't Know About Women

Women don't like explosions, in art or in life.

Women aren't as funny as men. We're often cleverer, frequently wittier, but to be really funny demands a certain clownishness that our grace just does not allow. It's fine, really it is.

We grow pathetic goatees and look awful in cargo shorts anyway.

Women are aware of about 10 percent of the things men actually think and say about us. Best to keep it under five.

Women love to be taken out to eat. It makes our day.

A clean apartment will get you more tail than you'd think.

Given the chance, women will smell and re-smell the scented-candle display at the store. We really can do this for ages.

Our clothes are complicated, our shoes unforgiving, and our constitutions delicate, so please, valet park.

Every living woman likes wedding crap. Even lesbians.

"Girls night out" is usually some other woman's idea.

Oftentimes, women simply want to lie back and get laid.

One orgasm is usually enough.

Women would rather be with you. We like you. Honestly, we talk about you all the time.

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