Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to limber up for 1n(2π). It’s gonna take a while.

If women aren’t allowed to be naturally too strong, how about sex-testing male athletes for being too graceful in sports where grace counts? I’m thinking diving. And figure-skating. If a diver or figure-skater who is a man seems a little too graceful, why not sex-test him to see if he’s really a female?

Sex testing has been destructive in the past – Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of a silver medal in 800 meters at the 2006 Asian Games because she was found to be chromosomally male, probably due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (which wouldn’t actually provide a performance advantage), subsequently attempted suicide. It has never been successful in it’s intended purpose. Singling out “masculine” women for testing is worse than testing by itself, and if anything un-levels the playing field instead of making things more fair, because the specter of sex testing could be used as a threat – “You beat me in this race and I’ll say it’s because you’re really a man.” It’s easy to imagine an athlete going through the rest of their careers with an asterisk after their record because she was suspected of not being a woman. The only good news is that the resurrection of sex testing seems to be universally considered to be stupid, and news articles about it are an opportunity for education about sex and gender, which you don’t usually see in the New York Times.

* see how I brought it back around?

Firstly, I can’t believe I’m the first GV blogger to find Green Porno! Oh frabjous day! I wish I could embed one of the movies in this post, but I can’t, so you’re just going to have to go and see for yourself.

What you’ll be seeing is a set of 8 short films about bug sex. Well, bugs and annelids. Yes, it’s Isabella Rossellini describing the sex lives of insects in the first person, just like you always dreamed she would do one day for you. And it’s pretty safe for work – the snail one may be ever-so-slightly nsfw, but if you can read this blog at work, you can watch that. Green Porno is cute and funny, and a little disturbing – who knew bugs were so kinky? Oh, you did? What, you think you’re so fancy, just because you passed high school biology.

Secondly, I’m so glad that someone reminded me about Samsung Means To Come, an amazing piece of flash art by Korean artist Young Hae-Chang. I’m going to call it erotica, in spite of the fact that it’s all text (monaco font, if you must know). Definitely not safe for work, unless you work in my office, and it’s imperative that you have sound on. And that you sit there for ten minutes and watch. When you’re done with that, you may want to move onto Cunnilingus in North Korea, which is provocative and funny, but not as sexy. To find out more about Young Hae-Chang or see more flash, I direct your attention to Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries, where you can see almost everything there in multiple languages.

I’ll qualify that a little. It makes part of our brains called mirror neurons think we are having sex. A recently released study monitored brain activity in people who were being shown images of aroused genitalia, apparently to determine whether “the sexual preference of the observer determines the neuronal responsiveness to pure male or female sexual stimuli in the human reward and motor system”. (I’m not a scientist, but that seems like kind of a basic assumption. Next! A study to determine whether water is wet!) They found that the subjects were, in fact, aroused by the genitals that arouse them (yay science), but the way it happened in the brain is what we’re interested in here.

Seeing the arousing images triggered the premotor cortex, which is where we find imitative, or mirror, neurons. Mirror neurons “mirror” the action of another person (or even animal), as though the observer was actually engaging in the action. They’re part of the same neurons that fire if you move your body to do the action you see, in fact. As you watch a movie there’s a part of your brain that’s imitating what you’re seeing, so if you’re watching someone fucking, there’s a part of your brain that’s doing it, too! (Of course, that also means that if you’re watching someone fucking while in an obviously uncomfortable but photogenic position, as often happens in porn, your brain may think you’re doing that instead, which can be a bummer.) It’s not just porn – this applies to pretty much all other activities and is why seeing some get sick can make us queasy and watching a boxing match makes us punchy. Our brains are constantly using the information they’re getting from the eyes to learn about the world and how to get around in it.

This makes me wonder about about this supposed lack of responsiveness in women to porn. Currently the vast majority of porn is produced by men for men – this is, in fact, one of the things Good Vibes exists to remedy. What if women aren’t responsive to porn because they’re wired differently, but because they’re wired exactly the same, but are watching and mirroring different things when they see it? Could it be that the arguments made against porn, that it’s anti-woman for example, are actually our mirror neurons seeing it and thinking “Oh my aching back”? Okay, that’s trivializing a complicated issue, but it does make me wonder if one day great porn will be produced by wiring some people up to an fMRI machine and seeing where their brains light up. Oh brave new world…

via The Frontal Cortex blog

Among their range of unusual sexual antics is “sneaky sex”, where the physically smaller males, who can’t compete with larger males, “cross-dress”. The smaller males change body colour and trick the stronger males into thinking they’re females. When the strong males are not looking, the smaller males change colour again and quickly mate with the females.

Apparently “cross dressing” is the accepted scientific term for this type of camouflage (octopuses do it too!). Also, according to Nova, the female cuttlefish actually preferred the sperm of the cross-dressing males over that of the larger males. Normally, I’m would not approve of resorting to subterfuge in one’s personal relationships, but that is possibly the best plan ever for getting laid (or, as they say in SCIENCE, reproduce). Kinda kinky, kinda bold… I kinda like it!

p.s. you can see some of the really cool Nova footage here.