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By Rachel Khona, The Frisky

“You just don’t know how to get me off,” M. snapped.

Humiliated, tears immediately sprang into my eyes. Every guy I had dated or hooked up with had always been more than pleased with our sex life.  M. had always had a problem getting and staying hard. But now that I was confronting him, he was blaming it on me. Once M. became erect, he would stay that way for a while until he lost steam and went limp. As for having an orgasm, it was relegated to a once in a while event. We would cheer as though he was a toddler who managed to make it to the toilet to pee.

In the film “Don Jon,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a man who is so addicted to porn he cannot enjoy sex with a real woman. Just like the protagonist, M. watched porn every day. Scared of what the answer may be, I began to wonder, 'Was porn the problem?' In pop culture, porn is often seen as an affirmation of masculinity. The idea of porn addiction always seemed nebulous at best, something invented by the religious right. I assumed most guys watched it from time to time, but it never occurred to me that my partner could actually be addicted to it. Until it happened to me.

In a Cambridge University study, neuroscientist Dr. Valerie Voon ran a series of tests comparing the brain activity of self-described porn addicts with those of healthy males while watching porn. While the control group was excited by the imagery, the compulsive users’ brains were twice as active, similar to someone addicted to alcohol, drugs, or nicotine.

When a user keeps watching porn a new dopamine spike is created causing the viewer to become accustomed to each additional hit. Over time, the brain’s receptors becomes less sensitive to the dopamine creating a need for increasingly extreme experiences to become sexually aroused. In other words, regular …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Janet Allon, AlterNet

1. Rush Limbaugh: The Nigerian girls aren’t “our” girls… and other atrocities.

Despicable, human-shaped being Rush Limbaugh went full-on evil this week when he decided to mock the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign to bring attention to the school girls kidnapped in Nigeria.

Why? What could possibly be partisan or controversial about wanting to help more than 200 girls kidnapped by radical Islamists and sold as sex slaves and wives?

Well, Michelle Obama held up a #BringBackOurGirls sign—that could be part of it.

“Look at her,” Rush snarled at a picture of Mrs. Obama, “looking all sad.” Also looking sad about the missing girls was Malala, the heroic Pakistani girl who nearly died because she insisted on getting an education. Jesus Christ himself would be ridiculed by Limbaugh if he sided with the Obamas on anything.

Also, Limbaugh felt the need to point out that the Nigerian girls are not “our” girls, so… maybe we shouldn’t care about them so much.

Of course, Limbaugh was deeply offensive on a variety of topics this week, including an assertion that this generation is “the most racist, and the most sexist” ever, because Obama was elected, and Hillary might be. But pitting himself against Malala pretty much took the cake. It prompted Jon Stewart to start a #f*@ckyourush campaign against the hater he aptly described as the “quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund clean-up site that was his soul.”

And that’s on a good day.

2. Laura Ingraham: Nigerian girls were kidnapped because, Benghazi.

As the world now knows, schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok, Nigeria. Their cause has become a rallying cry around the world. For Fox Newsian Laura Ingraham, this can only mean one thing: Benghazi. Also, Benghazi. It’s like a buzzing sound, a compulsive tic she just has to blurt out… constantly. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. During a show this week, she interrupted her guest, who seemed to be actually discussing the situation in Nigeria, to say: “I think part of the problem here is …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Edward Helmore, The Guardian

By Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

In the glory days of the anti-globalization movement, circa the “Battle in Seattle” of 1999, there was an oft-repeated street scene some of you will remember. A group of protesters would seize an intersection or a block for a little while, likely because the police were otherwise occupied or couldn’t be bothered or didn’t want to bust heads while the cameras were watching. The ragtag band would haul out the drums and noisemakers, climb the lampposts and newspaper boxes with colorful banners, and send out an exuberant chant: “This is what democracy looks like!” (Contrary to what you may have heard, smashing the Starbucks windows was not required, and not all that common.)

It’s easy to snark all over that from this historical distance: If democracy looks like a noisy street party involving white people with dreadlocks dressed as sea turtles, count me out! But the philosophy behind that radical-activist moment was not nearly as naive as it might look from here, and much of the problem lies in that troublesome noun: democracy. In those post-Communist, pre-9/11 days, the era of the “end of history,” democracy in its liberal-capitalist formulation was assumed to be the natural fulfillment of human society. It was the essential nutrient-rich medium for the growth of all good things: Pizza Hut, parliamentary elections, knockoff designer clothes and broadband Internet, not to mention all the wonderful gizmos that were about to be invented. Even anti-capitalist protesters were compelled to embrace the rhetoric of democracy, if only to suggest (as Gandhi did about “Western civilization”) that it was a great idea but we hadn’t gotten there yet.

A decade and a half later, democracy remains officially unopposed on the world stage, yet it faces an unexpected existential crisis. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American-style liberal-capitalist democracy has presented itself to the world as “the only legitimate form of expression or decision-making power” and “the necessary first condition of freedom.” (I’m quoting an anarchist critique by Moxie …read more

Source: ALTERNET