SAN FRANCISCO
(where else?)
| Why don't we just hang up a sign saying "America's Bath House" and be done with it? |
- From bondage to "breath play" and zoophilia, it's not easy keeping up with society's fast-developing sexual trends. That's why some of North America's top sexologists are hunkered down with academics and therapists at a Fisherman's Wharf hotel this weekend: to swap findings about everything from teens with underwear fetishes to transgender couples.
| And this differs from a average day in San Francisco, how? |
"These couples have problems that I didn't know how to deal with," said Olga Perez Stable Cox, president of the Western U.S. region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.
| Really, we don't have to make this stuff up. |
"You have to understand the culture, otherwise you're an outsider, and you don't get laid it." The theme for the society's four-day conference is "Unstudied, Understudied And Underserved Sexual Communities."
| Running out of gay and/or lesbian and/or bisexual and/or transgendered and/or hermaphroditics volunteers and/or gender-confused, are we? |
Presentations range from autoerotic asphyxiation, or "breath play," to zoophiles, or animal lovers, to more mainstream topics like sex motives of dating partners.
"So, what's your sex motive?"
"Getting laid, what's yours?" |
"Let me tell you, it was not easy finding these pictures," Hunter College professor Jose E. Nanin told his audience in a seminar about "specialized" sexual behavior among gay men.
| Funny, people keep trying to send them to me every day. That, and the millions they have stashed in African bank accounts. |
Nanin's photos are more than an explicit how-to of exhibitionism and sadomasochism, he says; they are examples of safe alternatives to sexual intercourse that need to be de-stigmatized in order to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS.
| Right. Rather than taking a chance on catching HIV/AIDS, put a plastic baggie over your German shepherd's head. And de-stigmatize it. |
Researchers say their greater goal is to help the medical community, the public and legislators figure out what behavior is merely out of the norm versus downright dangerous.
| San Francisco: The Nation's Bathroom, Where We Spend Too Much Time Exploring our Sexuality. Does the city produce anything anymore, other than sexual freak shows? |
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