It turns out that the straight-male fear of reciprocal anal play is a potent mix of sexism and homophobia; a straight man can do it to someone else, but having it done to him isn’t okay.

But the newly discovered anti-cancer benefits of prostate stimulation are giving straight guys—especially the progressive New York breed—a legitimate excuse to be more, shall we say, open to exploration.

And men’s magazines, which until recently discussed anal sex only in terms of how to trick a girlfriend into giving it up, now publish articles on the Aneros—the doctor-created, FDA-approved prostate stimulator—and the male G-spot, a.k.a. the P-spot, a.k.a. the He-spot.

“Straight guys come in looking for the Aneros,” says Riccardi, “but once they get all their questions answered, they’ll walk out with something more fun and less medical for themselves. Or their girlfriends will come in looking for ways they can be the penetrator, too.”   more »

Before the coming of George Bush and his shadow president Dick Cheney, the greatest military blunder in American History was thought to be Custer's Last Stand.

It did not take a lot of hindsight to know that general Custer's vain assault on a much larger force of better-armed native Americans would come to no good end.

His own turncoat Indian scouts told him the encampment at Little Bighorn was far too large to be attacked.

They were changing back into their native clothes en masse so as not to be associated with the white man.

But in his supreme arrogance Custer believed that HE knew better than his own best sources of intelligence. We all know the result of that one.

How uncanny are the parallels to the current situation in Iraq? The neocon ideologues who seized dictatorial control of our government brushed off all contrary advice and manufactured intelligence to support their case.   more »

Commercial culture in the United States is schizophrenic towards young women.

We buy and sell the myth that young women should be like “Miss America” -- paragons of virtue and walking advertisements for abstinence. Yet the culture teaches young women to present themselves as sex objects.

Clearly North Americans still have issues with the female body. What other words besides schizophrenic could describe a nation that hyper-sexualizes its young women, yet demands a virtual if not actual chastity?

Disturbed, perhaps -- a word my children use for anything troubling, or un-cool. Only a still deeply Puritan nation could be so repressed about the female body, and yet so crass about using that body, “clothed” in attire once reserved for hookers, as the cornerstone of its entire commercial culture.   more »

So then George, as the taunt goes, where's Bin Laden? For President Bush, having perhaps the worst week of his presidency, a reminder of the continuing liberty of Osama Bin Laden would not be welcome.

The claim, then, by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in an interview with Pakistan's Geo TV, that he had helped Osama Bin Laden escape both the Tora Bora mountains and the approaching US soldiers won't come as a pleasant surprise to the US leadership.

It will, however, remind them of their long and bitter relationship with the Afghan warlord: the man sheltering America's biggest enemy was once the American's biggest friend.

Hekmatyar's rise began in the late 70s, campaigning against Russia's then increasing influence within the Afghan government.

His ruthlessness, and that of his organisation, the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) meant that after the Russian invasion in 1979, Hekmatyar was the largest recipient of secret US funding.   more »

Tony Blair's ability to redefine reality surpasses art and touches fantasy. His words on war and peace have the authentic quality, these days, of organic delusion, endlessly adaptive, altering and shifting as it struggles to accommodate each new grisly fact. He has a hustler's instinct. You didn't believe that story? Try this one.

Speaking to a collection of analysts, serving officers and historians in a hangar at Plymouth yesterday, Blair sketched a picture of a future world for which, very soon, he will have no further responsibility.

By no coincidence, he was stiffening British spines for a generation-long conflict just after George Bush had committed a further 21,500 American bodies to Iraq, and five years after Guantanamo Bay became democracy's parallel universe.   more »

The war in Iraq was always more about marketing, to use Card's word, than reality; about, at bottom, creating a permanent wartime presidency to intimidate political opponents at home and to establish American hegemony - a beneficent hegemony, if everything had gone well, but hegemony all the same - abroad.

Now, even Bush has finally acknowledged a reality that set in long ago. But it seems far too late.

If handing the US forces in Iraq over to two generals, David Petraeus and Ray Odierno, schooled in counter-insurgency is a good idea now, then why wasn't it a good idea last year or the year before?

The same question could be asked, of course, of the five additional brigades, the 4,000 new soldiers headed for the Al Qaeda stronghold of Anbar province, and even of the $1.1 billion set aside for Iraqi jobs and reconstruction, after nearly nine times that amount had scandalously been identified as lost under onetime administrator Paul Bremer (eventual winner of a Presidential Medal of Freedom): Why now, and not earlier?   more »