Back from St. Louis!

Speaking at the St. Louis Skeptics in the Pub was a ton of fun last night! It was awesome meeting everyone, and I hope everyone enjoyed my talk. Thanks to the Skeptical Society of St. Louis for inviting me, especially Mike for organizing it and Shelley and Andrea for letting me couch surf! And thanks to my readers who came out to see me – it’s always great talking to you guys, and I’m flattered that some of you even drove a couple hours to get there.

Some random thoughts from the trip:

  • The St. Louis arch is a lot huger than I thought!
  • There are a ton of butterflies in Illinois. I discovered this because I hit about one a minute during my 5 hour drive each way – my car is riddled with the remnants of the massacre. It was even more morbid when I hit two in the middle of a little mating ritual. Court each other in the middle of the highway isn’t exactly the best way to increase your fitness, butterflies.
  • I visited the “Skeptical Palace,” the house of two members of the Skeptical Society. Oh my goodness. I should have taken photos – this place is my dream house. So eclectic and full random biological specimens, scary little medicine bottles from the turn of the century, religious kitsch, and a podium from a Christian church that they use for their debate nights. Win. Oh, and they had the most adorable kitten. Best way to win over a guest – throw kittens at them.

Quote of the night, during discussion on weird porn:
Guy 1: That’s nothing, I once saw anthropomorphic pterodactyl porn.
Gal: Oh man, I’ve seen that one!!
Guy 1: Where he’s standing and flapping his wings while getting a blow job from the girl?
Guy 2: Is the girl a pterodactyl too?
Guy 1: No.
Guy 2: Well, then that’s just sick.

I love Skeptics so much.

Strippers give church protesters a taste of their own medicine

This definitely goes down as a Win in my book (emphasis mine):

The battle that has heretofore played out in the parking lot of George’s strip club – the Foxhole, a run-down, garage-like building at a Coshocton County crossroads called Newcastle – has shifted 7 miles east to Church Street.

Every weekend for the last four years, Dunfee and members of his ministry have stood watch over George’s joint, taking up residence in the right of way with signs, video cameras and bullhorns in hand. They videotape customers’ license plates and post them online, and they try to save the souls of anyone who comes and goes.

Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church.

It’s just that they’ve come wearing see-through shorts and toting Super Soakers.

They bring lawn chairs and – yesterday, anyway – grilled hamburgers, Monster energy drinks and corn on the cob. They sat in front of the church and waved at passing cars but largely ignored the congregation behind them.

[…]The women don’t come here, after all, without their own version of religion. They bring signs with Scriptures written in neon colors:

Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing

Revelations 22:11: He that is unjust, let him be unjust still

Greg Flaig is executive director of the Ohio Owners Coalition, a group of showbar and club owners. He called the women’s protest extraordinary, saying he’s never heard of anything like it in the country.

George said the protest has been a long time coming. He sued the church in federal court several years ago, claiming a violation of his constitutional rights, but he lost. Now, he said, turnabout is fair play.

“When these morons go away, we’ll go away,” George said. “The great thing about this country is that everyone has a right to believe what they want.”

Maybe next time religious groups try to be the Morality Police, they’ll remember they’re not the only ones allowed to hold protests…

Goddamn men and their magical thieving penises!

Yet another thing us women have to worry about when having sex. Thankfully Lady Gaga enlightens us all (emphasis mine):

She may ooze sex appeal during her on-stage performances, but Lady Gaga is a little more conservative when it comes to her life in the bedroom.

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the eccentric singer, who recently reunited with her ex Luc Carl, says she is trying to avoid sex for a rather off-beat reason.

“I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina,” the 24-year-old says in the magazine’s September issue.

Well damn. I thought having sex just fractured your souls like horcruxes. Now I’m losing my creativity too? What other attributes have I been leaking out my genitalia?!

Indiana hospital ridicules transwoman and refuses treatment

Add this story to my long list of “Why I am so happy to be finally moving away from Indiana”:

Erin Vaught went to a Muncie emergency room coughing up blood. Two hours later, she was refused treatment on grounds that she is transsexual. In what is a serious lapse of medical ethics, and had Vaught died, would have been criminal negligence, Ball Memorial Hospital staff treated Vaught with contempt, ridicule, and even eventually met with dismissal of her condition.

It stated when the admitting nurse at the ER entered that Vaught was male into the computer despite the fact that her ID stated that she is female. Vaught stated “I pointed out that my ID says female. There were two ladies there, and one of them snickered a little bit and covered her mouth. The other got a very annoyed look on her face. Vaught was there with her wife and son.

When she went to the exa-room, she was met with stares and insults. She was referred to as a ‘he-she’, an ‘it’, and a ‘transvestite’. Vaught is a transsexual, or one who is physically undergoing the process of changing physical sex. Transvestites are people who often get sexually aroused while wearing the clothes of the opposite gender, but have no desire to change sexes.

The doctor arrives two hours later and said that she could not treat Vaught because of “her transgender condition”. According to Vaught “I was confused. I told them I didn’t know my condition, that’s why I was there. She said ‘No, the transvestite thing.’ She said I couldn’t see a doctor until I came back with test orders from my doctor in Indy.” What her exact condition is has not been released.

It’s so sad that people who make their living out of helping others and saving lives would be so cruel to someone based on their gender identity. Even if for whatever reason you don’t agree with or understand transsexuals, that doesn’t mean you should deny them medical treatment. Maybe since she was transitioning that posed valid medical concerns that this particular hospital’s staff was not specialized enough to deal with, but that doesn’t excuse the insensitivity of their statements.

Well adjusted sluttiness

There is an excellent post up at Feministe on sluttiness. I don’t have much to add since I just kept going “THIS” while reading the post. Go read it right now. Emphasis mine:

I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me. Sluthood gave me the time and space to nurse a shattered heart. It gave me a place where I could exist in pieces, some of me craving touch, some of me still too tender to even expose to the light. Sluthood healed the part of me that felt my body and my desires were grotesque after two years in a libido-mismatched partnership. Now I felt hot, wanted, powerful. My desire and enthusiasm was an asset, not an unintended weapon. Even now, with more time passed, now, when I am actually ready for and wanting a more emotional connection, sluthood keeps me centered. It keeps me from confusing desire and affection with something deeper. It means I have another choice besides celibacy and settling. It means I won’t enter another committed relationship just to satisfy my basic need for sex and affection. It gives me more choices, it makes room for relationships to evolve organically, to take the shape they will before anyone defines them.

This is post 38 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

New condom released by Trojan

This is sure to be the start of a new sexual revolution:

PRINCETON, NJ—Contraceptive manufacturer Trojan unveiled its new line of “No One’s Pleasure” condoms Wednesday, the first prophylactic specifically designed to intensify sexual dissatisfaction among bitter and resentful couples.

“We’ve always offered consumers a choice when it comes to protection, and we wanted to give emotionally distant partners an option that suits their lack of intimacy,” said Jim Daniels, vice president of marketing at Trojan. “That’s why we’ve developed the only condoms clinically proven to exploit performance anxiety, heighten discomfort levels, and prolong the petty arguments that allow couples to bicker needlessly all night long.”

There’s a lot of science behind it too!While it’s a great advance it sexual technology, hopefully I’ll never have to use them.

This is post 37 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I get weird email

Well, technically they’re formspring.me questions. But they’re still bizarre:

Do you feel the urge to post a picture of yourself every time you ovulate?

What is your mean and standard deviation of the number of days between ovulation?

Did you start to ovulate on June 17? The picture of yourself online induce lots of signals in my ovulation-detection Bayesian neural net. Please let me know if you do because I’d like to know whether to reward or punish my neural net.

…I think this guy’s neural net needs to be punished for not picking up on what questions are socially acceptable.

Oh wait, it’s the internet. Social norms, lulz.

This is post 29 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

“Easy A” is not destroying the atheist symbol

I like the blog Atheist Revolution, but I think Vjack may have missed the boat this time:

Look at the trailer for the upcoming film, “Easy A” and imagine what this could do to the meaning of a favorite atheist symbol. If this ends up being a hit, people will likely mistake our symbol some sort of odd promotion of the film. Admittedly, almost nobody outside the atheist community seems to recognize this symbol, but now they might assume we are die hard fans of this flick.

Here’s the trailer for “Easy A”:

Vjack makes it clear that he knows the scarlet A stood for adulterer long before atheists chose to use it as our symbol… so then what’s the problem? We co opted it because it was a symbol of religious persecution. If this movie helps publicize that, then good for it! The general public is way more accepting of sexual promiscuity than atheism anyway – it doesn’t exactly hurt our cause to be associated with it. Hell, we already are.

From the trailer alone, I’m actually kind of excited about this movie. Taking a dig at judgemental religious people? A strong willed female standing up for sexual women at her own risk? And doing that because it’s the right thing to do, not just for personal gain? I’m having a geekgasm over the possibility of feminist teen movie!

This is post 17 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.