"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare," Akin said. "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." [Atlantic Wire]

Hoo boy. The response was rapid and furious. He didn't apologize, exactly, but claimed he "misspoke." "Misspeaking"—or saying exactly what you think until you realize it makes you look like a frighteningly ignorant jackass—is just one of the many ways one can wriggle out from saying something factually incorrect without admitting wrong-doing or apologizing.

KwaZulu-Natal province, in the southeast, is looking to expand a project running for more than a decade where elephants populations have been controlled by injecting cows with a vaccine that triggers an immune system response to block sperm reception.

"Because we have taken away opportunities, they don't have the chance to remedy the overpopulation naturally as they would through migration," said Audrey Delsink Kettles, an elephant ecologist who has been leading studies for years on contraception at Makalali Private Game Reserve.

Testing of the vaccine, administered by dart and requiring an annual booster, has been conducted at 14 small reserves. Studies have shown it is reversible, nearly 100 percent effective and has no adverse impact on elephant health or behaviour, Kettles said.

Contraception is seen as a humane alternative for controlling populations over the other main options of culling herds or moving them vast distances to areas with more food. [Reuters]

Silly elephants. Don't they know they can just keep an aspirin between their knees?

Like it or not, if you live in Brooklyn, you are probably going to be around breastfeeding. "But I hate babies!" "But I don't have kids!" "Ugh, stroller people." That's fine. I don't have kids either. You don't have be in someone's exact situation to treat them like a human being. Herein, I will teach you to act like you were raised right when someone around you is breastfeeding.

• Happy birthday, Dr. Elders!

Dr. Elders has gone on to continue to support legalizing it and decrying abstinence-only sex ed. So today, in her honor, here are four hilarious sex ed materials dealing with masturbation.

• Sexy, Sexy Crowdfunding

“People talk about all the money that you can make in porn, but after attending numerous industry shows, talking with studio heads, and interviewing actors and actresses we realized it’s not what people think at all. The proliferation of free content has taken its toll on the industry no different than their mainstream counterparts. What’s worse though is that adult industry is a ghetto where your options for monetizing content are extremely limited,” [founder Ben Tao] said. “For Offbeatr it’s about going directly to the fans and supporters and engaging them in the process and giving content creators access to capital they previously never had access to. By getting this capital the industry will start to innovate and take more risks with business models, products they make, and how they reach out to their customers.” [Tech Crunch]

I think this is really cool! I know there are a lot of entrepreneurial porn performers out there who are looking for new ways to make authentic, interesting, satisfying porn that connects with viewers on a deeper level than just a quick xtube search and jerk, and to get paid for it.

• NY Daily News
• Guess which one is him

Calenda, who lives in Rome and has been separated from his wife for a decade, does not dispute he gave her pricey gifts at the start of their affair.

But he insists the 795-square-foot, one-bedroom unit on West End Avenue wasn’t one of them.

When Diamond-Walker asked Calenda for help purchasing the condo, the director insisted on two things, Fitapelli said: that the money be a loan, and that they have a written agreement.

They signed the agreement last July, and she closed on the condo in September.

“Several months” later she “suddenly severed” the relationship, court papers show.

Diamond-Walker repeatedly told Calenda that she considered the $775,000 a gift and “would never repay” him, according to the lawsuit.

Their written agreement requires no payments until December 2018, when the entire amount is due. As a gift, Calenda charged no interest — a nicety he has since withdrawn.
[NY Daily News]

Yeah, hi, you can't buy yourself an indentured sex servant, not even with Manhattan real estate. His complaint isn't "she promised she's start paying me back and then didn't," it's "she implied if I bought this for her, she'd keep having sex with me for at least five years." If you're dumb enough to drop three-quarters of a million bucks on your much-younger and clearly interested in your money girlfriend, you don't get to get all lawsuity when things don't work out. C'mon guy. Them's the rules of gold digging.

If you don't know—and if you don't, I wish you would show me the rock you've been hiding under because I would like to join you—massive blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey began life as Twilight fan fiction. While Viking, E.L. James's American publisher, rubs its hands together and cackles with glee at the million bucks a week the book is making, no doubt other publishers are combing fanfiction.net looking for the next big erotic hit. Please allow me to make some suggestions.

1. "High School Sweet Hearts", by Heart of the Wind 007. Bible fanfic posing the important question: what were Mary and Joseph like in high school? And how did they fall in love? Before she got knocked up by an angel and stuff?

An excerpt: Mary took a look at herself in the small mirror. She sighed, not knowing what to do with her hair on the first day of school. She didn't want to look like she was trying to hard. Saying a small prayer to the Lord, she ran a finger through her long, curly, light brown hair. After getting dressed and brushing her teeth she begin reading her Torah until her parents called her downstairs.

"Mary! Time for breakfast." Her mother calls.

"Coming mother!" Mary calls. Heading downstairs and giving both her mother and father a kiss on the cheek.

"I'm off to work. I got a new job as a carpenter. Goodbye you guys." He says, grabbing a bit of breakfast and heading out the door.

However, I had a weird thing happen. I wonder if anyone else's insurance did this. My prescription plan has three tiers—generally generics are tier one and cost $10, less-expensive non-generics are tier two and cost $30, and expensive stuff (like my precious Advair) is tier three and costs $60 a pop. I'm on a generic birth control pill that's been tier one forever, because, you know, it's a generic.

• Better not eat that, fatty!

Yes, men have now hopped on the pre-wedding crash diet bandwagon.

• Watch out, ya freaky little bugs.

Flies may not scream out in ecstasy during sex, but they do create quite a buzz with their wings. And now researchers have found these mating moans can be heard by bats hungry for a meal.

The result: Wild Natterer's bats get a double-size meal of copulating flies; the mating flies, rather than offspring, get death. [NBC News]

Gross, gross, and gross. An entire series of mental images nobody really needs. Still, flies out there, keep it down. To avoid being eaten by bats, sure, but also because nobody wants to hear that. Think about your roommates, man.

• Your real life will never, ever resemble this.

The point is, if you're a woman and you live here, joke's on you, because no WAY will you ever find a man, love, or happiness. Unless — unless! — you use your precious youth and free time commuting to a place where you have actively chosen not to live, but where the men are plentiful and the standards apparently lower. Yes girls, all the boys can now be found in the suburbs.

• Makin squid babies.

Dumpling squid live fast and die young, mating with multiple partners during their year-long lives. They make their time count, engaging in sexual encounters that can last up to three hours each.

During these trysts, the male clings to the female, grasping her and blowing water into her mantle, the bulbous part of her body behind the head. [Live Science]

Get it, girl! Gotta find a man that knows how to work that mantle. These freaky little squids are sexing so hard that they can barely even swim afterward:

"We found that squid could swim for half as long after mating, and would take up to 30 minutes to restore their swimming endurance to pre-mating levels," Franklin said. The same was true for both males and females, the researchers found.

That means less energy for foraging, avoiding predators, growing and finding future sex partners, she said. Ongoing experiments suggest that this high-intensity mating may even be part of the reason that dumpling squid have such short life spans, though those results are preliminary, Franklin said.

Get a load of these guys. Who knew? Squids are a lot more sensual than you might think. Thank you for the weird mental images, science.

Truvada, a little blue pill taken once a day, was shown in clinical studies to slash transmission of the virus by up to 75%.

"This is a big step," said Marjorie Hill, chief executive of the AIDS group Gay Men's Health Crisis. "If people are looking for the magic bullet, the cure-all, we don't have it yet. What we do have is an increasingly growing tool kit."

Many HIV and AIDS researchers and activists say the pill is a promising way to reduce new infections, which have remained stubbornly high for years.

"It's going to save lives," Hill said. [LA Times]

The pill is already being used to treat patients with active HIV infections, but now it can be used to prevent new infections as well. Unfortunately, it ain't cheap, which makes it inaccessible to many of the most at-risk populations.

“On the surface it’s something amazing, you can prevent HIV with a pill,” said Kevin Robert Frost, chief executive officer of amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. “But then you start to dig deeper and it gets really complicated. When I get to the question of who pays for this I am completely dumbfounded. In developing countries, most of them can’t afford to give pills to those who are HIV positive.” [Business Week]

As with most things, I guess, it's more exciting in premise than in practice, and primarily for the globally wealthy. It's not exactly throw out the condoms time. Still, any progress is progress, right?

According to United Nations figures, about 220 million women in the developing world who do not want to get pregnant, cannot get reliable access to contraception.

This week, the medical journal The Lancet published a series of studies that underpin the campaign.

One said that satisfying the unmet demand for contraception among women who want to limit or space their pregnancies could reduce maternal deaths by 30 percent, saving about 104,000 lives a year caused by complications linked to pregnancy and childbirth.

Better access to contraception would cut unsafe abortions, estimated to account for 13 percent of maternal deaths in the developing world. First pregnancies for very young women and those that are spaced too closely also carry a heightened risk, the study said. [Reuters]

Sounds like a total home run, right? 104,000 lives is a LOT! Make contraception available to women who want to access it, save lives, improve the health of women and children. But it's a bit more complicated than that. As the Reuters piece points out:

Experiencing my own abortion and photographing the result was a sobering experience. As a woman, I reckon with the power of images every day. But after my abortion, I realised images are literally being used as a weapon to petrify and assault viewers into fear, shame, and isolation. The protesters' heartless use of lifeless foetus images made me feel cheated, lied to and manipulated. It was just propaganda: intended to shake the core of my deepest biological, intellectual and emotional foundation.

Within 48 hours of launching thisismyabortion.com, I received a deluge of emails from men, women and couples all over the world confiding in me their own courageous and unique abortion stories. Some told tales of horrific self-inflicted abortions in countries where abortion remains illegal. Others expressed sincere gratitude for my documentation, either because it mirrored their own experiences of safe abortions or, in some cases, because they had always associated abortion with the same grotesque images I had encountered while entering the clinic. [Guardian]

Instead of the images you normally see of tiny feet in a garbage can, This is My Abortion simply shows a jar of red liquid. I think if you haven't had the procedure, you don't realize the realities of what it looks like, especially as early as six weeks. It's similar to the way that abortion stories in the media are often illustrated by an image of a heavily pregnant woman, when the reality is that most women have abortions months before they would ever show. Intentional or not, those kinds of images reinforce the "babykiller" narrative of terminating a pregnancy, when the vast, vast majority of abortions are the removal of invisible-to-the-naked-eye lumps of cells.

Which is not to shame people who have later-term abortions. I just really respect "Jane" for being willing to share the details that people on both sides of the debate gloss over. Her story is really moving, and I'm grateful to her for sharing it, especially given the avalanche of hate mail she's got to be getting right now.

Via RH Reality Check.

Indeed, none of these dalliances seemed to have an effect on the feelings Bowie and Jagger had for each other at this time. Ava Cherry, a backup singer who lived with the Bowies for a time, reportedly told a friend that “Mick and David were really sexually obsessed with each other. Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex.” [NY Post]

Trust me, your morning will be improved if you just go and read the whole thing. The only thing it's missing is Iggy Pop. Now that was quite sandwich—so many sharp knees and elbows.