The Truth about Details

RELIGION/SEX - What does religion have to do with men's magazine "Details"? Well, I'll tell you at the bottom of the article.

Not like it really matters. The content of Details magazine was always a bunch of macho bullshit anyway. Here is list of sample articles listed in Details magazine (Jan/2010):

  • How Internet Porn is Changing Teen Sex
  • The Five Creepiest Substitutes For a Woman
  • Meet the Man Who Has Slept With More Than 600 Women
  • Should You Get a Sex Coach?
  • Robot girlfriend ushers in a new dawn in "solo" sex

    In the January 2010 issue there is an article called "The Lure of Dating an Ex-Lesbian", which we have quoted below (complete with images):

    Certain female archetypes capture men's sexual imagination because they represent that elusive thing men can't have. Among them: the porn star (for obvious reasons), the nun (for obvious, more disturbing reasons), and the lesbian. For Dudus Americanus, this last image tends to conjure up the predictable girl-on-girl fantasies that have consumed him since he first stumbled upon Dad's secret stash of Oui magazines. But what about the guys who manage to break through? Is landing a woman who once found gratification in her own sex really a cause for celebration—or something more like trepidation?

    Paul Mattingly, a 34-year-old actor, was doing "Klingon work" at Star Trek: The Experience in the Las Vegas Hilton when he met Anne, the pretty young manager of the attraction's gift shops. He chatted her up at a party (out of costume) and found out she'd dated a few other guys at the Experience, which didn't bother him. But after he and Anne became serious, he learned she'd been romantically involved with a woman for years.

    "There was a minute there where I had a little Ben Affleck Chasing Amy moment," says Mattingly. "It was this feeling of 'Clearly, this person has out-experienced me—is that going to come back and bite me in the butt?'" Five years later, it has not; in fact, the two have been married since 2007. And while Anne admits she will probably always be attracted to women, he isn't worried. After all, the Mattinglys now have celebrity analogues. After three years as one half of the most famous lesbian couple ever, Anne Heche ran off with Ellen DeGeneres' very vagina-less cameraman Coley Laffoon. When she split with him, she didn't seek comfort in the arms of someone of her own gender—but instead shacked up with Men in Trees stud James Tupper. Even Ani DiFranco, folk guitarist, feminist icon, and prominent bisexual, just hitched up with a man for the second time last January—in freaking Hawaii. And Lindsay Lohan—well, these days it's safe to say Firecrotch will take whatever she can get.

    There are no reliable statistics by which to gauge how many refugees there are from the isle of Lesbos. Nor could there be: Bisexual women, for instance, don't have to "switch teams" to enter into relationships with men, even if they've lived with other women for decades. But if the hasbian (and for simplicity's sake, we'll include bisexuals who've shifted from women to men) really is having a coming-out moment, it might be because the lesbian had her big coming-out moment in the nineties—the decade that saw Cindy Crawford shaving k.d. lang on the cover of Vanity Fair, the birth of Lilith Fair, and the mainstream popularity of lesbian-friendly folksingers like DiFranco, the Indigo Girls, and Dar Williams, not to mention a slew of literal "coming-out moments" set off by Ellen's "Yep, I'm gay" in 1997. Today, The L Word has come and gone, Katy Perry has qualified her confession about kissing a girl with "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it," and the tabloids are far more preoccupied with LiLo's dropout antics than with her sexuality—just as we are more compelled by Rachel Maddow's intelligence than by her orientation. It's safe to say the novelty has faded. A woman who began her sexual exploration in the lesbian-leaning nineties would be in her thirties now. Is it unreasonable to suggest her biological clock could also affect her sexual proclivities?

    "It's impossible for women reaching their child-rearing years not to be aware of that at some level, and to have that influence who they're with," says Dr. Lisa M. Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah and the author of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. "I've seen bisexual women who say they could go either way, but as they get older, that structures how they want to be and who they want as a partner. The standard first question, Mattingly says, is "Aren't you afraid she'll go back to dating women?" "Continued change is really the norm," says Diamond. "We have this notion that as people get older, things stabilize. Not so. Meredith Baxter just came out at 62."

    Benji Friehling, 26, a restaurateur in upstate New York, had another concern when he started dating his fiancee, who had been in a 12-year relationship with a woman and identified fully as lesbian: Could he possibly navigate the female anatomy as skillfully as a woman? Those concerns weren't limited to the usual matters of clitoral mastery and G-spot triangulation. "I worried that perhaps I was a bit inadequate," says Friehling, "that my penis wasn't as big as her dildo." This sort of fear raises a question about that whole adolescent obsession with girl-on-girl action. Though these guys may be in a better position than the rest of us to act on it, none, including Friehling, has any interest in actually following through—not because they're worried their wives and girlfriends will revert, but because they fear that they themselves won't be able to handle it. And that might be the greatest irony of dating a hasbian: In the end, we're the ones who lack the balls to explore our sexual margins.

    "Of course I think about it. What man wouldn't?" Mattingly says. "But my wife's argument is that I wouldn't be able to emotionally survive it because I'm the one hung up on the 'sex is love' thing. She knows enough to know that it'd probably end in tears—and I'd be the one who's crying. She's the one who wears the pants." Anne Heche's rugged-looking new beau, Tupper? He enjoys bird-watching. After high school, he lived on a coffee farm in East Africa where he studied Swahili, and he has since appeared in several Off Broadway plays—not the resume of a dude who opens MGD with his molars and whacks off to Coochie Hoochies 2. It is hardly a stretch, then, to suggest that the reason modern men are more ably attracting hasbians is that modern men are, quite simply, offering these women something close to what they had before. Just look at Tom Cole, a pastoral-care director at International House of Prayer in Kansas City. Without a healthy exploration of his feminine side, he probably wouldn't have met his wife, Donna—who like Tom identifies as a "former homosexual." Before the two met years ago at church meetings for born-again Christians, Donna was in a lesbian rugby league. "They didn't even wear pads or anything," Cole recalls. "She had a tattoo and she drove a motorcycle." Since then, Cole notes, Donna has "softened up," and he's learned that the right woman can get him "extremely aroused." But a few aspects of their former selves never changed. "She doesn't love to cook, that's for sure," says Cole. "But I do, so it works out really well."

    So according to Details magazine...

  • Lesbianism was just a fad from the 1990s.
  • There is a mass exodus of lesbians back to being straight.
  • Lesbians need a man to have babies.
  • And WTF is up with the photo of a woman sucking a banana?

    Okay now here is the truth of it... Details magazine has been hiring a lot of Christians (or born again Christians) on their staff in recent years, including former American evangelical preacher. Try reading the above article and look for hidden messages that sound remarkably similar to the same crap being spouted by right wing Christians who obsessed with trying to convert homosexuals.

    Conclusions? Even men's magazines have a dual purpose, to convert people to the Christian right-wing way of thinking: Lesbians and gays are evil! We must convert them into born again Christians!

    Details my ass.
  • The Toronto Women's Bookstore in Crisis

    CANADA/FEMINISM - The Toronto Women's Bookstore at 73 Harbord Street in Toronto is near financial collapse. 2009 was a very bad year for bookstores in general, but the hardest hit are independent vendors.

    The TWB released the following statement to their regulars:

    Dear TWB community,

    The Toronto Women's Bookstore is in crisis and we need your help!

    Independent businesses and bookstores have been closing their doors this year, and after 36 years it is possible that we will have to do the same if we are not able to raise enough money to survive. TWB is one of the only remaining non-profit feminist bookstores in North America, but despite all of the events, courses, workshops, community resources and additional services we offer, the fact that we are a store means that we do not receive any outside funding and rely entirely on sales and the support of our customers to stay in business.

    Over the past few years, our sales have not been enough to sustain us and this is why we are coming to you, our community, for help. If every one of you donated $10 we would raise enough to keep going for 3 months, $20 each would keep us in business for 6 months, and $30 each would be enough for us to keep our doors open, hopefully for good. All donations will go directly towards covering the bookstore's costs, and are a part of a larger plan of action and structural change to make the business sustainable in the current economy.

    In the past, when feminist bookstores were closing down all across North America, the support of the community is what kept TWB alive. You are the reason that we are still here today, and we believe that with your help we can once again work together to save this organization where so many of us as readers, writers, feminists, artists, and activists have found a home.

    You can make donations over the phone, on our website www.womensbookstore.com (a paypal link will be available soon), or in person at the store. As a non-profit store we are not eligible for charitable status and cannot offer tax receipts, but we are hoping to be able to offer tax receipts for donations over $100 in collaboration with a non-profit charity who shares our mandate, and if that can be arranged we will have that information available on our website and in store as soon as possible.

    You can also help by spreading the word to your friends and community, contacting us if you know of any funding we might be eligible for, promoting this fundraising drive in your paper or on your blog, website or radio show, organizing your own save the bookstore fundraisers or just passing the hat at your holiday parties, giving a TWB donation as a gift, and of course, coming in and bringing all your friends to the store for some holiday shopping!

    Thank you all for your support,
    The Toronto Women's Bookstore Board, Staff & Volunteers

    The Truth about Mary Magdalene

    RELIGION - Who is this a painting of? Is it Mother Mary, Jesus, his brother and an angel.

    Or, depending on who you talk to... is it Mary Magdalene and the descendants of Jesus Christ? The painter Leonardo da Vinci was reputed to be a member of the Priory of Scion, a secret society which protects the direct descendants of Jesus Christ.

    It doesn't really matter, we will never know the truth on this matter.

    What is known however is that Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus Christ, did indeed have children and there has been a whole secrecy and mythology following that ever since... and a long list of conspiracy stories, dating back to the Knights Templar, the Free Masons... etc. A big long list of conspiracy theories and conjecture. All of that is "true" but can never be proven beyond the fact of mere hearsay.

    According to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant and Islam Mary Magdalene was a Saint. She was the first to witness the resurrection of Jesus Christ, according to all four gospels. She "was loved by Jesus more than the other disciples", a church leader and an apostle that the other apostles looked up to. According to Luke, Mary Magdalene accompanied him on all his journeys and according to Matthew was there at the crucifixion.


    Right: Leonardo da Vinci's "Mary Magdalene" - 1515.

    The word Magdalene in Aramaic means "great" or "magnificent", suggesting this was not really her name but a title bestowed upon her.

    What is also known is that Mary Magdalene also wrote "The Gospel of Mary", a document which does not appear in any version of the Biblea and was only discovered in 1896 in a fifth-century papyrus codex. All other copies had been destroyed or lost.

    Part of the text gets into spiritual transcendence, an idea not really covered in any part of the Bible. Mary asked Jesus about her ability to see him (his spirit) and how a soul ascends to Heaven.

    This idea however didn't really fly with Peter however, who had a different idea of how people enter Heaven... this schism between him and Mary Magdalene led Peter to found the beginnings of male-dominated Catholicism... (For fun, check out Peter in The Last Supper... he's the old guy who looks like he is arguing with Mary Magdalene whilst holding a knife in his spare hand.)

    Mary Magdalene meanwhile had children to raise, and the political tensions in Jerusalem were becoming worse so she left the region and according to various religious historians went to France (and from this point on it gets into a lot of conspiracy theories, with the followers of Peter / the Catholic Church [the creation of the Catholic Church dates back to the Confession of St Peter, which claims Jesus instructed him and his successors to lead the church] seeking to eradicate Mary Magdalene and her children, and the creation of the Priory of Scion to protect the descendants of Jesus Christ)...

    So what is the truth?

    In this case there isn't any to be found. Some things really come down to faith and what you believe. Do you honestly think Jesus wanted a church that excluded women from becoming priests? Or was that all Peter's doing since he was apparently jealous of Mary Magdalene?

    I personally can't believe in any church that excludes women. The truth is the Catholic Church hasn't just excluded women, its persecuted them under the disguise of witch hunts and bloody Inquisitions. To this day the Catholic Church continues to hold contempt for women, despite revering Mary Magdalene as a Saint.

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