When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. “I’m kind of scared,” he confessed. “Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come.” But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. “His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay,” Austin told me. “I’m serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect.”

Austin doesn’t have to play “the pretend game,” as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. “Half the girls I know are bisexual,” he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. “I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me,” Austin explained. “The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: ‘It’s just a phase! It’s just a phase!’ ” Read on

The Hotshot condoms, which cost ca. € 5,20 for a packet of six, have been created by Lamprecht AG, a leading condom manufacturer in Switzerland. The company has said the UK would be “top priority” if they expanded abroad, considering that it has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe.

Ad from an American campaign against teen pregnancy

A standard condom has a diameter of 5,2 cm in comparison with the Hotshot’s diameter of 4,5 cm. Both are the same length – 19 cm. According to a German study of 13 to 20-year-olds, a quarter said a standard condom was too large.

Family planning groups and the Swiss Aids Federation campaigned to have the Hotshot produced after a number of studies, including the government study researched at the Centre for Development and Personality Psychology at Basel University. Nancy Bodmer, who headed the research, said: “The result that shocked us concerned young boys who display apparently risky behaviour. They have more of a tendency not to protect themselves. They do not have a very developed sexual knowledge. They do not understand the consequences of what they are doing and leave the young girls to take care of the consequences. “The results of this study suggest that early prevention makes sense.”

The age of consent in Switzerland is 16, although if the age difference is not more than three years there will be no punishment. Other concessions exist if the older person is not more than 20 or believed the younger person to be at least 16. Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Kandahar just may be the world capital of buggery. There’s a popular joke here that goes, “Why do birds fly in circles over Kandahar? Because they’re covering their ass with one wing.” The rest of Afghanistan is always riffing about Kandahar. “Down there, girls are for procreation, boys are for recreation.” Stuff like that. Pre-Taliban, mujahideen strongmen in Kandahar — including the police chief — were not averse to taking boys as brides. In fact, according to a 1996 New York Times article, a homosexually driven feud led to the rise of Bin Laden’s future hosts, the Taliban.  Two mujahideen battled for possession of a prized boy. They rolled out the tanks and shot up the bazaar, killing scores of innocents. By 1994, many of the “holy warriors” who had beat back the Soviets were terrorizing their own people —providing Mullah Omar and a small band of Islamic scholar-avengers with popular support when they defeated the sodomites.

Omar put nooses around the necks of the two mujahideen, and the Taliban snowballed.  After taking control of most of the country, the new hardliners jailed some homosexuals, but Kandahar love continued to flourish, reaching far beyond its mecca. I reckon an Afghani, an anthropologist, or an Afghani anthropologist could contest my surmising, but the surface evidence is strong. Much in Afghanistan is homosexual, repressed and otherwise. All over cautiously and relatively progressive Kabul, women covered in burkas walk beneath billboards featuring muscle-ripped, Speedo-clad European bohunks, advertisements for bodybuilding gyms. Check out all the dandies holding hands, flirting, shod like pointy-toed elves. They kiss their pals on the cheek, a traditional greeting they make louder and wetter than need be. At gender-segregated wedding parties, they dance together frenziedly, thrusting pelvises at their buddies.

And then there was the guard at a Kabul guesthouse who buggered a middle-aged American guy I know in the generator shed for $50. It was during a party, and the American, an uninvited guest, solicited several locals employed by the guesthouse before finding his man. Not to say homosexuality is socially acceptable here. The Koran is clear in its condemnation, and most Afghanis profess to hate it. So such behavior is surprising in a society so rife with taboos—or maybe to be expected, like shepherds with their sheep. Kandahar love gets just as predatory too, famously so for some of the warlords. While Afghanistan has gained little toward rule of law, a multitude of old-school mujahideen are refashioning themselves as the most profitable sort for Karzai’s Afghanistan—pro-democracy politicians. Their crimes and improprieties, if not fewer, have become less blatant. But some old warriors can’t help themselves. A 2004 report on human trafficking by the International Organization for Migration notes a trend of gunmen sexually abusing boys. Although Afghani law prohibits homosexuality and pedophilia, neither crime qualifies for the far more unacceptable charges of adultery or pre-marital sex. For the incorrigible pederasts, there are wedding singers—fairylike boys, some pre-pubescent, who cover nationalist anthems and local pop songs over tablas and synthesizers. Demand for them at weddings is huge. But wedding singers are scorned on the street and minded closely by their families or managers. Numbering in the hundreds in Kabul alone, they are considered the catamite class.

I entered the life of a popular wedding singer for a couple of days recently, visiting him at home and accompanying him to a gig. Read the full story at the VICE Magazine

Photo by Rachel Papo

The report, presented at a conference of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition in London attended by the heads of private and state schools, goes against received wisdom that boys do better when taught alongside girls. The headmaster of Eton, Tony Little, warned that boys were being failed by the British education system because it had become too focused on girls. He criticised teachers for failing to recognise that boys are actually more emotional than girls, despite the fact that girls "turn on the waterworks".

The research argued that boys often perform badly in mixed schools because they become demoralised when their female counterparts do better earlier in verbal skills and reading, because the left side of the brain develops faster in girls. They also felt they had to be "cool" rather than studious. But in single sex schools teachers are able to tailor lessons to boys’ learning style, letting them move around the classroom and getting them to compete in teams to prevent boredom, wrote the study’s author, education expert Abigail James, of the University of Virginia.

Teachers could encourage boys to enjoy reading and writing with specifically "boy-focused" approaches such as themes and characters that appeal to them. Boys in boys’ schools "loved" to pen verse because they enjoyed the "inherent structure in poems", James said. Because, the researchers say, boys generally have better spatial skills, more acute vision, learn best through touch, are more impulsive and more physically active, they need to be given "hands-on" lessons where they are allowed to walk around, with this natural impulse not seen as disruptive. "Boys in mixed schools view classical music as feminine and prefer the modern genre in which violence and sexism are major themes," James wrote. Single sex education also made it less likely that boys would feel they had to conform to a stereotype gained from the media by girls that men should be "masterful and in charge" in relationships. "In the present sexualised atmosphere prevalent in mixed schools, boys feel coerced into acting like men before they understand themselves well enough to know what that means," the report said. [via The Guardian]

A mother who had sex with a 12-year-old boy nearly 200 times has been arrested; she was found to have kept a diary of her encounters, with each of 191 times the pair had sex marked off with a star. The 36-year-old unemployed single mother began the relationship by seducing the boy with alcohol, and then proceeding to have regular sex with him over a 10 month period, sending her own son away where necessary so the couple could go about their business undisturbed at home. Reportedly the woman kept a diary detailing her encounters with the boy, with each time the pair had sex marked with a star – 191 in all. It is said that for his 100th successful performance she bought him a pair of trainers. The boy didn’t seem too unhappy about all this: He bragged about it in chat rooms and told several friends about his adventures. [via Sankaku Complex & Daily Mail]

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided that gay people were no longer mentally ill, but that changed nothing for trans and gender-variant people. In fact, "experts" led the push to create a new disease called "gender identity disorder," which they successfully got added to the APA’s big book of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Though trans activists have been protesting to get this mental illness removed in the 2012 revision, these Toronto "experts" hold key positions among the people doing the revising.

Even worse is a sub-disease they created called "gender identity disorder in children." They have made a lot of money claiming to "cure" hundreds of children who are "too feminine." While they also treat kids who are "too masculine," in most clinics which have adopted their methods, 5 to 30 times more children assigned as males are treated. The methods? No playing with dolls, no drawing with the "wrong" colors like pink or purple, and no playing with or drawing pictures of girls. The anxious parents who bring their children in to be "cured" are expected to enforce all rules. They are sent home with instructions to make the child go through all their possessions and remove anything "inappropriate," as well as ways to use reinforcement to "correct" their child’s thinking and behavior. How did nonconformity become a disease? And how did Toronto become infamous for this? It’s a textbook case of pathological science with roots in the 20th-century eugenics movement, and it shows how a few misguided people can have impact all over the world. Read on at Boing Boing

The proposal would reverse a 2004 amendment making it illegal to have consensual sex with anyone under 16, the minimum age for marriage with parental blessing. That decision was part of broader changes to Puerto Rico’s penal code, making it difficult to gauge what consent age most lawmakers support. The proposal to lower the consent age faces stiff opposition from religious groups, who say it would lead to more pregnancies and an increase in single mothers struggling to raise a child whereas studies from the USA show that the US states with the strictest anti-sex laws and abstinence campaigns have the highest rates of teen pregnancy.

First, there are the adaptive hypotheses, which provide an explanation for same-sex behaviour that would boost the biological fitness of one or more of the individuals involved. For example, several species, including bottlenose dolphins, seem to use same-sex behaviours to promote social bonding. Others may have evolved them as a form of intrasexual conflict. Indirect insemination, as in the flour beetle, provides a third possible adaptive advantage. Then there is the practice hypothesis, that individuals are honing their skills for mating, which seems to hold good for male fruit flies at least. Several other adaptive explanations have been invoked to explain same-sex behaviour in humans, including kin selection – helping to further the genes you share with close family members – and "over-dominance" – the idea that certain genes somehow increase fitness in individuals who possess a single copy of them but are associated with same-sex behaviour in people with two copies. Then there is "sexually antagonistic selection" – the idea that alleles promoting same-sex behaviour in men are favoured by selection because they increase the reproductive chances of their daughters.

There are also various non-adaptive explanations. Mistaken identity could indeed be one cause. Van Gossum’s damselflies exemplify another idea, known as the prisoner effect, in which depriving individuals of interaction with the opposite sex prompts them to mate with members of their own sex. Then there is the evolutionary by-product hypothesis – selection for some other independent trait, such as high sexual responsiveness, might make individuals more likely to participate in same-sex sexual behaviour. It has also been suggested that same-sex behaviours appear when organisms are imperfectly adapted to their environment.

Read on at the New Scientist: Homosexual Selection: The Power of Same-Sex Liasons

According to a new survey, almost one-third of youths admit they’ve engaged in sexting-related activities that involved either e-mailing a photo or video of themselves in the nude or being the recipient of such images. Of those who admitted to distributing suggestive images of themselves, about 61 percent report that they were pressured by someone to send the image. Girls were more likely to share a naked image of themselves than boys. Those who are already sexually active were much more likely to send an image than those who were not sexually active. Most of the respondents sent the image to a significant other or a person of romantic interest to them. But 29 percent said they shared naked images of themselves with someone they knew only online.

To help measure where the younger generation currently stands on sexting and digital abuse, 1,247 youths between ages 14 and 24 were surveyed. About 50 percent of youths who responded to the survey said they’ve been the victim of some form of digital abuse. The most common type of abuse was being the target of a smear campaign; about 22 percent of respondents indicated they’d been the target of lies spread through digital media. About 8 percent of respondents indicated they’d been threatened with some form of digital blackmail. Females were targeted for digital abuse more often than males — with 53 percent of them acknowledging it, as opposed to 42 percent of males.

These are some of the findings of a survey conducted by MTV and the Associated Press as part of a new multi-year campaign the youth-oriented television network launched on Thursday with numerous partners. The aim of the campaign, dubbed “A Thin Line,” is to educate teens and college-age students about safe and appropriate digital behavior. The campaign will include a half-hour MTV news special to be broadcast next Valentine’s Day that will focus on sexting as well as a series of public service announcements addressing sexting, harassment, digital prejudice and other topics. In addition, the network’s documentary series True Life will do an episode on the issues that two young couples have faced through their digital activities. And so on… [via Oscar]

Not that we didn’t know already…