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patriotsnet · 4 years

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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex

“It’s quite possible someone’s having sex with me right now and I don’t even know it,” adult performer and director Stoya told me.

Her vulva is for sale on the internet and in stores. Or rather, a rubbery, lifelike mold of her vulva is, in the form of a Fleshlight. The outside of it looks almost exactly like her actual body. The inside is a labyrinth of corkscrew shapes, nodules, and ridges. It’s dubbed “The Destroya,” a name that, nine years after the product launched, still makes her laugh.

Fleshlight manufacturer Interactive Lifeforms LLC has sold more than 75,000 Destroyas and more than 15 million Fleshlights total since the company started 20 years ago. It averages around 20,000 retail orders every month, according to a spokesperson for the company.

At around 1.63 pounds each, that’s nearly 24.5 million pounds of fucktoy floating around, taking up space in closets, nightstands, and under beds around the world.

The Fleshlight is an artifact of the sexually adventurous, technologically innovative 90s, but it’s become the face—and lips, and anus, and lips—of the male sex toy industry. The fact that a disembodied vulva and vaginal canal to jerk off into exists in 2019, the era of #MeToo and grabbed pussies and tabloid uproar over sex robots, shows the often contradictory intersection of sex and technology.

On one hand, the Fleshlight is a portal to new forms of sexual openness, allowing people, even those who think of themselves as heterosexual men, to engage in sex that moves away from old notions of gender and the biological body in general. On the other, the Fleshlight is also the reduction of a person to a replica of their reproductive organs. But 21 years since its inception, Fleshlight, the people who use them, and sex toy experts are realizing that maybe people don’t need an exact replica of a vulva or anus to get off. Sex toys are increasingly taking on more abstract, functional forms, and the future of the Fleshlight and toys like it may rely less on using replicas of disembodied genitals.

Today, the Fleshlight is polarizing even for the people who use it. No matter your opinion of the ubiquitous brand, it’s made an undeniable mark on human sexuality and the world.

Hundreds of years from now, if sentient life still exists on Earth, when archeologists dig up the still-intact bits and pieces of plastic casings containing rubberized genitalia, what will they think of the Fleshlight? Will it be considered an antiquated representation of how society literally objectified and commodifed sexual pleasure, or a turning point in the normalization of sex toys for all people, and our first step into a world where technology is an inseparable part of sex?

The answer, according to people who make them, use them, and are them, is both.

WHAT MAKES A FLESHLIGHT

The original Fleshlight model consists of a 10-inch plastic tube casing with a soft sleeve inside. You stick an erect dick (plus some water-based lube) into one end, grip ridges on the outside of the casing, and stroke the penis inside of the sleeve. You fuck the tube, come in the tube, then (ideally promptly) unscrew the whole apparatus and rinse it out with water (soap could degrade the material) and dry it.

Earliest archived version of Fleshlight.com, captured May 1998

Why the Fleshlight exists is a complicated story that’s become seminal sex toy lore. If the many interviews given by the company’s founder Steve Shubin are to be believed, the Fleshlight was born from his desire to get off while his spouse was pregnant.

In the late 90s Shubin, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team, and his wife Kathy were expecting twins. Both in their 40s, the couple was advised by doctors that because of their age and the fact Kathy was having two babies, the pregnancy was high-risk. He claims they were told not to have sex again until after the baby was born.

“I asked my wife ‘would you think I was a pervert if I told you there was something that I could use, sexually?'” Shubin told Wired in 2008. “But the adult store had only junk. Just crap. I thought, I can make something better, and took $50,000 of our savings to start working on it.”

Image from the 1997 patent filing for a “discrete sperm collection” device.

Shubin’s first patent filing, in 1995, was for a “female functional mannequin,” a hard sex doll torso. He called his next invention, which boiled the whole doll down to just the genitals, a “device for discreet sperm collection.” The proto-Fleshlight.

This version of the Fleshlight was pretty similar to what we see on the market today. But the description Shubin laid out in the 1997 patent filing was much more clinical. The product was framed as useful for sperm banks or doctors’ offices.

It also predicted some of the embarrassment many men feel from tucking a sex toy away in their own homes:

While my [sex doll] patent succeeds admirably in fulfilling the objects of that invention, it has several characteristics that prevent it from universal acceptance. When the torso mannequin is used in sperm banks, doctor’s offices, and other public facilities, it is sometimes intimidating to the patient being treated or may have an adverse effect upon the patient’s sexual desire and ability to deposit sperm. […] When the device of my patent is used in the home, or by those who find such a mannequin to be positive in nature, there is the concern that others will still find the object during a casual visit to the home.

The earliest version of Fleshlight.com that’s archived online, captured in 1998, shows a company attempting to carve a path as the first widely-accepted male sex toy by characterizing it as a requirement of virility, manliness, and insatiable sex drive. From an archive of Fleshlight’s “Our Philosophy” page circa May 1998:

The need for sexual gratification is as present and as powerful in a man as it is in the stallion. But where the stallion has no ability to wait, relentlessly pursuing his desire until he is satisfied or restrained, man has the ability to control his desires through fantasy… That release has to be done in a responsible way or we risk our relationships, expose ourselves to disease, take a chance with unwanted pregnancy, or even, in extreme cases, break the law.

The market, and we as a species, were primed for this thing to succeed. Hallie Lieberman, sex historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, told me that artificial vaginas and sleeves date as far back as the 1600s—the first being Japanese masturbators made from tortoiseshell and velvet, she said. Artificial vaginas were sold in the U.S. as early as the late 1800s, she said, and Doc Johnson debuted the “pocket pal” in the late 1970s. Pocket pals look a lot like Fleshlights without the hard case around them (therefore, like long fleshy sandworms), and the labias themselves are a lot more realistic-looking compared to Fleshlights’ more smooth, almost cartoonish aesthetic.

Doc Johnson’s “Pocket Pal,” as seen for sale on Amazon.

When Fleshlight hit the market in the late 1990s, sex toys marketed to male customers still mostly consisted of “pocket pussies,” “those disembodied, often clunky looking artificial vaginas—sometimes with fake pubic hair,” Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation, told me. “They were really kind of gross looking and for years, many women-friendly retailers, such as Good Vibrations, refused to carry them because they felt that displaying disembodied female body parts didn’t fit with their women-friendly vibe.” (San Francisco-based Good Vibrations became the first sex-positive, women-friendly sex shop in the U.S. in 1997.)

“Some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

Since time immemorial, men have been fucking whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be rubber gloves, toiler paper rolls, couch cushions, fruit, teddy bears, etc. A story about a Redditor who jerked off into a coconut, then later had his penis covered by maggots (he did it multiple times with the same coconut), has become treasured Reddit lore. There are also communities committed to exploring upscale DIY masturbators by refashioning Pringles cans, sponges, and building a better Fleshlight.

The Fleshlight arrived in a perfect pro-masturbation societal storm, Lieberman said: On the heels of the safe sex messaging of the 1980s AIDS crisis, in the midst of cultural landmarks like Seinfeld’s 1992 episode “The Contest” which grappled with masturbation both male and female, and as the White House forced Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 for suggesting masturbation should be taught in school. In the 90s, masturbation, for better or worse, was discussed more openly than ever.

Shubin couldn’t have happened into a better time to unveil a tasteful sex toy for penis-having people. But the Fleshlight founder’s reputation is controversial: he’s waxed nostalgic in interviews about his time as an aggressive LAPD cop, and the company’s Glassdoor reviews are generally abysmal.

In 2010, Stoya stopped by the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin, Texas before her mold was made, and described Shubin as a “mountain of a man” who normalized the absurdity that surrounded him.

“He was like, ‘We’re having a meetin’ about selling your vulva, in a can, in a box,'” she said. “It suddenly seems so reasonable and everyday when you’re talking, but you get back to regular life and it’s like, Ha, there are like 100,000 replicas of my pussy floating around.”

USER EXPERIENCES

When I went looking for Fleshlight users, nearly 200 people messaged me to voluntarily talk about their Fleshlight experiences.

“It felt a lot better than I thought it would, which kind of depressed me tbh,” one Fleshlight user told me. “Made me miss actual physical intimacy. Hence why I only used it like 5 times.”

I offered all of them anonymity in order to speak freely about their private, sexual experiences, and asked the ones who requested anonymity to explain why they didn’t want to be named. Almost all of them cited some element of social stigma or shame.

The overwhelming majority of these people were male-identifying. Many said they were lapsed Fleshlight or non-Fleshlight pocket pussy enthusiasts—guys who told me they’d been gifted a masturbation sleeve of some kind, years ago, or bought one on a whim, and used it once or twice before casting it aside again. Several cited the difficulty of cleaning the Fleshlight for why they don’t use it more.

At least three cited some hazing ritual in college, or sharing one pocket pussy with an entire group of male friends.

Several described feeling a sense of disgust with themselves after using it.

“Used it like 4 times, post nut clarity hit extra hard, & now it’s somewhere in my closet soaked in semen & dust,” said one person.

Almost everyone who spoke to me said the feeling of masturbating into a fake vagina is nothing like the real thing.

“They’re billed as lifelike, and they simply are not,” one said. “Of course! It’s a chunk of rubber at the end of the day. It’s not a bad thing, they feel good.”

A few men told me that they use Fleshlights due to physical disability, to increase stamina, or conditions that make it difficult for them to have sex otherwise. One said he bought his online when he was 22. Because he has cerebral palsy, finding sexual partners is difficult. A Fleshlight, he thought, would make imagining the experience more vivid.

“It was what I expected, but it was also more difficult to enjoy for me as my hand would cramp from using the plastic container thing it came with for extra suction,” he said. “As a disabled user, it allowed me the freedom and knowledge that sex toys were definitely for me! It helped me deal with some of the loneliness that I was experiencing.”

I also spoke with Dan Cooper, senior editor at Engadget, about his experience reviewing a Fleshlight Launch—the company’s digital product made with teledildonics company Kiiroo, that moves up and down on its own, in tandem with porn scenes. Cooper’s childhood phimosis (a condition that causes over-tightening of the foreskin) led to him needing a medical circumcision, which he said gave him limited sensitivity during sex or masturbation.

“Even as someone who thinks of themselves as sex-positive, I’ve always held the view that Fleshlights were a bit sad,” Cooper told me. “I’d assumed that they wouldn’t have worked with my broken genitals, but it was revelatory how effective (and fun) they are to use.”

A few wives and girlfriends told me why they bought their male partners Fleshlights as gifts. Their stories usually involved buying masturbators as a couple, to use while traveling or in long-distance relationships. Some said they were gifts to use during military deployments.

Karabella, a trans woman and porn performer, told me that she first encountered a Fleshlight in 2012, on her first big production shoot. “I’d never even heard of a ‘pocket pussy’ before, but [the director] pulled out a brand new one and handed it to me,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly inviting when I first slid into the butthole-shaped slit of cold silicone, so I initially started to lose my erection. However, as it began to warm up around me it was increasingly difficult to differentiate between it and real flesh.” Seven years later, using a Fleshlight has become a staple of her cam shows and performances.

HOW IT’S MADE

Beyond what’s publicly available on the Fleshlight website, specific details about the production of Fleshlights are a closely-guarded company secret. No one outside the company seems to know what the soft, skin-like material—trademarked as “Real Feel SuperSkin”—is made out of.

Kristen Kaye, Fleshlight’s Head of Business Development until late last month when she left the company, said that the material “is indeed proprietary.” She told me she believes it is biodegradable, and “made of natural materials, mostly.”

The closest I came to finding the secret recipe for SuperSkin was through the founder of FleshAssist.com, a website devoted to all things Fleshlight and masturbators. A 24-year old web developer who goes by the pseudonym John started FleshAssist in 2014 after years spent frequenting Fleshlight forums. He told me in an email that ever since buying his first name-brand Fleshlight at 20 years old, he was “hooked.”

John told me that SuperSkin, as far as he’s aware, is made from “amorphous polymers,” a mixture of PVC and silicone. It’s similar to CyberSkin, another type of thermoplastic faux-skin material used in lots of non-Fleshlight brand sex toys and dolls (but not patented, like SuperSkin).

“The trick with softer materials is that they will inevitably not feel as velvety or suede-y as harder silicone,” Emily Sauer, founder of sex wearable company Ohnut, told me. “So there is in the development of the product, there is a constant battle between, you know, does it feel too sticky? Does it feel gross in any way? There’s a very fine line.”

“The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

Micropores in the Fleshlight’s PVC make their “skin” more realistic to the touch, but also can never be fully, truly sterilized once it’s used. The top complaint I heard from all of the Fleshlight users I spoke to was that it’s too hard to clean to use regularly.

“That’s really gross to me that guys don’t even rinse them out right after, now I’m thinking about it,” Kaye said. “How hard it would be to clean…. If you were to let things dry in there, how disgusting that would be?”

After our call, I borrowed a friend’s (unused) Fleshlight to find out for myself. It’s relatively easy to unscrew the pieces and take apart, and there’s a hole in both ends of the removable soft sleeve to run water through it. As In Bed Magazine’s YouTube review notes, the most inconvenient part of cleaning is leaving it out to dry in the open long enough that you can safely store it without worrying about mold growing in a wet, airtight can—but not so long that your roommates or family stumble across a silicone worm with a vulva on the end of it.

“I think it just comes down to laziness, to be honest,” Kaye said about why people don’t regularly clean their Fleshlights.

According to my very informal online polling, she’s right.

“The biggest annoyance for me was the clean up,” Twitter user and self-proclaimed “vaginal aficionado” @BurlClooney said. Burl first heard about Fleshlight on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had a partnership with the company from 2010 to around 2012, according to Rogan’s tweets at the time.

“Your semen goes down into a base at the bottom and you should really clean that shit immediately,” he said. “But, I usually just wanted to sleep right away and would leave it until the next day or I would forget until I next used it. It was absolutely fucking disgusting. The cum would turn a weird color and it was so gross to clean out then. However, I mainly stopped due to all the prep work. The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

BECOMING A ‘FLESHLIGHT GIRL’

Stoya told me she once fucked a man with a mold of her own silicone vagina.

“It was so like, bizarrely narcissistic, but kind of beautiful,” she said.

She’s featured in one of Fleshlight’s most popular product lines, the Fleshlight Girls. There are also Fleshlight Boys (anal molds), and Guys (dildos), all modeled after real porn performers’ anatomy. Fleshlight currently offers around 45 models of Fleshlight Girls, including Stoya, Riley Reid, Jessica Drake, and Kissa Sins.

“I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Becoming a Fleshlight Girl is a career goal for many in the industry. Kaye, who led the selection of Fleshlight models, told me that three or four years ago the performer’s popularity rank on Pornhub, for example, would have been a deciding factor. Now, she looks at a variety of metrics—social media following, engagement online, how entrepreneurial and invested they are in their own success.

As secretive as the SuperSkin material recipe is, the process of molding a real vulva into SuperSkin is kept even more tight-lipped.

Fleshlight Girl Elsa Jean told me that the process of getting her custom mold done involved going to the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin and having someone cast a mold of her vulva and anus. Fleshlight models’ genitalia are also photographed using a 3D camera, and the final mold is hand-sculpted by a professional artist to get the details as accurate as possible.

“For my butthole, I had to go into a doggy[-style position],” Jean said. “I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Once they’re finished making the silicone mold, the models are given the product to check out. When Stoya saw a Fleshlight modeled after her own anatomy for the first time, the first thing she did was text a handful of her former lovers a photo of the silicone vulva. They’d know, she reasoned, if it was realistically accurate. (They said it was.)

“It was a very like, holy shit moment,” Stoya said. “You feel a bit like an action figure.”

Models are paid in royalties instead of a flat fee. The more that sell, the more money they personally make. For Stoya, being recruited for a Fleshlight of her own was a springboard into independence in the adult industry. “It’s what’s enabled me to start independent porn companies like Zero Spaces,” she said. “It’s sold well enough that it gives me the extra resources to do creative things.”

“Having my vagina and butthole on sale for people is actually pretty amazing,” Jean said. “Believe it or not, it was one of my goals when I first started in the industry. It’s as close as they can get to having the real thing.”

The actual objectification—turning a woman’s body into an object—involved in making a custom Fleshlight has brought the company, and anatomically-correct masturbation sleeves generally, some criticism.

“I don’t think it’s objectifying,” Lieberman said. “In fact, I’d even say that some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

I asked Stoya how she feels about the objectification criticism, as someone who’s worked in the adult industry as an actor, director, writer and business owner. Is the idea that hundreds of men could be fucking “her” right now weird at all?

After all, hundreds of people could be jerking off to her porn right now, too—and isn’t that kind of the same? Not at all, she said.

“People like don’t give a fuck largely about who’s doing the fucking [in mainstream porn], who’s coming up with the fucking, but with a Fleshlight—someone has looked [for me],” she said. “And even if they don’t know who I am, or my work, or care who I am as a person? They’ve still chosen my vulva. And that’s qualitatively different.”

People choose the Stoya Fleshlight because they’ve seen her work, or read something she’s written, or even just read the description on the product page of her persona, she said—and liked what they saw enough to pay $79.95 to fantasize about fucking her.

“That feels really humanizing,” Stoya said. “Whereas seeing one of my videos pirated on Pornhub with a sentence in the description that says, ‘Don’t mention the performers name so she can’t find this and get this removed’? That’s really dehumanizing, and really separates you from your work. With the Fleshlight, it’s the opposite.”

THE STIGMA

As the woman charged with marketing a plastic pussy to the masses, Kaye had a big job. And a huge part of that job, she told me, is overcoming the stigma attached to masturbation sleeves, and the men who buy them. Kaye’s worked in the adult industry—in advertising, consulting, and marketing—for 13 years, but for the last three with Fleshlight, she’s made it her mission to drag that shame out from under men’s beds and bring masturbation tools into the light.

“Unfortunately, for men, there are stigmas attached to using a masturbation device… because for whatever reason, if a guy’s masturbating or talks about masturbating, it’s like they’re not getting laid,” she said.

“For cis-gendered males, revealing you have a fleshlight gives implications that you can’t ‘get a girl’ on your own, which inhibits the positive ramifications of using sex toys,” one anonymous user told me. “In reality, they can help people explore what satisfies them, and healthily masturbating can relieve stress or just clear one’s mind, at least in my experience.”

“I feel like a lot of men feel ashamed or embarrassed for using one, but when you’re having a dry spell or not getting laid often, it’s very beneficial,” Twitter user @g0dsparadise said. “I have given Fleshlights as gifts in the past, I have told my closest friends about it, and I am hoping that one day it becomes very common to own one just because this whole stigma is ridiculous to me.”

Some pointed out a percieved double standard between male and female-gendered sex toys. “There’s an interesting dichotomy,” Cooper said. He attributed it to women’s sex toys being seen as “luxurious” and respected, while men’s typically aren’t. “But it all drills back to the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of sex.”

FleshAssist founder John told me that while the stigma itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, it still exists.

“I saw a comment before that said something along the lines of ‘a dildo looks potent, it shows that a woman doesn’t need a man,’ making it a symbol of female independence and empowerment,” John said. “I think if we flip that around, and say ‘a man with a masturbator shows that he doesn’t need a woman’ it doesn’t have the same resonance at all.”

Liberman said that she has noticed this stigma, too—and that despite toys like Fleshlight in the mainstream, it hasn’t changed much. “I think that’s because men are supposed to be self-sufficient and not need additional tools to get off,” she said. “Their hands are supposed to be all they need.”

THE FUTURE OF FUCKTOYS

It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.

If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.

Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.

Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.

Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.

“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”

She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.

As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.

Sauer points to Tenga, a Japanese company that’s been making disposable soft strokers and sleeves since 2005, as an example of where the industry could continue heading: Toward a less gendered, more pleasure-centered future of sex. One of their products, the Tenga Egg, is a handheld stroker shaped like a gummy, hollow egg, and they’re sold inside Easter egg-hunt-shaped packaging.

“They’re de-misogynizing the male masturbator,” Sauer said. “[Tenga products] are so delightful, but they’re just as dirty. They’re meant to be thrown away, but they come in really fun patterns. And what’s less masculine than a white egg?”

“I think that sex toys now are moving away from realism: the idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away,” Lieberman said. “People are more focused on both the utility of a device (does it give me an orgasm) and the design: they want something that looks beautiful.” She noted that the Eva II vibrator by Dame, and Unbound’s Bean and Squish are geometric—not dick or vulva-shaped.

Fleshlight is no exception to this trend. According to Kaye, the Fleshlight Turbo, a newer, non-anatomical sleeve, is creeping up in reviews. It looks nothing like human anatomy. It doesn’t even come in “skin” colors—only “Blue Ice” and “Copper.” (However, a helpful cross-section of the Turbo labels where you’re meant to imagine the lips, throat and tongue would be.)

Screenshot via Fleshlight.com

“I think marketing the other stuff—the stuff that’s not like, pardon my French, fucking a rubber pussy—that’s how we’ve transitioned our marketing approach,” Kaye said. “The exact replica of the genitalia? I think that’s kind of getting tired. I see that the younger people are more inclined to get the stuff that’s non-anatomical, that’s a little more discreet.”

“The idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away.”

“There’s more of an acknowledgement that many people don’t fit into the gender binary and our toys should reflect that,” Lieberman said. “I think that gender neutral sex toys are popular now because sex toys always reflect the culture of the time they’re created in; they reflect the current gender norms…. I think this shift in sex toy design to gender neutral reflects both a profit motive and a desire for inclusivity.”

For some companies, this might be an inclusivity effort, but for others, “it’s a response to the fact that inclusivity can be profitable,” Comella said. “A business that de-genders vibrators or ‘queers’ sex toys also expands its potential market reach by eliminating labels that don’t have to be there in the first place.”

But for those who still want the visual illusion of another person, Fleshlight isn’t going anywhere.

“That’s the thing to always keep in mind with the adult industry: It’s the business of fantasy,” Stoya said. “It’s like magic or professional wrestling. The audience who enjoys it comes in, ready to suspend their disbelief.”

Lieberman believes that lifelike sex toys impact our sexuality mostly for the good. If you want the feeling of fucking a penis or vagina or butthole without another person attached to it, that option is available to us, here in the future.

“I’m not sure that our society is that much different for having the Fleshlight in the world,” Lieberman said. “But our society is better when more people are having orgasms, and since Fleshlights provide orgasms, then our society is a bit happier thanks to the device.”

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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thingstoseeinplanom81-blog · 5 years

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5 Vines About Plano Tx City Events That You Need to See

Fun For The Whole Family: What People Are Saying

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The heart and soul of Plano's history scene is undoubtedly the Interurban Train Museum. Housed in the initial 1908 substation of the electric train, the museum includes shows on Plano history and the line's impact on the town. Cap off your check out with an assisted walk through the brought back Automobile No.

Fun For The Whole Family: What People Are Saying

For another interactive museum experience, stop in at the Heritage Farmstead Museum. A living history place listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum has exhibits and costumed docents to present you to life on the Blackland Prairie in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Although it's not technically a museum, nowhere else than Southfork Cattle ranch can you get as close a look at life on the set of the long-running TELEVISION program Dallas.

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Criminal Syndicates, Not Politics, Drives Middle East Wars In 2015, I address a security conference in Damascus on the issue of organized crime syndicates and their relationship to the post 9/11 wars and so-called “Arab Spring.” Even in Damascus, efforts were made to stop the presentation forcing me to go directly to Syria’s Minister of Justice, Dr. Najm Hamad al Ahmad, using terse tones. Dr. Najm ordered the conference extended at my request. With regional security officials and media present, US Army Colonel James Hanke (retired) and I addressed the conclave with Dr. Najm at my side. The effect was startling, and there are reasons for this. No one every speaks the truth, not in public. There were repercussions from this, a poisoning attempt, an attempt to plant a kilo of heroin in our hotel room in Lebanon, a plot foiled by Veterans Today financial editor Mike Harris. That story hasn’t ended but, worse still, it is no longer told, even in Syria. Let us review that message and see how it applies today. Syria Currently, Syria is being looted by US backed Kurds who have ethnically cleansed and seized not hundreds but thousands of square miles of oil and gas fields, fertile farmlands, and billions of dollars of industrial and commercial resources. Before that, Syria was looted openly by Turkish organized crime, something I reviewed in detail with the Syrian government, not just endless antiquities sold in London and New York, but entire factories, machine tools, copper pipes from schools, anything that could be uprooted from areas supposedly under the control of ISIS and al Qaeda or the supposed Free Syrian Army, were stolen. Heavy equipment was brought into Syria, lines of trucks, even teams of engineers, across a carefully guarded border, under the watchful eye of Turkish security services full partnered with organized crime cartels we traced to Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and across Europe and into the United States. In addition, thousands of oil trucks were brought into the region, mostly from the United States. Used tanker trucks were being bought wholesale across the US and loaded on transports at the Port of Houston, shipped to Turkey and, from there, transited to Iraq and Syria to steal oil. Previous oil thefts, mostly by the US, had been done using the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, looting Iraq’s Kirkuk oil field, largest in the world, of up to $.5 trillion in oil during and after the US occupation of Iraq, mostly by Exxon and British Petroleum, aided by corrupt US officials. Alex Powers, a Veterans Today bureau chief, served as assistant to Paul Bremer, us appointed “Governor of Iraq” who allegedly oversaw this process. I met with Iraqi officials, while representing the United Nations, over this issue as well, during this period, from my office in Erbil. Everything was known. The reason we mention this is that there would have been no looting of Syrian oil, something moving into high gear at this writing with theft of Syrian oil at the highest levels ever, without the precedent set by the US and Britain in Iraq from 2005 onward. The theft of Syrian oil that began in 2012, hauled mostly by American trucks delivered into Syria and Iraq though Turkey, coincided, of course, with the renewed looting of the Kirkuk oil fields, North and Northeast of Baghdad. Problem is, when this oil was stolen from Iraq, the only road systems that would deliver this to refineries and the world market, and endless stream of thousands of trucks, was through the city of Erbil itself, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government, then into ISIS held Mosul and from there, north past a Turkish held region inside Iraq and right into Turkey herself. What am I saying here? ISIS, powerful Turkish organizations and the government of the KRG in Iraq were fully partnered with their massive theft of resources taking place with the tacit approval of the US and British military. This of course means the entire “coalition” effort against ISIS was fake, fake then and fake now. ISIS was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, openly aided by the Israeli Air Force and facilitated by many governments, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, Jordan, Bahrain and more, many more. Why? Our hypothesis shows the long partnership between multi-generational organized crime and governments, some controlled, some partnered with, that stage terrorism and organize wars as a backdrop for criminal activities. Iraq This isn’t politics, its organized crime, a mafia operating inside the Kurdish region, working in concert with the Turkish mafia, who has long partnered with what is called the “Kosher Nostra,” the “oligarchs” who run much of the world’s organized crime from Trump Towers in New York, from the City of London, where they own banks, from Ukraine and across the world. The government in Baghdad, with US cash flowing into key Sunni politicians, remained divided and helpless. I met with security officials in Baghdad in January 2014 to discuss the threat of ISIS. Several I spoke with assured me ISIS was easy to use and control. Months later, most of those I had spoken with had been beheaded. No one was prepared for the level of oil theft planned under ISIS. Until stopped by Russian aerospace forces, this stream of trucks stealing oil from Syria and Iraq, was so large it would have been visible using only the naked eye from the surface of the moon, and by small telescope from Mars yet the endless fleet of American surveillance drones saw nothing. Why? American lawmakers were receiving their share, paid into their campaign funds though dummy corporations allowed by a highly controversial Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2005) and through accounts in the Cayman Islands under the auspices of a former American presidential candidate. In 2012, a former FBI agent brought me the files on these payoffs and submitted to a video debriefing outlining billions paid to US officials. That video was erased from YouTube but still exists on Vimeo. It was offered to Mueller investigators during an interview at FBI headquarters. They did not accept for reasons unknown. The same “ratline” used to launder funds to pay off congress also launders cash from the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia as well, directly into the US political system and a manages a flow of cash from Afghanistan as well. Afghanistan When the US took over that nation beginning in late 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presented evidence that al Qaeda had vast underground cities across Afghanistan, housing tens of thousands of terrorists. He presented his evidence on MSNBD to anchor Tim Russert. The video of this farce is here. Of course, the dozens of bases never existed, but America’s transition of Afghanistan from a drug free nation to a nation of addicts, a nation that is the world’s largest producer of processed heroin, that exists to this day. In a 2009 interview with a former Seal Team commander and regional director for not “a” but “the” largest American contractor in the region at the time, I was told the US was using Global Hawk long range drones, like the one Iran shot down in July 2019 over the Straits of Hormuz, to move heroin to Europe and the US. Veterans Today editors Colonel James Hanke and Mike Harris were with me during that exchange. The money trail for this heroin led not only through Mexico and the Cayman Islands to key US officials but through Switzerland as well and paid officials in Afghanistan, former officials in Pakistan, key members of Israel’s Likudist party and funded extremist organizations across Europe. The United States The recent Epstein scandal in the US has had some startling repercussions as well. With the wealth of allegations, yet unproven, supposedly tying large numbers of American officials to a child sex ring run by a foreign intelligence agency, a very real issue of Epstein’s mysterious wealth has revealed useful information. Tracing his key financial backer, we stumbled upon a longtime partnership with the Gambino crime family of New York, and from there, developed inexorable ties to historical figure Meyer Lansky. A fascinating background piece published by MintpressNews outlines the American roots of the organized crime network that highly informed sources say is manifested in ISIS and some of the right wing movements in Europe as well. The article cites how Prohibition, a law enacted in the US in 1919, led to a major Canadian smuggling operation, bringing liquor into the US. The massive funding from this linked the Canadian crime family, the Bronfmans, to “Murder Incorporated’s” Meyer Lansky and allegedly ties them both to FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover and CIA founder Alan Dulles, making both organizations, at some level at least, rooted in the Kosher Nostra and possibly tying them to the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy and certainly tying them to Iran Contra and the massive criminal conspiracy that swept the American government under President Reagan. That trail, from the 1920s, leads to Roy Cohn, former legal council for alleged sex blackmail victim and “red baiter” Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the late 1960s, disgraced Cohn had moved into a powerful New York law firm, aided by former CIA director Alan Dulles. Note that it was Dulles, who John Kennedy fired as CIA director, who headed the Warren Commission which investigated Kennedy’s murder. In 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially discarded the Warren Commission report citing that John Kennedy was killed by “person or persons unknown,” something now censored from American history. From MintPress: “The Roy Cohn Machine Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country’s most influential figures. Among Cohn’s friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein’s now-infamous “little black book”. While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, these were only Cohn’s connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn’s most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.” Roy Cohn, of course, was Donald Trump’s mentor, constant companion and legal representative until Cohn’s death. Conclusion It is clear that the political processes of the United States, Great Britain and Israel are interlocked under the control of multi-generational organized crime. It is also clear that security agencies of these nations have chosen to seek funding through illegal arms and narcotics sales and that activities of these agencies have become inconsistent with their appointed tasks. You see, if seeking “black funding” is allowed, and it is, without limit, then security agencies, even military commands and, as it follows, governments, become criminal organizations. Their actions, psychological warfare, massive “lie machines,” to cover their activities, endless corruption, complicity in war for profit, false flag terrorism, manipulation of world markets, rigging elections, even rewriting history, must be considered as factual and real. Failure to do so, blinds and cripples any government, any organization, any people who attempt to resist. Then, worse, so much worse, a reexamination of history in this light then questions everything, events, wars, historical figures, is any of it real?

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uniqueartisanconnoisseur · 3 years

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Antique Tractor Calendar 2022

It’s that time of year again! Time to start thinking about tractors and shows and making plans for your own antique tractor calendar! As the days get shorter and the snow flies, we like to hunker down and start planning for the shows to come. We found a few new ones and got a few great suggestions to add to the mix along with the old tried and true. Here is our favorite list to mull over! Pick…

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patriotsnet · 4 years

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Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

And Then There Were Three

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Poop Feminism

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-inducing sleep app could help, though?

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt