Yes, we are referencing a 1997 Julia Roberts movie

• College Candy: When your backup boyfriend dumps you.
• The Frisky: 5 things to talk about before you move in together.
• TresSugar: Sexism, stereotypes, and the Super Bowl — recent ads that sexualize women.
• YourTango: 7 Valentine’s Day ideas for singles.
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: A Valentine’s Day gift guide.
• HuffPost/Women: How to break up with a friend.
• How About We: 3 ways to avoid breaking up before the first date.

image of Fingle

• College Candy: 10 signs you’ve been friend-zoned.
• The Frisky: 13 things to do after sex other than sleeping or cuddling.
• TresSugar: 16 actors who’ve cross-dressed in movies. 
• YourTango: The phrase men hate to hear. 
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: I love therefore I’m nuts: great philosophers who failed at love.
• HuffPost/Women: Heidi & Seal divorce over this deal breaker — what’s yours?
• How About We: The flirtiest video game for a first date.

• College Candy: An interview with Booty Parlor founder, Dana B. Myers.
• The Frisky: The 7 most baffling things about women’s clothes.
• TresSugar: 18 ways Michael Fassbender puts the sex in sexy.
• YourTango: When it comes to dating, are we shallower than we admit?
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: For the love of god, let my vagina sleep.
• HuffPost/Women: Gadgets for women gone wrong.
• How About We: 10 signs you need to go on a date.
• YourTango: To take his last name or not?
• College Candy: A guide to “dormcest.”

photo via flickr

• College Candy: Why are men obsessed with breasts? (This guy thinks it’s jealousy: because male nudity, sans boobs, is inherently a joke.)
• The Frisky: 15 skills every woman should master.
• TresSugar: 5 ways to attract love in 30 days! (We’re suckers for anything that sounds like an infomercial.)
• YourTango: How to make (and keep) resolutions as a couple (we know you’ve already forgotten yours!)
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: Why being thin is not a privilege. 
• HuffPost/Women: 5 must-know facts about your brain and desire.
• How About We: 10 movies to AVOID on date night.

photo via flickr

We’re always on the look-out for free podcasts to fill the interminable gaps between new episodes of This American Life and RadioLab, and one of our new favorites is the Stuff You Should Know podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. The hosts, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, are funny and smart and just the right amount of nerdy, and their meandering conversations cover everything from how Alcatraz works to how silly putty works. If you’re used to the tightly edited style of, say, This American Life, their loosey-goosey style will take a bit of getting used to. But unlike those high-budget shows, this one is updated every few days.

So anyway, we were thrilled to hear the recent episode, “What happens in the brain during an orgasm.” Imagine sitting next to two guys at a bar — two incredibly well read, sweet, dorkily funny guys –and listening to them discuss orgasms for 38 minutes. That’s kind of what this podcast is like. This time around, they had us from the intro, when they explain why they decided to go ahead with the episode despite having a lot of younger listeners: because in the past they’ve covered numerous gory topics, from cannibalism to Jack the Ripper to shrunken heads, and they didn’t want to fall into the puritanical trap of assuming that violence gets a pass where sexuality does not.

Suffice it to say, we learned a lot, and you will too. Like, for example, how cool it is that the vagus nerve, which is involved in orgasm, bypasses the spinal cord. As researchers (including G-spot goddess Dr. Beverly Whipple) have recently discovered, this means that paraplegics can still climax.

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It seems like just yesterday the two of us were out on the fire escape of the Nerve.com office, smoking (smoking!) and coming up with the profile questions for the original Nerve Personals (you may remember “______ is sexy; ______ is sexier”). The Nerve Personals had a meteoric rise, signing up affiliate partners like Salon and The Onion left and right. It was so successful, it spun itself off into a purely personals company called Spring Street Networks. But what goes up must come down: the personals network was eventually sold to Friend Finder long after we’d gone and the whole thing just seemed to fizzle out, at least on Nerve’s end.

But like Jesus, Nerve Personals is reborn! This time as “Nerve Dating.” Their new take on personals is to create a network that feels more like ever-changing and -updated social media, rather than a collection of static profiles. Of course, everyone still has a profile: you still answer similarly clever questions that try to capture your true — or at least aspirational — essence (“If I could give my sixteen-year-old self any piece of advice, it would be…”), and you are still given access to users who meet your criteria.  But gone is the limitless personal essay that can sometimes feel like homework. Instead, they ask you for a Twitteresque mini bio: “Now sum up your whole life in 141 characters. (Just kidding, have fun with it. You can change it at any time.)” As they put it, when you visit Nerve Dating, you talk about that movie you saw, that band you heard, that new sushi place you tried. Think Facebook for dating. (Or, if you prefer, dating for the ADHD generation)…

Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered

photo via flickr

We’re suckers for a good Twitter hashtag — they can make everyone feel like a stand-up comedian for a few minutes (not to mention giving us all a break from reading what our colleagues ate for breakfast). We particularly loved the #lessambitiousbooks hashtag that was trending this week, and of course we jumped on the bandwagon, finding ourselves hilarious @EMandLO. We were planning on publishing a round-up of our favorite sex- and love-related entries found on Twitter, but as it turned out, we had more fun coming up with our own. So here are our top 10 less ambitious sex (or sexy) books:

1. The Joy of Dry Humping
2. Lady Chatterly’s Booty Call
3. Are You There God? I Can Call Back Later If You’re Busy (and the racier book For Quite a Long Time)
4. Slightly Risky Liaisons
5. The Mauve Letter
6. Our Digestive Tracts, Ourselves
7. The Kinsey Tweets
8. One or Two Things You Were Wondering About Sex (But Never Got Around to Asking)
9. Eat Pray Date Night
10. Slight Hangup About Flying

• This post is a part of Sundance Channel’s SUNfiltered Blog
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Historic Naval homecoming kiss

• College Candy: The 5 stages of a new relationship.
• TresSugar: Famous kisses throughout history.
• YourTango: 10 tips for finding love in 2012.
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: Is casual sex good for you?
• HuffPost/Women: 2011′s most absurd quotes about women.
• The Frisky: 12 celeb couples to watch in 2012.
• How About We: 5 easy ways to be better at sex.

Through our friend, Lynn Harris, writer, co-creator of Breakup Girl, and now communications strategist for something called Breakthrough, we heard about a “Rewrite the Ending” contest (which ended last month):

Show of hands- How many of you wish that:

- Andy (Pretty in Pink) had ended up with Ducky?
- After Willy dies (Death of a Salesman), his wife gets a great sales job without having to play the “poor widow” card?
- When Simran’s father finally releases her hand (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge), she runs for the train to Goa and finds happiness on her own?
- Ariel (Little Mermaid) had kept her voice and won American Idol.

In other words: How often have you been enjoying a book, movie, play, or TV episode…when all of a sudden things take a turn for the sexist, misogynist, needlessly violent, or worse? Have you ever wished you could jump into a story, shout at the characters, grab the pen (or keyboard) of the writer, and make it turn out the way you think it should?

Of course we have! So I (Lo) entered the contest (you could do it via Twitter, Facebook or email, from 140 characters up to a couple hundred words). Here was my entry:

In “The Taming of the Shrew,” as Petruchio uses reverse psychology to try to “tame” Katherina, his kindness and gentleness actually starts to rub off on him and he begins to really appreciate Katherina’s independence, fiery spirit and strong point of view, until he accidentally yet genuinely falls in love with her, so that it is HE who ultimately becomes the agreeable spouse. At the end, when the three sets of newlyweds are attending Baptista’s banquet, it is the three wives who propose a wager between them to see whose husband is the most egalitarian: Petruchio is the only one who engages with his wife as an equal, getting into a heated political debate with her in which they ultimately, amicably agree to disagree, and then he has no problem holding her satchel while she goes to the bathroom. Needless to say, Katherina wins the bet hands down.

Turns out, I won the Facebook category, woohoo! Here’s the winning Twitter entry by Tim_Flatman:

@Bell_Bajao Sleeping Beauty wakes up early, breaks 4th wall & critiques a narrative where it’s good to be kissed without consent #rewrite

You can read the long-form winner here — a reimagining of the ending to “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” called “For The Love of Anjali” by Purva Dandona — along with two other great honorable mentions.

Honestly, I didn’t know anything about the sponsors of the contest — Breakthrough and Bell Bajou — I just loved the idea behind the contest. After I won, I asked Lynn what these organizations were all about and the relationship between the two of them. Turns out, they’re just as interesting as the contest itself:

Breakthrough (breakthrough.tv) is a global human rights organization that uses the power of pop culture, multimedia, and community leadership training to inspire people to take action for social change. We work out of centers in India and the U.S. on issues including domestic violence, immigration (see ICEDgame.com) and racial justice (see restorefairness.org). It all began with this awesome music video about a woman escaping domestic violence, the first to bring that issue into mainstream/pop culture in India.

Bell Bajao (“Ring the bell”) launched in India in 2008, calls upon men and young men to take a stand against domestic violence. It’s become our flagship campaign, combining award-winning — and culture-changing — TV ads with long-term training of Breakthrough “rights advocates” who work to challenge norms and challenge stereotypes in their own communities. This video describes the Bell Bajao campaign.

The goal is to bring human rights and human rights values — dignity, equality, justice — into mainstream culture and real lives. The key idea is that human rights start in small places — our homes, our relationships, our neighborhoods — and require not just laws, but people, to uphold them. By creating top-down, mass-media and on-the-ground, bottom-up change, we work to build a culture of human rights.

Oh, and if you love Alias/24/LOST/Rent/Margaret Cho, you might like our Facebook game, America 2049!

Good stuff.

• This post is a part of Sundance Channel’s SUNfiltered Blog
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Kardashian family Christmas card

• College Candy: Imaginary new year’s resolutions for celebrities.
• YourTango: 12 holiday gifts and what they say about your relationship.
• Eden Fantasys’ Sexis: Where God meets sex. (Happy X-mas!)
• HuffPost/Women: How to get through this week without killing each other.
• TresSugar: A holiday message from Banksy.
• The Frisky: Sexy holiday party looks inspired by celebrities.
• How About We: What your boyfriend was thinking when he picked out your Christmas gift.