Babeland sponsored Murray Hill’s 7th Annual Miss Lez Pageant!

Babeland was representing in full effect! Babelanders in attendance, Kelly, Leah, myself and Zach!
This event was fantastic, this is the best alternative beauty pageant around! Contestants competed in Swimsuit, Evening Wear, Platform, Talent and Q&A. Highlights were Miss Re/Dress,Bevin Branlandingham‘s Bacon Platform, Miss Choice Cunts, Sara Jenny’s commitment to Kink in the Queer community,  Miss This is Burlesque, Helen Pontani’s platform as the queer Madonna, and of course our fabulous Butch Mama KS Stevens winning the crown and Babeland Hitatchi Magic Wand!Here’s the shot of when I (in my best butch drag) presented the scepter to the pageant winner Butch Mama KS Stevens !

I spend much of my time at Babeland helping people learn how to have better or more frequent orgasms. We love orgasms! They feel great and help relieve stress. However, I recently learned about a condition that has just started being described called Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder. People with this condition are constantly aroused and can have as many as 200 orgasms in one day. If you’re someone who feels that they have difficulty having orgasms, this might seem like a dream come true, but take a step back and imagine what it would be like. With PGAD, people may have orgasms while they’re eating, working, exercising and spending time with family and friends. Orgasms can be pretty powerful things – they’re not easy to hide – I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to try to find a private place to have an orgasm you couldn’t control. The only thing that would be worse would be not knowing that there were other people like you out there experiencing the same thing.

I learned about this condition from one woman’s experience, shared on BoingBoing:

Every time I do something, I have to evaluate my situation. Where am I? Are there other people around? How well do I know them? What is the likelihood that, if I don’t get someplace private in time, things could get complicated? Can I make noise? (Being vocal isn’t necessary, but it helps release more of the pressure.) I avoid triggers — things like music with heavy bass, vibrations from riding a train or an idle car, cold air, musky cologne, darkness, stress, scary movies, romantic movies, unexpected touch, a full bladder. PSAS is completely unrelated to sex drive. Watching sex scenes does nothing for me, but the other day, when a friend put his hand on my back, I found it really hard to contain a screaming orgasm. If my heart rate shoots up too high for too long, I flare up. I avoided exercise and gained a lot of weight. One time, I was hugging a male relative and I felt an orgasm arise. It felt really dirty and wrong, and I totally freaked out. Now, I try to avoid hugs in general unless I feel ready for them.

I am grateful to this woman for sharing her story and educating me about PGAD. If you would like to learn more, go here.

A sixth grade class in Sweden filed a complaint against Toys R Us for having a catalog that featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”.

Whenever the gender behavior of children comes up, people are always quick to jump to anecdotes which always sound something like “well, when I was a kid I had trucks and dolls but I always just chose the dolls and I’m a girl so…”.  These stories seem to prove that there’s something inherent in gender, and that assumption is certainly supported by pretty much everything in our culture from sports to clothing to advertisements to how we all treat the boys and girls in our lives. However, I think the Nature vs Nurture debate is still strong here, and we can’t necessarily jump to those conclusions.

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