Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano has taken some great (and, to be honest, not so great) paintings of nudes from the past and reimagined what they would look like if their bodies conformed to what the 21st-century thinks of as an ideal of beauty. The results are revealing – and quite shocking in what they say about our modern attitudes to women’s bodies

Strangely, he’s managed to get a part of it wrong. Agreed, bellies, hips and thighs seem to be out of style at present. But breasts are very much in such.

And this is not just a change in fashion either. There has actually been a marked change in the general size of play puppies over the past century or so. Every year or two there’s another piece on how the average woman has moved from a B cup to a C or some such.

And no, this isn’t just about the increase in muffin tops either, a general embiggenning of the actual female form as opposed to the fashionable one. Nor is it about implants. Some (quite probably nutritional) factor has caused a change in the ratio between breast size and the size of the rest of the average woman.

What he’s done in the pictures is slim the stomach, hips and thighs…..but not enlargened the breasts. Which is a little odd, to note one change and not the other.

Convicted sex offender Gary Glitter stands to be paid thousands of pounds in royalties after the BBC aired a repeat of him performing on Top of the Pops in 1977.

What sort of tosspot phones up the BBC to complain about this?

Should we tear down Prospero and Ariel because Eric Gill was a kiddie fiddler?

And I’d love it if someone could tell me how he’ll get several thousands for one song in a TV repeat. It’s more like £50 on the radio so I rather doubt it’s thousands on the TV.

Miss Suarez told Caracol News in Cartegena that she called the police after the Secret Service agent with whom she spent the night refused to pay her the $800 (£500) he had promised. …….”Let’s go, bitch – I’m not going to pay you,” she said that he told her before throwing her out of the room in the early morning.
….
Miss Suarez agreed to go after the agent promised to give her a “little gift” of $800-dollars. But next morning he threw her out without paying and when she knocked on the hotel room door of another agent he refused to help her.

Miss Suarez said: “I said in Spanish, ‘Look, if you show no consideration for me, why would I have consideration toward you and not call the police? In that moment, I felt strong’.”

Prostitution is legal in Colombia and Miss Suarez said she had every right to be paid for her services. She said: “I told him, there’s a problem here. Because if I had come with you to enjoy myself that would have been one thing. But I didn’t come to enjoy myself. I had to beg from 6.30 am to 10.00 am for him to pay me.”

At first the agent offered her about $27 to pay for a taxi home and eventually after she returned to the hotel room with a police officer he gave her $250-dollars (£155).

Legality protects the prostitute from such breach of contract.

Legality also gives the prostitute the usual protections of the law against violence and so on.

So why is that all those who would “protect women” want to make it illegal, thus removing those protections from something we all know is going to continue to happen?

Others felt it was more like a wholesome nightclub where everyone was focused on the music and on dancing instead of getting drunk or finding someone to hook up with. There was a distinct lack of sexual energy at the Stockholm Lunch Beat, which, coupled with the ban on alcohol and drugs,

If you take away everything that makes a nightclub interesting then why bother?

The Princess Royal’s 63-year-old former husband has left his second wife, Sandy, to set up home with fellow equestrian Lauren Hough, 35.

Sufficiently unusual to make the papers?

Why do women vote for Boris Johnson?

He is an infamous philanderer, promotes few senior women and female colleagues at City Hall complain about him bitterly. Yet the London mayor is a hit with women voters. Why?

In order to be a successful philanderer it is necessary to be liked by women.

What’s important is that Jessie J is happy with the way she is – lesbian or bisexual – and that girls see that it’s OK to fancy girls

Pretty young thing with legs up to here likes shagging both men and women.

I’ve checked among that vital market segment of portly middle aged men and I find that we don’t care a bit.

Quite in favour of it in fact…..

South Africa’s polygamous President Jacob Zuma married his fourth current wife on Friday, the sixth time the 70-year-old has tied the knot.

It is, of course, complete nonsense that women ever marry for economic advantage.

That’s just the sort of evolutionary psychology nonsense put forward by the phallocrats.

Since 2006, patronizing prostitution is a crime when committed by service members under article 134 of the US military’s criminal law (the uniform code of military justice).

Sirsly?

A law to stop squaddies shagging tarts?

.

“One did not leave, police came and she refused to leave until she was paid for her services. So that is what started all this,” he added.

Further evidence about why prostitution should be legal of course. So that those who would rip off the workers are forced to pay the workers as agreed.

In a major embarrassment for Washington at the Summit of the Americas attended by more than 30 heads of state, 11 U.S. Secret Service agents were sent home and five military servicemen grounded over “misconduct” allegations in a hotel.

Prostitutes were taken to the hotel, according to a Colombian police source.

But, umm, why is this a scandal?

Every town in the US has tarts that will call in to visiting businessmen at their hotels. Why is the existence of the same in Latin America scandalous?

And surely no one at all thinks that “military personnel” never take advantage of those services at home?

Best Buy is investigating whether former chief executive Brian Dunn misused company assets during an alleged relationship with a female employee, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday night.

Shagging a bird in the training department isn’t really the sort of crime that gets UK CEOs fired. No one seemed all that worried about Fred the Shred doing it for example.

But the septics do seem to have a history of doing this: The Boeing bloke lost his job for very much the same reason. All rather Puritan really.

Yet I’ve noticed, of late, that the business of acquiring a status symbol has got more complex. Partly, of course, it is because in these times of economic austerity, it behoves the rich and successful to appear slightly less rich and successful in order to make the rest of us feel better.

But instead of abandoning their baubles of smugness, it seems that the top 1% have simply found another way of displaying their superiority: children.

Err, yes, it’s a fairly basic bit of this evolution lark really.

Compete for resources so as to maximise the probability of your having grandchildren. Several books have been written about it.

It does still amuse me that those on the left, those most likely to pooh pooh any alternative to evolution as the method by which we got here, are those most resistant to accepting the implications of evolution as being the way that we are.

You know, rich men tend to marry pretty women? Pretty we’ve found being pretty much defined by what looks like fertile? Pretty women tending to marry rich men because the rich men have the resources?

No?

And you also ignore the fact that people were not just punished for having Gay sex. They were punished for knowingly violating the law by having Gay sex. That knowing violation is still a criminal state of mind and is still wrong.

But I’m not quite sure how to make that joke…

I think there are excellent arguments in favour of gay marriage (not least they should be allowed to be as miserable as all us heteros). I think there are even better arguments in favour of a single civil marriage for anyone who wants it with you and whoever having a further religious ceremony from whomever you would like or none and from whomever will have you.

Hoever, trying to argue from within Catholicism for gay marriage doesn’t really work because of the underlying theology of sex itself. As I explain in this comment over there:

“What is a non-bigoted argument against gay marriage that actually holds logic?”

I most certainly don’t say that you have to agree with this logic (I don’t myself, despite a Cathoilic upbringing and education) but this is the underlying logic of the Catholic attitude towards sex (not surprisingly, it’s remarkably similar to traditional Judaic law as well and there are many similarities with Islamic).

Sex must always be open to the possibility of conception.

And that, pretty much, is it. If you really pin down the explanation of it all that is. I’ve not seen this stated quite so bluntly by a Catholic authority, but I have seen it written by a Rabbi and also an Imam.

Anal sex, oral sex, these things are just fine. If that’s what turns the parties on, mutually, why the hell not? Sex is fun, it’s very definitely a gift from God. But such anal, oral, frotting, handjobs, tit rubs, whatever you want to think of, are only allowable as long as the actual male orgasm happens where conception is possible. This was the sin of Onan recall, coitus interruptus.

Now, given that only a woman can get pregnant and only get pregnant if ejaculation takes place at least vaguely in the region of her genitals then the only morally and righteously allowable form of sex is where ejaculation takes place at least vaguely in the region of a woman’s genitals.

As I say, that’s pretty much it as the basis to the whole thing.

You can disagree with the premise (I do myself) but that is what the premise is that then leads to all of the other restrictions. The restriction on contraception, to gay sex itself. That sin of Onan again.

Of course, when the premise is accepted (and as I say, it is at the heart of the Catholic theology of sex however much all of us Catholics, nominal, practising or non believing like myself ignore it or disagree with it) then the very concept of gay marriage beomes unthinkable. For marriage is a public recognition of devoting oneself to a sexual relationship (the marriage ceremony really does say “I thee with my body shall worship”) and how can that happen with a sexual relationship where conception is not possible and thus is not a moral or righteous sexual relationship?

Just to repeat myself again. I don’t find this convincing either. But it is an explanation of that underlying religious argument and it is indeed believed to be true by many.

You can only argue from within Catholicism in favour of gay marriage if you are to reject the Church’s basic teachings about sex. At which point, you’re not really making a Catholic argument, are you?

Anna Gristina, 44, was in jail on the notorious Rikers Island last night after failing to come up with $3 million (£1.9 million) in bail money. A court heard she was accused of managing a prostitution racket with well-known figures and leading businessmen on her books.

Her lawyers claimed the Scottish-born mother of four had been merely attempting to create a dating website when she was arrested. She is said to have acted as a high-class madam for at least 15 years, operating from an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Highly skilled and highly lucrative management services.

Edna Milton Chadwell, who has died aged 84, was the last madam of the Chicken Ranch, the bordello that inspired the musical and film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

That I did know, that the show and movie were based on a true story. This part I didn’t:

The Chicken Ranch also inspired a famous song, La Grange, by the Texan rock band ZZ Top, released in 1973 on their album Tres Hombres.

I know the song of course, know what it’s about, but hadn’t known that it was about the same place.

Which leads to a slightly odd thought. How would the movie have rutned out if they’d had Dolly Parton singing along with Billy Gibbons?

I would outlaw marriage for everyone, including heterosexuals, and grant access to a civil partnership union across the board.

This is the situation in, just as an example, Portugal. In a legal sense there is no such thing as marriage. There is just the single civil partnership thing for all potential mixtures of two people (they are traditionalist enough still to insist upon that) who wish to sign up to the contract.

Of course, it’s possible to refer to this as marriage if you wish to. But what, in the terms Bindel is using at least, we normally describe as marriage has no legal weight here. You want to go to church, synagogue, mosque, the local gun club or get the publican in to run a ceremony for you? Sure, go right ahead. As far as the law is concerned you’re entirely free to do that just as the law is entirely free to ignore that you have done so. Which many people do and the law does.

The only puzzle is why no one’s thought of using society’s historical answer to not being very interested in sex.

Marriage.