So stop asking, dammit!

• Serial killer of the week. The Zodiac Killer! “Oh, yawn,” you say, “I already know ALL about that old thing.” Oh really, smartass? Well did you know that this dude thinks he cracked another cipher letter which reveals the killer’s name? And this lady says it was someone else — her dad. (However, she also thinks she is the biological daughter of JFK.) But wait, there’s yet another suspect fingered in this guy’s autobiography!
• Religion of the week. You’ve all eaten with Oneida silverware, right? Well now you can think about this wacky cougar sex and eugenics religion every time you see the Oneida logo. I don’t envy the person who had to write this carefully worded company history on their website. I want to visit the old homestead and ask the staff about every aspect of the sexcapades.
• Fetish of the week. Speaking of cougars, I guess the contemporary celebration of cougarism is probably good because it might break down some of the culturally enforced ideas about womanly beauty being the sole province of the young. My problem is when the cougar scenario becomes uneasily Freudian and just makes me think of mommy fetishists. I know I wrote about infantalists once before, but that was the non-sexual kind. Remember Stanley? Well, Senator Tom Coburn thinks he smells disability fraud. Apparently Senator Coburn is able to do full medical and psychiatric assessments based on a few minutes of television programming.
• Links!

Another diapered man in the news.

I love the show “Deadliest Warrior.” Yeah, I know it’s silly, but I frankly can’t get enough of weapons and fighting and watching things go smash and boom. I love mayhem, duh! This show is like an organized, televised, somewhat scientific version of the drunken conversation tradition of debating who would win in a fight between X and Y. Spetsnaz vs. Special Forces? Waffen-SS vs. Viet Cong? Shaka Zulu vs. William Wallace? Ninja vs. Spartan? Craziness! God bless television!

Looking back at Alien while looking forward to Prometheus.

Miscellaneous nasty facts with pictures.

What is the hum?

He boiled for your sins.

Drunkeys!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSm7BcQHWXk

Did you know that you can die from having sex with time-traveling sea monkeys? Well now you do. You’re welcome.

Hi! My name is Sheela!

Watching the “Hail to the V” commercials leaves me feeling conflicted.

They are certainly:

• Idiotic and annoying. But hey, what advertising isn’t?
• Considered racist by many people.
• Offensive to all women, everywhere, forever.

Why offensive? Well, their marketing has created and then preyed upon the idea that all women’s vaginal areas are inherently so dirty, stinky, icky and unsanitary that they require special products just to make the natural stench of women tolerable to the general public. One might hope we’d left that kind of misogynistic bullshit advertising back in the Women’s Day magazines of the 1950s, but sadly no. Just last fall, Summer’s Eve published ads for their feminine wash stating that douching is #1 thing every woman should do before asking for a raise. Le Wow.

Not only are these companies unethical for exploiting a fear that they created, their products are actually bad for women’s gynocological and general health. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommend against douching and using heavily scented chemical products in your vagina and on external genitalia. Using that garbage increases your risks of developing vaginal irritation, vaginitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, bacterial vaginal infections and certain STDs.

Now these adds are taking their nefarious campaign to the next level. Now they are groveling priests of the Cult of Vag offering gifts to your glorious vagina! It’s not about men or jobs anymore, it’s about what’s best for you. Only a company that advocates such overt worship of all that is the Sacred Feminine could produce a gift worthy of laying on the Alter of Vagina! Right? Except the gift is a toxic smoke bomb that kills everything inside the temple and corrodes the walls.

So why am I conflicted? They’re all bad, right? Well… I feel like I can take away at least one good aspect. In the past most feminine hygiene products were pure vague innuendo, euphemism, and metaphor. Unless you had pre-existing knowledge of the products and their uses you would have no idea what the ads were for. Here are some examples:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2mKtw77Sc

www.youtube.com/watch?v=potXaDoFZHQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvD0X-mFk4U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR8fyh7QgPM

So I can’t help but think it’s ultimately a good thing that these ads are actually saying the word vagina and even using a quasi-realistic portrayal of a talking vulva. What I wish they would have gone with instead is this covert ad campaign they’ve started online, which I think is much funnier and more assertive. While I still find their marketing to be inherently offensive, I actually like this ad a lot compared to everything that’s come before it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ss8uUbvprk

That kitty puppet sounds sincere, and I believe he would strongly condemn Summer’s Eve if he knew how bad their products are for vaginas. What do you think?

I don’t know what is happening in this photo. It seems like it might be rapture related?

• Serial Killer of the Week. Sorry I’m late. It was because I decided to make some changes to the serial killer feature this week. I am so alarmed and sickened by the blatant Islamophobia displayed by Republican primary candidates like the simpleton hate monger Herman Cain. Why should all Muslims have to apologize for the actions of some fringe extremists? Have Christians in this country ever been called on to apologize for explicitly Christian terrorist organizations or individuals? All the rape, murder, assaults, bombings, lynchings, arson, pedophilia, and intimidation that white, Christian extremists have perpetrated? Of course not. Anyway, I’m so annoyed that instead of featuring a serial killer this week I’m going to highlight some general American Christian atrocities. I want to make sure good Christians like Cain get all the points they deserve for their homegrown terrorism!

The Ku Klux Klan: America’s original terrorist group — formed just after the Civil War and still around today. They’re known for their violence and bigotry, but what rarely comes up is the fact that the KKK is a Christian organization that considers their faith and interpretations of the Bible to be the root of their beliefs.

The Army of God

Mormons

The Lambs of Christ

Concerned Christians

Hutaree, and more about Hutaree and Christian terrorism in general

The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

The Montana Freemen

Phineas Priesthood

“Patriot” conspiracy theorists and militias.

The Order

Operation Rescue

Aryan Nations -- I doubt it was a Muslim who planted this bomb along a Martin Luther King Jr. parade route.

• Religion of the Week. Christian Identity. One-stop shopping! It’s a religious movement, white supremacy group, apocalypse cult, and terrorist organization all wrapped up in one convenient ideology. “Conquer we must, for our cause is just.” Don’t forget to stop at the gift shop.
• Fetish of the Week. Gut flopping. An aspect of fat fetishism.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rglg4lsdWl8

• Links!

Did you hear what has happened to Harold Camping? Kinda sounds like the work of a vengeful God, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Too bad it didn’t happen sooner, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or this. Or this. Or this:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vj8-_jhFAA

Nothing the FCC can do about it. People are on their own to figure out who is credible and who is looney tunes. Like our future Mrs. President.

Who wants to learn about a singing penis?

And an inflatable shark!

And here’s your feel-good story: an update about the Nazi twins.

]]> http://www.thecontrarianmedia.com/2011/07/sex-mayhem-report-5/feed/ 0 http://www.thecontrarianmedia.com/2011/07/sex-and-mayhem-report-4/ http://www.thecontrarianmedia.com/2011/07/sex-and-mayhem-report-4/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:53:53 +0000 Miss Molly http://www.thecontrarianmedia.com/?p=14185

• Serial Killer of the Week. There is a series about female serial killers called “Lady Killers” airing on BBC Knowledge right now. But BBC Knowledge doesn’t air in the U.S. so I’ll just have to wait for it to show up elsewhere. In the meantime, I can feature one of the murderesses from the show, Myra Hindley, England’s first convicted female serial killer. You might recognize Hindley’s photo, as it has been used in many forms of popular art, from t-shirts to album covers.

Maybe you’ve wondered who those people were on this Sonic Youth record?

It is an artist’s rendering of a photo of the two key witness in Hindley’s trial. The woman is Myra’s younger sister Maureen Hindley with her first husband David Smith. Smith was friends with Myra’s boyfriend and co-murderer Ian Brady. He was actually somewhat complicit in one of the murders, but shortly after the act he freaked out and confessed to the police. It’s a good thing he had this attack of conscience because it resulted in the arrest and conviction of Hindley and Brady.

• Fetish of the Week. Vorarephilia aka “vore.” A vore fetishist is sexually aroused by the idea of humans eating and being eaten by each other. Not every vore fetishist likes the same stuff, though. There are distinct subcategories. It would be very interesting to me to find out what your first thoughts or mental images were upon reading the first sentence of this fetish entry! If you are willing to share, please post in the comments. I was imagining cannibalism like Hannibal Lecter or that time Moss tried to take a German cooking class.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij0d0t1fDv0

Here are the two main vore types — there are more out there. Human deviance is so gloriously abundant and diverse.

Soft vore: Being swallowed alive and whole, orally. Sometimes they get digested, rescued, suffocated, vomited back up, or survive a trip through the entire digestive tract (called “full tour”), but as far as I can tell the fantasy most often ends with the subject being warm and moist, happily nestled inside a stomach. Like most vore, this is purely fantasy and exists only in art, fiction and animation because it is not practically possible. A form of soft vore is a fetish I’ve covered before, macrophilia, but a lot of the artwork seems to depict cartoon creatures and furries, not humans. Here’s a collection of soft vore furry art:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r83TtcfRKc

Hard vore: In hard vore fantasy the idea of consumption is the same, but the tone is very different. The prey is not swallowed whole but rather violently eaten. There is typically a great deal of blood — biting, tearing, slashing, etc.. This seems to show up in human more than furry forms.

• Religion of the Week. Iglesia Maradoniana: the Maradonian Church. This a relatively small religion in Argentina which reveres former Argentine footballer Diego Maradona as a deity on earth. They have their own commandments and use his autobiography as their Bible!
• Links!

Trepanning is an ancient and obsolete… or is it?

I posted a list of improbable deaths, now here’s the Tudor version.

FOX News might have run a phony story about poop burgers? Here’s one more humble contribution to Rupert Murdoch‘s troubles. Ha ha haaaa evil fucker! I hope he dies broke and alone of slow, wasting stomach cancer.

We recently got cable and it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever had it. I’ve come to the conclusion that SpongeBob Squarepants is the best role model on television.

Cool art thingy wow!

There is a guy who lives near us who painted in huge letters across the front of his house “Cut consumption not foreskins.” No, really! Lookit:

I bring this up because I wonder if he’s heard of Foreskin Man.

• Serial Killer of the Week. For the third year in a row, Scott and I spent the Fourth of July holiday with family at my parents’ camp on Chateaugay Lake in northern New York State. My parents chose to buy land on this particular lake because it is quiet, pretty and dirt cheap. Why so cheap? Because there is nothing, nothing around for many, many miles in every direction except a big, scary, maximum security prison — Dannemora. The prison is actually called the Clinton Correctional Facility, but everyone calls it Dannemora after the town that hosts it (take the street tour down main street between the prison’s giant cement wall and the dilapidated abandoned buildings and liquor mart that face it) or “Little Siberia,” because a lot of its residents are convicts from NYC who feel very far from home in this remote locale. It was while driving past Dannemora’s beautifully imposing stone architecture twice today that I decided to feature the prison itself and some its more notable guests this week. Tupac Shakur and Ol’ Dirty Bastard both did time here, but today I’ve selected a few fellows whose celebrity comes entirely from their crimes.

Vincent Johnson, the Brooklyn Strangler.

John Jamelske. A sadistic prick who kidnapped several girls and women and held them as his captive sex slaves in a bunker beneath his home in Syracuse.

David Berkowitz.

Carl Panzram. This one is the most interesting to me because he had a surprisingly long career as a violent, angry, misanthropic psychopath. He hated people and expressed that in a wide variety of antisocial behaviors ranging from arson and B&E to rape and murder. At least two movies have been made about him, one starring James Woods. Still, very few people have heard of him. Have you?

Eric Smith. When Smith was 13 years old he killed and sodomized a four year-old neighborhood boy. Today, he is 31 and has been denied parole five times.

• Fetish of the Week. Plushophilia. “Plushies” are aroused by stuffed animals.

• Religion of the Week. Woodism. A religion devoted to and inspired by Ed Wood, of course!

• Links!

All hail Florida!

No, Jesus, fuck, no, no, no.

World’s most pierced woman got married! Sweet story.

Please sterilize these fucking people.

Freak bear crash (not a typo).

And I’ll just wrap up with one more upstate New York story: a new local celebrity! This homeless guy who is pushing his “wife” in a wheelchair camping trek.

Which of the MythBusters do you think would be the best lover? My boyfriend and I both immediately thought Jamie because he seems like intense endurance guy, but a few seconds later our thoughts turned to Tory. He just seems so… enthusiastic. What do you think?

• Serial Killer of the Week. This week I have for you the Vampire of Sacramento: Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980). Chase is one of those killers whose story made me feel like he was truly mentally ill. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic suffering from clinical vampirism (AKA Renfield syndrome). Not conscientiously evil like so many serial killers, I think Chase was an example of someone who was so genuinely turned around inside his own delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic world that he did not know right from wrong. The vast majority of serial killers appear (and self report) to understand consensus reality and the relative morality of their actions, but their defense lawyers would have you believe they were so mentally infirm that they didn’t understand what they were doing. Then there are those who really are living in a phantasmagorical, demonic world of delusion. I think Richard Chase was one of the latter.
• Fetish of the Week. Sex with ghosts! Spectrophilia. Dr. Barry Taff discusses it in a blog post here. But this is funnier.
• Religion of the Week. When I was in high school someone tried to get me to play Dungeons & Dragons. I never got into it, but I did fall in love with the whole “alignment” concept and found it hard not to consider the nine categories in later years when studying human evil in college. When choosing an alignment for myself I didn’t pause – chaotic neutral. I loved the idea of being an anarchic rascal, ricocheting around like an equal opportunity wrecking ball. I was in it for the LULZ before LULZ even existed. In reality I’m probably chaotic good (you can debate amongst yourselves) but chaotic neutral will always have a dark appeal to me. This brings me to my religion of the week: Discordianism. Discordianism is considered by many to be a joke religion like the Church of the Subgenius or Flying Spaghetti Monster, but as a religion which is devoted to the concept and deities of chaos, it only makes sense that nobody can or will ever know how “serious” its adherents might be.
• Links!

Mascot malfunction.

Fake crime scene, real stiff.

Use brain waves to control… wheelchairs for paralyzed people? Nope, kitty ears.

Why are some people who freeze to death found stark naked?

You know the old chestnut that says if you die in your dreams you die in real life? Well, apparently it really happens sometimes.

This could keep me entertained for hours: a list of unusual deaths!

No kissing the bigots!

Good for you, lady! I just hope you don’t get any bugs from his nasty tongue.

• Serial Killer of the Week. My killer choice this week was inspired by this fascinating request I found on our local Craigslist posted by a man who apparently wants to be hunted, naked, in a forest by cash-motivated, athletic young women bearing paintball guns. I’ll have more to say about that later in the post, but it reminded me of the surprisingly little known Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen (February 15, 1939). Hansen liked to hunt his victims like The Most Dangerous Game, except that in the story the “prey” are given some advantages to even the playing field. Hansen kidnapped women, mostly vulnerable prostitutes he found in Anchorage’s red-light district, and tortured and raped them before releasing them into the acres of uninhabited wilderness around his remote Alaskan cabin. He stalked each of these naked, terrorized, injured women (17-22 of them) at his leisure before finally killing them with a knife or firearm. You can read more about this cowardly “hunter” at CrimeLibrary. He currently resides at the correctional facility in Seward, Alaska.
• Religion of the Week. Nuwaubianism. It’s got Islam, UFOs, multi-national mystical conspiracies, mad scandal, Shriners, George Lucas, Christianity, Judaism, astrology, cosmology, extraterrestrial genetics, Dr. Seuss, um… er… I cannot summarize. It’s got more going on than Scientology and Mormonism put together. You’re going to have to read it yourself.
• Fetish of the Week. About eight years ago there was a minor media kerfuffle regarding Hunting for Bambi — an entrepreneur in Las Vegas was alleging that he offered discerning male customers the opportunity to “hunt” beautiful naked women using paintball guns in a 400 sq. foot indoor course. The course of that story and its subsequent debunking can be found at Snopes. Although that particular service proved to be fraudulent, I’m fairly certain that this is/was a real practice. I mean it just sounds so plausible, doesn’t it? I can imagine this kind of thing going all the way back to Medieval nobles hunting peasant Bambis with blunted arrows for fun and arousal. I know there is plenty of evidence that this exists in the form of staged pornography, but I can’t seem to discover solid documentation of anyone having organized to do it for real (well, faux-real with paintball guns or other non-lethal weaponry).
• Links!

Chupacabra mystery solved?

Everything you ever wanted to know about sea monsters but were afraid to ask.

I am afraid of swimming in natural bodies of water. It’s a deep, primal fear and I wonder if it isn’t some ancestral memory telling me I’m going to need a bigger boat.

Nope. No swimming for me.

New Bigfoot footage?

Wolfman’s got swords! Warn Keith’s cousin.

Cat burglar: let the punning begin.

Rob Zombie made a Woolite commercial.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnFIOj2dZRQ

Hi! I’m sorry for my extreme tardiness! It’s my boyfriend’s fault — he surprised me with a new computer last week. A beautiful MacBook! I’ve never had a Mac before so it’s taking me awhile to get used to my slick new electronic digs and import files and bookmarks from ye olde PC homestead.

• Serial killer of the Week. I often wonder what leads to some killers becoming prominent in our collective memory while others become tiny footnotes familiar only to law enforcement specialists and amateur forensic psychology fans like me. I think a lot of it has to do with the race and socioeconomic status of the victims. Is it sad, very sad. Prostitutes, black or Latino foster children, homeless people, junkies and illegal immigrants disappear and are found murdered all the time, but receive little or no national media attention. Compare that to what follows in the wake of the disappearance of one upper-middle class white girl — the entire country is instantly inflamed with outrage and calls to action, search parties, prayer vigils, wringing hands vigilanteism, and desperate 24-hour news coverage. I’m not condemning the latter, just lamenting the former.

I think that national origin has something to do with it, also. Most Americans would be hard pressed to come up with any non-American serial killer other than Jack the Ripper. Personal charisma or exceptionally bizarre behaviors make killers stand out, too. Take Charles Manson: a lot of people name him as a famous serial killer and yet he didn’t actually kill anyone.

Anyway, this brings me to my serial killer of the week, Harold Shipman. Many, many people have never heard of Shipman, even though his case was very recent and he is the #1 most prolific serial killer ever documented. Harold Frederick Shipman (January 14, 1946 – January 13, 2004) was a British doctor who is known to have killed 218 of his own patients, mostly elderly women in good health. It is thought that Shipman may have killed more than the official number but he always signed death certificates (indicating natural causes) and hastened most bodies to cremation, thereby destroying evidence of his guilt.

So why don’t more people know about Dr. Shipman? Is it because he was foreign, uncharismatic and his method of dispatching his victims was comparatively non-violent?

• Religion of the Week. I guess this is as good a place as any to bring up this Saturday’s Rapture. I keep hoping I’ll run into some Rapturite who will sign over their house and vehicle to me because it no longer matters. I think I’m out of luck, though, because Vermont is not a terribly fertile ground for this sort of thing. I’m not the only one who thought of scoring some post-Rapture booty; I found this posting on our local Craigslist. There are also a few businesses which have popped up to profit from the prophecy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DfggHLLjDU

A few thoughts:

1. She is a high school health education teacher??

2. Look at Harold Camping‘s fucking fingernails.

3. Victor Diaz’s companion looks ill. I think she is plotting her escape.

4. I bet the staff at that hotel had some super whackadoo stories. I hope those loons were at least tipping well.

5. I will be curious to see how many follow-up stories and interviews the press will be able to track down next week.

• Fetish of the Week. You’ve heard of Golden Showers, but what about Roman Showers? Meet emetophilia, sexual arousal achieved through vomiting, watching others vomit or being vomited on (aka Roman Shower). Links!

Please tell me Dr. Hawking will not dignify this with a response.

Texas chainsaw massacre!

My boyfriend alerted me to this vigorous shoe licker:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-1lao5UUac

I love DIY, but I really love deadly DIY.

Batman! Needs dress shields!

• Serial Killer of the Week. I’ve wanted to read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson since it came out, but it was only recently that I was able to find a cheap secondhand copy of the paperback. In honor of finally wrapping my lacquered fingertips around this book, I’m making H. H. Holmes this week’s featured serial killer.

H. H. Holmes, or Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the many aliases of Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861 – May 7, 1896^). Holmes was first and foremost a con man. Almost every description of him goes on at some length about just how very handsome, charming and simply winning a fellow he was. Like every great con man he was naturally expert in reading people — their clothing, body language, accent and diction — and exploiting the information to further his own agendas. He was warmly flirtatious with women, chummy with men, sincere with the elderly and exuberantly adoring with children. He would easily transform into whatever his mark needed him to be in order to get at their money, property, services, chastity, business and trust. He charmed and murdered his way into owning and operating a successful pharmacy, apartment building, and hotel, accumulated several wives and constructed a very elaborate “murder castle” — all without any qualifications or personal fortune to begin with. Nobody knows how many victims he took, but some think the number may be as high as 250.

• Religion of the Week. Prince Philip. No, really. Remember The Gods must be Crazy? Well, that really happens in a phenomenon anthropologists call “cargo cults.” I don’t really like the sort of patronizing tone of the some of the articles about cargo cults, as if this only occurs because of the simplicity and ignorance of indigenous peoples. Most people of every race and culture seek divine or cosmic explanations for events they don’t understand. Every person’s faith is somebody else’s mythology. I frankly find cargo cults much more understandable than the asinine beliefs of The Secret acolytes.

• Fetish of the Week. Infantilism. Just because something makes you feel icky doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That is a life lesson of which I was reminded this past week when my boyfriend sent me this clip of a man who lives as an infant:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB1gPgcycQ8

Since there is no sexual aspect to what he is doing, it is called infantilism. When people role play as infants for sexual arousal and gratification it is called paraphilic infantilism. There is also diaper fetishism, but that can be driven by arousal from contact with waste or from the humiliation inspired by conscientiously breaking a cultural taboo rather than the attempt to capture psychological regression. Someone who practices non-sexual infantilism is called an adult baby (AB), but one who enjoys paraphilic infantilism is referred to as a diaper lover (DL).

On a visceral level, I have the same reaction to infantilists that most people probably do: yuck. However, I try to be careful not to let those feelings make me recoil and turn away. Instead I make myself learn more until I can understand (in theory) why they do it and why I react the way I do. Infantilists aren’t hurting anyone — there is no known correlation between infantilism and pedophilia. In the case of Stanley, the subject of the National Geographic story, his lifestyle is the result of having endured a traumatically abusive childhood. I think that living as an AB or DL is a comparatively healthier coping mechanism than what many people end up doing: self-destructive addictions and socially destructive violence and crimes. So it makes me feel icky, so what? People feel icky in response to all kinds of things: oral sex, homosexuality, sushi, body piercings, tampons, etc., etc.. It doesn’t make any of them wrong.

Links!

• This has nothing to do with sex or mayhem. It’s Randall (the awesome honey badger guy) taking on sloths and David Attenborough:

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=mycVIhK9JCM

• Learn your prison slang before your next stint in the pokey:
  A Prisoner’s Dictionary Corrections Officer’s Guide to Prison Slang.
• You’ve heard of Bum Fights? Now, a twist…
• Condom finder app.
• Poor people are crazy. Rich people just have Lyme disease.
• Bath salts? Yes, bath salts.

• Serial Killer of the Week: Many people think of serial killing as being a behavior exhibited only by the male gender. It would surprise these folks to learn that #5 on the list of history’s most prolific killers was a woman: Elizabeth Bathory (August 7, 1560 – August 21, 1614). It should be noted, however, that her guilt is debated by historians to this day. Some believe she was the victim of malicious rumors and slurs. Unfortunately, we may never know the whole truth as her life story was quite complex and not objectively or meticulously documented. An impenetrably murky jumble of history stands between us and this notorious woman. Bathory was convicted of murdering 80 young women, but was thought to have killed 650 or more in elaborately bloody ways. The most commonly repeated story is that she bathed in the blood of virgins in order to retain her youth. But was she actually the target of conspirators? She was rich, intelligent, extraordinarily well educated (even more so than most of her male aristocratic peers), and a Protestant at a time when it was quite dangerous to be anything but Roman Catholic. Her accusers stood to gain a great deal in the event of her downfall. Not only that, but those who prosecuted, imprisoned and killed her were also the ones writing the history books. There were no investigative journalists, sympathetic biographers or advocacy websites in 17th century Hungary.

Here is the Crime Library website, which details the typical (and some say mythical) account of her life and alleged crimes. But many Hungarian historians have devoted long hours of research to uncovering the whole story and come to the conclusion that Bathory was innocent of all charges. There is an article from the Hungarian Quarterly which touches upon this research, but more complete text is difficult to find because little of it has been translated to English. Sadly, I think people are too comfortable with the intriguing and titillating tale of the Blood Countess to be interested in learning that it may not be true.

• Fetish of the Week. This week I recruited my boyfriend to help with the S&M report. I handed him my old copy of The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices and told him to pick a fetish for you. He settled on the snake-centric zoophilia subset, ophidicism! From Wikipedia: “Ophidicism is a sexual act in which a woman inserts the tail of a snake or eel in her vagina, and receives pleasure as it wriggles to get free. It can be dangerous in that some reptiles carry salmonella. Ophidicism has been documented as being practiced (as well as many other sexual acts) in Ancient Greece. Variations include inserting the snake/eel headfirst. The snake is an ancient symbol of fertility, and sexuality.”

• Religion of the Week: The Brethren (AKA Garbage Eaters). From ReligiousTolerance.org, “This Christian faith group actually has no formal name. Members refer [to] it as a church, spiritual community, or assembly. It has been called “The Brotherhood,” “Brothers and Sisters,” “The Roberts Group,” and “The Brethren.” Counter-cult groups, disaffected parents of Brethren, and others frequently call them by the derogatory term “Garbage Eaters.” This name apparently is derived from their practice of searching through supermarket dumpsters for over-ripe produce and food that is beyond their recommended expiry date.”

Links!

• What did Corey Feldman have to do with Osama bin Laden’s death?
• I feel like “grisly” is a conservative choice of adjective in this case.
• 2005 Samurai sword decapitation case finally set to conclude.
• Speaking of decapitation, this is how you one-up flag burning.
• Freedom of religion does not extend to setting children on fire. I somehow doubt that is a widespread voodoo practice.