For Those Who Ask Why I Don't Have a Facebook...

Reality television, consumed with liberal doses of MySpace and Facebook, will make friendships of the future far more promiscuous. So says a newly-released study about people who invest a lot of time in creating profiles of themselves online (which is increasingly all of us). The authors of the study have discovered an intriguing trend in the way people are re-define "friendship" after hanging out a lot online. The good news is that current trends all point to more casual sex for people who "friend" each other online.

While plenty of studies have already shown that friendships have become much more casual in an era of "friending" random people on MySpace, this new study takes that idea further. Its authors describe how reality TV and social networking sites feed into each other, creating a world where many people think of themselves and their friends less as real people and more like iconic celebrities. The researchers call this a shift toward having "mediated" selves, as if all social interactions take place via the media.

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I'm not saying Facebook et al. is all bad, but for me, the bad outweights the good.

Frank talk from Muslim Sex Therapist

Cairo-based Heba Kotb tackles sensitive issues within the framework of Islam.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff WriterJuly 29, 2007

CAIRO — In the delicate realm where the Koran meets human desire, Heba Kotb, a Muslim sex therapist in a ruffled gold head scarf, has strong opinions on vibrators, foreplay, premature you-know-what and why more men can't seem to locate the G-spot.

An hour in her clinic, where some women wear black abayas that reveal only their eyes, is a liberating venture into a culture that has traditionally relegated talk of sex to a family whisper. Demure she may appear, but Kotb's voice is strong and unapologetically public. The Koran, she said, forbids sex outside marriage, but within that union carnal satisfaction is a requisite for happiness."

I deal with pleasure, desire, orgasms, masturbation, sexual frequency and erection problems," said Kotb, whose TV show, "Big Talk," is popular across the Arab world. "Neither the Koran nor the Sunna, however, address masturbation. My advice is that it's OK to masturbate, but only if you need it badly. Masturbation has become more prevalent here because sex is forbidden outside marriage.

"In a society in which male clerics issue fatwas, or religious edicts or opinions, addressing all layers of family life, a feminine voice on something as intimate as sex has made Kotb a celebrity and a cultural revolutionary.

Some conservative clerics accuse Kotb of catering to sinners and Western-influenced permissiveness, but, overall, there has been little outcry about her frankness. Kotb's advice on sex is meticulously framed within the context of matrimony, which she says is a gift from God."

Everyone is searching for better sex, but people aren't having the best sex," she said. "Sex within Islam is the best. It covers the man's rights and the woman's rights. Islam is the ultimate sexuality. It's beyond the stereotypes of Islamic oppression. I'm replacing that template. I'm replacing the stereotypes."

Kotb's interest in the subject arose from conversations with sex offenders while working on her forensic medicine degree at Cairo University. She later studied sexology and philosophy at Maimonides University in Florida; her dissertation was titled Sexuality in Islam. She wrote advice columns for newspapers, including one called "Behind Closed Doors." In 2006, she started her own late-night TV talk show on the private Egyptian satellite channel El Mehwar."

I thought about the core of sexuality and religion," she said. "How many relationships could I save knowing about this? At first, there was a state of shock over the TV show. Gradually it was accepted, and today people love it. I think, outside of the sex act, people have little idea about their own sexuality. Five years ago, I'd see two or three patients a week. Today, I'm booked three months ahead."

Kotb has a lively face bordered by a hijab. She wears rings and bracelets; her cellphone hums incessantly, and she seems comfortable with her high profile. She blends science and anatomy charts with the Koran and the Sunna, teachings based on the life of the prophet Muhammad, who, Kotb noted, tended dutifully to his wives.

Kotb advises her listeners that every sexual encounter outside marriage leaves an indelible mark, and that the accumulation of those marks can destroy a relationship and push one further from God. But her larger aim is to help Muslims overcome sexual ignorance by showing them that scripture from centuries ago is relevant to today's preferences and inhibitions.

"It's hard for people to confess that they have no idea about sex, especially men — they think they're Valentinos," Kotb said, referring to those unschooled in the intricacies of the multiple orgasm. "Sometimes men believe they know everything, and some are, in fact, lying."

To add religious legitimacy to her show, Kotb invites young preachers to answer questions from viewers. Many are part of a movement that emerged in the 1990s that offers a less conventional interpretation of Islamic theology. On one program, Kotb and Sheik Khaled Abdullah discussed the misconception that sex is forbidden during the holy month of Ramadan."There is no correlation between how faithful you are to God and how much you avoid having sex in Ramadan," Kotb said.

Abdullah added: "Whenever you feel you need [to have sex] with your wife or whenever your wife feels the same according to God's rule, you can exercise this right and you will be rewarded for that … as long as you do it between sunset and dawn prayers."

Economics is also a factor in a nation where widespread poverty delays or prevents many couples from marrying. This, along with the increasing Western influence, most notably from risque music videos on satellite TV, is nudging more Egyptians into sex outside marriage.

Read on here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-sextalk29jul29,0,7141531.story?coll=la-home-center

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com--Special correspondent Noha El Hennawy contributed to this report.

Sex Deprived...What is going on?

Search Results on Google Trends

By Affad Shaikh
The graph is a three year time frame of the trends in google searches. It show a comparison of two searches that I put in- Sex and Islam. Sex mainly because I thought that it would be a good base line to see how significant the search result is, and anyway I have a closet...(inside head thought, inside head thought!) and Islam because I thought, heck new google service lets play around with it.

I did not imagine that it would become a blog-worthy item, aside from the fact that it was an interesting tool that google was introducing. See these results come from google search statistics. Each of your computers has this thing called an IP address, which is basically a computer physical address on this world wide web. So they use this to track where the searches are coming in from and with all the information they have they have created this database which is now accesible by mere mortals like ourselves to play around with.

When I did my initial search I was playing around and to find that the top ten countries or "regions" as google refers to it were actually Muslim populated areas, disturbed me!

Look at the graph below. Unfortunaly one thing google trends doesnt do is provide numerical values to see the "volume" of searches being done. That is why I used "sex" becuase the saying goes technology is motivated for the access to "pornography"- don't believe me? Just read about the invention of the camera and some the things it was first used for, or read about video technology on phones and what motivates researchers and designers to push the limits of this new technology- from a friend on the inside on these sorts of thing, I personally get stories of what the thinking behind some technology is, and its disturbing.




So this disturbing data leads me to some questions, for which I doubt I have any answers, but its something to reflect on.

1. What is going on?

2. Are Muslims that sex deprived that they have to search it to such an extent in the privacy of their own rooms...or in cafe's?

3. I am assuming this is more Muslim youth then it is adults, so my question is are the countries so corrupt that morality has fallen down the hole?

4. For people who want to jump the gun and say this is because of the "hijab" etc, notice that Iran and Suadia Arabia are not amongst the countries listed, and both institute mandatory "hijab" of women; there might be other factors but still the countries listed are liberalized, I know Pakistan and Pakistan the people using the internet are wholeheartedly liberal, my family is included in them- and Malaysia and Indonesia are for sure liberal and booming economically. So is it the "liberal" society that confuses and conflicts with peoples head to lead to such staggering numbers?

Islam is about modesty and not about social controls, so in a place where there is a Islamic culture it doesnt necessarily mean social controls inhibit individual free will. The norms are there, but people do as people do.

Again the first graph is total worldwide searches. Then the second one is top ten, normalized search results. Now "normalized" means they take the total number of searches for the search words and divide it by percentage of the total search amount to get a top ten list. This might mean that more people using the internet doing more searches in some countries will make the normalized ratio larger then in others. Other factors also deal with how many people access and use google compartively to how people search for these sites elsewhere. Google is popular, but its not the "only" search engine out there.

If you do the same with porn, it gives you much greater hits else where in the world and they are non-Muslim countires in the top ten, click here to see for yourself. You will notice, closet suburban Irvine is quite up there in the ranks when it comes to "porn" searches. Finally, still shocked, I put in "gay" and well, Irvine seems to top the charts- those rich white people are wierd- so vocally homophobic yet so active on the net in searching for that stuff.

So you can't just use statistics to label an entire community one way or another, really you can not do that, if anything you can use it to discuss an issue but to label, I would be hard pressed. I can see Fox news headline now...followed by "White Upper Middle Class suburban Christian community tops the charts in Homosexual Google Searches".

However you look at it, its still a figure that needs to be looked at and taken into consideration.