Losing touch in the online world

Mobile apps are making it easier for singles to hook up.

And now, a pertinent question that links loneliness with prostitution in the aftermath of a blog about acrimonious relations between Australian men and women:
Grindr for straight people, good or bad idea?
If you’re not familiar with the mobile app, here’s the skinny.

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Currently used by over 1.65 million people worldwide (particularly London), Grindr is a hyper-local match-making application for the gay community. Like a GPS/RSVP mash-up, users sign up to the service which delivers a catalogue of possible dates based on geographical proximity. Like the look of Gary, 23, 58 metres away, who’s looking to chat, network, and date? Exchange pleasantries via Grindr and a real-world meet-up might be organised in moments – you’re just around the corner from each other anyway …
The concept is pretty kooky and clever. But it’s not without critics.
The creators have long defended the app against those who say it poses safety risks, or promotes promiscuity.
"It’s no different from a gay-bar," they say, as others wail "but you're killing the gay-bar!"
And it is in mind of gay-bars - or any real-world meet-market for that matter - that we consider what comes next:
Grindr for straight people.
The project is already underway. Nicknamed Amicus, from the *LATIN meaning friend, the app will offer the same geo-based match-making service to everyone else when it makes it out of the beta stage. And surely, as there are gay lovers of Grindr, there shall be other lovers too.
But who will they be?
Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker was quick to wonder whether women needed an app to tell them they were surrounded by people wanting to have sex with them.
Tech blogger David McGowan supposed the straight version would mostly be used by “randy sweaty blokes looking at prostitutes pretending to be something else, and a very small bunch of women mistakenly using it to find a husband”.
Major LGBT newsite Pink.co.uk considers the straight app might struggle to match the original if it simply offers a place-mapping service similar to what Facebook Places already does.
Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out whether the whole thing is a sign we’re more messed up than ever ...
A recent report showed that the most "connected" generation – mine – is also the loneliest, partly because what used to be a room full of strangers is now a virtual world filled with people you not only don’t really know, or know at all, but haven’t so much as shared air with.
Here’s where the gay-bar bit comes in.
While I’ve never been a fan of using bars to meet other people, particularly if you’re hoping to meet someone who could be a partner for more than just sex, I really am starting to think that’s preferable to transferring the bulk of our socialising online.
Sure, online dating sits can be marvellous. The elegant algorithms, as Professor Helen Fisher points out, make sense – from a biologic anthropological point of view at least – and I know of many happy couples matched online. I also know of many happy sex lives fuelled by online services.
Yet, physicality is so much a part of sociality – getting a feel of someone is just as important as getting a look at them – and socialising has to exist in a physical world, especially if you intend on enjoying a physical relationship.
Milling about in a bar, on the street, in crowds, around people – this is important. It is important that you may smell the air, sniff out signals, observe movement, and make the deeper, animalistic assessments that literally cannot be made in a synthetic environment. These instincts that help us get a sense of the world around us, help us grow into better social creatures, and help us lead richer social lives.
So we continue to shift our sociality online, what will happen to our instincts? What will happen to our social lives? What will happen to our relationships, really, in the long run?
Grindr for straight people might help with the easy connections so many current gay users adore it for.
But since when was the easy way the best?


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/blogs/citykat/losing-touch-in-the-online-world-20110721-1hqma.html#ixzz1So4mMfdh

Naked truth: nudity disappears from German beaches, parks

One reason blamed for the decrease in public nudity has been Germany's shrinking population. Photo: AFP

If you're visiting a public park or beach in Germany expecting to see plenty of exposed flesh, you may be in for a surprise.
The naked sunbathers who once crowded Germany's Baltic beaches and city parks are becoming an endangered species due to shifting demographics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, growing prosperity and widening girths.
Much to the chagrin of Free Body Culture (FKK) enthusiasts who have been stripping off their clothing on beaches and parks since the early 1900s, a cold wind has been blowing across Germany for nudists and their numbers are steadily dwindling.

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Mostly clothed people relax in Munich's English Garten park. The naked sunbathers who once crowded Germany's Baltic beaches and city parks are becoming an endangered species. Photo: Reuters

"German society is changing and it's not easy to be a naturist anymore," said Kurt Fischer, president of the German FKK association (DFK). There are some 500,000 registered nudists and a total of seven million Germans sunbathe naked regularly.
"But the numbers are unfortunately falling by about two percent each year," Fischer told a group of reporters in the Foreign Press Association (VAP) while sitting, fully clothed, at a beach bar in Berlin's government quarter. "Times are tough."
The main problem is the shrinking population, Fischer said.
The number of Germans fell by more than 3.2 million over the last three decades even though the country's total population has managed to remain more or less steady at about 82 million thanks to immigration -- often from countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans as well as Turkey and Arabic countries.
"Our problems are demographic changes and the fact that immigrants aren't interested in social nudity," said Fischer, 70, whose association has such honoured standing in Germany that it is even part of the Olympic Sport Federation (DOSB).
"Germany is relying more and more on immigrants to keep the population steady. But many come from countries with strong religious beliefs. They just aren't into FKK."
Immigrants who arrive from cultures where headscarves are common will not usually be interested in becoming naturists in Germany, he said.
VIRTUES OF SOCIAL NUDITY
With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Germany's native population is projected to fall from about 75 million to 50 million by 2050, population researchers say.
The dwindling number of Germans has caused myriad problems -- affecting everything from beer and schnitzel sales to the numbers of schoolchildren. The country's proud nudity traditions are not immune. Fischer said the trend is inexorable.
"It's better that we shrink in a controlled fashion and keep a diverse age-group structure with all age-groups than to try to stay bloated with mostly seniors and few young people," he said.
Fischer added they were using "special trial offers", direct recruitment and other gimmicks to attract young people.

Nude sunbathing has a long tradition in Germany. The Free Body Culture (FKK) movement was founded in the early 20th century and succeeded in taking much of the smut and embarrassment out of nudity.
Even Germany's top model Heidi Klum was quoted in the German media recently extolling the virtues of topless sunbathing and describing difficulties she has pursuing it in places such as the United States and Italy where it's frowned upon or illegal.
"I love to get a sun tan and I don't like white stripes," said Klum. "I don't worry about what other people think." Her parents often ran around in the nude and still do, she said.
In Germany, public nudity on beaches and lakes is by and large tolerated and practitioners face no legal consequences, although some courts have fined some caught hiking nude on public trails or riding bikes or horses while naked.

'Love bombing' for happy kids

Love-bombing: spending uninterrupted time with your children, and giving them all the affection and treats they want. The aim is that they regress to a state of emotional security and "reset" their minds, so they shake off their anxieties for good.

It's when I am interviewing the psychologist Oliver James about his most recent book, How Not To F... Them Up, which he wrote for parents of children up to the age of three, that I wonder aloud what you do if this has already happened. What if your kids are over three and have already been f...ed up?

Is it a straight road to delinquency and destructive behaviour and an adulthood on the therapist's couch (if they're lucky)? Or is there something you can do in the meantime? Can you repair damage, rewire neural pathways, reset brain chemistry, even if your kids have had worse things happen to them than the usual new-baby-in-the-family shock or first-day-at-school anxiety?

James tells me about love-bombing, the subject of his next book. It is for parents of children between the ages of three and puberty, and sounds so simple that you wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. "What you do is you say to the child that you're going to spend the weekend together," says James. "You're going to spend Friday night and Saturday night alone together and give it a name that they choose, Mummy Time or whatever. It's going to be a very special sealed-off time during which the child can do anything they want: they can eat as much ice-cream as they want, or watch all the television they want, and you're going to do this together. You're going to sleep in the same bed and you're going to have a lot of cuddles and an enormous amount of fun. This is their time."

It works, he says, for children who may need extra reassurance and feelings of security. "What you do is first identify the problem," he says. "Usually it's not a big problem, it's not ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] or anything like that, but maybe the child doesn't speak very well, or there are still signs of cortisol [a stress-related hormone], in that they might be a bit jumpy or whatever. Or maybe just not doing as well at school as they might. This can also be used
to reassure children suffering after the birth of a new sibling."

But could it work for bigger stuff, like the traumatic bereavement that my two children suffered when they were five and three, after their dad committed suicide following an untreated depression? Although they have since done lots of therapeutic work around suicide and bereavement, the effects still linger, especially for my son.

"When I first used this technique I was flabbergasted," says James. "It seems to correct the child's thermostat, to get the electrochemistry back into sync again. The child comes out of it feeling very loved. And it changes the trajectory of your relationship with the child; the child feels that they're special. It's very simple and enormously rewarding."

Handsome men mean better sex

The female orgasm ... commonly found around good-looking men.

Women orgasm more quickly and more often with handsome partners, according to research carried out by anthropologists and psychologists.
Noting that "supporting evidence indicates that female orgasm promotes conception," the researchers concluded that the female orgasm is linked to the urge to produce "quality" offspring.
The study, which was carried out at Pennsylvania State University, focused on the sex lives of 110 heterosexual couples, who reported who orgasmed and how often.

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The male subjects were rated for "objectively-measured facial masculinity, observer-rated facial masculinity, partner-rated masculinity, and partner-rated dominance"; observers, as well as the men themselves, were also asked to rated their own attractiveness.
Women whose partners rated as masculine and dominant reported more frequent and earlier-timed orgasms than those whose partners rated less well. The women whose partners were deemed attractive also orgasmed more often during or after male ejaculation.
Frequency of female orgasm as a result of masturbation was not predicted by the male partner's attractiveness.
"Thus, possible conception-promoting correlates of female orgasm may be especially effective and/or likely when copulation occurs with masculine males," the authors wrote in the study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour. "These results appear to support a role for female orgasm in sire choice."
smh.com.au


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/handsome-men-mean-better-sex-20110722-1hryi.html#ixzz1So3gldr9

Sex attacker's alcohol lure

A man who offered a 14-year-old girl a cigarette and alcohol before raping her could strike again, police fear.
The girl was at the Bayswater train station in Melbourne’s east when she had a conversation with two men on June 26.
One of the men offered the young girl a cigarette and to buy her alcohol before they walked off together down the Mountain Highway towards a local bottle shop.

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Police wish to speak to this man in relation to a sexual assault in Melbourne's outer suburbs. Photo: Victoria Police

The attacker, thought to be in his 20s, became angry when the bottle shop was closed, and for unknown reasons became hostile towards the girl, digitally raping her and chasing her to a nearby park.
At the park he threw her on to the ground and attempted to rape her again but she fought him off, Detective Inspector Paul Binyon said.
She then ran to the Bayswater train station where she called her mother to come and pick her up.
‘‘The fact that he followed her and escalated it, we do hold concerns that in the same sort of situation if it was presented to him he may target other young girls and try and commit other offences,’’ Detective Inspector Binyon said.
‘‘I think in this day and age everyone has to be careful about their movements and be aware of their surroundings.’’
The offender, who spoke with a heavy New Zealand accent, was of Maori appearance and told the girl his name was James.
Detective Inspector Binyon said police had not yet linked the attack to any other crimes in the area.
He said the girl’s parents did not know where she was at the time of the attack, which happened about 7.45pm on a Sunday night.
‘‘I think there is a message for parents there that they need to be aware where their children are,’’ he said.
Investigators have released images and CCTV footage of a man who they believe can assist with their inquiries.
He was wearing a beanie, shorts and had a bag slung over his shoulder.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/sex-attackers-alcohol-lure-20110722-1hrl3.html#ixzz1So3T9dYj