sex – Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them. There will be a new album and review each Thursday (or there about).

My first band, Kilted Yak*, ended a lot of our shows with a cover of “Sister Ray.” We chose that song because Joy Division used to cover it, and we were obsessed with White Light/White Heat, the Velvet Underground’s second album.

I didn’t bother listening much to the band’s first, self-titled album. I wanted the chaos and noise of their second album, not the prettiness of Nico’s voice glossing over Lou Reed’s tales of dirty streets and deeds. Over time, though, The Velvet Underground and Nico has become a regular rotation in my personal playlist.

The songs sound familiar, and they never get old. They don’t sound dated. I suspect this album will sound as relevant 500 years from now as it is today, because there is no expiration date on humanity’s obsession with sex and life’s underbelly. As long as we have rebels, we’ll have people influenced by this album, wanting to emulate it, wanting it for the soundtrack of their lives.

Dave Lefebvre, over on MusicQwest, says he feels cool listening to this album. I do, too. Great albums have swagger that jumps from the songs into the listener, giving him a feeling of invincibility. Let me listen to some Velvet Underground, and I won’t take shit from anyone.

On my recent vacation, I found myself in a Copenhagen bar called Floss. It’s a small, narrow bar upstairs, with a young, party-worn clientele. But make your way to the back and down the spiral staircase. There you will find a huge room housing pool tables and sofas beneath a haze of cigarette smoke. This is the place for an album like The Velvet Underground and Nico. Put it on repeat, grab a two-dollar Tuborg beer and chalk your cue stick. You’ll feel like the world’s coolest person, no matter who you really are.

*Who can guess where our band name came from?

BONUS: Check out this bootleg, Live at End Cole Ave., a 1969 Velvet Underground show from my city, Dallas.

Please visit these other blogs participating in The Rewind Button project:

Betty Livin

Love As A Verb

Life Doesn’t Have to Suck

Renée Sylvestre-Williams

Sara Bynoe

Musicqwest
Zachary Stevenson
1throne: King of the Internets
Be a River With Me

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Exercising doesn’t thrill me. I tried running four miles one time, and I was in a terrible mood afterwards. The exercise high just eludes me. But not for women.

According to a recent study out of Indiana University, exercise (not including sex or fantasies) can lead to female orgasm.

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” said Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

Key study findings include:

About 40 percent of women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP) had done so on more than 10 occasions.
Most of the women in the EIO group reported feeling some degree of self-consciousness when exercising in public places, with about 20 percent reporting they could not control their experience.
Most women reporting EIO said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences.
Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent), and walking/hiking (9.6 percent).

“Magazines and blogs have long highlighted cases of what they sometimes call ‘coregasms,'” Herbenick said. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues, this is an area of women’s sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades.”

Yeah, she just said coregasms. Feel free to use that in your daily conversations.

(Image via Flickr: Dan Machold / Creative Commons)

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Jason Hensel

The Rewind Button: The Velvet Underground and Nico

Exercise Can Lead to Female Orgasm