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Stupid Patient of the Year
An emergency room doctor selects the best and the brightest.
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[03/02/00]

The truth about the polygraph
It's junk science, but proponents say it can be a useful tool in interrogations, and even a deterrent.
By Susan McCarthy
[03/02/00]

The chemical knife
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[03/01/00]

Urge: Naked World
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By Hank Hyena
[02/29/00]

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He grabs a magazine, takes his change and quickly turns to leave. A policeman at the door spots the boner. Busted! That'll be a $2,000 fine and maybe a year in jail for that hard-on kid. Sounds far-fetched? Come again. The Mississippi Legislature is considering a bill to ban erections in public. While the bill, sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom King, is aimed at strip clubs, the literal, almost forensic wording of the legislation is raising, um, eyebrows.

It defines nudity as "the showing of the post-pubertal human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering, the showing of the post-pubertal female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple or areola, or the showing of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state."

Such power and repression suffocates much of the South. But the land of Dixie is also drenched with sex and desire, creating a nutty, schizophrenic society. For all the Bible thumping in this ultra-religious region, the South remains the premiere hothouse for fornicatin' and sinnin,' be it on the back roads or in country-club bathrooms.

We tuck away sex and sin, creating a passionate underworld bubbling with seduction and eroticism, adultery and flirtation. Certainly, no one knows this better than Southern lawmakers, who constantly attempt to monitor morality with bizarre laws.

While Mississippi is trying to rein in strip joints with its boner bill, Atlanta is home to more nude dance clubs than any other state. Rebecca Poynor Burns, in the March issue of Atlanta magazine, writes:

The metro area's 40-plus nude dance clubs alone rake in $80-100 million a year. Not to mention the $20 million that dancers earn as independent contractors. Even a conservative estimate of the economic impact of the strip clubs, according to Georgia state economist Donald Ratajczak, translate into a whopping $200-240 million. That's well above the $147.6 million economic impact generated by the Atlanta Braves, the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta Hawks combined.

Benton, Ark., a small bedroom community 15 miles outside Little Rock, has one of the most active swingers clubs in the country. At the 12th Street Newsstand, where patrons are allowed to browse through porn for no more than 15 minutes, there's a self-published magazine dedicated to the swinging Benton housewife.

Coming Attractions Parties, Inc., a California-based sex-toy company, boasts that some of its best saleswomen are in Dixie, specifically Arkansas and Memphis, Tenn. That's surprising since many Southern states -- Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and even Louisiana -- have made such pleasure devices illegal.

On weekends, Coming Attractions representative Linda Brewer peddles sex toys from party to party in battered suitcases throughout the small towns and suburbs of Arkansas, giving shy Southern belles the opportunity to buy vibrators, potions and lotions. They choose these small, intimate parties, rather than the Internet, because they need education, says Brewer, who doubles as saleslady and Dr. Ruth.

"These women want a chance to be in tune with their sexuality," says Brewer. "And they have been raised really to not understand pleasure. Sometimes, I have to give a primer on what something is, like the clitoris as a pleasure point."

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