Everything you know about sex is true.

A controversy has erupted in France over a campaign to discourage young people from smoking. The images show teenagers kneeling in front of a man, as if being forced to have oral sex. The caption reads: "Smoking is to be a slave to tobacco."

The campaign, which was devised for a pressure group supporting the rights of non-smokers, has been attacked as "scandalous" and "potentially counter-productive" by feminist and pro-family campaigners.

The non-smokers' rights group says it does not care if adults are shocked by its posters. Gérard Audureau, the president of Les Droits des Non-fumeurs (The Rights of Non-smokers), the pressure group which commissioned the ads, said: "Very few anti-smoking campaigns catch the attention of the young. You have to use extreme images to make them take notice."

To celebrate the launch of their new website, underwear label Aubade spent ten days cheering up passersby with live strippers in rue Montorgueil, Paris. Not in your face, hard core, stiptease, it was more of a 'girl next door' approach.

Photograph: www.stmatthews.org.nz

A New Zealand church has sparked outrage by erecting a billboard depicting a forlorn Mary and Joseph lying semi-nude beneath the sheets. The St Matthew-in-the-City church said it wanted to inspire people to talk about the Christmas story.

But within five hours of the billboard going up in downtown Auckland a man was standing on his car roof painting over the raunchy image. Archdeacon Glynn Cardy said the church meant to challenge a fundamentalist interpretation of Christ's birth.

"What we're trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about. Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?"

Cardy said one person had threatened to tear down the billboard but that of the 20 odd emails and phone calls he had received "about 50% said they loved it, and about 50% said it was terribly offensive".

The Catholic church joined those on the attack, accusing the Anglican church of disrespect.

Two senior staff in an Alabama news station have allegedly been suspended after a billboard with a live Twitter feed seemingly accused its own presenters of rape.


Photo: THE PALMETTO SCOOP

The advertisement, for WPMI-TV in Alabama, showed the station's anchors with their top weatherman alongside the latest headline and the words “Right now on Twitter”.

Unfortunately for the station, at one stage the top headline on Twitter read “Three accused of gang rape in Monroeville”, and the misleading juxtaposition was caught on camera by a passing motorist as he drove through Mobile, Alabama. The resulting photograph soon found its way on to a South Carolina blog, the Palmetto Scoop, and then on to social media site Mashable, before being sent around the internet in a series of emails and blog posts.

Now, according to various websites, two of the station's senior staff have been suspended, allegedly over the billboard incident. However, the station has yet to confirm this.

Officials in the Spanish region of Extremadura have launched a major programme to teach young people about 'sexual self-exploration and discovery of self-pleasure'.

"Pleasure is in your own hands" is the slogan of a campaign that has sparked political controversy and challenges traditional Roman Catholic views on people having sex, even on their own, for non-reproductive reasons.

Officials from the neighbouring region of Andalucia have expressed an interest in copying the programme.

The campaign includes leaflets, flyers, a "fanzine" and workshops for the young -the target are those between 14 and 17- in which they receive instruction on self-pleasuring techniques along with advice on contraception and self-respect.

Commentators questioned why the poorest region in Spain was paying for a campaign to promote onanism. "Extremadura should be pleased with itself," sniped Pilar Rahola, a columnist in the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia newspaper. "It may have the most unemployed young people in Spain, but they will be the best at masturbation."

A doughnut shop in Portland called Voodoo Doughnuts submitted the ad reproduced below for their branded clothing line to the feminist quarterly Bitch Magazine. Bitch rejected the ad because, according to spokeswoman Jaymee Jacoby, they felt it objectified a woman’s body in order to sell clothing. “We felt that our readers would feel that the ad goes against our mission statement to be anti-sexist.” Voodoo owner Tres Shannon, whose menu includes such treats as Triple Chocolate Penetration and Cock-n-Balls, replied, “I thought Bitch would be happy the woman isn’t plucked and shaved, but all natural like a real woman.” It would be interesting to see if Bitch would accept the same ad without the pubes.

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