Can anyone name a movie that came out recently starring a black man who wasn’t a sociopath? Someone who had a terrific screen presence, like a young Paul Robeson? And he portrayed a character who was complex and fully drawn? Did he respect black women, too?

Anybody see that movie? I didn’t. But surely it’s out there somewhere, right? An alternative to those Tyler Perry films portraying black men as Satan’s gift to black women? But where is it?

Maybe I didn’t hear about it because of all the buzz over Perry’s “For Colored Girls,” which opened Friday and is based on Ntozake Shange’s 1975 stage play, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.”

Or maybe I didn’t hear about it because I was retching too loudly after seeing “For Colored Girls” – and reading so many inexplicably glowing reviews.

“This movie is powerful,” Demetria L. Lucas wrote recently in Essence, the nation’s premier magazine for black women. “It is incredible. The performances in it are astonishing, but most of all, this film will leave you lifted.”

Me, I thought the movie should have been renamed: “For Black Men Who Have Considered Homicide After Watching Another Perry Movie.”

“Oscar buzz, breaking news,” read the Hollywood Reporter on Friday. “Will ‘For Colored Girls’ blindside Tyler Perry’s critics?”

Too late. I was blindsided while watching the movie, especially when superstar Janet Jackson appeared onscreen looking like Michael Jackson with breast implants.

“Don’t laugh,” says Shadow and Act, an online publication about black films and filmmakers. ” ‘For Colored Girls,’ an Oscar contender?”

Oscar for what?

In the category for best infection of a black woman with a sexually transmitted disease that renders her infertile. . . . And the winner is: black man.

For best down-low, double-dealing husband who has sex with wife while sneaking around having sex with men on the streets. . . . And the winner is: black man.

For best portrayal of a guy who at first seems nice but turns out to be a rapist. . . . And the winner is – OMG, his third of the night – black man!

“You may need some time alone after viewing ‘For Colored Girls,’ ” wrote Tonya Pendleton for BlackAmericaWeb.com. “Whatever you may think of the fact that it was Tyler Perry who finally brought the award-winning 1974 Ntozake Shange stage production to the big screen, it will move you.”

So will ex-lax.

“You will want to know that two kids get thrown out the window by their father,” wrote Jane Nosonchuk for Hamptonroads.com. “The scene is well done.”

Do I hear another Oscar nomination?

“The men in the movie are all bad guys except for the cop,” Nosonchuk wrote. “They are a means to an end rather than any lead characters. Also, a back-room abortion may disturb some.”

You think?

What an awful year for movies featuring black actors. Samuel L. Jackson in “Unthinkable.” Thoughtless would be more like it. “Brooklyn’s Finest” had a nice cast, with Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes. But Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke got top billing. “Our Family Wedding” with Forrest Whitaker was okay. But how many black wedding comedies can you watch? Even preacher T.D. Jakes is coming out with his own copycat wedding movie next year.

Surely Spike Lee and Denzel Washington could team up for a sweeping historical drama – say, a black sharecropper’s son, educated in a one-room schoolhouse built by slaves in Alabama, who grows up to become one of Wall Street’s most powerful CEOs.

Smarter than Gordon Gekko, but more complex. With a cameo appearance by former Merrill Lynch chief executive Stanley O’Neal.

Maybe you saw the kind of movie I’m talking about. If not, maybe it’s time to make one.

Source

Enjoy.  I know I did.

For now, men who want to do their part for birth control have meager choices: A vasectomy — meant to be permanent — and condoms.

For years, experts have predicted that male contraception is under development and that more choices will be here soon.

But when? Experts agree it’s still a ways off, but it’s getting closer.

“It has been slow,” said Dr. Ronald Swerdloff, a researcher in the quest to find feasible male contraceptive methods. But there are good reasons for that slow pace, added Swerdloff, an endocrinologist and chief of the division of endocrinology at Harbor-UCLA and professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to take on a new product quickly because of untested liability issues, he said. And “one of the biggest single issues has to do with the fact that contraception in general is a difficult area it would be used by large numbers of healthy individuals.” The safety threshold, he noted, is high. Still, he added, more options are moving closer.

“If we really focus on studies, with funding, it could be four or five years” before more options might be available, said Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project, a San Francisco-based organization.

The problem, she added, is that the research has been scattergun. “If we [continue to] do a study here, a study there, as we have for the last 20 years, it could take forever.”

At a “Future of Male Contraception” conference, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Seattle, a variety of methods were reviewed, including:

* Hormonal therapy and testicular warming — Swerdloff and his team found that giving men testosterone and another hormone with testicular warming helped suppress sperm. “The transient testicular warming [like sitting in a spa] causes the suppression to occur much earlier [than the hormones alone],” he said.
* Transdermal gels — In another study by Swerdloff’s team, 140 men applied either a progestin gel called Nestorone or a testosterone gel, or both. The researchers studied various doses and then drew blood samples to measure hormone levels. They reported on the 119 men who complied and finished the study, concluding that the combination worked better to suppress sperm.
* “Intra Vas Device,” or IVD — An alternative to a vasectomy, this method involves inserting silicone plugs into the vas deferens, the tube sperm move through and the same tube cut in a vasectomy. “The sperm can’t get past the plugs,” said Joe Hofmeister, president of Shepherd Medical Company in St. Paul, Minn., the IVD developer. “Preliminary six-month data show that 90 percent of 60 men [tracked to date] have zero motile sperm,” he said. More study is needed to track the IVD for reversibility, Hofmeister said.
* Vitamin A blocker — Columbia University researchers tested a drug abandoned by a pharmaceutical company because it interferes with vitamin A receptors in the testes, lowering fertility. It worked well in animal studies; whether it will do the same in human studies is not yet known.

These approaches, if successful, will take several more years to get market approval, all the researchers agreed.

Source 

And when it’s pierced, it’s even better… (Not Work Safe)

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Not So Work Safe

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• Over his lifetime, the average male will produce about 18 quarts of semen. Who wants to be average?
• According to the world health organization, 100 million acts of sexual intercourse occur every day.
• Sexologists estimate that at any given second in the US, approximately 800 men are experiencing orgasm as you read this…
• The average testicle size is 2.5″ long by 1.25″ wide.
• 75% of men have their penis hanging to the left in their pants. 17% have their penis hanging to the right and 8% let it hang either way.
• The degree of sexual arousal often determines the trajectory and distance of ejaculation.
• A male in a high degree of sexual excitement is capable of ejaculating his semen 24′ or greater.
• Semen has only 5 calories per teaspoon.
• The human male has the largest penis (proportional to body) of all bipeds.
• There is a direct correlation between life expectancy and how often men have sex.
• Hitler and Napoleon were each missing one testicle.
• To “Testify” was based on men the Roman Court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

FYI on penis size:

• 6″ & below – 75% of all males
• 7″ – 15% of all males
• 8″ – 3% of all males
• 9″ – only 2 in 1000 men
• 10″ – less than 1 in 10,000 men
• 11″ – less than 5000 in the whole world

Source

Orlando Bloom

Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom (born 13 January 1977) is an English actor. He had his break-through role in the early 2000s as the elf-prince Legolas in The Lord of the Rings and blacksmith Will Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy of films, and subsequently established himself as a lead in Hollywood films, including Troy, Elizabethtown, and Kingdom of Heaven. Bloom most recently appeared in the sequels Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

CONTRARY to popular belief, Black men are generally faithful to their wives and lovers, are ready and willing to tackle their share of domestic duties, actually read books, use computers, do not lust only after light-skinned women, and do not seem to be obsessed with sex.

On the subject of sex, for example, our readers said they were not nearly as active as the mythology would indicate. In fact, one out of every three of our survey respondents said they had sex seldom or twice a month, compared with the 37.4 percent who said they had sex several times a week or more.

Similarly, our readers contradicted the notion that skin color plays an important role when Black men are considering whom to date or marry. More than 75 percent of the men in our survey say that skin color does not matter to them at all when assessing a woman’s attractiveness. Nearly 80 percent say they would never discount a woman as a potential mate based on whether she was too light or too dark.

But the Brothers also confess that they’re willing to cross the racial divide in search of romance. More than 65 percent have dated a woman of another race, and 73 percent say they are open to the possibility.

One reason for this may be the somewhat mixed perception these men have of Black women. About one-third say a supportive Black woman is hard to find. Just over 43 percent said that the behavior of some of their peers has made it difficult for Black women to be supportive of Black men. But more than half (52.2 percent) think Black women are only looking for men with money and status.

We also learned from our readers that Black men are basically monogamous. More than half (53.5 percent) said they had never been unfaithful to their mate, though 37 percent admitted that they had strayed from their marriages or relationships.

They were evenly split on the subject of romantic satisfaction. Although 46 percent said they were happy with the state of their marriage or relationship, 49 percent said they were unhappy. Surprisingly, only 18 percent said that more sex was the topic for a better marriage or relationship, compared with 25 percent who said more time with their partner would improve their marital or romantic relations.

And while two-thirds of the respondents described themselves as being somewhat sexually experimental, these guys are far from being an oversexed lot. Only 37 percent of them said they have sex several times a week, while 21 percent said they seldom had sex at all. They were almost evenly divided on the topic of premarital relations, with nearly 40 percent saying they would marry a woman with whom they’d not been intimate and 41 percent saying they would not.

Stats
Are you happy with the state of your marriage or romantic relationship?
a. Yes 46% b. No 49%

Do you think Black women are only looking for Brothers with money & status?
a. Yes 52.2% b. No 46.2%

What physical qualities attract you to a woman when you first meet her?
a. Overall figure 41.8%
b. Legs 9.1%
c. Bust 5.3%
d. Long hair 5.3%
e. Eyes 8%
f. Overall grooming 56.9%

Which qualities are most important to you in assessing a woman’s date/mate potential?
a. Physical appearance 73.3%
b. Independence 76.1%
c. Intelligence 21.7%
d. Occupation/income 46.5%
e. Honesty and integrity 55.7%
f. Sense of humor 82.1%
g. Spirituality 61.6%

In assessing a woman’s attractiveness, is skin color a consideration for you?
a. Yes 23.3% b. No 75.2%

Would you or have you ever not considered a woman as a potential mate because she was:
a. Too light 7.9%
b. Too dark 11.9%
c. Skin color doesn’t matter 78.6%

If you are single, would you ever consider marrying a woman with whom you have not been intimate?
a. Yes 39.9% b. No 41.2% A shock to me

How often do you have sex?
a. Every day 4.1%
b. Several times a week 37.4%
c. Once a week 18.2%
d. Twice a month 14.8%
e. I seldom have sex 21.1%

Who usually initiates sex?
a. I do 76.4 %
b. My partner does 18.6%

Sexually, how would you describe yourself?
a. Conservative 14.2%
b. Experimental and explorative 47.5%
c. Occasionally experimental 35.8%

If you are unmarried and sexually active, how would you describe your use of condoms.
a. I always use a condom 24.8 %
b. I frequently use a condom 10.7%
c. I sometimes use a condom 17%
d. I never use a condom 15.7%

If you are married or in a long-term relationship, have you ever been unfaithful to your mate?
a. Yes 36.5% b. No 53.5%

Do you or have you ever dated a woman of another race?
a. Yes 65.4% b. No 33.3%

Would you date a woman of another race?
a. Yes 73% b. No 22%

Does it concern you when successful Black women date and marry men of another race?
a. Yes 34.3% b. No 63.5%

Other than a relative or someone you know personally, which African-American man do you admire most?
a. Johnnie Cochran 12.9%
b. Bill Cosby 27.4%
c. The Rev. Jesse Jackson 11.3%
d. Earvin (Magic) Johnson 2.2%
e. Michael Jordan 11.3%
f. Kweisi Mfume 5.3%
g. Chris Rock 1.3%
h. Dr. David Satcher .6%
i. Will Smith 2.8%
j. Other 2.8%

Other than a relative or some one you know personally, which African-American woman do you admire most?
a. Maya Angelou 22.6%
b. Halle Berry 8.8%
c. Marian Wright Edelman 11.3%
d. Whitney Houston 3.1%
e. Terry McMillan 1.6%
f. Iyanla Vanzant 2.8%
g. MaxineWaters 10.4%
h. Oprah Winfrey 22.3%
i. Vanessa L. Williams 6.3%
j. Other 15.4%

COPYRIGHT 2000 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

~Mission accomplished