RIP: Fast & Furious star Paul Walker

Fast and Furious star Paul Walker dead in fiery car wreck: Actor killed after Porsche GT driven by his friend crashed into pole

• Paul Walker died this afternoon in a single-car accident
• The actor and one other died when their Porsche crashed into a pole

By Alex Greig

Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker died in a car crash this afternoon when his friend lost control of a Porsche GT and collided with a telegraph pole.
The star's representatives and official Facebook page confirmed his death this evening.

Tragic accident: Representatives for actor Paul Walker have confirmed that the star died in a car accident Saturday afternoon

Walker, 40, was a passenger in the high-powered super-car when it spun out of control in Santa Clarita at 3:30pm today.
The actor was giving rides in his new Porche when the accident occurred. 
The LA County Sheriff's department has confirmed that two people died in a collision at 3:30pm today, but no names have yet been released.
However, representatives for the actor have confirmed that Paul Walker was one of the two men who died this afternoon.
'It is with a truly heavy heart that we must confirm that Paul Walker passed away today in a tragic car accident while attending a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide,' reads a Facebook update on Walker's official page.
'He was a passenger in a friend's car, in which both lost their lives. We appreciate your patience as we too are stunned and saddened beyond belief by this news. Thank you for keeping his family and friends in your prayers during this very difficult time. We will do our best to keep you apprised on where to send condolences. - #TeamPW.'
Walker was reportedly an investor in the Always Evolving auto shop in Valencia, California and was in the area for a car show to support the Philippines typhoon relief effort.
Witnesses at the crash scene posted video of the site on YouTube, showing debris from the crash and emergency workers cordoning off the area.
The actor was best known for playing Brian O'Conner, the rev-head in the high-grossing films in the Fast and Furious franchise.  

It's with a heavy heart that we must confirm Paul Walker passed away today in a tragic car accident...MORE: http://t.co/9hDuJMH99M - #TeamPW
— Paul Walker (@RealPaulWalker) December 1, 2013

Horror crash: First responders gather evidence near the wreckage of a Porsche sports car that crashed into a light pole on Hercules Street near Kelly Johnson Parkway in Valencia on Saturday, November 30, killing actor Paul Walker

Crash site: Sheriff deputies work near the wreckage of the Porsche sports car that crashed into a pole on Hercules Street near Kelly Johnson Parkway in Valencia on Saturday 

Walker rose to fame after playing Lance Harbor in the 1999 film Varsity Blues.

He is best-known for his starring role as Brian Conner alongside Vin Diesel in the hugely popular Fast & Furious franchise, but his career began when he was just two.
Walker, the son of a fashion model mother and a sewer contractor father, began modeling as an infant, and starred in a Pampers commercial as a toddler.
He was born in Glendale, California and raised in the San Fernando Valley area along with his four siblings.
Throughout the 1980s, Walker had roles in TV shows including Who's the Boss and The Young and the Reckless before he branched out into films.
His break-out role came in 2001 when he starred in The Fast and The Furiousopposite Vin Diesel. The motoring enthusiast performed many of his own stunts in the Fast & Furious films.
Other roles include Brokedown Palace, She's All That,  Flags of Our Fathers and the Hurricane Katrina drama Hours, which is set to be released in December.
Walker is the father of a 15-year-old daughter, Meadow, whose mother had recently moved to California from Hawaii so the two could be closer.

At the time of his death, Walker was filming the seventh Fast & Furious movie with Vin Diesel. Just yesterday, he tweeted the following message to his followers

The boys are back. Will you be ready? - #TeamPW #FastFridays (Photo Credit: http://t.co/kkce2shzvM) pic.twitter.com/RDnrDBGs2n
— Paul Walker (@RealPaulWalker) November 30, 2013

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Jessica De Gouw: DRACULA [S1E5]

25-years old Aussie actress Jessica De Gouw in Dracula [S1E5]

Another fascinating episode. Loving the scientific angle à la Frankenstein. According to Deadline:
NBC was the only network to air an all original lineup last night with Dateline (1.2, 7.2 million) up a tenth from last week in 18-49 and hitting a season high in total viewers. Grimm (1.3) fell 19% from its most recent episode while Dracula (0.9) held steady at a series low.
Even GRIMM isn't doing so well this season.  Quite interested to see the DVR statistics of both shows.
[ PW: 034748KK2 ]

Jessica will feature prominently in coming episodes.....

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Are Sex and Porn Addictive?

We’re pleased to welcome a new blogger. David J. Ley PhD. is an American clinical psychologist who practices in Albuquerque, NM. He is the author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, writes a blog for Psychology Today, and is a frequent speaker on radio and television. His website is: http://Drdavidley.com

David J. Ley PhD

The cry “save kids from addictive porn” has resounded through Britain of late, part of the argument for restricting pornography access. The idea sounds sensible, at least at first. Like drugs or alcohol, porn (and sex in general) can feel really good. So, it seems to make intuitive sense that sex could be addictive in similar ways. Unfortunately, the idea of sex and porn addiction is merely an expression of human fears of sexuality, and is a concept which reflects the manipulative power of pop psychology and moral panics.

The idea of sex addiction first sprang into the American consciousness in the early 1980’s, when Patrick Carnes, a prison psychologist, first published a book where he related sexual behavior problems to the problems of alcoholics. He advocated for the use of 12-step treatments, like what is used in Alcoholics Anonymous. Carnes’ ideas caught fire and spawned an enormous industry in the United States, tapping into tremendous fears of sexuality, particularly aspects of male sexuality.

The idea of sex addiction took root in fertile soil, which had been fertilized by centuries of fear and sexual suppression. The ideas that masturbation itself could be unhealthy can be traced back centuries to European physicians, who argued that masturbation depleted men of crucial energy. We now understand that many of the problems blamed on masturbation and excessive sexuality, from mental health problems or blindness, were actually the result of untreated sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis or gonorrhea. But, for hundreds of years, physicians advocated against the dangers of too much sex or too much masturbation. Kellog’s cornflakes and Graham crackers were originally invented to be bland foods that wouldn’t “stimulate” physical passions or lead to sexual arousal.

Throughout history, societies go through periods of changing attitudes towards sex, from more liberal “free love” attitudes towards conservative times when sexual expression is restricted. Fear-based ideas such as sex addiction or nymphomania arise in times and societies that are attempting to suppress or control sexuality. Sadly, the medical field has often been an instrument of this control.

Historically, women suffered the most from these danger moral medical practices, where women diagnosed as nymphomaniacs were institutionalized, lobotomized, or had their clitorises removed, when doctors determined that these women liked sex too much (as much as men for instance). The diagnosis of nymphomania was finally abandoned and rejected as the medical field acknowledged that these diagnoses were based on culturally-determined gender stereotypes, not on medical or scientific data. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said it best, when he quipped that “a nymphomaniac is anyone who has more sex than their therapist.”

But today, it’s men’s turn. According to most studies, alleged sex addicts are overwhelmingly male. Between 85-92% of most “sex addicts” are men. There are two main reasons for this: first, the idea of sex addiction came to the fore at the same time that American media and society made a shift in the way that gender was regarded. For centuries, masculinity was seen as the ideal. Medical textbooks focused on male physiology, and females were ignored. Men were seen as smarter, and more valuable. But, beginning in the 1980’s, masculinity became a figure of ridicule. Men were increasingly portrayed as buffoons, subject to the whims of their penises. Penises themselves are most often portrayed as objects of humor, rather than sexual objects comparable to female genitalia.

Men today are seen as less moral than women, and male sexual desires are seen as baser, deficient, and dangerous.

Gender differences in sexual desire, attitudes and values are clear. Men masturbate more than women, use pornography more frequently, are more likely to be interested in fetishistic sexual practices, engage in infidelity more, visit prostitutes more, and are more likely to be interested in casual sex. All of these behaviors have been regarded as symptoms of sexual addiction, when they actually reflect sexual differences between men and women. The field of sex addiction has served to attack (and excuse) male sexuality for the past thirty years. Historically, powerful men throughout history have enjoyed sexual privilege that included a “hall pass” from monogamy. But, as social views of masculinity changed, powerful men caught in infidelity needed something to blame. The idea that sex is addictive and a powerful drug became a convenient scapegoat, which actors, politicians and sports figures used to excuse their misbehaviors.

The second reason why sex addiction is focused on men lies again in the time when sex addiction emerged. The early 1980’s saw the rise of AIDS. With the AIDS crisis, unrestrained male sexuality, and in particular male homosexuality, was seen as not just a moral inconvenience, but a potential life-threatening behavior that endangered men and those around them. Today, studies show that gay and bisexual men are about three times more likely to be labeled as sex addicts, than they are to be diagnosed with mental health or drug and alcohol problems.

But, despite thirty years of public acceptance and media embrace of the idea that sex is addictive, sexual addiction is not a diagnosable illness. Medical and psychiatric industries have consistently rejected this concept, as based on moral and cultural values, with little to no scientific basis.

Repeatedly, over the past years, proponents of sex addiction have been chastised for poor science, based on anecdote, rather than defensible empirical scientific research.

And yet, the idea that sex is addictive remains a powerful myth in modern society, because of its usefulness. Media and moral groups use this idea to invoke fear, tapping into normal human sexual anxiety. The idea that porn is addictive was used by religious groups to ban Playboy from the shelves of convenience stores, and is used today to invoke fear that childhood exposure to porn can create uncontrollable and damaging addictions.

Sex and porn, can cause problems in people’s lives, just like any other human behavior or form of entertainment. But, to invoke the idea of “addiction” is unethical, using invalid, scientifically and medically-rejected concepts to invoke fear and feed panic. The history of the idea of sex addiction should be a cautionary tale to modern British society – whenever this ploy is used, its intent is to restrict sexual freedoms, based on conservative social philosophies.

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Alana Blanchard: Surfer And Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model

Get To Know Scintillating Surfer And Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Alana Blanchard

The kind folks over at Sports Illustrated Swim Daily finally released the behind-the-scenes video of Alana Blanchard’s photoshoot for the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The tantalizing video shows you that besides being a professional surfer and winning several championships, the alluring Alana has got what it takes as a spectacular bikini model. Enjoy the enchanting video in which Alana displays why she was made to wear a bikini and then peruse some of the beautiful pics from the delightful photoshoot.

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Do images of naked people really cause us to “Objectify” them?

The Ways of Lust

By PAUL BLOOM

HOW does lust affect the way we think about people?

In 1780, Immanuel Kant wrote that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite.” And after that appetite is sated? The loved one, Kant explained, “is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.” 

Many contemporary feminists agree that sexual desire, particularly when elicited by pornographic images, can lead to “objectification.” The objectifier (typically a man) thinks of the target of his desire (typically a woman) as a mere thing, lacking autonomy, individuality and subjective experience. 

This idea has some laboratory support. Studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge those people as less intelligent, less ambitious, less competent and less likable. One neuroimaging experiment found that, for men, viewing pictures of sexualized women induced lowered activity in brain regions associated with thinking about other people’s minds. 

The objectification thesis also sits well with another idea that many psychologists, including myself, have defended, which is that we are all common-sense dualists. Even if you are a staunch science-minded atheist, in everyday life you still think of people as immaterial conscious beings — we inhabit fleshy bodies, but we are not ourselves physical. To see someone as a body is in opposition to thinking of her as a mind, then, and hence a heightened focus on someone’s body tends to strip away her personhood. 

But this analysis is too simple. It’s not literally true that women in pornography are thought of as inanimate and unfeeling objects; if they were, then they would just as effectively be depicted as unconscious or unresponsive, as opposed to (as is more often the case) aroused and compliant. Also, as the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Leslie Green have pointed out, being treated as an object isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine that you are sitting outside on a sunny day, and you move behind someone so that she blocks the sun from your eyes. You have used her as an object, but it’s hard to see that you’ve done something wrong. 

The real worry that people have with pornography — and with lust more generally — is that the targets of the arousal are seen as losing certain uniquely human traits. They are thought of as lower-status beings, stripped of dignity, more like animals than people. This attitude is well expressed by the misogynist hero of the Kingsley Amis novel “One Fat Englishman” who says that his sexual aim is “to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.” 

ALONG with a team of psychologists and philosophers (with the psychologist Kurt Gray as the lead author), I published a study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that looked at the effect of viewing naked bodies. We went hard-core, drawing our images from a book by the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders called “XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits.” This collection was perfect for our purposes, as it had two side-by-side photographs of each attractive individual, with the same lighting, posture and expression — but in one photograph the person was fully dressed, in the other naked. 

We showed the pictures to our subjects and asked questions about these individuals — about the extent to which they were seen as purposeful agents, with the capacity for self-control, moral action and planning, and about the extent to which they were seen as experiencing beings, capable of feeling pain, pleasure, fear, rage, joy and desire. Consistent with the objectification view, naked people were thought of as having less agency. But contrary to this view, they were also thought of as being enhanced experiencers, capable of stronger feelings and greater emotional responses.

Relatedly, in another study of ours, in which participants gave people electric shocks, we found that the participants gave milder shocks to people who were partially undressed versus fully dressed, presumably because the flash of skin makes us more sensitive to others as experiencing beings.

Marilyn Monroe once described sex as “the opposite of love.” This seems too harsh. Part of the effect of nudity that our study found is morally positive — it’s usually a good thing to be more attuned to someone else’s ability to experience — and it’s not clear whether the negative effects have any long-term influence on how we treat one another. In addition, the studies that psychologists have done so far involve the perception of strangers. I hope it’s not overly romantic to assume that sexual desire might work quite differently in the context of a continuing relationship.

These findings underscore the corporeal nature of many of our moral feelings. The experience of other people’s bodies can elicit empathy and compassion; it can also trigger disgust, fear and hatred.

Our moral thoughts and actions are influenced, often unconsciously, by others’ smell, their race, their sex, their age, how much skin they are showing and much else. 

If we want to be good people, to do right by others, it’s important to know about these influences.

Sometimes we will embrace them, but often we are going to want to combat them. 

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale, is the author of “Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.” 

 

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Celebrate Thanksgivukkah With the 27 Hottest Jewish Celebrities!

Happy Thanksgivukkah! Celebrate With the 27 Hottest Jewish Celebrities!

By JRT

It’s the first Thanksgivukkah in our nation’s history–since the Jewish calendar presents an unusually early holiday that coincides with the national American holiday. Maybe the dates have collided before, but that was before America was around. The next time that we get a Thanksgivukkah is in 57 years, and who knows what’ll happen by then? This may be the one and only Thanksgivukkah in the history of the world.

Anyway, some COED staffers have already put together exciting dinner menus mixing turkey and latkes. The actual holiday of Hanukkah starts tonight at dusk, and then carries on for the usual seven more nights. There will be plenty of innovative celebrations. Meanwhile, your COED staff thinks it’s a fine time to celebrate some of the sexiest Jewesses around. Maybe that’s a little more predictable, but we like to think of it as a fine Hanukkah present.

Also, we guarantee that this is the only time that we’ll ever use the idea as a Thanksgivukkah celebration. But with gals like these, you still might want to check back in with us in about 57 years…

From left to right: Alicia Silverstone, Alison Brie, Alyson Hannigan

From left to right: Amanda Bynes, Bar Refaeli, Brooke Burke

From left to right: Caprice Bourret, Dianna Agron, Elizabeth Banks

From left to right: Emmanuelle Chriqui, Emmy Rossum, Esti Ginzburg

From left to right: Eva Green, Evan Rachel Wood, Jamie-Lynn Sigler

From left to right: Jennifer Connelly, Kat Dennings, Lizzy Caplan

From left to right: Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman, Nikki Reed

From left to right: Nikki Ziering, Rachel Bilson, Rashida Jones

From left to right: Sarah Silverman, Scarlett Johansson, Winona Ryder

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