A year after the fall of Silvio Berlusconi, the new head of Italy's state television has launched a crusade against the 'Bunga Bunga era'

Almost a year to the day after the fall of Silvio Berlusconi, a quiet revolution is under way in Italian television. Once notorious for streaming a steady diet of inane game shows featuring barely-clothed showgirls, it is now under pressure to both clean up and cover up.

At the forefront of the campaign is the formidable new head of Italy's state broadcasting body, Anna Maria Tarantola, who has launched what some Italian commentators view as a "crusade" against the excesses of the bunga bunga era.

Mrs Tarantola, 67, whose golden coiffeur and steely resolve have invited comparisons with Mrs Thatcher and the Queen, wants to give more air time to "normal" women rather than the silicone-enhanced showgirls who became a staple of Italian television during the Berlusconi years.

"I don't much like the way women are presented on TV," said Mrs Tarantola, who has been appointed the head of RAI, or Radio Televisione Italiana, by Mario Monti, the sombre technocrat who replaced the flamboyant Mr Berlusconi as prime minister last November.

Mrs Tarantola, who was educated at the LSE and rose to become deputy director general of the Bank of Italy, called for programmes that were less "banal" and with more "values", in an appeal with distinct overtones of the BBC's founder Lord Reith.

Day-time talk show programmes which discussed the merits of plastic surgery for an hour or more were "excessive", she declared. The message, instead, should instead be that "women are beautiful as they are".

It is not just Italian television that is cleaning up its act in the post-Berlusconi era, however. While it may not yet be a case of No-Sex-Please-We're-Italian, commentators claim to detect a distinct shift in attitudes towards women in many areas of public life.

Contestants in this year's Miss Italy contest, for example, were ordered to ditch the skimpy bikinis they normally wear in favour of much more modest one-piece costumes. And girls who had plastic surgery or who sported tattoos and body piercings were prohibited from entering the competition in September.

The new rules were touted an attempt to return to the elegance of the 1950s, when the likes of Sophia Loren posed in demure all-in-one swimsuits, said Patrizia Mirigliani, the pageant's organiser.

The changes to the format were made after "hints" from Elsa Fornero, the new minister for work and equal opportunities in the Monti government.

Mrs Fornero, 64, who is another respected economist, also voiced her disapproval when a well-known showgirl, Belen Rodriguez, appeared in an extremely revealing dress presenting the San Remo music festival, Italy's answer to the Eurovision song contest.

Argentinian-born Belen Rodriguez, who is ubiquitous on Italian television, advertising and in gossip magazines, sashayed down a flight of stairs in a dress which was split so high that she exposed a butterfly tattoo adorning her groin.

Mrs Fornero did not criticise the actress directly but did say the day afterwards that as a woman she sometimes felt "offended" by what she saw on television, adding that she found the best ploy was to "change channel or switch off altogether".

The minister is part of a new female line-up in the Monti government that vividly illustrates the radical break with the Berlusconi era.

Gone are the young, attractive female ministers who crowded Mr Berlusconi's cabinet, including Mara Carfagna, whose steamy poses in men's magazines gained her a huge male following before she was made equal opportunities minister.

They have been replaced by a trio of high-powered, stern women with distinguished backgrounds in economics, public policy and academia – Mrs Fornero, 64, Anna Maria Cancellieri, 68, the interior minister, and Paolo Severino, 64, the justice minister.

As they mark a year in power, two of their predecessors face the ignominy of being called as witnesses in Mr Berlusconi's ongoing sex trial, in which he is accused of paying for sex with an alleged under-age prostitute – charges he denies.

Tomorrow, Miss Carfagna is due to appear at a hearing in Milan along with Maria Stella Gelmini, who was minister of education in the Berlusconi government.

The young woman at the heart of the trial has also undergone a radical change in circumstances since attending Mr Berlusconi's bunga bunga parties.

During the height of the controversy, Karima El Mahroug – better known by her stage name as Ruby the Heart Stealer – appeared in talk shows and nightclub openings in skin-tight, shimmering dresses.

These days she portrays herself as a demure young mother who is photographed, without make-up or sexy clothes, pushing a baby stroller. She gave birth to a girl in December last year and has settled down with her nightclub owner boyfriend.

There are those who argue that none of these changes go more than skin deep, and that, a year after Mr Berlusconi quit as prime minister, Italy has changed little in its attitude to women, television and sex.

The country is ranked a lowly 80th in this year's Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum– down from 74th in 2011. It ranked worse than Brunei, East Timor, Ukraine and Moldova. It makes its judgements on a wide range of economic and social criteria.

Most other Western European countries appeared in the top 20, with Britain at number 18.

"It is very sad that we have dropped six places but it reflects the painful truth," said Lorella Zanardo, the director of Il Corpo Delle Donne (The Body of Women), a documentary about the image of women on Italian television.

"Berlusconi has gone and the bunga bunga era is definitely over, but the patriarchal, macho mentality remains in Italy. Berlusconi simply took advantage of something that is deep within Italian culture and that won't change in a year.

"But I'm cautiously optimistic – there is a new generation of Italians that travels and lives abroad and they see that things are different overseas."

However, even though Mr Berlsuconi may not be prime minister any more, "il Cavaliere" still controls Italy's commercial television through his Mediaset empire.

"Superficially there is an impression that things have changed dramatically, but I think it's a matter of style more than substance," said Federigo Argentieri, a political scientist at John Cabot University and the director of the Guarini Institute for Public Affairs.

"Berlusconi's macho approach was like something out of the 1950s but it was diffused widely. Italian girls still want to become showgirls and I think that's a reflection of the difficulties in the labour market – it is very hard to achieve that level of success in other ways."

And while the bunga bunga epoch may be over, the Italian showgirl culture lives on, despite the best efforts of Mr Monti's ministers and the new head of the public broadcaster.

When Barack Obama was re-elected president of the United States last week, a lingerie company took out risqué, full-page advertisements in several national newspapers to congratulate him on his win.

"The best is yet to come'"– Congratulations Mr President!" read the ad, which featured a pouting model wearing a pair of pink knickers, black stockings and a Stars and Stripes top.

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The BBC should prove that 'Newsnight’ was not acting with malice towards Lord McAlpine, argues Boris Johnson.

You know, I am afraid that they still don’t get it. The people at the BBC show no real sign of understanding what they have done wrong, let alone making amends. We have heard an awful lot in the past 24 hours about the personal calvary of George Entwistle. We know of the agony of Lord Patten, who has told us that the resignation of Entwistle was “one of the saddest evenings” of his public life. We have been told of the grief of hundreds of BBC journalists, the anxiety, the anger, their fear for their jobs. Everyone at the BBC is agreed on one thing: that it is a “tragedy”. Yes, it is a tragedy for the poor old BBC.

It’s tragic for us! say Beeb journalists, who are all interviewing each other in a ludicrous orgy of self-pity. In all this nauseating navel-gazing and narcissism, there seems to be no one – from Lord Patten downwards – who appears to be remotely interested in the person the BBC has injured. Has anyone even begun to apologise, in a fitting manner, to Alistair McAlpine?

To call someone a paedophile is to place them, these days, in a special category. We loathe paedophiles, as a society, because we know more and more about their crimes. They groom and manipulate vulnerable young people. They are cunning, plausible, selfish and ruthless. They cause appalling physical and psychological pain to children – people who should be getting protection and support.

Paedophiles, therefore, do the rest of humanity a sort of service, because they confer moral superiority on absolutely everyone else. A convicted paedophile is a “nonce”, and a “nonce” is the person that every other prisoner – burglar, rapist, murderer, you name it – can spit on and feel good about it. Paedophiles are there to be jostled, beaten up and shanked in the showers, and the rest of the prison population will whistle and look the other way.

To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive. It follows that you should not call someone a paedophile unless you are pretty sure of your facts. It is utterly incredible that the BBC’s flagship news programme decided to level this poisonous allegation against Lord McAlpine when it had not the slightest evidence to support its case. It was sickening yesterday morning, at 7am, to hear the BBC radio newscaster claim – as if it were some kind of mitigation – that Newsnight did not “name” McAlpine. Is it really claiming that it protected his identity?

If so, it shows utter contempt for its listeners and for the intelligence of the British public. On the afternoon of Friday November 2, it was “tweeted” that a senior Tory politician was to be exposed on Newsnight as a paedophile. It wasn’t a vague allegation about a “ring” of paedophiles. It was about a particular individual, who was supposed to have committed a series of specific and vile crimes against a former occupant of the Bryn Estyn children’s home in Wales. “McAlpine” was the name of the mystery millionaire who had surfaced in the 2000 Waterhouse report into the scandal. “McAlpine” was the name the programme’s makers fed out to various Left-wing tweeters and bloggers; and within hours of Newsnight’s bizarre broadcast, people such as Sally Bercow and George Monbiot were pointing the finger at the bewildered and utterly blameless figure of Alistair McAlpine, 70, who is spending his retirement running a B&B in southern Italy.

You can’t really blame the tweeters and the bloggers. “McAlpine” was the steer they were given, and it was Alistair McAlpine that Newsnight had in its sights. It was no protection of McAlpine that he wasn’t explicitly named in the first broadcast – and it should be no defence of Newsnight, either. A twitstorm, a blogstorm, an internet hurricane howled around the former Tory treasurer. The whole of Fleet Street started to torment their readers with ever more prominent stories about this Top Tory Paedo, while those who used the web could see who was intended. The Prime Minister was dragged in, and immediately instituted an inquiry.

The whole thing became so unbearable that Lord McAlpine was forced to break cover, and point out that Newsnight was wrong. It was not just wrong: it was a slander more cruel, revolting and idiotic than anything perpetrated by the News of the World. The programme makers hadn’t taken account of the real anxieties about the reliability of their witness, as expressed by Sir Ronald Waterhouse, who led the inquiry into Bryn Estyn. They hadn’t shown him a picture of McAlpine. They hadn’t even put the allegations to McAlpine! Unbelievable! And why not? It was, as they say, a story that was too good to check. It wasn’t just that it showed Newsnight taking up the cudgels against paedophiles, after the embarrassment of the axed Savile exposé. It went one better. It pushed all the buttons. It was like a dream come true for any vaguely resentful and Left-of-centre BBC producer. It was a chance to pour unlimited ordure on a man who – in their book – jolly well had it coming. He is rich, he is a toff, he is a Lord, he is a Tory, and – joy of joys – he is an EX-AIDE TO MRS THATCHER.

The journalism was so shoddy, so cretinous, so ready to let the wish be father to the thought that the Beeb really now has to show that Newsnight was not acting with malice. The BBC cannot minimise what the programme has done. There will be people out there who will continue to believe that there is no smoke without fire, that Newsnight would never have broadcast such allegations unless there was something in it. The BBC owes it to McAlpine to grovel and keep grovelling until the public gets the message. Everyone associated with the “paedophile” segment on Newsnight should be sacked instantly. Then Chris Patten should make a penitential pilgrimage to McAlpine’s Italian B&B, on his knees and scourging himself with a copy of the BBC charter. This tragedy is not about the BBC; it is about the smearing of an innocent man. The BBC needs to grasp that first.

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Kevin Clash, the man who voices the "Elmo" character on "Sesame Street," has announced he is taking a leave of absence from the kid-friendly show after allegations that the Muppeteer slept with a 16-year-old male seven years ago when he 45-years-old.

Clash, who has won 12 Emmys for "Sesame Street," acknowledges he had a relationship with the young man, but vehemently denies the claims that the accuser was a minor at the time of the affair.

"I had a relationship with [the accuser]. It was between two consenting adults and I am deeply saddened that he is trying to make it into something it was not," Clash, who has a daughter, told TMZ.

Sesame Workshop has released a "Statement regarding Kevin Clash" on their website:

In June of this year, Sesame Workshop received a communication from a then 23 year old man who alleged that he had a relationship beginning when he was 16 years old with Kevin Clash, a Sesame Workshop puppeteer who performs as Elmo.

We took the allegation very seriously and took immediate action. We met with the accuser twice and had repeated communications with him. We met with Kevin, who denied the accusation. We also conducted a thorough investigation and found the allegation of underage conduct to be unsubstantiated. Although this was a personal relationship unrelated to the workplace, our investigation did reveal that Kevin exercised poor judgment and violated company policy regarding internet usage and he was disciplined.

Kevin insists that the allegation of underage conduct is false and defamatory and he is taking actions to protect his reputation. We have granted him a leave of absence to do so.

Sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell TMZ that after the accuser's initial meeting with Sesame Street, the accuser felt Sesame's lawyers "were trying to muzzle him ... so he lawyered up with Andreozzi and Associates — the firm that represented one of the victims in the Jerry Sandusky child rape case."

On August 15, 2012, Andreozzi sent a letter to Sesame accusing the company of trying to "discredit the victim in order to protect its employee and the image of one of its most valuable characters," adding, "This approach places a greater value on a puppet than the well being of a young man."

But, according to TMZ, Sesame Workshop officials "conducted a thorough investigation and determined the allegation of underage sex was unsubstantiated.  They say they never tried to silence the accuser — rather they asked for evidence supporting his claim, but he never produced it."

While there were emails found between Clash and the now 23-year-old accuser, they don't suggest there was underage sex and officials have disciplined Clash for inappropriate use of company email.

In the meantime, Sesame Workshop insists "Elmo is bigger than any one person and will continue to be an integral part of 'Sesame Street' to engage, educate and inspire children around the world, as it has for 40 years."

In the fall of 2006, Clash released an autobiography titled "My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Being Elmo Has Taught Me About Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud." Clash is the highest-paid Muppeteer ever, thanks to a merchandising deal he struck with toy manufacturers where he voices all Elmo toys.

He is also the subject of the 2011 documentary "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey." Watch the trailer below:

SEE ALSO: Meet the stunt doubles behind 15 celebrities >

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The soap opera sex scandal engulfing disgraced former CIA director David Petraeus took several turns for the weird over night, with the news that the FBI is investigating another four-star general over his relationship with Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who originally triggered the investigation into Petraeus's affair. 

To get you up to speed, Petraeus resigned Friday over his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, which was uncovered after a second woman, Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, told a friend at the FBI that she had received threatening anonymous e-mails about her own (reportedly platonic) relationship with Petraeus. A subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the emails had come from Broadwell and that Broadwell was having an affair with Petraeus. 

Last night, news broke that the FBI also uncovered "between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate emails" between Kelley and General John R. Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. 

So who is Kelley and how did she come to be at the center of the biggest Washington sex scandal of the decade? 

Here's what we know: 

• Born Jill Khawam, Kelley is 37-years old and grew up in Philadelphia, where her parents settled after emigrating from Lebanon in the mid-1970s, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. 
• She now lives in Tampa, Fla., where she is an "unpaid social liaison" to MacDill Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Central Command. From what we can tell, the role is basically a fancy term for socialite, and entails organizing, hosting, and attending social events for high-ranking military officials. 
• She and her husband Scott, a respected cancer specialist, live in a $1.3 million colonial mansion in Tampa's upscale Bayshore Boulevard neighborhood with their three young daughters. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Jill Kelley has "established a name for herself as an extravagant hostess with a military guest list" and the Kelley mansion is "the place to be seen for coalition officers." 
• Although she is not a government employee, Kelley was reportedly named an honorary consulate general to South Korea in September, and in a photo taken by the Daily Mail, she is pictured with a Mercedes with a license plate that reads "Honorary Counsel." The AP reports that she was also presented with a certificate awarding her as an "honorary ambassador for allied nations," and uses the title, but drops the "honorary." 
• According to reports, the Kelleys became friendly with David Petraeus and his wife when Petraeus was head of CENTCOM, from 2008 to 2010. The AP reports that Jill Kelley and Petraeus kept in touch after he left CENTCOM to take over command of the war in Afghanistan, and exchanged near-daily emails and instant messages. Acquaintances of both families have told reporters that the relationship between General Petraeus and Jill Kelley was platonic. 
• In the 10 years that Jill and Scott Kelley have lived in Tampa, one or both have been the subject of at least nine lawsuits "seeking payment of real estate and credit card debts,"according to the Tampa Bay Times. 
• According to an August story in the Tampa Bay Times, Kelley's identical twin sister Natalie Khawam, a Tampa lawyer who represents whistleblowers, is embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with her former employer, whom she has accused of sexual harassment and other charges. The employer has fought back with court documents claiming Khawam has a "history of abusing the litigation process." According to a bankruptcy petition she filed this year, Khawam lives with the Kelleys in Tampa, and owes $3.2 million in unpaid debt. According to the Chicago Tribune, Khawam was also involved in a brutal custody fight with her former husband, Grayson Wolfe, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capitalist who once worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. The New York Post reports today that Petraeus wrote a letter in support of Khawam to the court in the case, although we have not been able to confirm this. According to the Post, the judge called Khawam a "psychologically unstable person," and awarded Wolfe sole custody of the 3-year-old child the couple. 
• Kelley triggered the FBI investigation into Petraeus — and subsequently Allen and herself — when she told a friend in the FBI about the email threats. That FBI agent was removed from the case, after his supervisors decided he had become infatuated with Kelley. The agent also sent Kelley shirtless photos of himself, although accounts differ on whether the photos were sent before or after she told him about the Petraeus emails. (To make matters weirder, that same FBI agent contacted Washington Republican Congressman Dave Reichert in late October to tip him off to the Petraeus scandal, after the agent became convinced that the harassment case was being stalled as part of a coverup to protect Obama.)
• When news of the scandal broke this Sunday, Jill Kelley continued to throw a birthday party for one of her daughters at their home, despite the growing media mob outside the house. But by Monday, the family had left the home and hired Washington superlawyer Abbe Lowell, who represented John Edwards, and crisis PR manager Judy Smith, who has worked for Monica Lewinsky and Kobe Bryant.

But there are still quite a few unanswered questions about Kelley and her relationship with two of the nation's leading military and intelligence officers — not least of which is what could possibly be in the thousands of pages of correspondence between her and Allen. 

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A mother-of-two accused of running a £500,000 a year online escort agency told a court: "My two favourite things in the world are money and sex".

Marie McKinlay, 40, is alleged to have employed up to 25 high-class prostitutes with an array of talents including "girlfriend experience" to experience as a pornography actress.

Prosecutors claim the former escort bankrolled her two daughters' private school education with her profits from Agency Allure and rented a £1,500 a month four-bed home.

Clients were charged between £300 an hour and £1,500 for a 14-hour overnight booking that "must include some sleep".

Giving evidence yesterday Mrs McKinlay, who denies controlling a lucrative prostitution ring, she admitted forming the agency in 2002 with five other women who all "in control".

Asked why she began in the vice trade, she told Southwark Crown Court: "I've been asked this question many times over the years and the way I answer it is, my two favourite things in the world are money and sex, I absolutely love both of them, and a job that allows me to put them both together, why wouldn't I?"

She said she had been able to meet "a class of gentlemen that I had never met before". She added: "Wealthy people, not just wealthy people, people who worked in certain careers, like the City."

It said it enabled her to meet a "broader spectrum of people" and lead a lavish lifestyle including trips to Dubai, Paris, Geneva, where she stayed in five star hotels

Mrs McKinlay said she began work as hostess in her mid-twenties at the Stork Club, in Piccadilly, after a stint as a wardrobe assistant on the West End production of Miss Saigon.

She said she left the club because she 'got sick of the drinking', telling jurors she 'had to drink champagne and only champagne' from 9pm to 2am every day.

She then worked as an escort both independently and for a woman based in South Kensington before setting up Allure.

She said that by 2003 she was the only remaining founder member and following the birth of her first child she had taken over running the administrative side of the business.

She told the court that photos used online were supplied and owned by the girls and that any information on their online profile was checked by the girls before it was put on the website.

Prosecutors allege McKinlay, who was detained at an address in Southampton in July 2011, banked more than £350,000 in profits from the racket.

Mrs McKinlay, of Lewisham, southeast London, denies controlling prostitution for gain and converting criminal property between December 2008 and July 2011.

The trial continues.

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While the Petraeus Affair grows more alarming by the hour, it remains far from the worst military sex scandal in modern history.

That honor may belong to the Profumo Affair in 1963, when British Secretary of War John Profumo had an affair with the reputed mistress of an alleged Soviet spy, lied about it in the House of Commons, and was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

Interested? Here's more from Wikipedia:

Profumo's relationship with Keeler

In the early 1960s, Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan's Conservative government and was married to actress Valerie Hobson. In 1961, Profumo metChristine Keeler, a London good-time girl or hetaera or according to the newspapers call girl,^[1] at a house party at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion owned by Lord Astor. Many years later Profumo would claim, in discussion with his son, David, that he had met Keeler previously at a night club in London called Murray's and "probably had a drink with her."^[2]Also present at the Cliveden party were Profumo's wife and the fashionable osteopath and party arranger for the aristocracy, Dr Stephen Ward, a long-standing acquaintance of Keeler. The relationship with Keeler lasted only a few weeks before Profumo ended it. However, rumours about the affair became public in 1962, as did the allegation that Keeler had also had a relationship with Yevgeny "Eugene" Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. Given Profumo's position in the government and with the Cold War at its height, the potential ramifications in terms of national security were grave, and this, along with the adulterous nature of Profumo's relationship with Keeler, quickly elevated the affair into a public scandal.

Exposure of the affair

In 1962, Keeler became involved in an altercation with her former live-in lover Johnny Edgecombe. When she announced the end of their relationship, a confrontation followed 10 days before Christmas 1962. Edgecombe attempted to force his way into Stephen Ward's flat where Keeler was staying and fired several shots at the doorlock. Meanwhile, Keeler had become involved with a Jamaican drug dealer named Aloysius "Lucky" Gordon. When that relationship ended Gordon attacked her with an axe and held her hostage for two days. Keeler turned to Edgecombe for help and in the ensuing fight between him and Gordon, the latter received a knife wound to his face. Fearful of reprisals from Gordon, Edgecombe asked Keeler to help him find a solicitor so that he could turn himself in. She refused and instead told him that she intended to give evidence against Edgecombe in court for wounding Gordon. As a result of her refusal, Edgecombe hatched a plot to murder Keeler. Three months later, when she failed to turn up in court for Edgecombe's trial, previous press suspicions boiled over and the affair became front page news with headlines like "WAR MINISTER SHOCK".^[3]

Announcement in Parliament

In March 1963, Profumo stated to the House of Commons that there was "no impropriety whatsoever" in his relationship with Keeler and that he would issue writs for libel and slander if the allegations were repeated outside the House.^[4] (Within the House, such allegations are protected by Parliamentary privilege.) However, in June, Profumo confessed that he hadmisled the House and lied in his testimony and on 5 June, he resigned his Cabinet position, as well as his Privy Council and Parliamentary membership.

Peter Wright, in his autobiography Spycatcher,^[5] relates that he was working at the British counter-intelligence agency MI5 at the time and was assigned to question Keeler on security matters. He conducted a fairly lengthy interview and found Keeler to be poorly educated and not well informed on current events, very much the "party girl" described in the press at the time. However, in the course of questioning her, the subject of nuclear missiles came up, and Keeler, on her own, used the term "nuclear payload" in relation to the missiles. This alerted Wright's suspicions. According to Wright, in the very early 1960s in Britain, the term "nuclear payload" was not in general use by the public, and even among those who kept up with such things, the term was not commonly heard. For a young woman with such limited knowledge to casually use the term was more than suspicious. In fact, Wright came away convinced that at the very least there had been an attempt by the Soviet attaché (perhaps through Stephen Ward) to use Keeler to get classified information from Profumo.

Lord Denning released the government's official report on 25 September 1963, and, one month later, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, resigned on the grounds of ill health, which had apparently been exacerbated by the scandal. He was replaced by the Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Home, who renounced his title to become Sir Alec Douglas-Home. However, the change of leader failed to save the Conservative Party's place in government; they lost the general election to Harold Wilson's Labour a year later.

Stephen Ward was prosecuted in August for living off the immoral earnings of prostitution ( Miss Keeler had paid for the telephone calls she made whilst using Ward's flat, using the money she got from her rich male 'acquaintances') but he was found dying in his flat before sentencing. The official verdict was that he committed suicide. However conspiracy theorists believe he was murdered by security services to prevent him disclosing information that may be damaging to prominent persons. He was defended by James Burge QC (who was later the basis for John Mortimer's character Rumpole of the Bailey). Keeler was found guilty on unrelated perjury charges and was sentenced to nine months in prison.^[6] Profumo died on 9 March 2006.

The Profumo Affair in film and theatre

The relationship between a senior politician and a prostitute^[1] caught the public imagination and led to the release of a number of films and documentaries detailing the event. The Danish film The Keeler Affair^[7] was released in 1963 followed in 1989 by the British film Scandal. The musical A Model Girl premiered at The Greenwich Theatre on 30 January 2007.^[8] In theatre Hugh Whitemore's play A Letter of Resignation, first staged at the Comedy Theatre in October 1997, dramatises the occasion when Harold Macmillan, staying with friends in Scotland, received a political bombshell, a letter of resignation from Profumo, his war minister. Edward Fox portrayed Macmillan. ^[9][10]

Composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has said that his next musical project will be about Dr.Stephen Ward who was stitched up in the Profumo Affair.

The Profumo Affair in popular music

• The Song "Christine" by "Miss X" (a pseudonym of Joyce Blair) in 1963 is said to be about Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair.^{[11][citation needed]}
• Adam Ant referenced the Profumo scandal in a song called "High Heels In High Places".
• American folk singer Phil Ochs wrote and recorded a song about the affair, "Christine Keeler", in 1963. It is available on The Broadside Tapes 1, released in 1989.^[12]
• The Jamaican band The Skatalites recorded an instrumental song called "Christine Keeler" in 1964.^[13]
• Billy Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire depicts this affair in the line "British Politician Sex."^[14]
• Christine Keeler is mentioned in the song "Post World War Two Blues" from the album Past, Present and Future^[15] (1973), written and performed by Al Stewart, and the Ray Davies song "Where Are They Now?" from the Kinks album Preservation: Act 1.^[16]
• The British post-punk group Glaxo Babies released a 7-inch single in 1979 entitled "Christine Keeler" that included a song of the same name.^[17]
• The affair is central to the hit songs "Nothing Has Been Proved" and "In Private", performed by Dusty Springfield and written by Pet Shop Boys. These songs were used over the opening and closing titles of the 1989 film Scandal.^[18]
• The Lewis Morley image of Christine Keeler is used on the cover of The Charlatans 1997 single release "Telling Stories".^[19]
• The Clash's 1980 album Sandinista! references the events of the Profumo affair in the song The Leader.^[20][21]

Cultural references to the scandal

This section contains information of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article's subject matter. Please help improve this article by clarifying or removing superfluous information. (February 2011)

In the 1963 comedy LP record "Fool Britannia", subsequently re-released on CD, there are many references, direct and oblique, to the Profumo Scandal which is the integrating theme of the set of comedy sketches. The recording includes skits by Peter Sellers, Anthony Newley & Joan Collins. As the Lord Chamberlain's office would not allow references to the Stephen Ward trial or the resignation of Profumo on the last track on the record a voice says (apropos of nothing): "There's no smoke without fire" or as my old Latin master would put it "Non Combusto Profumo".

The book The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) mentions the scandal in the chapter "Hustler".^[22]

The film Sweeney! (1977), a movie spin-off of the popular police drama The Sweeney, involved a plot loosely based on the Profumo Affair. British actor Barry Foster guest-starred as an Americanised, and more deadly, version of Stephen Ward.^[23]

The Alan Moore-scribed comic book Miracleman has a character mention Profumo in issue #2. The main character's newspaper editor is irritated that the government has stepped in to suppress a story, and the editor replies, "It's bloody Profumo all over a-bloody-gain."^{[citation needed]}

The TV comedy-drama film Blore M.P. (made in 1989) starred Timothy West as a cabinet minister who also gets involved with a prostitute and faces blackmail from the Russians.^[24]

In Mad Men Season 3 Episode 6, "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency," (broadcast September 2009) Joan Holloway comments that the British Prime Minister loves prostitutes and is corrected, being told "actually it was the Secretary of War."

Harriet Evans's 2011 novel Love Always, partially set in 1963, discusses the Profumo affair, and the character Cecily is fascinated by it.^[25]

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Technology has a runaway-train inevitability. It keeps crashing into our lives, and there's just no stopping it.

Even at the bedroom door.

Here are seven technologies from past to present that are changing the way we think about sex.

VHS tapes, for filmed sexiness

Ever wonder why VHS beat Betamax, even though the picture wasn't as good? The consensus seems to be that Sony wouldn't allow porn on Beta tapes. There was no issue with this in the VHS world, and it's what stuck around. The ready availability of porn at home presaged the Internet smut explosion.

Email for sexy messages

Long before the immediacy and mobility of text messages, lovers turned to email for a far faster thrill. And it's still a primary way to swap naughty thoughts.

Instant messaging for sexy chats

IM, with its real-time nature and indicator of when people were online, took text-based cybersex to the next level.

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Last week, David Weber, a former chief inspector general for the SEC, filed a lawsuit against former employer.

He alleges that several individuals in the SEC retaliated against him for blowing the whistle on sex and corruption at the agency (h/t Rolling Stone).

Here's the 77 page complaint,

To begin, Weber says that two of his bosses at the Inspector General's office, former Inspector General David Kotz and his successor Noelle Maloney were sleeping together.

Kotz resigned from the SEC in January of this year.

Weber told Congress and SEC Commissioners that this, and other forms of misconduct on the part of Kotz, compromised high-profile SEC investigations into people like convicted Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.

This gross negligence, alleged Weber, even compromised the SEC's computer systems.

From the complaint:

Instead of fixing these issues, the complaint alleges that the SEC engaged in a campaign to publicly discredit Weber.

Weber alleges that SEC officials planted a false story in the press that he requested to carry a gun at the agency, among other things.

The statements they made trashing his reputation are being used in a custody battle over his kids.

The SEC fired Weber last month.

Now here are some of the more details in this scandal (Warning: This does contain some foul language).

• Kotz wasn't just sleeping with his successor, according to the complaint. He was also sleeping with an attorney on the Stanford case named Gaytri Kachroo. Here's how Weber found out from Noelle Maloney:
  
• Weber reported this misconduct to SEC commissioners a few days later. That's when Maloney started accusing Weber of threatening her safety. She told SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, who then told Weber she did not consider him a security threat. Maloney was demoted, but then started a campaign "attacking Weber's integrity."
• According to the complaint, Maloney had colleagues file false complaints against Weber and made it harder for him to do his work by removing his support staff.
• Maloney's attack culminated on May 3rd, 2012, when she alleged Weber was a "physical threat" and two SEC officials (including security chief William Fagan) signed her complaint knowing it was false. Weber was put on leave.
• SEC personnel allegedly brought laptops with super sensitive information to the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas and were walking around with nametags stating their place of employment. Weber brought this concern to Mary Schapiro the day before he was placed on leave.
• Weber was investigating allegations that Mary Schapiro perjured herself and lied during on-the-record testimony before the House and Senate Oversight Committees. Schapiro was aware of this before he was put on leave. Putting him on leave at all, actually, could spell trouble for her as well.
  

Weber is suing for $20 million in punitive damages (back pay, bonuses, benefits etc.). He also wants his job back (we're not sure why).

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The arrest of a former Scarsdale High School, N.Y., dean of students this week for allegedly buying sex and cocaine came out of nowhere, a former student says.

"It's really a tragedy, and it's really upsetting," Ken Hershey, a 2009 Scarsdale graduate and current Yale student, told Business Insider.

Ex-dean of students David Mendelowitz, 58, was one of three accused "johns" who allegedly patronized a prostitution ring that spanned the tri-state area.

Hershey told BI that Mendelowitz – whose role was essentially that of a guidance counselor at the posh school – always seemed kind and approachable to those students who actually knew him.

While the ex-dean's arrest came as a shock to Hershey, there was at least one sign that something might be awry.

In June Mendelowitz retired abruptly after missing several weeks of school, Scarsdale10583.com reported at the time.

Hershey remembers reading that news article and being surprised by the news.

"He says he loved his job, and he acted like it," Hershey said, adding that his retirement seemed "spontaneous."

The former dean's publicly appointed attorney, Monroe Mann, said he has been instructed not to speak to reporters about the case.

SEE ALSO: Former Dean At Scarsdale High School Was Arrested In Huge Prostitution Ring >

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San Francisco has banned public nudity in a vote that is likely to spark protests among the city's many naturists.

Two women stripped off as the result was read out at city hall on Tuesday. One said: "What are you afraid of? My government has failed me."

Another man stripped off and chanted: "The body is beautiful."

The vote went six to five in favour of the ban, which was supported by many residents and business owners in the city's Castro district.

For the past two years, there has been an almost daily gathering of naked men at a plaza on the corner of Castro and Market streets – a busy commercial, tourism and transit point in the city's famous gay area.

As soon as the ban was passed, one woman stood up and declared "this is not a democracy" before taking off her clothes.

Another lady in the gallery stood up and said: "I'm going to do it too" before removing her top. Two men followed suit.

Security removed a handful of others who had shouted their disapproval at the result of one of the most controversial votes the San Francisco city legislators have had in recent years.

The vote was close. Five of the 11 supervisors opposed the ban, largely on the grounds that they did not see the need for a city-wide ban to deal with a problem that is confined to one small area.

But supervisor Scott Wiener, who proposed the ban on nudity, said he had been hearing from upset residents of the Castro district for the past two years.

"This situation has changed" he said. "It's no longer sporadic. It's seven days a week in this neighbourhood where people live and work and conduct their lives."

He said people were standing at the corner of Market and Castro, "displaying their genitals to anyone who is passing by. It is very much a 'hey, look what I have' mentality."

While he recognised that Castro was a place of "freedom of expression," he said: "That doesn't mean we have no standards whatsoever."

He was opposed by supervisor John Avalos, who said he was concerned that a ban on nudity would be an infringement of civil liberties. "Sometimes there is a little weirdness about how we express ourselves and that's part of what is great in this city," he said.

Outside city hall, protesters gathered to shout their disapproval of the ban, with some ignoring the cold to remove items of clothing.

Opponents of the ban have until at least February to continue to walk naked in public. As a point of procedure the board must have a second vote in two weeks as a number of amendments were made to the legislation prior to Monday's decision.

A spokesperson for the law firm representing the pro-nudists said that a legal objection is also being filed.

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When it gets down it, in some biologists’ views anyways, it is all about sex.

Well, at least for much of the plant and animal kingdoms.

Every physiological adaption or morphological innovation comes about because it enabled some ancestors to survive, but becomes a trait of a species or a lineage because it gets passed on down the line of descendants.

Hence, sex matters – although, everything else that keeps an individual alive longer to have sex, or have more sex, matters just as much as well!

My friend and colleague Dr. Carin Bondar has a new series out for EarthTouch TV, an internet environmental and science channel on Youtube and also on their own webpage: EarthTouch.tv.

They have 21 series and it looks like how Discovery Channel and Animal Planet used to be when they just aired science and nature… but I digress.

The best part is that they are made for the internet. Short, interesting, entertaining and to the point with only a short commercial in the beginning.

Check out the first episode of Dr. Bondar’s Wild Sex series below and use your own judgement about appropriate age. It’s filled with double entendres but nothing obscene.

I think it’s an exciting way to present science. It’s fun, entertaining and filled with natural history. I think a teen and young adult audience would really like this series and has could have potential to reach audience segments that hard to reach for more traditional science communication on TV.

The trick is to push is out there, but with EarthTouch as a YouTube“TV station” the viral potential is great. Sharing among social networks is super easy, you can embed on your blog or website (like I just did) and discuss or critique it, and the energy of the Carin and length of the program is suitable for our ever-evolving short attention spans.

These characteristics are what sets Wild Sex apart from the current crop or “me-cumentaries” – where the documentaries are about the presenter and their journey and less about the topic/animal/environment/issue.

While the presentation and subject matter might remain mildly offensive to some nature documentary traditionalists and parents who might feel queasy whenever sex is mentioned around their children, those aren’t really the target audiences.

I, for one, am looking forward to future episodes!

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Last week, Chinese Communist Party member Lei Zhengfu was forced out of his role as the boss of Chongqing’s Beibei District after a tape showing him having sex with an 18-year old mistress circulated online.

The tape was apparently made in 2007, and though Lei had claimed it was doctored, the party decided that it was not and he was sacked.

But there may be more than just the sexual proclivities of a politician in this story.

Now the citizen journalist who broke the story, Zhu Ruifeng, is claiming that the girl was offered up to Lei as part of a bribe for contracting work.

Shanghaiist summarizes Zhu's claim:

Between 2002 and 2006, while Lei was Dianjiang County Party Secretary, he allegedly took advantage of his position to grant a number of lucrative contracts to his brother's construction company, pocketing a large sum of money for himself in the process. By 2007, after Lei had been promoted to Vice Party Secretary of Chongqing's Jiulongpo District, Lei's personal fortune had grown to the extent that developers effectively found him impossible to bribe.

One developer discovered Lei's weakness for women however, and set about hiring a number of attractive young girls, all under 20-years-old, and using them to set a "honey trap" for Lei. The women, after becoming Lei's mistresses, would secretly video themselves having sex with the corrupt official, giving their employer leverage over Lei.

Zhu also claims to have sex tapes showing 5 other party members.

Even more intriguing is that Lei apparently went to his former boss Bo Xilai (whose name you should know) a few years ago, and confessed the whole thing to get out in front of the story.

Bottom line, this story could end up being about a lot more than sex.

For more background, see here >

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The American Psychiatric Association regards Female Orgasmic Disorder as an official diagnosis.

It's in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, defined as a situation in which a woman is experiencing stress because her "orgasmic capacity is less than would be reasonable for her age, sexual experience, and the adequacy of the sexual simulation she receives." 

No matter how the notion of Female Orgasmic Disorder strikes you, someone thinks your opinion is sexist.

How we classify and name the aforementioned hypo-orgasmic scenario is passionately, hotly contested.

To deny its medical validity is to deny women's right to sexual prosperity; to support it is to put undue onus and the stigma of a "disorder" on women who aren't having orgasms.

Both sides believe it affects how we regard and treat women and these symptoms.

That's why a nasal-spray called Tefina (in development in Australia in Canada; just approved for phase two trials by Health Canada) designed to treat the condition — which could initially seem like a win-win-win-win-win proposition — is actually conspicuously contentious.

Dr. Susan Davis, chair of Women's Health in the Monash University Department of Medicine in Melbourne, Australia, is the lead researcher on the pharmaceutical company Trimel's trials.

On the CBC radio program The Current, Davis specified that while she doesn't use the term "disorder," she is adamant that there is a spectrum of sexual dysfunction in women — where they don't reach orgasm —that can be likened to impotence in men. She says that denying its existence and medical validity is "sexist [and] inappropriate." Men have Viagra/Levitra/Cialis, and women should have an equivalent option.

Tefina is testosterone in the form of a nasal spray, which, like Viagra, dilates blood vessels. One place that happens noticeably is the genitals, where increased blood flow increases sensation. "This dilation increases the capacity for women to experience an orgasm," Davis told The Current.

According to her it's been effective in about 60 percent of patients when used prior to sex. Beyond the physiologic mechanism, interestingly, she says testosterone also "has effects on thoughts, desires, and fantasy."

That sounds good, right? Everyone good with that? 

Liz Canner agrees with Davis in contesting the use of "disorder," but for a different reason. She believes that giving sexual dysfunction a name like Female Orgasmic Disorder is a byproduct of pharmaceutical company lobbying, created because it sounds more like something that warrants medication. She made an entire documentary about it, called Orgasm Inc. 

In a similar but less conspiratorial camp is Dr. Barbara Mintzes, assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology, and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia. She believes Davis is referring to sexual difficulty. "To call it a medical condition is to misrepresent it," she said on The Current, arguing that "sex is a cultural and psychological event." Testosterone may distract from treating the real etiologies — focusing on medication when what you really need is dance lessons, Mintzes offers.

Aside from arguments of stigmatization and distraction, this testosterone therapy might not even safely work. Similar treatments have been tried in the U.S. and failed. When Pfizer started profiting massively off of Viagra, there was a well-funded rush to capitalize on a female equivalent. If the answer was this straightforward it does seem like U.S. pharma would have found it.

After giving Viagra itself to women, which did not prove effective in clinical trials, there was Intrinsa testosterone patch, which was both ineffective and not approved by the FDA. It was partially approved in Europe but later withdrawn from production, according to Mintzes. She is skeptical that Tefina will be found effective and safe. In which case we would have less to argue about. 

We'll keep an expectant eye on Canada for more data from these clinical trials. Ultimately, though, whether this seems like a noble effort to remedy disparities in sexual health or a plot to capitalize on a stigmatizing medical diagnosis, we can at least agree that nasal sprays are inherently alluring and should be used to improve orgasm odds in every possible scenario.

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When a guy catches your eye, what draws your attention?

Some people may say nice eyes get them going, while others say a manly, chiseled jaw or big strong arms. Evolutionarily, though, a man's body fat, not masculine features, is a better indicator of how attractive of a mate he would be, a new study suggests.

With any luck, these traits of an "optimal" mate would be genetically encoded and would be passed on to the man's offspring — so a female wants to choose a man with good genes and a healthy immune system. We just need to know how to figure out if a potential mate has these traits.

Masculine looking males were believed to be a good indicator of good mate choice because their looks were thought to indicate better genes and a stronger immune system, one that could take on the negative effects of high testosterone levels (which make men more prone to infection).

A new study, published today Nov 27 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, switches that on its head. The researchers found that a man's waist size is more important than how masculine his face is, when it comes to attractiveness and good immune systems.

Twenty-nine women in the fertile stage of their menstrual cycle (meaning they were more receptive to sexual cues, and more responsive to masculinity) rated pictures of 69 young white males of all body sizes by their attractiveness, masculinity, and body fat.

They then took these rating and compared them to how well the men's immune system responded to a Hepatitis B vaccine. They also tested circulating testosterone levels in the participants.

The results showed that a man's masculinity rating didn't mean he was more attractive, and also didn't mean that his immune system worked better. How masculine a man was also wasn't an indicator of how much testosterone he had either.

On the other hand, body fat was linked to attractiveness, high testosterone levels, and a stronger immune system. Too much fat was bad too, though: Body fat attractiveness had a bell-shaped curve. The most attractive men had 12 percent body fat.

When he was above normal body fat — obese or overweight — the immune system was negatively impacted.

From their data, the researchers made a composite image of the bottom eight men with the cruddiest immune systems on the left, and the eight men with the best on the right. Which do you think is more attractive?

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Gennifer Flowers, a Louisiana woman best known for her involvement with former President Bill Clinton, has some advice for David Petraeus' biographer and former mistress Paula Broadwell as she faces the media onslaught over the scandal. 

Sipping wine in an interview with New Orleans ABC affiliate WGNO, Broadwell offered this pearl of wisdom: 

"Baby, you better buck it up because it's going to be one heck of a bull ride."

Flowers also told her interviewer that she last spoke to Clinton in 2005, when he asked to come by her house after Hurricane Katrina. 

“That was the last thing I expected," she said. "I said, 'No you can’t come over here, no way.'”

Watch the whole interview below. Seriously. 

(h/t Politico) 

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Restaurant chain Hooters gains more notoriety for its scantily-glad waitresses than its food. 

Now, a former Hooters waitress has come forward to talk about her experience there. 

The woman did a Reddit Ask Me Anything about her former job. Moderators verified her identity, and we edited some of her words for clarity and language. 

To start, she revealed how she got the best tips:

"I'm a big smart ass, and I can easily keep up with the guys. They LOVED it when I would come back with a quick remark, so I just never held anything back. The nice thing about working there was that I could say anything that I wanted as long as I was being genuine. I also had the best butt of the staff. It did its job."

She addressed the rumors that Hooters will pay for breast implants: 

"There is no truth in that. However, my store had a deal with a gym so we could get discounted memberships, and we often got deals on tanning. We were always trying to get them to set something up with a full-service salon so that we could get deals on hair and nail services, but that never happened."

How much she made in a day: 

"It of course depends on the day. We get paid our state's minimum wage hourly, and tips could be $50 on a very slow night. The lowest I think I ever left with was a lunch shift where I had two tables and brought home $23. But that's still $11.50 per table! On a huge game day I could easily make $250 or more."

Whether she minds customers checking her out: 

"A lot of gawking goes on, but really when I sit down most men are looking at my face, smiling, and waiting for me to make fun of their friend. I've never scoffed at a customer for glancing, even inwardly. Look what the hell I'm wearing. If I did not expect this, I have no business wearing it."

And her worst customer ever: 

"A customer straight up asked me if I would like to go on the cruise with him. I stammered out something about how I did not have break at that time. When he pressed, I just told him that I didn't want to go on the cruise with him because I really have no idea who he is and don't associate with customers outside of work. He finds this to be a good time to say, and I pretty much quote, 'Well, if you ever need a few extra hundred bucks, I could rent a hotel room and we could spend some time alone together.' I'm not sure I can describe my facial expression. I told my manager, who told him to get out and never come back." 

DON'T MISS: The Best Pictures From The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show > 

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We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but new research indicates that sometimes, those inclinations are correct. Women can often tell if a man is likely to be a cheater from their face alone.

Men weren't able to see the same in women.

This is "the first evidence that faithfulness judgements, based solely on facial appearance, have a kernel of truth," the researchers write in the paper, published today, Dec. 4, in the journal Biology Letters. "It seems remarkable that such impressions have any accuracy at all, given how poor accuracy is even with extensive behavioral information."

The researchers asked university students (34 men and 34 women) to rate photographs of 101 male and 88 female faces from photos. They were asked to rate how masculine or feminine the faces were, and how likely they were to be a cheater.

The images were from a set created in 2005 by the researchers, led by Gillian Rhodes of the University of Western Australia, which included about half self-admitted cheaters.

From the pictures alone, women were relatively accurate (they were wrong 38 percent of the time) at determining if a man had been unfaithful in the past. This unfaithfulness was linked to how masculine a man's face was, but not to his attractiveness.

Men weren't able to accurately tell if the female photos were faces of cheaters, guessing wrong 77 percent of the time.

That wasn't the only thing they were wrong about. To the men a woman's "attractiveness and femininity were highly correlated with unfaithfulness ratings, and each other, indicating that men perceived attractive, feminine women as likely to be unfaithful. However, there was no evidence that they were," the researchers write.

Another recent study indicated that the masculinity of a man's face wasn't linked to testosterone levels, or two how strong their immune system is (two indicators of a good evolutionary mate). Since cheating is evolutionarily bad (the male's investment in potential offspring would be decreased, or absent) these subconscious readings of a man's face may be working on concert to help women pick good mates.

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American Apparel has once again landed in hot water with UK regulators after running a series of digital ads of scantily clad women, one of which appeared to sexualise a model who appeared to be under 16 years old.

The controversial US retailer, which has regularly broken advertising rules for using exploitative images of young women, posted a series of ads on its website promoting two lines of clothing – tights and a range of coloured T-shirts.

Both campaigns provoked complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA received two complaints about the online images of young women modelling T-shirts – in which it was possible to see the breasts of the girls through the shirts – that they were offensive, irresponsible and overtly sexual and should not be displayed on a website children could access.

The ASA also received a complaint from a woman who had wanted to look at the online ads for American Apparel's tights with her 12-year old daughter, but found that the images – which featured women wearing almost nothing bar high denier tights – were "unnecessarily sexual and inappropriate for a website that could be seen by children".

American Apparel said the ads of young girls in T-shirts were "completely decent and a fair representation of their product".

In its ruling the ASA said that one of the models used looked under the age of 16 and that "because her breasts were visible through her shirt, we considered the images could be seen to sexualise a model who appeared to be a child".

Of the T-shirt campaign as a whole the ASA said that the images were sexually provocative, irresponsible and "likely to cause widespread offence, because they were displayed on a website which could be viewed by, and was likely to have appeal to, children under 16 years of age".

American Apparel argued it was "standard practice" to market hosiery and lingerie in the way it had done and added that children could access any website they wanted.

The ASA said that the ads were variously "sexually suggestive, gratuitous and flirtatious" and inappropriate in an ad for tights on a website accessible by children. It banned three of the 23 ads used on the website to promote tights.

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The town of Kennebunk, Maine, recently made headlines for releasing the identities of men charged with patronizing a Zumba instructor-turned-prostitute named Alexis Wright.

Despite all the attention, the strategy of "john shaming" is far from unique. It's just one of several tactics city and county police departments across the country routinely use to target the men who pay for sex, rather than the women who sell it.

Michael Shively of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, research firm Abt Associates has spent the past several years gathering loads of information about strategies that aim to reduce the "demand" side of prostitution.

Shively and his colleagues have compiled a database of at least 825 cities that employ at least one of these tactics.

The work has produced comprehensive reports for the Department of Justice [PDF] as well as a new website called DEMANDForum that tracks the "anti-demand initiatives" occurring across the United States:

Shively's work has shown that targeting demand can be much more useful than arresting the so-called "supply" side of prostitution: the women themselves, or the pimps trafficking sex.

Most communities begin by sweeping the streets for the suppliers of sex, but ultimately find the approach ineffective, he says. The women are often victims themselves who've been forced into the trade for various reasons, and the pimps are easily replaceable once they're taken off the street.

"Focusing on the supply, the supply of sellers of commercial sex, is not found to be effective," says Shively. "Police never find it to have any lasting or substantial effects other than short-term displacement or moving the problem around."

Isolated anti-john initiatives date back to the early 20th century, says Shively, but the trend really took off in the 1970s when groups began calling for equal enforcement of prostitution laws.

Since that time a number of strategies have emerged: from the "reverse sting" (undercover female officers solicit buyers) to "john schools" (programs designed to educate men about the risks of prostitution) to shaming. Shively's latest D.O.J. report charts the first cities of anti-demand: 

Shively credits St. Petersburg, Florida, for implementing some of the strongest early programs, back in the mid-70s, aimed at both reducing demand for prostitution and providing social support for female victims of it.

A pioneering john school started by San Francisco in 1995 reduced recidivism rates by nearly half, Shively reports, and became a global model for other cities.

A sustained program of reverse stings in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, established in the mid-1980s, led to a 75 percent decline in prostitution.

Other cities have turned to shaming because it's much cheaper than running schools or deploying undercover officers. Several places in addition to Kennebunk publicize names of johns on billboards, over the internet, or through press releases.

There are legitimate ethical concerns about the tactic — some argue that it unfairly maligns men who haven't yet been convicted of a crime — but from an effectiveness standpoint, police interviews and community surveys suggest it's a strong behavioral motivator.

"Cities have gotten themselves into position to pursue these tactics for many different reasons," says Shively. "In some cases, it's been a nonprofit organization that maybe heard something or was looking for something. … In other cases the police have said, what we're doing isn't working, what else is out there."

Cook County, Illinois, which encompasses Chicago, is doing the best overall job targeting demand today, says Shively. The county is part of a wider statewide anti-demand campaign called End Demand Illinois, driven largely by the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, with an aim to shift the attention of law enforcement onto patrons, not prostitutes, and create support networks for victims.

Nashville, Tennessee, also deserves praise for its aggressive john school, he says, which generates about $100,000 a year for survivors.

Budget is a major obstacle for some cities when it comes to fighting prostitution, but criminal priority is also significant, says Shively.

Some police departments or district attorneys choose not to emphasize the crime because it's only a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Still many officers recognize that most of the felonies targeted by cities — from weapons offenses to murders — are found in high concentrations around prostitution rings.

"Police that connect the dots and that connect all the crimes together, they  think it's time well spent to focus on prostitution," says Shively. "They know they don't get anywhere with supply and distribution, so the ones that are consistently aggressive about demand see that they're attacking the market that drives many of their other problems."

Shively hopes DEMANDForum will give cities the information they need to pursue whatever tactic they deem best for them. (The site is live but still being updated, he says, with an official public release planned for the coming weeks.) He's especially hopeful that some places will be able to learn from the efforts of others.

Cities that have given up on john schools because they couldn't get support from a district attorney, for instance, might follow the lead of Waco, Texas, where program leaders turned to the city attorney instead.

"One of the reasons we put the information together was so that people would not have to reinvent wheels if they're interested in a wheel," he says. "We want to make the information about what communities have done accessible, so others can get new ideas they haven't thought of, or find solutions to problems that have been solved elsewhere."

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Male and female executives sitting on the same board are engaged in "sexual display" - like mammals in the wild on the hunt for a mate - which is why most women won't succeed at the top, MPs have been told. Louisa Peacock reports.

If we are to believe independent researcher Steve Moxon, it won’t be long before Sir David Attenborough presents a wildlife programme on the mating habits of male and female board executives.

According to the self-described academic and author, also one of the first witnesses on the Government’s “ women in the workplace” inquiry, men and women interact through “sexual display” in the boardroom, which leads to the demise of the female of the species.

The display, Mr Moxon explained to MPs, involves men showing off their competitiveness, and women “backing off”.

“When there are men and women together, the basic interaction is not cross-competition; it is sexual display. Males will display their competitiveness; females will back off from competition. They will actually reduce their competitiveness,” Mr Moxon told MPs on the Business Select Committee last month.

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This mating ritual is the main reason why most women will never succeed at the top in a workplace, he claims. It is also the reason why listed companies will only ever have a ratio of male to female board members at around 10:1, or so he claims, rendering it pointless that government tries to boost the ratio to 50:50.

Mr Moxon, author of antifeminist book, 'The Woman Racket’, claims his controversial theory is based on “biology”. “You must start from the biology. The basis of the biology is, 'Is there a difference between the sexes?’ You are damn right there is,” he said. “Males compete with other males to sort out the men from the boys, as it were; females, preferentially, sexually select the highest-status males, i.e. the males of a higher rank in the male dominance hierarchy.”

He continues: “[The workplace] is a hierarchy for obvious reasons that we do not need to go into. Males fit into that very well. Females obviously do not.”

The researcher added that because men more readily identify with their peer group – whereas females are more tied to their “personal network” – male workers are even more likely to get ahead.

“It is no surprise that women have difficulty in the workplace. Not only do they have difficulty; they do not want to be in it in first place,” he claimed.

After a lengthy explanation of the “science” behind his theory, Mr Moxon said: “Presumably, the whole point of having women on a board is to bring some, what would you call it, womanly qualities ... However, since the Davies report there have not been any appointments of executive females; they have all been non-executives.”

Explosive theory aside, Mr Moxon has a point on numbers. A recent report by Cranfield School of Management showed the number of female executives on boards has barely risen in two years since the Davies review, which looked at ways to boost female board representation.

Company chairmen are ramping up efforts to recruit female non-executive directors, but little is being done about the dearth of women climbing the career ladder to fill core board seats.

A new Cranfield report on Monday shows that women who get executive posts often have financial experience, suggesting companies aren’t doing enough to “cast the net wider” in the search for talent.

But Mr Moxon’s “sexual display” theory won’t cut it with the main equality groups, who have long argued that the main barrier for women reaching the top is childcare. Dr Ruth Sealy, a researcher on the Cranfield studies, says childcare is often the “elephant in the room” when attempting to explain inequality on boards.

Bright and talented women who take time out to look after their children find it hard to return to the workplace after having been away. As a result, many opt for part-time roles, which are generally lower-paid, and many cannot see a way of reaching the top of their companies, research suggests.

At an event at the London Stock Exchange last month, organised by The 30% Club, women in the room cheered when a delegate raised the issue of childcare costs with Vince Cable, the Business Secretary. He was presenting at the event on how far companies had come since the Davies report – 40pc of all FTSE 100 board appointments in the last six months have gone to women – but childcare is still seen among many as the biggest barrier to women going further.

Mr Moxon doesn't buy that argument, and he's not the only one.

Mike Buchanan, chief executive of the Campaign for Merits in Business, which campaigns against more gender diversity in the boardroom because it believes it will "damage corporate performance", told MPs on the same BIS select committee that he believes women aren't wired to reach the top: childcare has nothing to do with it.

He mentioned the work of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge University, who published a book called The Essential Difference in 2003.

Mr Buchanan said: "His thesis is basically that evolution has led to the male of the species, if you like, having a brain that is hardwired for systemising, i.e. having an interest in systems, how to improve them and how to change things around, whereas women’s focus, for evolutionary and psychological reasons, is more around relationships.

"We even find in the business world that women talk a great deal more about interpersonal relationships than men do. Men, if you like, are task-driven, in a sense, and women are far more likely to be people-driven. It is my thesis that as you go towards the top of major organisations, particularly private-sector organisations, being good at systemising gives you a natural advantage over being good at empathising."

He added: "At the end of the day, the biological side of all of this - I know it is contentious - is not part of our case, at the Campaign for Merit in Business, as to why increasing gender diversity on boards in particular is a dangerous thing.

"The core of our argument is that there are five longitudinal studies showing that when you 'improve' gender diversity on boards, financial performance declines. There is not a single robust study that says performance improves when you do that."

It is difficult to demonstrate absolute proof that gender diversity leads to better performance. But for every study claiming there is no link, other studies claim the opposite.

One of these includes a report by Credit Suisse earlier this year, which analysed the performance of 2,360 global companies over the last six years. The findings said it would, on average, have been better for shareholders to invest in corporates with women on boards compared to those without.

The Credit Suisse report added: "We also find that companies with one or more women on the board have delivered higher average returns on equity, lower gearing, better average growth and higher price/book value multiples over the course of the last six years."

Mr Buchanan's comments, along with Mr Moxon's, will undoubtedly upset those in the equality lobby, not to mention ordinary women who struggle to reach the top because of childcare, or sexism, or any other gender-related barriers that they experience.

But perhaps it is about time those campaigning for more women on boards switched the debate from the pure “numbers game”, focusing on how many women have or haven't been recruited to the top, to what UK companies are actually doing to help get them there.

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