At the start of the 1980s, video games were mostly relegated to coin-gobbling arcade machines, but their surging popularity prompted a Time Magazine cover story in January 1982 with a cringeworthy warning: “GRONK! FLASH! ZAP! Video Games are Blitzing the World!”
Why are masked characters so hot? Sex therapists weigh in.
From thirsting over “Daddy” Michael Myers to simping for Scream franchise villain Ghostface, the internet is really into masked men. Last month, the phrase “Ghostface kink” trended on Google search because TikTok users were in the (horny) Halloween spirit. Some creators made videos from the point of view of someone being murdered by him (for sexy purposes), while others bought their partners Ghostface masks to spice up their love life.
Over the past few months, content creator Brittany Broski has waxed poetic about her attraction toTikTok cosplayers who dress up as masked character Ghost from Call of Duty as well as the masked band Sleep Token. A video of her talking about “jerkin’ it” to the mysterious rockers has half a million views on TikTok.
“If I see a man in a mask,” Broski has said, “it’s over.” That’s because, she admits with tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, “I have a mental problem, I have a mental lack somewhere… and I’m not really motivated to do anything about it.”
Our curiosity has been piqued by these feral FYP posts, so we asked two professionals to weigh in on the erotic possibilities of masks. What’s so enticing about them, even (or especially) when they’re worn by murderous characters? What does our attraction to masked figures tell us about our greater sexual desires?
Fear and arousal can be strange, sexy bedfellows. That’s because they “come from the same base emotion [of] physiological arousal.” says Gigi Engle, a certified sex and relationship psychotherapist and resident intimacy expert at dating app 3Fun. The adrenaline that accompanies fear increases heart rate and blood pressure. “It’s a state of euphoria so intense that we chase it and seek it out,” she says. “Think of people who absolutely love rollercoasters or scary movies. They genuinely enjoy the feeling of being afraid.”
With all that excitement, blood flow to the genitals also increases. “This is why people in fearful states sometimes report experiencing a genital response despite not feeling turned on,” says Engle. “Consensual encounters designed to amplify the ‘near-death’ feeling are not literally putting you in a life-threatening situation, but your nervous system doesn’t know how to make the distinction.”
So, those TikToks that make it kind of hot to be killed by Ghostface? The fun is all in the fantasy. “Even though fear can amplify sexual excitement, you also need to know that the ‘fear’ or perceived ‘danger’ is grounded in real safety,” Engle notes. “In order to become fully aroused, we need to feel safe.”
“Sometimes a mask grants the opposite of fear and can help someone feel safe and confident,” says Bobby Box, certified sex educator at b-Vibe. “Similar to how trolls who feel comfortable being rude online but not in person, there is a veil that can make someone act more bold or out of character.”
“When you obscure even a portion of someone’s face, their identity is immediately changed,” Box explains. Plus, masks can alter the voice, “further removing any identity from an individual.”
Then, the possibilities for sexy fun multiply. “This person can be anyone and do anything, which can be incredibly sexy given the scenario,” he says. “I know many gay men who prefer anonymous sex or ask that you wear a blindfold so their identity isn’t revealed. While some men do this because they are closeted, others are merely turned on by the fact they’re having sex with a stranger.”
A study from early in 2023 found that people who think they are attractive are less likely to still wear a mask in hypothetical situations like a job interview or while walking their dog than someone who does not think they are attractive. Box says this extends to the bedroom, where masks can make someone who isn’t confident in their appearance feel more comfortable and adventurous.
When it comes to role-play, masks are “a simple way to visually assume a role without much effort,” says Box. “I mean, Clark Kent wore a measly pair of glasses as a disguise and nobody knew he was Superman.”
Bad boy tropes and forbidden trysts up the ante of a sexual encounter with any partner, whether they’re a stranger or a long-term love. Masks are often crucial to the believability of this kind of role-play and help with immersion, says Box. If our desire to make out with a tragic character is motivated in part by our belief that our love can fix him (ex. the Phantom of the Opera, Kylo Ren), then removing his mask is a sign of deepening trust and connection.
When people are attracted to fictional characters they see in horror films and media, that attraction can get mixed up with fear in interesting ways. Engle explains that when fear is “coupled with an erotic cue or image,” for example, “a sexy actor starring in the scary movie you’re watching (think Brad Pitt in Seven)… [T]he physiological arousal produced by fear can be mistaken for sexual arousal because people are misattributing the true source of that arousal.” Basically, “they’re linking it to the sexy person rather than to the fearful situation.”
And this happens for people you’re attracted to IRL, too. Engle says that “riding a rollercoaster with a date you’d fancy seeing naked later,” for example, can also make it hard to separate fear from attraction.
Ironically, covering up in the bedroom may be one of the easiest ways to set yourself free from insecurities or expectations. As long as you feel safe, incorporating masks into sex is totally normal.
Molly Manning Walker’s film is a chilling revelation of how sexual pressures can manifest differently for men and women.
Content warning: This feature discusses sexual assault.
It was meant to be the “best holiday ever” but it ended up being a euphoric yet devastating life lesson.
Molly Manning Walker’s Cannes Film Festival breakout How To Have Sex takes audiences on a sizzling, searing journey to Malia, Crete, on a tumultuous girls trip. Three teenage best friends Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis) have finished their exams and are taking the Cretan town by storm in a blur of hedonism and newfound independence. But what ensues amongst the fish bowl cocktails and sticky nightclub anthems is a tussle with toxic friendships and the nuances of sexual assault and consent. At its core, the film weaves a dark but important tale of female sexuality and pressure.
How To Have Sex encourages post-watch conversations about problematic gender and sexual dynamics, particularly for young people. Walker’s film highlights the harsh contrast between the perceived experience of the “lads” and “girls” holidays, and how they are both portrayed in popular British culture. As a rite of passage, it is known as a trip taken by young women and men during school or college age – often a first solo trip abroad, even more often an excuse to blow off steam, party and experiment sexually.
When we watch films about “lads holidays” — think The Inbetweeners, American Pie, The Hangover, 22 Jump Street — they’re mostly lighthearted stories of young men on their quest to “get laid”, an experience, for better or worse, that’s often trivialised in comparison to the darker undertones of How To Have Sex and its female leads’ experiences.
The film is a chilling revelation of how sexual pressures can manifest differently for men and women — pop culture represents men having a laugh as they navigate their sexuality, while women are often put in danger. This portrayal is not an accident — it reflects the dark side of this journey for women. One in 16 U.S. women experienced forced or coerced intercourse as their first sexual experience in their early teens, according to a study, while a U.N. Women UK investigation found that 97 percent of women aged 18-24 have been sexually harassed.
For sexologist and relationship therapist Madalaine Munro, this highlights a gender gap when it comes to inherent safety within early sexual experiences, and how it has become normalised. Clinical psychologist Dr. Sarah Bishop adds that the lighter portrayal of male sexual experiences “trivialises male sexual exploration, often without addressing the consequences or complexities involved.”
Walker’s research while making the film revealed surprising attitudes towards consent and sexual assault in younger generations. In an interview with Empire, she described “mind-blowing” pre-shoot workshops with teens during which some girls expressed views that veered towards victim blaming. When the production team asked their focus group to read a scene of sexual assault from the film, “they’d be like, ‘I don’t see any issues with this scene,'” Walker said, with one participant saying: “Girls have to wear better clothes. They have to protect themselves and not get drunk.” Victim blaming aside, it’s clear that young women are absorbing societal messages that the onus of preventing sexual assault falls to those most vulnerable.
Conversations need to be had about the dangerous consequences of victim blaming, particularly amongst women in female friendship groups.
The director described How To Have Sex as “the sort of film we need right now… one we’ve needed for a long, long time”. Conversations need to be had about the dangerous consequences of victim blaming, particularly amongst women in female friendship groups.
“When society teaches women to be competitive, dismissive, and weary of each other it adds to the lack of safety each woman inherently feels,” Munro explains. “It also creates a subtle narrative for women normalising mistreatment — that it is OK to be treated poorly by both men and women. This makes violence against women more dangerous because they feel isolated in it, and they can’t trust others for support while going through traumatic events.”
The film also dives deep into the nuances of consent, as protagonist Mia (played to perfection by McKenna-Bruce) encounters multiple sexual assaults from a “lad” her friends meet and party with on the Malia strip, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). She’s depicted saying “no” repeatedly, then “yes” in one instance, with clear negative and uncomfortable body language throughout all of the interactions, causing the viewer to think deeply about what consent truly is, and how it cannot be binary and must be continuous. More than that, consent can be withdrawn at any stage – and Tara’s experience onscreen brings attention to this often overlooked fact. Here, we see that “giving in” and saying “yes” after saying “no” repeatedly beforehand does not necessarily count as consent.
“We are witnessing a transition where consent wasn’t spoken about in the mainstream perhaps a decade ago, so as a society we are catching up with learning about consent,” Munro says. “For many, nuances in consent may be deeply misunderstood because we are living within an infrastructure which wasn’t built to recognise them.” She adds that “consent education at schools is so important, to help children and teenagers understand how to determine their own yes or no, and also how to process someone else’s no.”
“For many, nuances in consent may be deeply misunderstood because we are living within an infrastructure which wasn’t built to recognise them.”
The pressures around damaging trivialisation of “virginity” is also explored, with Tara’s friend Skye threatening to out her sexual inexperience in a game of Never Have I Ever. She tells Tara, “if you don’t get laid this holiday, you never will,” perfectly demonstrating the toxic competitive element of sexual discovery and experimentation, and how peer pressure influences and exacerbates it. It brings attention to how problematic “virginity” is as a concept – after all, it exists as a socially constructed idea within a patriarchal structure to devalue women, including Tara and her friends.
It encapsulates the onus that is applied to one’s first sexual experience, and the way this can warp our expectations to a dangerous degree. Bishop advises that discussions around virginity need to shift from judgement and shame to one that focuses on “personal choice and autonomy”, adding that stories onscreen should depict “a range of experiences and challenge stereotypes”, leading us to a more realistic and inclusive portrayal of virginity. This should help to dismantle harmful narratives, but before these conversations can shift, the negative nature of the status quo has to be highlighted.
In the aftermath of her sexual assault, we see Tara operate in silence, unable to put into words what happened to her. She speaks of how “strong” Paddy is, how he “knew what he was doing”, but the vocabulary of assault is never used. It’s a heartbreaking example of the need for better education around this subject, so that young people, whether they are victims or not, can express themselves about and call out this behaviour.
“From a psychological perspective, sex education is vital to help people develop the emotional and cognitive skills necessary for understanding consent, building healthy relationships, and reducing the stigma around the issues,” Bishop says, adding that a lack of education increases the likelihood of assaults occurring due to people being unaware of what constitutes sexual violence and abusive behaviour.
“For some women, this behaviour can be so normalised that they may not even realise that it is abuse until they see it on the screen.”
Munro adds that this silence and lack of communication after assault is part of a larger picture that involves lack of barriers to resources for victims – government research in January 2023 saw a reduction in conviction rates across domestic abuse (2.1 percent) and rape (7.2 percent). As well as pushing, campaigning and insisting on better sex education, instigating these important conversations through film, TV and other mediums is crucial.
“When consent and violence is portrayed on screen, it can give a voice to women who may not feel they have one. It may help them to understand the impact of what they have been through in a more accessible way,” Munro says.
“For some women, this behaviour can be so normalised that they may not even realise that it is abuse until they see it on the screen.”
Another huge vehicle for change when it comes to sexual assault and violence against women is exploring how men can help in preventing and challenging it – and How To Have Sex depicts this important issue perfectly. Alongside Paddy, we have the dubiously named Badger (played by Shaun Thomas), who forms his own friendship with Tara and clearly holds suspicions about potential sinister behaviour from his mate. But, significantly, he says nothing to try and stop it. He comforts Tara, sure, with weak comments about how long he’s known his friend — as if friendship duration negates the damage and his complicity.
Tackling this tricky dynamic, and the importance of men holding other men responsible for their actions, is one of the film’s biggest achievements.
“Engaging men and boys is very much part of the solution to ending male violence against women and girls,” Rebecca Hitchen, head of policy and campaigns at the End Violence Against Women Coalition tells Mashable. “Women consistently say they want men to call out unacceptable views and behaviour amongst their peer groups, and to be helpful bystanders. This means naming problematic behaviour when you see it, confronting your own ideas about masculinity and sometimes intervening in harassment and assault in safe ways.”
Munro insists that portraying the impact of men not holding other men accountable on screen is important, showing the impact of enabling and perpetuating abuse. “The standard of what is socially acceptable then changes, as we see with outdated perceptions of consent, abuse and violence,” she says.
Tackling this tricky dynamic, and the importance of men holding other men responsible for their actions, is one of the film’s biggest achievements.
One of Walker’s core missions with How To Have Sex was to shine a light on the “gap in education around consent” – she has done this and more, isolating shadowy corners of sexuality and holding them to the light. Munro calls films like this “pivotal for bringing conversations around consent and sexual pressures forward”.
“When we look at old romantic comedies, some of the behaviour normalises nonconsensual, harmful behaviour,” she says. “So films and stories that discuss consent and sexual challenges can help people to identify things that we relate to but may not have words for.”
Hitchen adds: “We’re still a long way from shifting public attitudes to sex, and it’s crucial that this is tackled not only through education and public campaigns, but in popular culture like films, TV shows, books, the media and beyond, which drives a crucial part of what we find acceptable and how we collectively think and behave.”
How To Have Sex, and films like it past and present, can stand strong alongside other campaign methods to change how we speak about sexuality and assault, and how they are navigated in the future.
How To Have Sex is now showing in cinemas.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
An asteroid slammed into Earth, triggering a widespread dinosaur extinction. Scientists found that a colossal amount of dust in the atmosphere darkened the planet and devastated the food chain.
For two particularly harsh years after the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth, the world darkened and temperatures plummeted.
Ultimately, the food web collapsed, wiping out starved terrestrial dinosaurs.
New research, published in the science journal Nature Geoscience, reveals a detailed view of what transpired after the roughly six-mile-wide rock collided with our planet. The impact hit around the Yucatan Peninsula, ejecting a nasty brew of soot, sulphur gases, and extremely fine dust into the atmosphere. Crucially, scientists found this dust proved extremely potent in blocking sunlight.
A long, callous winter, with vastly reduced light for some two years, followed.
“That shuts down photosynthesis. And breaks down the food chain,” David Fastovsky, a professor emeritus in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Rhode Island who has researched the dinosaur extinction, told Mashable. Fastovsky had no involvement in the new study.
In a well-known site that preserved fallout from the asteroid impact, the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota, the researchers found a high abundance of these fine dust particles in the pinkish, uppermost layer where the last of the dust settled. Then they simulated, using advanced climate models, how such a high amount of dust would have behaved in the lofty skies. Global effects persisted for well over a decade, though they were greatest for the first couple years. It wasn’t just dark, but also cold.
“The new paleoclimate simulations show that such a plume of micrometric silicate dust could have remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years after the event, contributing to global cooling of the Earth’s surface by as much as 15 °C [27 degrees Fahrenheit] in the initial aftermath of the impact,” Cem Berk Senel, a scientist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium who led the research, said in a statement.
It takes the largest class of asteroid — a half-mile-wide or bigger — to potentially trigger such a worldwide effect. “To shut down an entire global ecosystem is truly astounding,” Fastovsky noted.
“To shut down an entire global ecosystem is truly astounding.”
This scale of rock hits Earth every 100 million years or so. Fortunately, astronomers are vigilantly scanning Earth’s solar system neighborhood for big asteroids, and have found no known threats of collision for the next century, and the likelihood of an impact in the next 1,000 years is exceedingly low. (Smaller asteroids, which are more common, hit more frequently: On average, a car-sized asteroid explodes in our skies each year, while impacts by objects around 460 feet in diameter occur every 10,000 to 20,000 years.)
The latest research adds to a preponderance of evidence that an asteroid collision triggered the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction event, also known as the K-T event, 66 million years ago. (Some argue that potent, long-term volcanism in what’s now India could have driven the extinction.) Ultimately, some 75 percent of Earth’s species went extinct. The new study, pointing at the outsized role that dust played in collapsing the food web, fills in more of the picture of what happened so long ago. “It’s another step,” Fastovsky said.
Some life, of course, persevered. Some organisms could hibernate, some seeds could stay dormant. And some dinosaurs — avian species — survived, too. These birds, which have since evolved over millions of years, persisted, in part because they could gobble many different types of food (unlike, say, many carnivores).
Today, around 6,400 species of mammals roam Earth. Yet over 10,000 bird species inhabit the planet.
“You’re still living in the age of dinosaurs,” Fastovsky marveled.
Connections is a New York Times word game that’s all about finding the “common threads between words.” How to solve the puzzle.
Connections is the latest New York Times word game that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for November 4’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer. If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hit about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Training Arc
Green: Annular ring
Blue: Murder weapons
Purple: Electric-based things
Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Ways to prepare
Green: Hollow Cylinders
Blue: Weapons In The Game Clue
Purple: “E-” Things
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to Connections #146 is…
Ways To Prepare: DRILL, PRACTICE, STUDY, TRAIN
Hollow Cylinders: HOSE, PIPE, STRAW, TUBE
Weapons In The Game Clue: CANDLESTICK, KNIFE, ROPE, WRENCH
“E-” Things: CIGARETTE, BIKE, TICKET, SPORTS
Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Is this not the Connections game you were looking for? Here are the hints and answers to yesterday’s Connections.
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There’s a new study about cell phone usages and how it may impact sperm.
A new study out of the journal Fertility and Sterility suggests that higher cell phone usage may be associated with lower sperm counts.
The study, called “Association between self-reported mobile phone use and the semen quality of young men,” was published on October 31. Researchers recruited over 2,800 men — 2,886 to be exact — ages 18-22 from the general Swiss population between 2005-2018 during their mandatory military service.
This study was brought about because of the sharp increase in cell phone usage in the past few decades and concern over potential risks. Our phones emit a low level of non-ionizing radio frequency radiation, which is generally considered harmless according to the FDA, but some people have concerns as to how it impacts reproductive health.
Of the total amount of men who participated in the study, researchers had data on mobile phone usage for the vast majority (2,789). Of those, 2,759 responded to questions about frequency of cell phone usage, and 2,764 provided details of whereabouts of their phones when not in use.
“The median sperm concentration and TSC [total sperm count] were significantly higher in the group of men who did not use their phones more than once per week…compared with men using their phones >20 times per day,” the study reports.
This correlates into a 21 percent decrease in sperm concentration and 22 percent decrease in TSC for frequent (over 20 times a day) compared to rare (less than once a week) cell phone users.
The odds of having sperm concentration below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) reference value for fertile men (15 million sperm per milliliter) was significantly higher for men who use their phones 5-10 times a day compared to those who used it 1-5 times a day or less than once a week. “In this logistic regression model, men using their phones >20 times per day had a 30 [percent] and a 21 [percent] increased risk of having sperm concentration and TSC below the WHO reference values for fertile men, respectively,” according to the study.
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Sperm volume, motility (the ability to move properly), and morphology (size and shape) differences weren’t associated with cell phone use frequency. The majority of men in the study (85.7 percent) kept their phones in their pants pockets, but that was not associated with sperm quality differences either.
Correlation also doesn’t mean causation. Lifestyle factors like diet, alcohol use, cigarette smoking, stress, and others can affect infertility as well. As the study concludes, “The lack of clear evidence for a negative association between mobile phone use and male fertility [meaning an increase in cell phone use while a decrease in fertility], as well as the dramatic increase in cell phone use over the past decade, underscores the need for further research in this area.”
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