Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.

Breaking taboos

So the Family Planning Association, in an effort to break taboos and generate a bit of moolah, has launched an online shop selling sex toys. Unsurprisingly, it's the first in the charity sector.

The charity says it wants to use the service to encourage people to enjoy sex, as well as to learn more about their health, and generally to encourage more frank discussions. More information is available here.

The site was launched last night at a party hosted by Dr Dawn Harper, host of TV show Embarrassing Bodies. It will raise awareness and will plough profits back into FPA’s work around the UK. That work will educate, inform and campaign on sexual health issues.

Dr Dawn, as she’s known on the show, said: “Enjoying sex is an important aspect of human pleasure and can be key to a person’s overall wellbeing. There’s no reason it should be a source of embarrassment or shame.”

Amen to that.

#holdacokewithyourboobs

We move on to a social media charity craze which does pretty much exactly what it says on the, er, can. Folk are encouraged to post pictures of themselves holding a can of coke gripped between your breasts and post a picture to social media, apparently to raise awareness of breast cancer.

A number of individuals have not been backward about coming forwards, and you can scroll to the bottom of this page to see one particularly well-endowed individual. If you want to find other participants, well, the hashtag is out there waiting for you.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this is that it’s being touted as a craze to encourage breast cancer awareness, but it was actually just a joke between two adult movie stars. It was never intended to raise awareness at all.

Of course, this creates a surprisingly interesting philosophical conundrum about the consensuality of meaning – certainly more philosophically interesting than you’d expect, anyway, given the name of the hashtag.

It’s a similar issue raised by the deconstructionist literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes in his famous tract, The Death of the Author. Surely it is the participant and the recipient, not the originator, who is ultimately responsible for the meaning of a work. In this case, if everyone thinks the trend is raising awareness for breast cancer, then surely they’re raising awareness for breast cancer, whatever the originating porn star intended.

(On a side note, the first person to post to this hashtag, adult model Gemma Jaxx, has now said she wants to use it to raise awareness as well.)

Separately, of course, there is the moral conundrum of objectification and whether charities really want people to use soft porn as awareness raising, whatever the views of the participants. So the philosophy of meaning turns into a practical question for the sector – who has ownership of breast cancer awareness – the public, or the charities who are seen as convenors?

To what extent should breast cancer organisations attempt to steer the bucking bronco of viral media, and should they ever try to get off the horse if it heads in a direction they disapprove of?

Yeah, but what’s the score?

We take a break from sex to bring you news of the world’s longest football match, played in Southampton earlier this week by 36 players from the charity Testlands Support Project, which is a local children's organisation.

It looks like it’s been a bit arduous, to say the least. The guys who played the match competed in three- and four-hour stints, sleeping by the side of the pitch under gazebos and getting regular physio.

Organiser Luke Newman picked out some particular lowlights.

“Monday night was so bad,” he said. “I think it must have rained from about eight or nine o'clock in the evening, through to about 11 o'clock in the morning - it was just solid rain.

“We had to play for a 12-hour stint so we couldn't change our clothes.

“The tents all got absolutely soaking wet. The clothes inside and the sleeping bags were just drenched.”

The poor buggers had just about reached 100 hours and were looking forward to a warm shower and a sleep when someone told them that another group had done 101. You have to imagine that they must have looked a bit gutted.

As usual, news reports have omitted the most crucial point of the exercise, though. The match saw more than 1,500 goals, but nowhere is Society Diary able to track down who won, or what the actual score was.

Not a match for a goalkeeper, though, is it? Imagine how it must feel, trudging back to pick it out of the netting for the 750th time.

It appears they raised about £25,000, though. So well done there.

 

 

 

Did you scroll down? Here's the pic we promised.