Word: sexuality
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Awareness will also help victims' parents overcome the stigma attached to having a child die this way. People frequently confuse the game with erotic asphyxiation, the sexual practice thought to heighten an orgasm. And they frequently assume that victims suffer from psychiatric conditions like depression. In fact, victims tend to be high-achieving students at school, active in sports and well-behaved, according to doctors and some victims' parents. "They aren't playing this game for sexual gratification," Field says. "It's to get a high without taking drugs." (Read "How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century...
When Iceland installed Johanna Sigurdardottir as Prime Minister last February, newspapers around the globe printed variations of the same headline: ICELAND APPOINTS WORLD'S FIRST GAY LEADER. Everywhere, that is, except Iceland. The Icelandic media didn't mention Sigurdardottir's sexuality for days, and only then to point out that the foreign press had taken an interest in their new head of state - a 67-year-old former flight attendant turned politician whom voters had consistently rated Iceland's most trustworthy politician. Sure, she was gay and had entered a civil partnership with another woman in 2002. But Icelanders hardly...
...baiting has proved equally ineffective in Germany. Andreas Heilmann, a social scientist at Berlin's Humboldt University, believes that a politician who discloses his sexual orientation is insulated from criticism. "They embody a certain authenticity and credibility because they're open," he says. By contrast, opponents who make sexuality an issue are typically viewed as mean-spirited and politically incompetent. When Hamburg's former vice mayor Ronald Schill outed the city's Mayor Ole von Beust at a press conference in 2003, Germans mocked Schill, and Von Beust went on to win the 2004 elections in a landslide...
Demographic shifts may also play a part. For a growing number of people in a continent grappling with how to assimilate migrants, the gay community can seem less threatening than recent arrivals from the Muslim world. "It's creepy," says Rayside of the University of Toronto, "but sexual minorities are seen as a safer and more respectable minority because they know what 'Britishness' or 'Dutchness' is." A 2008 poll, for example, found that while only 27% of Dutch voters would approve of a Muslim Prime Minister, 78% would approve of a homosexual in the same role. (See pictures of Muslims...
...mayor, is all of those things: he regularly appears with his neurosurgeon boyfriend at public events and ran for office with the slogan "I'm gay and that's a good thing." But even he doesn't believe a level playing field exists yet. "As long as the sexual orientation of a candidate is publicly discussed at all," he says, "one has to assume that it's still not normal for a gay person to aim for such a position...