Liz Langley

Newt Gingrich hasn't said what he bought at Tiffany's for $500,000, so you'd have to think it could be a bit on the embarrassing side. We understand that Tiffany's doesn't have a sex toy department, but here are some of the world's most expensive adult items and  what adult items he...or you... COULD buy with a half-million dollars. Some of my other recent MyPleasure postings you might want to check out:  Secretly Sexy  about the joy of wearing beautiful lingerie for nobody but yourself, and  What's Your Goddesss Identity?  a look at some of the more intriguing female deities who (on the heels of Thor) might warrant their own action/adventure film one day (if you're Aphrodite, heavy on the action). Enjoy!

I love this story. It's not that I don't enjoy all the stories I do but this one was especially juicy for me. I found a study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology that said men often prefer women who have midrange or even low self esteem to those with high self esteem, a study I found both sad and validating. Sad because I like men and don't like to think of them as wussing out by avoiding confident women. Validated because I have seen - in life and pop culture - that that is sometimes the case. But just to make sure I called the study's author, Dr. Virgil Zeigler-Hill who said what even a confident woman often needs to hear - 'You're right.' He also offered greater insights into the nuances of the study and into the cowardice of narcissism and the sad behavior of guys like Jessee James and Chris Brown (I do like an academic who reads his tabloids). The result is this column:  Get Conifdent, Stupid!  I hope you enjoy it - and it might make you take a

Orlando was recently named the 4th Gayest City in America by  The Advocate ! We're gayer than San Francisco and Atlanta (combined, if you're in the right place at the right time) and personally I think we're better for it. I'm delighted to support a community which has supported me more than my own underwire so CONGRATULATIONS and send this to anyone who has helped us claw our way almost to the top (watch out, Minneapolis...we're getting that No. 1 tiara next year).

Republican job creation: Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to keep comedians, writers, photographers, journalists, talk show hosts and publishers busily working for quite some time thanks to his now-public extramarital affairs. The information just comes and comes and I got to weigh in on Arnold's thrill-seeking temperament thanks to my BFFs at Hollywood Life: Schwarzenegger slept with the housekeeper for the thrill, not the sex, experts say . True lies, indeed.

My new book, "Crazy Little Thing: Why Love and Sex Drive Us Mad," is coming out through Cleis Press / Viva Editions in November, but when my editor sent a review copy I had to show it! It's so gratifying to work on something like this for so long and actually get to hold it and show it off! The book is about love, all the wonderful, insane and totally counterintuitive things it can make people do, with lots of interviews with experts - psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and others - AND interviews with people who had extreme experiences in love, for good and bad, people who, like all of us, let their hearts take the wheel from their heads. "Crazy Little Thing" is already available for pre-order on  Amazon.com  and you get 30% off the list price if you order it now! I hope you do and I hope you fall crazy in love with it!

        As many of you know I was a columnist for many years for a number of newspapers. Now after lots of work as a freelance writer and with a  new book coming out this fall  from Cleis Press/Viva Editions I'm very happy to say I'm also starting a new column which will run every two weeks in  SeXis Magazine ! SexCult is about sex, relationships and love in our culture, with a large dose of science and psychology thrown in. I've got tons of ideas and while I'm working away on those check out the first one,  SexCult: The Bear Essentials , in which we broach the question...are those furries onto something?       Please check out all the other awesome work in SeXis while you're at it, come back and see me again and ENJOY!

     When Nora Ephron titled a book "I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being Female," she wasn't kidding. Well, she might have been a little bit, because she's pretty funny, but when it comes to feeling bad nobody seems to do it better than women.      After reading a story about women who compulsively watch porn feeling more guilty about it than their their male counterparts I started looking at why women feel so bad about feeling good, especially about sexual images.   The result is now on Alternet:  Why Do Women Always Feel So Bad About Feeling Good?                                                             So enjoy....and don't feel bad about it.

     I had never met a transgender person before I met Gina Duncan, at least not to my knowledge. Humans aren't peacocks, announcing their gender so definitively that you always know what's going on under their jeans, Dockers, pencil skirt or what have you. I was interviewing Gina for  Watermark , about her 2007 gender transition and the first thing I noticed was that she was far more put together than I was. Granted, I had had a tough week, but we all have tough weeks, but you should never show up in Thornton Park looking like it.      In  a society so glued to the status quo that it failed to adopt the metric system, changing things isn't always that easy and changing sexes is especially difficult, socially, psychologically and physically. Gina's approach to the extraordinary step she took - a modest-yet-ironclad determination to improve her life - is genuinely inspiring.      So I hope you'll read and enjoy  Mission: Transition / Creating a New Normal  along wi