Sex educator Violet Blue's site for sex culture commentary, accurate sex information, erotica and more.

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In an article headlined Super Bowl: Volunteers Prepare to Stop Pimps, Sex Traffickers, the Christian Post reports on what may be the very weirdest sporting-event-related promotional giveaway in history: Super Bowl anti-sex-slavery soap. No, I’m not making this up:

Theresa Flores, founder of Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.), told The Christian Post that major sporting events like the Super Bowl generally have more men in attendance who are visiting from a different city, and often do things they wouldn’t normally do at home. This creates a demand that “traffickers and pimps are there willing and waiting to supply,” she said.

Because of this, about 150 volunteers for S.O.A.P. are heading to Indiana before the event, not to tailgate, but to pass out soap at Indianapolis motels.

Each bar of soap will have a label on it with phrases like “Are you being threatened?” or “Are you witnessing young girls being prostituted?” The soap provides the number for a human trafficking hotline so that those at the hotel, or young girls who are being trafficked, will see it and can call for help.

S.O.A.P. volunteers will distribute the bars Feb. 1-2, in conjunction with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students who will hand out fliers to raise awareness for the trafficking issue with football fans.”

[Link.]

This has been an ongoing theme over the last week; the anti-trafficking activists are coming on like runningbacks. A Texas group called Traffick 911 has even started a petition trying to force the NFL to post their “I’m Not Buying It” posters opposing human trafficking. That’s called “free advertising.” The NFL is a business. If the New York Department of Public Health has to pay for their posters on the subway, my thinking is that some half-baked foundation ought to do the same for their misinformation spreading anti-sex hysteria at the Super Bowl. Would those same groups have been happy if public health groups tried get the NFL to put up posters encouraging safer sex?

Even Catholic nuns are getting into the act — at least eleven different congregations of them, according to this post at the LA Times:

[Sister Ann Oestreich] is coordinating the Super Bowl 2012 Anti-Trafficking Initiative for the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan. The group says it has contacted the managers of 220 hotels within a 50-mile radius of Indianapolis to help spot trafficking.

…Major events such as a Super Bowl or Olympics often attract a host of illegal activities, including sex trafficking and gambling.

To deal with an expected increase in prostitution, Indiana passed a law, which went into effect on Monday, designed to make prosecution of sex trafficking easier. Among other things, the law makes it a felony to recruit, transport or harbor anyone under the age of 16 for prostitution or other sexual conduct, punishable by 20 to 50 years in prison.

Another nun, Sister Nancy Conway, is quoted as saying, “If one woman is saved at the Super Bowl, it will all have been worth it,” in a WCKY Cleveland article that quotes some unbelievably sketchy statistics. The piece claims “The federal government estimates human trafficking is a $15 billion a year business. It’s also estimated about a 1000 girls are trafficked every year in Ohio alone.” Sister Pat Bergen quoted even more outrageous statistics in her article for the Chicago Tribune.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. Hooray for Flores, Conway, Traffick 911 and their parade of fanatics for opposing human trafficking…if that’s what they’re really doing. But it pays to remember that what they’re supposedly selling in this case is not the idea that human trafficking is bad, but that it happens more during the Super Bowl. Does it? Or have these groups cooked up a crazed response to a fictional phenomenon, in order to sell a few unrelated ideas — the ones about how sex is bad, sex work is bad, all sex workers are victims, and events like the Super Bowl encourage men to be somewhere other than church on a Sunday? [SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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Did you know that on Trojan’s 2006 report card on sexual health on college campuses, Yale was the only university with a perfect score, praised by Trojan for its excellent student sexual health resources?

One of the reasons Yale students rate as such sexual smartypantses is the annual Sex Week at Yale (SWAY), which kicked off today and runs through February 14. It’s been an annual event since 2003. Sex Week is “an interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest through creative, interactive, and exciting programming.” It’s long been the state-of-the-art event when it comes to sex education on college campuses. This year’s event features oodles of interesting programming, including programs by friends-of-Tiny-Nibbles like Maggie Mayhem, Babeland‘s Claire Cavanah, Bawdy Storytelling‘s Dixie De La Tour, The Center for Sex and Culture‘s Carol Queen, and more.

Unfortunately, not everybody has been stoked about the inclusive, sex-positive nature of SWAY, and as a result, it looks like the event’s undergone some unsettling changes. Sex Week At Yale 2012 almost didn’t happen. Anti-sex, pro-marriage activists tore into it last year under the euphemistic name “Undergraduates for a Better Yale College,” with a headline “Why Say No to Sex Week?”

And why, pray tell, should Yale “just say no?” Because Sex Week At Yale was too cozy with that old demon, pornography, and its bestest friend, BDSM.

Here’s what “Better Yale” says:

As we approach and prepare ourselves for Sex Week 2012, we ought to ask ourselves if these are really the messages we want to reinforce, and if these are the “experts” and role models we want to seek out for advice and instruction on the preciously important questions of love, intimacy, relationships, and our sexual nature.

[Link.]

See what they did there? Clever of them, huh? They called Maggie Mayhem and Carol Queen “experts” instead of experts. It’s passive-aggressiveness at its classiest, which is apparently one of the relationship values these cats “want to reinforce.” In protest, Undergraduates for a Better Yale College is sponsoring its competing “True Love Week” at the same time as SWAY. Because nothing says “no sex” like “true love,” right? [SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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Hmmm… What’s insulting, reductive and straight-up shitty about the new ads for .XXX?

Maybe that porn is not, in fact, moving its prime .com real estate to .XXX?
Maybe that women are not pieces of sexualized furniture?
Maybe that the women in porn are people – not objects 24-7?
Maybe that a representation of a permanently sexually receptive woman is rapey?
Maybe that some porn webmasters are also women?
Maybe that all of these things are an inaccurate representation of porn?

I’m just guessing. Feel free to add your opinion in the comments.

It’s not much better than the first round back in December, which has *interesting* African-American stereotypes in it.

The other two new ones:

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Boston indie publisher Circlet Press has been publishing erotic science fiction and fantasy since the early 1990s. One of my very favorite books they ever published was Nymph, a little hardbound collection of linked erotic stories by Francesca Lia Block.

Cooked up in a gumbo pot from equal parts ultra-hotness and ultra-gothness, Nymph is an amazingly sexy exploration of a Southern California fantasyland in which a scorchingly erotic love affair with a lost mermaid can be a Venice Beach surfer’s 6 a.m. — before he even gets coffee. Packed with melancholy eroticism and urban loneliness, Nymph pirouettes across the sexual spectrum in unpredictable ways. It shows the full range of Block’s “sensual, dream-like” approach to fiction, but in Nymph, it’s soaked in explicitly romantic sexual description that can be as beautifully heartbreaking as it is erotic.

In case you’re missing my point: Nymph is one of my favorite erotic books ever. And it just came out in a new ebook edition, available at the Circlet Books website for just $4.99, in PDF, mobi and epub formats. Here’s how Circlet describes this brilliant collection:

As in her other works, Block weaves together themes of subtle magic, youthful hopes, modern urban decay, and deep emotion, told with lyrical storybook language.The stories in NYMPH bear all the hallmarks of classic Francesca Lia Block — punk-spirited characters who celebrate love, life, and art–with one important difference: this time the author carries her vision through the full range of emotion and erotic interaction that her mature audience appreciates.

An interconnected series of stories, NYMPH is a special journey through the lives and loves of characters like Plum, a Crayon-haired girl who has a gift: if she makes love with a person, that person will then meet their true love, or Tom, a burned out surfer whose luck changes when he is rescued by a mysterious, wheelchair-bound woman, or Sylvie, a chronically depressed poet who finds beauty in unexpected places. Block’s erotic explorations of these smoky, kaleidoscopic fables are anything but conventional; these are stories of love, loss, and life, about the healing power of sex and bonding.

[Link.]

When it came out a decade or so ago, this book raised more than a few eyebrows. That’s because Block is primarily known as the creator of the Weetzie Bat books, a six-book series for young adults.

Weetzie Bat is every bit as interesting as Nymph, and far more important in the history of sexuality, for completely different reasons. Despite its young adult audience, the Weetzie Bat series shamelessly portrayed sexual orientation, attraction and choice as mutable across a range of options. Its main character chooses to be a single mother, and invites her two gay best friends into a Beatles-fueled threesome so that the child will belong to all of them. With its celebratory pro-queer view, the Weetzie Bat series radicalized the sexual politics of adults writing young adult fiction, without including a single explicit sex scene or the faintest whisper of exploitation. Wrapped up in magic and sexuality and set in the dreamland known as “Shangri-L.A.,” the series revolutionized queer representation in young adult fiction, portraying a wonderfully wholesome exploration of alternative lifestyles, chosen families, and even true love.

Plus, it’s just a damned lot of fun to read. Unfortunately, Block’s prominence within young adult fiction meant that booksellers and libraries didn’t know what to do with Nymph, and in my opinion it’s never gotten the recognition it deserves. When it comes to urban erotic fantasy, Block’s Nymph is sui generis and, more importantly, mind-bendingly sexy.

It may be short, but it’s lingered longer in my consciousness than many a one-night stand. Like so many of Block’s erotic love affairs, the book’s brevity only makes that last kiss sweeter and saltier as you turn the final page. Because every kiss in this beautiful book is laced with Venice Beach salt spray…and tears.

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