- Mandy Morbid describes what it’s been like making the cult-hit YouTube show I Hit It With My Axe (a Dungeons and Dragons group comprised of porn performers), and the absolutely astonishing amount of abuse they’ve received from the gaming communities for being mostly female, and being in porn. It makes the women in tech problems look trite — especially because some of the sickest trolls attacking the women are professional game designers, and validated by their communities.
More Reasons People Found to Hate Me (Mandy Morbid)
- Exactly what prompts Facebook to erase porn stars accounts even when they abide by the rules is something of a mystery. Maybe it’s just because they’re porn stars: Regular people frequently post the same content without fear of censorship.
Porn Stars Want to Know: Why Did Facebook Delete Me? (Daily Beast)
- This item is from Tuesday, but a friend just pointed out a very important piece of information we learn by reading it: Whisper, the “secret” and “anonymous” secret sharing app can: view your posting history, see your geolocation data – and they gladly analyze the data for Gawker. Think about it.
Fucking Uber And Lyft Drivers Is Apparently A Thing (Jalopnik)
- A great interview with one of my closest friends. “Eon McKai made a lot of smut starting in 2006, a time when change was afoot at the adult film production company Vivid Entertainment. Hustler had bought VCA Pictures, and Vivid was being squeezed out and destroyed. Under these difficult circumstances McKai was recruited to launch Vivid Alt. In a last gasp, Eon McKai was handed the keys to the kingdom, a chance to challenge stale industry standards by showing porn as a celebration of women.”
Beautiful things that happen in the dark: A conversation with Eon McKai (The Rumpus)
- The Kickstarter is for Gay Men Draw Vaginas, raising money for “A beautiful book of vaginas drawn by gay men.” Beautiful is one way to put it… the project started as a gag, and turned into a hilarious, celebratory and completely awesome collection of gay men’s artistic commentary on ladybits. I love it! Check out Buzzfeed for backstory and Tumblr for fun. On Instagram too, but destined to be censored.
Gay Men Draw Vaginas (Kickstarter)
- I wonder how this is going to go horribly wrong. Three guys have launched Great Fap (greatfap.com), where users upload a photo and then watch porn with performers who look like the person in the photo. The system uses software called ReKognition, designed by firm Orbeus, which built a facial recognition API for Google Glass. This program matches photographs using key facial features, hair color, body type and ethnicity. Right now, Great Fap is only a database of women.
Start Me Up: Is The Adult Industry A Place For Young Tech Entrepreneurs To Make Money? (Forbes)
- This 1997 instructional video can’t decide whether to be informational or sexy and, as a result, succeeds at neither. Tedium has never been this topless.
How To Have Cybersex In 1997 (Digg)
- A witness told Ohio County, W.V., sheriff’s deputies she saw 53-year-old Barbara Jean “B.J.” Geardello taking her boyfriend, Robert Deyell, 56, for a walk on a dog leash. She said he was wearing a hood, and his feet and ankles had been tied. As for whatever was protruding from his butt, she didn’t hazard a guess.
Woman Walks Naked Man on Dog Leash, Puts Unknown Object in His Anus (Gawker)
- A Houston woman is suing Facebook for $123 million, alleging that the social media company was inexcusably slow to respond to her complaints about a “revenge porn” Facebook page set up by an estranged friend. The woman discovered the Facebook page in December 2013, but the page wasn’t removed until February — and only after Houston police subpoenaed Facebook to find out who had created it.
Facebook “revenge porn” lawsuit hits Mark Zuckerberg where it hurts (Salon)
- 4-Hour Workweek author and lifestyle blogger Tim Ferriss is challenging his readers to 30 days of no booze and no jacking off. This Daily Beast writer doesn’t seem to know how to write about someone being simultaneously sex-positive while they talk about not masturbating…
Tim Ferriss Is Bro Culture’s Anti-Masturbation Crusader (Daily Beast)
Illustration by Jonny Ruzzo
- “With the possible exception of competitive pole dancing, no sport is more erotic than baseball in late summer… The only sound now was Glavine’s new tool. The baseball bat made a sick, dull thud each time it landed on his meager expanse of ass and muscular hamstrings (…)”
Baseball Erotica #1 John Smoltz and Tom Glavine (VICE)
- Despite its success in developing countries, the female condom has long suffered from a PR problem in the U.S. What would it take to salvage its image?
Can the Female Condom Go Mainstream? (The Atlantic)
- A new study has used a massive and long-running European survey to investigate how differences in cognitive ability are changing. This is super smart, because it offers us an escape from arguing about whether men and women are different in how they think, allowing us some insight into how any such differences might develop.
Are women and men forever destined to think differently? (Mind Hacks)
- I am so in love with this video. The founders of ManServants are two San Francisco women who work in advertising, and they say it’s not a stunt. The service, which launches September 1 in S.F., offers women (and men) a way to rent a custom-made male companion for almost anything she wants, aside from sex and stripping. Watch ManServants’ over-the-top commercial above.
Looking To Rent A Hot Pool Boy? New Startup To Deliver ‘ManServants’ On Demand (SFist)
- “The first time I caught one of my kids playing with their genitals, I said absolutely nothing. I was momentarily paralyzed with indecision. One thing I knew for a fact I did not want to do was to shout, “No!” or “Stop!” What good could that possibly do? Sure, I would be spared the awkwardness of catching my child playing with her genitals on the living room floor, but what kind of lesson is that? To fear or ignore your own vagina?”
This Is What Sex-Positive Parenting Really Looks Like (Huffington Post, via Vu)
- “True Blood” star Anna Paquin defended bisexuality — namely, hers — in a particularly awkward exchange on “Larry King Now.” The talk show host seemed befuddled by Paquin identifying as a bisexual when the topic of her marriage to male costar Stephen Moyer came up.
Anna Paquin defends bisexuality on ‘Larry King Now’ (SF Gate)
- These peaches from Yangshan, in Wuxi (China), an area that’s famous for its lingerie and garment industry, are being sold to capitalize on the the upcoming romantic Qixi Festival. China News reports that these unusual peaches are called “Ripe Fruit” (蜜桃成熟時). They aren’t cheap: A box of nine panty fruit is 498 yuan or US$80.
Peaches Sold as Sexy Butts in China (Kotaku)
- This is such an incredible essay. “At the age of 10, I took a pledge at my church alongside a group of other girls to remain a virgin until marriage… Waiting didn’t give me a happily ever after. Instead, it controlled my identity for over a decade, landed me in therapy, and left me a stranger in my own skin. I was so completely ashamed of my body and my sexuality that it made having sex a demoralizing experience. I’m now thoroughly convinced that the entire concept of virginity is used to control female sexuality.”
It happened to me: I waited until my wedding night to lose my virginity and I wish I hadn’t (xoJane)
- Six women discuss pornography, its place in our lives, and what a perfect porn future would look like. Here is an online conversation between six women about what porn means to them, how it’s affected their lives, and what could make it better.
Porn: A Conversation Between Women (Buzzfeed)
- “Female data sets are worth more money.” When you enter the online world, your gender doesn’t get left behind. When information or photos that are regularly posted online get into the hands of someone “who doesn’t care about us or our safety, or worse – someone who gets off on hurting women – [it] is disastrous, no matter how proud we are of our bodies, how sex-positive we are, or how comfortable we are with being sexy and strong at the same time.”
Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy offers practical solutions for privacy blues (Abine)
- This week the Prince George’s County, Maryland police department will live tweet prostitution stings in some weird attempt to create a social media version of “To Catch a Predator.” This is a horrible idea, for so many reasons, not least of which is the county’s horrible record on not screwing up things of this nature.
Live-Tweeting Prostitution Raids Is a Terrible Idea, But It’s Happening Anyway (VICE)
- Some adult film actors have voiced complaints after Samuel L. Jackson, during a press conference panel for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, replied to a question about what pop culture innovation he’d recommend to Steve Rogers by saying, “RedTube.” So much facepalm here I don’t even know where to start… Let’s hope someone tells these porn performers how tube sites do content partnerships. (Partnership affiliate programs between porn studios and the tube sites are where the studios GIVE FREE CONTENT to the tube sites for affiliate links — and it has been a big business for several years.)
Porn actors call for boycott of Samuel L. Jackson movies after he recommends free porn (AV Club)
- South Dakota Republican Rep. Steve Hickey sent a lengthy letter to the editor to the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest newspaper, in response to a federal lawsuit against the state’s gay marriage ban. The letter, titled “A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck,” is as fantastically vulgar and obsessive as you would hope it to be.
Republican Legislator Pens Fantastically Crude, Obsessive Op-Ed About Anal Sex (Slate)
- “Wen Zhou, a psychologist and olfaction researcher at the Chinese Academy of sciences, and her colleagues looked at two compounds found in bodily fluids that, according to earlier studies, are good candidates for human pheromones: androstadienone, associated with men, and estratetraenol, from women. The two steroids were found to elicit markedly different responses in male and female test subjects.”
Human Sexual Responses Boosted by Bodily Scents (Scientific American)
- “It doesn’t matter if you think sex doesn’t belong in games, because sex is one of those basic human drives that manifests itself in our lives and in our art, whether by our own volition or in the minds of our players. Barbie dolls were not necessarily meant to be used as objects of sexual experimentation — but that didn’t stop me when I was 10 years old.”
Childhood, Barbie dolls and make-believe: designing thoughtful games about sex (Polygon)
- “Right away, we might be reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Tyrone Slothrop may or may not have been secretly conditioned to get an erection every time a V-2 rocket is about to strike London. Yet to find more patients for Tausk, we don’t need to look to fiction. “At first I believed they could only terminate my erection, but recently I also started believing that they could create my erection,” writes the author of a recent blog about electromagnetic persecution by the government.”
Ruins of people’s lives (New Statesman)
- Online retail for sex toys in India is apparently starting to take off. “This may be the best kept secret of India’s $2 billion e-commerce story. The country’s middle class has found in it a platform that satiates their sexual desires and fantasies in ways that weren’t possible before.”
E-tail gives sex goods a big push (Times of India)
Don’t get hacked, make safe dating profiles and fight back at online harassment: learn how in my new book The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy. Find out more on the book’s Smart Privacy Tumblr.
- Vanessa Omoregie’s camgirlsproject project pairs famous paintings of nude muses – Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), Amedeo Modigliani’s Nudo Sdraiato (1917) and Guerin Pierre Narcisse’s Morpheus and Iris (1811) — with overlaid crops of camgirl-style self-portraits.
Classic Nude Paintings Remixed With Consenting Camgirls (Animal New York)
- IMO, this is a serious threat to free expression. The Web as we know it is being replaced, slowly but surely, by mobile apps. Access to those apps is controlled by just two companies: Apple and Google. There are now more people using mobile devices than are using desktop browsers. Do you have an app for your adult site? Not for Apple/IOS devices, you don’t, because Steve Jobs hated porn so badly that Apple still bans anything vaguely sexy from its app store. You probably don’t have an Android app for your adult site, either; Google’s app store has always banned explicit content, and recently tightened the rules to exclude “erotic” content as well.
Where Your Adult Site Visitors Went (Eros Blog)
- The Federal Trade Commission’s move this week to formally charge the operators of Jerk.com with alleged deceptive trade practices involving improperly obtained profiles signals the beginning of a new focus for the agency. The FTC said in a federal complaint that Jerk.com misled users when it claimed the content on the site had been created by users. In fact, regulators said, most of the site’s content was harvested from Facebook.
FTC Complaint Signals Caution for Dating Sites (XBIZ)
Veiviev’s New Awesome Oculus Porn Demo from VRSexLab.com on Vimeo.
- Don’t miss this fascinating exploration on Oculus Rift tech and gender, where danah boyd begins with the accusation that it’s a sexist creation and attempts to solve the question as to why women are more prone to be sick in simulators than men.
Is the Oculus Rift sexist? (Quartz)
- ABC News’ Nightline will be airing a segment “The Effects of Piracy on Adult Entertainment” tonight at 12:35 a.m. EST. The piece focuses primarily on Tasha Reign, but also includes interviews with Takedown Piracy owner Nate Glass, Wicked Pictures contract performer and director Jessica Drake and many more from the mainstream porn industry.
ABC’s Nightline to Air Segment on Porn Piracy Tonight (XBIZ)
- Ever feel like you just don’t have the energy for sex during the work week? Between exhausting jobs, kids and other duties, it’s hard to fit enough time in the day. But it’s not impossible to maintain a good sex life.
How To Maintain Your Sex Life During The Work Week (LifeHacker AU)
- The 2014 Feminist Porn Conference was presented by The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto April 5 and 6. It was the culminating event in a week of diverse happenings that included a special film screening of the past year’s best films, a storytelling event, a fisting workshop, a new film festival, and the ninth annual Feminist Porn Awards (2014 winners are here). More than 300 people attended the second annual conference.
2014 Feminist Porn Conference Reports Spike in Attendance (XBIZ)
- In a lawsuit by revenge porn victims over the controversial revenge porn website Texxxan.com, a Texas state trial court had ruled that Texxxan’s web host, GoDaddy, was liable for hosting the site. Today, a Texas appellate court fixed the lower court’s obvious legal error and emphatically ruled that GoDaddy qualifies for Section 230′s protection. While this is good news for the judicial system’s accuracy, it’s hardly the last word on revenge porn legal questions.
Revenge Porn Is Bad, But It’s Not GoDaddy’s Fault (Forbes)
- It was only a matter of time. If you’ve never heard of bubbling, the ingenious invention of a young, lonely Mormon man that lets your mind turn innocent bikini shots into porn, now’s your chance to get acquainted.
The Bubble Porn Video: No Nudity, But Extremely NSFW (Gizmodo)
- Despite the daunting challenge of collecting information and artifacts surrounding one of the most unspoken parts of our culture, Vienna’s Museum of Contraception and Abortion has managed to gather an impressive collection of contraceptive curios.
The Museum of Contraception and Abortion (Atlas Obscura, via Viviane’s Twitter)
- Mississippi’s sex-ed curriculum is not notable for its progressive nature. But one thing you can’t say about the Magnolia State is that it follows the advice of some conservative parents who want schools to totally ignore homosexuality. In fact, state law mandates that the subject be discussed, at least briefly: Students are to be told that homosexual activity is illegal.
Mississippi’s Sex-Ed Classes Teach Kids That Homosexuality Is Illegal, Even Though It Isn’t (New Republic)
- Sex with robots may currently be restricted to fiction, but with advances in technology this could eventually change. Despite how some may react, this is something that should be accepted, maybe even embraced.
Robots and sex: creepy or cool? (Guardian UK)
- Here it comes: “(…) let’s talk about the shit storm broiling over the pre-release material for the next Tomb Raider game, in which the protagonist, Lara Croft, is retconned as a survivor of sexual and physical assault. (…) Industry mandarins seem to have assumed that gamers, by which they mean male gamers, can only carry on loving cold, powerful, beautiful Lara Croft if someone “break[s] her down”.”
Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch (New Statesman)
- Even if you heard about this, the details are amazing (for all the wrong reasons) and deeply troubling. She said “vagina.” The House responded: “What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”
Lawmaker barred from speaking after ‘vagina’ comment (The Detroit News)
- As part of her recently completed PhD, Ms Monique Mulholland undertook a study involving children aged 13 to 16 from three high schools. While the study confirmed that young people are finding sexual images readily accessible, Ms Mulholland said they did not seem to be “taking over their hearts and minds”.
Teenagers not taken in by raunchy imagery (Flinders News)
- If you’re on Quertee, please vote for this USBGendered shirt so I can buy one!
USBgendered (Qwertee)
[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]
- One of Berlusconi’s Bacchanalian party attendees, a beautiful Dominican woman named Marysthell Polanco (pictured above), dressed up as U.S. President Barack Obama to entertain guests at what Berlusconi has described as “elegant dinners.”
Marysthell Polanco: I dressed up as Barack Obama for Berlusconi (FP Passport)
- Dayuse-Hotels.com, a libertine lodging service that lets you book upscale hotel rooms by the hour, has now launched stateside. Skip the no-tell motels and choose among more than 200 hotels in the world: to work, rest, rendez-vous…
Get A Room! (Museum of Sex Blog)
- Unhappy with the current state of the porn market in Switzerland, Sabine Fischer and Sandra Lichtenstern began experimenting with vintage ‘70’s porn in 2009 and have built their project into a business that has sold thousands of copies of new videos in just a few months, mainly to young couples and almost entirely by word of mouth.
Swiss Porn Takes Artistic Turn (XBIZ)
- Recently the Village Voice exposed the Schapiro Group, a private consulting firm in Georgia, and the Women’s Funding Network of California, a women’s charity, for knowingly deceiving both congress and the public using false data manufactured through fraudulent research. These groups presented alarming reports of a sudden rise in trafficking and sexual exploitation of girls.
Sex Trafficking Charities Caught Lying And Stealing Money (therealpornwikileaks.com)
[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]
As fate would have it, this morning I began reading Geoffrey Gray’s Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper, about the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. aviation history. An early portion of the book is devoted to the fascinating and horrifying conditions under which stewardesses were expected to work in 1971, at the time of the skyjacking. Marketed quite explicitly as sex objects, they were costumed to please (generally much older) businessmen, and expected not just to smile but to titillate. One airline, Braniff International, even instituted The Airstrip, with stewardesses peeling off breakaway uniforms in-flight.
And, perhaps most famously, stewardesses in 1971 could be fired for gaining weight. Gray relates the story of how the stewardess who would later receive Cooper’s skyjacking note was called into the airline’s office, ordered to get on a scale, and when she turned out to weigh 185 pounds, was placed on 30 days unpaid leave. She dropped her weight with diet pills and got her job back.
That kind of employment discrimination sounds like it should be ancient history in any business, right? Not entirely in the airline industry. (Also, see the fourth item down in this Nibbles.) And not in the casino trade, where a 7% weight gain can get you fired as one of Atlantic City’s Borgata Babes.
An article by Paul McGeough in Australia’s the Sydney Morning Herald relates complaints by female employees at Sydney’s Star casino, which recently got a makeover by Larry Mullen and Sid Vaikunta, the wunderkinder who opened Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel & Casino. The scantily clad “Borgata Babes” form one of the casino’s main selling points in a town that’s seen its revenues crash in recent years. There was even a Babes of Borgata calendar back in 2009, from which the lead image of this post is taken, although it doesn’t appear to have become an annual tradition.
The Borgata is trying to sell Vegas glitz as Atlantic City tries to compete with the easier, sleazier casinos opening throughout the Northeast, closer to many population centers and cheaper to reach and stay at. This part won’t surprise anyone who’s been to any casino on the Vegas Strip: [SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]
