(The post in which I prove to some that I am a bad, bad person, as they really knew was true all along.)

A friend emailed me earlier today asking if I’m going to Blog Her. I thought, blog who? Then I dimly remembered, in the wayback fuzziness of my porn-alcohol-Strunk and White-Raymond Chandler-jacking off in front of the computer too much-addled brain, that someone I knew, once, mentioned a convention or something called Blog Her. I seem to remember BH mentioned in nice, dulcet tones, and some sort of other disharmonious chords chiming in as well. Really, that’s all I remember. It was Webzine 2005, so it was actually my last memory before I woke up with my clothes off monday morning and a “we are the media” sticker still crammed in a personal crevice that Shall Not Be Named.

My friend emailed saying, but a famous woman on the internets is going. Are you going? I said “no, I have my limits. I will dwindle away in quiet obscurity while cows on stilts occupy the limelight, tending to my hearth fires of interenet blogwars and crazy blogger cat ladyness.”

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Parents shouldn’t be worried about naughty podcasts or iPod porn — there’s a bigger threat out there… Juice Box Pr0n! Since I can’t seem to get Phillip to let me edit an issue of Naughty Make (he, in fact, pretends not to know me when I bring it up no matter how much blow and hookers I offer him), I feel a certain duty to show off Hornboy’s latest invention. Originally intended as an electronic lyre for marching band practice, he’s been tinkering around with a Juice Box, alternately making it scroll the mysterious language of musical notation and bending bits of brass to affix it onto various shiny metal musical instruments lying around my house.

It was about two seconds later that I found porn on it. When queried about the new wave of portable porn devices and image sourcing, he sheepishly shrugged, “I got it off Fleshbot.” Oh.

I’m pinching myself all over — Coop made me a present and sent it to me and I have it right now! Guess who I’m dedicating it to!?

“God, how could he make a mullet–a mullet with highlights, no less–look so sexy? ”

Annalee Newitz opens up a can of (sexy) geek girl tech writer whoopass on Slashdot’s less evolved members in her AlterNet article The Down Side of Slashdot. It’s a short but pointed piece about writing an article and having its worth evaluated based on your looks, and comments are already out of control. Blogging on the local front, yesterday I wished happy birthday to San Francisco cult icon Anton LaVey, and thanks to Jonno and the Weather Channel, I’ve found my favorite new fetish: earthquake porn!

Boing Boing quipped about a blog post from a TiVo pauser who wrote down the contents of a quick shot of Rob Corddry’s “racist” hate list; I once actually had a vivid sexual fantasy about him. Is that wrong? Let’s just say, he was on *top*. But it’s good to know that along with nonwhites he also hates, “(…) Lebanese, Lebanese Christian. Lesbian Chrisitan, Jerry Lewis, TiVo List Pauser, Hawaiian, NPR Listener, Puerto Rican, Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Bicurious, College Lesbian, Sunni, Seriously Stop Pausing This, Canadian, From Either Dakota, Stephen Colbert, Terrier, Butch Bottom, Size Queen, Texan, Swiss, Somone Who Only Gets Their News from The Daily Show (…)”.

* I guess I’m just amazed that anyone on The Daily Show knows what a butch bottom is.

Even so pregnant she looks like she swallowed an old-school iMac. Especially when you can see through her top. Also check out the Many Boobs of Madonna.

I’m wading through book edits while squeezing in reading my way through the 250+ submissions I got for Best Women’s Erotica 2007. Jeebus. Horny in a cafe, again. But — two things are really making me crazy-homicidal with the erotica. One: don’t name your male characters “Sire”. Just don’t. Not seriously. And! Don’t! Write! With exclamation points! Take out the punctuation, disable your shift key… Just stop hurting me. Ow!

Just landed in my inbox (and I see the EFF’s Staff Attorney is, ahem, all over it) but it looks like “new media” student group Emersive at Emerson College is:

a) full of extremely sexy and uninhibited nerdy guys; b) they have made a beefcake calendar; and c) they are donating some of the proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is *so* going in my file for Sexiest Geeks of 2006 at the end of the year.

So… time to pitch Emerson’s new media department my guest lecture on emergent trends in digital media gender politics and the validity of experimental taste tests between edible panties (beta) as a collaborative new media project. Creative Commons in my pants. DRM in my back end. Time to begin the web 2.0 sex chart!

Buy a 2006 Hott Guys Calendar: Some Rights Reserved from the group, Emersive. It’s not too late. Or, download their monthly behind-the-scenes images (same page).

Awwwwww!

I love April Flores! Shout out to Sean Bonner in the background!

I’ve gone loco, I mean local over at Metroblogging San Francisco where I’m now an author! Check out today’s post about christian fundies spraying SF with earthquake exploitation AIDS terror in my post terror in the 94114, and my maiden post about kittens and puppies (really!) in her name was Lola, she was a showgirl.

From my inbox, this morning:

Hi, Violet!
Here is [name of my next book — all twelve chapters compressed into an attachment] copyedited by Mark Woodworth. (…) Can you look these over and have them back to me by Wed. noon? I know it’s a short amount of time (…)
Thanks!
[publisher]

Update: fun with edits. Here’s an example of the comment/edit structure on one of my books, from a list of possible sexual fantasies a reader might have, and their definitions:

* Multiple partners (a gang bang–one person with four or more partners; sex with the *football team*; threesome; sex party; orgy)

*text highlighted with inserted comments*
[editor] because right now there are so many sports team embroiled in rape charges, could we change this to “Olympic swim team” or something?
[publisher] Violet it’s your call.
[violet] Well, I wanted to say sex with the MARCHING BAND, but felt that football team was universal — and rape charges seem typically with basketball team players (Kobe, et. al.) so unless marching band fits, keep football team.

Party photos by Jason DeFillippo and after-party giantess photos by Hornboy. When I got cornered by naked drunk guy, I was all like, Jason — get the camera!

More photos after the jump!

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It’s been about a year since I stopped reviewing sex books and videos for Good Vibes, but I was there long enough to watch the world of sex and art coffee table books go through a revolution. And Taschen, publisher of all kinds of those glossy, tasteful and gorgeous books, was one of the biggest players in the edgy art and sex book scene. They weren’t the only ones, but they published sensational, very hot and wildy popular (and then-groundbreaking) books like Digital Diaries, Forbidden Erotica, Vlastimil Kula, Chas Ray Krider’s Motel Fetish and Roy Stuart’s collections. These explicit gems were of course after Taschen published Eric Kroll’s Fetish Girls, which when it came out in 1996 (before my time at GV), heralded the first wave of new fetish photo, perhaps even unintentionally grandfathering the altporn genre.

I was thinking about all this last night, where at the Kink Ink event (to which I dragged captives Sean Bonner, Jason DeFillippo, Simone and David and Hornboy) I got to meet Carlos Batts and April Flores, in person for the first time. I sat with Carlos and April and while he showed me his new and upcoming work, we bonded over the anicient, dinosaur-era attitudes toward sex and erotica (and gender, body, race and art) a la Hugh Hefner and his contemporaries, which still seems to inform today’s erotic photography and perceptions of truly, authentically erotic sexuality. Batts couldn’t put down his cameras the entire time I saw him last night; his vibe was gentle and cool but it seemed to me like his eyes were seeing and somehow wildly consuming things the rest of us couldn’t, and he had to catch it all quick, before it got away. Of course, Carlos is published by one of many upstart publishers who like to take risks with young, exciting artists like Batts (pictured), but it still made me wonder, whatever happened to Taschen?

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Subject: burn the NYT clown
“Violet - the largely-fictional NYT needs no protection. It’s coasted on an undeserved reputation for far too long.

Print his e-mail. Burn him, and burn that little bung who excreted the xenisucks site.

Chechen rules apply:
no mercy
no prisoners
no exceptions”

Subject: Post it!
“Why in the hell is a journalist telling you that a conversation is ‘off the record?’ Aren’t these the same people who say blogs aren’t journalism or a source of news? Seems to me he wants to have his cake and munch on it too. Post it, darlin’!”

I’m telling you something, but it’s totally off the record.

Of course, this is all in reference to the New York Times writer who starred in my post when a man hates a woman, who wrote me an epic email response a couple days ago but prefaced the whole thing with “this is off the record”. I’ve heard this twice in the past week, and each time it’s been from someone who just publicly did something really shitty to me or someone I care about. But what’s really troubling about this line of thinking in regards to the xenisucks site, and what it represents in regards to white naked hatred of women, and the culture of silence in which the NYT has participated in by sending them traffic and painting it as a humor site, is something (I think) the world really, really needs to stop being silent about. “Don’t talk about it” is tantamount to the tacit agreement made between abuser and those who witness abuse; like the victim somehow deserved it, and silence = shame.

Well, fuck that. Why did the NYT writer send me an epic email “off the record”? What’s he afraid of — what his male peers think of him — or is he worried he won’t have the friendship of the xenisucks guy anymore? Why would someone be afraid of distancing themselves from someone like xenisucks guy? Especially since in his email to me, he claims to desire distance from xenisucks. Lots of questions, no answers. I have more than a few answers, after the jump.

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Making it worth your while:

More at Peter Franck (Dark Side Hotel), with much thanks to Geoff Cordner.

* Metroblogging San Francisco beat me to… blogging about new stuff at Tiny Nibbles! About to land in the left sidebar is my guide to San Francisco, posted last night by Jason DeFillippo who sweetly wrote, “San Francisco’s favourite sex columnist and media maven Violet Blue has launched her guide to the saucy side of San Francisco. It has tips for the sexual tourist as well as awesome recommendations on places to grab a bite, generally hang out and enjoy this fine city.”

* Check out Hornboy’s super-awesome Braille resource page, including a list of blind bloggers and podcasters.

* And… I’m totally in love with The Taste Tester girl, a girl who is a blog who is detailing her experiments with flavoring her boyfriend’s spunk — and it’s as interesting as it is arousing to read. It goes down smooth with my podcast, How do you taste? I especially love her post titles, like Sex Good, Broccoli Bad and sidebar categories like Yuck!

* Now I’m going to do some blog tinkering; I have some hot stuff to blog about but want to fix a few things first… coming soon, dealing with the NYT writer, more possible YouTube discriminatory censorship on other blogs and other stuff — like what’s in The Adventurous Couples Guide to Sex Toys! (Hint: bend over boyfriend, how girls can have crazy orgasms during intercourse/oral sex/strap-on sex, a full-on teledildonics how-to chapter, sex machines, super high-end sex toys…)

* New York Times writer and star of my post when a man hates a woman sent me an epic email yesterday, but prefaced the whole thing with “this is off the record”. One wonders, why bother? What do you think, dear readers — should I post *my* responses to his “off the record” crit of my post, since *I’m* not afraid to speak about this issue?

* Village Voice columnist and cupcake hottie Rachel Kramer Bussel has a nice roundup of the Cake debate, wherein she smears her boobies with frosting, and — oops, my bad. She posts about Cake’s contribution to the downfall of civilization as we know it in The Politics of Cake.

* My bestest pal, prolific erotica author Alison Tyler has a blog! Yay!

* I’ve been immortalized in rope! Celebrated rope bondage (shibari) expert Twisted Monk has made a color of the month in my honor! It’s really beautiful, and sold in a limited supply. Like me. I’m extra-blushing over the name — The Unstoppable Miz Violet Blue — and the text:

“This month’s color is in honor of the one and only Ms Violet Blue; author, activist, sex educator, podcaster, blog star, and possibly one of the sexiest women on-line. The color, much like the rope’s namesake, is a vibrant and complex mix. A deep violet with subtle shades of purple and blue mixed in make this a striking rope that looks almost iridescent when photographed. Twistedmonk.com salutes this asset to the sex positive movement and wishes her many more years of success.”

* I have a big interview with Fatty D (April Flores) on Fleshbot right now, where she talks about her amazing video, peeing in public and her upcoming saturday appearance at San Francisco’s Kink Ink as a human canvas. I can’t wait to meet her in the ahem, flesh, at the event!

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Hope this works! Blip.tv looks extra hella cool. Here’s my text:

Liz Hickok’s amazing installation San Francisco in Jell-O was featured as part of the earthquake exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, last saturday, April 1st. This is my video of the teeny-tiny jello SF; I was sad it was only of the Exploratorium neighborhood and bay (and not the whole city), but it was really really cool nonetheless. Liz is talking, shaking the little city to make it look like an earthquake, and there is fake fog (!) being blown across the mini-city the entire time. There was a huge line to see this, and everyone was smiling from ear to ear. Photo: self-portrait of me at the Exploratorium.

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Last week local paper SF Weekly ran a seven page article about Cake, the New York grrrl-power sexy party, who had their debut San Francisco party a few weeks back. I met Emily from Cake at the Center for Sex and Culture where we both shared the stage to celebrate the release of Carol’s new book, Whipped. Emily was cute and smart and cool; she gave me a free copy of the Cake book and we chatted and joked. I didn’t make it to the party, even though my Stockroom Forum pal Midori was going.

I joked a few posts ago about the article, saying how it was hilarious the author Eliza Strickland made references to Playboy (and how dated that is, all by itself). But when I really dug into the article, I was actually pretty shocked that something so sex-negative, and olde-tyme anti-porn had made it as a viable piece about a women’s sex party in a local paper. The article wasn’t really about Cake, but was instead a grandstand for the writer to promote her views on women and porn, her extremely negative perceptions about sex workers, and make some seriously sweeping judgments about women who go to (and enjoy) events like Cake parties. I guess it just really bugs me that our local papers never seem to get what’s going on in the vibrant, exciting and edgy world of sexual San Francisco, which is always more evident when we get visits from sex-positive friends from other places. I’m saddened that Cake was treated to such distaste for free expression of female sexuality, because that’s not what we do here. We’re critical, yes, but we understand that fundamentally we’re all on the same side.

I interviewed Emily from Cake today and she gave us her opinion on the piece — and in my mind, what the article should have been about, the party — at SFist, in SFisting: We Ogle The Weekly’s Rack With Cake.

Image: the OG hottie of cupCAKEs and Lusty Lady-ness, Rachel Kramer Bussel, by Paul Sarkis.

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This I know. Because my butt plug tells me so. Sing along with me, people!

There was a huge box on my doorstep today; a giant gift from Tantus Silicone. Metis, the woman behind Tantus, is one of my heroes — because I think she single-handedly mainstreamed silicone toys, getting these safe, incredibly pleasurable toys into garden-variety porn shops. It was no small feat; not many people know how insane something like that was to undertake, and to get these smart products into in such an old-boys’ network. She’s worked tirelessly, patiently for years educating creepy old porn distributors as to why they should even care about what people stick into their bodies, and what responsible sex toy retailing means — all to an industry that historically doesn’t give a shit. Now you can find Tantus products *almost everywhere*, including even jack shacks in seedy parts of town all over the US. You go, girl. She is seriously St. Fuckin’ Metis.

Anyway, I sniffed her panties over all of this big time on the Stockroom Forums, and she sent me this incredible thank-you gift. We are all in this together. Jesus in a sparkly rubber thong, I can’t wait to find playmates to review the goodies with!

Pictured: black vibrating FeelDoe Stout (eeheehee!), purple G-Force, purple Bend Over Beginner Harness Kit, copper Ripple Plug, purple vibrating Pro Touch Plug, and a couple things I can’t idenitfy, like the white dildo — which I’m particularly excited about because white dildos are hard to find — and the Charmer dildo; the red thing I have no idea what it is. I’m guessing it’s for clit stim worn on a guy’s cock/balls as a cock ring, or fitted onto/into a harness and dildo rig for clit stim. Please *don’t* tell me if you know. I’m ready to dust off Tiny Nibbles’ Research Labs for the good of Planet Earth to find out. Fortunately for me, Earthlings are easy and “anal probe” is already in the lexicon.

My friend Thomas has officially lost his overmedicated, undersexed and almost beautiful mind. Read his review of the Behind Kink opening party, full of gems like:

“I spent years in the marketing field, so I’ll let you in on a not-so-well-kept secret: at these press events, journalists — among whose ranks your cottonmouthed correspondent cockily counts himself as Mencken flips bitches in his grave — are ‘wined and dined,’ as they say, by devious PR folks in an attempt to get us to say nice things about their product. They liquor us up, they stuff us with shrimp, and the next morning we can’t really remember if this JT Argento person was even actually in the movie, and whether Bettie Page was a country singer with a pill problem, or what.”

I would have gone to the event, but their PR guy seriously jerked me around for ideas on how to innovate their sites with RSS, then used my ideas and “forgot” about our meetings. I’ll go to the *next* free-booze-and-shrimp-in-the-dungeon event. Still, I have some cool friends that work at Cybernet, I mean Kink dot com. Go figure.

Image: taken when I got a tour of Kink dot com a month ago; it’s only *part* of their huge bondage gear supply wall.

Update: from Thomas via email two seconds ago, “Right, but I don’t give a fuck WHAT you say, Ariel X DOES have lips like munchable morsels of melty Scharfenberger, and that’s all there is to it.”

From Fatty D (aka April Flores)! I don’t think all the DVDs come with notes like these, but it’ll make watching her video this afternoon a lot sweeter!

Ask three women that you know if they’re ever been stalked, sexually assaulted or violently threatened by a man. I don’t need to bet money to know you’ll get a yes from one of those women. Too lazy to ask anyone? That’s okay, I’ll fill in the blanks for you. I’ll raise my hand for all three.

Are you laughing at me? Is this so hilarious that you’re clearing the latte out of your nose right now? If this is you, I’m guessing you work for the New York Times. On saturday, the venrable institution that brings the world “all the news that’s fit to print” ran a piece that finished with a real kicker — a hee-larry-ous puff writeup (loaded with inaccuracies) about a blog written by a man who virulently hates a female tech journalist, and writes in detail *several* times a day including his violent fantasies about her, and her family (who he names). The NYT, big fans of newsworthy items like this, gave the site a nice fat pat on the back in the form of a link, and a buddy-buddy reacharound by making light of the site’s content, even going so far as to say the writer had an affable “Comic Book Guy” tone. As if he were some loveable-but-rascally cad, you know — just one of the guys having a good prank on someone’s uppity female intern.

Of course, the site was xenisucks — if you read Boing Boing, you likely saw Xeni’s post to it last week, which I felt was the most graceful thing one of us female writers has done with something like this, to date. Her response was eloquent and dignified. Mine would have been a fantasy involving a lethal machine and a clip of 2×4’s, but that’s just me. But what happened in the NYT wasn’t just good-old-boys’ ignorance about a pathological hate site, it was malice.

This is what the New York Times has rewarded with lighthearted puffery and back-slapping, and the gift of a link from the NYT site. Because pathological hatred of women is not *just* goddamn funny, it’s news that’s fit to print.

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Audio, text and video! Wow, today my RU Sirius Podcast Show interview is blogged on Boing Boing; I’m profiled (with a great photo) in the Spring 2006 print issue of Venus Zine, along with Neko Case and Margaret Cho; and the Geek Entertainment TV video interview I did with San Francisco International Film Festival director Graham Leggat is up! w00t!

Link to post: Geek Entertainment TV: Graham Leggat Talks Film & Citizen Media (remember, this was a surprise; I had no idea I’d be on video that morning… )

* Image: Margaret Muthafucking Super-H4WT Cho dancing with snakes on a plane!!!! Seriously, I’m dying over the incredible coolness/hotness factor of Maragaret Cho’s blog right now. She blogs, “I am pussy without borders.” Nice.

Courtesy of Bruno Bisang, via my friends at Touche Sexy. Today, an article in the NYT about pro-anorexia online, not as thoughtful or informative as the one I asked Thomas Roche to write four years ago for the GV Magazine. Yesterday, pirate radio with Annalee Newitz (soon to be an episode of Open Source Sex; check out her sexy new blog).

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