Regular readers will remember a few months back when the Lara Jade scandal erupted. I wasn’t the first one to write about the porn company that used one of her self-portraits (taken when she was 14) to sell re-packaged “classic” porn (and her plea for help on Flickr), but I did write a fairly high-profile piece about it (see Lara is Not A Porn Star and my follow-up post to get the whole bizarre story). This morning I was contacted by Lara’s lawyer — because I wrote about the case, he thought I’d be interested to see the release about the lawsuit filed against TVX Films (and associated retailers) today. Here’s their press release, with permission:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2007

TEEN PHOTOGRAPHER SUES PORNOGRAPHERS OVER UNAUTHORIZED USE OF IMAGE

Tampa, Fla. - Teenaged photographer Lara Jade Coton never expected one of her
photos to turn up on the cover of a pornographic movie. She certainly never expected to
see a picture of herself on such a movie. But that is exactly what Lara Jade found when
she discovered that an innocent self-portrait, taken when she was only 14 years old,
was obtained off the Internet and used without permission as the DVD cover and face
art for the sexually explicit movie “Body Magic.”

“I was absolutely horrified to see my work and my own picture being used on that
kind of movie,” said Lara Jade. “It’s just appalling.”

What’s even more appalling, according to Lara Jade’s attorney, is the way she was
treated when she contacted TVX Films of Texas and asked them to stop using her
picture. Richard A. Harrison, attorney with Tampa-based Allen Dell P.A., said the
company responded first by ridiculing the young woman, then by accusing her of trying
to perpetrate some kind of scam. “Adding insult to injury,” Harrison says, “the company had the audacity to blame Lara Jade for the disappointing sales of its porn movie.” Bob Burge, president of TVX Films, told Lara Jade in an email, “Actually, removing your image will help improve the sale of the DVD. So far it bombed.”

In a lawsuit filed today in federal court in Tampa, Florida, Lara Jade accuses Burge
and TVX Films of copyright infringement, civil conspiracy, misappropriation of her
image, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit also
names other online retailers of the movie in claims for copyright infringement.

“We’re asking a jury to award damages, including punitive damages, for the
outrageous conduct of Burge and TVX,” Harrison said. “We’re also asking the court to
stop these pornographers from using the picture and to impound any copies of the
movie or other materials on which Lara Jade’s picture appears.”

Harrison is also consulting with state and federal law enforcement agencies. “If it’s
not a crime to put a 14-year-old child on the cover of a porn video, it sure ought to be,”
he said.

The case demonstrates a dilemma facing artists today and reveals yet another
danger of the Internet for teens and children. While the Internet offers creative people a
worldwide outlet for their work, it’s also common for artists to find that their work has
been borrowed innocently or just plain stolen by others.

For parents, the case demonstrates how easily children can become victimized in
the age of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. “This amazing
technology allows us all to share our photos with friends and loved ones, but parents
must realize that any picture a child puts on the Internet is about three mouse clicks
away from being stolen by anybody,” Harrison warned. “And as this case shows, it could be used for anything, including pornography.”

Lara Jade Coton is an 18 year old photographer and college student who resides in
England. She took up photography at the age of 14 and also works in photo
manipulation and digital art. Her work can be seen at www.larajade.com.

Allen Dell, P.A. is a leading Tampa law firm. It has been established in Tampa for
more than 80 years and maintains a diverse civil practice. The firm’s website is at
www.allendell.com.

Follow-up: I think it’s really unfortunate that they’re using “for the children” internet porn (and 2.0) hysteria for an unauthorized use case. But I also think it’s really fucked up (and gross) that TVX Films used that photo.

Image by Captive Girls, @.

I haven’t done one of these in a while; let me distract you for a bit….

* Fun stuff: Mind Fetish Bedding Company is introducing a huge new line of high-quality leather and rubber housewares to their inventory, so customers can better integrate fetish into their homes — as if a visit to the wooden spoon section of Bed Bath and Beyond or a trip to Design Within Reach wasn’t enough to make some of us want to play house… “Russell said he plans to expand his company to offer a full line of fetish and kinky housewares, but for now is focusing on what he calls two of the most overlooked rooms in most men’s houses: the bathroom and bedroom.” Link to Xbiz article/press release, link to Mind Fetish.

* In case you missed it, the DC Madam’s phone list is now a searchable index. Look for your favorite politicians and Fox News pundits.

* A lube to prevent HIV? Yeah, I’ve heard that song before and it didn’t sound good at all. Good luck trying to pass off that you’ll market it to South(ern) Africa, where sexual customs hold wet sex in disgust and disdain, and women dry out their vaginas with chemicals to be desirable. Pay attention! Update: I wrote “South” when I meant to write “Southern”, though I linked to correct information in this post (and I also misspelled “heard”, 3am notwithstanding). But my mistake was offensive to at least one South Africa resident who wrote, “While it’s possible that there are isolated communities in South Africa that practice the custom, and it’s possible that the huge influx of refugees from Zimbabwe into South Africa have had some influence on local custom, I’m not aware of any studies or news reports supporting this. In the absence of further evidence to the contrary, I think that in this instance you are giving South Africa a bad, and probably undeserved rap.” My apologies. Still, read more about dry sex in Southern Africa and the problems it creates for HIV prevention in this old but good piece in the Village Voice.

* Speaking of sexual customs:Vegansexuals — not just what’s for dinner. A piece about vegans who avoid sex with meat eaters — who really tastes better, anyway? (via sweet Viviane)

* Don’t miss one of my favorite Sex Blog Roundups at Fleshbot to date: my sex blogger friend Jefferson put together Business As Usual, six great recent blog posts by a variety of sex workers writing about their — jobs. Yay for lap dancers, porn store clerks, and peepshow girls!

* Gay, lesbian, straight… there’s one straight male porn performer everyone seems to agree is super-hot, and that’s Mr. Marcus. Eros Zine has a great interview with Mr. Marcus up right now, which makes me like him more than ever. He talks about his first porn experiences, HIV in the industry, race and more.

Sharing is caring, seen @ Kink.com; friday night. (Kept next to the condoms, so sharing is sanitary, m’kay?) The other great photo from the weekend — birdbath = bloodbath?

Site portfolio is Flash but still entertaining. The blog is okay.

After taking care of Hacker Boy with a 100+ fever all weekend and trying to meet deadlines (and enduring an insanely sex-negative, biased interview with Details asking about how women in porn are a result of ‘childhood trauma’ and questions about porn’s ‘psychological damage’) I get *this* idiocy from Times Online UK:

And there are endless sites offering the full 2.0 sex experience. Violet Blue calls herself a “pro-blogger, podcaster, vlogger and femmebot”. She’s written “ultimate guides” to cunnilingus and fellatio and, of course, The Smart Girl’s Guide to the G-Spot. Her site is a sex shop and supermarket of self-promotion - lust and recognition all in one super-refined techno-package. As one leading British thinker put it, “How come the highest technology is always used for the lowest purposes?”

But what is really new in all this is the attention-seeking, the overpowering need for recognition. “Sex is an amazing driving force,” says [Esther] Dyson. “Attention isn’t quite that visceral, but it’s going to be a strong force in the future.”

Link.

Fuck you, Times Online — and Brian Appleyard. This is not a sex shop. Sex is not a “lower purpose”. I’m the only one in your vacuous piece who doesn’t give a shit about fame. Take your attention elsewhere.

Update: In my inbox from last month, two emails from Brian Appleyard. Re-reading them in contrast to his finished article (and the overwhelmingly sex-negative bias in it), I’d say that he was totally misleading in telling me about what kind of article he was planning. His emails are not what his piece (”Notorious Nobodies”) was about *at all*. And, Ill say it’s likely his sentences about me were a slap for not responding to him. So, more douchebags with access to the press. But then again, it’s clear in his article he’s writing about 2.0 from the outside. n00b. His emails are below:

From: Bryan Appleyard [redacted]
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 1:55 AM
To: violetblue@sfgate.com
Subject: Interview

Dear Ms Blue,
I am writing a major article on prominent people/ celebs on the web and I’d very much like to include you. I’d be grateful if we could fix a telephone/video interview in the near future,. Please feel free to look at my site and read the kind of articles I do.
Bryan Appleyard

From: Bryan Appleyard [redacted]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 8:56 AM
To: violetblue@sfgate.com
Subject: Interview

Dear Ms Blue,
I emailed you on June 13th about the possibility of a phone/ video interview for a piece I am writing about Web Celebs for the Sunday Times magazine in Lodnon. Is that possible today or in the next few days?
Bryan Appleyard

Update 8/8/07: anonymous reader email –

not sure if this made it to the states, but the Times published extracts from “Girl with a one-track mind”, a sex blog by a woman who chose to remain anonymous - then their sister publication outed her.

http://girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html

Lowest of the low. I mean, I don’t write to editors often - but in that case, I did. Having people write honestly about sex is a good thing - we should celebrate it!

So, I’ve listened to your podcast for ages, almost made it to a thing you did in SF a few weeks ago when I was over for work, and I like your blog. The self-promotion jibe from the Times - the TIMES! - is so hypocritical it makes my eyes water!

If you’re not familiar with US federal 2257 regulations, you can read about them on Wikipedia and on Fleshbot, and even quite a lot on this website. In a (very opinionated, slightly tipsy) nutshell, they are a set of laws that are in place ostensibly to prevent underage people from becoming porn performers by making businesses that create porn keep really extensive documentation about the people in their products. Nice theory. Except legitimate businesses aren’t going to break laws that would put them out of business. Fucking, duh. The way the 2257 laws are crafted and enforced result in making it impossible for small businesses to survive, make it really, really easy to stalk porn stars, and trample all over First Amendment rights — in many ways treating porn as if it were a criminal act, even though it is legal in the US. The net result is that 2257 makes every aspect of making adult porn undesirable, unfeasible and even dangerous to women, while doing nothing to actually prevent children from being exploited. Awesome! And now, the US gov’t has put forth new changes to 2257 laws, which are now open for comment (comments close September 10, so please say something even though they’re making it really hard to find the document or comment area).

In the meantime, my friends at Kink.com made the world’s best (and extremely informative) PSA for understanding 2257 laws — and yes, there’s nudity, because we’re all adults, and see if you can spot a) the kitteh, b) teh EFF, and c) the Jake.

Image of wayward celery in Lorelei Lee from this album; I shot it at a San Francisco house party for Pink and White Productions.

Today’s column in the SF Gate (teh Chronic) is Hard Lessons in Local Pathology: What are the Bay Area’s most common rectal foreign objects? Need I say more? I had drinks with a couple local pathologists, and found out what gets stuck in people’s butts around the Bay Area — common and uncommon objects. Yikes! I’m delighted to say this column has gotten me some of the best email from local emergency workers — and so far no one will let me share, but they’re making me cringe and laugh out loud at the same time. Let’s just say that being the “new guy” on the emergency team is a real bummer. Snip:

Mission District house parties are the best. Haight house parties are next in line. House parties in either Bohemian, artsy, crime-soaked neighborhood are always in those old Victorians — you know, the ones that are run down inside and out and are often in the long-hallway railcar-style layout that forces everyone to cluster in the kitchen or the living room at the other end of the house. They always have the vibe of many, many housemates (and layers of house paint) come and gone. Some of the Mission parties are going upscale, part of the Mission-meets-West-Elm trend, but those sangria-and-chips-for-lunch, guests-diverse-in-every-way, lazy, well-worn Mission afternoons are still there to be had.

It was a Mission housewarming; the kind-of potluck where you know you’re going to need to get food afterward, where I met a man who worked for a local pathology lab, creating records of and cataloging foreign objects that have been removed from people’s bodies. He told me it was funny that he was meeting me around the Pride time of year, since he’d just recorded his most ironic extraction from a body yet. Last week, he told me, he’d recorded a very large dildo that had been removed in the emergency room from a man’s lower colon. When looking for any identifying marks on the object to record he’d only been able to note the name stamp on the base of the dildo. And the name, in a timely coincidence, just happened to be “Domestic Partner.”

After all the howling, clenching, and requisite bad jokes about equal benefits under the law (and below the belt), I was interested in learning what else this jovial, handsome man (who was, I found out after asking about the rock on his finger, about to become an, ahem, domestic partner himself) saw through the course of his work.

Years ago when I worked at a Mission District sex shop, it seemed like everyone who bought a small vibrator was thinking “destination Uranus.” Every day, whenever I sold a small vibrator not meant for anal play, I’d rattle off care instructions and innocently throw in that the toy was unsafe for anal use. Nine times out of 10, the customer would have to get another type of toy for their “friend.” One time, a cute little old man came in and bought a coffee mug emblazoned with the store logo on it, saying it was “for his friend” I told him it was the first time someone had ever bought a coffee mug for their “friend,” winking and dragging out the subtext, making us both laugh. But I didn’t think he was going to go home to shove a steaming cup of coffee up his ass.

Talking to the pathologist now, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

Link.

Except… it is. To the delight of many, this year indy porn company (and good friends) Comstock Films submitted their flagship title Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story to the MPAA for a rating — receiving on Feb 26, 2007, amazingly, the blessed/reviled (legendary) NC-17 rating.

In an email tonight from Tony Comstock, “the MPAA just told us we cannot use a press quote that contains the word ‘orgasm’ on the DVD cover for the re-issue of first film ‘Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story’. Grrr.”

No orgasms for the MPAA! Or those of you watching. Now get your hands out of your pants and rent some smoke-free Disney, for crissakes.

Well, they’re definitely still working on their website, and Porno Jim’s first release is about to be in the wild: but we’ll see if any mainstream channels will pick up Hookin’ Up. I hope so, and things seem to be getting easier for indy porn makers to get their work to customers and porn consumers tired of the same old, same old… But they’re not having an easier time because mainstream distribution channels are opening up, no ma’am. It’s still a proprietary network with stereotypical notions of sex and what they think customers want. Trust me, I’m getting all the gossip these days. No, indy porn is getting to buyers because of the interwebs. Democratization of porn, anyone?

Anyway, here’s New York City Porn: Hookin’ Up (trailers, galleries, etc.)

A very sex, flirty girl just sent me a very sexy, flirty website: N De Samim Lingerie. Sound and Flash alert, but whew — this is pure hotness. It doesn’t hurt that one of the models looks like a long-lost lover of mine. If I had the extra cash, I’d get this (silk version).

Moblog self-portrait taken with my Helio Ocean.

My Webnation interview went up last week — and it’s ultra-fabulous!!!! Webnation #9 with the wonderful, sweet, smart Amber MacArthur — featuring two guests: me and Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg. w00t!!!! The episode also has a couple of my favorite viral videos from last week (besides Math Bus), Will it Blend: The iPhone and the totally hilarious Canadian Sex PSA (by Planned Parenthood, whose video production team should be sainted, or something).

“Sometimes when she talks, you can hear the gun go off in your mouth.”

–friend who works customer service in the Ferry Building Marketplace

(image @, via)

As seen on Fleshbot and other media outlets last week, the results of a study about sexual motivations started to hit the wires; the psychologists thankfully eschewed the typical “biological imperative” argument and really dug into people’s reasons for fucking. I have no idea how diverse their definitions of sex were, nor if they only sampled heterosexuals, but it was interesting nonetheless — and deserving of more comment. Justin Park at Men’s Health felt the same way, and came up with a nice response to the study (and media surrounding it) in Why Do You Have Sex? He interviewed me for the piece, and with his permission I’ve included the entire, original email interview after the jump. The article itself is mini, but the interview went into more than we’d thought, and it was a nice afternoon of sex nerdiness for both of us. Here’s the Men’s Health snip:

Why do you have sex?”

The question sounds a lot like, “Why are you breathing?”

But University of Texas researchers posed it to more than 400 people ages 17 to 52 in an effort to catalogue human motivations for doing the deed.

They got the mundane:

“I was attracted to the person.”

The metaphysical:

“I wanted to feel closer to God.”

The manipulative:

“I wanted to break up someone’s relationship.”

The titillating:

“I wanted to act out a fantasy.”

And the sad:

“I wanted to be popular.”

Plus over 200 more reasons that are alternately funny, pathetic, touching, and even criminal.

Link.

(more…)

Margaret Cho emails,

as you know i love your blog…

AND

i love how your sakura so flirtatiously peek out from under your
skirt, so i had to get some myself… done by barnaby at mom’s tattoo
shop in sf…

love margaret

My head fell off when I saw this! I am totally freaking out. I think I’m in love. Love!

In case you missed it at Fleshbot, my post Get On Board The Math Bus:

We wish we’d thought of it first: hop into a van, drive around looking for hot math geek girls, and lure them into the van to go down on all of our outflow columns, make them do math in their heads, and then go looking for the next willing subject. (Sound familiar?) That’s just what the Math Bros. have done in Math Bus, a short film now in the lineup at SXSW’s Click, an annual event showcasing online and mobile video content. Before you get too excited, though, know that we have it on good authority that the girls in this clip are actually professional hardcore math stars and have done explicit taxes in, like, a zillion other videos — but don’t let that spoil the fantasy. Totally SFW, unless your workplace expressly prohibits taxkakke.

Link.

For this week’s column, I wrote about three moments in sex in San Francisco. However, some editor with sticky fingers decided that the word “dick” (in the text, not a subtitle) was way too exciting, and edited my piece to say “d-” in several quoted, plot-important instances. Which means nothing to anyone, especially anyone reading blogs or other major online papers. Dick is a noun for “penis” (circa 1990) and nothing more. I’ve got a taste here, but if you want, read the unedited final section after the jump: It makes more sense, and reads better. Snip from City Stories: Three Moments in San Francisco’s Sex Life:

Update: THEY FIXED MAH DICK!!!! WOOOO!!!!!!
Update 2: I noticed that a few of the more humorless SF Gate commenters on the piece seemed to think that these stories were somehow embellished or made up. They are totally true. Next week’s true tale of sex in SF goes even further, so there. :)

One: Talk Dirty To Me, MUNI Version

Westfield Mall exceeded my expectations. Not for the fact that we seem to now have a real, Hot Topic-boasting mall smack in the middle of The City, but for the restaurants in the bottom. The food court is a high tech maze of yummy gourmet smells and buzzing electronic coasters, of tourists and families snarfing up grilled salmon on skewers, and a few homies eating sushi for good measure. It’s a far cry from the urbanity of the old men playing chess in the sun above ground at the cable car turnaround, next to the tall white kid with the banjo who sounds like Tom Waits and all the lingering pickpockets; it is our mall.

There were a few hot days last week, and on one of them I convinced Hacker Boy to untether his laptop and flirt over some faux pho at Out The Door. After lunch, we slipped from the mall’s coolness into the sweaty swamp of the white-tiled Powell Street Station to catch the K back to my place. It was a late lunch, and the trains were crowded.

A seat opened and I sat, looking up into the tall boy’s green eyes. The ride was quiet, jerky, packed. Feeling frisky, I gestured towards HB, and mouthed a request. A private, explicit request.

“What?”

I repeated the gestures — okay, not really gestures, but American Sign Language. I mouthed my question clearly.

“What?”

Once more, with feeling, I signed and plainly mouthed, “Do you want to f-?” A huge grin spread across his face, followed by a “Yes!” (I don’t know why, but the pho-disiac always works on those nerdy, all-black-wearing hacker types.)

Link.

(more…)

I’m going here.

I just got a very complimentary email from San Francisco MC lesbian rapper JenRO — she loved my lesbian gangs column! w00t! See why I’m flattered when you watch her newest video (it’ll be on MTV soon; embedded after the jump). “Two tits are bettah than one!” Indeed.

(more…)

Okay, so… there’s this thing called “steampunk“. And a whole bunch of us are like OVER it and all its trendy permutations, even though we all love the Jules Verne and Victorian aesthetics of the fashion. (Dear interwebs: stop calling everything with a gear or a watch face steampunk, okay?) So when Praemedia emailed me this Brass Goggles link with a *gorgeous*, very sexy photo by Kat Bret, of steampunk fashion, we did have a minute of snarky, “I’m tying not to like this, but…”

And then I found Kat Bret’s blog, where she showcases several styles that are to die for. I went one better, and found her Flickr photostream, where she has a few nicer images. No nudity, but yum. She’s even local!

Happy birthday Hunter S. Thompson. Inspired by Miss Gala Darling:

In my most recent post about Flickr censoring my photos *again* even after the very same photos had been officially approved by Flickr (I’m still waiting for them to fix the rest, please un-censor me, kthxbye), I suggested that someone ought to “write an article called ‘The MySpacing of Flickr.” Well, my dear friend Thomas did just that, called The MySpacing of Flickr, Or: Revenge of the Spawn of Web 0.0, The Sucker Punch, and it’s *incredible*. Snip:

I suspect that some attention is given Violet’s Flickr stream, by Flickr, because her name is associated with the world of porn — she watches porn, she writes about porn, and therefore her artful erotic photos of implied nudity must be porn. Relying on Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity (”I know it when I see it”) works even better for Flickr than for the Supreme Court, because Flickr, like any corporation, owes it users nothing under the First Amendment. Its parent company, Yahoo, eliminated all user-generated chatrooms from Yahoo Chat because of objectionable content in user-generated rooms — not because of legal action or company morals, but because an investigation by a Houston TV station caused an advertiser panic. Yahoo’s chatroom closures were the 1890 Census of Web 1.0, the death-wail of a world gone mad, or at least as mad as human nature.

Clearly Web 2.0 isn’t going to let things go that far, and if it has to put the kibbosh on Violet’s panties and any other panties out there that might be on their way down… well, there’s no First Amendment in private industry.

Yahoo, like so many so-called Web 2.0 companies, seems unable to decide if it wants to be a consumer-based service that sees to the needs of its users and their creative communities, or something soft and gooey with no sharp edges, seams or pointy bits that allows its corporate overlords to avoid ever going out on a limb, mostly because it permits them to be so wishy-washy that they begin to resemble a lukewarm bowl of clam chowder without any clams… just the chowder, thank you, if no one objects that is?

Link.

Note: above photo by seventeenstars is not censored, when three identical photos (that are simply rotated upright) still are.

* An escort service comprised of sexy nerds.

I’d be a regular.

Thanks to my pal at Poor Mojo Newswire, I present you with Rammstein’s Sonne video (Wiki page) — featuring a sexy Snow White spanking and enslaving hunky miners in service to her gold-dust huffing addiction. Snow White is played by gorgeous Russian actress Joulia Stepanova. Very entertaining, very Rammstein.

This is one of the many (now) restricted photos:

Okay, this service is now totally unreliable. Suggestions, anyone?

Update: Here’s a Flickr photo extractor someone wrote (for pulling all your photos out of Flickr and moving them to another service) called Migratr. Scroll to the bottom for the new version.

Update: I received this email: Hello,

We apologize for the mis-classification of that image.
I have remarked it as “public”/”safe”.

Regards,
-Terrence

* for that one photo, now. I asked what about this photo (now censored) and many others?

Or, for the sake of conversation, Flickr has censored this one:

But not this one:

I *particularly* resent last week’s Wired article How Porn and Family-Friendly Photos Coexist on Flickr. I have NEVER uploaded porn to Flickr, I have NEVER been in porn, and I am NOT a porn performer. But in the article, Wired has me as synonymous with porn. Talk about porn when it’s valid. Explain Flickr’s mismanaged censorship. But do not confuse me with the two — simply because I write about sex. Thanks a fucking lot, Wired. Is this article what got my cheesecake photos censored, again? And, do I have to go through each and every photo to get them fixed? When will media shed the dated idea that any woman involved with sex is automatically a (guilty) sex performer?

If you’re not following why this is a continuation of as (non) problem and don’t see what my previous problems are, see this post.

Seems to me, Flickr is broken.

Update: So, I just went through one album and now Flickr has marked all the safe ones as officially Flickr approved safe (hopefully to keep them that way), and kept the ones I wanted restricted, as restricted (the same ones Flickr founder Stewart marked as restricted as well). There are still a couple more in other photosets that had been changed (even after getting the official okay). I’m going through them to see which ones Flickr changed *after* Flickr’s founder Stewart had personally approved the exact same photos — and requesting reviews, practically by hand, one by one. What a pain. It’s clearly another mistake, and not hypocrisy, but it’s so frustrating. I pay for this service, eh? If it wasn’t that all my friends and community were there… well, this blog will become more interactive and community responsive in the very near future. Still, someone should write an article called, “The MySpacing of Flickr”.

“She might not be a household name, but Violet Blue is the leading sex educator for the Internet generation.” Link (Amber MacArthur interview video — it came out sooo great!).

This is one of my favorite GETV episodes yet; after the event we did (I interviewed her in front of an audience at the Center for Sex and Culture last week), Eddie and I did this fab GETV segment about Audacia’s book, Naked on the Internet. Very fun! Watch it at Sex Blogger Audacia Ray Gets Naked (you can comment there) or embedded after the jump.

(more…)

Image via my new Flickr crush, santacroceisabella.

I just wrote a nearly 3000-word intro to Best Women’s Erotica 2008, got all the author and editor bios together, and turned them in. Phew! Now, would someone take pictures of me like this one? So hot.

Being a huge Holly Hunter fan, this series seems like a dream come true for me: sex, crime, a complex femme heroine — sort of makes me wish I had cable again. Or time to watch it. Snip:

Compared to the neurotics, moms, and ingenues that Holly Hunter is best known for playing, her character in the new TNT drama “Saving Grace” is virtually unrecognizable. In the first episode, which premieres on July 23 , she has sex with a married man, then chastises him for feeling guilty. She shows her naked body to an elderly neighbor, waves a gun in front of a pair of elementary school kids, and drives drunk. She’s a hedonist.

She’s also a cop.

Indeed, Grace Hanadarko is a far cry from most of the female cops on TV, whose edginess is generally defined as a tendency to sass superiors. You’d be hard-pressed to find a woman so rough-hewn on network TV — or, as Hunter herself points out, in film. She was attracted to “the largeness of her,” Hunter said in a telephone interview last month. “And the fact that she held such darkness. Such black. And such lightness, all in the same person. And I kind of felt like her sexual life was a really stunning one. A beautiful one to get to talk about.”

Link.

From a party I went to last weekend. This is actually when I interrupted something interesting in the hall, and they let me take this photo before leaning over and shutting the door.

Jim Mitchell dies at 63 (sfgate.com)