The public disgrace of PR spammers

Kinky image from this explicit Public Disgrace* gallery, in honor of International Fetish Day (today). Because this is what I want to do to all the jerks who keep spamming me with sex-negative all-caps “press releases” about crap content they want me to send my traffic to.

This week was the worst in press release spam. The Daily Beast tried to get me to blog their take on Playboy’s truly bizarre, crackhead “55 most noteworthy people in sex over the last 55 years” — with Monica Lewinsky at #6 and Dan Savage nor Bettie Page not on it anywhere, they can suck my left tit before I’ll give them a link (except they can’t, so there). Playboy: check your expiration date, plz. I actually passed that PR disaster behind the scenes to other bloggers and tech professionals and we all made fun of it throughout the day. No one blogged or linked it.

But there was more: oh, let me channel to you the joy of nonconsensually getting shouted at in all caps by Hustler. Please stop yelling at me, Julie Ambrose, whoever the hell you are. I’ll tell ya, when Jonno and I ran Fleshbot, our policy was to *never* regurgitate press releases and pass them off as posts, something I still take quite seriously. But it only took one super-duper FAIL from Details to send Bacchus at Eros Blog off the rails — and his reaction to the PR spam straw that broke the bloggers’ back is hilarious — and a wise lesson all online/dead tree PR flacks should study closely as the economy tanks and miraculously, they still “don’t get the internets”.

This is mouse-down, my favorite post online all week. Take the time to read it. Here’s a snip from the juicy midsection of the most fabulous post, Clueless At Conde Nast:

(…) This morning I get this email:

> Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:48:52
> Subject: ‘Flirting with Disaster’ in DETAILS

The subject line alone trips my bullshit filters. The word “disaster” suggests one of those breathless mainstream “the dangers of dating” articles — as a pro-sex sort of publication, Eros Blog doesn’t focus much on sexual disaster, especially when it’s portrayed (as it too often is) as the inevitable consequence of unzipping your zipper. Moving on:

> From: Stephanie Kim {Stephanie_Kim@condenast.com}
> To: bacchus@erosblog.com

Ayup. Corporate marketing. Conde Nast has some good titles, I’m still reading.

> Good Morning-
>
> Have you ever encouraged your significant other to explore their
> bi-curiosity?

Gosh, that’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not totally beyond the pale; it’s fair coming from a personal friend, or somebody who is on my blogroll that I’ve exchanged emails with before. But from a stranger?

Note the utter lack of an introduction. Note also there’s nothing in this intro that would have prevented mass-mailing this email to a dozen or a thousand or ten million other bloggers. Next we get to the meat-like substance in the can of spam:

> In the January/February issue of DETAILS, we share the surprising
> and unintentional consequences.
>
> http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_7783

Right ho, and you just proved you’ve never read ErosBlog. Spammer.

The consequences of “encouraging your significant other to explore their bi-curiousity” are deeply unpredictable. From an upside of endless wild three-ways to a downside of relationship-crushing rejection, you just never know until you try. If any of the possible outcomes are surprising, you weren’t being a clear-eyed sexual grown-up when you decided to take a whack at the bee-hive shaped pinata.

But we saw the “Flirting with Disaster” title, didn’t we? So we already know that this is a standard main-stream magazine “ZOMG, sexual adventurousness is dangerous” waste of time. Another in a long line of sex-negative propaganda pieces, all of which exist to prove that if you step out of your grey-flannel suit, you’re a doomed sinner who will surely suffer your just desserts of heartbreak, divorce, and damnation.

At this point the only thing we don’t know is how deep in the water this particular journalistic failboat will be. Remind me again, why anybody who reads ErosBlog would think we might want to link favorably to an article talking about the manifest and obvious dangers of sexual openness and adventurousness?

Back to Stephanie, who (it turns out) has been winding up for a bit of fatuous condescension:

> Please be sure to link to our site should you post anything.

And you be sure to put covers on them magazines, it would sure be bad if they were flappin’ around on the news stands and nobody knew what their titles were! (…read more, erosblog.com)

* A reader recently asked about my linking to the woman-run and woman-directed site Public Disgrace, which focuses on female submission and public sex adventures, asking if the title of such a site wasn’t against my sex-positive values. It’s my understanding that the site’s title is tongue in cheek (I asked), and parlays to “embarrassment” and “risk” sexual fantasy scenarios that the site covers — and I’ve combed through all the galleries: in each shoot, the female submissive laughs and shows herself off throughout.