February 2010

Image from this gallery.

I’ve been researching the history of sex and the internet to prepare for my NPR / All Things Considered interview (might go on the air tomorrow). I just got off the phone with the producer and had opened up my notes; I realized I did the entire call with my desktop looking like this! It’s always fun when people walk into my office… ahem. In my defense I was trying to find some girls on the beach in bikinis after hearing that the Eastern US has been slammed with more snow and thinking that you all probably wanted to see the *opposite* of the last post right now.

Here’s a very loose timeline that I pinged my conversation off of; does anyone have anything to add? Corrections? I’d love to make this a working timeline. The three primary areas under consideration are:

• Help, information & advice
• Chat / meeting people
• Pornography

late 1970s-early 1980s ASCII porn in BBS communities
1984-1989: Numerous sex focused BBS popped up – many allowing the sharing of images and stories – among them were several that focused on BDSM and and TV/TS fetishes
1990 – first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access – world.std.com
1990 – first Usenet newsgroup for text erotica stories rec.arts.erotica is created
1992 – alt.sex.stories (Usenet; altnet newsgroup for text erotica stories) is created
1992 – Term “Surfing the Internet” is first heard
1993 – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell introduced by President Bill Clinton.
1993 – World Wide Web goes live.
1994 – Sex.com was registered by Gary Kremen
1995 – Sex.com was stolen by Stephen Cohen
1995 – Salon.com launches
1995 – Craigslist is founded
1996 – SFSI.org sex crisis helpline launches online
1996 – Playboy.com launches
1996 – Communications Decency Act (CDA) signed into law and part of it is quickly struck down
1997 – DVD introduced
1997 – Peter Acworth begins Hogtied.com (Kink.com)
1997 – Domain name business.com sold for $150,000
1998 – Viagra introduced
1998 – ISNA.org launches
1998 – OutProud.org launches (LGBT)
1998 – Child Online Protection Act (COPA) signed into law; quickly blocked from enforcement by court order
1999 – PlannedParenthood.com launches
1999 – Planned Parenthood’s Teenwire.com launches
1999 – LiveJournal launches
1999 – Domain name business.com sold for $7,500,000
2000 – Sex.com was given back to Gary Kremen after a legal fight
2000 – AEBN launched first VOD site
2000 – American Express stops accepting porn transactions
2000 – Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) signed into law
2001 – Yahoo begins adult Groups purge; removes porn banners from search engine
2002 – Eros Blog launches
2003 – Paypal stops processing adult transactions
2003 – Gawker Media launches Fleshbot.com
2003 – Tribe.net launches
2003 – Penthouse files bankruptcy
2005 – Video iPod introduced
2005 – Tribe.net purges adult groups
2006 – Sex.com sold for a reported $12,000,000
2006 – YouTube style porn sites invade the Internet
2006 – Google resists court order for porn search results
2007 – Tumblr launches
2008 – Kink.com has over 12 websites
2009 – US Supreme Court refuses to hear final COPA appeal, killing the law permanently
2009 – DVD porn sales officially declined 50%

Tips: Bacchus, Nobilis, Erika, jess, Bryan, Erich, sjk

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Right or wrong, I knew that once I saw the censored gallery on HuffPo of the second annual German topless sledding event, that if I waited a minute many uncensored photos would surface and I could give you the chilly nekkid Olympian-esque post that you deserve. What I did not expect, and I should have, was that I would find a video to share with you as well. It’s like getting the gold when your moneyed competition slipped and broke their little toe on the ice and you’re not sure you actually deserve it, but you wear it like you own it anyway. The Sun has a way of making us all feel dirty like that. German coverage from The Local informs us that, “A naked sledging event in Germany’s Harz region created a logistical nightmare over the weekend after 14,000 people showed up to watch 30 men and women strip before sliding down the mountain.”

* Original topless sledding coverage in Germany’s The Local (gallery, thelocal.de).
* The Sun’s highbrow commentary on babes and nips in the air (thesun.co.uk)

Never mind The Sun; we’ve got video from DailyMotion:

And in an attempt to bring up the IQ of this post a bit, I highly recommend pairing our mindless boob ogling with this cute and funny XKCD Backyard Snow Tracking Guide, which features no German boobies but has a transmogrifier making it of equal, if not more, value.

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Agent Provocateur’s new “Whip me” stockings. Price: a wallet-dominating $70.

Babeland’s new Incoqnito Droplet Necklace (nipple clamp vibes). Price: what you’d expect from a high-end designer piece of jewelry-cum-sex toy. Lots.

More gleeful nudity and sexual beauty. It’s okay to want this, I think. Price: free. Image by FML Photography.

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And lo, the Internets deliver.

By Matthias Weinberger, via my sweet friend Chris Pirillo.

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We have two new reports especially for the sex nerds in the audience, so if data and stats get you all revved up don’t touch that mouse. Many readers will find the OkTrends Blog post especially interesting, as it dishes on sexual activities by age and interest, while dropping tasty stats on how often female Americans in the dating pool want to have sex, who thinks contraception is ‘morally wrong’ by age and state, and much more. It’s also interesting to see how a post inspired by unrealistic male expectations in dating and sex became a post about how kinky and sexually adventurous women become as they get older. (Read: hey old dude, that 19-year-old babe isn’t going to do anything deliciously nasty to, for, or with you. Not even on you.) I also want to give mad props to the awesome javascript slider widgets throughout the post where we can toggle data results on charts and maps of the US — that’s just so fucking cool and fun. First up is The Case For An Older Woman, snip:

(…) As you can see, a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger womenThe median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.

A man’s bias toward younger women becomes even more evident when we overlay his stated preferences with his actual messaging habits. (…)

(…) Articles touting a woman’s mid-thirties “sexual peak” have stalked the pages of Cosmo since time immemorial, but these articles typically cite clinical testosterone/estrogen/progesterone studies and attempt to make the leap to “sexual peak” from there—if they bother to cite any data at all. I, on the other hand, can make my claim by looking at a woman’s stated preferences:

[data/image] This is a nationwide “age progression” of American women, a normalized heat map similar to the ones you saw above, but with an added geographical component. By moving the slider you can watch how attitudes become more sex-positive as the population gets older.

This older-women-are-more-sexual pattern repeats across almost every proposition. Here are a few more data sets just as sparklines (computed, like the map above, for our sample set of 100,000 women). Again, these are just a handful of examples; whether we ask about bondage or kissing, women are the most sexual in their thirties.

[data/image] Researching this post, I also came upon an interesting complementary pair of graphs illustrating sexual dominance preferences. Younger men want to be dominated. Older women are generally interested in doing just that.

[data/image] In addition their lack of physical inhibitions, older women have much healthier attitudes in two other areas of sexual concern: STD testing and contraception. (…read more, blog.okcupid.com)

The OkCupid post touches on casual sex, specifically in regard to women and aging, such as with this graphic:

At the same time (last night), I came across this thick and crunchy data slam of premarital sex statistics, From shame to game in one hundred years: An economic model of the rise in premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation. It is tinged with judgement but still fascinating:

(…) The great sociologist William Ogburn (1964) suggested that a large part of social change was a reaction to technological progress. Our research presents a mechanism where socialisation, by parents and institutions such as the church or state, is determined by the technological environment that people live in. While a simpler model that focused only on technological advances in contraception could generate the rise in premarital sex without an appeal to the socialisation process, it would miss the dramatic changes in sexual norms that history convincingly documents. For example, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex. Such crimes could be punished by fines, public whippings, and jail terms. This begs the question of why such draconian measures were initially adopted and then abandoned by parents, churches and states. An answer is provided here. (…read more, voxeu.org)

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