* Photo: that’s wonderfully smiley web celeb, VC, former Chief Evangelist for Apple, and Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki hamming it up with a gleeful grin at the Lelo booth at CES last weekend. Yay! (yfrog.com, thanks Amanda!)
* Sex blogs (sex educators, bloggers and sex workers) are blowing up about the girl who is going to lose her virginity in porn January 15 in a live broadcast for Kink.com. The opinion from one Kink veteran – and friend – is that it’s in poor taste and sex-negative. An example of the marketing she references is at right. Read her excellent post, Virginity (missmaggiemayhem.com)
* Shame on Florida’s Erotic Art Museum – they filed a fake DMCA, fooled Flickr, and are trying to sue photographer Thomas Hawk for sharing photos they let him take. Greedy, awful people; Flickr might be complicit. Erotic Art Museum Sues Photographer For $US2m Over Reputation (gizmodo.com.au)
* The gay blogs are abuzz about the young, brave gayelle who got covered in blood and saved Giffords’ life: anti-gay righties can STFU now, m’kay? The gay intern who saved Gabrielle Giffords’ life (dallasvoice.com, thanks John!)
* The top sex ed resource for under-18s is compiling a much-needed sexual health provider database. Details: Announcing Scarleteen’s New Provider Database- Add Your Organization Now! (charlieglickman.com)
* Our SF Giants star pitcher just starred in a local HIV ad plastered around The City and it left us feeling… weird. Tim Lincecum’s HIV/AIDS PSA Questioned (sfist.com)
* It seems that the porn awards are where washed-up asshole Hollywood douchebags feel they can go and treat the “dirty sex people” like shit. That attitude got Andy Dick tossed out on his ass last weekend. Dick booted from porn awards (torontosun.com)
Every single category of human living breeds incessant hair-splitting. The nitpicking response creating the Nicki Blue virginity ‘escapade’ is a prime example. Hyper-sensitivity is the bane of intellectual freedom.
“Dick booted from porn awards” is the the best headline I’ve ever seen…
I’m a total fan of Kink.com, and love their usually sex-positive, kink-positive, “we’re not circus freaks over here” message. Yet, when I saw the announcement of this event on Twitter, I had to admit I cringed.
I wish it was marketed in the same way as described in Peter Acworth’s thoughtful comment above, and not as a “virgin sacrifice” sideshow. Yeah, yeah, I know they’re catering to a lot of people with the firmly entrenched Victorian attitudes about virginity, but I always thought that one of the parts of Kink.com’s mission *was* an attempt to change attitudes.
As for the idea of a “virginity losing” show itself, I have no problem with it – big part of kink *is* playing with the widely held roles and attitudes, some of them very uncomfortable, and giving them our own twist, either to confront them, or to subvert them. Without presumptions and prejudices, we’d have so much less material to work with :-).
Nickie Blue as a vaginal virgin? Apparently those big dildos did not debit her her pussy bank. For an actor/model who has to be pitched with the caveat or qualifier as a “vaginal virgin” this implies other penetration has been rampant. Whatever.. but marketing is marketing for Kink Inc.
Guy Kawasaki is a graduate of the same educationally excellent bu sexually repressed parochial prep school I attended elementary through high school and which helped me tremendously intellectually but absolutely failed me as far as accepting my identity in a timely manner. A public photo of vibrators in hand?! Right on Guy, bet that won’t make it into the Bulletin.
Once again I agree with Bacchus …
And I’m sorry for my faux pas …
Note to self: whenever sitting/studying/multi-tasking/browsing several pages back-and-forth, always refresh a blog before posting a comment, to check whether others have posted important comments in the meantime …
:]
Peter, by coming out among us on the blogs, admitting that the marketing is messed up, and trying to fix it, you’re making a big step toward that elegant, responsible, 21st-century marketing I was talking about. Sincerely, thanks.
Great articulations from Bacchus, and excellent article by Maggie Mayhem …
One important point that Maggie makes, in noting the presumptions even in wordage – not only that ‘virginity’ is still traditionally and ridiculously judged by penetrative vaginal sex – but more, that ‘virginity’ (however defined) is somehow equated with ‘innocence’: very Christian-Puritan.
On a closely related point, the very sex-negative cultural presumptions that with sexual knowledge (or, with sex education?) we are somehow ‘losing’ something, ‘losing’ virginity, ‘losing’ innocence (“sacrificing Nikki’s innocence”) – as if one could ever ‘lose’ one’s ‘innocence’ through sexual experience or sexual knowledge; and not, rather, be *gaining* something with sexual experience and sexual knowledge and, indeed, with sex education: again, very Christian-Puritan underlying cultural presumptions.
For kink.com to be ‘buying into’ and ‘selling’ these presumptions is kinda lame considering their history and their pride in representing all that is non-traditional and progressive, isn’t it?
I greatly admire and respect so much about kink.com’s world … how odd, and rather sad perhaps, that kink.com should now be promoting heterosexual vanilla vaginal sex as the ultimate!
Then, on the other hand … we can analyse as much as we like … fantasy and imagination are deeply tied up (little pun I like!) with our sexuality, aren’t they? However, less fortunately, so are our underlying social and cultural conditioning …
L.
We did admittedly make a mess of the marketing surrounding this event, and we are now working to change it, including the above banner. (We’re a largish porn company and i’m afraid mistakes do sometimes happen.)
The spirit of this event is that we are deeply honored that Nicki has approached kink.com for her fantasy to take place – that of being penetrated vaginally for the first time in front of a live audience of fans – and we will do all we can to make the fulfillment of this fantasy as positive and exciting for her as we can. (I have written a lengthy post on Maggie’s blog along these same lines).
Violet, will you come on Saturday? it would be wonderful to have you back.
Best wishes,
Peter Acworth
CEO kink.com
Glad that I was able to share the article with you and you found it interesting.
Keep up the great work, (Blog, writing, educating, sharing)
JT
yeah.. Bacchus … is spot on here xoxo
I thought Maggie Mayhem’s article on the Nickie Blue thing made a lot of good points, but missed what I see as the main one. I’m officially ignoring the Nicki Blue event, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s fake. Not “fraudulent” in a moral sense, just “marketing puffery beyond anything I care to share in spreading.” Which means, no blogging or event linkage from me (although no implied or intended criticism to you, Violet, for choosing differently — I’m sure I link to stuff all the time that makes you cringe, plus these are subtle judgment calls intimately linked to our personal prejudices.)
As Maggie so aptly explains, virginity is a very flexible, perhaps even nearly-meaningless concept. But when you’re marketing “taking virginity” as a porn event, you have got to know you’re shooting for a target market that is interested in the bad old Victorian “busted-hymen of a previously-chaste young lady” memes. And whatever Vicki is selling on camera, that ain’t precisely it. (I knew this from first principles before reading Maggie’s article; a “real virgin” in the previously-chaste-young-lady sense doesn’t do live shows. But Maggie filled in the background.)
So the whole thing is, to my eye, a production for fools and idiots, like penis pills and breast enlarger cremes. Anybody who sees the banner ought to know that what’s on sale isn’t what the banner promises; and anybody who is enticed, regardless, is either not as smart as your average bear, or is so desperately chasing a specific fantasy that they’ve got a huge suspension of disbelief thing going on.
Does this reduce my overall respect for Kink.com? If so, only a little. I’ll assume that the lady has at least averred to them that she’s never had penis-in-vagina sex, giving them a factual basis for the “virgin” claim in their marketing. (From their talk of an “official hymen-cam”, I’m gathering they think they can show video for the skeptics, too.) Beyond that, well, the Kink people have always been much better pornographers than they have been marketers. Ham-fisted off-key marketing from them we have seen before. And while I want one of my favorite porn companies to have elegant, responsible, 21st-century marketing, porn is still a medieval business in a lot of respects, nor are these easy times in it. It’s a lot to ask, and they still lead the pack. So, I can abide.