- Axe Argentina heats up its new ad campaign (above).
Momentos de la Verdad vol. 1 – AXE Get it Action (YouTube)
- Purity myth, indeed: In her 2010 book “The Purity Myth,” Feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti reported that “more than 1,400 purity balls” were held in 2006. Her citation: a 2007 article by Jocelyne Zablit, who gives as the source of that figure Leslee J. Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, in South Dakota. Reached by telephone this week, Ms. Unruh was rather more vague with her figures.
Purity Balls (NYTimes)
- How does a prostitute make an officer reveal military secrets? Rather easily, according to evidence assembled against a group of Turkish officers who allegedly ran a sex-for-secrets ring.
Turkey’s army scandal: Sex for secrets (Economist)
- Hundreds of sex workers from around the world who said they were denied visas to attend an international AIDS conference in the United States began their own meeting in Kolkata on Saturday in protest.
Sex workers denied U.S. visa hold their own AIDS conference (The Raw Story)
- A 17-year-old Kentucky girl is now facing a contempt charge for tweeting the names of the two boys who raped her when she was passed out and then shared/distributed photos of her rape for months – the boys got a soft plea deal for their crimes, and she’s rightfully angry.
Kentucky Teen Faces Charge for Naming Attackers (ABC News)
- Survivor and sexual assault advocacy activist Brooke Axtell writes a superlative post with seven crucial ways to help and meet the unique needs of young people who are survivors of rape and other sexual traumas.
7 Ways to Help a Teen Survivor of Sexual Assault (Psychology Today)
- As someone whose name is banned from Google Instant and Autocomplete (me! unfair!) this article about the troubling wider effects Google Instant and Autocomplete’s issues with bisexuality searches hits upsettingly close to home. I now wonder how their censorship and blacklisting of my name might be affecting my career.
Faith Cheltenham: Google’s Bisexual Problem (HuffPo, linked only because this article is not published anywhere else)
- Google appears to be applying negative bias toward sex in its products. The Australian Sex Party has now threatened Google with legal action after the search engine refused to run its ads on the eve of the Melbourne by-election. It comes after Sex Party ads were blocked by Google at the last federal election because the company – which is typically opposed to censorship – perceived the text as too racy (the ads were reinstated by Google the day before the election).
Sex Party threatens Google after ad spat (Sydney Morning Herald)
- Russia, WTF? Internet censorship made law, an NGO crackdown, now this: Seventy-three people have been prosecuted for violating new anti-gay legislation (“public homosexual and paedophile “propaganda”“) imposed in Russia’s former imperial city Saint Petersburg four months ago, police said Friday.
Russian city prosecutes 73 people for ‘homosexual propaganda’ (The Raw Story)
- An STI (not STD as is being misreported) is at the core of a huge scientific breakthrough: Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism – the bacterium that makes Bacterial Vaginosis, which when it’s in the lungs is ‘walking pneumonia’.
Stanford and Venter Institute Simulate an Entire Organism With Software (NYTimes)
- Is “vanilla” (as in sex) a bad word – or an insult? Catherine Scott says that if so, then “laying the blame entirely at the feet of BDSM folks is overly simplistic.”
Thinking Kink: Is Vanilla Sex Boring? Who Gets to Decide? (Bitch Media)
- Her laptop was stolen – along with her underwear. Secret Service says the thief demanded nude video of his wife’s “hot” friend, but that’s not all.
Laptop theft leads to “sextortion” – and arrest of family friend (Ars Technica)
- Read this and consider that we now know that porn doesn’t lead to violent sex acts in real life… “We don’t really know if violence in entertainment leads to violence in reality, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s unconstitutional to restrict depictions of violence. That’s what the Supreme Court has said, repeatedly: You can restrict pornography but you can’t legislate against violent images.”
Why violence, but not sex, is protected by the First Amendment (ThomsonReuters)
- Yay! For those who’ve always longed for sexual exploration between Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or for a bondage re-telling of “Jane Eyre,” get your Kindles and Nooks ready.
Clandestine Classics Porns Up Classic Literature (NewsBusters)
- Police in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and San Francisco are confiscating condoms from sex workers and transgender women, undermining health department campaigns to reduce HIV, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
US: Police Practices Fuel HIV Epidemic (Human Rights Watch) See also: US condom crackdown impeding efforts to prevent HIV, study finds (Guardian UK)
- The article I wrote in 2009 about porn stars on Twitter reminds me of the article (below) that is making the rounds this week.
Porn stars use Twitter to go mainstream (CNN)
- The owner of the popular “breastaurant” chain Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill has appointed himself mayor of Bankersmith, Texas —– and has changed the town’s name to, natch, Bikinis.
Owner of ‘breastaurant’ chain buys Texas town, changes its name to ‘Bikinis’ (The Daily Caller)
- Spinal Tap, anyone? A New York man known for his unusually large penis was patted down by airport security at San Francisco International last week after they questioned him about the bulge in his pants, he said.
Man with ‘world’s biggest penis’ stopped at SFO security (SFGate Blog)
- Anti-porn group Morality in Media has launched a “no porn on the plane” campaign, and has contacted most major airlines to argue that they should commit to policing what people watch.
Pornography in Public Causes Some to Gasp, Others to Shrug (NYTimes)
- Former Justice Department official Patrick Trueman (and current Morality in Media President), who proudly participated in federal pornography prosecutions during their “heyday” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, told The Daily Caller that Mitt Romney’s campaign assured him that Romney would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if elected president.
Reagan prosecutor: Romney promised ‘vigorous’ porn crackdown (The Daily Caller)
- We’ve been telling you those jelly rubber toys are toxic… Chemicals called phthalates – ubiquitous in soft plastic packaging, sex toys, fragrances, and cosmetics – could be contributing to a rise in diabetes rates, according to a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Diabetes could be linked to phthalates, chemical in common household products, study suggests (Daily Dose: Boston Globe)
- In this six-and-a-half-minute-long video Q&A for the site WeHappyTrans, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening‘s 20-year-old Stephen Ira Beatty, formerly Kathlyn Elizabeth Beatty, openly talks about how he made the transition from girl to boy at the age of 14.
Warren Beatty & Annette Bening’s Trans Son Speaks (Dlisted)
- Transforming FAMILY is a ten minute documentary that jumps directly into an ongoing conversation among trans people about parenting. Share it!
Transforming Families Film (LGBTQ Parenting Network, via Dr. Cory Silverberg)
- Sex Game of Thrones (YouTube)
- Former international call girl and Brazilian author of five books Vanessa de Oliveiras stripped in front of the Governmental Palace in Lima, Peru. Her reason: she’s tired of eBook pirates.
Woman strips in public to protest e-book pirates (NSFW video) (ZDNet)
- Bacchus writes, “I’ve always been a free speech absolutist who is nonetheless (1) opposed to people being hurtful dicks when they flap their gums and (2) quite capable of being an oblivious, hurtful dick when I flap my gums. West does a very nice job of explaining how (and how not) to exercise the freest of speech while remaining decent and humane.”
On Rape Jokes (ErosBlog: The Sex Blog)
- The Indonesian government has blocked access to 1 million pornographic websites in advance of Ramadan, the country’s holy month. Internet censorship is nothing new in Indonesia, but the scale of this particular restriction is unprecedented.
Indonesia blocks 1 million porn sites, is just getting started (ZDNet)
Thanks for supporting Valenti’s Purity Myth! :) Er, at least posting about it :P
Typical Google, they used to be such a good company
Yikes. The first “autocomplete” expansion I receive for “lesbian” is “lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.” WTF?