February 2014

• The Daily Beast profiles a feminist porn director seldom included in the usual lineup: Self-identified “left-leaning feminist” Managing Director of Penthouse Entertainment, Kelly Holland.
  Porn’s Behind-the-Camera Feminists (Daily Beast)

• “Threesomes made easy” is the tagline for what is poised to be a Grindr for boy-girl threesomes. So. Awesome. Also: they’re hiring devs.
  3underus (3nder.us, via Dan Savage)

• This article came out great. Facebook now allows users to self-identify as something other than male or female (a list is here). Facebook now has 56 gender options, and you can use up to 10 of them on your profile.
  Facebook offers users 56 new gender options: Here’s what they mean (The Week)

• Philadelphia Police Officer Terra Barrow had a side job running a handful of websites and phone lines appealing to lusty callers with fetishes both tame and taboo for years. She stopped running the sites – which featured fetishes that would be illegal if acted upon in real life, like pedophilia, rape, incest, kidnapping and snuff – about two years ago, because she worried that they would endanger her police job. Turns out she had no reason to worry.
  Ramsey: Cop with phone-sex job didn’t break rules (Philly)

• Publicly talking about sex in Pakistan is taboo and can even be a death sentence. Parents have slit their daughters’ throats or doused them in acid for crimes as innocuous as dancing at a wedding or looking out the window. Almost nowhere in Pakistan offers any kind of organised sex education. In some places it has been banned. Around 700 girls are enrolled in eight local schools run by the Village Shadabad Organisation. Their sex ed lessons – starting at age eight – cover changes in their bodies, what their rights are and how to protect themselves.
  Pakistani village gives girls pioneering sex education class (Reuters)

• Echoing the Reddit thread where people summed up their first sexual experience in gifs, Autostraddle did it one better with queer sex – and it’s hilarious.
  OPEN THREAD: Give Us The Gif That Describes Your First Queer Sex Experience (AutoStraddle)

• Drama in Boylesque-land, which sucks because they’re so great. Let’s hope it passes like a rough storm.
  Let Me Entertain You: How I Was Banned From Boylesque Because I Work in Porn (Queerty)

• They left a lot out (Last Tango in Paris, etc.) but this list of big-screen releases with real sex in them had a few new ones for my watchlist.
  21 Movies With Unsimulated Sex (Buzzfeed)

• Is a hooded clitoris to blame for many women’s failure to reach orgasm with their sexual partners? Whether it is or not, a surgical procedure is becoming more popular among both women and physicians. This article is horrifying, because it’s not.
  Female Circumcision as Sexual Therapy: The Past and Future of Plastic Surgery (PS Mag)

• Mr. Skin parent company SK Intertainment has acquired adult blog Fleshbot from owner and editor Lux Alptraum. Details about the transaction have not been made public. Gawker launched the site in 2003 (and hired me in early 2005), building it into a cheeky, edgy take on sex in popular culture. The site’s ability to straddle a thin line between adult and mainstream fascinated traditional media, generating profiles in publications including Wired and the New Yorker. Under Alptraum’s ownership (when Jonno and I, the founding editors, left); the site abandoned all aspirations to mainstream respectability, becoming adult-industry focused in the material it posted.
  Mr. Skin Acquires Fleshbot (YNOT)

• Captain Daddy strikes again. ::swoon
  Patrick Stewart Has Plans To Dress Up Like Captain Picard For His Wife (Buzzfeed)

• For decades now, adult videos in Japan have featured pixelated genitalia in order to comply with national, actively enforced decency laws. As a workaround, “mosiac removal machines” (モザイク除去機 or mozaiku jyokyo-ki) were developed to screw with the pixels. They’ve been on sale for years and, in the past, have cost up to several hundred dollars.
  The Machines That Claim to Uncensor Japanese Pornography (Kotaku)

• In her own words, it’s refreshing. ““But why would you do porn?” People often ask me this question. They know I am a freshman at Duke University, and their shock and incredulity are apparent when the rumor they’ve heard whispered or read on a chat board turns out to be true.”
  I’m The Duke University Freshman Porn Star… (XOjane)

• Linking this because it’s so true – me too. My Barbies had so much sex… And it was awesome!
  My Barbies Had So Much Sex. It Was Great. (NY Mag)

• I hate poetry, but even I’ll admit these poems sourced from tube site search queries are great.
  Porn Poetry: Artists Turn Live Feed of XXX Search Terms Into Verses (Animal NY)

• The Atlantic explores masking fetish, finally – one month after UK’s Channel 4 aired the author’s (terrific) documentary on TV Secrets of the Living Dolls in January. (You can find a few clips on Channel 4′s YouTube.) Strangely, The Atlantic’s article manages to avoid mentioning his popular, controversial and widely discussed documentary, which is currently headed to Australia’s TV screens.
  What Men Find Behind Female Masks (The Atlantic)

• New app Crowdpilot works like this: while out on a date, you crowdsource real-time advice from Facebook friends, Crowdpilot’s community of users, and/or strangers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program as they listen in on your date via your phone’s microphone. (It advises users to disclose the surveillance early on in the date, which is good, because otherwise it’s illegal.) Then, the community’s “pilots” offer advice to help you as you go along.
  This App Lets You Crowdsource Dating Advice… While You’re On Dates (Fast Company)

• This post is Bay Area centric, but I approve of its message for all. “The experience of watching people have sex in public, whether it be on screen or live in person, gets me going, especially when it involves performers with different bodies, relationships, and conceits than in traditional porn.”
  Go See Some Porn This Week! (The Bold Italic)

{ Comments on this entry are closed }