- Armenian pornographer Milt Abdjourian’s bold, single-minded dedication to fabric, attire, and hyper-specialized contextual perversion lives on in dozens of colorful titles and still-provocative covers.
Milt Abdjourian’s Vanished Empire of Clothing and Fashion Pornography (VICE)
- This sucks, this sucks so badly: A Manhattan judge ruled this week that a man who shared naked photos of his girlfriend on Twitter — and sent them to her sister and her boss via email — did not technically do anything illegal.
Why New York’s First ‘Revenge Porn’ Case Ended Terribly for the Victim (NY Mag)
- Cinema star badass Michelle Rodriguez has confirmed that model Cara Delevingne is her girlfriend, which is pretty fucking fabulous.
Michelle Rodriguez and Cara Delevingne Confirm Relationship (Autostraddle)
- So true: this is the one key, sexy scene missing from 50 Shades and all of its clones.
The hot scene missing from every 50 Shades of Grey clone (Pendowright)
Canadian government seeks public consultation on #prostitution policy, here: http://t.co/zR1oqnDsv8 Please publicize! #sexwork #sexworkers
— iamcuriousblue (@iamcuriousblue) February 20, 2014
- In the UK: Laura Lee, a spokesperson for the International Union of Sex Workers, claims that “sex is none of the state’s business” wants the government to consider making paying for sex in a ‘mega brothel’ legal. Lee, who has worked in the industry for 20 years, believes Britain should follow the examples set in Europe.
“I’ve been a sex worker for 20 years – and I love it”: Woman in call to legalise ‘mega brothels’
(DailyMirror)
- Transgender people exist in the US and across the world, and in some states – Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Idaho – trans people don’t have the right to complete their transition and change their legal sex. Petition to allow everyone, regardless of birth sex and location, the right to change their legal sex.
Allow all people identifying as transgender to change their legal gender (whitehouse.gov, via CSC)
- Gay porn company Falcon Studios is using CGI to re-create the bareback experience while its actors are fully strapped on. It already has one new digitally enhanced film, California Dreamin’ 1, an ode of sorts to the old-school porn movies.
How CGI Is Circumventing Porn’s Condom Law (Slate)
- In 2003, as Richard Bandy prepared for cancer surgery; what they didn’t expect was that the surgery would go wrong and internal bleeding would cause a brain injury. In a Feb. 12 article for Salon, How My Husband Forgot Sex, Lea writes about Bandy’s loss of short- and long-term memory and his ability to initiate and recall decades of marital intimacy.
Husband Forgets How to Have Sex After Botched Cancer Surgery (ABC News)
- Whether you’re clipping on a FitBit before a jog or turning on your Sleep Cycle app to log your eight hours, we’re becoming increasingly obsessed with tracking our most human behaviors. It should be no shock to learn that now there’s a way to quantify your sex life too.
This Map Shows Which States Have the Longest (and Shortest) Sex (Nerve)
- Great op-ed: “Part of the problem is that these people conflate ‘casual’ sex with meaningless sex.”
Cum one, cum all—in defense of casual sex (Badger Herald)
- Longreads lifted their paywall skirts to share this cool essay by Noga Arikha, first published in Lapham’s Quarterly, about the early days of personal ads. Arikha is a historian and the author of 2007’s Passions and Tempers.
Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads (Longreads)
- Joaquin Mendez-Hernandez, a Mexican national who operated out of Savannah, was convicted of acting as a pimp for women forced into prostitution was sentenced to life in federal prison Wednesday for his role in what prosecutors called a sex trafficking ring that traded women like slaves between Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas. Prosecutors said Mendez-Hernandez and his partners would bring women into the U.S. from Mexico and other countries and force them to have sex with 30 or more men each day for $25 apiece. They built a network that largely catered to Latino immigrants, meaning prostitutes were rotated not just between larger cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., but also in small farm communities such as Bonaire, Ga.
Accused Pimp Gets Life in Sex Trafficking Case (AP/ABC News)
- Cosmopolitan surveyed men and women’s porn viewing habits and discovered that men watch porn even more than women think men do. TIME reviews the survey’s results, which are based on a survey of 4,000 men and 4,000 women. It’s a very heternormative survey (framing and definitions) but I think it’s still really interesting.
This [Cosmopolitan] Survey Shows How Men and Women View Porn Differently
(TIME)
- China’s recent clampdown on prostitution, which began in a southern city on Feb 10 and has since spread to more than ten provinces, may be another round of anti-corruption campaign in disguise, says China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Youth League.
China’s Crackdown On Sex Trade: An Anti-Corruption Campaign In Disguise? (Forbes)
- Jimmyjane, a pioneer and innovator in high-end and high-tech vibrators, has been acquired. Jimmyjane will continue to operate separately, maintaining its product development, creative, online, and sales team at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco.
Pipedream’s Parent Company Acquires Jimmyjane (XBIZ)
- Diamond Products, a portfolio company of New York’s Brookstone Partners, acquired high-end sex toy manufacturer Jimmyjane. In September, the firm invested in Pipedream, with a product catalog of more than 3,000 items. The interest of an equity firm such as Brookstone highlights the sex toy market’s growing strength.
Private equity’s new target industry: Sex toys (CNBC)
- Times, they change: The Feminist Porn Conference is now a corporate-sponsored affair. Good Vibrations – purchased in 2007 by mainstream adult distributor GVA-TWN and overseen since by old-school Sturman associate Joel Kaminsky – announced that it is sponsoring the 2014 Feminist Porn Conference, set for April 5-6 at the University of Toronto.
Good Vibrations Sponsoring 2014 Feminist Porn Conference (NAME)
