Sex News: Harry Potter sex ed, Russell Brand, gaming and breast physics, #SexWorkerRightsDay

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  • Boston University is teaching students about safe sex and sexual health with a little bit of help from none other than wizard extraordinaire Harry Potter. “At this event, half-bloods, house-elves, and muggles alike will learn the proper way to get consent to enter one’s chamber of secrets and how to snog without getting hogwarts,” said the event’s Facebook page. “We’ll be casting some sensual spells in CAS room 313. Hope you can apparate there.”
    University Offers ‘Harry Potter’-Themed Sex-Ed Class (HuffPo)
  • Apparently Russell Brand has gone off (like old milk) saying that porn is bad. I’d like to debate him, live – but only if he did his homework. Anna Arrowsmith writes, “So now Russell Brand wants us to stop watching porn as part of his campaign against all things Capitalist. And like his previous forays into politics, he is quite proud of his lack of experience and knowledge about the subject…”
    Why Russell Brand is so Wrong About Pornography (Anna Arrowsmith)

Thank you to our Australian sponsor and friends, Bright Desire.

  • My Titties are Sisters Not Twins is a zine created by curator Antonia Marsh and artist Kelsey Bennett. Presented like a children’s workbook the zine celebrates imperfection and reminds us that no two titties are the same.
    My Titties Are Sisters Not Twins (Nerve)
  • Eric Chanson and Kevin Bollaert, two of the most infamous website operators in the field of “revenge porn,” must each pay $450,000 in damages to a woman whose nude photos of her taken when she was a minor were published on UGotPosted.com.
    ‘Revenge Porn’ Operators Must Pay $900,000 in Damages (XBIZ)
  • The owner of a revenge porn website has been labelled a hypocrite after asking Google to remove links to stories about his unsavoury business, over their use of “unauthorised photos”. Craig Brittain, whose website posted nude photos of women without their knowledge or permission, is seeking the removal of the articles on the grounds that they feature pictures of him that were used without his consent.
    Owner of revenge porn site asks Google to remove links to his own photos (Telegraph)

Thank you to our sponsor, Nubile Films.

  • Men have been circumcised for thousands of years, yet our thinking about the foreskin seems as muddled as ever. And a close examination of this muddle raises disturbing questions. Is this American exceptionalism justified? Should we really be funding mass circumcision in Africa? Or by removing the foreskins of men, boys and newborns, are we actually committing a violation of human rights?
    The Troubled History Of The Foreskin (io9)
  • ICM Registry continues its use of ICANN to scare people (by fear of x-rated domain squatters) out of their money. ICM Registry, the operator of the .xxx top-level domain, Monday opened up new .porn and .adult registrations to trademark holders who are registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH).
    Trademark Holders Now Can Register .porn, .adult Names (XBIZ)

Thank you to our French sponsor, Dorcel Club.

  • Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren’t the only queer ladies prowling the streets of Gotham anymore, folks. After decades of flirtation and fervent fan speculation, Catwoman is now a canon bisexual according to current Catwoman head writer Genevieve Valentine.
    Selina Kyle, DC’s Original Catwoman, Comes Out As Bisexual (Towleroad)
  • In 2012, teledildonics darling RealTouch was on the rise, getting featured in HBO’s Sex/Now documentary series and Amazon’s original comedy series Betas. But despite the positive press, the company’s fortunes took a nosedive. RealTouch found itself unable to sell its hardware and, what’s more, it is now catering to a dwindling group of existing customers. It wasn’t the moral majority, however, that pushed the sex-tech outfit to the brink of collapse. It was patent licensing.
    Adult Themes: The rise and fall of America’s first digital brothel (Engadget)
  • “Plenty of people theorize about why games often feature bad breast physics, but there is little hard information about the actual breast-creation process. After looking into it a bit, I found that many amateur developers seemed to genuinely have a problem figuring out how to tackle breast physics in their games.”
    How Video Game Breasts Are Made (And Why They Can Go Wrong) (Kotaku)

  • The gaming-themed strip club flyer images above and below are via @52stations, who was sharing them to express their displeasure at the flyers being handed out near GDC 2015 (a big gaming developers convention in San Francisco this week) and the message they believe it sends to female attendees. It’s okay to have that boundary, but I happen to feel very differently about it; I’m also a female developer, and I like the flyers. Making them cause for a moral panic is just silly. I find them cheeky, sex-positive, and I’m guessing my pals who are performers at two of those clubs had a hand in putting these handouts together. As for the assumptions people are making about what they represent, the women in them, who they’re meant to attract, and how they might scare women away from being developers… I’m inclined to think that sex work negative attitudes and all these accompanying assumptions about a local strip club’s flyers would make female sex performers (who are also developers) consider that GDC isn’t really a welcoming place for them. When you consider we’re talking about female workers, condemning their advertising just ends up reading as outsider hostility. (Here’s my opinion on sexism in dev culture.) Not to mention the fact that if there’s anywhere your assumptions about women and sex will be turned upside down in the most surprising and sex positive of ways, it’s going to be San Francisco. Ask a sex worker: exploitation is in the eye of the beholder.

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One Comment - COMMENTARY is DESIRED

  1. It’s a shame that Anna Arrowsmith is such a very terrible writer. The pro-porn camp deserves better advocates than this..

    “He fears that his previous focus on a woman’s beauty rather than her diabetic status (his words not mine) is a symptom that he as a man was encouraged to do because of his hitherto porn consumption” Anybody?

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