Sex News: BART sex on Vine, Orson Scott Card, the Rule 34 Report, Apple’s porn lawsuit

  • Good thing Edward Snowden isn’t gay. If a trip to iconic city of Moscow or the edgier St. Petersburg is on your bucket list, an anti-gay law recently passed in Russia may have you thinking again. It is now outlawed to be ‘out and proud.’ In a throwback to the country’s authoritarian ruling, Russian president Vladimir Putin has signed a controversial law that punishes people for “homosexual propaganda.” The law fines people—including tourists—up to 200,000 rubles ($6,240 CDN) for “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations.”
    Russia Says It Will Arrest Openly Gay Tourists (Travel and Escape)
  • Pornographic movie makers told a judge that a Los Angeles County voter-approved measure requiring adult-film actors to wear condoms violates their constitutional right to free speech. “It dictates the content of a movie,” Paul Cambria, a lawyer representing Vivid Entertainment LLC, Califa Production Inc. and two porn actors who are fighting implementation of the measure, said at a hearing yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles. “The statute doesn’t allow a producer to portray conduct that is lawful.”
    Porn Producers Say Unprotected Sex Is Free Speech Right (Bloomberg)
  • An amateur pornography video shot on a moving BART train has quickly gone viral, triggering a high-profile test on the agency’s new law designed to root out unruly and indecent passengers. Since being uploaded to the Web on Thursday, the one-minute cellphone video has been flying around social media and as of late Friday had already attracted more than 875,000 views — or four times the number of people who ride BART each day.
    Porn video of BART train sex tests agency’s new anti-indecency law (Mercury News)

  • It’s truly great to see the term ‘sex work’ and author/activist Audacia Ray profiled on ABC News, but the writer still couldn’t resist undermining the topic with unnecessary, sleazily-angled details. You’re growing up ABC, but you’re still ten years behind the rest if us.
    Sex Workers Tell Tricks of the Trade (ABC News)
  • Alternet writes, “Feminist Porn Awards founder Carlyle Jansen readily acknowledges that much of conventional porn is degrading toward women and that sex trafficking can happen in the industry, but she believes sweeping generalizations about the industry are unfounded. With feminist porn, which she says is a ‘small but growing market,” she notes that “women with larger bodies are not fetishized and people of color are not stereotyped.'”
    New Pornographers Claim Their Work Is Ethical, Feminist and ‘Sex-Positive,’ But Will It Sell? (Alternet)
  • Times are tough for Debbie, a prostitute in western England who runs a private flat with other “mature ladies”. She does two or three jobs a day. A year ago she was doing eight or nine. She has cut her prices: “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t still be open.” She says that she can now make more money doing up furniture and attending car-boot sales than she can turning tricks.
    Sex doesn’t sell (Economist)

  • A red paper barrier was placed over student art works at Palmer High School in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, Alaska’s second-largest public school district. School administrators covered the creations of 16 students in the school’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program on the grounds that the material included “nudity, homosexual relationships [and] gender/transgender identity” among other potentially controversial themes. Students are protesting.
    Alaska: Students See Red as High School Papers-Over Sexual Art Images (SIECUS)
  • The good news for women-loving chanteuses like Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley is that blues music in the 1920s was so far under the radar of mainstream America, female blues singers could get away with occasionally expressing their true lesbian and genderqueer lives.
    Singing the Lesbian Blues in 1920s Harlem (Collectors Weekly)

  • An interview with Laura Agustín, who has spent 20 years investigating the sex industry. “If you think what sex workers do is dangerous, why insist they do it alone? It is legal in the UK for individuals to sell sex, but they may not work with companions or employ security guards. Brothels are illegal. If you prohibit businesses but people run them anyway – which they do – then workers must please bosses no matter what they ask. That is why this is a labour issue.”
    Does banning prostitution make women safer? (New Scientist)
  • The sexts that ended New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s career in Congress are now on display at the Museum of Sex in New York. The exhibit is called Universe of Desire, and looks at the way the “digital experience” has changed sexuality. It features “a larger-than-life Facebook conversation between Rep. Anthony Weiner and Blackjack Dealer Lisa Weiss,” according to the exhibit page on MoSex’s website.
    Weiner’s sexts on display at Museum of Sex (Daily Caller)

Main post photo: Daphne Groeneveld Poses for Ellen von Unwerth in Numéro #145

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One Comment - COMMENTARY is DESIRED

  1. *boggle* I have never been through the tube on a train so empty as to get away with that… Heck, I sometimes had to let 2-3 trains pass at MacArthur before I could fit in the door. Hat’s off to them.

    And old blues is so incredibly open it’s amazing. Wonderful counterpoint to people exclaiming about the “old days.”

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