Sex News: Consensual porn now legal in UK, the Fyre Festival BJ king, Marriott’s war on single women, FetLife’s self-censorship

• “Pornography produced by consenting adults engaging in legal acts will no longer be prosecuted under Britain’s historic obscenity laws, the Crown Prosecution Service has said … A CPS spokesperson confirmed the change, which followed a public consultation: “It is not for the CPS to decide what is considered good taste or objectionable. We do not propose to bring charges based on material that depicts consensual and legal activity between adults, where no serious harm is caused and the likely audience is over the age of 18.”
  * Pornography of adult consensual sex no longer taboo, says CPS (Guardian)

• “In a landmark victory for adult entertainment, the Crown Prosecution Service today revised its obscenity laws in the U.K. Fisting, watersports, BDSM and squirting porn are now effectively legal to distribute in the country. The move by the CPS comes after years of work by campaigners, such as “Obscenity Lawyer” Myles Jackman, who fought for the draconian rules to be abolished. Jackman told XBIZ today that the concept of “freely exercised consent” is now embedded in English criminal law.”
  * U.K. Revises Obscenity Laws to Allow Fisting, Squirting (XBIZ)

• “The ignorance behind the war on sex raged by the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles, the advertisers, the algorithms, is not only dated, but dangerous. As women fight for control of our reproductive organs, as trans people fight for the right to use a bathroom, the trolls have convinced the gatekeepers that sex must be silent, and 4chan — acting on the urges of right-wing populists — deserves a voice.”
  * How sex censorship killed the internet we love (Engadget)

• “[Andy] King shot to fame for his interview in the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened. In the film, which recounts the disastrous Fyre Festival, King reveals that at one point Fyre CEO Billy McFarland ordered him to perform oral sex on the Bahamian Minister of Customs in exchange for shipments of Evian water. The more shocking confession: King was actually willing to do it.”
  * Fyre Fest organizer doesn’t want to be known as “The Blowjob King” (Queerty)

• “Over the weekend, a tweet describing a new policy being implemented by Marriott hotels went viral due to its discriminatory undertones that targeted single women staying at their properties … And according to an official press release, about half-a-million employees thus far have undergone training … This only seems to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of restaurants, hotels, and other businesses recently shutting out single, female patrons for fear that they are potential sex workers.”
  * When Anti-Sex Trafficking Policies Like the Marriott’s Do More Harm Than Good (Paper)

• “On the final day during which citizens could share comments with the Department of Education about its proposed changes to Title IX protections for sexual assault victims, the government website went down. Starting at 10 am ET, comment submissions sections on regulations.gov and federalregister.gov were inoperable for “a few hours” Wednesday morning, and have been “finicky” since, according to organizers.”
  * Government website outages prevent comments on sexual assault Title IX rule changes (Mashable)

• “All four panels touched on diversity and representation, the shared responsibility of adult entertainment producers for the welfare of their performers, and how to operate a successful business, one that grows and evolves, under the rubric of producing “porn with a purpose.””
  * XBIZ 2019: The LGBT Adult Biz and ‘Porn With a Purpose’ (XBIZ)

• “To protect the community, Fetlife decided to remove any content that the credit card companies could deem obscene. “We’ve been one of the most liberal, if not the most liberal, adult site on the web which makes us the perfect target,” Baku wrote, especially in the increasingly hostile political climate. The site’s newly updated guidelines weren’t intended “to be a negative comment against your kink or your fantasies,” Baku wrote. But Fetlife’s decisions could no longer revolve around the needs of just its members—it was about protecting the survival of the site itself. Fetlife was funded by ad sales (which weren’t enough to cover the cost of the site’s servers) and paid memberships. Without card payments for the latter, the site’s revenue dropped overnight. When Baku first got the news, he said, “I felt like my world just fell apart.””
  * The Internet’s Largest Kink Community Isn’t Going To Moderate Itself (Digg)

• “The historic nonprofit that served as a central meeting space for the sex-positive community in San Francisco no longer has a physical home, as rising rents have forced the center to shutter, according to its co-founder … Throughout the last 20 years, the Center for Sex and Culture took many forms. It was, at once, a gallery, an archive, a library, and an event space … The center was paying almost $10,000 per month. In two years, it was projected to jump to $14,000, [Dr. Carol] Queen said.”
  * SF kink community grieves loss of Center for Sex and Culture: ‘We’ve lost something enormous’ (SF Gate)

• “Sleeping With Strangers wisely does not claim to offer an exhaustive or chronological survey of sex in film … [it includes] the existence of a thriving gay subculture within the Hollywood social scene as early as the 1930s; the complicity of gossip columnists and talent agents, many of them also gay, in concocting offscreen heterosexual romances for less-than-straight movie stars. Devoting himself to the proposition that “if our culture is to survive, or deserve survival, then ‘straight’ people need to accommodate and learn from gay experience,” Thomson attempts to tease out an alternative history of sexual identity—a freer, fuller understanding of the varieties of desire—embedded in the film industry’s officially straight story.”
  * Hollywood’s Secret History of Sexuality (Atlantic)

• “A Texas woman unencumbered by pants was arrested yesterday for indecent exposure after she was spotted, vibrator in hand, masturbating in public … A hotel manager recounted seeing Nickels with “her legs straight up in the air, spread open” while she repeatedly penetrated her vagina with a “silver object.” … The Marriott manager–who estimated that Nickels masturbated for seven or eight minutes–added that she “yelled at him to stay back” when he attempted to approach her.”
  * Texas Woman’s Public Pleasure Sessions (The Smoking Gun)

• “When I saw that duct-taped bar, I was like, damn, there are some survivors in here.”
  * Seedy strip club meets boutique hotel (CNN)

Main post image via Golden Paris (C-Heads).