Sunday Sex Reads: Best of the Week

“On the first cover, a nude man (credited as “Eldon”) sat cross-legged, his modesty preserved by shadows, as an amorous woman (credited as “Lorelei”) nuzzled him from behind. One of its cover lines: “Compulsions of the promiscuous woman.” It sold out, moving six hundred thousand copies in four days. At its peak during the late seventies, each issue sold around 1.5 million copies.”
* A Penis on Every Page: The Rise and Fall of Playgirl (Esquire)

“To keep the lie plausible, I dressed like I was going to a catering gig and slipped my sleazy outfit in my barkit bag to change into once I parked at the location: a dreary L.A. motel. I changed clothes in my car in the parking lot. I hid whipped cream, low-rent titty-clamps from Pleasure Chest and a vibrating dildo (again, nothing fancy) in the glove compartment of my shit brown 1978 Chevy Disco Nova. I was supposed to meet another girl who was scheduled to do the show with me, sight unseen.”
* All the Crazy Shit I’ve Seen as a Bachelor-Party Stripper (MEL Magazine)

“If you’ve been hanging out on the internet lately, you’ve probably seen it: a creepy group photograph of all your ex-girlfriends, in doll form. It’s the New Ken Dolls, a Mattel roll-out that starts now and keeps on going indefinitely (many of the new Kens won’t be available ’til Spring 2018, EXACTLY LIKE YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND)!”
* 75 Lesbian Ken Dolls, Ranked By Lesbianism (Autostraddle)

“In the mid-1990s, as average American households were increasingly getting online, a “Great Internet Sex Panic” threatened to severely restrict the most significant communications medium of our time.”
* The ‘Magna Carta’ of Cyberspace Turns 20: An Interview With the ACLU Lawyer Who Helped Save the Internet (ACLU)

“As with any modern masterpiece, designer Jenna Josepher and photographer Jesse Untracht-Oakner‘s vision started with a box of dildos. SFW is an art experiment that features GIFs of sex toys that have been desexualized through jazzy design–well, somewhat desexualized. At first glance, it’s not so easy to decipher the various objects rotating and squishing about. ”
* Sex Toys Are In Need Of Rebranding And These Artists Are Doing Just That (Fast Company)

“The fight for net neutrality, the basic principle that all data on the internet should be treated equally, isn’t important only because it ensures users are able to stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones via HBO GO just as easily as they can watch the latest Pewdiepie video on YouTube. For companies on the fringe of mainstream media, like the adult entertainment industry, the end of an open internet could have dire consequences for their businesses and free speech.”
* Porn Companies Tell Us Why the End of Net Neutrality Will Make Porn Boring (Motherboard)

“There’s also the introduction of a new “Safe Mode.” Tumblr has always had a porn problem; adult content makes up a ton of the site’s traffic, but turns away advertisers. An estimate from analytics service SimilarWeb says around 20.53 percent of Tumblr’s desktop site’s total traffic is for adult content. Less than a week after it became official that Verizon was buying Yahoo, Tumblr announced that it would begin filtering “sensitive content” on the site more aggressively and requiring users to sign in if they want to view blogs designated “explicit.””
* Yahoo didn’t kill Tumblr but Verizon surely will (The Outline)

“Yu, a gentle-looking man in his early forties, with the placid demeanor of a yoga instructor, works as a mistress dispeller, a job that barely existed a decade ago but is becoming common in major Chinese cities. His clients are women who hope to preserve their marriages by fending off what is known in Chinese as a xiao san, or “Little Third”—a term that encompasses everything from a partner in a casual affair to a long-term “kept woman.” Mistress dispellers use a variety of methods.”
* China’s Mistress-Dispellers (The New Yorker)

“I click on a Reddit post and squint as the link loads. The silhouette of a woman appears, in grainy black and white. Just as the camera pans over her bare breasts, the gif glitches and replays from the beginning. At first I think something’s wrong with my laptop, but then I realize I’ve just found an example of glitch porn, a type of erotica that combines internet art borrowed from genres like vaporwave with hardcore porn. It’s a subsection of glitch art, which is itself a distinct category.”
* Glitch Porn Makes Being Naked on the Internet Interesting Again (Motherboard)

“Linking sex to consumption has a long history in advertising, dating all the way back to 1871 when Pearl Tobacco released an ad that depicted a nude woman floating above stormy seas. Pearl is largely credited with being the first company to take their advertisements in this direction. ”
* Sex Sells? No, It Doesn’t (Discover)

Warning for survivors of sexual assault and abuse. “Kim gave the pastor only a partial, fuzzy account of what had happened to her; as a child raised in a fundamentalist “haven,” she lacked the vocabulary to describe sex acts, let alone understand them. But rather than call Kim’s parents or contact the police, the shocked cleric turned to a higher authority, placing an urgent call to ABWE headquarters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That, Kim would realize many years later, was when the cover-up began.”
* The Silence of the Lambs (New Republic)

Main post image from SNAPSHOT, hot off the Frameline Film Festival.