Some things you might have missed, or ought to peep — niblets I’ve been wanting to blog but have been electing to investigate the aging, distended, disintegrating wall between celebrity and reality instead. Vacation from reality almost over. Check this out:
* Tristan Taormino, Village Voice columnist, sex educator, author, editor, friend and ultra-modern porn director wrote up her observations about Belladonna’s announcement to retire from performing in porn over contant STD/I concerns (also @). I really pushed to get someone as hip as Tristan on Tyra; they picked older, safer “romance” porn as the high (and they suggested, the most acceptable) standard for women to make or watch instead. Antiquated. Anyway, Tristan’s comments are very interesting, and Belladonna is truly among the modern young smart mavericks of power-player, business-smart porn women, so the whole thing is a piece of history worth reading. I’ve been repeating for years that the sex acts in porn are unsafe, not instructional and the sexual equivalent of Jackass — don’t try it at home, ever (and that’s why I have this porn act/STD chart on my site). Watch porn for fantasy and fun, and let the people making it make their own informed risks — which thanks to videos like this (insanely long one) by Nina Hartley and Sharon Mitchell, porn women have been empowered to make for themselves while they work in such a risky business (though not as risky as Iraq, hello).
* Zoe Margolis — the famed Brit sex blogger (and again, friend) Girl With A One Track Mind (who wouldn’t even tell me her real name when we met in person and went out for a night drinking in London two years ago) and was outed by UK press when her book came out — wrote a Guardian UK piece, Orgasms For The Hell Of It. Which you wouldn’t think is very controversial for a woman to write about anymore, except for some fucked up reason, still is. Like when I sat in the green room yesterday, stunned watching Tyra prod the pro and anti-porn “ordinary” women into fighting onstage, calling each other ‘sluts’. It’s not as quaint and bemusedly antiquated as I’m prone to suggest, as Zoe points out. (ps, *full* Tyra post on the way)
* Pretty girl friday, a day late: a decent Hegre gallery of model Linda getting sand in her crack (in a pretty hot way, above image), and a luscious, explicit black and white pussy play Gallery Carre with model Julia. These were the two I liked of the many that landed in my inbox and didn’t make me want to force-feed all the girls lasagna, if you know what I mean. Too skinny isn’t hot for me, sorry.
* Hot boy saturday begins with a trope and a half — but until you send me the link to the H4wt B0ys of Linux Cal3ndar *or* the Viggo Mortensen See-Through Calvin Klein Outtakes gallery, I have to say the Beckham calendar ain’t so bad. For a Scientologist, anyway.
* Google Blogscoped reports that a German ISP is blocking several porn sites, though I’ll tell you that YouPorn *always* has a fully operative age check page — not that I um, visit several times a week or anything. There are a few interesting comments about Google and sex/porn and their SafeSearch function after the link — I’m especially peeping this info because it looks like I’m giving a talk at Google next month about sex and search. (YAY!) GB sez:
According to Spiegel.de, German internet provider Arcor has blocked porn sites Sex.com, YouPorn.com and another site for its 2.4 million users. A company called Video Buster/ Kirchberg Logistik, themselves an online porn provider at Sexyfilms.de, complained with the internet provider that YouPorn – a YouTube impostor, and already self-censored by Google Germany – and others were not implementing sufficient age verification for the site.
At this time, YouPorn already does ask users accessing the site from Germany to confirm they’re over 18 years old (this may or may not happen from the US or other places). However, Sexyfilms on their site are using a set of much more secure verification checks, e.g. one called “postident” in which a person is required to hand out their identity card witnessed by a post office employee in order to receive a ticket. Sex.com on the other hand shows a different result here when directly accessed versus what the Google cache shows; perhaps the site is using geolocation to change its appearance and content. The group behind Sexyfilms now claims that the easier age check allegedly employed by Sex.com and others is a competitive disadvantage.
Link.
* Update, Google-related: Looks like Google just appealed to the UN about setting global privacy standards. Of course, porn and sexual privacy isn’t mentioned at all, but I think it’s essential that we think about it in those terms — especially since the US government loves to use porn to undermine our privacy rights (and actively wants to do so on the internet and with social networking sites).
