The stickiest links of the week

Image Devil Girl with Angel Wings by friend Demetrius Gonzalez.

As the week comes to a close, I’ve been sweating out a book deadline: Best Women’s Erotica 2009 to be precise. I received hundreds, literally hundreds of stories as hopefuls, I can only pick around 20, and the submissions are *incredible*. So I really have to slow down, and make it come together just so. Meanwhile, the links go on… Here’s a sampling of what I’ve had sitting in tabs as the most eye-catching bits in and out of my RSS reader while I’ve been in women’s erotica heaven… Which is a really nice way of also saying READING 30-40 EROTICA STORIES A DAY IS MAKING ME BATSHIT CRAZY. I mean, hottt. It’s making me hottt.

Here ya go.

* I am totally not afraid to admit that I have spent minutes, possibly hours distracting myself with the Knicker Picker. I just can’t get them to bend over. Yet. I love the Internets.

* Last week my pals at Bizarre magazine emailed me with their feature on the stunning fetish model amputee Viktoria. Her interview is startling and inspiring: she basically grew up with a withered leg in the bosom of the Torture Garden, where she identified strongly with fetish culture. It gave her such a defined sense of self that she recently had her hated leg voluntarily amputated and is now exploring all the ways she can make it beautiful, and was apparently an inspiration to the other women in the hospital whose various amputations were not voluntary and did not feel beautiful. Check it out. Then, don’t forget about the original hot fetish amputee, tattooed altbabe Amina Munster (official site).

* Not sex related, but for some reason this week I was thinking about the biggest journalism scandal you probably never heard of: the over 700 articles written for Wired (2000-almost 2006) by a woman who filled articles with “anonymous” quotes and anecdotes from sources that could never be confirmed (in one case, an entire story was based on an anecdote from a family the writer never contacted). Over 500 possibly made up stories on Wired? They never retracted the stories, just added a “note”. Think about it. I was reminded of it when I was researching a proposal and came across on the her articles. And knew I couldn’t use it as a source for even the basis of the article. Total junk.

* Here, rinse your brain with Titty City. Eon told me a day ago that he just got copies of their ‘zine in the mail and likes it.

* More ‘not sex related’ but whoa: Motivational speaker accused of violent bender. I guess it’s the John Wayne statue used as a weapon part that stays with me late into the night, not the glaring hypocrisy of people who tell other people how to live their lives. Because I’m just used to that. What would John Wayne do?

* I really really want to go to London to see the Klimt exhibition. They’re saying it is now so difficult to put one together, there probably won’t be one this comprehensive ever again — and there’s a whole room of his explicit erotic work. And hey, while I was across the pond, I could just pop down to Barcelona (another place I’m dying to visit) to see the erotic outdoor sculpture park in a forest in Catalonia.

* Monkey powered robot arm!

* Last night I, er, pored over what has to be one of the strangest sexual fetishes I’ve ever seen: Japanese Ecto Porn (that’s what we decided to call it on Fleshbot — if you know what this fetish is called, please tell me). It’s indescribable and so *very strangely* erotic. Just heed this one warning: do NOT do what I did out of curiosity and track the URL back and look at the original site’s front page unless you want to be goatse’d/2girlsonecup’d. I made the mistake of doing so. Hacker Boy found me after I did so and was trying to remove my eyes with a grapefruit spoon and he asked to see it thinking it wouldn’t be anything — and was quickly, deeply regretful.

* One of the most poignant points I’ve read on a blog this week is the opinion of The F-Word in regard to the truly evil actions of Rachel Moss: “I also do not want to dismiss Moss’ actions and culpability beneath the rug of mental illness. Her actions posed irreparable and significant harm for many people – for both those whose photos were posted and culture at large – and mental illness should never be used as a justification to harm others.” I too am angrily tired of mentally ill people harming me, and others. If you missed the story, Moss attended feminist sci-fi convention WisCon, “where she photographed fat, disabled and trans people (including children) without their permission and then poorly edited out their faces (but not their name badges) and posted to a high-traffic site with scathing editorials on each and their bodies.” Friend Liz Henry has a good post on it as well (“We are all ugly, fat lesbians. Yup, all of us. Just fyi.”), as does another fave blogger Angry Black Woman, lots of people are talking about Moss’ eating disorder, and I just have to add my personal rage at Moss to the pile. You see, one of my friends was in one of Moss’ hateful fat+trans+woman-phobic photo attacks. A friend who is pregnant with twins. Ya, she’s fat. I think don’t really want to know what’s wrong with women like Moss, I only want to see them exposed and their behavior drawn and quartered because the Internet is good for nothing if it is not good for outing douchebags. mentally ill people are accountable for their actions, period. It’s easy to say ‘she’s sick’ or ‘her mom told her she was a bad person as a child’ and then ‘her mom was abused by her dad’ — and the blame game can just go on and on and on. I say, fuck that.

* Last week I read this fun piece where journalists (LA Times + NPR) reverse engineered Google’s Hot Trends List to uncover a porn story — only to have a few excellent revelations about the layers and sophistication of web search spam, turning in a really good story about porn, after all.