Image from this very explicit gallery (includes videos).
Gah! I’m still not caught up on my post-SXSW blogging — I’ve had South By SARS, been feeling low, and have been trying to spend time offline with friends to ease the pain. But my friend Thomas Roche has a great post over at the Blowfish Blog called Killing Your Travel Boner, in which he wraps the SXSW trip — we hung out together quite a bit — and dishes about sex and travel on a general scale. It’s really interesting, as well as snarky. And no, I’m *not* the one he refers to say saying that SXSW made them horny. It made me thirsty for free alcohol, happy, tired, alleviated my general loneliness for a minute, reminded me that there are still people out there in the world that are crush-worthy, but mostly made me feel like I had a lot of good friends that I want to see more often. It did not make me feel like I needed to get any extra action. Web marketing is not my kink. (PHEW!) But I digress, as apparently it was the opposite for some attendees — and here’s a snip from the middle of Thomas’ sex travel piece to tease you:
(…) I don’t see a single article on the mainstream porn industry’s move toward production in Eastern Europe because “the girls will do anything for next to nothing!” But, then, that doesn’t seem to have ever become a moral panic for anyone other than me. In any event the porn industry is tanking so hard right now that I wouldn’t be surprised to find Russian porn producers showing up on the streets of San Francisco any day now, walking around with huge stacks of rubles and bellowing arrogant come-ons to Valencia Street hipster girls, screaming “Shirts! All take them off” while hurling multicolored banknotes. It was not long ago that Porn Valley production companies would brag to each other about what they could get foreign girls to do, and for how little money.
At the time, quite frankly, it made me a little sick; cheapskates should not brag about how much money they saved on human flesh by using poor girls. I’m not sure that American porn’s flirtation with Eastern European production and, in the case of tranny porn, South Asian production, is over — I doubt it. But it seems less relevant when everyone over here seems trying to keep their shirts.
A search on “sex travel” doesn’t fare that much better than one on “sex industry travel” — it’s a small batch of “sex tourism” articles, including some bullshit placeholder sites that shouldn’t even be coming up in a search. The very first hit is something called SlyGuide, which in North America covers two (count ‘em!) cities — Toronto and Las Vegas. Huh? On the same site, eight Asian cities are covered; this is the first hit on Google. What the hell is the message being sent here? I’ll give you one guess.
This all put a serious damper on my plans to write a light-hearted piece filled with rapt appreciation for first-class fingerfucks over the Atlantic and hot-tub buggery on the roof of a Kuala Lumpur high-rise hotel. For fuck’s sake, what’s happened to the world? Don’t Austrian zillionaires hire $2,500-an-hour callgirls for threesomes in the ladies’ rooms of New York’s finest restaurants any more? (…read more, blog.blowfish.com)
I couldn’t read past “general loneliness”. What the heck. Are you okay?