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Strong article by Rachel Kramer Bussel about the inherent racism in a currently talked-about book and blog about women dating outside their race: I Got the Fever: Book Makes One Writer Ashamed to Be White (theroot.com)
* This explicit side-by-side is superb, if you haven’t seen the story yet: Was The King’s Speech Filmed On A UK Naked Men Porno Set? (QueerClick, via Towleroad)
* This blog photographs the insanity in the alley behind the Good Vibrations warehouse in SOMA that I worked at for 6 years – I saw activity like this every day during the dot-com bubble (warning: disturbing): The Minna Street Humper (Old Dirty Alley, via SFAppeal’s fantastic newsletter)
* Sex.com ::yaaawn:: – er, I mean the Sex.com URL made Guinness Book of World records for being most expensive. (globalpost.com)
* Interesting article about AshleyMadison.com (the “infidelity” dating site) and their business strategies in an increasingly prudish corporate controlled internet ecosystem: Can Google and Facebook Push Adultery Sites Off the Internet? (The Atlantic)
* A writer whose POV on BDSM is literally “The Gimp” from Pulp Fiction takes classes on kink and BDSM, and tells a detailed, interesting tale: Majoring in Kink (eye.columbiaspectator.com)
* This one almost got a post of its own: porn studio Pink Visual wisely pulls back from litigation to solve their business model problems, and mainstream media (HEY SONY) should pay attention to what their results are: Lawyers not part of porn studio’s antipiracy plan (CNET News)
* One of our all-time favorite pornographers and pundits Tony Comstock guest blogged on The Atlantic for a week and even took that heinous Atlantic anti-porn piece to task – his posts are fantastic and he’s got a wrap of them all here: “Did you see my piece in The Atlantic?” (tonycomstock.com)
Hey Violet,
When you mentioned that article about Google and FaceBook censoring (or rather, refusing to run the ads) the ashleymadison.com site, I went over there and made a puppet account just to see what the fuss was all about. I got three messages within a day without changing the profile from the default, each of which would have required paying at least $70 to view, and I also found out that they want to charge $20 to remove a profile from the site completely. It really seems like a scam more than anything else. (Obviously I didn’t give them a red cent.)
You didn’t really take a position on the article – just said, it was “interesting” – so I’m curious if it makes a difference to you if the site’s legitimate or not, and if you think Google and FB would have any culpability for advertising something that’s pretty clearly a rip off. IMHO it seems to be a pretty clear scam – take a pile of money, fail to deliver, then charge to clean up the evidence. It’s not like someone who hoped to use the site for its stated purpose could sue or otherwise complain without admitting they’d used it.