- Above: Mad Men Season 5 First Look – Official Poster (TV Line)
- Lisa Ann and Tori Black, two of the Fleshlight “girls,” will be strolling the streets of downtown Austin and taking photos with SXSW attendees. They’ll be accompanied by the Fleshlight mascot.
Austin-based maker of Fleshlight sex toy hopes to arouse SXSW visitors (Examiner.com)
- TV writer Jill Soloway not only thinks rape jokes are hilarious and necessary, but that if you don’t laugh it’s because you are probably a lesbian because Jill Soloway believes that women become lesbians from being raped. I am not joking, and this article will trigger survivors of rape, sexual abuse and sexual trauma of all genders and orientations.
Rainn Wilson, ‘2 Broke Girls,’ and the Rise of the Rape Joke (The Daily Beast, tip: Harold)
- A rather exceptional experiment regarding sex dolls and STDs has shown that you can get gonorrhoea from an inflatable doll.
Improbable research: experiments with inflatable dolls (The Guardian)
- Seattle’s Wheredidyouwearit is sort of like crossing safer sex with Foursquare: The program to hand out condoms with QR-coded wrappers at colleges and universities in Western Washington is sponsored by Planned Parenthood and designed to make you proud of practicing safe sex. Scan the QR code with your phone and add a pin to the map.
When Foursquare and sex meet (KCPQ)
- Maybe you find Kate Upton and Carl’s Jr. and jealous girlfriend stereotypes, like, super panty-wetting hot? Then this boobylicious commercial is your fetish.
Above: Drive-In featuring Kate Upton (Director’s Cut) – The Southwest Patty Melt at Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s (YouTube)
- Adult performer Kimberly Kupps and her husband both agreed to a plea deal over obscenity charges. After Kupps was arrested, the Polk County sheriff — Grady Judd — declared war on the production and distribution of porn in his county. “We want a wholesome community here, we don’t want smut peddlers,” Judd said, “and if they try to peddle their smut from Polk County or into Polk County we’ll be on them like a cheap suit.”
Adult Performer Kimberly Kupps Agrees to Obscenity Plea Deal (XBIZ Newswire)
- This is a very limited look at the contemporary porn star, yet an interesting read. I completely disagree that porn stars “can barely find work” and that the new way porn stars are minted and viewed has piracy “to blame” – don’t forget that the people who torrent are fans, too. To state that porn stars are a dying breed comes from the POV of someone who doesn’t pay attention to internet porn trends.
Porn Stars: The Death of a Sex-Industry Profession (The Daily Beast)
- Don’t bang your students, part fifty mazillion: After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”
Yoga Fans Sexual Flames and, Predictably, Plenty of Scandal (NY Times)
- This is fun: anti-porn hysteria and linkbait from Business Insider! As a technical matter, if you search for “porn” on Pinterest, you don’t get any X-rated results. But that’s misleading, because Pinterest’s users are too smart to simply post smut and label it as such.
Pinterest Has A Porn Problem (Business Insider)
- What makes a good porn name? The Internet shifted the way adult film stars named themselves. Steven Hirsch, founder and co-chairmen of Vivid, explains that today domain names have serious influence over what an adult film star will choose to be called.
The porn identity (Salon.com)
@ Robert Squirrel
What context can you give that makes joking about rape making women into lesbians funny? Do you have a source for the comment in its original context?
It impresses me that the WhereDidYouWearIt program generated any data at all. Though I suppose checking in amounts to bragging that you had sex—or that you claim to have had sex, anyway. To add to my concerns about data validity, I found one check-in where two girls used a condom to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
What evidence do you have to dispute the claims that porn stars have trouble finding work and that new porn stars suffer development problems due to piracy? Up until broadband became widespread, what kind of piracy did you have? Videotape duplication? How does your average porn star make most of their porn money: working for producers or selling subscriptions through their own sites? How do you define the “average” porn star, anyway? How many people do a handful of shoots and then get out of the industry vs. attempting to make a career of it? You mention that fans torrent, too. How does that make any money for the performer (or producer, for that matter)? Other forms of media have other sources of income that make torrenting less problematic: TV shows make money off ads and cable/satellite subscribers, movies sell tickets in theaters, musicians perform live concerts and sell merchandise. I don’t see how porn stars have parallel income sources without getting far more interactive with fans than safety probably allows. And I suspect porn revenue will drop faster and sooner as piracy only becomes easier. Of course, I don’t have answers either. I suspect you _can’t_ find enough useful data without using some sort of observer-like superpowers.
Re: the porn names article. The author has mistaken the name of a character (Johnny Wadd) with the name of the performer playing that character, John C. Holmes. I’d post this comment on Salon, but then I’d have to sign up and log in.
I feel that you did Jill Soloway a great disservice by decontextualizing her already decontextualized arguments in the Daily Beast piece — drumming up outrage against her without first investigating if she deserved it. Soloway’s been involved in “feminist” politics for years; and while I’m not saying her points should be blindly accepted, I think she’s earned the benefit of the doubt in this case, and that there was nuance in what she was saying that a paraphrase of a quote loses completely.