Sunday sex reads: Best of the week

“Growing up gay as a West Texas preacher’s son, I’ve experienced homophobia in its most ridiculous, shit-kicking-est forms. Bigots in Texas aren’t particularly quiet about their distaste for fags like me, so when I relocated to the Bay Area and started working in the tech press, I wasn’t expecting the subtle, veiled discrimination I witnessed.”
Why I’m writing about my “dick fantasies” on Engadget (Engadget; bravo, Christopher Trout)

““… so much of the anti-decriminalization argument is about the symbolism of protecting women” .. Brents chalks up the relative disinterest in male sex workers — with the notable exception of last year’s federal raid on Rentboy.com — to the “gendered norms of sex: Men are active and have a tireless sexual drive. Women are passive and don’t.” Savannah Sly, the president of Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) USA, a national grassroots advocacy network, calls the “hysteria” around “women and girls, women and girls, women and girls” a strategy for justifying “the war on whores.””
Is Prostitution Just Another Job? (New York Magazine)

““When I go out I feel as if I’m wearing ‘slut’ across my forehead,” says ex-porn actress and former Charlie Sheen “goddess” Bree Olson in a new video, part of the Real Women, Real Stories YouTube video series. Her stark description of the ways she’s been slut shamed and shunned by society because of her former career in porn are chilling.”
Our porn double standard: Bree Olson slut-shamed after leaving adult industry while James Deen gets more work than ever (Salon)

“The work in question — Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Second Sex War Zone (2016) — is currently on view at Gasworks in south London. The artwork, once one straps on the goggles, provides a decadent, enchanting spectacle — but with its urgent collision of virtual bodies, is unconventionally pornographic. In advance of Oculus Rift’s commercial launch on March 28th, artists such as Hansen, whose exhibition “Second Sex War” opened at Gasworks last Thursday, are already preempting, and playing with, the technology’s likely effects on its users’ online identities.”
An Artist Explores Oculus Rift’s Impact on Pornography and the Female Form (Artsy)

“Scott Stevens hasn’t masturbated in 17 years, 43 days, and 16 hours and he’s “declared war on masturbation” with his $65,000 Kickstarter for an anti-masturbation app called Mastur Plan. There’s no other way to put this — his Kickstarter is INSANE. Let’s take a closer look …”
‘Mastur-Plan’ App Offers Mormon Alternative To Jerking Off (Unicorn Booty)

“A consent violation happens when someone chooses to ignore or cross someone’s boundaries. People do that for a lot of reasons, including selfishness, arrogance, not caring about their partner, getting off on harming someone (which is distinct from the consensual experience of BDSM), or being somewhere else on the douchebag-rapist spectrum. Consent accidents, however, are different because they happen because of error, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or not having all the information.”
Consent Accidents and Consent Violations (Make Sex Easy, Charlie Glickman PhD)

“It may have been my first MMORPG orgy, but it wasn’t my first rodeo. In my previous experiences with teledildonics and virtual sex, I’d learned a certain level of patience is required. I charged my Kiiroo Onyx masturbator, read up on the virtual world I was about to enter, signed up for a VIP account and watched a tutorial on how to sync my toy to the game. After about two hours of prep, I assumed I was ready for any and all of the digital dicks.”
The massively multiplayer online role-playing orgy I never had (Engadget)

“And investors too are wary of sextech. … Andrew Quitmeyer, cofounder of Comingle said, “We’ve been kicked out of two accelerators!” he added. “We passed all their hoops and training and customer discovery and at the end, when they’re supposed to give you space and funding and support, they came back and said, ‘we checked with the higher-ups and turns out we’re not comfortable dealing with sex stuff. Goodbye.’ Months lost.””
Eagerly We Await the Coming of the Sex Robots (Motherboard, via Eros Blog)

“FOR the first time since it started to function in 2002, the International Criminal Court at The Hague has passed a guilty verdict on a warlord for perpetrating, among other things, rape as an act of war. It is also the first time that the court has secured a conviction for “command responsibility”, meaning that a commander can be found guilty even if he did not himself take direct part in such crimes as rape, murder and pillage but allowed them to be committed.”
The International Criminal Court recognises rape as a war crime (The Economist)

A recent lawsuit claiming prominent venture capitalist Michael Goguen sexually and physically abused a woman for 13 years isn’t a shocker to many women who have worked in and among Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Amber Laurel Baptiste filed a breach of contract lawsuit in San Mateo County on March 8 that accused Goguen of entering a physical relationship with her while she was victim of human trafficking, and continuing to “sexually, physically and emotionally” abuse her for the next 13 years.
Sequoia partner’s sex scandal stirs talk of how VCs treat women (SF Chronicle)