“Feeling conflicted over this line between performance art and porn was one thing, but adding the unpaid sexual labor women perform constantly through small gestures to the equation, the lines become more blurred. How is a woman explicitly exchanging sex for financial security any different, besides bearing the heavily stigmatized label of “sex work”? Sex work may be so heavily defamed because it reminds us that maybe sex was never really free — that sex is not immune to commodification as it has always been traded for security, land, goods, or money.”
* Where Do We Draw the Line Between Sex Work and Art? (Vice Canada)
“… what are the pitfalls of quantifying our sex lives? Critics would say that the use of wearable and quantified tech in the bedroom gamifies sex, making it something to ‘win’ at or ‘complete.’ And Spreadsheets’ 30 earnable ‘achievements’ (“Endurance Novice” for a 40 minute bonk or “F Cancer” for tolling up 21 sex sessions in a month) certainly underpin such claims, as does Wax’s desire in the future for “an anonymous scoreboard that lets users strive for improvement or bragging rights.”
* The Dangers of Data Mining Your Sex Life (Broadly/Vice)
“If you were a kid growing up in the ’80s — maybe let’s say you’re gay too — this is what you first learned about sex: It will kill you. You don’t have sex yet; you don’t even really know what it is, but you know that it is lethal. That somehow it leads to the men with the skeletal bodies and the blotchy marks on their skin that you see on the television, the men who don’t look at the camera and are alone.”
* The Prince of Sex (The Nation)
“Prince was a master of creating sexual dramatis personae — something strippers see as not just necessary for professional survival, but fun, as well. Regarding Prince, and his many permutations, we knew we were all working the same racket, only he with more talent and prestige (and, let’s face it, male privilege).”
* Why Prince Was a Hero to Strippers (NY Mag)
“Indeed, the very man who pioneered American anti-porn activism also helped set the rhetorical template for Utah’s excursion into faux-medicalized moral panic. Anthony Comstock is best known for lending his name to the Comstock Act, the 1873 federal obscenity law that still makes obscenity a criminal act, unprotected to this day by the First Amendment. His moral crusading remains notorious, as he prosecuted everyone from anti-religion freethinker D. M .Bennett to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (information related to abortion and contraception were both included in the Comstock Act). Ironically, Comstock persecuted actual doctors, such as E. B. Foote, whose “Words in Pearl for Married People Only” explained contraception. ”
* Utah and the war on porn: Our long national history of condemning “obscenity” as public enemy #1 (Salon)
“Vanmalleghem/InstagramAt Belgium’s Beveren Prison, a new system called PrisonCloud allows inmates to access the internet and rent movies, including adult films. … Some feel that the very fact of allowing inmates these entertainment options is too much. Yet Beveren Prison officials aren’t deterred, saying that it’s both a humane position to allow prisoners’ these options and helps keep them from acting out.”
* Why Belgian Justice Officials Are Defending Prison Porn (Reason)
“Operas typically feature sex workers but are never written and performed by them. ‘PVC Clad Vice Girl sopranos’* meet high art in the latest rendition of the Sex Workers’ Opera. Devised over two years with escorts, strippers, webcam models and friends, this project takes a medium traditionally associated with wealth, power and influence and turns it on its head.”
* Sex Workers’ Opera (New Internationalist)
“Sex surrogacy appears to have inimitable potential because it literally reaches parts other therapies cannot. And its scope is broad. Genevieve, 27, used a surrogate to help her accept the ‘unusual’ appearance of her labia. ‘I had always detested myself too much to enjoy sex, because I felt my labia were too large,’ she explains. ‘I desperately wanted labiaplasty, thinking that was the answer. But having regular sex with a surrogate in a safe and nurturing environment showed me I was normal, natural, gorgeous and could feel incredible as I am.’ ”
* What I learned from my sex surrogate (Marie Claire UK)
“Would you trust a stranger with a packet filled with notes detailing your sexual secrets? In 2010, psychologist Anthony Lane and his colleagues at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium assumed most people would not. But they had a hunch about how to manipulate levels of trust with oxytocin, a neurochemical best known for its ability to induce labor.”
* How scientists fell in and out of love with the hormone oxytocin (Vox)
