Sunday Sex Reads: Best of the Week

“One of the most surprising facts about online pornography is how little concrete data exists about the ways in which it’s consumed. The most thorough collection of statistics to date was released six years ago by a company called Online MBA, but there are no details about how its information was gathered. The most frequently touted claims about online porn — 37 percent of the internet is pornographic content, Utah has the highest online porn subscription rate in the U.S. — seem erroneous at worst and dubious at best.”
* Is Moral Panic About Online Porn Misplaced? (The Atlantic)

“Though these often one-of-a-kind, tightly copyrighted works are no doubt priceless, when I first heard about [the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature] collection of erotica all I could think about was a different kind of value: the treasure trove of sexual knowledge potentially held within these volumes. What kinds of weird and wondrous sex tips and tricks were held within these illicit pages?”
* Sex Tips I Learned at the New York Public Library (Atlas Obscura)

“… Many biologists were seeing what they wanted to believe, and then using the results to justify prevailing cultural norms. … The result, Tang-Martinez and Roughgarden believe, is that scientists have often failed to recognise astonishingly diverse sexual behaviours across the animal kingdom. There are now myriad examples of animals that break the rules entirely – from intersex kangaroo to a fish with four separate “genders”.”
* We have the wrong idea about males, females and sex (BBC)

“Sin-A-Rama is a profusely illustrated chronicle of the smut peddlers, pulp writers, and illustrators who helped burst open a Pandora’s Box of the forbidden that would usher out Eisenhower era repression and usher in the libertine spirit of the Sexual Revolution. Not only are sleaze books historically relevant, having played a major role in obscenity law, they also are a delightful product of their time…. stories and illustrations of Hells Angel style biker gangs, groovy hippie love-ins, Mad Men style office hijinks, and suburban swingers swapping spouses at key parties. And for lovers of American illustration art, they are undeniably eye candy.”
* Sin-A-Rama: Conversation With B. Astrid Daley (Huffington Post)

“… The essence of this view is distilled in the video “What’s Japan’s Problem with Vaginas?” posted on The Daily Beast’s website on Jan. 17, 2015. Featuring “penis festival” footage, it condemns Igarashi’s arrest as incontrovertible evidence of an anti-vaginal society, and expresses the hope that someday Japan will have “something to symbolize that real change has come — a vagina festival. And the very thought of that is obscene — at least in Japan.” There’s just one problem: Japan does have a “vagina festival.””
* Western media cherry-pick facts and phalli to fit the Japan no-vagina narrative (Japan Times)

FYI: This article says “sex” when it means “gender.” “For generations, children with male and female characteristics have been assigned a sex at birth. Is there an alternative? Parents, doctors and intersex adults share their experiences.”
* ‘We don’t know if your baby’s a boy or a girl’: growing up intersex (Guardian UK)

“When Carol and I had arrived, half an hour after the party had begun, the front door of the house was open, and a tray of prosecco-and-spiced-rum cocktails was sitting in the sun on the porch. Gweneth, the host, materialized. We’d been warned not to say the words “sex party” or mention the “Killing Kittens” name anywhere on the South Fork — the term of art was “Gweneth’s birthday party,” as in, “Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure they’ll have lube at Gweneth’s birthday party.” Keep in mind that Marie Claire is the magazine that published an unresearched, un-fact-checked, and wholly inaccurate article on hacker culture and sexual assault, as well as a piece that was false PR-spin-printed-as-fact from Somaly Mam after she was exposed for lying about … well, everything.
* Inside an Elite Hamptons Sex Party (Marie Claire)

Pandora Blake finished her incredible series, Response to the [UK] Government consultation on Child Safety Online: Age Verification for Pornography. Final installment #6 is “Piracy, monopoly and industry standards.”
* 6. Piracy, monopoly and industry standards (Pandora Blake)

“A growing chorus has emerged claiming that porn is addictive, that it’s causing misogyny and sexual violence, that it’s leading people to have riskier sex, that it’s creating an epidemic of erectile dysfunction, and that it’s destroying our relationships. These are just some of the many reasons the US state of Utah recently went as far as to formally declare porn to be a “public health crisis.””
* Five Scientific Facts You Should Know About Porn (Lehmiller)

“If prostitution becomes legal in South Africa, Nosipho Vidima, a 30-year-old sex worker, knows exactly what she’ll do. She’d start her own business called The Pleasure House, a classy operation staffed with an office administrator trained in finance, a group of prostitutes earning minimum wage – and maybe even an Italian chef.”
* In South Africa, a Debate Over Selling Sex (US News)

“Some might assume that the shift towards viewing gender as fluid or encompassing identities beyond the binary is a novel cultural change; in fact, several non-Western cultures — both historically and today—have non-binary understandings of gender. In Indonesia, one ethnic group shows us that the idea that gender identity is expressed in more ways than two is actually hundreds of years old.”
* In Indonesia, Non-Binary Gender is a Centuries-Old Idea (Atlas Obscura)

“There’s a widely held belief that a disproportionately high number of the women in porn were sexually abused. It’s one of those casually accepted notions that are difficult to disprove, because there isn’t enough reliable research on the subject and because it happens to be true for several high-profile porn stars, such as Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords. We like to tell ourselves stories about why some women decide to do “this kind of work.” … Stoya is the sex icon for a generation that doesn’t trust institutions, and a greased-up, moaning blonde is the face and body of institutionalized sexuality.”
* Stoya Speaks Out on James Deen, Consent, and Fixing the Porn Industry (New York Magazine)

Main post image: Miley Cyrus for Plastik Magazine, via In The Raw.