Sunday Sex Reads: Best of the Week

“Few people have elevated the habit of pillow talk to an art form quite like the crafty American-born intelligence officer [spy Betty Pack], who “used the bedroom like Bond used a beretta,” Time magazine noted in 1963. … “She had a force, or magnetism, to a terrifying degree,” Hyde recalled. This was only amplified when, during her high school years, Betty discovered her unabashed love of sex. “The greatest joy,” she wrote, “is a man and a woman together.””
* The Brilliant MI6 Spy Who Perfected the Art of the ‘Honey Trap’ (Atlas Obscura)

“Listen, Mark, this is serious. First you create rules that don’t distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgement. Finally you even censor criticism against and a discussion about the decision – and you punish the person who dares to voice criticism.” People who write about sex, like me, have been living with this censorship and silencing for a decade. It is why I cannot put a link to this very post on Facebook.
* Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture. (Aftenposten)

Update: this “sex trafficking” story has been added because I missed it, and it’s too important to miss.
The institutional racism endemic in “trafficking” campaigns is stunning. “… These new defendants included archetypes of the Seattle-Bellevue tech class, including an executive at Microsoft, an engineer for Boeing, and a director of software development for Amazon. Local media reported that these men were part of a “large-scale sex trafficking operation” and offered headlines such as “Microsoft and Amazon Execs Busted for Promoting Sex Slavery.” It was shocking, scandalous, horrifying. Yet almost none of it is true—and the little that is technically true is so lacking in context that it’s utterly misleading.”
* The Truth About the Biggest U.S. Sex Trafficking Story of the Year (Reason)

“Specifically, people who develop addictions initially show high levels of response in the pleasure centers of the brain. Over time, as addiction takes hold, these parts of the brain no longer light up. In other words, one of the hallmarks of true addiction is that the pleasure received from the object of the addiction wanes over time as the person no longer wants the object but, rather, needs the object. In contrast, even people who report very strong “addiction” to sex continue to show activation of the pleasure centers of the brain when viewing sexually explicit images. This response is similar to the response people have to chocolate, ice cream and other highly desired pleasures. Prause concluded that “sex addiction” was no more than high libido coupled with low impulse control.”
* Anthony Weiner Is Not a Sex Addict, Neither Is Anyone Else (Psychology Today)

“With the movie season in these parts bracketed, roughly, by Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn and White Girl’s Leah, I initially thought it might be good to pause a sec and cast a jaundiced eye at the “Sexy, Troubled Girl” trope. … Cultural repression, moral hypocrisy, and blindness to the abuse she’s endured work together to turn a victim into a temptress, into a “bad influence”; and they also turn her genuine affection, the attraction she feels to Marcus, into “sluttiness” simply because of her agency in matters sexual.”
* Gamera Obscura: The Problem with the “Sexy, Troubled Girl” Trope (Screen Anarchy)

“Baseball is the common language with which so many of us are taught to think about sex. … The baseball model is so widespread, we rarely notice its influence. We’re like fish who don’t know we’re in water. … Most basically, baseball is a game involving two opposing teams. … Men are expected to pursue heterosexual sex (regardless of their actual desire) and are supported in doing anything to “get it.” Meanwhile, women are supposed to avoid sex, say “No,” yet be prepared for their “bases” to be “stolen.” “Scoring” is the ultimate goal. If we look at that in terms of sexuality, consent is actually a hindrance to the game. The baseball metaphor is all about one partner forcing their way through the resistance of the other. It has nothing to do with mutual desire.”
* To Slide or to Slice: Finding A Sex-Positive Metaphor (Scarleteen)

“Montreal, with its reputation for having a plentiful supply of strip clubs, sex shops, massage parlours and escort services, has been called a world capital for online porn. Those in the estimated US$60-billion global industry say business is booming in this city, but corporate consolidation and the Internet’s endless supply of free content on YouTube-style sites has meant, aside from a few exceptions, that the porn stars have moved out and the computer nerds have moved in.”
* ‘2016 will be our best year’: How the geeks took over Montreal’s porn industry (Financial Post)

“Back in January of 2014, Medium published a piece by investigative journalist Ethan Brown that shined a light on a string of unsolved murders in the Louisiana town of Jennings, which resides in Jeff Davis Parish in the southwestern part of the state. The victims were all sex workers who were involved in the same local prostitution ring, and they’d come to be known as the “Jeff Davis 8.”
* A New Book On The ‘Real Life True Detective’ Case Links A Louisiana Congressman To Murdered Sex Workers (Uproxx)

“More recently, the idea of a writing machine has started to move out of the realms of science fiction. AI is already used to create news stories (although it is not without limitations) and projects like NaNoGenMo have begun to popularize the practice of using code to generate creative projects. The results are frequently bizarre, and often strangely compelling, such as this “Existential Erotica” by code created by Agrajag Petunia …”
* Robot Sex Writers: Computer-Generated Erotica Is Becoming Popular (Future of Sex)

“But the more recent commentary is a reminder that that didn’t mark an end to the racialized, sexualized, dehumanizing comments about Serena Williams. It’s nearly impossible to imagine these comments being made about any of her peers; they’re a genre unto themselves, offering a case study on how biases make their way into media coverage. As James McKay and Helen Johnson write in a 2008 article published in Social Identities, about what they called the “pornographic eroticism and sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen,” even so-called complimentary commentary about Williams’s athleticism is often grounded in stereotypes about black people (animalistic and aggressive) and black women specifically (masculine, unattractive, and overly sexual at once).”
* Serena Williams is constantly the target of disgusting racist and sexist attacks (Vox)

“Police forces across England and Wales are considering expanding their definition of hate crime to include misogyny … Incidents reported by Nottingham women ranged from verbal harassment to sexual assault. Initial claims from sections of the media that wolf-whistling would be reported by women have proved unfounded. So far, two men have been arrested for public order offences and actual bodily harm in incidents classified as misogynist.”
* Police in England and Wales consider making misogyny a hate crime (Guardian UK)

Main post photo by my new favorite photographer, Martial Lenoir, via “Reflections of Disorder” on The Photographer’s Room.