““How old do you think she is?” he asks, pointing at you. From the pole, upside-down in a descending angel pose, you see the whole bar and everyone inside. Two girls give lap dances in VIP rooms, the bartender scrolls through her phone, and the front door opens. A blast of aggressive sunlight and hot dust lands on Kat’s naked stomach that glows creamy-white in the red, black club. You remove your flimsy sequins bra and let it fall to the stage. Kat and her customer are a few feet away from you in low soft chairs. They think you can’t hear them.”
* Your Life As A Middle-Aged Stripper (The Establishment)
“A Norwegian man paid porn producers to create a bespoke film of women burning the stamp collection he’d spent decades building. The unnamed man had spent 40 years and a lot of money building up his stamp collection, but he started to feel depressed and lonely. He went to see a psychologist who told him stamp-collecting was a ridiculous hobby, and so the man decided to destroy his collection. Through the medium of porn. With one film for each of his ten books.”
* Custom porn is such a big industry a man once paid producers to make a film of women burning his stamp collection (Independent)
I can’t believe how awesome these are. “I gathered over 20,000 Harlequin Romance novel titles and gave them to a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that learns the structure of text. It’s powerful enough to string together words in a way that seems almost human. 90% human. The other 10% is all wackiness. I was not disappointed with what came out. ”
* Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence (Medium)
“My “sexual experience” consisted of doctors poking and prodding me and men looking disappointed at me for something I couldn’t explain or help. My doctors told me I could have a sexual experience in other ways. But I never bothered to ask them how that would work when I flinched at the mere touch of a man. They told me there was more to relationships than just sex. I figured that was pretty easy to say when you were able to have sex.”
* What It’s Like To Date When You Can’t Have Sex (Buzzfeed)
“Sex workers continue to mobilise, engage and fight against stigma. The hashtags #rightsnotrescue and #facesofprostitution are examples of the diverse human faces behind sex work. But one of the most insidious consequences of stigma is its ability to curtail the capacity of sex workers to fight for basic human rights.”
* The stigma of sex work comes with a high cost (The Conversation)
* Image from: Results from Clue and Kinsey’s international sex survey (Medium)
“The rest of the world may have forgotten, but [Jennifer Lawrence] is still living with the after-effects of revenge porn every day. “I think people saw [the hacking] for what it was, which was a sex crime, but that feeling, I haven’t been able to get rid of it,” she told Vogue. “Having your privacy violated constantly isn’t a problem if you’re perfect. But if you’re human, it’s terrifying. I’m always waiting to get blindsided again.””
* Jennifer Lawrence is right; the long-term effects of revenge porn live on (Telegraph)
“What’s more annoying than meeting a “straight girl” who ends up leading you on? How many Tinder profiles have to say, “I don’t want a threesome with your boyfriend”? No one wants to be someone else’s experiment. Unless you’re being paid.”
* I Went to Skirt Club, a Lesbian Sex Party for Straight Women (Autostraddle)
Warning for survivors of sexual assault. “Marta Dunjó, a design student at Central Saint Martins in London, hopes to ignite discussions about virtual reality sex and whether using it to explore “extreme sexual fantasies” such as rape may potentially rehabilitate offenders or trigger them to attack. To do so, she has created a concept for a set of virtual reality sex accessories, which include orifices covered in United Kingdom’s definition of rape.”
* Designer Says VR Kit May Help People with ‘Extreme Sexual Fantasies’ (Future of Sex)
“Some seem to think asking for intimate details about your sex life is totally okay. They want to know mechanics and details like: “How do you have sex in a wheelchair?” “Can you…?” If you’re LGBQ, they ramp it up even more. The good old “but how do lesbians have sex?” question goes on steroids when one or both partners is disabled. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re being pretty rude …”
* I Beg Your Pardon? Dealing with Rude Nondisableds (Scarleteen)
Main post image: Ebonee Davis by Bryce Thompson.
