“While Gold and Sins are the very definition of multiracial, they’re both “not black enough” (and sometimes “not light enough”) for standard “Interracial” porn. As anyone with a web browser can tell you, Interracial in the porn sense usually and almost exclusively means a black man having sex with a white (or, sometimes, an Asian) woman. Scenes with black women — a minority of female talent — are confusingly classified as “Ebony.””
* Are Porn Stars Honey Gold and Donny Sins Too Multiracial for “Interracial” Porn? (LA Weekly)
VB note: Some of the Hefner-bashing I’m seeing (like in the NYT) is extremely anti-porn, masturbation-shaming, and has a problematic take on female agency as performers. This one gets to the heart of why I’m not a Hefner fan without the anti-porn and anti-sex baggage of the NYT’s piece. I’ll praise the magazine and its editors, writers, and models, but I won’t praise the man — and it’s not because of some lazy shorthand about exploitation.
“Hefner’s fantasy lifestyle was inhuman in every way. It was sex as something mechanical and lifeless, something one did because it was the thing that made you a Playboy, rather than because of true passion. That’s the dark secret about Hefner: he wasn’t even a hedonist. A hedonist pursues pleasure. Hefner didn’t even care about pleasure.”
* Good Riddance To An Abusive Creep (Current Affairs)
“Playboy was part of a tidal wave of pornography that flooded the former Soviet Union after it collapsed in 1991 — along with many other hitherto hard-to-find consumer goods, from bananas to Pepsi to punk rock. (Interestingly, the “feminist sex wars” were raging in the United States at the exact same time, with anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin calling porn the “orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls.”)”
* After Communism ended in Russia, American pornography found a huge market (Timeline)
“Contrary to the New Republic’s July article suggesting that Trump may be ruining book sales save for nonfiction political books (Clinton’s memoir “What Happened” has proven a breakout bestseller in this genre, selling more than 300,000 copies in its first week) and topical dystopian novels like “1984,” the romance genre is thriving.”
* Welcome to the Romance Resistance (Salon)
“There’s a popular joke about transhumanism. Three men are sitting naked in a sauna. The arm of one man beeps and he explains: “I have a pager installed in my arm.” Suddenly, the palm of the second man begins to ring. “That’s just my cell phone,” he smirks. Not to be outdone, the third man returns with toilet paper hanging from his behind. “Would you look at that!” he exclaims. “I’m getting a fax!””
* Transhumanism and the Future of Sex (Future of Sex)
“Of the studies that have been done, two—one surveying 605 female-to-male trans people online, and the other surveying 115 female-to-male and male-to-female trans people in-person—have found that between 40 and 60 percent self-reported a shift in their sexual orientation before or after transition. But the more subtle reasons why and how this shift happens are harder to capture via surveys or studies, and to that end, I set out to interview five trans people about their porn consumption and sexuality, and how transition affected either or both.”
* How Transitioning Affects Sex Drive and Porn Consumption (Vice)
“As sexual harassment allegations involving hugely popular entertainers, from comedian Louis C.K. to Bill Cosby to indie music darlings, queer band PWR BTTM, emerge increasingly frequently, we have an obligation to ask ourselves why. Some have alleged that abuse often occurs in artistic communities because of sheer white maleness. But Baltimore writers and artists Maura Callahan and Rebekah Kirkman say that it’s bigger than toxic masculinity …”
* Why Sexual Abuse in the Arts is an Epidemic We Must Take Seriously (Paper Mag)
From this article — as a former GV employee of nearly 8 years — I can already tell how frustrating it will be to read this book. “In her new book, Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure, Lynn Comella walks us through the evolution of these stores and how they ushered in an era of sex-positive thinking.”
* ‘Vibrator Nation’: Inside the Rise of Women-Run Sex Shops (Rolling Stone)
Main post image via Clever Girl by hugohugo on Teespring.
