- Since Trump seized power in the US, the war on sex and women’s bodies has gone nuclear. “These right-wing ghouls — who fulminate idiotically about how women could still be allowed to get abortions before they know they are pregnant (Alabama’s Clyde Chambliss) or try to legislate the medically impossible removal of ectopic pregnancy and reimplantation into the uterus (Ohio’s John Becker) — are the stuff of unimaginably gothic horror. Ever since Roe was decided in 1973, conservatives have been laboring to roll back abortion access, with absolutely zero knowlege of or interest in how reproduction works. And all the while, those who have been trying to sound the alarm have been shooed off as silly hysterics.”
* Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical (The Cut)
- “Both Armslist and Grindr presented tough facts and came amid an undercurrent of hostility toward Section 230 immunity. Fortunately, both courts affirmed the vitality of the immunity and embraced the prevailing view of an overwhelming majority of courts that so long as a website is merely permitting content to be posted, plaintiffs may not plead around Section 230 by framing their claims as targeting a site’s alleged defects, failure to take safety precautions, or the like.”
* Grindr and Armslist Cases Reaffirm Core Protections for User-Generated Content (JD Supra)
- “Crimes against women are notoriously underreported in the United Kingdom and around the world—particularly when they’re of a sexual nature. Now, one police unit in England is trying to address this problem, and it’s a surprisingly bureaucratic response to a very violent problem: The unit is changing how the complaints are classified as they come in, and early research indicates it may be having effective results.”
* Britain Is Making Sexual Harassment a Hate Crime (Foreign Policy)
- “One of the most exciting selections in this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight is Finnish filmmaker Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää’s tale of catharsis and bondage, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. [It] tells the story of a man who loses his wife in a tragic accident and finds a strange kind of solace when he accidentally stumbles across a local dominatrix and strikes up an unusual relationship.”
* Cannes 2019: DOGS DON’T WEAR PANTS First Poster & NSFW Clips For This S&M Drama (Screen Anarchy)
- “Recalling one particularly harrowing example in Soho, which was justified as an anti-sex trafficking operation, Niki tells me: “250 police officers, armed with dogs and riot gear, broke down sex workers’ doors and handcuffed them on the floor.” Women were paraded in front of press cameras wearing only their underwear; others were cruelly “outed” as sex workers to their families.”
* Sex Workers Are Having Their Earnings Confiscated in Trafficking Stings (Vice)
- “A Danish MP has admitted he placed an advert for his re-election on one of the biggest porn websites in the world. Joachim B Olsen admitted that he had indeed placed the ad on Pornhub in an attempt to reach new voters.”
* ‘You have to be where your voters are’: Danish MP places advert for reelection on Pornhub (Yahoo News UK)
- “There are shot glasses commemorating the event and it birthed memes ahead of the annual Army-Navy game. But the inside story of how an EA-18G Growler jet crew drew a penis across the clear blue skies of Washington state in 2017 has never been told. Until now.”
* The Navy’s probe into sky penis (Navy Times)
- “Berlin is a rare, welcoming place for radical perspectives in porn, which is often dominated by a starchy, commercial aesthetic. Films here often come from queer and/or feminist perspectives, and political discussions about labor, capitalism, and privilege are important to its participants. Over the years, this community has built a scene that values a radical, punk ethos, one that frequently has more in common with experimental film than with the more straightforward goals of mainstream porn films.”
* Berlin’s Porn Scene Is Open, Experimental, and Endlessly Fun (Vice)
- “A Miami federal judge ruled last week that IP addresses alone cannot be considered as concrete evidence that a particular individual infringed on a plaintiff’s copyright, as attorneys representing Strike 3 Holdings [Vixen, Tushy, Blacked, Blacked Raw and Tushy Raw] claimed.”
* Florida Judge: IP Address Not Enough for Porn Copyright Cases (XBIZ)
- “The law is designed to prevent children from accessing adult content … Yet ignoring the fact that teenagers will pretty easily circumnavigate said restrictions, there’s more at stake here. For self-employed workers in the sex industry, the measures could pose a tangible threat to their income and safety. And the magnitude of this threat won’t be fully realised until the law comes into force.”
* How The New UK Porn Block Could Put Independent Sex Workers At Risk (Elle)
- Note: research paper perspective believes all porn is harmful. “This paper purposes an image amino acid-based method to identify a pornographic image. The proposed method works by converting an image into biological amino acid form and then extracting a signature from the image (which is represented in amino acid form) using biological tools. Using this method, a number of signatures are obtained from a set of few known pornographic images.”
* Using Amino Acids to Identify Pornographic Images (Improbable Research)
- “Facebook does not know how many under-13s or sex offenders in the UK use its platforms, a senior executive has said at the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. Answering a question about safety checks carried out on new accounts, Julie de Bailliencourt said the company had no way of verifying the age or criminal history of people signing up.”
* No way to screen out under-13s or sex offenders on Facebook, inquiry told (Guardian)
