Web Log Archive: Week of 4/1/02
Sunday, April 7, 2002
Transcript of a recent Saturday Night Live highlight: Tina Fey's Weekend Update commentary on Hugh Hefner's new girlfriends, seven nearly identical-looking blondes.
Now, when I first saw these women, I thought the same thing we all did - what has happened to affirmative action in this country? Hefner's dating seven blonde, white women - not a blonde pubic hair among them, might I add. Not a pubic hair among them. Come on, though - seven blondes? There's not a hot Asian woman you can throw in there? A light-skinned black woman? A deaf brunette? Something? Where's the diversity? When are we going to have a Hefner harem that looks like America?
Later in the sketch, guest commentator Kid Rock riffs on Britney Spears, the Olsen twins and Puffy Combs.
SNL Transcripts
John Bartlett reviews Ed Wood's recently reissued pulp novel Killer in Drag (originally published in 1963 as Black Lace Drag), which blends lurid sex and violence with heartfelt advocacy for tolerance of transvestism.
Killer in Drag tells the unlikely tale of Glen, a hitman for the Mob who manages to put his love of wearing female attire to good use in his chosen profession. As might be deduced from the book’s title, this talent consists of making himself up as "Glenda" in order to obtain prime opportunities to put his intended victims on ice. Yet while Glen does hope eventually to become Glenda after a little trip to Sweden for which he’s saving up, he’s positively pussy crazy in the meantime.
The review quotes some amazing passages from the novel and provides ordering info.
Spectator
Saturday, April 6, 2002
In which the influence of a noted community weblog is revealed to the reader. A couple days ago, someone at Metafilter posted a BBC News article about the settlement in Tom Cruise's latest lawsuit against gay rumormongers. At least seven other weblogs have since linked to the same BBC News page, landing it in the Daypop Top 40 — even though the news item was published last December. Hey, no judgment, I snag links from Metafilter all the time. The long, ensuing Metafilter discussion thread is typically sardonic.
BBC News | Daypop | Metafilter
Author David Ehrenstein has posted several rounds of legal correspondence between Tom Cruise's lawyers and the lawyers for William Morrow & Company, publishers of Ehrenstein's book Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1996. (Link snagged from Metafilter, natch.)
Ehrensteinland
Spectator has several good reads in its latest online issue. Carol Queen discusses the case of a San Francisco couple whose two Presa Canario dogs attacked a killed a neighbor. During the investigation and trial, the two defendants came across as truly appalling human beings. They were also apparently kinksters in a threesome with their white supremacist former client and adopted son (who was already in prison when the attacks took place). Hints of bestiality involving the Presa Canarios have popped up. Queen obsesses, tongue mostly in cheek, about whether the case has given alternative lifestylers a bad name.
Oy vey, is this good for the polyamorists? Is this good for the people who like triads? Oy, this is hell for the kinky people! See, these are the kind of folks who make me want to go hide behind a white picket fence, even though I’ve been involved in one fairly long-term triad, and I have pals who probably know just what kind of pheromones to buy to get a doggie interested.
But fortunately, very little of the press coverage has stressed this angle. (Not having followed the case too closely, I knew that the victim was a lesbian, but hadn't read anything about the defendants' lifestyle until Queen's column.) Queen concludes, "I’m just grateful this case seemed to be more about arrogant culpability than lifestyle."
Spectator
Friday, April 5, 2002
The three-judge panel hearing arguments over CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) appears likely to strike down the law. According to Declan McCullagh at Wired:
A two-week trial over library filtering ended Thursday with a trio of judges criticizing the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) as an unreasonable intrusion into the rights of Americans to view legal material online. [...]
"We're stuck right in the heart of the First Amendment when we're talking about libraries," said Third Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Edward Becker, who heads the special three-judge panel that a nervous Congress created to hear legal challenges to CIPA. [...]
"Every witness has testified that the statute can't be applied according to its own terms," U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle said during closing arguments. [...]
The judges also were concerned that decisions about which websites should be blocked are made by anonymous corporate officials who consider their choices to be vital trade secrets, and in the past have threatened legal action against people who reveal the secret blacklist.... "The nameless and faceless," intoned U.S. District Judge John Fullam. "What right does the government have to require this kind of filtering system?"
But whichever way the judges rule, the losing side will immediately appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
Wired
Wired reports on Wednesday's testimony at the CIPA hearing, which featured pro-filtering librarians who support CIPA.
The Fulton County Public Library in Rochester, Indiana, not only cordons off sexually explicit material, but also bans websites that its filtering vendor has dubbed illegal or tasteless -- or that relate to hacking, dating or real-time chat. David Ewick, the library's director, testified Wednesday that he has no problem shielding adult and minor patrons from material that's entirely legal and unlikely to offend anyone. "Personals and dating, it's just one of those things," Ewick said. "It's in some of the newspapers we carry. We didn't think it was necessary (to carry on the Internet)."
Wired
Nine Russian photographers have contributed work to the "Body and the Art of Movement" category of this year's Photobiennale international festival of photography.
The fact that this festival division contains so many nudes is not insignificant: Josef Stalin banned nude photography in 1935 and it remained a censored art form until the 1990s. "This show proves that it [nude photography] is not a lost genre in Russia," Sviblova said. "While in the West, photographers have been able to show and publish their work, Russians have been producing these photographers in secret."
This review describes several of the photographers' work and includes two illustrations. (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
Moscow Times
The Penthouse publishing empire is crumbling. Penthouse's circulation has dropped from a high of nearly 5,000,000 in the 1980s to 650,000 today. Revenues from Penthouse and spinoff publications Forum, Variations, Penthouse Comix and Penthouse Letters have dropped sharply. Moreover, "Not only is its bottom line sagging beyond repair, the Penthouse name long ago lost whatever allure it may have held, even among purveyors of porn."
New York Observer
Thursday, April 4, 2002
A month before its publication, a provocative book about children's sexuality is being denounced by conservatives as evil and prompting angry calls for action against the University of Minnesota Press. In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, Judith Levine argues that young Americans, though bombarded with sexual images from the mass media, are often deprived of realistic advice about sex. Levine argues that abstinence-only sex education is misguided. She also suggests the threat of pedophilia and molestation by strangers is exaggerated by adults who want to deny young people the opportunity for positive sexual experiences. "Squeamish or ignorant about the facts, parents appear willing to accept the pundits' worst conjectures about their children's sexual motives. It's as if they cannot imagine that their kids seek sex for the same reasons they do."
Gainesville Sun
Wired has an update on the CIPA hearings in Philadelphia. Much of it simply recaps the arguments of both sides, with quotes from this week's anti-filtering witnesses.
Wired
Wednesday, April 3, 2002
Salon has a nice article about self-loving guru Betty Dodson's three-year relationship with a man 47 years younger than her. "Oh sure, we got Harold-and-Maude teasing. So, I'm so much older. But so what? When men have girlfriends or marry much younger women, no one bats an eye. But the other way around is a big deal. What we have here is a sexual double standard. The teasing stopped pretty quickly when our friends and families accepted our relationship. In our social circle, things feel comfortable now." (Link snagged from Cocky Bastard.)
Salon
Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews Charles Anders, author of The Lazy Crossdresser, an "advice book on how to crossdress with relative ease." Bussel writes in her preface to the interview:
The Lazy Crossdresser offers humorous as well as informative advice about how to wear women's clothes without agony. The book delves into reasons why men crossdress, ways to go about it, and most of all, how to feel comfortable doing it. As Virginia Postrel writes in a recent issue of Reason, on the subject of Afghani women and their newfound freedom to wear nail polish, "By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: I like that becomes I'm like that." For Charles, crossdressing is not just a way of adorning himself, but a way of defining who he is and enjoying (and owning) his body.
The sidebar has links to assorted web resources on crossdressing and Amazon.com listings for other books about crossdressing.
Clean Sheets
Several sex-positive bloggers are holding a coordinated Labia Blog-a-Thon yesterday and today. Kythryne Aisling explains the impetus behind the event:
Why, you ask? Well, lately we've had an inordinate number of teenage girls posting on the boards, asking if they can cut off their labia ::shudders:: or freaking out becaue they've just noticed their labia and are terrified that no one will ever want to have sex with them. And no matter how many times we repeat "no, everyone has labia, it's a perfectly normal part of your body" some are still convinced that it's disgusting and should be removed. ::shudders again::
Some of the participants:
A very cool event in honor of a very cool body part. Kudos to everyone involved.
Tuesday, April 2, 2002
A Texas judge has dismissed the $5 million judgment awarded to a college student whose image was used in TV ads for a Wild Party Girls video without her permission. Her lawyer misspelled the name of the company that produces the videos. The judge ruled, "Plaintiff took a five million-dollar judgment against an entity called Arco Media Group, Inc. No such entity exists. The proper entity, The AccroMedia Group, Inc., was not properly named as a Defendant in the lawsuit, and was not properly served with any citation or petition, and further, Plaintiff took the default without notifying this Defendant of any hearing on the matter so as to afford Defendant a chance to contest the charges and put on a defense."
San Marcos Record
Steve Weinstein reports on the twenty-third annual Black Party, "the largest annual indoor dance event in New York, a leather-laced marathon that includes three DJs, two lighting designers, and several hours of sex shows by porn professionals and gifted amateurs." This piece describes the carnal abandon of participants "partying like it's 1979," i.e., as if AIDS and safe sex were of no concern. Irresponsible, self-destructive behavior or spiritual celebration of gay male sexuality? Weinstein seems to see it as both, without trying to resolve the contradiction.
Village Voice
Silke Tudor explores the messy fetish scene, the "community of mess lovers known as 'sploshers' (an onomatopoeic title for folks who love to loll in such gooey substances as porridge, pudding, or mud) and 'wammers' (WAM stands for 'wet and messy,' and wammers include folks with a purely water-based focus, as well as lovers of more substantive goo)." The latter half of the article reports on a recent "Splosh" party in San Francisco. "People lie on the ground to make snow angels in the sickly sweet sludge; folks play Twister in oozing sweetness; others kiss each other in slippery corners as green frosting flies through the air; still others fingerpaint on the plastic walls and body-paint on one another; one woman slaps her yard-long braids against the walls, leaving chocolate ponytail prints. The crowd writhes and dances and laughs and squeals and wrestles into the small hours of the morning."
San Francisco Weekly
Japanese sociologist Shoichi Inoue has spent two decades researching Japanese men's fascination with glimpsing women's underwear in public. Or as Wai Wai's headline puts it, Professor ponders puerile
penchant for panty peeking. Inoue says, "What I learned was that even by the time (Japanese) women first began wearing Western-style underwear in the late '20s there were guys around who longed to get a glimpse of their undergarments. At the time, though, those guys were treated as weirdoes. It wasn't until about the '60s until the man's desire to catch a glimpse of panty was regarded as a normal feeling."
Wai Wai
LA Weekly has several articles about videogames this week, including a report on the 2001 E3 convention last May. The piece has a snide, hipper-than-thou tone I found annoying, with lots of easy putdowns of "geeks" and "fanboys." But it does have some entertaining descriptions of the pervasive cheesecake marketing at booths promoting different games. "Next to the booth for one game, a California blond with mirrored shades and diamond earrings poses in front of a police car. She sports a provocative new look for the security professional — a gray top tied off above the navel à la Daisy Duke, a black miniskirt and knee-high boots."
LA Weekly
Business Week looks at the practice of buying up lapsed domain names and converting them to porn and casino advertising, which it dubs "porn napping."
Business Week
