Web Log Archive: Week of 5/20/02
Friday, May 24, 2002
A signed first edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover once owned by H. G. Wells will be auctioned off at the Antiquarian Book Fair in London next month. Wells didn't think much of the novel, as his derisive marginalia reveals.
He scribbled rude drawings and insults all over the title page of a precious first edition copy signed by Lawrence himself. . . . On the title page, he drew two cartoons. The first depicts Lawrence with a giant phallus, urging on his erection with a shout of "Up Jenkins!", a catchphrase of the period. This is captioned "DHL by himself". The second shows a withered Lawrence slumped at the foot of an obelisk, staring at his tiny phallus and asking: "Well, has any other man the equal of it?" HG Wells's caption to this is "The real DHL."
The Guardian
Bazima of the scintillating The Bazima Chronicles discovers that her "gay boyfriend" (actually a platonic straight male friend who everyone assumes is gay) isn't all that fond of getting blow jobs. She's puzzled. Many readers pipe in on the matter.
The Bazima Chronicles
Many Japanese women are staying in touch with their inner virgin. Kaori Shoji writes, "The nation is currently undergoing a quiet boom in otome (innocent young girl) culture, to which a large number of aforementioned strong professionals are addicted.... The word [otome] originally meant virgin, but has evolved to embrace what Japanese females intuitively sense to have virginal connotations. It's a state of mind, one that treasures such concepts as stoicism and purity, chicness and style. It abhors conflict, conspicuousness, overconfidence and overt sexuality."
Japan Times
Democratic primary candidates for the office of Property Valuation Administrator in Floyd County, Kentucky, have exchanged mudslinging TV ads. It started when incumbent PVA Connie Hancock ran an ad attacking challenger Glenn David May. That "ad shows someone being handcuffed, a jail-cell door being slammed shut and locked, and a judge's gavel slamming down. Sirens are heard, as a narrator says May, a real estate appraiser from Prestonsburg, has had brushes with the law, including a DUI. 'Why vote for a man you can't trust?' it asks." May responded in kind with an ad showing "Hancock sitting on a small bed, beginning to remove clothing.... [May's political consultant] said the video, which appears to have been taken without the woman's knowledge, was shot in a mobile home belonging to a courthouse employee whom he would not identify. An unidentified clothed man is visible in the ad." Not quite Chu Mei-Feng territory, but pretty damn sleazy. (Link snagged from Fark.)
Lexington Herald-Leader
John Langone reviews two new sex self-help books, Getting the Sex You Want: A Woman's Guide to Becoming Proud, Passionate and Pleased in Bed and The New Love and Sex After 60. "These two informative guidebooks aim to help the sexually disaffected discover or reclaim the joys of lovemaking and, as the authors of Getting the Sex You Want put it, 'to understand the cycles of desire that wax and wane over many decades.'"
New York Times
In response to the US News & World Report cover story, InstaPundit criticizes the current hysteria over "a perennial bogeyman, teen sex."
It is not teen sex that is the aberration, but our increasingly absurd modern effort to treet teenagers as babies. I say increasingly absurd because teenagers are actually sexually mature at an earlier age than they were in those older days.
This doesn't mean that teen sex is necessarily a good thing -- as with adult sex, that depends on the circumstances, and the individuals, and also on what part of the teens we're talking about. But treating it as something scary, aberrant, or unnatural is part of an overall pathology about sex that is both unfounded and -- when, as it now usually does, it comes from baby boomers who felt quite differently about the subject thirty years ago -- pretty hypocritical.
Several reader responses follow. Well worth reading in full.
InstaPundit
Catherine Millet's memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M was a bestseller in France. The Observer summarizes, "By day she was a sought-after curator and well-respected member of the French intelligentsia; by night she was an insatiable hedonist whose passion was indiscriminate sex with anonymous men. And now she's written a shockingly candid and provocative memoir of her experiences." An English translation will be published in England and North America soon. Jessica Berens surveys the "shocked disapproval and loud applause" the book received in France, and talks to Millet about her reasons for writing the book.
Among American reviewers, Janet Maslin hates it and calls Millet's descriptions "ponderous" and "artlessly crude." On the other extreme, Stephanie Zacharek loves it and compares Millet to Sade and Henry Miller. "The Sexual Life of Catherine M. isn't a titillating read masquerading as an intellectual treatise: It's unapologetically both. But what's refreshing about it is the way Millet naturally assumes that we're interested in knowing why she thinks and feels as she does, instead of trying to convince us that we should be. Her raw confidence works like a charm: We hang on every word."
The Observer | New York Times | Salon
A Boston company runs theme cruises in Boston Harbor including Caesar's Roman Orgy, billed as "New England's Naughty, Sexy, R-Rated Party Cruise." An alt-weekly reporter tags along on the same night as a Wild On camera crew.
Boston Phoenix
Thursday, May 23, 2002
Thomas Korosec looks at an ongoing legal battle over obscenity prosecutions in Dallas. "Although roughly two dozen stores around Dallas rent or sell movies depicting unsimulated sexual acts between consenting adults and are licensed to do so under city codes, Dallas police vice officers routinely wander into the stores, pick out one or two particularly graphic titles and file misdemeanor promotion-of-obscenity charges against the clerk who rang up the sale." In the past, the clerks routinely pled guilty and had their fines paid by store owners (Korosec notes that some Dallas porno shop clerks have 50 such convictions on their records), but recently two stores have started to fight the charges in court. This article follows the case of a 22-year-old community college student who was busted while working nights at New Fine Arts Video.
Dallas Observer
The San Francisco Bay Guardian letters page has an anecdote about Janis Joplin catching a Cockettes show in 1969.
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Violet Blue looks back at the life of Linda Lovelace and the ideological battles she embodied.
Good Vibrations
The Adult Webmaster has two articles about designing and marketing sex sites for straight women. Nina Marachino identifies two "common traps that make most 'erotica for women' sites less than fascinating," and describes "my ideal site" combining the strengths of existing models. Karen Jackson also notes the failings of many "for women" sites, starting with what she calls the Prime Directive of women's porn: "women are not gay men.... Yes, both women and gays may like looking at pictures of nude men, but that’s where the similarity ends."
The Adult Webmaster
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Deborah Bach reviews a gallery show of Russ Meyer's photographs at Feigen Contemporary in New York City. "Despite Mr. Meyer's reputation as the father of soft-core, his 18 works in the Feigen show look rather modest today. Most of the models are clothed, posed in quintessential pinup style."
New York Times
Lara Riscol blasts the double standard in conservative concern over teen sex. "Right-wing moralizers wink at boys' sexual foibles -- it's unfettered female sexuality that they think is leading us into perdition." She advocates instead an approach to sex education that promotes sexual respect and responsibility to both boys and girls.
Salon
New workout trend: erotic aerobics classes at a New York gym taught by "an exotic dancer at a local gentlemen's club."
Columbia News Service
Michelle Chihara defends Internet personals. "For some reason, the inevitable pitfalls of dating are magnified into revolting new developments as soon as they are associated with anything intentional, like the personals. When the new-fangled online personals first arrived, the favored bogeyman was that one might find a geeky computer programmer on the other end of all those snappy emails. Then geeks got chic (and rich), and that didn't seem so bad anymore. The scare tactics became more nuanced. Now, they play on fear of the medium, or fear of our fallen consumerist times."
Alternet
This story is getting so common that I don't bother posting every instance: small town forgets to pay its domain registration bill, the registration lapses, shady entrepreneur buys the domain and puts up a generic porn/Viagra/gambling page, locals are appalled. This news story makes the cut for this priceless quote from appalled local Liz Bourne: "I am just absolutely appalled. This is the most outrageous thing to happen around here since they found the spanking tables at the 'House of Pain' in Andalusia back in 1994." (Link snagged from Obscure Store.)
The Trentonian
In honor of National Masturbation Month, Wyyrd presents some fun-filled masturbation party games. "Any game ever designed or twisted for adult purposes can also be used for some solitary pleasure. And why not? Why should you limit yourself to quick, furtive wanking when you can enjoy the same sorts of playful, competitive, gonna-get-laid fun as anybody else?"
Hoot Island
Jenny Diski reviews some recently discovered erotic writings by Philip Larkin, written under the pseudonym "Brunette Coleman" when the author was an Oxford undergraduate. The novella Trouble at Willow Gables and its unfinished sequel Michaelmas Term at St Brides are lesbian boarding school fantasies. Diski calls the work "pitiful" and questions the academic "scratching about at the bottom of the barrel" that led to its posthumous publication.
The Guardian
A short history of the brassiere, "one of the more unheralded inventions." (Link snagged from Breast Chronicles.)
iAfrica
US News & World Report has a cover story on teens and sex this week.
US News & World Report
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
The Loeb Classical Library demonstrates its new policy of publishing non-euphemistic translations of risqué classical texts with a hilarious excerpt from Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria.
Harvard University Press
The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Megan's Law. The question: Should convicted sex offenders who have completed prison terms be automatically included on published sex offender lists, or should they have the right to a individual evaluation and separate hearing to determine their ongoing risk to society. Two Connecticut men argue that automatic inclusion violates their right to due process. Their lawyer says, "It's important to remember that this case is not about preventing sex offender registries from existing. It is about making sure that sex offender laws are fair and constitutional ... that they do not post the current photos of people who are not dangerous alongside people who are dangerous ... without a hearing about whether or not they belong on that list."
CBS News
Penthouse settled with Judith Soltesz-Benetton yesterday just before a judge was set to rule on her lawsuit.
New York Post
Teacher quietly browses porn while students take an exam, not realizing that his computer is hooked up to a large-screen classroom monitor. This would make a great urban legend if it hadn't actually happened.
BBC
Monday, May 20, 2002
Thomas S. Roche weighs the scientific evidence regarding aphrodisiacs, "foods, herbs, scents, vitamins and hormones guaranteed to create or enhance sexual desire."
Good Vibes
The Wai Wai guide to talking dirty in Japanese.
Wai Wai
Sin-seekers Joy and Dominique celebrate the arrival of spring by dressing up in fluffy pink bunny ears.
In Search of Sin
Matt Labash trashes Fox's two-hour Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold special. "You know a show is truly abysmal when you start pining for all the other bad shows that are advertised in the middle of it (e.g. Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska.)"
Nerve
Greg Blanchette writes in praise of Internet porn, even if much of it is crap. He argues that the diversity of styles, fetishes and body types in Internet porn allows surfers to realize "how incredibly wide the spectrum of erotic possibility really is."
Globe Technology
The latest craze among those crazy kids is "freak dancing." And the latest craze among uptight adults is obsessing about "freak dancing." From two newspaper articles about the uproar:
For those who haven't yet seen it, "freak dancing" makes the lambada look like the hokeypokey. Think girls bending over and rubbing their backsides against their partners in time to the beat. Think boys putting their hands on their dates' hips to pull them in closer still -- then farther away, then closer still. Now picture the girls burying their faces into a second partner's midsection or gyrating over him as he lies on the floor. "If they didn't have their clothes on, you would swear they were having sex," Peterson said.
At Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, students and parents must sign permission slips, promising that the students won't engage in "lewd dancing" in its many forms and various names: "grinding, bumping, fondling, humping, licking, booty dancing, rolling, kicking, mashing, shoving, wallowing, disrobing, sexual kissing, freaking, jacking and whatever else a chaperone deems improper or indecent."
No doubt the quicky exploitation flicks are already in production. Get me Sisqo's agent on the phone!
San Diego Union-Tribune | Washington Post
The Nevada Public Utilities Commission held hearings last week over Las Vegas sex industry phone hacking complaints.
Computing.co.uk
Veteran film director Stanley Donen will make a rare foray into theater by directing Adult Entertainment, an off-Broadway comedy by Elaine May about the porn industry. Donen is 78, which means he directed On the Town and Singin' in the Rain by age 28.
Yahoo
