Web Log Archives: July 14, 2002 - July 20, 2002
Friday, July 19, 2002
Via the Daypop Top 40, where it's #3 with a bullet: the True Porn Clerk Stories message board.
Alana Kumbier criticizes Bush administration proposals to fund marriage initiative and abstinence-only education programs with welfare dollars.
Stephanie Lehmann writes about watching Sex and the City with her 14-year-old daughter. "Some parents I know would label me an unfit mother for exposing my daughter to the sexually explicit exploits of Samantha, Miranda, Charlotte and Carrie. But I've discovered that 'Sex and the City,' which is back for a fifth season this week, is a great way to explore the subject of S-E-X with my teenage daughter."
City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul alt-weekly) has a good feature article about modern transsexuality by Leyla Kokmen, covering "women rebuilt as men, gals who were born guys (some of them lesbians in male bodies), cross-dressers, drag queens, and some folks who say gender no longer means much." Part of the article deals with the exemplary transgender health and counseling services at the University of Minnesota.
New at Nightcharm: "Bad lighting and Wild Boys! Remember when skin mags were really filthy? Full of Trade looking criminal and magnificently exploited? John Calendo takes us back to Hollywood Boulevard during the Golden Age of Sleaze when he edited a skin mag that had no redeeming value whatsoever. Anybody here remember In Touch? Warning: IT'S ALL TRUE!"
Thursday, July 18, 2002
At the Stranger, Bradley Steinbacher looks at the explosion of amateur porn video and profiles one small adult-entertainment company based in Puyallup, Washington. . . . In the same issue, Adrian Ryan profiles a local Seattle amateur gay porn studio.
The annual Sexpo opens today in Sydney. The official title is Health, Sexuality & Lifestyle Expo, and organizers say the event is developing broader, more mainstream appeal. Among the non- (or less obviously) sexual merchandise on display this year are wine, sunglasses, shoes, mobile phones, sports memorabilia, watches and gemstones. Favorite quote: "The man at the vibrator stall offered to do a swap for an autographed picture of Don Bradman but we knocked him back." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
The Moscow, Idaho, city council has enacted a ban on women baring their breasts in public in order to shut down the notorious topless car wash. The new ordinance actually makes it a misdemeanor for women to display anything more than the cleavage between their breasts. Several women committed topless civil disobedience to protest the ruling.
Flutterby steers us to this Slashdot interview with SF/fantasy novelist Piers Anthony, which includes some feisty exchanges on sexuality issues. One questioner takes Anthony to task for sexist depictions of women, another for exploitative depictions of "female underage sexuality."
Carol Queen bemoans the limited range of kink on American porn shelves compared to Europe, and explains why videos with "fisting, piss, scat, animal porn, and SM that includes penetration" are so hard to make, distribute or buy in the US. Queen sees the settlement of the Seymour Butts obscenity case in Los Angeles as potentially a "first blow for freedom of kinky expression." In the second half of the article, Queen looks at another censorship case. Lesbian pornographers Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano sent their latest video, Sugar High Glitter City, to a queer film festival in New Zealand. That country's film review board insisted they "take out seven seconds of the offensive urine," which turned out to mean a female ejaculation scene.
This ad for Jennifer Lopez's new perfume will start appearing soon in magazines and on billboards.
First came warchalking, then blogchalking. Now there's whorechalking.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
New from The Onion: Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed by Powerful Penis Enlargement Lobby.
"If this legislation passes, the government would, for all intents and purposes, be taking three to four inches off America's cocks," said Denny Garner, president of the National Association of Penis Enlargers (NAPE), speaking to reporters Monday. "For millions of poorly hung American men, spam is a vital source of information about penis-enlargement options, and our elected officials have no right to take it away from them."
Added Garner: "MAKE YOUR DICK BIGGER THAN A CLUB!!!"
Media Life looks at the attack of the Maxim clones. "While the better-known beer-and-babes titles continue to strike many readers as formulaic and crass, even their critics concede that they are skillfully executed. In contrast, it’s hard to see the Maxim Clones as anything other than cheap, ill-differentiated cash-ins serving up a reheated hash of locker-room jokes, “wacky” statistics and publicity-starved starlets. Like a clutch of newly-hatched sea turtles, most of them will perish before they learn how to swim, but one or two may survive, so you might as well learn their names: Razor, Stun, Controversy, Swung, King, Smooth."
Jane magazine recently ran a satirical piece entitled "How to Get Laid Like a Priest." Author Jeff Johnson wrote, "Let's all take something positive from the vile pedo priests crisis, shall we? After all, the ... tactics they've arduously perfected can be used by non-psycho people who choose to have sex with consenting grown-ups ... (We) boil it down to 10 simple (sex)-getting commandments." The Catholic League is not amused.
Emily Eakin reviews the new book Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals by Marlene Zuk, which both surveys animal mating habits and skewers (in Eakin's words) "the tendency to hold up animals as role models -- to see in their behavior inspiration or vindication for our own."
Monday, July 15, 2002
BBC News: "The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has banned cable and satellite broadcasters from showing pornography. In a rare display of unity, Arab members voted alongside right-wing and religious Jewish parties in favour of the bill.... Left-wing and secular parties condemned the move, saying the law was tantamount to state censorship."
Jenna Jameson has her own action figure and bobblehead doll. At Hoot Island, Wyyrd brainstorms more Jenna toy ideas. Oooh, I really want the Jenna pez dispenser.
The Maxim guide to filming your own sex scene. (Warning: the most obtrusive floating Flash ad ever kicks in about 15 seconds after the page loads.)
Sunday, July 14, 2002
Nerve has a fascinating gallery of photographs of professional dominatrixes by Silvia Usle. (Free registration required now for Nerve's photo galleries; worth the trouble in my opinion.)
Patrizia DiLucchio presents a luxurious guide to erotic bath play.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is currently running a major career-spanning Andy Warhol Retrospective. But Holland Cotter in the New York Times complains that the show's curators have downplayed Warhol's gay sensibility and sexual subject matter.
Warhol was also the first major postwar artist to put gay identity — or queer identity, to use the term now favored by many gay men and lesbians as an ironic badge of pride — at the very center of his work. This was in the 1950's and early 60's, before Stonewall and gay liberation, when to do so meant to be shunned by many of his artist colleagues, gay and straight. Warhol didn't care, or pretended not to, and just by being himself, a public sissy, he automatically became one of the important political artists of his time.
You might not recognize the queer artist from "Andy Warhol Retrospective," a majestically installed career survey on view this summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. [...]
So what's missing? Sex. Not eroticism — everything Warhol did feels erotic — but representations of actual sex, physical sex. Try to imagine a Picasso retrospective without sex. No penises, no breasts, no vaginas. No artist having his way with his studio models, no men and women joyously in flagrante. It's out of the question; sex was too much a part of his work.
It was a main ingredient in Warhol's, too. He did whole series of sexually explicit paintings and took hundreds, probably thousands of explicit photographs. You don't see any of them here. Why? One possibility: the images are almost exclusively of men and male sex parts and express an undisguised interest in same-sex sex.
I have no idea if this criticism is warranted. The MoCA show is hardly unique in slighting Warhol's explicit homoerotic paintings and photographs. I spent an hour browsing Warhol material on the Internet this morning without coming across anything even remotely sexually explicit. But I do love this 1982 photograph by Christopher Makos.
