Web Log Archives: July 28, 2002 - August 03, 2002
Saturday, August 3, 2002
Mistress Matisse provides a glossary of sex work slang.
Harvard law student Benjamin Edelman, with help from the ACLU, is suing an Internet filtering company for the right to decrypt and distribute its secret, proprietary list of banned websites. The suit essentially challenges the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; Edelman is asking the judge to block the filtering company from suing him under the DMCA if he successfully bypasses the software's encryption. The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews Edelman about the suit this week.
Queens Borough Public Library officials have instituted a strict dress code for library employees: no sandals, blue jeans, t-shirts or fleece (?); no visible tattoos or piercings; and skirts must be long enough to cover thighs. "But employees - particularly women - are griping that their bosses are forcing them back to the days of hair buns and bifocals. Some said the policy smacked of sexism."
Friday, August 2, 2002
At Salon, David Tuller argues that "Sex between teenage boys and older men is not always coercive -- and it can be more ecstatic than traumatic." Like Judith Levine, Tuller makes clear that he's talking not about children but about sexually curious and willing adolescents.
However, adolescence -- let's say starting at 12 or 13 for some boys, at 14 or 15 for a great many more -- is a different matter entirely. Gay men compare coming-out stories like kids today trade Pokémon cards, and over the years I've heard many tales of teenage escapades with older men, of sex with an uncle, sex with a married neighbor, sex with an unknown man driving a shiny Chevrolet, sex with a teacher. Sex in a park at night, sex in a train station toilet, sex in a stranger's home. Sometimes the sex was great, sometimes awful. Sometimes the experience was tender, sometimes rough, sometimes somewhere in between. Most of the time the kids wanted it, like I did; they were just a bit braver, or more desperate.
Salon ran some letters to the editor later in the week.
Blogger Meryl Yourish writes: "Now, this may put me down in the Internet history books as both a comic book geek and a total freak, but hey, I can't stop my mind from goin' where it wants to go. Just because most comic fans are guys doesn't mean that we girls can't make lists like this, too. So, uh, I was thinking: What kind of dates would the various superheroes be?" Hilarious riffs on the romantic potential of assorted DC and Marvel characters follow. Continued the next day with more characters and email responses.
Houston entrepreneurs want to open a strip club in a former McDonald's restaurant. The building is currently empty and boarded up, but still painted "Ronald McDonald red and yellow." Local politicians and residents held a protest rally this week to block the strip club. One teenager at the rally said, "This was McDonald's, our meeting spot to eat and hang out. We are very hurt that this place is now going to become a place that produces drugs, prostitution and possibly sexual predators in our community."
Feeling better today, thanks. Meanwhile ...
Last remaining 42nd Street peep show closes
Las Vegas eases lap dancing rules
Trials of a gay-seeming straight male
BBC shock jock censured for Charlotte Church sex jokes
Good Salon piece about Lynn Breedlove
Can porn save the mobile phone industry?
Scientists working on Barbie drug
Early 1980s biker magazine ads
Great scholarly essay on the word "fuck"
Undercover Atlanta cops bust 115 clubgoers (after watching the three-hour live sex show)
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
More low-intensity catch-up blogging:
Porn producer fights ban of 'precious cultural asset' from French TV
US Internet pornographers arrested in Mexico
Nudist colony upsets neighbors
City worried about nudism decline
Barbara Nitke vs CDA
Barby is bad
Daze has been sidelined by a painful ear infection. This is something that's supposed to hit children and swimmers. I'm neither. I'm a complete wuss about pain and have spent most of the last few days curled up in bed with a hot water bottle, PG Wodehouse and a puppy (who is, quite frankly, accustomed to having the bed all to herself during the day but who has been very professional about the whole thing). I've done some surfing but haven't felt up to writing, so I'm just gonna clear the URL backlog without blurbs. Proper blogging will resume sometime soon.
Globalgasm on Thursday night
The virtues of promiscuity
New Orleans swingers club
My boyfriend sure looks hot in his tighty-whities contest
Weird celebrity couple
Streakers, streakers, streakers
Bush cancels UN family planning funds
Woman sues airline over vibrator humiliation
Should Dallas Observer drop sex ads?
Japan jerking off over
pseudo pedo-porno
History of shaving timeline
Nick rips dumb Salon article about metrosexuals
Debra rips dumb David Steinberg article about Bush's colonoscopy (I like Steinberg and dislike Bush, but this article was just petty and dumb)
