Web Log Archives: September 15, 2002 - September 21, 2002
Saturday, September 21, 2002
The publicly-traded Australian porn company AdultShop.com is under investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Among other questionable practices, AdultShop CEO Malcolm Day payed $1.6 million over nine months to a marketing company owned by his romantic partner, Bree Maddox, who was the 2000 Penthouse Pet of the Year. More about the Maddox-Day relationship here and here.
A group of 107 women donned pink bras and linked arms to form a Bridge of Bras across London's new Hungerford Bridge in order to publicize the upcoming Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Seven men who bared all in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade have been cleared of public nudity charges because they were wearing shoes, thus technically not nude. (Link snagged from La Di Da, who snagged it from Jill Matrix.)
Germany has instituted a new regulation banning soldiers from having sex while on active service. The Defence Ministry said on Friday it had issued a decree stating that sleeping with fellow soldiers of either sex would be bad for morale, threatening "mutual trust and soldiers' willingness to help each other."
Friday, September 20, 2002
At Blog Critics, Marc Weisblott claims that porn is dead. "Will those born after MTV have any desire to resurrect it? More likely those Jenna Jameson DVDs will replace big band box sets as the distraction of choice in nursing homes." Hmm, I'm skeptical.
Some Londoners are complaining about 'Billy Boy', a fruity energy drink that comes with a condom attached to each can. One upset parent says, "If you could buy it in an off-licence, so be it, but not in a shop that sells soft drinks and sweets."
At the Guardian, Robert Kelsey complains that American women are lousy dates because they're all following The Rules. Agreed that this whole The Rules phenomenon is stupid (unless you're a shallow, materialistic woman seeking a joyless marriage to a shallow, materialistic man), but this guy sounds clueless and bitter. Bitterness is not sexy.
Paroma Basu looks at India's mounting AIDS crisis and one innovative local public health program. "In recent years, public health officials, social workers, and politicians swarmed Kolkata's red-light areas, advocating safe sex, offering medical services, and distributing condoms. These campaigns resulted in tremendously successful initiatives like the Sonagachi AIDS Project, which went from being a quasi-governmental program to one of the largest community-run intervention projects in the world. Sex workers themselves now run the show, and in Sonagachi (meaning "golden tree"), famous as the oldest, largest, and most storied red-light district in the city, only 9 percent of about 6000 sex workers are HIV positive. In comparison, rates of infection among Mumbai (formerly Bombay) prostitutes as of 1997 were as high as 70 percent. At the end of 2001, the total number of people living with AIDS in India was 3,970,000, according to UNAIDS."
Neil Steinberg, who used to write the monthly mocking BobWatch column for alt-weekly Chicago Reader, weighs in on the Bob Greene sex scandal at Salon.
Sculptor Armando Munoz Garcia has built a house in the shape of a woman’s naked body in Rosarito, Mexico. The bedroom is behind her breasts, the bathroom in her bottom, the living room in her tummy. This article has three must-see photos.
Security officials in the eastern Afghan city of Khost have arrested the Sikh owner of a video shop for selling pornographic movies.
The Taipei Times profiles Japanese filmmaker Hamano Sachi, who worked in the porn film industry for thirty years before branching out into non-porn feature films. She was one of the few women directors in the Japanese porn industry. "I love making movies, which was the reason why I started with porn films. In 1966, porn was younger and more flexible and women were accepted in the industry. The feature film industry back then strictly excluded women." Two of Hamano's films are playing at the Women Makes Waves film festival in Taiwan this week. Her film Lily Festival is described here as "a witty and humorous story depicting eroticism in a senior citizen's apartment. When a honey-tongued geriatric Romeo moves into a nursing home with seven women, the gender roles of Snow White and the seven dwarfs are suddenly reversed."
Dan Savage invents a brand new fetish this week. I've never been much into scat, but DOAC sounds like fun.
John Lanchester reviews the Penguin Classic reissue of three James Bond novels, From Russia with Love, Dr No and Goldfinger.
Simon Winder, the editor responsible for republishing all the novels (and for cheekily bringing out three of them as a Penguin Classic) has said simply and robustly that Fleming was a sado-masochist. This is a sensible way of dealing with the profoundly unsensible sexual attitudes in the novels. It is not anachronistic to find the erotic climate of the novels strange and distracting, since plenty of people were distracted by it at the time. Christopher Hitchens, in his lively introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, quotes Fleming's friend and neighbour Noël Coward on the subject of Honeychile Rider's world- famous bottom, 'almost as firm and rounded as a boy's': 'I know we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?' In a way, we are now better placed to see the sexual attitudes of the books for what they are, part of the wish fulfilment in which the Bond novels bask, in which KGB agents disguised as English gents expose themselves as impostors by ordering red wine with fish, and tough dykes called Pussy Galore secretly long to be converted from sapphism by our cruelly handsome hero. The contrast between the real woman Fleming loved, complicated and demanding and grown-up as she was, and the wank-fantasies of the novels, must have been deeply embarrassing for Ann Fleming, and it is no wonder that she disliked Bond as much as she did.
Sado-masochism permeates the whole atmosphere of the books. I had forgotten until rereading them just how often Bond gets beaten up, how long he spends recovering from it, and how a woman is usually involved in the recuperative process. The strongest currents of feeling in the novels always circulate around these sequences. It would be an exaggeration, but not all that much of an exaggeration, to say that the Bond novels are at heart a series of lavish beatings strung together with thriller elements. The first of these beatings is the most famous - that's the one in Casino Royale where Bond sits in a chair with a hole cut out of it and has his testicles thrashed with a carpet beater - but not one of the novels is without its scene of Bond in torment. The tenderest, most yearning word in Fleming's lexicon is 'cruel'.
So why bother reading the books? The answer to that is the same as it always was: because Fleming wrote so well.
Thanks to Gary from Clean Sheets for the link.
Geoffrey Gray explores the subculture of online smoking fetishists. "Virtual smoking has turned into a giant industry. Hold your breath and type 'smoking' and 'fetish' into any browser, and you're liable to get over 100,000 hits. Pregnant women puff down at Smokesigs.com, and other sites offer amateur short stories revolving around virgin smokers and carcinogenic fantasies. Taimie Hannum, on the other hand, does it all. Once a week she puts on a special show in front of her 'naughty cam.' Her favorite trick? 'Smoky blowjobs, definitely,' she says. 'I can also smoke out of—well, you know, my private parts—if I want. I've trained my muscles to inhale and ex.'"
From Local6: "Jacky Assayag recently added a replica Belgian statue called the Manneken Pis to the front of his waffle business at the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando. The fountain statue is of a boy who saved the city of Brussels from fire by extinguishing the flame with his urine hundreds of years ago, according to legend. The statue is supposed to bring good luck. However, since the statue has been placed at the front of Jacky's Belgian Waffles, several customers have complained that it is indecent." With video clip of a local TV news segment.
Watching review copies of MTV's new reality show Sorority Life inflicted "desperate epic karmic suffering" on Mark Morford, one of the best writers working for a mainstream daily newspaper. "Let us herein lament the lack of cameras that follow around, say, a group of cool sexually attuned spiritually diverse funked-out intellectually interesting women as they strive to buck the system and carve out a life and maintain some sort of healthy self image as they suffer constant pummeling messages from Elle and Vogue that tells them they aren't nearly skinny/rich/buff/orgasmic/accessorized enough." (Link snagged from La Di Da.)
Thursday, September 19, 2002
An updated edition of The Joy of Sex is being published to coincide with the original book's 30th anniversary. The new version still uses line drawings to illustrate positions and techniques, but "the notorious bearded man" has been replaced by "a cute, toned, hairless, boy-band type of guy, all pecs and six-pack, a more appealing prospect for women."
Good feature article about college newspaper sex columnists.
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
The Welsh National Opera's production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus features "simulated sex, strong language, even an orgy." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
Some videogames slated for release this fall will feature increased T&A and even nudity. The extreme sports game BMX XXX "lets players rack up cash on the circuit, then spend it at the local strip club. Don't expect Duke Nukem-style pixilated strippers, though. BMX XXX rewards players with live-action footage of topless dancers. Teen horn-dogs can double their pleasure by opting to create a female character, with full control over breast size and the option to have that character ride topless." Presumably fortyish horn-dogs will be able to use this feature too.
Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene resigned last week after revelations that he had once had sex with a teenage girl whom he met while reporting a story. Greene had been with the Tribune for 20+ years and specialized in treacly human interest stories. I didn't bother posting the original news item, because the public sexual humiliation of third-tier celebrities doesn't interest me much. But several interesting commentaries about Greene's forced resignation have appeared since: blog entries by John Scalzi and Tony Pierce, a barrage of letters at Jim Romenesko's Media News, and a followup article at the Chicago Tribune itself.
Scientists have found a 100 million-year-old fossilized penis in Brazil, the world's earliest known penis. It belongs to an ostracod, an early crustacean related to crabs, shrimps and water fleas.
Libby Copeland reports on the murder of two transgender teens in Washington DC in August, covering both the ongoing investigation and the victims' life stories.
Neal Pollack, America's greatest living writer, has started his own blog of sorts. Today's entry is a hilarious parody of the Michelangelo Signorile-Andrew Sullivan feud from last spring. (Signorile exposed Sullivan's online cruising for "barebacking" partners, and Sullivan accused Signorile of sexual McCarthyism. Check out Daze's full coverage here.)
Russian composer Vitaly Okorokov wants to stage an erotic musical based on Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But the action would be switched to the Kremlin and the main characters would be Vladmir Putin and secretary Masha Lewinsonova.
Congressperson Mark Foley has authored a bill, now before the House Judiciary Committee, which would outlaw "exploitive child modeling," defined as "marketing the child himself or herself in lascivious positions and acts, rather than actually marketing products." The bill is designed primarily to shut down the many subscription websites that show under-18 girls posing in bikinis, leotards and such. This article quotes a civil libertarian calling the bill unconstitutional and a child abuse expert calling it unnecessary.
Private Media Group explains how it would use Napster if its purchase offer goes through. "Under the Napster trademark, Private plans to create a P2P community that would offer consumers of adult content worldwide the opportunity to share independent content for free as well as access top quality adult content for a fee. The community will feature two levels of access, an open level based on existing P2P software where registered users can trade content and a premium level which will feature Private's newest content as well as that of its partner companies. Both levels will contain features such as user profiles, dating and chat services." Dating?
A recent poll among Nevada residents shows continued support for legal prostitution, despite recent demographic shifts in the state's population. The poll conducted for the Reno Gazette-Journal and KRNV-TV found 52 percent of Nevadans opposed banning legal brothels, while 31 percent are against laws that allow prostitution in rural counties. Others were undecided or had no opinion.
A culture of promiscuous casual sex among young Japanese has boomed over the last decade.
Surveys suggest that many young Japanese maintain multiple sekusutomo —literally “sex friends.” According to a joint study by the University of California San Francisco and Hiroshima University, of 602 teens (age 15 to 19) surveyed in the Shibuya section of Tokyo recently, 43 percent said they keep five or more sex friends at a time. In a similar survey of 16-year-olds in two rural prefectures, 20 percent of boys and 18 percent of girls said they have at least five sex partners. “To many young Japanese people, everything about sex is casual,” says Masako Ono-Kihara, a public-health expert at Hiroshima University School of Medicine. “Girls now share their boyfriends like they’d share chips. Everyone’s hand is in the bag.”
And they rarely practice safe sex, relying on Japan's virtually HIV-free status for safety, which worries local health authorities. This story is from Newsweek, not Wai Wai.
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Richard Goldstein comments on the Smackdown gay wedding that wasn't; Take Me Out, a new play about a gay baseball player; and a new production of Burn This.
There's a vigorous Metafilter thread about CleanFlicks (the Utah video rental company that offers Hollywood movies with the sex, nudity, profanity and violence edited out) and its lawsuit against sixteen Hollywood directors.
The much-hyped World Wrestling Entertainment gay wedding between Billy and Chuck didn't happen last week. Before the on-air ceremony reached its conclusion, Billy and Chuck called off the wedding, declared that they were actually straight and that the whole thing was a publicity stunt concocted by their manager (all within the show's scripted, fictional storyline). Outsports has two angry pieces on the whole affair, one by columnist John McClelland and one by Scott Seomin of GLAAD. Seomin had played along with the gay wedding storyline and gave Billy and Chuck a wedding gift (a gravy boat from Pottery Barn), but now writes, "The WWE lied to us two months ago when they promised that Billy & Chuck would come out and wed on the air. In fact, I was told (lied to) the day after the show was taped in Minneapolis that the wedding took place and all was well."
The 10th Annual Adult Entertainment Awards were held last night at a former Sam's Club warehouse in Pinellas Park, Florida. Anne Lindberg writes in the St. Petersburg Times, "The Oscars it wasn't. Some men wore jeans, others, business suits or tuxedos. A few looked as if they belonged to Tony Soprano's crew. There was a man with a lime-green mohawk, and another with his head shaved and a bar code tattooed on the back. A number of women poured themselves into an assortment of fabrics. One wore a sheer white bustier with bikini panties, white stiletto heels and garters holding up sheer white stockings."
Europe's first fertility clinic for lesbians and single women opens for business in London. The clinic's founders also run the website mannotincluded.com, which helps lesbians find sperm donors. . . . UPDATE: Here's a better, longer article at the Telegraph.
At the New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood reviews Ursula K. LeGuin's The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Seven of the eight stories deal with, in LeGuin's words, "peculiar arrangements of gender and sexuality." (Link snagged from Amygdala; read Gary's take on Atwood's review here.)
A federal appeals court panel has upheld the ban on selling sexually explicit magazines and videos on military bases. A lawyer for the plaintiffs said afterwards, "The Taliban would have been proud of this decision. It's a shame that the kids willing to lay down their lives for this country are not able to enjoy the freedoms they are fighting for."
Monday, September 16, 2002
wken gets talking about sex in public places and asks his readers, "what is the strangest place that you've every made whoopee?" Several dozen people have responded. (Link snagged from Uffish Thoughts.)
'Mile High Club' Forces Airplane Refit. Virgin Atlantic Airways will have to replace the plastic diaper-changing tables in its newest planes because passengers keep breaking them during illicit trysts. (Thanks, Eric.)
At Arab News, "Saudi Arabia's first English daily," columnist Molouk Y. Ba-Isa (a woman) complains about brazen young women who have gone astray and abandoned "basic standards of dress and behavior that should be adhered to in an Islamic society."
Recently, at a shopping mall, a group of these young women stuffed themselves into an elevator with me. Even though I didn’t know them, I felt terribly embarrassed for their families. These teens had perfumed themselves with scents so overpowering that it was impossible to breathe comfortably in the confined space. The lower portion of their faces were covered, but their eyes were made up with sparkling bright blue and green powders plus heavy mascara and eyeliner. They had on sandals with platform soles at least six inches high and tightly cut abayas. Numerous bangles and rings adorned their arms and hands. Their fingernails and toenails sported outrageous manicures. Ragged, frayed jeans peeped out from under their cloaks. They talked loudly and giggled constantly on the short ride to the second floor.
Damn, anyone else getting hot? "The three brazen Saudi girls on the mall elevator" has jumped straight to the top of my fantasy rotation. (Link snagged from Peace Dividend.)
Andrea Nemerson fields a question about the erotic appeal of getting kicked in the balls. "I was recently play-fighting with my girlfriend when things got a little rougher than usual. She was trying to be playful, but she kicked me in the balls so hard that I couldn't get up. After the kick, she jumped on me and kept wrestling, so she didn't notice that I was hurt. Less than two minutes later she was stimulating me with her hands. This was the best orgasm of my life. I have thought about it for a while, and I think it was the kick in the balls that made it so good. I always thought that stuff like this should feel horrible. What gives?"
Brendan Bernhard profiles publisher Benedikt Taschen. "Along with his co-editor and wife, Angelika, Taschen produces coffee-table books that range from scholarly tomes to flashy compendiums of hip contemporary design to lurid explorations of underground sexuality."
Wired has a long feature article on Operation Candyman, an FBI dragnet that busted child pornography traders on three Yahoo groups. Much of the article focuses on Adam Vaughn, an Alabama police officer and ex-Marine caught in the sting.
The retro burlesque craze comes to Denver.
