Web Log Archives: December 08, 2002 - December 14, 2002
Friday, December 13, 2002
Showtime is developing an Osbournes-like reality TV series about adult filmmaker Adam Glasser, aka Seymore Butts. "The currently untitled 10-episode project will focus on various aspects of Glasser's personal and professional lives as well as the people around him. In addition to Glasser, his mother, who keeps his books, and his cousin Stevie will be featured. 'This is not an expose on the industry,' executive producer Arnold Shapiro told Daily Variety. 'It's about the ironies and the humor that are associated with a man who chooses to have an alter ego and do this work.'"
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Wendy Perriam, winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, lists her top ten seriously sexy books for the Guardian.
Two Indiana University students may face disciplinary action over their participation in the Shane's World campus video shoot. "One is alleged to have let the film crew into Teter Quad, and the other is alleged to have participated in a sex act with one of the Shane's World actresses in a public area of the building." (Shane's World #32 is available on DVD at Gamelink.)
Fiona Banner, the artist who painted a massive text description of a porn video, didn't win the Turner Prize, but she did get her own Metafilter thread.
Singapore's government Health Promotion Board is adopting the scare tactics approach to discouraging teen sex. "Teenagers in Singapore are to be shown graphic images of the effects of sexually transmitted infections to try to dissuade them from having sex. Health officials are to distribute a 10-page magazine featuring colour pictures of people suffering from diseases such as gonorrhoea, chlamydia and syphilis to 15-year-olds around the country."
More on the Vancouver police raid and arrests at Internet porn company Sweet Entertainment Group. Four people from the company face obscenity charges. CTV reports, "The police investigation focused on one particular website, which depicts images of sadomasochism, brags about painful erotic sex and offers viciously degrading photos. . . . The investigation began after a surfer in England complained to the Vancouver Police Department about a year ago. . . . If found guilty, the company's owners could receive jail time, but will more likely receive a fine. In the meantime, their websites are still running."
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
In "Lesbian Lolitas: High-School Girls Want to Be Gay-ish," Deirdre Dolan writes about high school lesbian relationships in New York. One girl explains, "The girls in junior high are more experimenting with a partner that they think is safe. It’s like practicing for guys. But girls who are in high school do it more for novelty purposes. A lot of popular girls do it. They just figure out that it’s something guys think is hot, and they use that to their advantage. It’s totally O.K. to be a real lesbian, but poser lesbians are usually a kind of insecure girl who feels like she’s not really special for any reason—and I know I kind of sound like Dr. Phil." An older writer quoted in the article says, "The pop-culture terrain about sexuality has changed, and I think it’s a lot more permissible to be gay-ish than it used to be. Not permanently gay, but gay-ish. So I think young people are trying these things on. If you ever go to Ani DiFranco concerts, they’re filled with girl-girl couples between the ages of 12 and 20, and I’m sure a lot of them are not going to end up gay."
Brendan Koerner at Slate explains What Is Sodomy?
A new research study confirms what everyone already knew: that Internet filtering software accidentally blocks many health information sites. The study "concluded that the narrower the focus of a filter -- limited to pornography, for example -- the more health information is available. A higher level of filtering -- to include categories such as tobacco, swimsuits, profanity, jokes, auctions, games and dating -- severely limits access to health information while only marginally increasing protection against pornography."
Vancouver police raided an Internet porn company and its affiliated "talent agency" on Tuesday. "Police seized about 100 computers and thousands of videos, CDs and files when they raided the offices and studios of a couple of local businesses in the porn industry after a year-long investigation." Sweet Entertainment Group runs several subscription porn sites. Their website boasts that "we shoot ALL of this content in-house so there is never any concern about legality or copyright issues and we specialize in EXTREME AMATEUR FETISHES that are in great demand by today's discerning porn consumer." Sweet's "extreme fetish" sites include watersports, fisting, bondage and femdom, areas that most big web porn companies steer clear of. (No consoles on these Sweet links, at least when I checked them.) . . . UPDATE: canada.com takes down its news stories quickly, and this story is already gone. So here's an excerpt:
Police announced Tuesday that they have made what could be the biggest pornography bust in Vancouver and possibly even the country. Police seized about 100 computers and thousands of videos, CDs and files when they raided the offices and studios of a couple of local businesses in the porn industry after a year-long investigation. "This is a major organization that we've taken down," says Sgt. Doug Lang of the Vancouver Vice Unit.
The companies raided were Sweet Entertainment Group, a local porn studio, and Diverse Talents, a talent agency that supplies models for porn manufacturers. Police allege the porn companies went beyond the legal limits in some of the porn produced. They say the material crossed the line, degrading and victimizing women. Lang says the material police seized was beyond obscene. "We're not talking about Playboy magazine here. We're talking about victimizing people," he says.
Sweet Entertainment Group set up shop four years ago and now feeds material to hundreds of Web sites around the world. Police believe is one of the major internet pornography producers in Canada, and quite possibly around the world. "You can see the magnitude of it. It's worldwide," Lang says. "This is a significant investigation and it will have a significant impact -- to some degree -- on pornography as it's distributed through Canada and the United States. Not to say there won't be other organizations to fill in. It's a bit like shovelling water, if you will."
Sweet Entertainment's material appears on hundreds of websites, and rakes in millions of dollars. Lang says some of the material police seized from the studio was almost "inhumane." One victim who has stepped forward says she was raped, beaten and degraded by a man at the porn studio during taping. Police are urging other victims to contact them.
Sweet Entertainment officials were not available for comment. Four people are facing charges of making or publishing obscene matter. They could face up to two years in jail.
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle: "Kathy Bates would shudder at the idea of herself as a crusader for the rights of full-bodied women. Nonetheless, her nude scene in the forthcoming About Schmidt will surely pave the way for large actresses to feel OK about shedding their clothes onscreen. 'We're so body-conscious in this country that it's a shame, really,' Bates told us. 'I think we live with very unrealistic expectations of what we should look like.'" Cool.
Osaka Prefecture may start cracking down on streetside adult video vending machines. Osaka has until recently interpreted the country's "harmful literature" ordinance differently than Japan's other 46 prefectures, but "authorities there are now proposing to bring Osaka into line with the rest of the country, a move that dooms the adult video vending machine business."
Monday, December 9, 2002
Amazon.com's automated recommendation system — "Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items" — often makes weird connections. Last week, the Amazon page for Pat Robertson's Six Steps to Spiritual Revival included "also shopped for" links to The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men by Bill Brent (and presumably vice-versa). Snarky British tech zine The Register broke the story Friday and posted a screenshot. Amazon.com removed the links almost immediately after the story went public, calling it "a rather curious juxtaposition." A "net privacy specialist" interviewed by The Register thinks it was probably a prank. "Someone just got friends to visit the Web pages for the two books a bunch of times. Since the Robertson book hasn't sold very well, Amazon relies on page hits for recommendations and not book purchases." So does this practice have a name yet? Amazonbombing?
Here are the Amazon.com pages for the Robertson and Brent books. The Robertson book page has been cleaned up, but Robertson followers have apparently left their marks on the Brent book page in the "Our Customers' Advice" section.
In this context, the Bible recommendation is clearly an anti-gay slur. So will Amazon.com clean up this page too? And on the subject of double standards, every news article I found aside from The Register's version mentioned Robertson's Six Steps by title, but refused to identify author name or book title for Brent's Ultimate Guide. The other articles (1 2 3 4 5) euphemistically called it "a sex manual" or "a book about anal sex for men." Why not mention the author or title?
There's a Linda Lovelace biopic project floating around Hollywood, and Angelina Jolie might be interested in the role.
Sunday, December 8, 2002
Meanwhile, Shane's World #32: Campus Invasion goes on sale Tuesday. GameLink is already taking orders.
The promotional blurb discreetly says the movie was shot at "one of the top party schools in the country" without actually identifying the school.
The O'Reilly Factor ran two more segments on the Shane's World Indiana University porn video controversy last week, which makes four segments over the last month. According to Adult Video News:
O’Reilly was given an exclusive first look at Shane’s World #32, which will hit stores on December 17th. A trailer from the movie was shown, including clips of the fraternity parties, the radio station segment, and footage of the character "Drunky the Bear".
Along with showing the sneak peak of Campus Invasion, O’Reilly announced that a Shane’s World college scholarship fund is in the planning stages. A portion of the proceeds from Shane’s World #32: Campus Invasion will go to the fund.
The Fox News website has partial transcripts of the O'Reilly segments for November 15, November 18 and December 3. (Shane's World #32 is now available on DVD at Gamelink.)
Money: "A group of religious leaders want you to know that General Motors, Comcast and AOL Time Warner all make money distributing pornography. The companies own interests in video distribution networks, such as cable or satellite TV companies, which provide the opportunity for people to view pornographic material through pay-per-view channels. The Religious Alliance Against Pornography is mounting a public campaign to pressure such companies to get out of distributing what it sees as pornography." Huh-huh, he said "mounting."
CNN: "A tour bus filled with beer-drinking passengers and a handful of strippers is plying the night-time streets of Berlin, giving the German capital a hot new tourist attraction. The double-decker bus cruises past the city's main tourist spots, including the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag parliament building, the chancellery, the state opera house, Tiergarten park and the Victory Column on a three-hour tour. But the crowd on board seem less interested in Berlin's cultural offerings than they are in the tour guide, who slowly disrobes during her commentary, and her two 'assistants' who keep spirits high with a series of strip shows."
Fellow Austinite Neal Pollack cuts to the heart of the issue: "As for Sodomy in Texas, I'm in favor if it involves Austin resident Ethan Hawke, but against if it involves Kinky Friedman."
