Web Log Archives: June 15, 2003 - June 21, 2003
Saturday, June 21, 2003
Senator Orrin Hatch removes link to porn site. Hatch's website used to link to myutahsearch.com. The previous owner let the domain registration lapse, and a porn webmaster snatched up the domain last month. (Though this AP story doesn't mention it, Hatch's website came under scrutiny after Hatch suggested developing technology to remotely destroy computers used to illegally download copyrighted music from the internet. Someone then noticed that Hatch's own website used pirated software. Someone at Slashdot noticed the porn link, and Metafilter got in on the action soon after.)
Bodypainting art by Filippo Ioco.
Many larger, higher-resolution images at his site.
The Guardian profiles Andrea Hackett, the former stripper who now leads a unionising campaign for the fledgling Las Vegas Dancers Alliance. She's also organizing opposition to the recently imposed city ordinance banning lapdancing.
Friday, June 20, 2003
Rotten.com answers the nagging question:
Q: Ever wonder why adult bookstores don't display fully-inflated "realistic" love dolls modeled after porn stars?
A: Because in real life, they look ridiculous.
Several dozen hilarious photos provide the proof. (Link snagged from Reverse Cowgirl and Uffish Thoughts, who are both my friends).
Hulk have no slash! The only two stories I could find are pretty tame and based on the 1970s TV series: Storm Damage and Obsession. A bit racier is this short Hulk porn photonovela (link snagged from Poison Koi.)
Also found while searching Google for "Hulk sex": Joel Grineau asks, "Superheroes must have sex lives, right? Is this sex also super?" He suspects the Hulk isn't getting any, which might explain all the smashing and rampaging.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
The Stranger runs two letters to the editor taking issue with Eli Sanders' articles about the rise in STDs in Seattle's gay community. Sanders responds to one letter briefly on the letters page, and elsewhere responds at greater length to the other letter.
The She Hulk Shrine pays tribute to "one of the sexiest leading ladies in Marvel Comics" with photos of transsexuals in green body paint (She-Male Hulks?) in X-rated tableaux. (Link snagged from Random Abstract.)
LA Weekly: "On display in the punishing Mojave heat last Saturday, alongside re-purposed Disney ingénues, Scheherazades, Audrey Hepburns, Theda Baras and Carmen Mirandas, the sweat pouring off them in rivulets, were tattooed leather girls, dominatrixes, carnival performers, performance artists and at least one conceptualist in a giant chicken costume. This was the 13th annual Miss Exotic World Pageant, a spectrum of competing interpretations of sex, danger, desire and the female form."
Mariana Beck at Libido reviews the Taschen book The Rotenberg Collection: Forbidden Erotica. With five thumbnailed images from the book, including one incredible tableau in which three women employ teamwork to keep a ping pong ball in the air.
More articles about dating via Friendster at ABC News and Business Week. Some factoids: "As of June, 450,000 people had joined. The membership roll is growing at 20% per week, says Abrams, who plans to start charging for some features in the near future." (Link snagged from Aprendiz de Todo.)
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Blake Morrison at the Guardian declares Paul Theroux's new collection of short stories the early frontrunner for the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize.
It doesn't take long for the reader to work it out. The countess's fondness for transparent dresses, from which a breast will idly fall so that she can caress it with a black-gloved hand - frankly, it's a bit of a giveaway. But our inept American hero is so slow on the uptake that it's page 51 of this 98-page novella before he finds the keys to the kingdom with the words "I love you," after which there's a good deal of "We communicated by touch, flesh was everything, and as though in mimicry of language we used our mouths, our lips, our teeth," and a fair amount of "I got her to the floor and hiked up her clothes - silks, straps, garters, stockings, ribbons, all the underpinnings of old-fashioned feminine Europe, a wilderness of lush lingerie and lace", not to mention a soupçon of "her favourite position was on all fours, facing the sofa, near enough to rest her head on it, to howl into the cushions and muffle the cries she knew would startle the palazzo's staff," with a passage or two of "each time I thrust she moaned like someone being stabbed to death" thrown in for good measure.
But I don't buy Morrison's theory that straight men over 50 just can't write sex.
Marcy Jarvis researches the phenomenon of wet dreams for women.
BBC News profiles Jane Pavanel, author of a new teen sex education book called The Sex Book. The project started as personal research when Pavanel's daughter turned 10. "I realised that soon she would be through puberty and into a whole new stage: sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was terrified that I wouldn't know what the issues were for her, what her fears and questions might be, how to speak to her openly about sex, etc, so to put myself in the picture I began to educate myself." The publisher's website has more information about The Sex Book including sample pages.
Also on the subject of teenagers and sex: Lisa Appignanesi, sex may be fun, but it can also be frightening.
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Juliana Beasley has published a book of her photos from strip clubs called Lapdancer. Elisabeth Eaves reviews Lapdancer at Slate alongside a slideshow of images from the book, and complains that lapdancing has killed off the art of striptease.
The Village Voice looks at dating via Friendster in "Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration".
LA Weekly covers the first round of the Survival of the Sexiest pageant at Venice Beach. The final competition will be held next weekend at the Erotica LA convention. "The judging criteria for L.A.’s sexiest in three categories — sexiest male, female and couple — would by definition seem a little more subjective than, say, a singing or skateboarding contest, yet few would question the stakes. Maintaining and flaunting one’s sexiness, after all, is something of a civic responsibility in this town."
Seattle's gay community has seen a sharp increase in STD rates recently. The Stranger has run two articles by Eli Sanders — here and here — sharply critical of the "small minority of gay men in the Seattle area" responsible for the outbreaks as well as local gay health leaders, gay press outlets and public health agencies for not doing enough to combat the problem.
Sydney Morning Herald: "When David Beckham begins a brief visit to Japan today, he will see plenty of evidence of his rock star status: crowds of adoring fans; his Manchester United shirt on the backs of young Japanese; and the occasional bleached Mohican hairstyle he favoured during last year's World Cup here. But there is one sign of his fame that will not be so obvious. Japanese women are reportedly styling their pubic hair into a Beckham Mohican." Wai Wai ran an article about the
Beckham-inspired pubic hair trend in January, translated from the tabloid Shukan Jitsuwa.
The SMH article confuses the issue by showing a photo of Beckham sporting a traditional Mohawk: head completely shaved except for an undyed stripe down the middle. A non-Daze reader might conclude that Japanese women are simply shaving their pubic hair into a landing strip. But that is NOT the hairstyle Beckham wore at the World Cup in Japan. His World Cup hairstyle, the one Japanese women are emulating, was more distinctive: short but not shaved on the sides, longer on top, an even longer dyed blond streak down the middle, with the hair on top brushed toward the middle to form a ridge.
UPDATE: Chris says Beckham's World Cup hairstyle has a name: the "faux-hawk".
An amusement park near Copenhagen has barred a vendor from selling penis-shaped lollipops. The 10-centimeter multicolored pops sold for 20 kroner ($4.50) and were called Dillermaend, Danish slang for penis.
The cowgirl made it her mission to find photos of the U.S. Open streaker for her buddy Phil.
UPDATE: The cowgirl has more and still more photos of the U.S. Open sorta-streaker, who turns out to be a pornstar hired by a casino as a publicity stunt.
Premiere has compiled a list of the top ten hottest love scenes in the movies.
The Louisiana state senate unanimously passed a new law against public sex. The New Orleans Times-Picayune notes, "Public sex is already illegal; Monday's bill outlaws sex for the 'purpose of drawing a crowd,' and includes harsher penalties than those in the existing law."
The Register: "The US Supreme Court has rejected the appeal by Stephen Michael Cohen in the sex.com case. . . . The decision was entirely expected however, since Mr Cohen's appeal against $65m costs awarded to Mr Kremen had already been rejected by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as an 'egregious abuse of the litigation process'."
The BBC reports on debate among scientists over whether anal sex is a major factor in the AIDS epidemic in Africa. (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
Science Daily: "Three decades of research on men's sexual arousal show patterns that clearly track sexual orientation -- gay men overwhelmingly become sexually aroused by images of men and heterosexual men by images of women. In other words, men's sexual arousal patterns seem obvious. But a new Northwestern University study boosts the relatively limited research on women's sexuality with a surprisingly different finding regarding women's sexual arousal. In contrast to men, both heterosexual and lesbian women tend to become sexually aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal pattern." This press release has lots more detail about the study if you're interested.
