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Web Log Archives: November 23, 2003 - November 29, 2003 Saturday, November 29, 2003
Thailand launched an unprecedented national debate yesterday on what to do about its billion-dollar sex industry, which stimulates rampant corruption and draws swarms of foreign tourists. There were immediate calls for the industry, outlawed in 1960 but still expanding, to be legalised as the Justice Ministry summoned 300 people to a public forum and invited the media to watch the debate. [...] Academics and some Thai prostitutes who were at the forum said they strongly opposed legalising the sex industry, arguing it would increase child exploitation and lure more women to the trade. Bangkok Post: Legalise sex trade, govt told. Feminists, academics and sex workers have called on the government to revoke the law against prostitution and decriminalise the world's oldest profession. [...] About 500 people turned up at the hearing organised by the Justice Ministry's Rights and Liberty Protection Department. National Post: Thailand touts sex tax as huge revenue stream. Government advisors have suggested that legalizing prostitution will give an estimated 220,000 Thai sex workers access to social services, health care and protection from abuse. They hope legalization will also help eliminate the web of corruption that surrounds the politicians, police and business owners associated with the sex industry. [...] Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's Prime Minister, has touted the possible legalization of prostitution, along with legalized gambling, as a strategy for boosting Thailand's economy. Since prostitution is now illegal, brothel owners and most prostitutes don't pay taxes. But they pay millions of dollars in bribes and hush money to corrupt policemen and politicians. A recent study by the National Economic and Social Advisory Council says that massage parlour owners alone pay a staggering US$114-million a year in police bribes. More. Thursday, November 27, 2003
No word yet if Alan Greenspan has posted a profile. Computerized matchmaking? Pshaw. Real objectivists would immediately sense their value compatibility and introduce themselves with wordless quasi-rape in a granite quarry. Talk about free markets! This is a great way to remove people who have no taste from the dating pool. If you think that's not funny and you're single, check out The Atlasphere.
Three years ago, the anti-porn activist was looking to Ashcroft and the Justice Department to wage an aggressive crackdown on smut. Federal obscenity prosecutions had flagged during the Clinton administration. The new attorney general, with his fervent Christian credentials, looked to be the ideal warrior to take on the nation's burgeoning and multibillion-dollar pornography industry. Today, the odds of a major federal revival in prosecuting porn appear to be fading. The Justice Department has picked up the pace and is filing more suits, but it has been mainly targeting smaller distributors that deal in the most radical fare. [...] Burress and the other leaders were looking to Ashcroft to change the terms of the debate — much like Edwin Meese III did in the 1980s when, as President Reagan's attorney general, he appointed a national commission on pornography and the department flooded the courts with suits that resulted in a number of high-profile porn operators going to prison. Justice Department officials, however, said they felt like they were starting from scratch. The dearth of obscenity suits filed under Reno had left a void of prosecutors with experience in the area. The rise of the Internet as an outlet for porn presented new and different investigative challenges, compared with shutting down bricks-and-mortar arcades and video stores. The section started gearing up, hiring high-tech computer sleuths and holding retreats where prosecutors were taught how to build a successful obscenity case. With just 18 lawyers, the unit also scrambled for resources, which were scarce after Sept. 11. The unit also oversees cases involving child prostitution and human trafficking. But that deliberate, methodical approach was not what the anti-porn interests had in mind. Burress began needling Justice Department officials in private meetings and at White House functions, passing along electronic links to pornographic Web sites that were "just laying out there" ready to be prosecuted. A self-described former porn addict, Burress believes that the government should be locking up "white-collar pornographers" like Internet service providers that facilitate pornographic spam and hotels that operate X-rated pay-per-view channels. Last year, Morality in Media created a Web site — obscenitycrimes.org — where citizens can report what they consider Internet porn. The information is verified before being put in affidavit form by a retired FBI porn investigator and forwarded to the Justice Department for review. About 34,000 complaints have been lodged to date. Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Players can pick from a number of delectable WWE divas, including top-quality eye candy Trish Stratus, Stacy Keibler and Torrie Wilson. These girls are beloved by wrestling fans across the globe for their unique fighting styles and enormous personalities. By pushing all the right buttons, players can build up enough steam to pull off special moves and get the girls pulling off each other’s clothes. The last lady left standing in anything more than her underwear is the winner. Bra and panties matches have never featured in a game before, and gentlemen gamers up and down the country are bound to be found furiously pumping their analogue sticks in appreciation. The gamemakers have been playing up "bra and panties mode" in TV commercials, but oddly enough not in the screenshots they make available to videogame sites. This gallery has one bra and panties match action shot and one solo shot of a stripped-down match loser, mixed in with dozens of beefcake shots of bodyshaved steroid junkies. Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. . . . You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. [...] The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity. I'm not sympathetic to this argument. Love doesn't always last forever, and the modern cultural acceptence of alternatives to lifetime fidelity (serial monogamy, cohabiting, periods of promiscuity, open marriage, etc.) is not a moral failing. Brooks bristled quite a few people with his opening paragraph. Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations. Actually, I had quite a few years like that before I was married, and I consider it a good thing, though I'm quite happy to be married now and wouldn't have wanted to live that way forever. (But I think that one reason that I'm happily married now is that I did live that way for quite a while first). But I agree with David Brooks that gay marriage is a good thing, and actually strengthens traditional values rather than harming them. Later on the same page, Instapundit posted and responded to reader letters on the topic. Elsewhere, VodkaPundit also takes issue with Brooks in a witty, column-length post: What we think about sex probably reveals more about us than we'd like to admit – especially more than we'd like to admit to ourselves. And that, perhaps, is why so many people get so damn angry when someone admits, "Hey, I like sex!" Well, I like sex, too. I like sex a lot. [...] It is possible to have a healthy libido and a clean conscience at the same time — and judging by the emails, some God-fearing people seem to fear that fact more than they fear God, Himself. Many comments and links to more punditry follow the post. All worth reading. Monday, November 24, 2003
In her debut as an adult-film actress, Paris Hilton offers a taste of good things to come. Despite murky video quality and a male partner, Rick Solomon, who has to repeatedly fondle himself in order to keep "at attention," Paris displays a playful gamine personality not unlike that of Aurora Snow (Blowjob Adventures of Dr. Fellatio #26; Weapons of Ass Destruction) while boasting a body that recalls the lithe, non-surgically-enhanced form of Roxanne Hall(Nasty Nymphos #6; Butt Slammers #16). . . . Throughout, Paris’ lilting, kittenish voice is a welcome, nostalgic throwback to adult stars of the 1980’s like Ginger Lynn and Erica Boyer, before porn had all the sentimentality drained from it. Lisa Gabriele at Nerve defends and envies Hilton's youthful daring. I am in my mid-thirties. . . . I now make a living as a freelance video journalist. I own a fancy Canon XL-1, top-of-the-line Sony wireless mikes and a light kit. Since I bought the camera five years ago, not one boyfriend has picked up my camera without implying that it could be put to much better use in the bedroom. I always laugh it off, pull the thing out of their grimy paws and place it safely back in its bag. I would never do it. Why? In part because I know the consequences of committing sex to tape. It will be shown to others. It will end up in the wrong hands. It will come back to haunt you. But mostly, because it's too late. The days of being unself-conscious about my body, of recklessly having sex with reckless boys and their anxious cameras, are over. But I tell you, if I were twenty-one now, if I'd grown up inured to the role videocameras play in most young people's lives, there would be a smattering of my own embarrassing fare out there online — entirely because of booze, balls and the pushy, horny boys I tended to attract back then.
The city is full of people we can't reach. We pass them on sidewalks, sit across from them in the subway and in restaurants; we glimpse their lighted windows from our own lighted windows late at night. That's in New York. In most of America, people float alongside one another on freeways as they drive between the city and the places where they live. To lock eyes with a stranger is to feel the gulf between proximity and familiarity and to wish -- at least sometimes, briefly, most of us -- that we could jump the hedges of our own narrow lives and find those people again when they drift out of sight. In a sense, the explosion of online personals speaks to the fervency of that wish. * * * Still, a fair number of people continue to feel a stigma about dating online, ranging from the waning belief that it's a dangerous refuge for the desperate and unsavory to the milder but still unappealing notion that it's a public bazaar for the sort of people who thrive on selling themselves. The shopping metaphor is apt; online dating involves browsing and choosing among a seemingly infinite array of possible mates. But those who see a transactional approach to coupling as something new and unseemly would do well to pick up a novel by Jane Austen, where characters are introduced alongside their incomes. There is nothing new about the idea of marriage as a business transaction. Serendipitous love is what's new, love borne of chance, love like what engulfed my grandparents after my grandfather, then a resident physician at a Chicago hospital emergency room, happened to remove my grandmother's appendix. Serendipitous love as a romantic ideal is a paean to cities and their dislocations, the unlikely collisions that result from thousands of strangers with discrete histories overlapping briefly in time and space. And online dating is not the opposite of this approach to love, but its radical extension; if cities erase people's histories and cram them together in space, online dating sites erase both cities and space, gathering people instead under the virtual rubric of a brand.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
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