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Web Log Archives: November 30, 2003 - December 06, 2003 Saturday, December 6, 2003
Friday, December 5, 2003
Several of the stores are operated by Lion's Den Adult Superstores, a national chain based in Columbus, Ohio. Nine of its 29 stores have opened in the past two years. Eight are in or near towns of 16,000 or fewer residents. All of them are just off an interstate. The rush to rural outlets has as much to do with zoning laws as anything else. Most small towns and counties do little more than segregate property into zones for residences, farms and businesses. Larger cities tend to have more complex zoning regulations. They typically restrict adult businesses to back-corner industrial areas, the least desirable locations. Bigger cities usually have laws that specify hours of operation, restrict parking and regulate liquor licenses. As a result, businesses that trade in adult material or entertainment are setting up outside city limits, but still near lots of traffic. "The cities have gone so crazy with zoning, it's difficult to find places to open stores," says Mark Kerns, a senior editor of Adult Video News. "Where else are they going to go but outside the city?" The article covers legal battles in towns where angry locals have tried, almost always unsuccessfully, to shut down the freeway porn stores.
Paula Carmicino spent weeks preparing to make a film for her mandatory Sight & Sound: Video class. She got approval for the subject matter from her professor, Carlos de Jesus, and recruited actors to play each part. But four days before she was to film the required assignment in front of her classmates in a Tisch School of the Arts studio, Carmicino, a Tisch junior, was told that she could not proceed because a scene depicting sexual penetration was not in line with "industry standards." Now, in direct response to Carmicino's project, Tisch is introducing those standards to the department of film and television. By the end of the semester, officials said, the department's handbook will prohibit the filming in Tisch studios of movies that would not earn an R rating or below from the Motion Picture Association of America. I taught video production for a couple years at Wisconsin in the early 90s. Two student video projects around that time featured on-camera sex (neither for my class, alas). There were a few complaints from fellow students during the end-of-semester screenings, but overall it wasn't a big deal. So what happened to all the jaded urban sophisticates in New York? Weird. As for "industry standards," that depends on the industry. Mainstream Hollywood hasn't embraced the porno revolution yet, but several films made for the international film festival/art cinema circuit have depicted explicit sex in recent years. The New York Times picked up the story. Law blogger John Smith of Lincoln Plawg, who sent me these links, has commented on the story himself. He suspects (and I suspect he's right) that the student isn't exactly devastated by NYU's actions. After all, what young filmmaker wouldn't want to get her name and photo in the Times as censorship victim poster child? Smith writes, "The upshot, of course, is that the struggling director-to-be (she's only a junior, apparently) has had thousands of dollars of free publicity, and established what I suspect is a pretty marketable profile - her WSN pic has a definite James Dean, don't mess with me feel about it. (I suspect she's got an agent already.) Will some generous studio volunteer the facilities to make her banned opus, to shlep round the festivals and get on the chat shows? Is the Pope Catholic?"
Thursday, December 4, 2003
She's taking off her blouse. It's on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She's taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There's a design as well. You gasp. 'What's that?' you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator... As your hands roam her back, her breasts, and trace the swastika on her mound you start feeling like an ancient Aryan warlord yourself... She sandwiches your nozzle between her tits, massaging it with a slow rhythm. A trailer to bookmark the events ahead. For now she has taken you in her lovely mouth. Your palms are holding her neck and thumbs are at her ears regulating the speed of her head as she swallows and then sucks up your machinery. She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time... She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion. The Guardian prints selections from other nominees, including John Updike and Paul Theroux. Wednesday, December 3, 2003
In October, America Online started earning money from searches for pornography on its search site. Now, a search for a sexual term on AOL returns a page noting that the search might produce "adult" content. This page gives the user two options. The first, presented in larger type, offers to hunt for the term using "Adult Search Fantasy Finder," which is described as "an independent adult search service." The second choice is to use AOL's own search service, which is provided mostly by Google. Both options can quickly lead to pornography, but the search results provided by Google do not have advertising or otherwise produce revenue for America Online. (Google does sell ads related to sexual terms on its own site.) But Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, said that Adult Search Fantasy Finder paid AOL to receive online traffic from its search site. MSN has a similar arrangement with a search company called NightSurf.
Abercrombie & Fitch pulled the catalog from stores this week. The National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families claims that as a victory for their protest campaign. An Abercrombie & Fitch rep counters that the catalog was in stores for the usual six weeks and was pulled "because we just launched a new perfume called NOW and we had to make space on the counter for the product." Copies of the catalog are being scalped on eBay. The Abercrombie & Fitch website has several photos, wallpapers and postcards from the catalog. Tuesday, December 2, 2003
Li Li, a 25-year-old aspiring writer from Guangzhou, probably realized as much in June when launching her weblog, "Love Letters Before Dying." Under the pen name Muzimei ("Wooden Beauty"), Li Li provided lurid details of her unusually hyperactive sex life, naming names -- some of them famous. China's titillated netizens lapped it up, and by November the blog was receiving more than 100,000 visitors a day. It was also attracting less enthusiastic attention. The state-owned press excoriated the blog as pornographic and corrupting, denouncing the author's disillusionment with love and marriage. The growing furor got Li Li fired from her magazine job, and in late November she shut down the blog. Since Muzimei was removed from the site, scores of imitators have taken her place. The most popular of these, a blogger calling herself Lady Cat, tells of her emotional and sexual voyage through an early marriage, hasty divorce and subsequent casual dalliances -- with a sprinkling of racy Calvin Klein ads and essays like "An orgasm a day," which discusses her discovery of masturbation and pornography. Meanwhile, "Love Letters Before Dying" came out in book form only to be banned after a few days, but it will probably enjoy the same fate as China's previously banned risqué books: translation and brisk international sales. Premium, Flash ad, day pass, etc. Earlier NYT article about Mu Zimei and sex blogging in China. Monday, December 1, 2003
It's only a recent development that middle-aged women are expected, to the extent of having nerve-deadening poisons injected into their faces, to maintain the smooth skin and silhouettes they had as 20-year-olds; is it really progress to impose this sexual drudgery on the old, too? And now a new book, A Round-Heeled Woman, by Jane Juska, and a film, The Mother, by Hanif Kureishi, bravely proclaim a woman's right to get jiggy in the bedroom, even if she does have to use a Stannah stairlift to get up there. And maybe I'm a killjoy, but I do feel a certain weary dread at the idea of yet another "taboo" being broken — and yet another group being co-opted into society's insistence that everyone be permanently "up for it". [...] In the face of this, would it hurt elderly sexuality not to be celebrated? Those sprightly old ravers who want to keep on doing it will do it anyway — and the rest of them won't feel like undersexed squares.
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