Daze Reader weekly archive: June 14, 2009 to Jun 20, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Another celebrity sex tape has hit the intertubes, this time a celebrity that people might actually want to watch having sex. TMZ thinks the Leighton Meester sex tape looks legit.
Spotted ... "Gossip Girl" star Leighton Meester having sex with her BF... on video.
We've learned a Meester tape is being shopped around town. It was shot a few years back, and shows Leighton in mostly innocuous though nude scenes -- with several big exceptions ... one involving her very talented feet.
A celeb porn site has already bought the rights and started promoting the tape.
IS IT REALLY HER???!
The answer is YES! This is 100% the REAL Leighton Meester, who plays the sexy socialite Blair Waldorf on the popular television series "Gossip Girl".
See sweet Leighton giving a footjob, ass closeups, her perfect breasts with perky pink nipples, stripping and more! Did you know she's a natural blonde?!
Expect the usual cultural decline handwringing and the usual career boost. Gossip Girl may be huge with young women, but a good sex tape scandal will boost her popularity with the important older-male-horndog demographic.
Sex and espionage are both subjects I find endlessly fascinating, so this question in a Huffington Post interview with Valerie Plame Wilson piqued my interest:
Did you ever feel real, physical danger during your CIA career? Did you have to sleep with anyone to get intelligence?
Spy buffs and sex buffs should definitely track down the Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage by Nigel West. It's chockful of racy anecdotes about honeytraps, ravens, illicit liaisons and hidden cameras. It's been an invaluable reference for getting the historical details right in my Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers slash fiction. Pricey at $85, but most libraries should have copies.
Portmanteau quibble: West spells it "sexspionage", while most other sources use "sexpionage", which works better since the x in sex already includes the s sound
So how did Plame answer the sexpionage question?
As for the question about whether I've had sex with anyone to get intel (which, by the way, has been asked of me by a US diplomat and a major movie star), the answer is: there were many aspects of my job which were James Bond-like, but that, emphatically, was not one of them.
Well that was disappointingly untitillating.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Gloria Vanderbilt (Wikipedia: "an American artist, actress, heiress, and socialite most noted as an early developer of designer blue jeans") has written a steamy erotic novel at age 85. Obsession: An Erotic Tale drops next week, and it actually sounds pretty good.
“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.
Did everyone else know that Anderson Cooper is her son? That was news to me.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
From Ananova quirkies: Bride scraps wedding over porn secret.
A Bristol woman has cancelled her church wedding after discovering her fiance is a secret porn star.
Haylie Hocking, 27, only found out Jason Brake, 30, made adult films just weeks before the big day, reports the Daily Telegraph.
It happened when a friend organising her hen night searched online for a male stripper and spotted Jason with a woman in a porn movie.
This would make a good urban legend. Better yet, the bride discovers her fiance's secret when he turns out to be the stripper on hen night. Or maybe, she discovers her fiance's secret while browsing pay-per-view adult movies at their honeymoon hotel.
Yet another fact-checking update on the "how many LA area pornstars have contracted HIV" question. The LA Times reports, "Los Angeles County public health officials backtracked Tuesday on their statements last week that at least 16 unpublicized cases of HIV in adult film performers had been reported to them since 2004."
County public health officials said they had mislabeled all reports from the [Adult Industry Medical Foundation] clinic as adult performers when, in fact, information about their occupation is unclear. Although the clinic was created primarily to serve the porn industry, it serves other clients.
"We have no information on these individuals," said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county's health officer. "All we have is the number from AIM."
Sharon Mitchell, the clinic's co-founder, told The Times this week that none of the HIV cases cited by the county involved active performers.
"Here's the bottom line: We're an HIV testing center," Mitchell said. "We don't just test the adult entertainment industry. We have a lot of people who come who want testing from the general public."
Oops. Serious oops. So as far as the LA Times or Los Angeles County or Daze Reader know, the recent positive HIV test for a female porn performer was the first case since 2004. (Previous Daze items ran last thursday and friday.)
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Chinese government has backed down slightly from its internet filtering software mandate. The Guardian reports, "The Green Dam Youth Escort program, which restricts access to pornography and politically sensitive websites, was due to be compulsorily incorporated in the hard drives of all new machines sold after 1 July, but the state-run media announced today that it would instead be an optional package." Still an outrage, but it's good to see the communist thugocracy backpedaling.
The Epoch Times poked around inside Green Dam and exposed some of the program's nasty secrets.
The regime says Green Dam can block pornography, filter illicit content, control web surfing time, and check browsing records. In fact, the software is capable of blocking politically sensitive websites, filtering out content based on a list of keywords, recording keystrokes and passwords, taking screenshots every 3 minutes, and recording all of the websites visited along with all of the user’s other internet activity.
The makers of Green Dam claim that, while the software will be pre-installed, users can remove it.
A mainland Chinese computer expert discovered the truth after he installed and uninstalled the screening software. He said, “When we used its [Green Dam] uninstallation program to uninstall the software, about half of Green Dam’s 110 system files continued to reside in the computer. After restarting the computer, Green Dam’s screening program is running actively in the background. The only part of the software uninstalled is its user interface.”
My favorite detail: among the banned keywords are "Truthfulness" and "Compassion".
Culture warriors are going wild down under. Australian police raided the company that runs Abby Winters and other porn sites today. This Herald Sun story is asinine, lazy, biased journalism of the worst sort, but for now it's the only news item on the raids available online.
Police raided a Melbourne porn business that makes up to $10 million a year from allegedly illegal activities.
Detectives raided five premises as part of Operation Refuge, seizing computers containing footage of women allegedly performing explicit sex acts, which are illegal to produce in Victoria.
They are also investigating allegations that some of the models on the porn company's website are under age.
Yesterday's raids came after the Herald Sun provided police with a dossier of information about the allegedly illegal porn G Media, and companies associated with it, have churned out in Melbourne since about 2000.
The company specialises in filming female teenage students and backpackers in Melbourne and has explicit photographs and videos of almost 1200 young women on its website, many listed as being aged 18 and 19.
Police have seen a copy of a driver's licence of one G Media nude model, allegedly showing she was 17 when photographed. It is not known if Mr Hall knew of her age.
[G Media director Garion] Hall, 34, was released last night, but possibly faces charges of making objectionable films for gain, which carries a maximum jail term of two years.
Each of G Media's 30 employees could also be charged with the same offence.
Abby Winters is a well-known brand in porn, but this article doesn't even bother to identify the site. And despite this article's repeated use of the word "explicit", Abby Winters and other G Media sites feature much softer material than most internet pornsites. Masturbation videos and "lesbian" makeout scenes are about as hardcore as their content gets. Despite the one disgruntled ex-model quoted by the Herald Sun, the company has a reputation for respectful treatment of its models.
The Herald Sun ran a hatchet job on G Media in 2007. By contrast, the Village Voice celebrated Abby Winters last year for its rejection of mainstream porn industry aesthetics: Australian Girls with Pubic Hair Reclaim Amateur Porn, subtitled "Why AbbyWinters.com says yes to healthy bodies and no to boob jobs and six-inch heels".
The Australian police and the Herald Sun should be ashamed of themselves.
UPDATE: The wonderfully titled blog Somebody Think of the Children! ("discussing censorship and moral panic in Australia") has an article about the raid and a statement by Garion Hall.
Monday, June 15, 2009
In late April, a Virginia congressman proposed the Families for ED Advertising Decency Act, which would restrict TV ads for erectile dysfunction drugs to late-night timeslots. LA Times columnist Dan Neil writes:
I realize that all the world's men can be roughly divided into two camps: those who have suffered from ED and those who think it's hilarious. Even though I am a raging liberal atheist appalled by Americans' obsessive-phobic complex over sexual matters, I am also the father of two little girls. I would really prefer not to have to explain the erection-lasting-more-than-four-hours thing to them while we're watching NASCAR. So, yes, while it's a slightly ridiculous issue, I sort of admire Moran's willingness to be the stooge for it.
As a childless raging libertarian atheist, these ads don't bug me any more than ads for beer, tires, credit reports, fast food, etc, but I can see his point. Neil notes an odd feature of the bill: it would cover ads for Viagra, Cialis and Levitra (which actually work), but not ads for "male performance enhancement" pills like Enzyte and ExtenZe (which don't work). Why not?
For that, you can thank the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which severely limited the Food and Drug Administration's authority to crack down on unsubstantiated dietary claims. Supplements -- everything from nutraceutical energy drinks to the male-enhancement potions -- fall under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission.
The feds did go after Enzyte for fraudulent business practices, and company founder Steven Warshak was sentenced to 25 years in prison last year. Now civil liberties groups are challenging the Justice Department's use of warrantless wiretapping in investigating Enzyte.
According to [The Electronic Frontier Foundation], the act under which the emails were obtained “is only supposed to be used for obtaining emails already in storage with a provider.” Instead, the Justice Department ordered suspect Steven Warshak’s email provider to prospectively “preserve” copies of his future emails, which would otherwise have been deleted as they were downloaded.
The government then subpoenaed the provider for copies of the emails, thereby obtaining 27,740 of Warshak’s private communications without a warrant and without him being aware of the arrangment.
The amicus brief filed by EFF argues that “Warshak had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his email even when those messages were in the possession of his email provider NuVox, and that the Fourth Amendment required the government to obtain a probable cause warrant before seizing those emails. . . . The government plainly exceeded its statutory authority, and did so unreasonably, in violation of the statute’s plain language and the Justice Department’s own policies.”
Warrantless wiretapping was billed as a tool for fighting terrorism, now it's being used against penis pill con artists. The EFF is absolutely right. The Fourth Amendment was a really good amendment, and it's time to repeal its repeal.
From the pages of Cracked, which pulled the plug on its print magazine a couple years ago but lives on as a humor webzine: The 25 Most Disturbing Sex Toys. Followed by 18 More of the World's Most Disturbing Sex Toys. Followed on the author's personal site by 13 Disturbing Sex Toys (That Weren't Disturbing Enough), for a total of 56 disturbing sex toys.
