Meet Shine Louise Houston, an award-winning director and a vital part of an incredible revolution happening in pornography right now. This revolution, centered in San Francisco’s indie porn scene, is focused on creating more inclusive offerings for consumers and opportunities for performers. And you can be a part of it. You’ve been needing something on your IMDB to feel proud of.
After hearing that the city was filled with wild sex parties, Vegas cops sniffed around, but had no luck infiltrating the group. By 2013, though, when they heard about the parties again, things were different. The swingers community no longer relied on word-of-mouth and personal references. It was online — and within reach.
In the modern rendering of the alpha male, the promise of access to territories, resources and protection for mating females is largely nonexistent — as is any notion of parental care investment. In this sense, the social aspects of “alpha” become conflated with those of dominance among species where females require only one thing from the male: his DNA.
Today, Google announced infinite gender options for users on the social network Google Plus, a move that tops Facebook’s February announcement of 56 additional options on its gender menu. After selecting the Custom option for gender, users will be prompted to enter their preferred gender into a freeform field. A user can write anything they like there, including emojis.
The California Highway Patrol has a fun little incentive to arrest you: the desire to see you naked. A CHP officer told investigators that officers have been stealing and sharing explicit photos of female suspects for years as part of a “game.” Presumably, the game involves finding the raciest possible images on a suspect’s phone and sharing them with other officers and non-CHP individuals for commentary and approval.
A group of hacker activists are developing a suite of tools to strike back at the culture of silence and isolation that surrounds harassment, coercion and assault. There are currently seven such tools, each of which focuses primarily on dating sites and social networks (which, face it, most of us use as dating sites) — depending on the website or app that they are designed for, the tools have different capabilities.
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. to uphold that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can exempt a family-owned, or closely-held company, from a federal regulation requiring that employers provide coverage to their female employees for certain types of birth control deemed, in the religious opinion of employers, capable of facilitating an abortion.
Yesterday the bipartisan activist group Evolve released a 30-second spot on YouTube reminding gun-owners to lock up their weapons. The video, which has over 1.3 million views on its second day, culminates in a bit of sword play between two little boys who have gotten their hands on mom’s vibrators. The ad ends with the reminder: “If they find it, they’ll play with it, so always lock up your guns.”
It’s been nearly twenty years since the affair happened, sixteen since it exploded in 1998. For too long Monica Lewinsky has been tied to the Clintons and the blow job. It’s time we recognized that she deserves a life as something other than a political football — perhaps even as a human who is much more than an ill-advised affair she had while she was in her early twenties.
This fall, Finland’s postal service Itella Posti Oy will showcase gay bondage in a series of stamps celebrating the “confident and proud homoeroticism” of the pornographic artist Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. Despite living in a place celebrated as the land of the free and the home of the brave, I’ve never seen anything like it — and in association with the postal service? It’s enough to make Anthony Comstock roll in his grave.
