Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ hoped to use the still frames they captured from millions of Yahoo chat users to develop facial recognition software in order to monitor targets and ferret out new ones. But what they discovered during Optic Nerve shocked them: “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”
“When we’re too scared to defend sex work, because it’s not our battle, because there’s a legal gray area we’re scared to touch,” writes sex educator Sabrina Morgan, “we’re saying it’s okay to let the sex workers — our front-line sex educators — take the bullets as long as we get to play the game. And we get to play the game only as long as we play it safe. Playing it safe means being afraid to show what it is that we’re teaching.”
Calling something the “fill-in-the-blank” of porn has become so commonplace that it’s difficult to read press releases without injuring the optic nerve from eye-rolling. That said, recent changes in the distribution of adult content stand to make things much better for the user — and the studios — and for that, sometimes you do need to reference the platforms and services outside of the adult industry that revolutionized the way we do things.
On Valentine’s Day, the Duke Chronicle ran a piece about a Duke freshman who spent her breaks in Los Angeles shooting porn. The student, who was given the pseudonym “Lauren”, told reporter Katie Fernelius that the idea to go into the adult industry first came to her while grappling with the question of paying for her education. This is the story of what happened next.
James David Manning is the pastor of the ATLAH World Church in Harlem, New York. Last week, his website posted a video through which the pastor educated his community about the dangers of the “white homo,” a demon Manning believes is coming to take black men. This is fear-mongering at a level you’ve never seen it before.
Like a weird self-fulfilling prophesy, Cosmo rule-34’d the bakery and the nation followed. The comments on its most recent article about spicing up sex with a doughnut suggest that a number of women and men out there are very interested — and some have already tried it. I believe it. But then, the last time I was surprised by food and sex was in 2011, when “what is the best sandwich to have sex with” became one of my site’s top queries.
Conservative Christians around the nation have been clamoring for increased religious protections to match the advances made by by gay rights groups. The latest attempt fell flat yesterday in Arizona when Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed Senate Bill 1062, which would have effectively sanctioned discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people by businesses in the state.
Understandably, the notion of bringing the high-end and design-conscious Jimmyjane brand under the same roof as Pipedream’s gaudy and affordable wares seems disastrous, but before you tweet “there goes the neighborhood,” consider the range of consumer needs that Diamond has effectively positioned itself to satisfy. Further, in investing in these companies, Brookstone is sending a message about the growing importance and acceptance of the sex toy industry.
I’m fond of joking that we haven’t seen Love in L.A. since that incident on the back forty in ’39. As it turns out, it may not really be a joke. According to Facebook, Los Angeles is the second best city in the nation for singles. And by “best,” they mean that if you want to be single and stay that way, the City of Angels is the place to be. Raise your hand, Angelenos, if you needed an official report to tell you that.
“Revenge porn” websites typically run sexually explicit or suggestive photos of individuals along with identifying information. They got the name “revenge porn” because, initially, a lot of the photos and films that got online were posted as an act of revenge by a jilted lover. But “revenge” is not the right descriptor, considering the tactics used by many operators of such sites. A much more apt term, perhaps, is “involuntary porn.” Now meet its barons.
