Austrian developer Pia Poppenreiter was out on the town in Berlin on a cool autumn night when she saw a sex worker on a street corner and had the sort of “a-ha!” moment any founder will talk your ear off about. “It’s crazy that there’s an app for everything, but not for that,” she thought, referring to street-walking. “Why do they have to stand there in the winter all day?” The answer is Peppr, the Tinder for sex work.
Over the past few weeks, Chase bank has been mailing members of the adult industry informing them that the bank is closing their accounts. While we’ve seen this kind of attitude from financial institutions before, we’ve never seen anything of this magnitude. Banks and payment processors have become incredibly risk-averse in the wake of efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to combat fraud, but some suspect this exaggerated response is a ploy from financial institutions to garner bipartisan support and get the government off its back.
In 2005, a protein was discovered on the surface of sperm thought to enable binding to the egg. Researchers named the protein Izumo, after the Izumo-taisha in Japan, a shrine dedicated to Okuninushi, the Shinto deity of marriage. The search was on to discover a counterpart protein on eggs. Last week, we found it — and it had been under our noses all along.
What were people up to during Easter? Looks like as far as Craigslist is concerned, the fertility cult won over the egg hunt. In San Francisco’s financial district, a couple was looking for a woman to watch a pegging. Meanwhile, down in San Jose, a young man was looking for a more conventional type of show. And someone in the Potrero Hill neighborhood left her thong behind. Must have been one hell of a scavenger hunt.
The May issue of Good Housekeeping has shocked the internet with an article about vibrators. But this isn’t the first time vibrators have appeared in a magazine targeting the homemaker. In the late 19th century, after technology advanced enough to enable vibrators to be marketed directly to consumers, they started popping up in ads alongside sewing machines in many magazines, including Women’s Home Companion, National Home Journal and Hearst’s.
Most of what 29-year-old Jonah Falcon had done up to the moment he shocked America in 1999 had been hard-earned. But the one thing that got him notoriety was something nature arbitrarily bestowed on him: an enormous penis. Despite getting a number of parts before the media got wind of his endowment, Falcon wouldn’t come to the public’s attention until he appeared in HBO’s Private Dicks: Men Exposed, a documentary about the human penis.
Nature defies our wildest imaginings, pushing the boundaries of what we know as possible. In some crocodilians, the female sex apparatus is so large, it is easy to confuse it with that of the male. In squid, the sperm travel into the female in a capsule that perforates the female body to deliver the sperm cells. Nature is a weird place and today, it got a little weirder. Meet the Neotrogla, a class of insects among which the female enters the male.
Pornography is a form of entertainment created for the purpose of arousal, but in many cases, in can serve also as a way of looking at our evolving social, economic, and gender attitudes. In a sense, pornography is an artifact as tangible as a culture’s earthenware, and never has this been more clear to me than in a recent clip released by Girl Bullies, featuring the abuse of subjugation of a male performer portraying a Google employee.
When the trade magazine Adult Video News, better known as AVN, was founded in 1983, there was very little in the way of attention from the mainstream media when it came to issues facing the adult industry. That’s no longer the case — we now live in a world where sex is often reported in high-profile, mainstream places. What does that mean for AVN and properties like it?
Porn consumption has received a fair amount of attention in the media, but unfortunately, so far the conversation has only managed to divide people. One camp sees porn as a social blight and the other sees it as a legitimate form of entertainment that’s being unnecessarily attacked by a hysterical minority. In conversations like these, it’s very easy to miss the nuance, which we need.
