Fables of the reconstruction

Local Program: Philly Sex Toy Store

To whoever showed up here looking for kinky medical toys shop in Phila area, please go either here or here.

Letter from a Sex Worker

Here:

I think at this juncture, I should defend the men that came to see me. There was nothing wrong with them, and they were not perverts. Most of my clients were single, unhappily married or married to a person that couldn't understand their needs. One even had a wife with cancer. I know you're probably thinking that he's the worst of all, but sex is important. He needed the comfort and solace of flesh against flesh, and in today's society, the only way to get the flesh against flesh comfort is sex.

I guess my role as a sex worker was to reclaim the human contact that has been lost with our island centric way of living. When was the last time you truly just held a person that wasn't your lover with no thoughts of the sensuality of the situation? Touch used to be a very important thing for people. We want to be touched. We need to be touched. Truth be told, I did more pillow talk snuggling with my clients than anything else. Even the submissive clients, after their fill of their fetish, wanted to be cherished. The older men and the lonely men, which seemed to go hand in hand, raced through coitus and settled down for the rest of their time with my head on their chest to talk about their days. This is not the behaviour of deviants and perverts. This is the behaviour of a person reaching out for affection.

I think this explains why women hug so much, are so physically connected to each other. It's support. Men's culture denies them that. (They support each other in other ways, but not that way.) It's not a choice, it's imposed from outside then internalized.

(Via Susannah Breslin.)

NSFW Blogging: "He May Be Rich, But He Ain't Happy"

Good for a chuckle:

"My Dad says if you never give up, and work hard, all your dreams will come true."

"That's the gayest shit I ever heard."

It gets more offensive from there.  NSFW video after the jump.

(Via Tom Paine.)

Investment Strategies: Commodity Ingestion

I know a guy who used to be a commodities trader and quit to open his own coffee shop. One of the commodities he would trade was coffee beans.

Fun fact: The commodity exchange employs someone whose job is to sample coffee beans as they are delivered, roast them, make pots of coffee and taste it to make sure of the quality.

Having made his fuck-you money, the commodities broker decided to create the coffee shop of his dreams. Surprisingly, it's just like every other coffee shop. When you issue a series of bonds, at the end the principals are given a bound set of the deal documents. These deal books have the heft of unabridged dictionaries. The name of the series is printed in gold on the spines. His coffee shop has one whole wall with all of his deal books on shelves. Riveting reads. The wall of books is beautiful but business is lousy.

I knew a woman who said she had an intoxication fetish rather than admit she was addicted. She called the drug "the lover in my veins". She was trained as a chef but worked as a hooker. She made thousands of dollars a day but was always broke. She said, "I make tracks look good." She was wrong.

Her sexual fantasy was to be handcuffed to a bed and have a guy shoot her up and then fuck her in the ass. She also told me that the two most unreliable types of service workers are hookers and drug dealers. I always try to remember that in case it ever comes up.

Fun fact: I know nothing about injecting drugs and am unwilling to learn even when the incentive is fucking a beautiful woman in the ass.

Smuggling is easy. You don't have to be clever, you just have to look humble. For example, you can transport a bag containing $3.5 million in cash between any two points in Philadelphia as long as you ride public transportation and wear an old t-shirt and jeans. You won't look worth robbing. To be safe, throw some dirty underwear on top of the cash so if anyone looks in the bag they will think it's laundry. Put $7.50 and your transit card in your pocket just in case you do get robbed by someone super fucking poor or high. They'll take the money and let you keep your laundry and transit card if they don't kill you. They may also ask you for a cigarette. Say you don't smoke.

I know this guy who acquired $3.5 million in a tax-free transaction and decided to invest it.  His investment strategy was to corner the world cocaine market. He planned to do this by hiding it all in his nose.

Fun fact: There is no formal term for the thing that people do when they draw powder cocaine into their noses, usually using a short length of straw or rolled-up bill. 'Snort' is slang. 'Inhale' is wrong, because the drug is not drawn into the lungs. The closest I've found is "insufflate", but that's hard to remember after the first couple of lines.

The guy used to say, "I don't like cocaine, I just like the way it smells." That was a lie.

After he got sober, he would say, "Coke is great. In fact, there is only one thing in the whole world that's better than doing cocaine. Not doing cocaine." That was the truth.

Fun fact: People who do a lot of coke get horny and seek out sex. The men are usually unable to get an erection while high. This leads to all sorts of amusing predicaments.

The moral: Sex, drugs and coffee are not good investments.

Howto: Hiring an Escort Online

Sex worker blog Bound, Not Gagged links to a newbie guide to procuring paid sex online:

Interestingly, he notes that many sites have shut down since the scandal broke. I have been hearing through the grapevine that many women have taken their sites down until the dust settles. I tend to think they are wise in doing so, as there has been a veritable media feeding frenzy on working ladies.

I wonder what the projected implications are for the online advertisers?

Yeah. I bet the alternative weeklies do well as escorts switch to print advertising temporarily.

Unless You Want to Start Calling Lawyers Whores Instead

Mistress Matisse:

I was masochistic enough to read the threads about this on a few feminist blogs, and good lord, I had to close the window and go do some deep breathing. Such a maddening combination of prostitutes are dirty whores whose lives should be made as unpleasant as possible AND/OR prostitutes are deluded victims who need to be protected from themselves whether they like it or not.   The truly talented people are the ones who can hold both positions at the same time, switching deftly from one to the other as necessary. And don't bother trying to tell them there's another option, because look, they have statistics to back this up!

Oh, statistics? Oh well, all right then, those of us who actually are sex workers will sit down and shut up and let ya'll decide what we deserve, thank you ma'am. I do not even participate in such threads. I have learned through infuriating experience that this is not a discussion based in reason, it's based on ideology, and you will never argue an ideologue out of their position.

It perturbs me no end that media reports refer to her as "the prostitute".  Last night at a party someone called her "the prostitute" and I blurted, "She's not 'the prostitute', she's a woman who worked as a prostitute. No one calls the man involved 'the john', they call him Eliot Spitzer." Which wasn't totally fair, but we were drunk and anyway they got my point.

Goodbye, Gov. Spitzer

Talk about going down in flames:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

The fact that she crossed state lines to meet him makes it a federal crime. How long until he resigns? What's the order of succession for the NY governor's office?

"My Wife and My Girlfriend"

From Philadelphia craigslist rants & raves:

The.  Best.  Weekend.  Ever.

My Raves:

1. To Caribbean wives who not only encourage their husbands to have a girlfriend...they sleep with her as much as he does. There's nothing like walking in from grocery shopping Sunday morning to find the wife in the kitchen spanking the tied up girlfriend. Unless it's watching the tied up girlfriend say thank you with her tongue.

2. To half-white-half-cuban girlfriends with pale skin, pierced tongues, DD chests, a cuban girl's ass on a white girl's body, and a UPenn education. They do exist, you just have to find them on CollarMe or pick them up at a chinese restaurant. Or recognize them from their profile on CollarMe, at the chinese restaurant...and be there just as the previous boyfriend calls 2 hours late to say he's not coming.

3.  To living in a house with two beautiful women, both of whom cook, clean, and love kinky sex and BDSM.

4. To having the kind of CEO for a boss who knows about your wife and girlfriend, gives you props when they call you Daddy on the phone, and lets you hire the girlfriend as your secretary when your old one quits.

5.  To our two year anniversary living together.  Polyamory works, if you let it. 

Life is good.

Yes, it is, my friend. Yes, it is.

QOTD: Working Hard for the Money

Lux Alptraum at Boinkology:

Sex work is just a job.

There is nothing inherently sacred or debased about sex work. It’s not a fundamentally magical, inspiring experience; nor is it a fundamentally degrading, psychologically damaging experience.

Sometimes sex work is incredibly gratifying and wonderful: a chance to help someone access their sexual self, a chance to create a work of art, a chance to inspire. Sometimes, sex work sucks: customers disrespect you, bosses treat you like shit, you get stiffed on pay. Like any job, a sex worker’s experience in the field is highly shaped by the environment the sex work occurs in.

Yes, sex work can be a painful, damaging experience — but so can any job. And for some people, the conditions of sex work are far preferable to working in retail, or as a bartender, or as a factory worker. Because that’s what it comes down to — people choose to become sex workers because they need a job. And at the end of the day, sex work is just a job.

Genarlow Wilson Ordered Freed

After spending two years in jail for what is now a misdemeanor, former honors student Genarlow Wilson has been ordered freed by the Georgia Supreme Court:

The court ruled 4-3 that Genarlow Wilson's 10-year sentence was cruel and unusual punishment. ...

Wilson, 21, was convicted of aggravated child molestation following a 2003 New Year's Eve party at a Douglas County hotel room where he was videotaped having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. He was 17 at the time. ...

The 1995 law Wilson violated was changed in 2006 to make oral sex between teens close in age a misdemeanor, similar to the law regarding teen sexual intercourse. But the state Supreme Court later upheld a lower court's ruling which said that the 2006 law could not be applied retroactively.

Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote in the majority opinion that the changes in the law "represent a seismic shift in the legislature's view of the gravity of oral sex between two willing teenage participants."

Sears wrote that the severe punishment makes "no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment" and that Wilson's crime did not rise to the "level of adults who prey on children."

That's justice.

Just-So Stories

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's.)

Why do men prefer skinny blond women with large breasts? Two psychology professors think they know:

Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Which strikes me as completely ridiculous, since it seems perfectly obvious to me that body type preferences depend more on cultural factors than instincts. Unfortunately, the idea that "it's all genetics" has a wide following.

Evolutionary psychology is the theory that natural selection has shaped how we think in the same way it shaped how we walk.  While on its face this seems interesting and a potentially productive avenue of inquiry, in practice ev-psych has proved to be a conveniently "scientific" way to prove that existing social conditions are natural and unavoidable, and hence that attempts to change those conditions are useless or worse.  For example, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers was making an ev-psych argument when he claimed that one likely explanation for the lack of female faculty in Harvard's mathematical sciences faculty was that evolution caused men to be more likely than women to have very high mathematical ability. The supposed reason for this difference was that over the course of human evolution, men were hunters, and throwing spears or slinging rocks at prey required the ability to calculate trajectories, so men who were better at math bagged more game and so had more and healthier children.

I shit you not. That's the "scientific" reason behind Summer's explanation for why there are more men than women teaching math at Harvard. Sex discrimination, Summers said, couldn't be the answer - despite copious research showing such discrimination in the sciences exists - because if there was discrimination, then a non-discriminatory university could hire all the brilliant female math professors cheap and so drive places like Harvard out of business. (Did I mention that in addition to being an adherent of ev-psych, Summers is an economist?)

Unsurprisingly, evolutionary psych is a goldmine for people who are seeking to justify the sexual status quo. The two professors with the theory about why men like big tits also say this:

While feminists and social scientists tend to explain sexual harassment in terms of "patriarchy" and other ideologies, [psychologist Kingsley R.] Browne locates the ultimate cause ... in sex differences in mating strategies.  ... Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men's repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.

Thus, their implied conclusion goes, it's unfair for the legal system to protect women from sex discrimination. How convenient.

One more example of how rigorous a science ev-psych is: One of the field's leading proponents is Dr. Steven Pinker, a prolific author who is well known for such books as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. In How the Mind Works, Pinker says this:

Women do not seek the sight of a naked male stranger or enactments of anonymous sex, and there is virtually no female market for pornography.  ... Women can sometimes be aroused when they have agreed to watch portrayals of intercourse, but they do not seek them out. ... The closest mass-market equivalents to pornography for women are the romance novel and the bodice-ripper, in which the sex in described in the context of emotions and relationships rather than as a succession of bumping bodies.

The ridiculousness of these assertions should be self-evident. Whether women look at porn (and even more importantly, whether they reveal that they do to a researcher) is heavily dependent on societal attitudes towards women who like sex. Pinker claims that women don't look at porn, and that the reason is that evolutionarily, women have to be very choosy about who they mate with while men do not. (Sort of undercuts the "men like big tits because they have to be careful they don't mate with an old woman" argument, doesn't it?) Thus, Pinker concludes, women can't become aroused by visual stimulus or it will decrease their ability to not choose an inferior partner.  This "just-so story", where the theory is molded to fit the most palatable explanation of the facts, gets blown out of the water when we get new data. In Pinker's case, writing in 1997, we have 10 more years' worth of examples of women seeking out actual male strangers and anonymous sex, in addition to representations of them, on the web. Either human genetics underwent a radical transformation in the past 10 years, or ev-psych is a bogus theory with no predictive power at all. 

Oh, and did I mention, Steven Pinker teaches at Harvard and was one of the staunchest supporters of Lawrence Summers?

Your Uterus is State Property

(Cross-posted at Gloria Brame's.)

Religious conservatives seek policies to make the maximum number of women into mothers dependent on a man for their and their child's life.

They're quite ruthless in pursuit of this goal. On one hand, they work to make it harder for women to gain access to sexual health information and contraception, because they know that will lead to the maximum number of pregnant women. They make it difficult to get an abortion. They cut funding for any sort of assistance that would enable the woman to live independently from a man. The push marriage policies that punish women who do not get married. They don't care if the women die in childbirth or by abusive men or the children die after they're born, so long as there are other women who can become mothers to take their place. It's God's will, after all.

As part of this effort to control women and make them nothing more than child-bearing servants, a particularly nasty policy has come along: Punishing women who are drug addicts and alcoholics if they fail to get sober when they are pregnant.

Bean from Lawyers, Guns & Money:

Take, by way of example, the case of Theresa Hernandez. Ms. Hernandez, who lives in Oklahoma, is being tried for first degree murder for suffering a stillbirth at 32 weeks of pregnancy. The prosecution is based on a "highly questionable" (according to NAPW) claim that Ms. Hernandez's use of illicit drugs during her pregnancy caused the pregnancy loss.

My "common sense" tells me that prosecutions like these -- which have taken place in the majority of states and have affected the lives of almost 1000 women -- are bad for public health. As Dr. Dana Stone, the Oklahoma head of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists explains it in a National Advocates for Pregnant Women press release out today:

"Stillbirths and miscarriages are unfortunately a risk of pregnancy for all women. Prosecuting women for pregnancy loss based on what they allegedly did or didn't do will only deter women from seeking prenatal care and drug treatment, and that's ultimately bad for babies."

over 150 other medical professionals back her up and oppose criminal justice responses to drug addiction during pregnancy.

In addition to the doctors' concern that prosecutions drive the women most in need of prenatal care away from it, is the simple fact that any prosecutor interested in protecting fetal health would try to keep a woman as far away as possible from a jail cell. Not only are drugs as widely available in prisons as outside (if not more widely so), but jails are also notorious for providing appallingly bad prenatal and delivery care, including the shackling of women during labor and delivery.

The point of policies like Oklahoma's is to instill the feeling of being controlled into women. Once they become fertile, and especially once they become pregnant, they are to learn that they no longer are autonomous persons - they are instruments to be used for a greater good.

More from National Advocates for Pregnant Women:

By combining drug war propaganda with claims of fetal rights, new and significant violations of civil liberties and human rights are occurring. In the last twenty years, hundreds of pregnant women and new mothers have been arrested, based on the argument that a pregnant woman’s drug use is a form of abuse or neglect. In 1997, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that a pregnant woman who used cocaine and who gave birth to a healthy baby could be convicted of child abuse. More recently, a pregnant woman who used cocaine and suffered a stillbirth that was caused by an infection-- has been convicted of homicide by child abuse in South Carolina. More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test. Like other applications of the war on drugs, the punishment of pregnant women targets vulnerable, low-income women of color—those with the least access to health care or legal defense.

These cases represent a significant expansion of the war on drugs. Pregnant women who are addicts can go to jail, despite Supreme Court rulings that treat addiction as a disease --and punishment for it as a violation of the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, despite the fact that people who are treated for drug related health problems are supposed to have extra protections under the federal drug treatment confidentiality statute, S.C., by reinterpreting drug use as child abuse, creates a devastating exception to the statute’s privacy protections.

Good people who are appalled by this and the theoconservatives who push it have no common ground. When we talk about what's best for mothers and children in a utilitarian, empirical way, as bean does, it falls on deaf ears. When we talk about civil liberties and human rights, it falls on deaf ears. To our opponents, our enemies, all of those things are secondary to what is good and right, and what is good and right is dictated by their bibles, not by science or law. There is nothing to discuss with these people.  All we can do is defeat them politically.

American Sex Stats

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

These results surprised me:

The average American man has sex with seven women during his lifetime, compared with four male sexual partners for the average woman, according to a new federal survey that used high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use.

The average man has only seven female sex partners in his life? And the average woman has sex with four men during her whole life?

I know a lot of above-average people.

Men are far more apt to play the field when it comes to sex, the survey found; 29 percent of them reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while 9 percent of women reported having sex with 15 or more men. ...

Fifteen? Fifteen is the "a lot" number? Fifteen? I crossed that in college. And didn't feel that unusual.

Though the survey results were presented by the CDC without subjective comment, they will likely provide ammunition to various parties in the national debate over sex education, cohabitation and access to birth control. The survey found about 11 percent of never-married adults had remained chaste.

Yeah! Let's get that "chaste" number down to zero! Woo hoo! Wait, that's not what the people in government have in mind?

Among the other findings:

About 96 percent of U.S. adults have had sex.

Sixteen percent of adults first had sex before age 15, while 15 percent abstained until at least age 21.

The proportion of adults who first had sex before age 15 was highest for non-Hispanic blacks (28 percent) compared with 14 percent for both Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites.

Six percent of blacks abstained from sex until age 21 or older, fewer than Mexican Americans (17 percent) or non-Hispanic whites (15 percent).

Twenty-five percent of women and 17 percent of men reported having one partner in their lifetime.

Despite the "high-tech methods" mentioned in the story, I think a whole lot of lying was going on here.

People Who Need to Work Out Power Issues: The Surrendered Wife

(Cross posted from Gloria Brame's.)

Jessica Valenti at feministing:

Remember that book, The Surrendered Wife, that came out a while ago and got all sorts of press because it basically told women that the key to happiness in marriage was to shut-the-fuck-up?

Well it seems that some folks are taking it wa-ay seriously.  This Australian version of 60 minutes covers women "who really do love, honour and obey. Especially obey."  Yeah.  Watch the video--it is fucking disturbing.

The short version: Women in "surrendered" marriages are just SO much happier because they don't have pesky things like opinions. Much better that only one person in a marriage have decision-making abilities.

The video features women who essentially have husbands that run their lives: one husband picks out his wife's outfits and hairstyles, another insists that she shave his face and put his toothpaste on his toothbrush, there is even one woman who is blindfolded when she and her husband drive so she's not tempted to offer help with directions.

Poor men. No, I really mean it. Poor men. A load of us can't get through life without needing a book like this to try to make our spouses submit to us, because those men can't take control in the way that they want to. It's a perfect example of what I call crotch-level politics: Rightwing, culturally conservative, religious Republican politics is entirely the result of sexual confusion and frustration. The men for whom The Surrendered Wife was written for, and their wives who will buy it to try to please them, are pitiful people. These men can't find it within themselves to treat their partners or themselves with compassion, humanity, or understanding. They can't accept themselves for who they are sexually, so they replace that acceptance with hierarchy and a rigid, gender-based paradigm of domination and submission. By doing so, they diminish themselves and their partners, and cut off or dull their experience of life as something to be enjoyed. Poor men.

Simulacrum

The Unporny Valley, from The Reverse Cowgirl:

QOTD

Bitch, Ph.D.:

The worst thing about women flashing their tits or playing the minx on the internets is that in doing so, they're demonstrating that they trust other people. To realize that it's all in good fun, that they can be sexual beings and still fully human, that enjoying the power of physical attraction doesn't mean losing all one's other complicated attributes.

And really, that kind of basic trust that other people are decent human beings is a good thing. If there's anything that needs to be analyzed, condemned, or regretted, it's that there are so many people out there who betray it.

Porn Industry Blames the Internet for its Ills

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

There was a NYTimes.com article on the porn business from earlier in the month that I have been meaning to talk about:

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.

After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.

I think the analysis here is fundamentally wrong. Read this passage closely:

It is an unusual twist on the Internet-transforms-industry story. The Internet quickly presented a challenge to some businesses, like recorded music and newspapers. But initially, the digital age led to a kind of mainstreaming of pornography by providing easy and anonymous access online.

The spread of high-speed Internet access promised even further growth. Instead, faster connections have simply allowed people to download free movies more quickly, and allowed amateur moviemakers to upload their creations easily.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the market continues to be flooded with new video releases, both online and on disc. Mr. Fishbein said that this year he expected to see more than 1,000 X-rated DVDs a month produced for retail sale, a figure driven in part by the new spate of low-budget filmmakers.

Last things first: It's not counterintuitive at all that even with falling sales, the industry would still be cranking out discs. In fact, it's exactly what you would expect, since each individual movie is still profitable; they're trying to make up lost margin with volume.

Second, skip back up to the first quoted section: "unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones". Wait a minute. Doesn't Myspace exist? Aren't people checking out bands that have no record deal exactly because the internet disintermediates? Aren't people buying or swiping single songs from their favorite signed bands? Yes, yes and yes. So what "challenge" does the internet pose to the music industry? It challenges shitty music, that's what.

Music and porn are not commodities. The mere fact that the internet exists to give people a cheaper means of distribution does not transform them into commodities. That is to say, quality matters. The porn companies acknowledge as much:

Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings.

But production values are not enough. Think again of music. What's the problem? That the recording quality - the production values - of most music isn't good enough? No, it's that the music sucks. Don't confuse production values with quality. Mainstream porn's problem is not the internet; it's that mainstream porn sucks. The internet allows people to choose indie and amateur producers because those offerings are better from the customer's standpoint.

Mainstream porn came up with a creative formula a long time ago: big-fake-titted blonds with stupid high heels and IQs lower than their waist sizes getting pumped by cretins with monster cocks. You know, lowest common denominator. The industry then went and innovated in all the technical areas: multiple camera angles on the DVD, web offerings with streaming video and seamless online payment. It may be an American thing, but it seems like it's easier to innovate on the technical side because tech is simple to understand. What the mainstream porn industry really needs is innovation on the creative side, which is sorely lacking.

Ich Bin Ein Perv

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

(Berlin Fetish Ball, via The Reverse Cowgirl.)

The Greenwich Village Project

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

When I saw the headline, "Pentagon Confirms It Sought to Build a 'Gay Bomb'", the first thing I thought of was a neutron-bomb-like device that only killed gay and lesbian people. The truth is just as ridiculous and absurd:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. ...

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents. "The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soldiers would become gay," explained Hammond.

The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994.

"The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform," said a DOD spokesperson, who indicated that the "gay bomb" idea was quickly dismissed.

However, Hammond said the government records he obtained suggest the military gave the plan much stronger consideration than it has acknowledged. "The truth of the matter is it would have never come to my attention if it was dismissed at the time it was proposed," he said. "In fact, the Pentagon has used it repeatedly and subsequently in an effort to promote non-lethal weapons, and in fact they submitted it to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider."

Clearly, this tells us much more about the repressed fantasies of Air Force personnel than it does anything else.

(Via Pinkhaired Girl).

BDSM and Adult Personals Sites

(Crossposted from Gloria Brame's site.) 

Let's just say you're the kinky type, you're on the web and you're looking for ... someone. A play partner, a date, a short-term thing, or a long-term thing, it might be anything so long as the person has BDSM interests that complement yours. Where do you look on the web?

There are seemingly a lot of choices. The adult online dating market is dominated by Adultfriendfinder.com (or "AFF"), which claims about 24 million members.  Although it bills itself as "the world's largest adult and swingers sex personals site", its profile builder gives you the options Bondage & Discipline, Sadism & Masochism, Cross-Dressing and Miscellaneous Fetishes, so it actually delivers more kink per click than some BDSM-specific sites. Those other sites include Alt.com ("A supportive alternative lifestyle community" - how friendly) and Bondage.com ("the world's largest BDSM community and the most exciting bondage and fetish website" - unsupported claims, but you admire the enthusiasm). Other adult personals sites that have BDSM components are Passion.com ("sexy personals for passionate singles" - meaning, I want to get laid but not be so blunt about it) and Outpersonals.com ("worldwide gay personals" and "get laid today" - gay men go for the blunt).  Taken together, these sites have about 2.3 million unique US visitors a day, with AFF comprising 1.75 million of that.

But in fact these are all the same choice. AFF, Alt, Bondage, Passion and Outpersonals are all owned by one company, Various, Inc. The Various family of sites dwarfs the competition in the adult personals market segment, like Sexsearch.com, IWantU.com ("where you are wanted" - catchy), Collarme.com ("the largest BDSM community on the planet" - uh oh, they'll have to arm-wrestle Bondage.com for the title), and Swinglifestyle ("start your sexual revolution!"), which along with a couple other sites thrown in there, don't even add up to 500,000 US visitors daily.

So how did we end up with what is effectively a monopoly in online adult personals? It really wasn't intentional. From an interview with Andrew Conru, the founder of Friendfinder:

Shortly after we went online with FriendFinder [in 1996], people started posting explicit photos that pushed the envelope of a friendly dating site. Our first response was simply to delete profiles with explicit photos in them. Later on, instead of fighting the persistent trend, we decided to go with it, and we created a new site called AdultFriendFinder. It started out as a kind of release valve for the more erotic adventurers. But it was so well received, it just grew like kudzu from there.

Today Adultfriendfinder knocks down about $100 $120 million in revenue annually, one fourth sixty percent [see David Evans in comments] of the total revenue for the Various group. I think AFF's success is attributable to what's called "first mover advantage", a situation in which the characteristics of a market segment are such that the first major entrant into that segment can acquire resources that makes it difficult for competitors to emerge. The main criterion an adult personals customer is looking for is a large number of ads to search, but there are a limited number of people running such ads in any given geographical area (outside of say, New York City), so the adult personals site that gets biggest fastest wins. AFF won that race.

There's another reason that a competitor to Various/AFF doesn't spring up, that is illustrated by this story about how AFF founder Conru can't find anyone to buy AFF:

Most investors can't do anything about Various other than watch it expand. Many firms have "sin clauses'' with their financial backers that outline the types of companies they are strongly discouraged from backing, such as adult entertainment outfits. An IPO is an option, but stocks of publicly held adult content companies get discounted heavily because so many investors, like mutual fund managers, can't buy the shares. There also aren't many potential purchasers and Conru says his company is worth more than they can afford. There's no easy way to "exit'' Various.

"Exit", in the investment sense, means "cash out", make a profit. Potential investors in competitors to AFF can see the difficulty that Conru is having in exiting, and investors are always interested in the path to profit. Investments that can't be turned over don't interest them. So despite Various/AFF being profitable, the investors who might fund a competitor stay on the sidelines.

Still, there are signs that Conru is seeking an IPO. Data point number 1: Acquiring smaller sites, like the Bondage.com acquisition earlier this year. Firms seeking to go public will sometimes "roll up" competitors first, to create a bigger splash. Data point number 2: Late last year, Various went out to hire a CFO. Data point number 3: A really good writeup at CNN Money with a mention of the fact that AFF appeared as a gag in a recent movie starring Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore. It's portrayed as a joke that AFF had nothing to do with, but I read both the story and the movie placement as conscious attempts by Conru to break down resistance to investors buying into his IPO.

All of us kinky types should be rooting for Conru to have his IPO. The reason is that AFF going public means a huge pool of capital will become available for competitors - which will mean actual multiplicity of choice when you're out there on the web ... looking.

QOTD

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I often talk about the flagrant inconsistency of American "pro-life" groups. But, in fairness, they are perfectly consistent about one thing: if they have a choice between reducing abortion rates and regulating female sexuality, they'll take the latter, as reliably as Carrot Top is unfunny.

Britain's Proposed Ban on Certain SM-Themed Porn

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

Last September, Gloria wrote about a proposal for a new law in Britain:

Viewing vile images of rape and sexual torture will become a criminal offence for the first time, it was confirmed today.

Possession of so-called "violent and extreme pornography" will carry up to three years imprisonment.....

It would cover, for example, violence that is - or appears to be - life-threatening or is likely to result in "serious and disabling injury"....

One so-called BDSM group - representing people who engage in bondage, domination and sado-masochism - wrote: "The theory that people should be punished for viewing an image that simply involves the idea of sexuality with violence... shows the proposal being made is to introduce a form of 'thought crime'."

The new offence will apply to England and Wales. Plans are being made to extend it to Northern Ireland and the Scottish Executive will announce its plans separately....

Like Gloria, I found this proposal extremely disturbing. I wanted to find out where things stood today, and found this update from The Spanner Trust, a London-based BDSM advocacy organization:

In November 2006 the UK Government used the Queen's Speech to announce their intention to create a new criminal offence making the possession of "violent and extreme pornography" punishable by up to three years' imprisonment. The Bill has not yet been brought before Parliament, but the Spanner Trust is concerned that the current proposals do not distinguish between real or staged acts, or consensual versus non consensual activities. Images of consensual SM scenes may well be caught up in the ban.

On the 5th March 2007 a member of the Home Office said that the Bill will be introduced "in the Spring" but also that "nothing was imminent". As soon as the Bill is introduced we would like as many people as possible to contact their MP, by letter, email or telephone but preferably by going along to see him or her personally in their surgery in their constituency, and urge them to object to the new proposed law. For more information on the campaign against the proposals please visit www.backlash-uk.org.uk

As misguided laws often do, this one sprang from a criminal case that excited public outrage:

[Graham] Coutts, 36, of Waterloo Street, Hove, East Sussex, allegedly strangled 31-year-old [Jane] Longhurst, a special needs teacher originally from Reading, Berkshire, with a pair of tights in March 2003.

Her death took place just hours after Coutts viewed internet porn sites such as "necrobabes" and "hangingbitches", his trial heard.

Chief executive of the new Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Jim Gamble, said of today's measures: "Legislation is only truly effective if it develops step by step with technological advances.

"Today starts to answer that need in respect of how the internet can be used to supplement this area of criminality."

Mr. Coutts had his conviction reversed on appeal, and is awaiting retrial, because the original trial did not permit the jury to choose manslaughter, a lesser offense, instead of just murder. Based on my reading of the articles, though, it seems Mr. Coutts did have a necrophilia fetish, and in fact visited Jane Longhurst's corpse several times over a period of weeks before dumping it. All of which has little, if anything, to do with whether S&M porn should be legal, of course.

The British Home Office published a paper (.pdf) that laid out in detail what the ban would cover:

15. In summary, material would need to be:

(a) pornographic
(b) explicit
(c) real or appears to be real act (these would be objective tests for the jury)

16. It would cover:

(i) serious violence*
(ii) intercourse or oral sex with an animal
(iii) sexual interference with a human corpse
*by serious violence we mean appears to be life threatening or likely to result in serious, disabling injury.

The Home Office paper also laid out the objections:

Opposition to the proposals was expressed by a number of sexual freedom organisations (such as the Spanner Trust, Unfettered, the Sexual Freedom Coalition, SM Pride and others), several BDSM-related businesses, anticensorship organisations (e.g. Feminists Against Censorship, Ofwatch, Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties), and some IT-related organisations.

Among the arguments those groups made:

A majority of those responding in detail to the Consultation as individuals opposed the proposals. Many of these referred to BDSM practices, expressing concern that a large number of law-abiding citizens who consensually engaged in such practices in private or in like-minded groups, and who circulated the associated images, would be criminalised by the proposed laws. ...

Most BDSM-affiliated respondents considered that these offences would not only proscribe certain images but would effectively criminalise their sexual lives:

“The theory that people should be punished for viewing an image that simply involves the idea of sexuality with violence (rather than a real instantiation of it) shows the proposal being made is to introduce a form of ‘thought crime’.”

“Criminalising the possession of material relating to a person’s own sexuality amounts to criminalising that sexuality itself by the back door.”

In other words, the kinksters argued, depictions of real violence could be banned, but depictions of fantasy violence was an unwarranted attack on BDSM as a whole.

Arguments for the proposed legislation should sound familiar, since they've been made in the U.S., too:

This imagery provides the cultural backdrop against which the abuse of women is mainstream and endemic. Legislation to strengthen the possibility of prosecution in this area would send out a strong signal of disapproval to the individuals who believe that easy accessibility equals an acceptance of their behaviour.

And:

The director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University reiterated this, pointing to its own research, training and consultancy for almost 20 years, and asserted that:

“Adult pornography in its extreme forms should be considered in the same way that child pornography is – a record of sexual abuse…Our interest has never been in ‘proving’ direct causal links between pornography and specific acts of sexual violence, although there certainly is strong evidence with respect to individual cases, but to suggest that the existence and now virtual ubiquity of pornography creates a cultural context which devalues women’s humanity and dignity…Government is right to argue that it does not need proof that images of torture and degradation are cor