If you’re a longtime reader, you know that it’s the time of year where I fly to Austin, Texas and attend SXSW (interactive), the tech/internet convention that’s referred to as “spring break for geeks”. Basically, this post is both a warning flare and a starting gun: this blog is about to be somewhat hijacked for the next five days by my trip. My goal is to meet the NSFW quotient I found in Austin last year and share it with you. And a lotta geeky stuff, too. Here are the basics:

* The panel: How To Not Be A Douchebag At SXSW Friday March 12, 5PM
* I’m judging a photo contest with some famous people, and my inclusion secures outrageousness: it’s Alltop and Strutta’s Over The Top photo contest — we’re looking for the most over the top photos at SXSW. GIVE IT UP! Winners get things like an iPad and more.
* I will be tweeting @violetblue more than usual this year, and I keep telling people to unfollow me to avoid annoyance, nudity, general NSFW (Not Safe For Work) activity and crankiness. But you can watch me unravel there if it pleases you.
* Twitter will be a vector for liveblogging photos. In fact, I’ll also be taking video live and the link will get instantly passed to my Twitter account.
* I will also be posting photos to my Flickr account, but I’ll put any dirty stuff here in a post. I don’t trust Flickr.
* I was asked to design a Violet Blue chocolate bar by Chocri to give away free. Naturally, I made it dark chocolate, almonds, coffee and an aphrodisiac ingredient. As soon as I have a link to share, I’ll post it. They have a really cool DIY interface for making your own chocolate bars, check it out.
* I’ll also be blogging on Laughing Squid as usual (I now officially work there as Assistant Editor). Yay!

I get to present again this year, and I’m excited. This time I’m not talking about sex for a change — well, I will a little bit, as in how to flirt and pick up (and hopefully hookup) without being a jerk about it. How To Not Be A Douchebag At SXSW is the brainchild of my dear friend Ed Hunsinger, with co-speaker John Adams. This year we have @dotBen in tow, with sexy Natalia Envy in our hotel room.

Are you wondering what the stickers are I’m holding in that photo? They are how you can show people how you roll. Are you work safe? No. No, you are not. I just got 1000 of these stickers made; does anyone remember when pranksters plastered buses and bus ad kiosks across San Francisco featuring pictures of me with the slogan “Violet Blue puts the SF in NSFW” in honor of my Chron writing gig? I though it was time for everyone who wants to be NSFW, or declare any object NSFW to be able to do so, freely. I’ll be giving these stickers away at SXSW this week as I cruise around looking for trouble. When I get back, I’ll post an address where anyone who wants some of these can send me a self addressed stamped envelope, and I’ll send them out free.

Image by DAVIDOVSKY.

Points of interest in sex include porn as a possible one-a-day vitamin, a sperm donor’s nightmare come true, bad news for gay Catholics, a true Handmaid’s Tale, ABC concluding that porn censorship is leading to “labiaplasty madness” and much more.

* An unflinching fan of Ms. Naughty, I was excited to read her post reflecting on her experiences and observations ten years as female-focused, online female pornographer. It’s eye-opening and is a story I’d like to see profiled in women’s magazines — if they had the courage of Ms Naughty, that is.

* Porn: it does a body good. The Scientist seems a straight-laced magazine, so it’s with excited surprise that I enjoyed their findings in Porn: Good For Us? (Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down. And there you have it. (the-scientist.com)

* Two posts on Laughing Squid you won’t want to miss: a full-on sperm roundup is in National Geographic’s Great Sperm Race and I finally covered someone’s coverage of Zentai, the Spandex encasement fetish. (laughingsquid.com, thanks Dweller)

* Why, God, why? That’s what a lot of same-sex couples were crying last week when the church recently caught in a long-running, high-tier gay sex scandal in the Vatican was also the same church running charities that decided to punish pretty much everyone for gayness. read To Avoid Funding Gay Marrieds, Catholic Charities Denies Benefits to All Spouses and cry quietly with me at home about the price of faith. (washingtoncitypaper.com, thanks MW)

* People close to me got excited that I was on All Things Considered last weekend, but the fun NPR story is about New York’s new official condom design: the power-on symbol for computing! New York’s New Sex Symbol is a humorous read and a delight to listen to as people talk about the symbol in and out of context. You will LOL. (examiner.com, npr.org)

* Oh. My. Fucking… Ow. The video is insanely difficult to watch, but big BIG kudos to ABC TV Australia for their segment on why they think Australian porn censorship has created abnormal perceptions of what women’s ladyparts should look like, leading to what they are calling “labiplasty madness.” Read more and if you want, watch the YouTube video (don’t worry, it does not autoplay) in Labiaplasty and Australian Censorship. (wilfuldamage.blogspot.com)

* Ladies, cross your legs and guard your babymaker for one more item: The Handmaid’s Tale is starting to come to life in Iowa. Read Pregnant Iowa Woman Arrested for Falling Down and be outraged, really really outraged. (richarddawkins.net, thanks Mojo)

* As usual, this requires a dose of context: Time reports on a recent British study in Even in Old Age, Men Want Sex More Than Women Do. Actually, the main jist of the story is that an active sex life makes you healthier in old age than otherwise; we’re going to have to assume what the study subjects mean by sex, as I’m guessing that it’s sex that is enjoyed, which would also include a healthy solo sex life. It’s an interesting read, though as for the perpetuation of the myths around the always-horny man and predictably frigid woman — whose generation are they talking about, anyway? That’s the context that is missing. (time.com, beware of popups)

Image by ussk.

It was my discovery of the blog Men In Porn that reminded me we haven’t been objectifying men enough around here, and I mean the in an entirely good way. You know I’m a big fan of Guys With iPhones (in fact, it gets overused on other blogs so I don’t mention it as much as I used to). But while Men Of Porn caters to a gay male audience, it doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong there. The editor simply loves men in porn of all kinds, and all orientations; here you’ll find a fan who is genuinely into the performers. He keeps up with straight porn stars, gay porn stars, gay-for-pay stars, and includes a nice variety in both “types” and his inclusion of women performing with the guys — yes, he’s an equal opportunity enthusiast for “bisexual” porn (typically depicted as two gay men with a women thrown in the middle, a combo that can get seriously hot). If gay sex bothers you, don’t look. Otherwise, it’s hardcore boy-candy.

Sometimes I find myself trolling for porn on fashion blogs more often than places that intentionally feature pornography. I know that for some, there is no difference. We in the pursuit of well dressed but half naked models salute you.

Click on images to see the full spreads. The one linked to below is actually my favorite.

This post is actually a flimsy excuse to share my late night oglings with you and also to run a test. A while back, dotBen gave me a present and it’s ready to roll for SXSW this coming week: a shiny black top of the line Asus netbook for my purse. I wanted to give it a test run for my blogging process; it’s gorgeous, has a big screen and a camera, everything on it is free open source software (and legal!), and it’s running ubuntu. It’s a sweet machine, and makes me outrageously mobile. This is going to be fun like a whole passel of well dressed half naked models in my purse fun …

If you’re arriving after hearing/seeing NPR’s All Things Considered on sex and internet history, welcome! You might want to check out this fascinating timeline of sex and the internet, showing in depth a lot more of what we all talked about on the show. You didn’t? Then check out something I worked on for a few weeks, NPR’s Thank Sex For Making The Internet Hot. If you’re a new visitor interested in following my sex column Open Source Sex (mentioned in the feature), my column will no longer appear in the San Francisco Chronicle and will re-appear shortly in another venue. Please stay tuned. Otherwise, enjoy the wonderfully nerdy sexy images in this post by Flash developer Exey Panteleev who had also made video stop-motions of his other (non-erotic) photoshoots here. I’m a big fan: his photos on Flickr even include markup descriptions and tips!

“Put your content into DIVs not TABLEs.”

“Time is a new HTML5 tag that defines time or date, or both.”

from: www.americanvice.com by clp.ly

First it was the porn recession. Then it became a porn depression. When the porn trade industry show and awards shrunk a large percentage and moved to a smaller venue this year, we got articles about porn’s financial meltdown — which by all accounts, is also a portrait of an industry that, like newspapers, is dying at its own hand. A director friend was told this year by her studio (a very famous one) that her job required her to attend AVN: it seems the industry is now held together by maintaining appearances. The faithful maintain the crisis is to be blamed on the evils of file sharing. Meanwhile industry outsiders and those making a mint outside AVN’s old porn culture watch grandpa screaming at the kids to get off his lawn — while quietly adapting to online business models and social networking principles.

A lot of it has to do with poor product delivery choices and not diversifying delivery methods: the porn biz is reliant on the DVD. Not good: the DVD was introduced in 1997, and as of 2009 DVD sales in porn were down by 50% from 2004. It seems that a business which is known for over-recycling footage (and starlets) had better hope that polycarbonate is recyclable, lest they end up collecting cans.

What can be done with all that porn? It’s still perfectly good porn; why not make it easier and cheaper to watch, and give it the attention and cataloging care the original companies couldn’t be bothered with… and make money off of it in the process? That might be what the guys at AmericanVice thought, but they probably thought something really snarky and funny at the same time. That’s how they roll. Like superstar porn baron Kink.com, AmericanVice has been exclusively online since the start, taking all those porn movies and cataloging them like a couple of grandmas arranging lewd literature, but maybe if the grandmas were played by Bill Maher.

I met American Vice on Twitter, where all the pervs go to pick up wide-eyed writers. They rambled about some “porn revolution.” I always think it’s adorable when webmasters go off their meds, so I paid them a visit. After a few clicks around their site and despite the clasically porny presentation, I was swooning; then I read XXXpwnage’s review and it all made sense. I had to ask them why they thought they were a “revolution.” AV webmaster Reg Berkeley crawled out of the fort he’d made of Dirty Debutantes DVDs in his living room to tell me,

If you scratch beneath the smutty surface of our DVD site, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. From day one, we refused to accept the notion that the average raincoater is a moron. Our approach has been to do something not only different but have it be utilitarian to the consumer.

What this means is that there is a ton of TLC that goes into AmericanVice. We patented our own search interface (RebelSearch) and have employed unwavering standards to the site – hand-selected screen captures, impeccable actor database and strict meta-tagging.

But mostly, our secret sauce is our editorial reviews of every scene and DVD. You can certainly appreciate the magnitude of what we’ve accomplished since 2006. My partner is a Cornell grad, and you can guess where I went to school. Our style is National Lampoon, Kevin Smith, Dennis Miller, etc.

Check it out and kick the tires. We’re the #1 site on PornUsers…so our small following of people dig what we do!

Part of the AmericanVice secret sauce (hey, keep it clean) is the search; they really got what old porn missed — mainstream porners made it near to impossible to find what you wanted, either out of malice (hoping we’d buy more) or out of stupidity (I can haz spellchek in pr0nz?). Just this past week, Reg emailed me to excitedly announce that they’d launched their mobile site: americanvice.com/m/ features 2,500 DVDs and 15,000 scenes, ready to play automatically on the iPhone, or download on Droid.

Now I’m off to make my fort (and cat fort!) out of all my old Vivid Alt and Vivid Ed boxes. Maybe I should call Eon to come over and help.

I’m feeling disgusted by the seriously slanted anti-porn feature being run in the Washington Post this sunday. And I’m irritated that no one will offer a counterpoint in mainstream media (oh yeah, I was the only one), so I maded you a happy porn post. Don’t believe the porn myths and stereotypes you see in WaPo right now; unsubstantiated claims and sneering at healthy porn use does not make a string case. It’s all they got.

IMHO, we’re just all tired of these loud hysterical buffoons acting as if we’re children. They really think porn destroys relationships — I hate to break it to people who don’t want to face reality, but it’s people who destroy their relationships with their behaviors. Just ask any gaming widow (and be sure to talk to avid gamers who have great relationships, too).

Onward to the porn, please… Every gallery below is free, and quite explicit. Much of it is made by women. All is personally selected. Hope you like!

Met Art beauties: Dominika and Lada; my goodness Ariel A is gorgeous. Cinema Erotique is a UK based woman-run site with all manner of playful fantasy and light kink; here’s video page one and two (I had the pleasure of naming their video, “In Your Face”).

Girl-girl porn, rawr! Lots of video goodies from Sapphic Erotica which could be classified as whatever the opposite of tattooed altporn is: I liked one, two, three and fisty-four.

Moving into altporn and fetish… I’m not sure I like Lexi Belle as a blonde. I’m even less sure about her doing clown porn shoots, but she’s hot, so there you go. Also at women-run Juliland, I found these two sizzling videos of super busty Jada Fire puoring milk on herself, and moisturizing her busts. But whither the altporn fellatio, you say? Why, yes, it’s here.

At French glamour amateur porn site Explicite Arte, I really enjoyed Angell Summers stripping in the studio (video of her with a ginormous toy here), this filthy streets-of-Paris shoot (video here), and Angell Summers shows her love of the shockingly large toys again, here.

Kink has been busy making that high-class ultra kinky porn; Princess Donna’s birthday party on The Upper Floor was off the hook, as we’d expect. That was after she passed Skylar Price around at a local bar like a smiley human sex doll. You won’t believe what one of Donna’s dommes did with a girl on the streets of an undisclosed European town. The Sapphic girls were nice to each other… The Kink girls are not. On Whipped Ass, this intense domination scene caught my eye, as did this forced orgasm punishment coupling. Lastly, something tells me the last thing one wants to be is the guy caught stealing panties at The Armory.

I tweeted this video last night, but it’s too amazing to only share there. My dear friend Mojo sent me this video last week when I was sad about pulling my column from the Chron. It will live again elsewhere when I decide on a good home (besides me, many people are missing it and readers are saying they’ll follow it wherever it goes). As for this video, you should only be worried if a) your head is a watermelon and b) this woman is in charge of the fruit salad at your wedding.

from: www.stdtestexpress.com by clp.ly

In what my friend The Sexademic calls “an interesting move for the private sector” we now have STD Test Express, a fully private STD testing website. I pinged her before posting because Sexademic has been exploring more ‘open source’ options for STD tests lately, and we just took an STD/STI update class where it was reinforced that testing isn’t always there when you need it. For instance, you pretty much can’t get tested for Herpes in San Francisco right now unless you’ve had known exposure; the test is just too expensive and lots of people have it in some variation… I found this site from their enjoyable blog, notably a recent post about their recent survey where they found that “1 in 3 people will still have sex with someone who refuses to get an STD test…even after being asked to get tested…even though they know ‘they shouldn’t.’” I also liked their post about Ozzy Osbourne’s Russian Roulette with sex. It’s just like ChatRoulette and Jon Stewart’s succinct description that it’s “five chambers” of cock.

The submissions are all in for American Apparel’s “best bottom” contest; when it was announced in January, reactions ranged from outrage and cries of “sexism!” to pervy excitement and posterior posturing of all kinds. I’m enjoying the range of butts that made the top categories and happy to see that the #1 butt is one of the roundest, showing that people who like ass like a lotta ass. My personal favorites were not in the top three. But it’s hot to check them all out; enjoy! Oh — and don’t be all like the reactionaries and forget that there’s also American Apparel’s best male bottom contest, too. Gawd, does the sexism know no bounds!!?? (via FashionIndie)

The Feminist Porn Awards has become a remarkable celebration of women and porn; they just emailed to let me know they’ve announced their 2010 nominations, and have an impressive stable of guests. Here are ten of the top noms:

Clipped from: www.goodforher.com by clp.ly

1) 101 Positions for Lovers – Jamye Waxman – Sensual Couples
2) A Man With a Maid: Tales of Victorian Lust – Nica Noelle – Sweet Sinner Video
3) Art of Female Self-Pleasure – Jaiya – New World Sex Education
4) Be My Boy Toy – Anna Span – Easy on the Eye Productions
5) Behind the Red Door – Carlos Batts – HeartCore Films
6) Bordello – Courtney Trouble – Reel Queer Productions
7) Buck Angel’s Ultimate Fucking Club – Buck Angel – Buck Angel Entertainment
8) Cocksucker – Julie Simone – Julie Simone Productions
9) Couch Surfers 2: Trans Men in Action – Brazen Garage Squad –Trannywood Pictures
10) Crash Pad Series 4: Ropeburn – Shine Louise Houston – Blowfish Video

(…read more, goodforher.com)

Also included in their email is an exciting category: porn sites by women. Here are linked thumbnails of three new discoveries in their list including Shot With Desire (main post image):

Clipped from: www.rubysdiary.com by clp.ly

Clipped from: www.juicypinkbox.com by clp.ly

I’ve had these in my tabs for a bit and just can’t let them go to waste… Plus I get to say, ‘and now for something completely different.’ Above we have a lovely image from Bestweekever.tv’s gallery of The 40 Most Sexual Photos From The Olympics, which we’re all glad someone else took the time to cap and collect for us. I got to witness and tweet this hilariously uncomfortably sexual moment on ice. If the sexual imagery was unintentional, then may the athletes forgive us, and we will rest pervily assured that Olympians were definitely being naughty in Vancouver when off the ice. I blogged previously about condoms being shipped in to meet demand, but no one anticipated that “Health officials well-versed in the needs of the world’s elite athletes had already provided 100,000 free condoms to 7,000 athletes and officials, which works out about 14 condoms per person.” Thanks to the Daily Mail, we also get to see the topless model who was also a curling star, boys behaving badly with their medals after hours, and porn viewing habits by athletes that were, well, probably nothing short of award-winning if the stories are true. It’s in The topless curler and the other Winter Olympic scandals: The gold medal for bad behaviour goes to… the Vancouver Olympics (dailymail.co.uk).

Image of The Chronicle being printed in their now-closed plant.

In 2006 I was tapped from the blogosphere to become San Francisco’s sex columnist. I recently discovered that the SFGate (the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle) is copying my column archives and distorting them. After four weeks of asking the Gate to fix them, they have made it clear that it’s not in their interest to do so. Additionally, they wouldn’t agree not to alter my content in the future. It appears that newspaper journalism and SEO is no longer going to be church and state. They do have the right to re-use my content, but it would be an understatement to say that it is my opinion that they have used their rights irresponsibly. I will no longer be writing my weekly column Open Source Sex (which I own) for the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com.

Here’s what happened.

In January I noticed that SFGate was republishing my column’s archives in ways that initially struck me as bizarre. Because SFGate’s internal search is powered by Yahoo, I use Google to quickly find my columns when I wish to link to them. I was preparing a blog post that would include a link to my interview with former porn star Jennie Ketcham (Penny Flame) about her graceful departure from porn. The column focused on her sex-positive attitude about her past; this subject was remarkable because she was not ashamed of her porn past, but had simply decided to move on.

My Google search results did not return my column’s original archive, as it always had in the past. Instead the top results were a copy of my column on an SFGate subdomain (articles.sfgate.com). The column had been stripped of all links, and divided across several pages. My bio was missing, as were all the comments. Freakishly, all the commas were gone. And the URL had been changed. The address was comprised of words; to my horror the URL had been keyworded to say “ashamed porn star” — the exact opposite of the article’s content. **See update** Worse, when I clicked around on the articles.sfgate subdomain I couldn’t navigate, couldn’t find content by author (or find anything), and was essentially trapped in a dead end of static content and ads.

My first thought was that I needed to email Jennie and apologize. She trusted me to tell her story the way she told it to me. Now if anyone searched “ashamed porn star” they get the interview I did with her. This was but one example of 161 columns I wrote, and I wasn’t sure how many had been altered with potentially offensive or sensationalistic keywords. In the past, SFGate had always notified me of alterations/edits post-publishing, and mutual agreement was always reached. Something had changed.

I fired off a few angry tweets, with links to the altered content. Then I started investigating, and sent an email to my main contact at the Chronicle, basically stating that the articles.sfgate.com content was now higher-ranked in Google than the same content in sfgate.com, and that articles.sfgate.com content is of lower quality in part because it is stripped of links (and on at least one occasion mangled):

(…) my columns have been stripped of all links, are missing commas throughout, and the URLs have been re-created with keywords — some of which are offensive to my work and the subjects of my column. what happened to my work has happened to all content duplicated on articles.sfgate. (…) in my opinion, the subdomain is trading off my name/content for pageviews. there is no reciprocation in links, or biographical credit. this means in the world of search — and these results are top ranked right now — they are using my own content against me. as with the other writers, who likely don’t know this is happening.

I wonder if they are going to do this for all of their online content. the articles.sfgate pieces are many, and all are stripped of links. I wonder if they think that people who stumble upon Gate content via Google search do not value links/linking. and I strongly believe that to remove my links damages my credibility as an online writer.

My contact responded saying they appreciated my explanation; they didn’t have a full understanding until my email. I sent a list of requests that could fix the content: links, bio, commas, keywords. Nearly a week later SFGate had not responded, and I pushed for a response. By the following Monday I got a phone call with their VP: Digital Media. She pressured me not to talk about SFGate on my own Twitter account. I did not agree, but I did say that now that I knew who to contact about issues, I’d contact her first when I had problems in the future. (Now this seems ironic, considering how long it took her to respond to me.) I told her I would be fine with my content appearing on articles.sfgate.com if the necessary fixes could be made, and she indicated a level of difficulty in restoring the articles so as they would likely have to pull my content from the subdomain. The commas could be fixed, the bio was actually there but on the last page (unlinked). Restoring my articles’ links would be the dealbreaker; they could not do this.

Does anyone remember what I went through in 2006 to get them to publish articles with links?

Days later I got an email with excerpts from my contract (apparently they would now exercise their option to use my content any way they wanted), and was told that if I wanted my articles removed from the subdomain I would have to pay SFGate their estimated losses on ad revenue for my duplicated content.

I responded telling them that it was utterly perverse of them to suggest that I pay to have my content taken down. I honestly wanted to know: did they really expect me to say I would? No, of course they did not. By suggesting something so ridiculous, they ruined what should have been a relationship of allies, and this seriously damaged my previously good relationship with SF Gate and the Chronicle.

That I might have to explain the essential importance of link integrity and standards in online journalistic practices to someone in their position is astonishing. Not to mention I couldn’t believe anyone in this day and age would gamble revenue (and relationships with notable, reliable writers) on search engine results, or controlling readers’ experience.

It was becoming my strong opinion that the SF Gate / Chronicle had begun to behave as a bad actor in this space, with regard to the integrity of organic search, presentation, and discovery of news content. As many of you know, something like this goes against my firm beliefs and professional practice as a media professional. My contract with the Chronicle was loosely prescriptive with what the Gate could and couldn’t do with my content. That contract was signed in good faith and I’d enjoyed the servicing of the contract while the Chronicle operated as a good actor in the space. I told SFGate now that the Chron was no longer acting in good faith with the way it reproduces my content, I felt the current contract was untenable. I told them I couldn’t write another column for them until my contract reflected protection for the integrity of my work and reputation.

I received an email saying they could restore my articles to my requests (at this point, just links and keyworded URLs) but that they would have to talk to legal about my contract, as they were not sure how much it could be changed. Okay, cool: I waited. Then, nothing. For four weeks. Links were not restored, so it looked like they *could* do it, but would not. After a month — last week — I got an email from the woman I had been negotiating with “formalizing” the end of my contract, citing that I had not turned in a column for four weeks. After four years of an agreeable relationship, the woman who demanded I call her before talking about SFGate on my Twitter feed waited four weeks to circle back, saying that my column “no longer fit their content needs.” Indeed.

There is a much bigger story here. It’s all in what’s going on with archive duplication and the nation’s old media newspapers online. I think that the work done to the duped content is done for the purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The idea here seems to be stripping content, duplicating it, make SEO’d content that is a dead end for readers, and drive up results with cost per click ads. This is not a business plan. It’s a short noose made of long-tail content.

Make no mistake. Other national newspapers are doing the same thing (the same strategy is at the LA Times*, articles.latimes.com + latimes.perfectmarket.com). Add to this the forthcoming paywall for the NYT and we have a very volatile and brutal future ahead for old media. If this is all they’ve got for revenue plans online, including the creation of an atmosphere of mistrust with writers and our content, it’s going to get bloody. It’s not simply someone being uncreative and desperate to drive revenue; these tactics are not unsimilar to what I’ve seen in my years of watching porn sites struggle to make money off of content that people simply don’t want to pay for.

In my research I also found many redirects in Google results leading back to the articles.sfgate site on multiple subdomains; articles.sfgate, ww2.sfgate, sfgate.info, sfchroniclemarketplace.com, sfchronicle.us, m.sfgate, sfgate.perfectmarket.com. They all go to the same ad-stuffed, linkstripped dead-end. This is what I would call SEO spamming. It is now a challenge to find original versions of SFGate content in Google searches; the subdomain results trample the original content. The results also dominate related content: my own blog posts related to the content, which used to come up, are no longer in their natural search result position. What’s worse is that this dead-end trap of copied content isn’t breathing new life into old archives; I found three examples of other Gate/Chron writers’ articles being gutted and copied quickly — their columns and articles were reproduced at only a week old.

Dear newspapers: your industry is dying and it is your own goddamned fault.

Update: At SF Appeal, Violet Blue Explains Why She Quit The Chronicle/Gate. Most spot-on to me is this comment,

Aside from Eve, I’m sure most of those who comment here do not actually know Violet. She wrote her column from her own experience and point of view. It reached a wide-ranging audience. With sex as the topic, it was bound to offend many, titillate some, and amuse a few. These reactions are merely reflections of the sophomoric attitude of our culture towards any attempt to have an honest, open discussion about sex. However, her writing also illuminated many topics that people often avoid at their own loss and peril, and helped countless others heal the wounds of their past. If you’ve ever met her, as I have, and had a real conversation with her, you know she is an intelligent, sensitive, hard-working woman.

The Chronicle/SFGate has profited immensely from her hit count. Despite the fact that she is routinely personally attacked and threatened with violence, they did little-to-nothing to protect her from the psychotic element most attracted by SFGate’s pseudo-anonymous user comment system. Leaving the Chronicle/SFGate is hardly a set-back for her. Rather, it sets her free to reach the goals she is already working toward. Fly, Violet, fly! xoxo

Update 03.04.10: Commenter Ani Niow informs us today that the Gate has quietly and non-transparently made a change. “Looks like the SF Gate removed “ashamed” from the url of the article you were talking about. Still shows up in Google’s cache however.” (I screencapped it, for posterity.)

* * * * * * * *

Here are some highlights from my column Open Source Sex during its time at the SF Chronicle / SFGate:

* Republished on UN sponsored health site RH Reality Check: Obama’s National Sex Ed Program
* Republished in Best Sex Writing 2008: Kink.com and Porn Hysteria – The Lie of Unbiased Reporting
* Republished in Best Sex Writing 2009: Is Cybersex Cheating?
* To be republished in Best Sex Writing 2010: Please Use Porn Responsibly
* 1300 comments: Fear of a Gay Planet – Why Prop 8 Passed
* Infamous: Sexual Healing – Recovering from Sexual Trauma
* Infamous: Kids Charged for Child Porn
* Infamous: San Francisco Values

I miss writing my column.

* I found a total of nine American newspapers using this strategy.

Photo by my dear friend, Steve Diet Goedde.

I’ve been wanting to see this happen for a very long time; at one point I even approached friends at Kink to crate a “best practices” based on their own spotless safer-sex guidelines and put them out for all to see (and hopefully follow). They did not, but I’m ecstatic to announce that San Francisco based women-run porn empire Pink and White have just published their safer sex best practices in porn standards, complete with resources and solid encouragement for Risk Aware Consensual Kink (aka RACK). We really need more porn companies to follow this example of transparency in business and healthy principles for their practices. (Please.)

One of the reasons mainstream porn is dying is because they’re maintaining a disconnect with their customers/users (the opposite of social media principles in business). Seems to me something like this would foster viewer connection to their products, which like social media, are made of people.

Image: beautiful artwork by The Pearls (adriana munoz).

Wherein I provide you with inarguable proof that there is no such thing as a “slow news week” for sexuality. This is just part of what’s in my inbox, plus a bit of what I’ve encountered online. Cherrypick your clicks accordingly:

* As a girl who has been playing with ChatRoulette (though I prefer CatRoulette), I can’t agree more with this hilarious FastCompany infographic: ChatRoulette By The Numbers. It’s realistic to have the “girls” and “pervs” blending into one another; I haven’t been naughty on the site, but lots of other girls have. It actually looks like this. (laughingsquid.com, fastcompany.com, buzzfeed.com)

* It’s interesting that PETA dropped Tiger Woods this week; especially when you look at this fab slideshow of PETA’s most skin-tacular campaigns. (treehugger.com, via Thomas Roche)

* The Sex.com saga continues; I wrote about the URL’s outrageous history in Sex.com: A URL All Crime And No Sex. As of last week, it has now been officially foreclosed and Sex.com is going up for auction next month. A pal on Buzz suggested that it be purchased and turned over to me, which would be a lot of fun, but I did note that if the traffic estimate in this cNet post is accurate, my TinyNibbles.com has higher traffic. :) (sfgate.com, elliotsblog.com, news.cnet.com)

* Oh, Apple. Last week we think Apple lost it in a fit of sexual hysteria (I have a feature forthcoming on the story) and yanked over 5000 (not really) adult apps from its app store. The latest development is that the developer whose app became the centerpiece for all the news stories (Wobble iBoobs) and leaked Apple’s bizarre double-standard policies about so-called erotic content emailed me the other night telling me that Apple backflipped and quietly re-instated their application to the store. Across the Internet, a hundred blog posts were updated by bewildered bloggers, again. (tinynibbles.com, chillifresh.com)

* I’m excited that Examiner loves my kissing book! Last week we got great news: it’s been out only two months and is now signed for a German translation and is getting picked up in Urban Outfitters. Even more wonderful then that last week Examiner published a very handy list of first kiss do’s and don’ts that I compiled. (examiner.com)

* Don’t ever let them tell you that you’re not beautiful. Read The Five Types of Haters Female Bloggers Encounter Online — and What To Do About Them. (thechicktionary.com, via Moneda)

* Over on Sociological Images, an ad is uncovered and discussed from 1934 for a device to keep women’s reproductive organs from wandering around their bodies. And people wonder where modern underlying cultural values about women’s sexuality being mysterious, unpredictable, treacherous and frigid came from. (contexts.org, thanks, Praemedia)

* Now you can finally get that Bang Brothers website subscription you’ve always wanted but felt too morally conflicted to purchase. Okay, maybe Karma Porn doesn’t do anything for Bang’s business practices or how they treat their performers, but they’ve signed up as affiliates with a large number of porn sites and are splitting portions of their affiliate cut for signups and giving portions to various fine charities, such as Haiti relief and LGBT awareness. It’s too bad porn sites don’t have the foresight to do this on their own… Like mine, which points you to ethical porn and keeps this free sex ed resource running. (karmaporn.com)

* Condoms were allocated to Olympian athletes, but supplies ran low and an emergency shipment was brought in. Yay team! (cbc.ca)

* Bear with me, I unashamedly adore her. More fetishes a la Lady Gaga (ladygaga.com), complete with my top current Hollywood crush, True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgard. Remember how many fetishes we named in her Bad Romance video? Look for LOTS of abasiophilia, in designer style, though you could correctly state that this music video is a refined and excellent representation of Kegadoru: Injured Idol Fetish, which is more fashion-focused than abasiophilia.

Image from this gallery.

I’ve been researching the history of sex and the internet to prepare for my NPR / All Things Considered interview (might go on the air tomorrow). I just got off the phone with the producer and had opened up my notes; I realized I did the entire call with my desktop looking like this! It’s always fun when people walk into my office… ahem. In my defense I was trying to find some girls on the beach in bikinis after hearing that the Eastern US has been slammed with more snow and thinking that you all probably wanted to see the *opposite* of the last post right now.

Here’s a very loose timeline that I pinged my conversation off of; does anyone have anything to add? Corrections? I’d love to make this a working timeline. The three primary areas under consideration are:

• Help, information & advice
• Chat / meeting people
• Pornography

late 1970s-early 1980s ASCII porn in BBS communities
1984-1989: Numerous sex focused BBS popped up – many allowing the sharing of images and stories – among them were several that focused on BDSM and and TV/TS fetishes
1990 – first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access – world.std.com
1990 – first Usenet newsgroup for text erotica stories rec.arts.erotica is created
1992 – alt.sex.stories (Usenet; altnet newsgroup for text erotica stories) is created
1992 – Term “Surfing the Internet” is first heard
1993 – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell introduced by President Bill Clinton.
1993 – World Wide Web goes live.
1994 – Sex.com was registered by Gary Kremen
1995 – Sex.com was stolen by Stephen Cohen
1995 – Salon.com launches
1995 – Craigslist is founded
1996 – SFSI.org sex crisis helpline launches online
1996 – Playboy.com launches
1996 – Communications Decency Act (CDA) signed into law and part of it is quickly struck down
1997 – DVD introduced
1997 – Peter Acworth begins Hogtied.com (Kink.com)
1997 – Domain name business.com sold for $150,000
1998 – Viagra introduced
1998 – ISNA.org launches
1998 – OutProud.org launches (LGBT)
1998 – Child Online Protection Act (COPA) signed into law; quickly blocked from enforcement by court order
1999 – PlannedParenthood.com launches
1999 – Planned Parenthood’s Teenwire.com launches
1999 – LiveJournal launches
1999 – Domain name business.com sold for $7,500,000
2000 – Sex.com was given back to Gary Kremen after a legal fight
2000 – AEBN launched first VOD site
2000 – American Express stops accepting porn transactions
2000 – Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) signed into law
2001 – Yahoo begins adult Groups purge; removes porn banners from search engine
2002 – Eros Blog launches
2003 – Paypal stops processing adult transactions
2003 – Gawker Media launches Fleshbot.com
2003 – Tribe.net launches
2003 – Penthouse files bankruptcy
2005 – Video iPod introduced
2005 – Tribe.net purges adult groups
2006 – Sex.com sold for a reported $12,000,000
2006 – YouTube style porn sites invade the Internet
2006 – Google resists court order for porn search results
2007 – Tumblr launches
2008 – Kink.com has over 12 websites
2009 – US Supreme Court refuses to hear final COPA appeal, killing the law permanently
2009 – DVD porn sales officially declined 50%

Tips: Bacchus, Nobilis, Erika, jess, Bryan, Erich, sjk

Right or wrong, I knew that once I saw the censored gallery on HuffPo of the second annual German topless sledding event, that if I waited a minute many uncensored photos would surface and I could give you the chilly nekkid Olympian-esque post that you deserve. What I did not expect, and I should have, was that I would find a video to share with you as well. It’s like getting the gold when your moneyed competition slipped and broke their little toe on the ice and you’re not sure you actually deserve it, but you wear it like you own it anyway. The Sun has a way of making us all feel dirty like that. German coverage from The Local informs us that, “A naked sledging event in Germany’s Harz region created a logistical nightmare over the weekend after 14,000 people showed up to watch 30 men and women strip before sliding down the mountain.”

* Original topless sledding coverage in Germany’s The Local (gallery, thelocal.de).
* The Sun’s highbrow commentary on babes and nips in the air (thesun.co.uk)

Never mind The Sun; we’ve got video from DailyMotion:

And in an attempt to bring up the IQ of this post a bit, I highly recommend pairing our mindless boob ogling with this cute and funny XKCD Backyard Snow Tracking Guide, which features no German boobies but has a transmogrifier making it of equal, if not more, value.

Agent Provocateur’s new “Whip me” stockings. Price: a wallet-dominating $70.

Babeland’s new Incoqnito Droplet Necklace (nipple clamp vibes). Price: what you’d expect from a high-end designer piece of jewelry-cum-sex toy. Lots.

More gleeful nudity and sexual beauty. It’s okay to want this, I think. Price: free. Image by FML Photography.

And lo, the Internets deliver.

By Matthias Weinberger, via my sweet friend Chris Pirillo.

We have two new reports especially for the sex nerds in the audience, so if data and stats get you all revved up don’t touch that mouse. Many readers will find the OkTrends Blog post especially interesting, as it dishes on sexual activities by age and interest, while dropping tasty stats on how often female Americans in the dating pool want to have sex, who thinks contraception is ‘morally wrong’ by age and state, and much more. It’s also interesting to see how a post inspired by unrealistic male expectations in dating and sex became a post about how kinky and sexually adventurous women become as they get older. (Read: hey old dude, that 19-year-old babe isn’t going to do anything deliciously nasty to, for, or with you. Not even on you.) I also want to give mad props to the awesome javascript slider widgets throughout the post where we can toggle data results on charts and maps of the US — that’s just so fucking cool and fun. First up is The Case For An Older Woman, snip:

(…) As you can see, a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger womenThe median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.

A man’s bias toward younger women becomes even more evident when we overlay his stated preferences with his actual messaging habits. (…)

(…) Articles touting a woman’s mid-thirties “sexual peak” have stalked the pages of Cosmo since time immemorial, but these articles typically cite clinical testosterone/estrogen/progesterone studies and attempt to make the leap to “sexual peak” from there—if they bother to cite any data at all. I, on the other hand, can make my claim by looking at a woman’s stated preferences:

[data/image] This is a nationwide “age progression” of American women, a normalized heat map similar to the ones you saw above, but with an added geographical component. By moving the slider you can watch how attitudes become more sex-positive as the population gets older.

This older-women-are-more-sexual pattern repeats across almost every proposition. Here are a few more data sets just as sparklines (computed, like the map above, for our sample set of 100,000 women). Again, these are just a handful of examples; whether we ask about bondage or kissing, women are the most sexual in their thirties.

[data/image] Researching this post, I also came upon an interesting complementary pair of graphs illustrating sexual dominance preferences. Younger men want to be dominated. Older women are generally interested in doing just that.

[data/image] In addition their lack of physical inhibitions, older women have much healthier attitudes in two other areas of sexual concern: STD testing and contraception. (…read more, blog.okcupid.com)

The OkCupid post touches on casual sex, specifically in regard to women and aging, such as with this graphic:

At the same time (last night), I came across this thick and crunchy data slam of premarital sex statistics, From shame to game in one hundred years: An economic model of the rise in premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation. It is tinged with judgement but still fascinating:

(…) The great sociologist William Ogburn (1964) suggested that a large part of social change was a reaction to technological progress. Our research presents a mechanism where socialisation, by parents and institutions such as the church or state, is determined by the technological environment that people live in. While a simpler model that focused only on technological advances in contraception could generate the rise in premarital sex without an appeal to the socialisation process, it would miss the dramatic changes in sexual norms that history convincingly documents. For example, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex. Such crimes could be punished by fines, public whippings, and jail terms. This begs the question of why such draconian measures were initially adopted and then abandoned by parents, churches and states. An answer is provided here. (…read more, voxeu.org)

The director of controversial film “Sex and Lucia” has a new film that has all the lesbian (bisexual) drama you need to last until your little sister gets back from college in June. The uncensored version of Julio Medem’s “Room In Rome” trailer I found above, however, is quite arousing and shows a surprising amount of realism and graphic realization of the sex between the two female characters — it’s pretty hot. The good news is that while the film debuted at the Berlin Film Festival (ended this weekend), it got picked up for distribution by IFC before the fest even started. The film is a remake of Chilean Matias Bize’s “En la cama” but with female protagonists — in “Room” a Spanish women meets a Russian woman, they have an unexpected sexual encounter that gets way more intense than they anticipated, and each have to reconcile what they’re feeling an experiencing with the realities of their lives at home; one is a married mother of two, and the other is set to marry her boyfriend in one week. (via High on Sex)

It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t allow adult content in its app store. And without writing too much about it here (I will be writing about it elsewhere), it’s easy for those without iPhones to kind of shrug and go, hm, well, that’s weird and prudish and out of step with culture and life, but whatever. However, now that Apple has released the iPad — and importantly, it does not have the cat-flavored Apple OS we know and love — with the iPhone operating system on what is intended to be a reader and tablet computer, it means that Apple has now produced a computer with a very closed system indeed. And a closed *minded* one. Right now the best article about it is The New App Store Rules: No Swimsuits, No Skin, And No Innuendo by Jason Kinkaid on TechCrunch. Here we can read in detail the unsettling and hypocritical list of things the company classifies as sexual, and sexually inappropriate. It’s like taking a trip back through time, with its antiquated definitions on sexuality as consumed by the heterosexual male circa 1980. In fact, it’s just bizarre, especially since it seems that we would not be able to even enjoy an Olympics figure skating app:

(…) One developer, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to multiple App Store reviewers about the new policy. He was told, “there will be no more applications that are for any purpose of excitement or titillation”. He was told this included swimsuits — both bikinis and one-piece suits. Along with having dozens of his “sexy” apps removed, Apple also removed one that featured a popular fitness model in her workout clothes (the app was a marketing vehicle for the athlete’s line of protein powder). When he asked if the ban would also affect apps like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit application, the Apple employee wouldn’t give a clear answer, but it was implied that the SI app would probably be removed as well.

Developer Jon Atherton, who is behind the popular application Wobble (which doesn’t actually include any sexual photos), also spoke to an Apple employee, and posted this list of rules to his blog based on what he learned:

1. No images of women in bikinis (Ice skating tights are not OK either)

2. No images of men in bikinis! (I didn’t ask about Ice Skating tights for men)

3. No skin (he seriously said this) (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)

4. No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs (yes – I am serious, we have to remove the silhouette in this pic)

(…)

7. No apps will be approved that in any way imply sexual content (not sure how Playboy is still in the store, but …)(…read more, techcrunch.com)

Interestingly, I was just interviewed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog at MacWorld 2010 about what the Apple app store could easily do to monitor erotic (and borderline) adult content, without becoming censorious and maintaining transparency and inclusivity. The answers are in the second half of the interview. It truly saddens me to see a company I love make space for the competition to trample them in the marketplace. But, I guess that’s business. Whatever happened to “Think Different”?

Just sent to me by my pal Erik Von Gutenberg, reminding me that I have to stop missing these events. This was their San Francisco event in December, when I was off having a fairly miserable time in Europe. Le sigh. This year I’m staying close to home, and causing trouble; this video is inspiring.

When I first got my hands on a copy of Babeland’s new book Moregasm I opened it with the usual skepticism and then became truly, deeply engrossed flipping through the tome to ogle the hot hot photos and soak up the gleefully fantastic sex information. It’s a perfect sex guide. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. It makes me determined to add a recommended reading widget to my sidebar so I can feature Morgasm even after this post roll by. Moregasm (authored by the founders of Babeland) is a gorgeous, complete guide that is heterosexually focused but not limited to heterosexual sex practices. YAY! And I just noticed that the SF Bay Guardian likes it as much as I do (and that one of the authors is doing a signing tonight) –

The majority of mainstream sex guides currently available follow a formula I’ve never understood, which is to feature real people in the cover photo and then nowhere else in the book. These ludicrous covers, mostly featuring underwear-clad models in suggestively prone positions, are a source of embarrassment at the cash register, but a worse offense is found inside. Upon opening the book the reader discovers, rather than any useful or instructional photos, a slew of black and white diagrams in stick-figure detail accompanied by text that is generally inscrutable. The sexual acts are described in ways that are alternately clinical and deliberately vague, peppered with medical terms like “vasocongestive arousal” along with meaningless Cosmopolitan-isms about revving engines or raising temperatures or similar banalities with which we are all familiar.

Taking this convention into consideration, Moregasm happily does the opposite.

From the outset, Moregasm is non-intimidating and neutral, with a cover that, instead of revealing body parts that might cause certain readers discomfort, finds clever use for the fermata. Not having to hide a book under the bed: always a plus! The inside of the book, conversely, is far from demure. Venning makes sure to feature actual photos of real people in compromising positions, which readers are sure to find, shall we say, insightful. The text is simple when it needs to be, and when a more detailed explanation is required, the descriptions are thorough but clear enough to be understood at all experience levels. (…read more, sfbg.com)