Today Apple launched their new music social network Ping (basically a clone of Last.fm), and in Apple’s promotional image for the new feature, they very obviously removed a thread of Tweets from Lady Gaga’s timeline where she clearly spoke out celebrating being pro-gay, about California’s anti-gay marriage legislation, Prop 8.

Seriously.

Apple, we see you.

::pause for the scream of WTF on loop in my head thinking about my gay friends who work at Apple.

Those of us who live in the SF Bay Area know that when Lady Gaga was in town for her San Jose shows, she paid a visit to Apple Headquarters and got a tour. Everyone around here wondered why. This was likely when it was discussed, pre-launch, that they would use her for the Ping page example. She shot a video there for them, it was in the Apple keynote. So either she knew her messages of tolerance (which sell quite well, by the way) were going to be censored, or Apple did not tell her. I wonder which it was.

Here’s the Daily Swarm with the story (thedailyswarm.com).

BUT — I screencapped her timeline just now so you can see what Apple removed. Apple’s version for Ping launch:

Her *actual* timeline:

If you’re tired of me being agitated about the proposed .XXX domain extension, then you can skip this post (and know that when the ICANN comment period is over this month I will stop bugging you to use this text to email ICANN to tell them that .XXX = OMGWTFBBQ). But I do want to say a big *thank you* to the people who have sent in emails with me!

That said, I got a ping last night from the people who set up the nifty website Dot-XXX Opposition: The rest of the story. And guess what!? It shows ICM’s claims of adult community support are unsupported, groundless and unverified; ICM does not have support from the adult entertainment community. It is proof, in their own words. They also state they will not make a business out of the .XXX ghetto. A very diverse group of adult webmasters (not all of them male, either) have come out to say loud and proud, no ICANN, do not do this. Not only for their own businesses; in this video they say it’s also because they know it won’t help solve any problems around minors and adult material.

Check out their blog, and follow/watch them on Twitter — this is going to be all over by December, so the time is now.

The video is pretty cool: I really like that now there is absolute proof that a diverse cross section of key businesspeople who create adult content do not want this, and the dudes behind .XXX are not telling ICANN (or journalists) the truth about community support.

Watch for cameos and statements by Larry Flynt, John Stagliano, Peter Acworth, Joanna Angel, the awesome president of Pink Visual Allison Vivas and many more. There are outtakes, but I only loved the hilarious 10-second scene of Peter at Kink spanking a submissive’s bottom saying in his polite British accent how very upset he is about .XXX.

Model Karmen from I Shot Myself

* Star Wars speed dating. Yes, it’s real. In case you *needed* an excuse to douse yourself in Slave Leia Perfume or Eau de Lando cologne. (abcnews.go.com, techyum.com)

* The comments are mean on Discovery’s article about a Japanese vacation resort offering a destination for men with virtual girlfriends, but the article itself is really interesting. Guys whose girlfriends are LovePlus sims can take their iPhone based sweethearts on a romantic escape where their amorous inclinations are encouraged. (I am almost done writing a book about this phenom; perhaps I am about to give up on finding an American publisher who “gets it.”) Mashable has a cool LovePlus map. (news.discovery.com, konami.jp, mashable.com)

* Please, please, please take a minute to join me in my concern for human rights and the proposed .XXX domain: read why I urge you to write an email to ICANN during the short public comment period. I did. (techyum.com)

* Department: Big business hookups create new corporate STDs. Foursquare and MTV have teamed up to reward STD checkups with a badge; if you use mainstream location based check-in application games like Foursquare, it means that in September when you go to get tested for STDs and STIs, you can check in and get a “reward badge” for demonstrating action about sexual heath. The thing that I think they missed is that it is being marketed as “tells your friends and family” that you did ‘something good’ but I don’t think they took into consideration that many people would rather not let anyone know they are getting tested in case someone asks why. I’m not poo-pooing it. I just think no one wants everyone on their Facebook to know (via Foursquare) that they’re like, “Mayor” of the STD clinic. (Personally, I think Foursquare has turned into an STD.) (news.yahoo.com)

* Good stuff: I loved the article on Carnal Nation from a woman who went from being an anti-porn feminist to being pro-porn — but still has sympathy for those who fear and hate porn. It’s eye-opening. (ourpornourselves.org)

* Not sex related, but interesting: Cyber stalker crackdown ‘thwarted’ by service providers. I’m working on a big project about this with a legal team and tech industry players, so I’m keeping an eye on this stuff… (bbc.co.uk)

Self-portrait of Karmen from women-run porn company I Shot Myself. Full gallery after the jump.

Looking over last weekend’s photos from this year’s Bubble Baba Challenge, the world’s only annual blow-up doll whitewater rafting race (in Russia), I really want to go, and enter the competition! It looks like so much fun. My pal Kumi sent me this post-race article in the St. Petersburg Times Inflatable Sex Toy Challenge Attracts Over 450 and I’ve since been totally entertained looking through the official site (in Russian; translate it with a browser such as Google Chrome).

Pictures in this post are by r0gue elephant (r0gue-elephant.livejournal.com), who really has a fantastic gallery — it’s my fave from this year’s event. Long may they ride the rapids atop inflatable babes of all genders. Snip:

LOSEVO, Leningrad Oblast — Adrenaline-addicts from the city and beyond competed in a three-minute wet and wild ride on inflatable women from sex shops in the eighth annual Bubble Baba Challenge at the Losevo Rapids on the Vuoksa River, about 80 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg.

The competition was held on Aug. 28. At the contest, riders have to raft on inflatable devices down the rapids on Vuoksa River. The triumphant winner of the race was St. Petersburg “athlete” Vladislav Pavlenko on his “Vanilla Pelotki” (2 minutes 47 seconds) , followed by Dmitry Arsentiev, another local, who rode “Killer Whale” (2.51). Alexander Marasin, also of St. Petersburg and the owner of “Fearless Zina” (2.55), came third.

Competitors, male and female, make their way back to the shore after a heat. Baba translates from Russian as “peasant woman,” but is sometimes used with sexually offensive connotations. More than 450 thrill-seekers took part in the unorthodox contest, where inflatable babes-turned-boats were given titles no proper regata would ever have accepted. Take, for instance, “Floating Piggy” or “Baby-Barge.” Other bold and sassy names that provided valuable insights into their male riders’ characters and egos, have included “Unstoppable Chick,” “Cuddly Female Racoon,” “Big Tit Excess,” “Sexual Goddess,” “Roach,” “Miss Peep,” “School Girl,” “Indefatiguable” and “Luba For A Price.”

The event, which was first held in 2003, runs under the motto “A Rubber Babe is More Than Just A Vehicle”. (…read more, times.spb.ru)

For some reason in my usual obsessive online erotic coolhunting rounds this past weekend, I cam across a number of really strange but highly entertaining videos. They kind of defy description, but have a “weird movie night” feel to them which I quite enjoy. We begin with the above fake ad for Bukakke Milk. Below is a vintage clip from an all-girl topless band The Ladybirds, from 1966. Dangerous Minds has a great post about them here (video via).

Next is another strange Japanese video, Dr. Phero: a series of medical fetish vignettes from former variety show “Vermilion Pleasure Night” (via Richard Kadrey’s Twitter). You can watch the three shows for free in full on this channel from AnimeNetwork.

UPDATE 09.01.10: The mainstream adult industry is making its opposition to .XXX loud and clear at Dot-XXX Opposition (with John Stagliano!) /update

I wrote this up last night on my tech blog Techyum in Comment Period Now Open on .XXX – Make Your Voice Heard, in part because I wanted to give people a linking option if they did not want to visit a NSFW website to get the info. In short, a few men with no ties to adult business or family groups have been trying for ten years to get ICANN to add .XXX to the selection of domain options — and they are already selling pre-registration at high prices. They scanned a list of rejected domain extensions and picked the one they could profit from the most. There has been no proof of support from any communities, despite their claims. Anti-porn organizations also oppose this. The men behind .XXX have continually skirted the issue that there is no single, universally accepted definition of adult content. There are huge security and global human rights concerns; meanwhile the men behind it are bragging to media about how much money they will make. Read about all of this in detail in the article Now Playing: .XXX. TLD Carpetbaggers Give New Meaning to “Drop and Snatch” (carnalnation.com).

On August 24 the 30-day comment period opened for the proposed .XXX top-level domain. Until September 23, the public is invited to tell ICANN what they think.

After the jump you’ll find a sample email you can send to ICANN (with address).

Image by Leonhard Kätzel via SyntheticPubes.

To: xxx-revised-icm-agreement@icann.org
Subject: Do Not Approve .XXX

Dear ICANN,

This email is a comment in opposition to the Proposed Registry Agreement for the .XXX sTLD by ICM Registry. The .XXX sTLD should be rejected in finality for the following reasons:

* The .xxx TLD is opposed by every sector and community it affects. This includes people working in the adult entertainment industry (including Hustler, Vivid, Penthouse, XBIZ, porn’s Free Speech Coalition, and Adult Friend Finder), anti-porn family and religious organizations (including The Family Research Council), thought leaders in the technology sector, and the ACLU.

* Despite ICM’s constant assurances of various industry representation and support, there is no evidence of community support for .XXX.

* The .xxx TLD will do nothing to solve problems surrounding adult content, manage adult content or protect children from inappropriate content. The higher purposes of ICM’s proposal have been abandoned. (As of this email the page on ICM Registry’s website about “Promoting Online Responsibility” for .XXX is blank and reads “Information to follow” as does the page titled “Contracts, Policies and Bylaws.”)

* There has been absolutely no proof of an “unmet need” for the .XXX TLD.

* There is no concrete, agreed-upon definition of “adult content.”

* The ACLU expresses serious concerns about the implications of .XXX outside the U.S., where in some countries, regulations around .XXX would certainly be enforced punitively. To this effect, the .XXX TLD raises human rights concerns.

* .XXX makes no business sense except to profit from defensive registration (brand squatting).

* Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) have introduced legislation to make the use of .XXX compulsory for all web sites that are “harmful to minors.”

* .XXX raises serious issues around spurious and unsupported TLD’s in regard to the impact of ICANN on rulings on civil and human rights, and ICANN’s role in content-based discrimination.

In light of the above, I object to .XXX and urge ICANN to reject .XXX.

Regards,

This stellar article from my dear friend Midori is right in line with the aesthetic I see increasingly expressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who visit this blog regularly. It’s what I call a “Whole Foods attitude” we’re all cultivating about porn, sex toys, and figuring out good ways we can live our lives as sexual citizens of the world. I love it! Here’s a snip:

(…) Below you’ll find some ideas on how to commit random acts of sex-positive agitation. They are small actions and subtle agitations. No life changes required. Some may push your own comfort levels and challenge your preconceived ideas and habits, but that’s part of growing as good citizen. Composting wasn’t the easiest thing initially for many of us either. Regardless of how stealthy or not, the actions should be made with wit and cheekiness. Accompanying any of these ideas with humor, levity and a mischievous grin can bring great success. Big thanks to my readers who provided some of these ideas. If you have ideas to add, please post them here!

Santa, The Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy and You:

If you find yourself staying at a hotel that supplies a bible in each room, tuck a packet or two of condoms in it when you check out. Flavored condoms just might get people thinking about what sort of sexual activities could be made better with little extra tastiness.

Got teenage kids? Stash the bathroom drawer with condoms, dental dams, gloves and a good safer-sex info booklet. Let them know it’s there. Make sure to check and resupply as needed.

Offer condoms to homeless youths. Small paper bags make the transaction smooth. This is a high-risk group that has a chance for turning it around with a little help with risk reduction. If you’re not keen on the idea of giving “handouts” of money to the homeless, why not give condoms? It’s even better if you include cards from the local youth shelter or free STI testing clinics. (…read more, carnalnation.com)

Photo by Nikola Tamindzic.

These are hilarious and horrifying, and some may even feel strangely familiar. Jezebel asked readers what their worst masturbation nightmare stories were, and people responded with true tales that are impossible to stop reading once you’ve started. Most of The 10 Worst Masturbation Stories We’ve Ever Heard are from women: woe is the Ken doll. Although, one of them (#5) is really troubling… Snip:

10. Ken
This is mortifying. I still shiver and block it out when the memory arises: I tended to use whatever was available at the age of 16; in my case, my little sister’s ken doll was just the right size. Being widely uneducated about how it all worked down there at that point, I would just sit on it and rock. Well, we all know how easily those ken heads popped off…. yep. Into the the vajayjay. The problem was, I could not get it out myself. I flipped completely out, thoughts of it going up into my uterus and damaging my internal organs (again, not properly educated!) flying through my panic-induced brain.

What did I do? I told my mother. Took a deep breath, then blurted, “I was masturbating with a ken doll and the head came off inside me!”

The look on her face was a mixture of anger, disappointment and embarrassment. But she took me upstairs, and attempted to get it out. I was crying, mortified to the core.

It got worse. She couldn’t get it out. So she: got. my. FATHER. (…read more, jezebel.com)

Image by Samantha Gallagher.

Yes, you read that title correctly, and no it’s not The Onion spoofing anyone: via the Meeting Boy Tumblr, I found Want a raise? Wash your vagina (dailykos.com). In a post today, Daily Kos’s dhonig points out that one of the nation’s top-read conservative women’s magazines Woman’s Day is running a large ad from Summer’s Eve that combines advertising and editorial, telling women “how to ask for a raise” with the first and top suggestion being that women should thoroughly clean their vaginas the morning they plan to assert their worth in the workplace and ask for higher wages. Yes: we now know the *real* reason women are paid less.

Summer’s Eve is a company that primarily sells vaginal douches.

This is so many all kinds of wrong, it’s difficult to know where to start. The suggestion here is that by the very nature of the main thing that makes a woman a woman — her vagina — is so dirty (smelly, shameful) that it must be cleaned or else she cannot feel confident about her worth. And therefore risks her value, risks her chance at an equal stake in the workplace, and risks success due to the way her dirty vagina will surely make her feel when she asks for what she would otherwise deserve if she were a man.

But let’s look at Summer’s Eve’s core product. The douche. Aside from the “wash your vagina” equaling self-worth message, for me the ongoing problem under all this is douching itself; an inherently unhealthy practice for the vagina. Summer’s Eve makes a product that traffics on shame, and is problematic for vaginal health. When a woman douches, the rinse actually does more harm than good by stripping out all the helpful bacteria that keeps the vaginal ecosystem healthy and robust. Douching weakens the vaginal immune system and creates imbalance that takes a few days for the vagina to recover from and get the chemicals back in order. The vagina is in a constant state of aqueous flux, like a crystal clear tidepool, truly a self-maintaining ecosystem. Think of Summer’s Eve (and its ilk) as a BP-like entity, and you get why this is so acutely disturbing for sex educators like myself who have a vested stake in promoting accurate sexual health information.

I don’t understand how a magazine “for women” such as Woman’s Day could allow this, all the way through approval and edits, and by printing it, are endorsing the message. Shows how far behind the lives of real women these entities have gotten. Worse, some women are going to be affected by this. Shame on the editors of this magazine, and on Summer’s Eve. I hope this becomes a PR disaster that wakes them the hell up.

Here’s Daily Kos, where you can see more of the ad and read the post:

(…) What is the very first thing you should consider if you want a raise? What is the most important thing of all?

Yup, wash that vagina, and wash it good. Remember the sandalwood-scented balls. You don’t want any, ahem, untoward odors to interfere with your chances, do you? What’s that you say? You don’t have an odor problem? You’re clean, you bathe regularly, and you don’t really need advice to use a product that “cleanses away odor-causing bacteria from the external vaginal area?” What are you, a barbarian? This is a raise you’re talking about. (…read more, dailykos.com)

I’m sorry Tron fans; and no, this item is nowhere near as hot as Olivia Wilde in her Tron Legacy costume. But I have to show you the Tron-a Sutra (wonderhowto.com, via Our Kitchen Sink). They shot 20 positions plus a video (sadly not embeddable; yes I know this non-sharing tactic is the mark of cheap linkbait but damn the video is pretty awesome).

Jasmine at Girls Out West: vibrator Samurai

With the globally enforced utensil embargo on Australia, Jasmine at Girls Out West (gallery) must combat the threat of starvation with only the crudest of tools at hand. Girls down under sure are fierce.

(Alt: vibrators and melons may satisfy, but cleanup is a pain in the arse.)

The InDecent Bed

No one enjoys seeing Brits being scandalized and spilling their tea to shriek “but that would be indecent!” more than me. But with this one, I’m actually having to squint to see what’s indecent. Today the British InDecent Bed launched to the tune of £50,000; perhaps it’s truly indecent to our refined UK friends — especially as compared to the Folsom Bed and Dungeon Beds scandalous designs. Um, where are the hidden indecencies? Anyway you know how much I love blogging sex luxury items, no matter how outrageous… I could totally see Victoria Beckham owning something like this.

(…) The name “InDecent” most probably comes from the fact that they hand-stitch an image of the owners making love onto the bed’s headboard. The image looks like a patterned mosaic when viewed from close, but when you take a look from a distance, you can clearly see the raunchy affair. The custom made bed costs a whopping £50,000 (approx. $77,150) and for the price, they offer a custom photoshoot in Los Angeles with a top glamour photographer – Sante D’Orazio, Guido Argentina or Warwick Saint*. After the photoshoot, they airbrush the image and stitch it into the headboard in a range of individual colored panels. This tedious process takes more than three months to complete. (…read more, bornrich.org)

* Ed note: hot pics.

It’s an end-of-the-day story, but today attorneys general from 17 US states sent a joint letter demanding that Craigslist remove its Adult Services section “because the website cannot adequately block potentially illegal ads promoting prostitution and child trafficking.” NPR reports in Craigslist Asked To Drop Erotic Services Ads,

(…) “No amount of money, however, can justify the scourge of illegal prostitution and the suffering of the women and children who will continue to be victimized, in the market and trafficking provided by Craigslist,” the letter said. (…read more, npr.org)

There is a very necessary issue to address in here. But it would be most wise to temper the approach of the US attorneys general with this item — today’s stunning report from Lawsome.net titled In Sweden, Buying Sex Is Illegal. However, Selling It Is Not. In short, strict criminalization of sex work allows those using tech for access to make it easier to do bad things, as does the failure to recognize the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary prostitution. Snip:

(…) Since the Sex Purchase Act was enacted, the sex trade has been forced underground into more isolated and dangerous conditions. Statistics suggest that there has simply been an increase in hidden prostitution, including via the internet. It appears that the Swedish government may be ignorant of the many ways sex industries have been utilizing modern technology for the past ten to twenty years or so. Many people, including an incredible number of prostitutes themselves, believe the law has made them incredibly more vulnerable to violence perpetrated by buyers. Shockingly, lawmakers and authorities never burdened themselves to consult the actual sex workers or sex workers’ organizations with regard to their plight. (…)

Many women’s groups even spoke out against the law, proclaiming that the law did not protect women, but rather hurt them by reinforcing patriarchal attitudes towards women and their sexuality, thereby damaging their integrity. Conversely, supporters of the law argued that it was in place to limit men’s access to women’s bodies, although the fact of the matter remains that others are placing restrictions upon another’s own person. The law also fails to recognize the differences between voluntary and non-voluntary prostitution, and that perhaps consenting adults should have the right to freely sell or purchase sex. Simply criminalizing sex work blatantly ignores the more expansive social welfare services needed to combat prostitution, and the deeper circumstances that cause it to occur. (…read more, lawsome.net, thank you Rick S)

Agent Provocateur had me re-upping my fangirl card with their recent retro-sexy video campaign to promote the Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, “Private Tapes.” Released and announced this morning, “Betty Sue” however, may be the best AP has created yet — and I wish it was an embeddable video so I could help it go viral. In it, supermodel Kirsty Hume stars as a no-apologies female pornographer and voyeur — and the turn “Betty Sue” takes as femme fatale Hume asserts her sexual power had me wanting to stand in my chair and applaud, throw my panties at the screen in glee, and simultaneously buy a new pair from AP. Super-stylish, dirty and glossy-chic, it’s 100% perfection. Their behind-the-scenes video is fun, too.

You are already familiar with the work of evil genius (and total sweetheart) Oatmeal — he is the creator of infamous and unsettlingly hilarious online memes such as 10 Reasons it Would Rule to Date a Unicorn, The 8 Phases of Dating, How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, How to Suck at Facebook, and the lesser-known How Many Baboons Could You Take in a Fight? (Armed With Only a Giant Dildo). He is just as funny in his talk (above) where he explains how these awesome comics are maded, and how they are created to leverage viral campaigns. Watch him talk! You will LOL out loud.

I too have been an unwitting Oatmeal traffic minion. And I’m cool with it: I’ve blogged a number of his creations in the past, such as his spoof dating site Zombie Harmony. But since I just released a book on how to kiss, and I *just* made this sweet video to go with it, do check out the awesome Oatmeal comic, Types of Bad Kissers.

Mr. Oatmeal spoke after me in Seattle last Saturday afternoon for Gnomedex. Then we had drinks. It was awesome.

Quickies and loving couples who occasionally like to “make fuck” aside (as compared to “making love”): for some guys it’s going to boil down to understanding the difference between a quick-and-dirty come-on — versus a bit more teasing, cat-and-mouse. However, there’s a little bit of ca-ca to step around first.

Sex ed colleague (and longtime friend) Dr. Charlie Glickman has a must-read post up right now called The Most Important Thing That Men Who Have Sex With Women Need to Know. It’s an elaboration on a “groping vs. cuddling” point made in articles by a Fox News sex writer, but Glickman mines nuggets of practical wisdom for guys about initiating sex with girls.

Let me be absolutely clear: I’m not in agreement with the post’s intro where he explains, but still excuses, the awful generalizations by Fox News writer Logan Levkoff. I think Levkoff is not forced by anyone to use lame sexual stereotypes (I should know, I write for conservative mainstream media outlets about sex) and that she needs to step up herself and be responsible about using tired and insulting titles like “5 Ways to Get Your Wife to Have More Sex With You,” which calls men whiners who need to grow up. Ugh. No. Stop it. Really. Please: no more articles about sex that insult male readers, while promising to tell these guys how to “get” women to do something sexual. This is a problem. We who work the front lines of the sex-positive sex ed movement have been trying to undo the damage of this exact mindset for decades. It is like talking to your readers about movies as if they only have VCRs. While we’re on the topic of Fox on Sex, take Ian Kerner’s misleading ‘evils of pornography’ article with this female-authored “how to trick your women” stereotype back to wherever you go to stand in line with Hannity to stuff tired old tropes into Rupert Murdoch’s gaping Fox-hole. But the way Charlie explains what is at the heart of something cavalier Levkoff stated (about the way men relate to womens’ sexuality when it’s time to get it on), is riveting.

Anyway: what Charlie wrote is golden for straight guys. I want all my straight-guy friends to read it. Here’s a snip from the middle of Dr. Glickman’s great article, which gets to the point on what I think a lot of guys miss — and some key things to understand about sex with girls that could really unlock making hot sex happen. It’s just a *bit* more sophisticated than “how to get her to have more sex with you.” Which means it’s sage advice for guys who don’t believe everything they read about initiating sex with women from the “tricks” promised in Fox News. (Double entendre intended.) Snip:

(…) Logan also touched on a raw nerve when she wrote:

Snuggle, Don’t Grope. You’re in the mood, so you reach out and grab us—our breasts, butt, or genitals, that is. Guys, believe me when I tell you that this is the biggest sin you can commit when trying to seduce a woman. It will not send us into an orgasmic swoon. (And, hey, if it does, you don’t need my advice, right?). Neither will groping us in the kitchen while we’re unloading the dishwasher.

Of course, for some folks, the occasional grope or grab can lead to a hot and fun quickie. But what most men don’t realize is that all women in our society are on the receiving end of unwanted sexual attention at some point in their lives, and most of them get it a lot. Women are catcalled on the street. They’re harassed in bars, groped in clubs, and whistled at in the grocery store. They’re told that they need to be sexy to be valued and then they’re attacked as sluts. Simply put, women put up with sexual intrusion for most of their lives, in big ways and small. It happens everywhere and most men have no idea how much of an impact it has.

I’ve heard quite a few men say that women should just take it as a compliment. Ironically, these are often the same guys who lose it if a man cruises them, winks at them, or simply appears to be sexually interested in them. Seems like a double standard to me. Until and unless men wrap their brains around what that’s like for the women in their lives, they’re not going to understand why their girlfriends, wives, and partners often get annoyed by being groped. (…read more, charlieglickman.com)

Image from this Explicite Art gallery (explicit, for certain).

I’m still reeling from the way my talk at Gnomedex came out; it was pretty much an unplanned 20 minutes, with the goal of talking about… well, exactly what I ended up talking about. But I just kind of let go… And to my amazement, I got a standing ovation at Gnomedex. In the ten years of the conference (Bethgo calls it, “the people’s TEDx”), there have only been three standing ovations, and I have the honor of being the only woman to have received such a deeply heartfelt compliment. It’s scary, and exciting.

I know you are going to like this one. It’s got teeth.

Derek K. Miller summed it up beautifully:

Time for some sex talk. We can’t make stable or sustainable online social media models for sexuality. Culture and media talk about sex in increasingly problematic ways: either as a bad and scary thing, or as something that doesn’t exist. Abstinence education caused spikes in STDs, unplanned pregnancies, and more, for instance. A sex-positive approach is descriptive, rather than proscriptive, and applies principles of harm reduction to sexuality. Understand what consent is, how safe sex works, and so on. Started podcasting in 2005, first female podcaster—but there was a backlash when iTunes started podcast support, and Violet was the top podcast. Another example of building a sex-positive community and then having the rug pulled out. If you want to see where things are most fragile, and where people are most hypocritical, start talking about sex. In social media now, we’re swimming through an ocean of bullshit and snake oil. Facebook is Wal-Mart for your communities. Why do Terms of Service vaguely exclude sex, and get used to shut down sex talk online? Do 500 million Facebook users never have sex? We need a harm reduction approach to social media. Gatekeepers shouldn’t decide what’s okay and what’s not okay to talk about. Sexuality is not a drug, not an illegal substance. It’s something that keeps us connected to our bodies. It’s beautiful, and gatekeepers can’t keep telling us it’s not.

Thank you Chris Pirillo and Imei Hsu, and the incredibly supportive Gnomedex staff. Thank you, people who watched, applauded, and shared your time with me!

I’ll do a post later highlighting a couple of other talks I loved. Until then, here’s a pic of dotBen and I, by our dear friend Brian Solis (and this might explain why I kept being mistaken for Lady Gaga):

Watch the Lady Java video if you must: do not bother unless you are the one person who totally fapped to Christina Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight video. I’ll get my geek on to peep the FleshDrive* news item instead — and all I will say is, $39.95, really:

“Hundreds of adult movies in the palm of your hand” is the motto behind New York-based FleshDrive, a new company selling USB thumbdrives filled with porn. The small devices are targeted at busy travelers and others looking/lurking for virus-free porn, and they come in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB capacities for your viewing pleasure.

(…) All of the movies are formatted for Windows Media Player (.wmv), and the FleshDrive Web site (Google it at your own risk, with the knowledge that the site is extremely NSFW) contains more than 20 “genres” that let you choose your own adventure. A very quick glance at the store shows only 4GB capacities for sale right now at $39.95 a pop, with straight and gay options available as well. (…read more, news.cnet.com)

* cNet wouldn’t link to it, so I did. ::sigh / Also: someone please tell FleshDrive the word is spelled “discreet.” Unless their flash drives really do arrive in a series of segmented parts. Tres discrete.

It’s just the best no-apologies San Francisco Honda owner motorcycle ad ever pecked out on a keyboard. Excerpted below because things this good just never last… And here you thought the Inception-rimming ad was genius. No so. (thanks, Korntee!)

Frankenstein Honda CB 750 cafe-ish womanizer/ Or parts bike – $700 (richmond / seacliff)

You are looking at one sexy BBW of a bike. Her name is Bertha and she loves to ride. I bought Bertha a year ago and she has been my moped on steroids. I only ride her around the city when I need to get somewhere fast. She is a k model with an F motor clip ons, two tires the back is new the front needs to be replaced before long. Dual disc up front on this bitch because fat chicks don’t stop on a dime they stop on big wet burritos. One fork seal is blown. Clear coat on the tank is coming off. But just like any hot fat chick you date they have problems so what do you expect? Give her love and she will get you laid. Does she need work? fuck yeah she does but you could ride her for years and only do the bare minimum and she would be fine. Starts up right away on the first time but then she needs to sit there while she gets her juices flowing. compression check was within specifications. Can you fucking believe that? If you are some skinny mission hipster/trustafarian this would be the perfect bike for you to hide your wealth behind, and mitigate your outrageous 5k collection of apple products you can’t even use but to browse the internet and post pics of you facebook playing the same three cord on your guitar with some stupid scarf on your neck. This truly is a poor persons Honda. The only problem with hipsters is you are probably too weak and pot saturated to wield such a big bitch; Hipsters are used to women who starve themselves on cigarettes, cocaine, bottled water, and tofu patties. I think a 50cc Buddy would be really up your ally. If you have any questions let me know. If they are funny and not entirely stupid I may answer. If you actually want to buy this thing I will probably in all likely hood respond. If there are no buyers I will ghost ride this bitch into a wall for 500 and you can video that shit and put it on youtube or digg if you are one of those.

Edit: Sale Pending. And I posted a pic of some of the sweet tang Bertha helped me land. Better hope the buyer doesn’t follow through.

Well, this is a twist that no one expected; with another twist. European porn company Private announced a few days ago that they are totally cool with “pirating” because they see it as free advertising for services they want to develop that will be made of content that people *actually* want to pay for. To me, I like the sound of the pressure of market forces in this statement: I’m seeing new torrent sites go online every week (especially in Eastern Europe) that are packed with files, and I think that for businesses whose pockets are not infinitely deep, it’s better to come up with a reasonable and sustainable business plan that adjusts around distribution changes, than to try and control something that is looking uncontrollable (meaning the relationship of consumers to purchase point content). Give people something that’s worth paying for — now that’s a bold idea for entertainment, erotic and otherwise, isn’t it?

The next day, Private announced an enormous federal lawsuit for trademark and copyright infringement against a number of named tube sites — for piracy.

Anyway, the reaction to Private’s initial announcement has been mixed. While people like me are curious to see entertainment product makers explore the creation of new opportunities that could be consumer-led, others freaked out about Private’s certain path to doom via their “piracy-okay” announcement. Their stock price plummeted the day they made the announcement. So, did they backpedal?

Techdirt has a nice unbiased story an interesting video in which Private’s spokesman explains that the internet killed the porn industry:

Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about an economist who tried to apply the whole CwF+RtB concept to the porn industry. Apparently, some porn execs have been doing exactly the same thing. Private Media Group is a publicly traded, multi-million dollar porn company, that has been a leader in porn in Europe for many, many years. The company just went through a management shakeup, bringing back an old CEO, Berth Milton (the son of the company’s founder). In discussing his initial plans, he said that the internet “turned into the worst thing that’s ever happened to the adult business.” But, if you read between the lines, he isn’t saying that it’s the internet that’s the problem, but that the internet pulled the rug out from old business models. He immediately followed it up by saying:

But there are also plenty of opportunities. There are ways of making money from non-paying traffic and that’s what Private is going to do. I can’t reveal anything more about our strategy, but we’re going to be more and more free, which will help us recruit paid subscribers.

That was just a few weeks ago… but he’s now moving forward with those plans, and is saying that he wants to embrace “pirates,” in a new interview with NewTeeVee:

“We will be extremely happy the more people are pirating our content and the more they look at it.”

Why? Well, it looks like Milton has come to the same conclusion as many others in terms of content business models… (…read more, techdirt.com)

Photo by Modern Citizen.

I’m so upset and worried about the Facebook/Foursquare/Gowalla marriage from hell where you can’t get your home address deleted once it’s posted unless you get enough friends to “flag” a check-in that I’m quitting Foursquare and Gowalla — for starters (that link is to a friend asking Mark Zuckerberg how tho get his home address deleted from Facebook’s new “Places” feature, announced a few hours ago, which makes a location public if it gets “popular” — and homes are, apparently according to this video, to FB anyone’s home is fair game.) Also: “By default people near you can see where you are and your friends can check you into a location without your consent.” (Buzz link)

As a distraction I visited Our Kitchen Sink, where they fantasized about Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis scissoring. So I present what I’d rather be doing: looking at the newest Australian amateur Girls Out West gallery of Anais and Evette scissoring to soothe. Add this gallery of Bonny and Peppe having girl-girl sex for the first time as GoW proprietor Annie watched and filmed, and I can chill down a bit while I delete my accounts.

Ugh.

It’s pretty safe to say that many people use Facebook, and most of the users hate it. That’s just weird. Your website users should not hate your website. Despite this, thousands of people miss the Our Porn, Ourselves Facebook page. In this update post, I explain everything that has happened so far and a bit about my next steps — steps that involve evolving tech and community past the frailties of places like Facebook and Tribe.net and Flickr (and all the others), so we women and men, and all genders/orientations who support us, can have a safe, sane conversation about pornography. And build community around sex-positivity — to make this world a better place, and to make porn safer for everyone.

It’s crystal clear that the easiest way to break a website is to talk about sex. And the fastest way to reveal hypocrisy is to be a woman and talk about pornography in any way that is not fear, hatred, accusation, or anger. Social media needs a slap for not growing up. And the anti-porn people, for pulling this childish and pathetic little stunt: I’m coming for you. I have no reason to be nice anymore. This conversation about pornography and its community will happen.

I think you’ll get a lot from this update, if you haven’t peeped it already:

On July 27, 2010, Facebook removed the Our Porn, Ourselves Facebook campaign page. After the page was removed, anti-porn organization Porn Harms claimed victory and thanked Facebook for the deletion, on the organization’s Facebook page and their Twitter feed. Our deleted group had roughly 3,500 members, most of whom were women (I combed through the member logs frequently). Our page had over three times the members of Porn Harms’ anti-porn page.

According to Facebook the deletion was in response to reported violations of Facebook’s Terms of Service, among which include obscenity. As I am an active and high-profile figure in the online social media space, I am not a newcomer to social media, or implementing Terms of Service. I also knew that someone was persistently trying to get every piece of art removed from our gallery — regardless of the content, nearly every user-uploaded photo was mysteriously being flagged and removed. (…read more, ourpornourselves.org)

Bonus idiocy: Digitally Blonde got banned permanently from FB for responding personally to everyone who tried to “friend” her. Her post has all kinds of juicy sexual hypocrisy, in case you’re wondering how far the world’s most popular social media site has gone away from actually serving the people who use its service. This model of media is broken. Facebook is a house you cannot ever live in, no matter how many times you let its master fuck you.

Photo by Modern Citizen.

Update Wednesday, August 18: BlogHer just added this post in support and adds their voice to the discussion > Sex and Censorship: What Recent Attacks on Online Sex Discussions Have to Do With Your Blog (blogher.com)

This image is without the words in the way. Yay! Stupid words. The gallery is here. I think there are more words that go with this but I will pretend to read them when my boyfriend walks back into my office later. (rollingstone.com, thanks, realmms!)

Update: I also love the True Gay Photoshop version.

Can you imagine AT & T as a sex partner? At the foot of the bed, while you clutch the sheet to yourself in disappointment *again* as they promise you it won’t happen again, I swear, I’ll be able to keep the call up until you’re done, this time I will, I promise.

I’m guessing the whole issue comes down to a lack of mature apps.

Here’s Thomas Roche on the bullshit OkCupid pulled last week with the help of a lot of wishful bloggers, with iPhone Users Do Not Have More Sex:

In case you were wondering, what publicists do all day is think up the kind of shit OK Cupid pulled last week. Reported extensively in a variety of media outlets and geekblogs, the online dating site’s media coup came by saying iPhone users have more sex.

What people who write for geekblogs do all day is sit around and tell themselves that OKCupid says that iPhone users have more sex, presumably because they all have iPhones. This is sort of the techie equivalent of a German sausage maker with a handlebar mustache who stuffs pig entrails with ground meat all day while wearing a “Germans Make the Best Lovers!” wifebeater.

And who knows? Maybe they do. But if I’m that handsome devil’s nightly bed-partner, I don’t need his T-shirt to tell me one way or the other.

Speaking of which, speculating on how much sex people with iPhones have, and what it would be like to be with the kind of cut, built, sweet, hot, well-endowed, obviously brilliant and kinda sensitive sort of person who would own an iPhone seems to have been a favorite sport for quite some time, among people with iPhones.

But I digress. To be more specific, what OKCupid said last week was this (…read more, techyum.com)

More sex partners does not equal more sex, duhhrrr.

Image: Marilyn Monroe via wizardface.

The above video is “How to Make a Fifi” and — it should be noted to avoid cultural misunderstandings — the video is a special, delicate slice of rich cultural American heritage that Brits (or other overseas visitors) may understand the nuances of only after watching the film, “Deliverance.” It’s from the Ranker post that must be seen to be believed: The 7 Greatest Homemade Sex Toys for Men. And hey — guys, I do not judge. I mean, if I had a peen, I’d probably have some sort of a wanky craft night every other Tuesday for the damn thing. But still… Wow.

Now go get a classy Tenga, because I sure can’t.