The paintings of Saturno Butto are not for everyone; they are rife with dark erotic mysticism and heavy Catholic themes, and combine a world of wantonly obscene medical fetish with BDSM relationship scenarios — things that alone would be intense, but together will surely strike a never, somewhere. Which, I think, makes them at turns erotic, disturbing, and like all complex art, important. Zoetic Ebb (Opium Fields) sums up the work of Saturno Butto perfectly saying:

Cult painter Saturno Butto portrays fetish alongside religious ritual, painstakingly executed in oil by a classically-trained hand. Here forceps and gags are sacred, eating, masturbation and bondage are divine ceremonies and provocative harlots are saints. Butto’s use of fetish tools as religious objects and vice versa moves beyond simple shock value; he elevates the themes that classic religious painting deemed taboo, undressing martyrs and placing pleasure on its rightful throne. Gold and vermillion, royalty and blood, ecstasy and violence converge here to build shrines to beauty, seduction and power all the while demolishing altars of dogma.

See much more in this Opium Fields post (thanks, Praemedia).

Image by the incredible Rebecca Tillett.

* Right now, California health and safety officials are deciding whether or not porn actors will be required to wear condoms for work. Will it drive porn elsewhere? (guardian.co.uk)

* On Twitter today many people have asked if I read Tiger Woods’ sex texts. I wish this job had hazard pay. Well, making money off of Jocelyn James’ honey pot just wasn’t enough to pay her plastic surgeon, so she went and bought herself sextingjoslynjames.com where she will make piles of money, for sure. Dlisted lists them, saving us the pain of sending her traffic, and explains, “In dirtier messages, Tiger calls Joslyn his whore and tells her that he wants to choke her out, slap her ass, bite her body and pull her hair. You know, basically the same kind of text messages your boss writes you when you’re running late to work.” (dlisted.com)

* Welcome to the creation of a generation that will not understand that a tampon goes in a vagina. Seriously: the word “vagina” has been banned from all TV advertisements, specifically in regard to Kotex commercials. Has the world gone absolutely insane, or are the broadcast networks just ensuring that they become obsolete to the internet even faster? Read Terms “Vagina” and “Down There” Banned from T.V. Ads. (womensrights.change.org)

* The cursed URL Sex.com was about to go up for auction; now creditors have pulled it from the auction block and want it in bankruptcy. The saga continues! (reuters.com)

* This is the awesome, pure and simple — and if anyone tells you they’re a sex educator, ask them about STD’s and know they have no excuse not to know their shit. Use the free online STD/STI course for non-clinicians to see who’s a fake sex educator, or to become a better one yourself. Should be required for everyone giving out sex advice. (stdhivtraining.org)

* Speaking of sex educators, one of my favorites and most informed Charlie Glickman asks why there aren’t more men in sex education. It goes right along with the constant question as to why there aren’t more men doing sex blogging. Superb and fascinating. (charlieglickman.com)

* Finally, some sanity with the teens being prosecuted for child porn for sex texting pictures of themselves, and the horrifying bullying and threats by moralistic prosecutors on the case: Court Says Parents Can Block ‘Sexting’ Cases. Go ACLU! Go smart parents! (nytimes.com)

It was the CNN article that finally set me off. I mean, nothing personal to the nice CNN photographers, writers and the guy in charge of CNN I chatted with while drinking beer in my pajamas at 4am in the Hilton lobby as people like Foursquare’s co-founders pretended to backstroke across the marble floor a couple nights ago. There’s nothing wrong with their coverage, but there is everything to be desired. It’s just that the SxSWi coverage in 5 things we learned at South by Southwest is irritatingly superficial and annoyingly uninformed. And that coverage everywhere else is scant. Which is weird for a tech conference that just burst its seams at 15K attendees.

If you read Jolie O’Dell’s piece Why SXSW Sucks, you get a very unfortunate picture, but it adds to a story that I’d like to see told — even if her experience doesn’t necessarily match mine.

Last year SXSWi had grown by 4,000 attendees and had its first queer tweetup meeting; this year it added another 4K and had its first LGBT panel — not that the overall population of tech conference attendees care about such things, but these are markers of growth, diversity and a certain maturity. There were so many panels and talks I kept saying it was “stacked” meaning that there were too many on top of each other, and the sheer volume of attendees made it difficult to see some talks (lines to get in or rooms at overflow capacity), and the other important part of SXSWi, the hallway and party learning, meeting and networking, was incredibly difficult with masses of people. It was great to have lots of people; it was also too big to be useful in the ways we need it to be.

This is a fork in the road for the organizers of SXSW Interactive. They either need to decide if the success of their event hinges on the parties and social events of their conference, with the panels and hard content as a sideshow, or they need to reign in the quality and depth of the panels/talks to ensure future attendance. The keynote interview disaster I describe below is a great example: you just can’t pick a semi-random dude who has never been to SXSW to do an interview with the founder of Twitter based on the fact that he was the one to come up with the idea.

Unlike the CNN article describes, there weren’t masses of new gadgets on the showroom floor. At all. There were booths of crap and more crap, startups whose “sell by” date was practically already expiring when I walked by. There were cool booths where we could say hi to cool companies we recognize, and meet new innovators. But the overall vibe was bizarre. It really was like Dave Chappelle’s Internet In Real Life skit, where you couldn’t walk ten feet without someone shoving schwag in your hand and asking for your contact information; it was human spam and popups in real life. The booth babes were unsettling, and you all know I do like me some booth babes — but they were conspicuous, as if trading off male sweat for mileage. I think the desperation of male geeks is assumed, but miscalculated: just because there were a lot of single guys there who code, it doesn’t mean they have no taste. The most telling part was when the loudspeaker announced that the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders were about to make an appearance. I Tweeted snarkily that it was obviously because geeks just love football. But the proof was in the perspiration. The line to meet the cheerleaders: 2 people. The line for free hot dogs: around 40.

Don’t forget the girl who nearly burst into tears when my friend asked her what she was handing out on behalf of a tech company. My friend said, “What’s in the brochure? I just want to know what I’m being handed before I take anything.” The girl almost fell apart. “I… I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry. I have to get someone to tell you.” My friend said that’s okay, but the girl blurted, “I don’t know, they didn’t tell me! I just hand them out. I’m going to go have to ask someone else… I’ll get someone in charge, I’m sorry, I really don’t understand what it is. I don’t know, I’m sorry.” (It was a Microsoft Silverlight handout.)

Overall, I’m hearing that the first day and last day panels were the favorites — though everything in between was at capacity. I have to agree: the few talks I attended in between were run by people who were green as can be (and therefore the title did not match the session’s subject), or it was a panel/talk masquerading as a self-promoting product launch. People really liked our How To Not Be A Douchebag At SXSW panel, and I heard great things about How SciFi Shapes the Internet, Open Science, the Experimental UI Design panel (though sadly it was too full to accommodate everyone), What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?, Battledecks, The Parody Home Companion: DIY Fair Use Determinations, and Mapping and Geolocation: Turnkey Approaches You Need to Know.

It was not all great; joking from the award stage about us being “out of our basements” was just plain insulting and wrong. Once again the keynote interview was a painful bomb — so bad that there was actually a line to leave during the interview. In all honesty, I was in a restaurant around the corner because the value of ‘hamburger with bacon’ was greater than the value of ‘Twitter founder interviewed by some dude’ so I was not actually there. No, I avoided carnage splatter by watching Ev’s interview get murdered on Twitter (on my phone) instead. Once again, someone with the potential to be an interesting subject was interviewed blandly, horribly — by someone we’re now finding out had not only never been to SXSWi, but who didn’t even bother to monitor Twitter during the interview for backchannel feedback. Even I can do this; it’s elementary. Tech scene, where is our Charlie Rose? If only we know some exciting, edgy, experienced media and interview people in the tech scene… oh, wait.

The CNN article and video reminded us for the billionth time that location based services are popular. But no one had anything to actually say about this story: how they are changing the way we make plans in real life, what they do to venues and promoters, how they are used by companies at SXSWi to get buzz going and make parties into promo fests — nor how people were lying to keep crowds away from venues, or how Foursquare was used to grief (humiliate) certain people. For instance, contrived celeb Julia Allison was at one point a location that literally anyone could check into: who was Mayor of Julia? And during the keynote interview I saw that Mark Cuban’s Ego was also a venue. Some of us had fun with it: I think I’m still currently Foursquare’s Mayor of Stuck In The Revolving Doors at the Austin Hilton.

Jolie was right when she wrote, “Too many people, not enough tech.” Usually at this time of the year, there are a million announcements and launches. But — right now is a seriously shit time for startups, period. It’s the climate, and a lot of people I talked to were attending for companies in information-gathering-mode. There were so many attendees that it was difficult to get into venues and people were really spread out. It didn’t help that venues, such as The Ginger Man, would intentionally hold a line for hours for appearances — and the doorman did not dispute this rancid, shitty fact that ruined part of people’s evenings. It made many of us go elsewhere: Jolie complains that the celebs bailed on big parties and that’s certainly true. What I did see celebs do was quite nice, though: instead of the VIP rooms, social media became real life and everyone hung out in non-exclusive places. This behavior proved to me that the so-called web celebs who use and truly understand social media are different than traditional LA-value-based celebrities (Hollywood/porn valley).

You see, they hung out — anywhere. With everyone. While the Hollywood/pornstars see social media as yet another gate by which they can pretend to connect with fans yet keep the riff-raff out, others (like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Rose) just hung out with everyone. While Ashton Kucher was making my friends look like drooling idiots at a VIP hole, Tarantino was at the Rackspace party and then hit the RVIP to sing kareoke with the nerds. The party was in the Hilton lobby, where I stayed and anyone could join. Foo Fighters in the elevator? Yup. One night we said screw the lines and VIP crap, and threw a late night party in the revolving doors of the Hilton (it was Ed Hunsinger’s idea), donned party hats, played music, and got everyone to dance in circles for hours. Who joined us at the Hilton anti-VIP? Anyone who wanted to. Hotel staff, friends of friends, Callie Lewis, Dave McClure, Glenda Bautista, some guy named Calcanis, Kevin Rose, CNN, Ustream, Laughing Squid, Scoble, a lot of web celebs, major tech company founders and CEO’s, respected tech blog editors (looking great in party hats), and more. On one hand, who cares? I despise celebrity crap. But people want to know. And It was fun, fun, fun.

I hope to go back next year. I’d like to actually cover it; I intended to cover it for this blog or one of the media outlets courting me right now (specifically about SXSW sex and tech content), but the sex content was so weak I nearly wept. Nothing to report this year. It really was like you could have called all the sessions either ‘Oh My God My Kids Might Find Sex On The Internet’ or ‘The Future of Porn As Told From Five Years In The Past’. It has never been more clear that porn people have no clue about online sex habits + social media, and that porn will continue to be caned by innovation. Granted, many non-sex sites need to get up to speed on adult media consumption as well; it’s my theory that sex-positivity is a key element of business survival online. Of course it all just set me and some devs going in some exciting directions — in addition to having me bring back a ton of innovative ideas for a not-for-profit site I’m advising on delivering sex education on a mass scale. The queer panel was exciting, but left a lot to be desired for me: I didn’t want to know what their blogging policies are, I wanted to know how to encourage queer participation in the very straight tech world, and what I can do as a straight player in the space to foster visibility — and get the tech world to tap into the wealth of knowledge and decades of experience that queer communities have about community management. That’s something many people in tech pretend to have experience about, but do not, and I can tell you that LGBT people have social community conflict resolution skills that straight, fake ’social media management gurus’ only dream of. Maybe I’ll get my answers next year.

Overall, it was a very good trip for me. It was reliably unexpected.

Related: Imei Hsu’s first SXSWi experience was this year, as told in the post I Am Not That Douchebag.

I think it’s kind of odd how whenever I feel a non-sex post coming on, I have a strong sense of duty that I need to bracket it with sexual content. Not sure why. But, I did get a fresh new slew of fetish girl galleries in my inbox before I got off the plane, and they are unusual enough to share. If you’re ready for something a little different than the usual pretty girl, Met Art style gallery posts I like to curate, you may find these a welcome distraction.

Girls with braces and mouth fetish, non-explicit: here’s Black Mali, Asian Schoolgirl one and Asian Schoolgirl two, Red Ribbon (tease), and a more extreme Asian-girl white leather mouth gag shoot.

Bondage babes: since I know models who literally do “schoolgirl” shoots on mondays and finish with MILF shoots on fridays, take the Bound MILF galleries with the appropriate grains of salt — I like the electric blue rope, a redhead in hand and ankle cuffs, pretty Karina frog tied in pantyhose. First timers are at Rope Rookie, such as this cutie in glasses, another pantyhose capture in Glamor Bond, this hot girl with lots of attitude, plus a garden-variety blonde in red rope (call me crazy, but I just don’t get the sense she’s an amateur). Light fetish glam in Biting the Bullet, Closet Kink and Pinko.

Gas mask fetish includes Disturbed, an explicit double in Mask Mayhem, Gas Vamp, eerie asphyxiation fetish in Prototype, and you can almost hear the rubber squeak in Matrix. There’s also Tissue Queens and Everyday Slaves (link: no exit).

When I was on the plane home last night I was reading Marc Ecko’s Complex Magazine and came across the Complex photo set with Alison Brie, who I couldn’t immediately place as Mad Men character Trudy Campbell. When I got back online, I was floored that this was dowdy Trudy so I had to share. Happily I also found Trudy’s character on Twitter, along with many other Mad Men characters, including my fave Betty Draper. (She follows me! So cool.)

The Complex video of Brie is not terribly exciting, but I can offer up in exchange the video of Kanye West’s girlfriend Amber Rose (and Complex’s hot Amber Rose gallery):

The Complex Girls galleries have a lot of babes to offer and is the first babe gallery I’ve seen in a long time that gives equal time to all skin colors (FINALLY), including a few women I love such as Amerie, Rihanna and yummy Keri Hilson. They have some good taste in girls, for sure. There’s too much Kim Kardashian (okay, any is too much) and Olivia Munn. I don’t have a Photoshop fetish. And yes, I could point you to the sexy Michelle Trachtenberg set but after I read her interview I lost interest in her altogether: she’s definitely one of the most disappointingly sex-negative, fetish-negative actresses I’ve come across in a long time. Soak up the eye candy for sure, but don’t even bother with their “sex” section: Joanna Angel is great, and a smart interview, but the rest is a snoozefest. Would love to have found a really hip, kick-ass sex column or sex tips for the kind of men that Complex caters to. I want to see Sex Tips For Ballers! Oh well.

Image by Exey Panteleev.

When Paul Carr writes the post, I don’t really need to frame it for you. Here, one of my favorite writers (Carr) tells us about one of my other fave writers (Zoe Margolis) being treated as a second class writer by a mainstream publication in either a desperate attempt to claw for pageviews, or because they foolishly think sex writers (or female writers for that matter) are not legitimate and deserving of respectful treatment. You decide, and do send Zoe some thoughts of support. No one deserves this. Snip:

(…) This time last week, my friend Zoe Margolis – who writes as the Girl With A One Track Mind – was asked by the UK’s Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper to write a column about how she went from being an anonymous sex blogger to a widely-recognised advice columnist and memoirist. Zoe, I should emphasise, does not have sex for money. I know this for a fact: we shared a house at SXSW a couple of years ago and she stubbornly refused to sleep with me, despite the fact that I paid for all of our groceries at Whole Foods.

And yet, thanks to an astonishing but – I hope – innocent piece of lazy subediting, when the IoS published her column they did so under the unambiguously libellous headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt“.

Hoo boy.

The IoS reaslised its mistake (for want of a better word for “misquoting one of our writers as calling herself a whore”) within an hour of the paper going to press and quickly changed the headline in print and online. But of course the damage was already done. Although, according to the paper, only a couple of thousand hard copies had been dispatched to news stands, the web version had already been syndicated to dozens of other sites – including Yahoo! – and such far-flung newspaper websites as the Times of India. Worse still, it took several more hours – and increasingly vocal complaints by Zoe – before the IoS changed the story’s URL which still contained the full wording of the original headline. (…read more, techcrunch.com)

Above image is of a go-go dancer in a glass booth on 6th street around midnight, Austin, Texas (taken by Superpixel). I might have some left when I get back, but they’re really, really popular — and I’m thrilled! Now I’m about to head down the the Hilton lobby to give out the Chocri chocolate bars I designed, free-Tweetup-flashmob style. Why not? They’re chocolate, almond, coffee and an aphrodisiac surprise. Thank you, Chocri!

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that it’s four am friday night (saturday morning) and I’m just getting to this post (I’ve been collecting tips for it for over a week). My hotel room, which got upgraded to a top floor executive suite, is at this moment populated with attractive drunk people (though @dotBen does not drink, and he is fighting South-By-Sars aka SXSRS). One is telling us how she cut some girl’s hair on a dare in a club. I am drinking wine; another is telling us how he danced down stairs at a club with a waitress to the tune of ‘Sugar Plum Fairies’. Now we’re realizing that the free breakfast starts in 4 hours. Which is the perfect time to give you The Blue Guide to Austin:

You’d think that this guide was all about sex. It pretty much is. We’ll start with the obvious.

Strip clubs are on this insider list. What is notable to me is that a significant number of strip clubs in Austin have wifi. Like San Francisco, you can’t see full nudity if they serve alcohol, so don’t be rude if you’re expecting more. A friend recommends Sugar’s Perfect 10 for women saying, “you’ll have to check whether or not you can go without a male escort (I’ve only gone with a boy on my arm; I think the bouncers discourage packs of women looking for their stray husbands).” Strip clubs are for guys, right? No, not here. At Austin La Bare, male dancers cater to a straight female audience. Which means that the 250 women out of 15,000 attendees at SXSW should get their dollars ready.

Research did not reveal a queer strip club for women. But I did find The Femme Mafia. There are also a good number of Austin gay bars and this is a fab LGBT resource linklist.

Now, the convention center is near one of the quietly sexiest, most sex-positive and nationally loved spots in Austin. Forbidden Fruit is literally two blocks from the SXSWi conference. Go there. It is everything you need for that date you didn’t expect, or when a good girl forgets to pack her vibrator and needs something for the room. Get your condoms there, and use them. Or, take that hot nerd there after a panel to see if they warm up…

If you get that date, or notice someone — maybe there’s a fun vibe with a co-attendee? Well, SXSW is not a good place for a real date. However, if you want to find a romantic spot for nibbles, investigate Urban Spoon’s list of Valentine’s Day restaurants in Austin, and Open Table’s list of romantic restaurants (and you can book it from your phone, you hot nerd).

Looking for someone? My sources tell me that Craigslist is a great bet here in Austin. Best place to meet someone you met on Craigslist? SpiderHouse café — one source told me Spiderhouse is highly recommended for you to, “Moon over each other in the outside eclectic garden seating at Spiderhouse. Yes, yummy cocktails, too! The ladies’ bathrooms have these interesting stalls with rolling slide doors that afford quite a lot of…real estate…to move around in. I’ve fantasized about stealing someone into that bathroom.” Best cruising? The Wheatsville Co-Op, conveniently around the corner.

But really, searching SXSW on Casual Encounters is the bomb. You can get it all in Austin right now.

Sexy local St. Claire tells me: “Favorite comfort food because you are out too late and need something warm in your belly before you go home to screw like minks at 5am: Magnolia Cafe on Congress. Also good if you are quite shagged out in the morning. Go sit in the covered garden and have a mimosa while you warm up in the morning sun.” One hot local girl tells me her favorite place to make out is Terrace59 atop Speakeasy (“go up the stairs to the tippy top where the palm trees and banquettes await you to lounge around on.”). She continues, “This is also my favorite place To Make A Spectacle of People. I took a friend up there and spanked her soundly with my jade leather belt in front of a room full of strangers, and even made some new friends as women came up to get their spankings, too! Also, the terrace built into the limestone cliffs at Club de Ville offers a nice seen/unseen place to tease.”

Timley stuff: We’re just missing the big erotic art fest on the 17th, ArtErotica 2010, and the Pornsaints show at the end of this month. There is one SXSW swinger’s party this weekend so you better act fast, while supplies last.

Looking for a good daytime date activity? Go to a shop full of sweets, or get out that nice nerdy camera you love and go for a 1 hour excursion. Austin has some of the best little bakeries in the US. Cupcakes and sweets are incredibly sexy little aphrodisiacs. One of my local sources tell me that for delicious pastries, you can surprise that hot geek babe with something from Upper Crust Bakery, 4508 Burnet Rd; Central Market at Lamar and 35th St (Chocolate Hazelnut Marquis!!!!!), and Sweetish Hill at 1120 W 6th St. Photo walks are some of the best dates I’ve ever had: make it a goal to go shoot some superb local Austin street art — let this Flickr photo pool of Austin street art be your guide. See if you can find a Kudos tag, from the graffiti artist who got caught and arrested through his MySpace page.

If you cruise, just remember it’s Spring Break for Geeks, not South By Girls Gone Wild. All the usual rules apply, but moreso with the fact that your moves will likely be uploaded for all to see. What happens in Austin does not stay in Austin. If you buy someone a drink, don’t expect anything in return and don’t act like you bought someone a drink at an open bar for chrissakes. Asking for someone’s contact info is a privilege, not a right — your business card doesn’t not necessarily get hers (or his). Know that reading a badge looks like you’re looking at my tits, and all girls know when you’re looking at our tits even when you think we don’t notice. (I’ve always thought that men’s badges should be worn at crotch level just to even the score.)

Wow, okay, now I’m getting the stories about geek girls making out at the party I missed. Yay Usestream party; I won’t miss that one next year… They got photos, too. Thus proving that the revolution will be uploaded (along with your public sexual experimentation).

Maybe you are tired of my Lady Gaga fangirling, with all the weird sexual fetishes and alien fashion. That’s okay; maybe you also like me and/or this blog for other things and will happily skip this post. Otherwise, I just watched her new video with Beyonce for “Telephone” and it is absolutely so not a music video, and I love it. In fact, it has nothing to do with the song. It is a bizarre violent cartoon of lesbian malfeasance. Expect lots of rubber couture, catfights, erotic prison scenes, hot butch dykes making out with Gaga, trannies, and the comment about Gaga’s dick is referring to this. Oh, and the video doesn’t make linear or narrative sense; just let it wash over you.

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 eMCi photo.

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.