Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek," has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.... Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters," said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior....
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
There is, however, a great deal of porn available through social-networking websites, much it made by and for the 18-24 year-old age group. XTube, with its communities and networks of friends, may qualify as a social-networking site. But if Tancer is analyzing web searches to determine what people are looking for, and discovered that porn searches are down, does that really prove that people are "consuming" less online porn?
Or...
Does it prove that most of us have found the porn we were looking for, thanks, bookmarked our favorite websites, and don't need to do web searches for porn anymore?
Wednesday, Sept 17th. And you know what? There's only 18 more days to make a HUMP! film. EIGHTEEN. The clock is seriously ticking. I'm going to start posting tips, every day, to hopefully inspire you to be a HUMP! filmmaker, instead of just a HUMP! filmgoer. Sir Savage answers some FAQ in Savage Love this week, and there's tons more information HERE.
HUMP! Tip #1
CASTING. Don't write some elaborate script that's going to be impossible to cast. Find actors first. Remind them that part of the HUMP! protocol is destroying the film, onstage, at the final screening of the festival. It's NOT coming back to haunt anyone. Also remind them that they don't necessarily have to show their face. Get creative. Think Halloween! Think masks. Um, maybe think bunny masks? Like this still from the brand new Vivid Alt flick Honey Bunny?
Little bunny WOOT WOO. Watch the trailer HERE. NSFW (duh).
posted by Charles Mudede on September 16 at 3:29 PM
Here we have a visual problem. The women in the middle (a Swazi princess--indicated by the red feathers--at the reed dance ceremony) is, one, modern and, two, in a very traditional situation. Her face is Vogue, but her breasts are National Geographic. How should we look at her? The traditional breasts negate the modern face (we are seeing nothing)? Or the face negates the breasts (we are seeing everything)? Or should there be no negation and just a coexistence of the two codes (everything/nothing)? Or should we look at the face as the surface (the modern city), and the breasts as the buried past (the ancestral underground)? But these breasts are fresh; they are not old, cold, or dead. Both face and breasts are youthful, yet one is about the youth of now and the other about the youth of the past. How does one resolve this visual complex?
posted by Paul Constant on September 12 at 4:00 PM
The Joy of Sex has been updated. There is apparently much more about pleasing women in the book—the female orgasm wasn't discovered until 1998, after all—and the book now includes cybersex, including something called "teledildonics." There's also a whole section devoted to horseplay. As in equine role play. It remains to be seen if the illustrations are still those same hairy hippies who were getting it on when the book was introduced in 1972:
2008
Enclosure (in a Letter to the Editor) of the Day
posted by Christopher Frizzelle on September 5 at 12:35 AM
Uh, has this already been all over the web? I haven't seen it, a Google image search isn't giving me any matches to it, and the letter-to-the-editor writer (the email they sent is in a thread that mentions http://whatreallyhappened.com and alaskacafe.blogspot.com, though I can't find it on either site) hasn't gotten back to me. It's gotta be fake, right?
Did anyone else just put on Hall & Oates' "Sara Smile"?
Steve Warshak, 42, founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, also was ordered to pay $93,000 in fines. He was convicted in February on 93 counts of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering.
Federal prosecutors accused the company of bilking customers out of $100 million through a series of deceptive ads, manipulated credit card transactions and refusal to accept returns or cancel orders.
Remember, folks, herbal supplements will not make your dick bigger. Love the dick you've got because it's all the dick you're ever gonna get.
Uh, Ms. Wax? How is it that this large and organized movement of non-monogamous heterosexual married couples is never acknowledged by conservatives who seek to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples on the grounds that gay men are insufficiently monogamous? (Lesbian couples are better at monogamy than gay or straight couples, but never mind about that.) If you're sincerely worried about the influence that non-monogamous, legally-married couples will have on currently-monogamous, legally-married couples—and not just looking for something to pin your bigotry on—then you should be up in arms about the organized swinging movement. Check out some of those websites, Ms. Wax. Swingers recruit. Here's a website for a Christian swingers, for crying out loud.
If non-monogamous married couples represent a dire existential threat to the the institution of marriage, how come we never hear any complaints from social conservatives about all these non-monogamous married heterosexuals out there? How come they get a pass?
Probably because it's not really about monogamy, is it?
The chaps who win gold medals—even those as geeky as Michael Phelps—are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy—smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.
But—and this is the thing—success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous.
A boy and his dog... and his dick, too, the boy's dick in there somewhere.
I must confess that, as the frequently mortified co-owner of a yappy lap dog, well, never you mind. Let's just say that all couples that own small dogs eventually have to make a choice about what's more distracting: the dog outside the bedroom scratching at the door and whining its head off or the dog in the room and sleeping and creeping you out. Still, if we were going to make a film, we'd probably exile the dog to the basement. Or something. Because animals are scene stealers, right? One might think with what's in the foreground that no one would even notice the dog in the background. But one would be wrong. That dog is totally upstaging that kid's dick.
Via Fleshbot. And does it even need to be said? NSFW. Well, not NSFYW, JFFM. (Not Safe For Your Work, Just Fine For Mine.)
News
Barista in Bikini Thows Boiling Water on Flasher in Bra and Panties
posted by David Schmader on August 21 at 9:25 AM
At Parkland, Washington's drive-thru espresso stand Java Girls, a lady in a bikini will serve you up the specialty coffee beverage of your choice—unless you're a man wearing a bra and panties and exposing yourself, in which case a Java Girl will douse you with boiling water.
Jamae Feddock, a bikini clad barista at Java Girls, said she first thought the man dressed in women’s underwear and exposing himself was a sick joke, until the man came back several times. “He has underwear over his face, he's wearing hot pink panties now and the underwear that he was wearing is over his face and there's a little peephole so he can see,” Feddock said.
Feddock and another barista were working around 5 a.m. last Thursday when the incident happened. They tried to get a look at the man’s license plate, but that too was covered up with women’s underwear.
When the man came back a third time one of the baristas took a cup of scalding hot water and doused him with it.
First, the fact that the sick-fuck underwear man concealed his license plate with panties is inspired.
Second, it sounds like he might have enjoyed the scalding. As Jamae Feddock told KIRO:
“[We] opened the door and threw boiling hot water on his face and his chest and he said oooh yeah.”
And as Jamae Feddock's sister told KIRO in a follow-up report, the flashing wasn't an isolated incident:
“At the Auburn stand of Java Girls, some guy came through doing something similar,” said Sharia Feddock.
Sharia said things like this don't just happen to bikini baristas. She was flashed when she was working in jeans and a T-shirt.
Sharia said she doesn’t think the flashing incidents have anything to do with being a bikini barista.
The research backs up previous findings that symmetrically proportioned faces are more attractive and suggests that our brains are hard-wired to find symmetry sexy in a potential partner. In our evolutionary past, symmetry may have been an honest signal of flawless development and health.
...
The theory is that disturbances in the womb, infections, poor nutrition and genetic flaws all increase your degree of asymmetry and so good proportions are an honest indication of healthy development and hence a partner's ability to produce healthy children.
My boyfriend is pretty darn symmetrical, but so far he hasn't produced any healthy children for me. We'll keep plugging away at it, though.
...The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. "The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom's, and it feels more natural."
But there are some stumbling blocks. The men who tested the spray-on condom had a few hesitations, Krause says. Some were "a little bit afraid to use the tube" and would only try it on their fingers. Others worried that the mechanism, which hisses as it sprays, might ruin the mood.
For those of us who grew up (or still live) with the incessant problem of indoor insects (a problem that does not exist in Seattle), and a problem that was temporarily solved with some poison blasted from an aerosol can, it will be hard to dissociate the spraying of pests from this spraying of the penis--all the more so if the one who is spraying is the one you are about to do it with.
Here's a link to a more complete story, from the Northern Territory News. This man is an end-of-days hero, Mad Max incarnate, speeding through the Australian bush with a whole lot of pot and a whole lot of testosterone.
Sgt Edwards said Mr Erhardt was arrested and told officers he had "found'' the drugs at a rest stop 100km north of Coober Pedy -- and he intended to smoke all of it at his Noonamah home.
Mr Erhardt also told police he had used the rifle to shoot "kangaroos from the vehicle whilst driving north.''
Mr Erhardt applied twice for bail last week so he could get married before going to jail.
On the eleventh day of this month, around the sixth hour of the afternoon, somewhere near thirteenth and John, a new pleasure seizes my body. The pleasure is triggered by a sudden break in Jaylib's track "The Red," which is playing on my little music machine. Thirty seconds after the track's first minute, the beat breaks down and there's a split second of silence/emptiness. In that split second, the ghost of a beat appears. It is the phantom of the track. The phantom vanishes the moment the banging beat resumes. Realizing I've just heard the ghost of a beat--the sonic equivalent of a pretty face faintly reflected on a winter window--my throat expresses my pleasure with this sound: "uuuuummmmmm."
A moment later, I notice someone is looking up at me. I look down at this person who is looking up at me. I see it is a young woman in booty shorts. Her back is turned to me. She is rising from her knees. I'm not sure if she was gardening or looking for something on the ground. I do, however, know what she's thinking at that very moment: My expression of pleasure (my “uuuuummmmmm”) was triggered by the sight of her ass in short shorts. She gives me the look of accusation. I've done something bad. It's totally rude and unacceptable. Because I do not feel like challenging and correcting her hard reading of the situation, and because men should not look spineless in moments like this, I proudly plead guilty and give her this smile: "Yes, I enjoyed the sight of your ass. It's the blessing of the cosmos. Thank you, thank you, and have a good evening."
Anyway, the incident recalled an old rap lyric:
the man- Can I get up all up in it?
the woman- Boy, you nasty.
the man- Girl, I'm talking about the track, now where you at?
A man died in a bondage session after his partner bound and gagged him at their Sunshine Coast home then left to take a shower, a court has been told.
Jean Margaret Meiers, 58, today faced the Supreme Court in Brisbane and pleaded not guilty to the manslaughter of Geoffrey Braunack, 47, on November 1, 2004.
She is accused of failing in her duty of care after taping the mouth of her de facto husband and using rope, tape and a dog chain to tie him to a concrete post on their Beerburrum patio.
Geoffrey died of asphyxia—and slapping his face and putting some "bulldog" clips on his nipples, Jean's first reaction when she found her partner unconscious, didn't revive him. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this case is that Jean didn't even want to tie up Geoffrey. According to reports, "he badgered her for hours to tie him 'like she used to' but that she had never liked playing her partner's sex games."
If your sex games require you to leave someone alone when he's tied up, invest in a pair of these.
The revelation comes not from the seedier quarters of the country that gave the world Casanova, but from the usually po-faced pages of national broadsheet La Stampa. According to yesterday's front page article, entitled "The Lunch Time Swingers", an estimated 500,000 Italian couples are officially swapping partners at private sex clubs, with thousands more doing it in a more ad-hoc fashion in car parks, specially designated beaches or even cemeteries.
Note One
I wonder what the percentage is for American couples?
Note Two
Recall the best passage in the Communist Manifesto:
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
In my freshman year of high school at a party at a cast party for my St. Jerome's Teen Club Teen Show production of Oklahoma I found a copy Playgirl sitting on the buffet in the dining room. I stole it, snuck it home, and was crushed to discover that every single man in the issue was covered in chest-and-belly hair, smeared with baby oil, and sporting a mustache. They were all dudes that looked like this...
Ugh. I found much better wank material pouring over the stacks of back issues of After Dark magazine in the junk store a block from St. Jerome's. Ah, After Dark's ballet dancers...
Anyway, I'm often mocked on Slog for my taste in men. But I'm not ashamed that I've always had a thing for boyish men—not actual boys, mind you, and thank God for that. But what some don't seem to realize is that, at the time and in the place where my tastes were being forged, developing a thing for boyish men was a rejection of prevailing standards of male beauty, not a capitulation to them. Can I help it that most everyone else's tastes eventually caught up to mine?
The Bush administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion.
A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying "the life of a human being."
Many medical groups disagree. They hold that pregnancy isn't established until several days after conception, when the fertilized egg has grown to a cluster of several dozen cells and burrowed into the uterine wall. Anything that disrupts that process, in their view, is contraception.... Dozens of Congressional Democrats—including presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama—have signed letters of protest blistering the proposal. His Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, declined to comment.
The goal of this proposed regulation? To make it harder for women to come by contraceptives. If standard methods of contraception are reclassified as abortion then laws crafted to allow pharmacists and other medical personal to "opt out" of providing treatments that violate their religious beliefs—morning-after pills, abortion referrals—would suddenly cover the pill and IUDs.
Helloooooo? Straight people? The GOP and the religious right don't just hate the gays and gay freedom to host gay brunches, enter into gay marriages, and do gay adoptions. They hate your freedoms, too.
The sleek black limo picked me up at the corner of Randolph and Halsted. I climbed inside to find my sleek black man lying there wearing nothing but a grin and a copy of the Sun Times. “This is on the D.L., right?” said Barry in his velvet baritone, a wry smile on his face. He knows my answer before I say it: Yes. Yes to anything, just take me….
“I’m going to teach you about the audacity of grope,” Barry chortled as tossed his unfiltered Pall Mall to the limousine floor and lunged at me, his hungry hands snapping like crab’s claws, grabbing me in a way that I knew would leave bruises. He turned me over, popping the buttons off my shirt. “Say it!” he bellowed, snapping the band on my underwear. “You know you want to.”
“Y-yes,” I moaned. “Yes…we…can…” as he sank deep into me…
Got your own dose of Obamarotica? Send 200-word submissions to obamarotica@thestranger.com. The best entries will be published in The Stranger's glamorous print edition. The worst entries will be published right here on Slog.
FOX News reports on the alleged ring of pregnant prostitutes busted in Camden County, MO:
Four women are under arrest for prostitution in Camden County. Three of the women were pregnant. One of the women arrested was eight months pregnant, another six months pregnant, and another was three months pregnant. They ranged in age from 18 to 22 years old. The undercover bust went down at a Lake Ozark area hotel after the sheriff's department received several reports that pregnant women were advertising prostitution on an internet advertising site.
Among many other awful things, this story brings new meaning to the phrase "My water broke on the john."
Sex
Mosley Wins Privacy Case, British Grannies Learn About S&M, Evangelicals Still Embarrassments to Selves
posted by Brendan Kiley on July 24 at 9:52 AM
Max Mosley, Formula One racing chieftain and son of 1930s fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, just won his privacy case against News of the World, which had published details of a Nazi-flavored S&M party Mosley hosted.
Or, in News of the World's original headline:
Mosley argued:
... they had no right to go into private premises and take pictures and film of adults engaged in activities which are no-one's business but those of the people concerned.
News of the World editor Colin Myler argued:
Taking part in depraved and brutal S&M orgies on a regular basis does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to be expected of someone in his hugely influential position.
The judge disagreed:
... there was no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording, for the publication of the resulting information and still photographs, or for the placing of the video extracts on the News of the World website - all of this on a massive scale.
We condemn unconstructive relationships based upon the dominion of one person over another.
Mosley's "Mistress Switch" appealed:
[It's] like children playing cowboys and Indians, it's adults having fun.
Now News of the World has to pay Mosley's legal costs, plus 60,000 pounds. (Which, I assume, Mosley will spend on a massive orgy and send taunting photos to News of the World.)
But Mosley's reputation remains fucked:
Paul Stoddart, the former boss of F1 team Minardi, said the sport was left "without credibility" while Max Mosley remained in charge. "Various heads of state that go to Grands Prix don't want to be seen with him."
The Nation is getting a sex column. They're calling it "Carnal Knowledge," which is a great name for a sex column—it's such a great name that someone already thought of it.
Life
If This is the World's Greatest Dad, the World's in Bigger Trouble Than I Ever Feared
posted by David Schmader on July 16 at 1:35 PM
ABC News introduces the world to Daniel Allen Everett, the 33-year-old Michigan man charged with child sexual abuse and using the Internet to attempt child sexual abuse after allegedly arranging a sex date with what he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
Even worse (or better, depending on how you view things), Everett showed up for the alleged sex date sporting his "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirt, as seen in the mug shot above.
(Fifty bucks says he's saving his "That's not a bald spot—it's a solar panel for a sex machine!" t-shirt for the trial.)
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the meetings where evangelicals try to figure out how they're going to condemn BDSM. Not just to watch prudish ideologues squirm while they contemplate The Horror of Sexual Deviance, but also to watch their intellectual contortions as they leaf through their Bibles, trying to figure out what it has to say about kink. There just aren't any theological grounds against people tying each other up, calling each other names, and pissing on each other's heads.
They know it doesn't seem very Christian, but they don't know why.
So when British evangelicals (of Christian Action Research and Education) try to make hay out of Max Mosley's "sadomasochism party" and say they condemn BDSM because it creates "unconstructive" relationships based on "the dominion of one person over another"—well, that's just comedy.
Because Christians, with all their Biblical injunctions about wives being submissive to husbands—I'm looking at you, Mars Hill—can't stand the idea of a relationship based on domination.
Nor can they stomach people fetishizing protracted scenes of suffering and humiliation.
Nope. They don't like that stuff one bit.
(See the full story—in which the BBC tries to explain BDSM to the grannies of Great Britain—here).
There was a whole group of fools planning on going there tomorrow specifically to indulge in the buffet(Friday was BBQ day apparently). They made a flyer for it and everything:
But according to a Vu employee, the Stranger article has brought this venerable club's proud tradition to a bumping, grinding halt.
"It's...ah, not good publicity", I was told by the nice fella on the phone.
Miss Washington 2007 might wanna take the crown off before flipping off the camera, getting her Beer Pong on and making suggestive oral sex gang signs...
...Elyse Umemoto, who was the second runner-up in this year's Miss America pageant, ran on a platform promoting diversity and women's empowerment. The Evergreen State must be so proud.
Miss Washington Executive Field Director Mike Miller tells TMZ the organization is "embarrassed," and issued this lengthy statement.
Our world has completed its fall. Nothing at all is safe, nothing is sacred.
First things first: You can now be charged with attempted sexual assault in Wisconsin even if your intended victim is dead. In 2006 three young men tried to dig up a body after seeing a picture of the deceased woman—a twenty-year old looker who died in a motorcycle accident—in a local paper. A lower court ruled that the men could not be charged with attempted sexual assault because the law didn't mention necrophilia. But the Wisconsin State Supreme Court disagreed with the lower courts, and reinstated attempted sexual assault charges against the three boys.
Oh, the heartland.
Slog tipper Brie noticed an odd detail in the report:
The men went to the cemetery with shovels, a crowbar, a tarpaulin, and a box of condoms, which the men had purchased that evening on their way to the cemetery.
Why condoms, Brie asks? Considering how few young men seem to think they need to use condoms with living, breathing, ovulating women, it seems odd that these young men would think to purchase a box of condoms on the way to a cemetery. Perhaps these boys know something about embalming fluid that we don't—maybe it burns?—or maybe they were worried about catching the mother of all cooties. Details will, presumably, come out during the trial, so we'll be staying tuned to WISC-TV for complete coverage.
The criminal accusations upset leaders of the Church of Satan, founded in San Francisco in 1966. A church representative Wednesday distanced the group from the accused....
The details involve dog cages, handcuffs, alleged sexual assaults, and Democratic party officials in Durham County, North Carolina. It's a good read.
It's common knowledge that attractivepeopleareattractive. Much more interesting to me are the negligibly attractive—normal-looking-or-lower people who nevertheless produce spasms of lust in otherwise sane citizens.
Recently I quizzed a group of friends about their personal shame crushes—which, as I explained, couldn't just be non-glamorous people, but must be those aggressively contrary to the common "sex symbol" ideal. (For example, Johnny Knoxville and Jean Enersen don't qualify, Kid Rock and Jean Godden do. To find your true shame crush, you must dig deep. If your ego isn't squirming, you're not doing it right.)
My friends' responses were as illuminating and upsetting as I'd hoped.
One sane young gay man expressed his bottomless lust for James Gandolfini.
Another sane 40-something straight man revealed his mysterious attraction to former Secretary of State of Florida Katherine Harris.
A lovely heterosexual woman shared her confusing childhood lust for Eric Stoltz in Mask, inspiring an equally lovely heterosexual man to reveal his ongoing crush on Charlize Theron in Monster.
Number 4 on the list of "10 Cool Things All the Cool Dudes are Doing Instead of Being Lame and Queer and Having Sex"—right after "Study for School," "Join a Boy Scout Troop," and "Play Football"—is this...
GET A PIT BULL!
There is nothing more wholesome than a boy and his dog. And at night, when the sin fairies are tickling your shame buds, you can distract yourself by training your bitch to grow up and kill: shaving her, kicking her when she makes on the carpet, and punching her snout so hard she learns never to whine during the rad 7th Heaven reruns which reinforce your awesome "abstinence-only" lifestyle choice.
Over at Bookslut, editor Jessa Crispin counters Kerry Cohen's definition of the word 'slut,' as described in Cohen's memoir Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity. Crispin says that "Having slept with 40 men by the time you're in your late 30s does not make you a slut," and, further, she provides an actual mathematical formula to determine sluttiness:
# of Total Men > Your Age x 1.5
It's unclear, based on Crispin's use of the word "Men," whether this would also apply to hetero men, too.
Many people are completely in the dark that their partner likes porn, much less has a serious relationship with it. Ignorant as to any issue, they trust their lover unconditionally. They assume their partner understands that using porn, at least beyond a magazine like Playboy, is the equivalent of having an actual affair.
Just how big an idiot is Fox News "sexpert" Yvonne K. Fulbright? She wrote the paragraph above, which posits that using porn is no different than committing adultery. Andrew Sullivan follows the the burgeoning debate about how big an idiot Fulbright is here and here. Of course, Savage Love readers have known that Fulbright is an idiot for years.
...The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. "The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom's, and it feels more natural."
