From the monthly archives:

September 2010

Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/30/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

Invasion of Privacy Charges After Death of Tyler Clementi – NYTimes.com – The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.
Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker – Gladwell disputes the usefulness of social media in motivating and coordinating high-risk activism. A very interesting look at the difference in utility between strong ties and weak ties. (via @sitps)
500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
It Gets Better. Also … Grief. Please #stayalive. – Sugarbutch Chronicles – That’s five. Five people, five boys, who could have grown up to be part of our world, part of our community, part of gay activism, or who could have, at the very least, grown up. Five boys since school started less than a month ago.

Tagged as: activism, gay, internet, kinkontap, online, safety, suicide, Twitter

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/30/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

The future of sexology comes to San Francisco with the Arse Elektronika conference | io9 – . I love this array of crazy science fiction/science/sex presentations that straddle the line between academic credibility and outright perversion.
Dr. Logan Levkoff: Sex Educators Unite to Support University Sex Weeks | Huffington Post – Though Brooks appeared to be concerned for students' and colleges' reputations, she offers no voice for the student organizers of these events or their faculty supporters (and hints at no discussion with them either). In an effort to present their voices, I reached out to sex educators, college student groups, and faculty members from various universities. Every educator and group contacted was frustrated by Brooks' mischaracterization of their events and their work. Many of them were outraged that the individual leading the charge against sex-themed programming was an economics professor with no experience in sexuality education. We decided to respond and together composed a Letter to the Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was sent it to the editors on September 16th.
Assistant attorney general blogs against gay student body president – CNN.com – For nearly six months, Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan, has waged an internet campaign against college student Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student assembly president at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Sexy Books: Celebrate your freedom to read during Banned Books Week | Examiner.com –
Internet Pornographers Now Suing Pirates | Mashable – The producers have targeted users who downloaded titles that prominently feature transsexuals and “barely legal” 18-year old girls. Since the lawsuits are on public record, the defendants’ porn-viewing habits would be exposed.
Why Folsom St. Fair is Fun, Sexy and Important | Charlie Glickman – One of the key pieces of sex-positivity can be summed up by the acronym YKINMKBYKIOK, which stands for “Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is OK”. Once you realize that your turn-ons and your squicks come from within you, once you realize that it has less to do with what someone else is doing or saying than you think, you can discover much more sexual freedom within yourself.

Tagged as: arse+elektronika, books, censorship, discrimination, education, gay, harassment, kink, kinkontap, legal, libraries, piracy, porn, sanfrancisco, sex, sexed, sexuality, technology

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/29/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

Gay Teen Suicides | Good Vibrations Magazine – But 5 kids in one month? Homophobia is a social disease. It’s real. It’s deadly and it’s 100% preventable. Talk to your kids about the spectrum of sexual orientation. It’s ok if you’re a little uncomfortable, it’s ok if they are a little uncomfortable. Go even further: support LGBTQ inclusion in your kids sex ed curriculum.
Rutgers freshman is presumed dead in suicide after roommate broadcast gay sexual encounter online | NJ.com – Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, and Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton, were charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy for setting up a camera in a dorm room on Sept. 19 and using it to view and transmit a live sex scene, said Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan
Arse Elektronika 2010: Space Racy sex conference Sept. 30-Oct 10, San Francisco – National Sex & Relationships | Examiner.com –

Tagged as: arse+elektronika, cyberbullying, gay, harassment, kinkontap, rutgers, sanfrancisco, sex, suicide, technology

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/29/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

Bronx Teacher Reassigned After Article on Sex Job – NYTimes.com – A teacher at a Bronx elementary school has been reassigned after writing on a Web site about her past as a sex worker. In a short online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the teacher, Melissa Petro, criticized Craigslist for shutting down its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising.
Sex and The Male Psychology — Catherine| Gamasutra – It's been a while since I've seen sex in a game and been taken aback, but I was genuinely awed when I realized it was happening again as I watched this trailer. The topic of true sexuality was certainly being addressed here, focusing not only on Vincent's sexual orientation but also the world within his dreams. Whether Catherine is just a symbol or a flesh and blood woman, the scenario being portrayed so far suggests that we are about to participate in a journey through his psychosis to seek the answers — and that is something new indeed.
The Dirty Little Secret of Feminine Desire… | Pamela Madsen | Psychology Today –
Dan Savage Creates YouTube Channel to Help Gay Teens | Mashable – Sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage has launched a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better.” He’s soliciting videos from fans who want to provide support and encouragement to gay teens who face adversity, discrimination and bullying in high school.
Band Aids, Saving Face, and Endangering Sex Workers: The Craigslist Saga | Waking Vixen – Removing online spaces for this community building, which often starts with advertising, drives independent workers underground and forces them to rely on groups that do not have their best interests at heart.
Five myths about prostitution | Washington Post – But as the Craigslist controversy proves, it's also one of the fastest changing. And as a result, most people's perceptions of the sex trade are wildly out of date.

Tagged as: craigslist, desire, gaming, gay, lgbt, media, prostitution, queer, sex, sexwork, women, youtube

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/28/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

What’s Happening with Google Instant Didn’t Happen Overnight | Tony Comstock’s Kōan of Silence – So now everybody knows — there are some things that Google doesn’t want to show you. This is not news.
Google Instant: No Sex — and No Violet Blue | violet blue ® :: open source sex -
Instant Censorship, Google Style | Sex In The Public Square – To Google my challenge is different: Don’t filter nudity or sexual health results in the name of filtering pornography. Don’t filter in the first place. Your users already have the ability to control their search settings. Don’t censor them automatically. Don’t be evil.
Google Instant Blocks Sexy Searches: See What Basic Terms Google Thinks Are NSFW – As The Register observes, Google Instant “includes a blacklist for words and phrases involving what the company considers ‘violence, hate, or pornography.’” Whereas querying for neutral terms like “weather” or “restaurant” offers up a dropdown menu with suggested terms and presents a page of relevant search results, the streaming search tool does not work with “NSFW” search terms, which cause the page to go blank.
Dependable Pleasure | Pamela Madsen | Psychology Today – Food doesn’t tell you that you are fat and undesirable.
Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: Unintended Consequences: Google Instant and the “Suicide Search” (and a Solution) – The effect my friend noted, and that I verified with various other searches, is a fundamental aspect of how Google Instant is implemented. Since GI continuously updates pages of result listings as the user types, they are presented through Google’s estimation of what the most appropriate results might be for partial search terms as they are being entered in real-time…The “problem” appears with words that are partial elements (substrings) of other words and terms. Human nature being what it is, the GI interface tends to suppress the previously standard behavior of typing a newline after entering a search query.

Tagged as: body, censorship, google, googleinstant, image, search, women

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Indecent Exposure: A Discussion and Screening of Films You Are Unlikely to See Elsewhere

by Viviane on 09/26/2010

in censorship,Events

09/27/2010
6:30 PM	to	8:30 PM

This month, the National Coalition Against Censorship is holding a series of programs called “How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20,” to highlight the effects 1990s attacks on culture continue to have on art and society and to reassess the state of art funding.

This Monday, there will be a free screening of Destricted, a collection of short films by visual artists, all exploring the boundaries between pornography and art. This will be the exclusive national pre-release screening of the film. Destricted has screened at the Tate Modern in London in 2006, Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Sundance and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

The films are as follows:

Balkan Erotic Epic – Marina Abramović
Hoist – Matthew Barney
Sync – Marco Brambilla
Impaled – Larry Clark
We Fuck Alone – Gaspar Noé
House Call – Richard Prince
Death Valley – Sam Taylor-Wood

Watch the trailer for DESTRICTED.

7:30 Discussion with Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU, documentary film director Tony Comstock, Andrew Hale, Destricted‘s Founder, filmmaker Marilyn Minter, and Neville Wakefield,one of Destricted‘s Producers.

8:30 Larry Clark’s Ken Park (2002), a film about the abusive home life of several skateboarders in California. Ken Park’s controversial sexual content has led to the film being banned in Australia and to its very limited distribution in other countries.

See also Comstock’s post, “Me and Destricted go back aways...”

Location: SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, NYC

The event is free and you can RSVP here: http://decencyclausefilm.eventbrite.com/

*Image: Marilyn Minter, still from “Green Pink Caviar,” in Destricted.

Tagged as: Andrew Hal, Cecily Brown, Larry Clark, Marco Brambilla, Marilyn Minter, Marylin Minter, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tony Comstock

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Marketa by Erro | Diafano

by Viviane on 09/24/2010

in galleries

Full gallery

Tagged as: blonde, galleries, marketa, naked, tgp

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Lolita’s NYC Picks of the Week: Sept 23-29

by Lolita Wolf on 09/23/2010

in Events, Fetish & Kink,nyc

Thursday: Sinclair Sexsmith will be teaching “A Dyke’s Secrets for Cunnillingus” at Purple Passion.

Friday thru Sunday: 2nd annual Sacred Sex Roundup. I’m teaching a class on Sunday.

Saturday: LSM meets for dinner and socializing before going to Submit. With the Butch Voices Conference in town, the Submit Party will be hopping!

Sunday: Suspension party at The Delancey. Woot!

Maitresse Madeline and Mckenzie Lee on WhippedAss.com

Tagged as: bdsm, Events, nyc, weekly calendar

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Lolita’s NYC Picks of the Week: Sept 16-22

by Lolita Wolf on 09/15/2010

in Events, Fetish & Kink,nyc

Thursday: The TES Queer SIG hosts an open forum about “The State of New York Queerdom.”

Friday: Eric Pride will be at DomSubFriends with a demo at Paddles on “Interrogation: The Border Between Play & Reality.” Also at Paddles later in a separate space is the Switch party for women and trans.

Saturday: Two good parties: TES and Stimulate.

Sunday: Rawhide Bar hosts “Guard,” a monthly Fetish CODE night 6pm to Midnight with special guest Bryan Slater, give-aways, demos and 2 for 1 drinks if you are in gear. 8th Ave at 21st Street.

Wednesday: The TES Bondage SIG invites you to share your knowledge at: ” Rope Tips and Tricks – A Bondage Experience.” Bring rope. This will be very hands-on!

Amber Rayne on hogtied.com

Tagged as: bdsm, Events, nyc, weekly calendar

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NYC Sacred Sexuality Roundup

by Viviane on 09/14/2010

in Events,tantra

09/23/2010

09/26/2010

NEW YORK SACRED SEXUALITY ROUND UP WRANGLES SEX EXPERTS FROM ACROSS THE USA
SEPTEMBER 23 – 26, 2010

SEPTEMBER 14, 2010 Sex educators Anton Diaz (SexySpirits.com) and Reid Mihalko (ReidAboutSex.com) founder of CuddleParty (cuddleparty.com) have teamed up to organize the 2nd Annual Great N.E. Sacred Sexuality Round-Up in Times Square this September 23-26th!

Come enjoy 4-Days of heart-felt lectures, workshops, performances, party events, promotions, and networking with the world’s leading Tantra Teachers and Sacred Sexuality Educators.

“The Sacred Sexuality Round-Up is a smorgasbord of sex ed enlightenment,” exclaims sex and relationship expert Reid Mihalko. “Porn and television are terrible teaching examples for adults to be better, more confident partners in bed. At the Sacred Sexuality Round-Up, we’ve created 4-days for adults to meet, greet and learn from the world’s top sex and spirituality teachers face-to-face. View the detailed event schedule, presenter bios, and purchase tickets to attend in person or watch the live internet broadcast at http://SacredSexualityRoundUp.com.

“The Sacred Sexuality Round-Up is the first Sexuality Expo to broadcast live on the Internet from Times Square! So just in case you and your loved ones are a bit too shy or you can’t get to New York City, know that the magic we’re creating in Times Square will be beamed around the globe,” says Round-Up co-producer Richard Anton Diaz, who dedicated his non-for-profit corporation Sexy Spirits to creating and implementing more effective education in sexuality, intimacy, and conscious communities. “The Sacred Sexuality Round-Up is completely in line with what I’m most passionate about and I’m thrilled that men and women get so much out of it.”

The 4-days kick off with a Thursday night “Club Tantra Lounge” party. Meet the organizers, teachers and gurus and schmooze and dance the night away with other sexy spirits in preparation for the weekend festivities. Friday evening things get more serious with the “Women and Power Symposium,” an all-women panel open to a co-ed audience exploring the feminine connections between sexual, financial and romantic freedom. Saturday and Sunday are filled with dozens of lectures, presentations and workshops from our expert presenters (Sheri Winston, Amy Jo Goddard, Kamala Devi, Rachel Cherwitz, Isis Phoenix, et al) covering the spectrum of spiritual sexuality. Everything from transformational breathing, to healing a broken heart, to being in a committed couple and tantric, to sensually satisfying pregnancies and energetic clothes-on sex, and even sacred spanking will be covered. Saturday night: Don’t miss out on the Triple Goddess Puja, an enlightening social ritual with deep-rooted traditions designed to explore the spiritual side of sensuality and intimacy without ever having to take your clothes off!

The Sacred Sexuality Round-Up, because of its mature content, is only open to adults 18-years old and older. Anyone interested in learning more, purchasing tickets or watching the internet broadcast can visit http://SacredSexualityRoundUp.com. Media interested in booking an interview with any of the Round-Up presenters should contact Reid Mihalko at reid (at) reidaboutsex.com and 917.207.4544.

Location: Reflections Yoga Studio
250 West 49th Street, 2nd floor, NYC 10019
Website: http://SacredSexualityRoundUp.com

Tagged as: Events, nyc, sacred sexuality, sexuality, tantra

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Kanya | I Shot Myself

by Viviane on 09/10/2010

in galleries

Tagged as: Asian, brunette, galleries, I Shot Myself, naked, tgp

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When Is Bondage Prostitution? Records May Help Set Boundaries (New York Law Journal)

by Viviane on 09/09/2010

in legal,sexwork

by Mark Fass

A Manhattan judge has ordered the New York City Police Department to shine a light on the hazy legal line separating bondage, domination and sadomasochism from prostitution.

In a decision last week, Supreme Court Justice Carol R. Edmead directed the NYPD to provide the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project with documents regarding police investigations of several Manhattan bondage, domination and sadomasochism clubs between 2006 and 2008.

The judge, however, ruled that the police department is not required to turn over a copy of a confidential Vice Enforcement Division manual, which sets forth the procedures used by undercover agents to identify, engage and arrest suspected prostitutes.

“Disclosure of this information…would ‘furnish the safecracker with the combination to the safe,’ as it would alert the potential violators of the prostitution laws to the unique factors and methods the undercover police officers are likely to use to communicate with the other members of the team,” Justice Edmead wrote in Urban Justice Center v. New York Police Department, 400988/2010 (Subscription reqd).

The Sex Workers Project, which provides legal services and policy advocacy for people who work in the sex industry—exotic dancers, dominatrices and pornography actors, among others—considers the contested documents essential to understanding how the NYPD interprets and enforces New York Penal Law 230.00, the single-sentence statute that prohibits engaging in “sexual conduct” for a fee, but fails to define “sexual conduct.”

Since NYPL 230.00 was enacted in 1969—”prostitution” had previously been treated as a form of vagrancy, according to the annotated McKinney’s Penal Law—the definition of “sexual conduct” has slowly been teased out by the courts. Homosexual intercourse is “sexual conduct,” courts have ruled, though “lap dancing” is not—so long as the person providing the lap does not touch the dancer’s naked breasts or buttocks.

The case law provides scant guidance regarding bondage, domination and “fetish for a fee” services. Only a single reported opinion, the 1994 Brooklyn Criminal Court decision People v. Georgia A., 163 Misc.2d 634, addresses whether such acts constitute prohibited “sexual conduct.”

Tagged as: bondage, legal, nyc, sexwork

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Lolita’s NYC Picks of the Week: Sept 9-15

by Lolita Wolf on 09/08/2010

in Events, Fetish & Kink,nyc

Thursday: The first DSD meeting is open to everyone and features Dov presenting “Crazy Glue Invisible Bondage and Infibulation!”

Saturday: New York boys of Leather and The Jersey boys of Leather host a Boy on Boy! bar night upstairs at the Stonewall, Wear fetish gear for drink specials. They’re having a 50/50 raffle to benefit the Women’s Leather History Project.

Wednesday: The TES Dominant Women/submissive men’s Group has Mistress Jada teaching: “Singletails: for the Safe, Sane, and Sadistic”

James Deen and Ashli Orion on SexandSubmission.com

Tagged as: bdsm, Events, nyc, weekly calendar

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Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2010: “Space Racy”

by Viviane on 09/08/2010

in Events,sex,technology

09/30/2010

10/03/2010

Conference, film festival, machines, workshops and performances

A conference near and dear to my heart – I was at the first two, and my talk with Susan Mernit is in the anthology from the 2008 conference:

Love hotels. Swinger club design. Phallic architecture. The gentrification of Times Square, kicking out all the peep shows, and similar anti-sex gentrifications and battles. Kids making out in the back seats of cars, and people fucking in parks. Housing for unconventional family units. Augmented reality sex spaces. Furniture for sex. Room design. Creating new environments. Gendered spaces, and gender in the creation of space. Architecture by women, and the potential for the construction of a feminist architecture. Actively gender-segregated spaces, as both empowering and oppressing. Queer-segregated spaces, similarly. The acts of human intimacy, sexual intercourse, and procreation in weightlessness and the extreme environments of space. Erotic space tourism. The visibility of sex, genders, and relationship structures in various spaces. Spaces of sexual control and permissiveness. Sexual subcultures as spaces of social division. Spatial enforcement of relationship structures and gendered power structures. Geotagging as an expression for kinks. The sexual reading of architecture, especially around historical and modern styles and concerning ornament and detail. The eroticization of buildings — architecture for whorehouses, the Las Vegas strip, people who want to sleep with buildings. What makes design “sexy” and the construction of “sexy” as an architectural category as a comment on late heteronormativity. The terabyte gloryhole. The space in which the male gaze occurs and the space it defines.

Heterosexism, misogyny, and heterocentrism reinforce the dominant cultural structure and contribute to the oppression of large sectors of society. Sexuality, sex, gender, and related constructs are heavily implicated in and reproduce space, and are also constrained and restricted by it and by heterosexism. Let’s explore this space of interactions

Johannes Grenzfurthner/monochrom (Conference organizer)

Tagged as: Arse Elektronika, arts, porn, sex, technology

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/06/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

Larry Flynt, John Stagliano, Peter Acworth Say No to .XXX | violet blue ® :: open source sex – That said, I got a ping last night from the people who set up the nifty website Dot-XXX Opposition: The rest of the story. And guess what!? It shows ICM’s claims of adult community support are unsupported, groundless and unverified; ICM does not have support from the adult entertainment community. It is proof, in their own words. They also state they will not make a business out of the .XXX ghetto. A very diverse group of adult webmasters (not all of them male, either) have come out to say loud and proud, no ICANN, do not do this. Not only for their own businesses; in this video they say it’s also because they know it won’t help solve any problems around minors and adult material.
Stop Hating on Campus Sex Education « Shanna Katz M.Ed — Sexuality Educator – ex education is helpful to people of all ages, but is crucial to people in their teens and early twenties, when they are developing their identities, making decisions about sexual activity. Getting sex education does NOT encourage anyone to be sexually active. In fact, many people who get comprehensive sexuality education in high school and middle school have better self image, are more comfortable in setting boundaries, know ow to say know, choose not to be sexually active as early, and/or choose not to be sexually active while under the influence of other substances. Almost everyone will have the ability to make healthier choices regarding safer sex, pregnancy prevention, and more.
There’s Nothing Wrong with University Sex Weeks | Charlie Glickman – While Brooks raises some important points, she bookends her piece with not-so-subtle messages of fear. That should tell you more about her agenda than anything else.

Tagged as: college, internet, kinkontap, sex, sexed, students, youth

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