Violet Blue ™ & Lolita Wolf

Originally uploaded by viviane212
The Perverts’ Saloon: the left coast met the right coast, at dim sum at Golden Unicorn, and later at my apartment.

Violet Blue, the well-known sex and sexuality writer and blogger, filed suit this week against Violet Blue, a porn actress using a stage name, alleging that Ada Mae Johnson adopted the writer’s name and distinctive black, Bettie Page bangs for performances in films such as Shut Up and Blow Me #29, Whore of the Rings and Who Violet Blew.

Journalist Violet Blue, whose actual name is appears to be Violet Blue, filed suit in a San Francisco federal court Monday, accusing Johnson of trademark violation and dilution, as well as unfair business practices. Blue wants the court to stop Johnson from using her name and to force her to pay Blue damages. (more. . .)

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle column, Violet Blue has advice about what to do when your blog’s content has been hijacked by a spam blog which offered her content as child porn bait:

[ . . ]

Adorkable Grrl didn’t just write a blog post and send e-mails; she also sent a cease and desist to the offending Web site, and asked for my advice. Being no stranger to having my content reposted without permission, or having my RSS feeds pilfered, I did a quick public records (whois) lookup for the URL offering her content as child porn bait, and discovered that the site was registered in India, but hosted by American company GoDaddy. I sent Adorkable Grrl the information, telling her to take extreme measures:

“Along with the e-mail cease and desist, send them a physical, registered mail copy of the notice of action. Also tell them that their false affiliation with your content brings to your attention their advertisement of pornographic material that is in direct violation of U.S. child pornography laws, and that you are left with no choice but to forward their information to the following entities:

1) Reporting Child Pornography. Provides contact details of field offices of the FBI in major cities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

2) CyberTip Line — NCMEC. Handles calls and online reports of sexual exploitation of children.

3) Adult Sites Against Child Pornography. Nonprofit organization that works with the United States Customs Service and the FBI in enforcing anti-child-pornography laws. Includes their goals, FAQs, press releases, details of members, and a facility to report suspected sites.

Tell GoDaddy. I’m sure once GoDaddy finds out (and is aware you’re reporting them to the FBI), they’ll yank the site altogether. How awful; these people are truly horrifying.”

[. . .]

Have a wonderrrrful birthday violet, you here? Your present is on its way. xxooxx

. . At least, this was all the setting when Lara saw that one of her old self-portraits had been retouched to remove her watermark and placed on the online sales cover of 1982′s porn non-epic “Body Magic.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t Lara Jade’s first experience with her images being used by someone else. It’s also no news that buying porn online is a “buyer beware” environment where consumers must constantly be on guard for privacy and personal information issues (just like with online pharmacy and “cheap” travel sites). (more. . . )

I celebrated the Carnival’s second birthday by meeting both Melissa Gira and Violet Blue (with Hacker Boy in tow). Finally.

Here are some pics from when Violet took me to visit Survival Research Labs. The discussions with each of them were wonderful. I am probably the techiest person I know. And they put me to shame.

Now that I have a free place to stay in San Francisco, I might come out more often. There are some really interesting conferences going on.

Sometimes you have those sudden moments of total clarity, and they often find you in circumstances that could best be described as “timeless.” I found mine on my knees in a dingy and dark club in the Tenderloin at about 1 in the morning Saturday night — I was, in fact, in a spotlight, on bended knee, sliding a size 15 Lucite stripper heel onto a slightly belligerent, bewigged tranny emcee, who, microphone in hand, was sitting on my date’s lap and admonishing the crowd for not tipping enough. While also publicly admonishing my date for being a tall drink of boyish cuteness and being decidedly straight. I was the drunken Cinderella’s footman, and it was well past midnight in a neighborhood far from mine. It was one of those Barbary Coast nights. Again. (more. . .)

Welcome visitors from ABC News.

Esteemed sex educator and performer Ducky Doolittle has an article on the ABC News site:

Seeking Sex Advice? Where to Get Some
Online, on TV and on the Radio, Where to Find Sex Advice That Even Experts Would Take

In the sidebar, click on the ‘Top 10 Sex Info Resources.’

Yep, the Carnival is listed! In the same list as Susie Bright, Sue Johansen, Violet Blue, and Cory Silverberg. Shit, we are in really good company.

That ad at the bottom of the popup is blocking 2 of the links (including Violet’s link) – you can see the complete list on Ducky’s Livejournal.

(Deep bow)

Thank you so, so much, Ducky! We are honored.

• Erin Bradley: Miss Information (Nerve)
• Em & Lo: Ralphina Macchio: “My boyfriend’s being a crybaby because I can beat him up.”
• Judy McGuire: Date Girl: Mizz Manners (Seattle Weekly)
• Dan Savage: Savage Love
• Cory Silverberg: Lesbian Books are Not a Sleep Aid
• Mistress Matisse: Mistress of Masturbation (The Stranger)
• Tristan Taormino: The Cum of Alt Fears (Village Voice)
• violet blue: Margaret Cho’s New Role (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Andrea Nemerson: oh dad poor dad (alt.sex.column)

What other columnists should I be linking to? Please leave suggestions in the comments. I can’t promise I’ll include them all. I notice the Village Voice has a nice spiffy new site, but when are they going to ask RKB to rejoin them?

And someone (maybe you) needs to update the Wikipedia entry. It’s outdated.

Today has been designated ‘Stop Cyberbullyinging Day.’

I am reposting violet blue’s SFGate.com column. Although I haven’t been a victim of harassment, I’ve tried to support my blog friends when they’ve been harassed and stalked.
=========

When A Man Hates A Woman
The ugly side of sex and the Web

Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Ask any three women who publish online if they’re ever been stalked, sexually threatened or threatened with violence on other blogs or in comments. I don’t need to bet money to know you’ll get a yes from one of those women. Too busy to ask anyone? That’s OK, I’ll raise my hand for all three.

Imagine being a girl and working really hard to earn the reputation of a respected voice in the world of tech journalism and blogging — a world populated by disproportionately more men than women — and to find yourself the target object of a hate-filled Web site. The tone and content of the hate site centers around sexually threatening you, suggesting ways you could be killed and have your corpse defiled, stating that you are a “slut” and that your gender is also in question. Your straight male colleagues don’t have this problem.

Then the person running the hate site blogs about every word you say, every time you make a post or publish an article. And targets your friends. And posts the names of your family and Google satellite maps of your family’s homes. They deface your Wikipedia page at every opportunity, with sexual slurs, objectifying you at every possible chance. It’s enough to make a girl choose not to be a tech journalist.

What I described above is a true story, one I have lived through with one of my closest female friends for over a year now. She was the target; I was collateral. My friend’s fellow bloggers said, “Wow, that’s awful,” but to my recollection, the only writings about it were authored by me, on my blog — standing up to him — and the New York Times, which wrote about the hate site (free registration required) as though it were written by a rascally-but-humorous cad, and linking directly to the hate site, sending it that fat New York Times traffic. My friend chose not to address the troll, and the hate site targeting her continues to run unfettered.

Recently, a marketing professional and blogger named Kathy Sierra blogged about finding herself on the receiving end of (anonymous or identity-obfuscated) sexually hostile posts, violent threats and even a Photoshopped image on a Web site that was ostensibly set up for trash-talking but evidently took a turn into troll-topia. Her post on her discovery is here (NSFW language). The offending Web site has since been taken down. On her blog, Sierra wrote a frightened and emotional post, canceling her appearance at the ETech Conference, providing examples of what frightened her (including a screen capture of horrifying comments directed at another woman) and naming a list of people she felt colluded, or at least were complicit in the situation — I only hope no one directly implicated is wrongfully associated with the hate speech.

How the blogging community reacts to open sexual hatred of women bloggers and writers is worth examining. In the Sierra case, she describes herself as feeling so helpless as to have to run and hide, saying on her blog: “I have canceled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same. … I have no idea if I’ll ever post again.” And Sierra has received support from many.

My friend did not characterize herself as helpless at any point, and neither have I. And with my friend, there was (and still is) no “bloggers-stick-togetherness” in our corner of Blogistan. The question is, Do we women need to portray ourselves as victims to garner support when men threaten to defile our corpses if we gain notoriety?

Sierra’s haters — and the man behind the hate, in my friend’s case — are doing this not because they’re immature. They’re doing it because they want women out of their worlds. Every female tech and sex writer I have contact with knows this — every girl whose work has been Dugg, Slashdotted or commented on in a forum that allows trolls to fester. When someone goes this far, to make death imagery and maintain a 24/7 hate blog, we’re not talking about a lack of social skills, we’re talking about a desire to destroy. These are the same kind of acts of sexual hatred that Patrick Califia wrote about in his essay about the sex-murder of transgender teen Gwen Araujo in “Sex With the Imperfect Stranger”:

“This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn’t do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself.”

In these situations, Califia tells us, “The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport.”

When you’re female in Blogistan, you expose yourself to a whole new kind of hate, and often your male colleagues (or your community) have no idea what it feels like.

But we belong here, too.

Are Google AdWords out of line with Google sex queries? Violet Blue questions the propensity of Google AdWords to completely misrepresent searches on the web browser in this article:

With equal parts bitter irony, offense and amusement, I receive regular e-mails from Open Source Sex readers about the keyword-generated Google AdWords text ads that regularly populate the bottom of this page. Take a look at a few of my columns — especially the porn entries — and you’ll be, er, treated to a fat serving of sexually shaming “porn addiction — get help” text ads. Which, of course, run totally against the grain of the pro-porn message I’m dishing out. Because I want you all to get help, too — help finding better porn, that is.

But I’ve never been shocked about this: Google AdWords has a rep for pairing inappropriate (if not offensive) text ads with the original content it’s posted with — especially when it comes to sex. AdWords’ insensitivities might seem trifling or even amusing on the surface (let’s assume those of you reading my column feel OK about porn enough to disregard the douchey anti-porn ads at the bottom of the page), but those trying to make a positive change in the way their sexuality is portrayed in the wider culture are facing a David vs. Goliath battle of keywords.

…Lustbites: What do you look for in a story? What do you hate to see?

Violet Blue: It’s funny—I know within the first 5-6 graphs if a story has what I’m looking for or not, and sometimes I can’t even explain exactly what it is. A good piece of erotica should let me know why I should care about it right away, and give me at least one character I like, even if she or he is an anti-hero or seriously flawed. I tend to be drawn more to publish character-driven stories because they really anchor erotica well; plot-driven stories are a joy but good ones with sex in them are hard to find, or perhaps more tricky to craft. And it should seem obvious, but I demand erotica with sex in it—I do not like “lite” romance or erotica that dances around the actual sex, and as a reader I hate to be teased. Not to say I don’t love a good love story; it just needs to have some tension and some explicit friction if you know what I mean. And one thing I really can’t stand is when authors go overboard with genital and sexual euphemisms —it’s often so distracting, and even vulgar. Go figure!

(more…)

Steam is coming out of violet’s ears, with good reason:

When I write my column for the Chronicle/SFGate, I don’t expect to get too fucked with as writer, though after the years of seeing how typically slanted and sex-negative the mainstream media is about sex and porn, I knowingly *hope* for fair treatment.

Last week I wrote a column about altporn, and interviewed the top director in this porn genre, Eon McKai. Halfway through the day SFGate ran a story about an anti-porn protest at the armory building, which the good people at Kink.com just bought. The piece that ran in the SFGate the same time mine did was slanted in favor of the anti-porn stance.

When SFGate put the anti-porPublishn piece up, they changed the front page copy on my column description to remove the word “porn” and changed it to “onscreen sex”. They moved my column to the *very bottom* of the page, and put the anti-porn piece as the top headline — for two solid days. SFGate clobbered my pro-porn piece with one that literally labled Kink’s employees as “manacled performers”. (more…)

PBS’ Mark Glaser has a outstanding analysis about the erotic blogs that went missing in Google, has great quotes from Matt Sutts, violet blue and Danny Sullivan:

So what if a few sex blogs drop down in Google search results? The problem is that with so much power concentrated in one company, Google, one small mishap has the potential to punish small independent blogs or web businesses that depend on Google-generated traffic. In late 2003, Google performed what was called the Florida Update on its search index, which caused small businesses such as FindGreatLawyers.com and Unforgettable Honeymoons to lose their ranking on relevant Google search terms. (Read about those case studies and more in this great story on SearchEngineWatch.)

He links to Google, Danny Sullivan and Google’s Webmaster Central, then forgets to link to the erotic blogs in question. Feh.

OK, Mark (or his intern, or whoever was formatting his post) , it’s Comstock Films (http://www.comstockfilms.com/) and Pretty Dumb Things (http://prettydumbthings.typepad.com/), got it?

Feh.

Update: Please go visit the PBS Ombudsmen’s form and tell them to update the links.

bloggers, blogging, mattcutts, Google, search, seo, violetblue

violet blue :: self portrait
Originally uploaded by violet.blue.

violet blue is accepting submissions for Best Women’s Erotica 2008 to be published by Cleis Press this November. More info on her site.