Posts tagged as:

technology

Bookmarks

by Viviane on 12/07/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Bookmarks

by Viviane on 10/23/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

  • The Downfall of Alexa Di Carlo | Charlie Glickman – But I do take exception when someone creates false credentials in order to dupe the gullible. I worked hard to get a doctorate in sex education and many of my colleagues, whether they have academic credentials or not, have dedicated years of their lives to learn about sexuality in order to provide good information. I feel a lot of anger when someone pretends to have done the work in order to make it seem as if they know what they’re talking about….It also upsets me when people misrepresent sexwork. Usually, people make it seem as if it’s much a much worse career than it might be, especially when they want to ban it. But it’s also problematic when people glorify it because it creates a misrepresentation of the challenges and difficulties that sexworkers face. In turn, this romanticizes the profession and makes it more likely that people will decide to try it out without knowing how to protect themselves.
  • Law.com – ‘Cached’ Pages May Be Evidence in Child Porn Case, Panel Says | Law.com – In a case of first impression in New York, a Brooklyn appellate panel has held that temporary files automatically “cached” by an Internet browser may serve as evidence of promoting and possessing child pornography…The Appellate Division, 2nd Department, looked at similar cases from other jurisdictions and concluded that their “consistent thread” was the need to distinguish “inadvertent” acquisition and possession of child pornography from “knowing” and “intentional” acquisition and possession.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

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.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/29/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

09/30/2010to10/03/2010

arsebanner Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2010: Space Racy

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)

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

  • I want you back, says Belle de Jour’s lover | News
  • Generation B – Anything He Can Do, She Can Do | NYTimes.com – IN September 1998, David Buechner, then 39, a prominent classical pianist, came out as a transgender woman, explaining that from then on, she would live and perform as Sara Davis Buechner. The pianist had been accustomed to rave reviews (at 24, David, in his New York City concert debut, was called “an extraordinary young artist” by a New York Times critic). But the debut as Sara, reported in a Times magazine article, was not so well received, even by loved ones.
  • Depathologizing Porn | Psychotherapy Networker – Yet, despite the undeniable harm that porn can do, we therapists need to bear in mind a fundamental fact: the overwhelming majority of people exposed to it don't become addicts. Patrick Carnes's research shows that sexual addiction affects three to five percent of adults, suggesting that porn use isn't about to turn us into a country of addicts glued to their computer screens. Further, assuming that porn inevitably leads to addiction can blind us to understanding its nonpathological appeal to so many people—most of them men who are quite normal in every other way.
  • Belle de Jour revealed as research scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti – Times Online – Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.
  • New York 2009 » I Wish I Was At WordCamp – If you couldn't make it to Wordcamp, you can follow what happened on this page.
  • » yeah I might be cracking I am a poster girl with no poster. – Please help Ammre, who has been housebound since August from an injury that went untreated due to lack of insurance.
  • hyper-fetish: Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video | violet blue ® :: open source sex – The video is way more entertaining than the song itself (which is catchy, by the way), and it’s packed with sex, high-gloss fetish couture, surreal effects and some serious shoes worthy of worship. Can you count the fetishes? There are some pretty obscure ones here, mixed with more obvious ones, and it’s interlaced with current pop fetishes (such as the coffins resembling the [Anubis] travel coffins in “True Blood”).
  • the top online sex management tools | violet blue ® :: open source sex – This week’s San Francisco Chronicle column is dedicated to everyone who wants to be organized, responsible, and truly deeply nerdy about their sex lives: it’s a guide to online sex management tools.
  • Help Lift Sex Ed to a Higher Plane: Support Scarleteen! | Scarleteen – What you might not know is that Scarleteen is the highest ranked online young adult sexuality resource but also the least funded and that the youth who need us most are also the least able to donate. You might not know that we have done all we have with a budget lower than the median annual household income in the U.S. You might not know we have provided the services we have to millions without any federal, state or local funding and that we are fully independent media which depends on public support to survive and grow.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

10/01/2009to10/04/2009

Location: Roxie Theater, Center for Sex and Culture, PariSoMa, Noisebridge
City/Town: San Francisco, CA

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called “Culture” in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the “Culture” are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete – on command – mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs – and control over the associated nerves – to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established. Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. “Bizarre enough for what?” — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century. Don’t you think, replicants?

+++++++++++++

Festival Schedule:

October 1: Film festival, opening ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika Gala
October 2: Literature, fiction, reading
October 3: Talks and discourse
October 4: DIY workshops

+++++++++++++

Arse Elektronika 2009 will take place in San Francisco, USA at Roxie Theater, Center for Sex and Culture, PariSoMa, Noisebridge.

+++++++++++++

http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
http://www.arse-elektronika.com

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

lips date sponsor 400 The second Sex 2.0: May 9th

Sex 2.0 May 9, 2009

Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? These questions, and many more, will be addressed within a safe, welcoming, sex-positive space.

The first Sex 2.0 was a year ago, which came about because Amber Rhea had a vision. Last year’s Sex 2.0 was really energizing – an diverse group of sex nerds, bloggers, sex workers and writers, talking to each other (and Twittering all the while). We have the run at a really nice venue in Silver Spring, MD. And like last year, the out of town guests will be staying at the venue, so there will be a lot of hanging out, before during the after.

I’ll be doing a WordPress open Q&A with MayMay, so bring your questions about WordPress and blogging and we’ll do our best to answer them. There will be even more attendees this year who will be Twittering throughout the weekend. I’ll try to post a list soon.

The discounted registration of $30 (which was to have ended today), has again been pushed back to April 16th, so you have two more days to register at the lower rate. It’ll go up to $40.00.

The website is here: sex20con.com/

The Sex 2.0 Google Group is where all the discussion and organizing of the event (and the events before and after) is happening.

groups bar The second Sex 2.0: May 9th
Subscribe to Sex 2.0
Email:

Visit this group

If you’re wondering what last year ‘s event was like, here’s lots of linkage:

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Kinkforall 2009

by Viviane on 03/12/2009

in kinkforall,sex

The inaugural Kinkforall was a smashing success!

I remember reading the Tweet worrying whether we’d get 40 attendees.  Turns out 100 people turned out for 45 presentations. Tremendous energy, lots of different conversations, lots of folks from different organizations and lots of new folks. I know there was was poo-pooing about this event and I was proud to have helped sponsor it.

Now there are other Kinkforalls being organized.  See the gallery below for my pics from the event. Kudo to MayMay, Sara Eileen, the timekeepers (who kept us on track) and all the volunteers who came out and made the event happen. I’m looking foward to the next ones.

The next opportunity for us sex nerds to geek out will be Sex 2.0 on May 9, 2009. Will you be there?

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Linkage for 10-25-08

by Viviane on 10/25/2008

in sex

Brad Balfour interviews Sam Rockwell about Choke. (HuffPo)

Alternet has an article on Sarah Palin and sex ed.

Bacchus warns us about Eden Fantasys.

Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks discuss relationship politics: the Obama relationship and body language of the McCain marriage.

Twanna Hines interviews Lust in Translations’ Pamela Druckerman on American political scandals.

The Black Phoenix playspace in Philadelphia is reopening.

A Brooklyn man has accused 5 NYPD officers of sodomizing him with a radio antenna.

Blogs are so 2004. (Wired)

Bonnie Ruberg attended Melissa Gira’s Blogging Sex workshop at the Center for Sex and Culture.

If you registered to vote via Rock the Vote, you may be screwed.

Kathryn Finney of the Budget Fashionista shows how to outfit the Palins for less than $2500.

MayMay: Equating passivity with sexual submissiveness is a stupid mistake.

It’s now possible to remotely eavesdrop on keyboards. (Schneier)

Microsoft has issued a critical out-of-cycle patch to guard against a vulnerability that affects all Windows systems.

Vice Magazine has an interview and photographs by Richard Kern with the contemporary artist, professor, pipe man, bear and S&M switch, Nayland Blake. (via Lolita Wolf)

Leonard Lopate has a great segment on jealousy.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

No on Prop 8: 8 lesbian bloggers have banded together to fight California’s Proposition 8. Their goal is to raise $8,000 by October 27th.

The Butterfly Temptress‘ series on cancer is being reprinted at the Best Sex Bloggers. You can also donate to the medical fund set up to help with her expenses by clicking on the link on my side bar. Note: Eden Fantasys was originally set to match the funds, but has pulled out.

Tango Magazine has an article about compersion, the feeling of joy associated with seeing a loved one love another.

Circumcision inquiry: Tristan Taormino’s writing a piece on circumcision. She’s looking to interview a parent-to-be who’s having a boy and has not yet decided whether to circumcise. Please email asktristan at gmail.

Get a badge for your blog:  I love sex and I vote.

Alternet has  a guide to how Obama and McCain compare on gay marriage, LGBT adoption and sex education.  (via Violet Blue)

Pepomint has an essay addressed to monogamous people, on how to be poly-friendly.

A student and part-time journalist who was sentenced to death for circulating an article about the rights of women under Islam after downloading it from the Internet, has had the sentence commuted. Instead, he has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

AV Flox has a post up at Open Salon about the “(seeming) paradox of how this so-called age of ambient awareness in fact makes us more disconnected in real life.” (via Bonni Rambatan).

Naughty voters, VibeReview has a promotion running until Election Day. Use this link and get 10% on your purchase.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

. . .In the days of social networks, always-on PDAs, real time tweets and FriendFeed links that update at the speed of light—and are visible to every Looky Lou perusing your account, deleting friends when things cool off can be a highly visible activity (as Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue each discovered when Xeni deleted 60+ posts and comments off her personal blog BoingBoing after the two apparently had a falling out). Therefore, the more politic of us now seem to do what corporate cowards have managed so adroitly for a long time—avoid any dramatic breaks in public contact, but in private, cut the sucker off, perfecting, if you will, the art of being ditched.

Obviously, if you’re dating someone regularly and they stop responding to emails, voicemails, tweets and so on, it’s brush off time for sure, but how about when it’s a more casual relationship, a friendship, or a friends with benefits situation? Can you tell if the person is just busy for the moment, or if you’re truly being ditched?

Link

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

arse 300x111 Arse Elektronika 2008

The 2nd gathering of kinksters and geeks (keeks and ginksters?) met in San Francisco, at CELLSpace. I also got to visit Kink.com and see the Ultimate Surrender live taping. Those pics are at Flickr and I’ll post shortly.

The Arse Elektronika Schedule page has links to all the MP3s, so you can hear the talks you’re interested in.

The MP3 of the talk Susan Mernit and I gave, “Avoiding the Emily Gould Effect” is here. Our Powerpoint slides (with additional references) may be viewed at Slideshare.net.

Susan has posted some of the notes and quotes for the talk over at Blogher: Over sharing, Blogging and Transparency—Notes—and Quotes– from a Talk.

Bonnie Ruberg (who writes the Click Me column for the Village Voiceand the Clickable Clit column for SF Weekly) had the stamina to Twitter the entire event.

The Arse Elektronika Anthology “pr0nnovation?” is out and can be ordered here or via RE/Search.

The Arse Elektronika 2008 Flickr pool is here.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }