Sexerati

“The idea at the time that gay men would use condoms was ludicrous.”

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:44:06 +0000

Sex Positive, a documentary on the life of safer sex educator and activist Richard Berkowitz in the early days of AIDS, is out now in Manhattan. The Times calls it a “sad, useful film,” with Berkowitz possessing “the aura of an army veteran who served on the front lines in a war that took the lives of countless comrades.” The San Francisco premiere is July 3.

Porn, condoms, trouble

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:36:46 +0000

Miss Calico, a BDSM porn performer and sex worker advocate, points to a adult film director Ernest Greene’s reponse to the coverage of a reported HIV case among US porn performers. When it comes to porn, notions of privacy, confidentiality, and rights get secondary play over outdated and just flat wrong figures on how hugely profitable porn is (isn’t), and fearmongering over porn actors “infecting” the “general public.”

Among the concerns from the industry named by Calico and Greene that aren’t making it to the press: pressuring AIM, the professional clinic that tests performers, to release names of the HIV+ performers is a breach of their rights; relying on current OSHA standards to regulate the porn business without tailoring them to porn industry could result in more danger for performers; and I’ll add one more from indie porn director Tony Comstock: what’s with printing these major studio directors’ assertions that the “right” not to use a condom is something performers actually would privlege over their own health without asking performers themselves? (Update: Thomas Roche on what’s really contagious in Pornlandia: “bullshit.”)

Art porn from your inbox by Elliott Burford

Melissa Gira Grant — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:21:18 +0000

(via kottke / archive at geekologie)

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:39:12 +0000

“Months later: another date, another guy, another technological incompatibility. This time she was out with someone who wanted to text . . . everyone. ‘He kept talking about Twitter.’ Fishkin rolls her eyes. ‘Ashton Kutcher. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.’”

Twitter. Twitter! Twitter.

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:00:29 +0000

More on the tech sex ed front: The Birds and The Bees line, a service advertised on MySpace, where adult sex educators can answer teens’ questions via text. Predictably conservatives are throwing anger around on the premise that the program is run without teens needing permission from their parents to participate. Which is precisely the point. Really, the dodgiest thing about the line is that staffers are apparently turning to urbandictionary.com to answer their own questions: about teen sex slang.

The web and the death of pornographic context

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:16:35 +0000

The best bit of Nerve’s deceptively swift history of how sex drove the internet, from ARPAnet to gonzo pro/am sites: “Yet, as normalized as online pornography may be, the material itself has become increasingly stripped of any greater context or meaning… The digital revolution has accelerated this trend greatly — partially because bandwidth costs money, which in turn encourages producers to limit their content to the essentials, and partially because the conventions have become self-perpetuating. Much like computer code itself, porn has become a purely symbolic language…”

1/5th of Facebook employees there to police porn

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:49:20 +0000

A photo of a young couple sloppily making out pops onscreen. It’s gross, but not against the rules, so Axten punches a key to judge the image appropriate. Next up: a young woman in panties only, covering her breasts with her hands. “That’s pretty close,” Axten says, pondering the image. There’s nothing arbitrary about his judgments: at Facebook, they have developed semiformal policies like the Fully Exposed Butt Rule, the Crack Rule and the Nipple Rule. In this photo there’s no visible areola, he decides, so it stays.

Newsweek offers a moment in the life of Facebook’s “internal porn police.” Advertisers fear smut they say, which is halfway valid logic: but why not just let users dictate who gets to see what, Flickr or LiveJournal style? Rather than have a fresh-out-of-Stanford boy hitting delete on my tits, I could opt to filter them out of my mother’s sight.

(Also my inner sixteen year old is weeping runny black eyeliner tears to see one of them sporting a 2600 tshirt.)

The inevitable #amazonfail infographic

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:51:40 +0000

(via National Coalition Against Censorship)

Eve Sedgwick, Marilyn Chambers, RIP

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:05:03 +0000

Two luminaries of sex culture that I would have paid dear money to see tangle live & in person on desire, performance, and politics passed away Sunday — queer theory provocateur Eve Sedgwick and All-American porn princess Marilyn Chambers. Sedgwick’s friend Cathy Davidson writes that Eve died at her partner’s side. 56 year old Chambers was found by her daughter. And here, Susie Bright remembers Marilyn.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos does like sex

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:35:11 +0000

Here is a photo composite of Jeff “not a sexless founder-entrepreneur” Bezos on a bearskin rug from my Valleywag days.

Because we need this now: