“As of publication, I am the proud owner of five dating sim apps and nine boyfriends. Their ranks include a sexually aggressive demon aristocrat, an emotionally withholding celestial deity, and a man with a fedora and a goatee who is unsettlingly referred to as my uncle (he is my least favorite). This love story—between woman and modest stable of nearly identical cell phone apps—had a precursor. In point of fact, there might have been no $60+ receipt for the iTunes store had I not downloaded, that fateful New Year’s Day, a certain initial anime boyfriend.”
My Sensual Journey into Japan’s $90 Million Fake Anime Boyfriend Market (Broadly)
“They have to keep two (or more) separate lives, and keeping that separation is both crucial and risky, a lot to manage. People want to hurt them. They’re isolated even in roomfuls of people. No one knows if what they do is illegal or not, but treat them like it is. They’re discounted and devalued and often ignored until something bad happens. The media thinks one of them speaks for all of them, and they fucking think about this stuff all the time. They’re sick of being talked about like they’re not in the room.”
The Unexpected Ties Between hackers and Sex Workers (PrimeMind)
“The Moods Planet condom store is set on one of Panaji’s busiest streets. Buffered by a motorcycle repair shop on one side and a jeweler on the other, this brightly lit store with its distinctive logo — the shapely ‘o’s of Moods intertwined — seems incongruous. … In a country like India, where sex is still a taboo topic, who would walk into a store like this? Turns out everybody does.”
India’s condom showrooms: A place to talk about sex, health and candy nipple tassels (Globalpost)
“… In the more physical world, what if you make a sexbot and offer its services? There’s already been some talk that eventually flesh-and-blood prostitution may be replaced by plastic and silicon. There are even services available already, such as Siumi Le Chic [NSFW], that rents high-tech sex dolls.”
Predicting the Future of Sex Work in the Digital Age (Future of Sex)
“ATTN: spoke with Jake Cruise, an adult film producer who has been producing porn movies for more than 15 years. Cruise owns and operates four gay porn membership sites, one of them is Straight Guys for Gay Eyes, a membership site that produces straight porn made specifically with a gay audience in mind.”
Why Gay Men Like This Straight Porn (ATTN:)
See also: Visible difference: Gay pornographers shooting straight porn (TinyNibbles)
Sexting is becoming so common that even the AARP has put out an information bulletin about it. https://t.co/sgyIbT4Bk6
— David Ley PhD (@DrDavidLey) March 16, 2016
“If you are one of the 40 million people who enjoy reading or writing the mostly romantic werewolf, superhero or historical fiction stories found on Canadian startup Wattpad, you may also be contributing to the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence.” Or, perhaps, its censorship. “Mr. Fast says the Stanford team weeded out the most sex-drenched human “activities” contained in the corpus because that’s not what they were interested in. “There were things we did not want to emphasize,” Mr. Fast says.”
Stanford researchers using Toronto-based Wattpad’s stories to inform artificial intelligence (Globe and Mail)
“Despite our freedom speech and of the press, smut has been attacked time and time again in this country, and it is currently not protected by the First Amendment. And while we feel that smut does have a right to be disseminated (under a deal of control, of course), arguments in favor of its proliferation don’t extend too far past “Well, it’s fun, innit?” It also may be hard to defend obscenity because the definition has changed a lot over the years.”
Freedom of Information Day Historical Definitions of Obscenity (CraveOnline)
“What is the most memorable or outrageous request you’ve received from a client?
(Mistress Cyan) Someone came to me and wanted to do an interrogation scene in which they would be tortured to get the information out of them. His fantasy was to refuse and be blindfolded and shot! He was surprised when I agreed. We did the interrogation scene and I finally told him he would be executed if he did not tell me what I wanted to know. He wouldn’t, so I put him up on a St. Andrews Cross and shot him with a paintball gun. The red ink splattered on his chest and he loved it. He later shared that he had asked many others, and all refused. Sometimes you have to be inventive and have an open mind to fulfill someone’s fantasy.”
The best dominatrix professionals in LA (TimeOut LA)
“In her new book The Pornography Industry, out Mar. 29 by Oxford University Press, Shira Tarrant tries to examine the various contemporary debates about porn with a neutral eye. This is difficult to do, as she tells Quartz, research and debate concerning pornography is almost always “ideologically driven.” Anti-porn campaigners are committed to showing porn’s dangers. Porn’s defenders, including many pro-sex feminists, are often bent on refuting the anti-pornography activists.”
The way to fix the world’s porn “problem”? Make more of it (Quartz)
“… according to a survey of college students in Britain, 60 percent consult pornography, at least in part, as though it were an instruction manual, even as nearly three-quarters say that they know it is as realistic as pro wrestling. ”
When Did Porn Become Sex Ed? (NYT)
Great writing, but warning for survivors of sexual abuse and assault. “The agencies that protect America’s natural heritage enjoy a reputation for a certain benign progressivism—but some of them have their own troubling history of hostility toward women. Ever since the U.S. created institutions to protect its wilderness, those agencies have been bound up with a particular image of masculinity. The other major institution tasked with preserving and managing the American wilderness, the Forest Service, developed on a similar trajectory.” All of them hide (and neglect to take action toward) a repulsive legacy of sexual assault and harassment.
Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream (Huffington Post)
Main post image: Ebonee Davis, via In The Raw.
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