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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
April 19th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
The headline for this story should read “Bullies throw food at students who wore animal-ear headbands” but instead it’s “No evidence of ‘furries’ in Nebo School District despite allegations, social media firestorm”. I’ve seen a lot of moral panics in my life, but the entire right wing freaking out about teen furries (while not knowing what a furry even is, apparently) has got to be just about the most bizarre moral panic imaginable. Doesn’t it have to be? Please tell me it does!
So here’s the actual story, as reported by local news:
PAYSON, UT — Allegations of students at Mt. Nebo Junior High School dressing up like animals and biting, barking and pouncing on fellow students created a social media firestorm on Wednesday.
As it turns out, these allegations were “completely unfounded,” said Seth Sorensen, spokesman for the Nebo School District.
Last week, “students were not treating each other respectfully and things were occurring that they just did not feel were appropriate and conducive to education,” Sorenson said.
A small group of students at the school were wearing headbands with animal ears, which led other students to throw food at them. Kelsey James, spokeswoman for the Utah State Board of Education, said that incident prompted the school to send a letter to students’ families.
The letter, which was obtained by KSL.com on Thursday, reminded students of the district’s dress code, which says “jewelry, accessories, tattoos, hair, facial hair and other elements of a student’s appearance that draw undue attention, distract, disrupt, or otherwise interfere with the learning atmosphere at school or at school activities and events, or that create a health, safety, or welfare issue are prohibited.”
After the administration had conversations with the students wearing the headbands — noting that they were a “little bit of a disruption” — the students stopped wearing them, Sorenson said.
The letter also addressed the food throwing targeted at the headband-wearing students, saying that a “written, verbal or a physical act that creates a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive environment is not permitted.”
…
He added that the school hasn’t had any incidents of students wearing masks or animal costumes, nor have any students engaged in biting, licking or any other forms of animal-like behavior.
Still, the unfounded allegations of “furries” (people who dress and sometimes act like animals) spread like wildfire across social media, most prominently in conservative circles.
In a post Thursday on the social platform X, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said students “who behave like animals and bite classmates should be expelled” and administrators “who defend such behavior should be fired.”
“There’s really been no evidence that any of those behaviors ever occurred. The administration has had no reports from students that that happened,” Sorenson said. “There’s been a lot of things pushed out on social media that are inaccurate and a lot of information that is not factual and is based on hearsay and rumors.”
…
State lawmaker and Utah gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman also chimed in on X, saying, “We The People, not the animals. Each of these children have more courage, conviction, and fortitude than all of our ‘Republicans leaders’ (RINOS) put together.”
Both Lee and Lyman retweeted a post from Libs of TikTok, which the Washington Post says has amassed an audience of millions on X, largely by targeting LGBTQ+ people. In the video, a group of students speaking over each other complain that some students at the school wear masks and pounce on people.
As for me, I’m just glad to hear that even Utah, there are some cool kids who wear cat-ear headbands and aren’t afraid to pounce on people they like. (We don’t actually know who it was that got pounced, but I’ve been around the block a few times and have myself been pounced. Pouncing in young humans is a love language.)
Image credit: The young people wearing animal ears at the top of the post are a cropped detail from this image by Blade Ride.
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April 17th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Twenty years ago I blogged about a site that had faked-up celebrity women with photoshopped jizz all over their faces. I ended the post with this prognostication disguised as a query:
How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?
Futurism is always a curious mix of oh-my-god-nailed-it and hilarious failure. In 2024 we still have phone cams, but DVD players are getting rare. Vivid Entertainment hasn’t released a new movie since about 2018, and superstar porn models are also a vanishing breed. But technology to give us porn that features our latest crush object, with or without their consent? That, twenty years later, we most definitely have. Whether we (socially, culturally, individually) want it, or not.
Here’s my existence proof. On the left, we have a 1957 photograph of cabaret dancer (high class stripper) Jenny Lee, aka “The Bazoom Girl”. Three clicks later, on the right, we have a very convincing image of Jenny without her dance costume, courtesy of an AI filter offered by the for-pay (if you have cryptocurrency) service DeepNoods:
I’ll have more — much more — to say about DeepNoods in a moment. But first let’s look more closely at what the service has done. (Click on the above image for the full resolution side-by-side.) What was my user experience, and what do we think of the modified image?
User experience first: After setting up an email-verified login, it’s literally just three clicks to process a photo. Hit the upload button, select a photo, hit the “reveal” button, wait two minutes, done. No parameters, no controls, no settings, no muss, no fuss. Just upload and go.
As for the image: I’ve studied it closely, and I only have three minor complaints. Look at the areas I’ve indicated with yellow arrows:
- The biggest flaw, by far, is that the AI got confused by her right foot where it was partially obscured by her left thigh. The bit of half-shod toes visible in shadows in the original image was removed entirely, and something subtly important has gone wrong with her ankle in the altered image, leaving the impression that she’s trying but failing to hide a club foot from the photographer.
- In the original image, Jenny artfully turned out her left foot in that subtle way that dancers and pinup models have. The AI did its “revert to the mean” magic and turned her digitally-unshod foot back to the right, into a more natural pose that’s presumably better-represented in its training database of nudes.
- That same reversion to the mean was cruelly unkind to Jenny’s generous bosom. Not to put too fine a point on it: the “bazoom girl” got robbed by the AI, which provisioned her with digital tits that fall sadly short of the 42Ds she advertised in her performing heyday. Indeed, her digital curves in general are smaller and more muscular than her actual ones were. This may be in line with 21st-century tastes, but for a nostalgic curmudgeon like me, it’s not ideal.
All of my nitpicks aside, the effectiveness and ease of use of this software/service is astonishing. These are the fraudulent x-ray spectacles of comic book fame, made real (or at least less fraudulent) through the magic of software. I’ve known for twenty years that this day was coming, and I’ve known for a year that this particular photomanipulation was possible with the image generation and manipulation tools we’ve come to call by terms such as “AI” and “generative art”. But I’ve been thinking of it as a technology with substantial barriers to entry, such as technical skill and access to software and the creative cleverness to avoid the pornocalypse filters that are baked into all commercially-respectable AI tools. DeepNoods has rubbed my nose in an unsettling fact: the barriers are gone. Any fool can do all this now.
So let’s talk about the ethics of it all. Make no mistake: this is software that can hurt people. As the name advertises, it is a deepfake generator. Deepfakes, in the succinct language of Wikipedia, “have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud.” The pornocalypse filters I’ve bitched about already exist for a reason, and the reason is that publicly traded companies and financiers with public reputations have to grapple with the pernicious deepfake projects listed on Wikipedia and somehow prevent the worst abuses of these capable image manipulation tools. It’s arguably among the biggest business problems that these so-called AI companies have.
The proprietors of DeepNoods have gone another way. They have chosen to remain carefully anonymous vis-a-vis their customers, and their web page makes no claims or representations about who they are or where you could find them. After processing your first image (which is free) at DeepNoods, the next one costs a dollar (presented as a 50% discount off a $2.00 list price). The “buy credits” button dumps you without explanation onto a sparse third-party page that demands a telephone number “for verification” in order to “complete your crypto purchase”. (That’s as far as I explored, since I don’t have a telephone number I’m willing to provide to an untrusted site presenting itself as a crypto exchange.) We are left to assume that DeepNoods proprietors have chosen to avoid the potentially-messy reputational, legal, moral, and financial consequences of any misuse of their tool by being, if not beyond reproach, at least beyond being found or forced to endure remonstrance.
Yesterday, when I processed the Jenny Lee image for this post, using the single free promotional credit found in my account at first login, the DeepNoods site had neither a privacy policy nor any terms of service. Today it has links to both; and the TOS do contains words of prohibition with regard to “offensive, harmful, or illegal content.” But terms of service have no binding force outside the law of contract, and you can’t contract with an anonymous party. Which is to say: the terms of service are empty words, and thus I shan’t bother analyzing them further.
It’s probably also worth noting that the altered demonstration image DeepNoods chose to display on their homepage began as a widely circulated image of celebrity musician Billie Eilish.
So much for the service-provider side of the ethics problem. What of the users?
First of all, let’s talk about me, here at ErosBlog. I was not paid to write this post; it is not promotional in any way. I am not endorsing DeepNoods nor any other deepfake tool or service; I am not making any general claims about the ethics of using such tools. The ethics of using this kind of software are not different in kind than we have been grappling with since the invention of Photoshop, or the airbrush, or the sharp knife in the darkroom wielded by Stalin’s propagandists. The only thing that’s different about AI-enabled generative deep-fakery is the lower barriers to entry. It’s fuckin’ easy now.
It’s true that I have said a lot in the past about the ethics of altering images. I’ve posted about photoshopped cum on celebrity faces, the asshole who puts fake digital “whore” tattoos on beach nudes, the infamous Jesus buttsexed by Roman soldiers ‘shop, the construction of a naked quadriplegic, and even my own fumbling use of generative art tools to create topless depictions of Sophia Loren, albeit ones that inhabit the uncanny valley. That last generated some mild backlash, as well as some thoughtful questions; and prompted me to dig in to the ethics (as I see them) in some — but far from sufficient — detail.
The shortest summary of my views is that the technology used to create an image — any image — has no particular ethical relevance. The ethical inquiry is always a balance: what potential for harm does this image have, and what are the benefits of creating and publishing it? Who suffers the harms, and who reaps the benefits? Are the harms big enough to worry about? Do they outweigh the benefits?
To one degree or another, I’ve had to grapple with these questions every time I’ve published an image on this blog. I’m 100% certain that some of my choices — some of my attempts to balance the harms and benefits — have been wrongly made. To test today’s deepfake service, I deliberately chose the image of an adult entertainer who has been dead for thirty years, knowing that she’s far beyond the reach of my ability to harm her. I’m comfortable with that choice. Some of you may not be. If you want to tell me how you feel, the comment section is open for any civil remarks. The ethics of erotic imagery in general, and of AI image manipulation in specific, are endlessly interesting to me. Let me know what you think!
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April 16th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
You’ve never heard any “not all men” nonsense from me in these pages. Since the earliest days of the “Me Too” movement, I have understood that the collective noun “men” should not be understood as a categorical accusation. If the shoe makes you uncomfortable, man, you need to wear it anyway; and if it doesn’t? Congrats to you! But we live in a world where it is known that a hit dog hollers. Saying “not all men” is hollering, and thus it’s an automatic way to align yourself with all the problematic men out there.
That said, before today I had never encountered the brilliant analogy in the video below. The analogy drives home the point that even if “not all men” is literally true, it’s not usefully true for women; in fact, it’s anti-useful, perhaps even dangerous:
Found here. Transcript follows:
00:00 Nah, nah.
00:00 You say you don’t understand why women say all men,
00:02 but really you do.
00:03 You understand that logic because you like guns, right?
00:06 True. And what’s one of the first safety tips they give you about guns
00:09 is treat every gun like it’s loaded.
00:11 Like it’s loaded, right? Exact.
00:13 Even if you know it’s not loaded,
00:15 all guns are loaded. Right?
00:17 That’s how you have this.
00:18 That’s how you look at every gun.
00:19 Because you can’t look at somebody’s gun
00:21 and tell if it’s loaded or not, right?
00:23 Women are doing the exact same thing.
00:25 Cause any man could be her assailant.
00:27 She can’t look at a man and be like, oh,
00:28 that’s the good one.
00:29 So she treats all men like they’re potentially, the same way we do guns.
00:34 It’s the same.
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April 15th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I don’t know if every good orgy has a fully-clothed orgy monitor, but this one definitely does:
From the cover of a vintage (1970s?) contact magazine aptly named Contact.
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April 13th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
The meme that marriage is a trap for the unwary bachelor has a deep history. Grose’s 1811 Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue includes “the parson’s mousetrap” as a synonym for marriage. This Wallace Wood cartoon from Screw magazine is a more visceral take on the same notion:
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April 11th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
I know, I know, in 2024 it takes more than glasses and a book to make a pretty woman into a librarian, but in 1964? It was enough:
Photo is from a men’s suits advertorial in the May 1964 issue of Swank magazine.
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April 9th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
In Real Men Hunt by Celia Kyle and Marina Maddix, Warren the werewolf is trying to court a human woman. It’s going badly, in general, but she likes his company when he’s in wolf form. His packmates have to gently explain why sniffing around her that way isn’t ever going to get the job done:
“So, how long are you planning on trying to melt her heart as a wolf?” Zeke asked the question, ending on a snicker.
“Don’t,” Warren grunted.
“Gonna ask her for a bone on your first date? Get it? Bone?”
Warren growled, scowling at the road.
“Look, man, I’m on your side,” Zeke scratched at the scruff on his face. “All I’m saying is the lady may think wolves are cute and fluffy, but how’s she supposed to fall in love with you? You’re barking up the wrong tree, my friend.”
“He’s barking up the right tree,” Val corrected. “The problem is the fact he’s barking.”
“Fuck my life,” Warren groaned under his breath and pressed his hot forehead to the cool glass. “I get it. I’m just taking what I can get as far as spending time with her goes. You heard her. She doesn’t even like me all that much. How the hell am I supposed to convince her she’s my mate?”
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