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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
ErosBlog posts containing "whore"
August 19th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
In a longer piece, Julie Meadows writes:
A woman has natural power in this world. She is a potent source of sexuality and life. It is a gift, but as with all gifts, it is also a curse because men and women will always hate her for knowing her own power.
That is why she is called a whore. She knows it, she uses it, and it scares people who want it or wish they had it, even if her choices have nothing to do with those people. Sex work can be safe and healthy, or it can be illegal and dangerous. We should be protecting all members of our society, including the beautiful and powerful women. A sex worker – properly trained for sex work – can be an educator and source of liberation for others. A friend of mine told me that as a young man, he picked the female with the most sexual experience and had her teach him everything. He had successful relationships after that because he acquired skill through mindfulness that many men never learn because they don’t pay attention. But more than that, a compassionate sex worker can provide emotional and mental soothing for clients, or teach couples things they can do together through instruction. I spent many hours as an escort just talking to clients, listening to their problems and assuring them that the stresses of their daily life are common and that they shouldn’t be too hard on themselves. With an education in therapy and counseling, coupled with the confidence that comes with providing a legal service, I could have thrived as someone capable of physical and mental and emotional therapy. They are all important.
What’s wrong with being a whore? The people who strip her humanity away from her and tape her mouth closed. Other than that, nothing.
Emphasis, on those first three sentences, added by me.
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March 10th, 2008 -- by Bacchus
This just in from the New York Times:
Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.
The wiretap recording, made during an investigation of a prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP, captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.
…
The man described as Client 9 in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, Emperors Club VIP, on the night of Feb. 13. Mr. Spitzer traveled to Washington that evening, according to a person told of his travel arrangements.
Classy guy, screwing around on his wife the night before Valentine’s day, eh?
Here’s a nice photo of the family man with his wife and three daughters:
(I found that photo on an adult webmaster board along with the cruel-but-funny caption: “Daddy’s been banging some prostitutes, girls, so let’s all go to church!”)
I’ll leave the detailed analysis to Susie Bright, who really enjoys tearing into the sexual hypocrisy of conservative old white male politicians (into which camp Spitzer, though a Democrat, surely falls, thanks to his reputation as an aggressive, even rabid, law-and-order prosecutor). I’ll just say there surely must be a special circle in hell for prosecutors who enjoy a particular vice while denouncing that same vice and sending people to jail for it:
Mr. Spitzer gained national attention when he served as attorney general with his relentless pursuit of Wall Street wrongdoing. As attorney general, he also had prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.
In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.
“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. â€?It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.â€?
Update, courtesy Jay Leno: “In the governor’s defense, he was bringing prostitution to its knees… one woman at a time.”
Second update: Susie’s take, as anticipated.
October 13th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
According to Radosh, who has audio to prove it, a very good modern answer on Jeopardy got rejected in favor of a deeply obsolete one:
Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings is robbed of $200 when Alex Trebek rejects his response to the clue, “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker.”
Jennings had said, “What is a ho?” The “right” answer: “What is a rake?”
Thanks to Eugene Volokh for the link.
February 13th, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Naw, that’s putting it too gently. Redwhore is probably dreaming. She writes:
Together, B and K make this enticing pair. In public, I am convinced that others look at us and assume they’re partners, because it’s rare to have such male beauty (booty) in the same place.
I’m trying to convince them both that it’s ok for me to rub their cocks at the same time and perhaps let the cocks touch for a quick pic…seriously…my TONGUE will be in it, for God’s sake! But they each just laugh at this and say (in the same, Alpha-male way): “Umm, NOT happenin’!”
I contend that if I sign a non-publish disclaimer and demand it as what I want, what I need!…they might give it up. I’m hopeful. The contrast of black and pink cock is just too sweet.
It’s that Alpha-male thing, Red. You know, that thing you like about them? I’m not saying you can’t make it happen, but that would be the way to bet. In any case, your (doubtless considerable) powers of persuasion are in for a workout.
July 29th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The Dirty Whore has a post up about why she uses such an edgy name, along with an email address that starts “filthy cumslut”. She writes:
I want you take a small risk when you come here. I want you to think and feel when you read my blog. I want you to be provoked sometimes. I want you to disagree with me. I want you to learn something about yourself and the way you feel about sex – that’s more important than what you absorb about me.
We got a lot of guys in this country who are scared of sex. It makes them feel sick, it makes them feel dirty, it makes them feel vulnerable which in their minds is only one step away from being gay, and yes they have a problem with that. And so, in their minds, any woman who likes sex, who revels in it and has fun at it and squirts joyously at the finish, is a cunt, a slut, a whore. And they use these words, in daily conversation and with considerable venom.
In my experience nice guys, guys who love sex and love women who love sex, don’t use these words much, don’t even think them except with an ironic smile or while recreating bad porno for the fun of it. Guys who own these words, who use them as basic vocabulary with all connotations accepted, who address them to women as titles, these are bitter guys, scared guys, angry guys, unhappy guys. Guys with an axe to grind and no loving woman to grind it with. Guys who lie in the locker room.
For reasons still unclear, Dirty Whore is telling us all, by exercising her natural monopoly over her own namespace, “if you want to talk to me, or about me, you have to pretend to be one of those bitter angry scared broken guys.”
Well, OK, she’s interesting and often worth talking about. If that’s the risk premium she charges as the price for addressing her namespace, I can pay it. Them as knows me know I’m not one of those guys anyway, and I’m not a huge believer in worrying about other people’s opinions in the first place. Nor did a little role-playing ever hurt anyone.
But I worry that she might also be saying “I think every guy is one of those guys, and that’s what I want you to learn about yourself.” In which case, sorry, no, but it’s not true, the shoe doesn’t fit and I won’t wear it. And I’m very sorry if her experiences have made her come to feel that way.
February 9th, 2003 -- by Bacchus
The hooligani who publish The Exile have attitude, and they’ll never be accused of political correctness. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that they really are as depraved as they pretend to be. But in Moscow, where depravity is cheap and flows as freely as vodka, it’s possible, or at least plausible.
Be that as it may, they publish some sex writing that’s as fresh and honest as it is politically incorrect. For example, this article (purporting to be the first of a regular series) in which prostitutes are interviewed for their stories — before the interviewer gets down to business.
“Oh bozhe moi! Hell yes! My first john was a young guy. A young bandit. I was literally shaking when I went over. I couldn’t help it. I sat there trembling. He was very gentle. He poured me a lot of vodka. I got completely drunk and calmed down. Then it was all right.” She laughed. “I’m blushing, aren’t I?”
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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