Fifteen years ago I posted a small photo of a steam powered fucking machine to this blog. It was all over the ‘net even then, without attribution (of course); and time has not been kind to the sourcing of that picture. No matter, moving on. Steam powered devices, like any other technology, have generations of improvement; earlier models are clunky and seem improvised, while later models are sleek, well-engineered, and and look more polished. Imagine my amusement, then, to see this photo posted by Jerusalem Mortimer on Twitter from the Prague Museum of Sexual Technology of a much-more-accomplished-looking steam-powered fucking machine:

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I like to Share Our Shit of a Saturday, and this is a Saturday, so:

1. I link fairly often to Paltego at Femdom-Resource, so I was thrilled to see him mention that he’d given this detailed interview to Miss Ava Zhang. The chance to learn more about him while also linking to and providing visibility to a woman in her line of work that I otherwise would not have known about, at a her own site — which is what these #SoSS posts are all about! — that I normally would not have had an excuse to visit, is a bonus in these trying times.
2. Since last we checked in with my good friend Dr. Faustus, he’s been busy; his empire of projects and commissions has been churning right along. Notable releases include The Sacrifice Of Gigi, which is an even-darker re-imagining by the artist Faustus Crow (no relation) of one of the scenes from Dr. Faustus’s comic In The Kitchen With Dolcetta. Dr. Faustus also completed publication of his sexy Star Trek parody The Needs Of The Many in both English and Spanish languages. I’m also pleased to announce that Faustus has got me doing image research for him again, and blogging the results at Erotic Mad Science; the first of these commissions appeared yesterday. Finally, a casual image forward on my part has become rather more; after sending him a vintage tube-girl illustration from a Japanese source, Faustus commissioned a paid translation of the accompanying text to provide context for a blog post about the image. Never let it be said that the man is not dedicated to his art!
3. The History of BDSM blog puts out a monthly roundup of deep-dive and/or thoughtful kink and BDSM links. It’s a pretty impressive effort that’s worth some time if you’re interested in these subjects.

This woman has hit upon a completely irresistible interrogation technique. He is helpless to resist, he must speak. “C’est bien, continue…”

Panels are from a 1980s Elvifrance detective comic.

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Those of you who were fascinated by the tale of poor Louise Rosine, jailed in Atlantic City in 1921 for failing to cover her knees on the beach and for having a bad attitude when confronted about this sartorial failing, may be interested in this related cartoon from 1919 from the other side of the Atlantic:

The caption reads: “It is stated that the Borough Council of St. Prudal-on-Sea have appointed inspectors to see that visitors are properly dressed — from the moral point of view — for bathing.” This appears to be lampoonery; Google has no results for “St. Prudal-on-Sea” or “St. Prudal” or “Prudal” or any related place names. Perhaps a pun on prudes and prudery? I can only assume that the cartoon is mocking the same sort of bathing attire regulations that would, two years later in Atlantic City, lead to fisticuffs and arrests. Thanks to Dara Howley on Twitter for unearthing the cartoon from a May 31, 1919 London Life newspaper.

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“Holy art museum, Batman! A bad guy has tied up Robin, again!”

Someone on Twitter posted a .gif of this scene that I can’t copy directly (because Twitter destroys gifs) with the observation “I have seen the greatest minds of my generation trying to make Batman heterosexual for 20 years without success.” Longer than that, I think!

Fortunately I was able to find a .gif that Twitter did not destroy:

It’s said to be from the Batman Stands Pat episode of the TV show (1966).

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I have been linking to The Rectal Foreign Bodies page since 2004. The problem they cover has not gone away in that time, but the quality of radiological imaging has dramatically improved:

Another thing that hasn’t changed changed is the fundamental safety rule that anything that goes up your butt should have a wider base, no matter how big it is to start with.

Image via @gretchenscience on Twitter.

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There’s a whole suite of reasons why I haven’t been posting at all about the rolling disaster for sex workers and online adult speech that is the FOSTA-SESTA bill signed into law by President Trump last week. For one thing, I was waiting to make sure His Vicious Randomness actually did sign it; for another, I’ve been busy with an exhausting rescue dog ongoing mini-crisis on the home front. Third reason: despite this being rather like the #pornocalypse on steroids from an adult free speech perspective, the primary negative impact is to sex workers, who are losing their livelihoods and are in many cases at risk of losing their safety and perhaps their lives. I’m not qualified enough or knowledgeable enough about sex worker issues to write about that, but writing about free speech issues while ignoring sex worker carnage is clearly shallow and wrong. Balanced against that, I’ve had multiple actual sex workers dropping into my Twitter DMs going “Hey, when are you going to write about FOSTA-SESTA? Do you need more info? How can we help?” Which is flattering — apparently they have more faith in my ability to write about their issues than I do — but also highlights the desperation that’s out there, as too many sex workers feel like they are being “vanished” from the internet with nobody much noticing or caring or speaking up.

On top of all this, in the last few days we had the likely final frost for the year in my part of the world, which means that a sensible person of constrained financial means who mostly eats vegetables really ought to be spending every waking minute in the garden putting seeds in soil, not pounding a keyboard about a problem that’s not going to go away before the midterm elections at the absolute earliest. So, yeah. There are lots of reasons for my sense of paralysis, even helplessness, when it comes to writing about SESTA-FOSTA just now.

But I do have a lot to say. Sex workers aside (and I’m not putting you aside!) this is an enormous threat to online adult speech; it offers, and is already being used as, an excuse to justify the blue-nosed pornocalypsing tendencies of every online community and platform out there. I am on this. I am with you. But I am also just insanely busy trying to survive and keep my critters alive.

For today, I can offer this roundup of helpful links, the mere titles of which are informative, and the reading of which should be eye-opening and instructive to anybody who has gotten this far without having previously been aware of the FOSTA-SESTA disaster:

1. FOSTA-SESTA’s real aim is to silence sex workers online: Under the cover of trafficking, sex workers are being silenced (Engadget article by Daniel Cooper, April 11)
2. Congress just legalized sex censorship: what to know — “sex work” is not another word for trafficking (Engadget article by Violet Blue, May 30)
3. New Legislation Forces Sex Workers Back to Streets and Strips Away Internet Freedoms in One Swoop: The SESTA-forced end of a Craigslist personal ads era means big problems for sex workers (Alternet article by Rick Riley, April 15)
4. The lies about sex trafficking that brought down Backpage: Powerful myths about sex work are behind the war against Backpage (Salon article by Noah Berlatsky, April 15)
5. Strange Fruit: How Sex Trafficking Laws Affect Consensual Sex Workers (Louisville public radio broadcast on WPFL interviewing trans activist and writer Londyn De Richelieu, April 15)
6. No One Wants To Listen To Sex Workers (Washington Post opinion column by Molly Roberts, April 10)
7. Sex News: FOSTA-SESTA damage continues (Tiny Nibbles link roundup by Violet Blue, April 14)

More soon!