Most of a year ago I dissected an absolutely awful and condescending marketing email I received from a PR person at Conde Nast. At the time, I objected to:

1. The over-hyped, sex-negative headline of the item being promoted;
2. The emailer’s utter failure to introduce herself or identify herself as Conde Nast PR at any point in the email;
3. The fact that the PR person clearly didn’t take the time to become familiar with ErosBlog before trying to promote an obviously unsuitable item;
4. The clueless and patronizing admonition to link to their article if I mentioned it, otherwise known as “telling me how to do my job as a blogger”;
5. A bait-and-switch article that didn’t live up to the breathless hype of its own headline; and
6. The bizarre used of oversexed and sexually-stereotyped slangy language throughout the article.

Well, that was then, and this is now. I just got another spammy PR email from Conde Nast. Do you think they have learned anything in the interval?

You be the judge:

Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:45:12 -0500
Subject: DETAILS: 5 Creepiest Substitutes for Women

Sex-negative headline, check! That’s a pot-calling-the-kettle-black headline if I ever saw one. If you label some sexual practice — in this case, the use of male masturbators and sex dolls — as creepy from the get-go, there’s no way this is going to be a sex-positive story. And calling them “substitutes for women” displays what strike me as deeply creepy attitudes toward women. The email goes on to confirm these creepy attitudes:

From: Taylor Harrell
To:

Good afternoon-

We all know that women can be difficult, so scientists (and in some cases
seamstresses) have been working around the clock to provide men with an
alternative. From sex in a flashlight to body pillows that breathe, check
out the five creepiest substitutes for a woman…

We “all know that women can be difficult”, huh? Well, with that attitude, are you surprised? That’s mistake number two and mistake number three from last time, check and check! Plus an added dose of apparent misogyny!

Please link to our story if you run something online.

There’s insulting mistake number four, just like last time. I’ve only been blogging for seven years, I did not know I was supposed to do that! Check!

What about number five — does the article live up (better say, “live down”) to the headline?

Sure enough. Aside from a few gratuitous slams at the kind of people the author imagines might want the products in question, there’s absolutely no effort to explain why the products are “creepy”. The reader is just supposed to assume along with the author. Bait and switch, check!

And now, just so we can collect the whole set, is this article full of bizarrely oversexed slang? Well, actually, no; it’s better written in a functional sense than the last one. But for new bonus points, this PR email didn’t actually include a functional link to the article in question. The link included was 404, and I had to navigate to the front page of the site to find the article. That noise you hear is the foghorn on your failboat.

Verdict: still clueless at Conde Nast.

College newspaper sex columns have long provided rich fodder for sex blogging, but too often (especially in the early days when campus sex columnists tended to spray burbling prose in a “Squeee! I’m writing about sex like a grownup!” sort of tone) they’ve tended to instigate mockery rather than respect. However, when “Dr. Strokes” addresses the extremely tricky subject of the rape fantasies so many women enjoy, the result is just about the calmest and sanest such discussion I’ve ever seen. Here’s an excerpt from Anatomy of A Rape Fantasy:

What are some of the reasons that people want to pretend rape?

1. Guilt avoidance. It sucks, but we still live in a society where people, especially women, are made to feel guilty about wanting sex. Let me quote Nancy Friday, from her classic 1973 book of women’s fantasies:

“The most popular guilt-avoiding device was the so-called rape fantasy… it simply had to be understood that what went on was against the woman’s will. Saying she was ‘raped’ was the most expedient way of getting past the big No to sex that had been imprinted on her mind since early childhood.”

2. Being irresistible. It can be fun to imagine that you’re so attractive that nobody can resist the urge to touch you, and that they need to have sex with you so much that they’re just going to take it. Let me repeat: it can be fun to imagine when you are in a highly sexually aroused state and completely in control of who is touching you and how. Not so much otherwise.

3. Fear can heighten excitement. This is a known fact–fear gets our adrenaline up, our heart pumping, our pupils dilate, even our genitals aroused. Think of a rape fantasy as like a roller coaster–a controlled fear experience which you can get off of, and not you being thrown around out of control at 150 mph.

4. The more positive side of guilt avoidance is “pressure to perform” avoidance. In my violent rape fantasy, nobody really expects me to “perform” or to be “good” or to really do anything but what my instincts tell me to do. And it’s fun to imagine a situation where we’re expected to just run on instincts. (This is another gradation for me between “BDSM” and “rape” fantasies–in my BDSM fantasy, I have less pressure to perform because I have less ability to perform, but in my rape fantasy, I become a purely instinctual creature.)

2024 update: Somewhere between 2008 and now, the link not only broke, but the entirety of the Swarthmore Daily Gazette at that URL has been excluded from the Internet Archive. That in turn presumably has an associated controversy or story, but I do not know it:

Here’s something you don’t see every day, courtesy of the “Furry Fandom” sex pack in 3D SexVilla. Furries going at it!

Sadly for our furrier friends, the furry functionality of the 3D SexVilla software is somewhat limited. Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion. But perhaps a furry-fetishist might see it differently.

Furry things I think the software would need to be really furry: more animal types, an assortment of tails, half-face furry masks, furry leggings and boots, furry gloves/paws..

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This sex vignette from Under His Hand reminds of the sort of blog post I was always looking for (and too rarely found) back when I would sometimes do Sex Blog Roundups for Fleshbot:

He was standing on his side of the bed when he started stripping, looking at me.

There was an animal in his eyes.

Standing on my own side of the bed, I started stripping, too. Cooperative prey, I am.

He climbed up on the bed, on his knees, and started toward me. I followed suit, climbing up and walking on my knees to meet him in the middle.

“Only in missionary and with the lights out.” I said playfully, thinking of the prudish behaviors we’d been mocking.

He gripped the hair at the back of my head and crushed his mouth to mine in reply.

Prudish wasn’t happening.

This was one of the rare times when kissing hit me as I assume it hits others. One of the rare times that I leaned into it, encouraging his tongue to probe and explore. His appreciative moan sent shivers down my spine and I went on my own exploration with my own tongue.

When we pulled away, wiping wetness from our lips and chins, there was a bit of animal in both of us. I felt bold and uninhibited, seeing the goosebumps, goosebumps that I gave him, peppering his arms and legs.

And his cock. Stiff and jutting. I grinned and went back in for more. Taking the initiative and grabbing, wanting, nipping at his neck and shoulders, his nipples, my fist wrapped around him.

I’m not usually the aggressor in bed. I’m much more suited to the submissive role— go figure, right? And generally, he’s not much of one for laying back and taking it.

He wasn’t this time either. He met my aggression with his own, sinking his teeth into the spot where my neck curves into my shoulder and growling. My movements on his cock, so sure and determined before, faltered. My head bowed and fell against his chest.

I tilted my head to the side, exposing myself to his mouth. Normally I dislike biting, finding the sharp pain of flesh trapped between unforgiving teeth to be jolting and unpleasant. But this time… this time, the pain came in delicious waves, seeming to start at the point of the bite and working their way down to my cunt, in a seemingly endless influx of pleasure.

“Oh.” Lightly, softly, the surprise carried in my voice. “I like that.” I felt his lips curl against my skin. “I knew you’d see it my way eventually,” he said, his mouth opening for another bite.

Across my collarbone, down my chest, back over my shoulders. My own body rippling into goosebumps; still we stayed as we were, up on our knees, face to face.

I wondered how I could get his cock in me from that position.

It was still wrapped in my fist. Hot and dry, smooth as velvet. And hard. So. Very. Hard. It was also about even with my belly button, and hot as belly button fucking sounds, I wanted him in my cunt. Now.

I tilted my hips forward, rubbing against him, inviting, wordlessly begging. Without loosening his teeth, he shoved a hand down between my legs and attacked my pussy. He chuckled at finding me so wet, greedy greedy cunt, and easily slid in a finger, two, then three, fucking me with them while I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and hung on for the ride.

And what a ride he is.

I came, hard, soaking over his fingers. When pulled his hand away, his gleaming, glistening hand, he pushed my head down to his crotch. As I took him into my mouth, I felt him wiping the warm wetness of my pussy juices across my back, in my hair, down my arms.

As Paris would say— that’s hot.

The smell of sex filled the air. I didn’t suck him long before I was rolling over on to my back, spreading my legs, a wanton whore inviting him in.

He accepted the invitation.

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I think the man with the electrified penis is asking a very good question here:

A Wall Street retiree wearing a red latex bodysuit and a black hood is strapped to a table while electric shocks surge into his penis. Talking to Daniel Bergner in his new book, “The Other Side of Desire,” the man compares his masochistic ecstasy to having onion skins stripped off his psyche.

“Is this a weird way to deal with life?” he asks Bergner at one point. “Consider the man who bought Mark McGwire’s seventieth home-run ball for three million dollars. Who’s weirder?”

They are having a discussion at Bondage Blog about whether this girl is tied to the tree, or just kneeling there with her wrists near the rope around its base. I think we can all agree, though, that she’s fetching in that tattered slip of a dress:

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There’s something deeply, bizarrely, and recursively ironic about this. While I was playing with the 3D SexVilla BrainImageInstantiator (mock trademark hereby claimed), an exceedingly primitive AI (aka weblog spamming script) landed in Faustus’s post about the future of such tools, and successfully (albeit briefly) hacked a nascent argument about the potential capabilities of AIs by taking three sentence fragments from the previous comment and rearranging them into something that looked superficially plausible to my own primitive high-speed “is this comment human?” Turing-testing algorithms.

Ladies and gentlemen and assorted avatars, please fasten your seatbelts, this is gonna be a long and bumpy ride. And there’s no telling where we might end up.

Meanwhile, back at the dance club, it’s after hours and one of the t-girls (that’s the term the 3D SexVilla software uses, not mine) has gotten bored and perhaps a little lonely: