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The Sex Blog Of Record
June 9th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
I saw a link to this excellent blog post: What the government doesn’t understand about the Internet, and what to do about it.
Even before I went to read the post (which you should do, too, even though it has almost nothing to do with normal ErosBlog topics) I knew that there would be something in the “the government doesn’t understand” category that the (mainstream) article wouldn’t mention; namely, the fact that the internet is for porn. (Sing it with me, normal people: “The internet is for porn, the internet is for porn…”)
Turns out I was technically right — the word “porn” nowhere appears — but not right in a clever way, because the post does say this:
These [internet] services are reducing traditional institutions’ ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.
And that’s internet porn right there, unnamed but encompassed. The repressive institutions, including governments as well as the churches that once went around my little town offering wads of cash to any store that would permanently remove its dirty magazine rack, have pretty much utterly lost their power to suppress writing and photography featuring naked people fucking. And this power is gone not just in the perennially-damned urban centers, but even in the tiniest and most repressed of farming hamlets.
Nor can government put the erotic genie (um, may I have one of those, please?) back in the bottle. As the post goes on to say:
Any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public).
June 8th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
After the post Faustus made yesterday, it is perhaps not surprising that a bit of marketing for a “robotic blowjob machine” caught my eye this morning.
The actual product, when I saw pictures of it, was the inevitable disappointment you would expect, which is why I’m not linking to it. (Well, that, plus a reluctance to recommend untrusted vendors of products that combine electric motors with holes for insertion of tender, fragile, and oh-so-precious penile tissues.) For a hundred bucks plus shipping, you get a “robotic” pocket pussy, which is to say, you would get a pocket pussy that’s been enclosed in a harder plastic cylinder that contains “beads, attached to a small motor” that “grab your cock and suck it”.
Brrrrr.
I shouldn’t scoff, I suppose. We do live in a world with toilets that know your anus position and can offer you a touchless wash-and-dry. But I’m skeptical, nonetheless.
Pocket pussies themselves (or “male masturbation sleeves” if you want to be formal) offer no serious competition to flesh-and-blood pussies (with non-optional — and yes, that’s a feature — real women attached.) But the pocket variety do come in a wide array of models at a wide array of prices. I suppose adding some motorized jerking beads to the expensive ones could quickly get you to that magic hundred-dollar price point. But, to be honest, the pictures on offer from the robotic blowjob machine vendor looked like they were starting with the cheap one, then MacGyvering it up with some leftover Jack Rabbit innards.
So, why have I gone to all this length to give you my impressions of a device that I wouldn’t touch with {pauses, points to random male in the audience} your dick?
Because I’m fascinated and impressed by the sociology of the marketing prose. It turns out that overpriced sex toys are dirt cheap compared to real women:
“If you go to a prostitute, a blowjob can run you between $50-$150, just for a single shot! If you have a girlfriend, the customary pre-blowjob activities (dinner, drinks, movie) can easily run you $100, just for the single shot! And if you have a wife…you have to be married and the costs involved in that are enormous.”
But wait, there’s more! We’re not talking mere economic savings, here. Apparently your robotic blowjob machine delivers an actual superior experience, by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t complain when you ejaculate into it:
“When you are ready to blast, just do it. It can’t complain! No fancy dinners, no carrying its purse, no PMS.”
To be fair, as I suppose I ought to be, what this prose reveals to us are the views about women that the “robot” manufacturer ascribes to its prospective customers for the device. That might be a fairly narrow subset of men, as viewed through some rather milky glass. (High technologists of plastic are not necessarily decent sociologists, or even competent marketers.) Nonetheless, I’m struck by the divergence between the men this advertising is aimed at and the men I think would be the natural market for the product.
Men who think real blowjobs are too expensive (and too fraught with potential feminine complaint) may be out there. But really, I’d expect there are more men — or, at least, more men willing to invest $100 bucks in a sex gadget — whose only objection to real blowjobs is that they aren’t currently managing to get ’em. Is sour grapes marketing (“Better than a real blowjob, because real blowjobs come from demanding women with opinions”) really the most effective approach here?
Fascinating to see that somebody thinks it might be.
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June 5th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Anybody out there who is fond of latex? Because Madison Young is looking shiny and fine in this red and black number:
From this Men In Pain shoot.
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June 4th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
I have friends in academia who consider New Scientist the best of the popular science magazines, and I’ll admit, the magazine seems to do some very professional science writing. This is the first bit of popular journalism I’ve seen that treats the subject of female ejaculation as a matter of scientific interest, rather than as a sexual curiosity to be tittered at, or, worse, denied outright. (So common is this inevitably male denial that almost every time the subject has come up at ErosBlog, some guy has failed to get an “it’s just pee” comment through moderation, that assertion being a tidbit of sexual ignorance so profound that I’ve decided I won’t be a party to spreading it, even as a mere publisher.)
The New Scientist article is not perfect, but it’s the first thing I’ve read on the subject in years that successfully conveys all that remains unknown about female ejaculation (lots and lots) without surrendering unto ignorance that which is known, by scientists or by anybody with first-hand experience and a functioning set of senses.
From the article, two paragraphs about the historical pedigree of the discussion:
Many historical texts, such as the Kama Sutra, spoke about female “semen”, as did writers, including the Greek physician Hippocrates. Sometimes the writers may have been referring to everyday vaginal secretions, which increase during sexual arousal. However, there are several references to something more akin to ejaculation. In the 17th century, the Dutch physician and anatomist Regnier De Graaf spoke of “liquid as usually comes from the pudenda in one gush”.
In the last century, Ernst Gräfenberg, the German doctor who gave his name to the controversial G spot, drew attention to female ejaculation in a 1950 paper published in The International Journal of Sexology. “This convulsory expulsion of fluids occurs always at the acme of orgasm and simultaneously with it,” he wrote. “Occasionally the production of fluids is so profuse that a large towel has to be spread under the woman to prevent the bed sheets getting soiled.”
Link credit: Sexoteric.
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June 3rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
The Sirens, as every mariner has known since the age of Homer, are a deadly hazard to navigation. Beyond that, not much about them is certain; even their names have been variously reported.
Until now, that is. Now, thanks to Kinky Delight and Met-Art, we know that in these modern times, they are called Julia, Viola, and Veronika:
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June 2nd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Looking at porn is one thing. But, to state the obvious, porn is pictures, commercial pictures. Everybody who makes porn wants to sell it. Specifically, they want to sell it on the internet. Which means they need words about their pictures.
What’s strange is the way people write, commercially, about their pictures. Every nude is a “scorching hot teen beauty!” or a “filthy cum-covered nasty slut”. Every penetration is a deep dicking, every orgasm a screaming fountain of some hyperbolized fluid or other. It’s rare to find anybody who writes honestly and descriptively about erotic imagery.
It is so rare, in fact, that after seven years of sex blogging I sometimes fantasize about creating a porn blog or review site that allows people to market their own stuff, but only to the extent that their posts can survive some sort of Slashdot-style community moderation on the sole criterion of honest and non-hyperbolic descriptivity. The trouble is, I’m not sure anybody would participate.
Sometimes, I’ll even catch myself imagining what bits of porn — especially in some of its more specialized or unusual forms — would sound like if neutrally and fairly described, in sentences of standard English, without emphatic punctuation.
An unusual post on Bondage Blog triggered my lastest “porn, described” reverie. The linked gallery contains the following descriptive prose, mostly in all caps before I standardized it:
“Gorgeous babes and teens bound, tied, gagged, probed and submissively serving their master and misstresses [sic]. Real bondage. Real torture. Real pain. Real tears. Click here for more erotic fetish action! Submissive slaves bound in rope, chains, and leather. Domination. Discipline. Sadism. Humiliation. Hard sex.”
The picture displayed on Bondage Blog? Here’s my best shot:
A nude woman with a shaved head (think Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta) is tied with rope, in a squatting position, inside what looks like a wrought-iron basket. The basket, and she, are on top of a bale of hay, next to a ladder with a rusty chain hanging from it. She’s looking nervously at a reasonably-buff man wearing leather pants. He’s approaching her, and in his left hand is an old-fashioned wooden blueberry-picking scoop with metal tines.
I know my description wouldn’t sell porn the way “bound, tied, gagged, probed” presumably does. But I’ve got some sort of defiant, lingering attachment to the idea that words ought to be deployed usefully. Maybe a list of fetish-triggering words is useful in the sense that it encourages more credit cards to be deployed, but in the sense of actually painting a useful mental picture of the thing described, it’s full of fail.
Even more interesting is the fact that nobody sees the same things when they look at a porn picture. How would you describe our basket girl?
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June 1st, 2009 -- by Bacchus
I surrender. Pursuit of truth must yield to gender solidarity in this instance. This really works, honest!
Perhaps you may remember this post from 2007, discussing a seemingly-innocent query on a health forum from a young lady whose boyfriend had convinced her that regular anal sex would help her enlarge her “really flat butt”. I assumed then it was a prank or a troll post, but it was so funny I had to share it. I never imagined it was an actual meme at large in society.
The evidence from my search logs suggests otherwise. Today I got a search for “will anal sex ass bigger?”
Uh, yes. Yes, it will. But you have to do it a lot.
Moving on: there’s a sense in which we are, all of us, constructing a very imperfect model of the universe in our minds, to enable us to predict the consequences of our actions. This model, necessarily primitive, includes rules and concepts regarding how things work. What must a person’s causation model look like, I wonder, for the “anal sex could make my butt bigger” meme to fit comfortably within it? Of what other notions could such a person be profitably persuaded?
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