Word is that a tabloid in Australia (obviously not a publication that values any broad notion of press freedoms) has managed to stir up a massive set of police raids against the company that produces the AbbyWinters.com family of websites. Reports differ on whether computers and data were seized, but the owner of the company was arrested (no charges yet filed).

If you’re familiar with the photos from AbbyWinters.com (which was once, briefly, an advertiser on ErosBlog) your mind will be boggled by this development:

Australian sexual politics are notoriously primitive, true, but AbbyWinters.com is famous for making some of the classiest, prettiest soft-core porn [see note below] in the world. It’s hard to imagine the expenditure of serious law enforcement resources on this, even in a place where it’s illegal to make an “objectionable film“.

Note: I should expound on my carefully-considered use of the word “porn” in the preceding paragraph, because the company behind the Abby Winters websites is — though respected for the quality of their photos — in one sense a bit of a laughing-stock in the U.S. adult industry. In short, they are often mocked — in my view, deservedly so — for insisting somewhat shrilly that their products are not pornography. Indeed, their boilerplate affiliate-promotion agreement used to threaten in direst terms to terminate any affiliate who characterized their products as porn. From an objective standpoint, this is about as ludicrous as threatening to fire a used-car salesman if he should ever be so vulgar as to call an automobile a “car”. As the current story makes clear, the bizarrely hostile legal environment in Australia presumably goes a long way toward explaining these “it’s not porn, honest!” symptoms of schizophrenia.

I can muster nothing but astonished contempt for the Australian newspaper that “takes credit” for stirring up the raids. Although I understand that Australia does not share the much-besieged constitutional protections of press freedom we endeavor to enjoy here in the United States, I am further aware that newspapers throughout what was formerly called “The British Empire” nonetheless do treasure and profit from a fairly robust freedom of the press. For them to attack this very freedom in order to sell a few newspapers — when instead they should be doing everything they can to protect and extend it — strikes me as both hypocritical and shortsighted. Or even downright idiotic.

Thanks to Violet Blue for the links.

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Just in case you’re one of those innocent people who missed the symbolic import of the whole “witches riding on broomsticks” thing, this vintage art by Eugene Reunier ought to sort you out:

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Because VirtuaGirlHD is a stalwart supporter of ErosBlog, I understand at an intellectual level that the “plain white background” aesthetic of their sample photos has a practical purpose (think “green-screen”). Nonetheless, I kinda dig it:

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I found this on my hard drive in a directory of vintage pictures. The photo is, of course, not all that old, but it did remind me that I should go to the classic car rally they are having a couple of towns over, next week:

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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).

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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