So I was reading a modest rant (title: The Horrors of Porn) over at The Twisted Monk and it was going like this:

A common trend in porn would be body art, I know what you are going to say tattoos are as old as civilization so this is not a new development, I agree, but since most porn focuses primarily on the “point of contact”, ie the wet, pink bits, as they thrust away more and more talent are opting to get tattoos on their hips, asses and even genitals in order to retain some level of uniquely identifying marks, lest they get lost in the sea of shaved wangs and oddly tanned taints.

And I thought: “Aha!” For, I knew where this was going.

And I was right:

So when I noticed the female model sporting what at first glance looked to be…ahem… well how shall I put it, a stain on her pink bits? No, more of discolored ring around her asshole. I was naturally taken aback. Surely this site has the budget for some hand-wipes and a videographer with the brains to know that he will soon be shooting this girls bottom in hi-def so it would be in his best interest to make sure that he has a, shall we say tidy pallet from which to paint his jizz stained masterpiece.

No, no on second glance it was not a stain but rather a tattoo. Yes, dear readers a tattoo on that most taboo ring of muscle.

Like passing a highway fatality involving a bus full of crippled nuns colliding with a tanker truck carrying sulfuric acid, I had to stop and stare. What the hell would you posses you to get tattooed there?! Can you imagine that tattoo session? Can you say ouch? I don’t even want to think about the post ink healing process. 4 weeks of scabbing and itching anyone? How do you keep it sterile? Fuck that, how hell do you take a crap?! Gah! The mind reels. Sadly, or possibly thankfully, the series of images in question chose to opt against using the ULTRA zoom lens and show a close-up of said tattoo as it was taking on the business end of her co-star so I still have no idea exactly what she chose to have permanently etched upon the ring of her ass.

Fortunately, some of his commenters guided him to ErosBlog and thus, to enlightenment.

(Monk’s post also links to a different photograph of the tattoo in question, for those of you whose fascination with the topic is not yet fully satiated.)

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From time to time, I have posted to remind people that there’s no substitute for having your own server (not literally your own, but one that you pay the hosting bill for) before building anything of substance on the internet. It’s always struck me as insane to build stuff on “free” servers run by somebody else who hopes to monetize the traffic you generate, especially if you’re involved with sexual content that they might decide is icky. Either they will like you too much, and try to steal your traffic in various ways, or they like you too little, and kick you out (oh, and keep your traffic). You might hope to be Goldilocks, but hey, good luck with that.

Thus, posts like my:

Why Blogging Services Suck
Indecent Blog Hosting
Blogging Services Still Suck

I don’t remember posting again when Blogspot (now Blogger, a Google company) killed about half the sex blogs out there over a period of months, deleting many of them and putting many more behind ugly, traffic-killing warning pages. It struck me as inevitable, and I saw a lot of sex bloggers take my advice when it happened and get their own host and domain. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot more just vanish when their “free” hosting environment became toxic. This might even be the second most common reason (after “stopped posting”) why sex blogs die. So, I notice it.

But it’s important to remember, this is a broader principle of life and business on the internet. It’s not just blogs.

Remember way back in 2004, when an outfit called Ning announced (with great fanfare) that they were going to host social networks like MySpace, for free, so you could set up your own? I even (briefly and somewhat later) toyed with the idea of setting up a social network on Ning for my ErosBlog community of fans, but I wasn’t confident Ning would prove adult-friendly over the long haul.

Well, other people dove into it. And as of this week, all the folks who started social networks around porn, sexual nudity, or “fetishes” learned they were about to be royally screwed, with all their years of community-building effort flushed right down Ning’s toilet:

On Monday night we announced that we will no longer support adult networks on Ning beginning January 1st, 2009.

As it relates to the Ning Platform, adult networks include, but aren’t limited to pornography and depictions of sexual acts. To clarify the point, networks that contain or are focused on the following topics would clearly fall into the adult category include:
* Pornography or images of sexual acts
* Nudity intended to sexually arouse the viewer
* Graphic photos or videos
* Fetishes

To be fair, the original announcement cites practical and (to me) believable financial reasons why the adult networks are being evicted from Ning’s network. Some of these networks — and this is no surprise to me, given some of the toxic porn marketing I encounter daily — seem not to have been good tenants.

To their credit, Ning appears to have embraced open standards that may (I am far from certain) make it possible for these banished Ning communities to export at least their user lists, and possibly more of the network content. Maybe some of them will be able to reconstitute themselves on their own servers — is there free open-source social-networking software out there these days?

Anyway, I’m not saying the Ning people are being bad or evil. But the effect of their sweeping anti-adult business decision has been to wipe out an enormous amount of effort that users invested in their platform. It’s a pattern that repeats itself whenever people use “free hosting” of whatever kind. If you build your shit on somebody else’s land, they can, and they eventually will, either tear it down or tell you to haul it away (if you’re lucky). Nor does “upgrading” necessarily save you; Ning offers paid upgrades from its free advertising-supported service, but it appears that, upgraded or not, if you like teh fetishes or teh pornz, you’re still banished.

It’s not just blogging services that suck.

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This, presumably, falls into the category of “Be careful what you wish for.” Apparently muscleman Rosario Faria fell into the trap of telling Dante “Kiss my ass” or something close to it. Which can be a mistake, no matter how rough and tough you are, when you’re all tied up. Dante’s kissing it all right, but unless I’m misinterpreting those red finger marks, he hauled off and smacked it a few times first:

From Bound Gods.

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An excellent blog post by Neil Gaiman on why it’s worth defending freedom of speech, even when the speech in question may strike you as creepy or dangerous.

In this case you obviously have read lolicon, and I haven’t. … [Y]ou seem to want lolicon banned, and people prosecuted for owning it, and I don’t. You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.

I have checked the date on this story, and it is not April 1:

$200k worth of inflatable boobs lost at sea

SYDNEY – More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australian.

Men’s magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP’s parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

The magazine has put out an alert to shipping authorities to see if they have the container, but if they don’t turn up in the next 48 hours it will be too late for the next issue, she said.

Ralph editor Santi Pintado urged anyone who has any information to contact the magazine.

“Unless Somali pirates have stolen them its difficult to explain where they are,” Pintado told AAP.

“If anyone finds any washed up on a beach, please let us know.”

Mr. Pintado may be a bit confused about his piratical geography (the sea route from China to Australia doesn’t pass through the waters infested by Somali pirates) but the more traditional Indonesian crews in the Malacca Straights may be pillowing their weary heads as we speak on the sweet vinyl bosoms of their latest haul.

That’s really all I have to say, except for another hearty “YARR!”

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Canada sure is hot for a place so far north. Sexy stars such as Keifer Sutherland and Jennifer Tilly hail from the Great White North, and according to a map I recently found online, it’s brimming with erotic-named places. Here’s a sample:

Bacchus must be really happy that Nymph Point is so close to Mate Islands and Easy Inlet.

Yes, gentle reader, your eyes do not deceive you: there are more, many more such names across the country! Geist magazine created the original map in PDF, and Bacchus created a JPG version.

All that remains is to change the old SCTV insult to “Take off, you fucker!” What a road trip, eh?

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A chance conversation with a friend about the Ama of Japan (women who dove, partially nude, for pearls, kelp, sponges, and the like) led to a Google search that led, in turn, to a page of spectacular photographs (dating from the 1930s to the 1960s) by Japanese photographer Iwase Yoshiyuke. This gallery of cropped details doesn’t begin to do justice to the often-panoramic scenery of the photographs, which are well worth a visit:

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