I’m really not old enough to remember the era when smoking cigarettes was supposed to be sexy. I’m thankful for that; my reaction to cigarettes is revulsion in varying degrees depending on proximity. I’ve always been one of those people for whom the idea of kissing a smoker is like the thought of licking out an ashtray — which is to say, retch-inducing even in the imagination.

Given that, images like this always strike me as particularly jarring:

Sometimes I wonder: if the tobacco industry spent a century and untold billions selling the notion that people who smoke are sexier than people who don’t, why hasn’t ADM and the rest of the modern mechanized processed-foods industry managed to use its advertising billions to convince people that a physique born of corn syrup and white flour, deep fried in canola oil, is sexy? If you’ve see the people in WALL*E, you’ll know what I’m asking — why isn’t that future here now, being reinforced throughout our popular culture the way smoking was in 1950?

(Please don’t misunderstand — although I’m personally closer to the WALL*E vision than I am to the sammich-deprived fashion-industry ideal of good looks, I wouldn’t approve of the food industry winning that propaganda war any more than I approve of the way the tobacco industry won theirs for many decades. I’m just curious why they don’t seem to be fighting it, when they’ve got the deep pockets and the profit motive and the utter lack of conscience that would let ’em do it.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my collection of vintage skin magazines lately, but some of the things you find in them are absolutely astonishing cultural artifacts. Of course it’s no surprise that pornographers, like fashion photographers, tend to have a warped idea of what constitutes “chubby” in a woman. But I was still astonished to find this photograph as the illustration, in a 1962 Mood magazine, for an article about “chubby girls”:

The article itself is an amazing compilation of wild stereotypes and unreconstructed male smugness:

HIGH WIDE AND HANDSOME
Chubby Chums Are Grateful Girls!
By George Pesante

The trouble with this country is not smog or juvenile delinquency or even TV commercials. The trouble with this country is, that it’s getting so hard to find a fat girl.

Oh, sure, they still exist, and a good thing too, because if they ever do disappear from view, we’re going to have to raise them in special herds like the vanishing buffalo.

But what with all this diet talk and reducing salons springing up to replace the corner pool room, and what with cars getting smaller, lower, the fat girl is being driven out of fashion.

This is too bad. Any man who has played parlor hockey with a fat girl knows that here is a wonderful fund of fun, frolic and felicity.

Unlike slim girls who are the darlings of modern fashion, fat girls get little attention. That means that when a man does bestow his favors upon them, they react like a St. Bernard in a sausage factory.

They laugh, they giggle, they respond to your attentions with happy shrieks. In short, they just lap it up. What’s more, they don’t need to be persuaded. Simply give them the nod and they’re off to the races. And once a fat girl gets herself in motion, she’s awfully hard to stop.

Incidentally, the old belief that fat girls are necessarily jolly girls is only sometimes true. There are plenty of fat girls who are so frustrated by their lack of male attention that they are foul-tempered, mean and sullen.

The majority of them are sunny though, and even the grumpy lumpies will respond much more quickly to a little warmth than the average slim-waisted woman.

Some girls are fat, of course, because they have glandular deficiencies and these are generally to be avoided. Frequently they have moustaches and evil tempers and are so fat as to cause topographical confusion.

On the other hand, a girl who is generously plump, simply because the good Lord made her that way, a girl who likes to eat and drink and have herself a good time — this girl is worth solid gold, all 180 pounds of her.

Another fallacy about fat girls is that they are light on their feet. This isn’t true, most of them are as heavy as all get-out. But it’s pretty easy to get them off their feet. And that’s what really counts.

A fat girl is used to the notiion that people can’t lift her up and toss her around as if she were a ballerina. Consequently, she won’t force you to go through those gymnastics. She’ll arrange herself in such a way as to spare you the grunt and groan preliminaries.

Generally speaking, fat girls have one trait in common which their slimmer sisters do not always enjoy. They tend to have skins as smooth as foam rubber and twice as bouncy.

They cost less to feed than slim girls because they go in heavy for bread and mashed potatoes and show a marked preference for beer.

Because fat girls do not get the rush that slim girls do, they don’t expect to be taken out to fancy places. They don’t expect filet mignon and champagne. The back seat of a car and a pile of sandwiches will do nicely, especially if both the sandwiches and the back seat are big.

Fat girls tend to live alone more often than slim girls. They need more room around them and also, they are embarrassed by their slimmer roommates. This makes it much easier to date a fat girl, and what’s more, to make the date pay off.

Needless to say, fat girls are a joy in the wintertime, because there’s nothing more comforting than to find yourself enfolded by great mounds of curvy girl. They are equally delightful in the summer time, however, because they like nothing on but the electric fan. And, after all, what could be more fun than that?

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There is no sex in this post — it’s a post about the business of blogging. Feel free to skip it.

Short version: this is a warning to my fellow adult bloggers about a very dubious pitch you may have received recently. Etology.com is sending out spammy emails to adult bloggers in which the company feigns an interest in buying ads, only to abandon that pretense once you answer the email. Without further ado, having confirmed your interest in selling ads, they begin giving the hard sell for ad brokerage services — not buying any ads at all, but rather, offering your ad space to their network of potential advertisers. Classic bait-and-switch: first the false offer (the bait) to get your attention, then the switch to the real offer. Illegal in some jurisdictions, scummy everywhere.

Long version follows.

On Monday, I received a curious email:

Subject: I want to Buy Ad Space on erosblog.com

Greetings,

I would like to buy advertising space on your website erosblog.com. Do you have anything available? Please let me know.

Best Regards,

Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com

Emails like this are not uncommon. What made this one curious is that Etology.com is an advertising broker; they act as a middleman between web publishers and web advertisers, collecting a commission on all the advertising transactions they touch, and helping to facilitate those transactions. I would expect them to be making a pitch to broker any available ad space ErosBlog might have, but buying advertising space here? It didn’t make sense. The “spam or con job” hairs on the back of my neck went up.

No matter; they got one of my standard responses, the low-effort one I save for leads I don’t think will amount to anything:

Hi, Tai. Ad space on Erosblog is available through the Blogads “advertise on ErosBlog” links in the ErosBlog sidebars. Prices and availability are visible when you follow those links.

Thanks for your interest!

I will confess to sending the above in a spirit of modest mischief. Even if Etology.com had a genuine interest in buying advertising space on ErosBlog, the idea that they might wish to do so via the services of a competing ad brokerage service (BlogAds) is, perhaps, implausible.

When I sent the above email, my “send-and-receive” email operation brought an identically worded email addressed to another one of my sites, with the only word of difference being the domain name. Asking about buying ad space via bulk email? Really? The unlikely inquiry now began to seem downright implausible.

And sure enough, my next communique from Etology.com was strangely silent about the ad space they wanted to buy just three hours and twenty-seven minutes previously:

Thank you for your quick response. I just want to mention that we are the largest adult advertising network and we have great relationships with big advertisers like rude.com, redtube.com, youporn.com, and many others. We offer the highest industry publisher payouts and I would like the opportunity to help you better monetize your ad space. I’m very interested in working with you and your website, please contact me so that we can see if we are a good fit.

Regards,

Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com

That’s a form letter, an email macro, and it contains the standard ad brokerage sales pitch: “to help you better monetize your ad space.” Which, it may surprise you to learn, I am not against. Monetization buys me beer and bacon and dinners out with The Nymph. But there’s the little matter of the bait and switch, which is so offensively blatant and dishonest that it has — not to put too fine a point on things — righteously pissed me off. What, am I supposed to be too stupid to notice that the bait has been yanked away?

More serious than me being pissed off is the issue of trust. Ad brokers, like affiliate programs, are notorious for collecting services from webmasters (in this case, ad inventory, page views for web ads) and then being slow to pay, or finding some lame excuse (“bad traffic” is the vague classic) not to pay at all, or simply getting behind on payments and then going out of business without paying anybody. It happens all the time.

Which means, of course, that if you do business on the web, business that involves collecting, holding, and transmitting money on behalf of webmasters, you need to be (or at least to look) as trustworthy as a bank. Your fundamental business challenge is to convince webmasters to trust you with their money. And that’s not easy. Webmasters who have been been repeatedly burned are a hostile and suspicious lot, when it comes to trying the next great new program. We’ve heard all the monetization promises before, and been burned by too many of them.

One way in which you do NOT gain a reputation for being trustworthy is to lie to your potential business associates in your very first freaking email to them. As J.P. Morgan once famously said, “A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.” Thus, my interest in pursuing Etology’s offer to broker my ad inventory, an interest that was never very high, is now … how shall I put this delicately? … very low.

Nonetheless, I was fascinated by the blatant nature of the initial deception, and amused by the slight dissonance resulting from the macro/form-letter nature of their brokerage pitch. In response to my response, they sent me a standard brokerage marketing pitch with out-of-place “please contact me” phrasing. Let’s ask about that, aggressively:

Er, I’m confused. I just DID contact you in response to a request from you to buy ad space. Why are you asking me to contact you a second time? Was your first email just a bait-and-switch spam to advertise your ad brokerage service? If so, that’s an exceptionally dubious business practice that’s not encouraging me to explore doing business with you.

In all honesty, I never expected to hear from them again. I was forgetting that it never pays to underestimate the tenacity, or overestimate the chutzpah, of a commissioned salesperson:

I apologize for the confusion. I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space on your website. Like I said before we are the largest adult advertising network and we have the highest industry publisher payouts. My intention is to help pair up our advertisers with publishers that have great sites like yours. Please let me know if there is any interest.

Thank you for your time,

Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com

Well, there we have it — a bare apology (for my confusion, natch, not for anything Tai actually did) and the sales pitch a second time. At least it’s now fairly clear that Tai never had any interest in buying ad space; the deceptive intent in the first email is now confirmed.

Sometimes the devil gets in me, and I write challenging emails to people. This was one of those times:

I’m sorry, Tailynn, but I’m still not sure I understand what’s going on here. The first email from you had the following subject line: “I want to Buy Ad Space on erosblog.com.” The first sentence of that email was “I would like to buy advertising space on your website erosblog.com.”

You are now saying “I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space.” That’s really quite different, and not, I think, a matter of “confusion” if your only interest is in brokering sales of ad space on behalf of third-party advertisers. That would not be confusion on my part, but rather, deception on yours.

So, which is it? Was your initial inquiry in respect to buying ad space, or brokering it?

I note with interest that I am now receiving queries identical to your first at some of my other blog properties. Right now it looks very much to me like you are engaging in deceptive spam practices, unless there’s some aspect to our communications which I am misunderstanding. I hope you can clear this up for me?

At this point, Tai’s best plan would have been to fess up to the deception, apologize for it, wish me a nice day, and move on, hoping I would forget all about it and never mention it to anyone.

What I got was the first two things in eight words, a miraculous verbal economy. This full and fair but extremely sparse apology was followed by — you guessed it! — more sales pitch. First sentence: I’m sorry I lied to you. Next seven sentences: now let me tell you how great it’s going to be doing business with you!

I apologize for being misleading in my inquiries. Let me start over. My company Etology.com is an adult advertising network that helps pair up advertisers with publishers like yourself that have great sites. We’ve developed extensive relationships with big advertisers like youporn, rude.com, and redtube to name a few. We also have a large selection of network ads. My offering to you is to place advertising on your site to help monetize your ad space, thus helping you make money from your site. The types of ads available to you are GTBs, text, banner, commercial breaks, and in-video XML. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best Regards,

Tai Kinney
Account Manager
www.Etology.com

Astonishing. Shorter Tai: “I lied, I’m sorry, but I don’t see why we can’t still do business.”

I decided to decline the invitation to let Tai start over. Churlish of me, I suppose. Instead, I offered Tai the short lecture on business ethics, along with modest foreshadowing as to why it’s not smart to lie to bloggers on behalf of your internet company:

Tailynn, thank you for being — on your fourth try — straightforward with me. I’ll try to be as straightforward with you.

As it happens, I am interested in finding another ad broker. I had previously looked at Etology, but your website contains no information suggesting that it is an adult-advertising friendly network, so I had dismissed it as a possibility.

However, your initial contact with me was, as you have now admitted, a deliberate lie. You are spamming bloggers with a false and misleading inquiry in an attempt to get attention, and then you are baiting and switching, disclaiming any interest in buying ad space and instead offering your brokerage services.

Not only is that unconscionable as a spamming technique, it is laughably stupid. It establishes you and your company as untrustworthy, which is a very poor basis for attracting new publishers to your network. A publisher has to trust an ad broker with collection and remission of funds. How on earth could I trust your company with my money, when your initial business contact with me consisted of a blatant and deliberate lie?

I am planning to complain publicly about your mendacious business practices to provide warning to the blogging community, but before I do so, I’d like to give someone in a position of higher authority in your organization an opportunity to comment on whether this sort of mendacious business practice is consistent with your corporate policies. Do you have any suggestions as to whom I should forward my complaint and request for corporate comment? Or shall I simply start with your abuse and support emails and work from there?

That one was sent after close of business Monday. A couple of hours into Tuesday’s business day, there was no response. As I was indeed planning to make this blog post, it seemed only fair to Etology to give them at least one shot to spin this their way. So I sent the following email to support@, abuse@, Tai, and to Brock Purpura, Etology CEO, whose email I deduced from press releases and from the Etology.com standard email conventions:

Subject: Complaint And Request For Corporate Comment

Hello. I have a complaint about Etology’s email marketing practices. Specifically, one of your Account Managers is spamming adult bloggers with a deceptive come-on, claiming that Etology wants to “buy” ad space and then, once this lie gets a blogger response, switching over to the standard “we’d like to help you monetize your ad space” broker sales pitch. As you are in the brokerage business, there can be no doubt that your sales managers know the difference between “buy” and “help monetize”, so the initial email appears to be an obvious and deliberate lie.

I consider lying to prospective customers to be an abusive and deceptive marketing practice that reflects extremely badly on Etology.com. I will, for whatever little it may be worth, be making my disgust at this marketing practice public, on my blog, tomorrow morning.

However, I am conscious that in a competitive sales environment, sales personnel sometimes do things that are not in accord with company policy. Accordingly, I have decided to hold off on making my complaint public until tomorrow morning, and to send this email in the interim. Please forward this email to whomever in your company might wish to comment on whether lying to generate sales leads comports with Etology’s accepted business ethics and policies.

The “abuse” email address bounced, no such address. None of the others bounced. Thirty six minutes later, I had my answer. There is a {snip} in the middle; I have elided (for brevity) four more paragraphs of sales pitch about Etology’s ad brokerage services:

I know that you are upset and I apologize for the choice of words that were used in the emails below. Tailynn is fairly new and may have overstepped with her first few emails.

I would like to provide an explanation of what Etology does. We are an online ad network that pairs up advertisers and publishers. Simple as that. We broker the ads and pay the publishers 75% of all the earnings. We pay our internally managed publishers twice a month, as opposed to net 30, like other ad networks.

{snip}

I apologize again, but hope I have cleared up any misunderstandings about our service and practices. I will be here to answer any questions or address concerns that you have about our service and practices. Feel free to contact me through instant message if that is easier for you. Thank you.

Jeff Sue
Account Manager
www.etology.com

This is standard PR smoothing, consisting of an acknowledging my aggrieved status followed by a non-apology apology. The “choice of words” is apologized for, but the underlying deception? Nope. This was a matter of unfortunate phrasing, nothing more, now let me tell you how we are going to get rich together!

Those of you in the adult industry will also recognize, and be laughing at, that phrase “Tailynn is fairly new.” Whenever an adult industry company is caught spamming, shaving, stealing web page designs, or doing anything else unsavory, the standard PR response is that “it was a new employee, and we didn’t know about the behavior.” It’s such a predictable response that it’s become something of an inside joke.

To be fair, in this case I wouldn’t be surprised if the bog-standard excuse also turned out to be actually true. The bait-and-switch deception is such a phenomenally bad idea from a business standpoint that it very well might be the act of a new employee desperate and eager to make a tough sales quota. But in that case, shouldn’t I be hearing an unequivocal disavowal of the practice, and an apology for something more substantial than “choice of words”? No, Jeff said “Tailynn … may have overstepped with her first few emails.” Or maybe not; for Jeff, it’s a wobbler. Maybe we really do approve of lying to sales leads? Jeff doesn’t know; Jeff can’t say.

Of course you know I had to write back to him:

Jeff, I appreciate your email, and I’ll be including the pertinent paragraphs in the blog post I make about this matter. Unfortunately, I find your reaction to this problem to show a disturbing lack of concern.

This is not a “choice of words” issue. One of your people is *lying* to prospective business contacts. Your response fails to indicate whether Etology condones that behavior; when you say she “may have overstepped” you leave open that she may *not* have. I’m looking for an unequivocal response from Etology.com as to whether, as a matter of corporate policy, she did.

Let me be explicit. Like everyone who does business on the internet, I prioritize my email responses. Spammish emails offering me business services like your ad brokerage receive attention at a much lower priority than requests to purchase advertising. By sending a fraudulent request to buy advertising, your person is deliberately exploiting this difference in priorities — lying to get to the head of the line. Obviously, when the lie is discovered, it creates anger and resentment, along with a fundamental lack of trust that — one would think — is a problem for a company that’s expected to collect and remit funds to its publisher customers.

I used to work in an office where salesmen would lie to our receptionist, claiming to be clients, in order to get their sales calls forwarded to my desk. Obviously, they and their companies went on my permanent blacklist for this behavior. My current complaint — and my reaction to it — is analogous. But, now that we live in the era of blogs and Google, I can more easily “share my blacklist” (and the reasons for it) with the world, in the interest of making this sort of behavior off limits for reputable companies.

Accordingly, I think it would be in Etology’s best interest to disavow this marketing practice in unequivocal words.

Thanks for your time.

Writing that email forced me to figure out why I care as much about this as I do. We live in an attention economy these days, and prioritizing our attention is vital to business success. I (well, me and my filters) sort four or five thousand emails a day, most of them spam and most of the rest, bacn. Sorting out the tiny but significant fraction of business email from people who actually want to send me money? That’s a vital business function that takes a lot of time and effort. Lying to me in an effort to subvert my vital business functions? Way to piss me off.

Lying for attention is theft of attention, and it’s not just a minor offense. Time is money, and stealing one is as bad as stealing the other. If the corporate culture at Etology.com is honestly supportive of this type of deception, they are not a company I’d enjoy having to trust for a monthly check.

Jeff’s response, this morning:

I am very concerned about all customers of Etology/AVN. Without our customers being happy and satisfied, we would not exist as the largest adult ad network.

As I mentioned Tailynn is fairly new here. It was not that she was lying, it’s just that she took the wrong approach and didn’t explain herself properly (as we do offer to buy adspace out right for a flat rate). I’m sure you can understand how issues happen when you are new on a job. Regardless, the lack of information resulted in your time used on deciphering, which ultimately led to mistrust. Again, I apologize for that.

We have addressed the issue with Tailynn and management and offer our customer support to your questions and concerns.

Jeff Sue
Account Manager
www.etology.com

So there you have it, another non-apology apology, apologizing for my reaction and my “mistrust” rather than for the actual wrong done. No, wait, I forgot, Jeff says “I would like to buy advertising space” was not a lie, even though the person writing it had no intention of buying advertising space, because the company more broadly does sometimes (but not this time) “offer to buy adspace.” Sorry, Jeff, but Tailynn herself told me “I just wanted to see if there was any interest in me helping you monetize your ad space.” Tailynn herself said “I apologize for being misleading in my inquiries.” If there was ever any intention to “buy” ad space on Erosblog, I gave Tailynn three chances to say so. She never did. If Etology.com cannot recognize the deliberately deceptive bait-and-switch, and acknowledge that it was problematic, Etology.com is not a safe company to do business with.

If any other webmasters have received dishonest solicitations from Etology.com, I’d be interested in hearing about it in the comments. And especially, if there’s any adult blogger from whom Etology.com has actually bought advertising space outright (as opposed to brokering it through their network) I’d like to hear about it.

As every red-blooded American guy knows, there’s an entire genre of “women in prison” movies featuring, in varying degrees, bondage, nudity, sex, and soapy lesbian shower scenes. Most of these movies ultimately deliver less of all four than they advertise in the trailer, although rare (and inevitably hard to find) counter-examples do exist. Still and all, if there’s a guy out there who hasn’t been disappointed by a “WIP” flick, I haven’t met him.

Pornographers, fortunately, are not constrained by the legalities and customs appurtenant to theatrical distribution. For anybody who has a credit card, it’s now possible to remedy the almost-forgotten adolescent dissatisfaction with the six short seconds of grainy naked boobies that were the highlight of the (only) shower scene in “South American Chain Gang Girls” on Cinemax at 2:00AM in 1988. I’m thinking the Captive Slut movie and photo shoot is what somebody at Whipped Ass thinks South American Chain Gang Girls should have looked like, back in 1988, or maybe 1974:

The getting-rapidly-cleaner model with the expressively worried-looking face is Clare Dames. As mentioned above, the move/shoot is called Captive Slut.

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From London comes word (link via Bondage Blog) of an unfortunate fellow who had to be cut out of a titanium (!) chastity device at great difficulty by the local fire brigade:

Firefighters had to cut a man out of a titanium chastity belt intended for sex games last week.

Crews from Kingston fire station were called to the red-faced man’s home in Ham at about 11pm on June 27 after he had spent all day trying to free himself from the device.

It took about 45 minutes for firefighters to release the man, believed to be in his 40s, from the structure.

…

Crew manager Brennan Healey, from the fire station, said the man, of average build, had put the two-piece device on in the morning but then realised he did not have a key to open it.

…

“The man had lots of swelling in his genital area,” said Mr Healey. “It took a long time to release him because he was in a lot of pain, and we needed to give him oxygen.

“Firefighter Simon Mitchell did a great job and was especially ‘hands on’. When the man was released we called the London Ambulance Service who took him to hospital, but he seemed much better by then.

A sad story to be sure, but it got me to thinking. I don’t know how things are in Kingston or in Ham, but if this story had happened in San Francisco, I think our “hands on” fireman would suddenly be getting a lot of friendly personal calls.

A man waiting for a bus noticed a pretty young woman stuffing her little dog into her blouse so that she’d be able to sneak the dog onto a a bus without the driver seeing him. She made it successfully past the driver, but when she sat down, the man who had watched her hide the dog now noticed that she was squirming uncomfortably in her seat.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Isn’t he housebroken?”

“Mister, he’s housebroken, all right,” the woman replied. “He just isn’t weaned.”

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