Greta Christina has a good essay up on the Blowfish Blog on sexual perspective and the reasons we aren’t very accepting as a culture of other people’s sexual tastes:

So unless you’re pathologically stubborn, you eventually learn perspective. You figure out that, as much as you may personally dislike broccoli or blue cheese, Wagner or Western Swing, people who eat it/ listen to it are not mentally deranged. (Or the reverse: that as much as you may personally enjoy these delights, people who don’t like them are not pathologically cut off from the one true source of pleasure and meaning.) People still do sometimes make personal judgments about others based on their tastes in food and music; but those judgments don’t usually result in people being sent to the county jail or the loony bin.

But when it comes to sex, most of us don’t get that kind of training. People don’t come back to work on Mondays and chat about how they tried spanking over the weekend, they way they’ll chat about how they tried a new Moroccan restaurant or went to see a German funk band their brother told them about. They don’t go to parties and share a funny story about the new buttplug they just bought, the way they’ll tell a funny story about trying to make a salmon souffle for their in-laws or the weird harpist who opened for Radiohead. (Well, they sometimes do at my parties . . . but you know what I mean.) Most of us haven’t been regaled with myriad and varied stories about exactly what kinds of sex other people like, and why exactly they like it.

It’s better now than it once was, by a long shot. The amount of sexual information that’s easily available today far surpasses anything I had when I was young. But most of us still don’t get exposed to a widely varied range of sexual tastes . . . not the way we get exposed to a barrage of different tastes in music and food, simply as part of everyday life.

And I think that casual barrage is exactly what we need to break through the intensely personal, intensely visceral nature of our sensual experience and give us perspective on it. It’s what we need to teach us that other people really and truly feel differently about sex than we do.

I have to agree with this as a matter of personal anecdote. Although I considered myself a fairly free-thinking and tolerant guy when I started this sex blog more than five years ago, some of the distancing remarks in my old archived posts (like this one, where I was obviously anxious to express my distaste for bukkake) make me wince in embarrassment now, so clear is it to me that I was uncomfortable with the sexual diversity I was reporting on. But the constant barrage of sexual information that I’ve processed in the course of writing this blog has given me much of the perspective Greta is writing about. The most unusual sexual practices now typically strike me as no more problematic than a taste for live grubs or pickled beets — I’d strongly prefer not to have any, thanks, but I’m not disturbed or surprised (ok, still a little surprised, sometimes) that somebody else finds enjoyment there.

While hitching rides in Germany, that is:

I can see how this would work for the young lady. But I should think her two boyfriends and their trashbag luggage would be slowing her down.

Update: I’m sorry to report that I’ve had to delete at least four comments from people who managed to be rude or superior or condescending about pointing out that this image was photoshopped from a non-nude scene in a movie. However, I’m quite grateful for the information, and especially for the original image provided by Azi in a comment that nicely avoided all the “ZOMG! Internet points for me!” attitudes I was busily moderating away. Thanks, Azi!

Anyway, here’s the unmodified real deal, which I like every bit as much:

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We don’t do unicorn chasers here at Eros Blog, but I’ve got the next best thing to cleanse your mental palate after that last post. What have I got?

I’ve got the the Governor of California as a young man, ripped and oiled and giving a lift to a lady, the two of them not wearing enough clothes between ’em to make up one good Austrian flag:

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This just in from the New York Times:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

The wiretap recording, made during an investigation of a prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP, captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

…

The man described as Client 9 in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, Emperors Club VIP, on the night of Feb. 13. Mr. Spitzer traveled to Washington that evening, according to a person told of his travel arrangements.

Classy guy, screwing around on his wife the night before Valentine’s day, eh?

Here’s a nice photo of the family man with his wife and three daughters:

(I found that photo on an adult webmaster board along with the cruel-but-funny caption: “Daddy’s been banging some prostitutes, girls, so let’s all go to church!”)

I’ll leave the detailed analysis to Susie Bright, who really enjoys tearing into the sexual hypocrisy of conservative old white male politicians (into which camp Spitzer, though a Democrat, surely falls, thanks to his reputation as an aggressive, even rabid, law-and-order prosecutor). I’ll just say there surely must be a special circle in hell for prosecutors who enjoy a particular vice while denouncing that same vice and sending people to jail for it:

Mr. Spitzer gained national attention when he served as attorney general with his relentless pursuit of Wall Street wrongdoing. As attorney general, he also had prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. â€?It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.â€?

Update, courtesy Jay Leno: “In the governor’s defense, he was bringing prostitution to its knees… one woman at a time.”

Second update: Susie’s take, as anticipated.

I cannot begin to explain my recent interest in the non-explicit photographs found in explicit porn galleries. But explain it or not, here are some before and after portraits of model Samantha Sin:

In between these pictures, Samantha gets tied up and quite roughly used in this bondage sex shoot for Sex and Submission.

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Just in case you missed it, Violet Blue did a talk at the big Etech 2008 shindig, a talk that ranges widely across the big topic of sexual identity online and how we construct it, shape it, and especially, defend it (and ourselves, where there’s a difference) from online trolls, stalkers, and haters of all sorts. Here’s Violet Blue about her talk, here’s the transcript.

It’s juicy chewy idea-rich media, the sort of thing that makes me worry about the decline in printed magazines, because I like to buy printed magazines with this sort of info-dense article in them (Wired used to do a lot of this) to read when I’m traveling and have a lot of time to read and think. Just pulling out a random useful and true paragraph:

I’ve been a blogger and occasional full-time editor at Fleshbot.com almost since its inception, a job when full time requires me to scour the internets for explicit sexual content of reasonable quality. We endeavor to cover a wide range of sexual expression and all genders and orientations; one of our regular features is the Sex Blog Roundup. When I did it weekly, I had upwards of 300 text-only sex blogs written by individuals worldwide in my RSS reader — outside the 50 or so usual suspects of variety sex blogs, mainstream media news, linkdumps and sex news blogs. Every week I’d have to cull for new blogs to add to my feeds because invariably a handful of sex bloggers who were blogging “anonymously” had to quit blogging — meaning they were for one reason or another, no longer anonymous. It was such a regular occurrence I developed a snarky attitude toward the anonymous sex blogger, even though they often offered up the juiciest and most explicit posts about sex. Time and again, they are a sure bet for being outed or discovered, have the shortest life span, and are the least reliable for following as a human narrative.

(That paragraph is also nostalgic for me, because I compiled the first of Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundups, and immensely enjoyed doing them until I ran out of time to keep up with the extra work. Sadly, I don’t think I understood the full power of RSS back then, or I might be doing them yet.)

One thing that struck me about Violet’s talk, however, was that it describes a dangerous-sounding online world for sex bloggers, full of hatred and weird jealousies and stalker trolls and malevolent creeps, so much so that she’s got an entire array of procedures and tactics for defending herself and returning the fight to her attackers. And that’s bizarre to me; in more the five years of blogging, the worst I’ve seen from that list is ranting commenters who are deeply threatened by a world — the world I advocate — in which no sexuality is condemned or forcibly closeted or judged by any standard other than who gets hurt. Death threats she gets? It’s been months since I so much as got one of those “you’re going to burn in hell” invitations to attend church services.

So, why the difference? I trust Violet innately — as far as I’m concerned, she’s one of the most honest voices on the Internet — so she’s not exaggerating or being oversensitive or doing anything else from the “there there, little lady, don’t be hysterical” laundry list of excuses for men to ignore surprising and unwelcome female narratives. Of course, she is a woman and I’m not. And equally of course, she’s got ten thousand times more skin in the game, literally and figuratively. She doesn’t use a pseudonym, she’s active in print and broadcast media, she lives and works visibly in a vital and media-connected city, she talks about her real and actual life, she gives people handles by which to grab for her, and she bares experiences online that actually matter to her, stuff her enemies can use against her.

Whereas, I sit in my undisclosed location in Red-State America and upload an endless stream of pointers to, and scanty commentary on, sexually entertaining stuff that’s happening somewhere else in the vast internet information ecology. When I started this blog, I didn’t even have a personal sex life to blog about. I was temporarily unemployed and sitting in a studio apartment sharing badly microwaved nachos with an unsympathetic parrot who perched on my shoulder and chewed holes in my undershirt while I blogged. (I know that sounds sad, but I was actually enjoying life quite a lot, apart from the “no girlfriend” thing.) By the time I fell in with The Nymph, I was comfortable with my pattern; sex blogging is something I do about other people, using information they’ve already made public. It makes things much safer and more comfortable, and (combined with the male versus female thing) explains a great deal of the difference between Violet’s and my experiences of the sex-blogging life.

So, that’s a lot of the explanation, but is it all of it? While pondering the matter, and reading reactions to Violet’s talk, I found Ethan Zuckerman’s blog and especially, his notes from his own Etech talk on The Cute Cat Theory Of Digital Activism. He was apparently at Tripod back in those dark ages where most folks needed a service like Tripod in order to “have a web page”, and he formulated the theory that

Any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Reading that paragraph was an “ah-ha!” moment for me. Because another huge difference between Violet and me is that, although we are both sex bloggers by any reasonable definition, I’m more of a pornographer and she’s more of an activist.

We both do stuff that blurs the lines, of course; sometimes I make posts that have at least a whiff of activist sentiment in them, and often she links to pretty pr0n pictures. But at any given blogging moment, my first thought is “will this amuse, entertain, or turn somebody on?” And, while I can’t speak for what happens in Violet’s thoughts, she’s clearly got causes — like sex education, to name just one — that animate and drive her blogging, her published writing, her public appearances, whole swathes of her professional life.

Perversely, I think her activism makes her sex blogging even more interesting and entertaining than my detached approach, so it’s not like there’s a sharp division between entertainer and activist. It’s just that — and this is the not-very-startling hypothesis you’ve waded through many long paragraphs to hear about — activists are more threatening than entertainers. They upset more apple carts, gore more oxen, get more done, make more enemies because they threat more status quos. Activists piss people off. Their fans and enemies alike are more animated and engaged.

And that, maybe, is why Violet Blue needs police contacts at the SFPD, while I make do with a lightly tweaked comment moderation plugin for my WordPress install.

If I ran the zoo:

Forget buckets, she HAZ A TUBZ!

From Usenet.

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