I’ve long felt that public fears (mostly among folks who aren’t particularly computer-literate) about internet sex predators were mostly press-fueled frenzy — the normal sensationalism that we get served with any new technology, where the press tries to “sell papers” (or whatever it is they are selling these days) by taking a tiny tiny handful of crimes that involve the new technology and turning that tiny handful into an endless parade of breathless handwringing and fear-mongering. All of which is eagerly devoured by the sort of casual Luddites who don’t much like the new technology and sort of wish it didn’t exist because then they wouldn’t have to deal with.

Well, it turns out I was right. Research by sociologists at the Crimes against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire in Durham has debunked several widely-believed myths:

Myth: Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

Reality: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. “The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours,” Wolak said.

Myth: Internet predators are pedophiles.

Reality: Internet predators don’t hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak’s team determined from interviews with investigators.

Myth: Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.

Reality: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.

Myth: Internet predators trick or abduct their victims.

Reality: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.

Myth: Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.

Reality: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.

Myth: Online interactions with strangers are risky.

Reality: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don’t know. What’s risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.

Myth: Internet predators go after any child.

Reality: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the link.

Duck penis? Boy, I’d hate to meet the duck to whom this penis belonged, because he’s BIG and I’m sure he’s pissed!

Ok, OK, I’ve had my fun. What you’re really looking at is a freshly-harvested Geoduck, a large edible mollusk, said to be tasty (by the folks who like to eat giant penis-shaped mollusks, anyway).

OK, despite the appearance of the link at the bottom of this post, this is not a political post. Of course, what you do with said link, I wash my hands of that.

{*scrub* *scrub*}

One of the most ancient and funnest games on the internet is posting links that aren’t quite what they seem, tricking folks into clicking on them to their immediate surprise or regret. These days the cool kids seem to be calling this a “rickroll” — apparently there’s a YouTube music video by Rick somebody that’s been a frequent destination of misleading linkage lately. I’m an old fart, I remember when Goatse.cx and Tubgirl were all the rage. These things are timeless; I’m sure there’s somebody out there who remembers clicking a falsely-described link in their Mosaic browser to some ASCII penis art with ejaculating semi-colons.

With all that talk to serve as your warning, and with you bearing in mind the sorts of things ErosBlog routinely links to, here’s an Erosblog-Approved destination:

Celebrate Bush!

Does anybody remember Pussy Ranch, the original Diablo Cody blog from back when she was a stripper and phone sex worker? It was an early ErosBlog favorite, when she still called herself “Darling” and long before she took up writing Oscar-winning screenplays for genuinely excellent movies with great if quirky music.

Sadly, Cody was also one of the people who was an early and influential progenitor of my distaste for blog vandals. The original Pussy Ranch vanished overnight, and subsequent projects (for awhile she had a blog-like thing in one of those “city newspaper” community sites, there was a more recent blogspot blog, and she does MySpace now) haven’t resurrected any of her old posts. I haven’t checked the archive sites, but it’s possible ErosBlog is now the only place you can read what she wrote about her 2003 engagement:

On Friday, Jonny presented me with a saucy new ensemble from Wet Seal (the man has some seriously excellent taste) and told me I should wear it for a “surprise date” on Saturday. But of course! I adore surprises.

So I donned the beaded top, miniskirt and pink fishnet tights on Saturday evening (Jonny wore an extremely hot new outfit as well) and we headed out. It turned out he had made reservations at our favorite sushi restaurant. We ordered cocktails and nigiri and commenced a fabulous meal. After finishing, we decided we were still hungry and ordered a second round of sushi.

So you can imagine my shock when the waitress arrived with a tray not bearing spicy tuna rolls, but a white ring box. “Here’s your special roll,” she said, barely able to contain her glee. Jonny dropped to his knee as I began bawling my fool eyes out in front of many gawking diners, and popped the question.

I had a surprise planned too: See, we’d been talking about getting engaged a lot recently, and I had a hunch a proposal was forthcoming. So several days earlier (as it turns out, the exact day Jonny had purchased the ring), I had secretly had the word “yes” tattooed on the inside of my wrist. I’d hidden it with an AC/DC wristband and hoped my surprise wouldn’t be blown.

And it wasn’t; I whipped off the wristband and flashed Jonny my wrist. “Yes!” Onlookers applauded, and my feet haven’t touched the ground since.

I wanted my answer to last forever, and now it will. (In fact, it’s healing nicely.)

We’ve also got her advice for guys who call phone sex lines, as well as a short discourse on punching men in the stomach for money. And let’s not forget what she said about poor Michelle Branch, who got so roughly used by Maxim’s art department!

From Bondage Blog. Commentary seems superfluous:

I’m not a comics guy, so I don’t know much about fumetti comics except that the vintage ones I keep stumbling over tend to be Italian and feature sex and violence combined in shocking and politically incorrect ways.

Lately I have several times run across the Groovy Age of Horror blog while doing Google image searches. It’s a resource for all manner of vintage pulpy wonderfulness, but the excerpted fumetti comics (complete with high quality scans of every panel) are one of the best features of the site. Example: all the good parts from Macho #3 as reprinted in Pecatti #1. You really need to follow the link, because while I’m “borrowing” Jaakko’s dry commentary in the block-quoting below, I’m only reprinting cropped and reduced details from a few panels of the artwork; the commentary-plus-complete-panels is a much more vivid experience. As Jaakko tells the story:

It’s called Il Clan Dei Centurioni (The Clan of Centurions), and it teaches us a new, fun way of defusing a stick of dynamite stuffed into a bodily orifice. Watch and learn, kids! First the bad guys chain Macho to the roof. Then they rape him, much to his delight. Then they stick a dynamite stick up his butt. Fortunately Macho is bisexual, and his girlfriend soon rushes to help him.

Wait a minute, what the hell?

Apparently this girl really loves using her mouth.

And thus, when Macho’s gay friends arrive, they find a horrifying sight: Macho is getting a blow-job… from a woman. Oh, the humanity! The End.

With a few notable exceptions, this sex blog generally stays away from the feminist porn wars, which always strike me as being in the nature of unhappy negotiations over the way political correctness ought to be defined by and among its most cutting-edge advocates and devotees.

Still, the wars continue, whether I blog about them or not. Case in point: this account from Audacia Ray, about some flack she took for allowing oppressive patriarchal semen to touch women’s bodies in a porn movie she made:

I was on a panel called “Good Porn for Good Girls” that featured some female porn directors. When I first found out about the panel, I was a little apprehensive — the idea of me being a good girl is kind of funny (to say the least), and it’s also annoying that despite the fact that I’ve never called The Bi Apple “porn for women,” other people enthusiastically slap that label on it. I’m a woman, and a self-identified feminist. Ergo, my porn must be for women.

Really, I find this tiresome — I made The Bi Apple for people who want to see a slightly different vision of sexual interaction, people who are queer or pansexual or just plain curious about people and bodies and fucking. Women are of course invited — but so is everyone.

…

Anyway … the panel quickly devolved into an argument about blowjobs. A few audience members questioned the prevalence of blowjobs in Erika Lust’s films and the extent to which giving a blowjob is a feminist act. Erika quickly said that she personally likes giving blowjobs, which is why they are in her films so much, and she personally is a feminist, so do the math. It definitely seemed like the crowd didn’t buy this explanation.

I’ve seen this happen too when people ask “Why do the men in your movie ejaculate on the women’s bodies?” and my answer “I asked the female performers where they wanted the cum, so it’s all up to them where it’s deposited” is often greeted with skepticism. This kind of skepticism is the stuff of “false consciousness” — or the belief that if only we (being Erika, me, and female porn performers who like getting cum on them) were radicalized to better understand our oppression, we would know that cocksucking and money shots are Bad For Women.