I got this story from Boing Boing, but I was surprised to see Xeni report it straight, without the least hint of commentary. Seems a fellow overheard the soundtrack of a woman screaming and pleading for help, so he grabbed an antique sword and rushed to the rescue. Alas, what he was hearing was the soundtrack from a porn DVD, and now he faces three criminal charges and the chance at close to three years in jail:

Man mistakes porn DVD as woman’s cries for help
He faces charges after entering apartment with sword in tow

Oconomowoc – Instincts took over, James Van Iveren says, when he rushed out his door to the sound of a woman being raped in an apartment above.

“It was a woman screaming,” he recalled Tuesday. “She was screaming for help.”

Sword in hand, he bounded up the stairs, kicked in the door and confronted a man who turned out to be alone – watching a pornographic movie.

“Now I feel stupid,” Van Iveren said.

Worse yet, police seized his sword – a family heirloom – carted him to jail and referred the case to a prosecutor who charged Van Iveren with three criminal counts.

“This really is nothing,” Van Iveren insisted, “nothing but a mistake.”

Van Iveren’s “mistake” unfolded on the morning of Feb. 12 when Van Iveren, 39, of Oconomowoc, was listening to music in the apartment he shares with his mother behind Red & Bunny’s Diner on S. Main St.

Suddenly, according to Van Iveren, the distinct cries of a woman pleading for help could be heard coming from the apartment above him. He tried putting them out of his mind at first, but when they persisted, Van Iveren decided something had to be done.

“I don’t have a telephone,” he said. “I couldn’t call the police.”

The cries seemed to be coming from the apartment of a tenant he barely knew, but that, Van Iveren said, didn’t matter.

“It had nothing to do with him,” he said. “I didn’t even know if he was there. It was the woman. I thought there was a woman.”

The woman, according to a criminal complaint, was on a DVD being watched by the neighbor, who later played part of the movie back for police to point out what he figured Van Iveren heard downstairs.

To Van Iveren, the neighbor’s film sounded like a rape in progress.

“So I grabbed the cavalry sword and ran upstairs,” he said. “I intended to hold it behind my back and knock.

“But I froze and instead, what happened happened.”

According to the criminal complaint, the neighbor told police that Van Iveren pounded on the door and kicked it open without warning, damaging the frame and lock in the process.

“Where is she?” Van Iveren demanded, thrusting the 39-inch sword at the neighbor, according to the complaint. “Where is she?”

The neighbor told police that Van Iveren became increasingly aggressive as he repeated the question, insisting that he’d heard a woman being raped. With the sword pointed at him, the neighbor led Van Iveren throughout the apartment, opening closet doors to prove he was alone, according to the complaint.

Van Iveren said it wasn’t nearly that dramatic.

“I walked in the front room and looked around,” he said. “When I saw there was no woman, I left.

“I went downstairs and when I looked out the window, I saw the police had come, so I went out to tell them what happened.”

Van Iveren insisted that he never threatened the neighbor with the sword.

“I had the sword extended,” he said. “But that was all.”

The neighbor wasn’t home when a reporter visited the building Tuesday, and he could not be reached by telephone.

For his effort, Van Iveren was charged with criminal trespass while using a dangerous weapon, criminal damage to property while using a dangerous weapon and disorderly conduct while using a dangerous weapon, all criminal misdemeanors that carry a maximum total penalty of 33 months in jail.

“All of them are going to be dismissed,” he predicted. “They have to.

“This was all just a big mistake.”

I find this a troubling story. On the one hand, I’m all for the rights of people to the peaceable enjoyment of pornography in the security of their own homes. But on the other hand, I’ve seen some porn DVDs that had pretty disturbing soundtracks. I can imagine this being an easy mistake to make.

That said, the sword and the forcible entry seem a bit over dramatic. There’s a certain lack of judgment on display. But what do we want people to do when they hear a rape in progress? I’m just old fashioned enough to think that, had events been what Van Iveren thought they were, he would or ought to have earned himself a good citizen’s medal and the thanks of a grateful populace.

Fortunately, I think the prediction of dismissal is likely to come true. There’s something called “the defense of necessity” which exists for any crime, and in most jurisdictions all you have to do is convince a jury that a reasonable person would have believed the otherwise criminal acts were necessary to save a life or avert a serious injury. Given that hurdle — and Van Iveren’s arguably heroic motive — I think the prosecutor would be insane to push this to trial.

Another advantage to being flexible — as if we needed another advantage — is that it lets you suck your own toes (or chew your own toenails I suppose, if you run that way), as seen in this fine vintage photograph:

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• Bondage Yoga In Mexico
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Lately, as I’m sure some of you have noticed, I’ve been giving in to my evil nature by posting pictures that are, if not designed to stir up trouble, at least likely to do so. (Like the man said, art is either plagiarism or revolution; me, I’m with the re-mixers, who are trying to prove it can be both at once.)

This picture of a man in chains, from Bondage Blog, is another one:

Some of my readers are going to enjoy, as Rope Guy puts it, “the very buff dude, in chains.” That’s all the reason I need to publish this picture.

I’m aware that some folks are likely to condemn any suggestion that we might find eroticism in a still photograph of an actor getting paid SAG scale for standing around sweating attractively in Hollywood during the production of a movie adaptation of a lurid fiction that, at least one one level, mocked long-dead racist bastards by suggesting that their women were fornicating lavishly with the buff guys they were trying so hard to oppress and exploit. Oh well, have fun with that.

But be nice about it, or I’ll move on to my ultimate weapon. Do you really want to see the cartoon drawing I’ve got of a sweet young lady making a mouthful (and what a mouthful!) of a horse’s cock? You’ll need Johnson’s Extra Strong Eye-and-Brain Soap after seeing that one!

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Thanks to an old friend and alert reader, I am this morning pointing you to the Marginal Revolution blog, in which George Mason economics professor Tyler Cowen wonders a bit about the porn industry. I don’t want to pick on Professor Cowen unduly, inasmuch as he’s asked the question politely and has attracted a lengthy comment thread that is mostly free of the usual anti-porn ignorance and bigotry (although the porn-is-an-addiction idiocy rears its stupid-head, and commenter Clayton Cramer does drop in to trumpet his longstanding kink-is-evil bigotry — but I repeat myself). However, Professor Cowen did disclaim having much knowledge of the porn industry, and he expressly invited his readers to call him clueless. With due respect, I’ll bite.

Professor Cowen, your post was a little bit clueless. I left a comment there, but it’s worth more discussion here:

[post title] Why Is Pornography Scarce?

Er, it’s not. Not even in the sense in which Econ professors use the word. It’s a glut, a golconda, an exploding cornucopia, it’s everywhere, it’s easy to find, it’s cheap, it might as well be free, it’s easy to get and cheap to store and anybody who wants any and isn’t terminally lazy or stupid already has lots, more than they can ever hope to look at. Unless they’ve recently suffered a house fire or a porn-hostile woman.

So, what’s actually scarce? New porn, fresh porn, different porn. It’s scarce because it doesn’t stay new for long, it’s scarce because ninety percent of everything is crap and so lots of even fresh-made porn isn’t fresh, it’s scarce because (short of stacking fetishes until you’ve got one-legged panty-sniffing midget girls mud wrestling with shaved sheep) it’s tough to make porn that’s new and different. “New and fresh” requires art, craft, skill, all the other things that are in short supply in any industry. And, oddly, unit volumes are so low in porn that art, craft, and skill tend not to be rewarded.

After noting with interest that Playboy is selling its entire set of back issues on disk for about six hundred bucks, Professor Cowen writes:

Have you noticed that storage is really, really cheap these days? Have you studied the durable goods monopoly problem? Once you’ve accumulated a stock of durable material, at some point you will sell off successive units very very cheaply. Have you noticed that costs of electronic reproduction — call it marginal cost — are really, really low these days? Have you noticed there is a massive stock of accumulated pornographic images?

…

Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography. But I don’t understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don’t they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um…busy…for many years? I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable. You don’t need to see “the new porn” to know what you will want to get off on.

First of all, Playboy is unique in the industry. Most porn sellers don’t offer “a single dense disc of images”, or when they do, they don’t price it attractively. In my comment at Marginal Revolution, I speculated as to some of the reasons for this apparent market failure.

Second of all, there is some fetish drift. People’s tastes do change over time. Guys don’t view pornography so much to see the movie on the screen per se. Rather, they view it in order to use the images on the screen to stimulate the somewhat different movies in their own heads. Those movies grow, and change, and shift, over time. Some of the change is stimulated by the porn that’s been seen lately. But lots of the change happens because of what’s happened in the guy’s sexual life, or the new woman he’s been lusting after, or a random comment the hot co-worker made, or any of a thousand other non-porn stimuli. As the internal movies change, most guys find that the external movies need to change also.

But the real confusion comes next, when Cowen reveals that he’s really only talking about a tiny fraction of the overall porn market:

As I observe the sector, buyers cough up new money all the time, and they buy relatively small units of output, and at relatively high prices.

Please “splain” it to me, as they say…

Um, “as I observe the sector”? I know it wasn’t intended to be, but that’s side-splittingly funny.

The “porn sector” is notoriously difficult to observe. Nobody even knows to within an order of magnitude what the gross revenues of the sector might be.

But that’s not what’s so funny. What’s funny is an Econ professor confusing the tiny “observable” fraction of a huge and largely furtive market, with the market itself.

The people who buy new porn are relatively visible. They have credit cards, they make people semi-rich, you can observe the money even if you can’t see the transactions. Porn marketing — which is splashy and observable — is directed at them.

The people who buy “a single dense disc of images” — or who would, if they could find one on the market — aren’t as observable because they account for fewer transactions and less gross money.

And the vast, huge, horde of people who don’t buy porn at all — but who use porn, collect porn, save porn, horde porn, most of which they get for free over the internet — they are part of the market too. Hell, they define the market. True, they are mostly paying a price of “zero” (or, rather, zero-plus, the “plus” being the not inconsiderable cost of a good internet connection), but they are still market participants. To be honest, they are the eight-thousand-pound gorillas of this marketplace, stomping around crushing the dreams of the naive newbie pornographers who think “hey, everybody loves porn, how could I not get rich?”

So, to sum up, Professor Cowen looks at a tiny fraction of the people in the porn marketplace, notes that it’s the most visible and most lucrative set of porn consumers (the part of the market he can see), and wonders why that tiny subset with a market preference for fresh porn in low volume isn’t buying stale porn in high volume. And the answer, of course, is that people who want stale porn in high volume — and there are lots of ’em — can already get it in job lots, for a price of cheap-to-free.

Postscript: To the folks who are happy with their massive collections of older porn (whether they collected it the hard way back in the day, bought it on “one dense disk”, or, like most folks these days, hoovered it up off the internet), it’s often a mystery “why anybody pays for porn”. In Professor Cowen’s comments that question came up, and to answer it, several folks trotted out that tired old war-whore, the “porn is an addiction” theory. That deserves its own rant, but I did point out over there, and want to say here, that it’s a silly explanation for why people are willing to pay money for new and fresh (and scarce) porn. Wanting fresh porn, and paying big bucks for it, when you could have stale porn for free, is no more a sign of addiction than wanting fresh food, and paying big bucks for it, when you could have canned food for pennies from Wal-Mart. Are people who pay big bucks for greenhouse-grown vine-ripened tomatoes in January “addicted to food?” Naw, they just like fresh tomatoes, and they think Del Monte canned stewed tomatoes suck, even priced at three bucks a case at Costco. They have what the economists call a market preference, not an addiction.

Double penetration is all well and good, but when the anal sex guy strikes milk, watch out! It’s a gusher!

I swear, that well’s gonna be good for at least thirty barrels a day….

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, of course. So what are you gonna do? Here are some suggestions for things to do with your sweetie on Valentine’s, borrowed from some old French Valentine cards:

Monmouth went on a date with Trouble. And nearly got in some, however you want to take that:

After this our conversation quickly and unavoidably degenerated into an exchange of flirtatious double-entendres, wayward glances and suggestive strokings of fingers, knees and lips.

Trouble made her intentions even clearer when she pushed an olive, gently but firmly into my mouth, her flawlessly laquered fingernail trailing along my top lip before she pulled away, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle out of the hem of her skirt.

And I was hard. Very, and obviously, the fabric on the front of my trousers miserably failing to conceal anything but the minor details of my erect shape.

Her eyes lingered on the naughty bump. “I’d love to see…” she whispered.

The thought crossed my mind to just flash her – unzip, a couple of strokes, cover up. Twenty seconds of pure delight, but the art deco bar was an impossible space for discreet hanky-panky. Mirrors everywhere, no dark corners.

Fortunately, they found a solution in technology.