I stumbled across an unfamiliar-to-me webcomic called The Devil’s Panties, and this strip about Barbie and Xena made me laugh:

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There’s an astonishing firestorm of controversy swirling around a recent event in which someone (male) posted a woman-seeking-sex personal ad on Craigslist. The responses, including the usual spectrum of cock pictures, were collated and made public on a wiki, along with all the contact information provided by respondents. There seems to be an ongoing effort to develop the wiki to more fully “out” the folks who responded, augmenting their information with whatever else can be found out about them from public sources and from those who may know them.

Predictably, all hell has broken loose. Details available from BoingBoing, Violet Blue, and many other sources. The most popular sentiment appears to be that this was a horrid and hateful thing to do.

But was it?

I find myself unable to get very worked up about this. Indeed, I can see a positive side. This might even be a good thing for the online sex personals ecosystem.

I’m reasoning thusly: Online sex personals are, by all reports, a toxic ecosystem. Serious seekers after sex partners, especially female ones, have to wade through an astonishing volume of bizarre, ugly, inappropriate responses in order to find the few “real” responses. For example, a woman emailed BoingBoing with this description, which sounds typical of many other accounts I’ve read:

I’ve posted a few “Casual Encounters” ads at different times looking for various things. The first ad alone received over 300 replies. Some of them were beyond repugnant — the bestiality proposition springs to mind. The majority were unappealing but mundane — people who just didn’t dance the same way I do, mentally speaking, didn’t know how to compose a well-thought-out email or articulate themselves attractively. Those were ones like the one-liner “yo, hit me on MSN”, that kind of thing. I received a lot of dickpix. Then, there were a tiny fraction that drew me in and showed me that as much consideration had gone into their reply as I put into my original post. Those were people I connected with, corresponded with (from a gmail account), and eventually met.

Speaking to all men, let me say this: Mailing a potential female sex partner an unsolicited picture of your dick is not appropriate, it’s not smart, it doesn’t work, it brands you as a vulgar idiot, and it makes all men look bad by gender association with your fucked-up self. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. I repeat, don’t do it. Man law, got it?

So I have no, none, zero, zip, nada, a distinct absence and lack, of sympathy for the guys who are pissing in the well with these inappropriate responses.

Why do they do this? Well, one reason is that they can get away with it. It “feels” anonymous, there’s a perceived zero cost, it’s like socially-approved flashing because nobody sees you except someone who (faintly, theoretically, but not really) “was asking for it.”

Well, guess what? It’s not as anonymous as it feels. As proven by the events prompting this post.

What happened here is that the flasher creeps have been exposed in public, for everyone to point and laugh at. That’s a bad thing? I don’t see how. If it becomes routine, maybe they’ll stop.

Folks who feel differently seem to feel that there’s been a betrayal of some reasonable expectation of privacy, some unwritten social contract that has been protecting these virtual flashers. Huh? If there’s any expectation of privacy in a picture of your johnson that you send to a most-likely-uninterested recipient, it sure as heck isn’t a reasonable expectation.

But what about the few serious, non-offensive responders caught up in this same net? What about the “tiny fraction that drew me in and showed me that as much consideration had gone into their reply as I put into my original post” guys?

I still don’t think they have any reasonable expectation of privacy in their responses, but much more importantly, I don’t see how they were harmed by this exercise. A guy that’s free to be looking for sex on the internet, who writes an inoffensive “you sound like a fun lady, I’d like to get together” letter, how is he harmed? Now the world knows that he’d like to meet women and have sex. The world did not suspect this already? Where is the harm?

My bottom line is that this is just like the old advice from your mother, about not leaving the house while wearing dirty underwear, because you could get hit by a truck and somebody might see it. To me it seems only sensible: don’t write personals responses that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper. Because, in the final analysis, email sent to strangers is an essentially public medium. Argue about whether it ought to be public, we may — but change the fact that it is public, I don’t think we can. (Whoops, Yoda moment, sorry.)

This is not a manifesto, I’m not walking way out on a limb in defense of these opinons. These are merely my preliminary reactions to an interesting story. I don’t use personals myself, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Judging by the firestorm sweeping the net over this, emotions run hot. Agree or disagree, I’d like to remind everyone who might wish to comment here on ErosBlog that the comments are heavily moderated, and your input needs to be civil and friendly or it simply won’t be seen.

I’ve been reluctant to post this image, because I don’t know enough about its history and context. Probably propaganda judging by the style, possibly racist in effect if not in artistic intent, perhaps depicting a rape (given the different uniforms, and the common theme of rape in military propaganda as a metaphor for brutal victory/defeat), though there are no overt indications thereof and both men have their weapons handy.

So why post? Because it’s two men in uniform fucking, that’s why. Guaranteed hotness for a certain fairly large fraction of the ErosBlog readership. Without further ado:

If anybody with the appropriate linguistic skills cares to comment on the meaning of the visible text, that would be appreciated. Larger version is here.

I know I’ve been quoting Susie Bright a lot recently, but then, Susie always has been a woman with a lot to say. Her latest big essay grabs firmly ahold of the seeming paradox of women and their rape fantasies:

I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies”?

One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.

Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could “overcome” them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.

She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night. Despite my assertive self-confidence, rock-hard feminist analysis, and weekly shift at the rape crisis hotline, I could still crawl into bed and successfully masturbate to the same disturbing fantasies that had aroused me since I was a child.

Feminism and self-esteem had no more effect on my erotic hot spots than the communion wafers I used to take every Sunday, hoping they would wash away the devil’s seed inside of me. Clearly, religion and linear politics were useless in explaining the unconscious and subversive quality of eroticism.

…

It’s normal, it’s common, to fantasize about the bizarre– the things that in real-life circumstances would trouble us, frighten us, or maybe just make us laugh. Erotic fantasies take the unbearable issues in life and turn them into orgasmic gunpowder.

…

In our fantasies, no matter how much we struggle to deny it, we control every frame. Whether we stand tall in thigh-high boots or kneel breathless on the ground, it’s a matter of our well-lubricated chosen position. We run the fuck in our minds, the exact amount of ambivalence, the perfect timing of climax. When did that ever happen in a real sexual assault?

These are just the tiniest of highlights; there’s much much more. Complete with bonus analysis of Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden”!

We all know better than to drink and drive. But there are worse things. (There are always worse things.) Here’s a cartoon object lesson on the perils of drinking (we may assume), driving (an applecart pulled by a donkey), singing, and fornicating, all at the same time:

Moral: Be careful when multi-tasking, lest you accidentally fuck a donkey up the ass.

Addendum: For some odd reason, this cartoon reminds me of humorist P.J. O’Rourke’s famous 1979 National Lampoon essay: “How To Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed Without Spilling Your Drink.”

The Nymph shrieks and screams whenever she feels I’m mistreating one of her stuffed animals (so of course, I mistreat them often). She also shrieked when I showed her this photograph of a happy bear:

I’m not sure why.

Anybody in the blogging world is by now familiar with the tired old newspaper column written by a journalist who’s decided it’s time to say “I don’t get blogging, blogs are dull / stupid / inane / written by geeks.” Well, now a British journalist has trotted out that weary formula and plugged in “sex blog” instead of “blog”, writing Sex Blogs: Why Bother? A few sample paragraphs:

I can always just go and pick another of the thousands upon thousands of sex blogs that seem to be girding their loins and penetrating the blogosphere; because let’s face it, they all read the same. It’s all “tensed muscles” this and “moist undercarriage” that: graphic details of the precise curl of some anonyknobber’s merkin and five hundred variants on the concept of “sweaty”.

…

Other personal bloggers choose to write about tube trains and cats and cheese sandwiches; why shouldn’t you write about your own – and I apologise for this in advance – rides, pussies and yes, the contents of your very own lunchbox? Especially, and this must be said, especially when, for a bunch of geeks, you all seem to have rather unbounded sexual proclivities.

Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps I just can’t stand to read because I’m jealous. I’m jealous that a growing community of bloggers want to stand on a table, face the world and shout “Look at me! I’ve got a stiffy!”. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say in return, except perhaps “Well, good for you.”

Sometimes I’m tempted to start up my own anti-sex-blog-blog. None of these glistening thighs and unbelievable multiple orgasms that go on for hours, pits that smell like flowers and sex that never goes wrong – it’ll be called “Fanny-Farts and the Jackhammer Rhythm” – and be a group blog full of tales of bloated post-takeaway sex, grumpy come-on-we’re-supposed-to-be-at-my-mum’s-by-now sex, and sex that you regret as soon as the first button is shucked but do it anyway.

Because what the world needs is more bad sex, described by people whose sexual proclivities are safely and boringly “bounded”. Capital idea!