This Fleshlight chained to a signpost at the notorious Burning Man desert festival is at once a simple sight gag and also a fairly sophisticated piece of conceptual art. I believe it’s supposed to make us think about the public masturbation taboo and the reasons for our squick around shared sex toys. It’s trenchant commentary especially in the free-wheeling context of The Burn, where almost anything goes. Why is the public Fleshlight squicky in some way that the giant orgy going on in a big tent a quarter mile away is not?

This one is from 2015, although I suspect the same or similar art has been on display in other years.

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A very very long time ago, some quasi-educational sex book I was reading (perhaps a Nancy Friday title) informed me that a common masturbation method for women was to fold up a pillow underneath themselves on a bed and ride it with some vigor. From time to time, during that vanished decade of popularity that sex blogs enjoyed, I would see some woman mention having done this, especially during that time of youth when their libido greatly exceeded their access to either sex toys or unsupervised young men. But it’s quite rare, I think, to see the practice actually captured in visual media:

This grainy .gif is from some long-lost Tumblr.

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Sometimes, they snoop the packages. And when you’re buying cock cages and other sex toys that lets her figure you for a male submissive, and she turns out to be a dominant woman with a lot of extra time on her delivery schedule, she might just bust into your house and make you do filthy stuff:

Yes, old boy’s nose is precisely where you think it is.

Photos are from Mean Package Delivery, via Kink Unlimited.

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This photo of Rosario Dawson in a dominatrix getup has been circulating recently in some of my social media feeds. It’s a very nice photo, but that “faux dominatrix doing nothing” schtick has been done — so much so that Spy magazine lampooned it with a photoshopped Hillary Clinton in shiny latex all the way back in the early ’90s.

But I have a problem, and its name is Provenance. It’s very difficult for me to just drop a pretty picture and go “Yo, this pic is fun, I don’t know anything about it, k-thanks-bye.” Dumbass me, I always gotta Google.

Suddenly, the “every pretty celeb has done one” dominatrix photo gets a lot darker and more fascinating. When we look outside the narrow crop everybody is circulating, we see heavy vinyl curtains, a morgue table, some human feet, and a collection of evil-looking electrical devices, complete with cables and clamps. We’ve gone from “posing in the gear” to “some sort of interesting story has been interrupted in progress”:

The natural next step for me is to look for the source photoshoot and see if there are more pictures that tell even more of the interesting story. The photo is sourced to a shoot by 1990s fashon-photography darling Dah Len that appeared in the premier May 2002 issue of Complex magazine. Complex was a stylish hip-hop/fashion/culture mag that enjoyed a 15 year run (before the internet ate print mags) and still exists in the form of a large and flourishing youth-culture media company. Although the accompanying cover story from the magazine got published in 2012 on a now-crumbling Complex Media website that Archive.org captured in the Wayback machine, neither the Complex people nor the Archive have any imagery to show us. Instead I must work from various dodgy collections of “celebrity photos” on malware-shoving picture sites, and these are not reliably comprehensive. Nonetheless, my best synthesis of the available information is that this particular gritty dungeon scene probably appeared in just the one magazine photo.

However, there were other photos. My favorites have Rosario in what could be a schoolteacher outfit, vamping on a school desk while an anonymous man checks his weight on a scale, in the background. He, or someone, has been writing lines (“I will not…” at least fifteen times) on the chalkboard. Is Rosario a stern physical education teacher? That would not explain the accoutrements of geography instruction in the office. Why is the man being weighed? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m pretty sure Rosario doesn’t plan to let weigh-in man out of her office without playing with him first:

A version of that latter photo, it turns out, also graced the cover of the magazine:

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Science fiction is wonderful. Among other things, it brings us this trans-girl space pilot on a long haul. It would appear that, being bored, she unpacked all her sex toys, fired up some freaky holographic alien milking porn, whipped out her “modified and supercharged” dick that she got during her last shore leave, and managed for just long enough to not think about the unpleasant task of wiping down every interior surface of her travel pod. (She knows she should have thought twice about getting the “super-squirt” enhancement, but there’s a cute redhead at Triton base who is really gonna dig it.)

In the future, bioengineering and nanotechnology offer us hope for a lot more body plasticity. It does not take a skilled prognosticator to predict that the early adopters and serious money in this tech will gravitate immediately to genital modification. A blessing, obviously, for trans people, to easily adjust their body until they’re happy with their parts. But who among us wouldn’t take the opportunity to make something bigger or smaller or a different shape, if it was no more effort than getting a new piercing?

Honestly, this kind of scifi backstory is the only possible explanation for the profusion of trans women with monster dongs in hentai porn. What I appreciate are the artists whose science-fictional speculations extend to thinking about social and cultural consequences. Imagine for a moment the year in their lives that young people in such a society reach legal age for plasticity treatments. There will be cock fads. And when all the young women at the school suddenly pop dicks the size of their arms, they’re gonna have to get together to compare and play with them:

I hope my light-hearted celebration here of the potential for easy genital plasticity will not be understood as mocking the difficulties of actual trans people in our present non-science-fiction dystopic society. Body dysmorphia is real, and plastic surgery is limited in what it can accomplish even when it’s available, as it too-often is not. I know that plenty of trans women keep and enjoy (and even make money with, if we can judge by the existence of cam sites like TSYUM) their original equipment. Others, reportedly, do not do these things, or would prefer not to if they had that option. The easy science-fictional body plasticity that I imagine in this post is, IMO, just one of the benefits that everyone will enjoy under the fully automated luxury gay space communism that all correct-thinking people aspire to. In such a future, having the body shape that you want will be just another human right.

I’ll leave you with these last two images, which we might file under the category of “things to do with your huge new cock”:

If you want to complain that all of the things to do with your huge new cock are boringly predictable, I make no apologies. Predictable, sure, I’ll cop to that. But never boring!

Look, folks. Sometimes “just because we can” is not a good enough reason to hook your sex toys to the internet. Sometimes, the old analog ways of doing things are better. Especially if what you’re doing is locking up your penis:

But wait! Wouldn’t if be fun if we didn’t need a key? We could Bluetooth it! And have an app! And then my virtual keyholder could lock or unlock the cock from anywhere in the world! What could possibly go wrong?

What could go wrong, you ask? Here’s your answer: The Qiui internet-connected penis chastity lock. Zack Whittaker at Tech Crunch has the story: Security flaw left ‘smart’ chastity sex toy users at risk of permanent lock-in

This could have been bad.

U.K.-based security firm Pen Test Partners said the flaw in the Qiui Cellmate internet-connected chastity lock, billed as the “world’s first app controlled chastity device,” could have allowed anyone to remotely and permanently lock in the user’s penis.

The Cellmate chastity lock works by allowing a trusted partner to remotely lock and unlock the chamber over Bluetooth using a mobile app. That app communicates with the lock using an API. But that API was left open and without a password, allowing anyone to take complete control of any user’s device.

Because the chamber was designed to lock with a metal ring underneath the user’s penis, the researchers said it may require the intervention of a heavy-duty bolt cutter or an angle grinder to free the user.

I’m no expert on penis cages or lockable male chastity devises, but I gather some users enjoy having other parties in control of when and how they can free their dick long enough to have a satisfying sexual experience.

You might trust your lover with the keys to that experience. But once you connect your cock lock to the internet, suddenly there’s a third party in your triangle of lust and frustration: A basement crew of unresponsive Chinese developers, along with everybody in the world smart enough to hack their weak-ass software. How’s that going to end? Not well!

Qiui chief executive Jake Guo told TechCrunch that a fix would arrive in August, but that deadline came and went. “We are a basement team,” he said…

It’s not known if anyone maliciously exploited the vulnerable API. Several user reviews of the app complained that the app had bugs that would cause the device to stay locked.

Image credits, top to bottom: Kami Tora, Froaden, KD Pierre.

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I am somewhat notorious for doom-and-glooming that the pornocalypse comes for us all. The aphorism is shorthand for my observation that companies and social media platforms evolve through a life cycle in which porn, adult sites, and persons interested in these are initially welcome while a platform or internet business builds out its internet presence, and then — slowly or rapidly — these outfits purge all the porn from their platforms in response to various pressures. Often, there’s a hypocritical element, especially when the company or platform retains a business model that’s porn-adjacent. In such cases, the porn purge looks like greasily disingenuous posturing: “What we do here is a matter of healthy pleasure. We’re not pornographic, oh no! And to prove it, we’ll exclude all those stinky pornographers — yes, the very ones that we courted for their traffic and money when we were younger, newer, and more desperate for traffic.”

The #pornocalypse comes for us all. I’ve detailed dozens of examples since 2013 and — without the catchphrase — going all the way back to 2004 when LiveJournal started cracking down on the sex bloggers who helped make it great. I’ve been on this beat a long time.

You want to know who has been on their beat even longer than I’ve been on mine? The legendary sex toy sellers Adam & Eve, who these days style themselves the “#1 Adult Toy Superstore.” They’ve been at it for fifty fucking years — an entire half-century. They got their start selling condoms and lube in brick-and-mortar stores, then branched out by starting a highly-successful condoms-by-mail business at a time when this was still technically illegal because of the Comstock Act. At some point they added sex toys and began franchising their brand to more than sixty sex shops nationwide. Prior to 1996, they put up a website they called “a collection of the finest erotic catalogs on the Internet.” Yeah, they’ve been at this game for a minute or two.

Now, let me tell you the story of how Adam & Eve the sex toy selling mega-chain first came to overlap with my little operation here at ErosBlog. Cast your mind back sixteen years, to 2004. There I was, blogging happily along, when I got a lovely email from Libby. “Libby from Adam & Eve” was a genuinely nice person who later became a sex blogger in her own right. In 2004, she greeted me with kind words complimenting ErosBlog for being “chock full of wickedness” and being “one of the most popular sex blogs in the world.” (That last was the best kind of flattery, since it was, at the time, essentially true.) Here’s Libby’s entire email. (Yes, I still have it.) You’ll need to click to make it big enough to read:

The essence of Libby’s pitch: Adam & Eve wanted to “start a brand new e-lationship” with ErosBlog. (Aren’t you glad that neologism didn’t catch on?) Our new “e-lationship”, boiled down, was intended to be a sort of primitive affiliate deal:

Wasn’t that nice?

In truth, it wasn’t. In those halcyon days, most affiliate schemes offered more than a 20% revshare. And although sex toy affiliate programs have always been notorious for not offering useful stats that an affiliate can use to track sales, Adam & Eve basically had no stats at all; it was my impression that their program was a “trust us” deal where they periodically paid out revenue without any visibility at all into the number of sales, the referring links, or anything else that affiliates need to verify that we are getting fairly paid.

So I wrote back, and, long story short, pitched them to buy a banner ad instead. Which they did, maintaining it on and off for the next year or two. My stinky-porn sex blog traffic was worth paying for, and pay they did:

Note the content the Adam & Eve banner ad is running next to in this screenshot: it’s a brutal spanking photo from this post, featuring an interview with a spanking model about the experience of modeling for one of the most severe/BDSM spanking porn producers of her day. In 2004 and 2005, Adam & Eve was happy to advertise against this raunchy porn content.

But, you know: the pornocalypse comes for us all.

Fast forward to 2020. I am, for various reasons, currently in the market for a good sex toy affiliate program. I went to Adam & Eve to see what their offering might be these days. And it instantly became clear that they have succumbed to the pornocalypse. Their affiliate program these days has two layers of content screening for potential affiliates. A potential affiliate has to satisfy not only Adam & Eve, but also their third-party affiliate program operator, a company called Ascend.

Adam & Eve, who used to be totally fine running their banner against painful spanking content, now say they won’t allow their affiliate links to appear on any website that publishes bondage, pain, or urination content:

Well, fuck. ErosBlog sometimes offers pissing stuff. bondage, BDSM, and pain content, too. After all these years, I still have zero fucking clue how a photo of a bondage scene is supposed to “depict” the “consent of the participants” — is the model supposed to hold an “I consent” cardboard sign, or what? Indeed, I’ve blogged at length about the actual ways to confirm consent in the BDSM porn we enjoy. Ironically, one of the first posts in which I did so was the brutal-spanking post that appears next to Adam & Eve’s banner in the 2005 screenshot above.

But that’s not all. Adam & Eve have some sort of working agreement with an affiliate program operator called Ascend. To become an Adam & Eve affiliate in 2020, you’ve also got to satisfy the content requirements that Ascend imposes:

That’s right, folks. To sell sex toys for Adam & Eve, you’ve got to do it from a website that doesn’t have any “pornographic, obscene, sexually explicit, or related content.” I dunno how you’d do that, but them’s the rules. I didn’t make ’em.

I call terms of service like this “porn-hostile TOS”. It’s my policy not to do business with anybody that has porn-hostile TOS. But, sometimes, the porn-hostile TOS are just for show. Sometimes, they are intended to cover butts and look good, but they aren’t enforced. By the time I got this deep into reading the rules, I had become curious whether Adam & Eve (and Ascend) could actually be 100% serious about all this porn-hostile nonsense. From a sex toy retailer! So I went ahead and filled out an affiliate application, just for the pleasure of seeing my inevitable rejection letter.

I was not disappointed. Here it is:

That makes it all nice and offical! My website does not meet their quality standards. It contains “inappropriate content”. Sixteen years ago, they pitched me to join their affiliate program, and when I said no, they bought advertising. Now? The pornocalypse comes for us all. Nowadays, you can’t sell sex toys for Adam & Eve if your website has “pornographic” or “sexually explicit” content. How the fuck does that even work? Sex toys are sexually explicit by fucking definition. Putting the Adam & Eve link on your website makes your website sexually explicit! What the actual fuck? It doesn’t make any sense.

The pornocalypse comes for us all. It fucking ate Adam & Eve.

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