What’s In A Glory Hole?

It’s right there in Wikipedia: A glory hole is “a surface depression produced by block caving in underground mining.” Which is to say: you dig a lot of ore out of an underground mine, and eventually the roof falls in. You get a glory hole, a big dangerous crumbling conical pit. If you fall into a glory hole, you don’t come out again.

Nobody seems to know just when this mining term originated, but it was in standard use (albeit inside scare quotes to indicate slang) by the time The Colliery Engineer wrote about the Treadwell Mine near Juneau, Alaska, in 1904:

(Click photo or here for article.)

In mining towns back in the day, a down-on-his-luck miner or a terrible public drunk (often the same individual) was said to be “down the glory hole.” A big hole you fall into and can’t ever hope to get out of again? It seems a reasonable analogy to alcoholism and despair.

Fast forward to sometime in the 1940s. Again nobody seems to know the details, but according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, a sexual connotation to the phrase “glory hole” arose in the gay community. You loyal ErosBlog readers know this meaning:

Press the fast forward button again. Now it’s 1981. The Juneau Cooperative Christian Ministry opens a soup kitchen and homeless shelter for local indigents and drunks. Their mission?

In response to God’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, the mission of The Glory Hole is to provide food, shelter and compassion to achieve physical and spiritual well-being for those most in need.

That’s from their website. They’re good folks. There’s a vegetable garden on their roof. They rely on donations. (The PayPal button is on their page.) People of all faiths, or no faith at all, volunteer for them and support their fundraisers. All this info is on their website or in Google, not buried very deep.

Back in 1981, yes they did go there: they named their new soup kitchen “The Glory Hole.” It was a nod to local history and tradition, with the collapsed mines and the people who had metaphorically fallen in. Did they know about gay sexual slang, these charitable Christian people, back in 1981, in that little town with no roads going in or out, before the internet, before the cruise ships started bringing five million visitors a year? Would they have cared if they did know? Or would they have laughed it off as an irrelevant oddity of far-distant urbanites?

Fast forward again to 2015. There’s a re-dedication ceremony for the soup kitchen and shelter. Ostentatious ceremonial praying is involved, because that’s how religion is done. A photograph of the ceremony makes the front page of the local paper. (It’s still a small town where, apparently, not much happens.)

But this is the 21st century, full of net-savvy hipsters aware of all internet traditions as well as everything that’s on Urban Dictionary. If it clickbaits, it leads. Truth? Reportage? Journalism? 30 seconds of Googling? Nah, why bother! Scoffing is funner!

And that’s how you get a thing like this at a place like Boing Boing:

Look at that smug headline again:

Notably naïve Christian group names Alaska men’s shelter “The Glory Hole”

Of course The Glory Hole in Juneau is not actually a men’s shelter, it’s open to people regardless of gender, which destroys the biggest part of the joke. (Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing grabbed that wrong detail, obviously without checking the charity’s website, from one of her credited sources, while grabbing the graphic from the other one.)

And about the naming of the place? It’s right there in the photo caption: the story is about the charity’s rededication, not its founding. The facility was set up and named back in 1981 (a fact that’s also on the website). So the newspaper story isn’t even about what the Boing Boing headline claims it’s about. Was it in fact “notably naïve” to name a soup kitchen after a strong local cultural tradition in 1981 in a town of less than 20,000 residents that was 1500 miles from San Francisco? I guess that’s a matter of opinion. But small town naiveté in 1981 wouldn’t be funny clickbait, would it? Nope, this will go viral a lot faster if you pretend the naïve act of naming happened in 2015. So let’s go with that, shall we? Hit the publish button! Viral viral viral!

Bloggers are generally not journalists. I don’t aspire to that standard, which is a good thing, because I can’t live up to it. Xeni Jardin, however, does claim to be a “tech culture journalist.” I guess “tech culture journalist” means never having to click through and check the website of the people you are making fun of. In order to find out if they are actually, you know, risible?

Update: Since publication of this post, BoingBoing has modified their item by adding this paragraph, including a direct link to the charity in question, to the bottom of Xeni’s post:

They do good work. They feed and provide shelter to the hungry and homeless. After you finish laughing, consider donating.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Bunny Girl Happily Working A Glory Hole
• Robot Glory Hole
• Reluctant Polar Bear
• Peep Show
• Ring A Christmas Bell

Sex “Research” Stories That Aren’t

Way back in 2002 when I started this sex blog, I imagined that many of my posts might point to online news stories about sex. There weren’t so many sex blogs back then, and online writing about sex from “mainstream” journalists was still rare enough to be notable.

What I quickly discovered, though, was that these stories were generally crap, especially when they pretended, badly, to be based on “the latest research”. Scientists usually don’t do sex well, and reporters usually don’t do science well, so a reporter’s view of sex research usually turns out to be hideous insulting nonsense and tripe. (Exceptions do happen. But man, you gotta dig for ’em.)

Pretty soon, it got to the point where I don’t even read journalism about sexual science. The noise level is too high; it’s all spam and no eggs.

Therefore I am amused to discover two articles in two days that discuss the whys and wherefores when it comes to bad reporting about bad sex research. This morning it was Thomas Roche blogging at Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles; yesterday it was How To Spot an Internet Sex Research Hoax at The Sexademic.

If you still read “Newest Research about Sex Reveals…” stories, you’ll want to read these, too.

Be The Best Phone Sex Operator You Can Be

Browsing through the big, big web today I came across an article about the sorry state of journalism by Maureen Tkacik in Columbia Journalism Review. Not ErosBloggable? Well, it does key into a theme Bacchus has explored here before, about how old media is screwed. Tkacik was working a “youth marketing” beat and managed to turn up the following story.

One of the companies in my “youth” sector, the mall chain Abercrombie & Fitch, made a weekly practice of purging its stores of hourly sales associates it deemed to be less than, in corporate parlance, “brand positive.”

The purgees were identified, a former regional manager explained, every week at corporate headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, during a conference call held specifically to critique photographs taken that week by the chain’s hundred or so district managers of all the “brand representatives” they had encountered in visits to their stores. The photos were uploaded onto some sort of company intranet, but my source told me his boss preferred printing them out on paper, so he could circle flaws, draw mustaches, scrawl racist epithets, etc. The source said braces, minor breakouts, the faintest possibility of weight gain, showing up to work in a prior season’s ensemble, wearing shoes that had not appeared on the list of authorized footwear for that season, and/or belonging to an ethnic minority could all be grounds for immediate dismissal from the ranks of Abercrombie & Fitch’s minimum-wage cadre of demand creators.

Not a bad story, no? But word got back to Abercrombie & Fitch’s lawyers and “crisis PR” people and before our intrepid reporter knew it, she was fired.

Must keep the corporate overlords happy, after all.

Looking for work, Tkacik took up a job (part of a bit of freelancing she was doing to try to get a new job) in a rather different kind of workplace.

The stranger thing about phone sex, though, was that the training program was more rigorous and extensive than any I’d encountered in journalism. There was a day and a half in a classroom learning such phone-sex fundamentals as the “hot statement” and the “ego stroke,” daily feedback sessions with supervisors who listened in on calls, a mandatory creative-writing contest for the best Halloween-themed fantasy scenario, refresher courses to hone fluency in more exotic proclivities, individual binders in which we recorded our progress in this stuff and collected, as per instruction, magazine clippings–Penthouse letters, perfume advertisements, etc.–whatever we found erotically inspiring. When my supervisor’s boss learned I was writing a story, he unfurled all the usual legal threats, but when it was published, the company ordered hundreds of reprints to dispense to new hires at orientation. They did not expect you to be some innate phone-sex genius, but they had full faith that you could get immeasurably better, especially if you wanted to, and they genuinely seemed to take it as a given that people wanted to become better at things they did.

I could comment at length, but perhaps I would do best just to refer you to the closing sentiment offered in another old Bacchus post: “Proof, if you need it, that there are still professions in the world where character and reputation matter.”