Okay, there's used undies and used undies. There's "I'm not wearing panties" and then there's "period underwear." Anyone who has worked sorting donations at a thrift store has particularly strong feelings on the subject of used underwear. Especially dirty used underwear. (And while we're at it, how about not throwing in dirty disposable diapers? Whoever succeeded me at Help the Aged, Camden Town will thank you.) Even clean old underthings though are a relative proposition: grayed and frayed, with stained gossets and stretched elastics. Someone can use them, the thinking might go - but how about taking that generous impulse and translating it into the minimal expense of a three-pack of new jockeys?

We've all held onto undies past their prime. In my case, I find it very hard to throw out something that was at one time expensive and still feels "special" - especially if the matching bra is still operational. Throwing such things out can be hard (a few drinks helps) and donation may seem a viable alternative, but understand what was for you a romantic splurge, a compendium of daintiness and all things pretty and adult, is in fact a ratty scrap of synthetic lace now missing its bow. Launder and save those sets with maximum sentimental value and let the rest go. Into the trash. Then dump coffee grounds on them just in case you're tempted come laundry day.

There's the other side of the question: do people buy them? That's what Pleticha set out to discover. And she was on the other side of the dirty-drawers divide: Think less saggy jockeys than Sam Baker-Anthony-Michael-Hall in Sixteen Candles (recently reprised on Glee): a sexy lady's used undies are the stuff of fetish, right?

One of the girls [a friend] met at that party sold her panties on the site for $200 a pair. I'd heard rumors about this kind of thing for years, but here was proof it was possible. Two-hundred bucks for underwear? I wasn't up for posing in my panties, but I could totally do that! Unlike sex for money, selling used underwear didn't feel inherently sleazy or immoral. And sure, a guy buying panties online might seem a little off, but in the words of my friend the Craigslist gigolo, "Just because a guy's a panty-sniffer doesn't make him a bad person." After years of flirting with the idea, it was time for me to find out: can a girl make easy money off her dirty laundry? And how much money are we talking?

So she posts a Craigslist ad.

"I'm a college girl who just started school in the city and really need some cash for books and stuff. I have a bunch of panties I don't need any more - some are super-cute, some are kind of old! It's $25 for the not-so-nice pairs, but I have some more expensive lacy stuff too. Serious inquiries only please!"

Instead, dudes want head-shots and extras. Not shocking, maybe.

This was the sketchiness I was hoping to avoid, but I was desperate for a sale. I had posted my first ad nearly a week ago, my asking price had dropped from $100 to $40, but still no takers. I didn't like this kind of bartering. Not only do I suck at negotiating, but it was making me feel like a whore after all. I'd envisioned a wallet full of Benjamins and a drawer of new panties. I hadn't envisioned myself - and I'm cringing as I write this - making extravagant promises about how "juicy" my panties were. I was selling myself. It felt gross. I got very close to forgetting the whole thing.

She ultimately sells a few pair, but isn't sure the hassle is worth the money.

I still don't have a problem with the idea of selling my panties - if it were just that. But it's not. It's teasing and marketing myself, and ignoring upsetting propositions in the name of a buck. The e-mails are still coming in as my last Craigslist post is set to expire, but they're going unanswered. From here on out, I'll just have to do my laundry.

Well, I guess we know who buys those old panties at the SalVa! And, when you think of it that way, maybe it sort of is an act of charity? It's also maybe why only the granny-panties are left. Ew.

I Did It For Science: Selling Panties On Craigslist

Rupert Murdoch has one. So do financiers Vivi Nevo and Bruce Wasserstein. Why are the West's most powerful men coupling up with younger Asian women?

I'll cosign with the Frisky here:

Asian woman as commodity? Asian woman as status symbol? Offensive much?

But I'll need to fully disclose something: I hold a deep personal hatred for racial trend pieces. While I think that discussing shifts in demographics can be quite useful information, the this-minority-is-the-new-hottness pieces only serve to reinforce stereotypes and dominant paradigms. Kind of like that term "blipster", the idea of an Asian trophy wife is only remarkable if one concludes minorities don't have the same types of motivations, thoughts, likes, dislikes, and feelings as everyone else.

There's nothing really new about this "trend." So what's makes this so special? That it's now socially acceptable to be seen marrying or dating someone nonwhite, instead of just having sexual relations? After all, the Marie Claire piece quotes from the author of The East, The West, and Sex who notes that this fascination with exotic others has been going on as long as humans have had the capacity to travel to other lands:

In researching his new book, The East, the West, and Sex, author Richard Bernstein found that the Orientalist illusion continues to influence. "Historically, Asia provided certain sexual opportunities that would be much more difficult for Western men to have at home. But it remains a happy hunting ground for them today," he says, citing one phenomenon in the northeastern region of Thailand called Issan, where 15 percent of marriages are between young Thai women and Western men well into their 60s.

Reading the piece, I was also struck by how the focus returns to the people-as-status-symbol theme again and again:

It's as though these Western men are hungry for a piece of that mystical Eastern formula. As such, Asians (in addition to African orphans) are hot commodities right about now-status symbols as prized as a private Gulfstream jet or a museum wing bearing your name (neither of which goes so well with a frumpy, aging first wife).

Though, I wonder how much I can fault Chu for perpetuating this kind of treatment. After all, while researching this piece, I read article after article looking for information on Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng. Ultimately, the only information I could find was on her marriage history. I never got the answers to my two main questions: essentially, who is Wendi Deng outside of Murdoch and why people seem to think that her pussy comes with a side of the Chinese market?

But Chu plays into this, writing:

Skepticism aside, the new trophy trend does have its benefits. We're already seeing a positive impact on global politics, economics, and the arts: The Chinese became privy to online social networking in 2007 with the launch of MySpace China under the News Corp. umbrella; contemporary Chinese painters-including Xiaogang Zhang and Minjun Yue-have rung up nearly $400 million in sales on international art circuits since 2006, thanks to well-connected supporters like Ziyi Zhang; and almost 43 percent of international adoptions, which have more than tripled since 1990, now come out of Asian countries (more playdates for Pax and Maddox).

In addition, while the article appears to try to have a reasonable discussion about fetish and relationships, it seems to embrace other stereotypes whole-heartedly:

What's more, perhaps a proliferation of gorgeous, mixed-race, multilingual offspring (assuming a classical Mandarin tutor is on the Chen-Moonves registry) is just good for our landscape.

Hybrid vigor, again? That's a lot of pressure to put on generation swirl.

And there are all kinds of essentializing stereotypes put forward in the piece (emphasis mine):

While I'm sure that real love and affection is sometimes the bond in these culture-crossing May-December romances, could it be that power divorcés of a certain ilk make the perfect renegade suitors for these overachieving Asian good girls-an ultimate (yet lame) attempt at rebellion? Maybe these outsized, world-class moguls are stand-ins for emotionally repressed Asian dads (one cliché that is predominantly true). Or... are these women just glorified opportunists? What's so perverse is that while Asians have always revered their elders, sleeping with a guy old enough to be your grandfather is just creepy-in any culture.

Yet, earlier in the piece, Chu talks about "excruciating colonial stereotypes-Asian women as submissive, domestic, hypersexual." So I guess those ones are bad, but the others are okay?

Ultimately, I can't help but feel that the article is a scattershot bunch of ideas, culminating in nothing.

It doesn't really put forth any information about the women who seem to be the subjects of the article. It speculates about their motivations and agency, but doesn't provide any evidence. It broaches a discussions fetishization but does not seem to take into account that people enter into relationships for all kinds of reasons. And while I do not agree that these types of relationships are above questioning, I believe that any questioning about racial motivation should be done with a healthy understanding that relationships are ultimately individual choices, and individual motivations are complex things.

This is better articulated by Vickie Chang, writing in 2006 on "Yellow Fever" in the Village Voice In the article, Chang talks about Asiaphilia (focusing mainly on male practitioners and women recipients) but makes one very interesting observation:

I was the 10-year-old girl swooning and singing along with Rivers Cuomo over the three-chord riffs of Weezer's "El Scorcho," that song about half-Japanese girls that do it to him every time. Oblivious to its implications, I was pleased that the man in the Buddy Holly glasses had a penchant for Asian girls because, you know, that way I actually had a chance. It was better than being invisible. After all, how many times did I come across references to Asians on television or radio? Let's see, there was professional tennis player Michael Chang, who provoked squeals of delighted pride from my parents, the unsportiest people you'll ever meet, whenever his matches were on television. And there was Margaret Cho and her hopelessly unfunny, short-lived ABC comedy series, American Girl. And that just about wraps it up.

I was a year into college, still listening to Cuomo as he referenced Madama Butterfly, when a friend pointed out that Cuomo was merely exoticizing and objectifying Asian women, the social phenomenon that is Asiaphilia.

And just like that, my favorite Weezer album, Pinkerton, suggested a disturbing question: Was Cuomo, the god of cutesy, simple-but-not rock-the guy I'd been so thrilled at merely standing near at the Roxy a few years before-was he actually a quasi-racist, ignorant Asiaphile?

And even if he was, would he ever call?

Is a white man dating Asian woman acting out a fetish?

Is an Asian woman dating a white man acting out a fetish?

If two people mutually fetishize each other, does that make it okay?

I've been trying to untangle how to have a productive conversation on racial fetishes and racial preferences for the greater part of two years now. The only think I can do - which doesn't always work - is to tread very lightly. After all, people internalize the political as it reflects their personal, and what begins as an intellectual exercise can quickly become a witchhunt, looking for people who don't have the proper justification for one of their personal relationships.

However, articles like this one published in Marie Claire continue to baffle me. Even after giving it a third read through, I still can't discern a purpose for why this was published. What was this supposed to prove or accomplish?

Chu ends the piece by saying "Asian women dating white men may never really know if it's a fetish thing." I'd add that racial trend pieces, seeking to profit from some idea of new minority cool, can never do anything but scratch the surface of our ultimate humanity.

The New Trophy Wives: Asian Women [Maire Claire]
Asian Trophy Wives: A Label We Can Do Without [The Frisky]
Buppies, Blipsters and other black unicorns [What Tami Said]
Hybrid Vigor Alert: Halle's Pregnant [Racialicious]
Official Site [Swirl, Inc.]
Yellow Fever [The Village Voice]

From Madonna's corsets to Britney's circus whips, the trappings of sex play often make fashion statements. Take the horse shoe high heels, seen at left. They'd be at home on a high-fashion runway, or on Ms. GaGa, or just strutting the streets of New York. But if you know anything about pony play, then you know fashion is not the point.

Why do we sometimes enjoy taking a fetish-y item out of its context and using it as a fashion statement? Does it add edge? Sexiness? Danger? (All of the above?) Why do photoshoots rely on "kinky" to be interesting? And if fetish looks become more and more mainstream, do the festih-y items lose their power and appeal?

Horse Shoe High Heels [Random Good Stuff]

These kind of jobs don't usually involve actual sex, writes Tracy Quan (a former call girl) for The Daily Beast. "The sector is poised for expansion as more unemployed and underemployed women begin looking for extra cash." And it doesn't matter if you're not really "into" the scene. Writes Quan:

Because many of these freelance pro-dommes are just supplementing their incomes and don’t plan on staying in sex work forever, they may not be as erotically hardcore in their outside lives. “I wasn't really that interested” in S&M, says Chloe. “I got involved because it was easy money. The strap-on? I'm OK with it, but it's not really a personal interest of mine.”

Maybe you're thinking, why spank a businessman or let some dude suck your toes if you're not even into it? But the same could be said of answering phones, making a latte or cleaning someone's house. (In Mumbai, profesional men are finding that sex work on the side helps them earn a decent living.)

On the other hand, unlike being a receptionist or a barista, working in the sex industry is an occupation some women might be reluctant to talk to friends and family about. Chloe, the art student Quan interviewed for her piece, says her mother "would probably cry" and be "very upset" about her fetish gigs, although Quan speculates: "some parents would be secretly proud of a daughter resourceful enough to hack the increasingly rigid class system that permeates New York life."

Still: Do you believe a job is a job? Do you believe extra money is extra money? If there's no kissing, no sex, just spanking or foot worship, is there any harm in freelance fetish work? Quan puts it this way: "Even if you’re bossing your client around in a pair of thigh-high boots, you’re still working in a service industry. And after an hour, your feet hurt."

Kinkonomics [The Daily Beast]
Male Professionals Double As Sex Workers For Extra Income [Hindustan Times]

Few figures have amassed as wide-ranging a fanbase as this former secretary from Nashville. From the men who objectified her to the later generations of feminists, gay men and stylemakers who have embraced her as an icon, hers is a unique appeal.


First and perhaps foremost, Bettie was a natural model. She had a natural, wholesome beauty, but was also preternaturally photogenic. Says Mary Harron, director of The Notorious Bettie Page biopic, in an interview with Susie Bright, "she knew just how to position her face and body for the camera. More importantly,
she was so relaxed."





What people often talk about is the contradiction inherent in Bettie's pictures. Says Harron, "her sunny smiles and cheesecake poses are at variance with the pictures' supposed message of dark S&M. She was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up."





Apparently, Bettie was a mystery even to those who knew her; people rarely knew her well. Says Harron, "Even her first husband, Billy Neal, found her a mystery. That suggests to me that she had sealed herself off: there was something blank and inaccessible about her." Like many so-called icons, Bettie could be many things to many people: instantly recognizable, but still a canvas for projection.



Perhaps more than anything, people are drawn to Page's comfort with her own body - a comfort with nudity that stripped her pictures of anything sordid, even at their tawdriest. She displayed a pride in her body unusual for the times, a sense that it was something to be celebrated. It's this, as much as her treatment of bondage themes, which is often cited as culturally important in ushering in the sexual revolution.

Interview: The Bettie Page Story [Susie Bright]

The product of an abusive home, Page fled a bad marriage in her native Tennessee for New York where she fell in with a pair of siblings who ran a pornography ring. Between the years 1949 and 1957, Page was the subject of more than 20,000 pinup photos, many of them dealing with bondage subjects that are today regarded as an important gateway to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Page's photos developed a following in later years for their unique mixture of risqué subject matter and almost wholesome sexuality.

After becoming a Christian, Page gave up her modeling career. Her later years were marked by depression and mental, illness, but she lived to see herself become a pop-culture icon, a turn of events that baffled her even as it kept her solvent. "I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. . . . I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

Bettie Page Dies At 85; Pinup Queen Played A Key Role In The Sexual Revolution Of The 1960s And Later Became A Cult Figure [LA Times]

Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies At 85 [NY Times]

First off, I know (and have known) many people in non-traditional relationships with non-vanilla sexual interests who have perfectly happy, loving relationships that incorporate each person's (usually complementary) fetishes in a supportive and open way. Sometimes, they have met through the Internet, sometimes through organizations designed to cater to their needs, sometimes through happy accident. But, as I have previously noted, for some fetishists, the fetish can serve as a pretty effective barrier to having an actual relationship with someone, which involves having to open yourself up to both positive and negative emotions. Walker lines up 4 examples of the latter type, with an asexual man and a charming older women who likes younger men (not a fetish!) seemingly the most well adjusted.

First up is "James," who loves his Real Doll like she's an actual person. He admits, like most serious Real Doll fetishists, to unspecified problems in having and maintaining relationships. Like his compatriots in this article, he hasn't told a soul about his fetish or the "woman" he loves and has sex with. He also prefers having sex with the doll to that with actual women, calling it "a lot easier and more pleasurable than the real thing," you know, where he'd have to take the needs of another person into account. But this, perhaps, is the money quote:

perhaps it's the power thing that appeals – being in control of every aspect of her.

Perhaps? I'd say that's exactly it.

Next up is the sex addict, "Simon," who cheats on his wife regularly with any NSA sex partner he can meet on a site designed to help spouses cheat. It's not that he doesn't love his wife, see, it's just he needs more sex than she can give him, and 12 years is a long time to fuck the same pussy! Of course, he could be single, or he could have an honest open relationship with his wife, but that's, of course, not the attraction. He only sleeps with married women, so they won't tell his wife, and says,

I know so many men who say things like, "Oh my wife wouldn't cheat on me," and I laugh and think, OK, whatever, mate – she probably already has, with someone just like me.

Except his wife, of course. She's the perfect wife. I don't know that Simon deserves to be categorized as a fetishists — if he and his wife had a legit open marriage, he might have been — but he's still a prick.

Onto "Gemma," who likes swinging and having sex with others watching. Having taken her last boyfriend to a sex party — where he watched her have sex with another dude (which is the point of a sex party) and didn't like it — she'll never tell a potential lover interest about her sexual interest out of fear that he'll leave. She will, of course, continue to go to sex parties and orgies and will never tell a soul about it because they'll think she's a slut. Naturally, she also doesn't think about dating anyone in the scene because, you know, they like to have sex with a lot of people.

Last on Walker's list of fetishists is "John," who has a fetish about playing at baby, which might (or might not) be related. But rather than continue to seek out relationships with women who fulfill his sexual fantasies and older-woman urges, he gets right on the Internet and orders himself up a wet-nurse and diaper-changer.

I realise that it sounds weird, but it gives me some sort of comfort at the same time as addressing my sexual needs. The fact that it's all done anonymously through the web provides me with extra privacy, too.

Basically, he went from having nominally-healthy relationships with older women that he cared about to having completely anonymous fetish sex with women he knows nothing about and ho know nothing about him.

Luckily, Walker interviews two people that really aren't technically fetishists — "Miriam" and "Mark" — who don't make all people with supposedly alternative lifestyles look like they are embarrassed about their life choices, selfish, controlling and/or sort of creepy. Miriam is a divorcée with grown children who dates younger men she meets on the Internet. That's about it. That's her "fetish." She thinks they're more fun in and out bed and, after a long marriage, ugly divorce and depression, she's just having a good time right now and isn't ashamed. Mark is an asexual, who just simply isn't interested in sex of any sort and never has been. He's open about it to at least some members of his family, has tried to find partners and belongs to an Internet of like-minded individuals who make him feel less alone in the world. He actually seems completely well-adjusted, and has an active social life with ongoing relationships with people, unlike the doll-guy or the diaperman.

Look, most people don't run around talking about their sex lives to a ton of people, which is totally fine (and a way to make holiday meals far less uncomfortable). But there's a difference between thrusting your sex life in people's faces and never having anyone that you're not sexually involved with (possibly anonymously) know who you really are. If a guy who likes to wear diapers and be breast-fed can't even tell the woman at whose teat he suckles his real name, he's not quietly living out his sexual fantasies in an emotionally healthy way, he's walling himself off from relationships that can fulfill him sexually and emotionally. And that sucks — for him and for the women who are potentially interested in both parts of him.

Modern Sex: Catherine Townsend Logs On To The New Revolution [The Independent]

Earlier: If You Always Like The Emotionally Unavailable, It's Because You Probably Are, Too
Why Am I Supposed To Date Older Men, Again?

`

At Balenciaga, the models' legs were caged in futuristic footwear made of metal plates laced up to the knees with braids. At Yves Saint Laurent, the soles of Mr. Pilati's needle-thin stilettos were replaced by a thin metal rod that connected the heel to the toe, leaving the most sensitive — some would say erotic — underbelly of the foot vulnerably exposed. The models looked as if they were walking a tightrope, and the audience was made to feel alternately fascinated and terrified.

Just so we're clear: This spring it's going to be cool to look as girly as you possibly can, and then add a heaping portion of humiliation. Choosing pain, embarrassment, subjugation, and degradation? Hotttt! Plus, if the outfit says, "Come hither, I am an innocent flower," then the shoes seal the deal by making it impossible to run away. They should just write "Please date rape me" along the sides! The best part is that because of the focus on shoes, crafty designers are predicting an end to the "it bag." Paging all podiatrists: clear your calendars. We predict an influx of broken ankles when those McQueen clunkers (above) hit the streets.

Killer Designs Or Killer Shoes [NYT]

• Rapper Eve's clothing line Fetish is having a revival. After suffering bad break-ups with both the Innovo Group and Marc Ecko, it's now reborn under the Signature Group's tutelage. And, like, the quality's going to be really good and, like, Eve is totally involved on a day-by-day basis with the line this time and we stopped listening and...uh, wait, is Eve even actually famous anymore? [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• Barney's, the luxury department store chain, will probably be acquired by the Dubai government's investment arm for at least $825 million. Because you can always find something to spend your excess oil money on at Barney's. [NYT]
  
• Apparently the Japanese Jill Stuart licensee wants to scrap Lindsay Lohan as the face of its fall marketing. Did these people learn nothing from Kate Moss? [Hollywood Rag]

• But OMG! Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham is totally going to be at the Saks Fifth Avenue New York flagship store this evening for the launch of her denim line, DVB. Because she is so imaginative, she didn't need a branding consultant to think of that name, which stands for "David Victoria Beckham." [Racked]
• Ok we get it already: Valentino isn't retiring anytime soon. (Even if he does have a bad case of "The lady doth protest too much.") [WWD, sub req'd]
• We are snickering at jewelry designer Carolyn Roumeguere, who told Vogue UK, "I think that my gold and silver discs... epitomise Bedouins. A percentage of each sale goes to education and medical aid in Africa so that I give something back to the country that I have chosen to be my home and have gained so much from." Ugh. [Vogue UK]
• The MAC Cosmetics AIDS Fund donated $1.25 million to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS Initiative. This is not exactly Bill Gates money but it makes us feel sorta better about buying at least one kind of MAC. [WWD, sub req'd]

And speaking of Jane, new editor Brandon Holley startlingly admits to her fetish in this month's readers letter:

"Speaking of piss, have you ever gone into a public bathroom barefoot? Because that I find incredibly fascinating. In fact, email me at janemag.com if you want to get dinner sometime and tell me about it."

After dinner, Brandon will order you to remove your shoes and wade in her fresh urine. Then she will lick in between your toes. Then she'll send you home with a free facepack.