National Porn Sunday is run by the oddly-named XXX Church, whose website states,

Porn Sunday seeks to drive the conversation about pornography into our churches, families and lives. This weekend service brings healing to those sitting in churches who are caught up in pornography.

For Leon, it brings easy targets. When a "large, highly repressed woman with glasses in matching tweed suit jacket and skirt" points him to her husband's "testimony" about losing interest in her due to porn, Leon reflects, "How surprising. Who would have thought that her husband would become sexually disinterested in this piece of work?" And here's how he says he chatted with "a large, smiley manly man:"

"Today's sermon was, how do I say it, powerful!" I exclaim. "I could tell you firsthand how porn has affected my life.

"Has it been something you've been struggling with," the manly man asks, making creepy eye-contact that shifts as I explain my faux porn addiction.

"Yes," I say, licking my dry lips, explaining that I was addicted to gay porn, most specifically photos of men in the outdoors doing very compromising things. His creepy eye-contact becomes stronger. I wave his brochure. "Yeah, I'll have to check out this Men's Prayer retreat. (Pause.) We'll be camping, right?"

Is that you, Bruno? But mock-the-Christians free-for-all aside, Porn Sunday does appear to have taught Leon some disturbing things about XXX Church's anti-porn crusade. In Dirty Little Secret (above), a video shown at the event, a guilty husband confesses, "If I have to be brutally honest, it's not just naked women I look at" — implying that looking at straight porn either leads you to homosexuality (horrors!) osr possibly, as Leon guesses, "Brazilian monkey porn." And the pastor "tells of an email he claims to have received from a 12-year-old girl who's struggling against porn. It was written while crying with alcohol and a bottle of sleeping pills in front of her, because Satan now gives her nightmares." This 12-year-old, if she exists, deserves to be told that her sexual desires are normal, not that "Satan is pimpin' this generation" and trying to make her "his ho" (apparently "hip-hop language" is another tool of XXX Church). I'm not sure that we needed an "infiltrator" to tell us that fundamentalist anti-porn programs are ignorant, sex-negative, and creepy. Still, maybe we should all watch a little porn this Sunday in protest — after all, Satan has to get his money somehow.

Porn Sunday, The XXX Church, And You! [True/Slant]

• The Transportation Security Administration has announced that snow globes will not be allowed in carry-on bags. The reason is that the souvenirs could hold more than the allowed amount of liquid, and security protocol is to discard undetermined amounts of fluid. Plan your holiday travel accordingly. •  Every Tuesday at Sardo's Grill & Lounge in Los Angeles, porn industry insiders swarm the place for Karaoke night. It's the place to be if you're interested in the adult industry, or if you care whether your favorite performer has talents outside of the bedroom (Nicki Hunter is apparently quite the singer). •  Everyone's favorite homemaker Martha Stewart is set to expand her empire, this time with paint. The Martha-branded colors will be available at Home Depot starting in March. •  A Connecticut prosecutor has revealed that he does not plan to bring charges against Sandra Herold, owner of the chimp that mauled and blinded a woman in February. However, the victim's family is suing Herold for %50 million. • Today NPR took a look at Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, a condition in which women (and men) have abnormally low sex drives. Psychologist Lorri Brocco makes the argument that HSDD is defined by male sexuality and does not take into account the differences between male and female arousal, particularly with regards to the significance of fantasies. • A 29-year-old cop has been charged with the rape of an 18-year-old woman on Thanksgiving day. The officer was off-duty, and had gone on a date with the younger woman, who he later assaulted in his Brooklyn apartment. Shawqi Ahmed was arrested Friday by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. •  Mary Glasspool has become the second openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church. Some are opposed to Glasspool's election, claiming that it raises "serious questions," but she is looking forward to using her new position to further human rights. "Any group of people who have been oppressed because of any one, isolated aspect of their persons yearns for justice and equal rights," she said. •  TMZ cornered Sarah Palin and asked her about the best thing a mother can say to her children. Her response? "Obey... listen to what we say!" Watch the video here. •

Researcher Simon Louis Lajeunesse studied twenty male college students, and found that "not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional." Furthermore, as we mentioned yesterday, he says,

Pornography hasn't changed their perception of women or their relationship which they all want as harmonious and fulfilling as possible. Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy. The fantasy is broken in the real world and men don't want their partner to look like a porn star.

And finally:

Aggressors don't need pornography to be violent [...] If pornography had the impact that many claim it has, you would just have to show heterosexual films to a homosexual to change his sexual orientation.

All of Lajeunesse's subjects said they supported gender equality — which must mean they totally do! In all seriousness, it's hard to tell exactly what Lajeunesse's methodology was. But since it's unlikely that he either read the students' minds or watched them have sex, it seems like he probably just asked them how they thought about sex, relationships, and women. Their responses, while not entirely worthless, were almost certainly colored by what they thought they were supposed to say — which is that they respect women and don't expect them to look or fuck like porn stars. The students even said they "felt victimized by rhetoric demonizing pornography," which would make them extra likely to claim that porn was harmless.

Which maybe it is. But I have a hard time believing that representations of sex that boys start seeing when they're about 10 and continue watching for somewhere between 20 minutes and several hours a week (according to the study) have absolutely no effect on their sexuality or their thoughts about their partners. Lajeunesse also seems to misunderstand feminist concerns about (mainstream, heterosexual) porn. I'm not worried that pornography will cause men to have "unconventional" sex (horrors!) or that it turns all men into violent "aggressors." I just think that it may affect how men see women's bodies and women's sexuality in ways that the men may not be willing to admit, and that these effects are worthy of study. And just talking to twenty guys isn't quite enough.

Are The Effects Of Pornography Negligible? [EurekAlert]
Study Stymied By Lack Of Porn Newbies [UPI.com]

Earlier: Researcher Refutes Demonization Of Pornography

Some of the offending passages, excerpted on BBC News, are pretty poorly written. Paul Theroux's line, "Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four," recalls a scene from one of the Naked Gun movies, which is not usually something you want from serious literature. But really the only laugh-out-loud example is from Philip Roth's The Humbling:

It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be.

It's possible that Roth's actually trying to be funny with his vadge-mask image (is this like a cock bib?), and none of the other nominees is really all that terrible. But neither are they hot. As Booker Prize judge Lucasta Miller points out, it's not so hard to write about sex in a silly or funny way. But why is it so tough, at least in capital-L Literature, to make sex actually erotic? Miller offers a clue:

A trap people fall into is an earnest anatomical description of sex. The difficulty with the anatomical is that it can read like a bit of a textbook. To stop it doing so, they will put in flowery metaphors from the animal kingdom, but you don't need that detail. When people use similes and metaphors in their anatomical depictions of the sexual organs, it's toe-curling and embarrassing.

So penis is out, but so is pork-sword? Miller's words sound pretty restrictive, but she also has a point — it's easy for sex writing to sound too clinical, but the farther it veers from straight-up health-class vocabulary, the more it risks being silly. Book critic Melissa Katsoulis says the solution is to avoid writing about sex entirely. She tells the BBC's Tom Geoghegan,

If I was writing a novel, I wouldn't attempt to write it except in the most Victorian and prim way, because it's awful. It's a cliche, but the moments of genuine frisson in books are when hardly anything happens. When you have a dream about someone you fancy, it's because they sat down next to you on the bus or something, not because you were at it, hammer and tongs. Either be suggestive or funny, but trying to do the nuts and bolts isn't going to work.

I'm not sure what kind of sex Katsoulis is having (hammer and tongs?), and I also can't cosign her statement about dreams (a bus?). And in a larger sense, it's a shame that people shy away from sex writing just because it's difficult. Miller says literary sex should focus on "the characters and their emotional state," because "that's the difference between porn and art." But I'm not so sure there's really a clear-cut difference, and I think that if literature is allowed to manipulate our emotions, it should be able to turn us on too.

This is not to say, however, that I have any concrete answers regarding sex writing. I tend to prefer the cheerfully vulgar to both the metaphorical and the clinical, but these are obviously matters of taste. As with actual sex, no sex writing is going to please all the people all the time. But — also as with actual sex — that's no excuse for not doing it.

Is It Difficult To Write Well About Sex? [BBC News]
2009 Bad Sex In Fiction Award Nominees Announced [Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Book Patrol Blog]

As some commenters pointed out, Grey's words in Newsweek, though unfairly slammed by Kathryn Jean Lopez, were actually kind of annoying. In response to the Mark Sanford scandal, she wrote,

Americans act so shocked when they hear about politicians, celebrities, and athletes having affairs, but I have to believe that many women who are married to men with power are aware of affairs, and accept it. Don't ask, don't tell; as long as they receive something in exchange from their husband-whether that exchange be children, money, material items, or sex. We create our own morals. It's once the affair goes public that morals change. The wife feels shame and humiliation because of public awareness, yet felt no desire to speak out prior. [...] Ideally, we should all openly have something extra on the side.

Commenter Old Jean Gallagher called this response "shockingly victim-blaming," which is pretty accurate. Grey criticizes political wives for making a public stink about their husbands' cheating, and sort of implies that they are all violating some previously agreed-upon quid pro quo. But while we may "create our own morals," when we're in relationships we need to agree on some of them, and it's unlikely that all wives of powerful men agree, even tacitly, to infidelity. As to her suggestion that we should all have something on the side, that's just as prescriptive as saying we should all be monogamous.

Grey seems much more thoughtful in her Dazed Digital interview with John-Paul Pryor. Pryor asks, "Do you think without prostitution and pornography there would be more instances of rape and so on? Or do you think that they actually allow for an arena where those kinds of abuses can take place?" The idea that porn and prostitutes act as a safety valve for men's natural desire to rape isn't new, but it is offensive — luckily, Grey handles it pretty well:

I think it depends. You have women on the street who are obviously being abused and they have pimps, I mean all you have to do is watch a few documentaries to see what that's like and how raw it is. That just perpetuates the negative stereotypes of prostitution, or pimping, or the johns. And then you have the women like Christine – they are like call girls, and they might not have a pimp; they are doing it on their own. I don't think that those necessarily perpetuate the abuse and the violence, but in the same vein, I don't think they help stop it at all. But the guys who are paying for the higher echelons don't beat the girls up – well, that's generally speaking from the research we did, maybe some politicians are going to go out there and beat some girls up, I don't know.

She makes the streetwalker-versus-call girl distinction that's been so much in the news lately, but she's careful to qualify it. She recognizes that just because she hasn't heard of violence against call girls doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Here's Grey on sex and communication:

Well, I just think it's 2009 and we're still so afraid to talk about sex. I think ignorance breeds fear and vice versa and the less you know the more negative things can happen, such as teenage pregnancy or the skyrocketing rate of STDs in young adults. It is about sexual freedom but it's about more than that, it's about communication and talking and learning. I think people are so afraid to do that; people are afraid of the truth – we'd rather hide inside a bubble.

And on acting:

I think the technical aspects and the people and the crews are all very similar but as far as performances go, I really hate it when people say, ‘Oh this is reality porn!" No. Because any time you put a camera in front of anybody, even if they have never been in front of a camera, they are going to act differently. For me, pornography is performing – it is what it is and I am an extension of myself, I am hyper me, whereas in a film like this, I am doing character research and I am stepping into the shoes of someone else, and I am thinking about my mannerisms.

It's nice to hear someone point out that pornography isn't real without denigrating it — Grey's words remind us that we can enjoy porn as a performance without expecting our actual sex lives to mimic it. Throughout the interview, she comes off as smart and appreciative of nuance — Kathryn Jean Lopez is missing out by dismissing her. However, Grey's also only 21 years old. While in most of the interview she sounds very mature and articulate, she occasionally makes statements like this one: "Before Christianity and Catholicism took over most people were in poly-amorous relationships."

I don't have the entire sexual history of the pre-Christian world at my fingertips, but I do know a little bit about Greece and Rome in the centuries immediately BCE, and I know that while upperclass men there often did have sex with multiple partners, the lives of their wives were pretty rigidly circumscribed. Of course, this doesn't mean women never had "something on the side," and it's frankly a little hard to tell who was screwing who thousands of years ago, especially among groups that didn't leave written records. But men were trying to control women's sexual behavior long before Christ, and the idea of a polyamorous pre-Christian golden age doesn't really hold water.

Maybe it's ageist of me to chalk up some of Grey's more sweeping statements to the fact that she's barely old enough to buy booze. I'm a half-decade older, and while I bet I could beat her in an ancient-history trivia contest, I may not actually know more about relationships. K. Lo's apparently 33, but being old enough to run for Senate hasn't taught her not to judge other people's personal choices. Grey can be judgmental too, but even in her short and very public life, she's managed to learn the value of "communication and talking and learning." A 21-year-old could do a lot worse.

Sasha Grey / The Girlfriend Experience [Dazed Digital]

Related: Governor Sanford's Appalachian Adventure

Earlier: Newsweek Too Hot For National Review Writer

Recently, Penny Flame, a well-known adult film star, quit porn to pursue an art career. She also writes a blog, Becoming Jennie, about her transition to a new life - with what SFGate's Violet Blue calls "a sex-positive stance on porn, women and self-defined sexuality. And most of all, a cool attitude of sexual responsibility." In this she's distinct from other ex-porn stars who, Ketcham feels, perpetuate the stereotypes and either present themselves as victims of the industry or still want to profit from being sex symbols. As she writes,

I hate the common exit strategy, hate that girls join the 'god squad' or feel ashamed of the choices they made but I understand it. I can see that it's much easier to say 'porn did this to me, or that' but at the end of the day, we are all responsible for the choices we make. I chose to be a porn star. Now I'm choosing not to be. It's the beautifully terrible thing about free will: we can do whatever we like but we must be held accountable for whatever we do. Just because I don't want to be a porn star today doesn't mean that I should feel ashamed to have been one seven months ago. It's something I did and I'm not afraid to say I did it, loved doing it, and just don't feel like it's what I need to do anymore. Shame and guilt are useless emotions. The only way I would feel ashamed is if I'd decided being a porn star isn't what's best for me and then continued doing it anyway.

To some ears, this may seem like a simplified - if pragmatic - attitude towards something that can't be separated from its moral and social implications. And there's an understandable ambivalence to some of Ketcham's writings. She feel she had become a

woman that exists for the sole purpose of others' enjoyment. I realized I have no identity as Jennie Ketcham and that I am incapable of developing sincere and intimate relationships. I don't blame this problem on being in pornography, it was something I've struggled with for a long time, but to continue as an adult performer would just perpetuate the issues. I quit because I wanted an identity outside of being a porn star. I wanted to be Jennie again.

Ketcham's point is well-taken, and her insistence on personal accountability is laudable. She's right that porn did not "cause" her issues. As she says, "the notion that my worth revolves around my sexuality is something I struggle with on a daily basis... In fact, that's a big reason of why I entered adult in the first place." And it's much healthier to say that she's proud of her career, that "I wouldn't be in the wonderful place I am today if it were not for where I'd been as a porn star, and Penny Flame" than to draw a curtain of shame over a significant portion of her life.

But, as a public voice - which is what she's becoming, in a new book as well as the blog - Ketcham's feels, in some ways, more conflicted than "porn-positive." She did a wide range of work - some woman-positive, but much of it of the sort Ariel Levy, for one, would condemn as harmful. As such, there's no reason her attitude should be doctrinaire, either; she had a good experience but the industry is not monolithic. Ketcham has a chance to say something important - and getting out of the industry, with sex-positive feelings of self-worth in tact, is already saying a lot - and we'll be reading.

Leaving Porn On Her Terms [SFGate]
Becoming Jennie

Dugard is probably the most upsetting possible subject for a headlines-to-bedroom transformation, especially since Shane Ryan, who wants to make the film, is also responsible for one titled Amateur Porn Star Killer. He makes the ridiculous statement that, "We're trying to figure out a way to do that so it's not exploitative." A spokesman for the Dugard family called the proposal "exploitative, hurtful and breathtakingly unkind," which sounds about right. But Ryan's idea, though gross, isn't unique.

Donald Trump, who both championed Carrie Prejean's tenure as Miss California and called her racy photographs "lovely," now says, "Maybe, she should become a major porn star, make millions of dollars, and give it to worthy causes." While his suggestion that she give her profits to charity is sort of touching — maybe she could choose Lambda Legal — it's still annoying that he assumes a porn career is the logical next step after making a private sex video. Of course, even those without sex tapes in their past are vulnerable to porn suggestions and unauthorized depictions. Octomom Nadya Suleman was offered $1 million to star in a porn movie, and who can forget Who's Nailin' Paylin?

There wouldn't be anything wrong with Prejean or Suleman choosing to do porn on their own but it's a little depressing that when a woman inadvertently becomes famous — even if her fame comes from a horrific multi-year imprisonment — others move so quickly to turn her into jackoff fodder. Probably when it comes to porn the, um, heart wants what it wants, and maybe the demand for adult films starring or depicting famous women will always be strong enough to keep people like Shane Ryan afloat. Still, there's an element of institutionalized sexism in the idea that women who become well-known — and who meet a certain standard of conventional attractiveness — must also become objects of mass sexual fantasy. Of course, Carrie Prejean and Nadya Suleman have sought the media spotlight, directly or indirectly, but Jaycee Dugard never did, and the fact that someone is even considering pornifying her story hints that there might be something screwed up about what Americans find hot.

Report: Adult Filmmaker Plans Jaycee Dugard Movie [Silicon Valley Mercury News]
Carrie On, Then [New York Post]
Dugard Spokeswoman Blasts Plans For Film On Case [AP]

Earlier: Dugard Family Responds To Film Proposal • Runners World Didn't OK Use Of Palin Picture

Jenna is happy with her life now, saying that she's happy to be retired. The only time that she showed any regret about her career was when she spoke about her 7-month-old twin boys, explaining that she fears her past might affect how others treat them. She made a good point, though, when she said that when you get into the industry, you have to realize that, no matter what, you will always be a porn star - it will follow you throughout your life.


The best part of the whole episode? When Oprah talked about the importance of dick size.

• On Sunday, Michelle Wie won her first LPGA tour title. This was her 65th LPGA tour event, and while she had finished second six times, she had never managed a win. ''Wowww-w-w ...... never thought this would feel THIS great!!!!" she said on Twitter. • President Obama told - not asked - Burma's junta to free pro-democracy leader Suu Kyi at a recent summit with the Burmese prime minister. •  A Zambian reporter has been acquitted of pornography charges, which could have held a five year sentence if she had been convicted. The so-called porn possessed by Chansa Kabwela was actually photographs of a mother giving birth in a car park, which Kabwela did not publish but instead sent out to women's rights groups. • The suburban swim club outside Philadelphia that was accused of discrimination earlier this year has announced plans to declare bankruptcy. The club reportedly asked several children not to return because of "racial animus" expressed by a member. But the swim club's president denies that their closing has anything to do with the legal proceedings. •  A bushfire on the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve has turned the area into an "animal graveyard." Some blame Terri Irwin for improperly managing the property, but Irwin blames it on pig hunters, who she claims were probably trying to clear the land. •  A recent study published in the British Medical Journal found that current policies to reduce teen pregnancies are simply not working. The study also linked certain factors to teen pregnancy, including dislike of school, poverty, unhappy childhoods and low expectations for the future. •  For the first time in decades, the U.S. skating team has no clear-cut Olympic medal contender. "In the past, we've had Michelle Kwan, Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill year after year, and every time we felt that they were going to win the gold medal," said David Ruth, executive director of US Figure Skating. "But when Michael Jordan left the N.B.A, they were looking for a new star, and we're looking for a new star." • Researchers have found that texting may be linked to neck pain, caused primarily by the hunched-over body position favored by serial texters. • Doctors are hopeful that a vaccine for chlamydia isn't far away. However, previous research has shown that injections don't work very well, so a vaccine may come in the form of a vaginal cream or spray. •  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has pissed off some 200 Italian women after he placed an ad recruiting "attractive girls between 18 and 35 years old" for an "event." While most expected a party, the event turned out to be a two hour lesson intended to convert them to Islam. •  A recent report touts the benefits of distributing contraceptives in Uganda. The report estimates that meeting just half of Ugandan women's unmet needs for contraceptives would yield dramatic health benefits, including an expected 21% decline in maternal deaths. • Angie Young's film The Coat Hanger Project tells the story of how abortions have actually become increasingly less accessible in the decades since Roe vs. Wade. One good example: the Stupak amendment. You can take action against the pro-choice Democrats who supported the amendment by signing a petition to send them a coat hanger. • The Association of Chief Police Officers in England and Wales has proposed a domestic violence register to track an estimated 25,000 serial abusers. The register would allow people to look up a man's history including convictions and unproven allegations. The Association is also pushing for the creation of a "course of conduct" offense to make it easier to go after serial offenders, even if there isn't enough evidence to prosecute each individual case. • Janet Clark went to a British hospital because she believed she'd gone into labor in her 25th week of pregnancy, but a doctor and four midwives told her to go home. The next day she went back and was told to go home again, and then started giving birth on the toilet. "A pregnant woman shouldn't have to plead with medical staff," said Clark, who had a healthy baby boy. • In a study 54 Caucasian subjects were asked to manipulate the skin color of male and female faces on a computer screen to make them appear as healthy as possible. Most increased the rosiness, yellowness, and brightness of the skin. "In the West we often think that sun tanning is the best way to improve the color of your skin," said researcher Dr. Ian Stephen, "But our research suggests that living a healthy lifestyle with a good diet might actually be better." The study didn't address what makes non-white faces appear healthier and attractive. • Researchers found that in business, gender is a factor in measuring a team's performance, but but not the leaders themselves. In industries in which most leadership positions are held by men, people will expect more of teams led by men, but expectations of the leaders themselves are not influenced by gender. • In an interview on CBS' Early Show Mary Lou Quinlan, author of What She's Not Telling You: Why Women Hide the Whole Truth and What Marketers Can Do About It, says women tell "half truths" about "anything with a number in it. Their age, their weight, how many drinks they had." • In a new interview with CBS News, Laura Bush said Texas feels like it's a million miles away from Washington. "...Not that I ever felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, or that George did when I lived there — but when it was gone, I could notice it," she said. "There's a great feeling of freedom." •

The Vanguard presentation centers a lot of the documentary around Kink.com, a successful niche operation based in California. The CEO, Peter Acworth, read a news item about the profits involved in peddling porn and left his PhD program to start the company. Twelve years later, the company is thriving, thanks to Acworth's tech savvy. Kink.com was one of the original sites to pilot affiliate marketing programs and has been at the forefront of our changing technological lives ever since.

In another segment of the documentary, Regina Lynn, author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0, provided some insights as to the evolution of sex and technology, tracing it back to the telegraph and the printing press. In general, once we invent something, its only a matter of time before we are trying to enhance our sex lives with it. Even chainsaws aren't immune:



Interestingly, the porn industry is in the same boat as the music industry - the onset of technology has not only created a quicker path for pirates (and made many of us content bandits) but also changed the perception of value. Current TV interviewed various staff members at Wicked Pictures, one of the last plot-driven porn companies, about how their work has been impacted by technology. While there's always been some form of bootlegging, the internet has been able to take what was once a localized network and deliver pirated content to the world. And the industry is feeling the pinch - DVD sales are estimated to be down as much as fifty percent.

Pornographers seem concerned with educating consumers about the economic consequences to downloading free porn, but I'm not sure that will work as well as it assumes that the consumer, regardless of circumstances, will always make the ethical choice when faced with the glut of free content available. In addition, the documentary doesn't explore the other reasons why sales may be slumping - like the recession (which is eating up discretionary income that would go to the companies) or perhaps even the decline of retailers like Tower Records, which offered pornography in an easily accessible venue. In addition, the falling price of technology allows for anyone to become an amateur pornographer (which is explored in the documentary), which means that the market is over saturated will all kinds of free content - the idea of paying for graphic material is starting to seem almost quaint.

As a counter-piracy measure, Wicked pays full time employees to locate poached content and to send cease and desist letters. However, this is hardly effective - even the employees admit that even if they succeed in getting the content removed for one day, it will reappear a few days later. (Someone from this industry needs to talk to Prince. The Purple One hasn't fully scrubbed the internet of his content, but it's the closest I've seen to success.)

A better tactic toward stemming piracy appears toward the end of the film, as industry star Jessica Drake discusses how building relationships with her fan base gives them more of an investment in her personal success. Also, the advent of newer delivery methods like iPorn does appear to be a game changer - the industry is moving toward making porn a full sensory experience through live events, 3-D videos, and content delivery through channels like the iPhone. However, I'm not so sure if the fleshlight 2.0 will catch on:

Ultimately, the brief documentary was interesting, but not satisfying. For technology heads, there wasn't enough discussion of what types of technology porn was ushering in. Quick mentions of HD streaming and affiliate marketing aren't enough to be a prominent part of the story, which focuses on what is currently on the market. Current also appears to be going for maximum sex appeal, trading off the naughty cache of talking to porn stars and industry people in their element. However, HBO consistently does this better with shows like Real Sex and Pornucopia, which leaves the Current TV version too sanitized to be truly salacious.

Porn 2.0 [Current TV]
The Sexual Revolution 2.0 [Amazon]
Pornucopia [Wikipedia]

The latest to take porn to task for ruining modern fucking is Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams. She writes,

Convenience, ubiquity, and the goal-oriented, money-shot, male-centric perspective of most porn (hint: women don't need to see that much fellatio) have changed us. Much has been written on how porn's transformation into the modern sexual lingua franca affects women – the pressure to be bush-shaved and adept at pole dancing didn't come from Oprah or Martha Stewart. But porn has changed men too – what we expect of them, what they demand of themselves. And the problem is that thinking you can learn to make to love to a woman from watching porn is like thinking you can learn to drive from watching "The Fast and the Furious."

Her point is that dudes who watch too much Ron Jeremy think that women want to be jackhammered — or, more upsettingly, that they enjoy a man "withdrawing his member at key moments to thump it on" them. Williams's piece is pretty funny; about the latter technique, she writes, "You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? 'Baffling.'" But do men really need to "learn to make to love to a woman?"

Williams writes that "unlike other recreational pleasures — bowling, baking pies — sex, unless you're a swinger, isn't something people get much firsthand observational experience with," and speculates that some turn to porn for its "instructional uses." She also says, "sex isn't just a matter of doing what comes naturally." To which I thought, it's not? Yes, it's true that your first encounter with your high school boyfriend (or girlfriend) is not going to be the most mind-blowing intercourse of your life. And Williams is right about the necessity of communication: she writes, "I have nothing but admiration for anyone who's ever had the guts to simply come out and ask a lover what works and what doesn't." Me too. But the idea that sex is a skill, like bowling, for which we need instructions, actually seems like part of porn culture to me.

To be clear, I don't think Williams is suggesting that guys bone up (sorry) on a million different techniques before bedding women. She seems to be arguing for talking to your partner, not believing everything you see on the Internet, and not taking yourself too seriously — all of which sounds like good advice. What I'm dissatisfied with isn't so much Williams's argument per se as the whole idea that people have to be "good in bed." It's a concept promulgated not just in porn but in magazines, which imply that you don't really have a good sex life unless you know 32 ways to massage the taint. And in terms of commodifying something that's supposed to be fun and (usually) free, convincing us that we need professional advice on sex is almost as bad as telling us we're not allowed to have pubic hair.

Both sex advice and new sexual techniques can be fun and hot. What's less hot is the idea that sex is just one more area where we have to achieve — and where we're supposed to pay other people money to help us do so. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich alleges, late-stage American capitalism has produced the life coach, it's also spawned a crop of sex coaches — magazine editors and self-help book writers devoted to helping us win the game of satisfying a lover. But unlike capitalism, sex should be a game where everybody wins.

Though Williams, with her emphasis on fun and communication, is part of the solution, her claim that guys can't just do what comes naturally is part of the problem. So, of course, is porn, privileging huge dicks and ridiculous moves over actual enjoyment. But maybe the pornification of sex wouldn't be such a problem if we weren't worried about "doing it right." Maybe we could keep porn in its proper place — entertainment, not instruction or comparison — if we weren't constantly told we needed to compare or instruct ourselves. Maybe what we need is not so much to critique porn, but to get past it — to stop thinking so much and just fuck.

How Not To Make Love Like A Porn Star [Salon]

Lucy Davies of the Telegraph interviewed Hef in advance of the publication of his autobiography, and her article focuses heavily on his early life in Chicago. She describes a number of Rockwellesque scenes: "we see him haunting newsstands, devouring comics; lying on his bedroom floor scratching out his own versions of Jekyll & Hyde for his friends" and "he is charming on the subject of his childhood, sprinkling the story with a confection of period detail: soda fountains and hayrides; ping-pong in the basement; girls named Candy and Betty who he tried to impress by jitterbugging in his 'red flannel shirts, yellow corduroy pants and saddle shoes.'" But all was not sweetness and light! Hefner says he grew up in "a very typical, conservative, puritan home… [where he] wasn't getting many hugs and kisses." And indeed, he frames his creation of the Playboy brand as a reaction to a culture that wasn't hugging him enough. Of his early moviegoing experiences, he tells Davies,

In that darkened theatre all things were possible: I escaped into wonderful dreams of adventure and romance. But the Hays Code [strict censorship guidelines governing moral standards in film introduced by Will Hays in 1930] destroyed all that. Eventually even the married couples on screen slept in twin beds. I was very connected to that kind of repression early on.

And when he was thinking of creating Playboy, he says,

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, Great Gatsby and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar; a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up I knew we were in big trouble. It turned out to be a very conservative, serious period – socially, sexually and politically.

Hefner's not without a point here — a culture of sexual repression is bad for everyone involved. But it's telling that he chooses to figure this repression in terms of skirt lengths. Brooks Barnes of the New York Times notes Hefner's commitment to the pro-choice cause and the Equal Rights Amendment, and these shouldn't be discounted. But sexual freedom for Hefner is still largely the freedom of men to look at women, and this is a pretty narrow view both of human sexuality and of how to combat repression. I'm firmly in favor of the right of women to wear short skirts, but the fact that dudes can see our legs doesn't necessarily mean we're sexually fulfilled, and the existence of a soft-core men's porn mag doesn't really do much for women.

Davies's inclusion of Hefner's first editor's letter in Playboy drives this point home, as well as reminding us of how poorly, in some ways, Playboy has aged. The letter reads, "If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you" — Hefner himself now falls outside his original target audience. The letter continues through some hilarious use of the second person — "We like our apartment" — to the famous and now self-parodic-sounding statement, "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Davies calls this bohemian act "delightfully hammy," until you get to this: "If you're somebody's sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion." Ouch — a "female acquaintance" may be good for a discussion of "Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex," but she better not pick up the publication that aims to teach men how to talk about these things. Instead, she should stick to her ladymags.

It's tempting to say, especially after reading Barnes's Times article (with its unbeatable title, "The Loin in Winter"), that Hefner's reign is over. Barnes writes that Playboy Enterprises "said earlier this year that it would consider acquisition offers, something that was believed to be unthinkable while Mr. Hefner was still alive." He also points out that Hefner's ex-girlfriends have embarrassed him by publicly calling him a "control freak" — and while some will always take a "yeah, bra!" attitude to the 83-year-old's "relationships" with ever-younger women, to many these dalliances are beginning to seem ridiculous. Barnes's funniest criticism is of the Playboy Mansion itself, whose game room apparently "smell[s] musty," and whose grotto is now "like a fetid zoo exhibit."

But while Hefner-bashing offers some schadenfreude-y fun, the man did popularize a cultural attitude with disturbing staying power: the idea that a woman's sexual availability is the same as sexual liberation. Again, Hefner deserves praise for his support of actual feminist causes. But when he describes his magazine as a response to "repression," he conflates male desire with social freedom, a conflation that's now so totally ingrained that Ariel Levy wrote a book about it, and women everywhere live with it every day. I'm not against porn directed at men, as long as the women involved consent. But I am against pretending that making such porn and distributing it to a wide audience — as Barnes writes, Hefner "essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class" — is somehow empowering for everybody, and that pretense is Hefner's biggest "legacy." Hefner tells Barnes, "We just literally live in a very different world and I played a part in making it that way. Young people have no idea about that." Unfortunately, I do.

Hugh Hefner: Interview On Playboy [Telegraph]
The Loin In Winter: Hefner Reflects, And Grins [NYT]

Tender meat… bulging and exploding with a surprise inside. All you have to do is put it in your mouth.



Juicy, sticky, sweet and warm.

Would you like to nibble a lean little hunk? Or get your hands on something fleshy and chunky? Ooh, naughty: You want both at the same time, don't you.



Opened wide. Ready, willing. Waiting.

Or do you like it raw? Glistening and pink?

What a tease… Encouraging you to finger those folds.

Put your tongue inside, where it's moist and delicious.

Oozing. Just for you. You know you want it.

Biting is allowed… encouraged.

Can't you feel your heart race? It's dripping and luscious, waiting to be penetrated. [Ugh, Dodai, I'm blushing. -Ed.]

Mackenzie Ltd [Official Site]

Earlier: The Naked Chef: Pfaelzer Brothers Peddle Hot Food Porn

According to Michael Winerip of the Times, Hefner fille is a mover and shaker among Illinois Democrats, having donated $201,000 to Democratic causes over the years. She apparently got Barack Obama to speak at the 2005 Magazine Publishers of America conference, and Gloria Steinem invited her to be on the board of Voters for Choice. Victor Navasky, the former Nation editor who recently tried to recruit Hefner as the publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, says,

She's certainly a liberal feminist and a liberal Democrat. People would say, ‘so what's she doing putting out a magazine and running clubs catering to horny men?' But she found a way to make it work consistent with her values, to serve Playboy and her father and give them an opportunity to do socially useful things.

But it's hard not to see Christie Hefner's position at the head of her dad's sex empire as a little creepy. While he dated women half her age (she's 52), she rebuilt his business. It was in shambles when she asked to take over in 1982, and, she reports, "Hef said, ‘I felt like I had this incredible birthday party and you had to come in and clean up the day after.'" Cleaning up after your dad's birthday party — especially a dad whom you call "Hef" — doesn't seem like the most empowering career.

Then there's the issue of hard-core porn. Winerip writes, "while Hef bragged about not crossing the line into hard porn, she did, buying Spice TV and Club Jenna and defending the move as business." Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors questions whether Spice TV is really "consistent with Christie Hefner's values," and if so, how feminist those values can really be. The answer to this depends on what you think about porn, but it is worth noting that Playboy Enterprises represents a very corporate end of the porn spectrum. Annie Sprinkle they are not.

But Hefner's "values" may be a whole lot simpler than the can-porn-be-feminist debate implies. The words "networking" and "networker" appear over and over in Winerip's article, and it's clear that Hefner has been very successful in making powerful friends. Her job tidying up after her pajama-clad, twin-banging dad may not be particularly enviable, but she's leveraged it to create a high-profile political and entrepreneurial platform. She's appeared on CNN, Fox, and CNBC, she'll be working with Navasky to create a for-profit arm of the Columbia Journalism Review, and she's collaborating with Canyon Ranch on a line of health products. Whether or not she's a feminist, she's certainly doing well for herself.

Winerip's emphasis on this success makes his profile kind of depressing. Bartow goes a little far when she calls it "sycophantic," but it's certainly not critical, and Winerip takes claims of Hefner's feminism at pretty much face value. It's popular lately to claim that any woman who is very successful is somehow a feminist icon (The Onion skewered a similar sentiment in the classic "Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does"). But doing well as a woman doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good for women. Hefner may support liberal causes in her personal life, but where her business is concerned, it seems like her most important "values" are monetary ones.

No Silk Jammies For Her [NYT]
The NYT Adulates Christie Hefner, Delicately Refrains From Substantively Mentioning The Hardcore Porn That Generates Most Of Playboy's Revenues [Feminist Law Professors]

With the lines between fashion, eroticism, and porn becoming less and less clear, it seems perfectly on point for a sexy slew of stylized skin mags to arouse new curiosity.

While most mainstream American magazines tend to be rather modest, magazines like French Vogue (see Lara Stone, etc.), Purple Fashion and Dazed & Confused will often print "artsy" nudes.

Kaufman adds Paradis, the biannual "magazine for the contemporary man"; Jaques, a "fashion-conscious erotic mag" with a no-airbrush policy; the rather self-explanatory Butt Magazine; "smut-meets-art" pub S Magazine and Purple Sexe to the list. These publications are "high-end," and along with the bare breasts of model Lily Cole, you'll find an interview with Damien Hirst and photography by Juergen Teller.

It's interesting to think about the subtle intricacies that make a nude photograph "highbrow" or "fashion." When Agyness Deyn poses without clothes, is it automatically a fashion shoot? When a woman poses for Straight Stuntin, is it automatically porn? (I also wonder about the sexualization we place on womens' bodies; a woman with D-cup breasts can have just as much or as little sexual experience as a woman with an A-cup, but chances are, we'd read a nude photograph of a woman with D-cups as "sexier" or "raunchier." And do some people automatically think a naked woman is wilder, sexier, raunchier if she is black?)

And why is it that crotch-centric American Apparel ads can be so distasteful, but the crotch-centric cover of Paradis (with strategically placed peacock feather) can be so pretty?

A New Wave Of Erotic Mags Blur The Line Between High-Style and Smut [Refinery 29]

Earlier: Advertising Taking Cues From Porn: What Is The World Cumming To?
Why French 'Vogue' Is Better Than American Vogue, Part I: Boobies
The Emperor Model Has No Clothes
American Apparel Will Satisfy All Your Crotch-Covering Needs (But Just Barely)

The book went to press within 48 hours after the King of Pop's death, and rocketed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list last week. Hastily thrown together, Unmasked is rife with typos and questionable "anonymous sources." Shoddy, shady, and sleazy, I think I read it almost as quickly as author Ian Halperin typed it up.

Halperin claims that he started the project a while back because he was out to prove, once and for all, that Michael Jackson was a pedophile, but in his research, discovered that he was not. (The resulting work is pretty biased, but some evidence presented makes for some decent-albeit comparatively crude-rebuttals to Maureen Orth's thorough and persuasive reporting on Michael Jackson for Vanity Fair.)

Much has been made of Jackson's infamous sleepovers with young boys at his Neverland Ranch, and Mark Ronson, along with his friend Sean Lennon, participated in some of them. One anecdote of Ronson's - which he originally told on a British TV show - appears in the book:

We used to watch the porn channel because we were like, ten, and, 'Oh my God, tits!' So Michael was in bed. And me and Sean said, 'Michael, do you want to see something cool?' We turned the dial to the porn channel and there were strippers shaking their tits around. We were like, 'Michael, Michael, how cool is this?' We turned around and he was cringing, saying, 'Ooh, stop it, stop it, ooh, it's so silly.' We were like, 'Michael, you have to look, maybe you're not seeing it right, it's naked girls!' He was not down with the program whatsoever! I think he had really strong feminist views on porn.

He's cute. Anyway, while the story doesn't prove that Michael always behaved appropriately around his young guests, it does kind of point to something that I always thought: He was probably gay. Halperin thinks so, too. In fact, in his book, Halperin actually claims that Michael hit on him at a pizza parlor (more on that in sec).

Halperin claimed to have spoken to two of Michael's "gay lovers." (Redundant term!) One was a "Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor." He claims to have seen photos "corroborating" the relationships. The best bit comes from "Lawrence," the actor:

He was very shy, but when he started to have sex, he was insatiable. He was a bottom, but he was so thin, I worried that I would break him. The very first time he blew me, he said, 'The King of Pop's going to lick your lollipop.' I still laugh thinking about that.

Me too.

One of Halperin's sources was supposedly someone who worked in Jackson's camp. The source tipped him off that Jackson and his children were going to a Hollywood pizza parlor, so Halperin "got in [his] hairdresser's disguise" and sped over there. Of the encounter Halperin said:

We talked about old Hollywood movies and hairstyles, which I had researched for months before I took on this undercover persona. Michael went on and on about the Hollywood hairstyles of the silver screen during the forties and fifties. 'No one has come along with such class and style since Deborah Kerr, Dorothy Lamour, and Susan Hayward,' he said…At one point during our conversation at the pizza joint, Jackson put his hand over mine. I then wondered if the singer was hitting on me. After staring at me for over a minute in complete silence, he told me my blue eyes reminded him of Frank Sinatra…It was one of the most intense moments I have ever experienced looking into another man's eyes.

This was also good:

I had been trying to persuade [Jackson] to change his look to a platinum blond wig with a streak of ocean-blue down the middle.

But my absolute favorite passage was in regards to Liza Minnelli. After failing to score an interview with Jackson's best friend Elizabeth Taylor, Halperin, again, went undercover as a gay hairdresser, and hung out at a dance rehearsal studio he knew Liza frequented, cornered her, and told her he had been Ava Gardner's hair and makeup artist before she died. That was the clincher, and Liza invited him to hang out with her in the back room of the studio, where she shared a joint with him and some other dancers. Despite the fact that she was stoned, Liza didn't really give up any of the goods on Jackson, but she still sounds like a fun hang:

I told her that Ava was a huge fan of Jackson and used to practice some of his dance moves. At that, she let out a trademark Liza Minnelli laugh. It proved to be infectious…especially after Liza stood up and did an impression of Ava Gardner attempting to moonwalk.