* Alyssa Rosenberg articulates my annoyance with the glamorization of "housewife":

This is a show [Real Housewives] where the term that distinguishes the franchise, "housewife," is pretty much stripped of all meaning. You don't have to be married to be a Real Housewife. You don't even have to be dating anyone particularly seriously. And you're almost certainly not simply a stay-at-home wife or mom if you've been found interesting enough to be on the show. You're running a business, or a charity, or at the very least, stirring up a hell of a lot of trouble semi-professionally. Being an American wife doesn't mean anything in particular these days. That definitional void might be scary, but it's also an opportunity to fill it up with something valuable and interesting and varied.

Interesting. I've always seen the show's title as a shallow attempt to redefine successful women solely by their roles as wives and mothers. But perhaps it works the other way, too—housewives can have it all. Even jobs!

* Via the Washington Blade: D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier has launched an investigation into a satirical flier circulated around the force announcing "D.C.’s First Deaf Mute Gay Marriage."

* Not only will watching porn cause you to get raped, it may also kill you!

* Graph! Canada loves gay marriage. And "Kisses to the 3.5 percent of gay-affirming Jamaicans," Rick Rosendall writes at GLAA Forum.

* NOM tour hits Maryland, attempts to prevent all video evidence of the event:

[youtube:v=qe9QNdcRplw]

Photo via The U.S. National Archives

The courtroom was silent, save for the faint sound of screaming emanating from the jury box. Fourteen District jurors, outfitted with court-mandated headsets, watched excerpts from gonzo porn titles Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice in the course of the federal obscenity trial against pornographer John “Buttman” Stagliano last week. An audience of about 50 onlookers watched them watch it.

“Yes, it was nasty,” says juror Terri Crawford, 46, who spent the bulk of the viewing looking sad. “There was things in that video that was degrading to humans.”
In opening arguments, the U.S. government had warned the jury of those things: Performers using “syringes and tubes to pump milk into women’s anuses and vaginas,” then expelling the milk from their orifices and “into each other’s mouths.” A performer inserting his “penis into a woman’s anus” and then immediately into “another woman’s mouth.” “Drills” in “women’s vaginas.” “Extreme close-up shots” of “women squirting liquid” across the room. A “foot inside a vagina.”

The government also warned the jury of what it wouldn’t see: a “real plot-line.”
What the government failed to detail is why the jury should care. “This wasn’t any of our business,” juror Stephanie Mordecai, 43, said after the trial. Throughout the viewing, Mordecai held the base of her headset defensively in front of her face, as if the thin swoop of plastic could shield her from the parade of milk enemas unfolding on screen.

Last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon threw out the government’s case against Stagliano due to lack of evidence. But before he did, the jurors were forced to watch 50 minutes of Milk Nymphos and 36 minutes of Storm Squirters, porn titles Stagliano was charged with transporting from California to a D.C. post office box. The jury never got the opportunity to decide whether the films violated D.C.’s “community standard” for obscene material.

Too bad: The government had cherry-picked the titles for the express purpose of riling them. “Looking at the covers [on the website], it appeared that those movies emphasized the excretory function and squirting,” FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley testified on the witness stand. “So that’s why I ordered them.” The Milk Nymphos soundtrack contained a little extra trigger for District jurors: In it, porn actress Annette Schwartz entreats fellow performer Jon Jon to “come on you nigger, fuck me in the ass,” then instructs Lorelei Lee to “look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock.”

But after the trial, jurors were more concerned with what wasn’t in Milk Nymphos: Violence. Rape. Bestiality. Kids. “These people were adults and they were willing. No one put a gun to their head,” Crawford said. “Had they brought a child out in pampers, then we would have been like, hell no,” Mordecai added. In opening arguments, the defense emphasized that the only entity forcing anyone to watch porn is the government. “The movies are not—and are not meant to be—distributed to these 14 strangers sitting in a federal courthouse,” defense attorney Paul Cambria said. The films feature “adults putting on a performance...for another adult, who would make that choice [to watch it] if that were his or her cup of tea.”

After watching two (or three) consenting adults engage in milk enemas and vaginal squirting in open court, Stagliano jurors may not be clamoring for more milk in their tea—but they’re not crying over it, either. After the trial was dismissed, one of those adults, Milk Nymphos’ Lee, passed quickly by a group of jurors in a court hallway. “We’ve seen you before. Aren’t you the milk girl?” a juror called after her. Lee waved. The juror turned back to her fellow jurors. “She should get her teeth fixed,” she said. “I guess the milk isn’t doing too much for her.”

“That’s because they keep spilling it all,” Mordecai said.

A lot has changed in the 30 years since the government last brought a high-profile obscenity case to D.C. In 1973, a city jury was tasked with deciding whether the Swedish adult film Hot Circuit was obscene enough to require jail time for Louis K. Sher, who’d been charged with “distribution and exhibition” of the title. According to IMDB, the film is an ensemble porn featuring a salesman, a stripper, a babysitter, a feminist, an anti-feminist woodcutter, a forest’s nymph, a secretary, and a hustler who accidentally spills whipped cream onto the stripper.

Unlike Milk Nymphos, Hot Circuit’s dairy play failed to amuse District jurors—they found Sher guilty of violating federal and local obscenity laws, including “knowingly presenting” the film in D.C. and shipping obscene material from New Jersey.

In the three decades since U.S. v. Sher, the government’s approach to obscenity cases hasn’t exactly evolved with the times. Despite the proliferation of adult material online—where anal milk is hardly the strangest fetish on display—Stagliano was tried for the antiquated offense of physically shipping obscene material across state lines.

The government made a half-hearted attempt to modernize the prosecution by introducing the online trailer for Belladonna’s Fetish Fanatic Chapter 5 as evidence: Minors could access in as few as “four clicks” on Stagliano’s website, prosecutors said. But the trailer was thrown out of the trial after prosecutors couldn’t figure out how to play it for the jury without it freezing mid-way through the display of vaginal drilling.

In the end, the prosecution’s case fizzled not on the obscenity test, but on simple facts: The government failed to prove that Stagliano actually sent anything to anyone.

Obscentity prosecutions have ebbed and flowed over the years. Once a culture-war touchstone—Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese famously authored a 2,000-page report that blamed porn for a variety of ills—smut-versus-state battles slipped from the headlines during the ’90s. George W. Bush’s administration made some efforts to revive the war on filth, nearly doubling the number of prosecutions. And now they’ve fallen again under Barack Obama. But Stagliano’s trial, like many of the obscenity cases still languishing in federal court, was originally the work of a Bush-era task force.

The Justice Department declined to offer a rationale for the prosecution—or any predictions about whether D.C. residents can expect a less bumbling repeat performance anytime soon. For his part, Stagliano told reporters outside the courthouse that today’s government simply lacked the “passion” to prosecute him. One of his attorneys, though, said porn cases were doomed not because of missing passion on the part of the government, but because of free-speech sensibilities on the part of potential jurors.

“Jurors have a difficult time with the government telling people what they should think, see, or believe,” offered Robert Corn-Revere, who served as local counsel for the defense. “That will likely be a lesson for the government going forward.” After hearing that a group of female jurors had convened post-trial to make milk jokes, Cambria was more direct: “Women!” he exclaimed. “Fantastic.”

Juliana Brint contributed to this report.

Last month, Wheelock College University of Pennsylvania professor Mary Anne Layden hit Capitol Hill to explain how pornography "robs men of their masculinity, of their psychological health, of their self-respect, of their greatness . . . of themselves." Now, Layden is back to explain the effects of pornography use among women: It gets them raped.

From a Washington Times story on the new trend of pornography "addiction" among women:

"The more pornography women use, the more likely they are to be victims of non-consensual sex," said Mary Anne Layden, professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston. "The earlier the male starts using pornography, the more likely they are to be the perpetrators of non-consensual sex."

The story never mentions that rape thing again. It doesn't offer up any evidence or statistics in its defense. (In fact, it never uses the word "rape"—just the skeezy "non-consensual sex"). In a response, psychologist David J. Ley attempts to figure this all out:

This is a staggering statement, and a frightening insight into the rebirth of the "blame the victim" argument against rape. . . So a female victim testifying her assailant is going to be asked about that time she downloaded a dirty movie to watch? And that has what to do with the immoral, narcissistic, selfish and angry acts of the man who violated her rights? The only way this has any kernel of truth is that highly sexual women are more likely to report use of pornography. Highly sexual women are also likely to report greater numbers of partners, and somewhat higher risk of an incident of sexual abuse or rape, possibly as a result of situations of date rape. But it's not the pornography, and it's not even the women's sexuality. It's the act of person who violates the rights of another.

Layden's assertion is both victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing. Pretending that porn is responsible for creating rape victims and perpetrators—that it robs men of "themselves" and robs women of consent—shifts the blame for sexual assault away from rapists (the few) and on to every man and woman who watches porn (the many). The implication is that the perpetrator and the victim deserve each other.

And since almost every man admits to looking at porn—and only some women admit to the same—the burden for avoiding "bad" behavior falls largely onto women. Notice how, in Layden's statement, women are faulted for the quantity of porn they consume, whereas men are faulted for the age at which they begin watching porn. Presumably, a woman can control the amount of porn she consumes, but a man can't control the fact that he was initially exposed to pornography at a young age.

Under Layden's model, all men are potential rapists—but some women are good enough to resist making themselves into rape victims.

* Thomas MacAulay Millar on the problem with seeing sexual assailants and domestic abusers as "monsters":

I’m fine with saying that one who does monstrous things is a monster, and the data tells me that this is true. But there is a danger there, that by calling rapists monsters we may convince people that we should be able to see them. We can’t. They look like everyone else. They certainly will give some behavioral clues, but those are subtle. The rapists fit in. If they didn’t, we would all know who they are, and all their targets would avoid them.

. . . Monsters, and not monsters. Regular people that are nice to children and small animals, tip well and bring attention to important causes may also be misogynists, rapists, abusers, racists . . . all the wrong that people are capable of is not concentrated among people who look like they mean to do harm. The people who do the most harm do it, in part, because they can walk among us and not look like monsters. Monsters don’t look like monsters. They look like the rest of us.

* Monsters, and not monsters: Lloyd Mack Royal—also known as "Blyss," "B," and "Furious"—has been sentenced to 37 years in prison for human trafficking of minors in Maryland. Testimony in Royal's trial asserted that he profited off of coercing minor girls into prostitution; threatened those girls verbally and with a gun; hit them; transported them between Maryland and D.C. for the purposes of prostitution; gave them illegal drugs; raped them; forced them to lie about their ages; forced them to sell drugs; and "forced them to kiss his pinky ring."

* Emily Nagoski on sexual fluidity and LUGS.

* Via the GW Hatchet, the GW Medical Center has received a $3 million grant for HIV/AIDS research courtesy of The National Institutes of Health.

* Evil Angel general manager Christian Mann weighs in on the Stagliano trial in the comments:

What could be more absurd? That would be the U.S. government, represented by the real Fetish Fanatics (AKA the DOJ) spending taxpayers’ dollars to clog the judiciary and bring such a case to trial in 2010. My elation at having my boss (and friend) exonerated is tainted by one small regret: I quietly hoped we would have a chance to bring milk enemas and squirting orgasms to the U.S. Supreme Court and douche the archaic obscenity laws from the Criminal Code once and for all.

Photo via George Eastman House

* The Daily Beast's Tricia Romano declares Old Spice Guy Isaiah Mustafa a "post-racial commercial genius." Commercial genius? Yes, ladies. Post-racial? Not so much, says Georgetown Girl.

* Liz at THE LINE writes about the problematic social imbalance between fraternities and sororities:

The social structure that we lock into as a sorority is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Here’s how it works: sororities are dry and fraternities are not. This means there is absolutely NO alcohol allowed in the sorority houses. If the fraternities host all the parties, decide who gets to come, and provide all the alcohol, who holds all the power? Frat parties can be fun –my friends and I are even known to take our costumes to the next level. But there is a problem with the structure because it promotes an unbalanced social scene.

* Help Holla Back DC! re-brand itself.

* Milk Nymphos star Lorelei Lee talks to Broadsheet about the importance of keeping her real name private:

While most of the fan mail that I receive is positive, I've also received a number of e-mails that have been pretty frightening. For my own safety, my professional name is the one that I use in every public context. There was never a need for my legal name to be revealed in open court. The prosecutor's claim that using my professional name would give me an "air of legitimacy" was incredibly insulting.

Last week, pornographer John "Buttman" Stagliano was tried on obscenity charges in D.C.—but the government fucked up its case so bad that the trial was dismissed before 14 Washingtonian jurors got the chance to weigh in on Stagliano's work. Sexist readers, for one, aren't too fond of the government prosecuting their milk enemas and squirting:

Barbara Booey sees art in the enema:

The very fact that Stagliano was put on trial is a miscarriage of justice. John Stagliano is the Kurosawa of dairy-product enema cinema.

Bart wonders if the government cares about his girlfriend's "actual dick with veins":

I’m young and ignorant of the law. I thought porn was legal in DC. I buy DVDs, I order in on Comcast. My girlfriend has a vibrator, and not a medical looking one but an actual dick with veins. What is he exactly on trial for and why are they wasting time when thugs, dealers, spies, BP execs, Republicans etc are running lose in this city?

Legba Carrefour on the government's insistence on releasing a porn performer witness' real name:

Fucking bizarre. Simultaneous to this, the federal government (through the Department of Health and Human Services) is investigating the leaking of personal records of two actresses who were STI tested by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM). The testing results are made available to producers, one of whom decided to leak the information to an industry blog. One of the major points of contention was the leaking of the actresses’ real names and social security numbers and addresses and medical records.

So the federal government is opening a criminal investigation into one outing of sex workers but actively pursuing the outing of sex workers in another case.

Aaron is impressed by the government's incompetence:

I’d be a lot more worried about modern obscenity trials if it didn’t so often turn out that the prosecution is utterly hapless. It seems kind of like how if you criticize somebody’s spelling or grammar on the Internet, you’ll invariably screw up your own? Like if you try to prosecute for obscenity, you’ll invariably trip over your own ass in front of the judge, or something like that.

Rover shares:

On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog with an enema fetish.

brian is looking for more variety in his enema porn:

i think they are missing an opportunity here, theres a whole drink market to consider…O.J., purple stuff, sunny D….maybe even diet cola and mentos.

Obscenity obscmenity. I probably spelled that wrong.

Typical DC BS asks where babies come from:

I hope the jury takes about 5 minutes to find this guy non guilty. Hard to believe an FBI agent was given the go-ahead to initiate and perform this investigation.

Maybe the FBI will also discover that sex is required to create babies and that the stork doesn’t really deliver them.

Photo via psd, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* In her final dispatch on the Buttman trial, porn director and performer Aurora Snow claims that LAPD Det. Michael Ozaki, a witness for the prosecution, is a fan:

[Ozaki] looked all too familiar to me. I heard the detective explain how he had to attend the AVN Expo for the last five years in a row “undercover” in order to research the new material being put out by adult companies. I was surprised to hear how the LAPD spends tax money so consistently on porn related materials in the name of “research” when the city is reeling from recent budget cuts. But mostly, as the LAPD detective answered questions under oath, I began to realize why I was recognizing him; I am almost sure that I have signed autographs for him at adult conventions. That is one dedicated undercover officer! I wonder if somewhere in a police evidence folder is a signed photo of me or if the detective kept that for his personal collection. I hope the latter. I don’t want to be in a file and even detectives should have fun with their porn collections.

* When Maryland man Aaron Burroughs was convicted of "sexually exploiting a minor" for an offense involving child prostitution and child pornography, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison—plus extra restrictions "that required him to keep a daily log of his computer use and to permit the authorities to monitor that use." Last week, a federal appeals court struck those restrictions, as Burroughs' offense wasn't conducted via computer.

* GLAA Forum updates us on the NOM bus tour for hetero marriage, declares it an "epic fail. As it turns out, holding rallies at noon on weekdays isn't the smartest way to drum up support for opposite marriage after all. The tour hits D.C. Aug. 15.

* Figleaf 0n how sex work obscures assault in the Lawrence Taylor case:

the word “prostitution” magically washes away all traces of “statutory rape,” “sexual assault of a child,” “sex offender registry,” “corruption of a minor,” and every other offense prosecutors, judges, and juries are usually (and, I think, correctly) willing to throw at people who have sex with minors

* Via Metro Weekly: Victim of hate crime plans to leave D.C.

Photo via State Library of Queensland.

On hand to celebrate the victory: Stagliano's wife, Karen Stagliano, pregnant with a boy; Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice director Joey Silvera; Milk Nymphos performer Lorelei Lee, who just escaped being forced to reveal her real name on the witness stand; documentary filmmaker Simone Grudzen, currently filming a documentary on Lee; and porn performer and director Aurora Snow, covering the trial for AVN.

"They were sloppy," Stagliano told reporters outside the court. "They were doing it for the wrong reasons . . . there wasn't any passion to prosecute it."

Roman Polanski is free again: A victory for art, intellectualism, European sexual mores, and French dudes with a column on HuffPo, no? Um, no—all attempts to hide a convicted rapist who fled sentencing under a pile of shiny Oscar statuettes will not fool Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I! For, as Sady explains in this excellent piece for the Atlantic, Polanski ain't the only predator to hide behind the veil of "art":

Last week, the New York Times reported that Emma Tamburlini, the daughter of artist Larry Rivers, was asking to have videotapes of herself—young, topless, fielding uncomfortable sexual questions from her father about her breasts—removed from her father's archives and destroyed. She referred to them as "child pornography." The director of the Rivers Foundation, David Joel, demurred: "I can't be the person who says this stays and this goes," he said. Nor can Emma Tamburlini be that person, apparently; the current agreement is that the tapes will be shown after her death.

Looks like some priorities are fucked up in the art world! In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady and I are totally on this! So join us as we  "sneak in a little Buttman discussion, and debate the merits of creating art while simultaneously not sexually assaulting people.

—

SADY: Hey! You know what feminist blogs haven't discussed, ever: Roman Polanski.

AMANDA: Nope. Kind of just let that one go. It's been so long, after all!

SADY: Right! If there's one thing I can say for us all, it is that a very famous dude sexually assaulting someone, confessing, being convicted and serving NO SENTENCE WHATSOEVER for this is something that we all just kind of let fade, after a certain point.

AMANDA: That, or convicted criminals who have fled the country gradually gain points for stamina. I think that's a legal thing. Particularly if they spend their 30-year European vacation doing things like making fancy movies!

SADY: Hah, yeah. This is the thing that kind of enrages, about the Polanski thing: The way so many folks were like, "but... he made MOVIES? They were really good!" And I won't deny that those were some really good movies. And that they benefited from having Roman Polanski direct them. The non-Polanski directed sequel to "Chinatown," for example, is just not so good! (Although, you know, kudos to Jack Nicholson for trying. And for not being convicted of rape.)

AMANDA: Generous points for that last detail. But like, how good do the movies have to be for people to excuse the rapist? As you pointed out in your piece, it's not like this happens all that often, but I'm betting that a lot of people would be willing to forgive people who make less than "Pianist" levels of art. Even saying that is ridiculous. THEY'RE MOVIES. Not people!

SADY: Right. I mean, if Tommy "The Room" Wiseau were convicted tomorrow, I doubt we'd be seeing these outpourings of sympathy. Although folks did rally around R. Kelly during his trial, which makes me think that the question is not how good one is, but how famous one is. If it were some random "Law and Order: SVU" directing alumnus, we wouldn't be here. But Le Cause de Polanski has always been framed as this issue of the permissive/enlightened European sophisticates/degenerates versus The Hard-Working Moralistic American People. Which is a take that's been encouraged by both sides, and ends up serving neither.

AMANDA: So there's a little bit more fame-mongering in Bernard-Henri Lévy's free-Polanski intellectualism than he'd like to admit, is what you're saying.

SADY: Oh, goodness me oh my, yes. I mean: How immeasurably has Levy's profile been raised, now that he's A-Number-One Polanski supporter in the public eye and/or the on the Huffington Post? And I'm sure he'd feel above all that, to some degree, but I don't understand why he keeps publishing on the philosophically enlightened and sophisticated HuffPo if he's not eager to get his name out there. I mean, maybe he just feels passionate about this cause, but I feel that demeans him MORE than a desire for HuffPo readership. Which is not something I say often!

AMANDA: I have several original Huffington Post nipple slips in my collection. So I'm covering this obscenity case in D.C. right now, and it's funny how the "art" argument worms its way into the legal pornography debate as well. These jurors have to decide if there's any redeeming artistic or literary or scientific value to the copious milk enemas they've viewed over the course of the trial. And so on cross-examination, the defense is asking witnesses stuff like, "And are you aware that the Adult Video News Awards are the Academy Awards of the adult entertainment industry?" "And are you aware that Buttman has won several of these awards?"

SADY: I SEE.

AMANDA: The whole thing is ridiculous. Like, I'm not against obscenity. But take the absurd "art" defense out of it.

SADY: Right. I mean: That's the thing. Like the Tamburlini/Rivers case that was being reported earlier this week. In that case, you could maybe make a more convincing argument for "artistic value" — an Artist, Recognized As Such, was coercing and pressuring his daughters into participating in uncomfortably sexual video shoots! For his Art! — but we're still not assuming that Art has the right to involve harm to actual human beings in the process of its creation. A person coerced and pressured his daughter into sexual activity, to which she objected. In the case of "obscenity," which is always tricky — even Dworkin didn't fully support banning porn under "obscenity" laws — the Art question can be brought up in defense, however. If it was relevant for Joyce, it's relevant for Buttman, sad to say. Which is what's so infuriating about this: Often, as in the Max Hardcore case, what's being prosecuted is sexual abuse of performers. And then people are like "obscenity laws are unconstitutional; why didn't these performers bring their cases to court?" Whereas if they did, as sex workers, they'd be slut-shamed and devalued and wouldn't stand a chance of winning.

AMANDA: That's true. The tricky thing is when there is legitimate abuse of performers (as in the Rivers case) and then the dissemination of the work in effect constitutes more abuse. Which, again, in any of these cases, the art argument only serves to obscure the issue, right? Are you producing these works with full consent and participation of everyone involved? Or are you abusing people, and filming that? In either case, it doesn't really matter to me if there's zero artistic value there or if it's fucking Shakespeare abusing his kids for "art.”

SADY: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I think our conception of Artist as Special Person who is obliged or privileged to Stand Outside Of Societal Norms is useful, in some respects. In the respects that you can't just send D.H. Lawrence packing because he uses the fuck-word a lot, or you can't shut down Mapplethorpe because he's showing these queer BDSM images. But it's abused so easily by folks for stuff like the Polanski case, or the Rivers one — the Polanski case being even more indefensible because SEXUALLY ASSAULTING THAT GIRL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF HIS MOVIES — to argue that These People Can't Be Held To Normal Standards.

AMANDA: Right. It also ends up being really elitist, or in Polanski's case, both elitist and celeb-focused. Like, hey, what if I'm a really shitty artist who works with queer BDSM imagery?

SADY: And I have to admit, most of my off-the-top-of-the-head associations with Artists who we have to Defend Against Charges of Obscenity because they're just outside the norm have to do with very famous men. Kathy Acker, maybe? But maybe not. I don't recall court proceedings, but that may just be the result of insufficient Googling.

AMANDA: Yeah. I mean, the art test is a really fucked up standard for obscenity law in my opinion. Like things we determine to be “good” and things we determine to be “bad” just balance each other out, naturally? And I think the Polanski case is some sort of bizarre extension of the logic—that if art is good enough, it can make anything tolerable. And maybe if Polanski starts making really shitty movies, everyone will have to be like, "Alright, lock him up," on principle.

SADY: Right. And it might just be a case of removing the quality of the art from the equation: Like, if we're testing whether the art in question is "obscene," that can apply to any kind of art with any kind of behind-the-scenes process. As a person who watches the extremely sophisticated Bravo program "Work of Art," I know this. BUT, if we make the question whether the creation and distribution of the "art" (????) objectively has to harm in order to be produced, we can actually legislate on the level of production, not content. And no-one will ever be able to say that this glorious painting made with the entrails of their Gramma deserves serious consideration ever again. I mean, yeah, we should protect "artists" against petty common morality charges. DUR. But "please don't rape anybody" isn't petty. Nor, sad to say, all that terribly common.

Photo via Jacob Freeze, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.o

Wondering how butt enemas and female ejaculation came to be the subject of the first obscenity case to hit D.C. in decades? Credit Los Angeles Police Department Det. Michael Ozaki, who testified yesterday as a witness for the government—and may be responsible for bringing the works of John "Buttman" Stagliano to the attention of the FBI.

Ozaki works with the LAPD on obscenity-related matters, helping to regulate everything from child pornography to topless bars to video arcades. Ozaki has been following Stagliano's work since July 22, 2007, when he first spied Stagliano's Evil Angel booth at the Erotica LA trade show. Ozaki testified that LAPD was on-site at the adult convention to ensure that the venue—the L.A. Convention Center—was in compliance. While on duty, Ozaki also observed Stagliano standing behind the Evil Angel booth, "speaking to a male" to whom he later "sold a DVD."

Ozaki next spied Stagliano on a police field trip to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, which Ozaki says he attends yearly to keep tabs on the "new line of products" hitting the industry. On Jan. 11, 2008, Ozaki saw Stagliano engaging in similar activity—selling DVDs, magazines, even T-shirts—from behind a convention booth.

Later that month, Ozaki paid a visit to the Evil Angel offices in Van Nuys, California, where he snapped some aerial photos of the facility and secured photographic evidence of Stagliano's wife, Karen, entering the building. Also visible in that photograph? A sign reading "Beware of the evil pussy." DVD sales? Pussy jokes? The evidence may seem tame, but the government is attempting to prove not only that Stagliano disseminated obscene matter to D.C., but also that he's is in the regular business of "pandering" obscene materials "for commercial purposes."

After Ozaki brought Buttman to the attention of the feds, the feds set to work bringing Buttman to D.C. As it turns out, before 14 jurors were forced to view Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice in court this week, there is no evidence that either film has ever been screened inside the District of Columbia by anyone else—not even by the FBI.

Though FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley arranged to have the DVDs sent to a District P.O. Box in 2007, Bradley actually watched the movies in a cubicle in his office in Manassas, Va. Since Bradley is not a resident of D.C., didn't order the DVDs from D.C., and didn't watch them in D.C., defense attorney Paul Cambria questioned what, exactly, this case has to do with the District at all. "Did you conduct any surveys to determine the level of acceptance of adult materials?" he asked Bradley. "Have you visited any adult bookstores in D.C.?" he asked. "Have either of those two movies been declared obscene by any jury or any court?" he asked. Government prosecutors objected to Cambria's line of questioning—and the mystery of why milk enemas and vaginal discharge became D.C. issue remains unanswered.

Photo via big-ashb, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Unlike the first two days of of the John "Buttman" Stagliano trial, yesterday's court session involved no video evidence. Despite the lack of porn screenings, though, someone in the courtroom was still getting fucked: the prosecution.

Prosecutors needed to rebound after yesterday's Fetish Fanatic 5 fiasco—which resulted in the barring of the trailer as evidence, thanks to a corrupted file—but the cross-examination of FBI Agent Daniel Bradley, the government's chief witness, raised a whole new set of problems for Prosecutor Pamela Satterfield.

When asked during cross-examination when he last viewed the charged films, Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice, Bradley answered that Satterfield had told him that Judge Richard Leon wanted him to review the films before the trial, so he re-watched them in full last Wednesday.

If Bradley's testimony were accurate, it would almost certainly necessitate a mistrial—it's not exactly kosher for the presiding judge to be advising lawyers on how to prepare their cases. But Leon was adamant that he had never issued instructions of this kind to the prosecution, and Satterfield concurred—meaning Bradley had, knowingly or not, issued false testimony.

After the jury and witnesses were released for the day, Leon and the lawyers discussed how best to address "the Bradley situation." Leon made it clear that he would issue a statement to the jury assuring them that the court had never instructed Bradley to watch Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2 in preparation for trial. But the defense team argued that a remedy would have to be more extensive than that.

Because Bradley attributed the instructions to Leon through Satterfield, the defense argued that they have the right to call Satterfield to the stand to give testimony on the matter. Doing so, however, would make her an impeaching witness against the central witness in her own case—and would force her to recuse herself as prosecutor.

Leon suggested that it might be possible to find a way around that outcome, possibly by having Satterfield issue an affidavit. Leon said he would rule on how the issue will be handled this morning.

Regardless of how the false testimony is addressed, though, it will probably cause a significant blow to Bradley's credibility as a witness, upon which the lion's share of the government's case rests.

"How can [Satterfield] vouch for the credibility of her witness before the jury?" Defense Attorney H. Louis Sirkin asked.

"I would say gingerly," Leon replied.

* Ms. Magazine reporter Kate Noftsinger asks a panel of Lilith Fair artists a question:

“Who here identifies as a feminist?”

I got a long pause, followed by nervous laughter.

Finally [Brandi Carlile] spoke, “I don’t know, it means something different that it used to.”

Before I could ask what it meant now as opposed to then, [Sarah McLachlan] assumed the role of official spokesperson and began building a mystery:

"It’s a tricky question, because it’s been redefined and I think we all define feminism to a certain degree. We all define femininity. I think we’re able to have a little more balance. There’s still fights to be fought. There’s still inequality, absolutely. . . . I think as long as we’re being mindful and honest with ourselves and doing what we feel is right, and that’s a very personal decision for all of us, if we’re going forth with that intention, then we are; we’re being feminists, we’re being humanists, we’re being feminine. We’re being true to ourselves, in every way, in every facet of our personalities."

By conflating feminism with femininity, Sarah McLachlan officially lies squarely in the feminist tradition of Sarah Palin devotees.

* Metro Weekly profiles "the first out transgender Capitol Hill staffer."

* But, also in Metro Weekly, magazine co-publisher Sean Bugg is "terrified to write about transgender issues."

* In 1999, David Segal penned the definitive Buttman profile:

Ladies and gentlemen, hide your daughters: John Stagliano is strolling down a riverside walkway and he's got his mojo working.

Cradling a video camera in his hands, he sidles up to a curvy brunet and fumbles for a pick-up line. Gazing into the lens, the woman seems flustered at first, then amused, then — lo and behold — flattered. She follows him to a hotel room, and within minutes she is standing on a coffee table, peeling off her dress. A man knocks on the door and eventually there is a whole lot of naked writhing on a white couch.

Stagliano shoots. Stagliano scores.

* Sady Doyle channels Simone de Beauvoir-as-dating advice columnist.

Photo via Kashmera, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Yesterday, Lee's attorney Carmen D. Hernandez filed a motion for a protective order to withhold Lee's legal name and allow her to testify under her stage name (which Lee takes from the Marilyn Monroe character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). "Ms. Lee, who is scheduled to be a witness for the defense in the instant trial, seeks for reasons of safety to be allowed to testify under her professional stage name without disclosing her true identity and address in open court," the filing reads. The filing goes on to argue that judges "have wide latitude to impose reasonable limits on cross-examination based on concerns such as harassment, prejudice, confusion of the issues or the witness's safety."

For a porn star like Lee, the filing argues, simply testifying under one's legal name has the effect of threatening the witness. "[T]he need to protect the witness’ true identify in open court will protect her from explicit threats of danger," the filing reads. The exact nature of these "explicit threats" are not explained, but the filing says that Lee will present "identifiable need for protection" in a "separate sealed submission" to the court.

Witness intimidation isn't the only rationale for allowing celebrities to testify under their stage names. Professionally, the witness "is identified in the movie credits by her stage name, Lorelei Lee"—and it's in her context as a porn performer that she plans to testify. The filing cites a 1992 decision in the First Circuit: "One can easily envision circumstances in which a witness testifying under his birth name might present a much more spectral figure than if he or she testified under an adopted name," the decision reads. "For example, the appellations Issur Danielovitch Demsky, Betty Joan Perske, and Marion Michael Morrison will probably be of less assistance in placing the affected individuals in their proper settings than their screen names (Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and John Wayne, respectively)."

The government is already aware of Lee's real name, the filing reads, so "the use of a pseudonym merely shields the identity of the witness from the press and public." But yesterday, prosecutors for the government aired plans to oppose the motion. Using the performer’s stage name in the legal proceedings “gives some air of legitimacy to the porn star,” Pamela Satterfield argued for the government. “She shouldn’t be treated any differently than anyone else in this case.” Judge Richard Leon has yet to rule on the matter.

"A lesson lived is a lesson learned," porn performer Angela Stone announces after expelling copious amounts of vaginal fluid in Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice. Shortly after the film was shown to the court in the John "Buttman" Stagliano obscenity trial yesterday, prosecutors learned the greatest porn lesson of all: That shit will fuck up your computer.

When the government attempted to play Exhibit 9—a copy of the trailer for Belladonna's Fetish Fanatic 5, as downloaded from the Internet by FBI Special Agent Daniel Bradley on Jan. 21, 2008—the video froze midway through the 5-minute parade of enemas, squirting, and foot play. "The video worked before trial," Prosecutor Pamela Slattery informed Judge Richard Leon. "The file is corrupted." She added that the file is "so sensitive" that it could be thrown off by something as minor as the laptop overheating. She suggested that jurors view the remaining 1 minute 53 seconds in the trailer off a copy of the original file prepared by the prosecution.

The corrupted file threatens to undermine a big part of the government's case against Stagliano: The accusation that he made obscene materials available to minors. Count Seven in the indictment against Stagliano asserts that he "knowingly used an interactive computer service to display an obscene image, that is, a motion-picture trailer identified as 'FETISH FANATIC CHAPTER 5,' in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age." Without the full Fetish Fanatic 5 trailer, the count could be scrapped.

Defense attorneys jumped on the opportunity to clear the count, urging the court to strike the corrupted file from evidence—along with any copy made by the government. "We were never able to open up the copy we were sent," defense attorney Allen Gelbard argued. And since the defense never viewed the government's original, "we have no way of knowing" if the copy is exactly the same as the trailer that was actually admitted into evidence. Furthermore, both the original and the copy are "glitching at different points," making the "audio continue to play while the video catches up," Gelbard said. The defense went on to argue that the inconsistent glitching made the porn unreliable as evidence: You're "not seeing it or hearing it as a whole. . . . This is going to go back in the jury room and it's going to play differently. . . . we don't know how it will play." Also: In its first presentation to the jury, the trailer was mistakenly played without sound.

The government countered that the file was already admitted into evidence, whether it plays correctly or not. Exhibit 9 "is what it is," Slattery said. "It's like a grainy photo of a robbery outside a 7-11"—the evidence could require some explanation, but it's still the file that Bradley downloaded from Stagliano's website. Now, the defense is just "playing games," Satterfield added. "They were hoping that I wouldn't be able to open it." Satterfield said that she first sent the defense the evidence for review over two years ago, and that "they have a duty" to object to the evidence before trial begins if they have concerns about its reliability. "There's been so much time for them to work with me on this," she said. As for the sound? Slattery attributed that to "a jack in the wrong hole," but added that the sound wasn't a significant part of the evidence. It's just "groans, screams, moans, and expletives," Slattery said. "It's not as if we're missing any dialog."

The determination will come down to the pornographic memory of FBI Special Agent Bradley. Slattery asserted that Bradley could confirm that the trailer and the more reliable copy were an exact match, but under cross-examination, Bradley admitted that he couldn't determine whether the trailer is glitching in the exact same spots.

Judge Leon voiced his "frustration" with the prosecution over the technical glitch. "You've had a year and a half to get this together," he told the government. "This is not an acceptable way to do business." If Leon remains unconvinced that the government "copy is complete and accurate. . . . that count is gone," Leon said. He is expected to rule on the matter this morning.

Photo via Stallio, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* Porn performer Aurora Snow is also filing updates from the Stagliano obscenity trial. Her take: The prosecution hates fun:

Opening arguments began yesterday, and as a performer I was stunned by the prosecution’s description of what made the material obscene. From my point of view, the prosecution’s lack of contact and knowledge of what we do in adult entertainment seemed laughable. Oh no, there are close-up shots of pussy? Oh, the horror! If this were not such a serious matter, it would be a pure farce of cardboard bad guys picking on others for having more fun than them in life.

* Feminist running tally: Score one for Playboy, Chloe Angyal says.

* Remember that "conscience rule" the Bush administration squeezed through in its lame-duck period, allowing workers in federally-funded facilities to refuse to provide services they found morally objectionable? Yeah, Megan Carpentier noticed that Obama never repealed that.

* Silvana at Tiger Beatdown on the fun and frivolity of fashion! Unless you're fat:

For fat women, clothes are supposed to be about making people forget that you’re fat. “Hiding” “flaws.” “Smoothing out” your “shape” (i.e. your fat). “Emphasizing” your “assets” (at least you have big boobs, fatty). “Defining” your waist (because, hey, at least you can make one part of you look smaller than the other parts). It’s all code for: Don’t look fat. The advice isn’t too different for thin or average women. You also want—surprise, surprise!—to not look fat. And for a long, long time, I bought into that. I bought the idea that my body wasn’t acceptable and I had to use clothing as best I could to try to make it acceptable.

* The D.C. Attorney General's Office has dropped all charges against Lt. Dan Choi in relation to his "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protests outside the White House last Spring.

Photo via walid.hassenein, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Yesterday, jurors in the John "Buttman" Stagliano obscenity trial got a 50-minute display of milk enemas. Today, prosecutors turned their focus to a different substance. This morning, jurors viewed a 36 minute scene from Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice, a film about women expelling impressive amounts of discharge from their vaginas—colloquially, "squirting."

The trajectory of the scene went something like this:

Porn performers Angela Stone and Richelle Ryan are just hanging out in a living room, commenting on the quality of each others' asses. "Have you ever squirted before?" Stone asks Ryan. Ryan has not. "Have you seen a girl squirt before?" Again, no. One thing leads to another. "I want to use you as target practice," Stone tells Ryan, as Ryan performs oral sex on her.

Stone sits on a chair and instructs Ryan to position herself on her knees. Stone states her intention to aim her vaginal secretion into Ryan's mouth. "I don't know if I can do it," Stone says. "I don't know if I can do it that far." She tells Ryan to crawl closer to her. She does. She tells Ryan to scoot a little back. She does. She tells Ryan to remove her top. She does. She tells Ryan to turn around and show her her ass. She does. She tells Ryan to turn back around. She does.

Stone screams very loudly and squirts a clear substance into Ryan's mouth. Ryan gargles. They furiously make out. Then, the naked guy shows up. That's Jay Lassiter. They all have sex together in various ways. Despite the ejaculatory role-reversal that Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice is predicated on, the scene ends with Lassiter ejaculating onto the faces and mouths of Stone and Ryan.

"You're everyone's target practice!" Ryan announces. Stone turns to the camera: "A lesson lived is a lesson learned," she says, for some reason. If there's any serious literary value in the film, that's gotta be it.

When the trial concludes, jurors will be forced to decide whether the acts filmed in Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice violate the District's standards for obscenity. Until then, they're being forced to watch hours of porn—in a public hearing—that they likely wouldn't have chosen for their own private viewing. As the scene played, a couple of the female jurors remove their headsets, relieving themselves of the frequent sounds of gargling, gushing, and the two women choking on Lassiter's penis. Apparently, this is not their cup of tea. But will the jurors' personal disinterest in target practice affect their decision about what erotic sporting activities other Washingtonians are allowed to watch in their own homes?

Photo via doreta-wm, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

The prosecution opposed the motion. Using the performer's stage name in the legal proceedings "gives some air of legitimacy to the porn star," Pamela Satterfield argued for the government. "She shouldn't be treated any differently than anyone else in this case."

Gelbard argued that porn stars who are outed to the public can endure stalking, harassment, even death threats. He told the story of one porn performer whose legal name was aired in public. A fan used her name to track her down when she visited his city on business, then showed up at her hotel room door. "Anyone involved in this case could receive death threats," Satterfield countered. "I have received a death threat" as a result of the case, she told the court.

Gelbard said that by opposing the motion, the prosecution gave off an "air of witness intimidation."

"I can't remember any case where a request of that nature has even been made, much less granted," Judge Richard J Leon told Gelbard. He promised to rule on the motion later.

A report by Washington City Paper intern and "Buttman" trial correspondent Juliana Brint:

The story of how 14 D.C. jurors came to spend 50 minutes viewing a parade of hardcore erotic milk enemas from the jury box begins with the pornographic discretion of FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley.

In December 2007, Bradley—using a fictitious name, credit card number, and address–ordered copies of Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice from the website EvilAngel.com to a location inside the District of Columbia. John "Buttman" Stagliano, accused of filling Bradley's order, now stands trial for obscenity charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

So how did Bradley decide which of EvilAngel.com's hundreds of porn titles to purchase? "Looking at the covers [on the website], it appeared that those movies emphasized the excretory function and squirting, so that's why I ordered them," Bradley testified yesterday.

Deciding the DVDs—along with an online trailer for Belladonna: Fetish Fanatic 5—were crude enough to justify obscenity charges, the government indicted Stagliano for "transportation of obscene matters for sale or distribution" and "engaging in the business of selling or transferring obscene matter" in 2008.

Two years later, District Court Judge Richard Leon was left with deciding just how many milk enemas the jury should be made to watch during the trial. Stagliano's lawyers motioned to make the jury watch the entire five-and-a-half-hours of prosecuted material during the proceedings. Leon ruled against them, arguing that as long as the whole works were admitted as evidence and available in the jury room, there was no need to show all of them in the courtroom.

"A work need not be viewed in its entirety to be judged on the whole," Leon ruled.

Leon then went on to dictate how exactly the evidence would be presented during the trial—to both the jury and the audience of about 50 who came along for the viewing yesterday.

Before starting the porn, court officials examined the IDs of everyone in attendance to verify that they were over the age of 18. Prosecutors briefly fumbled with the DVD system—the jury caught an extra scene of two women making out in cat costumes—before arriving at the main event. Milk Nymphos was screened on two large televisions, one on each side of the jury box. While it was certainly possible to catch the on-screen action from many angles in the public viewing area, it was clear that the material was intended for inspection by the jury, not the audience. This point was reinforced by Leon's decision to play audio through Court-issued headsets, which members of the public were not provided. (Leon made a slight exception for the press, issuing two headsets to be shared among the several reporters present).

Without headsets, the public missed one of the most interesting aspects of the scene that the prosecution decided to show—the repeated use of racial slurs.

The 50-minute-long Milk Nymphos scene involves two white female performers, one black male performer, and a whole lot of milk entering and exiting various orifices. One of the female performers repeatedly refers to her male co-star as a "nigger," declaring, for example, "Come on you nigger, fuck me in the ass," and imploring the other female performer to "look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock."

Rarely has dialog been so central to the reception of a hardcore pornographic film. But are the epithets enough to convince jurors that the film's anal milk fountains "cross the line" into obscenity? If the prosecution was hoping the slurs would get a rise out of the jurors—11 of 14 of whom are black—it was unclear whether they succeeded. Although some of the jurors seemed to flinch at the epithets and a few removed their headsets well before the end of the film, there were few signals of outright disgust. After 50 minutes of milk play, the group generally looked more tired than scandalized.

Let's hope they got some rest: When the trial reconvenes today at 10 a.m., the prosecution promises to show significant excerpts from Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice.

Photo via Gravityx9, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* Via GLAA Forum, The Nation reports on queer youth in juvenile detention facilities.

* From THE LINE: "I have noticed a disturbing trend among women: we do not like to admit we have sex."

* SAFER Campus on alcohol and consent:

there is so much defensiveness about alcohol and consent, as though it’s a really really complicated thing. And ya know, I think that for people who are aren’t raised to think about sex as a shared experience in which two people are actively, positively participating, it can actually seem that complicated. But the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. Having sex with an incapacitated person should be widely understand as rape. Two drunk people having sex should be aware enough of the other person to have a sense of what is or isn’t consent because they’ve been raised to respect other people, and it’s second nature to them to check and make sure their partner is involved. I understand this is reductive; that it’s real nice to think about this sexual utopia where things are simple, but perhaps not a realistic picture of how things are now so what’s the point. But I think that we overcomplicate consent; people say that defining consent is making something natural more complicated than it needs to be, but really isn’t something only complicated when it’s unclear? Wouldn’t the actions themselves be less complicated if we had the complicated conversations beforehand? I dunno. I long for the day when this can be that simple.

* Tony Perkins is concerned that Amtrak is using taxpayer money for "recruiting homosexual passengers." Gays on trains? Is nothing sacred?

* Adult Video News reporter Mark Kernes registers his displeasure with the court on its handling of the John Stagliano obscenity case. At issue: The judge's decision to keep jury selection private, presumably because of the porn-y nature of the line of questioning:

As a journalist, I have covered three previous federal obscenity cases—U.S. v. Little (Middle Dist. of Fla.), U.S. v. JM Productions (Dist. of Ariz.) and U.S. v. Isaacs (Central Dist. of Calif.)—and in all of those cases, reporters were permitted to attend all phases of the trial, including the jury selection, during which the jurors were all referred to by their juror number in order to protect their privacy.

However, in the Stagliano case, Judge Leon closed the courtroom while the attorneys were discussing the written jury questionnaires and questioning individual prospective jurors based on their answers in the questionnaires. It has been my experience that prospective jurors' answers to counsels' questions can be very informative of their backgrounds and mindsets, and as a reporter, I believe I should have had access to that information as background for my coverage of the trial, and that Judge Leon's order amounted to a violation of the First Amendment's "freedom of the press" clause.

This morning, opening arguments were held in the U.S. government's prosecution of John Stagliano—the adult entertainment industry impresario known as "Buttman." The obscenity trial hinges on three porn titles allegedly distributed by Stagliano: The full-length DVDs of Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice, and a 5-minute online trailer for Belladonna: Fetish Fanatic 5.

The D.C. jurors—six men, seven eight women; nine 11 black, three white—will be tasked with determining whether Milk Nymphos' dairy-based enemas and Storm Squirters' water sports violate D.C.'s "community standards" for obscenity. But before jurors even see the smut, attorneys provided a run-down of arguments for and against Staglino, through the trial's opening arguments:

Government: You won't find Milk Nymphos on Pay-per-View. "This case is about crossing the line," the prosecution offered in its opening argument. These videos aren't like the ones you'd order into a hotel room or catch on "late night TV"—this "goes beyond that."

Buttman: Exactly—so don't order it if you don't want to see it. "The movies are not—and are not meant to be—distributed to these 14 strangers sitting in a federal courthouse," Stagliano attorney Paul Cambria said. They include "adults putting on a performance . . . for another adult, who would make that choice if that were his or her cup of tea." And at least some people like it: An attorney for John Stagliano Inc. promised the jurors that when they watch the tapes, "you'll see the actors enjoying themselves."

Government: Kids could have seen this stuff! The investigator downloaded the free movie trailer in "a public area in a Washington, D.C. hotel," where he gained access to the material with "only four clicks of his mouse." The trailer could theoretically be made available to people under the age of 18.

Buttman: Yeah—but they didn't. "The evidence will prove beyond all doubt that there was no distribution  . . . at any time to children," Cambria told the jury. "No children involved whatsoever." In the hotel, an attorney for John Stagliano Inc. argued, there was only "one customer in there—an adult"—and they didn't see anything, either. On the production side, Stagliano also keeps records of birth certificates of his performers to ensure they're of age (But Stagliano isn't being accused of producing these videos—just distributing them).

Government: No, seriously, this stuff is really gross. The prosecution laid out the "extreme" imagery of the videos: Performers using "syringes and tubes to pump milk into women's anus and vaginas," then expelling the milk from their orifices and "into each other's mouths." A performer inserting his "penis into a woman's anus" and then immediately into "another woman's mouth." "Using drills" in "women's vaginas." "Extreme close-up shots" of "women squirting liquid" across the room and onto each other. A performer sticking a "foot inside a vagina." And one omission: "No real plot-line."

Buttman: But the videos have some artistic merit! The performers are "sexual athletes, if you will," said Cambria. "They are attractive people. A lot of care and work went into designing these movies." Also, it's not like  consumers are surprised by that content. The videos include "exactly what they expect: Intercourse. Oral sex. Women-on-women sex," Cambria said. And, yes, "enema play."

Government: D.C. doesn't want this stuff in its community. The videos, the prosecution told the jury, "violate your community standards."

Buttman: Hey, D.C. is a diverse community. An attorney for John Stagliano Inc. urged the journey not to rule based on "personal preference" but rather with respect for "all the cultures that are here in the capital of our nation." Like the Milk Nympho culture, for exabple.

Government: This guy is promoting this smut in public! The prosecution noted that an investigator came across Stagliano's offerings after visiting an "Adult Expo in Las Vegas." The FBI was alerted.

Buttman: That's actually a very classy porn expo. The expo "is like the Academy Awards of adult movies," Cambria said—and Stagliano is "a several-time winner." Also, it's a porn expo. It's not like this stuff was "on a billboard on 495."

Photo via Tambako the Jaguar, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

SADY: HI. THIS IS NOT A LATENESS THAT IS MY OWN FAULT. IT IS THAT OF MY COMPUTERIZED CHAT SYSTEM.

AMANDA: I'm just going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were not too busy feeding your Internet pornography surfing addiction to join me here for this very important Internet pornography discussion.

SADY: It's true! I was... not at all indulging in my shameful addiction to Internet pornography! Because if I were (indulging in my Internet pornography addiction) I would be rendered incapable of interacting with you, a woman! “Are you waiting for a pizza to be delivered?" I would ask. "Or, perhaps, for someone to fix your plumbing? That is the only reason I can conceive of for you not to be having titillating adventures at this moment!"

AMANDA: Well that's too bad! For if you truly were suffering from an Internet porn surfing addiction, I could get you a great gig speaking to groups of conservative audiences about your Internet porn surfing addiction in glorious detail. My very favorite part of the "Porn Harms" briefing I attended last month was right after Shelley Lubben—ex-porn performer, current anti-porn activist—finished her spiel, and one of the old white men running the briefing stood up and informed everyone that he was addicted to porn for 25 years.

SADY: These two storylines connect, I am thinking! It is all very LOST!

AMANDA: Everyone clapped!

SADY: Awwwwww. I mean, I have no doubt — NONE NONE NONE — that there are women in the porn industry who are abused, for whom working in porn was sexually traumatic, for whom being an anti-porn activist seems like the best and most necessary course of action, given what they've been through. It's that whole prayer-meeting aspect to it, though, that freaks me out. Like, a lot of these speakers are clearly people who have spent a LOT of time looking for porn, and specifically for the most transgressive porn they can find! And then they describe the porn, in porn-like terms! In order to demonstrate the evils of porn! Like, the "I once was lost but now have found gagfactory.com, AND AM WILLING TO REGISTER MY DISTASTE" aspect is a little weird. Like a ritual purification, rather than a discussion.

AMANDA: Yeah. I mean, one of the most frustrating parts of the debate around porn is how difficult it is to punch through the dichotomy of Porn v. Anti-Porn. It's often framed as a fight between the "Keep Your Fascist Government Off My Boner" camp vs. the "Bring All the Poor Abused Women to Jesus" camp. And if you're someone who is approaching this from a feminist perspective (and there are a LOT of feminist perspectives on porn, pro and anti and in-between) you're sometimes forced to align with one or the other. Boners v. Jesus, if you will.

SADY: Right. And, I mean, I think it's symptomatic of people seeing that institutions are troubled, and then assuming that the institutions THEMSELVES are the problem, which sort of bars off a more nuanced discourse. Or bars you off from encouraging yourself to take a more nuanced standpoint. But I like to think that we're slowly getting past that. I mean, we're maybe getting to a point where people can acknowledge that porn can express pretty vile attitudes toward The Ladies (and anyone else it sets its sights on) and that those vile attitudes can be expressed on set in ways that hurt people, without having to describe ourselves as "anti-all-porn-everywhere-ever."

AMANDA: Right. And also that porn isn't some big monolithic hate-fuck. It can be a lot of things. And as much as the strange explicit purging of the anti-porn activists freaks me out a bit, pro-porn people who aren't interested in dissecting it at all scare me more.

SADY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, a commitment to not looking at the potential problems in porn is probably way worse, in the long run, than TIRELESSLY AND VIGILANTLY WATCHING A TON OF PORN so that you can point out the problems.

AMANDA: Yeah. And the reluctance to engage isn't something I've seen in the more feminist pro-porn circles, but it's definitely something I've seen in the Get-Your-Fascist-Government-Off-My-Boner circles. Any industry that provides boners can't possibly be problematic!

SADY: Boners are our nation's most valued resource! It's just that it seems to me that the people most qualified to write or speak about porn's effect on women are . . . women who've been in porn? Rather than women who've seen some of it, or read what someone else wrote about seeing it?

AMANDA: Yeah.

SADY: But I worry that, with the Defend the Boners league pressing for those stupid sluts to keep their mouths shut when they're not giving blow-jobs, and the Burn the Tapes crew pressing for the elimination of any non-anti-porn discourse, sex workers who express complicated feelings about porn are being sort of shut out. Not that those folks aren't having conversations and building communities of their own.

AMANDA: Right. And then you have Sasha Grey on Tyra talking about her job and life, as Tyra shakes her head slowly and announces on television that she refuses to believe that Sasha Grey is not a victim of childhood abuse.

SADY: Haha, yeah. Or the cases in which porn stars DO (like a lot of women) have incidences of being sexually abused or assaulted, and everyone is like, "don't you SEEEE? Don't you see that this has clearly driven you MAD? And any of your feelings about the job you do are now INVALID?????" Whereas no-one is saying that to the accountant who was sexually abused growing up. Clearly no-one is like, "the pain and shame of your assault warped you so that you had no other choice but to fall into a life of TAX FORMS!"

AMANDA: Yeah, I mean what sexual assault victims really need is for more people to take away their agency and reduce their options in life, and then to shame them based on their sexual expression, right?

SADY: EXACTLY! I mean, I think a lot of porn discourse—and people who are fervent watchers of porn, and would fight to the death your right to take away their cinema boners, are just as willing to say that people (particularly women) who do porn are sad and deluded and damaged—depends on the assumption that, if it looks gross and un-sexy to me, it must be gross and un-sexy. And anyone who does it has to be stopped or "saved." See: BDSM, and the vast misunderstandings around that. Whereas, if I look at the kink conference you covered, well, I will be honest with you: There were a lot of videos you posted that I was just like, "nope! Not gonna open that one!" There were a lot of things that I consider gross and un-sexy going on there, such as: homemade Harry Potter erotica.

AMANDA: Haha. Right? But crusading to wipe it clean of this Earth, citing The Children, is another position entirely.

SADY: But who am I to come between you and the turgid purple manhood of Severus Snape?

AMANDA: Gah.

SADY: You know? Like: I can say, "I will not jack off to this, and would prefer not to discuss the levels of arousal it produces in you," without singlehandedly trying to ban it.

AMANDA: Yeah. Dan Savage gives some pretty good advice in his column this week to a guy who has been indulging his wife in her daddy fetish. The husband writes in wondering if the fetish is a sign that his wife was abused as a child, and Savage basically says: Maybe, and that's something you should talk about, but it doesn't mean that she now has to deny her safe exploration of that fetish because her sex life has been informed in the past by horrible experiences. It's your sex life. And past abuse doesn't make your safe and consensual adult sex life invalid.

SADY: Right. I mean, I guess the other side, the argument against mainstream porn is that (a) it influences expectations of what sex "should be like," or what good sex is supposed to look like, and (b) it has to use real bodies in order to do so. Which, I feel like we've dealt with (b). Terrible things happen in porn, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not ban porn. Terrible things happen in houses, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not to ban houses. But (a) still does trouble me, I'll admit. It is a fact that stuff that happens in porn—your anal sex, your spitting on crotches, your facial shots or bald vaginas, what have you—can be kind of uncomfortably enthused over by people who watch a lot of porn. And have picked up, can I tell you, just the WRONG MOVES for accomplishing it.

AMANDA: Right. Like, I've heard a lot written about how younger men and women absolutely expect hairless vaginas. But again, what are we supposed to do about that? (a) Ban porn; (b) talk about how expectations in porn do and don’t translate into real life; (c) make more diverse porn, maybe? Because (a), beyond being dumb, is also impossible. So we have to start thinking about how to accomplish (b) and (c).

SADY: Yeah. I mean, I think the option is actually to become a little more relaxed and less shameful about porn. Rather than, like, watching it on your own, and then expecting your sex life to match up to it, and then responding to efforts to talk about your porn feelings with "lalala, can't hear you, it's DIRTY!" There are a lot of people who are absolutely cool with sex for the 20 minutes they spend doing it, and then feel weirded out and shameful about it immediately after the fact. And I think porn takes a lot of the bullets, when it comes to those folks and their freaked-out feelings. But, if they're talking AGAINST porn, they can be as graphic as they please! I think, is the message here. That all of us should express our desires to our sex partners in terms of lengthy, Old-Testament-style inveighing against sexual acts we were ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTED BY when we saw them last.

AMANDA: I think if Ayn Rand taught us anything, it's that absolutely no thought or discussion needs to go into our darkest dominant sexual fantasies. Just Do It!

SADY: And/or build an entire social order around it!

AMANDA: Right. Or people could just, like, talk about it. What porn needs is more dialogue!

SADY: Can you imagine how much easier porn would be to deal with if it actually included scenes of the date and well-adjusted people undergoing sexual negotiation with each other in a kind and realistic way? "I consent to this," Miranda panted, erotically, "but not the other thing which you mentioned earlier this evening, which is never as much fun as you'd think."

AMANDA: You are seriously crushing some dude's boner right now. But possibly arousing some other dude! So: Even.

SADY: "Your consent gives me such a boner," cried Hans, "which is made but firmer and more sexy by my respect for your stated boundaries!"

Since the strangely explicit anti-pornography briefing "Porn Harms" hit Capitol Hill in June, commentators have been weighing in with alternate perspectives on the state of smut today. Their thoughts—from a defense of "the fuck me look" to nostalgia about a 1978 Penthouse, after the jump:

* GLAA Forum takes on the fervor over porn addiction: "why don't we explore the harm done by some people's addiction to snooping into their neighbors' entertainment choices and bossing them around?"

* A reader of Andrew Sullivan's writes: "The only thing [Gail Dines] convinced me of is that she's got shoddy methodology and her kids must spend an inordinate amount of time rolling their eyes."

* The Good Men Project surveys a couple dozen public figures for their thoughts on porn. Twitter owner Todd Dagres says: “If you have to ask whether porn is good or bad, then you already have the answer. The question is how bad?”

* Bay Windows rejects the feminist take on the "fuck me look":

Dines has more in common with Jerry Falwell than she does with Gloria Steinem. Take, for example, her views on what is termed the "Fuck Me Look" —the sultry come hither look adopted by models since models were first photographed, and which is used to sell almost anything—from cars to mouthwash— no matter how tenuous the product’s actual connection to anything sexual.

Said Dines at a Pornography and Pop Culture conference, "The problem with [the FML] is that males in our culture are socialized in a society in which they are bombarded with the 'Fuck Me’ look, where it offers visual entitlement to ownership of women’s bodies. And what is rape and sexual assault if not taking them up on that offer that she’s offering? The only trouble is that she’s not walking down the street, WE ARE."

Got that? It’s not just genital objectifying hard-core pornography that we need to worry about. It’s now sexy looks that will also bring down civilization as we know it.

* Lifechurch.tv is also leading an online crusade against smut.

* Rod Dreher thinks of the children: "I fear for them all, especially my daughter, trying to find a suitable marriage partner in a world in which so many of their peers will have grown up with widely-available pornography."

* But Time's Joel Stein [via the Good Men Project] says boys will be boys: "What is going on to create such an accelerating and insatiable appetite for porn among men in our country? You clearly have no idea how much of 1985-1989 I spent looking at the same three 1978 Penthouses."

* Via Vox Populi, Georgetown student Julia Shindel talks to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her reproductive health activism on campus, which included chaining herself to a statue of Georgetown founder John Carroll and wearing duct tape over her mouth. She rates that symbolic silencing method "disgusting."

* The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health offers up a proposed curriculum on porn.

* Something to remember, via Hysteria!: "There are too many instances in the world when women’s voices are discounted.  Not just our figurative voices—the words we speak and the meanings of those words—but our literal voices too—our sometimes soft, high-timbre ululations. We are told that we are too soft-spoken to hear, that our proclamations carry too much emotion, too much shame, too many tears."

* Queen Emily on what can happen when you're outed as trans:

One time, I inadvertently outed myself to a group of students. I’d been teaching a tremendously interesting media studies class to first years; that is, mostly 17 and 18 year olds. The first three weeks went pretty well. We talked video games and violence, Hollywood, what they actually did with media. The discussions were engaged, it was all going fine. Then, a month in, I came down with a cold. My voice suddenly dropped an octave, because I couldn’t vocalise at my usual pitch. And like that, you could see the lights go on in their eyes. They’d realised I was trans.

. . . The next week, we did adbuster style cut-ups to jam dominant media messages and several groups turned in transphobic assignments, giggling their arses off. They were laughing at me. Another student spent the lesson interrupting me, telling the class how everything I was saying was stupid. And of course, a number of students stopped attending my classes altogether, trying to get into classes in the same unit run by other teachers.

. . . The point is, the mere fact of their knowing that I am trans meant that they, 17 and 18 year olds with scant knowledge of the subject they were taking, suddenly felt entitled to talk over me, to mock me openly when previously they had been respectful. Of itself, being subjected to ungendering takes its toll, especially if it’s something you experience frequently.

* Elena Kagan on abortion. Apparently she believes that the constitution provides for women's lives being protected in abortion regulation. Activist judge!

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Photo via George Eastman House

You've heard from the pro-kink side. Now, in the anti-porn corner: Here's what national anti-smut activists educated the public about on a recent trip to Washington, covering everything from porn addicts who can't make job interviews because they're too busy "surfing" porn to bestiality sites featuring "any animal on Noah’s ark":

"How Addiction Harms the Person," with Mary Anne Layden (above): "I once had a patient that we will call John. He told me that he had a fantasy about a career that would be ideal for him. He spent a significant amount of time preparing himself for this career, training, looking for career opportunities, making contacts and applying for jobs. Then one day he came to the therapy session with the exciting news that he had an appointment for a job interview that was the dream job. This was the big chance that he had worked so hard for. John didn’t go to that appointment because the morning of the interview John could not get himself to stop surfing Internet pornography sites."

—

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"Pornography Harms Children," with Sharon Cooper: "[Consumers] who first look at adult pornography . . . then begin that slippery slope of searching for adolescent images called ‘barely legal,’ and finally begin to download child pornography.”

—

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"Pornography Debases Men, Women, and Children," with Gail Dines: "If you go to Gagfactor.com, you’ll see a 20 second clip of a scene with a young woman they call 'Scarlett'. . . The clip opens with ‘Scarlett’ sitting on a toilet, having a penis thrust down her throat, while the man attached to the penis pulls her head back and forward.”

—

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"The Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn," with Shelley Lubben: "The last thing I want to do, people, is talk about porn,” insisted Lubben, an anti-pornography activist who lists “ex porn star” among the qualifications on her hot-pink business card. But talk she did: “I have been hit, spit on, penetrated everywhere you can imagine, told to sit still or pose still while every orifice of my body and hands are engaging five to six male performers. I’ve been totally humiliated on the set, where they had to stop the scene when I didn’t even know what was going on, and they had to wipe up feces."

—

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"Childrens' Easy Access to Hardcore Internet Pornography," with Donna Rice Hughes: "We are indeed facing a national crisis that is every bit as damaging to our citizens and our cultural environment as the oil spill catastrophe is to the environment in the Gulf," says Hughes. Online, children can be exposed to “explicit urination pornography with women being treated as toilets," a "hard-core porn site” featuring “graphic close-ups of homosexual acts," and "men and women engaging in sex acts with any animal on Noah’s ark," all through a faulty Google search.

Last week, I wrote about the second KinkForAll unconference to bring ad-hoc alternate-sexuality education to the D.C. area. Below, some video evidence of kink educators from around the country talking everything from oral herpes at orgies to erotic Harry Poter fan-fic. (I'll post videos of that story's anti-porn conference later today).

"Sexy Fun Time With Google Apps", with Maymay and Emma, on the way Google's suite of applications can be applied to sex, from spreadsheets for calculating orgasm rations to calendars for annotating past sexual experiences.

"The Language of Touch", with DDog, on gender politics and touching. One participant: "After i came out as trans and started using male pronouns and presenting more male, it became more OK for me to be touchy-feelie and cuddly with people than I had previously, because for some reason a lot of my straight female friends then saw me as a straight guy instead of a gay woman—neither of which have ever been true!"

"How'd You Get Here? Rocky Horror, Fanfic, and Gateways to Kink", with Julia, on how nerdy subcultures can facilitate exploration of kinky sexualities—from the Rocky Horror Picture Show to Harry Potter fan fiction. Engorgio!

"Sex, Gender, and Pathologies", with xMech, on the scientific language of "gender identity disorder," and how it hurts the trans community.

"Taboo Erotica," with Jack Stratton, on erotica that defies social norms. He begins the session by having participants name "some horrible things." A working list: Scat play, piss play, incest, bestiality, furries, underage people, rape, edge play, snuff, race play, slavery, cuckoldry.

"Kissing," with Molly Ren, on navigating life as an orgy-attender with oral herpes. "I've dated mostly in the kink scene for the past two years, so I don't know what vanilla people do anymore," Molly says. "My first reaction when I would tell people, 'Oh, I can't kiss'? They'd say, 'Oh, Molly has a dom that's telling her not to kiss anyone but her! This is really hot!'"

"KinkForAll: What and Why?", with Maymay and Emma, on the reasoning behind this whole thing.

Players of first-person shooter game Team Fortress 2 have discovered a new accessory to aid them in offing other players: Images of English pin-up models Lucy Pinder and Keeley Hazell. Users are inserting the cheesecake photos into the game's environment in an attempt to distract other players long enough to sneak up and kill them. They call the tactic "Hot Girl Backstabbing," and judging by the confusion of the targets—many of whom linger near the photos for several seconds before getting blasted—the strategy appears to be working. Is this another instance of feminist-inspired simulated murder, or just another way to apply the exploitation of women to gaming? Judging by the players' enthusiastic use of the word "boobies," I'm going to guess it's the latter.

Ever had a sexual experience? Then welcome to the magical world of "virginity," where a white wedding dress can restore a sexually-active 40-something's innocence, a set of pigtails can turn even the most experienced porn performer chaste, and a new hymen can be shipped from China for about 30 bucks. Documentary filmmaker Therese Shechter explores the culture of denouncing sex (even while you're doing it) in "How to Lose Your Virginity," a film about our cultural obsession with chastity— and the way its meaning shifts mysteriously depending upon the implement and the orifice.

Shechter has got nine days to raise a couple thousand dollars to finish the film; while she's waiting to seal the deal, she agreed to answer some questions about surrendering your precious chastity orb to that one special fella who will ensure its proper maintenance until death do you part:

SEXIST: What's it like making a movie about people not doing something?

TS: The definition of virginity is so subject to interpretation. A Mormon college student who considers herself a virgin did a post for my blog, The American Virgin, about how enthusiastically sexually active she was, even though she was waiting for her wedding night to have intercourse. In the film you get the whole spectrum of sexual activity, from Cindy, a very religious and abstinent 30-something screenwriter I met at the Sundance Film Festival, to former ‘abstinence poster girl’ Shelby Knox who now runs seminars called “Fucking While Feminist.” This is all pretty much North America I'm talking about, by the way. There's so much more to say about the rest of the world and I deal with a lot of that on the blog.

SEXIST: In your pursuit of understanding our culture's obsession with virginity, you've examined a variety of industries and subcultures that rely on our fascination with virginity for their own purposes—from "barely legal" porn producers to wedding dress retailers to religious abstainers. How have you seen the meaning of "virginity" shift to satisfy these different contexts?

TS: I think they’re remarkably similar in that they all work within the fantasy of female sexual purity as something to be fetishized. They have different props—the Big White Wedding Dress, porn’s white panties, and the purity ring—but all use a sort of ritualized process whereby a symbolically virginal female is offered up to a male for deflowering. I say symbolic because the porn actress is definitely not a virgin, we’re pretty certain that most modern brides aren’t either, and given our shaky definition of the V-word, we might not even consider some purity pledgers to be totally chaste. But it’s the fetishization of all three that really fascinates me. For whose benefit is it this being played out?

Interestingly, in shooting these scenes, I felt the most comfortable in the company of the pornographers. I don’t know what that says about me, but I’d sooner go back to Barely Legal Ranch than a bridal salon or an abstinence conference.

How does our culture's emphasis on virginity affect men and women differently?

TS: That’s kind of at the heart of it all, isn’t it?

There are the abstinence-until-marriage programs and purity balls that focus almost exclusively on female virginity, going as far as having young girls symbolically hand over their purity to their father for safekeeping until their wedding night when it gets transferred to the husbands. You know, we may cringe at this, but as I mentioned earlier, it’s just a more blatant version of the traditional wedding ceremony. That’s something I really get into in the film as I deal with my own wedding planning and all its chastity-based rituals.

In terms of more mainstream culture (and by that I mean teen sex comedies), I think it used to be that the guys had to be total horndogs and get rid of their virginity as quickly as possible, and the gals had to defend the castle for as long as possible. I feel like recently there’s been a cultural shift where the guys are still basically supposed to be horndogs but it’s now okay for gals to have pre-marital sex under the right conditions (i.e., sex with your perfect boyfriend in a romantic setting with scented candles, possibly after prom, after you’ve professed your love for each other). And by sex, I mean intercourse. I think the idea that a woman needs a penis in her vagina to turn her into a full-fledged sexual being is still pretty prevalent. In reality, young men and women do all sorts of things sexually that don’t fit these gender-based scripts at all, but then they run the risk of being judged, shamed or punished by their peers, media, religious authorities, what have you.

Something seems to change for women in college. Young women talk about this in the film: there’s this metaphysical dividing line between high school, where no one is talking about having sex, and college, where everyone is expected to be having sex. Except not too much. Because that would be slutty, or according to the media, soul-killing (see: Caitlin Flanagan’s article “Love, Actually” in The Atlantic Monthly). The flip side of all this is if you don’t feel ready for sex, you’re considered freakish or undesirable, so you end up either keeping that fact to yourself or doing a bunch of stuff you don’t really want to do.

What’s really interesting is how this plays out after college with people who haven’t yet had sex. Those earlier expectations—that ladies should only have sex when in love and guys should be getting some nightly—often continue past the college years. The women are usually still waiting for that ‘special someone,’ and the men are so totally humiliated by their lack of horndog experience that they just withdraw. I hear this so often—people just assume that not only is everyone but them having sex all the time, but that no one would want to have anything to do with someone who was sexually inexperienced. Again, I think it’s the script we think we should be following so we’re not honest about what’s really going on. I got into this film project because I was pissed off by how women were shamed for being sexual, but as I’ve looked deeper, I’ve found there’s a significant portion of people out there who feel shamed for being non-sexual. I was a post-college bloomer myself, so I can relate.

I think it’s interesting that if you’re queer, you don’t really have a cultural script to follow, because among other things your sex life isn’t about penis-in-vagina sex. Maybe that’s good because you can create your own script when it comes to sexual initiation. I love the Marshall character in “The United States of Tara,” and I’m hoping the writers are building up to some kind of interestingly complex virginity loss scenario. I haven’t seen all of season 2 yet, so if it happens in Episode 11, don’t tell me about it.

In your work on the issue, have you come to find any healthy, inclusive, and non-judgmental conceptions of what "virginity" could mean? Or should we just call the whole "virginity" thing off?

TS: I don’t think we can call the ‘virginity’ thing off. Even though it’s socially constructed, impossible to really define (there isn’t even a medical definition), and often employed as a tool of the patriarchy, virginity still matters. For most of us, sex is important, and the first time you have a significant intimate moment, it’s a milestone (maybe not the best one, but a milestone nonetheless). But it’s hopefully just the first of many milestones in our sexual lives.

So, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the word ‘virgin,’ just the values we attach to it. Virginity is already imprinted with so many meanings, depending on who you’re listening to. It would be nice to be able to create our own personal language of sexuality, and dis-engage it from religious dogma, double standards, the fantasy porn sex you just downloaded or last night’s episode of Gossip Girl.

We spent a whole day talking about all this at the “Rethinking Virginity” conference where I was a panelist, and in the end it came down to this: Do whatever you want with whomever you want as long as it’s consensual and safe. Go forth and shag. Or don’t. That’s fine too.

Your film is called "How to Lose Your Virginity." Any tips?

TS: Unfortunately, no. I’m hoping that by the time you’re done watching the film, you think that phrase is absurd. There’s no right way, we’re not losing anything, and virginity is ultimately an ephemeral and elusive concept. So maybe you’ll be mindfucked, but you’ll still technically be a virgin.

* Marnia Robinson begins a recent argument against Internet porn like so: "A few years ago, men from all over the world began arriving in my website’s forum complaining that they were unable to stop using Internet porn. Google had sent them—perhaps because my site shares information about the effects of sex on the brain." After learning from the experiences of these men, Robinson declares that "In short, many men are happier without Internet pornography."

In other news, binge eaters suggest that many people are happier without food.

* How to Have Sex in Texas on the FDA's decision not to approve Flibanserin, a drug for increasing "sexual satisfaction" in women: On the one hand, the medicalization of women's sexuality can't replace proper sex education, work in the bedroom, and relationship-based problems. On the other hand, men's sexuality is medicalized, so why can't ours be, too?:

Everyone knows that many men take Viagra, Cialis and Levitra as "enhancements" and not because they have clinical erectile dysfunction, and women ought to have their own fair share of drugs to enhance their sexual experience, either on the front end of desire or the back end of response. The FDA's continued refusal to approve testosterone and other sex enhancing drugs for women suggests a fear of women's sexuality, not agreement with anti-medicalization sentiment.

* Anna Clark on a school's decision to dismantle its girl's volleyball program—and form a varsity cheerleading team in its place—in order to massage Title IX requirements: "it's possible that competitive cheer could be a legitimate sport. I'm open to the point. But what a sorry birth it would be for varsity cheerleading if it were to come out of a swamp of data manipulation and lawsuits that pit sports against one another, making a mockery of any claimed commitment to the participation of women in athletics. In this case, I'm cheering for the volleyball team."

* Nancy Bauer on Lady Gaga's ongoing critique of feminine performance—if it IS IN FACT A CRITIQUE, Lady Gaga!:

Is [the "Telephone" video] an expression of Lady Gaga’s strength as a woman or an exercise in self-objectification?  It’s hard to decide. The man who drools at women’s body parts is punished, but then again so is everyone else in the place.  And if this man can be said to drool, then we need a new word for what the camera is doing to Gaga’s and Beyoncé’s bodies for upwards of 10 minutes.

* Femonomics adds to the discussion of the issues with "welcomed" rape in the works of Ayn Rand, with added commentary on "He Raped Her And She Liked It" scenes in the works of Michael Winterbottom and Ang Lee.

Photo via The U.S. National Archives

Charlie Glickman points to this graph to illustrate how the fight over porn needs to get more specific (enlarged image here). The data is from a 2000 article in the Review of Sex Research, where researchers examined the link between porn consumption and sexual aggression. The results: For men determined to have a low risk of sexual aggression, frequent use of pornography was not correlated with higher rates of actual aggression. But for men determined to already have a high risk of sexual aggression, frequent porn use was correlated with an increase in acting out that aggression.

Glickman's take: "the thing that I find so interesting about this study is that it shows a possible reason why some people say that porn is harmless and others say that it causes real harm. Different people have different experiences, so of course, porn has different effects on different people." [Via Kink on Tap].

Hip-hop moguls have a long tradition of multitasking: Over the years, rappers have doubled as actors, restaurateurs, clothing designers, videographers, and snack promoters. But local rapper Imani the Misfit is pretty sure he's charting new territory, as far as side-projects go: He bills himself as “Maryland’s First Bisexual Porn Star Rapper.”

Sure, there are bisexual rappers—Nicki Minaj comes to mind. There are porn star rappers—porn performer Pinky recently entered the rap game. There could even be another bisexual porn star rapper somewhere out there. But Imani thinks he's the first to accomplish the feat in the state of Maryland. "It's basically a title I've never heard anyone claim before," Imani says. "I don't know if I am the world’s first, but I wouldn’t doubt it." And even if he were, he'd still hold on to the local flavor. "I want people to know that I’m from Maryland," he says. "It’s just kind of a rapper’s thing to want to put your area on the map."

Of all of Imani's qualifications, the "rapper" part was the first to emerge. "I was a musician first," Imani says. Growing up in Maryland and then New Jersey, he learned drums, keyboard, and vocals in his church's gospel choir. He started rapping at age 13, but focused on playing keyboards in friends' go-go bands before he starting rapping in earnest in 2004. Last Friday, Imani released his latest single, "My Definition of a Drug," on Amazon and iTunes; he's still at work on his upcoming full-length effort, "The Gold Pill."

After coming out two years ago, Imani started thinking of himself as a "bisexual rapper," he says. "But then I realized that just saying 'bisexual rapper' didn’t fully describe what I do. I also pose for nude erotic art. And I think that the combination of me being a musician and being in porn, it adds to the sensation of it all. It's a unique combination."

The "porn star" part is still in development. Imani began posing nude within the past year—including shoots with local photographer Sean Dibble, for whom he's posed naked and dripping in blood. He's yet to get into the video market. "In Maryland, the porn industry is mostly guys starting up a porn company and looking for girls," says Imani. "I've had a few opportunities to do movies, but every time an opportunity comes up, something stops it from happening," he says. "I'm starting to wonder if there’s like some spiritual force trying to stop me from doing a movie."

There are more immediate forces attempting to stop Imani from speaking out about his sexuality. "Especially in hip-hop, that's something that you don’t say," says Imani. "I’ve heard rumors of people being on the down low, but they're not going to say it because in hip-hop, being bisexual is like the last thing that you want to be," he says.

Imani says he's received death threats over his sexual orientation. He's also received letters from fans thanking him for helping them come to terms with their sexuality.  "There is a fascination that some people have. I’m kind of one-of-a-kind. I say a lot of things that will alienate me, but those things also make me special in other people’s eyes. And a lot of people who are bisexual or gay will support me just [because I'm] open about it."

There's only one demographic he's not representing: "My age is something I don’t really like to talk about," he says.

* This weekend, kick off the D.C. Capital Pride festivities with a leather lesson:

''People might think this is corny or not as serious, but providing an educational day on safe play is primary to the weekend as well,'' says Michael Sessa, founder of the event and president of The Center. ''A lot of people think it's funny, cool or kinky to be in the leather community, but they don't know what the hell they're doing, and that can be dangerous."

* Via Violet Blue: Finally, all your erotic pretentious bicycling fantasies have come true: It's fixed-gear porn.

* I love Lynsey G.'s McSweeney's column, "The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Reviewer." Recently:

But ah, there's the rub, that one little word: good. Alas, despite the prettiness of the sex being had by porn "lesbians," very little of it looks remotely good to me. As a woman who knows what she wants from sex, it's easy for me to tell that in most of these scenes, the so-called "lesbians" are not feeling very good at all. Because they're doing it all wrong! For instance: a little pat down there with one finger wouldn't get much of a reaction from the women I know, yet these ladies seem to need little else to get them going. Sucking on a fake phallus, as these women so eagerly do in most scenes, would likewise not do much to get most lesbians going: the only exciting thing about giving head (to a man or a woman) is the other person's response to it—the knowledge that you're turning that person on. The physical act of fellating is pretty neutral. But these girls sucking on a glass dildo and moaning in ecstasy? No. It makes me roll my eyes and fast forward because it's neither convincing nor arousing.

* Nerve trolls for sex advice from fans of professional wrestling:

What wrestling moves could you bring into the bedroom?

The Lou Thesz press — which, according to Mick Foley, could just as well be called the "dick to the face" — is a candidate, but you probably have to make sure it's okay before you bust that one out. Although wrestling often hilariously resembles intercourse, most of the moves are either mundane or "don't try this at home."

* Brightest Young Things'  high-school interns write about their proms. Prom update, for those juuuust a few years out of high school: They still have chocolate fountains there, but now the limos are stretch hummer. Kids these days.

Photo via boothekolt, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

FUK!T, a D.C.-based initiative that supports condom use among gay men, has produced a spoof of old-school sex-ed films in an effort to promote modern safe-sex practices—just in time for D.C.'s Capital Pride. Delivering the message are porn stars Brent Corrigan and Matthew Rush, who administer advice on condoms and lubes, deliver campy bon mots, and do their best coach-and-student routine as the camera lingers on Corrigan's penis (in this version, censored with a yellow smiley face). FUK!T—short for "fuck kit"—began distributing packages of condoms with lube at clubs and other businesses around D.C. after staggering reports of D.C.'s HIV epidemic were released last year. An uncensored version of "Brent's Oral Exam"—along with plenty more explicit penis-in-condom shots—are available on the organization's website.

Have you always wanted your very own pornographic video store, located in a strip-mall off the highway and marked only as "VIDEO"? How about if that porn store came with a fridge? From the Craigslist ad:

Adult video store 1200 Sq Ft with huge inventory, around 15000 movies in best condition. This store stay in best location and almost 15 years. A lot of parking space.

Income $106000

Net Incone $50000

. . . I sale this store because I must move to New York as son as posible.

The store, located at 11108 Lee Hwy in Fairfax, Va., is listed as "Goatar Inc." The owner is asking for $39,000—"or we can talk about it." Also available: Your very own porn fridge.  "Plus I have in my store two speakers and amplifier. Plus refrigerator. Call me if you interesting."

Daniel Nardicio has served as the director of marketing for Playgirl magazine since August of 2009. Since then, Nardicio has introduced three crucial developments to the long-time beefcake mag: (a) Acknowledgment of the magazine's gay readership; (b) a nude Levi Johnston; and (c) "The Shaggin' Wagon" (above).

Yesterday, Nardicio circled his magenta, man-centric wagon outside of the Georgetown University campus in search of hunks for the magazine's annual "Campus Hunks" issue. I spoke with Nardicio over the phone about the strength of D.C.'s hunks, the lingering perviness of  driving a man van, and straight dude recruiting, post-Levi:

SEXIST: How was Georgetown? Did you meet any hunks?

Daniel Nardicio: Tons! The great thing about the van is—once we decided to wrap the van, we thought it would be really funny to do a college tour and drive it on to all these campuses. What I’m learning from this now is that I don’t even have to leave the van. I thought I’d have to get out and walk around and humiliate myself, but I don't. People will just come up to the van and ask us things. We're giving away t-shirts, posters, and we have some of the last Levi Johnston issues in the back. So it’s been great. We have a lot of guys coming up, and some girls coming up too, telling us they want to see their boyfriends in Playgirl. It's very progressive.

Do you think straight guys are turned off by it?

DN: No! I have to say, I love the South, because contrary to what people think, people are so friendly. They're really respectful. Sure, some people walk past the van and look down or look away. Most people—like over at Georgetown yesterday and at Rutgers—are coming over to pull their shirt off to show their abs. I get a lot of cat-calling in the van. Sometimes I think the guys wish a hot girl were driving it—I kind of wish it was, too! I kind of wish it wasn’t me sometimes! But they’ve been great. The main reaction I get from straight guys is, "My buddy would love to be in this," or, "Do you think I’m hot enough to be in Playgirl?"

So, were any of them hot enough?

DN: Oh my god. Yeah. I have to say, Georgetown is beautiful . . . We drove around around the area and walked around the campus itself, and people were really friendly, and there were a lot of beautiful guys.

Do you think you have to advertise the magazine differently for straight women and gay men?

DN: I was handed a great gift with Playgirl, because it appeals to both straight women and gay men. So straight men feel more comfortable with it—it's not like I'm driving up in a van for Honcho or Inches magazine. If I did that, I'd get things thrown at me. I consider Playgirl to be the classic American brand. It comes out of a feminist background from the 1970's, and so there's a lot of goodwill toward it. So I'm just really trying to find the most interesting, attractive guys for the magazine and promote it that way.

When I came onto the magazine, Playgirl wasn't really acknowledging its male readership. I succeeded in getting rid of the "Entertainment For Women" byline—it was doing a disservice to the gay readers. Now, we're the most open to both. Playgirl was the first magazine to be doing this male erotica in the mainstream, and now, we're embracing our gay guys, straight women, and smattering of straight guys that buy the magazine—believe me, there are a few of those. And we’re very proud of the fact we really put a dent in Sarah Palin’s reputation. We're very, very proud of that.

So do you think Playgirl is in this sweet spot where it's insulated from criticism both by feminists and by homophobes?

DN: You know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Women were objectified for so long, and now straight men are being objectified. It's a great position to be in. I'll drive my van down the street and yell at construction workers—"Hey! Show me your dick!" I do this for fun, and to let them know what it feels like to be cat-called. Of course they yell things at me, but let’s face it—it’s hilarious to turn the tables on this. But the van is so in-your-face—I don’t want to say it's so "gay," because it’s not necessarily "gay"—it's just in-your-face male sexuality. There's a brilliance to it in a weird way, because it's all about beefcake men, and it's in a position where people are really forced to acknowledge that. So it's fun to watch their reactions.

Unlike the construction workers, though, it seems like some of the straight guys are really into this.

DN: Oh my god, yeah. It's great! At first, I was a little scared going into Rutgers yesterday. I felt like Chris Hanson was going to jump out, like To Catch a Predator. I felt very pervy for a few minutes. But the great thing is that the reputation of the magazine isn’t really hardcore, and guys seem to respond to it really well. The greatest response guys have for me is, "Do I measure up?" Of course, I’ll still get called "faggot" now and again, but that's something you learn to live with when you drive a magenta van. It's like being in a pride parade 24-7.

Do you think gay men particularly like seeing straight guys in the magazine?

Yes. As a gay man, I think there’s something about the power of turning the tables. Growing up, a lot of us were bullied. I know I was bullied by straight guys in high school for being gay. And I think there’s something to be said for straight guys, you know, stripping down for us. Even with Levi, you know, there was that satisfying elment of the straight cocky stud from Alaska taking off his clothes. Levi is now actually amazingly, amazingly gay friendly. He's even pro-marriage.

Where are you going next?

Tonight I'm headed to Chapel Hill. We're going to work frat row, driving around the frat bars. I'm a little nervous about what the reception is going to be like in Chapel Hill. Hopefully you won't hear any news of my car being torched. . . . But I'm meeting some people I know, and they told me that they recruited a couple of really cute girls to help us out. So that will help. I think we've got three girls and a couple of gay guys to work frat row with me.

Interview has been condensed.

This year, the University of Mary Washington's student newspaper, The Bullet, crowned a new sex columnist for its long-running sex column, "Sexclamations." Since taking the helm, 19-year-old freshman Erin Hill has tackled such campus-ready topics as female masturbation, representation in pornography, and pubic hair choices (an area of particular Sexist interest).

Over the past couple of months, Hill has heard from the haters ("Can you tell me how talking about masturbating is 'progress' in female journalism?"), lovers ("THIS ROCKS SO MUCH"), and one student who wrote in opposing Hill's column because her grandmother read it one time and became overwhelmed by the column's impolite subject matter. Seriously.

The detractor, Anne Elder, wrote:

My grandmother is an avid reader of the Bullet.

She reads the online edition every Thursday, looking forward to reading the happenings of her alma mater.

A few weeks ago, however, she received quite a shock when she tuned in.  She saw the first column of the new Sexclamations.

Needless to say, my inbox had an e-mail waiting from her regarding the column.

Her overall opinion was that it was “tasteless” and “some things are best kept under wraps and are more interesting if shared with select folks.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Elder went on to note that "Sex is an incredibly intimate expression of love, and that’s how it should stay," that "No one wants to know how many times a day you masturbate, how many people you’ve had sex with or what your favorite positions are," and that "If you take the passion out of sex and degrade it by putting it in print, it becomes less of an act of love and more like watching promiscuous college students get it on."

Putting aside the obvious question of why a grandmother is reading a publication for college kids and becoming offended that the content is not tailored to her sensibilities, I'd like to address Elder's complaint that sex columnists "degrade [sex] by putting it in print." According to this theory, sex isn't inherently bad—but people who admit to doing it are. Fucking is understandable as long as you deny, deny, deny, because talking about sex just about the sluttiest thing a person can do—even sluttier than doing it in the first place. This theory all but guarantees an unhealthy sexual environment. On a campus where you're shamed for opening your mouth about anything sexual, bad shit happens—students will be less likely to verbalize their consent—or lack of consent—with their partners, less likely to feel comfortable reporting a sexual assault if it occurs, and a lot more likely to silently agonize over whether their bodies, sex lives, sexual orientations, and most intimate expressions of love make them bad people.

All reasons why Erin Hill is providing a valuable service to the students of Fredericksburg, Va.'s University of Mary Washington. The proof is in the comments section: No matter what grandma thinks, students are talking about these issues. I asked Hill to talk a little bit about life as a college sex columnist:

Sexist: What sort of response have you gotten from classmates, friends, anonymous commenters, etc. since writing the column?

EH: Face to face with readers and friends, I have received nothing but praise since I became the new writer for Sexclamations. I have had several people tell me that the primary reason they pick up a copy of The Bullet is to read Sexclamations. According to upperclassmen, the column used to be less about sex and more about the relationship aspect of sex. They said that they didn’t enjoy the column in the past because it was not as interesting. Supposedly, previous articles provided commentary on lighter issues, such as the “romance and meaning of holding hands.” Everyone has applauded my efforts to be more raw, real, open, and honest. I try to not to censor myself too much. Sex is a brazen act and I feel my articles should be just as forthright.

Thank goodness I have an awesome editor who fully supports my writing. I managed to use the term “money shot” in a school newspaper- I thought that was a pretty big deal! I didn’t think my editor would allow it (originally, I used the term cumshot), but she did! It is important to remember that I don’t use vulgar language just for the sake of creating shock value, rather I use it to illustrate my point. Sometimes stronger language conveys my message in a better, more realistic fashion.

I suppose the most surprising response was from my mom. My mom fully supports the column, despite the awkwardness of reading about my perspective on porn. Out of all the compliments I receive, the best are from my mom- who simply stated in a facebook message yesterday, “Loved your article! <3”

A lot of college sex columnists use pseudonyms. What are the advantages and challenges of putting your real name out there?

EH: I think putting my name out there shows an unabashed support for women’s reproductive rights and women’s sexuality. I can’t be afraid to talk about topics like masturbation and attach my name to it if I expect and encourage other women to open a dialogue about their sexuality and exploration. I hope that my articles can make people more comfortable and knowledgeable about things related to sexual matters. I would like to lessen the taboo surrounding sexual issues. For that to happen, I must be fully confident, comfortable, and knowledgeable about sexual matters. Attaching my name to what I write is a part of achieving that goal. Perhaps some of my peers may stereotype me as the no boundaries, sex-obsessed girl or the liberal, feminist girl who writes Sexclamations. Hyperbolic labels don’t really bother me that much, as long as I’m able to convey interesting, informative ideas regarding sexual issues through my articles.

Why do you think it's important to write about stuff like representation in porn, female masturbation, and women's health?

EH: I think it is important to write about these things because it is important to talk about them. If my articles can provoke a conversation among a few girls in a college dorm about their sexual experiences, then I will consider my articles to be a success. I think it is important for people, especially young women, to have an open dialogue about sexuality. Because of conservative social norms and a prominent abstinence only message in schools, I think many women are shamed into not fully appreciating and celebrating their bodies. Personally, I don’t think sexual exploration is a bad thing; however, sexually exploring oneself and others can be a poor notion if not done safely. I hope my articles open the door to “sex positive” conversations.

What was your reaction to the letter to the editor which stated that the topics in your column are too vulgar to even be spoken about?

EH: Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. I respect Miss Elder’s comments and can understand why she might feel that way about my column; however, I was disappointed that she made false claims about my articles. She stated that I had written about “how many times a day [I] masturbate, how many people [I’ve] had sex with, or what [my] favorite positions are.” This could not be farther from the truth. In fact, I agree with Anne in that writing about such personal details would be “tasteless.” Perhaps Miss Elder misunderstood my intentions of the articles. My intentions were not to expose details of my sexual life, degrade the meaning of sex, or make crude/vulgar statements. My intentions were to creatively educate, provoke curiosity/inquiry, and encourage sexual conversation- in hopes that people become more comfortable with sex and sexuality. All in all, Miss Elder and I fundamentally disagree. I wish to promote conversation and education about sex while she wishes to keep sex a completely private, intimate institution. I’m glad we each have the freedom to express our differing perspectives in the “Viewpoints” section of The Bullet.

What do you think of the idea of writing a college sex column with the goal of pleasing students' grandmothers?

EH: The Bullet is a paper primarily read by current students and I feel the topics discussed in The Bullet should cater to that readership base. I understand that faculty, parents, and alumni read The Bullet, too. On the other hand, it is important to note that there are plenty of articles other than Sexclamations that are exclusively pertinent to current students. I don’t think it would be tremendously troublesome for the older readers to simply skip articles like Sexclamations. In general, I don’t see a major problem with skipping articles that do not appeal to you. If you don’t like it, don’t read it! It’s an elementary concept. Until I am given restrictions, I hope to continue to write a column with relatable and interesting information regarding sex and sexuality.

Mistresses! Whenever a public figure takes one as a secret lover, Society at Large is obligated to publicly shame this woman for her untoward behavior. But just how much shame shall we pile on a woman accused of having sex with a man who has pledged to only have sex with one other lady? Use this handy guide to determine how much irrational hatred she deserves:

a) if she is a mysterious and beautiful Argentinian mother of two, leak romantic e-mails.

b) if she is a fertile campaign videographer, proceed with light mockery over musical tastes.

c) if she is a cocktail waitress, insinuate that she is actually a sex worker.

d) if she works in a strip club, lose all ability to refer to her as anything other than "stripper."

e) if she is a porn performer, release grainy video stills of her shaking her boobs in front of a fire truck.

f) if she is literally the Devil, insinuate that she is actually a sex worker.

In this week's edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss why mistresses receive the brunt of all our projected self-hatred, wonder why the term "Mistress" has no male counterpart (I nominate "Mrstress"), and respectfully request that Tiger Woods set his Facebook statuses to private.

SADY: Mistresses!

AMANDA: Indeed. I have heard many sordid tales of their existence as of late.

SADY: sometimes, mistresses talk about being mistresses. At other times, they do not talk. In either case, it is fine to talk about them! For they are MISTRESSES, scourge of the "I am married to a cheater" world.

AMANDA: Can we talk for a second about this "mistress" business? Is there a word for the "mister" of a married woman? like a "Mrster"? Or something?

SADY: I prefer the term "Mister Mistress." Which is also the name of my new glam-metal band, in case you were looking for an update on that.

AMANDA: I think that was also a Hulk Hogan movie.

SADY: But really, we know that the appropriate word for "man mistress" is "totally rocking dude."

AMANDA: The only other term I can think of that is dismissive (dismistress!) in the same way is "pool boy."

SADY: Yeah. Basically, the only words we have for dudes who are being cruelly exploited for sex on the side by lady types are class (and often race) based.

AMANDA: Yeah. "Mistresses" (ugh) on the other hand, have to be cornered into this odd cultural Other Wife space, even though they are not married to this guy, and they actually have plenty of their own shit going on as well. They are still defined solely by this relationship.

SADY: Yeah. I mean, we have this strangely romantic Victorian version of the mistress, STILL. It is not just "I hooked up with a dude, he is married, sometimes I make bad decisions in my personal life," it is this strange thing where we still think of them as dissolute Women of Leisure who are sexfully attending to their patron's sexful needs while draped in diamonds which of course are the whole point. And I think, weirdly, though I definitely GET that intimacy and all of that are scary, and the fact that you could love someone and they could love hooking up with other people is really unsettling for just about anyone, our need to drag mistresses into the light and be like, "mistress! Behold ye alle this Creature, captured in thee most Wanton Abandon!" Well, it's people working out personal anxieties, sure. We WANT to hate them because then the people who are cheating on us are clearly choosing people lesser than ourselves. But also: it's a way of deciding which women are all right. A way of deciding what makes a good woman (being cheated on!) and a bad one (being cheated with!) if that makes sense.

AMANDA: Yeah, and I have found that to be a really weird part of the Sanford / Edwards ladies' narratives, where there is an attempt to make some sort of Character Coup out of being cheated on.

SADY: Well, but also, that excerpt from "Game Change," about the affair, went to great lengths to portray Elizabeth Edwards as a screaming, controlling harpy who clearly deserved to be cheated on.

AMANDA: But the thing that really disturbs me when people get to talkin' about cheating, is that we know that about 50 percent of married men and women (and men I think do it at higher rates than women, but not significantly higher) will cheat on their spouses at some point. And so all of this faux outrage tends to worry me, because either these people are just ignoring their own realities, or they are attempting to work out their personal issues by piling their hatred onto these women.

SADY: Right! And it is like: I would prefer people not to cheat on me. I am not a fan of cheating in general. I think it is a thing you should not do. And yet, affairs are such a commonplace part of human life that they form the basis of: much literature, much television, "Mad Men" specifically for like three seasons, many movies, music, and now apparently our salacious news headlines that are going on when also there is a huge recession which I find sort of important. So, when a marriage is found to contain cheating, and everyone panics gets all, "this is the worst thing! The worst thing that could happen! Ever! For marriage is a sacred covenant, united by God's holy tears of joy over the entwined bodies of lovers!" Well: but you know it happens all over, right? People just want to be clear that they are in the OTHER FIFTY PERCENT, maybe. Even right now, I am worrying that people are going to think I am a cheater because I am inappropriately freaked out by mistresses, strangely.

AMANDA: Cheater! Cheater! I think it's that people have always wanted to hold their public figures and role models to a higher standard than themselves, and that makes sense to me. But they also, now, want to bring them down to our level. Which is really easy! Because they have never been morally superior to us in the first place, and the news of their private lives has just been more strictly controlled. I think at some point we are going to have to just stop giving a shit, I guess? Because it is getting boring, to me. I don't think our 24-hour news cycle can endure the weight of all the revelations of cheating that will occur among the huge number of suddenly newsworthy people we're reporting on now. For example: I recently read a very large-fonted Huffington Post headling about Matthew Fox possibly cheating on his wife with a "stripper" (the most reviled form of Mistress!) How long can people keep clicking on that? Tell me it's not forever.

SADY: God. Okay, can we talk about this? Sex worker mistresses? One of Tiger Woods' mistresses was apparently a porn performer, and there is a lawsuit going on have been vague threats of a lawsuit which I don't clearly understand, but which has to do with her quitting porn for Tiger, and thinking she was his only girlfriend, and etc.

AMANDA: (I also don't understand the legal precedent here).

SADY: I think it is lost income? Because she stopped working due to their relationship? It does seem like a frivolous and fairly transparently mercenary deal, from all I can understand. And taking a dude to court over your failed relationship is a bit over-the-top. But also, people are just shocked, SHOCKED AND APPALLED, that a person who made PORNOGRAPHY could DARE to express hurt in public! Like: it is that, not the nature of the debate here, that is getting some I think unfair focus.

AMANDA: It ... has feelings?

SADY: She made PORNOGRAPHY Amanda! I do not understand it! I thought the pornography cameras stole your soul!

AMANDA: That is the rumor.

SADY: Like: that's the thing. Mistresses are always slutty, trashy, tacky, la la la. I think it is bad form to date a married dude, not least because what is the best-case scenario for YOU, Mistress, in this relationship? Dating a dude who hurts ladies' feelings? No. But when they are also sex workers—and there is always, if not a specifically Matthew-Fox-centric version of this rumor, a version of this rumor floating around— then they are basically the devil. Women get to be like, "and also, my husband cheated on me, and it was with Satan."

AMANDA: I think that the intensified shaming of the porn actress goes back to the idea of the Mistress as well being this woman who is committed to the married man, even though he is married. Tiger Woods has like a million "Mistresses" at this point, who are really just women he's seen at some point or another, and who were obviously not under any obligation to only have sex with Tiger Woods. But we are somehow encouraged to see them that way, because if you have sex with a married man, the only way to come out looking a tiny bit better in the public eye is if you were just so totally and hopelessly in love with him that you were sexually committed only to him, and all 12 of you thought he was the real deal, or whatever. Which is gross. Tiger Woods himself actually did get a little sensitive about his "Mistresses" seeing other dudes, from the literature I've read on the topic. So even Tiger couldn’t find a reasonable perspective on cheating with someone he was cheating on his wife with.

SADY: Right. Some mistresses get to be like, "well, but my heart and feelings were involved." And it helps if we can see them as not-at-all sexual outside of this relationship. But when a lady clearly engages in sexual activity elsewhere, people are like, "wait a minute! This is about FUCKING, isn't it? Gross!"

AMANDA: Right. Because if you're a porn star ... well, then, many other dudes who are not Tiger Woods have seen you, like, naked and stuff! Bad mistress! We grade Mistresses now.

SADY: Heart and feelings involved: A+

He really was getting divorced though and now also you have his baby: B+

Clearly having had sex with people not your Mistressifier: F. For Failure.

AMANDA: Being married to a guy who cheats on you with a woman who does porn: Priceless, or something.

SADY: Yeah. I feel for that lady. TO THE MAX. In conclusion, can we all just agree that sometimes DUDES who cheat are really the ones who Destroyed This Marriage, though?

AMANDA: Sure, but can we also agree that unless the dude in question is like a noted marriage advocate or some shit, I don't particularly want to see him stand on a podium and cry about it? Just go deal with your own business.

SADY: Yeah. Seriously. We are not Facebook friends, your Relationship Status Updates are not really my personal concern. TIGER WOODS IS IT'S COMPLICATED.

Image via Wikipedia Commons

Today, Tucker Carlson launched The Daily Caller, a Web site that has been hailed as the conservative answer to the Huffington Post. Given my peculiar obsessions with Arianna Huffington's left-leaning political tabloid, I had but one question for Carlson: Will there be nipples?

Last June, I noted the Huffington Post's regular publication of "nipple slips," or the accidentally bared nipples of major and minor celebrities. I argued that the promotion of these red-carpet snafus encourages readers to objectify women's bodies, while denying those women the agency to control their own nipple exposure—and that these non-consensual erotic displays compromised the Huffington Post's ostensibly progressive bent. (Recall this intensely zoomed-in image of the outer reaches of Beyonce's areola to reveal the depths of HuffPo's obsession with accidental nipples).

When pressed on what it all means, editor Arianna Huffington insisted that a nipple slip is divorced from political ideology: "As Freud said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'—and a nipple slip is just a nipple slip." (Translation: Sometimes a cigar does not mean a "penis," but sometimes a "woman's nipple" does mean a "woman's nipple," and that means lot of page-views).

Huffington's armchair psychoanalysis failed to shed any light on the matter: How is the objectification of women justified by political progressives? With the launch of Carlson's Caller, I was presented with a rare opportunity to see how a right-leaning Web site might deal with women's boobs peeking out of their dresses. Would it lean toward the side of abstinence-informed modesty? Would it tend toward boy's-club objectification? Or would it just publish, like, real news?

I e-mailed Carlson to ask him about his site's political ideology, and whether it would embrace nipples. Carlson's response: "I can't promise the site will be areola-free—in my experience these things are hard to predict—but even at this late stage we haven't settled on a firm nipple policy," he wrote.

So far, the Daily Caller has yet to promote images of any accidentally naked celebrities on the Web. A perusal of the Daily Caller's "Entertainment" page reveals some tabloid fare ("Lohan in paparazzi incident...again"), and some sexy news ("Avatar was supposed to have a sex scene"), but, alas, no nipples:

Yet.

Still looking for that sexy Halloween costume? If you've been dreaming of dressing as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, except naked and horny for other high-profile female politicians, you are so in luck!

Hustler has produced a promotional cardboard mask in the likeness of Lisa Ann, the adult film star who portrayed everyone's favorite VILF in the Hustler-produced picture "Who's Nailin' Paylin?" (featuring porny Hilary Clinton and porny Condoleezza Rice) and its spell-checked follow-up, "You're Nailin' Palin: Interactive!" (co-starring porny Carrie Prejean).

Ladies, I'd really love to tell you to strap on Hustler's "Parody Mask of Lisa Ann" this Halloween. But according to the instructions on the back, the mask is actually produced for men to slap on to you. Presumably in the boudoir. It reads:

PLACE ON FACE OF:

• Wife
• Girlfriend
• Mistress
• Significant Other

Doesn't every man deserve to pretend to fuck a dead-eyed porn star who is pretending to be an absurd Republican politician? Just shut up and take the mask, Mistress.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a law banning video depictions of animal cruelty. The law was party inspired by the sensationalized "crush porn" craze. In crush porn, women stomp on small animals, in bare feet or in heels, in order for crush porn fetishists to get off.

Crushing puppies and kitties to death in the name of sexual arousal obviously ain't legal. The question posed to the Court was whether disseminating video evidence of these crimes constituted a crime in itself—even if the evidence was being used to educate people not to hurt animals.

The Supreme Court will likely overturn the ban on "crush porn" and other filmed animal cruelties. I support upholding the First Amendment position on this one, but I'd rather I had never, ever become aware of the fact that there are people out there who actually get off on killing widdle aminals beneath their scary feets.

Luckily, a completely safe, totally adorable—and porn-inspired!—kitty video has surfaced to wash all those crush-porn thoughts away. It's called "3 Cats, 1 Steak," and I've watched it twice already. Enjoy.

"What's up guys?" writes the "very masculine" bisexual white male, before getting down to business:

"[I'm] looking for other masculine buds out there who wear jockstraps," this Baltimore Craigslist poster writes (warning: possibly NSFW photos of dudes posing in jockstraps). The poster, who runs an amateur jockstrap photo blog, is looking for any guy "into showing-off and taking pics in their jocks," including:

* "Ex HS/college jocks"

* "military jocks"

* "guys who get jocked up for a weekend softball game or a trip to the gym"

* "lean/muscular/beefy" jocks

* "straight/bi/gay" jocks

* "any age" jock

* "doesn't really matter, just look good in your jockstrap" jocks.

I have noted the parallels between the term "jock" (a person) and "jockstrap" (an accessory for that person's genitalia) before. Perhaps the association has caused this blog administrator to conflate "guys who wear jockstraps" with "guys into wearing jockstraps" here. Because if self-identifying as a "high school jock" actually signals one's interest in strapping on a jock for some Internet photography dude, I wildly misunderstood the social dynamics at my high school. Let's just call jockstrap porn jockstrap porn, shall we? This amateur jockstrap pornographer ain't looking for guys who like to jock up for a weekend softball game. He's looking for jocks willing to jock up for him.

Recently, the problem of consent arose in two porn-inspired real-life incidents. In one, a teenage girl claims she was coerced into having drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm. In another, a teenage girl apparently consented to drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm, then instantly regretted it. Scenarios where four men have sex with one woman carry obvious challenges for establishing consent. Each sex partner must establish consent with every other partner. Each sex partner must be able to listen to every other partner to establish that each new sex act is OK. And each sex partner must realize that a group power dynamic can be a seriously coercive sexual environment for everyone involved, and discuss the act accordingly.

I don't blame porn for these incidents, but I do think that if enthusiastic, informed, and sober consent were featured in pornography to the extent that gang-bangs are, it might help teenagers clear up consent issues before sex begins—not in the press, through the student judicial process, or in the courtroom.

But how do we make consent porn-ready? Let's start at the beginning: Punny consent porn titles! Here are mine:

ID Check XVIII: Girls Your Own Age

The Mile High Club: Consent From Above

Consenting Adults II: Double Checking

Doggy Style: Consensual Seduction

Safe Word III: When "No" Doesn't Have to Mean "No"

Totally and Completely Legal

Night of Refusal: No Anal Sex This Time, But Maybe Next Week

Sex, Extended Consultation Over Each Party's Feelings, and Videotape

Backseat Bangin': The Honda Accord

Suggestions?

I was pleased to read Jessica Wakeman's interview with Diablo Cody this morning, because it features Hollywood's most hated woman talking about Hollywood's other most hated woman—Megan Fox. The talking, incidentally, is a major source of the Cody-Fox hate fest. People hate Diablo Cody for talking about being an ex-stripper (above), a big part of her unlikely success story; people hate Megan Fox for talking about being a hot girl in movies. Cody has been talking a lot lately to promote her latest film, Jennifer's Body, which stars Fox as a hot high school girl who eats boys. Let the hate-fest begin.

How have Cody and Fox become so successful while inspiring such vitriol from the general population? Because both have found that success by acting like objects, and objects aren't supposed to talk about being objects (they're not supposed to win Oscars, either).

Men tolerate women who take off their clothes for money (or in Fox's case, almost all of her clothes), because men like to watch naked ladies. Feminists tolerate women who take off their clothes for money because they know that the patriarchy encourages women to make a living objectifying themselves for men. But neither group really likes to hear women talk about taking off their clothes for money. Why? Because men don't like their objects to be people, and feminists don't like men's objects to be feminists. Naked women who can speak for themselves don't help dudes get an erection. But they also don't help feminists argue that the lives of naked women are being destroyed by the men who like lookin' at 'em.

Granted, Cody generally catches the hate of the objectifiers, while Fox courts hatred from feminists. But it's the same shit: Cody rose above her stripper past to win a trophy, while Fox is still working as a hot girl. Neither women ought to be considered better fit to talk about what that's like.

Which is exactly why it's interesting to hear people like Diablo Cody and Megan Fox run their mouths. One, because we never hear enough from the stripper perspective, the professional hot-girl perspective, the sex-worker perspective, or the porn-star perspective (the insanity of the Fox/Cody backlash is a perfect example of why that's the case). And two, because those are exactly the women that feminism intends to represent—those that have been objectified for the benefit of men. Of course, Megan Fox doesn't speak for every hot girl and Diablo Cody doesn't speak for every ex-stripper, just as Sasha Grey doesn't speak for every female in the porn industry. But it's a hell of a lot better than people who aren't strippers, sex workers, and professional hot girls insisting on speaking for them. We may not always like (or understand) what they have to say. But when these women talk, the worst thing we can do is tell them to keep their traps shut. After all, both Cody and Fox identify as feminists, even though we tend not do them any favors. Since we know that they don't speak for all feminists, everywhere, what are we so worried about?

That being said! Here's Cody on feminism:

K, here’s a problem that is holding back feminism and you see it on the blogs. We all hold each other up to an incredibly high standard in a way that men do not. Let’s say a woman directs a movie that’s not very good—everybody piles up on her. It’s, like, “No! You’re representing us! It has to be perfect!” And that’s not how it works! Women should be allowed to make bad movies. Good movies. Porno movies. Terrible made-for-TV movies. Women just need to be out there directing as many movies as men do. We don’t all have to be the model woman—what we need is to be more visible. We really, really are tough on each other.

And Cody on Megan Fox:

She really makes people angry! Girls hate her, don’t they? . . . I appreciate [her sense of humor]. I do not know her very well. Even having worked with her to this extent, I don’t know her very well because she’s very private and mysterious. But I’ve [heard] these things come out of her mouth. I’ve been present for some of these interviews and she is totally fearless. What she is saying is completely genuine. It is not a front. I think people think she’s trying to create some kind of image for herself that she’s not, but she’s a really, truly eccentric person. . . . I don’t think people know how to process her at all. I think it’s one of those things where she does not fit the mold in any way and it freaks people out!

Listen up, teens: Guess what happens when you get teen pregnant, you're not allowed to have a smushmortion, and you can't figure out how to secretly swap your fetus into your mother's aging but willing womb. Umm . . . you get rewarded with an eccentric celebrity handler and sexy undies shots in Vanity Fair? Oh ho no, honey, that's what's happens to the dude. What happens to you is you get to hold the dang thing throughout a couple of tortured appearances on a crazy middle-aged lady's FOX News program, and then everyone makes fun of you for being a hypocrite because GOD, YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER EVEN HAD SEX. And then you have to raise it.

Did I mention your babby's daddy got to do Tyra?

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown: Why Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I think that's kind of fucked up, actually? BONUS: what to expect next in the SARAH PALYN SNOMOBLOWJOB TODD PALYN BAREBACK LEVI JOHNSON porn saga of the Palin family story, after the jump.

AMANDA: Hi!

SADY: WHY HELLO. are you ready to discuss THE TERRIBLE REVELATIONS OF LEVI JOHNSTON???? because there are a few, apparently.

AMANDA: Yeah. Apparently Sarah Palin attempted to engineer the EXACT SAME LEFT-WING BABY-SWITCHING CONSPIRACY that liberal bloggers speculated about after photos of pregnant Bristol surfaced during the campaign.

SADY: ha ha, yes. but the version of Sarah Palin in this article is capable of all trickery.

AMANDA: but not of cooking.

SADY: yes. it's the intimate revelations of terribleness that are really special. she apparently often walked in on Levi and Tripp (?) and tried to trade him for Trig (??) saying, "I don't want the retarded baby — I want the other one." did you get a chance to read the full article?

AMANDA: No! That's fucking insane! I just watched a video of Levi Johnston posing in men's formalwear. I think I missed the good stuff.

SADY: well: one gets the sense that mr. johnston may be, let us say, playing up the anti-palinry a bit. it is a really, really anti-palin article. also, there's some thing in there with meghan mccain throwing a fit because no-one will do her hair, which her rep calls a "naive mischaracterization." NO-ONE COMES OFF WELL, i am telling you. only LEVI JOHNSTON, sole bastion of integrity among the corrupt palin clan. which: i kind of doubt it. but speaking of poses, you may soon have the opportunity to see levi himself in his underthings!

AMANDA: Yes, but at the same time, I think that Levi Johnston may be the only person who really gets it. First of all, Levi Johnston is hot. Like Sarah Palin

SADY: Ah, true. They have so much in common! Like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, really. But with more snowmobiling involved.

AMANDA: yeah, but Levi Johnston is willing to settle for that. By which I mean hot photo-shoots and tabloid-y tell alls, and a personal handler named Tank. And from my perspective, that's a pretty good life!

SADY: Right? There was Trip and Trig and Tank... lots of T-names. I'm surprised he can keep them all straight. I can't, really.

AMANDA: yeah. but the point is, he's not trying to ruin the lives of a whole country of humans! i know: low standard

SADY: it's true, it's true! Sarah Palin does set an imposing standard for any young douchebucket. like, i guess i'm fine with the whole self-serving tabloid expose thingy as long as he's not trying to make Jurassic Park illegal for promoting evolution. or something.

AMANDA: yeah. Also, if he keeps along this path, my election season prediction of him becoming a porn performer may come true!

SADY: ah, so now we see what this is about. your GAMBLING ADDICTION. i plan to tell all to vanity fair.

AMANDA: yeah. I wonder how easy it is, though, just to make up an absurd lie about sarah palin's home life? Because at this point, i think people will really believe anything, they hate her so much. still, I wonder: could any mind have invented the "I don't want the retarded baby" story?

SADY: it's true! that is kind of unmatchable, all things considered. i automatically distrust anyone who tells these kinds of "and then I stood around and was awesome and watched everyone else in the world suck" stories. but, on the other hand, the idea that sarah palin, at home, "would literally say things that did not make any sense." that is sensical.

AMANDA: I don’t know. I can’t hate him. he doesn't seem like a liar to me, and any overblown statements i just have to attribute to him enduring media scrutiny for having the grandson of a famous crazy lady while in high school. i didn't have to endure any of that shit in high school, and i was still kinda bratty

SADY: yeah, exactly. he does, all things told, come across as a regular dumb dude that you'd maybe make out with in high school. who is maybe still a little bitter that sarah palin made him cut off his mullet (the mullet plays a crucial role!) and threatened to spray-tan him.

AMANDA: dude, NO

SADY: i don't MIND levi johnston so much as i mind the media creation of "Levi Johnston: Totally Admirable Guy! Who is Cute! And Also Sexy!" like, one thing i have learned from the levi johnston thing, as a whole, is that if you accidentally get someone pregnant in high school you can end up a sex symbol. and if you accidentally GET pregnant in high school, you end up a tragedy.

AMANDA: bummer. you're totally right. imagine a bristol palin interview treatment that was super fun and sexy like this one!

SADY: I KNOWWWWWWWW.

AMANDA: i think the closest bristol could get to that would be doing an US Weekly How I Got My Body Back.

SADY: and yet? i think if one could give bristol a year or two and get her away from the whole family dynamic? she would be a far better storyteller. SHE WAS FORCED TO MARRY THE GENTLEMAN WHO STOLE HER VIRTUE. AS IN YE OLDEN DAYS. if you want dirt, that lady is the one to get dirt from. should she ever be in a position to reveal it.

AMANDA: and her options were: have the baby, or have the baby and have your mom steal your baby. although i would bet that bristol and levi's porn performance options are roughly equal.

SADY: um, yeah. i'm kind of surprised that there's no bristol "paylin" porn on the market already. maybe they're waiting until they can get levi?

AMANDA: oh man—mind went slightly insane imagining all the creepy options available. "trig palin isn't the only thing sarah wanted to trade"

SADY: you know. every now and again i realize what life would be like if i had no scruples. and i imagine myself rolling around on a bed of pure gold with a mattress stuffed with $1,000 bills.

AMANDA: and a handler named Tank!

SADY: and all i would have to do is to invent some scenario whereby levi "johnson" and todd "paylin" bond – WITH TANK, TANK'S NAME COULD STAY – over snowmobiles and enthusiastic outdoor sexual escapades.

AMANDA: what does it say about society that one political family's story translates so easily to pornographic storylines?

SADY: power corrupts. and power within a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere where the kids have nothing to do but make out to conserve their bodily heat and their mom is better suited to image-making than rational thought corrupts absolutely. or something.

Aww, I miss the '80s, when the media pumped a veritable sea of licentiousness into American ears through the radio waves instead of this half-assed T-Pain shit. Also: He's talking about Prince, right?

"Through another picture series I want to take a view on the more sexy side of the pageboy," wrote Hair Porn Dude, as the tone switched from style advice to sexy time. "As this WWW pages do and will not contain any nudity, the pictures do not show it, but you can imagine where they came from. "

He then goes on to say that if you cut your hair into a bob, you will likely be associated with prostitution (it's a good thing): "There are so many erotic aspects of this haircut—a lot of men love it and some women already know that. The professionals seem to know even better than the usual ones—they know how to attract and they dare to look that way, where so many others are still too afraid to try. (don't you also associate a prostitute with a pageboy cut, and don`t many films show one with that haircut?)"

What's creepier: the smiley emoticon, or the sorting of women into"prostitutes" and "usual ones"? But on to the sexy photos:

"Isn't she lovely?" hair porn dude opines. "She's called Joanne Guest, and she's a famous model—I know why."

Pssst: Here's why:

Hair Porn Dude, it seems, ain't the only one crushing on the erotic bob. The men who lurk on the "Bob Haircut Message Board" are just waiting for a bobbed girl to  join them in their private MSN chat-rooms (send them your pics!).

Back in 2006, bob wearer Claire fell into their midst. Claire wanted to talk about bobs:

I'm a girl from Holland and I am a really bob lover. I like to talk with other girls/boys about this haircut. If you also like this, we can shear our intrest!

And Tom wanted to talk about bobs, privately:

Hi Claire, i'm Tom from France. Have u got msn ? we can speak together about bob haircuts ... & share our pics ...

Claire edged the conversation back toward salon-friendly:

Hi Tom. Sorry I don't have msn. How nice that a man like the bob haircut. 10 Years ago, I was a girls with long hair. Than I moved and decide that is was time for a makeover. That was the beginning of my love for the bob. Now 10 years later I still have a bob, and i still love it! I try to convince other girls to cut a bob and 2 colleaques did it, they look fantastic. So the wirld looks much better!

But by that point, the fetish could not be tamed. Tom replied:

Lol very good ...!!! and have you got any pics of your own bob ?  for me i love it since a few years & i don't know why but i find this cut very sexy. it makes the women so beautiful and so "fatal"...  My e-mail is Halflight@hotmail.fr if u want to have this discussion just between us!

conway29 offered up his resources:

Hi clare, i like the bob cut too. I have a vast amount of bob cut pics on my hard drive, would love to share pics with u if u want.

Dave S. got explicit:

Hi Claire! I don't think it is difficult to find men who like bobs.... for me its a very special thing and definitely the most erotic haircut... my girlfriend often says, that for me it seems to be some kind of fetish :-) Feel free to contact me, i would like to chat with a girl that loves bobs! my addy: mercer41hotmail.com. Cheers!

Mark joined in:

he Claire, i'm Mark and i live just west of London. I've been a huge fan of the bob for ages now and would love to know what women like about it. e-mail me at marktaylor843yahoo.co.uk—it would be great to chat to someone about bobs!

Newton piled on:

Hello bob lovers. I am male and therefore do not have this haircut but if I was a girl I would because I totally love it. The Pageboy is my favourite. I would like to make friends with other bob lovers (male or female). My address is neilcox85@yahoo.com.

And onL

Hi Claire.  Would you you not like to make friends with me Newton?  I am a true bob lover. I hope to hear soon.

When Claire returned, she didn't have a bob anymore:

Hi everybody. I am happy that so many man like the bob. In the meantime my hair is something longer now, but I like to change, jaw line, shoulder, shaven nape, it doesn't matter!

Newton was undeterred:

Hi Claire it's me Newton again.  Did you want to be friends with me? I am a huge bob lover. My E-Mail address is neilcox85yahoo.com as my real name is Neil Cox. I hope to hear soon.

And finally, a guy showed up who Claire might actually be interested in speaking with:

hi claire i am david from england. i used to have long hair but recently i got my girlfriend to cut my hair into a bob and i love it. she undercut my hairline at the back and buzzed my neck. it feels wonderful. it just goes into a ponytail for work but when i come home i cant wait to show off my bob.i should of had the chop years ago !!! i would like to see more men bobbing their hair.love and bobs x

But by then, she was already gone.

But Wakeman errs in her either/or assumption about the sex act: that facials are either grounded in mutual respect, and elicit pleasure, or are grounded in degradation, and elicit humiliation. In fact, facials can imply all of these things, though we rarely analyze it all in the moment. Plenty of sex acts made popular in mainstream pornography, like facials, are based on achieving male pleasure. Under this model, the female's pleasure is derived by successfully pleasing the male—and in the process, allowing herself to be degraded. As Amanda Marcotte writes, "our culture constructs sex as something women do for men, and men do for fun." That model of sexuality is undoubtedly objectifying for women. But it nevertheless—voilà!—conjures up an idea of "pleasure" for both sex partners.

Interestingly, Wakeman concedes that the facial is an act loaded with objectification and subjugation—in porn. When this act is removed from the context of pornography and placed into the bedroom of a Man and Woman Who Love Each Other Very Much, however, those demeaning undertones disappear for Wakeman. I can understand that: actually thinking about the implications of why we like jizz on our face tends to put a damper on the whole mutual-attraction-to-degradation thing. So what do we do? We compartmentalize. When porn stars do it, it's degrading; when we do it, it's respectful:

I think leaving facials up to the porn stars—actors who are making the facial appear to humiliate the woman—is what keeps it looking demeaning. Certainly some facials are depicted in porn as humiliating or degrading, but not every man who wants to give a facial wants it to degrade and humiliate just like it looks onscreen. Many do love and respect their partners, and know, to varying degrees, that porn isn’t real. Likewise, some of those female partners enjoy the act as well.

When Wakeman liberates the facial from the demeaning clutches of the porn industry, she performs a useful little trick for us feminists—she separates her sex life from her personal philosophy. We all perform this function in our daily lives—detesting cruelty to animals while eating meat, denouncing philanderers while cheating on our wives, denouncing corporate America while smoking cigarettes. But it's a particularly common move when it comes to sex. Why? Because getting off is very necessary, very much informed by a tradition of male dominance over women, and can be very, very hard to accomplish if you only allow yourself to get off progressively. Of course, that doesn't mean that enjoying performing or receiving facials means that you hate women, or that you have no self-respect, or that you're a bad feminist. It just means that the patriarchy affects a lot of the things that we perform and enjoy on a daily basis, and it's good to remember that our attempts to recast these acts as "empowering" isn't so much transgressive as it is convenient.

See, facials are like weddings. We all know that the institution of marriage is one of the patriarchy's all-time greatest hits, in which women are sold into sexual slavery from father to husband in exchange for livestock. And yet, who derives the greatest joy from weddings? Women! It's the craziest thing. But even though we all know that weddings were clearly institutionalized to facilitate the willing subjugation of women, feminists figure out a way to do it anyway. Why? Probably because even though we all know it's sexist as fuck, weddings—like facial ejaculation—still make some people happy.  And feminists deserve to be happy, too. But that doesn't mean we should forget about the sexist tropes that sometimes inform our happiness (and our sex lives).

MVC, pre-makeover

Until very recently, motorists traveling along Leesburg Pike in Falls Church and shoppers at MVC Late Night Video, a sex shop that sits on that road’s busiest stretch, were blissfully unaware of each other.

Thanks to thick black tint that darkened MVC’s large front windows, folks looking for the latest adult DVDs, magazines, and sex toys could browse without fear of someone they know driving by and seeing them. Drivers could chug right past the nondescript building and pretend the place was just a regular ol’ video store that happened to stay open very, very late.

But a couple of months ago, the tint came off, and all of that changed. Drive by MVC today, and you’ll see a clear window filled with mannequins dressed in lingerie, as well as rows and rows of DVDs. The store is separated from the street by a small service road, so you won’t get close enough to get a good look at the cover of, say, Team Squirt #10, but you might be able to make out the face of the person thinking about buying it.

An employee who declined to give his name says the removal of the tint was a strategic move to make the sex shop seem less shady and “more friendly to couples and women.”

“With the tint, it made it look worse than what it is,” he explains. “So, we took it off and put the lingerie up front so women drive by and can see it’s like Victoria’s Secret.”

MVC isn’t exactly like Vickie’s. The lingerie at MVC is a bit more tawdry and, well, Victoria’s Secret doesn't sell butt plugs the size of traffic cones. But the employee insists that more women visit now that they can see the place isn’t crowded with creepy guys in trenchcoats. He says a lady friend who lives in the area and never would’ve come in before is now a regular.

Still, what about the establishment’s base—the guys who like to sneak in on their lunch break and pick up a little porn without anyone knowing?

“Some guys may have preferred it, but this isn’t a porn store that needs tinted windows, it’s a sex shop for men, women, and couples,” the employee insists.

A survey of customers at the MVC today revealed that few of them had even noticed the change to the building. Most of them grunted some form of “didn’t see it ,” so either their attentions were, understandably, not on the building’s remodel during their visit, or they just didn’t feel like chatting up some woman standing outside of their favorite sex shop holding a notebook.

Only one man, a staunch opponent of the new look, stopped to express his outrage…on his way inside.

“They’ve gotta put the tint back—people wanna keep their business on the low-low,” he says. “And you don’t want a co-worker driving by like, ‘I know that person,’ and then saying, “Hey I saw you at MVC on your lunch break!’ They gotta put the tint back.”

The anonymous employee says the store has gotten a few more community complaints than usual since the curtain came down (“Don’t you know there’s a school nearby,” is a typical one, he says), but the store’s neighboring businesses don’t really seem upset by the change.

Sam, a manager at City Diner, across the street, says the new look is "nicer.” “You can see the girls, the mannequins, with their stuff on—it’s nice, you should be able to see that,” he says. So no complaints from families who frequent his eatery and now have a pretty clear view of MVC’s interior? “No way—what’s better than sitting down and having a hamburger and seeing some nice lingerie?” he says.

"Movies," he parrots back to me without inflection.

I look from him to the other bike guy, who's suddenly very interested in stripping the wheel in his hands. I introduce myself as a writer from the City Paper and ask him about the movies again.

"Ugh, god," he says after he realizes I'm not only here for the movies, but I'm here to write about the movies. He cradles his face in his hands and mumbles something incoherent into his palms.

The shop is silent for a second.

"Yes," the man finally says. "This is the bike shop with the porn in the back."

But that's all he'll say. Clearly, bikes are his thing, not smut. Before going back to what he's doing, he points out that technically–technically–the porn is a separate business from Rollin Cycles. Hence the dirty white banner over the entrance that reads Video 2000. That's also why the movie section at the back of the store is cordoned off from the rest of the operation  by a graveyard of bike frames and tire carcasses. The man behind the counter (who won't give me his name) demands delineation.

But Charles–the heavyset man with the glasses who's currently cataloging DVDs and nonchalantly listening to our conversation–Charles "wouldn't be a business man" if he wasn't willing to talk about his video operation with a journalist.

"Hear that guys?" I say to the mechanics. "No such thing as bad press."

"Yeah. Right," says the guy behind the counter, aware, perhaps, that this is not an entirely accurate translation of what Charles just said. On cue, the other mechanic ignores me. (Later, as I'm leaving the shop, the mute mechanic will confide that he doesn't actually work at Rollin Cycles, and is there to use the shop's bike stand to replace his tire.)

"Exactly," Charles says, staring into the back of the mechanic's head before turning to me. "What would you like to know?"

Turns out, the shop sells and rents both adult and general release cinema. Some really good general release cinema, at that: Dawn of the Dead. Silence of the Lambs. A lot of Michael Douglas movies.

There are movies here that I would probably rent if I lived near Logan Circle and weren't in the 21st century and addicted to the convenience of Blockbuster Online. I look around a little more. An orange and black Ruskin Sport leans against what looks like the family section. A blue Iro frame with no wheels is propped up against the lower dramas. A Schwinn obscures a small portion of the extensive horror section.

Charles apologizes for the mess and explains that up until a year ago, Video 2000 was the only business in the building. But the market for in-store rentals, especially porn, which is cheaper and more accessible online, is disappearing. So he decided to let the surly mechanic out front, a friend of his, try running a bike repair store. The decision was a success, and they added sales after Fuji cut them a deal.

Then he shows me the porn room, which is respectfully separated from the two walls of general audience by a cheap red curtain. Inside the alcove are several racks of every-day porn: Pretty boys with pretty girls, pretty girls with pretty girls.

But there's a real drought of weird. Nothing for dwarf fetishists. No porn with pregnant actors. Maybe it's there, but I don't see anything for shitters, pissers, or frotteurs, either. Even the closest-but-not-quite thing to mainstream in the porn community–watchers of gay porn–get the short-shrift here. There's only a handful–literally, there are only 5 or 6 gay movies–of dudes on dudes. And you can just forget about chicks with dicks.

"Our customers are more heterosexual," Charles says, and adds that the few customers who buy gay porn normally buy a lot at a time, though he has no idea why. Also, gay porn costs him twice as much as straight porn, which means he has to rent a gay DVD twice as many times as a straight one to make his money back.

As we return to the front of the shop, Charles, who has been in the movie business for years, confesses that he doesn't think Video 2000 will be around much longer.

"It's dying," he says.

The surly mechanic looks relieved.

Last week, the Maryland state legislature threatened to withdraw $424 million dollars in funding to the University of Maryland if its College Park campus proceeded with its plan to screen the satirical hard-core porn "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge."

University officials nixed the screening, but allowed a campus student group to show portions of the film "in an educational context"—with ACLU reps speaking on free speech issues.

Now, Republican state senator Andrew P. Harris, who led the anti-porn charge, is moving to ensure that, in the future, hard-core pirate sex will be contextualized in an educational setting that will address more than simply his own ass-hattery:

Mr. Harris said Monday he plans to insert language in the state's capital budget that would require the university to come up with a plan that will address the health and social concerns that are attributed to pornography, in the event an adult film is ever showcased on campus again.

Photo by St3ve