Novelty Candy with a Kinky Bent

I found this in the gift and sundry shop at the Wynn casino resort in Las Vegas the other morning, looking for a candy bar to tide my appetite over until I could return to my hotel room after an all-night poker session.

It's a flogger, put together out of two strands of candy beads on strings.

Please don't put it to its apparent purpose. The candy beads would likely shatter on impact, leaving sharp edges that could break skin (and contaminate the candy with bodily fluids). Lots of sting, not much thud.

Also seen on in the same store from the same manufacturer: a candy bra ("one size fits most"), a candy waist chain, and candy handcuffs.

You can order these products online from the manufacturer, Spencer & Fleetwood Ltd., at www.rudefood.com.

Tags: sex sexuality candy whip bdsm kink funny novelty flogger photo

Top Ten Sexy Ads for Toys and Lingerie

ann summers Originally uploaded by guerrillaguru.

Amy Gifford at InventorSpot asks, "What is the best way to get your message across about lingerie and sex toys without the use of half naked models?" Her answer is a list of ten print ads, billboards, posters, and guerilla marketing campaigns that are as inventive as they are sexy — except that many of them do rely on that old standby, the half-naked model of the slender European-descended female variety. The images are PG-rated, but they still might not be safe for some workplaces.

My favorite is the X-ray shopping bag from German lingerie vendor Blush, with honorable mention to Stringfellows' pole-dancer posters affixed to Parisian lampposts.

(via Violet Blue)

Tags: sex sexuality advertising marketing photos marketing

Animated Map for Gardeners Shows Progress of Global Warming

image source: The Arbor Day Foundation

The Arbor Day Foundation has on its Web site a Flash-animated map that dramatically illustrates the impact of climate change in the United States. The map shows the changes in hardiness zones between 1990 and 2006.

Hardiness zones are a geographical tool developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to assist farmers and gardners to choose plants to cultivate that will thrive in their local climate, based upon average annual low temperature. The USDA most recently published its hardiness zone data based on climate data from 1990. The Arbor Day Foundation produced its own hardiness zone data for 2006, based on climate data from the preceding 15 years provided by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.

The animated map plainly shows the northward movement of warmer temperatures beween 1990 and 2006.

(via Pat Kight)

Tags: arbor day foundation map animation flash hardiness zone climate change environment global warming climate weather gardening agriculture

Study: Fears of Online 'Sexual Predators' Are Greatly Exaggerated

image source: Yello Dyno

Fears that children are at risk to sexual predators on the Internet are greatly exaggerated, according to a study published today in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association. Janis Wolak and her collaborators at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham conducted the research.

Frank Greve, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, quotes Wolak: "Actually, Internet-related sex crimes are a pretty small proportion of sex crimes that adolescents suffer."

The study is based on two surveys of 3000 youths between the ages of 10 and 17, one each in 2000 and in 2005, as well as interviews with 612 investigators at agencies that deal with Internet-related sex crimes involving minors.

The study debunks a number of widely held, unfounded beliefs about sexual predators upon youth on the Internet:

• Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

  Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. "The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours," Wolak said.

• Internet predators are pedophiles.

  Finding: Internet predators don't hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak's team determined from interviews with investigators.

• Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.

  Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.

• Finding: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.

• Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.

  Finding: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.

• Online interactions with strangers are risky.

  Finding: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don't know. What's risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.

• Internet predators go after any child.

  Finding: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.

Update: 2-26-08 Here is a PDF of the paper, Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment by Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and Michele L. Ybarra.

Tags: sex sexuality crime youth internet sexual predators predators statistics mythbusting debunking

High Heels Improve Women's Sex Lives, Claims Researcher

Slingback High Heels Originally uploaded by shielaannkeller.

A scientist in Italy claims that high-heeled shoes offer health benefits to women that include improving their sex lives.

In a letter published in European Urology, Dr. Maria Cerruto reported a study of 66 women under the age of 50 in which she found that:

those who held their foot at a 15 degree angle to the ground — the equivalent of a two inch heel — had as good posture as those who wore flat shoes, and crucially showed less electrical activity in their pelvic muscles.

This suggested the muscles were at an optimum position, which could well improve their strength and ability to contract.

The pelvic floor muscles help support abdominal organs in women and men alike. Gynecologist Dr. Robert Kegel developed the so-called Kegel exercises (or "kegels") to strengthen these muscles as a treatment for women with urinary incontenence, and discovered from the reports of his patients that they were experiencing stronger and better orgasms during sex.

Dr. Cerruto claims that women who regularly wear high-heeled shoes can also experienced the sexual benefit of strengthened pelvic floor muscles.

Tags: women sex sexual health heels high heels shoes pelvic floor pc muscle kegel exercises wtf

'Tis the Season for Marshmallow Peeps

2012: Survivor: Easter Island Originally uploaded by andrea z.

Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday have passed, and Easter approaches. Apparently, because devout believers have given up tastier and healthier candies for Lent, the demand for Marshmallow Peeps is climbing, at least according to the As I Please referral logs. Give the people what they want — that's our motto here. If it bleeds corn syrup, it leads.

Peep in a Microwave:

Peep Brulée

Peep Research

The Lord of the Peeps

Earlier As I Please posts about Peeps:
Elder Peeps
Passover Peeps: The Ten Plagues

Tags: marshmallow peeps peeps candy video youtube silliness microwave wtf

Police Find Crack in Man's Buttocks

image source: Fox Television Stations, Inc.

A news story from Hagerstown, Maryland, about a small-time drug bust bears an unintentionally funny headline.

The headline reads, "Police: Crack Found in Man's Buttocks." One wonders how they found it. Were the man's trousers riding low on his hips, giving them probable cause to search for the crack?

(via Charlie Stross)

Tags: fox news headline drugs war on drugs adolescent humor bathroom humor humor funny crack wtf

What the Heck Is a "Chyron," Anyway?

image source: Welcome to Pottersville

In a recent survey of Americans' level of knowledge, when asked to define "Chyron," 42.3% of respondents answered, "In mythology, the learned Centaur who taught the best and brightest of Greek youth how to think and speak in punchy sound-bites."

Tags: chyron fox news misinformation television tv cable news ignorance humor funny

Dubai Developers' Plans Resemble Las Vegas

Falconcity of Wonder

Imagine a wondrous city in the desert, with buildings that reproduce the Great Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, and the canals of Venice.

No, it isn't Las Vegas, it's Falconcity of Wonder, now under development in Dubai.

Let's see: I can pick out the Venetian, Paris, and the Luxor, but I can't find the Mirage, Bellagio, the Wynn, or Circus Circus. And I have to say: laying the lots out in the shape of a hawk doesn't make up for leaving out the Fremont Street Experience.

And let's just hope that the developers aren't duplicating Las Vegas' housing foreclosure crisis as well.

(via Ellen Kushner)

Tags: dubai real estate theme park las vegas eiffel tower pyramid excess desert luxury wtf

Don't Watch the SuperBowl With Organizational Psychologists

A group of spectators sat watching a football game. They saw two groups of eleven men facing each other, heard a whistle blow, then suddenly action erupted, followed by another blast of the whistle, whereupon everyone stopped. One of the spectators said, “That was a good draw play, we gained eight yards.” When questioned about his jargon, he said, “Well, the quarterback handed the ball to the fullback, who counted off several seconds, waiting for the opposition to be drawn in, and then crashed into the middle of the line and advanced eight yards before being tackled and stopped. That's what is called a 'draw play.'” Someone asked a second spectator, “What did you see?” “Well,” he replied,”I saw the acting out in different degrees of the needs for aggression and achievement in the players and the effects of how each views himself in relation to the other twenty-one men.” A third spectator said, “I saw eleven men on either side engage in a pattern of coordinated behavior with very well worked out expectations of action for each position in regard to other positions, until these patterns were disrupted by the other side.” A fourth spectator said, “I also saw your role relationship and integrations. But additionally, I saw a leadership structure, which included a man in one position calling signals during the play and a captain exercising some limited authority. I saw a social system of eleven men opposing another social system, each of which was composed of many subsystems and structures like leadership, conflict, plus a coach attached to each system.” A fifth spectator said, “I saw two kinds of traditions: the ritualistic and emotional meaning of a game of this sort and the heightened excitement and tension of this particular game due to the traditional rivalry between these two teams. Both traditions reflect the competitive and peer values of our young adult culture.”

(From Benne, Kenneth D., Robert Chin, and Warren G. Bennis: Science and practice. From The Planning of Change: Readings in the Applied Behavioral Sciences, edited by Warren G. Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin, Holt Rinehard & Winston, 1961)

A football game is very like a snake. No, wait — a tree! A wall...?

Tags: superbowl football organizational psychology organizqational development psychology sociology anthropology business sports humor funny

The Truth Behind the Southwest Airlines "Stripper Plane"

Gadling's Neil Woodburn relates a lurid story about a Southwest Airlines flight from LAX to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, each Friday afternoon, crammed with exotic dancers on their way to work the gambling Mecca's strip clubs for the weekend:

Every Friday evening, some time before most people have clocked out of work and begin heading home for the weekend, a plane takes off from LAX.

Like so many other flights at this time, this one is also heading to Las Vegas. It's not full of gamblers, however, but rather a disproportionate amount of silicone that bounces and jiggles through the warm, desert-air turbulence all the way to Vegas where, for the remainder of Friday and Saturday night, it will continue quivering away at $20 a pop.

This, folks, is the Southwest Stripper Plane....

No one really knows what time this legendary, perhaps even mythical flight leaves Los Angeles. Seats are reserved months in advance and few mere mortals are able to secure a reservation. A friend of mine claims he once found himself on this flight but can't seem to remember the details, as though some powerful force scrubbed his brain clean, leaving only a trace of glitter on his sweaty forehead.

Gadling is part of the Weblogs, Inc. blog network. Maybe the pittance that Jason Calacanis pays his indentured servants is not enough to reward or encourage fact-checking. But it takes only a few minutes of playing with the Southwest Airlines reservation system to discover that, except on particular high-traffic weekends, seats are available on all Friday afternoon flights to Las Vegas, not just from LAX but from Burbank, Long Beach, and Orange County's John Wayne airports as well.

There is a seed of truth from out of which grew this male fantasy of a pleasure plane packed with pulchritudinous pole-dancers. The strip clubs of Las Vegas do indeed receive an influx of transient dancers from out of town every weekend, and many of these dancers do spend the rest of their week somewhere in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. If you fly on any Friday afternoon flight on from any of the area's airports to McCarran, some of the passengers will be women on their way to a weekend of work as exotic dancers.

But mark this, horndogs: If you find yourself one one of those flights, sitting next to one of these women, she is not at her job yet. In a strip club you get to ogle and flirt and maybe even grope — because you are paying the dancer directly for the privilege. On the the plane, however, she is just another working stiff commuting to her stressful, emotionally demanding job, so leave her alone. She doesn't want to talk to you.

(You might not even know it: she's wearing street clothes, not a camisole and T-back thong, and she won't put her war paint on until she gets to the dressing room at Cheetah's. Without her glamour on, you might never give her a second look.)

(via Flight International)

Tags: strippers exotic+dancers sex+work los+angeles las+vegas southwest+airlines urban+legend sex

Airline Re-Brands as "Ank Air" With Embarrassing Results

Flight International reports that Turkish air carrier World Focus Airlines has rebranded itself as Ank Air — with a new logo that bears an unfortunate resemblance to the letter "W." As Travolution Blog puts it, "Thankfully the web address will be less embarrassing."

(via Debbie Notkin, who got it from Arthur Hlavaty Feòrag NicBhrìde)

Advice for Relationship Problems from Golden Age Wonder Woman

Having trouble with a spouse or partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, family members, the people around you? Dr. Golden Age Wonder Woman, Ph.D., uses the ancient wisdom of Paradise Island to give advice on love, life, and relationships.

(via Avedon Carol)

The Wire - Fifth Season Link-O-Rama

Here in these parts, we love The Wire, HBO's series about crime and punishment in the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland, also known as The Best Show on Television^TM. The show's creator, David Simon, makes Joss Whedon look like Aaron Spelling, and that's saying a lot, because Joss Whedon makes everyone who isn't David Simon look like Aaron Spelling.

The fifth and final season began airing last Sunday night. The occasion of the final season is marked by a great deal of ink (and magnetized ferrite) being put out in the media. Here is some of what I have been seeing:

In The New Yorker last October, Margaret Talbot's 11,000-word profile of David Simon, Stealing Life, looks at both The Wire and Simon's next project in development.

This Nick Hornby interview with David Simon appeared in the August 2007 issue of The Believer.

Slate has just reissued Meghan O'Rourke's 2006 interview with Simon, as well as Jacob Weisberg's analysis of the show, the one in which he called it the best TV show ever broadcast in America because it portray[s] the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.

New York magazine has brief interviews with cast members, including Andre Royo (Bubbles), Michael K. Williams (Omar Little), and Jamie Hector (Marlo Stansfield).

Now appearing in The Atlantic is Mark Bowden's The Angriest Man in Television damns The Wire and David Simon with faint praise, going on to call the show a bleak fiction and Simon a hack.

"Bleak" is the epithet tossed around like a Karl Rove talking point by the show's detractors. The Bleakness of the Wire is the title of Reihan Salam's critique at at The American Scene. Salam wags his finger at Simon for portraying the situation in Baltimore as hopeless. Matthew Yglesias chimes in with David Simon and the Audacity of Despair: Fundamentally, I think [Simon's] vision of the bleak urban dystopia and its roots is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear. David Simon responds in the comments. At the blog Shadow of the Hegemon, Demosthenes raps Yglesias on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper

Lastly, HBO's Web site presents three videos of the backstory, episodes in the lives of some prominent characters -- Proposition Joe, Omar Little, and the first meeting between Jimmy McNulty and Bunk Moreland.

Of course, if you like sipping from firehoses, you can find more at del.icio.us.

Are 3-D Movies Evidence of Creative Thinking in the Studios?

3-D movies are back. After fads that died off in the 1950s and 70s (memorialized only in revivals of House of Wax or Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy) there has been a spate of recent 3-D cinema releases: Meet the Robinsons. Beowulf. U23D. The upcoming Hannah Montana.

Maybe it's just a perennial fad making a reappearance. But Mitch Golden, guest-blogging at Ed Felton's Freedom to Tinker thinks something else might be going on:

Could it have something to do with the fact that a 3d movie cannot be pirated? ...

Isn’t it just possible that the studios were thinking: Hey guys, I know you could just download this fantasy flick and see it on your widescreen monitor. But unless you give us $11 and sit in a dark theater with the polarized glasses, you won’t be seeing the half-naked Angelina Jolie literally popping off the screen!

The Surge of Abstinence Education Will Succeed in a Friedman Unit

As we all know, abstinence-based sex education doesn't work to promote abstinence among the young people who receive it.

But wait...! Barbara Ehrenriech has spoken to abstinence-education advocate Joneen Mackenzie, executive director of WAIT (abbreviation for "Why Am I Tempted?"), and asked her about this:

There is, however, one shadow hanging over the abstinence training industry. A study commissioned by Congress revealed in April that abstinence training doesn't work: Students exposed to such training turn out to be no less likely to have sex than those who are not, leading some to question the over $100 million the Federal government spends on it annually. Mackenzie dismissed the study out of hand, saying it had been undertaken before serious abstinence training really got off the ground.

In other words, it's just like Iraq: We need to allow more time for the surge of abstinence-based education to work.

(via Avedon Carol)

Susie Bright Interviews Jamie Gillis

Susie Bright interviewed male porn star and director Jamie Gillis last week. That is, I think it's her interviewing him, but it seems like she did all the talking.

Gillis started making pornographic loops in 1970. Then the porn movie business exploded in the seventies (the "Golden Age"), and exploded again into videocassettes in the eighties. He invented the "Gonzo" genre of porn in 1990 with his video On the Prowl.

SB: For those people who don't know, what is gonzo? What did you want gonzo to be?

JG: All I wanted to do was just go out into the streets and meet people. Bring a girl out – maybe to a dirty bookstore or something — and just throw her to the wolves.

SB: Your first movie in that style was "On the Prowl." You took a pretty girl out and she said, "I'll fuck whoever wants to if you'll let us tape it." A lot of people will think everyone jumped at the chance. But of course, they didn't! There was a lot of tension. People were afraid of being conned, or that it wasn't real, or that she would cut their balls off in some crazy... There's this tension that they don't know if they can trust you with their nuts.

JG: It's a very unusual offer. Sure!

SB: (Laughing) Yes it is!

And in the late nineties, Gillis was a regular in the Oaks Club, playing (what else?) seven-card stud. That was where I met him and played against him from time to time. It's been a few years since I've seen him, but Susie Bright explains why in passing: he is living in New York now.

I got search hits a few days ago for "jamie gillis poker." It turns out that someone was asking about him on 2+2. According to rumor, he is now a poker pro. That's funny – he wasn't that good a player when I knew him. But then again, neither was I.

(via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing)

My First Disemvowelment

It started out with a claim provable with pathetic ease to be a lie, and it ended with another; and in between it was filled with vitriol unleavened by fact. In fact, it was a total driveby. The clown found As I Please through a Google Images search for "home," and thought that the right response to finding something he didn't like in an ill-refined search was to post a nastygram as a comment.

The nastygram is still there. Well, most of it, anyway.

The Fourth of July

Light up the barbecue in the back yard. Fill the cooler with beer and spend the afternoon emptying it. Cover your hot dog with ketchup, mustard, relish, onions, maybe even sauerkraut. Find a good place to watch the fireworks, or maybe even set off a few of your own.

And all the while, remember that you are doing this because a two hundred and thirty-one years ago today, a group of men were gathered in Philadelphia to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause ending the rule of the greedy villains who were using the powers of government to rob them blind. The King was deaf to their protests and in fact was quite mad. Parliament would not act, but was in fact part of the problem. And so these men saw no other choice before them but to band together to refuse and resist the tyranny.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is in the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

SF's Marina Safeway *Is* a Meet Market

The Safeway supermarket in San Francisco's Marina district has had a reputation as a cruising ground for heterosexual singles at least since the days when Armistead Maupin was writing Tales of the City.

Violet Blue decided to check it out. She and a companion trolled three different Safeways, in the Castro, Marina, and "South Beach" (the beach-less area south of Market Street, by China Basin and TPC Park, that was industrial grunge before developers turned it into a yuppie trap).

They struck out in the Castro and in "South Beach." But the Marina Safeway lived up to its reputation:

While not as packed as the Market Street store, this Safeway had the goods and the groceries. The candy looked sweeter. The produce (allegedly the place to meet and be met) all looked so … young and ripe. The bananas looked eager. People were dressed up. And they were eyeing my (ahem) basket. It was eerie how sexually charged the atmosphere was.

Suddenly, we weren't dorks with striped socks and way too many condoms and bananas and tubs of cupcake frosting in our shopping baskets — we were the hunted. When a sexy Asian boy found himself flirting with both Michelle and me, trapped between us in a hot moment of blushing and smiling, I knew the legends were true. People don't go there just to shop for dish soap. Score one for scoring (and Michelle) at the Marina Safeway.

The Marina Safeway is indeed the place to go if you're shopping for a hookup.

500 Years of the Same Nose in Western Art

With the sound turned down, this video could conceivably be taken as an indictment of artists through the ages for drawing and painting stereotypes of women's faces rather than what artists actually see. But the sonorous cello solo he chose for the soundtrack makes it pre-eminently clear that video artist eggman913 wants us to accept this as a demonstration of the Timeless Verities of Great Art.

Debbie Notkin and Laurie Toby Edison, writing together at Body Impolitic, have pulled some counter-examples off the Web after just a few minutes of googling. Not only do not all women, or even all beautiful women, look like this, but there are and always have been artists who represented a wider variety than eggman913 does.

The film-maker did a great job at two things: his (presumably “his,” the nickname is “eggman”) morphing from face to face is brilliantly done, and his ability to pick similar faces and similar sizes and positions to make the morphing work is superb.

But there’s one catch. By picking the faces that work most seamlessly together, he has neatly excised a huge variety of women painted by the same painters or schools that he selected, and left us with the impression that for the first three hundred and fifty years every woman in Western art was not only white, thin, and young, but had a long nose, dark eyes, and a demure downward gaze. In his last hundred and fifty years, only three-quarters of women fit that description.

In the comments, Lori S. writes, Yes, I think it’s fair to call the video “500 years of the same nose in Western Art.”

Repression and the Roots of Rape

Samuel R. Delany writes, in his essay "Pornography and Censorship" [1] of two sexual encounters: the first between on Harold Norse and W.H. Auden and the second between Delany and a musician friend:

In the early eighties, some years after Auden's death in 1973, in the gay press Harold Norse published a journal account of an afternoon's sex with Auden. I do not have the article to hand. But memory tells me that the encounter involved a pounce by the older poet; the coupling was brief, desperate, and — while, by Norse's description, the encounter was consensual in that he had known certainly that the pick-up was sexual — nevertheless the physical exchange between them verged on rape. The word that remains with me from the writer is that he found the experience "appalling."

My autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Plume/New American Library, 1988), gives an account of a similar sexual encounter that happened to me about 1960, which, to my mind, has many things in common with Norse's encounter with Auden. When i was eighteen, while we were at the piano bench together, a musician friend in his late thirties, with whom I was collaborating on an opera, suddenly, and clearly in a state of great distress, pounced on me and physically dragged me to his bed. So I know first-hand the sort of thing Norse was recounting.

Delany goes on to write:

In a population that basically feels that Sex is Bad — or at best a necessary evil — often sex will occur, whether within the bounds of marriage or outside it, only at those moments of extreme need, and then in a paroxysm of guilt, so that the sexual incident itself is likely to be infrequent, desperate, brutal, and brief — and satisfactory, if such a word can even be used for an act which, in their different ways, both "perpetrator" and "victim" probably come to dread — for only the most basal needs of the more aggressive partner.

Within such a populace, where this is the basic sexual model and where this is the sort of act arousal leads to, it's small wonder that situations of arousal in general — which include the pornographic — are thought by all concerned to be basically Bad Things.

The fear of pornography is summed up in the anti-sex-feminist's canard, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." And Delany's anecdotal evidence certainly calls into question another feminist slogan, that "rape is violence, not sex." Some rape is sex as an instrument of violence; but by no means all.

Sex in this pouncing mode is certainly violent, or coercive at the very least. This approach to sex is, ultimately, that of many sexually motivated serial killers. [2]

But this mode of sexual behavior exists apart from pornography; and it flourishes and spreads itself wide under conditions of sexual repression. What's more, this mode of sexual behavior is itself a motivation for sexual repression. If all, or even most, sex is rape-like, then it is obviously something to be repressed!

And without anyone explicitly wanting or desiring a society where rape serves, among other things, as a tool of social control of women, the social control nevertheless is exerted. The individual rapist is not aiming to keep all women in a state of permanent terror; but every individual woman must always fear that every individual man is a potential rapist, and so the terror persists. And, as we have seen in the program of anti-sex-feminists, the omnipresent terror of rape is a motivation for campaigns of sexual repression.

(This mode of sexuality is rape, but it is certainly not the only sort of rape there is. Some rape explicitly is an overt tool of terror and social control, for example the systematic and widespread rape campaigns by soldiers in the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia or the ongoing civil wars in West Africa.)

When sex is shameful and rape victims are shamed, those victims are silenced -- and rape, by its taboo nature, becomes a problem we cannot address because we cannot talk about it sensibly. Contrariwise, in an atmosphere of sexual openness, we can talk openly of rape, and in doing so work more effectively against it. True sexual freedom includes the freedom to comfortably decline to participate in sexual activity every bit as much as it includes the freedom to participate. And as such, true sexual freedom is itself freedom from rape.

If the practice is rape, the theory that underlies the practice is sexual repression.

This is why irredentist sex-phobes like the Warriors for Innocence pose such a clear and present threat: despite their stated intent of protecting children from rape, their stated method is the wholesale suppression of information, including information in support of survivors of childhood rape. By imposing fearful silence, they mandate that victims' cries must go unheard. And this is one reason why the thoughtles capitulation of Six Apart's Barak Berkowitz to WFI is so deeply disturbing, and why his equally thoughtless backpedaling is ultimately unsatisfying.

Avedon Carol writes about the ways in which imagined or invented sex crime against children is used to punish society's identified villains when real crimes are unprovable or never occurred in the first place. Greg Costikyan warns of a law making its way through the New York state legislature that would brand as child molesters people who sell to minors video games with violent or sexual content. Garance Franke-Ruta is pushing an intolerable extension of the definition of children. And now WFI is using child sex hysteria as a cover to attack same-sex erotica.

I am terribly afraid of the re-emergence of a full-scale moral panic over child sexuality, with witch-hunts, show trials, and ruined lives. The anti-sex creeps are pulling hard on the Overton Window of sexuality. Those of us who live on the opposite fringe are in grave danger, and the people now in the middle may soon find themselves on the uncomfortable fringe.

Make no mistake: the world the anti-sex creeps are working for is a world of misery in which sexual trauma would be compounded and redoubled, with its victims smothered by a blanket of silence.

[1] Delany, Samuel R.: "Pornography and Censorship," in Shorter views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary, Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

[2] Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Shachtman: Whoever Fights Monsters, St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Don't Call It "Speculative Fiction"

The expression "speculative fiction" seems to be escaping out of academic circles into general usage. It grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. It has always struck me as the sort of expression that would be used by a junior academic who has not yet achieved tenure and who therefore feels she has a lot at risk if her colleagues look askance at "science fiction" or, worse, "sci-fi." Look, Doc, don't use your anxieties about your future career to mislabel me.

I've been feeling alone in this point of view, until I came across this gem, written by SF author and critic Chip Delany, currently professor of English and of Creative Writing at Temple University, in his essay collection Shorter Views:

"Speculative fiction" was a term that had a currency for about three years — from 1966 to 1969. ... Robert A. Heinlein first used it in a Guest of Honor speech he gave at a World Science Fiction Convention in 1951[1]:he said that "speculative fiction" was the term he felt best fit what he was doing as a writer: whereupon everyone immediately forgot it for the next 15 [sic] years — until 1965 or '66, when a group of writers centered around the British SF magazine New Worlds resurrected it and used it for a very specific kind of thing. Basically, as these writers — the New Wave — first used the term, it meant anything that was experimental, anything that was science-fictinal, or anything that was fantastic. It was a conjunctive, inclusive term, which encompassed everything in all three areas. ...

By the end of 1969, in the world of practicing SF writers, editors, and fans, speculative fiction (like most conjunctive terms) had degenerated into a disjunctive, exclusive term (rather like the honorific "Ms.," which began as a conjunctive term meaning any wooman, married or single, but which today, through use, has degenerated into a disjunctive term used [almost] exclusively to mean an unmarried woman who's also a feminist): By the end of '69, "speculative fiction" meant "any piece that is experimental and uses SF imagery in the course of it.' ... A year later, the term simply dropped out of the vocabulary of working SF writers — except to refer to pieces written within that '66-'69 period, to which (usually) it had already been applied.

At about the same time, various academics began to take it up. Most of them had no idea either of its history or of its successive uses; they employed it to mean something like "high-class SF" or "SF I approve of and wish to see legitimated." Now that's a vulgar and ignorant usage of the worst sort. The way to legitimate fine quality SF is by fine quality criticism of it — not by being historically obtuse and rhetorically slipshod. I deplore that particular use of the term — and though I support your right to sue any terms you want, including "fuck," "shit," and "scumbag," I simply won't use the term in that way. It's uninformed, anti-historical, and promotes only mystification — all three of which are fine reasons to let this misused term die the natural death it came to fifteen years ago[2].

(Samuel R. Delany, 1990: "An Interview with Samuel R. Delany." Science Fiction Studies, 17, 1990. Reprinted as "The Second Science Fiction Studies Interview: Trouble on Triton and Other Matters," in Shorter views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary, Wesleyan University Press, 1999, pp.346-347)

Now I no longer alone, and have a well-respected ally in my dislike. So don't call it "speculative fiction" — it's uniformed, anti-historical, and it promotes only mystification. So there.

[1]Actually it was 1941, the DenVention, in Denver, Colorado.

[2]The interview was recorded in a classroom in 1986, and was not transcribed for publication until 1990.

Canon Formation in Harry/Draco Slashfic

Here's something that makes me wish I were (or at least had the academic chops to be) one of the group bloggers at Crooked Timber:

Ever so slightly longer but not quite as thick: Toward a quantitative literary sexology of Harry Potter fanfiction

Abstract: Discussion regarding fanfiction tropes produced the observation that in one subset of Harry Potter fanfiction, "Harry/Draco slash" [HDS], Harry has a short, thick dick, while Draco's penis is long and thin. We tested the hypothesis that there was a consistent difference in how these two characters' genitalia were described. Additionally, we tested the hypothesis that slash fiction authors in this subset of fandom did not place equal emphasis on the description of testicles as compared with penii. We surveyed 100 HDS stories in online fanfiction archives and collected data on sexual description and content. Here we present the first quantitative test of fanon stereotypes and show that these explicitly sexual stories contain low levels of visual/sensory genital descriptions. Qualitative comparisons demonstrate trends in support of both hypotheses, although sample sizes prevent statistical significance. We use these findings to discuss how fanon may develop despite the incorrect assumption of perceived ubiquity.

What strikes me about this paper is that it is at once utterly clear that it is a joke and that the authors had a tremendously good time putting it together, and it is a serious work of quantitative literary analysis with a rigorous methodology. It both parodies and celebrates academic analysis of the paraliterary. What's more, serious students of the paraliterary will find this a useful example in an area where scholarship is otherwise unknown or hidden. Read the whole thing.

Violet Blue's Guide to Porn for Women

Violet Blue has updated her porn recommendation page, changing it into a Porn for Women page [NSFW], which promotes her book The Smart Girl's Guide to Porn.

People of other genders shouldn't let the "for women" rubric put them off. This is one of the best guides to video and Internet pornography I have ever seen, and it is certainly the best single-page guide.

Along with some links to excerpts from her book, the page lists: "Hot porn I think women will especially enjoy," "A few porn sites girls will dig," "New porn I love," detailed reviews of particular favorite videos, links to a number of articles Blue has written about porn, and "women watch porn, fastfacts."

I am adding this page to my my permanent bookmarks. If you are at all like me, you will, too. I anticipate it providing a welcome starting point for lots of fun sexy Websurfing.

New Food Fad Emerges From the Delta

There's a story they tell down south in the Mississippi Delta, that if you wait by a crossroads after night falls, at midnight a dark man that some say is the Devil himself will come to you and teach you the secret of making Kool-Aid pickles ... in exchange for your soul!

(via skippy)

0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

The answer: 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

The question: What is the MD5 hash of the ISO-8859-1 null-terminated string "I am Spartacus!"?

"Harlan's Bounce" MP3 by Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson composed and performed "Harlan's Bounce" for the soundtrack of filmmaker Erik Nelson's documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, A Film about Harlan Ellison.

"Harlan's Bounce" is an instrumental piece featuring Thompson playing guitar with a Django-esque swing.

(via Debbie Notkin, who got it from Emma Bull)

US Farm Subsidies Put the Junk in Junk Food

In You Are What You Grow, published last Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan tells us:

• Junk food is the cheapest food in the grocery store, calorie for calorie.
• Junk food is cheap because its raw materials are cheap.
• The farm bill, renewed every five years, provides massive subsidies to growers of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice -- and non-foodstuff cotton.
• US farms overproduce these five crops, particularly corn and soybeans.
• The farm bill does little to support growers of fresh produce.
• The price of fresh produce increased by 40% in constant dollars between 1985 and 2000.
• The price of soft drinks (water, corn syrup, and flavoring) declined 23% in constant dollars in the same time frame.
• The school lunch program buys agricultural surplus to feed to students "chicken nuggets and "Tater-Tots."
• The farm bill is coming up for renewal.

Historically the farm bill has been left to midwestern legislators to craft to the desires of their farming constituencies. But Pollan describes combination of interests coming together to change the way things are done. The public health community is concerned about the farm bill's impact on the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Environmentalists worry that chemical and feedlot agriculture jeopardize clean water. The international development community is speaking up on the impact of massive US food exports on developing nations' agriculture and trade. People who are concerned about the food they eat want to do something about the torrent of high-fructose corn syrup.

Pollan says that it isn't a "farm bill," in reality it is a food bill, key legislation that determines what we, as a nation, are going to eat. One of these years, he writes, the eaters of America are going to demand a place at the table, and we will have the political debate over food policy we need and deserve. This could prove to be that year: the year when the farm bill became a food bill, and the eaters at last had their say.

Bill Clinton to Create Crossword for New York Times

Quoth Editor & Publisher:

Former President Bill Clinton has signed on to create a crossword puzzle for the Web site of the New York Times, according to an article in Advertising Age.

Clinton, whose passion for the puzzles was on display in the crossword film "Wordplay," will pen the answers for a puzzle that will appear May 6 on NYTimes.com, which will coincide with an issue of the New York Times magazine with a Baby Boomer theme. It will remain free online until the end of the month.

Clinton's puzzle will coincide with the revamp of the paper's games and puzzles section, according to the Ad Age article. "This is all part of building out the game portal," said Robert Z. Samuels, senior product manager, games and mobile, New York Times Digital, is quoted as saying.

But the real question remains: Will the answers to Clinton's puzzle depend on what your definition of the word "is" is?

Lynn Kendall tells me that a mutual friend's father had connections to Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas passes on an anecdote of "Clinton simultaneously having one conversation on the phone, another with people present, all while doing the Times crossword in ink."

More on the Media Racism Scapegoating Ritual

Atrios has this to say about the stylized ritual drama I sketched out in my previous post:

Memo to the Media

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are not the only black people in America, and more than that they do not have the ability to force themselves onto your news shows. There's a pattern here:

1) Bigot eruption somewhere
2) Lots of people condemn it
3) Al Sharpton goes on every teevee program
4) The media people turn around and use Sharpton's past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption

If Al Sharpton is an imperfect spokesperson for an issue, and you keep putting him on the teevee to be the spokesperson for that issue, then the obvious conclusion is that this is a deliberate strategy.

If the talking-head shows called upon people like Michael Eric Dyson or Cornell West, they might wind up actually getting people in the audience to look at their own behavior. The advertisers would never stand for that.

Passover Peeps: The Ten Plagues

dam
Originally uploaded by stylecouncil1.


Marshmallow Peeps aren't just for Easter any more. Just in time for Pesach, here is a Flickr photoset of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, dramatized by Peeps.

Now I want to see a whole Haggadah illustrated with Peep pictures.

(Note: Peeps are not kosher for Passover.)

(via Lynn Kendall)

The NFL: Socialism for Capitalists?

Miss Laura at The Daily Kos highlights an op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson in today's Boston Globe entitled "Football Socialism":

Enter the National Football League. This week, it agreed to revamp what is arguably the most successful form of socialism in the United States. It made some adjustments to its revenue sharing plan. The league's teams, which currently number 32, have shared equally in national television revenues going back to the early 1960s. The Mara family of the New York Giants and George Halas of the Chicago Bears realized that it had to be done to give tiny cities like Green Bay a chance to field competitive teams. Halas even once advocated a new stadium for the arch-rival Packers.

Four and a half decades later, the Chicago Tribune wrote that the decision to share revenues was "the single most important reason the NFL enjoys unmatched prosperity" today and has become the nation's top spectator sport. Shared prosperity means more teams with a legitimate chance to win the title. More competitive teams mean more fans.

What a peculiar sort of socialism we have here: From each capitalist according to his ability, to each capitalist according to his needs! MissLaura says that the US should follow the NFL's lead here.

I'm sure that Levitra DeShill, spokesperson for Billionaires for Bush would agree.

Corporations are People Too
Originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

Students Claim Anti-Plagiarism Service Stole Their Work

The Washington Post reports that a group of students are suing an anti-cheating service for copyright violation, claiming that the service copied and archived their school papers without permission.

Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

Two Arizona high school students also are plaintiffs. None of the students is named in the lawsuit because they are minors. ...

According to the lawsuit, each of the students obtained a copyright registration for papers they submitted to Turnitin. The lawsuit filed against Turnitin's parent company, iParadigms LLC, seeks $150,000 for each of six papers written by the students.

One of the McLean High plaintiffs wrote a paper titled "What Lies Beyond the Horizon." It was submitted to Turnitin with instructions that it not be archived, but it was, the lawsuit says. ...

Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, co-director of the intellectual property law program at Suffolk University Law School, said that although the law regarding fair use is subject to interpretation, he thinks the students have a good case.

"Typically, if you quote something for education purposes, scholarship or news reports, that's considered fair use," Beckerman-Rodau said. "But it seems like Turnitin is a commercial use. They turn around and sell this service, and it's expensive. And the service only works because they get these papers."

(If I post this quickly enough, I just might scoop Boing Boing!)

Nutritionists Call Chinese Food "Unhealthy"

The Associated press reported Wednesday that nutritionists associated with the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a report last Tuesday that highlighted the health risks of food served in Chinese restaurants,

The AP account of this report describes a meal of General Tso's chicken, steamed rice, and egg rolls. pointing out that this meal is high in calories, high in sodium, and high in saturated fats.

This is the sort of thinking that Michael Pollan dissected and found wanting in his New York Times Magazine article late last January,

Someone is stacking the deck here. Both the main dish and the egg rolls are deep-fried in oil, while most fare at a Chinese restaurant is lightly stir-fried in a wok. Moreover, General Tso's chicken as I have generally seen it made, is mostly battered, fried chunks of chicken in a sweet, spicy sauce. A more typical dish served in a Chinese restaurant has more vegetables.

What's more, although Chinese food is singled out for nutritionist demonization, it's not even the worst cuisine. In a throwaway aside, the article mentions that both Italian and Mexican cuisines are worse than Chinese, according to the nutritionist ideology.

An uncritical reader will come away from this article with the message "Chinese Food Is Bad For You." But this is not true. This is the sort of dietary fear-mongering that the high priests of nutritionism have been foisting upon us for decades.

What's going on here? Racism? Xenophobia?

A person who tries to eat by Pollan's brief guidelines ("Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.") will have a much easier time of it at a Chinese restaurant than, say, at a diner.

AP has done the public a significant disservice by running this piece of scaremongering propaganda. And unless the piece's author has misrepresented the report they cite, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is in fact acting against the public interest in reporting such information.

No Australian Policewoman Breast Photograph Here

The damnedest things turn up in referral logs. Starting yesterday there was a spike of hits on my dream archive. The search terms were "photograph of a young Australian policewoman's breasts" coming from a number of different locations. So I googled the same phrase myself and found this report from Reuters:

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A photograph of a young Australian policewoman's breasts, sent to her boyfriend as a get well message on her mobile phone, has sparked an investigation after it was circulated on internal police e-mail.

The Victoria state police constable was in her police uniform with her name badge visible, her shirt undone and her breasts exposed when she was photographed, Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported Monday.

The image was circulated widely through the force's internal e-mail, landing in the inboxes of top-ranking officers and ethical standards department detectives....

And I was getting hits because, in the surreal mishmosh of my dreams, the archive has all the terms in the search. For a while yesterday it was on the first page of Google's hits.

I can guess what happened: The story went out on the Reuters wire and began to appear in online news pages, and eager horndogs started googling in hopes of finding the actual picture.

Keep looking, horndogs; the picture isn't here. And might I suggest that you look for breast pictures at a site like Sensual Liberation Army [NSFW], where the models' consent is much more clear-cut.

300, Racism, and Ignorant Ethnography

Author and geek icon Neal Stephenson has an op-ed in Sunday's New York Times about the film 300, about which he is mostly favorable. In addressing the negative criticism the film is receiving, though, he says, Many reviews made the same points: ... All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained...)

Dude, get a clue! To the extent that "white" means anything at all, Persians were and Iranians are white. Hint #1: "white" is a synonym for "Caucasian"; the Caucasus is due north of modern Iran. Hint #2: "Iran" is linguistically cognate with "Aryan."

In modern American formulations of racism, of course, Iranians are "brown," not "white." Ask any Iranian about how they get treated by shop clerks, for example. But here's the twist: Greeks get the same treatment. Remember when Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988, and some commentators were referring to him as "brown"?

I don't feel any more comfortable about adopting the role of the arbiter of who is (and implicitly, who is not) white, than I do about Stephenson adopting that role.

Nevertheless, he inhabitants of the sun-drenched Peloponnessus are neither more nor less white than the inhabitants of the sun-drenched Iranian plateau. Cinematically depicting one side of a war, the Good Guys, as pale-skinned and the other side, the Bad Guys, as dark-skinned when the original combatants looked much alike, is an expression of racism, pure and simple.

Twitter Considered Harmful

You may have heard about Twitter, a new Web 2.0 application that has been getting good buzz over the past several weeks and exploded into geek and hipster fashionability during SXSWi last weekend.

What is Twitter? Quoth Webware's Rafe Needleman:

Twitter is an online service that lets you broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.

Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert. You can't say much in 140 characters. That's part of Twitter's charm.

In effect, Twitter is like LiveJournal for cellphones. You can broadcast messages to everyone who follows your message or to a restricted list of friends. The messages are retained on the user's Twitter page, functioning as a very terse blog. It also interfaces with instant messaging programs, and one's Twitter page also has an RSS feed.

Things Twitter is useful include: tracking contacts at a conference (like SXSWi), tracking friends while clubbing, staying in touch with a cluster of people over the course of a day, and so on. People who use it and get over its learning curve (which, as much as anything, consists of discovering what it is good for) are liking it a lot.

Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is asking the question "Is Twitter TOO Good?"

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic — contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

Sierra states that her view is very much a minority one, saying that opinion about Twitter seems to run 100:1 in the other direction. But her criticisms ring true to me.

I am especially concerned about what Sierra says about Twitter's potential addictive qualities, because Twitter is far from unique in this regard. I would say that this feature is common to many commonly used Internet applications, from email to LiveJournal to instant messaging to message boards to.... The intermittent reward of reading or seeing something new has shaped my own Internet surfing habits in ways that are less than constructive.

Sierra's third point, on the importance of interruption-free time to getting into the flow seems familiar and obvious to me, and at the same time it is something that I need to be reminded of over and over again.

When I first heard of Twitter, I was a little hesitant to get into it, on the basis that I wasn't quite sure what it was good for. I now have a better idea of what it's good for, but now I'm afraid of it: Internet junkies don't need a new form of Net Crack.

Inconspicuous Consumption

This past Thursday, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Pia Sarkar took us comparison shopping for women's black T-shirts. A black tee that costs $7.90 at H&M and costs $14.50 (two for $20) at Gap. Go to the Armani section of Bloomingdales, however, and a woman's black tee costs $275.

There are subtle differences: the shirt at H&M is cotton with a bit of spandex woven in; the Gap tee is 100% cotton; and the Armani tee is 70% nylon, 25% polyester, and 5% Elastane. The Armani shirt is also "superior in cut and finish." Is that alleged superiority really worth more than $265?

Unlike much of branded designer clothing, the brand on an unadorned black T-shirt is invisible to everyone except the person buying and wearing it. The value of the brand is invisible. Why, then, would anyone buy it?

Milton Pedraza has an idea why. He's the chief executive of the Luxury Institute, "a research company that focuses on the top 10 percent of the country's wealth." Says Pedraza, "It may be incredibly wasteful to some people, but it makes you feel powerful. It makes you feel wealth. You're paying for that intrinsic value."

(I do not think "intrinsic value" means what he thinks it means.)

To be sure, even Pedraza notes that when times get tight, "[t]here are some things you're going to compromise and some things you aren't, and in my mind the black T-shirt is the first to go."

In essence, Pedraza is telling us that people with sufficient access to money will buy $275 T-shirts because they can. It's the same impulse that leads someone to light a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill.

I wonder, though. Nobody is going to Bloomingdales just to buy a T-shirt. They may well be bedazzled by the Armani brand, but it seems to me that a more likely scenario is that the tee is intended to complete ensembles the shoppers are buying. It isn't that the shoppers value the tee that much; but rather that the $275 is buried in the overall cost of whatever ensembles. The shoppers simply don't notice that they are paying that much for the T-shirt until perhaps they get home and examine the receipt. If they ever examine the receipt, that is.

A $275 T-shirt makes me think of the $300 that defense contractors are reputed to bill the government for hammers.

It also makes me wonder what is going on in the minds of the people at the highest levels of wealth in American society. Could it be that they are as disconnected from reality and reason as the people they have hired to run this country?

"At This Event, Nobody Would Even *Notice* If the Wifi Went Out"

As a tonic to the Tech Boys Club packing the keynote speeches and program panels at the latest Web 2.0 circle-jerk — to say nothing of lists of the N Most Studly Tech Boys on the Web — Six Apart's Anil Dash has put together a list of speakers covering The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover:

Do you want to learn about the future of web applications? If so, when choosing an event, you might want to make sure it's one that cares about including speakers based on merit, instead of based on arbitrary gender qualifications. I judge merit to be those who meet these criteria:

1. They've already been successful
2. They have done something innovative and unique
3. They are well-known names who will draw an audience and make the event compelling
4. Their work impacts a large audience, or has great influence on the space....

• danah boyd: The younger generation of web users have different definitions of "public" and "private" than you do.
• Mitchell Baker: How to take something from being an interesting technology to being a mainstream tool
• Caterina Fake: How to get things done even within the constraints of a big company
• Mena Trott: How to design an application that delights its users, instead of confounding them
• Liza Sabater: Your project won't succeed unless you reach people who are different from you
• Amy Jo Kim: How best practices from game design can make your web applications like crack
• Linda Stone:What we will be paying attention to in the future
• Kathy Sierra: How to design products that make your users smarter, sexier and hungry for more
• Heather Armstrong, Meg Frost, and Gina Trapani: One person can be a successful media outlet
• Lynne Johnson: How to credibly bring new media to an old-media company
• Jane Pinckard: Anybody with half a brain could have seen that the Wii was going to win, but you were busy bickering about the Cell processor
• Meg Hourihan: A real mashup: How to combine technology with something you love
• Heather Champ: How to manage a web community shitstorm with grace and tact
• Susannah Fox: You talk about "accessibility", but what do you know about people who are sick, old, or disabled?
• LeeAnn Prescott: Everybody talks about traffic and stats -- what about someone with actual data?
• Charlene Li: What are the criteria by which real-world analysts create their make-or-break analyses? ...

To conference organizers: If you haven't heard of these people or their work, or you think that Yet Another Bookmarking To-Do List Guy is more important, perhaps you owe some refunds. At this event, nobody would even notice if the wifi went out.

Dash also argues compellingly against the Tech Boys Club in another post here

The Male Gaze

As an almost-throwaway at the end of a piece on the influence of eyetracking studies on Web page design appearing in Online Journalism Review, the authors include a fascinating tidbit: Apparently, men and women look at pictures differently, with men spending measurable time staring at the crotches and private parts of figures, both human and animal.

(via Boing Boing)

My Can't-Miss Web 2.0 Business

Introducing...

MyWebBiscotti.com!

For too long Web browsers have stored cookies on the users' own machines. A wealth of information has gone unexploited.

At MyWebBiscotti.com, you will be able to upload your browser cookies to your very own page, where they won't be mere cookies, they will be Biscotti!

Downloadable plugins for every major browser will enable your Biscotti to be updated transparently as you surf the Web. Even if you don't use one of these plug-ins, participating partner Web sites will be able to set Biscotti for you as you browse.

MyWebBiscotti's social networking feature will allow you and your friends to share Biscotti. Biscotti RSS feeds will be available to everyone in your network! You'll be able to track the most popular Biscotti, either on our main page or as a feature on your customizable MyBiscotti personal page.

Information shared is information multiplied! Join the Web 2.0 revolution by joining MyWebBiscotti.com today!

Coming soon: YouPoint.com, the site for sharing PowerPoint presentations...

All You Need to Know About Acting in One Easy Lesson

Sir Ian McKellen explains: It's all just pretending:

(via Ellen Kushner)

Will Writing About Women's Privacy on the Web Haunt Journalists' Careers?

There's a growing constellation of stories the unintended impact of the Internet on privacy, particularly relating to employment, particularly relating to women. The Washington Post had a story last week about AutoAdmit, a law school discussion board that evidently is having a negative impact on the hiring prospects of law students who are gossipped about there. Lindsay Beyerstein and Jill at Feministe talk about it; Jill was slimed on the board also.

Melissa Gira at Sexerati pointed us last month to Emily Nussbaum's article in New York Magazine, "Say Everything," about how youth participation in as MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, and other Internet social networking phenomena are changing their understandings of the meaning of privacy. The link has been sitting around in my to-be-blogged queue, to the point where Xeni Jardin picked it up for Boing Boing last Friday, so that means I better blog it quickly, if I do at all, because its hip factor has started to decay exponentially.

Laurie Edison and Debbie Notkin are in dialogue with Susannah Breslin about The New York Times Magazine's exposé sober examination of college sex magazines like Boink and H Bomb. To be sure, these college sex magazines appear to be more printed presences than Internet ones; but something about the discussion seems to me to fit in.

And today's San Francisco Chronicle warns young ladies of the Web 2.0 generation that those sexy photos on the Web "could plague women in years ahead." The article leads out with the story of Y.M. Chang, participating in CollegeHumor.com's America's Hottest College Girl competion at the same time she is interviewing for engineering jobs after graduation. A male friend submitted Chang's picture, and she discovered only later that she was a finalist competing for $10,000.

Why are all these articles focusing on women? It could be because of the naughty picture angle – there are many more naughty pictures of women than of men, and our culture doesn't regard barechested men anywhere near so sexually as it does barechested women. Men don't get slut-shamed the way women do.

I predict, though, that in 2008 there will be more than one race for national office in which the Internet activity of one of the candidates will become an issue. It might be blogging, it might be something on MySpace, or perhaps some pol's pseudonymous account on Alt.com will be outed.

Singularity? Or Gravitational Collapse?

Sarah Dopp points us to a Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us, a piece of fatuous Web 2.0 cheerleading that tells us that ZOMG! the Web changes everything!!!111!!:

What particularly gets up my nose is the claim that syndications like RSS, Atom, FeedBurner et al. RELEASE CONTENT FOREVER FROM THE STRICTURES OF FORM ZOMG!!!!11!

Horsepuckey.

You can't separate content from form. Content cannot exist without form. The interpretation of form is how we determine content.

The reason syndications enable display of content in a variety of forms is that the content so displayed is highly constrained.

I've heard these "There will be Pie in the Sky when you join MySpace" claims before. Remember the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchy? Strong cryptography was supposed to bring on the Infocalypse and end government. Well, we've got strong cryptography, and the Feds are still tapping our phones.

Meanwhile, Mark Gritter points us to Karl Auerbach, who asks the question, Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

You would have thought that in this internet age that we might have learned that clarity of internet protocol design is a great virtue and that management, diagnostics, and security are not afterthoughts but primary design goals.

There is a lot of noise out there about internet stability. And a lot of people and businesses are risking their actual and economic well being on the net, and the applications layered on it, really being stable and reliable.

But I have great concern that our approach to the internet resembles a high pillar of round stones piled on top of other round stones - we should not be surprised when it begins to wobble and then falls to the ground.

I am beginning to foresee a future internet in which people involved in management, troubleshooting, and repair are engaged in a Sisyphean effort to provide service in the face of increasingly non-unified design of internet protocols. And in that future, users will have to learn to expect outages and become accustomed to dealing with service provider customer service "associates" whose main job is to buy time to keep customers from rioting while the technical repair team tries to figure out what happened, where it happened, and what to do about it.

What's the bloody use of a vast externalized memory and reasoning capabilty that takes ten minutes to load a page and is filled with dead links because the routers are down?

How Much More Proof that Microsoft Is Evil Do You Need?

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing points us to a research report indicating that, thanks to the cycle of software obselecence, users of computers running Windows upgrade their machines twice as often as those who run Linux.

The report stresses the impact of downversion computers on the waste stream and landfill. There is another important factor, however: the resources used to make the new machines, and the human toll that acquiring those resources takes.

Yesterday, Chris Clarke at Pandagon highlighted the connection between the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the mining of tantalum there.

Tantalum is a relatively scarce element that is a key component of the dielectric material in the capacitors used in the manufacture of just about every piece of electronic equipment made. The world's largest known reserves of tantalum ore are in the DRC, and with the personal electronics industry boomed in the late 1990s, the price of tantalum ore skyrocketed. Tantalum is mined in the DRC, smuggled out through Rwanda and Uganda, and sold to the world electronic manufacturing markets from there.

Millions of people have died in the bloody war, known as the African World War from the number of nations involved. The prize is the Congolese mineral resources, including gold and diamonds, yes, but the real treasure is tantalum ore.

The demand for electronics drives the price of tantalum ore, and as that price rises and falls, so does the level of violence in the Congo, the wholesale rapes of area women committed by the various militias and armies, the number of area residents impressed into service in the militias, the number of slaves working in the mines at gunpoint, the number of women forced into sexual slavery to service the miners and the soldiers, the overall human misery.

So anything that cuts into the number of new computers manufactured reduces the intensity of the agony of the Congo. To use Microsoft Windows and committing oneself to an hardware upgrade every time the software is rendered obsolete is to increase the toll exacted of human misery.

So does getting a new iPod, or mobile phone, or PDA, or GPS receiver, or just about any of the gadgets we take for granted in the privileged segments of Western society.

Can You Be Too Buffed?

(This is a repost of a guest post I wrote for Body Impolitic)

I've been thinking about Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider, which I saw just over a week ago.

Cage is an actor who alternates between heavy-duty action-hero roles (as in Con Air) and more serious, thoughtful parts (e.g. Bringing Out the Dead or Adaptation). Ghost Rider is not a serious and thoughtful movie -- it's an adaptation of a B-list Marvel comic.

As a contemporary action hero, Cage needs to present a buffed,muscular physique. The paragon of the genre is seven-time Mister Universe and known "juicer," i.e., steroid-user (Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film Adaptation has one unintentionally funny moment when Cage, playing out-of-shape screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, did a shirt-off scene, trying to look fat and out of shape. He's hunched over, sort of hiding his washboard abs. Nice try, Nick. Where's that Hollywood movie magic when we need it? (How tall was King Kong?)

One way I exercise is by lifting weights. I enjoy how it makes my body feel. One effect of my years of weightlifting has been that I have added substantial muscle bulk to my frame. I like how working out makes my body feel, and I like the resulting strength it has given me. The experience of gaining muscle bulk was transformative experience, largely positive, in a way that's worth an essay on its own. At the same time, though, bodybuilding seems misguided to me, and I find its aesthetic to be grotesque. The bodybuilding ideal looks to me like a body that has been flayed, the skin and fat removed to show the muscles beneath.

Just as the women of Hollywood do not look like real women, the men of Hollywood do not look like real men. I remember noticing, when I first saw The Empire Strikes Back in its original release in 1980, that Mark Hamill, playing Luke Skywalker training to be a Jedi under Yoda's tutelage, showed what looked to my eye then as remarkable muscle development in his arms and shoulders. Since then (and since I took to weight training myself) I realized quite how many of the men in the movies were buffed and toned. Even Actors' actors like George Clooney, Tobey McGuire, Matt Damon, and so on, have that look. I imagine that the great actors live with the fear that the next job might go to someone who might not act as well but whose physique looks good enough to make up for it.

I now know, from my experience of weight training, that the visual ideal of manliness as propagated in the media takes extraordinary determination, attention, time, and effort to approach. The ordinary man in the street doesn't come close. Even the man who works out in the gym multiple times weekly only loosely approximates the ideal -- and not even loosely if he is a "hardgainer," someone who gains relatively little muscle bulk through weight training. To get there, one has to cross the line to obsession, and (if one isn't blessed with the right metabolism) resort to risky artificial aids such as steroids.

Cage has a shirt-off scene in Ghost Rider, too, just out of the shower and in front of a mirror. His torso and arms have the grotesque, alien appearance of the hypermuscular bodybuilder, looking as if they were drawn by a pulp artist more fond of muscles than knowledgeable about human anatomy.

In that scene, Cage does not look healthy to my eye. Without any direct knowledge, I imagine that he too, was juicing. His body doesn't seem to have an ounce of fat. Indeed, througout the film I was noticing how gaunt and haggard his face appeared.

Now maybe this is an example of Hollywood movie magic at work. After all, Cage was playing Johnny Blaze, a damned soul whose head transforms at night into a flaming skull. Or maybe he was cast for the part because of his gaunt appearance.

But seeing him in the role, particularly with the scene with his bare torso, was watching someone who I believe was doing damage to himself in the service of trying to attain an arbitrary and unnatural ideal of manliness.

The effect is that he doesn't represent that ideal so much as serve as an unconscious parody of it. He looks like a cautionary tale: If you overdo it and pursue the image rather than pursuing health and well-being, you could wind up looking like me.

As a man, and especially as a heterosexual man comfortably partnered in long-term relationships, I don't have the social pressure on me to look great in order to attract and keep a mate. "I don't see people like me on the silver screen" is a different experience from "If I can't make myself look like that, I will fail in my life and be unable to find happiness." I'm not, by a long shot, the only man seeing these images over and over and over.

Marvel Kills Off Captain America

The Associated Press reports that Marvel Comics is killing off superhero Captain America in the edition of the comic of the same name that hits the stands today.

The AP story says Marvel Entertainment editor-in-chief Joe Quesada hints that Captain America could conceivably return. Indeed, he's done it before. What's more, in the Marvel universe, there is no form of death, destruction, vaporization, or annihilation sufficient to prevent a character's return.

But it's interesting to me that Marvel is chosing to kill him off now.

(via Avedon Carol)

TONIGHT at Marcus Books

Tribute to Octavia E. Butler with Nalo Hopkinson and friends. Saturday, March 3, at 6:30 PM, Marcus Books, 3900 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland, California.

One of the friends will be our own true Debbie Notkin. Will we see you there tonight?

Octavia E. Butler Memorial Tribute Fundraiser

(I should have posted this sooner. Better late than never.)

Octavia E. Butler Memorial Tribute Fundraiser

Join Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez, Susie Bright, Jennifer de Guzman, and Guillermo Gomez-Peña for a fundraiser reading to benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship.

Sunday, March 4, 5 - 7 pm

The Starry Plough
3101 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA.
510-841-2082
http://www.starryploughpub.com/

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It is meant to cement Octavia's legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.

Contact Claire Light for more information.

After the benefit, Debbie and I will be hosting an open house reception at our house, just around the corner from the Starry Plough (details available at the benefit). Be there or be rhomboid.

Dough We'd Like to Knead

Mark Harris at Preludium points us to this remarkable video of a talk-show appearance by Cornell University history professor Steven Kaplan, who tells us what goes into great bread (caution: this might not be safe for some workplaces):

I bet you thought I was kidding when I called it "Bread Pr0n."

There's a more sober profile of Prof. Kaplan in the Washington Post. He is the author of Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It