The four big myths of profile pictures.

OK Cupid went through statistics related to 7,000 profile pictures to find what kind of pictures were most effective. Surprising and interesting.

Antonia Crane has worked many jobs in the sex industry. She’s done escort, BDSM, porn, and stripping. Read the rest of this entry »

I just learned from Jacket Copy that “Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across “oral sex” in its pages.”

It’s thanks to dirty dictionaries like that one that I decided to become a writer.

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Most of the time, the topic of sex makes so many journalists spin moralistic, accusatory or just plain inaccurate. For those who are able to keep their wits about them, there are The Sexies.

The Sex Positive Journalism Awards foster high standards of journalism by recognizing writing that is unbiased and accurate across the entire spectrum of sexual topics, and “celebrate[s] healthy sexuality as a positive force in people’s lives.”

Among the winners are Time magazine’s coverage of the prevalence of genital plastic surgery, by Laura Fitzpatrick; Boston magazine’s coverage of a teen pregnancy scandal in Gloucester, by Rachel Baker; The Nation’s sex column, “Carnal Knowledge,” by JoAnn Wypijewski; and opinion pieces by Judith Levine at 7 Days, and Michael Bader at Alternet. Check out the complete list of winners for 2009, and submit your own nominations for 2010.

Rumpus contributor Lindsay Meisel on sex, literature, and film.

Cuba’s progressing fast when it comes to recognizing the rights of transgendered peoples.  First the ban was lifted on sex-change operations in 2007, and now not only are the surgeries being performed in Cuba, they’re being paid for under the government’s universal health care plan.

It probably doesn’t hurt that the president’s daughter, Mariela Castro, runs the Center for Sex Education in Cuba, helping to prepare people for the procedures. And Mariela Castro’s plans to bring about change don’t stop there.

“Well, I’m getting older, so I can’t get it up as much as I used to. [...] I think prostitutes are amazing people with so much knowledge of human nature and so many fantastic stories. Some of them are scam artists, but most of them are very, very brave and a lot of them compassionate. I think it should be legalized.”

Mother Jones has posted an extended version of their interview with William T. Vollmann in which he discusses popularity, prostitution, borders, and why he distrusts the Internet.

Tia Ling is one of the most popular models at Kink.com. Here are some pictures from some of the work Tia Ling has done on Ultimate Surrender, Device Bondage, Hogtied, and others. NSFW. Read the rest of this entry »

One of our favorite adult sites is Ultimate Surrender. That’s because the women on the site actually wrestle (as they do in Naked Kombat, the male version).

Points are scored for undressing and fondling the opponent. And in the final round the winner gets to do whatever she wants with the loser. The result is porn that feels less scripted.

Kink.com, the producer of Ultimate Surrender, invites a live audience to attend a tag-team match once a month. Following are some pictures from the site, not remotely safe for work. Read the rest of this entry »

“The first time I read A Sport and a Pastime, just two years ago, I knew I’d experienced something unusual, alive, difficult in its directness; not something to look upon “fondly,” but a story that, like all great art, connected me more deeply and truthfully to my whole human self – sans irony or “cool.”

[...]

The nakedness of these characters is soul-deep, and the novel demands no less of its reader; the “new narcissism,” per Roiphe –“boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of ‘I was warm and wanted her to be warm,’ or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world” – won’t do here.”

At The Millions Sonya Chung joins in the collective response to Katie Roiphe by singling out a wonderful writer that Roiphe had neglected to mention: James Salter and especially his novel, A Sport and a Pastime.

Recently, in the Sex section: the Courtney Trouble interview, literary sex and Katie Roiphe’s big cock block, and the orgasmic frequency of Elle Rocket.

Courtney Trouble’s no pedestrian pornographer. She’s a pale, femme, riot girl with squiggly tattoos and rocker bangs. Read the rest of this entry »

So some of you may have seen Katie Roiphe’s long and sometimes-sharp-and-other-times-kind-of-annoying piece in the New York Times Book Review about literary S-E-X. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new update at Ultimate Surrender, Kink.com’s girl on girl wrestling site. This week’s feature’s Tia Ling and Ally Ann. Pictures after the jump. NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Read the rest of this entry »

New videos from Kink.com. This is an adult advertisement and is NOT REMOTELY SAFE FOR WORK. Pictures after the jump.

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More new content from Kink.com. NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Seriously, this is porn. There’s hosted preview videos from Device Bondage here. More pictures after the jump.
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Former pornstar Penny Flame (nsfw) has a great blog, started in April of this year, about leaving porn and reclaiming her identity under her real name, Jennie Ketcham. There’s a lot of really good writing in here.

One of the things that’s great is that she’s making changes in her life but not repudiating her past.

I met her in Los Angeles this past weekend when she took my workshop. Here’s a post she did on the lecture.

I am going to guess that there is no file on this usage in Nintendo’s Product Safety Department.

You gotta respect it: dude knows what he wants — and just asks for it: Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, a literary contest I might have a shot at winning.  Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize winner was recently announced by the editor’s of Literary Review magazine.  The shortlist consisted of several notable luminaries, including Phillip Roth, Paul Theroux and John Banville.

The annual award is given “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”  Past winners include Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, and in 2008 John Updike was given a lifetime achievement award after having reached the award’s shortlist four times since the award’s inception 17 years ago.

This year’s winner?  Jonathan Littell, for a passage from his controversial, bestselling tome The Kindly Ones. The passage describes a Nazi officer’s orgasm while sodomizing a woman locked in a guillotine as “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”  Yum.

When I met Elle in San Francisco, we were sleeping with the same tattooed Puerto Rican stripper in AA. Ten years later, she contacted me on Facebook and asked if I’d like to work with her. “Work” would mean erotic sensual massage: naked strangers, happy endings, making out with Elle and cash. Read the rest of this entry »

INTERCOURSE
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing intercourse. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I saw you, in 2000, we were in a hotel room in Pittsburgh; one of us was naked and there was a beautiful, heavily tattooed girl handcuffed to the sink… Read the rest of this entry »

Pick any political debate or news article about prostitution, and there’s a high probability there’ll be a quote along the lines of “It’s a far cry from Pretty Woman.” As if that’s going to come as a surprise. As if everyone doesn’t already bloody know that. Read the rest of this entry »

Kaylie Jones, daughter of James Jones who penned From Here to Eternity, revealed in an interview with The Daily Beast that her father was forced to remove gay sex scenes from his original manuscript prior to publication.

Jones had originally included discussions and details about sexual favors and relationships between male soldiers, which were deemed too “salacious” for the American public. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, November 14, 2009, I attended “MODA, La Envidia Xtravaganza Ball.” The ball was a drag competition hosted by Hector Xtravaganza at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza, which was attended by Michael Kors, fashion designer and judge of the reality television program Project Runway.

Drag balls, a kind of street-gang warfare for drag queens in which they compete with attitude, pomp and truck-loads of glitter, have been going on for decades. Their subjects and history have been well-documented in film (Paris is Burning, an acclaimed documentary by Jennie Livingston), video (“Vogue,” by Madonna, which features Hector Xtravaganza, Grand Father of the House of Xtravaganza), and literature, Michael Cunningham’s essay for Open City #6, “The Slap of Love,” which details the origins of the House of Xtravaganza and its members, Madonna is one. Writer Steve Lewis of Black Book magazine was a judge at the event and has posted some great pictures. Here is a subjective account of my night: Read the rest of this entry »

There are new videos and pictures from Kink.com. More after the jump. Not even remotely safe for work. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Ames wears many hats: writer, boxer, performer, raconteur, and screenwriter.

The hat he wears in his video interview on bigthink.com is a jaunty chapeau; a beanie perched atop Ames’ bearded head.  It’s almost jaunty enough to distract from the fascinating responses to questions about Ames career arcs as a boxer, performer, writer, screenwriter and more.

An especially interesting tidbit centers on Ames’ answer to the questions “Is there a particular joy to writing about sex?” and “Do you have any personal stories about Craigslist?” which dovetail together nicely and resonate with Ames’ explorations of sex and loneliness.

The only question I wish they’d have asked: “Where did you find such a jaunty hat?”

There is not enough nice things you can say about the incredible varieties of sexual diversity in San Francisco.

I think as Bay Area folk it’s easy to take it for granted. But all the same I find endless reasons to be grateful.

It was my first year in San Francisco when my girlfriend and I were fortunate enough to live with a queer punk surfer artist with a penchant for boiling her sex toys in the mornings and painting naked in the afternoons, when I realized this city would introduce me to people, things, and experiences that were beyond anything I had ever known. Read the rest of this entry »

Sex and Submission

If I’ve learned anything from interviewing JT, it’s that “no one ends up in the adult industry by accident” and “when you fall, you have to land somewhere.” Read the rest of this entry »