Posts tagged porn

Erotica Controversies The 1st District Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted inmate, Andres Martinez, the right to read a werewolf erotica novel in prison. The book in question was The Silver Crown by Mathilde Madden (a pseudonym used by Guardian contributor, Mathilda Gregory). NPR says the two year legal battle to read the book began when guards at Pelican Bay State Prison confiscated the novel on the grounds that it was pornographic.  According to TIME, California banned porn from prisons in 2002 to prevent inmates from creating a “hostile work environment” for female guards. But in the 1973 case of Miller vs. California, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if a literary work has scientific or political value, it can’t be deemed “obscene.” Outlawing all works that describe sex would go against the standard.  So, after 30 pages of decision making, the court decided that the book possesses “serious literary value” and doesn’t qualify as straight up porn. The Warden of Pelican Bay State Prison has been ordered to “allow petitioner to receive, possess, and read his copy of The Silver Crown.” Victory. And if this erotica scandal isn’t hot enough for the press, the first female deputy CIA director, Avril Haines, is being what Salon calls “slut-shamed” for hosting “erotica nights.” According to The Daily Beast, in the 1990s, Haines co-owned Adrian’s Book Cafe in Baltimore, Md. The cafe used to feature events where published guests would read their erotic prose. Apparently, Haines even read some racy excerpts herself from Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.  FJP: What does any of this have to do with the fact that Haines is the new CIA director? Nothing. So why bring it up? Media Matters suggests that the press applies a “shockingly different standard” to what they cover in regards to accomplished females vs. males in Washington D.C. The media assumes that a woman’s sexuality, or even what she wears, defines who she is (see: Purse Politics: Tote and Vote), and that’s a standard that’s “almost never applied to male counterparts.”  Would this story be being beaten to death (here, here, here, here, here, and here, to name only a few articles) if Haines was a man who used to be into smutty reading nights? Or is a woman’s sexuality just infinitely more interesting? Also… if a male inmate can read what he wants, shouldn’t Haines have the same right? — Krissy Image: Salon 

Erotica Controversies

The 1st District Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted inmate, Andres Martinez, the right to read a werewolf erotica novel in prison. The book in question was The Silver Crown by Mathilde Madden (a pseudonym used by Guardian contributor, Mathilda Gregory).

NPR says the two year legal battle to read the book began when guards at Pelican Bay State Prison confiscated the novel on the grounds that it was pornographic. 

According to TIME, California banned porn from prisons in 2002 to prevent inmates from creating a “hostile work environment” for female guards. But in the 1973 case of Miller vs. California, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if a literary work has scientific or political value, it can’t be deemed “obscene.” Outlawing all works that describe sex would go against the standard. 

So, after 30 pages of decision making, the court decided that the book possesses “serious literary value” and doesn’t qualify as straight up porn. The Warden of Pelican Bay State Prison has been ordered to “allow petitioner to receive, possess, and read his copy of The Silver Crown.” Victory.

And if this erotica scandal isn’t hot enough for the press, the first female deputy CIA director, Avril Haines, is being what Salon calls “slut-shamed” for hosting “erotica nights.”

According to The Daily Beast, in the 1990s, Haines co-owned Adrian’s Book Cafe in Baltimore, Md. The cafe used to feature events where published guests would read their erotic prose. Apparently, Haines even read some racy excerpts herself from Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. 

FJP: What does any of this have to do with the fact that Haines is the new CIA director? Nothing. So why bring it up?

Media Matters suggests that the press applies a “shockingly different standard” to what they cover in regards to accomplished females vs. males in Washington D.C. The media assumes that a woman’s sexuality, or even what she wears, defines who she is (see: Purse Politics: Tote and Vote), and that’s a standard that’s “almost never applied to male counterparts.” 

Would this story be being beaten to death (here, here, here, here, here, and here, to name only a few articles) if Haines was a man who used to be into smutty reading nights? Or is a woman’s sexuality just infinitely more interesting? Also… if a male inmate can read what he wants, shouldn’t Haines have the same right? — Krissy

Image: Salon 

The Internet’s Effects on The Porn Industry The popularity of porn is at an all-time high thanks to the Internet. Slate cites an estimate that says there are almost 25 million adult sites worldwide which make up 12 percent of all websites total. Daily Infographic reports that 28, 258 people are looking at Internet porn every second and 40 million Americans are regular adult website visitors.  Aside from being a great distribution tool, the Internet also brings greater recognition to individual adult performers. Porn star couple James Deen and Stoya are what The Village Voice calls “The Jay-Z and Beyonce” of porn — and the two of them owe a lot of their fame to online activity. Net-followers refer to themselves as “Deenagers” and “Stoyanauts,” and they dedicate their time to tracking the couple’s every social media move (see Stoya’s Tumblr and James Deen’s Twitter.) Even established porn stars like Nina Hartley and Alexis Texas amp up their fame with their own websites dedicated exclusively to their individual work. But even though porn popularity is at an all time high, profits are dippin’ low. 72-year-old porn actor, Dave Cummings, told The Huffington Post that piracy has “killed the industry.” Theo Sapoutzis, CEO and Chairman of Adult Video News (AVN), estimates that porn made $13 to $15 billion during its peak in the early 2000s, but now DVD sales have dropped by 50 percent since 2007 due to illegal uploads. (Note:”Estimates” is the keyword here. Because so many porn businesses are privately owned, it’s impossible to determine the exact gross income of the industry.) FJP: Despite the blows to profits, the porn industry hasn’t totally deflated yet. Sherri Shaulis, an editor at AVN, says that video companies are now creating their own sex toys and lingerie to make up for losing money on DVD sales. Also, The Institute of Network Cultures notes that even though free porn sites make up 70-80 percent of adult content online, they usually function as “bait” to lure people to pay-to-watch, premium websites with better quality content. So, people who want that classy, story-driven, Hollywood-lit coitus have to pay their dues. And hey, that’s fair. (And all is always fair… in love, and German Whore Fare.) — Krissy Sort of Related: Speaking of premium pornographic material, artist, Jonathan Harris, created I Love Your Work, a clickable, interactive documentary on nine women who work in lesbian porn (here’s the trailer). The project is limited to 10 viewers per day and it costs $10 for 24 hours of access to six hours of material. In the FAQ section of the project’s website, Harris says he only allows 10 viewers per day because it’s “an experiment in delayed gratification.” He says that “Internet porn is abundant, and most websites attempt to accumulate as many viewers as possible. It seemed interesting to do the opposite.” Check it out.  Image: 2Space.net

The Internet’s Effects on The Porn Industry

The popularity of porn is at an all-time high thanks to the Internet. Slate cites an estimate that says there are almost 25 million adult sites worldwide which make up 12 percent of all websites total. Daily Infographic reports that 28, 258 people are looking at Internet porn every second and 40 million Americans are regular adult website visitors. 

Aside from being a great distribution tool, the Internet also brings greater recognition to individual adult performers. Porn star couple James Deen and Stoya are what The Village Voice calls “The Jay-Z and Beyonce” of porn — and the two of them owe a lot of their fame to online activity. Net-followers refer to themselves as “Deenagers” and “Stoyanauts,” and they dedicate their time to tracking the couple’s every social media move (see Stoya’s Tumblr and James Deen’s Twitter.) Even established porn stars like Nina Hartley and Alexis Texas amp up their fame with their own websites dedicated exclusively to their individual work.

But even though porn popularity is at an all time high, profits are dippin’ low. 72-year-old porn actor, Dave Cummings, told The Huffington Post that piracy has “killed the industry.” Theo Sapoutzis, CEO and Chairman of Adult Video News (AVN), estimates that porn made $13 to $15 billion during its peak in the early 2000s, but now DVD sales have dropped by 50 percent since 2007 due to illegal uploads. (Note:”Estimates” is the keyword here. Because so many porn businesses are privately owned, it’s impossible to determine the exact gross income of the industry.)

FJP: Despite the blows to profits, the porn industry hasn’t totally deflated yet. Sherri Shaulis, an editor at AVN, says that video companies are now creating their own sex toys and lingerie to make up for losing money on DVD sales. Also, The Institute of Network Cultures notes that even though free porn sites make up 70-80 percent of adult content online, they usually function as “bait” to lure people to pay-to-watch, premium websites with better quality content.

So, people who want that classy, story-driven, Hollywood-lit coitus have to pay their dues. And hey, that’s fair. (And all is always fair… in love, and German Whore Fare.) — Krissy

Sort of Related: Speaking of premium pornographic material, artist, Jonathan Harris, created I Love Your Work, a clickable, interactive documentary on nine women who work in lesbian porn (here’s the trailer). The project is limited to 10 viewers per day and it costs $10 for 24 hours of access to six hours of material. In the FAQ section of the project’s website, Harris says he only allows 10 viewers per day because it’s “an experiment in delayed gratification.” He says that “Internet porn is abundant, and most websites attempt to accumulate as many viewers as possible. It seemed interesting to do the opposite.” Check it out. 

Image: 2Space.net

Banning Porn According to Smithsonian, the desire to ban porn exists all over the world. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, wants all porn to be blocked from public spaces to maintain “clean Wifi.” There are websites exclusively dedicated to banishing porn in the U.S. And Iceland has even proposed to get rid of Internet porn altogether.  Despite these efforts, The Economist points out that porn is impossible to eliminate from the Web. Algorithms can’t catch everything, which means to totally get rid of porn, humans would need to scour the Internet all day for inappropriate content.  Slate writes that when Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, was met with suggestions to restrict porn on Tumblr for the sake of Yahoo’s reputation, she refused. The “Not Safe For Work” (NSFW) tag that Tumblr already offers is sufficient enough at filtering pornography, and Mayer wants Tumblr to maintain the “richness and breadth of content” that it’s known for.  And that richness and breadth is going to be hard to beat back. An infographic by Paintbottle shows that 70 percent of men and 30 percent of women watch porn — with the average viewer visiting porn sites 7.5 times per month for an average of 12 minutes at a time. Smithsonian says that one of the driving forces behind this porn paranoia is that children are learning about sex through porn and not sex education classes. Parents are afraid of porn’s influence on minors who aren’t properly educated on intercourse. Apparently, this concern isn’t without merit. Aside from kids accidentally stumbling upon porn while web-surfing, porn shows up in public places. In Slate’s Manners For The Digital Age podcast, a woman explains that a passenger had been watching porn on his portable DVD player in close proximity to herself, her daughter, and her young and impressionable granddaughter during their flight. FJP: In an attempt to make porn more “appropriate,” L.A. County passed Measure B — a law forcing porn actors to use condoms in their scenes and to receive STD training before performing. The law also forces adult film producers to pay a fee for Department of Public Health inspections.  So should your child stumble upon some pre-marital, raunchy, no-holds barred Internet sex, at least there will be a thin layer of latex to shield them from that silly strain of death-gonorrhea. — Krissy Image: Found down in the NSFW, dirty depths of Tumblr. 

Banning Porn

According to Smithsonian, the desire to ban porn exists all over the world. The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, wants all porn to be blocked from public spaces to maintain “clean Wifi.” There are websites exclusively dedicated to banishing porn in the U.S. And Iceland has even proposed to get rid of Internet porn altogether. 

Despite these efforts, The Economist points out that porn is impossible to eliminate from the Web. Algorithms can’t catch everything, which means to totally get rid of porn, humans would need to scour the Internet all day for inappropriate content. 

Slate writes that when Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, was met with suggestions to restrict porn on Tumblr for the sake of Yahoo’s reputation, she refused. The “Not Safe For Work” (NSFW) tag that Tumblr already offers is sufficient enough at filtering pornography, and Mayer wants Tumblr to maintain the “richness and breadth of content” that it’s known for. 

And that richness and breadth is going to be hard to beat back. An infographic by Paintbottle shows that 70 percent of men and 30 percent of women watch porn — with the average viewer visiting porn sites 7.5 times per month for an average of 12 minutes at a time.

Smithsonian says that one of the driving forces behind this porn paranoia is that children are learning about sex through porn and not sex education classes. Parents are afraid of porn’s influence on minors who aren’t properly educated on intercourse.

Apparently, this concern isn’t without merit. Aside from kids accidentally stumbling upon porn while web-surfing, porn shows up in public places. In Slate’s Manners For The Digital Age podcast, a woman explains that a passenger had been watching porn on his portable DVD player in close proximity to herself, her daughter, and her young and impressionable granddaughter during their flight.

FJP: In an attempt to make porn more “appropriate,” L.A. County passed Measure B — a law forcing porn actors to use condoms in their scenes and to receive STD training before performing. The law also forces adult film producers to pay a fee for Department of Public Health inspections. 

So should your child stumble upon some pre-marital, raunchy, no-holds barred Internet sex, at least there will be a thin layer of latex to shield them from that silly strain of death-gonorrhea. — Krissy

Image: Found down in the NSFW, dirty depths of Tumblr. 

Porn Studies is the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts. Porn Studies will publish innovative work examining specifically sexual and explicit media forms, their connections to wider media landscapes and their links to the broader spheres of (sex) work across historical periods and national contexts.

Porn Studies is an interdisciplinary journal informed by critical sexuality studies and work exploring the intersection of sexuality, gender, race, class, age and ability. It focuses on developing knowledge of pornographies past and present, in all their variations and around the world. Because pornography studies are still in their infancy we are also interested in discussions that focus on theoretical approaches, methodology and research ethics. Alongside articles, the journal includes a forum devoted to shorter observations, developments, debates or issues in porn studies, designed to encourage exchange and debate.
Announcement from England’s Routledge Publishing, an academic publisher of books, journals and online reference materials. In the announcement (PDF), the editors make a call for papers and say the first issue of Porn Studies will come out in Spring 2014.
‘Without any mental deliberation, picture the average female porn star. Just let her spring into your mind’s eye looking however she looks. Can you see her?’

I’d bumped into a friend who I’d not seen in a while and this was the first question I asked him. He didn’t realise at the time that I’d be in self-imposed smutty exile for an untold number of weeks, working on the largest study of porn stars ever undertaken, and now I was out and eager to spread the news.

‘Erm, yeah, I suppose,’ he said.

‘What does she look like?’ I asked, struggling to hide my smile.

When he replied by saying ‘a blonde with big boobs’, I must admit I relished the opportunity to lean in, let the grin spread across my tired face, and say ‘That’s what everyone says. And in fact, it’s wrong’.

‘Oh,’ he said, after I explained how I knew what the average porn star actually looks like, as well what her name probably is, how many films she’s most likely done and the probability of her having a tattoo or body piercing.

‘So you’ve spent all this time watching hundreds of porn movies?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve spent all this time analysing the demographic profiles and filmographies of ten thousand adult performers. There is a difference.’

‘I see’, he then said. ‘And how, dare I ask, does one go about doing that?’

There’s data porn and there’s porn data. Combining the two is Jon Millward, a self-described “Ideas Detective”.

Millward spent six months going over a ten thousand person porn star database to determine “what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.”

The result is both a longread analysis and multiple data visualizations of things you never know you’d be interested to know.

Jon Millward, Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers.

Somewhat related: Sex Diseases Cost $16 Billion a Year to Treat, CDC Says

Porn is Larger than You Think Take Extreme Tech: Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. And add Pacific Standard: And while the average visitor to your typical news site spends only a few minutes there, porn visitors linger for four or five times as long. And you’re left with an FJP imponderable: Porn sites, where for some unknown reason, people linger just a little bit longer. Image: Manipulated detail, Ugh, by Patrick Charles. Flickr/Creative Commons.

Porn is Larger than You Think

Take Extreme Tech:

Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit.

And add Pacific Standard:

And while the average visitor to your typical news site spends only a few minutes there, porn visitors linger for four or five times as long.

And you’re left with an FJP imponderable: Porn sites, where for some unknown reason, people linger just a little bit longer.

Image: Manipulated detail, Ugh, by Patrick Charles. Flickr/Creative Commons.

So What is it that Journalists Actually Do?

Via Jonathan Stray at Nieman Lab:

In the endless debate about what the “future of journalism” holds, “journalism” doesn’t have a very clear meaning. We’re in the midst of hot arguments over who is a journalist, whether social media is journalism, whether data is journalism, whether cherished tenets like objectivity are necessary for journalism. As the print advertising model that funded the bulk of working journalists collapses and forces transformation, it’s pressing to know what is worth preserving, or building anew.

After decades where “journalism is what journalists do” was good enough, there is a sudden a bloom of definitions. Some claim that “original reporting” is the core, deliberately excluding curation, aggregation, and analysis. Others say “investigative reporting” is the thing that counts, while a recent FCC report uses the term “accountability journalism” liberally. These are all efforts to define some key journalistic act, some central thing we can rally around.

I don’t think I could tell you what the true core of journalism is. But I think I have a pretty good idea of what journalists actually do. It’s a lot of things, all of them valuable, none of them the exclusive province of the professional. Journalists go to the scene and write or narrate or shoot what is happening. They do months-long investigations and publish stories that hold power accountable. They ask pointed questions of authorities. They read public records and bring obscure but relevant facts to light. All of this is very traditional, very comfortable newswork.

But journalists do all sorts of other things too. They use their powerful communication channels to bring attention to issues that they didn’t, themselves, first report. They curate and filter the noise of the Internet. They assemble all of the relevant articles in one place. They explain complicated subjects. They liveblog. They retweet the revolution. And even in the age of the Internet, there is value to being nothing more than a reliable conduit for bits; just pointing a camera at the news — and keeping it live no matter what — is an important journalistic act.

The what is a journalist question reminds me of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s attempt to define porn: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”

Journalism: we know it when we see it. — Michael

Porn and the Internet

Where we learn that:

  • Xvideos has 4.4 billion monthly page views, is twice the size of Reddit and three times the size of CNN or ESPN.
  • Xvideos transfers about 50 gigabytes of video per second.
  • The average time spent on a news site is about 3-4 minutes. The average time spent on a porn site is between 15 and 20 minutes.
  • YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. This averages out to 950 terabytes of data transfer per day. 
  • YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, and delivers about 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.

From ExtremeTech:

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. And there dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn… It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

Library sex began with high hopes. Long before the era of the public library, stories of sex among books were set in private collections, in secluded humanist studies. The protagonist of Antonio Vignali’s 1526 La Cazzaria (The Book of the Prick) examines a collection of raunchy books and manuscripts in a private study as he awaits the arrival of a lover. The presence of smutty works in progress is telling: there is an elegant cross-pollination here. Books inspire sex, sex creates books—and all within the four walls of the library.

Avi Steinberg, The Paris Review. Checking Out.

A brief history of libraries, librarians and sex in which we learn that “again and again,” in contemporary library-porn lit, “the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.”

Filed Under: Porn Analytics Cause Someone Somewhere Might Be Curious. Via.

Filed Under: Porn Analytics Cause Someone Somewhere Might Be Curious.

Via.

ICANN, the industry organization that governs domain name extensions such as .com, .org, .li, etc., has approved of .xxx for use with adult, mature, porn sites. The move is being denounced by both the sex industry and some religious groups. Via the New York Times: The decision was immediately slammed by some of the sex industry’s biggest names. Industry members say they fear they could be subject to arbitrary censorship by governments and even by a new board overseeing the dot-xxx domain. They also say the plan would unfairly force existing pornography sites to register their sister domain names ending in xxx to prevent other businesses from using the names. “Our industry is unanimously opposed,” said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing more than 1,000 pornography businesses. Ms. Duke said that she expected the association’s members, which include companies like Hustler and Adam & Eve, to continue to use dot-com addresses. She also said the association was considering its legal options. The dot-xxx registry was also opposed by some religious groups, who feared that the new domain would lead to the further spread of pornography on the Internet.

ICANN, the industry organization that governs domain name extensions such as .com, .org, .li, etc., has approved of .xxx for use with adult, mature, porn sites.

The move is being denounced by both the sex industry and some religious groups.

Via the New York Times:

The decision was immediately slammed by some of the sex industry’s biggest names.

Industry members say they fear they could be subject to arbitrary censorship by governments and even by a new board overseeing the dot-xxx domain. They also say the plan would unfairly force existing pornography sites to register their sister domain names ending in xxx to prevent other businesses from using the names.

“Our industry is unanimously opposed,” said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing more than 1,000 pornography businesses. Ms. Duke said that she expected the association’s members, which include companies like Hustler and Adam & Eve, to continue to use dot-com addresses. She also said the association was considering its legal options.

The dot-xxx registry was also opposed by some religious groups, who feared that the new domain would lead to the further spread of pornography on the Internet.