

An Australian dating site ran a competition to find the best-looking tradesman. Here’s the result. He actually looks more like a model, to be honest. Or a tradesman that has an awful lot of time to go to the gym.
Still, not a bad piece of eye candy.
Good news for female porn fans in the US – Petra Joy has revealed on her blog that Feeling It is going to be distributed in America through Candida Royalle’s Femme line of films, and Adam and Eve. I know Petra’s had a hell of a time trying to get her films out to the public, with numerous potential distributors either going broke or else trying to impose inappropriate ideas and marketing onto her movies. It’s great to see Candida continue her legacy of offering top quality erotic films to women.
Petra has two short films showing at the Cinekink festival in New York this weekend, excerpts from Feeling It. She’s also working on a documentary about women who make porn. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Find out more about Petra’s films and where to get them here.
Yes, yes, I know I already wrote that about the Rated X festival in Amsterdam. But this is true too – I really, really wish I could be in New York to enjoy the Cinekink erotic film festival. For a start, Jennifer Lyon Bell’s amazing film Matinee is showing on Friday night, as well as a collection of female-friendly shorts collected under the banner of “Wanton Female Desire.”
And of course, there’s plenty of other thought provoking and arousing films on display, plus plenty of clever conversation to be had afterwards. Do you know how fabulous that sounds? Especially when you live in a small town in a country where the police tend to turn up at film festivals if there’s sex involved?
Maybe I’ll make it next year, possibly also subbing a film if I can.
If you’re in New York, please go along so I can enjoy it vicariously through you.
Apparently the lunatics from XXXChurch will be handing out bibles at Sexpo in Brisbane over the weekend.
I’m very very tempted to go and protest their protest. Maybe hand out flyers about the dangers of church addiction. These silly bastards should have some kind of counter to their insanity.
Although I suspect most people going to Sexpo will just laugh at them.

Do you remember your first introduction to sex education?
I found myself pondering this as I read about the new documentary The Joy Of Sex Education. The doco looks at the history of sex ed films, from the earliest “look out for VD” propaganda from WW1 to the hippy-influenced fun of the 70s through to today.
It occurred to me that there was never a moment in my life where I didn’t have some kind of knowledge about sex. That’s because, thankfully, I was a child of the seventies and my parents believed in sex education. They weren’t hippies by any stretch, and they certainly suffered from various red faces when it came to the crunch, but they gritted their teeth like good people and… well, they bought us a book.
Yes folks, I’m talking about that classic tome of rudeness, Where Did I Come From?
This amusing book appeared not long after the arrival of my baby sister when I was five and I absolutely loved it. Especially because it had the EXTRA RUDE PAGE where the man and the woman “got as close to each other as two people can get.” I can still remember smuggling it out of the house so I could snigger about it with my brother and his friends.
Obviously that attitude is not the most perfect approach to sex ed, but we were young and had picked up that sex was naughty. Prior to that we’d done the “I’ll show you yours thing”, except that, unfortunately, I was the one who did all the showing. Bastards.
That’s not to say that I didn’t learn anything; indeed, the book does give a nice, straight-forward approach to sex, refusing to stint on details about pleasure or orgasm. (Interestingly, some reviewers on Amazon are horrified that you would tell a kid about orgasm. Why leave out the good bit?)
Still, Where Did I Come From does have its flaws. For a start, it left me believing the sperm have cute little faces and top hats. Damn, was I disappointed to discover they don’t.
But the main problem with the book is the way it gives the wrong information about female sexuality. Men have a penis, women have a vagina (and that’s all). Rubbing the penis in the vagina is what causes the “nice feelings.” There’s also not a lot of info on where the egg comes from or female anatomy in general (”boys have a penis, girls don’t”). So I must admit, this book helped to create my teenage misconception about how women have orgasms.
It didn’t help that, when I was about 4, my mother had sternly told me to stop sticking my hand down my pants. To give her credit, I think this occurred because I had an embarrassing habit of touching myself when visitors were there, especially the minister’s wife. These days we tell kids that it’s something you save for your bedroom but Where Did I Come From notwithstanding, masturbation was still taboo in 1977. So discovering my own body did have a certain stigma surrounding it.
I had other sex education moments as I grew up. There was the time I was taken along to the school library to see a “special film”, an evening organised by the local church. Don’t remember much about the movie except thinking that sex must be equivalent to a religious experience if the church was involved.
I do remember learning the details of human reproduction in year 7 science class at school, mainly because I was in the almost horrific situation where my Dad was the teacher. Still, he did very well and it was all terribly detached and factual.
“Personal Development” classes in high school recycled the usual reproductive stuff but they were also really big on condoms. AIDS had just become a problem and so safe sex was where it was all at in Australian classrooms. Unfortunately there was no discussion of pleasure, clitorises, orgasm or how to negotiate with a partner in bed. Useful stuff like that was out of bounds.
One memory I have is of finding the courage to put my hand up and ask where the sperm went once it was inside you. My teacher informed me that it stayed up there and was absorbed by the body.
I can’t believe I was lied to about the wet patch!
As for the other details, well, Dolly Doctor filled in a few gaps, although the advice column didn’t mention orgasms or clitorises that I recall. Acne and tampons seemed to be the main obsession. And I did enjoy the odd furtive peek at 1980s porn magazines, a habit that left me in no doubt of the inherent sexiness of stockings and suspenders.
So there it is. I didn’t grow up ignorant but I did encounter some misinformation and a few negative attitudes along the way.
I sometimes wonder if today’s kids are doing any better. Certainly there’s still a determination to keep any mention of pleasure out of sex ed classes (that’s if they’re not pushing abstinence-only) and I don’t think they discuss any of the really tricky issues surrounding sex.
But then again, sex ed classes are always a lesson in embarrassment more than anything else. I’m actually glad kids have access to the internet so they can research this stuff in privacy.
And then overshare it on their blog 30 years later. Like you do.
A couple of good links:
Where did all the good sex-ed lit go? (”It was my Most Favorite Book Ever. And after a disastrous show-and-tell session at Christian day care, it was also mandated to be my Most Favorite Book Ever That Was Never to Be Taken Out of the House Ever Again.”)
Where Did I Come From Book Review (”I should note that Peter and Arthur have also teamed up to bring us What’s Happening to Me? and hopefully after this offering will reunite to answer the timeless, Whisky Tango Foxtrot?”)
So this week has seen Clive Hamilton come out hyperventilating in support of the ill-considered mandatory internet filter – originally his idea, by the way.
His arguments are flawed in a lot of ways and I recommend the excellent Somebody Think Of The Children blog for further analysis. To be honest I’ve been trying to stop thinking about it because it, and the comments section, inundated with nonsense as a result of an email from fundie Christian groups, make me too angry.
I am, however, inspired to make this post thanks to two recent news items regarding the reality of the way teens approach porn online.
The first is, admittedly, sensationalist but it does offer some very useful statistics. A recent survey found the average British teen will spend one hour and 40 minutes a week surfing porn sites. It also found they spend roughly the same amount of time looking at dieting and weight loss sites.
The study of 1000 teens revealed that the average kid also spends an hour and eight minutes researching breast enhancement and liposuction on cosmetic surgery sites. Teens also look for information on contraception, pregnancy and sex as well as details on adolescence in general. They spend around two hours a week looking at Youtube and nine hours chatting on social networking sites.
So porn is in the mix, but so are diet and cosmetic surgery sites. Sounds like a typical teenage mindset: I’m too fat, my butt is too big, I want sex but I don’t know what I’m doing.
Thing is, I don’t hear calls for mandatory filtering of diet or cosmetic surgery sites.
The next article is the really important one because it answers Clive’s boogeyman fear-mongering quite well. How Teens Really Feel About Pornography cites three recent European studies that sought to discover how young people deal with the issues surrounding porn.
The whole thing is worth a read, but here are some salient facts:
While sizing up youth porn consumption, investigators found three main uses for it:
1. It’s a form of social interaction between viewers. Youth who observe porn together end up gauging their reactions as compared to others. Viewers create a norm as far as what’s “normal” or “deviant” via information that’s communicated, such as comments, laughs, jokes and sighs.
2. It’s a “reliable” information source. Youth learn new things from porn — for example, tips on different positions. Yet they are processing this information critically, comparing it to life experiences and information from other sources. Young people are able to evaluate the materials as overstated, distorted or incorrect. The ultimate reaction: They tune out or distance themselves from the source.
3. It’s an inspiration for sexual excitement. For boys, interest in porn grows less as they get older and have their own sexual experiences. They actually become more critical and negative about porn with age. Porn for them becomes something more for stimulation and ideas than a source of information or socializing.
Let me say that it is perfectly reasonable to worry about what sort of messages teens may be getting from porn. Most mainstream smut is far from politically correct and a lot of it is misogynist or offensive.
But these studies suggest that teens learn to treat porn with a certain amount of cynicism. They realise it’s not real life, in the say way they understand that you can’t drive a real car the way that Bruce Willis does in the movies. They process it, compare it and ultimately put it in perspective. It’s a learning experience and it’s something they cope with as part of becoming an adult.
I’m a firm believer in education when it comes to porn. I honestly think that the issues surrounding it need to be discussed sensibly with teenagers so they can deal with it in a mature way.
Given the above research regarding the relatively benign nature of porn, imposing a nationwide mandatory filter in order to stop teens from seeing it seems a ridiculous approach to this issue.
I hate shower curtains. It’s been scientifically proved that the difference in pressure between the warm inside of the shower and the cold outside will always make the plastic blow in and stick to your leg.
Still, I’m finding it a lot harder to hate the Shower Boyfriend curtain. Mainly because it features exactly the kind of hot sexy guy you’d want sticking to your leg. It’s like a big flat male blow up doll that’s actually useful.
At first I was disappointed that the Shower Boyfriend is so coyly covering his tackle. But then again, maybe that’s a good thing when you’re hosting the next dinner party.
I have no idea if the Shower Boyfriend is impervious to mould (as all good boyfriends should be) but if nothing else, at least cleaning the shower will be less tedious.
The Independent has a he-said, she-said article discussing women and desire. Much of it rehashes the New York Times article from a couple of weeks ago, but I felt the need to blog these two paragraphs, just because I liked the sentiment.
So female desire can be a paradox – as Prof Chivers reports, we may want to be ravished roughly in an alley and also want someone who can be tender and caring. But I’m always amazed by how male writers manage to make that sound impossible, when really, women are not that complicated. Our sexuality just doesn’t parallel men’s; we can’t always be viewed through the same filter. So perhaps when they study women, scientists should drop the unifying theory idea.
As Mary Roach says, “[Scientists] saying that they want to increase orgasms, or boost libido is much more helpful than saying: ‘I want to understand women.’”
Catharine Townsend has a point. Why do men always find this complexity confusing? Surely they experience the same thing? Men and women are not automatons, we all want variety in bed and in our relationships. Everyone has their own kinky fantasies… so enough with the “what do women want?” question.
I’m a bit late with this but I wanted to direct your attention to Violet Blue’s SFGate column criticising the mainstream porn industry’s ongoing continuation of racist stereotypes in their movies. Her article quotes several feminist porn stars and directors including Madison Young and Shine Louise Houston. She’s also made a number of further comments on her blog.
While we all understand that sexual fantasies are often politically incorrect, it’s still worth standing up and questioning the way the industry continually perpetuates negative stereotypes of African Americans – and of Asian and Indian people as well. There’s no balance, and there’s certainly a distinct lack of positive perspectives when it comes to depicting non-white people in porn.
I’ve said before that For The Girls is unfortunately skewed towards a white audience; our photos and movies invariably feature white actors. This is because it’s damned near impossible to find acceptable content featuring black couples making love. Instead we’re invariably confronted by the standard “booty” / “ho” / “brother”/ “pimp” stuff that I just find offensive.
Violet’s piece has inspired a particularly vitriolic editorial from AVN. The author takes Violet to task over a number of factual inaccuracies but unfortunately he does so in an extremely petulant and nasty way, constantly trashing the concept of sex positivity.
Indeed, the tone of the whole thing seems to sum up what’s wrong with so much of the porn industry. We’re down and dirty exploitative pornographers, don’t you know. It’s our JOB to be racist and negative and misogynistic. Any woman who takes it up the ass like Madison Young deserves to be hated. And all you queer types can take your thinking approach to sex and porn and stick it.
At least, that’s the vibe I got.
I read it and felt immensely disappointed with AVN. Their slogan is “the industry standard” and they’re the most visible face of the porn world. So to see such a negative attitude displayed in an editorial like that does them no favours.
Perhaps they should stop hating the sex positive porn community and instead start paying attention to what we’re doing. There may be a global recession and DVD sales are well down but I honestly feel that well-made, positive, realistic and, yes, “politically correct” porn is the future.
There are millions of people who are turned off by the offensive stuff the industry churns out in a never-ending attempt to out-shock a jaded audience. Why disdain such a potent market?
Almost another week gone without a post. The last few days have been rather stressful, mainly because my husband had a seizure on Wednesday. Beyond the initial adrenaline-laced shock of that day, I’ve been busy visiting doctors and generally looking after him, not to mention doing a lot of online research into epilepsy. We’re both OK now, but it’s going to mess with our lives a bit.
For me, the incident has been a reminder not to take my loved ones for granted. It’s also shown me just how many good friends we both have, both in our neighbourhood and online. The Tweets, DMs and emails I received were very much appreciated. I felt so alone when it originally happened but I know that’s not the case.
So. In the meantime, I’m still editing the video from last weekend, behind schedule now but getting there. A lot of my other projects are on the backburner, sadly neglected after such a hectic couple of weeks. I’ll get back to them eventually.
Life goes on.

My poor blog has been neglected for a week now, but I like to think I’ve got a good excuse.
I’m currently editing the footage from my first ever video shoot which occurred over the weekend. It involved a heap of planning beforehand and a very busy couple of days in the city. It was my first time directing and working behind the camera. I’m pleased to say that whole thing went really well and it was a huge learning experience. There’s plenty of stuff I’d do differently but the only way to find that out is to have hands-on practical experience. The resulting footage looks amazing and now it just takes a lot of patience to choose the best shots and angles. We used two separate cameras, although I wish I’d had a third one. The stills above give a small idea of what it looks like.
The full video will appear on For The Girls in the future. I’m also going to edit up a shorter version for submission to festivals. Yes, delusions of grandeur already.
Bam. Two negative, almost hateful diatribes against female-focused erotic fiction books in as many days.
Instead of being condemned as a cheapjack book slut pandering to male fantasies, you will be profiled in the serious press, with a photograph of you dressed demurely, and women will not be ashamed to be seen reading your book on the Tube. Feminist websites will praise you for “provoking debate in intellectual circles” and claim your book “does not intend to function as porn” (even though it sort of is porn).
- Feminist slant for female erotica writers – The Times Online
and
Roche and others from the new wave of women shock-jocks tell us that baring their fantasies, or recounting their love lives in lurid and exhaustive detail, is uniquely emancipating.
While I would fight tooth and claw for women’s right to sexual freedom, I’m not sure the sisterhood has gained much if it sees that freedom as a chance to brag about sex and conquests in the same kind of tedious and lewd manner that made the new lad so obnoxious back in the Nineties.
Un-erotica? As another female writer publishes an explicit novel is this new feminism or a tawdry betrayal of women? – The Daily Mail
The first piece derides all those nasty women writers for daring to dabble in erotica, because it’s really just porn, you know. And porn’s for men, after all.
The second piece happily indulges in all the usual false consciousness assumptions about how women who explore their sexuality mustn’t really know what they’re doing. That they’ve been duped, somehow, and isn’t it a shame they’ve lost their femininity like that?
The shoes-in-handcuffs idea pays lip service to the concept that exploring your sexuality equals being enslaved or degraded by it.
There’s this ongoing idea that writing about sex is inevitably tawdry, that writing something to induce arousal is a less noble and certainly less literary pursuit, one that should only be done by dirty old men in raincoats.
Facts. It IS feminist to have sex whenever and however you want. That’s a choice that women should be free to make. It’s a feminist act to express your thoughts and feelings about sex. And when a woman challenges the whole Madonna/Whore myth by publicly revealing that she is a voracious sexual being, she does all women a favour.
Now, go and read Girl With A One Track Mind. I’m sure she has a heap more to say on this topic.
Behold: Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies, the Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States.
That’s a whole lotta capital letters, but if you skimmed over that last bit it didn’t matter much. The main thing is that a bunch of online companies and government bodies got together and tried to determine the *actual* risks to children, as opposed to all those hysterical, made up ones that usually get the headlines.
The summary has a number of interesting points. The one that stood out for me was this:
The Internet increases the availability of harmful, problematic and illegal content, but does not always increase minors’ exposure. Unwanted exposure to pornography does occur online, but those most likely to be exposed are those seeking it out, such as older male minors.
Bing! There you have it. Teen boys like to look at porn. Knock me down with a feather. This is exactly the same result that Clive Hamilton is waving around with his “shocking” survey that revealed 84% of 16 and 17 year old boys have looked at porn online (and the other 16% were presumably lying). This is the report that inspired the mandatory filter plan that’s giving us all so much grief at present.
Of course teenagers look at porn. It’s what they do. The big question is whether they’re looking at porn for mere entertainment or if they’re seeing it as sex and gender education. If it’s the former, where’s the harm, really? If it’s the latter, well, we need to beef up our sex education programs to make sure kids know that porn is often quite, you know, dumb.
The report presented these other salient pieces of information:
Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors
face, both online and offline.Much of the research based on law-enforcement cases involving Internet-related child exploitation predated the rise of social networks. This research found that cases typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware (my italics) that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity.
Again, there it is. Those damned kids, those poor innocents that everyone is trying to protect, keep being stubbornly self-aware and sexual. How dare they!
I think we’d get a lot further with these discussions if people would stop being so shocked at the very idea of teenagers exploring porn or sexual situations and instead looked at ways to ensure that exploration has positive outcomes.
When it came to solutions, this is what the report said:
Careful consideration should be given to what the data show about the actual risks to minors’ safety online and how best to address them, to constitutional rights, and to privacy and security concerns.
Parents and caregivers should: educate themselves about the Internet and the ways in which their children use it, as well as about technology in general; explore and evaluate the effectiveness of available technological tools for their particular child and their family context, and adopt those tools as may be appropriate; be engaged and involved in their children’s Internet use; be conscious of the common risks youth face to help their children understand and navigate the technologies; be attentive to at-risk minors in their community and in their children’s peer group; and recognize when they need to seek help from others.
How ridiculously sensible. Who’d have thought it?
Of course, this is a US report. Here in Australia hysteria, misinformation, and religious agendas seem to be setting the tone of the debate about child safety and online censorship.
I can’t believe I haven’t read this before. I discovered it via a short story by Cory Doctorow and found myself nodding along as I read. This Declaration was written 13 years ago but it still resonates now, especially as Australia, China, Germany, the UK and US continue to plan ways to censor the internet.
I think we Netizens need to reaffirm the ideas behind this: that the internet is a source of liberty and we should defend it from those who would seek to restrict that liberty.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
by John Perry Barlow
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996