Brief History of Bad Things...

So Many Birthdays... So Little Time...

Yeah, there are some interesting things going on (like the stimulus bill barely making it through Congress) but I know way too many people born in February and have been celebrating accordingly. I'll probably do some stuff tomorrow but until then... Dita von Teese will keep you company.

Kink Is the New Green...

In an article on the Daily Beast, regular working girls (no, not that kind) are getting into the business of whips and chains on the side:

"I've seen it before," says Linda, “during the tech bust in 2002. Women who thought they would always make a decent living in the tech sector lost their jobs.” They came looking to Linda’s industry for freelance work, and now it’s happening again: professional women whose cubicle-bound careers have been downsized are entering Linda’s corner of the “gig economy”—a corner that involves whips, ropes, and occasionally, nipple clamps.


With staff jobs evaporating and former nine-to-fivers cobbling together incomes through scattered side projects, freelancing as a dominatrix—or “pro-domme,” as industry types prefer to call it—has become a plausible gig option. As a former call girl, I know plenty of people in the industry, and I recently spoke to several who have started doing kink work to supplement their incomes. (I’ve changed their names to protect their privacy.) They agree: The sector is poised for expansion as more unemployed and underemployed women begin looking for extra cash.


Linda began working in a dungeon when she was a student. Now she works a regular day job, picking up occasional domination gigs at night to supplement her income as an editor. Throughout her time in the industry, she’s seen “regular” jobs and kink jobs happily coexist—even complement each other. She knows women who were self-employed pro-dommes before the tech boom began. Then, she says, “during the boom, they got tech jobs.” And after the bubble burst, they brought their skills back to the kink industry and built new websites for themselves with the updated skills they’d acquired.

Teenager On Teenager Crime...

Violet Blue's editorial on the ridiculousness of charging teenagers for sex crimes for... doing things to other teenagers and documenting it. Stupid? Sure but a crime? Hardly:

Now if people under eighteen do the same thing with online tools and cell phones, they're being charged with trafficking child pornography or charged as sex offenders - even when they've taken the photos themselves.

In March 2004, a 15-year-old Pittsburgh girl was arrested for taking nude photographs of herself and posting them on the Internet; she was charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography. Okay, so maybe in 2004 the people interpreting these laws were slightly more ignorant about how the Internet works and that the legal system just needed to "catch up." Or so you'd think.

Intermission...

Off to try and be responsible. Leighton Meester will keep you company.

Happy Friday Everyone...

You know what it is... whatever you do, do it safely and responsibility. Especially if it's something really ridiculous/awesome.

On the Culture Wars...

Both Ross Douthat and Peter Beinart have some pretty solid pieces on the 'culture wars.


Beinart:

In the 1990s, things began to change. Crime declined, welfare was radically scaled back, and affirmative action receded from the political stage, in part because of the deep support it enjoyed from such conservative bastions as corporate America and the military. But the culture war didn't end: It simply morphed from a struggle primarily about race to a struggle primarily about religion. In the 1990s, as the affirmative action, crime, and welfare debates subsided, the void was partly filled by gay marriage, an issue that pits not black against white, but secular against religiously orthodox. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was not a racial battle, but a battle over what standard of public morality would govern political behavior. Bill Clinton's legacy, noted political scientists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, was to relieve some of the racial anxiety that white working-class voters felt about the Democratic Party but substitute for it a new moral anxiety, felt most acutely by whites who regularly attended church.


For Barack Obama, this shift has been useful. A black politician running in the midst of a racial culture war is virtually doomed. But amidst a religious culture war, being black is less of a handicap since blacks are the least secular element of the Democratic coalition. Barack Obama was more successful than John Kerry in reaching out to moderate white evangelicals in part because he struck them as more authentically Christian.

Douthat (in response):

...what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn't a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation - it's a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren't that invested in the issue.

Intermission...

Probably going to read for a while and listen to some heavy metal. Picture from my Tumblr (with the credits and all that) after the jump.

Intermission...

Agent Provocateur's brilliant commercial reminding gentlemen Valentine's Day is near. (thanks to Violet Blue)

3D Porn...

Thanks, but I think I'll stick to the smut on my computer screen.

In Australia, There's No Such Thing As Whiskey Dick...

I think a hard drinking country like Australia will appreciate their researchers findings:

Australian researchers have made the surprise discovery that alcohol improves, rather than damages, men's performance in the bedroom.

They hope the finding, which flies in the face of conventional belief, will reassure men who worry about the affects of drinking on their sex lives.


Until now, it has been widely believed alcohol consumption could cause erectile dysfunction, commonly called "brewer's droop''.


But a study of 1580 Australian men has shown the reverse may be true, with drinkers reporting as many as 30 per cent fewer problems than teetotallers.


Even binge drinkers had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who never drank, although this type of drinking can cause other health problems.

Now I'm not a scientist but could it be that people who have a drink or eight on the weekends are more likely to come across a friendly lady who has had a drink or eight herself? I only know very little about erectile dysfunction at the moment, but I imagine using it on a fairly regular basis is good for the cause.