Last week I was puzzled by the use of the term “virtual pornography” in a CNN piece about a man who photo shopped young girls faces on to naked adult women’s bodies.

After reading Wendy Kaminer’s concise and worrisome warning about the potential legal implications of this case I feel a bit myopic in my concerns. Kaminer discusses the virtual porn case along with another involving a convicted sex offender who was imprisoned for talking about the sexual abuse of children. Kaminer argues that these cases, along with some Supreme Court rulings, have important implications not only for free speech, but free thought. It’s well worth reading.

It’s hard to write about this stuff when you know it can be read as if you’re defending speech that’s so heinous (at least it’s hard for me). As Kaminer says, few people will lose sleep over losing the right to discuss abusing children. And it’s hard for those of us who aren’t lawyers or legal scholars to know how much of this hand wringing is justified.

But I hope I’ll never be so complacent that I’ll pass over something about criminalizing thought and not take a second to read more.

Read more – The Atlantic: Child Porn, Animal Cruelty Porn, and the Right to Imagine

Reuters reported this week on a small Australian study that found that men who had damaged sperm were able to significantly increase the quality of their sperm by ejaculating daily. Apparently doctors debate whether or not it improves chances of pregnancy for men to abstain from sex prior to trying to conceive. This research suggests they shouldn’t; that while frequent ejaculations does decrease the volume of ejaculate, it actually increases the quality of the sperm (so for those keeping score, this is one of those times when size doesn’t matter).

I’m not sure that better sperm is going to be an argument guys pick up in terms of reasons to have more sex or masturbate more frequently. Getting pregnant is one of those things no one wants, until they do. But it might be a helpful thing to know if you’re trying to conceive via sexual intercourse and having difficulty, as a call to have frequent sex for pleasure is kind of the opposite of what often happens in that scenario.

Read more – Reuters: Daily sex makes for healthier sperm

Related – Sex & Infertility ; How to Talk About Sex & Infertility ; Keeping Sex Fun While Trying to Get Pregnant

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The passionate and committed folks behind Arse Elektronika are planning it's third conference for 2009 and has just posted a call for papers, workshops, machines, and (from what I've heard about them) any good ideas of ways to communicate about the future of sex tech. From the site:

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don't you think, replicants?

I personally think that in some ways sexuality represents a site of the least amount of change, and one of the problem is that the general public and sexuality professionals confuse novelty and radical change on a regular basis. But I devoured their anthology culled from the first and second conference and sincerely hope I'm able to make it to this year's conference.

Follow this link to submit papers and read more about Arse Elektronika 2009.

Related: Is Technology Ruining Sex? ; Which Came First, Sex or Tech? ; Sex Tech History ; Ways We Use Technology for Sex ; Is Virtual Sex Real Sex?

_{Image courtesy of monochrom}

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I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in someone else's hotel room in Glendale, Arizona with my fingers knuckles deep inside Real Touch. Most of the time professional conferences don’t start off for me in such a semi-clandestine way, but I came to Arizona to give a workshop on sex tech for the American Association for Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists annual conference and this was an invitation I couldn’t refuse.

My tour guides for Real Touch are two of the team members from AEBN, the company behind what I think will probably be the first giant leap in consumer teledildonics (after years of many smaller and clumsier steps). At least that’s what my fingers are telling me.

What Real Touch offers is tactile stimulation to accompany visual erotic imagery. That imagery might be in the form of pre-produced pornography or, eventually, it could be a live web cam feed (courtesy of either a sexual partner or a sexual professional). You put the Real Touch over your penis (or your penis inside of Real Touch, depending on where you want to place sexual agency) and you watch something sexual. As you see something happening on screen you feel a surprisingly similar thing happening inside Real Touch.

Real Touch comes equipped with two soft rubber drive belts, four vibrating areas, a heating element and the ability to deliver lubricant on command. All of these elements are programmed by AEBN to work in concert with porn (if you’re interested in the details I recommend checking out the site, it’s wonderfully easy to navigate and answers most of the questions you’ll have directly).

My fingers took a test drive of Real Touch while watching a clip from an educational sex film. As you see people engaging in penetration you feel Real Touch moving up and down in time to the penetration. When the couple moves positions Real Touch also changes. As the action progresses my fingers feel warmer and wetter thanks to the heating and lubricating properties of Real Touch (one of my guides explained that the lube chamber can be programmed to release a little or a lot of lube, such that a scene with female ejaculation can be felt as a gush of warm lube in Real Touch). They have plans to develop a dildo like toy that a partner can use to control Real Touch. When one partner strokes the dildo up and down the movements, speed, and pressure will be felt inside Real Touch. Eventually they promise to make toys for other body parts too. But being a company that makes most of its money of male porn viewers they logically started with them.

After having Real Touch on my fingers for four or five minutes, my hosts opened it up and showed me the insides of the toy. While the construction was impressive I was amazed there wasn’t more going on inside. It felt to my fingers as if there were 10 or 12 different things happening at once something that felt reminiscent of really great sex I’ve had. But the insides of Real Touch seemed orderly and logical (which is less reminiscent of really great sex I’ve had).

Not having fully tried Real Touch I still have questions and concerns. Right now Real Touch only works with video that the company has coded. So you’ll have a choice of what to use it with, but the choice will be limited to the porn the manufacturers have chosen. What I really want to see is Real Touch that can be controlled by another user with another toy.

My major concern is actually from a programming perspective. I wonder about the people who are actually coding the videos and the folks who came up with what Real Touch can do. As long as everything is closed technology users will be relying on the sexual creativity and sophistication of those making the toys and coding the videos. I think this severely limits the experience. What I’d hope for is for the company to come up with some way to let users code videos (their own or professionals) and ultimate for users to suggest other things for Real Touch to do.

What’s exciting about technology is how putting it in the hands of millions of people can morph it in ways that the developers never would have imagined. Most sex tech is closed and takes a relatively antagonistic attitude toward users. Here’s hoping the makers of Real Touch have the vision not only to make a great teledilidonic toy, but also to change the sex toy industry model.

Learn More - Real Touch Website
(note: the first few pages of the site don't have any porn on them, it's easy to avoid, but not hard to find).

Related - All About Sex Tech

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There are all sorts of ways to approach sex. Being a sex educator I tend to take the most direct route (which, ironically, doesn’t always get me there the fastest). But I learn just as much from people who get to sex from a completely different angle.

With over 750 Guides, About.com is a great place to find people talking about sex from diverse and often unexpected perspectives. In this irregular series I’m going to point to my favorite examples of sex on About.com.

This week’s post is all about dinosaur sex. Bob Strauss, About.com’s Guide to Dinosaurs opens our eyes to how little we really know about how dinosaurs mated (and of course how oblivious we are to whether or not they did other things which we’d call sex). Reading his piece I learned stuff like dinosaurs could have been wicked gender benders for all we know, and genitals, despite their somewhat elevated status among live humans, don’t endure nearly as well as other parts of our bodies. This makes me wonder if, once we have easily accessible technology that can do everything our genitals can, might we discover more versatile parts of our body to focus on when we have sex for pleasure.

Why not add some pre-history to your sex ed.

Bob Strauss: Dinosaur Sex - How Dinosaurs Mated and Reproduced

Previously 'Round About Sex: Soft Core Austim Awareness

_{Photo credit: ballyscanlon/Getty Images}

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This CNN headline caught my attention yesterday morning:

Tennessee man charged in 'virtual pornography' case

I clicked on the link assuming the story was about someone charged for possessing porn that was completely user generated, pictures or videos of avatars or animated characters either engaged in violent sex or characters who were clearly created to look like minors. In fact, the porn in question is of real people with real bodies:

the photos feature the faces of three young girls placed on the nude bodies of adult females…two of the faces were of local girls -- a 10-year-old and 12-year-old, the station reported. The third face appears to be Miley Cyrus…

According to the CNN piece this is an increasingly common problem where individuals are using photo manipulation to try and avoid prosecution for child pornography charges. In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law that made such images illegal. The wording in what was the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 referred to both computer-generated images and real photos that had been manipulated as being “virtual child pornography”.

I think I was surprised by this use of the term “virtual pornography” because when I think “virtual” I think of something that’s other than real. Interestingly the government’s definition turns on exactly the opposite understanding. They claimed the harm from virtual pornography comes from the fact that it is “virtually indistinguishable” from real pornography. I don’t know if the un-footnoted use of the term virtual in a definition of the term virtual bothered anyone involved in the writing of the Act, but it reminds me of Peter Sellers “lascivious adulterer” scene in What’s New, Pussycat? I’m not particularly interested in demanding a clear distinction between real and virtual here. But I find it odd that in the case of pornography CNN chooses to refer to real photos, which have been digitally altered as “virtual” yet I doubt that they have ever referred to the cover of People Magazine or Vanity Fair as the “virtual cover image”. What I’m interested in is how the media are constructing these two terms, contrasting them, and feeding them back to us.

There’s a larger question to be dealt with about whether pornography and child pornography share anything in common or are categorically distinct. What I’m interested in is legal adult pornography and how the increasingly blurry lines between what is real and what is virtual will play out in the production and consumption of porn.

Here’s another example. I was on one of the popular porn portals the other day, the kind of site that has tens of thousands of free video clips of porn which you can browse through by category. I was amazed to find that inside the different categories, the site was displaying porn featuring real people side by side with porn featuring avatars and animated images, without distinguishing them. So the real porn clip found in the “oral” category was right beside a porn clip featuring two avatars that looked sort of human, but clearly were computer generated. I wondered whether that decision was thought about at all, and what long-term effect it might have on what we find arousing.

Related - Sex Tech FAQ ; Is Virtual Sex Real Sex? ; Interactive Porn

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There are all sorts of ways to approach sex. Being a sex educator I tend to take the most direct route (which, ironically, doesn’t always get me there the fastest). But I learn just as much from people who get to sex from a completely different angle.

With over 750 Guides, About.com is a great place to find people talking about sex from diverse and often unexpected perspectives. In this irregular series I’m going to point to my favorite examples of sex on About.com.

This week’s post comes courtesy of Lisa Jo Rudy, About.com’s Guide to Autism. Lisa Jo blogged about a series of short public service videos meant to raise awareness around autism. To the extent that the videos include information about austim it's all from a non biomedical perspective. What is most unique about the videos is that they read like a soft core TV commercial for a hard rock radio station.

Lisa Jo doesn't hold out much hope that the videos will have an impact, writing that while the creator of the videos "may get a good deal of personal publicity for her arty and provocative style...she's also likely to get a lot of flack for her anti-feminist, disrespectful approach to autism education. She's unlikely, however, to make much impact as an educator."

I agree with her assessment of the videos impact, although I think the low impact in part is due to what are kind of amateurish productions (they look better than actual amateur productions, but they're on the nose and lack any irony). What I do like about them though is the juxtaposition of images and text that can feel awkward. How often do you see a half naked woman (who is clearly meant to read as heterosexual) with the word neurodiversity next to her boobs? As one of Lisa Jo's commentors on her blog says, if a few people see this and are curious enough to look up the term neurodiversity (or self-advocacy) then it's hard to argue the videos didn't have an impact.

Read more - Sexy Autism Ads: Clever or Catastrophic?

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The latest media release from the Guttmacher Institute announced that teens are heading in the wrong direction. They are referring to a new study that shows teens are less likely to be using condoms than they were ten years ago.

I definitely agree teen contraceptive use is headed in the wrong direction. But does that mean that teens (which teens? all teens? some teens? just the ones having sex?) are heading in the wrong direction? I know that the Guttmacher didn’t mean it this way, but conflating “teens” as individuals or the “teen” demographic with “teen contraceptive use” is kind of emblematic of the problem with so much sex education. It defines problems too narrowly and doesn’t address them with the complicated, multi-pronged approach that such complex problems require.

After all, it might seem simple to say that there’s a right direction and wrong direction for contraceptive use among teens. But the meanings and reasons teens (and the rest of us) do and don’t protect ourselves from unwanted pregnancy and STIs is hardly simple. And even if everyone understood the risks, many of us would still take them.

One way to explain this is to say that our directions, our paths in life, are rarely direct: They more often resemble vicious circles than one-way streets. I think the direction metaphor is a rich one, but I didn’t like what they did with it.

When I think of the direction I’m heading, I imagine myself with a map in front of me. It’s messy with all sorts of scribbled notes plus directions friends have given me along the way, and the initials and phone numbers of a few people I thought were cute and didn’t want to forget. My map isn’t clear and I don’t understand it all, but it’s mine and I’m in the process of figuring it out. What I’d like from sex education is someone to sit down with me and my map and point out some of the major landmarks, maybe give me tips on the best subway routes to take, and how I can get a deal on tickets by waiting until Thursday when they’re on sale. I would be happy to hear about which paths are easier to walk, on which ones you should use your bike, and the ones that you can only get to by train. What I don’t want is someone to sit down, ignore my map altogether, and hand me a map they’ve made which I superficially understand but that has no real meaning for me and no space for me to make my own notes or figure out my own short cuts and scenic routes.

When we only focus on one aspect of sexuality, like contraception, when we tell teens that this is THE most important thing for them to know, we’re giving them the kind of boring pre-printed map you find in hotel rooms and never use. I’m with the Guttmacher on the point that we’d all end up at our destinations healthier if we followed the path that includes using contraception. But honestly I think it’s more important to teach people how to read a map than to insist that they take the route you know is best for them.

If we want to help teens navigate their way through teen-dom we’ve got to accept that their paths are far more circuitous than the ones we would choose for them, and the best way to help them is to start with the map that’s in front of them, not the one in our heads.

Read more - Guttmacher Institute: No Crystal Ball Needed: Teens Are Heading in the Wrong Direction

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The Associated Press is reporting that John Joseph Houghtaling, the inventor of the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed passed away on Wednesday at the age of 92.

My most vivid memories of Magic Fingers are from a road trip I took with my father and three brothers to Myrtle Beach in the 80s. There were many a fight over who got the Magic Fingers Bed in musty motel room after musty motel room. It was one of those things that was never actually fun, and kind of made me feel sick, but oddly desirable.

Apparently Houghtaling came up with the invention while repairing vibrating beds and discovering that “it was the vibrator that counted, not the bed." Words to live by, words to live by.

Read more – AP: 'Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed' inventor dies at 92

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I'm thrilled to see that the excellent documentary Sex Positive, which I first saw at the SXSW Film Festival is opening this week in Los Angeles and New York. There's a review in the Sunday LA Times.

The documentary focuses on the life and work of activist and journalist Richard Berkowitz, who along with Michael Callen and Joseph Sonnabend co-authored "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach" which was the first safer sex tract in 1983. They were (and still are) reviled by some who saw them as self-hating gay men turning their back on the sexual emancipation that was hard won by the movement.

I'm 39 years old but my teen years were spent in mostly heterosexual circles and as such I missed the history that this film covers, which is a history most people who weren't there don't know about.

The film is moving, powerful, funny, and sad. Berkowitz is unbelievably generous in the film with his time, archives, and honesty. And the result is an important document that anyone interested in the history of sexuality or in the current state of sexual health should see. Keeners should also try to get a copy of Berkowitz's book, Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex

Read more - LA Times: 'Sex Positive' documents the pioneers of safe sex

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