By: Jessamyn West,
on 6/22/2016
Before I forget, I’ve actually started a Tiny Letter, also called TILT though it’s a bit more essay-ish than these posts. Subscribe if you like this sort of thing in your inbox. Infrequent messages, well-designed and lovingly delivered.
Been thinking about the workplace a little this week. Here’s my top five.
By: Jerry Beck,
on 1/3/2016
If a film's success is judged by how much erotic fan art it generates, then Disney has already won 2016 with "Zootopia."
The post This Petition Asks Artists To Stop Creating ‘Zootopia’ Furry Porn appeared first on Cartoon Brew.
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By: Jerry Beck,
on 4/1/2014
By: Michelle,
on 3/29/2011
As most of you probably know by now, there’s a new stage in life – emerging adulthood, or for the purposes of this post, the unmarried young adult. Marriage is getting pushed off (26 is now the average age for women, 28 for men) which means…more premarital sex than ever!
According to sociologists, emerging adults are all part of a sexual market in which the “cost” of sex for men and women in heterosexual relationships is pretty different. Out of this disparity has risen the theory of “sexual economics,” which I recently read up on in Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. At first glance women appeared to be the clear losers in this market. See this passage:
Sexual economics theory would argue that sex is about acquiring valued “resources” at least as much as it is about seeking pleasure. When most people think of women trading sex for resources, they think of prostitution and money as the terms of exchange. But this theory encourages us to think far more broadly about the resources that the average woman values and attempts to acquire in return for sex – things like love, attention, status, self-esteem, affection, commitment, and feelings of emotional union. Within many emerging adults’ relationships, orgasms are not often traded equally.
Basically, the sexual economics theory says that while women and men are doing the same thing during sex, socially they are doing two different things. Women can and do enjoy sex, but they also have an agenda, while men…just want to have sex. Which to me just seemed, well, sad. Hadn’t women all finally agreed that a man can’t ever make you happy, only you can? But the more I read up on the theory of sexual economics, the less cut-and-dry it became. Women might use sex to get commitment, but they’re also getting things like advanced degrees and independent financial stability - which also play a role in this new sexual economy. This led me to ask: are men really the clear winners in this game? I scoured the countless studies and interviews in Premartial Sex in America and came up with the following chart to sort all the data out.
Wins in the Emerging Adult Sexual Market by Gender
Tally:
Women &
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 1/22/2011
by Brian Heater
[Beat Correspondent Brian Heater Reports from the Consumer Electronics Show/Adult Entertainment Expo in Vegas, held January 6-8 in Las Vegas]
On Saturday morning of CES, I got an e-mail from PW’s Calvin Reid
, asking if I’d be willing to meet up later. He was in Vegas for the week. The magazine had sent him out in search of comics content at the Consumer Electronics Show. I told him that it would have to wait until the afternoon. I wouldn’t be at the show until three—or maybe four—that afternoon. I had other work-related business to attend to that morning.I had already walked the majority of the Las Vegas Convention Center by the time I finally met up with Reid in the South Hall. I’d seen nearly a hundred tablets, more 3D TVs than I’d care to mention, and a handful of robots. As far as comics are concerned, however, there was really nothing to speak of.
I suggested he check out the color eBook reader on the other side of the room, and the new Batman flash drives from Mimobots—the product of a newly-announced partnership with DC Comics, will manifest itself in the coming year in the form of Superman, Flash, and Green Lantern portable storage devices.
I considered, for a moment, telling him about what I had seen offsite that morning, during a brief trip to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo—the massive pornographic convention held in the Vegas the same week ever year as CES. I’ve attended the show the last few years
, (all links SFW, by the way) getting material for my day job—the adult industry has, after all, been disproportionately effective in the advancement of mainstream consumer electronics. The example we often cite is the industry’s role in the defeat of VHS over Betamax in the format wars. More recently, companies have been dipping their toes in the world of 3D TV, media streaming, and augmented reality.And the timing of the show is far from coincidental. AVN was literally born out of CES’s basement
—the proverbial redheaded stepchild of the country’s largest consumer electronics show. And likely much to CES’s chagrin, the two shows have maintained a certain bond—according to an AVN rep I spoke with, roughly 40 percent of the show’s foot traffic comes from CES attendees.Given those sorts of numbers, it’s unsurprising, perhaps, that much of the subject matter for the adult films on parade at the show are direct “adaptations” of prominent geek culture. Perhaps it’s a product of culture at large’s increased mining of comics, sci-fi, and other standard geek fare for its blockbuster entertainment. Or maybe it’s the result of targeting content at those folks who put up the money for a trip to Vegas for the express purpose of having a photo taken with their favorite adult stars. I’m sure its some combination of the two.
Whatever the case may be, it was nearly impossible t miss the giant banner for the “Justice League of Pornstar Heroes” at the show,
By: Jessamyn West,
on 4/23/2009
I read it first on Librarian in Black but liked the coverage of the Mercury News. The San Jose Public Library decided to not add filters to the public library computers after a year and a half of debate. One of the points made by the article is that startup costs to add filters would be about $90,000 with annual maintenance costs of $5,000. You can read the final policy statement here (pdf). In includes the fact that, out of almost 1.4 million computer login sessions at SJ Public Libraries (excluding the King Library), library staff received two complaints of lewd behavior and only one complaint to staff about pornography viewing. The King Library, the main library, had a similar number of login sessions and 14 complaints about pornography viewing.
By: Jessamyn West,
on 2/20/2009
Library Journal put up a quick article about the Topeka Library Board’s decision from yesterday to restrict access to four books with sexual themes. I was following most of the meeting, in realtime with photos by keeping an eye on David Lee King’s twitter feed (starting about here) as I was in my all day meeting. Here’s the brief story from the AP Wire. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this story.
One lawyer at the meeting told the newspaper he had already been approached by potential plaintiffs. “Because it would take these books off the shelves and place them out of reach of patrons browsing the shelves, the proposed policy is unconstitutional,” warned the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri in a letter to the board.
“And adult filmmakers, like Hollywood, are happy to bring our stories to their own perceived logical conclusions.”
In this case: happy endings.
Either that Justice League porn has a lot of gay scenes or Wonder Woman is incredibly busy in it.
There is one scene where Wonder Woman “takes a meeting” with all of the JLA “members”.
But Zatanna, Catwoman, and other female roles are throughout the films (they filmed 2 back to back) as well.
It’d a great topic for quips and giggles, sure, but as we start talking about the relevance of digital in comics it would be short-sighted to not recognize the relevance of porn-centered design and navigation for the most successful web-based properties. Porn has a specific and measurable client base as well as a vested interest in giving them content unobtrusively with a dollar sign attached. Web designers look at porn to figure out how to make web-based content pay (sort of like reading PLAYBOY for the articles).
The smarter systems of moving the specific client base for comics onto the web isn’t going to come from a careful study of what makes a GREEN LATERN movie popular. It’s going to come smart designers figuring out how porn serves the internet audience better than adult bookstores do and how to apply some of those methods to a new digital comic user. How do we make and measure our audience in ways that we never imagined before the internet? The porn industry leads the pack on this kind of digital discovery and Apple was silly to have restricted their involvement in such a new field of delivery.
But, yes, Wonder Woman must be very busy. Yet one can’t help but wonder what might’ve happened if the move to digital coincided with the “Aunt Harriet” period of BATMAN. Porn would be teaching us a lot of lessons there, but some that scare the beejesuzz out of me.
“Either that Justice League porn has a lot of gay scenes or Wonder Woman is incredibly busy in it.”
:sigh:
It’s the latter.
“it would be short-sighted to not recognize the relevance of porn-centered design and navigation…”
I’m reminded of the line in TROPIC THUNDER where the one character is describing the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD: “People thought it would come down to pixel-rate or refresh rate, and they’re pretty much the same. What it came down to was a combination of gamers and porn.”
Gamers and porn. Them’s your segments that are the leading indicators of where media’s going.
Trust me, if it were fanfiction taken to its logical extreme, it would be far more imaginatively filthy and have an extremely involved and ridiculously earnest plot about alien invasion and eternal doomed love.
Also, women would pay money for it.
Somehow, this headline following the one about the end of the Comics Code in the news feed seems to fit in an amusing sort of slippery slope logic, doesn’t it.
Only in vegas baby, only in vegas
Did we go to the same CES? While there were few traces of popular comics characters at the show, all kinds of companies were offering giveaway comics to promote their products. They all looked like pseudo-Image comics c. ‘94 and read like little kids wrote the ’scripts,’ but they were there.
Y’know, the comparison between the two industries probably isn’t too offbase–I’m surprised you didn’t mention the fact that they were both kind of bastard/underground industries that were partly founded because mainstream “respectable” business interests wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole (comics partly being an outgrowth of the pulps; like Hollywood, it was open to certain groups that had the doors of opportunity closed to them in the mainstream).