Saturday, December 3, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Fighting Over Online Sex Ads
What if the price of having a vital, well-financed string of newspapers included rare, but inevitable, sexual predation of minors?
Not a tough call, right? But maybe more complicated than you think for the businesses involved.
Before you head out for the lanterns and pitchforks, it’s worth remembering that a free press is not free. One of the offshoots of free speech is that it will be used to pernicious ends. In this instance, Village Voice Media has a classified network called Backpage.com that includes a section labeled “adult” with categories like “escort” and “strippers & strip clubs.” The vast majority of ads involves one consenting adult seeking another, but there have been instances in which the section was used to offer minors for sexual ends.
Village Voice Media is controlled by Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, whose weeklies include The Village Voice, Westword and Phoenix New Times. It has an anything-goes approach to advertising, but in a digital age, that policy has new implications.
In September 2010, Craigslist, which hosted a great deal of sexually related advertising, bowed to pressure and banned that advertising in the United States. A number of crimes, including several murders, had been linked to ads on the site, and many critics, including a number of state attorneys general, suggested that Craigslist was enabling the trafficking of minors.
A significant portion of the estimated $44 million in sex-related advertising on Craigslist found a home on Backpage.com. Like a lot of newspapers, Village Voice Media’s chain of 13 weeklies has struggled through the terrible economic cycle and big changes in advertising spending, so the revenue from Backpage.com, much of it unrelated to sex, has played a critical role in its survival.
But in August the country’s 51 attorneys general sent a letter demanding that the site close its “adult” section, and now a coalition of religious leaders has joined that effort. Last Tuesday, Groundswell, an interfaith social justice group sponsored by Auburn Seminary in New York, published a full-page ad in The New York Times that was signed by clergy members of all stripes and cited the arrests of adults who had sold minors for sex using Backpage.com. The ad stated, “It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.”
“While we empathize with your business challenges and the increasingly difficult marketplace in which Village Voice Media competes,” the letter went on, “we trust that you are committed to running your business without compromising the lives of our nation’s boys and girls.”
The Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, said that while the issue was complicated, the bottom line was not.
“On Backpage.com, you can buy a toaster, a car or a girl for sex,” she said. “We agree with the attorney generals on the legal issues, but we are raising this as a moral issue. Even if one minor is sold for sex, it is one too many.”
Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey are accustomed to having people come after them. They were harassed and arrested in the middle of the night in response to the coverage by one of their newspapers of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. Mr. Lacey, who has made a career out of tweaking the powers that be, sees this battle as no different.
“I am beginning to like our odds,” he said. “We have all these practicing politicians and concerned clergy after us. We must be doing something right.”
In a phone call, he and Mr. Larkin pointed out that Web sites like Backpage.com are not legally responsible for posted content and added that the company had spent millions on both human and technological efforts to screen ads that feature minors. They said they had worked with law enforcement officials and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in an effort to make sure Backpage.com’s “adult” section included only adults.
Both men see the debate as a free speech issue.
“We have always had a very libertarian approach to advertising,” said Mr. Larkin, adding that classifieds represented 30 to 35 percent of their business. “We don’t ban cigarettes, we take adult advertising. We take ads that sell guns.”
From their perspective, the claims of their opponents are wildly exaggerated and all the money being spent trying to wipe out advertising would be better spent on the root causes of the problem, including drug addiction, poverty and family abuse.
“There is a lot of mythmaking around the issue and I think it’s a way of avoiding the real problem,” Mr. Lacey said.
Rob McKenna, the attorney general of Washington State and the head of the association of attorneys general that went after both Craigslist and now Backpage.com, says the issue goes beyond minors.
“I think we have to be careful to protect the First Amendment rights of publishers, but free speech does not extend to the knowing facilitation of criminal activity,” he said. “This is not just about children being prostituted, this is about human beings being trafficked into the sex trades, as adults and as children.”
It’s no news to anyone that sex is an integral component of the Internet and much of the mainstream media. Early on, AOL included lots of raunchy backrooms. The brand-name cable channels make a great deal of money on sexually explicit content, and if someone is looking to buy sex, there are any number of Web sites that cater to all manner of interests.
It’s worth remembering that while pressure from the attorneys general and Congress led to a change at Craigslist, the whack-a-mole on the Web continues. If Backpage.comretreats — not likely given the predispositions of its owners — some other alternative will immediately take its place.
It reminds me a great deal of the early 1990s, when I was the editor of The Twin Cities Reader, an alternative weekly in Minneapolis. At the time, we were under fire for publishing ads for strip clubs, escort services and massage parlors. The staff and the publisher at the time, R. T. Rybak, were keenly attuned to the community and always looking for points of difference from City Pages, our weekly competitor. With support from the staff, Mr. Rybak announced that we would no longer take ads that “objectified” women, a bold move. It was thought that beyond the good will we earned in the community, other, nonracy advertisers might find our paper to be a more suitable platform.
Our critics, including many women’s groups, were thrilled at their victory and congratulated us on our sensitivity. The policy went into effect, wiping out, as I recall, about 15 percent of the bottom line. City Pages left its ad policy unchanged. Some of what we lost went to them and little in the way of new ads materialized to fill the hole.
City Pages eventually became the dominant paper — in part because it was very good and run by smart people — and when, yes, Village Voice Media decided to enter the market, it bought both papers and closed The Twin Cities Reader. I was gone by then, but I thought the decision to be selective about ads contributed to its demise.
I called Mr. Rybak, who is now the mayor of Minneapolis, to ask if he regretted the decision.
“It was absolutely the right move,” he said. “When you engage in a certain kind of journalism that is designed to be an alternative to the mainstream, you have a special obligation to have your editorial, your values and your advertising align.”
“If we had more time, I think it may have worked out,” he said. “But I often think about what would have happened if we had those two pages of ads in the back. Would the paper still be around? It wasn’t the only reason it went out of business, but it played a role.”
Although Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey hardly agree, they are taking their own version of a principled stand. And just because it aligns with their business interests doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Connecticut Prisoners Protesting ‘Unfair’ Porn Ban
State officials believe that having a bunch of porn lying around in prisoners' cells all the time doesn't make for a very hospitable work environment for women who work in Connecticut's penitentiaries; indeed, the Associated Press reports that some female guards have complained about being sexually harassed by porn-wielding inmates. Also, porn doesn't really help rehabilitate sex offenders, officials say. But the pro-porn protester-prisoners assert that the ban violates their First Amendment rights. (It might also violate their Eighth Amendment rights, if they happen to be Chronic Masturbation Syndrome sufferers.) They're willing to compromise: If they can't have magazines, they'll accept "cable programming that offers and displays nudity, also sexual activity"—otherwise known as Pornographic Films.
Do you think it's unfair to make Connecticut prisoners do their time without access to "pictorial depictions of sexual activity or nudity?" Or do you think these guys are just being whiny and spoiled? At least they don't have to remain in isolation for 22 hours a day or endure being frozen by air conditioners running at full-blast, like the hunger-striking prisoners in California's Pelican Bay prison do. Maybe that's an unfair comparison to make, but consider that the ban "doesn't include material that could be considered literary, educational, artistic or scientific." So it's not like they're being kept from reading. These guys can still subscribe to National Geographic, which sometimes has naked people in it. And art magazines. And Reader's Digest, which doesn't have nudity but a lot of great jokes.
Porn.xxx Domain Expected To Fetch $50,000 At Auction
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
Porn Industry Featured in LA Weekly
LOS ANGELES — The adult industry is getting some mainstream attention, with a lengthyarticle in this week’s LA Weekly. A brunette performer in a bikini graces the front cover of the magazine and inside is an in-depth profile of the adult industry titled “Porn Defends the Money Shot.” The five-page article talks about several topics that are impacting the adult industry today such as the success of adult parodies, the ongoing campaign by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to enforce condoms on production sets to prevent HIV infections and where Cal/OSHA stands on the issue. The article also interviewed several adult industry stakeholders such as director Axel Braun, AHF President Michael Weinstein, FSC attorney Jeffrey Douglas, performer Tom Byron and others to get their take on condoms in porn. “We’re selling a fantasy,” Braun said. “If you make something illegal that has so much demand, you’re going to send it underground. You’re going to have people not getting tested anymore. I don’t think it’s the right approach.” The article talked about how many porn performers engage in escorting, an activity that can be risky especially if the performer continues to work on adult productions. “The dirty secret of porn isn’t crossover,” Weinstein said. “It’s taking escorting jobs.”
Behind Closed Doors: An Analysis of Indoor Sex Work in New York City
 | Urban Justice Center 666 Broadway, 10th floor, New York, NY 10012 Tel: (646) 602-5617 - Fax: (212) 533-4598 |
PRESS RELEASE
| For Immediate Release: | Contact: | Juhu Thukral (646) 602-5690 jthukral@urbanjustice.org |
| Wednesday, March 30, 2005 |
Juhu Thukral (646) 602-5690 jthukral@urbanjustice.org Wednesday, March 30, 2005 Indoor Sex Workers Are Isolated and Fear Violence (New York City, March 30, 2005) - The Sex Workers Project (SWP) of the Urban Justice Center (UJC) has released the first-ever in-depth report in the U.S. examining indoor sex work. Behind Closed Doors: An Analysis of Indoor Sex Work in New York City, released today, includes interviews with sex workers who work independently or for brothels, escort agencies, dungeons, and private clubs. The report highlights the extreme violence that sex workers experience from customers, and the dangerous effects of isolation and stigma. According to the report, 46% of sex workers experienced violence in the course of their work, and 42% had been threatened or beaten for being a sex worker. Additionally, 14% reported violence at the hands of the police, and 16% encountered sexual situations with the police. Sara, a respondent in the report, describes a client "who came in and had a knife ... I was cornered and I was about to be attacked and raped ... I didn't go to the police because it would be coming out about what I've been doing." "Many people are unsympathetic to prostitutes," says Juhu Thukral, Director of the SWP, "however, this level of violence is unacceptable, even if they are engaging in unlawful activity." Leticia, another respondent, adds, "Just find a way to help us with the police ... we need somebody to protect us when we get beat up. Around here, they don't arrest you, they just mess with you like they own you." Eight percent of the report's respondents were trafficked into the country for prostitution. The trafficked women told of being threatened, beaten, raped, and having their money withheld by the traffickers. The respondents were ethnically diverse and included women, transgender women, and men. Sex workers interviewed ranged in age from 19 to 54. Forty percent were born outside the U.S. and its territories. Shockingly, 67% of respondents got involved with sex work because they were unable to find other work which provided a living wage. Previous jobs included waitressing, retail, and domestic work. Immigrants without work permits saw sex work as their best economically viable option. The unlawful nature of most sex work often results in extreme isolation, which serves as a barrier to accessing legal, financial, educational, and other necessary services. Prostitutes explained that they feared arrest and its consequences, and expressed a need for peer support and substantive services. New York City's quality of life initiatives have always caught prostitutes in their net. However, Thukral stresses that "these police operations result in arrests that destabilize the lives of many sex workers who are members of the working poor, and jeopardize other legal employment." "This activity comes at an extremely high cost to the public, and is a waste of valuable public resources," added Melissa Ditmore, a co-author of the report. "Stringent policing creates an environment of fear and isolation that prevents sex workers from coming forward when they are victims of violence and other crimes." Thukral aims to have the City do two things: ensure that all violence against sex workers is taken seriously by law enforcement authorities; and offer in-depth and appropriate services that lead to long-term solutions. "There is clearly a need for a fact-based public discussion around the problems of police and violence that include the voices of sex workers themselves in order to effectively and productively address the needs of sex workers and the community's concerns." The full report can be found at http://www.sexworkersproject.org/ or http://www.urbanjustice.org/.
Urban Justice Center Interviews U.S.-Born and Immigrant Sex Workers About Police Contacts
Sunday, September 18, 2011
January Seraph Discusses Adult Performers Association
“We’ve been getting five to 10 emails a day with people wanting to be involved and to be kept abreast of the things we’re doing,” Seraph said. A six-year industry veteran performer, producer and webmaster, Seraph started APA with producer/director Nica Noelle in an effort to provide assistance and resources to the adult talent community. The Bay Area-native said she reconnected with Noelle through Twitter after realizing she was “talking about a lot of the same things that I was.” “I’ve been joining in the discussion off and on for the last two years but I didn’t feel there was anybody committed to it,” Seraph said. “Nica was all about it though, so we compared ideas and we were pretty much on the same page with our core values.” Seraph had already been privately compiling a list of “adult performer friendly” resources for some time. But as her concerns grew during the past two HIV scares and the problems caused by the rogue site Porn WikiLeaks, she was moved to act. “I had the intention of starting a resource site about three years ago,” Seraph said. “I kept hearing stories about other women and the problems they’ve been facing. So we thought this was a really good time to start something like this. I feel that adult performers aren’t represented enough and I think there is a need for it.” Seraph explained the APA is primarily about “harm reduction” and providing good information. “We wanted to start something without causing more hatred, without looking like a labor union,” she continued. “We wanted to start just a supportive organization that assists you in how to get into adult, how to get through adult and how to segue out of it when the time comes.” The APA Contact Form (AdultPerformers.org/contact) is discreet — it asks only for name/email/subject/message — so talent does not have to worry about possible “bullying,” Seraph noted. She added that APA would soon be launching a KickStarter account to begin developing some educational videos targeting individuals who are thinking about entering adult and exiting the industry. “It’s really exciting,” Seraph said. “We’ve had a lot of positive feedback.” For more information about the launch, click here.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Judge Dismisses Sex Trafficking Suit Against Backpage.com
MISSOURI—U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas C. Mummert has dismissed a lawsuit brought against Village Voice Media in Sept. 2010 by an unnamed 15-year-old girl who was a victim of sex trafficking through the company's Backpage.com online classified website when she was 14 years old. The woman who pimped the minor out on the site, Latasha Jewell McFarland, pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in December and was sentenced to five years in prison.
The victim held Backpage.com responsible as well, alleging in a four-page complaint that it “had knowledge that: explicit sexual photographs were being posted on its website; that postings on their website were advertisements for prostitution services; that minors were included in these postings for prostitution on its website; that sex trafficking of minors was prolific in the United States of America; and that the internet including their service was being used to advertise illegal sexual services, including child exploitation.” The minor sought $150,000 per alleged violation.
In his dismissal, however, Mummert found that Backpage.com, as an “interactive computer service,” is immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for content posted to its site by third parties. The plaintiff made several arguments that attempted to override the immunity, but Mummert found none of them viable.
Indeed, in response to the claim that Backpage should not be immune under § 230 because it "is aware of prior cases of minors being sexually trafficked on its website and based upon the posted ads and photography, no reasonable person could review the postings in the adult categories and deny prostitution was the object of almost each and every ad,” the judge noted a 2007 First Circuit finding that it "is, by now, well established that notice of the unlawful nature of the information provided is not enough to make it the service provider's own speech."
In other words, even if a service provider knows that third parties are posting illegal content, under § 230, the service provider is under no obligation to intervene, and is in fact immunized from being held legally responsible. This immunization held in the earlier Craigslist case as well, in which a sheriff brought suit against the online classified giant for having “the single largest source for prostitution, including child exploitation, in the country.” Regardless of the allegations, § 230 immunized Craigslist, as it does Backpage.com, unless it had created the ads itself.
In conclusion, Judge Mummert wrote, “"Plaintiff artfully and eloquently attempts to phrase her allegations to avoid the reach of (the communications decency act). Those allegations, however, do not distinguish the complained-of actions of Backpage from any other website that posted content that led to an innocent person's injury. Congress has declared such websites to be immune from suits arising from such injuries. It is for Congress to change the policy that gave rise to such immunity."
The Order by Judge Mummert can be accessed here.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Oral Sex Tips
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Exposing the Oral Orgasm: Play Prep and Tongue Techniques
“I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.” — J. Edgar Hoover
Bodies are sweaty, stinky beasts and though it is our animal instincts we want to get in touch with, we want to get sweaty together between the sheets, not deal with office BO, so get clean first! Take a long, thorough shower before initiating sex and while you’re all wet, take a look at the hair down there. Few people enjoy a face full of fur, so if you want to encourage your wife to keep clean and trim bush, you need to do the same. A body wax isn’t necessary – a trim or some Nair should do the trick and leave her pleasantly surprised!
This isn’t high-stakes finance, so don’t get stressed out, but it’s important to talk about oral sex a bit beforehand, so there is an understanding about protocol when you in particular are closing in on the big O. Whether you want to pause and move on to another position, or push through to climax, it’s important to have an understanding and an early warning system in place! No one likes to be caught off guard and if you want to keep getting blow jobs, you’ll let your wife have a say in how to finish things off.
Gabrielle Moore? Spread The Love! >> 
