Elder Porn

The Japanese are well known for their unusual taste in porn. The latest is apparently referred to as 'elder porn'. Shigeo Tokuda is apparently a star of the genre.

Sex Toys and Class

To think I once had a colleague who objected to my study of pornography. She was concerned a student would walk into my office and see porn. This despite the fact that all of my research is based on a dataset, and does not involve actually looking at porn. The comical thing about her objection was that at the time, some faculty on campus would show ACTUAL porn in class.

Now we have this from Northwestern:

Northwestern Uni defends sex-toy demonstration.

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — A Northwestern University professor concluded a discussion of bondage and other sexual fetishes in his human sexuality class by having a woman take off all her clothes, climb on stage and graphically demonstrate the use of a sex toy, the school has acknowledged.

The demonstration took place Feb. 21 at the conclusion of psychology professor John Michael Bailey's class on human sexuality. According to guest lecturer Ken Melvoin-Berg, after the students were told that a couple would take part in a demonstration involving a sex toy, the students were warned about a half dozen times that "what was about to happen would be graphic."

With that, Jim Marcus and his fiancee Faith Kroll climbed on the stage in front of about 100 students and demonstrated the use of the motorized device with a phallic object attached to it, as students heard about issues such as safety and consent, Melvin-Berg said.

However this has to be my favorite quote:

"It is probably something I will remember the rest of my life," said senior Justin Smith, 21, one of the students who stuck around voluntarily after class when students were told about what they were about to see.

"I can't say that about my Econ 202 class and the material that I learned there," Smith told The Chicago Tribune.

Age of Consent

Age of consent laws around the world. Clearly we are a sexually mixed up lot. Ages vary from 9 to 21, and depend on your sexual preference. WTF. At home we have technology generating further problems for our legal definitions of what is sexually permitted.

A teenager who was charged with possession of child pornography after taking nude photos of herself and sharing them with another teen will not face sanctions under a deal worked out last week with the Marquette County District Attorney's office.

Prison

An absolutely riveting account of prison. Its not for the feint of heart. Everything from the types of food, to drug use, to gay sex is covered. There is even a good dose of economics:

5. The Economy


I joked to my cell mate on the first day that at least the GFC couldn't fuck us inside. He'd been done for assaulting a cop when his house got taken by the bank. But within months 'GFC Nigger' became the standard reply to any query as to how black market prices were suddenly going through the roof. The price of a deck of smokes tripled. There was an actual economic reason about this. I went away in Michigan, where a lot of people lost their houses, mostly poor people already. When they had to move away from the prison, it meant they couldn't bring their loved ones as much contraband group, which meant the price of what there was sky rocketed. And the worse things got, the more the people who worked in the store would wonk and take home with them, which meant stocks ran low which fucked us even further.


Bet you didn't read about that one in the Wall Street Journal.

Plus a whole lot more. There are some interesting insights on porn as well.

Porn for Women

Infographic on Porn

As is always the case with data on the porn industry, this should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Same is true for the youtube video below. The video is risque, but no nudity. However it might not pass your employer's test, so in that case consider it NSFW. It is a unique way to view data. I wonder if I did this with my power point slides for class what would happen? They probably would still miss the message.

Brain Rules

A post on brain research by Tyler, has this great line:

As the authors put it, experienced value and decision value are not the same. The main test involves heterosexual men looking at the faces of women and thus one concrete implication, or so it seems to me, is that the pornography men enjoy the most is not necessarily what they are willing to pay the most for.

Sticky Wages?

This LATimes article talks about the troubles in the Porn industry. Its a good example of an industry where wages are downwardly quite flexible.

Caroline Pierce, an adult film performer who lives in Las Vegas but flies to Los Angeles for work, said many companies have pressured her to do more scenes for less money.

"Instead of paying you $800 to do one, they'll pay you $1,200 for both," she explained.

As economic pressures increase, many performers have also changed their minds about what they are willing do on-screen. Previously, women earned hefty bonuses for unusual sex scenes. That's often no longer the case.

"A few years ago the girls we got were OK, but not stellar models, and we were sometimes paying $2,500," said porn director Matt Morningwood, referring to a website he shoots for that features one woman and multiple male partners.

"Nowadays some of the top-tier models will do that scene for us and you're looking at maybe $1,800. I'm happy for the production, but I feel bad for exploiting the girls' situation."

Porn Marketing

Porn marketing, not the most original. Is it because they have no budget, their creators are uncreative marketers, or their customers or simple?

Charity Porn

Via Marginal Revolution: Charity Porn.

I Read It For The Articles

Well, at least some people can make a good case that they do read Playboy, just for the articles. The Library of Congress produces a copy in braille for the blind.

Porn's Financial Woes

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Porn, Rape and the Internet

Todd Kendall's paper suggests that this latest maneuver by the Chinese authorities will simply lead to more rape.

BEIJING, Jan 23 (Reuters) - China shut down 44,000 Web sites and homepages and arrested 868 people last year in a campaign against Internet porn which will continue until the end of this year's Beijing Olympics, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.

China launched a crackdown on online pornography and "unhealthy" Web content after Chinese President Hu Jintao said the country's sprawling Internet posed a threat to social stability.

Rights groups have said the campaign has been used as a thinly veiled pretext to crack down on dissent and round up online dissidents ahead of the Olympics.
Xinhua said authorities had also investigated 524 criminal cases involving online porn and "penalised" another 1,911 people.

Some 440,000 "pornographic messages" had also been deleted, the agency said.
China has attempted to stifle online criticism of the ruling Communist Party and discussion related to sensitive topics such as Tibet and Taiwan by ordering Web sites to register with authorities.

Authorities registered 199,000 Web sites last year, Xinhua said, but refused 14,000 for failing to get official registration or to apply for official approval.
China employs tens of thousands of human Internet censors and a vast network of filters to control online information.

The anti-pornography campaign would continue until September, Xinhua said, "after the Beijing Olympic Games end".

As long as the story is somewhat true, and access to porn is at least modestly reduced then this should serve as a useful experiment to identify the impact of porn on rape.

Cost Reductions in Porn

There are markets for sex and there are markets for watching sex. Why has it taken so long for an entrepreneur to utilize the former as a labor input to the latter? Bloomberg has the story:

If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you.

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

``Sex is no taboo,'' Nick says, though he asked that his last name not be used. ``You have to free your mind.''

Big Sister is marrying 21st-century technology with the world's oldest profession to profit from the public's appetite for ever-more graphic reality TV. Since 2005, more than 15,000 men have taken up the offer of free sex in return for 15 minutes, or less, of fame, according to the brothel. Big Sister is now expanding into the U.S. with a local version of its Web site.

Induced Demand

Here is an excellent description of how females can induce demand for nude pictures.

A friend who spends his life negotiating with the agents of glamour models explained to me the principles of “boobonomics”. Let's assume a pretty girl, who has been snapped in her bikini for a local newspaper, seeks a big-time career. Her agent phones a men's magazine and proposes for a given sum, say £3,000, that she pose in lingerie.

If she's a hit with the readers, her agent will then suggest that for a greater sum, say £5,000, she will pose topless, but with her nipples concealed by her cupped fingers (“hand bra”). Subsequently her fee will rise for each coy permutation: “hair bra” or “girl-on-girl bra” (two models face to face shielding each other's breasts). Eventually, once this dance of the seven thongs has been exhausted and readers are believed to be slavering with anticipation, the agent will propose that for a huge sum say £50,000 the girl will finally reveal all.

But the harshest principle of boobonomics is that after this shoot, the value of the girl's assets which is what they are in a technical, business sense collapses. From this point she will only receive £20K for full topless, a sum she only recently received for showing far less. Her product life cycle is reaching an end. Now, however, agents have a new strategy for reviving the brand, rather as when Kit Kat launched peanut or orange-flavoured variants. He proposes that his client have a breast enlargement: would the magazine be interested in the first pictures, you know, when the scars have healed? The going rate for new knockers will never match her initial “reveal”, but raises her value momentarily to, say, £35,000. Jordan, the Milton Friedman of boobonomics, has amassed a great fortune increasing her breast size by increments in three operations.

Linkfest

Too lazy to comment heavily on these links, but I want to preserve them somewhere.

1. Teens prosecuted for racy photos...of themselves. File under absurdly wasteful prosecutions.

2. Never trust estimates from advocacy groups, they usually exaggerate. The UN is no different.

3. Sex Tourism for women.

4. You can't legislate abortion away. They still happen with the same frequency.

5. Realistic estimates of the porn industry.

6. Another wage effect of female menstruation. Increased absenteeism.

7. Trends in female anatomy. Boobs are getting larger.

Hard Drives

Apparently they are all used to store porn.

Unexpected candidness is a recurring theme of our CE-Oh no! series of posts, but this latest example from Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate, truly takes the biscuit. At a recent corporate dinner in San Francisco, the Texan CEO produced a quotable line edgy enough to give any PR people in the immediate vicinity an instant heart attack. In his exact words: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." We're gonna have to give the guy a break for two reasons: a) alcohol was readily available, and b), all those naughty digital photos have gotta be stored somewhere, and Seagate is in the digital storage business. Besides, the rest of Watkin's quotes are relatively thought provoking: his views on media distribution ("It's the content that's important"), Dell's problems -- no, not those ones -- ("They don't understand the consumer"), and other areas of the technology industry appear to be fresh and honest. Maybe just a bit too honest this time around.

Turn The Volume Down

You've got to love this guy's frankness.

Porn Makes You Rational

A new paper looking at how testosterone and visual cues affect offers in the ultimatum game can be found here. This article in Nature sums it up:

High-testosterone men fight hardest for a large cut, the researchers found. But the most testosterone-driven men were also the most likely to slacken their cash demands after viewing sexy women. Perhaps they relaxed and began to care less about money. Or perhaps, the researchers suggest, with a 'mate' to impress the men were driven to have some wealth, however modest.

The sight of a potential mate might therefore actually make men more sensible, Van den Bergh says. "Since a few coins is better than no coins at all, men thus become more economically rational after exposure to lingerie or sexy women," he says.

There apparently has also been work which has shown men's rate of time preference changes after seeing "hot" looking women.

Pretty ladies make men want wealth with which to impress, according to a new study - even if they’ll be worse off in the long run.

Psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, asked students whether they would prefer, say, $19 tomorrow or $25 next week. They then showed them the faces of ladies whose attractiveness was ranked on the website ‘How Hot Am I?’.

After eyeballing pictures of pretty women, men were more likely to want immediate monetary gratification than to wait for a bigger bonus. Women’s calculations, on the other hand, were unaffected by male eye candy, as were men’s after ogling plainer women or fancy cars1.

Cuckolds

The post entitled conspiracy against cuckolds, by Robin Hanson, reminded me I've wanted to look into the origin of the use of the term cuckold.

What is a cuckold?

A cuckold is a married man whose wife has sex with other men. In current usage it sometimes refers to non-married couples in committed relationships as well, although the traditional meaning is a man whose wife is adulterous.

There are connotations of helplessness and humiliation attributed to the word: implications that the husband lacks the strength to enforce the fidelity due to a man, and is too weak, too stupid, or henpecked to leave or divorce her. Although historically it was a term in general use, nowadays it is much more frequently associated with female domination, power exchange, sexual humiliation, erotic sexual denial or sexual fantasy based on those themes.

"Cuckold" is derived from the Old French for the Cuckoo bird, "Cocu" with the pejorative suffix -ald. The earliest written use of the Middle English derivation, “cokewold” occurs in 1250. The females of certain varieties of Cuckoo lay their eggs in other bird’s nests, freeing themselves from the need to nurture the eggs to hatching. In mediaeval Europe, the law, custom, and the church all defined married women as a category of property held by her husband. Although Christian marriage vows strictly enjoined sexual exclusivity in a marriage for both partners, custom and doctrine rarely enforced it on the husband. A married woman who was unfaithful to her vows made a “cuckoo” of the husband who unknowingly provided her, and potentially her illegitimate offspring, with shelter and protection as a tricked bird does to the cuckoo’s eggs.

I've been surprised at - what seems to me to be - the recent surge in cuckold porn. It seems to be pretty clear evidence disputing the myth that all porn objectifies and humiliates women doesn't it? Apparently some males fantasize about being humilitated.

Cuckolds apparently are paid about $100 per scene, whereas the male performing talent might make $500-600 for the scene.

There was this interesting discussion on Adultdvdtalk where some guy was contemplating being a cuckold in a film which offered to pay him $500. Most of the posters thought he was being conned into producing some solo footage for gay porn. You can read it here, though it is all text some ads may not be safe for work.