Scanner : erotica

Safe For Work: Hipster Photo Erotica

Drew Grant — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:31:00 GMT

There are tons of ways to make money if you're a pretty woman in the city, but for non-Williamsburg Brooklyn set, it's harder to get noticed if you're not the conventional model type. Luckily there are photographers like Mauricio de Fex, a Manhattan-based photographer who has traversed the dangerous nooks and crannies of the J train to find some of these hidden beauties. Whether you live on Christopher Street, St. Marks, or Goodbye Blue Monday on the Bushwick/Bed-Stuy border, Mauricio is always on the lookout for the non-traditional.And lucky for us with day jobs, the photos are extremely sexy without being NSFW, a blessing in the age of online erotica.

(Via)

Vintage Erotica

Today in Porn Art: Rock Formation Artist Weirdo

Amazon Rank Fail

Colleen Kane — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:17:00 GMT

My journalism professor used to say, "never get into a battle with someone who buys their ink by the barrel." He was referring to newspapers, but the same could be said in the firestorm of writers (and readers) versus Amazon.com, which arose over the weekend.

Many writers, editors, and publishers of erotica as well as GLBT and sex-related books, including Scanner's friend Rachel Kramer Bussel, noticed that the Amazon sales rankings of books they had written, edited, or published had disappeared as part of their new adult policy. Hundreds of titles had been affected.

When books are deranked, they no longer come up near the beginning of search results, even if they're a popular-selling title or a classic like Lady Chatterly's Lover, and hence, they are hidden from potential buyers. It appears that the books have been selected for deranking due to their sexual content, or in the case of gay titles, simply due to the tag "gay," whether or not sexual content appeared in the books themselves.

Word quickly spread via Twitter with the tag # amazonfail, and throughout Amazon online superstore itself with the tag amazonfail, which users added onto the listings for books that had been de-ranked.

Amazon's response to those who have emailed to complain is an additional fail.

Amazon is now denying having a new adult policy (though one blogger documents it here), and claims all the books that just happen to have "sex" or "gay" as tags were deranked due to "a glitch" in their system.

No one is having that explanation, and The Guardian's story on Amazon rank fail-gate noted inconsistencies like this that go to prove the claims:

The 2003 paperback edition of Fry's autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, which Amazon tags as "gay", is unranked, whereas the original hardback , filed under "memoir", has a ranking.
The New Joy of Sex, an updated version of the 70s classic, which is filed under the subject "sex/sexuality", has lost its ranking, while the original edition (subject "love/sex/marriage"), from 1974, is ranked. DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, meanwhile, is now unranked.

As of this morning, some titles have been relisted, but many have not. If you're as pissed about this as we are, sign this petition and register your disapproval on the internet however you usually do so. More coverage here.

Related:

Amazon's "Girl Scout Cookies"

Amazon Giving Away Lots of Great mp3's

Rape Simulation Game: Wheee!

How Much Would You Pay for Peeing.com?

Colleen Kane — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:47:00 GMT

An Internet domain name auction was held recently in Las Vegas, where Erotica.com sold for $850,000. SexyLadies.com went for nearly $30K.

Some of the more specific site names went for significantly less, but still in a few cases more than a lot of people make in a year.

FootJob.com: $53,388

Peeing.com: $31,000

Licking.com: $16,000

FootSex.com: $16,000

Just a little something to share with the grandkids someday: "In my day, FootJob.com hadn't even started up yet!"

Related:

Own lubricate.com

Like Wal-Mart for Boobies, Porn.com Now Open for Business

The Internet: No Longer for Porn

Via AVN

'The Dumbing Down of our Culture Is Not Inevitable' Adult Reading on the Rise Not Counting the Internet

Scanner Matt — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:14:00 GMT

The National Endowment for the Arts has reported people are reading literature again after a twenty-five year decline. But nobody is sure why?

The NEA data is based on a survey (“The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts”) conducted in 2008 by the United States Census Bureau. Adults 18 and older who claim to have read at least one novel, short story, poem or play over the past year has risen.

Here's a chart we stole from the New York Times:

“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “In a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.”

But he said he did not think that more reading online was the primary reason for the increase in literary reading rates overall.

So what is the reason? Nerve doesn't make you want to dust off that old copy of Madame Bovary you never read in college?

Instead he attributed the increase in literary reading to community-based programs like the “Big Read,” Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the huge popularity of book series like “Harry Potter” and Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” as well as the individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents and civic leaders to create “a buzz around literature that’s getting people to read more in whatever medium.”

Then there's always the economy. Reading is cheap and provides an escape. Or maybe intellectualism is in this year.

Full story here.

Dumbest Person Ever? Pregnant Woman Gives Birth on Rollercoaster

Celebrate Banned Books By Buying Everything On This List

Top 100 Books of 2008

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Sex Writer On "Obscene" Website Sentenced To Home Detention

Brian Fairbanks — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:38:00 GMT

A woman whose website, Red Rose Stories, was shuttered three years ago by the Feds, pleaded guilty yesterday to obscenity charges and received a long term of probation plus six months of home confinement.

Wait, fiftysomething years after Howl and Naked Lunch, they're still busting people for "obscenity," particularly on the internet? We had to find out just what the site could have presented that could get its owner in so much trouble...

Karen Fletcher is the owner of Red Rose Stories. She's a 56-year-old Pennsylvania woman who happens to live in the district covered by crusading US attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, a staple of the Alberto Gonzales/George W. Bush Justice Department and her website contained

stories that allegedly involved bestiality, water sports, scat, bondage and domination, S&M, slavery, threesomes, orgies and sex with children.

Note that not one of Fletcher's pages featured photos of any kind, nor did the site explicitly encourage real-life encounters with children. After her arrest, Fletcher quipped that, to her, it seemed "the only legal sex stories are those that involve a man and a woman consenting to missionary position sex in a dark room.”

Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on his blog.
Randazza, who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues, acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he suggested the U.S. Constitution protects fictional stories. "If you believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.

What do you think? Was Fletcher a fool for writing about child sex and enjoying it?

Via Anarchist Librarians and PC World.

Betsey and the Bear Bone (and the Vicar, Too)

Emily Farris — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Scanner Storytime, the choose your own adventure-ish erotica we started on Monday.

Betsey is in for a big, hairy treat, but will it be the bear's or the vicar's?

That, friends, is up to you.

There's still time to contribute to the story and hopefully it will reach climax by Friday when we post it in its entirety (with minimal editing, as needed). Here's where we left off:

The vicar nearly fell over with surprise. Me?!! She wants me?!! His heart leaped into his throat at the mere thought of her flesh pressed against his. How often he had dreamed of her smell, her taste, her sweaty body, and now the chance was before him Waving. Wanting. Him.

Help us finish the story!

Scanner Storytime: Choose Your Own Adventure-ish Erotica

Emily Farris — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:24:00 GMT

Hey, Scanner Emily here. I'm going away for a few days to have titanium put in my wrist and mope around my apartment on painkillers. But I hope you'll help me with a little something while I'm gone that will be fun for the whole family and give me something really great to read when I'm back: community erotica, written by you. A telephone-game-choose-your-own-adventure hybrid, I'm going to start a story, and I want you to finish it in the comments section (remember, you can post anonymously).

So it begins...

Betsey was a busty girl, with pale skin, wide hips, a soft belly, and buttery blonde hair, cut into a precise chin-length bob—the only hair she groomed perfectly. When her roommate would leave the apartment, Betsey liked to play her Rolling Stones records and dance naked in front of the full-length mirror in the kitchen, while drinking cheap whiskey from a flask encased in leather.

WAIT! Before you post:

I know sometimes comments take a while to show up, but please try to build your part of the story on the part that came before. If that doesn't always work out, it might make the story even better. If Betsey's grocery delivery is interrupted by a purple people eater, we'll work with that.

Please also limit your contributions to one paragraph. You can post more than once, just not consecutively.

Be as ridiculous as you wish, as long as you think it works in the plot.

Nasty comments that are not part of the story will be deleted. By me. So there.

Have fun.

Okay, to get you back in the mood:

Betsey was a busty girl, with pale skin, wide hips, a soft belly, and buttery blonde hair, cut into a precise chin-length bob—the only hair she groomed perfectly. When her roommate would leave the apartment, Betsey liked to play her Rolling Stones records and dance naked in front of the full-length mirror in the kitchen, while drinking cheap whiskey from a flask encased in leather.

Disbarred Scooter Libby Now Has More Time For Erotica Career

Katie Halper — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:47:00 GMT

The bad news for ex Cheney aid Lewis "Scooter" Libby is that he's been disbarred. The good news is that now that Libby can't practice law, he'll have more time to dedicate to the erotic literature he writes so well. In case you haven't read any Scooterotica, check out this kinky gem from Libby's 1996 novel The Apprentice:

At age 10 the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

We want more, Scooter! So give it to us!