Tue Oct 28, 9:21 PM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - A government Web site for Brazil's prostitutes that suggests they be prepared to perform fantasies and offer specialties, among other tips, is going to be toned down.

Prostitution is legal in Brazil and sex worker advocacy groups say the Labour Ministry Web site aims to promote the human rights of prostitutes.

However, critics say the site goes too far, and its contents have become fodder for Brazilian newspapers.

The site urges hookers to demonstrate an ability to perform erotic fantasies and to demonstrate a capacity to communicate in a foreign language.

The site, which began in 2002, also gives prostitutes advice on how to negotiate condom use with customers and encourages them to denounce violence.

Opponents had said the site should be changed so it doesn't appear to encourage prostitution.

Law professor Luiz Flavio Gomes says the site gives the impression of an apology for sexual exploitation.

Porn passed over as Web users become social: author

Tue Sep 16, 8:40 AM

By Belinda Goldsmith

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.

Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek," has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.

Some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows, belly button lint and ceiling fans are on the list of people's top fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.

Others give an indication of people's interests or emotions, with an annual spike in searches for anti-depression drugs around Thanksgiving time in the United States.

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters," said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior.

"There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays," Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

SOCIETY CLICKS TO CHANGE

Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years -- a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.

But analyzing data also showed what preoccupied people, allowing Tancer to predict the outcome of reality TV shows.

"I noticed in our data that some of the top search terms are about tropical storms in the United States," said Tancer.

"Before Hurricane Katrina rarely would you see a search on tropical storms but the devastation from Katrina has made us as a society much more sensitive to tropical storms."

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined -- and no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.

"You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue."

But Tancer said the speed at which information spread on the Internet had meant in some cases it was consumers generating the story and the media is last to record it -- or fact-check it.

"With the explosion of this type of false information on the Internet I think we will see someone come forward and develop a new type of software that can filter for the most accurate information," he said.

"Maybe accuracy is the next thing we will all search for."

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

Japanese murder investigators fooled by life-sized sex doll

* Justin McCurry in Tokyo
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday September 02 2008 17:12 BST
* Article history

Police in Japan have been left red-faced by an apparent murder that turned out to be an unusual case of mistaken identity.

It began in the morning with a frantic call from a couple who had spotted a "corpse" while out walking their dog in a mountain forest in Izu, central Japan, the ZakZak news website reported today.

Fifteen officers were dispatched to the scene, where they discovered a human form wrapped in plastic and tightly bound around the neck, midriff and ankles, with hair protruding from one end.

The body was left untouched and taken away for examination, and the crime scene duly secured by a police cordon.

Back at the local police headquarters, officials notified reporters who had turned up early the same morning to cover an annual earthquake drill. They began preparing to write up the launch of a major murder investigation.

Dozens of extra officers were dispatched to interview potential witnesses, while the evening edition of the local newspaper carried a report of the gruesome find, complete with a photograph of the body's resting place.

By mid-afternoon, the body was in the hands of police pathologists. But when they sliced open the wrapping, they were confronted not by a decomposing corpse, but by a life-sized sex doll.

A police spokesman apologised for the commotion but defended his officers, saying they had simply been following protocol by leaving the concealed "body" untouched until it was in the hands of pathologists.

Though no crime had been committed, the spokesman could not resist admonishing the doll's mystery owner. The doll, he told bemused reporters, showed signs of repeated use.

"Our guess is that the owner didn't want to take a risk by throwing it away with the rest of his rubbish," he said. "It was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do."

Lewd, crude vandal leaves his greasy imprint on Nebraska town

2 hours, 29 minutes ago

By Nate Jenkins, The Associated Press

VALENTINE, Neb. - Boy, how people here wish their busiest vandal would find another way to make his mark.

Beginning more than a year ago, some man has been skipping from one business to another at night, pressing his naked behind - sometimes his groin, sometimes both - on windows.

Store owners, church workers and school janitors have had to wash lotion and petroleum jelly off the windows he selects.

Police Chief Ben McBride says it's the weirdest case he's ever seen.

Some residents of Valentine, a town of about 2,650 people, find some humour in the strange vandalism and have taken to calling the perpetrator the "Butt Bandit."

But they also can't help but cringe when finding his marks.

"We were completely grossed out," said Kalli Kieborz, who works in a downtown building. "One day I walked into the office and an employee said, 'Oh, my God, we've been struck!"'

The police chief is far from amused.

"It's not funny," McBride said. "We're worried about the next step."

It started in spring 2007, when the window of a Methodist church was greased with an imprint. McBride figured it was a high school prank. But the church kept getting hit, even after police staked it out.

The bandit struck business after business, window after window last summer.

Then he - and maybe, McBride said, copycat vandals - stopped over the fall and winter.

"People said he was done," McBride said. "Then he started back up this summer."

During one particularly brazen session, virtually all the windows at a local hotel were imprinted.

McBride said no one has reported seeing the vandal in action. The only clue is a blurry picture of him caught by a surveillance camera at the middle school last year.

The man was six feet tall or slightly taller, and slender. He had a dark complexion, and McBride said the man's dark hair was styled in a "1980s, feathered look."

Valentine, in remote north-central Nebraska, promotes itself as "The Heart City." Downtown sidewalks are painted with hearts, and locals encourage people from around the country to send their Valentine's Day cards to the local post office so they can be mailed out with the word "Valentine" stamped on them.

"This is not normal behaviour for Valentine," Cherry County Attorney Eric Scott said. "It's not funny or something people want to be exposed to."

-

On the Net:

City of Valentine: http://www.valentine-ne.com/

Jeju Loveland: Sexual Theme park in Korea

Online brothel tours via

Aimé Van Rod, Edition Parisienne

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Boys Peeping at Nature
subscription ticket by William Hogarth, 1830.
Notes from Rylands: "Subscription ticket, signed & sealed by Hogarth, issued to Samuel Hill in receipt of the first payment for 6 prints of 'A Harlot's Progress'. Hogarth features as the satyr lifting Nature's skirts & exposing parts previously ignored by art."

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New Zealand court allows 'boobs on bikes' parade

Tue Aug 19, 5:25 AM

WELLINGTON (AFP) - Topless porn stars are expected to cruise down Auckland's main street on motorbikes on Wednesday after a court said the "Boobs on Bikes" parade was not legally offensive.

Bureaucrats in New Zealand's biggest city had called for a court injunction against the event, saying it breached an Auckland City Council bylaw banning offensive public events.

But a female Auckland District Court judge rejected the plea, saying she was not convinced that bare-breasted women parading in leathers was legally offensive, local media reported.

Judge Nicola Mathers said that while critics in the council might find the spectacle tasteless, last year's event drew a crowd of 80,000 photo-snapping supporters.

Her decision was based on the law, not morals, she added.

The annual parade is part of an "Erotica Expo" organised by "porn baron" Steve Crow, who had threatened to stage the event with or without a council permit.

Crow said outside the court his lawyer would seek a judicial review of the bylaw involved, while it is understood the council may appeal Tuesday's decision.

From The Times
August 2, 2008
Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 - a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

Hawes, an Oxford graduate and university lecturer, emphasises his total admiration for the literary Kafkaesque genius who wrote brooding classics such as The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial, and argues that these discoveries merely show Kafka as more human than the popular image. He believes that "suppressing" them detracts from sensible assessment of his work, and has even led to nonsensical evaluation.

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol."

He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books... Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."

The journals' title - The Amethyst/Opals - reveal nothing about their contents, but Kafka kept his collection locked at his parent's house where he lived, taking the key with him when he went on holiday.

Perhaps he feared his father Hermann. But the obsession with a supposed brutal father and with being a Jew, are two other myths which Dr Hawes challenges. Hermann, a conventional Jewish businessman and ex- sergeant-major in the Hapsburg army, was probably "a father of his time", may indeed have been stern, but Dr Hawes - who is also senior lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University - argues that Kafka admits that he "hardly if ever actually hit" him. He also let him study what he wanted, live at home rent-free for years, when Kafka earned handsomely, and come and go "as he pleased".

As to the myth that Kafka's works are based on his experiences as a Jew in Prague, and that Kafka somehow predicted the Holocaust, Dr Hawes acknowledges that Kafka was very much aware of being Jewish. But "there is zero actual Jewishness" and no Jewish characters or scenes in his work. He was immersed in German culture.

Dr Hawes's biography also challenges the enduring popular portrait of Kafka as a tortured and lonely figure, neglected in his own lifetime, stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to write. The true Kafka could not have been more different, he said, describing him as a popular and well-paid state lawyer whose writing was supported by a prominent literary clique. It was only towards the end of his short life in 1917 that TB was diagnosed, and his poverty only occurred near the end due to economic collapse after the 1914-18 War.

Commenting on the book's discoveries, Ritchie Robertson, a professor of German at Oxford University and author of Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, said he was unaware of any academic actually looking at the pornography pictures, let alone reproducing them for biographies, even though they knew of his subscrition to Amethyst/Opals.

He added: "The many myths about Kafka circulating among the semi-informed public... do include the idea of Kafka as a kind of saint, originally propagated by his friend Max Brod. So it's salutary to assemble evidence that he was human."

Kafka's interest in pornography, which left traces in such works as The Metamorphosis, matters if it makes us look at any of Kafka's fiction in a new way, he said: "Kafka had a strongly visual imagination, and the importance of the visual arts for him hasn't yet been fully explored."

Man says he's porn inspector, demands free videos

Mon Aug 11, 6:40 PM

By The Associated Press

LONGMONT, Colo. - Nice try.

Authorities in Colorado say a man claiming to be a police detective asked an adult novelty shop to give him free X-rated videos, saying he wanted to make sure the performers weren't underage. The man, who is on the run and has not yet been identified, attempted to get the videos on three separate occasions over a nine-day period last month.

He was turned down each time and the store manager called police after the third try.

Authorities said Monday that the man showed a badge and left a business card from the Longmont, Colo.. police "age verification unit."

Longmont police Cmdr. Tim Lewis says there is no such unit.

The business card didn't have anyone's name on it, but the store gave officers surveillance video of the man.

Mexican sex workers want place at AIDS conference

2 hours, 12 minutes ago

By Tan Ee Lyn

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A global AIDS conference that opens in Mexico City on Sunday is meant for people infected with HIV, but transsexual sex worker Elma Delea cannot get inside.

She will be protesting on the fringes of the six-day biennial event.

"They (Mexican health authorities) said they had no money for everyone who wanted scholarships. We are very angry," said Elma Delea, as she stood at the junction of Calle de Alfredo Chavero and Calzada San Antonio Abad, a stretch of road where transsexuals wait all night to be picked up by customers in passing cars.

Her friends nodded, citing other explanations given by organizers, such as not being able to speak English.

Some 25,000 people are expected at the event, which draws scientists, international agencies, government officials, non-government organizations and the media.

But people most at risk of the disease, such as sex workers, homosexuals and intravenous drug users, are least visible. Most are poor and cannot afford registration fees.

"The conference is a place to exchange opinion but now, only those in power have a say," said Elvira Madrid, an activist working for the rights of sex workers in Mexico City.

At one point, passengers in a passing car hurled eggs at the group standing on a street corner, narrowly missing.

"This is common. One time, some men shot paintballs at us, and it hit my thigh," said Orchidia Montenegro, as her colleague Marthade Juarez nodded in agreement.

SHUNNED IN HOSPITALS

Those infected by HIV say they are shunned in hospitals.

"We are told to stand far away and open our mouths from three feet away," said another sex worker. "And when they do examinations, they use the same tools without disinfecting first."

The AIDS virus infects 33 million people globally, 1.7 million in Latin America. In Mexico, $23 million was spent on keeping blood safe in 2005 and $5 million on prevention and care among men who have sex with men, but less than $1 million on sex workers.

"Interestingly, although prostitutes are considered to be victims, they are also viewed as wanton, debauched and morally weak," reads a UNAIDS report on sex workers.

Delea, who had been hoping to speak at the conference, said it was important for society to acknowledge sex workers, starting with the police, who often detain prostitutes when they find them with condoms. This makes it harder for the workers to practice safe sex.

"We also want the government to reduce prices on HIV drugs, which are 13 times more expensive than in Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras," said Delea, who heads the sex worker group Angeles en Busqueda de la Libertad or Angels In Search of Freedom.

Prostitution is illegal in Mexico but widely tolerated everywhere from grimy street corners to swanky brothels. Police can easily be bribed to turn a blind eye to sex workers.

Delea's group wants to coach women on how they can protect themselves when customers refuse to use condoms.

"We have to be very creative when using condoms. We have to start looking at them as tools of eroticism instead of disease prevention," said transvestite sex worker Chrisna.

"We are able to put condoms on our customers with our mouths without them even knowing, so that they even think we have swallowed their semen. But we have it in a bag to go," she said with a laugh.

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

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Venus Ouverte
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Death, you certainly have been a naughty boy!

Death is not always depicted in such a salacious manner but on the other hand it’s not uncommon either. I selected the above images because I think they provide an interesting counterpoint to the contemporary Zombie whose appetites have essentially been neutered. I suppose we should all be thankful that zombie porn isn’t as popular today as it was back in the sixteenth century.

Libidinous inclinations aside Death, although dreaded and loathed, plays a morally ambiguous role compared to Zombies who seem to be purely evil. In these examples, Death is unloosed to mete out justice to those who’ve transgressed against the moral codes of the day. Yet the implied punishment, the act of rape transporting the figure through the portal of death, seems more troubling than the transgressions which summoned his appearance. Furthermore he seems just as guilty of getting off on carnality as his victims. This is especially apparent in Death and the Indecent Pair where one glimpse at Death’s mid-section lets you know his “hammer of justice” is ready to strike.

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When I first starting taking this idea seriously, there wasn't much to go with. At the time, brain machines were all the rage. Interestingly not much came of those, and I'm not sure why. In doing my original research there was an unconfirmed rumor, that sometime in the early 1960's, General Electric designed and built a sonic shower. As part of a product test run they installed about a hundred of theses in a suburban Chicago neighborhood. They were allegedly pulled from the market less than 6 months later, because apparently many of the adult women using it were having spontaneous orgasms. I suppose back then the mere idea of such a possibility was so outrageous, that GE quickly and quietly buried the technology for fear of scandal. I've tried googling this rumor to see if someone has finally spilled the beans on it. No luck so far.

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For decades, Men’s Club 45, on the western edge of Monterrey, Mexico, was among the region’s most notorious “tolerance zones,” or government-permitted red-light districts. Despite it’s name, it was not a single nightclub, but a walled-in complex of strip bars, seedy hotels and brothels visible from the main highway that serves as a gateway to Mexico’s northwest. In January 2007, the zone was shut down and put up for sale following a shoot-out, according to the man who guards the now all-but abandoned property, a man who declined to give his name. Business was in decline anyway. The chaos and freedom of Mexico’s “zonas de tolerancia” has left them open to drug-related violence. Moreover, times and tastes have changed. The sex market has shifted to more secure, centrally located, US-style “executive” strip bars offering the same services. Men’s Club 45, meanwhile, remains as a curious, one-year-old ghost town where only the security guard, his fighting roosters and two dogs roam the alleys and parking lots. The once-remote property has been encroached upon by suburban and medium-density commercial development. The location of the land on which it languishes -- on the fringes of a growing city of more than three million people just hours from the US border -- may eventually make it a tantalizing site for developers.

Photographer
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