today in porn

Planned Parenthood, have you no shame?

April 30, 2013 by Southern Expat at 11:13 am

Our Friend Duffy has a terrific post up at Patheos today in response to Pope Francis’ recent comments on the healing power of shame.

There were no particularly Christian reasons to feel shame at that time in my upbringing. We slept in on most Sunday mornings of my early childhood, and no one had inferred to me in any way that sex was bad. But looking through the magazines was something Marcy and I definitely did under cover of darkness, regardless of how boldly they had been left in our path. We both knew that there was something inherently wrong with two little girls looking at grown-up naked women.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, American Life League attempted to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post that displays images used by Planned Parenthood in public school sex education courses. The ad was rejected because the images were considered “too graphic” for the newspapers’ readership.

I can understand the newspapers’ reasoning, honestly – I assume they would say the same about an image of the human reproductive system from, say, a ninth grade biology textbook. Right? I’m a little confused about this detail from the story:

Likewise, the New York Times offered to run the ad only if ALL would agree to blur the pictures. Its staff suggested that they could run a disclaimer saying, “Image too shocking for the New York Times audience. To see actual image and for more information, please visit: http://www.all.org/pdf/PP_HookingKids.pdf.“

That actually seems like a good compromise – I’m unclear as to who suggested it; the NYT or ALL? As a parent, I’m not crazy about the idea of a newspaper that my child might read including these graphic images in a full-page advertisement.

Because the images themselves are so explicit – I don’t understand how something like this even gets designed. I don’t understand how you have a staff meeting to look over the mockups, share feedback around the table, decide to go with the image of the young girl bent double with a mirror, exposing her genitals to the viewer so that they can be properly labeled. That’s the one. That’s what we want to send to the printers, distribute to the students, talk about with the kids, emphasizing there’s nothing to be embarrassed about and we just want you to be comfortable with your bodies so we can all be sex-positive. And let’s couple that with the image of the young boy masturbating.

Aren’t you ashamed?

11 Comments Filed Under: today in porn

Is NOTHING sacred…?

February 15, 2013 by JOB at 7:17 am

Apparently not.

10 Comments Filed Under: bookish, cartoonish, caution, confessions and/or retractions and/or korrektions, consumer alert, Diversion, fiction, JOB, reading klub, reportage and/or commentary, today in porn Tagged With: Matthew Cuthbert is spinning in his grave...

Today in Porn: Life Imitates Art Edition

January 25, 2013 by Quin Finnegan at 5:04 pm

This news flash just in from Melbourne by way of our La Crosse office:

A Southern Health dental hygienist ceased work a day after being told dozens of images of her posing explicitly in the Cranbourne clinic were posted on a members-only internet porn site.

Which is as if ripped from the pages of Bird’s Nest in Your Hair, the latest publication from Korrektiv Press:

It took them a couple of trips up the elevator, but other than a dropped item here and there, everything went off without a hitch. While Tom and the others set up cameras and the rest of the equipment in the examination rooms, the performers sat on couches in the lobby, smoking cigarettes and thumbing through copies of Highlights and Ladies Home Journal. One fellow wearing a white lab coat was fiddling around with a tank of nitrous oxide, pressing a mask to his face with one hand while turning a dial with the other.

A couple of guys in tool belts were in the final stages of clearing out one of the overhead lights, deemed an obstruction for one of the more complicated shots. Near the front of the examination room were two women, chatting with a man holding what appeared to be a giant diaphragm. The women were unusually well built. This was obvious enough in their tidy little mauve smocks and white leggings—grossly exaggerated idealizations of dental assistants, judged Tom.

Perhaps they were inspired by the novel. Kind of hope they were, kinda hope they weren’t!

Read the rest of Bird’s Nest in Your Hair, available at amazon.com.

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This is Something; This is Nothing; This is Something; This is Nothing: This is Lindsay Lohan in REM’s Final Music Video

November 27, 2012 by Southern Expat at 10:32 pm

You can just skip to 2:21 if you want to avoid the rest of the film, directed by our own James Franco.

If only someone involved with the production had been to acting class.

8 Comments Filed Under: Diversion, today in porn, YouTubular Tagged With: thanks to korrektiv i recognize Terry Richardson glasses when I see them

Today in Mommy Porn: Fifty Shades of Grey Divorce Edition

November 13, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 9:50 am

“When her husband refused to play out some of the scenes in the raunchy book – which includes bondage and S&M – she filed for divorce.”

1 Comment Filed Under: Diversion, reportage and/or commentary, today in porn

Bird’s Nest in Your Hair

November 12, 2012 by Quin Finnegan at 8:58 pm

Finally! The third book from Korrektiv Press is now available. I hit the “publish” button a few days ago, and was told the page would be up later this week. My brother called to tell me he’d manage to find it at Amazon today. You can all also get it at CreateSpace (the printing division of Korrektiv Press).

Here’s the description: Diana tends bar at Queequeg’s Tavern, where she meets Pete, a recent retiree always ready with a joke, and Jeb, a homeless student driven by a poet’s Romantic aspirations. Tangled up in a history of the family blues, she sometimes takes refuge in a church she can’t decide to join for good. Tom, the manager of a video store near the tavern, is settling into a new marriage with Helen, an adult film producer wealthy enough to save Tom’s store from impending doom. But when a figure from his past walks through the door, who will save his marriage? Who will help whom as this nest of birds unravels?

Bird’s Nest in Your Hair: a novel about bartending, old-time religion, and the twilight years of commercial pornography. Plus, poetry!

Before the Altar

Two dozen beers on tap and even more in bottles,
and not just beer, but wine and especially booze,
built up on shelves in something like a ziggurat
for a cult dedicated to the certainty of conviction
granted only to drunks in the blindness of an alcoholic
haze. Rituals have their priests; I see you as a high
priestess of drinking, surrounded by the paraphernalia
of your order: corkscrew, strainer and cocktail shaker,
a dozen kinds of glassware handled with a dexterity
demanding devotion, a cloud rising from cigarettes
burned as incense by attendants at your altar.
How well you handle every office—confessions
whispered without sorrow or regret, the jukebox choir,
and a communion of breadsticks and Beaujolais.

11 Comments Filed Under: Bird's Nest in Your Hair, consumer alert, Diversion, fiction, finnegan, happy birthday, Korrektiv Press, Life, Seattle, Things to discuss with Walker Percy over drinks, today in porn

“…nobody will be shocked by any amount of exposed sheet metal…”

November 12, 2012 by JOB at 1:16 pm

This article does a good job of explaining the joy of Svexuality, explaining why others have fallen where stout Dominican hearts have made a final and persevering stand.

9 Comments Filed Under: alcohol, tobacco and/or firearms, cartoonish, caution, clothing and/or shelter and/or weather, consumer alert, Diversion, food and/or drink, JOB, Nguyen, one or more of the seven deadly, today in porn Tagged With: wine and or robots and or song

And that’s supposed to make it BETTER?

November 2, 2012 by JOB at 12:02 pm

Oh, Nicole, honey, why don’t we just go ahead and flip that ick switch, ‘kay?

“Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn’t end up in the movie. I did feel safe — I never felt it was exploitive (sic) or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.”

And don’t forget to file this away for that next installment of Korrektiv’s “Lives of Famous Catholics“!

8 Comments Filed Under: caution, clothing and/or shelter and/or weather, confessions and/or retractions and/or korrektions, consumer alert, Diversion, JOB, lickona, Surfing with Mel, today in porn, wine and/or women and/or song Tagged With: He held her like a father

The boys of…winter?

August 24, 2012 by JOB at 8:17 am

There seems to be something twitching in the cultural scalp that’s got so many folks itching about the fate of boyhood.

There’s this little gem from the fellow over at Wondermark which is just a hoot.

But it got me thinking about Hanna Rosin’s recent report in the Atlantic (WARNING: Much stripping of mystery and manners to the crude and obscene throughout):

One of the women had already seen the [porn] photo five times before her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night that they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend asked if the two of them were getting married, he gave the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see it, so she wouldn’t get any ideas about a forthcoming ring. She remained unfazed. She was used to his “juvenile thing,” she told me.

Which in turn reminded me of Jeff Minick’s piece in Chronicles (WARNING: much discussion of the restoration of mystery and manners throughout):

We begin by teaching boys from an early age the romance and adventure of life. How did the adolescent who played a high-minded knight-errant evolve into a sullen, nihilistic teenager? How did that same adolescent become the 30-year-old who wears his baseball cap backward, plays more video games than the teenager, and lives with his parents? Boys who come of age watching sex and violence in movies, or the cynicism offered by most television comedies, who listen to loveless music drenched in ugliness and despair, who possess no sense of responsibility or consequence, will likely join Peter Pan’s tribe of Lost Boys. To buck this trend, we must keep a vigilant watch on the culture. To grow men, we must teach our boys heroism, taking our models from literature, movies, and living examples.

Which in turn recalled that this book will be coming out sometime soon:

From his celebrated appearance, hatchet in hand, in Parson Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, the all-American boy was an iconic figure in American literature for well over a century. Sometimes he was a “good boy,” whose dutiful behavior was intended as a model for real boys to emulate. Other times, he was a “bad boy,” whose mischievous escapades could be excused either as youthful exuberance that foreshadowed adult industriousness or as deserved attacks on undemocratic pomp and pretension. But whether good or bad, the all-American boy was a product of the historical moment in which he made his appearance in print, and to trace his evolution over time is to take a fresh view of America’s cultural history, which is precisely what Larzer Ziff accomplishes in All-American Boy.

9 Comments Filed Under: Academentia, alcohol, tobacco and/or firearms, alphonse is kid's stuff, animalia, backward glances, bookish, caution, confessions and/or retractions and/or korrektions, cut and paste, Diversion, Earth, Flannery Oh!, for self-examination, fragments of philosophy, JOB, kulture klash, Life, me, reportage and/or commentary, research, so many children, The Thanatos Syndrome, today in porn Tagged With: Boys will be girls and girls will be boys..., today in hookups, today in pop culture

Ars longa, caenum facile: Part II

May 16, 2012 by JOB at 8:15 am

The frisson between porn and lit continues…

On the face of it, this case pivots on a trivial legal distinction – to wit: “that simply viewing child porn on the Internet is not enough to prove its procurement or possession.”

But it has it’s roots in the deeply inhaled myth that pornography is just another art form – and as long as the perveyor is not directly harming another, well, we all know art has no affect on it’s audience, right?

Sed contra est, what one bloke from Rockford, Ill. has to say about it all:

Libertarians insist that these innocent fantasies do not lead to harm. After all, we know from a series of enlightened court rulings that the state has no interest in banning erotic novels if there are the slightest pretensions to literary merit – yes, an obvious reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After all, moral questions can all be reduced to subjective value, can’t they?

Libertarians put the case directly. We should enjoy the freedom to read or watch anything we like so long as no one has been demonstrably harmed. So, if a father of two little girls becomes aware that his next-door neighbor is addicted to virtual pornography depicting the rape, torture, and murder of little girls, it is none of his business. If people feed their imagination on images of sexual violence – as, by the way, so many sex offenders predictably do – this has absolutely no bearing on what kind of people they are or on the crimes they might some day be willing to commit.

What say you all?