Christopher Handley has pleaded guilty to Possessing Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children. He faces a maximum of 15 years in prison, a maximum fine of $250,000, and a three-year term of supervised release. What Handey was arrested for was not child pornography, however, but Japanese Manga. Previously on MetaFilter. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on May 22, 2009 - 79 comments

Shuttlecock burqas to fetish wear. Some snapshots of Pakistan's struggles with its sexual identities. [more inside]
posted by tavegyl on May 14, 2009 - 10 comments

Two Christian ministries, Hookers for Jesus and JC's Girls aim to "save" Las Vegas sex workers from their professions by introducing them to Christianity. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Apr 14, 2009 - 35 comments

RIP: Marilyn Chambers, star of the first widely distributed hard core porn film, "Behind the Green Door. NSFW
posted by Xurando on Apr 13, 2009 - 53 comments

Torsten Solin's Dolls [NSFW]
posted by dydecker on Feb 26, 2009 - 69 comments

Extreme pornography illegal in Britain since Monday, 26 January, thanks to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Aside from changes to custodial sentencing guidelines (and early release guidelines to ease overcrowding), the most controversial aspect of the law relates to the legal definition of extreme pornography. An image is deemed to be extreme if it "is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character" and "it portrays in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following (a) an act which threatens a person’s life, (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals (c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse (d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive) BDSM groups, among others, have campaigned and protested against the law. Aside from concerns about the legality of kink, some have pointed out that some comics and graphic novels would also fall afoul of the new law.
posted by Grrlscout on Jan 29, 2009 - 87 comments

Back in 1972, there was a fellow who had a novel idea for a porno flick. But when his producer objected to the movie's title, fearing no one would understand it, Gerard Damiano reassured him: "Don't worry, "Deep Throat will become a household word." And indeed it did. Now, 36 years after the infamous and influential film's release, director Gerard Damiano, aka Jerry Gerard, has gone on to that deep, deep throat in the sky. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Oct 30, 2008 - 73 comments

According to a new report, children in Sweden are becoming increasingly concerned by their parents' internet habits. "This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what's important to me. And when she's not at the computer she's like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing. I'm not doing so well." Dr Jerald Block from Oregon Health and Science University in Portland is pushing for internet addiction (and its three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations and e-mail/text messaging) to be included as a common disorder in the next update of the DSM (DSM-V). "The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer... It's much more acceptable for kids to talk about game use, whereas adults keep it a secret. Rather than having sex, or arguing with their wife or husband, or feeding their children, these adults are playing games..."
posted by chuckdarwin on Jun 26, 2008 - 66 comments

Vintage Girly Magazines is a blog devoted to nude photography from the era before Photoshop and breast implants. NSFW. [more inside]
posted by jason's_planet on May 31, 2008 - 62 comments

Photographs of esteemed Sydney artist Bill Henson have been removed by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, and the debate over art vs pornography vs pedophilia heats up in Sydney this week. Some of the debate is quite measured and intelligent while other sides are descending to unruly levels. [more inside]
posted by robotot on May 25, 2008 - 61 comments

What happens if you put three professional musicians in a recording studio and have them watch porn movies? You get porno soundtracks, of course. [NSFW] [more inside]
posted by dhammond on Apr 25, 2008 - 23 comments

Paul Raymond, billionaire porn baron and property magnate, founder of Raymond's Review bar - the "World Centre of Erotic Entertainment", and publisher of such periodicals as Mayfair, Men Only and Razzle that added much to several generations of English gentlemen's education has gone to the great strip-club in the sky.
posted by fearfulsymmetry on Mar 3, 2008 - 28 comments

London's 30 Most Erotic Writers, 50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die
posted by fearfulsymmetry on Mar 1, 2008 - 20 comments

Yesterday, the US House passed the SAFE Act. No, not that one. Points of note:
- If signed into law, the SAFE Act will require people offering WiFi at their cafe, library, or even allowing their neighbours to use it, who notice that someone appears to have viewed certain dirty cartoons, or pictures of fully-clothed children looking sexy, to immediately make a comprehensive report to John Walsh's CyberTipLine, and retain the images, or face a fine of up to $150,000.
- ISPs or email services have the same obligations, and must store all data relating to the user's account, to be handed over to the authorities.
- The Democrats rushed the legislation through using a mechanism intended for non-controversial legislation. There was no hearing or committee vote. The legislation changed significantly before the vote and was not available for public review.
- The bill passed 409-2. Opposed were Paul Broun (R-Georgia) and Ron Paul (R-Texas). The Senate is next, so consider telling them what you think.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 on Dec 6, 2007 - 98 comments

He served in law enforcement for over 20 years. He's been a youth counselor, an ordained minister, a Big Brother. He deplores the rampant proliferation of "smut" in America. He bills himself as Klutzo the "Christian" Clown and visits orphanages overseas. Of course he's up on charges.
posted by misha on Oct 12, 2007 - 91 comments

The Sex Life of Robots. [NSFW, via Sex or not?]
posted by homunculus on Sep 26, 2007 - 32 comments

An Israeli porn site is trying to promote peace through pornography, and has succeeded in getting surfers from Arab countries that normally block access to all Israeli sites. Specializing in pornography with political themes, Ratuv is part of an industry that features Jewish, Israeli Arab, and Druze actors and plenty of political tension. The most popular downloads from Arab countries is apparently an X-rated parody of the kidnapping of nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu, though pictures of women of the IDF are also popular. Salman Rushdie has noted the power of pornography in the Muslim world, arguing that pornography is vital to freedom in his essay, The East is Blue. [All links are worksafe to major mainstream news sources, except potentially the fourth link, which goes to Nerve].
posted by blahblahblah on Sep 3, 2007 - 53 comments

Discovering Porn (On Your Boyfriend’s Computer) [SFW]
posted by BeerFilter on Aug 24, 2007 - 233 comments

onoes! teenz on teh pr0n webs! It's been a year since I posted about Stickam, and in that time, one would be naïve to think that a community of unmoderated videos broadcast live from the private and semi-anonymous bedrooms of the world would not result in epic lulz (nsfw). To no one's surprise, disgruntled Stickam ex-VP Alex Becker says Stickam shares office space, staff, and equipment with live pornographic video providers -- this via NYT tech writer Brad Stone. Cue the "think of the CHILDRUNZ!" moral panic. But popular websites being related to or backed up by prurient interest are nothing new: Wikipeda predecessor Bomis was once accused of having "softore porn" in its "Babes" section, and of course everyone knows porn drives technology. What do you think the internet is for? But if you use Stickam and this bothers you, the burgeoning field of live embeddable Flash-based webcam video streaming is rife with alternatives: uStream.tv, Justin.tv, BlogTV, Mogulus, and Operator11, just to name some -- but there'll be naked girls on those too. I guarantee it.
posted by brownpau on Aug 6, 2007 - 41 comments

This short film begins on a somber note...railing against the dangers of pornographic magazines in the 1960's, but as it progresses, the images it shares with the viewer are more and more tantalizing...from nudity, to promotion on sodomy, to bestiality (really, just a farmgirl pic with a goat in the far background), to hardcore S&M and B&D...all displayed for the soon-not-innocent eyes of the film's target market.
posted by Kickstart70 on Jul 21, 2007 - 51 comments

BOG VENUS VERSUS NAZI COCK-RING: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography Alan Moore, renowned comic author and creator of a recent work of unapologetic smut waxes at length on the history and role of pornographic art and literature, asserting "our impulse towards pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable".
posted by thedaniel on Apr 6, 2007 - 33 comments

Teens convicted of producing and possessing child pornography for taking pictures of themselves. [via]
posted by brundlefly on Feb 12, 2007 - 53 comments

Should a politician's "artistic endeavors" come into play when voters go to the polls? George Allen thinks that parts of his opponent, Jim Webb's, novels are demeaning to women and contain depictions of incest. Also, Republican candidate for Texas Comptroller, Susan Combs, is being accused of writing porngraphy because of excerpts like these from a romance novel she wrote 15 years ago. And they're not the only politicians who've written naughty things.
posted by eunoia on Nov 4, 2006 - 40 comments

Internet porn reduces rape. Violence on the silver screen reduces it in the streets.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts on Oct 31, 2006 - 88 comments

Teh Intarweb suXXors! Macleans, the venerable Canadian magazine of declining circulation, declares the Internet a failure. But they're not bitter.
posted by GuyZero on Oct 27, 2006 - 95 comments

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed - H. L. Mencken (Still, if I were you, I'd ditch my copy of Blue Lagoon . . .)
posted by Crotalus on Oct 9, 2006 - 40 comments

(NSFW) “If you are denying yourself pleasure then you have to take responsibility for where you are right now. When you get to a place where you are happy then love comes into your life. When you begin to love yourself then people recognize that and you can start receiving it. Self-pity will get you nowhere. Our society is sexist, racist, ageist, but I am a biological creature with all these amazing gifts of orgasm and I cannot wait for the world out there to change for me to be happy. I have all the happiness I need inside myself and I’m keeping it. I have denied it and avoided it for myself for too long. I have waited around for other things to be arranged before I gave myself happiness and I’m not going to do that anymore. It wasn’t until I stopped wallowing in all that self-pity and took matters into my own hands that things started to change for me. . . . Don’t wait around for another person to give that to you, give it to yourself. . . . We have been taught to not like ourselves and it takes a lot to unteach that to ourselves. There is a lot of conditioning and everyone has their own kind of conditioning that they have to unlearn. . . . All I can tell people about myself is that I give it to myself just as I can. My area just happens to be sex, while others have art, painting or public health or whatever. I’m just as true to myself as I can be.” --Nina Hartley
posted by jason's_planet on Sep 23, 2006 - 79 comments

The promotional game for an upcoming movie has drawn the ire of the National Institute on Media and the Family and some Twin Cities parents for having graphic sex scenes (in which "You literally engage in oral sex as a player of the game") that are easily accessibly to children by lying about your age.
posted by charmston on Feb 22, 2006 - 44 comments

What Would Tyler Durden Do is the latest home for Brendon, the one time head writer over at celebrity gossip sites thesuperficial.com & idontlikeyouinthatway.com (while his writing remains sharp & inventive, the domain names of the sites he writes for are getting longer & less original with each move). The usual content (updated several times daily) involves photographic embarassing invasions of celebrity privacy and absurdist writing.

Oh, I almost forgot - for the undoubtedly small percentage of the reading audience interested in watching Colin Farrel have sex with a playboy playmate, a digital copy of the illegal tape stolen from Farrel's house is the lead post on wwtdd.com currently.
posted by jonson on Jan 18, 2006 - 36 comments

Through his Webcam, A Boy Joins A Sordid Online World Justin Berry got a webcam when he was 13. Within an hour of his setting it up, a pedophile found him. More followed. They paid him, and he performed. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and lots of gifts, including webcams with better resolution which his new "friends" ordered him from his (presumably now abandoned) Amazon wish list and an apartment from which he could perform and not be bothered by Mom. He soon was persuaded by his "fans" to make lucrative in-person appearances so they could molest him, and he also started his own personal subscription service. More inside...
posted by spira on Dec 18, 2005 - 152 comments

What you watch Tucked deep inside a massive bill designed to track sex offenders and prevent children from being victimized by sex crimes is language that could put many Hollywood movies in the same category as hardcore, X-rated films. The provision added to the Children's Safety Act of 2005 would require any film, TV show or digital image that contains a sex scene to come under the same government filing requirements that adult films must meet.
posted by halekon on Oct 12, 2005 - 41 comments

Porn can make you go blind. Kinda.
posted by gottabefunky on Aug 22, 2005 - 40 comments

Girls of '64 ... preserving the sexy side of the C64. (NSFW)
posted by Ljubljana on Aug 9, 2005 - 11 comments

(all links safe for work) Some once hypothesized that as pornography became more accessible and more mainstream, men in turn would become uncontrollable, ravenous sexual beasts. I always thought this myself: a man will see something in porn that a real woman won't give him—Internet porn now caters in a click to every fetish you can imagine—and he will find a way to get it.
 
My ex-girlfriend, observant and intelligent beyond her years, always used to tell me the opposite: it wouldn't turn men into beasts, having their way with every woman they saw. No, it would turn them away from women completely, libidos and their ability to connect with real females weakened by the hardcore acts and impossible bodies that only porn stars could give them. The porn would crave some intrinsic desire, but leave both people in the couple lonelier and less fulfulled.
 
Now I think she was absolutely right.
posted by symphonik on Apr 17, 2005 - 209 comments

Andrea Dworkin, feminist icon and scourge of pornographers, has died aged 58.
posted by Holly on Apr 11, 2005 - 138 comments

Mayumi Lake makes pornography out of your non-lascivious body parts. Or she makes art by miming pornography's camera angles and costumes. She calls it Poo-Chi. (NSFW) Here's an artist's statement and here's a very brief gallery essay.
posted by nobody on Feb 18, 2005 - 12 comments

He spent a lifetime peddling smut and once had an $11 million fortune, but after losing everything and becoming just another homeless New Yorker, Al Goldstein is now happy pushing bagels instead of porn.
posted by terrier319 on Jan 24, 2005 - 16 comments

Anti-Porn Law Is Unconstitutional A federal court in U.S. v. Extreme Associates has struck down the federal anti-obscenity law. In this case, the government argued that "entertaining lewd and lustful thoughts stimulated by viewing material that appeals to one's purient interests . . . . is immoral conduct even when done by consenting adults in private." The court, however, wanted no part of this moralizing, as it declared "upholding the public sense of morality is not even a legitimate state interest."
posted by expriest on Jan 23, 2005 - 36 comments

CEO of eBay's Indian company arrested for an item offered up for sale on his site. Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of baazee.com, an Indian auction site purchased by eBay in June 2004, was arrested on Friday while assisting in the investigation into the attempted sale of pornography by a user on the auction site, and charged with violating the 2000 India IT Act. Bajaj was arrested even though he was not involved in the sale, had it cancelled as soon as it was found, and the people involved had already been arrested.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow on Dec 20, 2004 - 25 comments

Addiction to porn is destroying lives, Senate told. Experts compare the effect on the brain to that of heroin or crack cocaine.
posted by travis vocino on Nov 19, 2004 - 118 comments

When did Porn become mainstream? John Walsh asks the question in the Independant. The question might seem silly save for this. People in Buffulo asked to pose niked in public? Why not, American athletes do it, Spike Lee endorses it, and even Matt Damon wants to screw in front of you. Bosnian men don't seem to share Matt's fervor for the camera, but everyone is talking sex, even those icky old folks who frequent online football magazines. Why not have your tittilation in-your-face! Does the line between erotica and pornography even exist any more? many of the links via World Sex News.
posted by Wulfgar! on Aug 15, 2004 - 45 comments

You wanna be free? Accept pornography. Or so says Salman Rushdie. He argues that a free and civilised society should be judged by its willingness to accept pornography. So which comes first, the liberty, or the boobies?
posted by Wulfgar! on Aug 10, 2004 - 45 comments

This is not pornography. Spaces filled with removed figures.
posted by the fire you left me on Jul 13, 2004 - 19 comments

Enviropornoshockrockers!!! Ellingsen claims the couple performed the surprise sex stunt during a set by the controversial band The Cumshots "actually to draw attention to the rain forests, which are in the process of disappearing." (NSFW, maybe, and via The Spoonbender)
posted by _sirmissalot_ on Jul 8, 2004 - 35 comments

Hot on the heels of the critically-acclaimed War on Drugs and its blockbuster sequel, the War on Terror, an alliance of U.S. and Canadian organizations sets its sights on yet another noun, this time with the War on Pornography. The first salvo in the conflict was, naturally, fired in Utah.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Jul 6, 2004 - 81 comments

Viewing porn will make you want to kill, kill. KILL. And Dr, Science will prove it. He has a degree in science.
posted by Wulfgar! on May 20, 2004 - 35 comments

A dictionary of Japanese pornography terms. After you've mastered the theory, you can read about it in greater detail, then test your knowledge. (First link SFW if no one's reading over your shoulder, others N.)
posted by kenko on Apr 11, 2004 - 9 comments

If you caught the Daily Show the other night, you might have seen the segment featuring a couple goofballs and "pete the porno puppet" trying to convert folks at an adult film convention. Their site, at xxxchurch.com, boasts "the #1 christian porn site" and like any porn site, they even get their share of hate mail. The guys behind it seem to have a good sense of humor, even though they're sure that porn is "not what God intended for us."
posted by mathowie on Apr 8, 2004 - 22 comments

John Ashcroft's Patriot Games. An interesting article from last month's Vanity Fair on Ashcroft and his revolution inside the Justice Department. Now the Justice Department wants to wage a war on porn, and "are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains." [Via Boing Boing and Instapundit.]
posted by homunculus on Apr 7, 2004 - 47 comments

A 15 year old girl has been charged with several counts related to "child pornography" for sending out pictures of herself to several people she chatted with. As more and more teens use webcams for all sorts of things from keeping in touch with friends, getting strangers to buy them things from their wishlists and making some $$$ this has caused a little discussion. As she did not "force" herself, how does this intersect with recent attempts to criminalize "virtual" child porn as both situations have at their heart whether the primary issue is coercion/harm or the concepts images themselves. At the risk of "Newsfiltering", I am interested in opinions from a less histrionic group (thats you) than some others who are discussing it.
posted by soulhuntre on Apr 3, 2004 - 77 comments