An article entitled “Ranking the 20 Hottest US Congress Women” seems problematic enough, but this was the thumbnail image for the sponsored link at Raw Story:
It’s kind of hard to tell how tongue-in-cheek the article intends to be. Here is their entry for Nancy Pelosi, who ranks fourth on the list: Continue reading
Two things I have learned recently:
1. There are examples of tentacle erotica from 19th-century America (and earlier):
![By Staff of "The Mascot", New Orleans [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/800px-LewdAndAbandonedTheMascot.jpg "By Staff of \"The Mascot\", New Orleans [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
Click to embiggen
“Lewd and Abandoned”. Caricature of notorious New Orleans prostitute Emma Johnson, from “The Mascot”, 21 May 1892. Johnson is depicted in a window with a fan, with tentacles reaching out to the sidewalk entrapping passers by, including men, an old man, an adolsecent boy, and a young woman.
2. If you do a Google search for public domain pictures of octopi, you might stumble upon a Wikipedia talk page for tentacle erotica, which, fortunately for my taste, only has pictures from 19th-century America.
Photo credit: By Staff of “The Mascot”, New Orleans [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
We have achieved yet another zenith in human scientific and technological achievement with Kate Upton’s zero-g photoshoot for Sports Illustrated.
With GIFs. Continue reading
UPDATE (01/29/2014): She got reinstated. I take no credit for it.
Bonus points if you get the reference.
Yet another teacher has been suspended (which may or may not be code for “fired”) after daring to reveal that she is in fact naked underneath all of her clothing. This time she’s an elementary school special education teacher (or teacher’s aide, depending on the news source). An “anonymous source” sent copies of not-quite-nude pictures to the school’s administration, which is a real classy move:
A Fitchburg teacher’s aide who moonlights as a model of sexy lingerie has sparked a debate over what conduct is befitting of an educator outside the classroom.
Many people seem to have no issue with Kaitlin Pearson’s modeling portfolio, while others are questioning whether someone who works with young children should be posing for racy photos.
Regardless, Superintendent of Schools André Ravenelle placed Pearson on paid administrative leave early Friday afternoon after the district was anonymously sent a packet containing her modeling photos.
Pearson has been working in one of South Street Elementary School’s special-education programs as a full-time classroom assistant for a small group of students since November.
***
Ravenelle said he was not aware of Pearson’s modeling photos until school officials were mailed the anonymous packet. A similar packet was also sent to the Sentinel & Enterprise. Ravenelle placed Pearson on administrative leave before speaking with a reporter for this article.
A short note, typed in all capital letters, that was included in the packet sent to the Sentinel & Enterprise read, in part: “Can you believe that this girl was hired to work with special education children in the Fitchburg schools?!!” [Emphasis added.] Continue reading
If you’re at all like me, you’ve never wondered what the most common search terms are on the world’s biggest online source of occasionally-copyright-infringing porn. And yet I find myself noticing that PornHub (the site I just described in admittedly less-than-flattering terms) released data about what people are searching for on their site. The data include the most common search term used in each state on the site, and the average amount of time spent on the site (which streams videos, YouTube-style).
The winners for longest time spent on the site are Mississippi and Hawaii, with an average of over 11 minutes and 48 seconds per visit. New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island users clock and average of ten minutes or less. Read into all of that whatever you will, especially the part about Mississippi.
The more interesting aspect of the search, at least to me, is the identification of popular search terms. This presumably only covers the one site, so it’s not even remotely a scientific sample, but it’s interesting nonetheless. A revision to PornHub’s map is color-coded to highlight search terms: Continue reading
I’m going to talk about sex and stuff in a minute, but first, some exposition: I frequently save links to articles that give me an idea for a blog post, but then never get around to writing the post. I also start posts, save them as drafts, then never finish them. I have over a hundred saved WordPress drafts, and countless links saved in my iCloud reading list, Evernote, Instapaper, and elsewhere. Maybe I’ll get to some of those ideas eventually, but sometimes I go through my blog post drafts and delete the ones that are hopelessly outdated. This is an attempt to consolidate ideas accumulated over months into a single post.
To be fair, the adult industry is kind of encouraging the horndogs here.
Teachers, at this point in American history, are not allowed to have pasts. Nor are they allowed to have much in the way of lives outside of teaching. This applies to other professions as well, but teachers seem to bear the brunt of our society’s perfectionism.
I’m going to talk a bit about sex, as well as portrayals of sex in entertainment, so stop reading if you’re easily offended. I’ll warn you if a link goes somewhere NSFW (not safe for work.) The gist of what I’m saying is that we as a society have profoundly conflicted views of sexuality, especially female sexuality. People who routinely interact with children are often expected to be effectively asexual, even if no one ever quite puts it in those terms. People who have expressed their sexuality in overt ways, from basic modeling to outright porn, while breaking no laws, often lose their jobs as teachers and in other fields. Sometimes, we can justify it as “protecting the kids,” while other times, t really makes no sense at all.
Even when it is supposedly about protecting children, what is it really teaching kids? (Disclosure: I do not have kids, but I used to be a teenage boy.) The most common justification offered for dismissing a teacher because of modeling, porn, etc. is that it creates a “disruption” or “distraction” in the school environment. I assume that this refers to the idea that students will not be able to learn as effectively because they might have seen their teacher in a state of undress or more, perhaps online.
That is, at least initially, a compelling argument. What is it actually teaching kids, though? This is not about teachers who actually have sex with their students, or who call their students “jailbait” on Twitter. Those are pretty obviously illegal and/or inappropriate. I can also see an argument against letting teachers moonlight as bikini models or whatever, but what about something a teacher did years ago? I don’t necessarily know the best answer for how to deal with it, but firing a teacher for modeling bikinis or more in the past might have more negative long-term consequences: Continue reading
This is the closest I’ll get to posting anything NSFW on here.
I couldn’t think of a good opening for this post, so I just used the headline from an article by Stoya, posted on Jezebel on Monday. Not everyone knows who Stoya is, and many people pretend they do not know who she is, so let’s get this out of the way. Stoya makes her living as an adult film actress, a/k/a a porn star. If you can handle reading about concepts of opposing the harassment of women in public, and you can handle it in the context of pondering a person who makes a living doing sex stuff in front of a camera, read on. Otherwise, Disney still has a website.
Stoya provides a direct attack on the idiotic notion that, if a woman has sex on film or video, she must like having sex with everyone, and therefore she’ll have sex with me. A South Park episode once featured Kurt Russell being forced to go through a Stargate-like device, because he once did it in a movie. The point of the joke was that it is absurd to expect a person to do something in real life just because they did it in a movie. Porn actresses do not get that sort of deference, though. When you stop to think about it for more than one second, it makes sense that she ought to be able to have a normal life, free from excess groping, the same as anybody else. And yet: Continue reading
Houston was shocked, shocked! to learn that one of the Houston Chronicle’s society reporters — truly the last guardians of dignity in our culture — was moonlighting as a (gasp) stripper. Now she no longer works as a society reporter, and presumably society is safe once more.
Richard Connelly, a writer for the Houston Post, broke the story with all the gravitas you might expect from the guy who broke the story of hot chicks on the Texas sex offender registry. When faced with criticism that all he was doing was good old-fashioned slut-shaming, he tried to deny it by confirming it:
I don’t get the”slut shaming” charge. If you want to be a stripper, fine.
If you want to write for a very conservative, uptight paper — covering the very powerful, very conservative and straitlaced people the paper so desperately works to keep happy and unruffled — fine.
If you want to combine the two, it’s interesting, to say the least.
Andrea Grimes aptly addresses why Connelly probably really doesn’t think it’s “fine:”
Connelly’s entire post belies the “If you want to be a stripper, fine,” sentence. Obviously it’s not “fine” with Connelly or he wouldn’t have written an entire blog post on this woman, dug up background information on her, posted pictures so everyone could see what she looks like, contacted her bosses to make sure they knew she was a stripper and–here’s the journalism 101 FAIL, guys: posted the whole thing before he had heard from her for comment (or heard from her declining to do so).
This strikes me as an example of a person creating a situation, then claiming that it is something important, “interesting,” and newsworthy. Connelly acts like he is motivated out of concern that a reporter at a conservative Texas newspaper is also a low-level sex worker, but the whole thing might have never come to light had he not broken the story himself. It is the journalistic equivalent of internet hunting. Besides, Tressler wasn’t exactly hiding.
It’s not terribly hard to drum up a bit of outrage by revealing that someone works on the side as a — gasp! — stripper. Houston has a rather tremendous number of strip clubs (I have heard that it has among the biggest number of strip clubs per capita in the country, whatever that means, but I can’t find figures on that, alas.) It should not be surprising to learn that a Houstonian works or has worked as a stripper, any more than learning that a Houstonian has patronized a strip club. Many people seem to still think that activities in strip clubs are much more interesting (and less legal) than they usually are. The bottom line is that it is an effective way for some people to make money, and now one person has lost the job most directly related to their career. Working as a stripper is only scandalous because certain busybodies make it so.
In closing, the best headline to come out of this manufactroversy: “Stripper Holds Shameful Secret Day Job as a Reporter.”
Photo credit: Silhouette of Stripper on a Pole by Momoko (Open Clip Art library image’s page) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons.
