Too bad he’s outside the Standard Scale of Creepiness — he’s younger than my age divided by 2, plus 7.

The squashing in these images is my fault. Click to see the originals, and don’t forget to mouse over them for the hovertext when you get there.

Example 1:

Example 2:

The new Sexier Sex Lessons blog is up and running and has a couple of months of content now, so it’s ready for you to check it out.

It’s a simple blog: one mini-lesson every Wednesday, either excerpted from the book or brand spankin’ new. I’m trying to keep the posts short enough to scan through in a minute and long enough to have something useful to share.

Today’s topic is How to Laugh Your Way through Technical Difficulties and into Great Webcam Sex. We’ve also had these and many more:

How to Build A Sex Tech Collection Your Friends Will Envy

How to Find Porn That Actually Turns You On

How to Be Bisexual on the Internet

How to Justify the Expense of Luxury Sex Toys and Why

You know that the first modern vibrator was powered by steam, yes?

Look at what this engineering major with sexuality minor came up with:

Photos & Story of Sleek Steam-Powered Vibrator

its been proven to work (and vibrate) off of compressed air, I’m seeking a more powerful boiler than my pressure cooker so I can actually run it off of steam so please let me know if you know of one.

this is prototype so its got some quirks, the engine isn’t quite as optimised as I would like (it takes way more pressure than it should to get it working) and the offset weight I need to machine some more.

it weighs about a pound (5/5: measured it and its close to 2.5lbs exactly) and is pretty damned smooth to the touch. when I tried to run it off of steam earlier though it got REALLY hot, you have to wear like welding gloves to hold it and even then its almost too hot to handle. another reason I’m using compressed air for the moment.

She says she’s going to “bend it” into a g-spot vibrator next time she’s at the shop.

I think it’s awesome. Although, I do wonder how you make welding gloves fit you on the … never mind.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY/NPR in Philadelphia, talking about sex and tech and online relationships, and wow does the time fly. Anyone who wants to continue the conversation (especially if you asked me for feedback on your dating profile, 45 seconds before the break), email me: ginalynn@gmail.com.

I think the show might be posted here eventually, as there is a search form to look up guests or show dates:

Radio Times

… and I can’t find it anywhere online. Perhaps I shall scan it in from the hardcopy magazine.

It’s a feature about having great sex at any age (although it starts with the 20s and ends with the 50s “and beyond”). The cute thing is that they gave Dr. Ruth and me a mini-bio at the end, with our photos, and we have very similar glasses and smiles.

I showed it to my grandpa, who is 94, saying “Look, Grandpa, they picked me to be the other source, right next to Dr. Ruth!” And he said that he had “heard of her.” And then: “I wish you would do something I could brag about.” Even he realized how that sounded — and yes, he is proud of me, that’s not what he meant — so he rushed to explain. “I can’t really tell my tablemates [at the retirement village] about my sex granddaughter.”

Why not? Dr. Ruth is 81 if she’s had her birthday this year. If she can be respectable and sexy at the same time, why can’t I?

I can’t go this year but it’s not too late to register and attend Sex 2.0 in the Washington, D.C. area on May 9. These folks are friends of mine and many colleagues I respect are trekking there to discuss, meet, talk, and play.

All the info at sex20con.com, with a nice summary in this press release (I know, it’s lazy of me, but I’m on deadline for an article about the history of vibrators):

WASHINGTON, D.C. - April 27, 2009. Now in our second year, Sex 2.0, a one-day unconference, will take place on May 9, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? Sex 2.0 is an unconference, which means that sessions will be informal conversations organized by people attending the event. Session leaders with some knowledge in a subject area facilitate conversations among the participants.

Sessions will include: “Internet Advocacy for Sexual Freedom” with Ricci Joy Levy of the Woodhull Foundation; “Polyamory in Media’s Spotlight” with Anita Wagner; “Craigslist Red, Craigslist Blue: Why we should dismantle the “internet red light district” with Melissa Gira Grant and Joanne McNeill; “Kick Ass Twitter Apps” with Cunning Minx; “Revenge Porn” with Maria Diaz; and “Sex Writing Beyond Erotica, Beyond Porn” with Jack Murnighan, Nerve.com editor-at-large. The keynote speaker will be Nikol Hasler, creator of the Midwest Teen Sex Show (http://midwestteensexshow.com). A complete list of sessions may be viewed at: http://sex20con.com/2009-schedule/sessions/

Sex 2.0 will be held in a Washington, D.C. hotel. (To ensure everyone’s privacy, location information will be email once you are registered). It will offer five conference rooms, a lounge (with free WiFi), vendor area as well as space for various sex-positive outreach groups to set up informational displays and tables.

The event is managed by volunteers and funded by sponsors. We are pleased to have SEXTOY.com as our presenting sponsor this year. SEXTOY.com has been focusing on building a relationship within the blogger community with the recent start-up of its sex toy reviewer program. SEXTOY.com is honored to be the official sponsor for Sex 2.0 and looks forward to a mutually rewarding relationship with the blogger Community. Two SEXTOY.com associates will be attending Sex 2.0 this year: Erik Van Riper and Domina Doll; who both look forward to meeting everyone, attending the talks and participating in discussions. Sex 2.0 is also pleased to have community sponsor Bound Not Gagged (www.boundnotgagged.com), hospitality sponsor Kimberleecline.com and technology sponsor PosAlt.com supporting this years conference.

While the event itself is on Saturday, May 9, there are participant-organized meetups, outings, and parties being planned for Friday night and Saturday evening, as well as a Sunday brunch. For more information, visit the Sex 2.0 website at www.sex20con.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/sex20con.

What will you do if you didn’t pack enough novels, playing cards, and board games in your earthquake-or-other-disaster survival kit? Love Honey has a suggestion…

Earth Angel Wind-Up Vibrator
Why? Because the new vibe from Irish company Caden Enterprises is the world’s first 100% green sex toy. It’s made from totally recycled material and it never needs replacement batteries because its power comes from a patented rechargeable cell.

To get the vibe to work, you have to wind it up using a handle in the base. It’s like cranking up one of those Freeplay Radios, only with much more pleasurable results…

Crank the handle in a clockwise direction for 4 minutes and you’ll earn yourself 30 minutes of vibrations. If that’s more than you need in a single orgasmic session, you can use the on/off button to store up the power for later.

Wind it for 8 minutes and you’ll get an hour of vibrations, which is a good job because your arm won’t be good for much else after you’ve been winding like a mentalist for that long.

Happy sexy Earth day!

I’ve seen couple of sex toy recycling program websites over the years that turned out to be hoaxes, but just this year a legitimate program :

sex toy recycling program
The Sex Toy Recycling Program, was launched in December 2008, and was certified by the Institute For Green Business in January, 2009. This “non-profit” program was founded by David Kowalsky of Dreamscapes, LLC and Jean Kozlowski in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the adult novelty industry. To view or Green Certification documents click here.

We take pride in our country and support our economy, by making certain that all the post recycled materials stay within the United States and are used to produce a variety of environmentally friendly and recycled products made by US manufacturers. Furthermore, we strive to purchase working materials that are made in the USA.

We give back by donating all monies we receive from the purchased recycled materials to local and national environmental causes.

We are the first and only Sex Toy Recycling Program that is nationally recognized as a Green Certified Business. Ninety percent (90%) of items we receive are recycled by material specific recycling centers. To clarify, the rubber, silicone, hard plastics, metals, motors, e-waste, and packaging are all separated and sent to designated recycling facilities.

As a consumer driven program, we look to the consumer as well as within our industry for program support. We thank all of our corporate sponsors, program affiliates and environmentally supportive consumers who make this program a possibility.

A Sex Drive Forum member asked recently how he could use Twitter to share explicit photos and other playful aspects of his sex life with some of his followers but not others, without having to manage two Twitter accounts. Stacie Adams of A Kinky Sex Life had a great answer, and gave me permission to publish it here.

I use two services in tandem that let me manage my naughty tweets in one profile and the rest of my professional friends in another. It’s quite easy when you get the hang of it, using entirely free sites. The best part of twitter is that as you expand your presence on the other social networks, you can usually feed your tweets right into them so you are updating all your profiles with one message:

1. Set up a hootsuite.com account and add your two twitter profiles. Add their hootlet button to your browser bookmarks bar and when you want to tweet a site, it lets you choose which profile to tweet from, without ever having to log into hootsuite at all.
2. I use www.zannel.com/stacieadams for posting my videos and photos. They don’t seem to have xxx content restrictions, but I haven’t tried anything really naughty there yet. I set it to post to twitter whenever I upload, and I can even email content to it from my phone. You can do same on flickr, but I couldn’t get it to integrate with twitter after many attempts.
3. I use tweetdeck.com to organize twitter followers into groups based on various criteria so I can look at the different streams separately. Very handy.

I recently got a new laptop, and it has the little webcam thingie embedded in the frame around the display. And oh what an unflattering image it creates! When I angle the screen for best productivity, I end up shooting video from below my chin. This not only gives a nice up-the-nose perspective to anyone who might be on the other end, it also widens out my jowls and narrows my eyes and forehead.

I feel like I need a ticker to scroll across the lower third: Not this ugly IRL.

So, for those of you who have wanted to play with webcams as part of your sexual exploration or working on improving your body image, I amend all my previous writing about webcams to add this suggestion: invest in a good webcam or video camera that you can plug in and use separately from the integrated cam.

The on-board cam is great when in stealth mode (coffee shop, airport, office) chatting with people I already know (because, of course, they know I’m pretty IRL, LOL). But as a first impression in an adult cam room? No thanks!

This is the one I use:

I wanted to post something brief, basically the web 2.0 equivalent of “I’m calling you from the airplane phone! tee hee,” but as it turned out, Southwest’s net nanny blocked this site.

I had no problem getting to sexiersexlessons.wordpress.com, however.

Southwest is testing satellite internet on four of its planes and I just happened to be on one today. The service was fast and steady but comes with the inevitable “to ensure a safe and secure experience for everyone, we block certain sites” disclaimer. I presume I could get to Sexier Sex Lessons either because the wordpress domain fooled the nanny or because I just soft-launched it two days ago (to celebrate the anniversary of the book!) and the bots haven’t caught up with it yet. (I’ll post an official announcement about it next week.)

Do they really think people are going to use airplane wifi for porn though? It’s not like we haven’t had the ability to bring x-rated material onto the plane for decades, with laptops and personal DVD players and PSPs and all kinds of other devices. You’d have to be extremely socially inept to surf porn while crammed into the cubic foot of space you’re allotted in coach. (By the way, I don’t think it counts as the mile-high club if you’re alone.)

If not porn, though, what are they protecting us against? I understand why they block large transfers like movies or big audio files, as there is a technological logic to that, but against content? I use question marks even though I’m not surprised. All it will take is one person to whine to the airline that their neighbor was looking at gory pictures from National Geographic, or playing a vividly violent video game, and the airline is going to be in some kind of public relations, if not legal, trouble.

It’s as insulting as it is annoying. Especially when one is attempting to research an article about vibrators, which one would have been doing if one weren’t too busy trying to tweet things like “I’m tweeting from the plane!”

Latex doesn’t agree with my delicate flesh, so I thrilled when the non-latex Durex Avanti condoms came out way back when. They’re made of polyurethane and while they have a bit of a Ziploc-baggie feeling — even when they have to stretch extra extra tight around the person wearing them (ahem). But they don’t irritate and burn the skin the way latex does for those who are allergic or sensitive to latex.

Lifestyles has just introduced a new non-latex condom, made of polyisoprene, called SKYN. They’re also taking a wild step in their advertising, at least for the United States, with a television spot showing sex (rather than the traditional way to sneak condom ads onto TV, using humor, although you can’t beat the balloon animals). The claim is that SKYN not only protects against children and other sexually transmitted diseases, it “enhances sensation” and “feels like nothing at all.”

You can see the ads and other marketing here:

SKYN

I’d like to hear from you about SKYN condoms as it’s going to be a while before I have the opportunity to try them. (Testing condoms on a toy doesn’t provide enough data for a real review.)

Edit: A commenter reminded me of the existence of the Trojan Supra, for those of you looking for even more latex-free choices.

My former Wired colleague Kim Zetter reports:

ACLU Sues Prosecture over ‘Sexting’ Child Porn Charges

The American Civil Liberties Union is helping three teenage girls fight back against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who has threatened to charge the girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves.

In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, ACLU lawyers accuse Skumanick (.pdf) of violating the civil rights of three girls. The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute minors for child porn “is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head.”

The lawsuit comes in the wake of a string of cases around the country in which teens have been arrested on child porn charges for making and distributing nude and semi-nude photos of themselves.

Continued at Wired Blogs….

I have been speechless — and hence not posting — about the stories flitting by about this teen or that teen charged with child porn for sending topless or naked photos of themselves or their friends to other people. Yes, it’s mean and suckie to publicize photos someone entrusted to you and expected you to keep private, which has also happened in some cases, … but how anyone can claim that teenager’s nudie self-portrait is “child porn” blows my mind.

Isn’t child porn about intent not just the image? There’s a really cute picture of me, starkers, around age two, wearing only my dad’s cowboy boots; another one where I’m stretched out on the couch on my belly looking at a tray of trout my mom caught that day, with our puppy sprawled out on the other side also looking at the tray. In both, my little round nakey butt is super duper cute! And neither photo pornographic in the least. Would I get busted if I scanned them in and posted them here and the child porn police saw it? Probably not … but who knows?

Think about actions and intentions. Rape involves some of the same actions as lovemaking. Yet rape is violence - a violation, a perversion of the sex act. Lovemaking is sex. (And if lovemaking includes “violence,” it’s consensual, not violation.) Sex is not a crime; rape is, for good reason. Yet if you just took a picture of the two people’s pelvises, you might not always be able to tell if it’s one or the other. The intention is part of the act. Teens getting caught up in being sexually provocative with their peers does not, to me, have the same sick intent as exploiting children for adult sexual gratification. Even if the resulting photo is a topless girl. (One of the photos at the root of Kim’s story is a self-portrait taken by two 13-year-old girls that shows them from the waist up, wearing white bras, but “posed provocatively” according to the prosecutor.)

Teenagers are not making the best, most mature, most adult decisions about their flirtations or sexual actions because, well, let’s see, they’re teenagers. That’s how you learn to make better decisions. Hopefully. If you survive it. Considering the dreck that can pass for relationship advice in mass media, I don’t know that adults are any brighter about love than teens are. We’re just more worn down.

Yet again, the technology enables us to extend behaviors humans have already done forever, like writing notes, sharing erotica (sketches then photos then digital photos and videos), and getting in trouble over sex as teens. But to be labeled a sex offender and sent to prison for child porn — on top of everything else, that undermines the seriousness of the actual crime of sexually exploiting children. When a high school senior leaks a naked photo of a peer to MySpace is considered in the same class as a person who forces children into sexual situations are considered … it’s ludicrous.

Now, in Kim’s blog post, it sounds like the prosecutor is using child porn charges more as a threat and a hammer to get the kids to agree to go special classes about “why what they did is wrong” … but that’s just one example of a larger problem. She has another good story from January about the trend, Child Porn Laws Used Against Kids Who Photograph Themselves.

I received this email from Dr. Charlie Glickman, the Education Program Manager at Good Vibrations. Seeing as how both BDSM and online sexual exploration require (and attract) creativity, intelligence, wit, and tolerance — along with a willingness to defy convention, even if only in secret — I think many SexRev readers probably qualify to take this survey. Wink wink nudge nudge say no MORE!

From Charlie, with my emphasis added in bold:

I’m on the Advisory Committee for the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS). CARAS is conducting an online survey to assess the educational needs of the BDSM community. The goals of the project are to identify what educational needs people have, determine what practices educators and organizers have, and increase the quality of content and professionalism among BDSM educators. There are a lot of sex educators and “sexperts” (I really dislike that word) out there and while many of them are quite skilled, there are also plenty that don’t really know enough about their topics and/or how to teach.

Anyway, we’re about halfway to our goal of 1200 completed surveys and we’d love your help. The participation criteria are:

“You should complete this survey only if you have actively participated in a ‘face to face’ BDSM community event, such as attending a conference, organizational meeting, social event, or other gathering. You do not need to be a member of any BDSM organization. Intimate relationships, friendships, and mentoring are important avenues of BDSM education, but this survey is focused on activities of the public, organized BDSM community. If you have no direct experience with BDSM or “kink” community events please do not complete this survey.”

This is the first community-based survey of sex education workshops and we want it to be the best it can be.

Click for Survey

What’s happened to me, the once-hopeful, determinedly cheerful sex-tech writer who saw this time of chaos as growing pains toward a more tolerant sexual society? Now I’m surprised when common sense reigns over an incident involving sex and tech.

However, I’m glad that the 13- and 14-year-olds who exchanged a topless picture won’t be smacked down with child porn or obscenity charges. And I think it’s cute that this article explains to readers that now cell phones can take pictures (pictures!) and that adolescents sometimes make “poor decisions.”

Topless teen photo prompts warning

Meanwhile, Australia apparently has a new law stating that homosexual couples have the same rights as heterosexual couples that may have some interesting ramifications for secret lovers and polyamorous tribes, too.

New laws leave cheating partners open to divorce-style litigation

The main objective is to remove same-sex discrimination from the Family Court system, but they have left the door open for a raft of de facto relationship claims.

The laws declare that de facto couples who satisfy basic criteria - such as being in the relationship for at least two years - will be treated in the Family Court in the same way as a married couple. It also applies to same-sex couples.

The laws will change the way property is divided by enabling the court to consider the “future needs” of partners, as it does for married couples.

Men or women who have a second relationship outside a marriage are now liable to legal action in the Family Court should the second partner decide he or she deserves income support or a share of assets. This is particularly the case if a child is involved.

Here’s what I said in the Sex Drive forum, in response:

I used to have hope that we would learn from the internet to be more tolerant
and forgiving in our love relationships, or at least to rein in our
vengeful actions no matter how strongly we felt betrayal, anger, and
the blind need to HURT someone.

Any secret lover who would threaten exposure, or who would
vindictively expose, his or her married-to-someone-else partner, does
not need to be a secret lover. Just like those who would post their
online lovers’ nekkid pics publicly on the web without permission do
not deserve to have online lovers or nekkid pics in the first place.
Unfortunately we often don’t realize that someone is capable of such
meanness until it’s too late.

Since many folks have learned online that they can love more than one person at a time, I’m willing to bet a month of web hosting fees that more men and women than ever have secret lovers — and that they haven’t given thought to supporting that person financially for the rest of their lives. Given that there is a special kind of hate that coalesces out of broken love, I think the Australian family court might be in for a wild ride.