Here’s a way to make online dating more fun:

Don’t serve this wine before you go online - What Were They Thinking - MSNBC.com
We all know the real world and the virtual one in cyberspace are increasingly overlapping, but singles bars eveywhere should be very alarmed at this development: A French winemaker is trying to help people find romance with a new vintage that links them up with a special online dating site.

The “Soif de Coeur” (A Thirst for Romance) bottles of rosé, red or white wine contain a unique code in their labels that you tap into the Web site in the hope of finding your perfect match.

Now here’s a smart way to protect the children.

TECH/SEX Conference Website
Inaugural STD/HIV Prevention Conference focusing on Youth and Technology
January 22 - 23, 2008 Hosted at SFSU’s Institute for Next Generation Internet, San Francisco, CA
About Sex::Tech

The Internet and mobile technologies have strengthened youth networks, provided new avenues for expression, and increased youth access to tools and information designed to improve their sexual health.

Sex::Tech will explore available tools and methods for reaching youth with culturally appropriate STD/HIV prevention and sex education interventions from a youth perspective, with input from public health professionals, educators, researchers, and technology developers.

Cute link from Jim:

GPod vibrator hits high note with Japanese women | NEWS.com.au
The “gPod”, a phallic-shaped vibrator, is designed to respond automatically to sounds picked up by an accompanying handset, which can plug into anything from a telephone to a music player to a television.

The ¥25,000 ($243) gPod was one of a number of toys that went on public view today at Japan’s first-ever sex toy expo in suburban Tokyo.

“You can use it in many ways, for example hooking it up to your mobile phone,” said Ichiro Kameda, the machine’s inventor.

Way to go Japan! Enjoy your sex expo.

Today’s column:

Online Therapy: Like a Diary That Writes Back
Earlier this year, I became so mired in personal crisis I couldn’t see any way out. I struggled against depression and desperation and barely managed to produce columns, much less keep up with my day job or my book.

My distress peaked one night and I found myself frantically searching the web for some kind of drop-in crisis counseling chat. I wasn’t suicidal, so I didn’t want to call a suicide hotline and tie up a volunteer who could be helping someone on the verge of ultimate despair. Yet I felt I would implode if I didn’t immediately talk to someone neutral and anonymous.

You know how you can be ensnared by inertia? I’m not sure why I didn’t call a counselor during regular business hours; it wasn’t as if the trouble happened only that one night, without warning. Yet there I was, staring at Samaritans, a U.K. site, wondering if they would talk to me if I used Skype and pretended I was in England — and still not clicking the number.

Continued…

About as naked as it gets.

If you’re in NYC this weekend, here’s an interesting date movie:

PASSION and POWER: The Technology of Orgasm
PASSION and POWER: The Technology of Orgasm

This documentary film offers surprising new information which calls into question all we thought we knew about our own bodies, our own pleasure, and ultimately, our own power.

Premiering at Lincoln Center in NYC
Saturday July 28, 2007
At Scanners: The New York Video Festival
Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Tickets on sale now

I want to propose a petition to Save Sex in Kansas, after reading this:

Kansas.com | 07/16/2007 | Grand juries to determine what’s obscene
OLATHE, Kan. - Separate grand jury investigations in two Kansas counties are expected to decide what’s too obscene for businesses to sell.

-snip-

In the next several weeks, the jurors could decide what is and what isn’t obscene, setting standards for their Kansas communities. The jurors could be asked to watch adult videos, review adult toys, or even take field trips to the businesses.

“We don’t know yet what they’re going to want to see,” said Wyandotte County District Attorney Jerome Gorman. “Each community has to answer for itself what it will tolerate.”

The petitions in the six counties, including Jackson, Clay, Platte and Cass on the Missouri side and Johnson and Wyandotte in Kansas, ask the courts to look at strip clubs, sex shops and video rental stores.

Honestly, National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, I wish you’d look at things that cause real harm to children. Drug abuse. Improperly stored guns. Homelessness. Starvation. Gang mentality. Somehow I don’t think adult products in adults-only shops are all that harmful to children. Leave everyone else’s sex lives alone; don’t you realize that the stronger you protest, the more you reveal about yourselves? You’re so afraid and so threatened and we understand that — but quit taking it out on the rest of us.

We’re not fooled, y’know. We can tell you’re not God. You’re a Christian organization ignoring Jesus’ message to love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, cast no stones and let God do all the judging, and you’re interested only in power and control which are pretty much the antithesis of Christ’s teachings.

Bah.

Kansas communities, it’s up to you: are you going to let NCPCF get this toehold in your bedroom? Or are you going to laugh at the very idea, and set a community standard of “I’ll make my own sexual decisions, thanks”?

Brian Alexander, whose card I can’t find and therefore whom I can’t email in person until I track him down through mutual friends OR he sees this and writes me, hint, has an interesting column up about the opening of the San Diego Sexual Medicine this week.

The sex doctors will see you now

I’m delighted at this new “holistic/integrated sexual medicine” center opening up practically next door and at the recognition that sex is a multidisciplinary subject (”Traditionally, primary care physicians would refer a patient to a urologist or ob-gyn, but this may not address the complexities of sexual experience which could require intervention from psychology, endocrinology, neurology or other disciplines”).

At the same time, I wonder what all these progressive doctors (and they are; look what they’re up against; look what they’re doing) are going to do when faced with questions about online sex, polyamory, BDSM, fetishes, transgender, fucking machines and all the other explorations we get ourselves into in this sexually expressive age. Given that one of the doctors is apparently ground-breaking by saying that sex is “a couples’ issue” rather than specific to one gender or to one person’s biology, I can’t wait to see what happens when the first swingers arrive.

Sex is a helluva lot more than a couples’ issue, as my previous post linking to Violet’s interview shows … but that’s not a reason to poo-poo the new clinic. It’s a great step forward just to have the medical field acknowledge sex is important.

They should have Violet and Cory Silverberg and Jamye Waxman come down and talk to them. And send a representative of the center to the Sex 2.0 unconference, too.

Violet writes:

…the results of a study about sexual motivations started to hit the wires; the psychologists thankfully eschewed the typical “biological imperative” argument and really dug into people’s reasons for fucking. I have no idea how diverse their definitions of sex were, nor if they only sampled heterosexuals, but it was interesting nonetheless — and deserving of more comment. Justin Park at Men’s Health felt the same way, and came up with a nice response to the study (and media surrounding it) in Why Do You Have Sex? He interviewed me for the piece, and with his permission I’ve included the entire, original email interview after the jump.

In her exchange with Justin, she notes the role of the web in challenging myths that (still!) llinger about female sexuality:

…in my experience as an educator, forum moderator,
writer and researcher, women are on pretty equal ground when it comes
to physical sexual desire, and men by and large seem to seek sex for
emotional reasons just as much as women do. Men love to please their
partners and love to be loved, and sex is part of that for many men.

I think a lot of the assumptions about women’s sexuality — physical
desire and satisfaction, specifically — come from ignorance about
anatomy and female sexual function. Guys do it because everyone knows
it feels good for *them*, right? Girls do it because they have to, or
so it goes until we learn about sexual pleasure in female anatomy and
not just reproduction. But not so much anymore for us women; just see
what’s happening online with women discovering their sexuality — and
catching up to men in terms of porn consumption, which until the
Internet, was largely inaccessible to us as a gender. Let’s see if
media punditry will catch up with the rest of us in the next decade.

The whole post is here.

Today I’ve been consciously smiling at strangers all day: walking, driving, at the barn, from the front porch.

Every single time, the stranger has smiled back, whether male, female, old, young, child. Sometimes they looked pleasantly surprised and other times they just smiled.

I love days like this. Also, I got to say things all day like “Oh, yeah, tonight, I’m hanging out with the butt plug people” and “Yup, gonna get together with the sex machines.” Because if all goes according to plan, I’m going to have drinks this evening with nJoy founders Greg and Chris (who are *pure fun*), the Monkey Rocker folks, writer and sex educator Jenn Ramsey from Adult Novelty Business magazine — all people much cooler than I am, so I shall bask in the neato-ness and enjoy some tequila since I have no articles due tomorrow morning.

Let’s just not mention Monday, okay?

Beautiful:

Cross-posted from the forum …

Having confirmed with my neighbors that they will be available to receive packages if my Harry Potter book requires a signature of receipt, I can now commit to being on Digital Village this weekend.

You can listen online at:

http://www.kpfk.org/index.php

(Or if you’re in the LA area, on FM at 90.7)

Digital Village
10am to 11am Pacific time

The first half hour is tech news and commentary divided into “sex, drugs & rock’n'roll” sections. The second half hour is an interview with a guest (me, this time).

I think we’re going to talk about Second Life, sex, and — protect the children, this is an adult topic coming up — copyright law. Gasp. (a column on this very topic)

What’s really fun for me is that it’s in studio so I can make eye contact and be effortlessly present. Doing radio interviews on the phone always requires one to put some energy into imagining their facial expressions, the cues to wrap or expand, the environment in general. It’s also harder not to talk over one another on the phone.

The audio will be posted to the Digital Village website some time after the show:

http://www.digitalvillage.org/audio.html

Wheeee!

Update: Digital Playground NSFW changed the EXIT links on both sites to point to Yahoo. Thank you daedae for pointing this out in the comments, and props to DP for fixing it so promptly.

–
If you go to porn site Digital Playground and click the EXIT link (to say you’re not 18 or you’re not interested in adult content), instead of sending you to a search engine or Scarleteen or other site useful for minors, it takes you to Robby D — a hardcore porn site owned by Digital Playground. And the EXIT link there takes you back to Digital Playground.

I’m not sure why this is bugging me so much, except that I support text-only splash pages that require the user to take an action to see the porn (and once they’re there, it’s their own damn fault if they see something they wish they hadn’t) and I think this EXIT loop is underhanded.

I was going to DP on a tip, to see if it said anything about its making video available and easily transferable to iPhones … but now I’m too annoyed with them to care.

Another article on the Eros case that actually explains the product at issue as something other than a “virtual sex bed” which is how the earlier news stories were describing it (wrongly):

Lawsuit May Bring Reality To Virtual Community
TAMPA - Can what happens between made-up characters in virtual reality have real-world, legal consequences?

I wonder … is this what we will look back to as the start of a cultural change, to drop the “online” or “virtual” from things? Online dating is dating. Virtual life is real life. I know these things. You know these things. Yet even I have to use the qualifiers so people who don’t yet know that just because something involves computers, or computers and imagination, doesn’t make it unreal or somehow not part of your “actual” life. I try not to use “real” and “virtual” in the column — usually I’ll pick “offline” and “online” when I have to distinguish.

But online interaction — chat rooms, 3-D worlds, dating, role-playing games, banking, movie times, weather — is no more “outside” of your life than, well, going outside. You can play with identity and persona all you want, and the internet facilitates many great tools for doing just that, but it’s still you. It’s parts of you that you might not share on a regular basis if at all, in any other context, but it’s still you. Which I think is a great strength. I mean, if you thought it was someone else, or not connected to the rest of your self or your life, what kind of self-discovery is that?

If online activities weren’t real, the RIAA would be long and gloriously dead by now. The people targeted by RIAA lawsuits have not been able to get out of it by saying “it wasn’t me, it was my character, Pizza Crazeo.”

If online activities weren’t real, people would not fall in love over the tubes.

If online activities weren’t real, I’d have a higher number in the Available Balance column of my checking account, and fewer Zappos boxes around the house.

The flurry to report on this case as “ZOMG! It’s ‘virtual’ but also ‘real’!” is much ado about nothing new — but for once I’m welcoming it. I think this could be a pivotal moment in reshaping how our culture thinks about the whole internet (it’s the uploads, stupid!) thang. The only way to push that reshaping along is to make a big fuss, and be like omg wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

a little off topic jaunt today …

i saw harry potter movie last night. and while the kids are (finally) legal, at least by UK standards — and fred and george must be over 18 by now, right? — i still feel a little odd having little flutters about daniel radcliffe. he’s like this sapling, where you can see the form of the handsome tree he will become. 20 years from now, when he’s truly a man, he’ll probably be Just My Type.

still, it’s snape i’ve had the crush on all this time, and casting alan rickman (and alan rickman’s *voice*) in that role is genius. i can still hear him saying “turn to page three hundred and ninety four” in the last movie, and it still has the same delicious effect on my spinal brain. (won’t tell you about anything he says in this movie; no spoilers.)

also, you *know* he knows his way around a riding crop. y’know?

*shiver*

wands at the ready, indeed

I could not sum up hundreds of years of copyright law in this column, and by skating over it vaguely to provide context, it’s going to make all you lawyers and law groupies (guilty as charged) roll your eyes. But let not your heart by troubled. For a deeper, more involved look at the legal issues, see Virtually Blind, which is written by - gasp - a lawyer.

My point is that sex-tech is blazing trail (again), and that it’s stupid to dismiss the importance of the Eros, LLC case as “just fantasy” as if being digital makes something unreal. (I’m sure software developers all over the world would be surprised to hear that.)

Also, what’s this about “just” fantasy? American life is about fantasy.

Also, sexual fantasy is important. Even science says so.

But why am I ’splaining here? I say it better here:

Stealing Code in Second Life Is Still Stealing (or, Get Off Your High Horse About How Other People Get Off)

We’ve been discussing the Eros case in the Sex Drive forum, too.

As always, more Sex Drive columns at http://www.wired.com/commentary/sexdrive. And there’s the RSS feed, too.

And again, the most romantic blog post on the entire internet today is at xkcd:

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Randall, I love how you think. And feel. Thank you for making the world a better place.