This is the third time I face this decision. The first time, my phone broke beyond repair, and I went to the store to get the replacement (free, as it was still under warranty). That’s when I found out that when I splurged on ringtones, I was buying a license to use that song snippet on that device, and that device only. I went ahead and re-bought the handful of custom ringtones I had. But then over time, I built up quite a collection, assigning people their own special songs. My sister got “We Are Family,” my childhood friend got “You’ve Got a Friend,” my riding instructor got “Whiskey for My Men, Beer for My Horses.”

Never mind the songs I assigned to my online specials.

This week my phone was stolen on the plane. (Hey, I’m sure I dropped it originally, but if no one turned it in to the lost and found or to security or even just switched it on and called some of my contacts to find out who I was, it was stolen.) And I’m thinking that to buy my ringtones again, it’s going to cost $20. That’s not going to break the bank … but having already bought, and then re-bought, that brings my ringtone expenditures up to what, $50 or so?

Is it worth it? I have become rather Pavolovian about the ringtones, responding with joy or anxiety, depending on which snippet sounds. It’s hard to imagine putting up with the pre-set ringers in the phone, or not customizing the tones to the contact so I know whether to answer it at all.

But. The price of a ringtone is already quadruple what it should be, and this would be the third time for the Lyle tunes.

I guess it boils down to this: how lazy am I? I could probably figure out a way to use my replacement microSD card to house some MP3 snippets from my hard drive. Or use the voice memo feature to record something from my speakers.

I’m just grateful that I back up my contacts online.

This pro athlete has not lost his job or been otherwise publicly punished for his racy Facebook photos, although of course he’s had to apologize and pretend it’s a big deal when it really shouldn’t be. The boss’s statement doesn’t sound too hysterical or condemning, either. Could this be a sign that we’re already starting to get over ourselves? Or is it just that Canada is more sensible about sexuality and recognizing that how we play online doesn’t have anything to do with our day jobs?

Athlete’s Racy Pics Stir Questions of Privacy, Sexuality
Toronto Maple Leaf forward Jiri Tlusty, 19, originally posted the photos on his Facebook page, according to The Toronto Sun, which first broke the story. One of those pictures show Tlusty nearly touching tongues with another man.

Other images that depict the player nude have turned up on various Internet sites and blogs. Those were cell phone photos the player apparently sent to a woman he met on the Internet, who then posted them.

Tlusty apologized publicly for the photographs, and in a statement released by the Leafs said that he had “learned a valuable lesson.”

Tlusty’s actions were a “naïve mistake as a teenager,” John Ferguson, the general manager of the team, said in a statement provided to ABCNEWS.com. It’s a “lesson in how something private can easily become very public in the Internet age.”

And while Tlusty did deny he is gay or even bisexual, the reactions to the photos largely focused around Internet safety. The incident is a sign that the increasing number of private photos getting leaked on the Internet underscores the care people, both ordinary and celebrity, need to take, experts told ABCNEWS.com.

UPDATE: Maybe here’s another reason Officials don’t have time to care about naked hockey players.

British data disaster
It’s being called the worst data leak of the information age. Earlier this month, U.K. officials had to admit they’d lost hard drives containing personal information on almost half the country’s population, including nearly all families with children. If that’s not bad enough, the databases included the worst kind of information to lose — consumer bank account numbers.

That seems a bit more serious to me than my boobies being plastered all over the internet. So if I ever miss out on a job because of my sexual explorations, I’ll have to remind the client that at least I didn’t cause $500 million in damages and expose the children by misplacing hard drives containing personal information for half a country.

(Although I still want to use my favorite new excuse, “at least I didn’t murder a kitten.”)

The funny thing about this Yahoo News story about developing physical interfaces for virtual worlds is that it doesn’t make any quips, cracks or cheap shots about cybersex.

Making ‘Second Life’ more like real life

Now, technology from Japan could help make navigating online virtual worlds simpler by letting players use their own bodies — or even brain waves — to control their avatars.

Take the new position-tracking system developed by Tokyo University, which uses a mat printed with colorful codes and an ordinary Web camera to calculate the player’s position in three dimensions.

The user turns left, and the avatar turns left. The user crouches down, and the avatar follows.

“This technology lets you use take the actions you’d use in real life and transpose them to the virtual world,” said research leader Michitaka Hirose. “It could make maneuvering much, much easier.”

The attorneys at Virtually Blind consider the integration of physical stimulation devices with virtual worlds from the perspective of how they could be used violently — long-distance assault and battery, for example. Or how we could cause one another accidental injury if our actions in-world create more impact in the other person’s force-feedback vest than we intended. (The inventors of the Sinulator teledildonics system thought of this and included local thresholds for users, so you could turn the control to 11 and she would still feel it as a gentle 2, if she wanted.)

As you might expect, the potential for using the interfaces for violence hadn’t occurred to me, as I was too distracted by thinking of the possibilities for lovers. I’m such a Pollyanna! Yet when the physical and the virtual merge well, and keyboards become a quaint, archaic device we keep around for nostalgic purposes, I look forward to dancing, swimming and hiking in virtual representations of places I can’t easily get to in person. Making love when we get there is just a bonus.

I love the concept of a “kissing phone” you can use to send and receive kisses. It’s the kind of thing I expect would catch on faster than vibrator teledildonics, because it’s cute and silly and fun and you can use it in public. Most partners who live together aren’t going to reach for internet-enabled sex toys all that often … but shirts that hug and phones that kiss? Why not?

However, this looks too much like a child’s toy for me. And its nonstandard keypad layout would annoy me, as I dial numbers from muscle memory — the pattern of the number on the keys, not the numbers themselves. (Although the beauty mark is kind of cute.)

It’s not clear whether you can make phone calls on it, or just send kisses; I sent the inventor an email and will let you know when I know.

[via Gizmodo]

Update — Got the answer from the French inventor, who was kind enough to write in English for me

Hi,

Yes of course,

Principal functions exist

Beauty spot have a secret function that you can search

Thank you

Georges Koussouros
Inventor Freelance
“MY JOB IS TO INVENT ON DEMAND”
Website: http://www.proinvention.com/

This week’s Sex Drive column:

Teachers Should Blog, Tweet and Flirt Online Like the Rest of Us
What would you do if your employer told you not to use MySpace, Match.com and Second Life because those sites are “too dangerous” and “inappropriate” for you?

If you’re a teacher in Ohio, you’d better think twice before you answer, because it’s not a hypothetical question. According to the Columbus Dispatch, the state’s teacher’s unions recommend that teachers not post profiles on social networking or online dating sites because it could lead to the appearance of improper relationships with students.

What’s next? Police officers prohibited from posting hook-up invitations on craigslist lest it appear they are hooking on the side? Firefighters advised not to enter a members-only adult community, in case some old biddy sees an episode of Primetime Live and accuses them of cyberperversions?

Continued…

And here is the rest of it — a blog exclusive. LOL

The problem is we were all so busy this week, we didn’t have time to reshape the second page of the column — to carve away the repetitive bits and strengthen the additional point I wanted to make. But I bring it to you here, naked and raw, unedited, because I really do want to address the bit about our culture wanting teachers and other “pillars of the community” to lie to youth about sex and relationships.

Last time I wrote about Ohio teachers losing their jobs over their online activities (”Sex and Nudity Aren’t Good Reasons to Fire Someone,” 04/17/07), I made the radical suggestion that we embrace the idea that sex is a good and wonderful component of life, and that sexual expression is part of that. I also noted that as technology opens doors to greater sexual expression, we are seizing the opportunities by the millions. Internet sexual exploration is not (just) the pastime of a small group of odd pioneers out there on the fringes.

It seems to me that the internet has provided teachers with safe, semi-anonymous place for them to express the desires and feelings they’ve always had, because they’re people, but were not encouraged or allowed to express, because they’re role models and we don’t want teenagers acting with the same sexual freedom as adults until they are adults.

Yet if teachers are expected to pretend to be celibate, or to conform to a rigid standard about sex and relationships that our technological and social evolution have made obsolete, they’re no longer serving as good role models. Instead they are lying to young people about their futures as lovers, partners and parents.

Keeping educators away from social networking also perpetuates the message that adults who meet a “higher standard” are adults who don’t have sex.

We need to live in the same world that young people do, and that means helping teachers and students develop skills that will serve them in the future. We cannot expect teachers to communicate with teenagers if we attempt to increase the digital divide between the generations rather than bridge it.

A teacher who has the life experience to make smart decisions and the online communication skills to demonstrate that in a blog without preaching, who has strong social networking skills and who exhibits good judgment about what to make public and what to reserve for a private community — that’s a real role model for the next generation. If that teacher also meets her partner online, or maintains a healthy long-distance relationship through the internet, or plays in Second Life on the weekends, that does no harm to the young people in her charge.

And that’s the teacher young people will respect and turn to for help and support. That’s the adult who will open students’ eyes to other ways of online interaction beyond bragging about exploits they may or may not have actually done but that they think makes them sound cool.

Besides, if teachers really are the cream of the American crop, held up as role models and meeting the highest possible standards for ethical, rational and responsible behavior, we should not deprive all the other internet citizens of their company.

Let the teacher romances begin.

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Interesting story in the Chicago Tribune about Alzheimer’s patients who seek romance and intimacy and touch, long after they’ve lost their memories and have progressed well into dementia.

Alzheimer’s: Intimacy found after all is lost
The family of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast a rare spotlight on this sensitive situation last week when Scott O’Connor told an Arizona television station that his 77-year-old father, John, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 17 years ago, had fallen in love with a female resident of his Phoenix nursing home. Moreover, O’Connor said his mother, who stepped down from the Supreme Court in 2006, is happy that her husband of 54 years has regained some joy in a life so profoundly altered by the disease.

“Mom was thrilled that Dad was relaxed and happy and comfortable living here and wasn’t complaining,” Scott O’Connor told the television station. He described his father, who reportedly had been suffering from depression, as behaving “like a teenager in love.”

Such nursing home liaisons, many of which involve more hand-holding and snuggling than intercourse, are not uncommon, according to Alzheimer’s experts.

The hardest part about reading this feature was the reminder that family members get yukked out by the thought of their relatives still have sexual needs and feelings, and have demanded that care facilities separate their relative from his or her partner. Why would you step in to block your loved one’s happiness?

I think the quote at the end from the wife who saw her husband holding hands with another woman is most poignant. She felt that all her work in caregiving had been forgotten and that she herself had been replaced. But I think she forgot that it’s not she who was replaced - it was her husband. His mind, the mind of the man she loves, has been so altered by the condition that he is basically a different person.

But he had obviously not forgotten that he is a loving man, a man who holds hands with a woman, a man used to the intimacy and partnership of marriage. A man who surely appreciated and valued the care his wife gave him when he could still do so, even if he no longer remembers the details, just a vague sense. He sounds like a man with a lifetime of partnership behind him, who feels secure and normal as a partner to a woman, who perhaps because of his wife sought “normality” in his new home by reaching out to the concept of “wife” rather than walk the halls alone.

It seems natural to me that he would seek that connection, that sense of belonging in his new environment — and perhaps not even be aware that she’s not his same wife. (One caretaker told the wife that the resident probably reminds her husband of her.) His brain knows the concept of love, and caring, and physical affection, and I think that his reaching out on his second day in his nursing home shows that he had a strong and devoted partnership with his wife. That even in his dementia, his default mode is love.

Sometimes our sites say things about us that aren’t really about us. It’s hard enough when we experience professional difficulties due to our sexual explorations online — but when our site has been pornohacked and we just let it stay that way, we earn a reputation for poor judgment at the very least, and much worse if people believe things of us that aren’t true (like that we want to rape schoolgirls and their little dogs, too).

Given how quickly and thoroughly we are judged based on our online presence, this story about a public relations professional allowing his site to continue to exhibit search engine keywords like rape, schoolgirl and bestiality — which were apparently placed in his source code without his knowing — just floored me. I mean, this is PR. It’s about reputation. Now that he knows it’s there, shouldn’t he do something about it?

Here’s what my friend Peter says:

Here’s a thought - if the hack dumped porno terms on to the website, I wonder what else it might have done? A few trojans in there, per se? Email grabs, perhaps? Good thing it’s not an e-commerce site, huh?

I guess my biggest concern is that this is a shop dedicated to PR. Part of PR is reputation management. To manage reputation, you need to be proactive.

How is knowing leaving pornographic, bestiality, and child molestation terms on your website for a minimum of sixteen days in any way shape or form being proactive?

Don’t you think, if this happened to a client, the first thing you’d do would be to tell them to take down the site and put up a placeholder and then get a tech crew in ASAP to find the problem, secure the leak, and fix the site? Then, after making sure that the site is clean, and more importantly, PATCHED and SEALED, only then can you put the site back up.

So there you have it. I don’t understand why, and as you can see, emails to RLM have not resulted in a fix.

So what’s the lesson here?

Reputation management doesn’t mean just looking good from the outside. It’s kind of like a cancer that you don’t know about until it’s too late. Fortunately, it can be fixed here - but reputation management starts at home - and more importantly, should be a daily part of your routine, both for your clients, as well as for you.

I just had a whole conversation (on camera) with the Wired for Sex documentary producers about robots and sex, and where I think we’re headed. I’m afraid I have a very boring perspective on it all: sure, we’ll have sex robots, like we’ve always adapted technology for sex. But it’s not going to replace anything in general, blah blah blah — you’ve heard me say it before, and I don’t feel like ranting about it again.

Here’s a fun blurb about author David Levy’s new book about robots and sex and what people are saying about it. What will Dr. Ruth think? What about COSMOPOLITAN magazine?

ROBO SEX
FORGET speed dating, Internet personals, setups by friends. The singles scene is about to enter a whole new dimension, and it’s sure to set off sparks. Robot Love. “Love and sex with robots on a grand scale are inevitable,” writes David Levy in his new book “Love + Sex with Robots” (HarperCollins).

Levy, a 62-year-old British chess player, says hes “absolutely serious” and “completely convinced” it will happen - he estimates by the year 2050.

“I think men will obviously be enthusiastic largely for sexual reasons,” says Levy, married for eight years to his second wife. “But women, I think, will appreciate the fact that robots have been programmed not only with great lovemaking skills to be virtuoso lovers, but also with sensitivity and with the right level of conversation and expert in foreplay and just all the things that women want.”

So we’ll have sex robots, emotional robots, partner robots. Fine. Sounds fun. I can’t bring myself to consider it a big threat to sex, relationships, love, humanity, or The Children. I do see robotics as another option that we’ll mold to our various purposes. It’s inevitable and in fact seems past due, but not something worth fearing, don’t you think?

Graydancer (of Ropecast fame) made me breakfast this morning, and as he cleared space on the table–that’s The Table On Which All Things Eventually End Up — we noticed just how many tools of our trade were in the pile.

So he took a picture and created a contest.

It’s more difficult than it looks, so good luck!

If women walk in the least sexy manner when they are fertile, and the most sexy manner when they are infertile, does that mean those of us who are on the pill cannot help but develop a sexy walk?

Silly me, I always thought that gait related first to conformation and then to contraptions (high heels, girdles) and only then to intention like “attract admiration” or “in a hurry.”

BBC NEWS | Health | Sexy walks ‘keep men off scent’
Women give a wide variety of subtle signals to men to advertise the fact that they are ready to conceive and Meghan Provost, the lead researcher, had expected a “sexy”, hip-swinging walk to be one of those.

She analysed the gait of female volunteers, showed video clips to 40 men, asking them to rate the attractiveness of the way the women walked, and then matched the results to the hormone tests.

She said the results, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, were so surprising that she had repeated the experiment again with another group of male viewers.

The women who were most fertile at the time of the experiment walked with fewer hip movements and with their knees closer together.

She now thinks the findings tally with other research suggesting that women want to conceal their ovulation from males other than their chosen partner.

From a college newspaper:

The naked truth about porn
Some people hate porn because it goes against their religious beliefs. Others hate porn because it degrades women. And as Gross pointed out during the debate, women hate porn because they cannot live up to its expectations. Due to the latter issue, I am not a fan of porn.

Never in my life did I picture myself agreeing with a right-winged, male, Christian fundamentalist. But as it so happens to turn out, I whole-heartedly concur with his statement, “Girls on campus can’t compete with porn.”

Let’s see. If flesh-and-blood women can’t “compete” with porn … and if flesh-and-blood men can’t “compete” with sex toys … sounds like we’re all set and compatible, doesn’t it? Give porn to men and vibrators to women and everyone’s got what they like best, right?

(Actually, that would fit right in with the goal of abstinence education, protecting young people from infections and unintended pregnancies….hrm….are we on to something, here?)

Eric Reuters reported on a study showing fewer people have cybersex in Second Life than people generally assume.

“Noble Pierre-Etienne (Second Life: Wolkam Winger) and Angelica Ortiz (Second Life: Angelyka Klata) surveyed 657 residents about their Second Life usage. Only 13.6 percent said they “often” or “always” practice cybersex,” he writes, although the study found that another 28 percent or so “sometimes” practice cybersex. (Full results)

Eric quoted me in the story but he only had so much room to explore it (darn wordcount), so here’s an expanded version of my thoughts on the subject:

Of course the numbers are lower than “assumed” when you asked people specifically about cybersex. People typically assume that “cybersex” means two (or more) participants building a sexual fantasy online, usually while masturbating offline.

Ask instead about the full range of sexuality and you’ll get a different number. How often do you flirt? How often do you use Mature language or discuss Mature topics — especially topics you wouldn’t bring up in the office? How often do you put on a sexy outfit to dance in a club, or strip off some clothes to enjoy a little topless dancing by the pool and enjoy the sexy banter, with no intention of ramping up into cybersex?

I think romance is much bigger than cybersex in Second Life. Just like there is more flirtation and come-hither and ooh-la-la in a bar than actual going home with someone to have sex.

People can register as SL partners — romantic partners, not just business partners. They can dissolve those partnerships too. To me, that’s “sexual activity” — even if they don’t cyber. I know some SL couples who don’t cyber, but who consider themselves couples in-world. And people who meet up in person for sex who haven’t cybered in-world, but who have flirted and become friends.

And to have more than 40 percent the respondents report (or admit! ) that they sometimes, often or always have cybersex tells me that sex — sexual expression, sexual attraction, sexual thrill, if not literally “online sex” — is indeed a big draw in Second Life.

Having just written a rather tongue-in-cheek piece on “how to be bisexual on the internet” for my new book — and fearing that the tongue-in-cheek part isn’t coming through, and everyone will hate me, this great post over at Bisexuality and Beyond caught my eye:

Bisexuality and beyond: Tila Tequila and the MySpace bisexual
You couldn’t make it up – although someone obviously has. A bisexual dating show where a woman who is quite literally famous for being famous is getting “16 gorgeous straight guys!” and “16 hot lesbians!” to compete for her affections on the MTV show A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. It sounds positively demure besides her previous series: Pants-Off Dance-Off. And that’s “pants off” in the underwear sense of the word, rather than simply an overly constricting pair of trousers.
Now Tila Tequila is most famous for having completely invented herself as a sleb through self-promotion, and clearly she’s very good at it, with currently 2,170,161 MySpace friends – more than when I looked a couple of hours ago. Now she’s a singer/actress/presenter/model/stripper/all-purpose brand, and good luck to her I suppose.
She has also been credited for giving rise to the term MySpace Bisexual, which Urban Dictionary defines as:

“A girl who makes out with other slutty chicks at parties and then claims to be bisexual because it’s trendy to say so and gets people’s attention on Myspace.
Pretty much any girl on Myspace who lists her sexual orientation as “bisexual”. Hence, Myspace Bisexual.”

Well, being a “girl” who lists my sexual orientation as “bisexual” on MySpace I obviously have a quarrel with that. Actually lots of quarrels with that. You could equally well call them “Girls Gone Wild”. But moving on…

What follows is an interesting look at how the media treats romantic relationships, regardless of the sex or gender of the people involved. And then:

The problem isn’t that there are wacky views about bisexuality in the media – there are wacky views about everything - it’s that all of them are wacky. Isn’t it about time that there were some genuine ones too?

I’ve worked a little bit in TV, and I sometimes wonder if the reason TV doesn’t handle “real” relationships very well is that people who have healthy, strong relationships tend not to work in TV.

*grins, ducks, runs*

A new Sex Drive column is up:

Court Does Right by Social Sex Sites
Just three business days after my last column explained the futility of subjecting adult social-networking websites to the same record-keeping requirements as porn productions, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a slip opinion agreeing with me.

No, I don’t feel smug, why do you ask?

Also, I wrote the cover story for this month’s AVNOnline, about what the adult industry needs to be thinking about as 3D virtual space becomes a reality.

AVN Online NSFW

AVN has the most annoying, obnoxious online format of any publication I’ve ever seen. Even if it loaded instantly, which it doesn’t, who thought we’d want to “read a magazine” online like we do iin print?

Anyway.

If you want to read the piece, follow the link above and then enter “70″ in the page number field in the toolbar at the top. On the other hand, if you’ve read Sex Drive for a while, I probably didn’t say anything you don’t already know. (But there’s a hot picture of Kevin Alderman in the sidebar, where you can see he looks exactly like his avatar Stroker Serptentine.)

You might be more interested in my colleague Tom Johansmeyer’s piece about the military police confiscating dildos in Iraq, which starts on page 80. About the article, he says “The army’s ban on porn is widely known. But, my story covers a unique angle. Two women had sex toys confiscated in the course of an improper search. They almost lost their jobs. But, military legal advisors explained to the Command Sergeant Major that dildos are not porn…. It is important that the taxpaying public understand where are money is going. We may not be able to find WMDs, but at least we’re keeping Iraq safe from orgasm.”

…but for those of you about to write, we salute you.

National Novel Writing Month

If you work sex-tech into your novel, send me the title and your wordcount on December 1st, and I’ll post a list here.