Register today and it’s only $40 — register after 11:55pm ET tonight and it’ll be a still-very-reasonable $50.

A note from organizer Amber Rhea:

Hi all, just a reminder than the $40 admission ends at 11:55pm tonight. After that, it will be $50. We will not be taking any registrations at the door. You MUST pre-register; no exceptions. This is to ensure the safety and security of all our participants’ identities.

Sex 2.0 information and registration form

Most of us are staying at the Renaissance Hotel downtown — it’s a Marriott. When you call for reservations (the number is on the Sex 2.0 site) make sure you tell them you’re going to Sex 2.0. There might still be rooms reserved for Sex 2.0 and this will ensure you book a room in our reserved block.

Refresher info:

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? These questions, and many more, will be addressed within a safe, welcoming, sex-positive space.

Respecting the confidentiality and protecting the identities of participants who wish to maintain a degree of anonymity will be a top priority at Sex 2.0.

When? April 12, 2008
Where? 1763~A Deviant Place of Decadence, 1763 Montreal Circle, Tucker, Ga., 30084
How much? $10 until February 17; $40 until March 28; $50 after March 28.

At Sex 2.0, everyone is a participant rather than a passive attendee. This is YOUR event!

Dr. Kris Gowen, who studies the effect of the internet on teen sexuality, has been wondering about erotic fan fiction lately and whether teens are writing and publishing it.

Teens creating ‘adult’ content

Of course they are. You shoulda seen my private writings — journals and stories — back in the day. You can tell, reading through those (yeah I kept ‘em so whatsyerpoint?), exactly when I graduated from Sweetheart Romances to Jean Auel’s The Valley of Horses, which is the first porn — scuse me, erotica — I ever read. Suddenly my characters weren’t just holding hands, and when Fonzie came to visit me in the hospital, he gave me a lot more than a glance. That woulda been around the middle of 8th grade, so I was what, 13?

I’d have been mortified if any of the adults had read my stories or journals, but I could see me publishing my stuff in a ‘closed’ forum like Live Journal, especially if my peers liked my work.

From a friend of a friend and sent to a friend, who replied “Your friend is a ninja.”

‘Struth.

GOOD JUDGMENT CAN’T BE BOUGHT OR LEARNED FROM BOOKS. PEOPLE AREN’T BORN WITH IT, AND IT ISN’T TAUGHT IN SCHOOL. ONLY SELF-AWARENESS AND VAST KNOWLEDGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND POTENTIALITIES, WHEN COMBINED WITH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, RESULT IN GOOD JUDGMENT. MENTORS CAN SPEED THE PROCESS, SUPPLYING INFORMATION AND EVEN EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE ARTFULLY TOLD STORY. OTHERWISE, THE BURNED HAND TEACHES BEST.

GOOD JUDGMENT IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCE, WHILE AN “EXPERIENCE” IS THE RESULT OF POOR JUDGMENT.
——Mark Twight, Extreme Alpinism

Why does this surprise anyone? The internet is all about relationships and talking. Pretty soon, there won’t be any reason for men to log on at all.

*evil grin*

Women outnumber men online, and more teen girls blog than teen boys

Last year I was deathly ill — mainly of exhaustion, I think — and missed half of Arse Elektronika, so I can’t speak with authority about everything that happened. It’s all the cool kids in sex-tech, though, doing cool-kid things, and from all accounts, last year was a blast.

This year’s theme is Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep? Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction and the call for papers went out about a month ago. They just announced the dates and location (Fort Mason, SF).

If you’re gonna go, let me know — we’ll get a latte or somethin’ and toss the ball for Jedi in the bay right there at Crissy Field (hey, do I know how to party, or what?).

My guess is that Violet Blue, Annalee Newitz, Kyle Machulis and a host of other interesting sexy geeks will be speaking, so it’ll be worth the trip from wherever you are (right, DaddyD?).

My friend Carly Milne, author of Sexography, has teamed up with Chelsea Bowers and Kevin Apgar to launch a blogging contest to benefit Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) during the month of April, which is National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. The goal is to raise enough money to offer victims of sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape an online hotline offering counseling and assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

All you have to do is sign up before March 30, blog about sexuality and how it relates to your life, include the contest button and encourage your readers to donate. The more donations you channel, the closer you are to a prize. (Total value of prizes if $5,000.)

Also, you don’t have to be a ’sex writer’ or ’sex blogger’ or ’sex anything’ to participate.

Contests and prizes are too much pressure for me, egads! I’m going to do it because I want to, but I’m exempting myself from the competition.

However, for those of you with more fortitude than I, the full contest details and rules and sign-up instructions and prize descriptions and nifty graphics and all the rest are here:

Everything You Need To Know

Dr. Petra Boynton explains in detail what happens when magazines contact sex researchers for articles.

Say what we want and keep it light: how (some) magazines like you to talk about sex

A while back I was asked by a colleague to comment on a feature about men and sex. The piece was to be about the key problems men have with sex and was for a glossy young women’s magazine.

{snip}

Later a writer from the magazine also got in touch as they had now come up with their own set of men’s sex problems for discussion.

Again they emphasised the feature was ‘fun and light-hearted’ and explained how the piece would include issues like men’s body image anxieties or tiredness due to stress.

I pointed out I didn’t think either of those topics were all that fun, and the journalist agreed but explained since it was a sex feature they never wrote anything all that serious and obviously quotes had to be ‘entertaining’.

I said I’d try and help and they agreed to email over the issues they wanted comment on. Below is the email from the magazine showing their suggested topics - and also more tellingly - how they wanted me to answer. Continued…

Having just gone through a fact check with a national magazine who not only misquoted me, they put my name over a piece of sex advice I would never have given — one of the worst pieces of sex advice I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot, considering how much I’ve read on the subject — I have some personal experience with what Dr. Boynton is talking about.

I used to get all excited about being quoted in magazines, getting the word out about Sex Drive and the idea that sex-tech doesn’t have to be scary, but of late I’ve become much more wary. Luckily, the big magazines do fact-check and you can request to have your name taken off or the quote taken out (which I did); but all you can do when you tell them “Actually, what I said was …..” is hope they correct what they quoted. So far I haven’t been too terribly misunderstood or misquoted — and I am proud to say I have a good record of not screwing up people’s meanings or quotes in my own work. (And I’m always paranoid that I somehow did, just this once; there’s a past column in which I did leave out a very, very important word in a quote, which caused some critical emails afterward that I totally deserved though I didn’t know why until I went back weeks later and re-read — but it was too late to change the published piece and no, I’m not telling where or what it was.)

Please join me for champagne, appetizers, sex toys and the launch of my new book, SEXIER SEX: LESSONS FROM THE BRAVE NEW SEXUAL FRONTIER.

April 1, 2008 (this is not a joke! LOL)
8pm - 10pm

Freddy and Eddy have graciously offered to host the event in their sensual boutique — see pictures here: http://www.freddyandeddy.com/storeinfo.htm
Freddy and Eddy - Where Couples Can Come
12613 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90066
877-915-0380
freddy@freddyandeddy.com
(Calendar Listing: http://tinyurl.com/2ehpto)

SEXIER SEX is a fun collection of neat things you can do to have more fun with sex, using the gadgets and gear you already have around the house: cell phone, phone, laptop, mp3 player, digital camera, washing machine, pickup truck … OK, I’m kidding about the washing machine. But you can learn more about the book at Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/yrl7vs

I’m going to read a tiny bit from the book and we might even do a hands-on demonstration, so bring your cell phone or digital camera or iPod or whatever else fits in your purse or pocket.

Regina

P.S. I will be in the bay area doing a similar event — more workshop, less party, LOL — at Good Vibrations in Berkeley on 4/21, for those of you who want to come but can’t make it to LA. After that, it’s Sex 2.0 on April 12 in Atlanta, and then the Balticon sci-fi convention over Memorial Day weekend in Baltimore.

ok so i admit i haven’t seen a lot, but this is incredible. and totally off topic, too, so don’t waste your time looking for fucking machines or boobies or anything.

freeze in new york - grand central station

note that because it’s not sex-tech, it’s possible this is an ancient internet meme that’s already made the rounds a billion times and spawned 407 imitators, but i haven’t seen it until today.

Annalee Newitz’s latest column shows, yet again, why I have always been and will always be an Annaleen groupie.

I almost don’t want to quote from it, because the whole thing is good and I want you to experience the whole thing … but if you’re super busy and skimming through my blog and just want a taste, here’s the middle part:

Spitzer Did Nothing Wrong
[snip]

The reasons given are always the same: sex work is abusive to women (male prostitutes don’t exist?), and being paid for sex is inherently degrading.

Let’s look inside one of those heavy economics books that I just beat you with and examine these assumptions for a minute, OK? Every possible kind of human act has been commodified and turned into a job under capitalism. That means people are legally paid to clean up one another’s poop, paid to wash one another’s naked bodies, paid to fry food all day, paid to work in toxic mines, paid to clean toilets, paid to wash and dress dead naked bodies, and paid to clean the brains off walls in crime scenes. My point is, you can earn money doing every possible degrading or disgusting thing on earth.

And yet, most people don’t think it’s immoral to wipe somebody else’s bum or to fry food all day, even though both jobs could truthfully be described as inherently degrading. They say, “Gee that’s a tough job.” And then they pay the people who do those jobs minimum wage.

The sex worker Spitzer visited, on the other hand, was paid handsomely for her tough job. The New York Times, in its mission to invade this woman’s privacy (though in what one must suppose is a nonexploitative way), reported that she was a midrange worker at her agency who pulled in between $1000-$2000 per job. She wasn’t working for minimum wage; she wasn’t forced to inhale toxic fumes that would destroy her chances of having a nonmutant baby. She was being paid a middle-class salary to have sex. Sure, it might be an icky job, in the same way cleaning up barf in a hospital can be icky. But was she being economically exploited? Probably a hell of a lot less than the janitor in the hospital mopping up vomit and cleaning up after you.

[snip]

Watching how producers and reporters expose their ignorance and prejudices and rudeness as they rush to cover the Spitzer story — see Audacia Ray’s posts here and here in which she gives some appalling examples — reminded me that I wrote a piece three years ago about tech replacing pimps and empowering women to do sex work their own way.

Re-reading that column I find I would clarify a thing or two if I wrote it now. It sounds like I’m less supportive of sex workers than I am (and was then), and it also focuses exclusively on female sex workers, which I wouldn’t do now.

But it was interesting to compare the column I wrote then to what’s happening now, when sex workers and activists and advocates are banding together to send a message to the media about the hypocrisy of it all, rather than quietly grumbling but staying out of the limelight for fear of reprisal. (See Bound, Not Gagged, the blog of the Desiree Alliance, for example.) This is not something I addressed in the piece, and yet it seems like the logical progression, does it not?

This is why I’m so delighted to see conferences like Sex 2.0, a day of discussion about sex work, feminism and social media. These conversations need to happen if anything is ever going to change for the better.

Tech Does It Better
More often than you’d think, men worry about being replaced by sex-oriented technology. They fear that their penises, which cannot vibrate or rotate and do not have multiple attachments or clitoral stimulators in cute animal shapes, will no longer be enough after a woman gets her first ride on a jumbo-sized rabbit pearl.

The analogy I’ve been using to lay those fears to rest is this: Sex toys are like almonds. Almonds can be a delicious and satiating snack on their own. Almonds can be a delightful addition to a salad, a bowl of cereal, yogurt or a dessert. You can share almonds with others, or enjoy them on your own.

But few people want to replace every meal with a bowl of almonds for the rest of their lives.

And few people want to replace human touch and intercourse — and love — with tools, no matter how advanced our technology becomes. (Besides, those who prefer inanimate objects to human lovers aren’t good candidates for sexual relationships anyway. Think of it as a valuable weeding-out process.)

Yet for women working in the sex industry, whether prostitution or pornography, technology just might be replacing men — the middlemen, that is. Because while the media continues to portray high tech as a man’s world, that same tech has been quietly liberating women who work in what has historically been an exploitative field: “professional” sex.

cont’d at wired