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It probably shouldn’t surprise to anyone that, in general, women in the blogosphere get a lot more harassment than men. After all, just walking down the street, women get a lot more harassment than men.
While I’ve been aware of this for a long time, it returned to the foreground of my thinking when John Scalzi wrote The Sort of Crap I Don’t Get, which is a nice overview of the issue from the perspective of a man who understands this. He’s been blogging for 13 years and has had a very strong online presence for 20, so he’s seen the development of the interwebs for a while. It doesn’t even matter what the topic is- knitting bloggers get vitriol, too. As he says,…
Continue reading When Sex Bloggers Get Slut Shamed
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
Google just launched Google Instant, a somewhat nifty feature. You’ve probably noticed recently that when you start to enter a search query, Google would give you suggestions so you wouldn’t need to keep typing. They’ve taken it a step further. Now, as you type, the search results from the first item in the list of suggestions appears. Keep typing and new results show up. If you want to search for “George Washington,” you’ll see search results for “Gmail”, then “Geico”, then “Georgia”, then “George Steinbrenner”, and then the ones you want.
I’m sure that this will be useful to a …
Continue reading Google’s Acting in Loco Parentis
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
The internet is abuzz with the latest back and forth about porn between Apple and the rest of the world. Ryan Tate at Gawker.com had an interesting conversation with him, and he’s posted the entire thing here:
In particular, there are two snippets of the emails from Jobs that I think are important:
Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away.
and
And you might care about porn more when you have kids
The first thing I want to …
Continue reading Freedom From Porn and the iPhone
I have to admit that I wouldn’t have thought of this if I hadn’t read about it, although if you’re a techie, this probably won’t surprise you.
According to a blog post at Come As You Are, there’s a potential privacy issue that results from something called EXIF data being added to your photos. Most digital cameras add information about the photo, such as the date and time it was taken, as well as camera settings, and a thumbnail of the photo. A few phones also add geotagging to photos, which is when the latitude and longitude of the location where the photo was taken is added.As phones get smarter, I expect to see this more and more often.…
Continue reading Keeping Your Online Photos Private
This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
I recently received a press release about STD Test Express, an online service designed to make getting tested for sexually transmitted infections easier. At first, I thought it was a great idea. After thinking about it, I still think it’s a good idea but not perfect.
Here’s how it works. You go to their site, select which tests you want and pay with a credit card. You get a printout that you take to the closest lab (they have a search function) and give them a blood and/or urine sample. It’s fast, it’s easy, and nobody will know why you’re at the lab since the same sites also do lots of other medical stuff. …
Continue reading STI Testing via the Internet: Pros and Cons
Sometimes, it seems like every time I turn around, someone else is freaking out about “protecting children from sex” which usually translates into withholding information, lying about sex and safety, pretending that teens aren’t sexual beings, and projecting a “do what I say, not what I did” message. Ironically, as Judith Levine points out in her extensively researched book Harmful to Minors, all of these strategies actually increase the chances that youth and young adults will end up in the very situations that we really need to protect them from. STI and pregnancy rates go up and kids have se
x at younger ages when we hide the facts from them. The research shows it, even though lots of people refuse to accept that.…
Continue reading some new info about kids and the internet
If you’re kinky and looking for folks to connect with, you might find Facebook to be a bit vanilla for your tastes. Plus, Facebook doesn’t give you too many options for relationship types. If you’re polyamorous, have a play partner, a life partner and a submissive, Facebook simply can’t handle that.
If you want a social networking site that reflects the diversity of BDSM relationships, check out Felife. Whatever your sexual orientation, relationship status, or sexual desires, preferences and practices, you’ll find folks on Fetlife. The forums are lots of fun to browse through (although you’ll definitely find some that make you wonder), lots of the photos are super hot, and you can find plenty of folks to meet.
Also, there’s a lot of …
Continue reading kinky social networking
Given that the Obama administration has stopped funding abstinence-only sex misinformation, I’m sure that lots of schools are scrambling to figure out what to do. Fortunately, Planned Parenthood just launched an amazing site which is full of resources, information and support. If you work with kids, or if you have kids, or if you know someone with kids, pass the link along. I’ve embedded it above, but here is is, so you can cut & paste it:
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/resources/index.htm
A big thanks to Planned Parenthood! (again)…
Continue reading Planned Parenthood has sex ed tools for you
Via Feministing
Be prepared to be amazed. It turns out that many of the websites offering information about sexual health have wrong information. According to a Stanford School of Medicine’s press release, even some highly trusted sites like WebMD have inaccurate info about things like birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and Pap exams.
In all fairness, a lot of the information changes quickly. New research comes out all the time, state laws change, and some sites simply don’t have the ability to keep up to date. I suspect that some sites end up with out of date info because they prioritize updating other pages instead of their sexual health pages and it’s not clear from the press release whether the pages they reviewed were …
Continue reading Sexual misinformation on the web? I’m shocked
In one of those serendipitous moments, Tony’s comment reminded me of an article that was in the Advocate recently (sorry- link broken) about the effects of porn tube sites and pirated porn on the industry.
One of the long-standing advertising maxims is, of course, “Sex Sells.” And it’s true that sex is used to get people’s attention and/or convince them to buy stuff. It’s also true that when the only way for most people to get porn was to go to a theater or buy a videotape, there was a lot of money to be made. But as the Advocate article points out, the digital revolution has started to change that.
There are a few reasons for that. First, there’s a lot of free porn …
Continue reading Porn Expectations, Part 3
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