It’s hard to say how much revenue the porn industry has lost to free porn tube sites. No matter what they do, they can’t seem to bring their sales back to the levels they saw before these sites made access to porn so easy. Tired of fighting, the adult video production company Pink Visual is joining their ranks.

Sort of. They’re working with other studios in the industry to launch an entirely free, ad-supported streaming site that will bring fans the porn they want while still creating a direct source of revenue for the studios that provided the content.

“In talking to the heads of other adult studios about the state of the market, one of the most frustrating things for them in recent years has been seeing their content generate literally millions of views on free sites that are displaying their content without their permission, and yet they get no direct revenue from all those views,” says Pink Visual CEO Allison Vivas. “On the site we’re developing, the advertising revenue generated by views of their content is shared directly with the studio. The more their content is viewed, the more the studio earns.”

This is great news for the consumer — though not entirely surprising. Pink Visual came to be in the time of web, eventually turning itself into the first mobile site for iPhone. By 2009, Pink Visual had developed its mobile offering to run on the majority of popular U.S. smartphones. In 2010, they moved aggressively into the tablet space. They know these here intertubes.

Also, the move to create a tube site that benefits studios directly fits with Pink Visual’s aggressive anti-piracy stance. If they can bring better quality content to viewers, they could stand to really hit the tube sites where it hurts: the bank account.

Their motto “We Innovate, You Masturbate” is right once again. Power to you, Pink Visual. We’ll be in our room if you need us.

Header image via PinkVisualPass.

Patrón knows how bummery it can be to worry about what you’re doing on Valentine’s Day, so they’re throwing you a line. A chocolate-coffee line. No, this isn’t some unholy partnership with Starbucks, but it could be if you took out all the sugary nonsense from your mochaccino. Oh, yes. XO Cafe Dark Cocoa is hardcore. It has no use for that sweetness. Picture the booze power of Patrón Silver rushing through a field of coffee and cocoa beans.

Last week, Google’s social network Google Plus (Google+) opened its doors to users 13 years of age and above. In order to prevent minors from accessing adult content that sometimes appears on this blog, our editrix created a Google+ Page to disseminate our posts (you may have noticed the button on the far right column). To illustrate the page, we put up the same image we have on our Facebook page.

The very next day, we noticed that the image had been yanked. To make sure it wasn’t a glitch, we uploaded it again. No more than six hours later, the image was gone once again.

In protest, tireless anti-censorship campaigner Brandon Campeaux, issued a statement to the network’s photo team this evening, asking why the photo had been censored:

Is it because of the darker skin as we near the pubic region that gives us the impression that there is in fact pubic hair? Or are we offended by the belly-button, ribs, or can we simply not handle the curvature of the female form? I wonder because I don’t see anything wrong with this image and while it was banned twice, this other image (right) of a man’s curves went unscathed.

The Google+ Photo Team will go after this innocuous page avatar for a sex column but pay no attention to images that show up for common keywords relating to porn. First of all, I don’t think anything should ever be censored unless the content is illegal (e.g. child pornography). But the mere fact that Google has not penetrated their porn problem by filtering images that match frequently used keywords for review is a sign that the team isn’t reinvesting their talents in the company. Any first year programmer could write a script that culls images that might violate policy. Instead we have a focused effort to go after the accounts with the most followers — but only some of them, and never in a consistent manner.

Campeaux included the following image as a means of illustrating his point:

Our editrix responded to the post with some critique of the network: “This yanking of content or limiting viewing to the post without warning makes it a little anxiety-inducing to post, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place when I created the page for Sex and the 405.”

Later that evening, Brian Rose, the community manager for Google+ photos, responded the thread:

I don’t believe … photos of men from behind violate our content policies. You can show a person’s bare buttocks on network (non-cable) TV, like ABC’s “NYPD Blue”. Likewise, the image in your screenshot titled “Banned” should not be flagged as far as I can tell. If what’s visible in your screenshot is the entire image, if you send me a link to the original flagged photo I’ll follow up with our Review team so I can clarify why this judgement was made or un-flag this photo.

When Rose realized the image was a profile picture he added:

Oh, that’s likely the reason — profile photos are held to a stricter standard than photos shared in the stream, I believe because they may also show up on Google.com search result pages, other Google services, etc. I’ll still raise A.V. Flox’s photo with our Review team, and thanks for continuing to share your feedback.

He pointed to the Google+ content policy, which states: “Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content. For example, do not use a photo that is a close-up of a person’s buttocks or cleavage.”

“I believe you can share photos of buttocks in a post, but that same photo can’t be used as a profile photo,” Rose told another commenter on the thread.

What happens when the profile picture depicts neither breasts nor buttocks? Or are abs really so very inappropriate?

The content on the actual Sex and the 405 page has not been censored or limited and remains accessible to people following that stream.

We’ve gotten word that AfterDark LA, the LA Weekly‘s sex blog, is pivoting from its L.A. focus to a national one in order to appeal to a wider audience. This no doubt includes taking a step back from adult industry happenings to an extent, which is a damn shame since most other mainstream media properties online have a tendency to be unabashedly sex-negative.

But don’t be sad, we have you covered. To satisfy all your civilian cravings about what’s happening in Porn Valley, we present Porn Valley Vantage, a great blog run by eminent pornologist Dr. Chauntelle, a visiting scholar at USC’s department of sociology and academic whose primary interest is in the expansion of women’s rights and opportunities in the adult film industry.

In Porn Valley Vantage, Dr. Chauntelle reviews films and comments on happenings in the adult entertainment industry.

“Everyone has an opinion about porn -– it’s either good or bad, exploitative or liberating; it’s super hott, or it’s just plain nasty,” she says. “But I’m here to tell you: it’s more complicated than that. Just like real life, porn is multi-dimensional and complex, and every discrete element is also part of a wider socio-cultural past, present, and future … Porn Valley Vantage engages these complexities, connecting the dots and offering readers a unique take on the adult film industry.”

Image of the Valley by Tony Hall.

Playboy has a line of lingerie and sleepwear called Playboy Intimates, which is getting ready to launch a brand spanking new collection. To celebrate, they’re running a contest that could land one lucky lady a wishlist full of lingerie. To enter, you need a Facebook account. Once logged in, go to their Facebook app and select one of the four items you like from four categories: bra, panties, lingerie, and sleepwear.

Their app will spit out a line to a little Valentine’s Day poem for every item chosen and send the final version and your wishlist to the lover one selected to receive the want-a-gram at the beginning of the exercise. See what they did there? If you have an accommodating lover, he or she (the app assumes it’s a he, tsk tsk) will buy you the lingerie. If you don’t (which is totally understandable given this economy, so be nice), you can always explain away the epic hint-hint by saying you did it to enter a contest. No harm done!

All users who participate in the poem and wishlist blitzing will be entered into a contest. One lucky winner will receive all the items in her wishlist. Of course, if you don’t need anyone else to get you your lingerie, you can go get it yourself once their new collection launches with our best regards — and this promo code we secured for you to get a nice independent woman 15 percent discount: PBmodel15

Designers create for many reasons, but very few of them specialize in the erotic life in the same way that ainsley-t does. The Milan-based footwear designer is tired of the usage of words such as “cheap” and “tacky” to describe the items that make our fantasies come to life. His life mission is to take erotic wear to the heights of haute couture.

“We’re convinced that the erotic need be no enemy of quality,” says founder Stuart Thom. “And when you’re thinking with every square inch of skin and breathing for every touch, wouldn’t you much rather wear shoes from people who take the same care as you do? Of course you would.”

To this end, ainsley-t has joined forces with Les Jeux du Marquis to bring to life a pair of ainsley-t lace boots that incorporate a wicked flogger as an accessory. This effort doesn’t seek to provoke conversation — this is art you can use. The flogger, custom-designed by Les Jeux du Marquis to meet the “dictates of High Fashion,” is made of French nappa, lambskin suede and lace-effect lasered calfskin.

The boot will debut in Barcelona, Spain at the end of the month at The Brandery, a fashion trade show which is offering for the first time an exhibit focusing explosively on high-fashion erotic products.

We can’t wait to see this boot. Our editrix has not one, but two pairs of ainsley-t’s anal plug pumps, so we can vouch they’re to die.

Best director, best actress, best feature — these are the awards the porn feature Portrait of a Call Girl scored at the AVNs last week. We got curious, so we decided to take a look at how the legal aspect of the sex industry understood its marginalized twin.

We had faith in the film. Gram Ponante had written a review on Fleshbot that said Portrait had achieved for the studio Elegant Angel what every porn company hopes for: a skin flick that could pass for mainstream were it not for all the sex in it.

He’s not wrong when he says that Portrait is the most “thoughtfully acted, beautifully shot, and sparsely, elegantly orchestrated” porn flick out there. It is right up there with the original Emmanuelle. It even pays passing tribute to Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and uses voice overs reminiscent of Gia (“A life is like a book. A book is like a box. A box has six sides. Inside and outside, so, how do you get to what’s inside? How do you get what’s inside, out? Once upon a time, there lived a very pretty girl, who lived in a beautiful box, and everybody loved her.”).

The film has serious problems, however, the biggest of which are all the tired cliches that relate to sex workers. Elle, played by Jessie Andrews, comes from a broken home complete with an abusive stepfather. She hates herself so much, she destroys a relationship with a man who genuinely loves her and runs off to the city to become an escort. From that moment on, the variety of sex acts in which she engages place her in positions of intensifying humiliation, suggesting that sex work, for her, is nothing but a catalyst for self-hatred and self-destruction. The is the epitome of the girl Who Must Be Saved.

And then after a six man bukkake session, one of the johns asks her out on a date. Elle is as surprised that anyone would want her as she is that she is getting paid more money than was previously agreed (come on). She hasn’t even gone out on the date when she tells the man who set her up with the bukkake gig that she’s not interested in another engagement. The final scenes make it seem as though she’s going to quit for good, though at the end we’re not quite sure — a small step forward for reality, three steps back for character development.

Then there are the little things that don’t jive. She’s too explicit when talking about the price of sex. No “roses,” straight up cash. She rarely takes her money first. And her clients are attractive, if not outright gorgeous.

Then there is the therapy sessions. Elle wants to destroy herself, but she confides to her therapist that she loves what she does. Not because it’s destructive. Not because it gives her a thrill to escape as someone else’s fantasy. Not because she is being paid more for one hour than most people are paid in a week. No, she loves the sex itself. She doesn’t fake it ever! Immediately afterward, she occasionally masturbates thinking about it. It’s not work regardless of her careful accounting of every deposit.

That’s nitpicking. Far, far more egregious is the fact that none of the sex scenes include condoms. We know how the industry feels about condoms. We get it. And we also know that some girlfriend experience situations work that way, but to see it in every scene featuring penetration severely sabotages the suspension of disbelief.

Don’t get us wrong — we liked the editing. We liked the score. We liked the way the scenes floated alongside one another. Portrait feels almost like a blog that you stumble on while you’re surfing the web at work, which gives you little peeks into a person’s life. Not always honest. Not always in order. Not always consistent. Aside from the issues we mentioned, the film comes off as real. It’s human.

Andrews epitomizes this humanity — which may be why her costars feel so desperately out of place. She has the sort of body you’d see on the girl next door, if the girl living next door didn’t believe in Brazilians. There is nothing particularly sexy about her body until she decides to make it sexy and then, quite suddenly, she unfolds before the viewer like some kind of iconic beauty. It doesn’t happen during the sex scenes, mind you. In them she is blotchy, sweaty, her makeup smeared all over her face. Sometimes, she’s outright ugly — ugly in the way we civilians are ugly when we have sex. Masterfully, one of her fake unlashes come partially unglued during the threesome scene and completely fall off during the bukkake scene, ending up on her left cheek right below her eye. You can’t easily fake that level of human.

The isolation, too, is very real. We don’t see a lot of waiting in the ivory tower, to nod to Scarlot Harlot, but we do feel the loneliness. The scene where Elle goes to the movie theater alone perfectly captures this and the music only heightens it. It’s crushing.

We respect the restraint director and writer Graham Travis exercised in the ending. Elle doesn’t end up staying with the guy who asked her out on a date. She doesn’t end up with the man she wronged. That’s something. Thanks for keeping it real. Ish.

Carl Zimmer, a celebrated science writer, has published a piece about Neil deGrasse Tyson in the January issue of Playboy magazine (also featuring Lindsay Lohan!). Almost immediately after the article started making the rounds on the internet, the question of whether “respectable authors” should publish in Playboy arose.

The discussion largely unfolded on the Google+ profile of Miriam Goldstein, a writer for the ocean science blog Deep Sea News, where a commenter asked, “What is with women who applaud Playboy — the magazine that strives to reinforce a social hierarchy where men have all the privilege and women are told in no uncertain terms what they’re good for?” The conversation shuffled between how pornography socially affects women and how this compares to other “more acceptable” publications such as Esquire and women’s fashion magazines.

I will preface this discussion by saying that there are different kinds of pornography and that talking about the way pornography impacts women is akin to making a statement as broad and useless as discussing how literature or film impacts women. The type of pornography that Playboy offers is different from the sort, say, porn producer and sex educator Madison Young offers, which focuses on women’s pleasure as well as couples remaining intimate during pregnancy. Granted, Young’s work is much more recent than Playboy, which has changed little since Hugh Hefner created it in 1953.

The role that Playboy played in the “pornification” of culture cannot be brushed off completely, however, as it — along with other publications of the time, including art and nudist magazines — played a key role in creating a legal structure that upheld our right to express ourselves in regard to our sexuality, opening the doors to hundreds of literary works which had been banned in the United States since Anthony Comstock’s crusade against immorality and sexual expression after the Civil War.

Allow me to paint a picture for you: Comstock used spies, informers, decoys and was not against tampering with the mail in order to capture the immoral, practices which blatantly flew in the face of constitutional freedoms in this country. We’re not talking about the sort of porn we see online these days, we’re talking about all of that, as well as educational materials about contraception, and all the way to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Goodbye freedom, hello Society for the Suppression of Vice. Fines leveled against publishers and writers and anyone holding these materials were as high as $5,000 and jail time as lengthy as ten years.

Think about this: in 1877, a man committed to debunking the Bible, taxing church property, and educating the public about birth control by the name of D.M. Bennett ran an underground publication called The Truth Seeker. He was charged with mailing two indecent articles, one of them “How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind?” It was no euphemism. It really was about marsupials. Indeed, the suppression of sexual discourse has always come hand in hand with the suppression of literature, as well as that of scientific inquiry. This is something we cannot afford to forget.

The assault against freedom of expression in the guise of protecting the public against immorality continued long after Comstock’s death, being taken up by all manner of church organizations and politicians in need of an easy battle to get behind. It was into this environment that Hefner was born in Chicago. And it mustn’t be forgotten when mentioning Esquire magazine that the publication was not always what we know it to be today. Esquire was bullied by church leaders and severely weakened by the cost of having to defend itself in court for charges of obscenity between 1942 and 1946. This shift in content is evident if one looks at the issues closer to its inception in 1933. Esquire caved.

George Von Rosen, himself in the magazine business, published nude photography in his magazine Art Photography, a nudist lifestyle rag called Sunbathing & Hygiene, as well as Modern Man, a magazine that offered suggestive images of women along with excellent articles as a means to get around the laws that required publications to have “redeeming social value.” Hefner joined Von Rosen’s newsroom shortly after the launch of the latter and would eventually take the same combination of imagery and content when launching Playboy a few years later. Unlike Von Rosen’s magazine, which was written for the outdoorsman, Playboy would cater to the urban, more intellectual man.

Playboy’s contribution was two-fold: it created a Trojan horse out of sex that educated men, and it also took a healthy approach to sex, which similar magazines of the time portrayed as aberrant, immoral behavior. Women’s magazines at this time, you must remember, did not acknowledge female desire and addressed sexuality as a problem to be dealt with. Meanwhile, Hefner published the Kinsey report on American women without censoring what readers may consider offensive and without editorializing Kinsey as a menace to society, as several other news sources did at the time.

What is easy to miss about this very long and multi-faceted discussion of the cultural significance of pornographic magazines is how they informed a generation about sex. Up until that point as I mentioned previously, women’s sexuality was hardly considered, but in the years of the great “pornification,” women were finally able to break out of the role of wife and mother and recognize themselves as sexual creatures. It’s true that Hefner was — and remains — caught between his traditional upbringing and the cultural shift he helped catalyze, but to ignore the bigger picture in favor of his inconsistency is a great disservice to the facts.

The sexual revolution did a great many things for women. Today, there is more female-geared pornography than ever. Playboy’s studios, along with others catering to mainstream pornographic interests in film have taken the hint and, though clumsily, have attempted to cater to this audience, finally moving toward more couple-geared offerings. Female sexuality is recognized and the importance of this cannot be underestimated. It is ridiculous to consider how little progress we have made in this particular arena when we stop to think that it’s been over a century since Sigmund Freud asked, “what does a woman want?” To deny that the “pornification” of this country enabled what little progress we have made in this regard is absurd.

That said, the question of whether it is advisable to write for a publication that is geared toward men and which casts women as beautiful things to look at is not a bad one. The science, technology and skeptic space is plagued by questions relating to equality between men and women. This year alone we have read countless of pieces about how unsafe it feels to be a woman at conferences, in comment threads, and the web in general. But it is my opinion as someone who champions our freedom of speech and inquiry, that pornography and our expressions of sexuality have little to do with the respect that we offer one another as colleagues, peers and human beings. Just as a woman should not be subject to harassment for wearing a little black dress, neither should she be subject to harassment for appearing as a centerfold. The only way we can drive that point home is not to shun our work from publications that cater to demographics we consider problematic, but by reaching out to them with this message.

In the case of Carl Zimmer, who has written something completely different, I ask myself: shouldn’t we be glad that he can? Should an entire demographic be ignored because we disagree with the contents of the magazine that caters to it? If we mean to educate the public about science, then we must stop worrying that doing so for mainstream magazines, weeklies and sites outside the ones dearly loved by the science writing community, is going to hurt our careers. We need to penetrate those markets. To break out of the echo chamber, we must stop talking to peers and start targeting the everyman and everywoman through every avenue we can access. Playboy is one of these.

This piece originally appeared as a comment on Google+ on a thread about this conversation. It was later syndicated as a post, and finally reproduced here. Image use courtesy of James Vaughan.

As someone who has been researching and writing about slavery and trafficking since 2005, I worry that the overall desire to help on the part of Google has overridden a lot of details that must be understood if we are going to find a way to rid the world of trafficking and slavery. The most harmful and least understood of these details is the importance of supporting organizations that distinguish between consensual sex work and sexual slavery (something the State Department finally does and something NGOs must do to really help combat this blight). Several of the organizations that Google is funding do not make this necessary distinction.

International Justice Mission is a Christian group whose abolitionist practices are founded in morality, which casts anyone involved in sex work — coerced or not — into the role of victim in need of salvation. Their crackdowns on the sex industry is driving prostitution further underground, making it difficult for law enforcement to find real victims, and impossible for sex workers who have information about crimes to step forward.

The Polaris Project is little different. One look over their materials exposes their position on consensual sex work: they see no difference between a sex slave and a topless dancer. It’s also worth noting that they were one of the organizations on the forefront of the attack on Craigslist that resulted in the removal of the erotic services section. The problem with efforts like these is that people involved in sex trafficking will not cease their activities because a single avenue is closed off. Almost immediately after the section was closed, listings for adult services began to appear in other sections of Craigslist — in sections that do not require payment for postings, meaning there is no paper trail for law enforcement to follow.

While opponents of Craigslist may shake fists screaming about how Craigslist “profited” from sex trafficking, it is important to remember that the system of payment for adult services was instituted to create a record. That’s how Boston authorities managed to apprehend the Craigslist Killer, Philip Markoff. Censoring Craigslist has moved these activities to locations within the site where there is no paper trail, making it hard for law enforcement to locate and crack down on perpetrators.

Campaigns to remove sites similar to Craigslist altogether — such as that leveled against the Village Voice’s classified ads site Backpage, at the hands of Ashton Kutcher and the organizations with which his own DNA Foundation is aligned (among them the aforementioned Polaris; Shared Hope International, an organization that fights child sex trafficking by educating men about “the dangers of engaging in commercial sex markets, especially pornography”; and Citizens Against Trafficking, which continuously launches smear campaigns against sex educators, whom they believe are the cause of all these problems) — will only result in moving these activities underground where law enforcement will have an even more difficult time helping victims.

Censoring a site, it must be noted, is an easy victory. It gets organizations more money and it gets politicians elected. Never mind that doing so doesn’t really do anything to help real victims. And that’s not where it ends, unfortunately. The inability of these organizations to see a difference between sex work and trafficking means that efforts to censor will continue beyond sites like Craigslist: pornography is frequently a target and we’re not just talking about nude magazines and independent sites (where do you draw the line? Remember when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was considered obscene?). Sex educators are also consistently attacked, as are any groups whose desires don’t fall into the cookie-cutter moral ideal of what sex should be.

Ignorance on the topic, willful and not, and the eagerness of people to exploit this lack of information in pursuit of a moral agenda or political gain results in inaction and very dangerous legislation that affect all victims of slavery.

E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous — an expose about modern day slavery in various forms — has been a vocal advocate of the necessity of not only differentiating between the sex industry and sex trafficking, but also giving the same amount of attention to other forms of slavery, often overshadowed by sensationalism surrounding accounts of sex trafficking:

“The West’s efforts have been, from the outset, hamstrung by a warped understanding of slavery,” he says in A World Enslaved. “Though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all victims.”

The inability to see the differences between sex work and slavery thwarts efforts and taxes resources set aside for identifying, freeing and protecting actual victims of slavery, because those working to help victims become diverted with matters of consensual prostitution, which should be handled by local law enforcement as necessary, and which, though a crime in most U.S. cities, is nowhere as severe as slavery of any kind.

Not for Sale also conflates consensual adult sex work and forced sexual slavery and rape. Their stance against the partial decriminalization of sex work among consenting adults in a 2008 San Francisco ballot initiative more than illustrates their position. Allowing this initiative, known as Proposition K, to pass would have brought the underground to the surface, making it easier for sex workers to work with law enforcement to nab abusers and rapists, and to find real victims of sexual slavery. The moralizing, driven in part by Not for Sale, led to the failure of Proposition K.

So, no. I am not glad that Google is supporting these organizations.

But what happens when you offer erotic images in a format that’s no longer the norm?

It’s a stretch, but there is something about the glow of of bodies on Polaroid film that adds a little art to an image that otherwise has none.

Of course, this being Tumblr, ground zero for great found porn, we doubt you will be dealing with any courts. But if your partner should be upset that you’re looking at naughty things, you can easily placate him or her with the loophole. Disregard the name Pornlaroid, baby.

It’s not porn, it’s art.

And if you should feel compelled to add to their catalog of found sexy images but find yourself one Polaroid camera short, you can always put that iPhone to good use with the ShakeIt app, hands down the best app on the market to transform any photo into a decades old-looking masterpiece.

You’re welcome. Anything we can do to make sanitized Apple products just a little more exciting.