SugarClick, the Adult Website Reviews Blog - Soft Launch Today

A new adult website reviews blog.

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The last soft launch I was involved in featured the casting agent for Disney’s next Olsen Twins movie, a couple of Viagra the forty minutes immediately preceding a ‘casting’ (the agent ended up casting it all over the actors face and chest as I remember) - but I mean it in the business sense today.

To marketing professionals ’soft launch’ means releasing something to the public without undue fanfare as a way of controlling growth and finding bugs; but to marketing professionals teen-pregnancy means a chance to sell high-value consumables to the youth market so they’re not to be trusted.

SugarClick is the first of the SugarBlogs (yeah, I know) to launch with a team of writers - headed in this instance by the lovely Dacia - and is going to swim through the net (ooh, good visual), filtering the krill from the crap like an RSS-powered sperm whale (Fuck, I missed a logo opportunity right there.) Today’s our soft-launch.

I’d like my close personal net-buddies (that’s you) to check it out, subscribe and submit a site for review if you have one. It’ll provide us with valuable feedback, and give you the chance to explore the blog. It’s truly great, even if I say so myself.

SugarClick: sex website & blog reviews

(NB: SugarClick has a female dominated team and Dacia would like a guy to add a little balance. When Dacia asks for a man only fools ask why, so if you can write and have a dick - we’ll take post-up - drop Dacia a line and we might be able to make you part of the crew. With free access to porn sites as part of the job spec and a profit share what do you have to lose?)

I Want A Gay Man

Don't pretend you didn't see it coming.

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Are you gay? I need to know so here’s a quick test;

Question 1 - In the gym:
A - You’ll join any aerobics class that plays Madonna.
B - You’re known for being ‘ready for a wrestle’ after a shower.
C - You look better than 90% of the other guys in there.

Question 2 - At work:
A - You will slap anyone who gets in your face.
B - You ensure co-workers can get an ‘assist’ anytime they need to.
C - Your female colleagues take you out for lunch on your birthday.

Question 3
- At home:
A - You have given pride of place to a collection of ceramic dogs.
B - You ignore ‘that fat breeder bitch’ who’s paid to act as if she’s in love with you.
C - You don’t have a tiny trashcan beside the toilet.

Mostly A’s - You are a stereotype.
Mostly B’s - You are Tom Cruise.
Mostly C’s - You might be gay.

If you answered B’s or C’s, SugarPit needs you.

zero (small ‘z’, huge sport-ute) wants ‘the Pit’ to cover the gay sex scene with the comprehensive efficiency of Chi Chi LaRue at a free lunch buffet. If you think you might have the writing chops, enthusiasm and wit to help - email him.

Trade Links With SugarBank and BLT

A plugin's been written, let's use it.

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When I suggested there was a gap in Wordpress the shape of a decent traffic-trading plugin I didn’t imagine that three days after writing a post I’d be testing a plugin written to my specifications.

Will, the man responsible for condensing my enthused ramblings into working code has done something truly extraordinary, and I’d like to help him out by stress-testing his work here.

The plugin - called BLT for Blog-Link-Trade (Will obviously has marketing chops to go along with his programming ones) - allows people to place a link to their site from any BLT enabled blog they visit by filling in a form.

BLT displays a link to the referring site each time it counts a visitor, meaning that a blog with BLT can have 100 link-trade partners, and only 5 visible outbound links if they choose. They need never worry about promoting a site that’s not promoting them because only people sending visitors show up in their recent referrers list. It’s awsome (and it seems extra awesome if you’re about a minute into “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore: D. Con Safo” by The Mars Volta.) BLT can also produce a traditional referrer list, but has some significant additional sophistication (read this for more).

SugarBank is now BLT enabled, and if you sign up (at the base of the right hand menu you’ll see the form) we can find out how to make BLT better while you get a couple of clicks from SugarBank for taking part in the test. The hope is that a couple of other developers will help will tweak BLT into the kind of full-fat snack that’ll fatten up every blog that snarfs it down.

I’m not sure how many people can sign in to the version I’m running so be quick and remember you need to have a link here in order to show up.

(Henry Rollins is a really angry guy.)

It’s exciting to be involved in the genesis of something so useful (I was also involved in Genesis around ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ - long story). If you want to test BLT too - and when two sites both trade intelligently it gets really interesting - you can download the plugin here.

Don’t forget to worship Will. The man deserves his own cult. Where else can you download code and look at boobs simultaneously? (The last time I got this excited I was telling Sam Jackson about a script I’d just finished called ‘Snakes on a Plane‘)

(Controversy is one of Prince’s best albums. No doubt.)

Could Donkey Punches KO Porn’s First Amendment Protection?

Ultra-violent porn is changing the debate about limits on acceptability.

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Why are people making movies like Donkey Punch (pictured)?

Fact 1 - All pornographic movies are made with profit in mind. The all-time top sellers from Adult DVD Empire (one of the largest online adult movie stores) are:

  1. Flashpoint
  2. Award Winning Sex Scenes
  3. Island Fever
  4. All Star
  5. Dream Quest
  6. Island Fever 3
  7. Virtual Sex with Jenna
  8. All Time Best Teen
  9. Brianna Loves Jenna
  10. Virtual Sex with Tera Patrick

The list is comprised of movies which are notably free of degredation or violence - consensual or otherwise. If we were to throw in other known top-sellers (Comstock movies, 1 Night in Paris, Pam and Tommy, Deep Throat) the observation regarding tone stands.

Fact 2 - (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Donkey punch is a slang term for a sex move performed during doggy style or anal sex. The move involves the penetrating partner punching the penetrated partner in the back of the head or neck. The term may refer to the surprised party “bucking” like a donkey.

The practice of hitting one’s partner for sexual enjoyment is familiar (see Sadism and Masochism), but in the various joke-descriptions of the donkey punch more exotic rationales are often given for it. For example, sometimes it is said to cause the muscles around the vagina or anus to contract around the penis, giving enhanced pleasure to the active partner. In some exaggerated tellings this phenomenon is of such great force as to result in the inversion of the rectum (which may then be described as a “pink sock”). Sometimes the active partner is said to punctuate the technique with a victorious cry of “Donkey punch!”

In reality, punching someone in the back of the head (rabbit punching) can damage the brain stem, causing death or permanent injury. It is illegal in professional boxing for this reason. The donkey punch may also be prosecutable as assault or sexual assault, in some jurisdictions even if consent is given.

Fact 1 tells us that every dollar spent by the producers of violent pornography could be invested more profitably by adopting a softer tone. Fact 2 tells us that some scenes are either genuinely dangerous to the performers involved or suggest that potentially deadly activities (donkey punches, ‘erotic’ axphixiation etc.) are safe.

Thirty years ago ‘The Devil in Miss Jones’ contained scenes of oral, anal and vaginal sex. With only a handful of stunts most people don’t want to try at home added to that in the past decade, every sane sex act is already on film. Have some producers turned to violence as the only area in which they can break new ground?

Here’s a quote from Max Hardcore’s website:

“Hairless Hillary just wants a friend, but I fuck her face so hard she pukes out her nose! Then I jack my rod in her ass & blast her throat with goo!”

The accompanying clip shows Hilary crying, gaging, puking and drinking urine from her rectum via a clear tube while being called a dirty whore. Are we watching a scene from a violent sex movie, or a scene from a movie about violence with some sex in it?

If there’s reason to draw a line between violent movies and sex movies, should we be drawing it now? If not is there anything that we shouldn’t allow others to package as entertainment? When violence, fear, implied lack of consent and sex are rolled together how do we counter accusations of fetishizing rape? How comfortable are you with the crying edge of pornography? How comfortable do you think you’ll need to be?

Between 1992 and 2004 the only procecutions for obscenity within the US were brought in conjunction with child pornography, and the porn industry (particularly online) has become overconfident. With the government having publically declared that obscenity is a priority, should the adult industry distance itself from the excesses of ‘porn’ to ensure its survival and the well-being of performers?

Should Pornographers Challenge the Miller Test?

Are 'community standards' still relevant.

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Obscenity is illegal in America and pornography can only be sold in the US if it can’t be defined as obscene. Obscene material has no first amendment protection.

The legal definition of obscenity dates to Miller vs California (1973). The three pronged definition of obscenity that court gave rise to is known as the ‘Miller Test’.

Miller asks:

(a) Whether ‘the average person,’ applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.
(b) Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law.
(c) Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The porn industry has embraced Miller. It was the first ruling which allowed some pornography to be defined as legal in the US, and for thirty years has been used to successfully defend pornography from being classed as obscene. However, each prong of Miller has serious flaws which are making it increasingly likely that it’ll be successfully used to bring obscenity charges against sexual material and put the legal production of porn in the US in jeopardy.

  1. The use of ‘community standards’ means material can be legal in some places and illegal in others. Transporting obscene material carries a 10-year jail term and a $250,000 fine and, thanks to clause (a), the only way to test material for obscenity is in court. This allows any prosecutor to go after any pornographer at any time, with the consequence that most porn companies choose not to ship to states who might litigate. The ‘community standards’ clause has imposed self-censorship on pornographers and made all explicit material potentially obscene in any community. If you win in court in Tennessee you can still be obscene in Arkansas. For pornographers they only know their material is not obscene where they’ve been to court and won.
  2. Asking a jury to decide if material’s ‘patently offensive’ is to require them call on their own standards. Many people find many things ‘offensive’, and each jury will have a different take on what’s ‘patently offensive’ (not a problem with crimes like car-jacking, burglary and tax evasion which are all pretty clear-cut and juries tend to agree on). Offensiveness is a moving target which limits pornographers ability to confidently produce legal sexually explicit material because they can’t guess what a jury might be offended by.
  3. Most porn fails to clear Miller’s first two hurdles when tested, and relies on (c) to keep producers out of jail. Exploiting the ’serious… value when taken as a whole’ phrasing is why Hustler is a good place to keep up with the writing of Greg Palast, and why the big porn movies continue to shoehorn plot, dialogue and music into their movies between the sex scenes. Clause (c) is also why the rise of ultra-violent porn is making conservatives confident they can win an obscenity case. Producers of plotless, music, dialogue and perspective-free porn will have a great deal of difficulty proving ’serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value’ and the violence that accompanies the sex is easy to class as obscene.

For thirty years Miller has served the porn industry well, but thinking Miller will never succeed in proving any pornography obscene is wishful thinking. A 3 minute downloadable clip on a webpage is easy to ‘take as a whole’ and is increasingly likely to show an apparently distressed women being deliberately hurt by a sexually violent man. The government are confident the public won’t view downloadable clips the same way they did movies like Deep Throat in the seventies. They also know that if one judgment goes against porn it’ll put the industry in the same position as the once unassailable tobacco industry - paying fines and under constant, successful assault (the difference being that pornographers will do serious jailtime.)

As some pornography becomes deliberately violent, should people who believe in the right of adults to consume explicit sexual material be forced to defend all material which includes explicit sex in any context? If not - should the porn industry seek to replace Miller with a better, more specific, law which allows the successful prosecution of obscenely violent material and leaves pornographers safe to shoot sex legally?

Looking to other countries for guidance proves interesting. Europe hasn’t decided on how to integrate its sex law - depending on where you travel the age of consent moves between 11 and 18, prostitution is legal - or not, and porn is either freely available or only sold under license. Then there’s Canada.

In 1962 Regina vs. Dominion News & Gifts (Regina’s the state/crown - not a lady who hates porn) established that standards of obscenity in Canada must be national - you can’t be obscene in Toronto and legal in Montreal. Thirty years later, Canada’s equivalent of Miller arrived in Regina vs. Butler (1992).

Butler saw Canadian courts split porn into three categories:

  1. Explicit sex with violence
  2. Explicit sex without violence but which subjects people to treatment that is degrading or dehumanizing
  3. Explicit sex without violence that is neither degrading nor dehumanizing

Material falling into category 1 is almost always found to be obscene, category 2 is considered obscene if the court finds ’substantial risk or harm to society by viewing the material in question’ (a test also applied to material in category 1), and category 3 is almost never obscene (with the exception of material which features children). In Canada an emphasis on freedom of speech means that in cases of doubt, material is found non-obscene.

Butler doesn’t ask jurors to make judgments based on their own opinions. It doesn’t ask if the material offends the jury, or their ‘community standards’, and doesn’t ask pornographers to pretend their producing serious work, its sole focus is the harm that arises from the production or viewing of the material. While leaving ample room for debate Butler recognizes that sex and violence aren’t natural bedfellows and should be considered separately.

With a body in place to ensure porn performers safety (as there are in Hollywood for stunt performers, animals and children) a US law similar to Butler would allow anything to be portrayed in porn (including violent scenes as long as the violence was simulated) and allow pornographers the freedom to produce sexually explicit material, saleable in any state, without fear of arbitrary legal persecution. It would write into law that there’s nothing obscene about consensual sexual activity, and draw a line between porn and exccessively violent material of the kind that already exists between porn and child-porn.

Is something more like Butler the kind of obscenity test pornographers in the US should be lobbying for before Miller inevitably fails us? Would American pornographers embrace the chance to protect performers from material that can only be produced by hurting them? Is Canada wrong and can sex itself (lacking violence) be obscene?

(thanks to my readers for inspiring this post and Paul Kent-Snowsell of AVN Online for providing the facts to flesh it out with. Paul - Yo fo’evah ma nigga.)

Sugasm #24

The best of the sex-blogs by the bloggers who blog them.

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The best of the blogs by the bloggers who blog them, this week starting with the letter H:

A Question About Consent?

Does consent remove all responsibility for content producers.

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The comments following recent posts I’ve made about violence and porn have revealed that a number of people fear any attempt to legally separate the treatment of sex and violence, with regards to obscenity, is an attack on their right to consent to violent sex as sadomasochists.

The fear is that if we question the ability of sadomasochists to consent, the legality of sadomasochism comes under question (as it has in the UK) and sadomasochistic porn becomes an illegal record of criminal activity.

Sadomasochists rely on being able to consent to things that would otherwise be considered assault. American porn traditionally deals with this by separating scenes of bondage and sex, the thinking being that a court might argue there was no easy way for a bound performer to withdraw consent (recently this has been changing, Nina Hartley has shot bondage and sex together last year. The Feds appear to have decided to let it slide for now, perhaps they’re fans.)

Which leads to a question:

Should anything that’s consented to be legal?

The standard pornographers response is yes - but if we accept that some people, e.g. the clinically depressed or sufferers of other mental illness, make decisions with consequences they don’t understand, isn’t the key to consent how well informed it is? If so, in cases where uninformed consent is knowingly exploited, should society treat the consenting party as ‘under duress’ and only in that light decide if any criminal activity has occurred?

(NB: I get to play devil’s advocate here sometimes - anyone who misses that and decides to compare me to MacKinnion, Dworkin, Hitler or Willy Wonka for daring to challenge lib-alt-porn convention will find ‘I am a facist douchebag’ edited into all their comments.)

Filed Under

Is it Time For Sex Blog Awards?

Be honest. You look great in formal wear.

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Last night, once again, Hollywood failed to make a star-packed awards ceremony interesting.

With unlimited resources and access to every major star, the Oscars was less entertaining than the AVN Awards. Where was the Oscar for ‘Best Fem-Dom Strap-On’? How did the academy fail to bestow a ‘Best Anal’ statue to ‘Brokeback Mountain’? Why didn’t Ang Lee mention his inspiration, AVN’s ‘Best Anal’ award winner ‘Cumshitters’ (original title ‘Cumshitters Mountain’. Could it be that Cumshitters had no Asian’s shitting cum in it and that Ang Lee’s secretly a ’round-eye’ hating racist?) If last night is the best Hollywood can manage, is it time for a sex-blogs award show? Could we do it any worse?

It’s not totally crazy.

Okay I’m fucking with you, it’s a stupid idea.

Then again, the major blog awards are effectively shut to sex-sites and it’s not as if sex is a tiny online backwater - there should be plenty of interest. Why are the major blog awards sex-phobic anyway? Are thet scared we’ll show up, drink their beer, loot their villages, marry their daughters and steal their oxen? (Sorry about that, sometimes I wear a horned helmet while I blog and it can effect my writing).

How should sex-blog awards work? The Oscars have a voting panel of almost dead old white men who seem to have been retired your entire life but could still have you killed industry experts, and they vote on the nominees. Then again, for me the Oscars means waking up in the morning to read about what happened at Defamer. The awards are so comprehensively rigged by skilled PR that the media coverage is more interesting than the show. This morning over my cornflakes (Crunchy Nut. Who’s asking?) I learned that, despite the evidence of the Daily Show, John Stewart is a cunt who should be shot (I’m paraphrasing), flipped sites to check out Nathalie Portman rapping old Eazy E lines on SNL (that’s a woman worth getting circumcised for. Hollywood’s chief negotiator in the Middle-East piece-of-ass process. A professional I’d let assemble my rifle etc.) and then enjoyed all the bile piled on Crash (which is a good movie and only cost $6.5M, Brokeback’s fluffer budget.)

The alternative to the Oscar model is the public voting online, but how do you get real results without it just being a ’she who sends the most people to vote here wins’ deal like the Bloggies?

Should there be an event? Would your travel somewhere to party and watch mostly-other-people get gongs? Do awards need a charity hook for people too guilty to get fucked-up on an open bar and canapés without pictures of starving kids on easels too take the edge off?

I ask these things because I’m being asked for an opinion on sex-blog awards by people who want to do them and I don’t have one. I don’t even have any pants on to be honest. It’s pretty sad to see.

How Influential is Porn?

How responsible should pornographers be?

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Questions regarding violence in porn normally focus on any consequences suffered by performers during production. What, if anything, is the effect on consumers who choose to watch violent and/or degrading pornography?

The radical libertarian view is that people aren’t affected by the media they consume. Advocates point toward the preponderance of violent material in Japan, and the majority of studies (all I know of) fail to make a robust connection between porn and crime. The imagined confluence of porn and rape, long supported by the far right and radical feminists, hinges on an assumed lust = passion = aggression = violence connection that’s never been proved.

The counter argument runs that media influence on behavior is almost total. Gay teachers create gay pupils and GTA: San Andreas encourages cop-killing and car-jacking. Advocates point at rapists who collect porn and analyze killer’s record collections for violent lyrics. For all its appeal, on both the far left and extreme right, the argument falls flat when the media consumption of the majority is compared to the media consumption of the criminal minority - on aggregate no differences are seen.

That would be the end of the debate, and is for many pornographers, were it not for the voice of money. The advertising industry continually demonstrates an ability to affect attitudes and behavior. American politicians view TV ads as the key to motivating voters and given enough time, a society itself can be changed by well targeted propaganda (counter to a tradition of arranged marriages, Japan has adopted the diamond as an essential token of romantic love in response to a 40 year - and counting - ad campaign by DeBeers)

If the global advertising industry isn’t a total sham and media does affect thinking, do pornographers have a responsibility to consider the societal impact of the material they produce? If Hollywood can sell us simulated images of crime, safe in the knowledge we’re not going to behave as its characters do, should pornographers have the same liberty as mainstream filmmakers to simulate whatever they want to, however taboo it may be (rape, murder, pedophilia etc.)? If not, why not?

SugarClick Launched

The beta is over.

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Today marks the official launch of SugarClick and the world that will never seem the same again (PR school says always go for a big opening).

If you haven’t seen the ‘Click’ yet you’re missing out. Fleshbot loves it, Wired loves it - you will love it. I command you.

SugarClick reviews sex websites and blogs but refuses to be boring about it. The ‘flannel panel’ (Pat Pending - he’s the guy who designed it) beside each review contains a point score that reflects each site on a technical level, provides an instant ‘pro’ and ‘con’ from the reviewers viewpoint, and gives a bulleted list of the kinds of people who’ll find the site makes their genitals tumescent.

It’s pretty nifty.

Now SugarClick has a submission form for site owners and bloggers who want to get reviewed. We’re all about the paysites so be sure to drop those in there too (and include a password unless you’re just using the form for typing practice). It’s great marketing, SugarClick has 60 subscribers and over a thousand visitors a day pre-lanch. It’s going to be huge.

You also get to use a nifty ‘SugarClick Rated’ logo if we include you (see above). Don’t you just want to tattoo it on your face!

For the official take on this momentous day check out the press release. It’s one of the best ever written apparently. I’ve been getting email on it all morning. People love this damn release.

Download the SugarClick Launch Press Release (.pdf)

Sam Sugar Launches SugarClick, the Adult Website Reviews Blog

Los Angeles, CA, March 8 2006 - Today Sam Sugar announced the official launch of SugarClick, a blog devoted to reviewing and rating sex blogs and websites. Every day SugarClick publishes fun to read reviews of adult sites in a market facing a dearth of quality and polluted with choice.

“There are a lot of great adult sites but most of what’s out there is dreck,” said Sugar. “SugarClick is a hotline to the good stuff. The blog format allows readers to leave comments on our reviews, debate our conclusions or make supplementary recommendations as they wish. Instant feedback from site users makes SugarClick’s reviewers directly accountable to readers. In a market where everyone claims to be ‘fair and balanced’ if you disagree with SugarClick you can just visit the site and let us know. There’s never been a review site like SugarClick - Viva la Reviewolution!”

SugarClick is part of the soon to be launched SexNotWork sex-blog network, and directly linked to the growing number of SugarBlogs.

“SugarClick is a tool for site owners and a resource for people who like porn. Submitting a site to SugarClick using our online form puts in front of an audience of readers actively looking for a sexy website to visit, and provides surfers with a qualified, truly independent opinion of what’s on offer. Every site reviewed earns the right to display a ‘SugarClick Rated’ button and our archive of reviews is growing by the day, from a marketing perspective it’s a no-brainer,” said Sugar before adding, “unless your site is awful, in which case consider yourself warned.”

SugarClick is accepting submissions from sexy websites and blogs at http://sugarclick.com.

About Sam Sugar: Sam Sugar has worked in publishing, advertising, film, television and the adult industry. He’s a co-founder of SexNotWork, runs a network of blogs including Podnography (http://podnography.com), PSP Porn (http://pspporn.com), SugarPit (http://sugarpit.com), SugarJoy (http://sugarjoy.com) Sugasm (http://sugasm.com) and blogs at SugarBank (http://sugarbank.com).

Contact Sam Sugar via sam.sugar@gmail.com

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