6.04.2011

Market for Sex Dolls?

Just when you think men couldn't get any more foolish, they're now spending a minimum of 8 grand on human-sized female sex dolls.



What kind of message does this convey about men in our society? It says that men can't control their sexual desire and therefore a company can make a doll that will satisfy the uncontrollable sexualities of men.



As a radical feminist, I say: Men, would you please stop and think with the right head?

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Let's talk about sex ... with robots

People often talk to machines, including computers and robots, and a growing number of AI (artificial intelligence) researchers are working to enable them to talk back. And soon, human-computer interactions may include having sex with them. That's the view of David Levy, who has just won the 2009 Loebner prize for the most human-like chatbot.

This is an area Levy got to know well through researching his 2007 book Love and Sex With Robots, which he then rewrote as a PhD thesis for Maastricht University in the Netherlands. It caused quite a stir.
But so far there hasn't been any commercial interest in adding conversation software to sex robots.
"There's a Japanese company that has a product called HoneyDoll, which has some electronic sensors. If the man strokes the nipples in the right way, the doll can make orgasmic sounds … There's also an engineer in Germany, Michael Harriman, who has developed a doll that has heating elements so most of the body is warm, apart from the feet."
I'm sure a male sex doll with a vibrating penis will sell better than sex dolls today. I'll be surprised if it's more than another three years or so before we see more advanced sex dolls with more electronics and electromechanics.

"I am firmly convinced there will be a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind."

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

6.02.2011

Hilton Hotels Want to End Sex Trafficking

I'm happy about this but a bit disappointed that it's specifically for children. What about women who are trafficked?



'No industry wants to be associated with illegal activity' says the representative from Hilton.



Indeed, nobody wants to be under that microscope but I wonder if this is just on paper or if it's something they really want to do. In other words, I hope it's not a PR stunt to make Hilton look good.



From what I understand, Hilton offers pornography in their hotels. Do they not know that porn is related to sex trafficking?



The tourist orders up a porn film, gets excited, and goes and buys a prostituted woman.


5.26.2011

Maureen Tkacik on Dominique Strauss-Kahn

This piece by Mo demonstrates just how far we've come as women in our society. When in live dialogue with Naomi Wolf this young journalist casually dismissed her own rape and said 'Should we go around and round up all these creepy guys?' to which Wolf replied, 'No, they're criminal guys.'



The hypersexual culture and the non-victim cult vibe sweeping through young women today is eliminating common sense from the dialogue.



If you're a victim, you're weak. If you can't get over your rape, you're weak. Doesn't that sound like the patriarchy we are all too familiar with?

Amplify’d from blogs.reuters.com

Whatever transpired in Suite 2806 of the Midtown Sofitel early Saturday afternoon, it seems clearer with each passing hour that being accused of sexual assault is far from a “Black Swan” event in the life of DSK. In 2007, the journalist Tristane Banon told a TV talk show host he had wrestled her to the ground and torn off her clothes during an interview a few years earlier; the talk show host in turn allowed that he knew “fourteen” separate women with similar tales. DSK’s name was eventually edited out of the broadcast for largely legal reasons, but it surfaced the next year when the IMF was forced to launch an investigation into his affair with a subordinate.

This week brought a startlingly different narrative of that liason: Nagy’s, as told in a 2008 letter to IMF lawyers in which she described her old boss as a ruthless predator who briefly got in her pants via a combination of relentlessness and brazen abuse of power. “I felt I was ‘damned if I did and damned if I didn’t’,” she wrote, describing him as “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command.”

If I were an economist, I could design a theoretical model to plot the self-perpetuating feedback loop mechanism by which the ever-expanding concentration of wealth and power within the global financial elite perpetuates and intensifies the marginalization of women by some function of corporate profit growth, global capital flows and the spot price of an average evening’s bottle service at a trendy West Village nightclub.


But I’m a woman, and no one would listen anyway.

Read more at blogs.reuters.com
 

5.23.2011

The Problem With Slutwalk

Here's a debate about Slutwalk protests, which originated in Toronto, Canada. There is an upcoming Slutwalk protest planned for London. Watch this excellent video of the two opposing sides to this protest.