Preaching To The Perverted

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Preaching To The Perverted

What happens when Gen Y gets horny? This ultra-connected, media-savvy marketing demographic does porn a little differently than you might expect. ROBBIE SWAN from the Eros Association takes a peek.

A new survey by a large U.S. internet analysis company called Hitwise has found Generation Y (18-24) visits to adult or sexually explicit web sites have fallen by about a third over the last couple of years. In the same period, Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research for Hitwise and also a Time magazine writer, argued that there was a correlation between this finding and the rise in popularity of social networking sites within the same demographic. In the 25 and over age group (Generation X and baby boomers) visits to search engines like Google and Alta Vista were the most popular but were closely followed by adult entertainment sites.

I have long suspected that the internet would change adult viewing habits in a way that no one suspected. Watching porn on line is a very different experience from watching it as a film on a screen. For a start there is an unlimited amount of variety. Within 20 minutes you can watch a small amount of interracial, amputee, MILF, milkin ‘n poppin, shaved, hairy, amateur and pro sex and then sit back with a cup of tea as if you’d just browsed the latest ALDI catalogue. Although many people in the industry don’t like to admit it, there is a burnout factor in this type of viewing. However desensitisation doesn’t lead to people wanting to take in more and more extreme forms of sex or to rape and kill as religious campaigners would have us believe. No. It actually sends people to dating and social networking sites where they can talk about their sexual feelings and find out more about them.

Tancer’s article rings true in just about every way except his assertion that Gen Yers are “too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin”. Rule number one in the marketing bible is, ‘Sex Sells’. Rule number two is that ‘Sex sells to everyone' – regardless of race, colour, creed or generation. There are plenty of old age pensioners out there consuming sexual media and products and there are just as many generation Yers as well. It’s just that they seek it out in different ways and in areas that baby boomers don’t understand.

Many of the sites which cater to this audience have twigged to the changing attitudes, particularly with Gen Y. While they appear to be non explicit up front, behind the ‘dating’, ‘friendship’ and ‘relationship’ buttons lies plenty of explicit content. Sites like the Adelaide-based Red Hot Pie are good examples of this genre. They know that by providing sexually explicit material underneath the non-explicit, they stop people from heading back to the porn sites when they’ve had enough ‘heartbalm’. The operators of these sites would reject the label ‘pornographic’ when applied to their sites because people who post explicit films or photos alongside relationship profiles are not said to be doing it with the aim of titillating prospective partners or friends. It's just ‘relationship information’. To a degree this is true but for generation Yers these are the new porn sites. The operators of them are one step ahead of the rest of the industry and the industry regulators who haven’t quite understood them.

So are there any savvy Generation Y porn sites that start out as offering the kind of explicit sex that baby boomers and Gen Xers are used to, but end up giving subscribers lots of connected Gen Y values as well? Perhaps surprisingly, Australia leads the way in this genre. A series of Melbourne-based sites including Abbywinters.com, ishotmyself.com and beautifulagony.com are all largely run by generation Yers and involve subscribers in a way that is unique.

Most of their photographers are female and many in their administration teams are former models. Subject matter includes nude yoga shoots and moody sunset masturbation scenes. Discussion boards show models like Violet promoting her love of Chamber music and directing punters who have logged on to see her naked body to listen to artists like Felicity Lott singing Henri Duparc’s L’Invitation au Voyage. A model called Marigold writes serious poetry and encourages subscribers to critique her work. This is not your normal porn site activity where models and actors tend to keep themselves as far away from the punters as possible. They take their clothes off, do their thing and then get out of there. Many of the young Gen Yers on Abby Winters are out there engaging with their admirers and linking them into their own broader networks.

At the recently concluded Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, the Abby Winters team walked away with the Best Amateur Series award, which was remarkable for their first foray into a U.S. show. Nude yoga and lingerie chess were immediate hits with the punters even if they didn’t quite understand what it all meant. They signed a deal with the big gun, Wicked Pictures, and were the unlikely hit of the show. With many aspects of society rapidly changing now to meet new paradigms and new ways of living, porn is not exempt from these powerful social pressures.

beautiful-agony

Another unlikely Australian success story is beautifulagony.com. Launched in 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, by a couple of savvy Gen Yers, the site shows face-only clips of men and women masturbating to orgasm. Site coordinator, Richard Lawrence, says “Although Agony is a commercial site, it isn't motivated by profit. It's a passion not a profession. So long as there are sufficient subscriptions to pay for bandwidth and compensate each contributor for revealing such a precious facet to the world, Beautiful Agony will continue to be a demonstration of the extent to which one of the largest and wealthiest industries in the world has totally got it wrong.” Strong words from a couple of amateurs who just stumbled into the business but their huge success is testimony to their ability to judge changing sexual tastes.

If there is one aspect of the Generation Y ethos that makes these sites stand out from their older rivals, it’s the fact that Abbywinters.com donates $1000 a week to charity. And not just any old charity or one particular charity. They range from animal welfare to Christian charities and from health-based charities to unions.

Robbie Swan is the Eros association’s publisher. In the mid 1980s he founded a political humour and satire magazine called Matilda and before that was the editor of Australia’s premier alternative lifestyle magazine, Simply Living. Click here for more.

Images courtesy Abbeywinters.com and beautifulagony.com.

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The Honorable Cynthia McKinney served six terms in the US Congress and she was the Green Party candidate for the office that you eventually won. It is an outrage that the Israeli Navy would block the boat that she and 21 others were on in international waters and board the boat and kidnap the crew and humanitarian aid workers.

President Obama, when an American captain was kidnapped by Somali "pirates" US Navy SEALS were sent in to rescue him. He was the captain of a private, for profit, ship and the US military was used to rescue him.

What Israel did, outside of its waters, to an unarmed boat filled with aid for Gazans who have been trapped in a concentration camp by Israel, is an act of international piracy and you must demand that Israel release Ms. McKinney and her fellow captors with all haste.

I just received word that the illegally detained captives have been moved to another prison and may be charged with trying to enter Israel illegally, when they were trying to get aid to Gaza and were not even in Israeli waters.

I can't even express my immense outrage at this overt breach of international law that has been perpetrated by Israel.

Use your influence as the greatest dispenser of military aid to Israel to force that rogue state to release Ms. McKinney et. al., then we can talk about their immoral occupation of Palestine and the inhumane blockade of Gaza.

With urgency,

Cindy Sheehan

US a failed state on climate change - from George Monbiot

It would be laughable anywhere else. But, so everyone says, the Waxman-Markey bill is the best we can expect – from America.

The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations. Like the UK's climate change act (pdf) the US bill calls for an 80% cut by 2050, but in this case the baseline is 2005, not 1990. Between 1990 and 2005, US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose from 5.8 to 7bn tonnes.

The cut proposed by 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill's measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it's printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.

There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There's a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.

Like the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), Waxman-Markey would oblige companies to buy only a small proportion (15%) of their carbon permits. The rest will be given away. This means that a resource belonging to everyone (the right to pollute) is captured by industrial interests without public compensation. The more pollution companies have produced, the greater their free allocation will be – the polluter gets paid. It also means, if the ETS is anything to go by, that the big polluters will be able to make windfall profits by passing on the price of the permits they haven't bought to their consumers.

In one respect the bill actually waters down current legislation, by preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating coal-burning power stations. If the new coal plants planned in the US are built, it's hard to see how even the feeble targets in this bill can be met, let alone any targets proposed by the science.

Even so, I would like to see the bill passed, as it at least provides a framework for future improvements. But why do we expect so little from the US? Why do we treat the world's most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?

You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out. Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. The ranking Republican on the House energy and commerce committee is Joe Barton, the man who in 2005 launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. Like those of many of his peers, his political career is kept on life support by the fossil fuel and electricity companies. He returns the favour by vociferously denying that manmade climate change exists.

A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama's real challenge.

[via monbiot.com]

We are the Pancake People - From Nicholas Carr

We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.

Even aside from Internet business strategies, this tendency toward distraction is built into the Net through the use of hyperlinks and search engines, and I believe it’s beginning to influence not simply how we gather information but also how we think.

I’m trying to put some limits on my Internet and e-mail use, but that’s not always possible. There are broad social and economic changes underway that reward Internet use. If you cherish the ability to concentrate deeply and be reflective, you need to set aside time to read and think every day, so that those circuits in your brain don’t get erased.

Neda...Nada From The Outsider

Juxtapose the profoundly touching YouTube images of Neda dying in her father's arms with today's ‘front page' stories from Australia's media - the continuing parliamentary hoo-hah about Utegate; the State of Origin footy fight between two players; criminals in Australian ports. And what do you get? Nada ...nothing. In conversation with our very own Alchemist, here at HPD, we lament the pathetic inability of our newspapers to focus on matters of substance, their preoccupation with trivializing our daily existence, and their erroneous belief that sales of newspapers will rise as a result.

Neda our hearts go out to you. In the hope that your experience and your blood will help turn ‘nothing' into something new.

Reach Out- By Sean Maguire

Reach Out, the respected organisation that helps to tackle youth depression, has launched a new mass ad campaign. The campaign focuses on The Nudge, ‘the oaf like blue thing you may have seen getting around', which is meant to ‘nudge' you back on track when you lose your way. A nice sentiment, but very strangely expressed, for one, nudging is rarely a positive thing- when someone asks a depressed person if they need a nudge, it usually means off a cliff. Secondly, who, apart from a five year old, would want to open themselves up to an organisation that's most public figure is a self-described oaf?

Gordon Brown's Doomed Inquiry - By BINOY KAMPMARK

Any inquiry into politically calamitous causes is bound to be better received if done transparently. The circumstances behind the Iraq War, from lead-up, commencement and execution, has been anything but transparent. Behind a very thin veil, crimes in international law have been committed with flagrant disregard. Evidence has been discounted. The campaigns have been costly and, at stages, incompetently waged.

It is then little surprise that the recent announcement by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to hold an inquiry into the origins and execution of the conflict should take place in the same circumstances it began: behind closed doors. The microscope of inquiry will be well and truly hidden, insulated in heavy, establishment wool. The Tory leader, David Cameron, has termed it "an establishment stitch-up." Given the cautious chairman who will preside over the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, a powerless mandarin in the eyes of many, he might be right.

The entire field is already muddied by previous inquiries that did little to restore the faith of a skeptical British public in their war-hungry leadership. The 2003 Hutton Inquiry confined its investigations to the narrow circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, a government advisor who had been critical of the British governmentâ's deeply flawed dossier on Iraqis spectral weapons of mass destruction. On its heels came the Butler Inquiry, which examined the intelligence that supposedly catalyzed the British decision to throw in its lot with the United States.

The inquiry is supposedly to be modeled on the Franks Inquiry undertaken into the Falklands conflict in 1982, eschewing the temptation to apportion blame and seek, instead, the strengthening of "the health of our democracy, our diplomacy and our military." It is intended to be independent, comprising two historians, a member of the House of Lords unaligned to any party and a diplomat. It will consider the period from the buildup to the conflict in the summer of 2001 to July this year.

We can speculate what the inquiry will be most concerned with. There are the strategic blunders - why did Britain reduce the numbers of personnel at Basra even as the Shi'ite insurgency was raging? What role did the behemoth of American unilateralism play in driving the decision?

The difficulty with this inquiry is that it already has an appearance of being toothless even before it begins in earnest. The procedure of this paper tiger will take place in camera. It has no powers of any consequence, lacking such important means as that of subpoena, relying on the goodwill of those it asks to attend. (Tony Blair will, in all probability attend to spite his long time rival, though he need not.) Evidence need not be given on oath. When ultimately published, sensitive material will be abridged for the public readership.

The final matter that further weakens the credibility of this gesture is one of timing. In politics, timing is all, and Brown has decided to sink his project before it event gets off the ground by releasing the report after the General Election. It will take twelve months to complete. "No inquiry," argues Brown, "has ever been conducted over such a long period or in such breadth." Nor, it can be said, has an inquiry promised to be so ineffectual before it even starts, so devoid of worth before a single deliberation is undertaken. With British politicians heavily derided and maligned, Brown will have done wonders to affirm the views of cynics and critics.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Imran Khan warns of Pakistan’s ‘suicide’

Pakistan's military offensive against the Taliban will backfire and fuel more extremism and bomb attacks, the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan warned last week.
“I have never been so depressed in my life,” he said. “Pakistan is on a suicidal course.”

Khan was speaking in London, where he was visiting his two sons by his ex-wife Jemima before heading to America to raise funds for refugees displaced by the fighting.
The 56-year-old leader of Pakistan’s Movement for Justice party has been branded pro-Taliban for speaking out against the military operation, which has driven 2.5m people from their homes.

“I’m not pro-Taliban,” he said. “But my point is: shouldn’t we have looked at other options? How do you justify using heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-jets in civilian areas? Who in the world does this? Meanwhile all the top Taliban leadership have escaped. It’s so inhuman, what they have done; it will backfire.”

Khan pointed out that the launch of the operation coincided with President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit to Washington in late April, after which the US agreed a five-year deal worth $1.5 billion (£910m) a year. “Was this operation to save the people of Swat or to get dollars from the Americans?” he asked.

“Only 10 days earlier, Parliament had passed a resolution endorsing a peace deal in Swat with the Taliban. Why was there no discussion? A military operation should have been the last resort.”
Khan insisted that Pakistan would never contain extremism as long as American troops remained across the border in Afghanistan. “Hatred of America is much more than of the Taliban,” he said.

The first European Union-Pakistan summit will be held in Brussels this week at which Zardari will call for more aid for the refugee crisis.
“How do we look after these refugees?” Khan asked. “Already you see the anger. This is a very sorry chapter in Pakistan's history.”

From Christina Lamb

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21 feb

The HomepageDAILY community likes to co-create both content and process. What are you thinking right now about what we do and how we do it? Tell us about the news, videos and stories and anything else you see on HPD. What you like, what you don't like, what you'd like to see in future. Recommend a website, video or article; send us pix, new stories - share it with us and by so doing you are giving us permission to share it with the world.

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Re: My Unrealistic Wish for the Chaser

Right on, the chasers approach is exactly what is needed to make the comfortable uncomfortable and give greater accesibility for criticism and analysis of the ridiculous shit we have to continuously put up with from our political system and those running it. I only hope they manage to keep it up without compromising themselves. - Simon

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Re: Sol Trujilo

Sean Maguire is right to say that Australia has racist tendencies. Our first people have been copping it badly since the next lot arrived. When my refugee father's lot arrived in '59 he suffered racist abuse. My mother had to put up with neighbours refusing to speak to her because she'd crossed the line and married "one of them" and, growing up in the 60s and 70s. I copped it too, including a public school infants school teacher ostracising me for my wog breath. Newcomers still cop racism every day.

But while horrid things happen here all too often, I don't know that Australia is particularly racist. We don't have hostels being razed to the ground (yet). We don't have religious riots either. It isn't as bad as many many other places but that's not really the point of my letter. My main point is that I just don't believe that Sol Trujillo's accusation is made in good faith. It seems like a pretty easy way to try and distract the world from the real reason that Sol is leaving and leaving early. He failed at Telstra and he failed spectacularly. What he really is pissed about is that we're "over-regulated" because he's still caught up with the whole neo-con approach: the approach that led to our current financial meltdown. If we were even less regulated he and his henchmen could have taken us for even more of a ride. - Mouldfield

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Re: The AfPak Blues

Isn't it strange that the bad terrorist guys we need to attack all seem to have things in common: >OIL >GAS >OIL & GAS >PIPELINE ACCESS TO OIL/GAS Just one of those weird coincidences I guess. Maybe the next attack will be on a little country with huge reserves of Brussel Sprouts -just to prove me wrong. - Warren

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Re: How To Become Weapons of Mass Destruction

Well written, I really dig this article. - Peter Silver

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Re: HomepageDaily

I usually get the real news from overseas sites. How good it is to find your site after wading through the sanitized oz media for so long. Onya HomepageDaily! [this is definately not a commercial announcement]. - Woz

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Re: Ron Paul on Swine Flu

It takes courage to speak out when those around you are cowed by ignorance and fear. HPD's running the Ron Paul article shows they are one of those we can count on in Australia to hold the line and provide decent edutorial standards.When I came through Brisbane aurport on the morning of May 1st 2009 the passengers were ordered to walk in single file keeping a one metre distance from the person in front. The flight crew who I thought would be used to this sort of thing joked "they will be making us goose step in time next". This was suposedly so we could be screened electronically for "fever". This flu virus beat up like the 1976 version ramps up budgets for more police state nonsense and loss of civil liberty. HPD carries some of the only copy that speaks to the decline of criticism of the status quo. While Murdoch's papers are lobbying for the criminal class of the financial banksters HPD gives life to a wider debate. When my North American friends say "Who can you recommend for some genuine Australian insight?" HPD is tragically one of the few links I have to offer and does so with my heartfelt thanks. - Anthony Innes

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