Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Newsflash: Porn Has Been Mobile Since Day One

filed under: Design for Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

A minor sex ruckus is going down in Canada, between Telus, the first North American mobile service provider to make pay-per-download porn available over their network, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver, who is calling for a boycott.

On the one hand, there’s the Globe and Mail, trotting out as many stereotypes as they can fit into (the first paragraph non-subscribers are allowed to read of) their editorial:

Telus is crossing an already blurred moral line and besmirching its good name in pursuit of a piece of a multibillion-dollar business that is sadly infiltrating every aspect of popular culture. Pornography, once confined to a distinct subculture and available on a limited basis through adult bookstores and theatres frequented by men in trench coats, now reaches a mass market through cable and satellite television, the Internet and DVDs. So what does it say about our world when 24-hour access to porn through so many distribution channels isn’t enough — that people need to get it delivered to their cellphones for a fee as well?

… and then there’s the rare pro-porn editorial, The ethics of porn on the go, that also manages to do a nice little bit of web & mobile sex history spin:

You may not have noticed, but visual pornography has been available in convenient print form for generations. Cellular phones have featured built-in Web browsers for nearly a decade and devices from the wireless laptop to the portable media player are already more than capable of receiving video smut through the ether….

All Internet service providers make money from pornography; search engines, which earn cash from every set of eyes that falls upon them, make money from pornography; the economics of scale that allow commercially-made Web browsers to be distributed for free are possible, in part, because of pornography.

No matter how freaked the Church or porn conference throwers are over this, I’ve been skeptical of the big numbers re: the explosion of mobile adult content, especially as, some of the anti-mobile porn alerts have been exposed as corporate news release pissing matches engineered by mobile device rivals.

Honestly, I’m still holding out for d.i.y. smut I can get on the go. Lucky for me, I’m blessed with some pretty (and) perverted friends in my phone book. Maybe instead of waiting for the corporate pornglomerantes to catch up, we need some some sort of peer-to-peer indie solution?

(Yes, that’s officially me fishing with a start-up concept.)

(phone porn photo: toolmantim, via flickr)

Friday, February 2, 2007

The Only Way We Can (Tell You That) We Know VC’s Use Vibrators

filed under: Design for Sex, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

We just wish that the sort of VC’s who invest in sex toy startups (even super-sexy bar-raising ones like jimmyjane) weren’t also the type to fund questionable pay-per-post shilling-cum-blogging companies. Because as much as our toy shelves are buckling under the weight of the latest-greatest, fair blogging ethics are what really get us off at the end of day.

(via Susannah)