One from the vaults, to keep you warm while Sexerati HQ moves. Bless you all, and thanks for a year of smart sex.

Taking for granted that you’ve got a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to be a (little) sexxxy in (sort of) public (hey, you’re reading this), here’s my quickest, dirtiest tutorial on how to be a camgirl, or camboy (how in need the world is!), camwhore, or what have you…

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That? That was the shiver of agreeing with Valleywag for this tip: 2007’s standout flirting-for-nerds site iminlikewithyou, in trying to adopt web video’s hotness, has jumped its own rainbow-striped shark. Where the limited interface and smarts required to seduce well with it once drew out the best in commitment-free wit, the rapid-fire comments users can now leave in exchange for dropping some points are needlessly lowering the bar. Unsolicited suggestion: find some way to integrate a CrazyBlindDate-esque feature, and fast.

The author of more than 145 professional publications in the area of infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Rice said he was “gathering information” at the time of his arrest and was not guilty of offering to engage in sex for a fee, the offense with which he was charged. He has been placed on leave since his arrest, according to a UMass spokesman.

Judge Paul F. LoConto entered a not-guilty plea on Dr. Rice’s behalf, released him on personal recognizance and continued his case to Dec. 17.

According to a written statement filed by police in support of their application for a criminal complaint, a female police officer was working undercover in the area of Main and Grand streets shortly before 12:20 p.m. Saturday when a man later identified as Dr. Rice pulled up next to her in a black BMW.

The officer, who was posing as a prostitute, approached Dr. Rice, who had his driver’s side window down, according to the statement.

“They engaged in conversation and he requested that she provide him with sex, according to the police account. The undercover officer signaled fellow officers in the area and Dr. Rice was stopped and arrested.

UMass administrators are now claiming that they knew nothing about this aspect of his project. You can read between the lines yourself — Dr. Rice’s abstract from a 2005 study is similar if not a continuation of his current study, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Extramural Activities.

Only $40, professor? I know sex researchers have trouble enough getting government funding. What do we do now?

Chinese state media (I know, reputable) report that condoms being recycled into hairbands are posing an HIV/AIDS transmission risk. Really? HIV/AIDS can only live outside of the human body for at most 15 days in highly-controlled laboratory settings, and fluids lose 90-95% of their viral load through exposure to air. For HPV, though it can also live on outside the human body in the form of fluids present on objects (towels, toys, and the like), it’s most commonly transmitted through skin-to-skin contact — the risk of transmission after days, let alone what chemical process they may go through as part of rubber or latex recycling, is tiny.

Not that I’ll be doing a MAKE: Used-Condoms-Into-Accessories weekend project anytime soon, but are there any reports from China directly on this one? Are there now pink bins for condom recycling?

Update:
Shanghaist advises ladies to beware, asks for a doctor in the house.
Consumerist readers are thinking hoax as well.

Graydancer’s sum-up details how conversations he struck up with other bloggers were shyly broken off, how one of his models — previously down to be tied up for a performance at a conference party — declined at the last minute over fear of having her startup’s image tarnished, and of how little formal attention sexuality & new media were given on the program. Sad, but common, for sex people doing work outside our niche, whether that’s in or out of web circles. Then at a pajama party as part of the same conference, the owner of Vibrator.com was asked to leave by event organizers for giving out promotional stickers. Was this due their sexual content, or because, as Libby Durfee, co-founder and event producer of BlogWorld said, they were unfairly competing with exhibitors who had paid significant money to be there with their own products? Yes, it’s gross, but that’s the big business of blogging — not unlike the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, also held in Vegas. Now some sex bloggers are questioning Facebook for not permitting a sex blogger to have a profile under her professional, but not legal, name, and yes, I’m asking those questions, too.

But I fear that one of two things is coming to pass, and pass fast:

• The sex bloggers, they have arrived at web celebrity
• The sex bloggers, they have arrived, and my god, some of us are acting just as douchey as the rest of the web celebrities

In other words, important contributions, in the name of improving sexual health, relationships, and pleasure, and of better understanding the sex culture we all play a part in, are being made, and deserve recognition. Unfortunately, just having something smart to say isn’t enough, and so we get some of the behaviors of the so-called New Media Douchebags, that we love to hate but still sometimes indulge in ourselves: starting faux-controversies to get traffic, or worse, to build a brand around. Who wants to be known as “that blogger who had that big problem with [x]”? Some apparently do, and are trading on that sort of flamey attention gladly.

This might be why we can’t have nice things, blogosphere, and sex bloggers are no different. We have no greater claim than anyone else to authenticity or transparency just because it’s about sex with us. We feel just as alien and ostracized — more so, some — from the mainstream and our shoulder chips are significant, and we’re no kinder to one another for it. Though we might fuck really hard, or type really fast about the hard fucking we wish we were doing, just like the rest of the New Media Mafia, we’ll still plunk down a few hundred bucks for a sweatshop labor lanyard with a few dozen logos on it… so we feel like we belong? That we matter? That sex matters?

No schwag, no matter how many planes we had to Twitter we were waiting on to get it, can do that if we lose our inspiration and our wits along the way.

But seriously, I cannot describe my identity (hint, actually, that can be a hard question) & desire with a series of pulldown menus:

And nor can I find satisfying answers even after a never-ending flood of questions. Scientific sluttery dictates that I will still try, but I will be secretly wishing for a better way.

Is the future of dating really going to be the online equivalent of a sidelong glance on the subway, whether or not it turns into lurv?

Until the day comes that you can fuck a textbox, what do we modern lovers do? (It’s the weekend. Go work it out in the comments.)

But the folks the laypeople hear from are most likely those who got porn expertise from, it would seem, their virtue of being able to have a heated, soundbite-driven debate about porn…

… or being addicted to porn…

… and sometimes (if they’re uber-businessmen about it, or can act as decently repentant women) from having worked in the porn industry itself:

So who are the real porn experts?

While it may be easy, easy to limit critique of pornography to its end product, to get dirty with the production of pornography itself? Not done so often. It’s foolish to believe pornography may be understood without examining the rules of the industry, too — porn is as much a matter of labor as it is media.

Porn is huge, and the story of porn that penetrates into the full-on economy of porn has yet to be told, and will not, cannot be told, without all of porn’s players in collaboration.

That is, you can’t critique pornography’s content for being dehumanizing, boorish, risky, or uninspiring without an analysis of the industry that creates it: both the working conditions within porn, and the social forces at play that shape what the industry produces, markets, and, we know this, sells and sells well. It’s not enough to complain that some porn performers have little awareness of sexual health (assumed based on their on-camera activities, not their medical histories), or that porn pushes a fake sexuality, or that porn hurts people, or that porn hurts you.

Then the question that remains is, if we could be sold healthy, real sex, would most of us even buy it?

Debauchette returns, with this on Gawker’s sex worker obsession of late:

The fact of the matter is that this kid, who’s coming from the land of the snarkiest, decided to slum it up by soliciting the services of a prostitute who didn’t understand English, who was beholden to an agency, who was getting paid very little and was most likely expected to work through the evening. Then Stein wrote it up to be posted among short, sharp rants on hipsters and celebrity.

Susannah Breslin’s at work on a new novel, and it seems like none of the usual porny suspects will be happy with it (called Happy), because, she explains:

In this post-feminist era, some sex pundits have promoted the idea that “porn is good,” but what some pro-porn post-feminists have failed to do is discern between porn the product and porn the industry. As long time readers of this blog know, I have spent some time around the adult movie industry. A decade ago, I entered that world with the same assumptions as the pro-porn post-feminists. Over the years, my attitude changed. Eventually, I began referring to the porn industry as a meat grinder for the human condition. In my opinion, it is a lot to ask someone to get fucked in the ass for a living.

In Myanmar, panties have become protest:

A pro-democracy group based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai is urging people all over the world to “post, deliver or fling” their undergarments to Myanmar’s international embassies.

“The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman’s panties or sarong can rob them of their power,” the Lanna Action for Burma group said on its website.

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments on whether or not hypothetical possession of child porn constitutes actual possession of child porn, and Slate is there reporting:

It takes several more minutes of these bizarre hypos before Justice Samuel Alito—the newest member of the court and thus perhaps the most in touch with reality—points out that most people just don’t randomly receive child porn in the mail, nor do real schoolchildren do a brisk trade in the stuff.

Hypermicroblogging service Twitter, according to the Times, is love:

[Chris Messina] described how in April he and his partner, Tara Hunt, “had a big fight after we’d been drinking and then she Twittered that she was leaving me.” Because her message went out very late, most of the Twitter users who read the posts were in Australia. Many e-mailed Ms. Hunt to ask what happened. Those messages helped persuade the couple to reconsider. “I don’t know what might have happened if people who care about us (for reasons I can’t necessarily fathom) didn’t intervene and diffuse the situation,” Mr. Messina wrote in an e-mail message.

Warren Ellis lovingly donkey punches us Americans for how we broke sex:

This is how you know you’re living in the future: when the pornography bears no earthly resemblance to sex as even the filthiest of us know it. You may as well be renting DVDs of aliens fucking. And America, as Martin Amis once said, is where they road-test the future.

And if that’s all too sad to sex to, don’t blame me, as you can just get yourself off then:

Name that year, kiddos:

The area has sprouted computer-themed art galleries, a billiard hall and a Gold’s Gym, where former geeks can acquire new muscles to match their beefed-up social status. There is even “Gulch Gossip,” a column in a local computer magazine. Its author, who writes under the name Jonathan E., says, “My attitude is, if there’s going to be a media industry, it’s going to run by media morals — people will get drunk and swap each other’s wives.”

That would be The New York Times, on San Francisco’s newly sexed-up web culture, c. 1994.

(photo by & link via Scott Beale/Laughing Squid, gloriously reminiscing)