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May 25, 2006
"The internet. More than just fun and games. It has become the global source of infinite uses!"
New technique for rounded CSS corners
Is the MPAA hacking BitTorrent trackers like Torrentspy?
The neo-cons' pet PR firm was behind the false story that Iran makes religious minorities wear identifying marks à la Nazi Germany, apparently part of an effort to drum up the public for another war?
And to continue a conversation from earlier today...
Porn and technological progress:
Both English and Italian can trace their emergence as popular tongues partly to pornography. Before the fourteenth century, the gentry of England spoke as much French as English,(9) while the Italian language was a hodgepodge of Latin-derived tongues varying from city-state to city-state.(10) Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387) and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-51), larded with the sexy and the scatological, passed in manuscript from hand to hand and read aloud to a largely illiterate populace, helped create national languages in both countries.
But two less noble works did more to popularize print and bring literacy to the masses than the scholarly works. These were Pietro Aretino's Postures (1524)(14) and Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1530-40).(15) Of the two, the Postures was the more pornographic in the strict sense, a series of engravings of sexual positions, each with a ribald sonnet. Rabelais' work, on the other hand, instantly entered the canon, where it has remained ever since. His tales of the two courtly giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, the vinous monk Friar John and the reprobate scholar Panurge, are classics of satire and adventure, spoofing every vestige of the Middle Ages from feudal war to scholasticism to law to religion, with hearty doses of sex and scatology. Playful governesses introduce Gargantua to sex;(16) Gargantua's horse pisses an army away;(17) a woman scares the devil away by exposing her vagina;(18) Panurge scatters musk on a fine lady who scorned him, exciting the dogs of Paris to rapine and rut.
It was not long, however, before the Civil War taught photography two new uses. The first and more famous was the battlefield photography of Mathew Brady.(26) The second, the more infamous, was pornography.(27) Soldiers demanded more than letters from home, they demanded erotica. So great was the traffic to the front, not only of dirty books, but soon of erotic daguerreotypes and photographs, that Congress passed the first U.S. law proscribing obscenity via the mails.
One of the first uses of pay-cable was pornography: people would pay to watch X- and R-rated films at home.
What were people watching on these early videotapes? The early home video rental stores, the outlets that drove Betamax from the market, were almost exclusively pornographic, drawing on the same clientele as early nickelodeons.(42) The same was true of home video sales.(43) It was not until the mid-1980s that first, local videorental stores, and next, national chains like Blockbuster entered the field with videos for the mass market. By then, porn had shown the way.
Other participants in the communications revolution that have been helped by pornography include "900" phone numbers,(44) CD-ROMs, and laser discs.(45) In fact, the French Minitel, which many see as the prototype of the computer-mediated telephone system, owes whatever success it has attained largely to its use for exchanging sexual messages.(46)
Here's how it works. Your Sinulator package includes the transmitter, a vibrator and a receiver. You download the client application from Sinulator.com. During installation, you connect the transmitter to a USB port. (If you use Windows XP, make sure to read the installation note in the user guide and save yourself some frustration.)
When you're all installed and have the client running, you attach your toy to the wireless receiver and switch it on. Finally, you go to Sinulator.com and choose a name for your toy. After that, anyone who knows your toy's name can set your toy a-buzzin' using the Sinulator control panel. Neither of you has to register or divulge any personal information -- not even an e-mail address.
The control panel looks like a grown-up version of a driving toy for baby, with buttons and levers and sliders that you manipulate with your mouse. I laughed when I first saw it -- now you can have sex and drive a race car at the same time! If that's not a popular male fantasy, I don't know what is.
But it gets even better. You probably want to stick to the dashboard if you're at the office, but for home use, the Interactive Fleshlight is where it's at. The Fleshlight is a standard, sleeve-style vibrator for men, with a twist: It's also a transmitter. It measures the speed and force of each thrust and communicates those metrics to the software, which translates them into vibration and pulse on the other end.
In other words, a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle, and the cybersex experience gets one step closer to the holodeck.
Posted by Jon Rubin at May 25, 2006 10:20 PM
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