US Sex Sells News

Sex shops across the USA are seeing a spike in sales of the kinds of toys and accessories mentioned in the New York Times best-selling trilogy by E L James, including Fifty Shades Darker .

The sex is between two consenting adults, with an explicit contract and much discussion of safe words, but the books are filled with spanking, flogging and gagging, and the use of restraints, masks and Kegel balls, which are used during exercises to strengthen vaginal walls and the pelvic floor.

From national online retailer AdamEve.com to Tempe-based Castle Megastore, displays are going up in shops, banner ads are being added to websites and sales staff are being encouraged to read the books, which have been selling out in stores for about two months.

Mark Franks, president and CEO of Castle Megastore said:

These books have ... introduced the average woman to modern fetish sexuality. We're seeing a customer coming into our store seeking the books and accessories who maybe wouldn't have thought about these products before, but now they're intrigued.

At Fascinations, which has locations in Arizona and Colorado, sales in the bead-and-ball category are up 98% in the past four weeks. Feathers and items that tickle are up 34%, and the BDSM category is up 18%.

Good Vibrations, which has six stores, mostly in the San Francisco area has seen a 350% increase in BDSM items, including handcuffs, blindfolds, bondage tape and paddles.

Several factors are coming together to create what Franks of Castle Megastore calls a phenomenon. Sex shops are more welcoming and more female-friendly than their adult-video-store predecessors, looking more like lingerie shops than kink palaces.

And, said Tristan Taormino of New York, a feminist sex educator, women are more sexually self-actualized today than ever before: They are more likely to say, 'This turns me on and I'm going to go do something about it.

Another strip club tax is being considered by California's Legislature. AB 2441 is set to place a $10 fee on visitors of establishments that offer alcohol and topless or nude performances.

It's the fourth attempt to tax sexually explicit businesses in the past four years in California. All of those bills, which would have levied a 20% sales tax were shot down. A tax raising bill requires a two-thirds vote of both the Assembly and Senate.

AB 2441, however, would be the first legislative action to mandate a fixed-fee pole tax .

JA spokesman for Californian Assemblyman Das Williams said that strip clubs are a good possible resource for funding because there's already a model to tax adult entertainment establishments. Pole taxes are now mandatory in Texas and Utah, with legislation being mulled for similar tariffs for adult entertainment customers in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. He said that the bill is on track in the Assembly and could be approved by both houses in September.

The porn parody Not the Three Stooges XXX has sold out of the initial DVD replication run.

Speculation is that the legal battle which was reported on by the national media between the license holders of the actual Three Stooges and the porn company might have played into some of the impressive early wholesale orders.

The legal wrangling continues and attorneys have still not allowed the parody's PG-rated movie trailer to be uploaded to YouTube.

In the parody version, the boys are unemployed so their girlfriends refuse to have sex with them until they find jobs. Desperately horny, they try anything to find work and end up in wild sexual situations with gorgeous girls. The climax is a spectacular 10-person sex orgy that will make you wish you were a numskull.

Not the Three Stooges XXX stars Mandy Armani, Danica Dillon, Bailey Blue, Callie Cyprus, Cassandra Cruz and Britney Young as the beautiful girls having wild sex. Anthony Rosano plays Moe, James Bartholet is Curly and Evan Stone is Larry.

A Los Angeles jury has just found Ira Isaacs guilty on all five counts in his obscenity trial.

The jury began deliberating the charges of producing, selling and shipping the four charged movies:

• Mako's First Time Scat,
• Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 and 10,
• Japanese Doggie 3 Way

Isaacs looked pensive as the jury filed into the courtroom, and was visibly shaken as the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts on the five counts, each of which could net him five years in (likely) a minimum security federal prison.

Isaacs' attorney Roger Jon Diamond told AVN that he felt his client had several grounds for appeal, but a final decision as to whether Isaacs will appeal the verdicts has not yet been reached.

Offsite Comment: If Porn Isn't Art, Does It Still Have a Right to Exist?

Ira Isaacs basic defence was that hi work was art.

3rd May 2012. See article from thedailybeast.com , thanks to Nick

Obviously Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10 was never intended to be art, and that's the real problem with the art argument: it covers up what's truly valuable about these films, which is that they allow us to critique of the notion of obscenity itself.

The California obscenity statute defines prurience as a morbid, degrading, unhealthy interest in sex. But this sells all sexual minorities down the river. Is it more degrading to see a representation of your desire, or be deemed perverted by the state? In 2012, should the state still be passing judgment on the consensual sex lives of others?

In the end, the jury pronounced Isaacs guilty on all counts and got home before rush hour. That's not surprising, given that they'd been instructed not to consider what a deviant subset might find normal, or even what they themselves might find normal, but instead to imagine the values of the community at large. Even in Central District of California---the home not only of the nation's porn industry, but also of bedroom communities from San Luis Obispo to Orange County---that leaves a lot of room for sexual missteps.

...Read the full article

Morality in Media (MiM) president Patrick Trueman had delivered 5,000 or so letters to Congress calling for a Congressional hearing in either or both the Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Energy and Commerce to explore the true harms of pornography by bringing together leading medical professionals and researchers on the subject, a hearing that Trueman described as now vitally necessary.

Trueman managed to get 127 like-minded national and well-known leaders to sign the letter with him, including Alliance Defense Fund president Alan Sears, conservative Princeton University Prof. Robert George, Citizens for Community Values president Phil Burress, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, anti-women's rights activist Phyllis Schlafly, anti-Kinsey crusader Judith Reisman, Shelley Lubben and five of her acolytes and a couple of dozen other lesser-known movement conservatives, plus 43 more pages of names of religio-conservative citizens.

The porn industry is rallying against Rick Santorum's war on sexually explicit material with an online video protest of the Republican presidential candidate.

The satirical clip on Jest.com, entitled Porn Stars Against Santorum , follows the conservative's pledge last month to ban hardcore pornography if elected.

Not to be outdone, adult film stars Allie Haze, Chastity Lynn and Chanel Preston feature in the two-minute video, calling for a co-ordinated protest on May 1 to protest the politician's anti-pornography stand.

Jest teamed up with producers at Los Angeles-based porn industry giant Vivid Entertainment to make the campaign video.

The actresses also encourage viewers to vote for Santorum in the remaining primary elections, because if he wins the primaries, he will definitely get crushed by Obama. And Obama would never try to stop the porn industry.