Gwyneth Paltrow's insanely profitable empire of quack remedies has had some serious lowlights: it wasn't just squirting coffee up your asshole, or vaginal steaming and smoothie dust: really, the lowest of the lowlights was a concerted effort to convince women to insert $66 jade eggs into their vaginas because, supposedly, this was a widespread practice from "ancient China."

Update: An earlier version of this article credited Ms Paltrow with inventing the fictitious ancient Chinese practice of keeping jade eggs in one's vagina; it turns out that this legend was plagiarized from other sources." Read the rest

The new parental controls in Ios 12 have all the same problems that all parental controls have: they overblock legit material (with a bias for sex-ed, especially sex-ed targeted at girls and queer kids, including Teen Vogue) and underblock all kinds of other material (neo-Nazi publications like The Daily Stormer and Reddit's pornographic /r/Gonewild are not blocked). Read the rest

Fendi is taking a beating online after creating a pink scarf that resembles female genitalia, bush and all. Read the rest

Motherboard's Sofia Barrett-Ibarria talks to sex-worker advocates about the early history of sex-work and the net; after economically sustaining the alt-weekly industry and its excellent local journalism, sex workers found themselves increasingly unwelcome in their ad sections and moved online, pioneering the internet as we know it today. Read the rest

"Porn for women" was Pornhub's "top trending" search term for 2017; across the pornosphere, the number of women viewers continues its meteoric rise and rise, up to 25% now -- for the porn industry woman viewers represent a huge opportunity for growth. Read the rest

The internet is perpetually amused and fascinated by the crazy, corkscrewing duck penis, but commonsense dictates that if fella ducks have crazy willies, then lady ducks will have equally amazing hoo-hahs. Read the rest

Agalmatophilia, a sexual attraction to dolls and other human figures, is nothing new: people have been attracted to and humping dolls for as long as there have been locks on doors – not that the practice needs to be kept a secret. Human sexuality is a weird attic to stumble around in. If your kink hurts no one and leans towards watching wee plastic people get it on, I say it's fair game. Apparently so do a lot of other folks.

From Motherboard: The longer you look for Lego porn, the more you see, and the more you see, the more have you wonder what the odds are that someone near and dear to you is consuming Lego-themed fetishism as their kink. There’s a subreddit dedicated to Lego porn with 725 subscribers, and only 15 posts over five years, but it’s quality over quantity—which makes me think a lot more people are consuming than making Lego porn.

There’s the Big Lego Porn Album, a glorious repository of some of the greatest Lego porn, from New Yorker style cartoons of Lego sex workers to tentacle-Lego crossovers. Several of the images are watermarked with drew.corrupt.net, which now redirects to a Japanese-language blog about someone’s toddler, and definitely not hardcore brick fucking. This album has more than 34,000 views.

r/legoporn features a few crossposts from r/bdsm with bricks, which are actually quite artful. Another crossover fandom: Harry Potter.

Motherboard's Samantha Cole spent a good chunk of time researching the smutty-stop-motion underworld of LEGO pornography, those that make it and the folks that consume it. Read the rest

In 2017, nearly 2.3 million STD cases were diagnosed in the USA, the highest number ever reported, topping previously highest year of 2016 by 200,000 cases.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released new numbers on STDs in America. Read the rest

Twenty years ago, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted patent number 6,368,268: "Method and device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks," a minor classic of a majorly fucked-up genre, the bullshit tech patent that simply adds "with a computer" to some absolutely obvious and existing technology or technique. Read the rest

The FDA has sent warning letters to seven companies selling quack "energy based" vaginal rejuvenation "therapies," in which repurposed laser and radio-frequency-based tools that are used to remove warts and precancerous growths are used to scorch peoples' vaginas, a process that is claimed to have benefits for sexual dysfunction, urinary problems, dryness, "laxity," itching and a host of ills. Some of these companies specifically target breast-cancer survivors. Read the rest

Last week, I sent an SMS to our babysitter that said, "Hey, are you free to sit on," and rather than offering autocomplete suggestions like "Saturday" or "Friday," the default Android keyboard suggested "on my face and." Read the rest

Donald Trump can be heard on an audiotape released by CNN tonight talking with his former fixer/attorney Michael Cohen about how to purchase the rights to a Playboy model's story about an affair she says she had with Trump years earlier. Read the rest

Aarran Lee Wright, 36, a married man and father of two young children, says his sex-robot can be switched to "family mode," for G-rated playtime with the kids.

From the NY Post:

Wright revealed that his children, aged three and five, play with Samantha and watch TV alongside her. And his wife said: “I am not worried she will replace me. She is just someone there like a family member.”

Now a group of professors have slammed the idea of a family-friendly sex robot as “damaging” for kids.

“Children will imitate machines if brought up by them,” Kathleen Richardson, professor of ethics and culture of robots and AI at De Montfort University, told New Statesmen.

“A daughter is going to grow up and think maybe this happened because Mommy wasn’t beautiful enough – am I?

“They’ll learn that women only have certain uses. Then they start to use that as a template for how they interact intimately with others – this is profoundly damaging.”

NSFW video:

Image: HAVC pipes by F. Javier Ballester/Shutterstock Read the rest

In Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, two researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute reveal their empirical findings on the efficacy of porn filters -- the online systems that are supposed to stop users from seeing sexual images, videos, and text. Read the rest

In the five years since I first wrote about "Autonomous sensory meridian response" (ASMR) a folk-neurological condition that describes the pleasant shivers some people experience when hearing certain soft noises, ASMR has gone mainstream -- my ten year old daughter describes the texture of the slime she makes as "really ASMR." Read the rest

Transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf hosts the new Channel 4 documentary What Makes a Woman? Science and society are grappling with the complex and contentious topics of sex, sexuality, and gender. New research and evidence demonstrate that simplistic binaries are more complicated than previously believed. Read the rest

Menage Life's world's biggest orgy on June 2 will move from an Embassy Suites hotel in Las Vegas to the Erotic Heritage Museum. Menage Life said the change is due to “increased interest in the event." Embassy Suites management told the Las Vegas Weekly that "while Sin City 8 room guests are welcome to stay there, the previously scheduled events outside of the orgy—including the seminars and parties—are no longer permitted at the hotel." No matter who made the decision to relocate the orgy and other events, Menage Life says that the new location for the sex party makes it possible to do some science among the carnal chaos! From the Las Vegas Weekly:

According to today's news release, Erotic Heritage Museum Executive Director Dr. Victoria Hartmann will conduct a qualitative research project during the orgy to help fill holes in the study of the evolution of group sex. And a museum documenting the history of sex is a natural to exhibit a history-making sex event—provided, of course, the participants bring their own sex toys and leave the ancient Chinese ones in their glass case.

“We are excited to be working with the Erotic Heritage Museum on this historic opportunity!” Menage Life founder Sante Suffoletta said in a statement. “We are both aligned in our view that consenting adults should be able to fully express their sexuality without fear or shame."