“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair

About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

The stories I’ve been told by nearly two dozen people who have attended these events or have intimate knowledge of them are remarkable in a number of ways. Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Like Julian Assange denouncing the nation-state, industry hotshots speak of these activities in a tone that is at once self-congratulatory and dismissive of criticism. Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness—the audacity, if you will—that make founders think they can change the world. And they believe that their entitlement to disrupt doesn’t stop at technology; it extends to society as well. Few participants, however, have been willing to describe these scenes to me without a guarantee of anonymity.

“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

“Elle” is a 63-year-old sex worker. She’s been at it for decades, and what makes her extraordinary isn’t just her longevity in the business, but her ability to adapt to a changing market. Sex work is as old as civilization, but in the past 20 years the market for illegal sex services has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the internet, upending how it is sold and priced. There are now more women selling sex, more overall encounters, and—unlike in many other industries disrupted by the web—higher wages for workers.

Gregory DeAngelo, an economist at the University of West Virginia, scraped 17 years’ worth of data from The Erotic Review, a website that is like the Yelp for illegal sex services. The dataset features about 1.1 million reviews, which contain extremely detailed descriptions of encounters, time spent, features of the sex worker, and price. According to data on the site, average inflation-adjusted hourly rates increased 38% between 2000 and 2015. Elle’s reviews have appeared since 2000 and her prices—now around $270 per hour—almost exactly track the national average each year.

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

The study, which discovered the startling information by accident, was originally trying to determine if women who have been pregnant with a son might be more predisposed to certain neurological diseases that occur more frequently in males.

But as the scientists picked apart the female brain, the study began to veer wildly off course. As it turns out, the female brain is even more mysterious than we previously thought.

The study found that female brains often harbor “male microchimerism”, or in other words, the presence of male DNA that originated from another individual, and are genetically distinct from the cells that make up the rest of the woman.

According to the study: “63% of the females (37 of 59) tested harbored male microchimerism in the brain. Male microchimerism was present in multiple brain regions.”

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

‘Fauxcest’: The Disturbing Rise of Incest-Themed Porn

Utter the word “incest” and most people will shudder, ill at the thought of being intimate with a family member. The fantasy of incest isn’t socially acceptable; it’s one of the extreme taboos, which could help explain why titles such as Forbidden Family Affairs, Mother Son Secrets and My New White Step-Daddy are topping the porn sales charts. Fictional incest porn, better known as fauxcest, is on the rise—a dark, dirty desire that’s certainly not for everyone.

Over a century ago, Sigmund Freud suggested most people have unconscious incestuous urges that need to be repressed. Though most of Freud’s theories have been discredited, if recent data on porn viewing habits is any indicator, he may have been onto something. Leading adult content providers GameLink.com reported a 178 percent average increase in the consumption of “family role-play porn,” while 1 in 10 purchases made by young adults on the site were for fauxcest titles.

Feminist pornographer Jacky St. James has embraced the controversial genre, calling it one of her favorites to direct. “It’s the one taboo that can’t really be explored in real life safely. This will be forbidden no matter what you do,” she says. “Because of that there is this allure of the untouchable, and what’s untouchable to us is often the most appealing.”

‘Fauxcest’: The Disturbing Rise of Incest-Themed Porn

Forced into pornography: Japan moves to stop women being coerced into sex films | World news | The Guardian

A slew of reports about women being offered modelling contracts, only to be tricked or coerced into appearing in X-rated films, has finally prompted authorities in Japan to confront the darker side of its multibillion dollar porn industry.

Last year, the government launched its first survey of the industry’s recruitment of vulnerable young women and found that 200 among the 20,000 surveyed had signed “modelling” contracts, with more than 50 later asked to pose nude or have sex on camera.

In 2016, 200 women sought help from Lighthouse, which supports victims of human trafficking, and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence – a dramatic rise from the 62 cases recorded for the whole of 2015 and just 36 the year before.

Forced into pornography: Japan moves to stop women being coerced into sex films | World news | The Guardian

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair

CASUAL SEX: EVERYONE IS DOING IT

Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?

New Yorker

The Secret Life of America’s Greatest Swinger

Say you’re a guy who’d like some other guy to bed your wife. No? Well, it happens. And when it does, Dave’s the sort of man you call. He’s a demure doctor from a quiet neighborhood. But thanks to some rare talents and ubiquitous technologies, he’s also a star in the bedrooms of others—and a helpful guide to the joyful, lusty life of the truly modern hedonist.

….

In an era when the Internet and hookup apps customized to every taste are unleashing sexuality in unprecedented ways, Dave usually needs a few hours just to juggle the weekend’s many possibilities. He is in his early 40s, a soft-spoken primary-care doctor, a tall and muscular black man with tattoos and a disarmingly boyish face—all of which has made him particularly sought-after in this wealthy part of Phoenix.

GQ