Bloggasm

Remember the often-repeated phrase by social conservatives that porn ruins lives? You know the one, where a husband and father becomes so obsessed with porn that he completely neglects his family in his addiction, an addiction that sends him spiralling into his own demise? Well, now they’re making the next (il)logical step: They want to ban sex offenders from having porn:

A pro-family organization in Cincinnati wants to stop sexual predators by making it illegal for convicted sex offenders to possess hardcore pornography.

Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values (CCV), said his group has proposed legislation that would make it against the law for a sex offender to possess obscene materials.

“They cannot possess it (or) buy it in any way, shape or form,” Burress told Family News in Focus. “If they’re caught with it and if they’re on probation, then they will go back to jail.”

When sex offenders get hold of pornography, he said, it inevitably leads to trouble.

Next we have the CCV listing something as “obvious” when it’s anything but:

“The connection between the use of pornography and sex crimes, especially where it involves children, is obvious,” he said, “though the other side always wants us to prove the correlation.”

Oh, yes. Correlation. Why would they want that? It’s only, you know, the way of proving something “obvious.” If we were to go by logical common-sense, then banning porn will only increase the sexual frustration of sexual offenders, the exact opposite of their intended effect.

Related posts: A History of Amateur Porn, Can’t get Paris Hilton to pose nude for you? Get the next best thing: A porn look-alike

Everyone knows that bunny rabbits have a lot of sex. Well, North Korea has decided that they can use this fact to their advantage: they’re encouraging their citizens to breed rabbits as food chiefly for that reason:

North Korea is encouraging its people to breed rabbits for food, the regime‘s official media reported Wednesday.

“Rabbit-breeding farms have been built to rapidly increase parent rabbits which have a high fertility rate, grow fast and produce much meat with less feed,” KCNA said. “Rabbits are being raised by collective and widespread methods at factories, enterprises, cooperative farms and schools, to say nothing of stock-breeding farms.”

Rabbits better start practicing safe sex. Their species may depend on it.

UPDATE: Brody Ruckus is a fake (click on that link to get the scoop)

Remember my post about the facebook user who started a facebook group so his girlfriend would agree to a threesome? Well, he reached his goal and she has agreed, and soon they’ll start an online “contest” so people can vote on which girl they pic. Here’s a video so everyone can get caught up on the whole situation:

I still haven’t joined the group, just watching as a passive observer.

If this guy were smart, rather than posting the video online for free, I’d charge 5 dollars to people who want to watch it. I bet with all the publicity this is getting, he’d make a chunk of change.

UPDATE: Brody Ruckus is a fake

UPDATE: Brody Ruckus is a fake

A facebook user from Georgia named Brody Ruckus has started a Facebook group with a peculiar mission statement. It’s called If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome. The details:

If I can make a facebook group with over 100,000 people in it before the end of the semester (Dec 31, 2006), I can have a threesome with my gf and a girl of my choosing.

The back story:

Like any red-blooded college guy, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idea of a threesome is perhaps one of the greatest things imaginable (right behind midget tossing).

Naturally, I have bugged my girlfriend, Holly, to partake in this dream of mine on multiple occassions… sadly, she has declined every single time.

The other day (September 4th, 2006 to be exact), she and I were talking about Facebook for some reason or another and she mentioned how she’s a member of some group called the “Largest group on Facebook” and she mentioned how hard it must’ve been to get a group that size together.

I promptly slapped her (jk darling)… and told her that anyone, given the proper idea, could make a facebook group of larger than normal size.

And just like that, the bet was formed. So INVITE everyone you know and help me on my quest for sexual salvation.

PLEASE HELP. My manhood thanks you in advance.

Apparently, the group reached 100,000 members in less than three days. Chances are that this is all a hoax, because here’s what he wrote after it reached 100,000:

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE: Friday, September 08, 2006 – 4:04 PM

My lil brod-lings, we’ve done it – 100,000 members. WOW. I was expecting this to take an entire semester and you people pulled it off in a little over 3 days. Amazing. Drinks are on me.

So what now? I have been talking with my gf and she is 100% owning up to the bet.

I’ve been in contact with some potential girls from Facebook who have emailed me and my gf also has some of her own friends in mind. Given your support I think it’s only fair that you, the group members, GET TO VOTE for the chick that is going to complete my naked sandwich.

Please give me a few days to put together a voting mechanism (probably a mini-site that I’ll soon link to) and allow me to narrow down a list of 3-5 potential threesome applicants. After that, we’ll have a week long voting session for whoever the lucky girl is gonna be.

And to make things even more interesting, my gf has AGREED to your many msgs and requests and will allow some pics of the event to be taken… on the one condition that this group gets to 300,000 MEMBERS. (one of you out there suggested that number, don’t blame me, I’m just trying to help you all enjoy a little slice of my threesome heaven)

And for all you DEVIANTS out there… I am still working on her for a video, but she said she that would only happen “if hell froze over” or this became the “largest group on Facebook” … and last time I checked, largest group has about 850,000… so best of luck people… I have faith in you; she doesn’t… haha, that bitch (kidding, sort of).

Threesome applicants will be picked shortly and voting will be enabled in a few days. Stay tuned, and INVITE Everyone YOU KNOW.

PS. Stop friending me, I haven’t accepted a single request since this began, there are like 25,000 pending. Use my email to contact me.

UPDATE: Brody Ruckus is a fake

Since posting Your chances of getting laid through Craigslist: A Bloggasm case study two days ago, I’ve been getting a ton of email feedback. Some of it has been the usual blather (i.e “ur just mad because you can’t get laid thru craigslist!!111), but I’ve also gotten some very thoughtful responses as well, often pointing out where I had gotten things wrong. Below I’ll post this feedback anonymously:

This person claims that I overlooked a lot of things when I did the experiment:

Nice experiment. However, I think you missed a lot of issues.
You had classifications as Bi female, straight male, female and so on.
But, In truth it has more to do with the ad to start with that gets a responce.

Most the fake ads get sent over and over again. People try to avoid those. Usualy they have no area and no picture. Most the real ads with out pictures will be left up on the thing unless the person feels like taking it down and for what reason most don’t. One guess is they are always wanting to see what else they can get. They are grass shoppers always looking over the fence.

Then there is the biggest issue does the ad pertain to that person. It isn’t simply enough to make your self one sexual preference over another. A person who is attractive will get far more hits than one who is not. Then a person who can be convincing in their reason is even more so. Put those two together you will find a lot more ability.

When it comes to selling yourself, confidence and logic matter most, they want to believe they can trust you even if they know they can not.

There is some guy trying to sell a course for learning how to pick up on people. It may help some people it won’t help all. You can’t turn people easily into something they are not Charisma is more like a martial art. For most people takes lots of training. For some it’s natural. Myself, I am lucky most people once I meet them in person they like me. That’s why I ended up with a wife 13 years my younger. To bad her OCD kicked in and tore the family appart. Now, I am a single dad with primary custody 5 days a week.

Even now I have little problems. I managed to grab the attention of a Woman about 19 or 20 today in service (at church).

If you watch “King of the Hill” The episode where Bomhower takes Bobby under his wing to learn how to pick up on women. He’s got the easiest approach. Ask everyone someone will say yes. The trick is to learn how to get the ones who wouldn’t normally say yes to say yes.
Get their attention. How, lot’s of different angles to follow. It boils down to finding something you can do to grab their interest.

This person thinks that it IS possible for straight men to find women:

Top of the Mornin’ to Ya “Simon”:

Thanks for the study with an interesting, albeit dishonest, methodology; I took a look at your study and found it interesting, but with several flaws.

As a CL veteran of more than 2 years now- who has actually just met… PHYSICALLY, IN PERSON- woman number 30 (over half of which I have had sexual relations with), I am way ahead of you. About the only part you have accurate is that it is, statistically speaking, overwhelming in term of numbers/competition for a man responding to a woman’s post to meet & have relations with her.

However, about this I must say two things. First, your chances are INCREASED the closer in time it is when you respond to a REAL (as opposed to all that spam) woman’s post. And second, I would advise men new to the site to generally not even bother with responding to those posts (with all the fakes & phoneys now on there, like yours), but to do what you have conveniently ignored, i.e., post YOUR OWN ad.

The latter has easily been my most-successful methodology; granted, it often does take lots of repetition (but no problem with ads saved as files), but it also produce RESULTS- lots of them. So, your claim that “It is almost impossible for man to get laid through craigslist” is simply false. And you even state that you didn’t measure how difficult it is to get laid, but merely how difficult it is to meet in terms of responses.

Finally, in general, I will also tell many men to use the best methodology ever invented by man; it is the one that has worked for me for years (although on rare occasions I have had success without it, specific cases being 3 women from earlier this year on CL). You know what that’s called?… PAYING FOR IT!!!

Yes, as my brother (who operates a very successful website out in CA- [URL REMOVED SO PERSON CAN REMAIN ANONYMOUS]) and I know all too well, this is THE method that is best, avoids endless bullshit, and gets you RESULTS! And I am not even talking about all the stuff in the erotic section (which you also ignored and which would falsify your claims even more), but of making sweet, younger, new girls that have not done this before into your own private whores.

I have done this several times on CL, and am enjoying the current fruits of it now with a nice, beautiful, shapely, younger blonde girl. This is just one example, but I have many more; in general, I highly recommend CL and this methodology, as well as posting YOUR OWN ads and seeing the results you can get.

All in all, then, you have an interesting, although flawed, study that- by your own admission- doesn’t measure the actual getting-laid aspects. My brother and I should write a book of our own, with our own testimony and statistics.

In direct opposition to your contrary study, we say the opposite… Craigslist is, when used properly over time, a GREAT tool for meeting women and having relations with them!

Sincerely,
[NAME REMOVED]

I responded with this email:

Thanks for your interesting email, [NAME REMOVED]. Let me address the first half of your email: I’m not sure what you mean by putting up my own ad. I did put up ads by straight males, and they got absolutely no responses, except for one in Houston. You’re right though, repetition might be the trick, since I didn’t have time to repeat experiments. Like I said, this is hardly a representative sample, and to get a truly representative sample I might have to go back and do several weeks of work. Please let me know if there are any specific methods (other than paying the girl) to use when you design your ad. Will including a picture in the initial ad help? I won’t ever use CL to get laid myself, but it would be interesting to know for future possible experiments.

Now, to move on to your second notion: Paying the girl. I did notice that there were a number of “Sugar Daddies” who responded to my email. It was interesting how they phrased it, rather than saying they were paying for sex, they were “spoiling” for sex, which in my mind they’re hurdling over our cultural taboos against prostitutes, and perhaps making the girl feel like she’s not performing the sex for immoral reasons.

But at the same time, I wonder what percentage of the CL crowd is looking to pay their way down a girl’s pants. A lot of people who responded did appear to be semi-wealthy professionals, but still more were college kids (who are notoriously cheap!) and other like-minded individuals.

And he responded with:

I can, and actually already have (unintentionally!) over my time on there already done your work for you Simon; I just know what has worked the most, and what hasn’t- in terms of an overall pattern (as Sergio Mendez might sing… “I know the pattern much too well”!)

The main idea I referred to is a man posting his own ad, and GENERALLY not wasting time responding to females (or, a supposed female- like what you put up!). And over time, you tend to notice the tell-tale signs of all the spammers that pervade this site, and others as well- especially nowadays.

In general, it’s all a numbers game anyway- like it is anywhere in life as man when you try get with women. But, to INCREASE the probability of success, I do know that offering $, i.e., putting a dollar sign in front of your ad, INCREASES the chances of success because this is the one thing that will make more girls take an interest in intimacy, namely, MONEY! You are also probably better off when you include a nice picture; and ditto for a nice structure to your ad overall. (Incidentally, this “sugar daddy” here wouldn’t “sugarcoat” the ad with that term necessarily- LOL; I just say it’s about $, in a direct, no-nonsense fashion. This has been fine.)

Over time, the women I have met have generally been from their responding to MY well-worded ads; you have to present yourself in a clear, well-written fashion, and be as specific as possible. Granted, most of the time you don’t get diddly back; but once in a while, you hit some real gems/paydirt- like I have many times on there.

It also goes in CYCLES, i.e., sometimes you can be on there for days or weeks, and nothing. Then, all of a sudden, like magic, you get several LEGITIMATE, non-bs responses. But, you just have to be persistent, and never give up; you will get results- one other benefit of being in a big city like Chicago here!

Well, this is just a little more from this CL veteran; let me know more anytime. CL is definitely a system that, when used with care and lots of repetition, can yield you some wonderful results. And most of all, it’s still free!

This person has some ideas for how to conceal your identity when you reply to ads:

interesting! I read your blog post. I for one got laid this week (w/ female) thru CL. But I agree it’s few and far between. I also agree that a lot of people who DO respond (I’m a mostly straight/occasionally bi guy) use their REAL names. Bad idea. How do they know I’m not some psycho with a hidden agenda? What if I meet them, we have great sex, then I want to see them again but they don’t want to so I decide to stalk them? You can find a lot of info about someone sometimes with just their email address. Even more with their real name or a couple facts about them like their job.

Most people I’ve met this way seem pretty normal but you never know. It only takes one psycho looking to stalk – or case your house – to fuck up your life.

I have this email which I only use for online dating/sex. I don’t use it for any other purpose and I don’t use any other emails for setting up stuff this way. I don’t give away details about myself unless I’ve already met someone a couple times and it’s not a ‘just sex’ thing. So I’m pretty smart about it… I think!

As for the quality of the meat… well if you’re looking for chicks they are either going to be a) fat b) really fat c)otherwise unattractive d)playing for pay, whether looking for sugar daddy or tricks. I do think there are some attractive women on CL but of course you have to be in their league to get a chance. I had a date with an attractive redhead once. But usually you’re dealing with lowering your standards somewhat. I’m ok with that, if it’s a situation of just getting laid without all the bar bullshit. I don’t mind a curvy chick depending on her look. There was one today that wanted to come over but she didn’t want to send a pic. no way will I fuck a chick I haven’t seen a photo of first.

now as for the gay thing… if you’re gay/bi you can get lots of action on CL. the problem is you probably don’t want to mess around with the CL regulars. Flakes, crooked or possibly diseased. I am very VERY selective with who I’ll mess around with if I’m looking for bi action. I read the ads regularly so I can tell who the regulars are. They post the same fucking ad all the time. duh. Or they post the same ad to m4m and CE too.

oh one more thing. It’s totally unscientific of course but judging by the m4m/CE posts I’ve read, there is a significant percentage of outwardly hetero men who are on the down low, including married guys and guys who are in het relationships and happy/comfortable with them. It is astounding, the percentage of CL personals ads that are from guys who are ‘not gay, but…’

anyway that’s my 4 cents since I went on twice as long as I should have. Have a good one.

And this person says that my results are consistent with other parts of craigslist, not just the NSA section:

That tracks with what I learned in my research for Spreadsheet Boyz: Adventures in Mid-life Dating. Women do not respond to the men’s ads – the guys all told me this. It also track with the fact that IO make it clear I am NOT just trying to “get laid”, I am trying to meet someone to spend the rest of my life with, but 9 times outta ten they just want to get it on. The 20-40 year old average respondents tracks the same, too.

Premise: I was surfing through the job listings at Craigslist, and inevitably wandered my way into the personals section, and became instantly fascinated with all the posts. I eventually made my way into the “Sex with no strings attached” section, and immediately wondered: Could this be real? Is it really this easy to get laid by simply logging in and making a post, when so many other people out there have to struggle to get laid the normal way? It didn’t take long to realize that for every female who posted, there were anywhere from ten to twenty males posting, and several of the posts mentioned that half the girls who posted were just spammers, which led me to believe that the ratio was even greater than that. So with this curiosity in mind, I set out to find out how hard it was to get laid using Craigslist, or rather, how many people actually responded to the “No strings attached” ads.

Methods of experimentation: I picked three cities: New York, Chicago, and Houston, and posted ads to each city, using different email addresses for each ad. For each city I posted four ads: One pretending to be a straight female looking for sex with a male, another one as a straight male looking for sex with a female, another as a bicurious male looking for sex with another male, and one as a bisexual female looking for sex with another female. I said basically the same thing in each ad and didn’t include a pic or much personal information, except that I had just moved into the city. I then sat back and let the emails build up in the inbox, and then went through every single one to assess the results, which are as follows.

Results: Here are the stats on how many people responded to each person.

New York:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 165 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 0 responses

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 9 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 2 responses

Chicago:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 200 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 0 responses

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 6 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 2 responses

Houston:

Straight female looking to have sex with a male: 54 responses

Straight male looking to have sex with a female: 1 response

Bi-curious male looking to have sex with a male: 10 responses

Bisexual female looking to have sex with a female: 1 response

Interesting observations:

1. For the New York and Chicago postings where I pretended to be a straight female looking for a male, I had over twenty emails after only three or four minutes of posting. The rate of emails slowed down as the day went on when the post got pushed further and further down on the page.

2. I was overwhelmed with how many straight males simply included pictures of their penises and nothing else. Were they really expecting that a girl would see a picture of their penis and exclaim “That’s the guy for me!”?

3. Some men wrote really short, one-lined notes, while others gave entire biographies of themselves. One guy included a 2,000-word erotica short story to “get [her] in the mood.”

4. Many men included their full name and face pics, and it wasn’t hard to find most of them using Google.

5. Two of the men who responded were aides to Congressmen and bragged about it in their emails. Other people told me their professions.

6. Several men admitted that they were married or in a relationship and were looking to cheat on their significant others.

7. Home phone numbers were often included in the emails.

8. Some men tried to impress the girl with how witty they were, I guess as an attempt to stand out in the crowd.

9. If you haven’t gotten the point yet, most of the people gave away an ungodly amount of personal info away to an anonymous person on the internet.

10. The post from the straight male looking for a female got spammed the most by people trying to advertise their dating websites and webcams.

11. Many of the people who answered the ad for the bi-curious man claimed to be straight, which means that a lot of bi-curious males are surfing through craigslist to have their first experiences.

12. Most the responders were between twenty and forty years-old.

Conclusions/advice:

1.The first thing that always came to my mind was the fact that if a really malicious person wanted to get on craigslist and ruin a lot of people’s lives, he easily could. I had so much personal information and so many pictures of so many people, that I could have posted their names and pictures alongside their messages online somewhere and have their most treasured secrets available to anyone who google searched their names.

2. It’s almost impossible for a straight male to find anonymous sex through craigslist. At least when he has a post that doesn’t include his picture. Out of all the ads put out by straight males, there was only one woman who responded. Also, whenever you respond to a female’s ad, you are normally competing with anywhere from 100 to 200 other males.

3. Lesbian/bi females, gay/bi males, and straight females should have no problem getting laid through craigslist.

4. My advice for straight males is to perhaps try answering ads in other personal sections, including the “friends-only” section and the “relationship” section. Many of the female ads there indicated they were only interested in light dating, not a serious relationship, so my guess is that a few of those people could lead to some casual sex after a date or two. This based purely on speculation. But as a side experiment, I filled out a few ads pretending to be a straight female inside the “dating” section, and they got far fewer responders than in the “no strings attached section,” meaning a lot less competition. In my limited experience, girls are just as horny as men, they’re just less likely to meet anonymously some stranger they’ve never met so they can have sex.

5. Or here’s even better advice for straight males: don’t get laid through craigslist. I’m all for the internet and the doors it opens, but c’mon, guys have managed to get laid for thousands of years, and so have our evolutionary ancestors. It won’t kill you to actually put some effort into the task at hand and actually meet people on your own. There were times when I really felt ashamed to be a straight male. I mean, I can understand the allure of the whole thing, but there’s nothing like staring at 200 emails from horny men that allows you to understand how dismal the male gender really is. This must be why so many males think that honking your horn at a lady while you’re flying by her at thirty miles an hour is a legitimate way of hitting on her.

Flaws in my experiment:

1. This experiment didn’t really measure how hard it is to get laid through craigslist, only how hard it is to get people to respond to you. Getting them to meet you is probably another battle on its own.

2. I didn’t exactly create a representative sample: Houston, Chicago, and New York. All three are major cities, and the results might have been slightly different if I’d posted in less-crowded areas from different parts of the country. But I only gave myself a week to put this together, and between creating all the different email addresses, and then all the different personal ads, and then collecting and sifting through all the data, it was very time consuming and I only had time for three cities.

Final notes: Thanks to everyone who unknowingly participated. I’m sorry that I wasn’t the person who I pretended to be and you were a guinea pig for my experiment. If anything, hopefully you’re now more aware of the situation and can use the results from this experiment to increase your chances of getting laid through craigslist. Be sure to tune in next Friday for a new Bloggasm case study.

UPDATE: This post got a lot of reader feedback, which I posted over here

ANOTHER UPDATE: In the past few days, several journalists have contacted me asking for interviews, for both my Craigslist experiment and my post on facebook’s controversy. If you’d like an interview, contact me at Simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

We can set up either a phone or email interview through there.

The excellent blog SugarBank (NSFW) has a detailed post about the history of internet Amateur Porn:

Today, most people only know newsgroups via services like SkinVideo, but back in the early nineties, when I upgraded to a 28.8K modem and paid $4,000 for a 2GB disk-drive the size of a shoebox, the only way to get images online was to download small files from newsgroups and stitch them together for display on-screen. The difficulty of the process meant that only scientists and perverts bothered. Swingers and strippers, who had a history of being nude in public, flocked to it, and stocked the net with free porn.

I think it’s fascinating how these exhibitionists started making money for doing something they wanted to do anyway: post pictures of themselves having sex on the internet for thousands to see.

What’s really interesting is the fact that what we now view as “Amateur Porn” really isn’t amateur at all. The word “Amateur” has become a style of shooting a sex scene, rather than the lack-of-means to do it artfully.

Related posts: How influential is porn?, The hardships of owning a brothel