There’s what might only seem like a minor kerfuffle regarding the linking policies of Web Merchants, Inc., who’s holdings include the popular EdenFantasies shops, magazines, and community groups.

AlwaysArousedGirl, who broke her ties with Web Merchants some time back, has posted an essay by web expert and KinkForAll co-founder Maymay explaining the problem in technical, social, and editorial terms.

A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.

Read the rest of Maymay’s essay at AAG’s site here.

The very short version is that while the company solicits guest posting from outside bloggers and encourages them to link back to their own sites and the sites of other bloggers and vendors, they use sophisticated javascript hacks to make sure that while their “links” in posts and blogrolls work correctly for viewers (in other words they work for people who click on them from their browsers) but that they’re invisible to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other automated, but extremely important automated indexers.

The result is that links from inside Web Merchant’s websites are never counted in search-engine page rankings. Search-engine page rankings really, really matter both as points of pride for individuals, as visibility to vendors, and as pricing metrics for anyone who relies on online advertising revenue.

It’s particularly sticky, as Maymay indicates, when on the one hand Web Merchant content managers invite outside web authors to do link exchanges and when they try to require outside authors who cite them to “properly” link back to them (thus upping Web Merchant’s page rankings) while on the other hand the “links” back to outside websites are effectively blocked.

I’m more of a social sex blogger than a sex sex blogger, and so I haven’t had much of anything to do with vendors like Web Merchant’s EdenFantasies or SexIs online magazine. I regularly decline requests for link exchanges. So all this is technically no skin off my back.

And as a webmaster I’m vaguely sympathetic to their assertions that it’s all really just a security measure to “protect” outside sites. (From what I’m not sure… maybe they think higher Google Page Ranking can cause allergic reactions the way peanuts do.) More likely I suspect the scheme probably started out as a way to easily track outbound clicks and maybe to help track and manage dead or dying links. I dunno. Maybe that’s how it started.

But!

However the practice started the behavior Maymay carefully details is currently unseemly at best and a serious breach of internet ethics at worst. (It is not, repeat not, illegal nor is anyone with credibility, including Maymay and AAG, saying otherwise.) It’s certainly is a breach of social networking standards and certainly looks like an attempt to hoard social capital.

They ought to cut it out. As I said it’s no skin off my back that they behave this way because I neither give links nor (as far as I know… but then how would I know?!?!) do they ever link back to me. But if I was affiliated with them, and especially if I provided them links and content in good faith, if they didn’t end their practice, and end it immediately, I wouldn’t feel reluctant at all to sever my relationship with them. Further, I’d certainly understand, and support, anyone who likewise severed their relationships.

Update: I forgot to mention when I wrote this that my criticism of the mechanical back-end behavior of the website (which is really, really bogus) should not be taken as a criticism of the people who contribute on the front end either as staff, contractors, recruited volunteers, or, well, volunteer volunteers. That’s because, again, I know very few of them, and also because they appear to be very well spoken and well-spoken of by others in the larger online community. I’ll just say that because content contributors are so well regarded it seems like a shame that back-end link-hiding shenanigans would be hurting not just their credibility but also their visibility elsewhere on the web.

Update: As I mentioned in reply to a comment, below, deliberately obscuring outbound links is a social-media version of wiping your nose on someone else’s shirt — not at all illegal, no, but still awfully rude.

Via Jennifer of Activist on a mission to initiate change here’s some news bound to make let’s-keep-sex-a-tool-for-social-control arch-conservatives and English-only jingoists heads explode

Seems as though the police in Montreal were busy arresting and charging an adult store owner for failure to put English wording on a Sleeve Super Stretch. (aka jack off toy) Like tax payers dollars would not be better spent actually pushing criminals through the court system. Sheesh.

Read the quote in context here.

On the one hand they weren’t arresting the owner for selling sex toys (particularly sex toys for men, who generally aren’t seen as either needing them to “get off” nor deserving them.) On the other hand they were arresting him for being insufficiently bi(lingual)-positive.

Worse, the language he was arrested for not including was Canada’s other official language, French!

What’s interesting to me, and fairly important, is that the story illustrates how, contrary to certain fairly dominating ideologies about ordered societies, the impulse to debate attempts to regulate morality can coexist peacefully with sexual and relationship license. As opposed to the opinion that sexuality and the forms of relationships are the essence of moral debate.

I don’t know if it’s either necessary or natural or even healthy for morality of any sort to be socially mandated. I do know that if it must it’s probably healthier for such debate to be more evenly distributed across the spectrum of human behavior rather than focused on one or several small areas.

I might also add that it seems more productive to stress over something like bilingualism, which is amenable to social upbringing and social influence and which can be subject to opinion, than for things that appear to have flexible but fundamental baselines in our biologies.

Anyway, I’d far prefer that if a sex-shop operator must run afoul of the law at all it would be not because she or he sold sex toys at all, and not because he or she neglected to label them in all official languages, but only when she or he continued to sell materials after they’d been determined to contain toxic materials or otherwise be demonstrably unsafe.

Summary: Susannah Breslin mocks feminists (but evidently only feminists) who warn readers of unpleasant content with the text “trigger warning.” Whatever. Since I think such warnings are often a good idea I’ve created a freely-distributable badge people can use instead of the standard text and put it at the end of this post, along with cut-and-paste-able HTML code if you want to use it in your own posts.

Vanessa Valenti of Feministing, who titled her post “Susannah Breslin: Certifiable Asshole,” may actually feel more generous towards Breslin than I do.

Susannah Breslin, the writer who called feminism “cultural roadkill” has now taken it upon herself to mock the shit out of a very serious term: trigger warnings. You know, because it’s so uncool and passe to care about rape victims.

Her post on True/Slant today begins by calling us folks at Feministing self-victimizing, angry man-haters (*yawn*), setting the tone for this oh-so-expert account of contemporary feminism. What follows is joking banter about Feministing and other blogs’ use of trigger warnings with seemingly no knowledge of what they’re actually for:

Read the quote in context here.

If you follow the links to Breslin’s post (which I’m snit-ishly not going to post since I’m… pretty sure she’s mostly just trolling to boost her stats) you’ll see that she makes one modestly fair point in the midst of her otherwise general assholishness. I’ll get to the fair point in a moment.

First, though, I hadn’t really noticed that Feministing bloggers were particularly man-hating. Nor self-hating and/or self-victimizing. So fuck her.

Second point, Breslin claims she reads feminist blogs, including Feministing, “from time to time” but that “lately” she’s noticed that some posts are prefaced with the ZOMG!1!!-like phrase “****TRIGGER WARNING***” Since those things have been around for, like, years one wonders how often Breslin actually does read Feministing and other feminist blogs. As opposed to just pulling crap out of her certifiable ass.

For the record, the first comment on Breslin’s post, by someone named Sara Libby, makes the entirely sensible (and obvious) point that… (emphasis mine)

I actually wasn’t too familiar with the whole “trigger warning” phenomenon until I read this, so I went back and looked at the Feministing posts. I found most of them that included a warning talked about rape, and other serious stuff that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe some people could get offended by (like, say, rape victims?). The Internet can be a very cold, uncaring place, and I don’t see what the problem is in providing readers with a little heads-up that they might encounter something offensive, particularly if you’re trying to build a community where people feel comfortable expressing their opinions.

Breslin’s justification for snarking about trigger warnings is that there’s triggering stuff all over the internet

I guess I should’ve posted a trigger warning with that WikiLeaks.org video. Oooops! Come to think of it, probably 87-percent of the internet needs a goddamn trigger warning these days

You’ll have to find the quote yourself, but that’s what she said.

This, of course, is true enough. And as I recall many of the sites that posted that WikiLeaks.org video, including major, mainstream, general-interest, and otherwise non-“self-victimizing” ones, actually did include warnings that the material could be upsetting. And/or triggering. If Beslin didn’t include a warning when she linked to that video well… she’s still an asshole.

Creative Commons
license.
I do agree with her that the standard text with all its asterisks, exclamations and capital letters does seem a little retro-MSDOS. So I took a couple of minutes with Photoshop and, thanks to a randomly-Googled tutorial (from the CSS Creme design site) I put together a colorful little badge that people can use instead. If they don’t want to create their own.

Use the following HTML code to insert the image in your own posts. It will float the image on the left-hand side of whatever paragraph you insert it in, allowing the surrounding text to flow around it.

<img alt=“Trigger Warning” title=“Trigger Warning” src=“http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cDVtg63O_Jc/S8VzA5JP2pI/AAAAAAAAAHs/_HQlWsz39ro/s1600/TriggerWarning.png” style=“float: left; margin: .5em;”/>

I do think it’s a good idea to replace the text with a graphic. (The HTML title and alt-text ensure accessablity on alternative browsers.) Feel free, of course, to make and use your own instead.

Back in October Erotic blogger Remittance Girl brought up some interesting points about sex-positive/feminist critiques of erotica

Nobilis pointed me in the direction of Figleaf’s “The No-Sex Class: Men, Women, and Gangbangs in Porn” which led me to “Once more into the breech” by Amanda over at Pendragon.net, which led me to “On Porn, Sex And Pincushions” over at Echinde of the Snakes.

Although each of them stray in their topics a little, all of them are worth reading, as they all deal with the subject of porn tropes, and how those play out in the reality of society, sex education and the bedroom.

These are all very sex positive people who have, in their turns, problems with certain depictions of sex in porn. I’ve dealt with this subject a little myself in a couple of posts on non-consensual sex in erotica and the semiotics of semen.

I think I must agree with Amanda and Echinde that because of a woeful lack of sex-positive sex education, a lot of young men and women are learning about sex from the porn industry and – I’m sorry if this makes people angry – but they are not responsible sex educators. That’s not their job and, with some notable exceptions, like the Tony Comstock films, education is not much of a byproduct of porn.

Neither is written erotica an educational tool. The assumption is made, and rightly so, I think, that once you are reading erotica or watching porn, you already know a decent amount about sex. Certainly I do not put myself forward as a sex educator. However, a lot of these articles demand, subtextually, that porn SHOULD act as an educator by virtue of its reach into the groins of millions of boys and girls out there. The truth about porn and erotica is that they are seldom vehicles for changes in thinking. They are much more likely to be sexually framed reflections of the society in which they are made or written.

There’s more. Read it here.

I think most feminists (and certainly Amanda, Echidne, and me) think that rather than saying porn and/or erotica providing accurate education sex educators should provide sex education. Because, seriously, we don’t have to worry about the Road Runner cartoon’s depictions of gravity. Thanks to education and considerable experience our expectations in reality aren’t influenced by what happens to the coyote. If we could assume the same experience and education it would be the same for sex.

I think she put it extremely well: to the extent porn has a pernicious influence it’s because viewers have no other sources of education and, frankly, relatively limited opportunities for experience.

As for the notion of getting off on dominance or submission she makes another really excellent point: a lot of this stuff really does have a half life. And to build just a bit on her point, if women grow up in a culture that assumes the avenue to authorized sex is submission and self-effacement so deeply that marriage erases your own family name then yeah, it’s not going to be too surprising that submission as release is going to work itself into fantasy.

But in this case I’m pretty sure most feminists (Amanda, me, I’m not positive about Echidne) would say that whatever turns you on in bed is fine as long as you don’t confuse it with the rest of your life or, worse, try to enact your personal turnons into law. For instance a fantasy about Grand Inquisitors could be hot. A reintroduction of the actual Spanish Inquisition would… not.

In other words it’s not so much the responsibility of sexual fantasy-facilitators such as porn and erotica to educate. But it is the case that without somebody doing education porn is going to wind up teaching a lot of people that, oh, say, positions that maximize camera angles are preferable to positions that maximize sexual stimulation.

—-

For a different perspective see also Katherine Chen, guest posting at Em & Lo about what she learned from porn that she didn’t learn in sex ed. For instance

• “My mom always classified every single sexually active female as either a prostitute or a “dumb animal” who had nothing better to do with her time. I would have probably agreed with her, if it weren’t for Asia Carrera”
• “...the fact that the porn star Belladonna had semi-retired in 2007 because she was concerned about contracting STDs like herpes had a much bigger impact on me than my sex ed teacher insisting I memorize the side effects of every genital infection out there”
• “...even I realize that the scenarios of porn films are unrealistic — they’re fantasies that most viewers understand can’t be replicated in real life. Even if you “set up” a scene with your partner, it’s just not going to be the same.”

• “...whenever I finally do get around to having sex myself, I’m pretty confident that, like the best porn, I’ll have some good moves, I’ll use a condom, I won’t be self-conscious, and — most importantly — I’ll have fun.”

This is the second of two posts by Chen, the first being about how poorly served she was by her first, badly managed encounter with sex education.