For this Saturday, a writer and two podcasters.

• “Freedom of the press is meaningless if your printers, your publishers, your distributors, your retailers, your credit card companies, your online payment gateways, and your government all get a say in what they think should be allowed out into the world.” Dirty books writer Guy New York explains why demands from publishers of authors of erotica to “self-certify” the themes in their books are so terrifying.
• I haven’t heard his podcast yet (I shall soon), but I urge you to check out counterculturalist Conner Habib on the strength of this tweet alone: “You are allowed to sexualize and fantasize about whomever or whatever you want at any time, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Obviously how you act out or don’t act out those fantasies is a different matter. But your imagination is yours and should remain free.” Note that in terms of his podcast, it’s surely a major plus that Episode 12 has as its guest Felix Biederman from Chapo Trap House.
• I’ve also recently been enjoying activist and sex educator Tina Horn’s podcast Why Are People Into That?, which is fine coverage of all sorts of sexual weirdness. Not my personal one mind you, but that is truly exotic…

Long live the free and open Internet!

An erotic writer, a sexologist, and a comics artist this week.

• Sexy writer May More offers us a story about a Catholic schoolgirl who decides she has a vocation to become a nun…for a very unusual reason.
• Sexologist and therapist Chris Donoghue gives a good succinct rubbishing to the pseudoscientific concept of “sex addiction.
• French erotic comics artist Alex Varenne makes some of his paintings available at his website (in small size, alas!).

And although it may seem like shouting into the void given recent developments, long live the free and open Internet!

Some things out there that might be of interest.

• Artist Willy McFarland has work at a site of his own, including both pin-ups and fan art.
• Prolific pin-up artist Elias Chatzoudis maintains an Internet shop here.
• Artist Nathan Szerdy also makes some delightful pinups available.
• While many of you have already heard of this site, a fan of vintage material should never miss Dr. Kate Lister’s amazing Whores of Yore site. You can read an interview with Dr. Lister, “The Unbridled Joy of Victorian Porn” on Vice here.

Long live the free and open Internet!

Our continuing series of sharing stuff that’s out there, in more ways than one.

• The new technology of “gene editing” has long been thought of as a way to make human beings strong, smarter and healthier. Someone at Future of Sex has had the mad-science sense to ask whether it might not also be used to make us sexier.
• Here’s a long read at Engadget about the ongoing mishegas at Patreon about adult content. One of my takeaways is that the imagined distinction between “porn” and “erotica” is just as useless to Patreon as it has been to everyone else.
• The Brothers Hildebrandt are fantasy artists of decades’-long standing, and still active. Have they been so generous as to put some of their gorgeous pin-up art on the open web? Yes, they have.
• It has been difficult for me to find much of the gorgeous erotic comics art by James LeMay on the open web, but he’s certainly busy publishing. If you go to BD-adultes you can find some pages from some sexy supernatural detectives.
• Finally, is it any surprise in our modern world that there is now a publisher devoted exclusively to tentacle erotica?

That’s it for this week. Long live the free and open Internet!

No Saturday is a bad Saturday for Share our Shit Saturday. Today, three artists and an open letter.

• Writer and artist Scott P. Vaughn has an online gallery and store with fine comics and pin-ups with a pulpy sensibility, both in classical fantasy and dieselpunk genres.
• The site run by Jesus Garcia Lopez appears to be flash-based (unfortunately) but if you look through to the appropriate parts you can find some exquisite erotica and fantasy art.
• Casemiro Arts has an intriguing variety of erotica for sale. I for one am especially tempted by a surreal Samsung Galaxy case and I don’t even own a Samsung Galaxy.
• Finally, at the Future of Sex site, some some much-needed pushback in the anti-sex-robot campaign, in the form of an open letter. “In a world moving so fast, what we do need is a movement not against sex robots but one looking for ways for every human to live a happy and fulfilling, and consensual, sex life—with whoever, or whatever, they wish.”

Long live the free and open Internet!

It’s no real secret that people who provide “adult” content on the web are treated pretty shabbily by the corporations that dominate much of the Internet. You pretty much can’t do anything adult at all on Facebook (which in my humble opinion is the Internet for people too stupid to be responsibly allowed access to a global communications network, but there it is). Once adult-friendly services like Tumblr, now in the clutches of the corporate suits from Verizon, have begun hiding adult content and stripping it out of search results. And there is now some sort of ongoing fiasco at Patreon, which while it hasn’t quite banned adult content, has changed its terms of service to be considerably more hostile to it. Adult content providers are also mistreated by search engine operators, which their material posted way down in search results.

My blogfather Bacchus at ErosBlog has decided, and announced in a post put up yesterday that we who are still out here on the open Internet to start pushing back. If we can’t be found on social networks or via search engines, we need to start promoting each other’s content. So Bacchus, following the brilliant Girl on the Net, has proposed that we have a regular feature called Share our Shit Saturdays (hashtagged with #SoSS). The proposal is simple:

I’m thinking maybe three links with a sentence or two about each, but here’s the core notion: you put this on your own website, not on a tumblr or a blogspot or facebook or any other social media. And the content you share and promote? Should likewise be content that’s on the independent web, not on anybody’s “free” social media server anywhere. Once your #SSoS post is up on any given Saturday, then, sure: promote the shit out of it on any social media that will allow the promotion. That’s a given. But this meme is all about promoting what’s left of the open web, on what’s left of the open web.

Bacchus has already put up his post, and I too will give it a shot, indeed I will. Here are this week’s shares, all artists.

• Netherlands artist Frans Mensink a site on the open web. I’ve commissioned a fair amount of work from Frans over the years, and his extraordinarily lush, high-polish style has never failed to please. He has been worth every Euro (and makes me wish I had a lot more Euros). Be sure to visit his galleries.
• Prolific CG artist KristinF has an open site, with samples of her work. She also has available products for purchase, like the graphic memoir Diary of a Party Girl. As those who have seen Kristin’s work on this site know, she is a remarkably bold and sometimes even transgressive artist who’s willing to go into some dark parts of the imagination.
• CG artist Drake is still going strong with his site Medusariffic, where he continues to publish his women-only A.S.F.R. universe comic. How many ways are there to transform a pretty woman into a work or art? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet Drake will have explored them all before he hangs up his mouse. For a sample of Drake’s work on-site, you can see “A Dreadful Accident”, a minicomic which he generously contributed to Erotic Mad Science a few years back.

That’s promotion for this week; more to come. Long live the free and open Internet!

I don’t do this too often, but just for today I’d like to announce that we’re having an extra-special holiday weekend run of images over at Infernal Wonders, which I like to describe as my “squickblog,” the place where I run imagery that many people would find a bit disturbing — or perhaps, a whole lot disturbing — but which has some sort of appeal for me. You can find a lot of icky fetishes and erotic horror over there. And I’m putting up a post every hour on the hour beginning at noon ET Friday and continuing through 6 a.m. ET Tuesday.

As usual for these long runs, the honor of the first post is given to an image of Santa Muerte, who presides as patroness of the blog:

[Dia de Los Muertos by DolceCarmella.]

The presence of Her deathly image today strikes me as particularly appropriate (it might strike more wholesome people as particularly inappropriate) because today, as many of you will know, is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. At first light on this day tens of thousands of young British and Commonwealth men climbed out of their trenches and walked into a hail of German machine-gun and artillery fire. By the end of the day perhaps 20,000 of them would be dead. If you’re an American, you might better appreciate the trauma by trying to imagine an event which killed 120,000 young American men on a single day.

[Soldat und Tod, by Hans Larwin (1873-1938).]

But perhaps that’s a sentiment more appropriate for yet another blog of mine that decent and wholesome people ought not to read.