By now I am sure you have all heard of Shaindy.com, which is a website catering to Orthodox Jews who want to meet other Orthodox Jews for extra-marital affairs. I am also sure you have browsed through - and laughed at - the Chassidic sex ads in the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Many of you may have even seen the Tefillin Date blog or tried to search for frum porn yourselves, either because you are truly interested in finding some hot women wearing nothing but sheitels, or you are a serious porn fan who likes to find new and exciting varieties of smut online.

I personally am fascinated with the whole subject of frum porn, purely from a statistical perspective (girls in long skirts just don't do it for me even if they are showing a little more ankle than normal). You see, I run a popular Orthodox blog that makes fun of Orthodoxy. Due to Google's search engine algorithms, many people who come to my site are searching for frum porn. Not just frum porn, but everything from "naked Lubavitch girls" to "Chassidic gang bangs", and much more. I have wondered for years what exactly they expected to find, who these people were, and what exactly would constitute frum porn.

By definition frum porn would be oxymoronic - that would mean that the porn stars would have to be dressed modestly and this would defeat the entire purpose of porn in the first place. Maybe it would mean that all products used in the video were certified kosher, and before licking any cream products off of each other the porn star would make the required blessing. Maybe all of the male stars had to be circumcised, or the women had to keep their hair covered during the video. 

"Bais Yaakov Girls Gone Wild" has been in my imagination since I was 15. I never thought there were any other sick yeshiva guys like myself, but I have been surprised again and again by the search traffic to my site and the random emails from horny Chassidim in Brooklyn who think that I hold the key to their frum porn adventures.

Several months ago I wrote about the Hot Chani phenomena sweeping through religious neighborhoods in the New York metro area. "Hot Chanis" are religious women who wear wigs but dress very scandalous with tight short skirts, hooker boots and lots of makeup. I posted an example and was flooded with emails from people seeking more pictures. I told them I was not in the porn business - but that they should take s stroll down any street in Flatbush if they wanted some Hot Chani action.

I have been rethinking this whole comedy thing, seems I could make a killing in the frum or Chassidic porn industry.

This awesome article first appeared on April 1, 2009 and has been republished as part of the series JEWCYEST WEEK EVER.

Good news, ladies: Evan Seinfeld, the Jewish porn star, musician, and actor is back on the market. He and Tera Patrick, also a porn star, have just announced that they are divorcing. The announcement is conveniently timed, as Patrick has a memoir, Sinner Takes All, that comes out at the end of the month. She claims that she and Seinfeld are divorcing because he wouldn't give up his porn career - she retired from the industry and is attempting to go mainstream. (Patrick seems to be trying the Jenna Jameson technique, as Jameson tried to cross over with her book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. No word on whether Patrick has plans to date a UFC fighter and have twins.)

For his part, Seinfeld says that's not the case. He told Page Six:

While it was great that we were the 'First Couple' of porn, the fact is Tera hates the industry. She's not a sexual person. We barely had sex in our own marriage. She's desperate to break into the mainstream, and just wants to generate press. I didn't choose porn over her. Our marriage had a lot of holes in it, despite what she claims.

For those of you itching to hook up with Seinfeld, here's a little background: he grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn and went to Camp Lokanda in Glen Spey, New York. He is the former lead singer of the group Biohazard and played Jaz on HBO's prison series Oz. No word on whether he's related to Jerry Seinfeld, though. Can you imagine how entertaining their family seders would be? 

As I'm sure you're all aware, last week marked the launch of the sixth season of "The Girls Next Door," E!'s reality show about life at the Playboy mansion. Kendra, Holly and Bridget are out, and Crystal, Kristina and Karissa (the latter two are twins) are in. As I curled up with Hef and the ladies, sipping a cup of Bedtime tea and rocking my sympathy pajamas, all seemed right with the world.

But as the half hour progressed, I couldn't help but be struck by something peculiar. The prevailing aesthetic, I noticed, was one that screamed "Aryan Nation": mounds of bleached blond hair, svelte hips...mounds of bleached blond hair.

Where, I wondered, were all the Jewish Playmates?

Well, it turns out they’re not that easy to find because indeed, they are few and far between. Out of approximately 670 Playmates since the magazine's inception, only a handful are known Jews. Cindy Fuller kicked it off in 1959, then Susan Bernard followed in 1966. Sally Sheffield posed in 1969, and Hef's longtime girlfriend, Barbi Benton (nee Barbara Klein) was also a Jew. Lindsey Vuolo was next in 2001, and most recently, Anita Marks in 2002.

And so, when I first sat down to write this, I thought, "How unfair! Playboy gives preference to the goys, promoting a singular notion of beauty." I thought I would be speaking on behalf of all Jewish women when I expressed my outrage that Jewish beauty is being overlooked or underappreciated.

But the more I look around, the more I realize that may be a bit out of touch.

Let us look first at Vuolo. Of all the Jews that have relieved themselves of their garments on the pages of Playboy, she seems to be the most notorious. Following her spread (haha), she was vilified by the Jewish community for the most part, and a nice summary of said vilification can be found here, in an interview she did with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

It's a painful read, but if you feel like a humiliating smackdown, go ahead and click over. I'll just wait. Done? OK. If you skipped that part, I'll summarize for you: Vuolo felt she had done nothing wrong by posing in Playboy, and Boteach took her to task for it. By the end, Vuolo said that she had begun to feel "like a bad person."

And Boteach isn’t the only one who feels like Vuolo let the Jews down; the same sentiment was expressed here at Jewcy. At other websites she was called stupid, blog commenters openly wondered what “happened to her,” and the general message was one we’ve all heard before: this is simply something that nice Jewish girls don’t do.

I'm beginning to wonder: is the lack of Jewish representation in this mainstream magazine a result of narrow definitions of beauty, or have Jewish women opted out of the running? And if it's the latter, is it because they truly don't want to do something like Playboy, or because they’re afraid that if they do, they’ll risk rocking the Jewish community boat to such an extent that they’ll knock themselves right off?

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The yentas over at celebrity gossip site Ohnotheydidnt are insisting that an actual Sarah Silverman/Jimmy Kimmel sex tape exists, citing ZackTaylor.ca's anonymous source that claims the twosome recorded it while on vacation back when they were a couple, and then forgot the camera in their hotel room! While I find this story, along with the grainy photos of the alleged encounter sent to Zack Taylor, tenuous at best, I can't help but hope it is all true. Horrible, right? The Sarah/Jimmy couple is one of my least favorite celebrity pairings, and we all know that Sarah was fucking Matt Damon the whole time.

Then why am I so interested? Honestly, it's because these two people, both of them hairy and somewhat misshapen, are some of the truest representations of actual-humanity that Hollywood has got. They're not Pam and Tommy, and they are certainly not Kim and Reggie; instead, they're you and me. They are that couple next door that never stops arguing, they are that couple you see making out in the same cafe every week and every time you see them you accidentally make eye contact and then can't control your own gag reflex. They are, undeniably, real human beings. And it's gross! So of course I want to see them having sex.

And I bet you do too. Just admit you'll be grabbing it from the torrents as soon as it's released.

I'm not sure if you guys heard, but we're getting a new President tomorrow, and apparently he wants to change a lot of things. A couple of Jewcy's bloggers weighed in on what they think Barack Obama's administration should focus on in the next four (or eight!) years.

Howard Schweber:

As the Obama administration initiates its promised interventions in the economy, a lot of people are talking about the desirability of being as green as possible. I am second to no one in my enthusiasm for the environment but with due respect to the ecological enthusiasts, maximizing green-ness is not the immediate priority. That distinction between immediate and non-immediate priorities is the key. As the Obama team goes forward, they need to keep in mind the need to operate on three distinct tracks: short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

Short term, the crucial thing is to blunt the effects of the economic collapse. The goal has to be to minimize the number of people who slide into working poverty as well as to blunt poverty’s worst effects. That means putting people to work and keeping them in their homes. There are a million proposals floating around; in judging between them, the administration needs to ask how quickly the proposal will get people to work, how effective the interventions will be in preventing foreclosures. The other question to ask is how effective any program will be in getting money into circulation. (For a really good example of how not to achieve these short-term goals, see the TARP program.) Tax cuts, subsidies, and public employment are all potentially perfectly good or potentially utterly useless mechanisms; it all depends on whether they are designed and implemented in a way that gets money into the hands of those who might otherwise slip into poverty. Conveniently, those are also the people who are most likely spend any money they receive.

In the medium term the goal is restoring credit. Here’s where we begin to look to the futures of the mid-size and larger firms. Here is also where the TARP program has failed miserably, creating a system of giveaways that banks are gaming to the hilt (see the Jan. 19th New York Times for some depressing details.) By contrast, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility that Timothy Geithner launched at the New York Fed is a good example of exactly what is needed; programs that will use federal money specifically and solely to increase the availability of short-term credit. Certainly we are right to be concerned about the stability of the banking sector, and the idea of initially pumping capital into banks was not a terrible one (although we obviously should have followed the British model of insisting that the money be used for lending rather than stashed away). But in the medium term, we care about the banks because they are the source of liquid capital, not because they are bastions of American virtue in and of themselves.

Looking to the long term, thinking green makes good sense, both from the perspective of reducing dependency on oil and forward-looking technologies. Long term, we need to be talking about infrastructure improvement, not just repair: broadband wireless everywhere would he an awfully good place to start. We should also be talking about education, and that includes postsecondary as well as primary education. Technical and vocational training, affordable public college, increases in general levels of literacy and numeracy; America needs a major push to improve education across the board. And at long last, we need what used to be called an “industrial policy” for this nation (although “postindustrial policy” might be just as good a term at this point.)

Finally, a few things not to do: reward bad behavior, encourage future recklessness, make the rich richer, dump money into the political cesspools that exist in many of our state capitals. And for god’s sake, let’s have some transparency, some oversight, and a modicum of accountability this time around.

Phyllis Chesler:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that the world-wide "plight of women and girls..(is) of particular concern to me." She "pledged" that the violence against women issues, including sex trafficking, and other "crimes" against women, will be "central to our foreign policy," that "we cannot have a free, prosperous, peaceful, progressive world if women are treated in such a discriminatory and violent way."

Stirring, Beijing-like words indeed. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice often said similar things. The question now is how much money and power the Obama administration will allot to rape crisis and anti-incest interventions, shelters for battered women, the Violence Against Women Act and the William Wilberforce Act Against Trafficking, and the Equal Right Ammendment--as they apply to women in America.

Beyond that, is America prepared to economically sanction those countries that engage in honor killings, stonings to death, female genital mutilation, arranged child marriages, polygamy, and forced veiling? If we are serious, that means we will radically alter our relationships to Muslim world countries and to countries in Europe which have become increasingly Islamified.

My advice? President Obama should immediately institute mandatory gender equality training in American grade and high schools. Very young girls are being indoctrinated to look and act like prostitutes. This is happening all over America, among all classes and races. This is a shameful development which we must solve here, right in our own backyard.

At the very least, we must ensure that the crimes of Islamic gender apartheid do not take root on American soil.

Continue reading...

I have it on good authority that many prominent conservatives read Jewcy for its porn coverage. That field has, admittedly, lain rather fallow these past several months. But given the intense interest shown in Sarah Palin -- particularly by my seagoing friends at the Weekly Standard -- we are proud to present the first minute of Hustler's new feature, Who's Nailin' Paylin'? You'll notice the governor's Fargo cadences have been badly imitated by stand-in, mouthing a generic Southern twang ("This ain't washin' outa my hair, y'all.") But I think you'll agree the other resemblances carry an admirable verisimilitude. Nice special effects on that ruptured oil pipeline. Enjoy.

 

Dear Jewcy,

Thanks for inviting me to be a guest blogger! I have to admit, at first I wasn't sure what to write about. I mean, I do post every so often on The Huffington Post--but those are usually impassioned tirades about the calamitous political situation. You know: how George Bush and the Republicans have destroyed the country, and the Democrats have let them do it, and how if Obama doesn't get on the stick we're in for four more years of it? But let's face it: that stuff's just no fun! 

Between the occasional HuffPo rant, and co-organizing San Francisco's Progressive Reading Series, and teaching creative writing, and promoting my new novel, Lady Lazarus, I've been pretty busy lately. Which is why I recently decided I needed a vacation. Somewhere beautiful, quiet, maybe a little on the chilly side. Somewhere slightly exotic, but not foreign, somewhere people wouldn't constantly be talking about literature, or yammering on about elections. Somewhere far off the political map.

That's how I wound up in Alaska.

And that's how Sarah Palin and I met, and fell in love - if that's what you call the hot, slippery, sexually supercharged relationship we're carrying on in secret - and how, at last, I found something to blog about.

It all started at the Baranof Hotel, a dignified old establishment on Juneau's North Franklin St., just a few blocks from the capitol. On weekday evenings the Baranof's almost-swanky lounge, the Bubble Room, bustles with legislators and staffers in snow shoes and Armani parkas, hunting rifles slung amiably over their shoulders, talking policy over scotchcicles and bowls of moose stew. Light jazz tinkles from hidden speakers, but can't drown out the baying of the sled dogs tied up outside. Everything about the Baranof says "romance," and when I made the reservation, I'd told them I wanted to splurge - what with the tsunami of royalties from Lady Lazarus, and the exorbitant salary of a creative writing teacher, I figured, sky's the limit. They gave me Suite 604, a nicely appointed suite with plush couches in the sitting area and a beautiful view of the Gastineau Channel and Douglas Island. "Home, sweet home," I thought, flipping through the television menus to see what my late-night porn choices would be. Little did I know, I wouldn't have to choose.

When I walked into the Bubble Room, I was greeted by waves and back-slaps and high fives. It seemed a little odd, but I figured Alaskans must just love left-wing Jewish artists from San Francisco. Everyone wanted to buy me a drink, and to talk about Lady Lazarus - again, I was surprised; I had no idea a book about poetry, punk rock, celebrity, and suicide would be such a hit on the Last Frontier. By midnight, when the sun had started to slant through the windows, I was in my cups, feeling pretty proud of myself for having chosen Juneau for my getaway. All that was missing was female companionship, so I called the bartender over and asked him if he knew where I might find some.

"Funny you should ask," he said, with a strange look of concern. "Someone's been trying to get your attention." I started to turn around, but he lunged across the bar and grabbed me by the shoulders.

"Be careful," he said. He squared his jaw and leaned closer. "Be strong."

At a table near the back sat the brightest bubble in the Bubble Room. She was wearing a red leather jacket, tightly belted, with big black buttons and wide lapels. Her hair was swept up and shimmering under faux-tiki torches. When our eyes met, her smile flashed with the kind of megawattage that can only be generated by fossil fuels. I was paralyzed. I tried desperately to think of how to introduce myself.

Jewcy, it was love at first sight.

Before I could come up with an introduction, hands grabbed my elbows and lifted me off the stool. Two tall, blond men in hunting jackets stood at my sides. Their sunglasses reflected the torches; their earpieces buzzed with secret instructions. They had identical clefts in their strong chins. "Time for your appointment," one said.

"Appointment?" I croaked.

"Her Babeness doesn't like your game. She wants to talk to you," snarled the other.

I looked over to where my beautiful bubble had been. Seeing a flash of red disappearing into an adjoining room, I suddenly understood.

They ushered me through the bar, slowed only by the many people trying to get me to sign their copies of Lady Lazarus. "I'm sorry!" I called back, as they dragged me through a door. The room was cold, windowless, concrete. There was a steel table on an incline, with a complicated network of tubes and pulleys overhead. Somewhere, the sound of water slowly dripping.

"If you wanted to impress me, staying in Suite 604 isn't the way." Behind me, in a high-backed leather chair, sat my lovely bubble. Her smile was the only source of heat in that chamber. She wrinkled her nose - so adorable! - as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

"W-why?" I said. "What's wrongwith Suite 604?"

The two Aryan goons started to snicker. "Like you don't know," one said. "Why else would you be here?" said the other. "All you New York journalists come here because of 604." In the chair, Her Babeness tilted her head and blinked a lot. I said I wasn't from New York, and I wasn't a journalist - which seemed to confuse the goons. "But... you look like a New Yorker."

"I'm a novelist," I said, somewhat indignantly. "From San Francisco. I'm on vacation."

"Boys," said the bubble. "Maybe you should take a lunch break."

When they had left, she motioned for me to have a seat on the steel table. I said I preferred to stand and she giggled, then stood and shoved me backward. I sat.

"See, not many people request Suite 604. It's got what we Alaskans call ‘a history.'" That's when she explained about VECO, the oil pipeline company that bribed basically the whole state legislature, not to mention Alaska's only U.S. congressman, Don Young, the ornery senator, Ted Stevens, and for good measure, Stevens's son Ben. The Feds had caught them by bugging Suite 604 and capturing some pretty incriminating discussions on tape. Suddenly I understood the warm welcome I'd gotten from all the government staffers: they thought the gravy train was back!

It turned out that my bubble of charm and sex appeal was none other than the governor of Alaska, who'd made much of her reputation by denouncing Alaska's good ol' boy system of corruption, even while she worked hard to help Stevens continue to extract pipelines full of pork spending from the federal government.

"Not a bad trick," I said. I pressed my palms against cold steel. It may have been the chilliness of the room, but I was shaking like a kid at the eighth grade dance.

"I know!" she said, biting herlower lip. "I like to play both sides."

I was sure now that Her Babeness was flirting with me. How I longed to pull her close! But I didn't dare.

"Governor of Alaska," I said. "And so smart, and so, um, physically, you know, attractive. You're doing pretty well for yourself."

That's when Sarah Palin put her hand on my chest, leaned close, and said, "It gets better than that, even..."

Jewcy, I'm sure you're reading this with your mouth wide open. I'm sure it's as hard for you to believe as it was for me - but I swear every word of it is true! As she led me out through a back door, and up a hidden staircase to the sixth floor of the Baranof, she told me something that blew my mind: She'd been chosen to run for Vice President. Of the United States!

Needless to say, by the time we arrived at Suite 604 the governor and I were weak-kneed and frothing with desire. She shoved me into the room and dimmed the lights and we fell onto the couch in a sweat. I fumbled with the belt of her jacket, but she pinned my arms under her knees and whispered in my ear, "Is it true about Jewish men? Are you really the Chosen Ones?" How to describe the look on her face? She was still smiling broadly, but her eyes pierced me with intensity, drilling into my skull as though I were a coastal plain in the ANWR, and she'd just caught a whiff of light, sweet crude.

Sarah unbelted her jacket, undoing each button with an unblinking wrinkle of the nose. What do you think she was wearing underneath?

"I like novelists," she said. "I like them a lot. In my administration, we're going to outsource the fiction to professionals. That way, we can privatize, and keep our hands clean, at the same time." Stark naked except for her mukluks and the latex gloves, dazzlingly beautiful, Her Babeness glanced around Suite 604 with a proprietary, satisfied look. "You know," she said in a husky voice, "a lot of people have gotten royally fucked in this room..."

Somehow, though my throat was parched, I managed to whisper, "Why do you think I requested it?" Sarah threw back her head and laughed. Then she picked up the remote control and tossed it in my lap.

"Stop talking, novelist," she said. "Save your words for the next war. They comped us the all-night porn package. You'd better conserve your strength."

Tomorrow: Sarah takes me on a moose hunt; the Secret Service roughs me up while Sarah watches; First Dude Todd Palin suspects something...

Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Lady Lazarus, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

She May Not Be Dressed Like a Diplomat: but she sure can negotiate some rocky terrain!First, they refuse to acknowledge Israel's existence. Then, they log on to a website that's doubly forbidden: Not only is it Israeli--it's Israeli porn. Who are these seekers of sexy skin? Oh, just a few hundred thousand (at least) Arabs in countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, and if you ask me, they're exhibiting some kind of newfangled Madonna and the Whore complex. "I hate Israel and will beat her down...or at least, beat off to her lovely ladies!" The fact that some of these countries even go so far as to block the Israeli ".il" domain isn't slowing these sneaky porn rats down, either. Nosireebob: They're logging on in droves to a site called Ratuv, especially now that the site has been translated into Arabic, with lots of detailed descriptions and a veritable assload of free pics.

It happened like this: After installing software that identifies where users are logging on, the managers of Ratuv discovered that a large number of their visitors were in Arab countries. They decided that a lack of diplomatic relations didn't have to equal a lack of sexual relations, so despite not being able to accept money for video downloads from these countries, manager Nir Shahar set to work making the site as hospitable as possible. With the Arabic translations and extra free pics, traffic from these countries rocketed to 100,000 hits per week. The Ratuv team is currently looking into creating and registering a similar site in Europe or America, so that they can legally accept credit card payments from countries prohibited by Israeli law. They're also eyeballing the possibility of making films in which Arab and Israeli stars come together. So to speak. Talk about a forbidden fetish.

Perhaps there is something to the old adage, "make love, not war," after all. Someday soon, the ambassadors and diplomats of the world might just have names like Dick Long and Wendy Whoppers.

There’s this website where you can look at Mormon missionaries posted around the world, and then if you click on their pictures you can see a short bio, and a picture of the missionary in question without his shirt on.

Is this, like, Mormon porn?

He's Hot, But: I'm not interested in being his third wife

Now that The New Republic’s Britt Peterson has come out as a highbrow porn star (well, extra), we thought we’d get in on the cerebral smut racket by offering the following compendium of recycled Jewcy articles all about the oldest profession in San Fernando Valley. We took some heat back in the day for doing what all Jewish magazines must do when they come alive and try to titillate the reader with uncensored displays of chosen carnality. A few dames in cyberville even claimed that the Jewcy

I’ve been thinking a lot about pornography recently. In the past, I’ve had a laissez-faire attitude about porn. It doesn’t do anything for me, but I’ve never been particularly bothered by it. I believe in free speech, and much as Playboy makes me roll my eyes, I figured it was ultimately harmless. Certainly an improvement over oversexed guys going out there and raping girls, I thought.
Playboy: kind of makes me gag now
But then, in the past few months, someone I know pretty well, someone from a very observant background who is, as far as I know, still shomeret Shabbat and kashrut, began making pornography. And I’m not talking a few scantily clad pictures, I’m talking a significant library of photos and videos available online of her doing a variety of things with a variety of partners of both genders. This is a girl who has a degree in biology from a top-notch university (something she touts on one of her websites), who spent time learning in a seminary in Israel, and who plans to teach Judaica. In one of the pictures someone sent to me she lies naked on a kitchen counter, her head hanging off of the edge and her naked breasts framing her face from above. The captions names her a naughty housewife.

Suddenly, my ‘whatever works for you’ attitude seems horribly naïve. Because I’m now paying little attention to the consumers of this porn, and instead considering seriously what gets a girl to the point where she feels it’s necessary or ultimately beneficial for her to have sex with someone for money. And beyond that, I’m thinking about the ramifications this must have on her family and her community. It is hard to imagine what, specifically, the ladies of the Sisterhood might have to say to the mother of a girl like this, but one can safely assume it would be brutal and sharp.

I have suddenly become an anti-porn crusader, and I hate it. I would prefer never to agree with Pat Robertson. I have no interest in sharing common ground with the Moral Majority. I wish I could throw my arms around all porn stars and tell them I think the work they do is great and important and not psychologically problematic at all, but I can’t, and I’m frankly horrified that I ever could.
Jesus May Love Pornstars: But Moses doesn't
In thinking about all this I did some research about halacha, Judaism and pornography. There’s a lot of information available online, which is good, because I have no interest in discussing this face to face with a rabbi. What I found was that, at least in terms of what’s online, no one in the Jewish world has anything really positive to say about pornography. Even the most liberal sources come down hard on pornography. No one in the Reform, Reconstructionist, or Renewal crowds is cheering publicly for porn stars. The only thing close to good that any Jewish source could bring themselves to say about Jews and porn was that at least these days Jews aren’t considered too unattractive to be in porn. And while I suppose it’s nice to know that the general public no longer considers Jewish girls prudish and frigid, I can’t say I’m overjoyed that the stereotype is now that Jewish girls are more in touch with their sexuality than gentiles. As Anne Roiphe writes in the column I just linked to, “With all our personal variety, we are probably no more or less sexy than anyone else. All the rest, negatives or positives, form a tall tale--and a slightly toxic one, at that.”

Amazingly, the discourse on pornography seen through a Jewish lens is really intelligent, and uniformly condemning. The condemnation is usually not angry fire-and-brimstone ‘God will/should strike pornographers with lightening’ (the exception coming, shockingly, from a Reform rabbi’s commencement address at Liberty University, of all places). Instead, Jewish leaders and intellectuals have clearly struggled with the various ways pornography has affected and is affecting the world and the Jewish community.

The discussion goes as far back as the Talmud, where a story is told of a man who’s so infatuated with a woman next door that he becomes deathly ill, and his doctors think the only way to make him better is for him to have sex with the neighbor in question. But the rabbis forbid it, and forbid anything even approaching it. They won’t even permit her to speak to him from behind a wall. Why? Because, the rabbis say, it’s better that he die than defame her dignity. (See Sanhedrin 75a, Rashi’s commentary).

Though one might expect the Orthodox world to be devoid of porn problem, that’s hardly the case. A chabad rabbi on askmoses.com discusses how to stop a porn addiction. A cover story from the Jewish Journal tells of an Orthodox rabbi caught in a porn addiction, and his work to try to stop it. Last year Arutz Sheva featured an anonymously written article about a porn addict in the frum community. This has prompted a number of castigatory responses, all of which address porn viewing exclusively. The idea that a member of the Orthodox world could be involved in making porn is well beyond the imagination of most of the rabbis choosing to deal with the issue.
Lindsey Vuolo: Hot Jewish Chick who thinks she's a bad person
Even outside the Orthodox spectrum, though, the reaction to Jewish pornography is pretty icy. Bitch magazine, has an article about Playboy’s first Jewish centerfold, and what it means for Jewish girls (in short: nothing good). Over at Slate there’s an awesome conversation between Wendy Shalit, Laura Kipnis and Meghan O’Rourke about the effects on porn on American culture. Though the three disagree in a lot of areas, none of them can bring themselves to say anything really positive, or even anything not-negative, about porn. Google books took me to a page from a book called How Do I Decide?: A Contemporary Jewish Approach to What's Right and What's Wrong By Roland Bertram Gittelsohn. Though the book seems pretty liberal, it comes right out and calls pornography “wrong.” Beliefnet is actually home to some of the most interesting discussion of porn and religion. They have a fantastic conversation between Shmuley Boteach of Kosher Sex fame, and Lindsey Vuolo, the Jewish Playboy centerfold discussed in the Bitch article. Go read the conversation now. Though Vuolo comes off as intelligent and generally well-spoken, Boteach’s arguments clearly get to her, and by the end of the interview she actually says, “I mean, you definitely made me think and now you've made me think I'm a bad person—.” It’s pretty incredible. Equally fascinating is a response to that interview by Bradley Hirschfield, Vice President of The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) and a modern orthodox rabbi. Hirschfield basically says that people shouldn’t be getting up in arms about the fact that Vuolo is Jewish. It’s not a problem exclusive to Jews, and he says Jews need to deal with it in the same way as Christians, Muslims and the rest of the world. The best line from his article is “I want to be very clear. If Jews have a problem with this, it ought to be a problem with Playboy, not with her as a Jewish girl. That is, their discomfort should be coming from the fact that a magazine is paying women to get naked for a camera.”
Joanna Angel: Someone should tell her that adding bagels doesn't make porn kosher
There is simply no justification for pornography in any facet of the Jewishly engaged world. No one is saying it’s okay. Of course, that hasn’t kept Jews out of the business. Ron Jeremy and Nina Hartley are Jewish, and here at Jewcy we’ve brought you interviews with Jewish porn star and producer Joanna Angel, as well as an interview with her distraught Jewish mother. You can even find an academic article on Jews in the porn industry over at the Jewish Quarterly. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any publication, organization or blog willing to rave about how Jews in porn is a good or even acceptable thing.

When I finished reading through all of these discussions and articles it occurred to me that what I’d been looking for was something that would let my friend off the hook. I wanted some rabbi somewhere to be giving away free heters to porn stars. But there doesn’t appear to be any such rabbi. And the more I think of that, the more I’m okay with it, even proud of it. I’ve written before about how important I think it is for us to provide realistic sex education and information to the frum community, but I’m relieved to find that even I have clear boundaries. And pornography is way out of bounds.

Wow. Says Mediabistro book blog Galleycat:

We hear that the August issue of Hustler is going to name the world's twenty "most beautiful" women, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former member of the Dutch parliament who recently published the memoir Infidel, just made it onto the list—the only author to do so, unless you count Jenna Jameson and Pamela Anderson (which, for the purposes of this discussion, I don't).

Because nothing says "Congrats baby, you've finally escaped the patriarchal oppression of your native land" like an endorsement of your hotness from Larry Flynt.

Tomorrow, if you get yourself to synagogue you’ll hear somebody sing The Song of Songs, which is full of titillating lines like, “Your love is more delightful than wine. Your ointments yield a sweet fragrance” (1:2-3), “My beloved to me is like a bag of myrrh, lodged between my breasts” (1:13), and my favorite, “Your hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of ewes climbing up from the washing pool; all of them bear twins and not one loses her young” (4:1-2).
Your teeth are like goats: And I mean that in a good way
I don’t know about you, but when a guy tells me my teeth are like a flock of ewes I pretty much lose all control. And since Wikipedia tells me that myrrh smells “sharp, pleasant, somewhat bitter and can be roughly described as being ‘stereotypically resinous’” you can imagine how anxious I am to find a guy who reminds me of a bag of myrrh in my cleavage.

So what’s the deal with this supposedly holy erotica?

Anyone who spent any time in Jewish day school can probably tell you that the rabbis made it very clear: no matter how many times breasts are mentioned (seven, by my count) it’s not actually about sweet action. Rabbinic commentators have generally understood the book to be allegorical. It’s about God’s love for Israel, or God’s love for Shabbat. Christian theologians understandably want to bring Jesus into the picture, and since the time of Origen have been linking the Song of Songs to the relationship between God or Jesus and the Church or the individual soul.

Problem is, there’s no hint of allegory in the text. We’re used to parables and metaphors in the Bible, but they’re generally explained to us in detail in the text itself. God doesn’t seem to trust us to figure out what he means based purely on his allegories, so he spells it out. That’s why, for instance, in the first chapter of Jeremiah it says, (1:13-14) “And the word of the Lord came to me a second time: What do you see? I replied: I see a steaming pot, tipped away from the north. And the Lord said to me: From the north shall disaster break loose upon all he inhabitants of the land.” God doesn’t just show Jeremiah a pot and say, “You’ll get it eventually,” Mr. Miyagi-style. The Bible isn’t supposed to be a big puzzle that’s incredibly difficult to decipher. And if that’s the case, a book about lovers is just a book about lovers, right?

It amuses me that so many rabbis are so intent on proving that the Bible wouldn’t write explicitly about sex. The characters in the Song of Songs aren’t doing anything particularly kinky or shocking. They’re enjoying sex and each other’s bodies. Even the most observant communities at least pay lip service to the importance of sex in a strong marriage. Why not use this as a model for a healthy/exciting sex life? It can be the reward you get for staying chaste until marriage, no?

Apparently not. The concern is that when some girls hear “His hands are rods of gold studded with Beryl, his belly a tablet of ivory, adorned with sapphire. His legs are like marble pillars set in sockets of fine gold…His mouth is delicious and all of him is delightful” (5:14-16) they just won’t be able to wait for the chuppa to get it on. Better tell them that Mr. Sweet Lips is really God so they don’t get too hot and bothered.

Continue reading...

I must admit to being deeply suspicious of the “Anti-Raunch Culture” warriors. I’m reading Pornified now, but all author Pamela Paul seems to prove is that men are, gasp, masturbating. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is a bit more likable (who doesn’t want to slam Girls Gone Wild Pioneer Joe Francis, both figuratively and literally, in the gut?), but completely lacks subtlety. While Levy insists that she’s not anti-sex worker, she spends less time skewering male pornographers and more those sluts who won’t shut up.

Besides, she claims we can’t like thongs since they come from the sex industry. I wonder how Levy feels about those brothel imports- jazz and tango.

Author Tracy Quan sums up my problems with Levy and co in this Fifth Estate article.

In America, for example, the anti-raunch consensus seems to be that society is going to hell in a hand basket — and college girls are getting rowdier — because sex workers aren’t cowering in their shame-filled closets. Recalling that Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown because Penthouse photos had resurfaced, Ariel appears to be nostalgic for the good old days when “being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from.” Now, to her dismay, being in porn is “itself the comeback.” Though she urges her readers to remember that sex workers are, indeed, working, you get the eerie sense that we’re like black people moving into a previously white neighborhood.

Well said.

At 24, Lux Nightmare is already on her second career. As a nineteen year old, she was creator and operator of That Strange Girl, one of the first altporn sites (i.e. a site with naked, unconventional-looking models) online. Now, Lux, along with San Francisco vlog queen Melissa Gira, is running the sexuality mega-blog Sexerati. Thanks to the wonders of 2AM g-chat, Lux and me catch up on press, entrepreneurship, and who killed alternative pornography.

Molly: By the time you were 19, you were the CEO of your own porn site. How'd you make the transition from cam girl to adult entrepreneur?
Geeky girls are hot: Lux Nightmare can eat your soul, and your harddrive.
Lux: The tale of my transition from altporn model/cam girl is a sordid story of betrayal, bad business ethics, sex, lies, and adultery—okay, mostly just the first two (and some of the third—it was porn, after all).

Like so many altporn models, I entered the adult industry wide-eyed, naive, totally dedicated to the idea of progressive porn...and completely clueless about things like fair compensation, contracts, and what I was really getting myself into. After about a year in the industry, I started to realize that the woman running the site I was working for was completely screwing me over: I was getting paid less than other models (and doing more work, to boot), and was repeatedly pressured into doing things for free (not to mention getting heavy guilt trips if I ever tried to work with another site: apparently, unbeknownst to me, I was "exclusive" to the site I'd started on.).

I got sick of this shabby treatment pretty quickly, and decided that the best way to avoid shitty bosses was to become my own boss. And so, with a handful of models, some basic knowledge of HTML, and a whole lot of moxie, I set out to change the face of altporn.

Molly: One of the things we both found is that fame, while beguiling, has no necessary relation to money. As the recipient of lots of loving media attention, what do you think press is good for?

Lux : It's definitely true that press doesn't necessarily equal money, but getting press can certainly help with the whole money-acquiring thing. More than anything, press is free advertising. It provides an aspiring artist/writer/businessperson/whatever with access to an audience; what you then do with that audience is your call. When I was younger, I mistakenly thought that one big press push would leave me set for life (or at least a couple of months)—what I now realize is that press is a mere window of opportunity, one that closes pretty quickly if you don't take advantage of it.

Getting lots of press functions similarly to paying for a lot of advertising: the more people hear your name, the more they learn to associate you with whatever it is that you're doing.


Molly: What lessons can businesspeople learn from the altporn world?

Lux: Don't be afraid to question the status quo: before altporn, a lot of people assumed that porn stars looked a certain way because they had to—that no one would be interested in porn that presented an alternative look. Clearly, altporn proved that idea to be very wrong.

The fact that something hasn't already been done isn't a sign that it shouldn't be done.


Molly: Despite Suicidegirls’ omnipresence, you've written in Sexerati that altporn is dead. What factors led to its collapse? And why are altporn pictures of men such an unmitigated failure?

Lux: I got some flack for declaring altporn to be dead: to a lot of people, altporn is still a thriving industry, with VividAlt and Burning Angel regularly putting out movies, and Suicide Girls still chugging along. I don't see that as altporn, however. At its core, altporn was about independent porn producers creating pornography that was wholly unlike anything being put out by the mainstream: porn that challenged standards of beauty, porn that dared to present a wide range of body types, porn that questioned common conceptions about sex and sexuality.

Altporn thrived because it was cheap and easy to create a website—far cheaper and easier than to, say, create a zine (which, I suppose, would have been my path if I'd been born about ten years earlier). There wasn't much financial risk in me creating a website (and there was the potential for a lot of payoff), so I didn't have a lot of qualms about taking a leap and doing something different. That's no longer the case, however; an increase in fees and regulations (thanks to Visa/MC and your friendly, anti-porn government) have made starting an adult site a complicated, expensive process, something which, not surprisingly, acts as a pretty big deterrent to wannabe indie porn producers.

To be fair, there are still some good altporn sites in existence (No Faux and Veg Porn immediately spring to mind)—but they're sites that began back when I was still working in porn. New sites are pretty few and far between, and they usually have a different back story (and better business sense, and more start-up cash) than I did back when I started my site.

The men issue is one I've often wondered about, and it's not quite something I've been able to answer to my satisfaction. I think it's a combination of a few factors: straight girls aren't (usually) raised to think of porn as something that's accessible to them, so a lot of them don't even think to look (or pay) for it, and altporn is too "straight" to really attract a gay audience.

There's also the fact that no one's really invested all that much money or effort into producing porn of boys—pretty much across the board, they've always been tacked on as an afterthought, a nod to equality. If someone actually cared enough (or was independently wealthy enough) to invest a lot of time and money into really trying to create good, heavily marketed, thoughtfully produced porn of boys, it might actually be successful. I just don't think there's anyone really willing to jump beyond the assumption that girls are the cash cow of porn and actually try to figure out how to really make good porn of boys.


Molly: Care to talk about Sexerati, and its sinister plans for the future?

Lux: I started making porn because I wanted to have a conversation about sexuality: to question society's assumptions about what's sexy, about how we have sex, about how we think and talk and write about sex. Porn was a good way to begin the conversation, but after a while it started to feel too limiting -- it wasn't a broad enough medium to really support the conversation I wanted to hold.

Enter Sexerati, a blog I co-run with Melissa Gira (another altporn expat). Melissa started the site in 2005, and—after a whirlwind week of bar hopping, blogging, and bonding in San Francisco last December— invited me to come aboard earlier this year. Sexerati picks up where porn left off: it's smart talk about sex, culture, and everything in between (with a bit of tech savvy and snark thrown in for fun). With a whole lot of smart posts and a hot video podcast ("The Future of Sex," put out weekly and hosted by Melissa), we're aiming to become the source for smart commentary on sexuality.

 

Invade East Timor in that dress?: The level of nudity in Indonesian PlayboyHow to program your quadrophonic stereo -- that's what did it:

The magazine's first edition sparked protests in Indonesia in April although it had no nudity and less flesh was visible in the issue than many other magazines on sale in the world's most populous Muslim country.

Part II: Joanna Angel

Jewcy: Your mom is concerned about your financials.

Joanna Angel: How many other twenty-five year olds do you know that are buying real estate and investing? I live on both sides of the country, and that’s expensive. You tend to spend a lot when you’re going coast to coast. When you’re in this business, you also have to look like a million dollars all the time and that isn’t cheap.

Jewcy: Did you go to public school?

Joanna Angel: My parents were a little nutty. They kept taking me in and out of Hebrew school and public school.

Jewcy: We were talking about the old clichés of adult stars and how they come from broken homes. But aside from having a stable high school environment, your upbringing sounds very different. It sounds nurturing.

Joanna Angel: There are a lot of people in porn. There are a lot of functional people in porn.

Jewcy: Tell me about the time your mom discovered your first piercing.Passover seder at the Angel household

Joanna Angel: [Laughs] I was doing tashlich on Yom Kippur and I raised my hand to throw bread into the water. And she was like, Oh my God. What is that? I was going to tell her but I didn’t want her to be upset.

Jewcy: Your first tattoo was on your shoulder.

Joanna Angel: Yeah, I actually have a lot of them now that she doesn’t know about. She knows about some of them but I forget which are the ones she knows about and the ones she doesn’t, so I try to keep track for when I have to cover up when I go home. Sometimes, though, I make mistakes.

Jewcy: Did you secretly desire to be a porn star in high school, or as a teen?

Joanna Angel: No, never. It never crossed my mind until my roommate in college asked me if I wanted to start a porn website with him. I knew nothing about porn initially. I grew up in the punk and hardcore scene—we were focused on making the world better, not sex. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was eighteen.

When my roommate did ask me about the website, I thought I was going to help run it or just write on it. It was exciting. It sounded like fun. I remember getting the website together and asking girls to model and I started to feel really hypocritical not doing it myself.

Then we took the photos of me and I didn’t think they were going to come out well and I remember looking at the photos and thinking, “Wow, I look kinda hot.” Originally, I thought I was a crusty vegan girl with short hair and bad skin but it came out kinda hot and it made me feel great.

Jewcy: Why did you start stripping?

Joanna Angel: I was sick of living in Jersey. I wanted to move and take it to the next level. I was in a crunch for money because of the website and I didn’t want to wait tables. And after I started the website, I saw a new side of myself and I didn’t mind going with it.

Jewcy: Have you ever had any feelings of guilt?

Joanna Angel: I don’t like pissing off my mom. I used to like it when I was little. And the only time I really thought that if my mom could see me, she would cry—and this is going to sound really fucked up—is when I did my first porno with a black guy. I was thinking, this right here is my mother’s worst nightmare. This is not what a nice Jewish mom wants her daughter to do.

And I feel bad when she sees some stuff. I remember when she borrowed my car and she opened the trunk and I had some DVDs in there, and she was like, “Oh my God. There are pictures of Joanna having sexual intercourse in the trunk of the car!” But I don’t feel guilty because I think I’m doing something wrong. I just don’t want her being upset.

Jewcy: Your mom thinks you want to get married eventually.

Joanna Angel: My mom’s been talking to me about it since I’ve been fifteen. And I do want to eventually get married. Yeah, why not?

Jewcy: Where do you want to be in ten years?

Joanna Angel: I would like to direct more and act less. I don’t think I’m that good at performing. But I do enjoy it. I wish I was better at it. I get nominated generally for Best Directing and Best Acting but other girls in my movies get nominated for Best Three-way or Best Oral.

Jewcy: Does it matter to you that your family can’t respect your profession?

Joanna Angel: I was never looking for validation from my family. It’s important that they’re in my life but I don’t need my dad to pat me on my back—I just want to see them and have them love me. It’s huge to me that my mom is still willing to embrace me and accept me. I think I took my mom for granted when I was growing up but not anymore.

Jewcy: How do you respond to your mom’s criticism that men take advantage of women in this industry?

Joanna Angel: Men take advantage of women in every industry. We live in a patriarchy. But that being said, when you want to do porn, you go to an agent and they ask you what you will do and what you won’t do—will you do girls? Will you do boys and girls? It’s not like that in the real world. They don’t give you options like that.

Jewcy: Does your partner in Burning Angel appear in any of the films?

Joanna Angel: No. He actually tried to talk me out of doing the movies. He tries to tell my mom that but she doesn’t believe him. It was just something I really wanted to do.

Jewcy: Do you still have a passion for having intercourse on film for public consumption?

Joanna Angel: Um, yeah. Well, as times goes on, I don’t think I’ll be doing more Burning Angel movies because it’s my own company so it may look strange that I’m promoting myself. But I am doing like six Hustler movies a year. I think the stage I’m at is kind of nice because I look forward to doing them now as opposed to tiring of them. There are some girls in the industry that work every day. You can’t enjoy that. But nobody enjoys what they do every day.

Jewcy: Do you still feel connected to your tradition considering your line of work?

Joanna Angel: I go home for the holidays. It’s a time to see my family and it’s a purely traditional thing for me. It’s not spiritual. And you know, I think I would feel uncomfortable marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish. I couldn’t live in a house with a Christmas tree—that would make me uncomfortable.

Dave Choe, Jewcy's resident guerilla art director, left the New York offices about two weeks ago for California. Since then, I've had to hop onto his computer on a semi-regular basis in order to seek out art source files, mockup designs, and various other creative assets to help get the site ready for launch.

Today I sat down to find some of the stuff Dave did before he left that we could use for the header images on the homepage. As I searched, it became increasingly apparent that, while Dave's "Source-Images" folder did contain some very helpful graphics, it was without a doubt, primarily a repository for the respectable collection of porn he was apparently accumulating while at the office.

And we're not just talking a couple images of Joey in his Underwear here and there (says Tahl, "Yes, that's his underwear. He's disgusting."). This is straight up porn.

So I got my files and left, later commenting about the predominance of porn on Dave's work computer to Tahl. He laughed for a second, and then asked whether I was serious. When I told him I was, he made me go back and delete everything in there that could be classified solely as smut... That is, the Farrah Fawcett nude screencaps had to go, but the fat naked hog-woman stayed. (I'm really sorry I can't link to that, folks. It's [somehow] possible that we'll have a use for it someday.)

Jewcy has a strict office network usage policy that Amy made us all sign a little while ago, though it's been made evident since then that on any given workday, two or more of those rules will usually be broken just in the name of research.

Don't tell anyone.

Also, keep it on the down-low that, while Dave's porn stash has disappeared, Craig's porn stash has grown exponentially.