In an effort to boost the quality and quantity of Israel's sex life, Tel-Aviv recently hosted the country's first ever sex festival. The 'Sextival', as it is called, was co-sponsored by Playboy and organized by ex-model Nitzan Kirshenboim. The event featured an array of stalls, workshops, toy sales, erotic shows, Playboy bunnies, and art exhibitions.

The highlight of the Sextival was a contest crowning the best stripper in Israel (broadcast live on Israel's digital cable channel Ego) and a raffle with a trip for two to Hugh Hefner's legendary Playboy mansion. Although the event brought out a few protesters, for the most part the three-day affair went without any problems.

Of course no major event in Israel is without political significance. A sex festival, much like the gay pride parades, is a unique phenomenon in the region. You will not find one in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, or Iran. As Nitzan Kirshenboim, the woman behind the festival jokingly pointed out: "Tel-Aviv can now brag about a new record. We have the largest number of vibrating dildos in all of the Middle East."

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Friend of Jewcy Harlyn Aizley on what to do during the High Holy Days when you’re a non-practicing Jewish lesbian and your wee daughter has just developed an interest in the Russian Orthodox church next door:

The thing about my people is going to temple during the high holidays ain’t easy. You need to belong or you need a ticket or you need someone to invite you. It’s easier to go to church and for a moment I thought maybe we should just go to a church where we could mumble things in Hebrew and secretly be celebrating the Jewish high holidays.

 

The Stranger’s article on the dearth of female stoners (via Gawker, via Feministing) is so right on — not about pot, but about the relationship between women and work:

Perhaps the obstacle to female toking is a fear of looking lazy. Getting stoned is, in effect, a great way to relax. Men are allowed to be lazy—being stoned is part of their farting, pajama-wearing, video-game-playing pantheon of acceptable male relaxation techniques. Since Jeff Spicoli made his debut in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and continuing into the entire oeuvre of director Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), stonerdom is an accepted part of modern maleness. Their sloth is even kind of adorable.

But modern women are not allowed to be lazy, adorable stoners. Women have to go to college (which they're now doing at higher rates than men), and then get their careers going quickly, before their biological clocks run out. Then they have to have kids and take them to all of their activities. There is no time for women to be slovenly and relax—and if women do relax, it has to be at a gym.

Dude, that’s not about the fear of looking lazy—that’s about the fear of being lazy. And laziness is a grand American tradition, one to which my gender should really be demanding access.

We happen to live in a moment when female laziness is genuinely subversive. The conservative side of the cultural spectrum expects us to work tirelessly—and without pay—to maintain our households. Failing in her feminine duties: The most subversive woman in HollywoodThe progressive side expects us to work equally hard to break the glass ceiling. Meanwhile, the ostensibly-apolitical forces of pop culture want us to weigh 93 pounds and wear full-on makeup whenever we leave the house, both of which require a hell of a lot of effort if you’re not attached at the hip to Rachel Zoe. At this point, there’s nothing more radical than a woman who doesn’t clean, doesn’t strive, and doesn’t work out.

I’m being a bit provocative, obviously, but I’m also not entirely joking. Think for a moment about why people are lazy: because it’s pleasurable. Because lying around in front of a funny movie eating popcorn is more voluptuously enjoyable than either scrubbing the bathroom floor or sitting in a cubical or doing 45 minutes on the elliptical trainer. And female sensual pleasure is still a deeply threatening thing.

The Stranger sort of gets into this:

With all this social pressure on women not to be stoners, the gender divide is not surprising. Every aspect of getting stoned is banned from women's psyches—relaxing, eating, and feeling pleasure. It's reminiscent of old-school ideas about female sexuality—orgasms aren't ladylike so why would women want to have them?

How depressing is that final sentence? It's nice that we live in a society where female sexualty is (semi) accepted, but have we really swapped the old taboos against having orgasms with new taboos against, like, sitting down and having a nice meal? As if women are only entitled to pleasure if it's sexual? If so, maybe we do need a movement of feminist slackerdom. If you're with me, let's all get seven-layer burritos and go watch Daria DVDs. Take that, patriarchy!

“Why hadn’t I known Jews could be so sexy before?” asks a tourist visiting Israel in Miriam Libicki’s illustrated essay. American Jews like to joke about the aphrodisiac powers of the Holy Land, which can turn even the most ardent universalists into fetishists of their own people. Is it the sun? The complexion-flattering tendencies of nationalist pride? Libicki, who grew up Modern Orthodox in Ohio and moved to Israel to enlist in the IDF, has another idea. We’re suckers for the transgressive, and as Israel’s reputation on the world stage gets more controversial, coveting a man or woman in uniform just gets kinkier. You know the pick-up line: Baby, you can occupy my territory any time. To read ...

“Just looking.”

What is wrong with just looking?

Does it harm anyone just to look?

I had said that I would blog about evil today, but certain events this week have led me to write about lust instead.

One of those events was pricing a fence for our back yard. Sticker shock! Could a fence be so important that someone could spend three months' salary on one?

FrostWhat did Robert Frost mean by this line: Good fences make good neighbors. (Bonus points if you can recall the name of the poem.)

Is the poem about the irony of meeting your neighbor only when building a wall between you, or is it a metaphor for constructing social fences between people? Social fences make good relationships?

There are several religious Jewish families in our neighborhood. We’re even friendly with some of them. We recently saw some of these Jewish daughters hanging out with some teenage boys who are not Jewish. Normal for a secular teenage girl, unusual for a religious one. Then they were playing some kind of game that kids play. But one of the non-Jewish boys was overheard taunting one of the girls, “You can’t touch me because you’re Jewish!” I’m certain that he didn’t make that up.

Good fences....

Maybe he meant good fences as opposed to bad fences. The narrator’s voice comes across as critical of the wall, but acknowledges that his neighbor’s belief in the wall comes from his father – that is, from tradition. He has a tradition that good fences make good neighbors, but he may not know why.

Another Jewish fence besides the touching thing is the looking thing. If you have a significant someone in your life, man or woman, how do you feel when he or she looks at other women or men? How would it feel if you were absolutely certain that he or she never had eyes for anyone else?

How do you yourself feel when you're playing the seeker?

That feeling is totally physical. There is nothing spiritual about it. Once, after hearing me say this, some guy challenged me -”Isn’t it possible to look at a woman and just appreciate her beauty without it being sexual?”

Well, I guess theoretically, but not practical for 99.9999995 percent of the men out there.

The Entire PlanetMeaning, there are approximately three dozen men on the entire planet who can pull it off.

Judaism says that if you look merely at a woman-who’s-not-your-wife’s little finger in an aroused way, you are objectifying her, which is bad for you. Makes you more of an animal, less of a holy soul.

What’s a poor fella to do?

Well, he could start by finding a soul mate. And with her channel all of that physical energy into a synergistic spiritual fusion that can only happen when you’ve made a binding commitment to each other.

A soul mate isn’t the solution, but she can help.

Like any addiction, the surest way out of the wandering eye syndrome is a 12-step method. The first step is to admit you have a problem.

So men (and women) should at least be honest. Instead of “just looking” they should say, “Just lusting”. It’s not going to make your partner feel better, but it’s the way to start.

Here’s a little exercise you can do: next time you're out there - try counting how many times in one hour you wander after your eyes. Then challenge yourself to go an entire hour without seeking.

As usual, please share your results below!

This is my final guest blog of the week. Thank you to Jewcy for inviting me and thank you everyone for welcoming me here. Your comments and feedback have been always interesting, at times uplifting and occasionally moving. I will continue to blog my Friday Table Talk over at my usual space, (if there is enough clamor, maybe the good folks at Jewcy will invite me back some time!) Please stay in touch, and don't forget to check out the book that everyone's talking about.

Wishing you a truly Shabbat Shalom.

PS – Does anyone remember Opus the Penguin?

Opus

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.

 

Two of my brothers recently started attending Orthodox synagogues where mechitzas divide men from women, ostensibly to eliminate improper thoughts in shul. As a gay man, I never know where to sit. Seating me with a bunch of men is like locking Jackie Gleason in a delicatessen, as the old Jackie Mason joke goes. But if I were to sit with women, my own beauty might distract everyone around me. I could sit in a section composed solely of gay men, but then we’d all distract each other. To be safe, I’d have to sit in a room with only one other person, a lesbian. But first, we’d both have to undergo testing to make sure neither of us had any latent bisexual tendencies.