One benefit to audio erotica is that it keeps your hands and eyes free, unlike books and videos. It’s also a convenient way for two or more people to experience the story simultaneously. But I was neutral about the newly launched clickforeplay and its adult radio plays … until I listened to a sample.

Hot.

My hopelessly Californian ears can’t identify the type of accent other than “sexy British” but honestly that was enough for me. These aren’t stories read aloud or moans and panting with the occasional dialog thrown in — these are scripted radio dramas that just happen to be erotic, and each lasts about 12 minutes. They’ll be a nice addition to the old-timey Mystery Theatre podcast that keeps me company on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Our plays, which last around 12 minutes each, are designed to set your imagination running into all sorts of places and situations. As each one builds to its climax through thoughtfully devised plots, many of which could happen to you, you will picture in your mind’s eye each character and feel what they are feeling, such is the power of the stimulated mind. Some people describe our plays as porn, and they might be right, but we believe that it’s the classiest form of pornographic entertainment on the web

They also pay 50 pounds if they produce your scene.

In a tip almost worth of Sexier Sex, entertainer Aubrey O’Day

gives women a sex-tech tip for safe steamy sex: watch your homemade sex video — and then watch your man delete it.

O’Day Insists Boyfriends Delete Sex Tape Footage
The singer admits she gets turned on by filming her steamy sex sessions and then watching them afterwards but she takes precautions to make sure the footage never ends up online or on a DVD.

She tells Complex magazine, “I’ve made all of them delete it right after we watched it. … I watched them delete it.”

I have an even better idea, though. Bring your own laptop and camera and delete it yourself.

Meanwhile, if you want to thumb your nose at all those researchers who claim that putting a television in the bedroom kills your sex life, O’Day has another tip for those who like to watch video but don’t want it captured at all:

“If you do a live feed through the TV, you can watch it on the TV while you’re doing it and it never records.”

The Calgary Herald has a nice introductory piece about consumer-grade teledildonics:

Sending good vibrations over the Internet
Cyber sex isn’t just the late-night pastime of techno-tarts, sex addicts and pedophiles.
[snip]

“That mental and emotional connection you make during cybersex, even when you’re just typing words or sending emoticons or photos, makes the body respond. Now there’s a physical device that — albeit still too clunky — your partner can control, which augments the experience,” says Regina Lynn, a Los Angeles-based columnist for Wired magazine.

“It not only bridges the gap between mental and physical, but now you can be stimulated without typing one-handed.”

Can’t make it home for a lunchtime romp with your lover? Why not put a “do not disturb” sign on your office door and log in to a private chat room for a cyber-quickie with your spouse?

“It’s a nice way to send that extra-special message home from work,” says Lynn. “Or if you’re a soldier, you can schedule time at home with your wife and connect intimately.”
[snip]

Techno-tart? I think I want a t-shirt that has that emblazoned across the chest.

The second life/ohmibod party starts at 10pm in-world time, which is Pacific time for those of you who only have a first life. *evil grin* I’m going to the in-person event since it’s only 20 minutes away, but if I can get on a machine, I’ll be there in SL too.

I asked Stroker Serpentine when the HUD/toy demo would occur and he said “early,” and I have the impression that they’ll try to do it within the first hour or two of the party. Presumably it will take place when enough people have arrived in person and in-world, and when all the tech is working as it’s supposed to. No one seems to want to commit to telling me a particular time, though; sounds like it’s a go-with-the-flow kind of thing.

(Stroker also asked me what time I’m arriving. I said “ten o’clock, isn’t that the time on the press release?” and he laughed at me. I added, indignantly, “I grew up in the sticks and to me ten o’clock means be there at ten o’clock even if it’s a hipster Hollywood thing.” Grrrrr.)

I’ll keep you posted on twitter/facebook/myspace. (Search by email, ginalynn@gmail.com, or by name “regina lynn” and request to follow/friend. I’ll do a last check at the computer before I leave for Hollywood and accept all the invites.)

I got this nice-but-also-sad email just now, from the Playboy Radio producers I work with:

First and foremost I want to say thank you so much for being a part of our team and doing our Sex in the News for so long. We’ve absolutely LOVED having you on! Due to our merger w/ XM Radio, which launches on Monday, Sirius has asked us to make some changes to the show. We are taking the Sex in the News segment and the show in a different direction and will no longer need you to come in every Tuesday to do the news. Again, we’ve loved having you. Please stay in touch with us and let us know when you are promoting something, so we can have you as a guest. We will miss seeing you every week!

I’ll miss it too. I am grateful to have had the opportunity — and even as I indulge in some personal mourning at the loss, I look forward to what’ll show up next. Because something always does. Right? Right.

Here’s a badly cut-out screenshot of the OhMiBod HUD (”heads-up display,” or in normal-people talk, “controller”):

You can use the keyboard and drumpad (which looks like the Simon Says game) to create your own sounds for the OhMiBod vibrator to respond to, or bring in music tracks for a richer experience. I haven’t figured out yet how to grant someone else control of my OhMiBod but I’m pretty sure that’s the point of the HUD, it being teledildonics and all.

Tomorrow is the official demo and launch so today’s top-secret, available-only-if-you-know-who-to-sleep-with HUD might not even be fully functional; after work I’ll test it out with my OhMiBod and see what I can figure on my own.

But it’s pretty, with a look-and-feel that matches the OMB rather than some weird cybertechno design or , and the big buttons are easy to click even for a Second Life dabbler like me. I was able to hear the music when another friend played with his copy of the HUD, which I like - if someone else is using music to control my vibrator, I want the whole room to hear. Heh.

You can use your OMB with Second Life without this HUD, by plugging it into the audio jack and going anywhere in-world with music or sound. But this promises to add that extra dimension of erotic connection between people.

It seems like someone picked up the calendar by February and tilted it so that all sex-tech events fell into September: this Saturday in particular. I can’t get up to San Francisco for Arse Elektronika after all, for a variety of personal reasons (and I’m very sorry about that, I hate to miss you), but because the live celebration of the OhMiBod / Second Life interface is happening in Los Angeles, I will be able to go to that.

The live party is at a private house and I’m not in charge of the guest list, but you can attend in Second Life, at Sextoy Dave’s Party Place in Eros the North Pole, home of Virtually Adult.* They’re doing all those Hollywood Lifestyle things (live and virtual), with strippers and celebrities and giveaways and DJs and swimming pools, but the important thing is the OhMiBod / Second Life HUD is finally out of NDA and that means I can talk about it.

For now, I’ll stick with the press release description, as I haven’t seen it in action (and Brian and Kevin, why haven’t I, hrmmmmm?).

The new interface uses a specially designed heads-up display (HUD) to control OhMiBod technology virtually. Players can get the HUD for free at Strokerz Toyz and VirtuallyAdult (two adult stores within Second Life) as well as at virtual social events sponsored by the OhMiBod Squad.

Once activated, the OhMiBod HUD allows the player to create music to affect the patterns of vibration, as well as control the intensity of those vibrations. Back in the real world, the OhMiBod also reacts to the music played at virtual events, where avatar DJs spin music at raves, parties, and nightclubs.

I’m not very good at publicly documenting things while I experience them, although my thorough test of the horrible Blowguard — a blowjob accessory so awful I didn’t even publish my response to it — proves that I can take pages and pages of notes with old-fashioned pens and paper while actually, er, testing.

But I’m going to ask my companions to remind me to twitter the OhMiBod demo if I have cell service up there. My Tweets aren’t public so you’ll have to request to follow me by, oh, noon on Saturday, so that I can approve you (and I won’t be hurt if you un-follow after the event, no commitment expected, heh).

*Correction from the organizers: SexToyDaves Party Place isn’t on Eros, it is at the North Pole, home of Virtually Adult. This is also where we will premiere the brand new Virtual Vending system that allows you to purchase real life products using virtual currency, in this case Lindens. What this does as you can see, is allows anyone in a virtual world to be anonymous with their purchase history, much like the “plain brown wrapper”!

Franklin Veaux, creator of the sex game Onyx, offered Playboy Radio listeners a discount code so you can register your copy for $29.

Onyx guides two to six players through hours of sexual exploration in a Monopoly-meets-Truth-or-Dare-meets-Cranium kind of way. Look for my full report in a month or two, when the magazine publishes my article; but the gist is that the game is surprisingly fun and will provide hours of entertainment through the cold dark winter to come.

You can download Onyx and play at the make-out level for free, but to get to the spicy stuff, you’ll want to register. The code is playboy08. (All lower case, btw, as caps probably won’t work.)

Reason number 439 that I’m a better columnist than a blogger: I forget to post things ahead of time. I’ve known for almost a week that this week I’d do the Monday Sex in the News instead of Tuesday, but did I think to tell you? No. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s not a deliberate plot on my part to keep you confused and guessing. It’s simply that my writing rhythm is too geared toward a weekly deadline (still!) and that I am not used to writing about things I’m a-gonna do, versus things I (or others) have done and had time to think about.

I am better at alerting people to things via Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, btw, if you want to follow/friend me there. (I’m “regina lynn” on all of them, or search ginalynn@gmail.com.)

And now, the news! [Read more →]

Yeah, yeah, whatever, there’s a sex machine in Dacia’s new short film, but LOOK AT THAT WALL OF BOOKS! *droooool*

Dacia’s Love Machine chronicles Audacia Ray’s efforts to sell a sex machine — namely, The Love Machine — on Craigslist. The 25-minute film costs $2.99 to download and is DRM-free.

What better way to celebrate the advent of sex machines in mainstream film than to check out Dacia’s documentary? It’s perfect timing, what with the success of Burn After Reading last weekend (which I got to see with the Monkey Rocker inventors, whom the Coens’ propmaster called upon for consultation and design work during the development of the sex machine in the movie. I was one seat away from fame-by-association! LOL).

Meanwhile, I have a new, not-yet-on-the-market sex machine in my office right now that I promised to test and review for its inventor, as soon as I either a) find my one vac-u-lock dildo or b) acquire a replacement vac-u-lock dildo. The details are still NDA but it’s so exciting to see what people come up with.

On that note, here’s a column about sex machines that debuted at the Adult Novelty Expo in July.)

My alumni magazine reports that a UC Davis professor of communications published a book about “applied interpersonal communication,” which here means “flirting and carrying on,” in which he found reasons for why a female “no” sounds like “yes” to many young men.
[Read more →]

Apologies for not posting show notes last week - the day went pear-shaped and then I never got back to it. And since this week’s could easily be 2000 words, I’m breaking it into two posts. And next week I might start spreading the posts out over several days, so I have more room to discuss and start discussion, and am not blasting you with a huge digest almost-every Tuesday.

First, I jumped on the “revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) so it doesn’t assume kinky behavior is a mental illness” bandwagon and the recent petition circulating among sex-positive folks.

(Well, actually, FIRST, I described my adventure in rescuing a puppy from the streets and finding its home and returning it to the lady — and I did this all in Spanish, of which I’m proud. SECOND, I noted that I got to have teh sex yesterday for hours and hours until I could barely sit down in the studio this morning and was still rather aromatic. But THIRD, I dove into the news with … the petition.)

[Read more →]

CNN says that Philips is launching a sex toy in the UK and muses about whether other big electronics companies will follow.

You mean like Hitachi?

I realized the only other sex-tech — not sex and sometimes tech, not tech and pop culture which sometimes includes sex — columnist I know is Bonnie Ruberg’s Click Me in the Village Voice.

[Personal aside: Click Me is both fun and achey for me to read, because she's covering a lot of the same stuff I have, but with a different perspective and voice and slant and also it's a different time. So much can happen in a year or more online; a person I interviewed or a website I covered four years ago has changed greatly since then, so Click Me has been a good way to see what's goin' on. At the same time I confess to a twinge that's both nostalgic and mournful.]

Audacia Ray, who wrote Naked on the Internet, also hits the sex-tech thing most of the time, although she expands beyond the tech as well, covering the sex worker angle.

I list a number of names in the left margin of this blog, many of whom cover sex-tech more than most. (And I know I need to update and add to that list; time time time time time.) But who is covering it exclusively? Is the distinction even still .. distinct? Or is tech so woven into our sexual relationships now that it’s silly to give it a beat of its own?

If you’re out there, whether it’s a blog, a series of features, an investigative report, a book … let me know, willya?

FWIW, I don’t think it’s silly, just like some sex writers focus on monogamy, others on youth, others on polyamory, others on gender issues, others on health…

Sex in the News was on vacation this Tuesday but that doesn’t mean no one was making sex-tech news.

The BBC reports that Japanese geeks have tied ultrasound to computer images to engage the sense of touch. Think we’ll see it at next year’s Virtual Worlds Expo?

Takayuki Iwamoto and colleagues from the University of Tokyo have now demonstrated a simple haptic device that employs a number of ultrasonic transducers, which emit ultrasound.

Sound is a pressure wave, meaning that as the inaudible sound waves from each of the transducers interfere, they can create a focal point that is perceived as a solid object.

The team’s prototype system includes a camera which tracks the position of a user’s hand and shifts the output from the transducers to move the focus around with the hand. The result is a feeling of tracing the edge or surface of the virtual object.

Canadian researches discovered a group of Kenyan female sex workers whose bodies resist HIV infections.

The discovery could lead to the improved design of vaccines and drugs to fight the deadly virus, which infects an estimated 40 million people worldwide, the scientists say in a new report.

In the new study, Adam Burgener and colleagues note that 140 of more than 2000 sex workers studied in Nairobi, Kenya, appear resistant to HIV infection. Although evidence suggests that certain biological factors in their vaginal fluid may play a role in resistance, the exact identity of these substances was unclear.

The scientists used a high-tech analytical method to compare differences among proteins in vaginal fluids from HIV-resistant women and those infected with the virus or susceptible to it. HIV-resistant women had proteins significantly different from other women. Vaginal fluids of the HIV-resistant women had higher levels of proteins with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory actions.