The New York Times takes a peek backstage at the Hustler Club in Manhattan with an interactive panoramic shot of the unglamorous dressing room that lies beyond the stage lights.

In any act of fantasy — from a feature film to a political campaign — there is a hidden place where the dirty work gets done, where the make-believe is made.

In Hollywood, this is the editing room; in Washington, the spin room. At Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, a strip joint on Manhattan’s West Side, it is the dancers’ private dressing room where the image of available sexuality and the naked facts collide.

Tucked behind a closed door upstairs from the dance floor, the dressing room is a shrine to female beauty — to the tireless attempts to tease the hair into a proper state of sultriness and adjust the bosoms upward at just the right incline. It is a small piece of the contemporary demimonde (strippers nibble take-out food in thongs and gold lamé). Near a plastic bowl of pretzels, a topless beauty steams the wrinkles from her ball gown with an iron. A tall brunette in nothing but a G-string wanders by. She is brushing her teeth.

"Where the Dancers Dress to Undress."

When Charlie Stross -- the mad, gonzo antipope of science fiction -- told me he was working on a Heinlein-esque novel, I wasn't surprised. Old Robert A. Heinlein's classic fiction was some of the best action-driven sf ever written. Then Charlie told me he was working a late Heinlein-esque novel and my eyes bugged out.

Towards the end of his career, RAH's novels got very long, very meandering, explicitly sexual, and very weird. Turned out, he had a tumor that was blocking the flow of blood to his brain (really!) and after it was removed, his fiction (and, reportedly, his personality) really changed again.

And it was those giant, pervy books that Charlie was setting out to pay tribute to.

Saturn's Children is that novel. It's the story of Freya, a sex-bot who was engineered (along with her untold legion of near-identical, near-immortal sisters) to be the perfect pleasure-toy for human masters. Unfortunately, the human race went extinct before Freya was ever booted up, leaving her (and the rest of the robots that comprise galactic civilization) with no purpose in life.

Robot society is sick -- because it was created in the image of our own. Robots are hardwired to obey humans and to serve them and their governments. When humans let themselves go extinct, the robots divided into two castes: those who wired to be empathic and those who were not. The non-empaths seized the moment: they formed shell corporations that bought their robot bodies from their dead and absent owners, and effectively owned themselves. Once this aristocracy of "free" robots was established, they ruthlessly enslaved the rest of robot society, seizing their deeds and slave-chipping them into obedience.

The robots yearn for -- and dread -- the reappearance of humans. The hardwired robotic obedience to humans means that the robots clique that successfully engineers a new human (preferably without releasing the dread "pink goo" -- the robotic bogeyman of self-replicating organic material) may be able to liberate robotkind, or enslave it forever.

Against this backdrop, Freya lives and (nearly) dies as she finds herself embroiled in a series of interplanetary intrigues, shuttling from world to world in realistic (and therefore slow and miserable) spaceships that can take a decade or more to reach Eris and the rest of the outer system. In a book laden with science-fiction in-jokes, philosophy and sly critiques, this may be the very best fillip. Stross puts the terrible lie to the idea of sub-lightspeed space-travel and explores the only way a species could effectively colonize our own system: by turning into robots, willing to amputate limbs to reduce payloads (or, in extreme cases, to simply ship "soulchips" bearing copies of their personalities around), willing to perch atop highly radioactive fission reactors, willing to take a one-way ticket to the outer reaches of our system.

What's more, Stross manages to find the narrative juice hidden in this constrained version of space-travel: to tell a tightly plotted, Maltese-Falcon-esque thriller with reversals and surprises galore, spread out across decades of objective and subjective time.

It's quite a remarkable trick. It's one that neither Heinlein, nor Asimov (the other author to whom the book is dedicated -- as is only proper, given Asimov's prominence in society's conception of what a robot is) managed. This is a fabulous book, a witty and deep critique of the field's shibboleths, and well worth the price of admission.

Saturn's Children

The New York Times reports New York governor turned Luv Gov Eliot Spitzer won't be charged for his part in the call girl scandal that ended his political career.

On March 6, 2008, this office announced the filing of criminal charges related to an international prostitution ring known as the Emperors Club V.I.P. The investigation which led to those charges began when this Office learned of payments made in a questionable manner by former Governor Spitzer to a bank account in the name “QAT Consulting.” After the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation Division, the office determined that the QAT Consulting account and a similar account at another financial institution had been used to launder more than $1 million worth of criminal proceeds derived from the Emperors Club V.I.P.’s prostitution business.

Eliot Spitzer has acknowledged to this Office that he was a client of, and made payments to, the Emperors Club V.I.P. Our investigation has shown that on multiple occasions, Mr. Spitzer arranged for women to travel from one state to another state to engage in prostitution. After a thorough investigation, this Office has uncovered no evidence of misuse of public or campaign funds. In addition, we have determined that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against Mr. Spitzer for any offense relating to the withdrawal of funds for, and his payments to, the Emperors Club V.I.P.

In light of the policy of the Department of Justice with respect to prostitution offenses and the longstanding practice of this office, as well as Mr. Spitzer’s acceptance of responsibility for his conduct, we have concluded that the public interest would not be further advanced by filing criminal charges in this matter.

In a statement, Spitzer responds:

I understand the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York has decided that it will not bring criminal charges against me. I appreciate the impartiality and thoroughness of the investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office, and I acknowledge and accept responsibility for the conduct it disclosed.

I resigned my position as governor because I recognized that conduct was unworthy of an elected official. I once again apologize for my actions, and for the pain and disappointment those actions caused my family and the many people who supported me during my career in public life.

I asked my friend Debauchette, a blogger and ex-courtesan, for her thoughts on the news. She writes:

It's definitely annoying.

I suppose my immediate response is that it seems like a pretty typical case of the john being released while the prostitute, or in this case, the agency, gets punished. It's sad to think that Emperors would have been left alone if it hadn't been for Spitzer. He's the one they were after, and now he gets off while the agency owners get god knows what kind of punishment. Put this within the larger context that Spitzer saw prostitutes while actively seeking their imprisonment, and that Emperors was only attending to his requests, and the whole mess strikes me as a distortion of justice and a sickening waste of resources. But that's nothing new.

Related: "Letters from Johns."

(Image credit: Barbara Kruger's award-winning cover for New York Magazine.)

In January of this year, on what amounted to a whim, I created an online project called Letters from Johns. To be perfectly honest, I can't even recall exactly why I did it, but I've been writing about the sex industry for years, and I suppose I was curious about why men pay for sex. Rather than hearing someone else's version of their stories, I was interested in collecting their stories. So, I put out a call on my blog for exactly that, and that's exactly what I got.

Every so often, another letter from a john would show up in my email box. They were state investigators, lonely, single guys, married men, enlisted, world travelers, virgins, and thrill-seekers. When Spitzergate hit, I got more letters than ever. (I wrote about the project here.) Eventually, though, the call girl and john coverage slowed. These days, I get fewer letters than I used to.

Last night, I got a new letter from a john. It was more sad than most, although many of the letters are somewhat sad. More often than not, the emails are testimonies to loneliness, and the lengths people, men, in particular, will go to be anywhere but alone. This letter, though, was particularly sad, and my guess is it came from a Boing Boing reader. Seeing as I hadn't gotten any letters in a while, and this one rolled in the night I started guestblogging, it's likely he came across the project from here.

Of course, I don't bring this up to out him. He's a John Doe, and all letters remain anonymous. Sometimes, though, there's a tendency to see stories like his, or those of the others, as belonging to lives that are nothing like ours, to "Other-ize" them, when, in fact, the themes of these letters -- the desire to transcend one's internal abyss -- are not so unlike the stories of most who have experiences that require them to find out what's hidden in their darkest places.

"I Wanted To Kill Myself."

Hi! Susannah Breslin here. Thank you to Xeni for the kind introduction and to the rest of the Boing Boing team for inviting me to guestblog. Surely, it will be a good time.

On this exciting election night, in which all my dreams may be realized at the moment McCain's head explodes, I could not think of a better way to start my tenure here than with some Sarah Palin erotica. First, there was the This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll. (I know I enjoyed mine.) Then came the haunting specter of "Nailin' Paylin." Still, a question remains. What about something for those Palin obsessed who are a bit more sensitive, those aesthetes? In this spirit, Rachel Kramer Bussel created Sarah Palin Erotica, an online repository of erotic stories about the person I pray will disappear into this good night, leaving in her wake little more than a deflated love doll in my closet.

What makes Sarah happiest right now is that she has the attention of a great many men. If her favorite thing is telling herself she will be the next president of the United States each time she passes a reflective surface, her second favorite thing is to sit in a conference room full of men in their crisp, slightly sweaty dress shirts and designer slacks with their earnestness and condescension and turn away from the table just enough to slowly cross and uncross her legs. She’ll allow her eyes to crinkle, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly and she’ll lean forward just enough for her blouse to part. She’ll watch them and the predictable way their eyes follow the toned muscles of her calves up to her breasts. They’ll clear their throats and adjust their ties and shift uncomfortably in their seats. She knows what they’re thinking—they’re thinking if they play their cards right, they too could be fucking the next president of the United States.

Sarah Palin Erotica

Nathaniel sez, "Sonicwall, the web content filtering vendor, now blocks XKCD as "Adult/Mature". A STICK FIGURE COMIC is now too mature for the internet. Classic."

As of this week I can no longer see XKCD at my office, due to SonicWall, a content filter service my company subscribes to. It is not blocked as "Adult/Mature Content". As this is the same service some businesses that offer public wifi use (Panera Bread in particular), this may mean XKCD has been dropped from a lot of public places.

I don't blame you, guy. I blame SonicWall. They're most anal about the smallest things. Only recently has my office gotten access again to MySpace, which was also listed as "Adult/Mature". principiadiscordia.com was listed as "Occult"; now it's still blocked, but listed as "Other". My best guess is that what did it for XKCD was the sexual positions strip...as far as I can tell, these people have little brain and less sense of humor.

SonicWall now blocks XKCD (Thanks, Nathaniel!)

A fifteen year old girl in Newark, OH faces being labelled a "sex offender" for sending naked cellphone photos of herself (a minor) to other minors. If convicted, she'll spend the next ten years on public registries, classed as a producer of child pornography. No word on what compensation she (as the victim of the crime) will be able to get from herself (as the perp).

According to Ohio law, 2907.323(A)(3) states anyone possessing material that shows a minor in a state of nudity is guilty of a fifth-degree felony. The violation also might qualify the juvenile as a Tier I sexual offender, which requires annual registration for a decade.

The section of the law the girl, who is a foster child, was charged with allows parents or guardians to take photos of their unclothed children for a list of acceptable purposes but does not provide an exemption for the child themselves.

Law didn't anticipate cell phone photo case

Futurismic's Paul Raven sez,

Imagine what high school would have been like if dealing drugs had been legal when licensed, mobile social networking had been ubiquitous and the in-crowd had more leverage than most political parties… what would the smart-but-slightly-crazy outcasts end up doing?

In Adam Rakunas’s novella “The Right People”, they’re in the lucrative but precarious position of selling clandestine bootleg sex toys to the overachievers, but the rug is about to be pulled out from under their operation…

It’s simultaneously a slice of full-bore gonzo science fiction blended with a Brat Pack movie, and a timely metaphor for the present presidential tussle, and Futurismic is very proud to present “The Right People” as Adam’s first fiction sale - in fact, I think we’re lucky to have found him first!

The Right People (Thanks, Paul!)

Inspired by Something Awful articles and forums where folks used Photoshop to transform porn photos into images that are hilariously "safe for work," the brand Diesel put together an entire video of SFW XXX. I'm not sure that the result is, in fact, SFW, but it certainly is a hoot. Diesel SFW XXX (somethingawful.com, thanks Vann Hall!)

A paper in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses, "Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males" (Zarrintan, S) proposes a good hard wank to relieve nasal congestion in men:

So the author proposes a more...natural method of decongestion. "It is known that sexual arousal in men is followed by penile erection and subsequent ejaculation" (unless of course you've taken too much Viagra or something). The emission phase of ejaculation is under the control of the sympathetic nervous system, which of course has lots of adrenergic receptors. The author reasons that ejaculation will stimulation adrenergic receptors in the refractory period immediately afterward, and stimulation of your adrenergic receptors will give you relief from your cold.

The author proposes that, with proper scheduling of masturbation and/or sexual intercourse a guy could keep his nose clear for the rest of his life! I wonder how the partner takes that. "Honey, come here, my nose is stuffed up..." And what if your nose is REALLY messed up? I hope those people work from home.

And if a guy can keep his nose clear for life, what about us ladeez? My allergies bother me, too, you know. I think this needs to be tested, both on men and women. So I want to hear back from all of your whether it worked. Wait 'til the hay fever sets in, go at it like rabbits, and then leave a comment with whether or not it worked. Obviously this is not a well controlled study, but I don't know that I want to ask whether it was masturbation or intercourse, and I wouldn't trust anyone with a timer in the few minutes after sex to measure their refractory period. So this is more of a pilot than a real test. Go to it! This is your homework for the weekend!

Screw the sudafed: When your nose ain't great, masturbate!

Here's a fantastically horrible 1946 Disney film about menstruation, "The Story of Menstruation." Your period, according to Disney

Screenwriter/producer Lauren McLaughlin's YA novel debut, Cycler is just out, and just in time -- this is a book that the kids in your life really need to read, a gender-bending piece of speculative fiction aimed at young people that manages to say novel, useful, and challenging things about gender and sexuality without ever descending into squicky fluid-exchange or soapy romance.

Jill McTeague has a secret: every 28 days, at the start of her menstrual cycle, she...changes. Painful, graphically, her body transforms into an adolescent male form, and her mind is remade as Jack McTeague, an angry, horny teenaged boy who stays locked in Jill's room for four days until she comes back to reclaim her body and mind. Her stepfordwife mom is mortified by this, and bent on ensuring that none of their neighbors in their affluent Massachusetts suburb discover their family's dark secret, and her absentee father (moved into the basement years ago to practice meditation and yoga) is no help either.

Jill does everything she can to pretend that her four-day absences just don't happen, while Jack seethes and rages against his captivity, in chapters that alternate between both points of view. Both characters are flawed and likable, smart but dumb about emotional stuff in exactly the way I was when I was a teenager. McLaughlin does an admirable job of nailing the voice of Jack -- I know that hormone-addled, enraged teenaged boy. I was that boy.

McLaughlin's screenwriting background carries through well, too: the plot is faultless, building from the weird premise (and the concomitant weirdness) to a series of ever-more-desperate scenarios that have you rooting for Jack and Jill even as you facepalm yourself and peer between your fingers at the wreck they're making of their lives.

This is a book about sex and love, and it's got a lot of it -- but not steamy between-the-sheets stuff (though there's some of that). Instead, McLaughlin's sex and love happens between the ears, in the realm of the mind and its contradictory and embarrassing and fickle passions. Through it all, there's always something redeeming happening, some sense that these people might, somehow, muddle through.

I've got a few years before my newborn daughter needs to start thinking about these things, but this is one I'm putting on the shelf for when she does. Cycler on Amazon

I took my family to a free (and terrific!) The Knack concert in Woodland Hills, Californian on Sunday, and used my digital camera to take a crappy video of the band performing my favorite song of theirs, "Good Girls Don't." Silent Porn Star wrote a wonderful essay about what the song meant to her when she used to listen to it in high school in 1978.

I'm no music expert, so I wouldn't even try to discuss "their sound" and it's place in Music History; but The Knack holds a very important place in my music history.

You see, like most high school girls in 1978, I ran out and bought My Sharona. First, it was the 45 single (for you young pups, that's a smaller vinyl recording played at a faster speed); but as soon as it was released, I went to Get The Knack (that's the LP, dearies). And when Good Girls Don't hit the airwaves, well, things changed.

In that flushing-heat sort of way.

Read the rest of the essay here: Good Girls Don't

Weird Universe is hosting a complete scanned copy of "A Boy Today…A Man Tomorrow," a sex-ed manual for boys from 1972. As you might expect, it's a comedy goldmine. Snicker snicker. A Boy Today…A Man Tomorrow (Thanks, Paul!)

Excavating Kafka, a new book by James Hawes, includes (for the first time) material gleaned from Kafka's hardcore porn stash, booklets that were published by the same publisher who published Kafka's own work.

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol."

He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books... Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."

Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet (Thanks, Sherry!)

(If you can't view the veoh video above, try the YouTube version)

Photographer Clayton Cubitt (disclosure, he's a personal pal) recently returned to NYC after a few weeks in New Zealand on an editorial assignment. During that trip, he also took a series of beautiful (and formal) portraits of interesting people there, including Maori people whose bodies and faces are embellished with traditional tattoos.

He also took one short, informal little video interview (Clayton, what'd you shoot this with?) with a man named Vic Taurewa Biddle, shot with a Sigma DP1 digital snappy cam "as an afterthought during a portrait session." Mr. Biddle speaks about his face tats, known as moko in the Maori language, and shares some insight on how homo/bi/trans-sexuality are viewed among his people -- both historically and now. I wish Clayton had shot more of these, this is short, simple, really interesting stuff.

I've embedded the Veoh video above, here's Clayton's tumblr post with a YouTube version. Incidentally, when Clayton first sent me this link I was in Guatemala, and couldn't view that Veoh item at all. I learned that this is because Veoh is blocked in like 37 countries around the world. WTF, what's up with that?

For years, Bruce Sterling has been blogging about political sex scandals around the world, calling them "centipedes" -- today, he's defined the term in a little essay explaining why they're so darned interesting, speaking sociopoliticotechnically.

Centipedes are new phenomena because the barriers-to-entry in media have crashed. This means that subversive efforts formerly isolated and punished as libel, slander and whispering campaigns can swiftly take on avalanche proportions.

While pretending to be about spontaneous indignation and moral values, centipedes are coolly calculated and all about power.

The asymmetrical advantage that enables a "centipede" is that the conspirators themselves are never outed. They plot, they find a sexual weakness, they accumulate data about it, they launch a scandal from out of the woodwork, and while exposing private deeds to the public glare, the conspirators themselves remain unseen.

My blog lists a host of these political events that have recently taken place in societies all over the world: India, Greece, Poland, Indonesia, South Africa, Britain, USA. (((And Canada.))) I named them "centipedes" because they are segmented, covert, and poisonous. They seem to have a remarkable commonality as a species.

Link

In this ~9-minute video, Daniel Floyd, a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, convincingly advances the theory that the major problem with sex in video-games is that there isn't enough sex in video games -- that video-games' failure to come to grips with sex as part of the artistic message and aesthetic in games (in addition to the hypersexualized juvenile Lara Croft/Duke Nukem stuff), it can't convincingly argue that games are an actual artistic medium that deserves to be considered on the same terms as painting, literature, sculpture, film, and other media that often feature sexual material. Link (via Wonderland)

Health officials in New York are cautioning people to avoid a "street aphrodisiac" made from the excretions of a poisonous toad, after a man consumed the illegal concoction and died.

The city's poison control center issued the warning Friday after receiving a hospital report that a 35-year-old man who ingested the hard, brown substance died earlier this month. The product is sold under names including Piedra, Love Stone, Jamaican Stone, Black Stone and Chinese Rock at sex shops and neighborhood stores. It is banned by the Food and Drug Administration.

City health officials said the victim, whose identity was not released, was admitted to the hospital complaining of chest and abdominal pain. He died two days later. Health officials said the hardened resin, made with venom from toads of the Bufo genus, contains chemicals that can disrupt heart rhythms.

Link to AP item, more on a NYT blog here.

In our latest installment of Boing Boing TV's "SPAM THEATER" series, a cash proposition from a faraway land, and the secret to what girls want. Special thanks to Erik Sheppard of Voice Talent Productions for contributing -- well, voice talent!

Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Previously on Boing Boing tv:

SPAM THEATER: Love Song of Kseniya
SPAM THEATER VOL II

NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program student Drew Burrows, 28, engineered a "virtual girlfriend," and showed her off at a recent Tisch School of the Arts show:

It's simple to behold — a single mattress, tucked into a dark, curtained back room of the showcase space. On it: a lithe brunette. She's perfectly quiet, but once you sit or lie down, she responds to your every move. Lie on your back, she snuggles up right next to you in a log position. Curl up in the fetal position, she spoons. The only hitch: She's 2-D. "Yeah, you can't feel the girl. That's the thing," Burrows explained as he demonstrated his invention, an "infrared sensitive" light projection (meaning it reacts, and the projected woman moves, based on an infrared sensor) called INBED. "Still, it's so nice if you're tired and worn out to have someone to curl up with."

Link (thanks, Jessica Coen, image courtesy Drew Burrows)

"More than 140 million women in the world are condemned to feel nothing." Link to post at Ads of the World, more scans on kuteev's livejournal. Campaign by Contrapunto BBDO, Barcelona. The ads are for a group called AMAM, Association of Women against Genital Mutilation, who have run some very provocative PSAs before, too. Link to AMAM website (Spanish). (thanks Susannah Breslin)

Susannah Breslin interviews the 57-year-old scat video producer who is at the center of what may be the "most extreme obscenity trial in U.S. history." Of note: he compares himself to Picasso, Mozart, and Kafka, and does not consider his work to be pornography.

Snip from her intro:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled "The 2 Girls 1 Cup Defense," focusing on the case of Ira Isaacs, a Los Angeles based director of coprophagy and distributor of bestiality films who was indicted last summer by the Department of Justice's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force for various obscenity-related offenses. Not long after that post went up, I got an email from Mr. Isaacs himself. He said if I wanted to interview him, I could. So I did. That interview is now online at Radar Online: "But Is It Obscene?"

And snip from her Radar interview:

RADAR: How did you get started making these movies?
IRA ISAACS: When the Internet was happening, I wanted to enter it in some way, and I wanted to do something different. In the past, you needed a lot of money and people to make a movie. Until video cameras were invented. Then the Internet was a big breakthrough for distribution. So, I started making a lot of money with these fetish shock videos. I was distributing shock art films from Europe.

What do you mean by "shock art films"?
You talk about art? What is art? Art is what artists do. If it shocks you, it's art. One of the things art should do is make you think and question things. Shock art has always been something that has been a very popular thing through the 20th century and the 21st century. People used feces as shock art. There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.] So, the Internet allowed me to be an artist, to reach a lot of people. It allowed me to be on the edge, to do what I would never do as a fine artist. If you're going to paint, you've got to compete with Picasso. If you want to write a great classical music piece, you're competing with Mozart. I would never write anything like Kafka's The Trial. If I was going to make a mark, I was going to do it in some extreme shock way.

Link to Radar piece, and here's the post on Susannah's blog with more out-takes and background. (Photo, via Radar: Getty Images). [Ed. note to Susannah: you win at internet dumpster-diving, dude. Seriously.]

Previously on Boing Boing:

The "2 Girls 1 Cup" defense

The internet dumpster-divers over at Fleshbot found a real gem today. Link (NSFW).

Susannah Breslin wrote a piece for Salon today about the apparent suicide of the so-called "D.C. Madam," Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

When her 76-year-old mother, Blanche Palfrey, called 911 just before 11 a.m., the emergency operator asked if her daughter was still hanging from the rafter. "Yes," said the madam's weeping mother, who had regularly accompanied her daughter to court the month previous, "I can't move her. I'm 76 years old."

Breslin interviewed three women who are currently documenting online their past and present lives as sex workers, and asked for their thoughts.

Another sex worker I spoke with, who writes online about her call girl experiences but requested anonymity for this story, was pained by the news of Palfrey's death as well as the related older news of the death of University of Maryland professor turned call girl Brandy Britton, 43, who killed herself in January 2007 while awaiting trial on prostitution charges. Britton was a one-time employee of Palfrey's; after Britton was found hanging in her living room, Palfrey pronounced, ironically: "I guess I'm made of something that Brandy Britton wasn't made of."

The call girl I interviewed was struck by the emotional stories behind these public deaths. "The first thing I thought about was the incredible isolation that both of them probably felt," she said. "Because you're doing something that's perceived to be so morally wrong that you're immediately outside society, as a prostitute or a madam. You've got this secret life or a compartmentalized life, and then to be pushed out there and villainized -- I can only imagine the incredible isolation they must have felt."

As a sex worker, she went on, you live a "double life." A madam whom she worked for before she went freelance was intensely paranoid, "crazy," prone to anxious late-night phone calls. "It got to her. She would call me up and panic, thinking they were out to get her. It was the psychology of sex work, the fear of being outed."

Link. Image: Reuters.

UPDATE: details of Palfrey's suicide note released: Link. (thanks Susannah).

A friend at Fleshbot writes...

Prague's Big Sister internet-enabled brothel has long been high on our list of travel destinations ever since our globetrotting siblings at Gridskipper first bought it to our attention a couple of years ago. (But only from a sociological perspective, you understand, not because we want to boink our way to international notoriety via the dozens of video cameras set up throughout the establishment which broadcast the goings-on to tens of thousands of the site's subscribers.) Short of going to Prague or coughing up a $40 monthly membership to join the website, the best way to see what Big Sister is all about is photographer Hana Jakrlova's Big Sister photodocumentary project...

Link to Fleshbot post (nsfw). Shown here, the, ah, polar bear theme room inside the Big Sister brothel.

Every time I think I've seen it all on the internet, someone informs me that I have not. Evidently, there is some population of folks online who take visceral delight in gazing upon poorly-photoshopped images of pinups being squished alive by pythons or elephant trunks. NSFW, some include hand-drawn bodily fluids being squeezed from helpless modelbodies. The only thing that could make this crude cropping any sexier is a li'l drop shadow and some emboss. Mmmmm. Link. (thanks, Reverse Cowgirl)