US Sex Sells News

Caballero Video is to stop selling and advertising 10 Ben & Cherry's adult videos and recall products from stores.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a temporary restraining order against Caballero after Ben & Jerry's sued over the sales of such titles as Chocolate Fudge Babes, Boston Cream Thighs and Peanut Butter D-Cups. The ice cream giant said those porn titles were poached from its own names, Boston Cream Pie, Chocolate Fudge Brownie and Peanut Butter Cup .

This order prevented sales but did not require a product recall. But now according to Reuters, terms of a recall and other restrictions have been agreed in a consent injunction signed by Caballero's president, Tomer Yoffe, and approved by Judge Kaplan.

Caballero will also destroy the content used in making the 10 videos in the series.

Reuters reported that the studio acquiesced in response to a lawsuit against it by the ice cream by Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc, a unit of London-based Unilever Plc, which is still pending.

Ben & Jerry's said Caballero's packaging and copy could be confused with the company's images of puffy white clouds and grazing cows .

New York's highest court is set to hear arguments on whether Nite Moves , a strip club in suburban Albany, deserves a state tax exemption similar to that for theater or ballet.

State tax officials say the club owes an 8% sales tax for admissions to the club and for so-called couch sales, where patrons pay for private lap dances, the Associated Press reports.

Nite Moves claims the dances are exempt under state tax law as live dramatic or musical arts performances, which applies to theater and ballet, the AP reports.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office argues in its briefs that some Nite Moves performers have no dance training and simple pick it up by watching. Such a dancer isn't engaged in a genuine choreographic dance performance when she removes her clothing, the brief says.

But Stephen Dick, the club's CFO, dismisses the notion that formal training should be any critera when its comes to entertainment.

A Manhattan judge has ruled that a 2001 city law was unconstitutional in seeking to reduce the number of stores and clubs that offer a mix of sexual content and other material in neighborhoods where X-rated establishments are banned .

The law sought end a work around to the city's moral ban on sex shops. An earlier 1995 law defined an adult establishment as any business where more than 40% of its material was sexually oriented. By the end of the 1990s, the city came to believe that many of the so-called 60-40 establishments were shams that kept a few shelves of innocuous material to disguise the true nature of their business.

In 2001, the city broadened the definition to include criteria that would have required most of the 60-40 establishments to close or move to industrial areas.

But Justice Louis B. York of State Supreme Court ruled that the mixed-use establishments were not shams and did not create a public nuisance in their communities, and that the city had sufficient tools to close any establishment that skirted the 40% rule.

In a discussion of the case attached to his decision, Justice York wondered whether the city's failure to study the negative impacts of the 60-40 establishments suggested that what the city is really regulating is the content of expression, clearly a violation of the plaintiff's rights to freedom of speech.

City lawyers said that they would appeal.

A new XCritic.com and Vivid Entertainment survey has found that DVD porn buyers are big collectors, sometimes amassing stashes of more than 200 feature titles.

The fourth Sex Tracker survey conducted by the companies show that 28% of respondents have more than 100 DVDs in their personal porn collection. Of these, 40% say they've watched each 7% viewed them six to 10 times, but 24% can't remember how many times they've watched them.

What surprised the XCritic.com editors, was that 57% said they do not watch porn on a smart phone or tablet.

The survey also revealed that the star of a movie is the chief purchase motivator for a whopping 61% percent of people who buy adult movies, while 15% buy them because of the story line and 10% buy them because they like a particular studio.

Price, the director, and a movie's special effects have little impact on a purchase decision.

Nearly 55% of viewers said they follow or interact with their favorite stars online and through social media.

Features with story lines mixed with sex are favored by 51% of the respondents, compared with 49% for all-sex movies.

The US Republican Party is calling for a crackdown on pornography. As they prepare to nominate Mitt Romney as their presidential candidate for the Nov. 6 election, Republicans have added language to their official platform that anti-porn nutters said would encourage the federal government to step up prosecution of pornography involving adults.

Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced, the platform says, according to a draft obtained by Reuters.

Republicans are planning a Tuesday vote on the document, a nonbinding statement of principles that tackles everything from monetary policy to abortion.

This appears to be the first time that the party has called for a crackdown on sexually explicit material involving adults, a multi-billion-dollar industry. Adult obscenity cases have been exceedingly rare over the past 20 years. Though the administration of George W. Bush promised a crackdown, only the most extreme forms of pornography have been targeted.

Anti-pornography nutter Patrick Trueman said the language in the Republican platform would bolster a broader push against the type of sexually explicit material that is sold by convenience stores, by hotels via pay-per-view television programming, and satellite and cable TV providers.

According to Trueman's group, Romney promised earlier this year that he would push for strict enforcement of obscenity laws, as well as the broader use of blocking software to screen out Internet porn.

A performer who tested positive for syphilis has been in touch with the industry group, Free Speech Coalition, and is meeting with FSC's medical professionals to begin partner identification, evaluation and treatment.

FSC has called a temporary moratorium on production until the risk to performers in the industry has been properly assessed and all performers have been tested.

APHSS' doctors have met and discussed the best avenue to protect the performers and have determined that testing the entire population is the most prudent strategy. A determination will be made by the doctors on the appropriate time to lift the moratorium as more information is revealed.

Update: Resumption

30th August 2012. See article from blogs.laweekly.com

The porn industry has a new syphilis test that just might save the day. After a nearly two-week ban on production, adult video shoots are clear to restart this weekend, an industry official told the Weekly.

Following a syphilis scare that L.A. county health officials say has infected as many as 9 people connected to the adult video business, the industry's official STD office declared that shooting would shut down for about two weeks while ALL performers were treated for the disease with antibiotics as a precaution. Leaders took that route because syphilis could stay in one's system for 90 days undetected under current tests.

Late today Adult Production Health & Safety Services (that STD office we told you about) announced that it has found a test that can determine if someone has been infected within 14 days. That means porn stars who don't want to be treated for syphilis whether they have it or not can get the 14-day test and be back to work in two weeks if they're clean.

A dispute over a table dance at the Teasers strip club in Newton, Alabama, was motivation for a customer to draw a handgun and shoot people.

According to the Dothan Eagle, Ryan Clark Petersen has been charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in connection with the shooting.

Those killed  were an employee of Teasers, the son of Teasers' owner and a customer of the club. Another customer was injured in the shooting.

Police said the fatal shootings occurred just before midnight at Teasers. Witnesses said a customer had been kicked out of the club, returned with a handgun and started shooting.

Trojan's plan to distribute 10,000 free vibrators from hot dog carts ran into trouble  when New York council employees shut down the Flatiron District location due to overcrowding.

There's a lot more important things the city should be worried about than a free-vibrator giveaway, complained Park Slope bar owner Melody Henry: Bloomberg doesn't want anyone to have fun. You can't have a giant soda. You can't have a vibrator.

But city council workers issued a statement explaining that the problem wasn't the sex toys; and claimed it was just that the carts just needed an official permit.

Over at Buzzfeed Shift, Amy Odell provides an eyewitness account of the Flatiron Scene. When she arrived, the carts were already empty. Trojan employees were taking down email addresses and promising to get people their free vibrators somehow, even if they had to mail them. About 50 people were waiting in line, and when two cops showed up to deal with the crowd, they put their names down too.

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of a new Washington state law that would require classified advertising companies to verify the ages of people in sex-related advertisements.

Gov. Chris Gregoire claimed the law this year to cut down on child sex trafficking. The law received unanimous approval from the Legislature and had been scheduled to take effect in June, but courts have put its implementation on hold.

The Washington law would allow for the criminal prosecution of anyone who knowingly publishes or causes the publication of sex-related ads depicting children, unless they can show they made a good-faith effort to confirm that the person advertised was not a juvenile.

The decision U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez stops the law from taking effect until the lawsuit challenging it can be heard in court.

The website Backpage.com and the Internet Archive, a popular archive of Internet sites, asked for the preliminary injunction.

Backpage and Internet Archive argue the new law violates the Communications Decency Act of 1996, as well as the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments and the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Backpage.com argues that SB6251 would force websites to become the government's censors of users' content and would place an incredible burden on the company to review every bit of third-party content, as well as obtain and maintain records of individuals' ID.

These obligations would bring the practice of hosting third-party content to a grinding halt, according to Backpage.com's legal suit.

In his ruling, Martinez found merit in some of their arguments that the state law would conflict with existing federal law. He also drew a distinction between the idea of the law and the reality of its enforcement.

Patrick Trueman, the head of Morality in Media, has told the conservative Daily Caller that he was quietly promised that fighting porn will be a top priority in a Romney White House.

Trueman said he and an anti-porn prosecutor from the 1980s Justice Department, Bob Flores, met earlier this year with Alex Wong, Romney's foreign and legal policy director. Trueman said:

Wong assured us that Romney is very concerned with this, and that if he's elected these laws will be enforced. They promised to vigorously enforce federal adult obscenity laws.

Around the time Trueman says he received those assurances, Romney signed Morality in Media's anti-porn pledge along with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, whom he was still battling for the GOP nomination. Since then, he hasn't mentioned the issue very often.

Romney has however promised that if elected president he would require every new computer be sold with a porn filter.

There may be another reason Romney isn't talking up porn: he needs the support of millions of primary voters who supported Ron Paul, who notably did not make opposition to sexually explicit materials a campaign plank.

Los Angeles County voters will decide whether adult performers should be required to wear condoms during shoots.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation's nutter initiative to mandate condoms on porn shoots within county lines has received enough signatures to qualify for the November election, a county official said.

Michael Weinstein of the AHF said his group collected 371,000 signatures in five months, far exceeding the 232,000 signatures needed to qualify the measure for the ballot.

If approved by voters, the measure will require adult film producers to pay a fee and obtain a permit from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Performers will be mandated to use condoms for acts of anal and vaginal sex.

The requirement would apply to shoots in unincorporated areas of the county and 85 of its 88 cities, including the city of Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles already has a porn condom ordinance, but it continues to be sidelined until the first week of September at the earliest because city leaders haven't yet drawn up formal plans to implement the law.

Stripper Crystal Ludwig's attempt to have full nudity protected as free speech was shot down this week by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ludwig, an exotic dancer at the now defunct Garter Belt strip club in Detroit, challenged Van Buren Township's ban on full nudity, saying the ban violated her First Amendment rights.

The club itself and another dancer previously sued the township located in a rural area of Wayne County and lost their cases. The court ruled that the decision against Garter Belt also applied to her.

Houston council voted this week to levy a $5 fee on strip club customers of the city's 30 licensed strip bars. This in addition to the $5 fee to the state of Texas when visiting an adult venue, thanks to a law passed in 2007.

The moral tax will be ring-fenced and put towards analysing forensic evidence collected from rape victims.

Supporters of the so-called pole tax argue that lap-dancing clubs must shoulder some of the financial burden of rape investigations , on the supposed grounds that their businesses help foster misogynistic attitudes towards women, which can lead to sexual assaults. If they were being fair about it then the tax would have been better targeted at the Catholic Church.

The morality tax was passed by 14 votes to one. The ordinance stipulates that the fee also applies to bars and night-clubs which offer one-off events that could be construed as sexually explicit, such as wet T-shirt contests or naked sushi contests .

Albert Van Huff, a Houston lawyer who represents strip clubs, told the Journal that the tax is based on flawed logic. There is no known correlation between people going to nice, high-end gentlemen's clubs and rape, he said.