NEW YORK – In a case that reaches back to the days of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his campaign to eliminate adult businesses from Times Square (among other places in the city), this week the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the city’s ban on adult businesses operating within...

MOSCOW – About 10 years ago, give or take, I participated in a panel discussion at an adult trade show when a man in the audience got worked up in a way I’ve rarely seen during one of these routine, generally tame Q&A sessions. In the middle of asking a leading question about...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – When former University of Florida deputy Title IX coordinator Chris Loschiavo was fired in 2016, the university initially justified his termination by claiming conflict of interest. This rationale was, as it turns out, somewhat less than half the story. The...

GLENDORA, Calif. – If you study crime statistics, or any other statistics that track trends, you’ll quickly notice something undeniable: All trend lines start at zero, not because the events or actions they track never happened before, but because zero represents when tracking...

ST. CATHARINES, Canada – If you ever find yourself employing lies to keep from getting into trouble, here’s an important tip to bear in mind: Whatever bullshit you float as you’re trying to wriggle your way off the hook, make sure it’s plausible bullshit. Another, related piece...

LOS ANGELES – For years now, I’ve been searching for a truly compelling anti-pornography argument, something that will at last persuade me porn is as evil and morally ruinous as many of its harshest critics say. Along the way, I’ve tried reading scientific papers concerning the...

DANVILLE, Ill. – As you’ve no doubt heard by now, infamous “copyright troll” attorney John Steele has been disbarred, an unsurprising development in the wake of his pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in March. To those of us who have been unfortunate enough to...

MONTREAL – I have something important to say about this new trend of people searching for “fidget spinner porn”: Get off my lawn. For old-timers like me, the word “spinner” already has a well-established meaning in the context of porn. Spinners are petite women, not...

LINCOLN, Neb. – Every so often, I’ll hear someone refer to a three-year prison term as a “light punishment,” or complain modern prisons are more like country clubs than correctional facilities. When I hear such things, I immediately suspect two things about the speaker: He or she...

MENLO PARK, Calif. – The technologies behind social media platforms may be modern, but the conundrum predates the printing press: When it comes to depictions of sexuality, where is the line drawn between “pornography” and “art”? Among the intriguing details that have emerged from...