5 Podcasts You Should be Listening to

There are countless podcasts making their presence known on the internet. Regardless of your interests, you can find a podcast (or 50) that you can quickly become addicted to and like your favorite television show, not be able to miss an episode of. Podcasts bring back the love of radio, where we pay more attention to the words people have to say than the pictures we’re seeing on a screen. But radio isn’t cool anymore, now that it has become a giant business of deception and the people have always been more entertaining than the hired hands telling the people what they want to listen to.

The question is–what podcasts do you listen to? What are the top-rated podcasts that have claimed the attention and hearts of those who have been listening to it since its inception and what podcasts should you be listening to that perhaps the rest of the internet world hasn’t caught on to yet?

Here are 5 podcasts that are entertaining, thought-provoking and just plain awesome. You’re bound to find one that fits well.

This American Life

This American Life is the most popular podcast in the country. It garners more than a half million downloads per episode and includes much of the same content heard on the This American Life public radio show that is broadcast on more than 500 stations.

This American Life is comprised of an array on non-fiction stories, investigative journalism, fiction, essays and experimental story telling. This American Life helped to launch the literary careers of David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and David Rakoff.

Muckmakers

Muckmakers is a blog dedicated to exposing corrupt politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, celebrities, or other public figures in the most brutally honest manner possible. It was created to inform the public of what is going on right under their noses and hopefully inspire and motivate people to want to do something about it.

The Muckmakers podcast has the same premise as the blog, where the two creators of the site can expand a little more on their thoughts and generally talk about what’s going on in the world. If you’re interested in politics and have a passion for analyzing everything from politics, religion and current events or just have a love of hearing about hot button debate issues, check it out.

WireTap

WireTap is a Canadian public radio show from Jonathan Goldstein, former This American Life producer. Like Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen, Goldstein takes an alter ego approach full of self-deprecating humor with the weekly installments of WireTap. In addition to discussing the minutiae of daily life, WireTap also features short stories.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features both well-known and up-and-coming authors who read short stories they have picked by their favorite authors. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is a great find for anyone who needs that literary pick-me-up.

Kink On Tap

Kink On Tap is a thoughtful, well thought out and captivating podcast that brings up topics like sexuality, society, culture, feminism and queer issues and activism. The two hosts of the podcast have weekly guests where they speak in-depth about issues the guest is intimately involved with.

Porn Review: Seven Minutes in Heaven 2: Tender Hearted

Warning: This review is an adult film review that is highly explicit in nature. This review also contains visuals that are pornographic in nature and shouldn’t be viewed by anyone under the age of 18 (or 21 in your respective area) or by anyone who is not comfortable with seeing or reading about adult films.

While I do not often bring you adult film reviews, I was recently given the opportunity to review Courtney Trouble’s Seven Minutes in Heaven 2: Tender Hearted from Babeland and I jumped at the chance. I am not extremely knowledgeable when it comes to women porn directors, but I do appreciate the work that they do and have always felt very strongly about getting more women behind the scenes when it comes to porn, if not only for the extremely negative stigma that is attached to porn. When I found out that not only Courtney Trouble was an award-winning director, but had made a name for herself among the most prominent of feminist porn, I could not contain my excitement. I absolutely needed to get my hands on this DVD.

The set of Seven Minutes in Heaven 2 is a fun slumber party where reserved etiquette gets thrown out the window. During a game of spin the bottle, once someone spins and, as we learned from our early years, sees who they have to kiss, we not only see the kiss, but also get a great view of their obvious chemistry and lust taking over as they devour each other.

The film stars Puck Goodfellow, Chocolate Chip, Cyd Loverboy, Red, Soma Stardust, Akira Raine and James Darling. This cast is completely amateur and we are privy to seeing most of their porn debuts, with the exception of Puck Goodfellow and Chocolate Chip who have also starred in the first Seven Minutes in Heaven. The fact that this cast is predominantly amateur makes it even hotter for me. If there is one thing that is completely obvious throughout the entire time you are watching this, it’s that these people are real. They are people of diversity; they have the bodies of real people who aren’t striving or really even caring about fitting into mainstream society’s norm of slim, slender and meticulously flawless.

Everyone in the film picked who they wanted to appear in the film with and I think that made all the difference. In every scene you can tell there is real chemistry and everyone is really enjoying themselves. In particular, during the scene featuring Red, Cyd and James, there is a refreshing playfulness that will actually make you smile and laugh along with them as Cyd and Red crack jokes back and forth.

Most of the scenes are incredibly enjoyable, but one in particular I cannot get out of my head–and not in a good way. The scene featuring Akira and Puck disappointed me so much that I could barely make it through the scene’s entirety without wanting to press the fast-forward button. Akira, who I enjoyed in the first scene with Chocolate Chip, is just too much. Too much noise, really weird “O” face, just way, way too much for me to handle. I also found that every time Akira moaned way too loudly for just a little bit too long, my arousal state decreased. Every single time. That is not good when it comes to watching porn for an “end result,” we’ll say.

But that did not turn me off of Puck Goodfellow in the least. In fact, I am STILL reeling over the complete and utter sexiness that is Puck Goodfellow. He has an undeniable sex appeal that you can only truly understand from seeing him in action yourself. He is incredible when it comes to fucking, possessing a talent that will make you lock your eyes to his hips and never leave. It is amazing. His scene with Soma in the bathtub while Soma is handcuffed to the faucet was my absolute favorite scene in the entire film, hands down. I have watched and re-watched it several times now and I swear, he gets better with every view. You need to trust me on this one.

Another person I was undeniably attracted to was James Darling. He is just the cutest boy I have ever seen in my life and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him and I really wanted to see more of him. Since seeing Seven Minutes in Heaven 2, I have now vowed to see each and every single thing featuring both Puck Goodfellow and James Darling from this day forward. I cannot get enough.

Courtney Trouble shines a fabulous and positive spotlight on the people in her film. We see different gender identities, safer sex with the use of black latex gloves, dental dams and condoms, twosomes, threesomes, and even what is being said to be the first gender-fucking, all-hands-on, seven person gangbang as everyone plays a part in getting Red off.

It is abundantly obvious that Courtney Trouble is dedicated to spreading knowledge of safer sex, not just by having everyone in the film wear black latex gloves or use dental dams, but because she has an entire scene in the film of her talking on the phone asking if someone could bring by more latex gloves and how important safer sex was. And we do see the gloves being dropped off, but when the cast takes the gloves from Jiz Lee and then slams the door in her face, I thought it was a joke. Like they would laugh and then open the door and then Jiz Lee would come in and join the party. But no, she just leaves and I was left almost yelling at the screen, asking “Where are you going!?”

But even given the few slight problems I had with Seven Minutes in Heaven 2, I loved this film and it delivered everything I thought it would–and then some.

I have not seen the first Seven Minutes in Heaven so before receiving this, I was a Courtney Trouble virgin. With that said, overall, I could not be happier to add one of her films to my collection and I can certainly say that she has certainly created an enthusiast out of me.

Thanks to Babeland for giving me the opportunity to review Seven Minutes in Heaven 2: Tender Hearted. Check them out to see all the other adult DVDs they stock!

Eden Fantasys: A Sex Shop No One Can Trust

A few months ago I was contacted via Twitter by a delightful and enthusiastic woman who was the blogger outreach and off-site review program coordinator from Eden Fantasys. Because a company is only as good as the person whom you have direct contact with, and because this woman was just downright awesome, I began a partnership between Woman Tribune and Eden Fantasys. I immediately began hosting contests for gift cards, reviewing products for our love and sex category, putting up their banners and telling all of my friends about how great their site was. I sent a lot of people to Eden Fantasys who spent a lot of money.

Everything regarding this partnership was going great and I was an enthusiastic affiliate. Not only did I link to them through banners, text links, posts and pages on Woman Tribune, I did the same on my other (far more liberal) website, Menstrual Poetry, which in turn generated more income for Eden Fantasys. I loved the sense of community I was overwhelmed with on the site and began contributing more reviews and became active in the forums. In short: I was in sex blogger community heaven.

One week ago a member of the community and highly prolific and well-known sex blogger Epiphora was banned from Eden Fantasys. A thread was posted in the Eden Fantasys forums announcing her banning, citing her as “having an adverse effect on the positive culture at EF” and claiming they receive “continuous complaints about her drama, rudeness, and overall negativity.”

Well, that’s all well and good. Eden Fantasys was disclosing that they had collectively decided to ban a member of the community and were just following their policy that they would be transparent regarding all the goings-on within the community. However, according to Epiphora’s post, which cited all of the posts she had made within the forums that could be construed as offensive over the past year, she had no warning about her so-called drama, rudeness, and overall negativity and after reading her forum contributions, I personally see nothing wrong with anything she brought up within the forums. She merely woke up that morning to an email from Eden Fantasys saying that she was banned and that the decision was final. What’s worth noting here is that it is also Eden Fantasys’ policy to warn their contributors of being out of line or offending others in the forums before banning them which is something that they did not do, again, according to Epiphora.

That was the first sign of drama within the time frame I had been a part of Eden Fantasys. I was not the only one who had been put-off by the forum post made by a staff member of the company who claimed transparency and many other contributors disagreed with the way Eden Fantasys had handled the situation.

It was this first straw that prompted me to look into Eden Fantasys the business and oh what a potluck of horrendous business practices I found.

Aag Blog, another very well-known sex blogger, had once been employed by Eden Fantasys. She was not paid for work she had completed. After taking the company owner (Fred Petrenko) to small claims court for the $1200 for work previously agreed upon, the company owner had sent a lawyer to her small town (undoubtedly racking up legal fees more than what Aag was owed) to get out of having to pay her on unfounded technicalities.

Essin’ Em has two posts and there’s also one from That Toy Chick containing compelling and wildly unfortunate additions to Eden Fantasys’ business practices.

Fast-forward to last night. Maybe Maimed wrote an important, must-read article, Edenfantasys’s unethical technology is a self-referential black hole. Maybe Maimed’s post exposes how Eden Fantasys “has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity.”

Because it’s just easier than trying to put it into my own, tech-y words, I am republishing Maybe Maimed’s Executive Summary of the article in full:

Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.

Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.

For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.

Understandably, contributors of the Eden Fantasys community were concerned about what they had learned about Eden Fantasys and their unethical linking practices and a post was started in the forum about it. The post garnered 28 responses from equally concerned contributors asking Eden Fantasys for an explanation. Eden Fantasys, the company that had just been boasting about transparency deleted this forum thread. Luckily, someone took a screenshot of the thread in full before it was deleted, catching onto the fact that Eden Fantasys may not want everyone knowing about their linking practices and sensing a coverup in the making.

You see, when you click on a link through the Eden Fantasys website or SexIs you are taken to the out-of-site destination, if you have JavaScript enabled on your browser. If you disable JavaScript and try to click on those same links, they do nothing. Those links are illusions and are not real links and do not provide real link back properties like hits to your website or an income traffic alert on your blog administrative panel. You did not get that link back and search engines do not see that link at all.

Sex, Lies & Law began another thread on the forum addressing the deletion of the post and again, asking for Eden Fantasys to address this issue. With 5 replies and a post by a staff member, this thread was closed for discussion and a link to an “explanation” was provided.

The so-called explanation to the unethical linking practices was addressed by the president of Eden Fantasys and provided a lot of non-answers and failed examples. According to the president of Eden Fantasys, their linkfarming is a common practice used by other user-driven websites and without cheating people out of real links to their blogs from Eden Fantasys, malicious software would be inserted into the site and the entire site would die. It’s for our own good and oh wait, let’s throw in some strings of words like “AJAX with DotNET and JQuery frameworks” to jumble the minds of those who may have no idea what we are talking about so they can take us at our word.

After going through each and every website that was linked to having the same linking platform such as CNN, USA Today and cele|bitchy with JavaScript enabled, links to out-of-site destinations work just the same because they are real links. One logical explanation as to why is because Eden Fantasys is not using the same Javascript linking platform as any of those sites, as they claim.

After people congratulated the president of Eden Fantasys for providing such a “thorough and well-written explanation” I put in my two cents because Eden Fantasys is a company that is about transparency and who value the contributions of their community. Right?

My entire response to this thread was deleted in the amount of time it took me to take out the garbage. I unfortunately did not get a screenshot of my response on the site, but what I wrote is as follows:

“I am sorry, but this doesn’t look like a misunderstanding to me. Not in the slightest.

Sure, the entire basis of this post relies on addressing emotional gut reactions to people realizing that they are being cheated out of backlinks from Eden Fantasys while being told they must provide three links to EF in every review they publish on their websites, (ie: we do this for your own good and let’s cite a bunch of technological terms most of you won’t understand but keep the bottom line that without us doing this, the entire site would die and all of your hard work would be lost and oh yeah, we care about you and need you to keep EF alive.)

The biggest problem I have here is that when you go to any of the pages on Eden Fantasys and SexIs, after disabling Javascript, you are not able to click on any links because there are no links there. They are an illusion. However, after just going through every single other site you linked to and doing the exact same thing, disabling Javascript and then clicking on a link within any of the websites above, the links work and go to their out-of-site destination.

I do not need a paragraph of technological terms to tell me that in fact none of those sites use the same encapsulation as Eden Fantasys. If they did, they would function the same way EF does and they do not.

The encapsulation Eden Fantasys uses is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It is not ethical and the people who were concerned about this violation were correct.

I will be leaving Eden Fantasys from this point forward and I urge all other contributors who care about the ethical standpoint of companies they work with to do the same.”

Someone responded to my post before it was deleted about how the explanation was not overly-technical and easy to understand and how people are reacting emotionally and not giving the president the chance to respond.

I’m sorry, but wasn’t this thread his response? I mean, this is the story he was going with and he did respond, now isn’t it the contributor’s turn to say something? Isn’t that why we have a forum, to ask questions and voice our concerns? Apparently not since my response was deleted. So I responded to the post of the person telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about, saying:

“I understand the problem that is trying to be avoided. I have been in the internet/blogging/web management world for over 9 years but the way it has been gone about is wrong. Hence why even the websites that were sorta-kinda but not really linked do not function the same as EF. That was my point, even though my post was deleted because I did not take this response at its word.”

This second contribution to the thread of a company who values transparency and the contribution of their community was also deleted in record timing. The reason? Exactly what I stated in my response. My replies were deleted because I did not say “Great job! Thanks for clearing that up!” But I wasn’t the only one whose replies were deleted, five other replies were also deleted.

After my second reply was deleted, I did not contribute anything else. It was obvious my contributions were not making Eden Fantasys look good and thus not welcome on their forums.

After spending some time away from the site, when I went back to see what else was going on, I found that I was not logged in. I have been banned by Eden Fantasys without my posts in any thread receiving any flags, without receiving a message, warning or email.

It is apparent now more than ever that Epiphora was banned just as she said she was. Without warning. How do I know that? Because it just happened to me. Not only that, but it also happened to others today.

Eden Fantasys is a sex toy shop and community no one can trust. They lie, cheat and break their own policies whenever it benefits them. They don’t give a damn about transparency or even giving their contributors the respect they have earned to speak their mind and ask questions. If you are current a reviewer for them, there are other far better, ethical and positive companies out there who are assets to the sex blogging community. I could not support Babeland and Good Vibrations enough.

*Please feel free to share this post and republish it on your own blog either in full or in part with a link back to this post on Woman Tribune. Thank you.

Good Vibrations Launches Sexy Mama Resource Site

Good Vibrations has come out with something thoroughly awesome recently that is sure to excite all the sexy mamas out there. The brand new Good Vibrations Sexy Mama resource site contains all sorts of intriguing, eye-opening and absolute must-see/read/have information just for parents–because moms need to take some time out for themselves while they’re working hard caring for their families every day.

At goodvibessexymama.com, you will find the , containing items like the book Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex 3rd Edition. You can also read great articles from talented and educated writers at the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama Blog.

What is really great about this blog is that it is completely inclusive. Every single mother can relate to something that has been written and if a topic you’re interested in or looking for hasn’t been written about, why not write about it from your first-hand experience? Good Vibrations is currently looking for sexy mamas to contribute articles to the blog and have even come up with a few topic suggestions in case you’re very interested in contributing but are stuck for an idea. Some possible topics include:

• How pregnancy and motherhood affected your sexuality
• Humorous moments in talking to your kids about sex
• Who are your Sexy Mama Role Models?
• The challenges of balancing a sex life with having kids

If you’d like to contribute to the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama Blog, email your submissions to submissions@goodvibes.com.

This resource site will definitely give you pointers, ideas and support to continue being the awesome sexy mama that you are. They can also provide you with the tools to unleash that sexy goddess in you because remember, Good Vibrations is a provider of sex education and sex positive products.

Go check out the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama resource site and get inspired!