“A notorious East Harlem sex killer is shamelessly hawking disgusting handwritten accounts of his rape spree on the Internet. Arohn Kee, who is serving life in prison for three rape-murders, has created 20 revolting ‘rape cards’ that a Web site is selling for $19 a pop. ‘It’s very, very disturbing,’ said Gregory Washington, whose daughter Rasheeda was raped and strangled by Kee. ‘This is just an added insult.’ Rosa Castro, whose daughter Johalis was also murdered, couldn’t bear to hear the details of the online outrage. ‘I don’t want to reopen the wound,’ the mom said. ‘It is very painful. I don’t want to go back to the time of the murder.’ The 5-by-7-inch cards each include an explicit description of sex attacks and echo the shameless taunts that Kee leveled at his real-life victims. ‘Say, ‘I love it,’ ‘ he has written on one card. There’s also his ‘prison-worn’ T-shirt on sale for $99 and a color mug shot, both autographed by Kee, along with a hot-dog wrapper that he supposedly used behind bars. The Web site pulls no punches in exalting Kee’s brutal credentials. ‘Each Rape Card has violent sex written in his hand,’ the site boasts. ‘Signed In Full at bottom in bloody red ink.’ Kee, 35, was convicted in 2000 of carrying out a nearly decade-long rape and murder spree in his East Harlem neighborhood. He’s doing his time at Attica state prison near Buffalo. He killed three teenagers: Paola Illera, 13, in 1991, who lived in his building; Johalis Castro, 19, whose smoking corpse was found on a rooftop in 1997, and Rasheeda Washington, 18, who was raped and strangled in a stairwell in 1998. Even among the annals of murderous serial rapists, Kee stood out for his unrepentant arrogance. He taunted his half-dozen victims, telling one she was ‘lucky’ to be attacked by such a handsome rapist.” — New York Daily News (US)

Probably there has always been a cultish market for objects associated with high-profile criminals and their crimes. You can imagine ancient Romans hawking the knife that stabbed Julius Caesar or the hammer that drove the nails into the palms of Jesus Christ. Nowadays it’s the doodads that once belonged to Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy. Or perhaps Nazi memorabilia is the ultimate murder souvenir. Charles Manson didn’t kill six million people.

Ebay was already pressured a few years ago into prohibiting auctions of “murderabilia,” but where there is demand there will inevitably be supply. Prisoners, with their limited options for making money, have been only too happy to collaborate with the middlemen selling their trinkets. Probably it flatters their vanity as well. Meanwhile auction houses such as murderauction.com and prisonboundserialkillers.com have filled the void left by ebay. The items by Arohn Kee are being sold on daisyseven.com. Do a search on the site and you’ll find his “rape cards.”

The moral problems involved in murderabilia are obvious. But what about the aesthetic problems? Some years ago PervScan was at first stimulated and then disappointed to find samples of Ted Bundy’s poetry in Elizabeth Kendall’s memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. It just wasn’t that interesting, and indeed that’s the problem with most serial killer poetry, mass murderer art, rapist fiction, etc. It isn’t very good. (Exception should be made, however, for Charles Manson in His Own Words, a brilliant and energizing book.)

In general the killer-as-creator genre forfeits aesthetics for authenticity. All that distinguishes it is the fact that the author committed a crime. And really, what sort of achievement is that? Few are the crimes about which you can say that they are brilliantly conceived. Nevertheless, murderabilia is all the rage, and it makes you wonder if there won’t come a day when so many murderers and sex criminals write stories and paint pictures that those in the fiction business won’t have any credibility unless they actually kill or rape too.

Geek Space sent in a link to the site converse-fetish.com, saying: “wasn’t expecting a porn site. What is this subset of the alt-porn thing?” That’s just what converse-fetish.com is, a porn site dedicated to anyone obsessed with the sight of people naked except for Converse sneakers. The same company offers sites for Keds and sneakers in general. At first blush, it’s hard to believe that the sites are serious about their fetish. Most likely they’re just the work of an entrepreneurial pornmeister looking to differentiate his properties from the glut of other porn sites online.

But then, serendipitously, the BBC just posted today a news item about a man who claims to suffer from a fetish for Ugg boots.

A man with a fetish for Ugg boots has admitted using the internet to harass a group of schoolgirls in the Leeds area. Mark Southeby, 38, used social networking sites to contact the girls. An “enormous number” of photographs of teenage girls wearing Ugg boots were found on his mobile phone, Leeds Crown Court heard. Southeby, of Dutton Way, Iver, Bucks, also developed an online relationship with one 15-year-old and tried to goad her into a series of sex acts. Southeby, who is unemployed, admitted three counts of inciting sexual activity involving the same 15-year-old girl and six offences of harassing teenage girls. The court heard the married stepfather infiltrated a group of girls at a secondary school in the Leeds area by posing as their friends using fake email addresses. His mobile phone also contained an “enormous number” of photographs of teenage girls wearing the popular sheepskin footwear. He was particularly interested in Ugg boots, which he later told police he had a fetish about.

If you read the story cynically, you might think that this business about the Ugg boots is just a cover for the real kink — young girls. But then it turns out that there is at least one web site for Ugg fetishists. So perhaps this man really does harbor a brand-specific foot fetish. The boots are kind of cute…

It all makes you wonder, though. Where is the line between the consumer’s “fetish” for branded items and the pervert’s fetish for branded items? Is it time to invent yet another perversion? Brandophilia: noun. Sexual excitement derived from or enhanced by the presence of a brand, trademark, or label. See also brandophile and brandophiliac…

There is an editorial by a person named Mark Shea at the NC Register, which bills itself as “America’s ‘Most Complete’ Catholic Newsweekly.” Yes, its own site puts “most complete” in quote marks, making you wonder exactly whom they’re quoting. Jesus? And what does it mean to be the “most complete” Catholic newsweekly? Is that like being the most complete idiot?

By and large it’s probably not worthwhile to engage in a back-and-forth with a writer at a conservative, religious-based newspaper. The opinions of an adult tend to be too completely embedded in deeply held beliefs to change very drastically through debate. He could say “God lives” and you could reply “God is dead” and the conversation won’t go much further than that.

All the same, it is enlightening to see what the other half is saying. Here is what Mr Shea writes in a recent piece called “How Sin Takes Over” — a title that most PervScan readers will probably interpret as a how-to, whereas he doubtless intends it as a diagnosis of a world gone to hell.

Sin blinds as it kills. The more depraved a culture is, the less it can see its depravity. That is why a culture like ours can reach a state where a professor entrusted with passing on the riches of the Western philosophical tradition can instead be hired by a major university in order to persuade students of the glories of bestiality.

There is a subtle tautology in the assertion that the “more depraved a culture is, the less it can see its depravity.” The phrase is true, in a way, but the reason is not that it becomes blind to its own depravity. (”I’m a pervert and I don’t know it!”) The reason is that it no longer defines certain acts or behaviors as perverse. (”I’m gay. A generation ago, to be homosexual was depraved. Today, not so much.”) In other words, what was once depraved becomes normal. Perhaps Mr Shea would agree that depravity has become the norm. But if that is so, then to be religious may itself be the new depravity.

Meanwhile, presuming that the professor to whom Mr Shea refers is Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher who has indeed offered radical arguments about bestiality and consent, it is surely overstating the case to say that any university hired him “in order to persuade students of the glories of bestiality.” Why would a university want to convince its incoming freshmen to doodle dogs or shag sheep? It’s funny. It used to be that bestiality was associated with the dim-witted, as though it were the perversion particular to illiterate, uneducated farmers. Now it’s the perversion of the Ivy League elite?

You could carry on analyzing the rest of Mr Shea’s text, most of which concerns society’s “ongoing descent into grave evil,” which somehow he equates with — of all things — consent. Or wait, he thinks consent is just a slippery slope toward enslavement and the “culture of death.” And Catholic doctrine is the one thing “which alone can help us live in ordered liberty.” Shit, maybe it would be better for universities to hire professors to espouse the “glories of bestiality.” At least bestiality, unlike Catholic dogma, need not habituate a mind to thinking in contradictions. Evidently it is only a short step from “virgin birth” to “consent is enslavement.”

“A South Daytona man was arrested Monday at an Interstate 4 rest stop near Daytona Beach after a trucker called the sheriff’s office saying a man was soliciting him for sex. ‘A pervert tried to get in my truck and do something with me,’ a trucker said in a recorded 911 call. Deputies arrested Jordan Lewis, 59, for trespassing because Lewis had already been warned twice previously for hanging out in the rest area. ‘He’s kind of cruising the truck line,’ a woman told a 911 dispatcher in another recorded call. ‘He’s heading over to another truck right now. This guy comes up to my passenger side door and he’s looking at me like he’s gay or something,’ said the truck driver from the first 911 call. ‘Sir I’m sending someone out there, but I don’t know how someone looks gay,’ said the 911 dispatcher. ‘Like he’s gay like he wanted to get in my truck and do something,’ said the truck driver. ‘He looks like he feminine. He looks like a woman, but he’s a man,’ he said. Lewis said he stopped at the rest area to take a nap and to stretch after driving back from visiting family in Tampa. ‘I’d rather stop there and rest than get in an accident,’ Lewis said of stopping at the rest area he estimates to be 10 miles from his house. ‘I didn’t even see anybody while I was there,’ Lewis said. Deputies searches Lewis and found condoms on him and in his car. Brandon Haught, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said they could only charge him with trespassing because Lewis hadn’t done anything sexual. Haught said they have gotten other calls from the rest area with similar complaints but wouldn’t call it a major problem.” — Orlando Sentinel (US)

Evidently Mr Scared-of-Gay-People Trucker missed the memo that highway rest stops often serve as cruising grounds. His 911 call is available to hear online. It can be inadvertently funny to listen to the trucker and the operator banter back and forth about what a gay person looks like. You’d think they were trying to describe an extraterrestrial.

On consideration, though, the whole thing is alarming. This trucker actually called the police because a guy who “looks like a woman, but he’s a man” made a pass at him? Well, so fucking what? If you’re not interested, say so. Then, provided the interested party isn’t pointing a knife at you, forget about it. Gay or straight, it’s not illegal to make a pass at an adult.

Besides, you know that if a trucker were to wander into a gay bar, nobody would call the police. Shouldn’t the hospitality extend both ways?

J.G. Ballard, who recently passed away, once said that “sex times technology equals the future.” It’s a prescient statement, with perhaps one qualification: the future is now. Browsing through the PervScan archives, you can’t help but be amazed by the number of stories concerning the influence of technology on sexual behavior. There are obvious phenomena, like the rise of net porn, the proliferation of child pornography, and the boom in online prostitution. But there are also less obvious ones — sexting, cybervigilantism, flash mob rape, and many others. One story even looked at the claim that online pornography constitutes a form of artificial intelligence. Impressive stuff.

Given the increasing use of “location-aware” mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone, it is difficult not to wonder if we are about to see technology influence sexuality in yet another way. For example, a science writer recently coined the term “geoshagging“:

Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers (’muggles’, in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they’re looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish your coordinates online and wait for someone to come along and sweep you off your feet. Gender roles and sexual mores being what they are, I never thought it likely that there could be hetero geocruising. For casual sex with women in western society, you need to buy strange ladies drinks in bars into the wee hours unless you’re willing to frequent prostitutes. Skulking around in parks with your GPS is fun, but let’s face it, it will rarely get a straight male laid. Now though, I find … that ‘geoshagging’ has entered the online vocabulary, referring to ‘location-aware mobile computing’ when it is used to set up such brief liaisons.

A skeptical commenter says that this “geoshagging” business will amount to nothing more than a previous fad called “toothing,” which involved random sexual encounters arranged via Bluetooth devices. The cynicism is understandable. Will people engage in any more or less casual sex simply because they have another means to arrange it? Only time will tell.

However, location-based mobile computing need not affect only promiscuity. There are other sorts — deviant sorts — of sexual behavior that may also be transformed. What if there arises an entire new genre of geoperversions? For example, imagine a pervert who develops a fetish for having sex with people at a certain intersection of longitude and latitude. Or perhaps bestialists could put mobile technology to good use. You know how sometimes wild animals are tagged so that their movements can be studied? Imagine bestialists who hunt down a wild animal, commit an unspeakable act on it, then tag it so that they can have the pleasure of hunting it down again someday…

If all that sounds insane, then perhaps it is time to offer an update to the Ballardian formula: perversion times technology equals the unimaginable.

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