Some perv at Mashable noticed that LinkedIn just barred an entire profession from using its social network.

The social network updated its user agreement terms on Monday, adding an interesting clause, which caught the attention of one of our readers. Under a section entitled “Don’t undertake the following,” LinkedIn now includes this statement:

Upload, post, email, InMail, transmit or otherwise make available or initiate any content that: Even if it is legal where you are located, create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution.

A LinkedIn spokesperson contacted by Mashable explains, “In the old [user agreement], we had it covered by saying that one could not use a profile to promote anything ‘unlawful’. However, in some countries, that activity actually is lawful.”

That raises the question, How many other legal professions are barred from using LinkedIn?

Via Hong Wrong and thousands of other sources comes this photo –

– accompanied by this angry posting to the Facebook page of Starbucks Hong Kong:

This is my sister’s cuppa from your HKU branch. Fancy your staff not being able to spell an American name like Virginia. Forgiving she has been with every misspelled cup. Her cup was once ‘Virgin’. Every Starbucks experience for her has been coupled with fear and anticipation. But THIS is just UNACCEPTABLE. Starbucks HK, you have to buck up or just not spell your customer’s name anyway. It is a derogatory attitude even if it is unintentional. What do you have to say about this?

I can sympathize with the embarrassed customer, though “coupled with fear” is a bit over-the-top. I can sympathize with the hapless barista too. How many Americans would nail the correct spelling of unfamiliar Chinese names after hearing them once? And I assume that working behind the counter at Starbucks is low-paying drudgery in Hong Kong just like everywhere else.

Because this is the internet, there are sites devoted exclusively to the “funny names on Starbucks cups” phenomenon: starbucks cup love and starbucks spelling and probably others.

“Love Land” is a sex education theme park on Jeju Island (sometimes spelled Cheju) in South Korea, opened in 2004. Der Spiegel ran a travel piece about the “salacious Disneyland” in 2006, available in English here: Sex Education in Korea: A Phallus Garden in “Love Land”.

Just behind the entrance to Love Land, an acrobatic, oral-sex ensemble greets visitors. It shows a man and two women — one woman has her legs wrapped around the man’s neck and looks like she’s going to break her own neck any minute. The acrobatic threesome is illuminated at night, just like the other exhibits here: the nipple mountain crowned with pink nubs or the sturdy erect penises that rise up from the goldfish pond like a fountain. The sculptures are so explicit you can’t help stopping in front of them with a mixture of disbelief and amusement — even as a jaded Western tourist.

Jeju Island has been a traditional honeymoon spot for South Korean newlyweds since the late 1940s.

During the last few decades, many of these marriages were arranged by the parents of the spouses. The lucky ones might have had a brief chance to meet each other — under the watchful eyes of relatives — before exchanging vows. And then, after their wedding, they were immediately flown off to the south — to Cheju Island. As they got used to the notion of being bonded for life, they spent their wedding night and the following days on the Honeymoon Isle, which thereby also became a kind of “island of sex ed.”

In the evenings, the hotel would offer an entertainment program featuring lap dances and others raunchy or risqué highlights. Its purpose was to help the intimidated, freshly married novices relax — and perhaps to give them some ideas for later.

Love Land fits into this “island of sex ed” theme, though one would imagine that more couples nowadays commence their honeymoons with some sexual experience or at least knowledge.

The Windsor Star website has a gallery of 40 snapshots from Love Land. Most of it strikes me as tacky or silly, not especially erotic, but the visitors all seem to be enjoying themselves immensely.

People magazine named Gwyneth Paltrow the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World”. Its most recent “Sexiest Man Alive” was Channing Tatum. Meanwhile Mila Kunis has been named the “Sexiest Women Alive” by Esquire, the “Most Fuckable Celebrity” by Details, and the “Sexiest Woman In The World” by FHM.

Here’s my question: why always actors? Nothing against these three, who are all objectively attractive people, but what’s so exceptionally sexy about actors? Hollywood actors generally exude a blend of self-importance and shallowness that I find grating and unsexy. Plus Kunis is sleeping with Ashton Kutcher and Paltrow is sleeping with the Coldplay guy, which further undermines any fantasy element for me.

The most beautiful woman in the world today is probably a recent high school graduate in the Ukraine or Ireland or South Korea.

Worth a read: “Most Gwyneth!” by Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.

New York magazine ran a hot trend piece this month: Why are a bunch of men quitting masturbation? So they can be better men. The article’s research consists almost entirely of browsing the NoFap forum on Reddit, which the article does not link to.

The piece is getting much supportive response. Up at The Frisky: Why It’s A Good Thing That Men Are Reflecting About Masturbation The piece is also getting much skeptical response. Up at Gawker: In Defense of Masturbation.

Count me in the skeptical camp. I’m a great believer in moderate vice, whether drinking alcohol or smoking pot or masturbating to porn or gambling or playing videogames or whatever. All of these things can be harmful if taken to extremes or done compulsively, but all can be very enjoyable parts of a balanced and productive life in moderation. Occasional masturbation has definite health benefits, both physical and emotional. Excessive self-denial can be just as harmful as excessive indulgence.

I’m also skeptical about Gary Wilson, the guy whose TEDx talk and website YourBrainOnPorn.com are frequently cited in movement circles. He makes grand claims about internet porn causing erectile dysfunction and “rewiring” your brain, but these claims have no scientific basis. Other skeptics are skeptical too.

This no-fap subculture may help some guys get control of their lives. For others it may lead to needless anxiety and shame. Disclaimer: Daze is neither a licensed therapist nor an expert on anything whatsoever.

Wood Rocket brings whimsy and smarts to a usually crass genre, the porn tube site. And the site produces much original content rather than simply recycling or stealing old porn.

My favorite series there is Topless Girls Reading Books. It’s exactly what it sounds like: video clips, mostly around two minutes each, of topless girls reading aloud from books. The reading choices range from The Art of War to Tom Sawyer to Clockers to They Call Me Baba Booey.

The most recent installment features London Keyes reading Beowulf. I really wanted to like this one — great book, great boobs — but it exemplifies two flaws in the series. First, stumbling delivery. Reading aloud cold is difficult, and you can notice the difference when the performer has read through their passage once or twice before the camera rolls. Second, half the point of topless girls reading books is lost if the topless girl holds the book directly in front of her breasts while reading.

The LA Times has an op-ed column and editorial cartoon by David Horsey regarding the new Los Angeles County condom mandate for porn shoots. He opens with this unsurprising observation:

The new law in Los Angeles County requiring actors in pornographic films to wear condoms seems merely to have pushed the smutty movie industry into the quiet residential areas of unincorporated Ventura County.

Many pornographers threatened to move the industry from LA if the condom referendum passed. For now, it appears they’re staying in the LA area but driving outside the law’s reach for shoots. Horsey later reports:

Ventura County residents have been registering complaints about strange sights and sounds in neighboring homes.

“It’s really disturbing,” Tim Gray, a 56-year-old father of four, told the Los Angeles Times. “We were eating dinner and we heard these loud sounds outside, like something really bad had happened. I went outside and heard, well, the typical sounds you’d hear in a porn movie. It was echoing all over the neighborhood.”

Ventura County officials are now proposing their own condom requirement, hoping that will get the pornographers to keep on traveling to the next county.

This LA Times page also has an awkwardly worded online poll: “Will L.A.’s condom mandate for porn prove counterproductive?” Responses are currently running 84% for YES, meaning opposed to the condom mandate. As usual with online polls, this landslide probably does not reflect public opinion but simply indicates which side has been more successful in gaming the poll.

The Daily Beast has an interview with porn director Rob Black, who spent a year in prison on obscenity charges in 2009-2010. He resumed his career after doing his time, and he recently launched a tell-all online radio show. (His wife/collaborator Lizzie Borden also did a year in prison and also resumed her career afterwards.)

I haven’t heard his radio show, but in the interview Black comes across as a whiny egomaniac. Too much “I’m a revolutionary” and “I’m a victim” gets on my nerves. For the record, the feds did not target him and Borden for shooting interracial sex or using transsexual performers or breaking rules that everyone in the porn biz was breaking. They were targeted for producing hardcore abduction/rape/torture/murder scenarios. They were also targeted for pushing grossout porn further than anyone else in the mainstream industry back then — women vomiting and then reingesting their vomit; women given enemas, pooping into a bowl, then pouring the poop water over their heads (see this old Adult DVD Talk thread). One can make the First Amendment case in defense of extreme pornography, and I agree that he and Borden did not belong in prison, but at least be honest about what those extremes consisted of.

It’s also not true that the porn biz has shunned Rob Black since he got out of prison. He has worked steadily for Exquisite Films, mostly making high-end (by porn standards) superhero parody flicks like Captain America XXX, Iron Man XXX, Supergirl XXX, Batgirl XXX and the Justice League of Pornstar Superheroes. He received XBiz and AVN Award nominations for his 2011 and 2012 work (granted, they nominate pretty much everyone). AVN inducted Black into its Hall of Fame in 2012.

I wish the interview had dealt more with Rob Black’s criticisms of unsafe or shady industry practices. He has a must-read Tumblr site which covers these topics in more detail. That site also has lots of photographs of Black and Borden in prison.

The lastest idiotic cosmetic surgery trend in the news: women getting their breasts tattooed to make their areolae look bigger, darker and more defined. For now it seems to be mostly a British craze. From the Telegraph: Nipple tattooing sweeps UK as women strive for ‘perfect boobs’. From the Daily Beast: Nipple Tattoos Increase in Popularity in U.K.

Nipple and areola tattooing for women who have undergone mastectomies has been around for a while. This is perfectly understandable. What’s new is purely cosmetic tattooing to achieve some nipple ideal or to fix some perceived nipple flaw. This is just stupid.

Jezebel rightfully criticizes this trend: Nipple Tattoos Exist Because Your Tits Will Never Be Good Enough. Thankfully the Jezebel blogger resists the urge to blame this trend on men or porn.

Another Daily Beast column argues: Forget Tittooing — Small Nipples Have Always Been the Platonic Ideal. This strikes me as equally stupid. Why does there have to be an “ideal” nipple type? Variety is the spice of boobs.

Google Streetview cameras have accidentally captured nudity or sex acts or prostitutes at work in the past. But there was nothing accidental about this racy scene captured along Dukes Highway in South Australia. The couple saw the Google camera car, raced ahead and arranged a roadside tableau.

Don’t go looking on Google, they’ve already blurred out the couple.

Arranging shocking scenes for the Google Streetview camera car probably won’t become a meme, since there’s no way of knowing when it will drive by. (I’m assuming Google doesn’t publish a schedule.)