Sex Edition

Continued from page 1

Sander's death is shocking. But what isn't is the fact that, in America Gone Wild, a "sweet, good kid" — as her grandfather described her to ABC — might take her clothes off for money and post her naked photos online. For half a century now, Hef's Girls Next Door have been leaning nude on hay bales and stirring lemonade topless. Playboy bush is a perfect timeline of both the country's increasing comfort with pornography and pornography's corresponding discomfort with the natural. Before '69, the magazine hid the bush entirely. When it appeared, it immediately began to thin, becoming less unruly every year —  a patch, then a tuft, then a Velcro strip, then a sharp-lined eyebrow. And then, finally, to keep up with Penthouse and strippers and former Mouseketeer starlets, nothing at all.

The women changed elsewhere, too. Now they're glazed over, poreless, their flesh like the caramel dripping in a candy-bar commercial. Breast implants are so common that a couple of times a year, Playboy publishes Natural Beauties as a sort of event: "real" as a fetish.

As the Girl Next Door goes, so — to an extent — goes the girl next door. Sander was shaved and tattooed, professionally tanned and pierced through the lip. But she still was "natural," both in the categorical sense and in that real-girl essence that is the selling point of online amateurs. She looked real because that's what she was: a real young woman trying — like so many of her peers — to look like a porn star.

The day-night writers prefer to think of Zoey Zane as someone separate from Emily Sander. But such real feeling pulses in that photograph of her grinning in that beige bedroom that it's dishonest not to ask the hard questions. What if this is simply who she is? Who we are? At what point does pornography become documentary?

Zoey Zane is still online, of course. YouTube tributes compile her more modest shots. A friend has posted a celebration called "Emily Sander: Somewhere Over the Rainbow," writing, "Her head may have been in the clouds, but her feet were on the ground. Even if they were dancing."

This being the Internet, though, tributes are overwhelmed by anonymous nastiness. Check any message board where Sander is discussed, and you'll find yourself staring hard into an ugly truth: Many users of porn despise the women who turn them on.

"The good news is, in her current state of decomposition, she has finally gotten rid of that god-awful tattoo."

"One less prostitute. Yes, prostitute. Even, worse, prostitutes get a room and do it but these do it in front of millions."

"This dead little hottie is having her tight 18yo pussy spread all over the net! HOT :0."

This last one is mostly inaccurate. Soon after the discovery of Sander's body, something rare happened: The number of sex-related photos online lessened. Her site was wiped clean of her nude photos, as were dozens of sites linking to hers. The first three pages of Google hits for "Zoey Zane" all yielded remarkably similar results: an announcement of her death and police descriptions of Mireles. Two months later, with Mireles arrested and charged with murder, the Web is again chaotic. Call up zoeyzane.com, and you're redirected to a site called "Live College Cam Girls." Another URL bearing her name links to a spazzy porn site boiling over with spyware and pop-ups. Search for her, and you will find a slew of news reports as well as a couple of galleries, mostly labeled "SFW" and featuring her smiling sweetly in bras. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll get her, on that beige bed, beneath that insulting text: "We'll Never Forget Her Contribution To Society!"

The same wiseass has a couple of other, sicker Photoshop pranks. One juxtaposes the head shot that ran with her missing-person report with another nude picture, arranged to illustrate a familiar duality. Over the first, he — because it could only be a he — has written, "Emily Sander." Over the second, the nude shot: "Zoey Zane."

From the Emily Sander picture comes a word balloon: "I got my ass raped to death!!!"

The message-board idiocy and the collagist's sick jokes are to the legitimate press reports what South Park is to a libertarian stump speech: the same crap, just dirtier. With little else online about Sander, perhaps the real woman who is gone might be better served if the Web had not been purged of her alter ego.

Some claim that 30,000 people ponied up for her Web site. Surely a number of them saved their favorite photos. What if they posted them? What if Google picked up the links? What if the collagist's cruel work sank back into the abyss, where it belongs?

What if, with the merely pornographic, we could wash away the obscene?

It's Better with Three

If a UMKC researcher is right, bringing a third into your bedroom could make you healthier and happier.

By PETER RUGG

Chell knew she had at least one day to search for the boy she wanted before her husband would find out. She hit the road by 8 a.m. and left messages for Tank at the places she thought he would stay.

It was June 2007. Tank had been her houseguest and her family's employee until two months earlier. Tank had been in one too many arguments with Chell's husband, Spawn. Chell had last seen him at her daughter's high school graduation ceremony. Looking at Tank, she could tell right away that he was back on meth.

Still, it wasn't surprising to see that Tank had made the graduation. She had known him for six years, ever since her daughter met him. At age 13, Chell's daughter went through a goth phase, and Tank, part of her new circle of friends, was like an older brother to her. When he needed a place to stay, Chell agreed to take him in. Chell and Spawn gave him a job in their home-construction business.

In his first week there, Tank overheard Chell and Spawn having rough sex. She saw him the next day and told him, "You know, he's not beating me in there." Tank didn't need any further explanation. Talking over the next few months, Chell learned that Tank had a submissive streak and wanted to be on the receiving end of a beating himself someday.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
Next Page »