Shemaleyum Up To $35 A Month Now?

[Paladin]

It's called supply and demand folks, Econ 101

[cam22001]

these lowlife wall street scumbags. these motherfuckers are not satisfied being millionaires they want every last penny on this earth. bunch of lowlife punk cowards that dont even have a decent bone in their body. Not 1 ounce of decency in their body

I'm sure your kind and civil name-callings will entice them to change their evil ways and join the path of righteousness that only you know.

[tsmandy]

The price of everything is rising and if porn companies don't follow suit profits will quickly diminish.

I know from my end of things, I have to charge more for my services because my monthly expenses are skyrocketing (food and fuel). It's not even an issue of greed, its a basic issue of paying bills and continuing to operate. 29.95 is just not worth what it was 1 year ago. Especially not for a global company like Grooby that is suffering from a crashing dollar.

[GroobySteven]

also 5 dollars increase is what a 15 to 17 percent price increase, I think thats not fair and a lot of business will be lost with this increase.

Hasn't made a difference in joins in the 4 weeks that it's been up with the exception of a few more people taking 1 year joins.

My costs in Thailand, UK and Europe have risen 25% at least in the last two years, I don't think that's fair either. I've never been to business school, never worked on Wall St and dislike the establishment more than most - but this is business.
Send me your username and I'll have a look at your account on our sites Worthy and I'll see what I can do to ease the burden for you.

seanchai

[SarahG]

I'm not in the industry myself, so I can be entirely off base with what I am about to say (someone correct me if I am mistaken) but with the executive in the US going after porn the way it has in recent years, I would think it would make sense for anyone in the industry as a company to go beyond what it costs to get by to ensure they have the assets to survive any baseless attempt at a crack down.

Even when the gov loses its cases, it still takes a lot of resources out of their targets. I would imagine anyone whose business is international in nature will have the potential for headaches if they can't immediately on the spot produce enough convincing documentation to get past any idiots at the various customs checkpoints.

As but a single example-
This has been in the news in recent years with the American customs officials detaining (forcing people entering the country to surrender their digital data storage for duplication & screening) laptops, hard drive, cell phone memory cards and digital cameras even when they contain otherwise privileged information (diaries, medical records etc). At times these devices are just screened for porn (some reports are saying child porn exclusive, but not all indicate it is that specific) and in the case of some laptops there has been confiscations where the devices were sent out for data duplication and then sent back anywhere up to 3 months down the line. I can't imagine the frustration of going overseas to do a shoot, getting it all finished, returning only to have some undereducated crank on a power trip in customs go "wait, I want your computer so I can send it out, maybe you'll get it in 3 months..." and not be able to use anything from that gig until the gov "kindly returns it."

I also found this BBC article, albeit from 1998, talking about the same practices in the UK so its not just an American thing:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150465.stm

I am unaware of what other countries may engage in this type of behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if there were others out there.

Then hitting closer to home than international security checkpoints:
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun...al/me-obscene9

The text from above: [bold I added, not the author]

Fetish porn on trial in obscenity case

Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

By Scott Glover
June 09, 2008

If all goes according to plan, an otherwise stately federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles will be converted into a makeshift movie theater this week, screening a series of graphic – many would say vulgar – sexual fetish videos.

At issue is how a jury will define obscenity in a region that boasts its status as the capital of the pornography industry and at a time when technology has made the taboo adult flicks of a generation ago available to a mainstream audience.

Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs says the videos he sells are works of art, protected under the Constitution. Federal prosecutors contend the movies are criminally obscene.

The prosecution is the first in Southern California by a U.S. Department of Justice task force formed in 2005 after influential Christian conservative groups appealed to the Bush administration to crack down on smut.

For jurors to determine whether Isaacs’ work is obscene, they will have to view hours of hard-core pornography so degrading that in one film, an actress cries throughout, prosecutors said in court papers.

But if jurors find that any of the four videos at issue in the case have any “literary, scientific or artistic value,” the work is not legally obscene, according to a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

“All they’re going to do is turn on a DVD machine and hope the jury is going to be so shocked and disgusted and offended that they’re going to throw me in prison,” said Isaacs, 57, a native of the Bronx. He said he hopes that jurors will be shocked – he’s a self-described “shock artist” – but also that they will see artistic value in the work.

The portly defendant, who sports a pony tail and goatee, produced and starred in one of the videos. He contends that the sex in the movie is incidental to the art. It’s merely a marketing tool to drive sales of the videos on the Internet, he said.

In a statistic that some may find every bit as shocking as his work, Isaacs said he was selling about 1,000 videos per month at $30 apiece before being raided by the FBI early last year. The number has since dropped to between 700 and 800 per month, but they still generate enough money to pay the rent on a house with a pool in the Hollywood Hills.

Isaacs predicted that many jurors would not be able to stomach viewing the movies, some of which feature acts of bestiality and defecation.

“It’s going to be a circus,” he said of the upcoming trial. “I think I’d freak out if I had to watch six hours of the stuff.”

Jury selection is expected to begin Monday. Presiding over the trial will be Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Kozinski was assigned the case as part of a rotation in which he and other appeals court judges occasionally oversee criminal trials in addition to deciding appeals.

His involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That’s because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court’s Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

“I did some rabble-rousing about it,” Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. He said he was made aware of the issue when a law clerk researching a case was banned from accessing a gay bookstore’s website.

“I didn’t think the bureaucrats in Washington should decide what the federal judiciary should have access to,” the judge said. “I thought that was incredibly arrogant for them to decide on their own.”

Kozinski declined comment on any aspect of the Isaacs case.

Isaacs said he would testify as his own expert witness at trial and planned to lecture jurors on how perceptions of art have changed over the years. There was a time, he said, when the works of authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were called obscene.

The point, Isaacs said, “is do we really want to throw artists in jail in America?”

Kenneth Whitted, the Justice Department prosecutor assigned to the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, declined to be interviewed for this article.

According to the Justice Department’s website, the task force “is dedicated exclusively to the protection of America’s children and families through the enforcement of our Nation’s obscenity laws.”

The task force has won convictions in more than a dozen cases, the vast majority resulting from plea bargains, according to case summaries provided by the department. Only a handful of defendants have elected to fight the charges at trial. Punishment in most cases included some prison time, ranging from one to seven years, as well as stiff fines and forfeiture of proceeds.

At a time when even hard-core pornography is available in major hotels, through cable companies and on the Internet, prosecutors have focused their efforts on particularly outrageous material, often involving sex with animals and defecation.

Most of the cases were brought in relatively conservative areas of the country, five of them in Texas. Whether jurors in Southern California have more lenient views on obscenity will be tested at Isaacs’ trial.

Federal agents raided Isaacs’ Koreatown office in January 2007. Isaacs said he was told by authorities that the investigation was initiated after a local person complained, and was eventually turned over to the task fore in Washington. He is now facing charges related to the importation, transportation and distribution of obscene material in connection with four videos he was selling over the Internet, including the one he produced. Isaacs admits to producing that film and to distributing all four.

But he denies that they’re obscene.

“That’s for the jury to decide,” he said.

He said that prosecutors have made several overtures inviting him to take a plea in the case, but that he has refused every time.

Pleading guilty would be admitting that he was just another pornographer, he said.

“If I get convicted and go to prison now,” Isaacs said, “I go as an artist.”

Of course the ironic part of the whole thing is this ultra conservative reagon appointee judge "maintained a publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos."

The following from the LA Times again:

9th Circuit’s chief judge posted sexually explicit matter on his website

Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

By Scott Glover
June 11, 2008

One of the highest-ranking federal judges in the United States, who is currently presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, has maintained a publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as “funny.”

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Asked whether the contents of his site should force him to step aside from the pending obscenity trial, Kozinski declined to comment. Opening statements in the trial are scheduled for this morning. In the case, Ira Isaacs, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, is accused of distributing criminally obscene sexual-fetish videos depicting bestiality and defecation.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told The Times that Kozinski should recuse himself from the Isaacs case because “the public can reasonably question his objectivity” concerning the issues at hand.

Gillers, who has known Kozinski for years and called him “a treasure of the federal judiciary,” said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was “seriously negligent” in allowing it to be discovered.

“The phrase ‘sober as a judge’ resonates with the American public,” Gillers said. “We don’t want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people.”

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would “harm his reputation in many quarters,” but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, “that’s a transgression of another order.”

“It would be very hard for him to come back from that,” he said.

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was “degrading … and just gross.” He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. “I would not keep those files intentionally,” he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

The sexually explicit material on Kozinski’s site earlier this week was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women’s crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear. There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

Kozinski, who was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year, is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He has a national reputation for a brilliant legal mind and has developed a reputation as a champion of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several year ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the Issacs trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appeals court judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Kozinski said he didn’t think any of the material he posted on his website would qualify as obscene.

“Is it prurient? I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I think it’s odd and interesting. It’s part of life.”

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: “Ain’t nothin’ here. Y’all best be movin’ on, compadre.”

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski’s essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The judge said he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest years ago.

“People send me stuff like this all the time,” he said.

He keeps the things he finds interesting or funny with the thought that he might later pass them on to friends, he said.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun.../me-kozinski12




My commentary: I am sure "I didn't mean to upload it to where the public could see it" argument would never have worked for a defendant accused of porn related crimes in this guy's courtroom. Just another example of where the righties have one set of rules for themselves, and another for the rest of the peons.

But the more important thing here is that it shows our political leadership IS using the judicial system for political gain, conducting an unneeded, unhelpful, for most (I hope most) citizens unwanted attack on civil liberties.

If this is taken to be a trend the important question is what will be next, how far these policies will extend, and what cost it will inflict on businesses related to it. I don't have the answers to any of these questions, but I think they are of grave importance.

[Skwisgarr Skwigelf]

Will you guys shoot Kimber James soon?

Buddy has shot a number of Kimber scenes for Shemale Yum

nice to hear

[rvince]

also 5 dollars increase is what a 15 to 17 percent price increase, I think thats not fair and a lot of business will be lost with this increase.

Look at how the US dollar evolved compared to the Euro (situation is the same with most of the other currencies: CAD, YEN, AUD, ...) in the 2 last years:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDEUR=X&t=2y
from being worth 0.80EUR, 1 USD is now only worth 0.64EUR. That's a 20% drop.

I can't talk for Seanchai, but it's clear that the cost of content production for Thai + Brazilian + European models increased by 20% at least.
In these conditions, increasing the site prices of ~15% doesn't seem unfair to me. (but yes, I'm a premium site operator too, so my opinion is probably tainted )

[Celeste]

Awww.. stop picking on Seanchai hehe j/k. Come here Seanchai ::HUGS::

[happychris]

You must be happy that the new lines of DSLRs that have HD video capabilities, that should save a few bucks.

[AmyDaly]

I had nothing but good experiences talking to Seanchai. He has answered every email and PM that I have sent him in a pretty timely matter for running all these sites that he does. He has also been very nice.

His sites are some of the best shemale sites on the net. You get what you pay for, thats for sure.