February 8th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Cupid’s Blindfold
I found this sweet little illustration on my hard drive and thought it was a nice way of suggesting that love is blind:
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Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
February 7th, 2010 -- by Faustus
The Wisdom of Elizabeth Pisani
Faustus blogs:
I’m fighting off a nasty old cold this week but that doesn’t mean I can’t still enjoy myself. My particular mode of enjoying myself hsa been reading Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS. Pisani, a journalist turned intrepid epidemiologist, has done some remarkable fieldwork in Southeast Asia which she writes about with great candor and wit. I’m only part of the way through (this cold medicine makes me dopey, or perhaps just dopier than usual), but already I’ve found a passage that’s to cherish. In it, Pisani reflects on how badly neat analytical categories, presumably mapped out by World Health Organization officials in offices in Geneva, fail to map onto the complex sexual realities of the real world.
A brief bit of explanation might help. Pisani refers to a kind of person called a “waria” in the passage below. In case you’re not familiar with that, a waria is a third-gender category, a biological male who lives as a woman, and an often-encountered sort of individual in Pisani’s account of sexual life in Jakarta.
One of the first people we spoke to was Fuad, a twenty-one-year-old lad who occasionally worked as a truck driver’s assistant and who bought sex from waria. Fuad’s girlfriend lived in Bandung, a university town in the cool hills west of Jakarta. Because his truck work was intermittent, he occasionally supplemented his income by giving blow-jobs or selling anal sex to men who cruised in one of Jakarta’s few parks, outside the Finance Ministry beneath the bulging thighs of the monumental, bare-chested Papuan who was symbolically breaking free of the shackles of Dutch colonialism. Sex with men was just a cash thing. Fuad was straight. To remind himself of that, he might occasionally want someone to give hi ma blow-job. But that’s not something you can ask of a ‘nice girl’; Fuad shared a common perception that oral sex is insulting to women, including to female sex workers. So he went to a waria, also known less politely as a banci (pronounced banchee).
‘If I go to a banci, well it’s that I’m thinking of my girlfriend,’ Fuad told our research team. ‘I’m 100 per cent into women. Don’t think that because I go to a banci I’m a fag. I’m not into that at all.’
Fuad’s girlfriend was doubtless a nice girl. She also worked the streets of Bandung at night. So here we have a self-proclaimed heterosexual who has unpaid sex with a woman who sells sex to other men, while himself also selling sex to other men and buying it from transsexual sex workers. He pushed a lot of ‘high risk’ buttons for HIV infection, yet he wasn’t a female sex-worker, a client, a drug injector, a gay man or a student. He didn’t fit into a single one of our questionnaire boxes.
And then the payoff:
The truth is, real people don’t have sex in boxes.
Quite so. I hope for a fuller review of the book here at ErosBlog soon. In the meantime, you can visit the website for the book.
February 5th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Talking G-Spot Sense
In which noted sexologist Carol Queen talks sense about the Great G-Spot Massacre of 2010, and in the process, recaps pretty much everything you might need to know about playing with the ones you may have handy:
That Swooshing Sound You Hear? A Million G-Spots, Vanishing
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February 4th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Stalking Horses
I’m not sure what’s going on in this picture at Kinky Delight, but there’s certainly no doubt it’s kinky:
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February 4th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Tennis With No Panties
First of all, let me get on the record and say that I am not opposed to this.
Moving on. Apparently Venus Williams attracted quite a lot of outraged attention last week when she gave every appearance of playing in the Australian Open without any panties on:
Of course, it was a deliberate fashion illusion:
“My dress for the Australian Open has been one of my best designs ever! It’s all about the slits and V-neck. I am wearing undershorts the same colour as my skin, so it gives the slits in my dress the full effect!
This is completely my design. I just sketched it out. The whole idea is just about the illusion that I’m wearing a deep V-neck. Then the idea was to wear shorts that were like the same colour as my skin. It works very well, apparently.
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February 3rd, 2010 -- by Bacchus
The Prettiest Bounty Hunter
Wait, was that “prettiest” or “sweatiest”?
Illustration (sourced here) is from the September 1967 True Action magazine, illustrating an article entitled “Bounty Hunt for the Yank Ruler of Amazonia’s Taboo Maidens.”
February 2nd, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Vaginal Maintenance
There are some odd synchronicities in the life of a sex blogger. One moment, I’m following a link from Violet Blue about women who maintain their vaginas with Agent Orange, surgical lasers, and unsweetened beverage mix; the next, I’m looking at vintage erotic photography on UseNet and realizing that there’s a connection:
What’s the connection? This just keeps getting weirder, but the connection is my mother, may she rest in peace. She was a big believer in the power of soap and water. I can still hear her voice in my head from thirty years ago, telling my sisters: “Soap and water and a clean wash rag, that’s all you need!”
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February 2nd, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Riding The Rumble Strip
Mika Tan twitters from the road:
Bella thought I was getting sleepy but there’s an AWESOME bumpy texture on the shoulder on the highway! Boredom brings out the perv in me.
February 1st, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Explicit Medieval Corbel
I have seen references on the Web (sadly, they are aren’t coming before my eyes just now) to the fact that early Medieval churches in Europe often contained startlingly explicit sexual material in the carvings and ornate stone decorations. I don’t have a source for this picture, but I wonder if it isn’t an example:
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January 31st, 2010 -- by Faustus
Implausible Fantasies
Faustus blogs:
Those of you who don’t already know her owe it to yourselves to get acquainted with the work of Greta Christina, who is (among other admirable things) both an impressive blogger on sex and atheism and politics and also the editor of Best Erotic Comics 2008 and Best Erotic Comics 2009.
In a repost this week of a post that originally appeared on Blowfish Blog, Greta Christina made an unusual confession:
I seem to be incapable of having sex fantasies that are implausible.
By this she does not mean a disinterest in supernatural or sci-fci fantasies (although she does not seem to have much interest in these either). What she means is that she has trouble with fantasies that lack a high degree of psychological realism. She wants fantasies with rich backstories and then for the characters in the fantasies to do the sort of things that characters like that could then be expected to do. For example:
If I’m trying to have a fantasy about someone I know, and in real life that someone is in a monogamous relationship, I first have to come up with an excuse for why it’s ethically okay. The couple is experimenting with non-monogamy, or the other partner is watching, or they’ve given their blessing as a one-time birthday dispensation, or something.
Greta Christina’s concern with doing right extends not just to waking fantasy but even to dreams.
I’m even like this in my sex dreams. More than once, I’ve had dreams in which I almost have sex with someone I shouldn’t… but we decide it’s a bad idea, and don’t. (And then I wake up, totally frustrated with myself, going, “It was a dream! Nobody would have gotten hurt! I could have done it, and enjoyed it, and not had any reason to feel guilty!”)
When you have this going on in the blessed morality-free zone of human experience, you know something interesting is going on.
Greta Christina’s commentary is further intriguing to me, because I seem to live in some ways at the opposite pole, fantasy-wise. I have a pretty strong positive attraction to sci-fi-ish fantasies, as perhaps readers of my posts here at ErosBlog might have noticed.
But in terms of the main thing that Greta Christina has noted about herself, I seem more driven by unusual and unlikely psychologies rather than plausible ones. It seems like my imagination, like Greta Christina’s, enjoys rich backstories. But unlike Greta Christina’s, it enjoys people acting strangely. That is, having some situation so bizarre that 99 out of 100 people (say) would be running for the exits and dialing 9-1-1, they instead decide to jump in with both feet and explore the erotic possibilities created by the situation. (What sort of situation Faustus, you ask? Well, all good things to those who wait, and not for much longer, I hope.) I would call the psychologies of such people
So we’re very different, Greta Christina and I? Perhaps and perhaps not. Another of my pleasures this week was reading the recipients of the 2009 Sexies, that is, the Sex Positive Journalism awards. (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.) Tied for first place in the “Opinion” category is Michael Bader’s The Great Porn Misunderstanding, which argues inter alia that we (Bader generally writes “men,” but I suspect his point generalizes) carry a concern for not causing harm to others over from our real lives into our fantasy lives and that satisfying this concern is a ncecessary component for having satisfying fantasies: if you’re worried about hurting someone, then you can’t relax, you can’t let yourself go, you can’t enjoy. Bader is specifically writing about what he calls “gonzo porn:”
In the overwhelming majority of pornographic sex…the women come to enjoy it. If they aren’t, themselves, actively, insisting on it, they eventually appear to get aroused. In other words, they’re invariably depicted as enjoying their so-called degradation. Everyone is turned on. Everyone. Based on my own clinical experience and on a review of the research, if the actresses were to respond on film realistically — say, by screaming in pain, sobbing, dissociating into grim and vacant fugue states — the overwhelming majority of men would get turned off, lose their erections, and change the channel. The male viewer does not, in fact, want these women to be demeaned and hurt; unconsciously, he wants them to be happy.
But that point might also generalize into strategies for fantasy. Now of course there are different strategies for dealing with a concern of not causing harm to others. And perhaps what Greta Christina and I are doing are variants of the same thing. She build her backstories and her fantasies such that the characters in them are happy to be doing what they’re doing. And so do I, often. It’s just that I try to reach then same end by giving my characters unusual imagined psychologies. The point of unity is “everyone happy.”
I admit this is speculative, but it’s the best I’ve come up so far. What think you, gentle readers?
January 29th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Best School Nurse Ever
Matron Jenny, as she’s known at St. Mackenzie’s Academy, is what we used to call “a fine figure of a woman”:
Bend over, boys, and get ready to cough!
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January 29th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
A Rare ErosBlog Tech Prediction
The iPad is not going to take off as an ebook reader. I haven’t seen it, I haven’t thumbed its virtual pages with its flashy on-screen touch controls, I don’t have the first clue what it offers for a reading experience. But, as an ebook reader, it will fail. (Whether it achieves commercial success on the strength of its other virtues, I do not care to opine.)
How do I know it will fail as an ebook reader? Is it because Twitter is alive with #iTampon jokes? No, it’s because, for once, Steve Jobs has chased a market he manifestly does not understand. Here’s proof:
Steve Jobs, on the device’s 10 hour battery life: “Ten hours is a long time, you’re not going to read for 10 hours.”
Not on your device, obviously. Next product, please!
