Remember Yakov Smirnoff? The annoying Russian comedian in the Reagan era who escaped from the Sovey-jetski Soy-ooze to tell us all how lucky we were to live in America? Well, he’s got his own theater and nightly show in Branson now, so he wasn’t entirely fulla shit. But Bondage Blog has another take on why he was right, and offers us this as evidence:
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I’m struck by the athleticism of this feat of sixty-nine, as found (in uncropped form) at Kinky Delight and drawn by one Marcello Dudovich:
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Alternative Title: Saliva Is An Inferior Anal Lube
There’s a long poem, fourteen or fifteen hundred lines, attributed to Lord Byron; the attribution is thought to be both false and scurrilous. The poem, called Don Leon, has apparently existed in several versions; the one linked from Wikipedia matches Ashbee’s description as being “entirely in defence of sodomy” but it lacks the lines Ashbee thought worth quoting, in which are supposedly explained the reason why Byron was estranged from his wife. Long story short, supposedly, she was great with child, he asked nicely, she didn’t say no, he went up the butt, she decided he was a monstrous pervert. Only, it sounds better in the original:
That time it was, as we in parlance wiled
Away the hours, my wife was big with child.
Her waist, which looked so taper when a maid
Like some swol’n butt its bellying orb displayed,
And Love, chagrined, beheld his favourite cell
From mounds opposing scarce accessible.
“Look, Bell,” I cried; “yon moon, which just now rose
will be the ninth; and your parturient throes
May soon Lucioa’s dainty hand require
To make a nurse of thee, of me a sire.
I burn to press thee, but I fear to try.
Lest like an incubus my weight should lie;
Lest, from the close encounter we should doom
Thy quickening foetus to an early tomb.
Thy size repels me, whilst thy charms invite;
Then, say, how celebrate the marriage rite?
Learn’d Galen, Celsus, and Hippocrates,
Have held it good, in knotty points like these,
Lest mischief from too rude assaults should come,
To copulate ex more pecudum.
What sayst thou, dearest ? Do not cry me nay;
We cannot err where science shows the way.”
She answered not; but silence gave consent,
And by that threshold boldly in I went.So clever statesmen, who concoct by stealth
Some weighty measures for the comonwealth,
All comers by the usual door refuse,
And let the favoured few the back stairs use.Who that has seen a woman wavering lie
Betwixt her shame and curiosity,
Knowing her sex’s failing, will not deem,
That in the balance shame would kick the beam?
Ah, fatal hour, that saw my prayer succeed,
And my fond bride enact the Ganymede.
Quick from my mouth some bland saliva spread
The ingress smoothed to her new maidenhead,
The Thespian God his rosy pinions beat,
And laughed to see his victory complete.
‘Tis true, that from her lips some murmurs fell—
In joy or anger, ’tis too late to tell;
But this I swear, that not a single sign
Proved that her pleasure did not equal mine,
Ah, fatal hour! for thence my sorrows date:
Thence sprung the source of her undying hate.
Fiends from her breast the sacred secret wrung,
Then called me monster; and, with evil tongue,
Mysterious tales of false Satanic art
Devised, and forced us evermore to part.
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But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).
My exploration of Roger Corman-related bonus material continued this week with the cast and crew interview features on the new release of Galaxy of Terror (1981).
Galaxy of Terror would probably be remembered today (if at all) as a minor, competently-made low-budget Alien rip-off but for one notorious scene. The set-up is something like this: A spaceship crew is dispatched to a strange, dark planet where a mysterious force generates monsters out of each crewmember’s deepest fears. Many grisly deaths result. Not a bad premise, so far. But one of these deaths turns out to be unusually kinky or unusually squicky or both. As Roger Corman himself explained in the interviews:
Of the various monsters which came out of each person’s unconscious, the one that was most famous and really became notorious at the time and helped to sell the film…was the monster coming out of Taaffe O’Connell’s unconscious.
Taaffe O’Connell played a character named Dameia, a highly competent spacefarer. And a stunner to boot. (She’s depicted to the left in her part as Dameia, and on the right in her present-day bonus-material interview.)
Dameia has just one little hang-up. As Corman puts it:
For the part of Taaffe I decided that in her unconscious mind she was afraid of sex. So for her we designed a monster maggot-like creature with certain phallic overtones.
Yes, indeed. The design for the maggot was apparently done by James Cameron, who got his start working for Corman and thus was able to join the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and a your-jaw-will-drop-when-you-see-the-list parade of others who got their start in that amazing one-man film school.
Now there’s an image to keep in mind the next time you see Titanic or Avatar.
And what does the giant icky maggot actually do to poor Dameia? Well, as Taaffe O’Connell puts it rather bluntly in her own cast interview:
…this woman succumbs to her greatest fear and her greatest pleasure.
And images from the sequence can make make matters blunter still.
In short, this sequence is a dramatization of a certain kind of pop-Freudian psychological conjecture: there are people whose conscious hate and fear of and disgust at something covers up unconscious desire for that very same thing.
Now is this conjecture a smart one? Perhaps. It does seem to me that there are certain psychological phenomena (homophobia is a clear example) for which it suggests at least a promising line of inquiry. But okay, maybe it’s a dumb idea. Maybe it’s even a pernicious idea (I hope I don’t have to spell out why that might be). But the more serious point here is that it is an idea, an interesting one, carried inside the unlikely vehicle of a B-grade horror movie. Good or bad? You might want to study the matter.
The film industry’s Moral Guardians, however, were not interested in having this matter available for you or anyone else to study. Galaxy of Terror editor R. J. Kizer explained:
Galaxy of Terror ran into several rating difficulties. First and foremost was the famous giant maggot scene. When we submitted the film we initially got an X rating. …[W]hat the rating board does is that won’t exactly tell you what is it that got you the rating. They just tell you, “well, you got an X rating.” The original concept of the maggot was the fact that the woman being attacked by the worm is in terror and then eventually comes to enjoy the experience. That was how she was directed, and that was how the thing was designed. So I had to take all of the erotic rhapsody looks out. I had to take out any suggestive movement of the maggot, there were — how else to put it? — humping movements being made by the worm and I had to take those out, so it looks like the maggot just kind of like… falls down on her and is just pressing down on her as if to crush her. So when I made all these little snips of film, and I went though and went through and resubmitted it we got an “R”. So Roger [Corman] comes into my room and says “I want to see what you took out.” And I had this box of trims, filled with little frames, a foot long to half a foot long to just a couple of frames to literally one frame of everything I had taken out all labeled where I took it out from…and I just reached randomly into the trim box and pulled this four-frame long piece of film. And I held it up. “Well, for example we started with this”…and Roger just looked at that four-frame piece of trim that I was holding in my hands and he says “Oh I don’t believe these MPAA people! I can’t! You take out four frames and we go from an X to an R. I give up. I don’t understand these people. Well, there’s no point even putting that stuff back in. Well, just ship it.” And he walked out.
So let’s reflect on what went on here. The MPAA has in effect just told us that it’s more or less okay to make a commercial movie in which a woman is stripped, raped, and killed by a giant slimy maggot and show said movie to youngsters, as long as they’re accompanied by a parent or guardian. Nice. But a slight variant the same scene, presented as the cinematic realization of an admittedly somewhat-disturbing erotic idea, will get your movie slapped with an X rating. Which means, of course, commercial death for the movie. The rating will keep the ideas in the movie out of the public realm just as effectively — if not more so — than if the gendarmes had trooped in and carried off the prints.
If someone wants to explain how behavior like the MPAA’s is consistent with the communicative norms of an open society, I am all ears.
And as for the little bits of trim in editor Kizer’s box? Lost for good, I’m sorry to say.
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We all know of the legendary Kama Sutra and its endless catalog of sexual variety. But do you know why those varieties were spelled out in such loving detail?
I just discovered this explanation, from near the end of the famous translation by Sir Richard Burton:
The chief reason for the separation between the married couple and the cause which drives the husband to the embraces of strange women, and the wife to the arms of strange men, is the want of varied pleasures and the monotony which follows possession. There is no doubt about it.
Monotony begets satiety, and satiety distaste for congress, especially in one or the other; malicious feelings are engendered, the husband or the wife yields to temptation, and the other follows, being driven by jealousy.
For it seldom happens that the two love each other equally, and in exact proportion, therefore is the one more easily seduced by passion than the other. From such separations result polygamy, adulteries, abortions, and every manner of vice, and not only do the erring husband and wife fall into the pit, but they also drag down the manes of their deceased ancestors from the place of beatified mortals, either to hell or back again upon this world.
Fully understanding the way in which such quarrels arise, I have in this book shown how the husband, by varying the enjoyment of his wife, may live with her as with thirty-two different women, ever varying the enjoyment of her, and thus rendering satiety impossible. I have also taught all manner of useful arts and mysteries, by which she can render herself pure, beautiful, and pleasing in his eyes.
This one’s for… hell, I’m not quite sure who it is for. It’s a buff young man getting his ass whaled, somebody out there must be looking for this because it’s a prolific porn genre of which this is a better-than-average vintage exemplar:
Via.
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It’s knowledge I’ve had kicking around in my brain for awhile. There are these Roman-era coin-like objects, called spintria, sprintria, or sprintia. (I’m giving you Google search terms, not trying to tell you which of these is a good Latin word, ‘cos I dunno.) They have graphic sex scenes on them. They aren’t thought to be coins, precisely; coin collectors get huffy if you call them coins. They’re often called “tokens” and one venerable theory, now coming under discredit, is that they were used in brothels in polyglot Roman cities to help communicate about various desired sex acts. Another theory I found in this worthy thread is that they were a military parody of worthless tokens given as official political gifts.
I don’t much care about the numismatic details. Happens, I found some nice images. I’m not saying where, because it’s a trashy link-baity sort of place, so junked up with mendacious ads for buying gold from dodgy ponzi scheme operators that I can’t link you there in good conscience. But the coins are pretty:
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Another bummer of a tattoo, by my standards.
It’s the anal variety again. And it says “Fun Center” — which is at least defensible. If it weren’t for the ring of barbed wire inside the words. Talk about your mixed messages!
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OK, OK. The dog in the last post was funny, you have to admit. But Julia from Met Art just makes you want to shuck off and dive for the water:
Does it look to you like her buttocks are floating? Maybe a trick of refraction, maybe a miracle of pertness and buoyancy. I think a close hand inspection is the only way to be sure.
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One of the things I like about ALS-Scan (and one of the reasons I’ve considered them A Real Solid Porn Value for a lot longer than I’ve been running a sex blog) is that once a year or thereabouts, they pack up their cutest models and head for some sunny island somewhere, for an extra-decadent set of sun-drenched photo-shoots. This never fails, because it’s clear that everybody from the models to the photographers to the company dog is having an extra good time, and as always, fun porn is best porn:
Now-wait-a-gawd-damned-minute! Did I just say “dog?”
Yes, yes I did. I even put in a helpful red arrow in the right-hand side of the frame, where you can see him ambling down the beach. If you click the photo (recommended) you’ll see a much bigger version, letting you see the dog (and the girls) more clearly. Dog lovers will recognize, by body language and expression, much of what this particular canine critter is thinking:
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Spanking Blog ponders this approximately 85-word tattoo and wonders “can you imagine pounding that ass doggie-style every few days, week in and week out, seeing that verse heaving in front of you every time?”
Me, I’m the kind of guy for whom the catastrophic apostrophic mishap in line six would be a boner-killer. But wave the magic laser wand and deem that fixed, for the sake of the thought experiment. I’m still reminded of an old chestnut of a Robert Service poem called The Ballad of Salvation Bill.
It’s about a preacher trapped in a Klondike cabin all winter with a sinner of a prospector who has tobacco but no rolling papers. The prospector eyes the preacher’s bible, the preacher won’t share single page for smoking, and it’s a long hard winter for awhile. There’s violence, and melodrama, and eventually there’s an agreement: he can smoke the Bible pages, but he has to read them first. But you guessed it:
I smoked and smoked from Genesis to Job,
And as I smoked I read each blessed word;
While in the shadow of his bunk I heard him sigh and sob,
And then… a most peculiar thing occurred.
I got to reading more and more, and smoking less and less…
It would be a terrible shame if this tract of a tattoo had a similarly depressing effect.
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“Damn, honey. I think we’re going to need some more lube…”
From Explicite Art.
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When I first saw this model, I was struck by her unforced beauty -- a sort of semi-amateur look to go with a really pretty face: But why, oh why, in this next shot, is her face all squeezed up like she's eating a lemon? Ahh, here's why. Mystery solved -- she's getting a spanking! Found on Spanking Blog.
