It is a privilege and a pleasure to be able to announce here the complete publication of Study Abroad, the second erotic graphic novel in my Tales of Gnosis College series.
Prior to traveleing overseas for cultural enrichment and a bit of education, four comely coeds at Gnosis College make a wager among themselves as to which among themselves as to which of them will manage to have the most outrageous adventure. Unknown to them, one of Gnosis’s many mad scientists has found a way to manipulate their minds for his own sinister purposes. Resulting adventures abroad will turn out to be at once more pleasurable — and more dangerous — than any of our heroines might have anticipated. Talk about higher education!
Orientalist Bridget O’Brian will travel to a tiny, wealthy emirate and accept a strange proposal in order to get a very intimate view of the lives of its jaded inhabitants. Biologist Cleo Mount will find at once steamy encounters and that which she most fears in the rainforests of southeast Asia. Politically-engaged Jill Keeney will put her body on the line in a conspiracy against a tyrant. And philosopher Iris Brockman will take a job in the world’s priciest and most decadent mermaid bar, where her provison of unorthodox services will allow her to slake her lust…for knowledge! Which story is most bizzare? I report, you decide.
John Severin (b. 1921) is doubtless one of the great comics artists of the twentieth century. He was one of the founding artists at Mad and later head artist at Cracked and worked over his career in all sorts of comics genres, many relatively little-known today such as war, western, and historical comics. In 2003, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, and you just don’t get much higher in the comics world than than.
And like so many great comics guys, he had a taste for the ribald.
Caption: “What’s wrong, Mr. Bailey…have I done something wrong?”
The student of erotica gets so much pleasure out of unearthing ver subject’s obscure history, and I’ve just come up with another example.
First someone invented a camera, then got someone to take ver clothes off in front of it. And shortly after that, no doubt, having sex in front of it. And the same certainly applies to motion pictures, which have the added advantage that you could show bodies, well, moving, which is what people do when having sex. The earliest examples that I can find documented by scholars indicate that sex and nudity began appearing on film right around the turn of the century, with the first American sex film for which we have a title (either A Free Ride or A Grass Sandwich and involving “a man, two women, and a Model-T Ford…and…probably shot in New Jersey”) dating from 1915, although because of records of police seizures, still earlier examples are believed to exist.
The reference to the police is material, because of course shortly after anyone actually tried to show people having sex on film, the pokenoses of the world got busy with their eternal project of suppressing Sexuality We Hate.
And they were fairly successful at it, for several decades anyway. By the early 1930s there was a Production Code in place to suppress any excess (or indeed, even minimal) erotic exuberance in the movies, of which there were at leastglimmerings through the start of the talkies, and that Code held more or less right through the 1960s. During these decades stag films existed and they could be displayed in venues where their enjoyment could be limited to audiences of relatively wealthy and powerful men. Police and prosecutors would wink at this, as they generally do at the illegalities of those high in status (under-color-of-law beatdowns being reserved for the lowly). For the rest of the movie-going world, erotic experience would be purged, or at best deeply sublimated. This system would start to break down when film makers working outside the system began to push the boundaries of what sex and nudity could be depicted, an event perhaps datable from Russ Meyer’s release of The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. By the 1970s, the emergence of porn — with gay porn blazing the trail others would follow — would change the cinematic world forever.
Or so it seemed to me, anyway. It turns out that even before Mr. Teas there was an earlier outsider world of exploitation cinema, of cheapo independent producers making movies on shoestring budgets and publicly exhibiting them, albeit in ways that often that seemed to resemble carnival acts more than film distribution as it is or was conventionally understood. I (like millions of others on hundreds of topics) can thank Susie Bright for the enlightenment, specifically for her interviewing film historianEric Sheafer and specifically his book “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True” A History of Exploitation Cinema 1919-1959. Shaefer did amazing research to uncover a twilit world of definitely-not-up-to-code movies that you might have actually have had a chance to see if you lived in mid-twentieth century America. These were movies that dealt with crime, violence, drug use, and of course, nudity and sex.
A showman might come to town — even if your town was an inconsiderable place no one in Hollywood had ever heard of — with his movie and you could go see it. It wouldn’t be like an ordinary movie showing. There might be a pitchman and truly lurid posters outside. The showings might have been segregated by sex or age. Inside there might be nurses (or at least, women costumed as nurses) for the sake of rendering aid to patrons overly shocked by the content of the movie.
Or perhaps two or more movies. Because the showman would have at least two reels, on to show if the cops showed up and another one if they didn’t. And if you were lucky and the cops didn’t show up, you might actually see a glimpse of nudity of the sort the Hays Office would never have approved. In some cases, you might even have seen full-frontal. Shaefer, who seems to have watched many of these movies very carefully, comes up with an example (sadly low in resolution).
That’s from Girls of Loma-Loma (or Forbidden Daughters) which Shaefer dates to the 1930s but which IMDB appears to date to 1927. That’s unsurprising, given that these movie makers didn’t necessarily keep terribly accurate business records, much less register their work with the Copyright Office.
More evidence, as if any were really needed, that porn will find a way.
I’ll cap off this series of posts on making your own with a little practical, if perhaps boringly technical, advice about tools you can use to make your experience as creator go well.
On things everyone ought to get a little familiar with is WordPress, exceptional blogging software, some version of which powers both ErosBlog and EroticMadScience. Most hosting companies make WordPress installation available directly from your control panel, so if you set up your own domain it will be sitting there waiting for you as soon as you’re up and running. In thirty years of working with computers I’ve had few technology experiences as agreeable as being a WordPress user: it installs in seconds and if you want, you can be up and publishing to the world in minutes. You can customize it and make a really good-looking site in hours, so if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet and start making your own on your own site, I’d say this is definitely the way to go.
An option now available in WordPress that makes it an especially good tool for creators is that not only can you use it to publish to the universe, you can also create private, password-protected multi-site blogs by using a few simple plugins. These make splendid collaboration tools: you can, if you want, create a blog that is just for you and a single artist, which might sound silly but actually allows you to see a commission develop over a series of posts from initial script and visual references through pencil sketches and other drafts (which can be accepted or critiqued in comments) to delivery of finished product: the whole thing laid out right in historical order on a page, which is both useful as a means for both you and your collaborators to learn and creates something that can be quite gratifying to look back upon as well.
For writing tools that go beyond the capabilities included in WordPress or ordinary word processors you might want to look into a product called Celtx, which I’ve been using for a few years now. Celtx is media production software which you can use to create beautifully and correctly formatted and organized screenplays, stage plays, storyboards, and comic book scripts. You can download the basic version and use it by yourself — this version is available for free. It can also be used as a collaboration tool if you subscribe to something called Celtx Studio. The studio is subscription-only, but it does allow you (and people you’re working with) to work on common projects anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Just think what she could have accomplished if she had had Celtx!
If you want to make your own e-books, look into a tool called Calibre. This is powerful and free e-book software which not only allows you to keep track of your e-books on your own computer, but it has a conversion utility which enables you to take, say, the beautiful archive of comic books pages you’ve created and turn them into a compact file useful for other people, like a .mobi file for people to read on their Amazon Kindles (or other e-book readers — it handles many), or a single neat PDF for them to read on their desktops.
For managing images, whether re-sizing, cropping, watermarking, etc., I strongly recommend an image tool called GIMP. This usually comes pre-installed in most Linux distributions I’ve seen, and there’s also at the very least a version available for Windows as well. It is very much the publisher’s friend, and like so many good things in life, it is also available for free.
Finally, while we’re talking about free, those of you who have ever been over to EroticMadScience might have noticed that it is liberally bespangled with little icons that look like this:
These are Creative Commons Licenses. You might or might not be interested in them, but if you see your work as being a form of hedonic philanthropy especially, please consider using them. They in effect give you a way of allowing other people to share and enjoy your work, with requirements for attribution and permission for commercial use or the creation of derivative works (or not) at your option. If you want your work to spread far and wide, and want people to feel comfortable that they are in the right in doing so, the Creative Commons license gives you an excellent tool for doing that.
So now you have tools: go forth and make something!
So you’ve found someone you’d like to work with out there on the wide wild web. What now?
The first question worth asking yourself is, how do I present myself? A good place to begin would be to have a public presence where you can show a potential partner that you’re for real and what you’re into. There are many ways that you might do this, but I happen to think that setting up a site of one’s own and doing a little writing is an excellent start.
Write down what turns you on. Try to make that into a vision and publish. Don’t be shy. You can use a pseudonym if you want (I do!). About two years ago, after having diverted myself with writing a sequence of weird and porny screenplays that I’m pretty sure will never be acted out in front of a camera, I sat down and wrote an illustrated essay about what I really liked. This essay became A Thamatophile Manifesto, and together with that strange screenplay material, became the foundation for the site Erotic Mad Science. Then I started blogging about what I was into, writing posts as simple as “Look! A concept or image makes me squee (even if it makes others squick)!” or “Wow — here’s a provocative historical forerunner of one of my own kinks!” The useful outcome of all this activity (which, okay, maybe I took a little far) was that when I started looking for creative partners to commission I had a rich bed of source material to point to and say: here is what I am into — do you think you’re sufficiently interested in it to want to join me in working on it?
And I do think it is important for your creative partners to, in at least some degree, share your enthusiasms. If they do, they’ll be much better able to understand what it is that you’re asking them for when you place commissions. The art they work with you on creating will be sexier, because they’ll engage and have some of themselves in it. And they’ll be able to come up with ideas that contribute positively to the projects you work on.
A note about setting up sites and publishing. There are tons of places on the Internet that will allow you to do this for free, but as a general matter I endorse Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet: “Anything worth doing on the Internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.” Anyone who’s done anything with erotica for any length of time knows horror stories: material deleted, accounts canceled, creators banned. You and your material are much safer if you set up your own domain. Sure, there are some up-front costs, but it’s easy to find someone out there who will register your domain and host your site and leave you alone as long as you pay the rent, which will work out to pennies a day if you get anything remotely like a good deal. With tools like WordPress available (for free!) it is easy to be up and running with a good-looking, customized site in a few hours. And of course, you will look a lot more for real if your domain name reflects your Internet identity.
Approach with respect. If you’ve found someone whose work you like and who want to commission, get in touch. Explain what you like about their work and inquire whether they might be interested in accepting a commission. There’s nothing rude at all about this. Remember: creators who publish on the Internet are out there because they want to be found, and in general, they want to hear from you. One good thing to try, especially if you have a site of your own, is to ask permission to publish an image or story-excerpt or whatever of theirs on your site (with attribution, of course). This is an effective way to communicate your admiration of their work, and as long as the request is reasonable, they will generally say yes.
When it comes matters of money and commission cost, be courteous but matter-of-fact and businesslike. Other creators have opportunity costs for their time and just like you they have to eat and pay the rent, and generally they’ll be able to tell you what they need to charge to do a given piece of work.
Don’t be afraid to ask in detail for what you are looking for. Here is an example of where it pays to have done preparatory work for what you’re into, because it will help another creator figure out what you might like, but at the same time, don’t be afraid to write a detailed script. (Your preparatory work writing on your own site will help a lot here to, because you’ll get in the habit of describing what you like in detail.) When working with a visual artist, use of visual references is also an excellent idea. For example, when working with Lon Ryden on the character design for Bridget O’Brian (one of the four adventuresses in the current Tales of Gnosis College story Study Abroad), I suggested basing her on Clara Bow. (A 1920s screen goddess not too much remembered today, except perhaps for some astonishing rumors which turn out not to be true.)
Lon’s artistry then resurrects the 1920s sex bomb as an early 21st century college student (how’s that for practicing mad science?):
Ask for what you want, and more often than not, you’ll come away happy.
Finally, and I think centrally important, remember that your creative partners are partners, not servants, and that this is true even when you’re paying them. If you’ve selected them well, they are people who are sympathetic to what you’re into. They’ve read what you’ve written and looked at visual images that turn you on and they have taken on your projects. Remember that they are creators in their own right. If you trust them, they can and will contribute to what you’re doing. They will have ideas about how to do things. You don’t necessarily have to accept them, but remember that they are often very good at what they do and often might think of ways to do it better. Take them seriously. Among the more gratifying experiences you can get as a co-creator is working with someone who has become sufficiently into what you’re doing that you no longer always have to write a detailed script or commission: you can just outline it and have gratifying results come back. You can get to that point, but you need to establish respect and trust, which you easily do if you use decency and common sense and keep the maxim of this paragraph in mind.
Having written four somewhat theoretical posts on why it’s a great idea to get busy making your own erotic art, I would like to turn to some more practical matters. Let’s begin with finding creative partners, particularly creators you can commission.
Some people are truly multi-talented and can see a project through from concept to finished piece all on their own. If you’re one of these I congratulate you, but I regret that I am not one of them. I have ideas, and I can write some, but I can’t draw worth a damn: even my stick figures look wooden and unconvincing. (And yes, there can be vivid stick figures — see xkcd.) If want visual representations and not just words, then I need artist partners. I’ll write here from the perspective of a writer looking for artists, although I think much of what I have to say here will apply, mutatis mutandis, to artists looking for writers or indeed anyone looking for collaborators.
So if you’re in the position I was about two years ago, you might be asking yourself, “I have ideas and scripts and some money to spend, but how on earth do I go about finding artists?”
Here are some things that worked for me:
Hitting the books. There are a lot of publications having to do with erotic art, and if you’re like me you’ll have some on your shelves. Newer ones will generally include web contact information for the artists, or for agents who work on their behalf. One of the first commissions I ever placed was with Glass House Graphics, when I found a piece I very much liked by one of their artists in a volume of erotic fantasy art. They directed me to the Brazilian artist Hugo da Cunha Araújo, whom they represented and who created the striking, sexed-up image of the Maria/Maschinenmensch transformation from Metropolis that now graces every page over at Erotic Mad Science.
This method of finding artists can produce some really terrific art, although it is likely to put you in touch with high-priced professionals, so you need to be prepared for large commissions if you pursue it.
Hang out where the artists do. There are a number of spots on the Internet where a lot of artistic talent congregates, and you can find people you like there. And what’s better, these sites frequently offer ways (usually requiring registration, which isn’t ideal but which is at least normally free) to leave comments, get known, and get in touch. The one that I’ve had be best luck with has probably been a huge site called DeviantArt. I think I first encountered Lon Ryden, who draws the Tales of Gnosis College for me, over there, and also Lucy Fidelis, Roe Mesquita, Bokuman, and the alluring Dark Vanessa there. Another site I’ve much enjoyed — one the specializes in CG art, is Renderotica (registration required for almost everything, unfortunately), where I first found Niceman (who did a CG illustration that has beenfeaturedtwice at Tiny Nibbles), KristinF, and Russkere. But these are only suggestions. Pretty much every forum devoted to whatever kink you are interested in will attract artists, so hang out and find out who they are. Look for stuff that appeals to you and take notes.
Just search. No matter how weird you are there stuff that’s appealing, and probably Google Image Search or its equivalents) can find it for you. For example, I’m pretty damn weird. I’ve had this strange fantasy about a mad scientist making a girl orgasmically dissolve into liquid in his laboratory (top that, kinksters!, but please don’t try it in real life). Eventually I got it illustrated for me thanks to both Niceman and, later, Lon. But rolling back the clock a bit, let’s ask how I might find someone to do this sort of art if I didn’t know anyone. I mean, it’s a really weird interest — could I be all alone here?
Well, let’s try a Google Image Search on “liquid girl.” What comes up? Keeping in mind that results might have changed between the moment of my writing, the very first result leads me to this. Exquisite! And right at DeviantArt, too, so I can contact the creator easily. And at DeviantArt also this. And then there’s this — with a phone number right at the bottom of the page. Let’s try “melting girl.” Well, there’s easily morefuntobehad. Obviously there are a lot of artists I could have been tracking down in addition to the excellent ones I’ve already met.
But okay, you’ve searched around, and you’ve found artists who you think are awesome. What now? How do you approach them? That will be the subject of next week’s post.
Here are two poisonous but common myths in the culture I live in:
(1) People who like erotic representations are really a bunch of pathetic losers masturbating in their mother’s basements, and
(2) Only a tiny number of people are actually kinky, even in their minds.
And these myths serve those who want to beat down others who are not like them sexually, or, more insidiously, others who are like them sexually but unwilling to live lives as hypocrites. We all know that there are too many such people: busybodies and bigots. Why someone should want to behave in such a vile way to one’s fellow human beings is a a mystery to me, but we are confronted with the brute fact of their existence, and the brutal fact that they can do immense harm.
But in a larger cultural context that at least formally honors human liberty and equality (thank you, Enlightenment!), the proposition that you should be allowed to beat down other people for no other reason than that their sexuality pisses you off is not going to sell. “Because my religion tells me I must” might get marginally more traction, but not much more. In a religiously pluralist society, claims like that understandably make people nervous. But what you can sell is the claim that somehow you’re doing people a favor by suppressing their revealed sexual preferences.
And how do you do that? By advancing the claim that their sexuality is somehow inauthentic. By claiming that other people are helpless, passive vessels into which bad wine been poured. They’re brainwashed. They have false consciousness. They’ve gotten bad lessons from the media/the patriarchy/corporate capitalism/Satan. They’re addicted. If only we took Pete Pajama’s porn away from him he’d get out of his mama’s basement and fine a real girlfriend for a change. They’re sick. They need therapy. We know they’re sick because there are millions of us and only a few of them so if they disagree with our consensus reality, we know they must be wrong, right?
You know the litany.
The point here is that if you’re a creator you are presenting to yourself to the world as no longer passive. Being able to create involves being inherently active: you select your materials, you choose, you shape. You have no choice but to reach into yourself and engage with the world. In the place of the passive loser, you put a Promethean self.
And of course, you can no longer be represented as lonely, because your very act of creation is likely to involve creative partners, and you are reaching out to the world, making friends and making fans. Making art of any kind is a social act, because it involves an audience.
And not only are you reaching out, you are encouraging others. Lots of people have interesting ideas and intriguing fantasies but are intimidated about expressing them. If you create, you encourage others on the margin, who will encourage others and others.
If we do our jobs right, in the end there will be millions of us creators, linked to each other by billions of strands of friendship, influence, and affinity. And that’s a lot harder for bigots to beat down that a lonely, disconnected individual.
As I write these words, one respectable estimate puts the number of Internet users at two billion globally. That’s a lot of people, and if you make art, some of them will find you,. With numbers like that, there’s philanthropic magic in the math.
About anything you might create, you might think, “Well, it’s a strange thing and maybe not that many people are into it, and of those, not that many people will find it.” And maybe both of those propositions are true. Suppose your thing will only appeal to or give pleasure to one person out of a hundred. And suppose you’re not that easy to find, even if you optimize search terms for people who want to see the sort of thing you’re into, so only one person in 500 who wants to find your art will find it over the entire life of your site or posting or whatever where you present it.
Well, if you assume two billion Internet users worldwide and do the math, what do you find? That there are 40,000 people in the world whose day you’ll brighten up, at least a little. You could almost fill Wrigley Field with smiling folks (which is more than can be said for the baseball team that plays there these days).
Suppose that creating a single work of art costs $200.00, whether in artist’s commission fees, the monetized opportunity cost of your time, or what have you. (And you can do something pretty nice for $200, in my experience.) Divide that $200 by 40,000 people and it works out to half a cent per person. How many other forms of pleasure can you buy for that little? In philanthropic terms that sounds like a tremendous bargain to me.
It doesn’t matter how strange you are. The human race is very large, and there are people out there who are like you and who will like you.
The real question is not whether they are out there, but how to find them. I’ve long asserted that publication of erotica is not just about expression, but association, a means of forming part of civil society and overcoming personal loneliness. I have yet to tire of enlarging on this point.
Publishing erotic art of whatever kind is actually a pretty good way to find them, especially if you’re weird. It’s unfortunate, but for the most part we live in a society not terribly friendly to kink, and so frank expressions of unusual turn-ons are likely to get you into trouble. But if you can put yourself on the line and manage to get the fantasies out of your head, you are doing two things simultaneously. You are making a friendly gesture and providing a bit of happiness to people who are like you, and you are also identifying yourself as someone they would like to talk to. You are reaching out to people and showing them that they are not alone, and that you are committed to a common interest by having put in time, effort, and resources, to something that will make them happy. Many great friendships have started over less.
(It is also possible that if you identify yourself as interested in something that you’ll find people who want to play with you. In candor I cannot speak to this possibility all that directly myself if only because the thing I’m into can’t — or shouldn’t — be realized in real life. Your situation might be different, because there is a galaxy of things that you can be into — and it can be anything from an interest in exotic edible oils to speaking Russian in bed to re-enacting scenes from Stephen Douglas’s Slaveworld stories — that you can realize with the right partners. And if that’s the case, awesome! I hope you get together with like-minded people and have a blast. Although if you do want to go the Slaveworld route, please make sure to keep it safe, sane, and consensual.)
Also worth nothing is that there are lots of people out there who not only have common interests with you, but who will be interested in being creative partners, and that too is a rewarding form of friendship. If you’re a writer you will want to find artists and vice versa, and working together with the right sort of people you can experience a form of mutual enrichment.
When you publish, you show the world your individuality. Not the phony simulacrum of “individuality” you get through social networking sites, where you check the boxes as to what cheesy pop-cultural phenomena you “like.” You are rather putting something unique into the world, something that’s not just a formula for the convenience of corporate marketers. Remember that your friends aren’t internet persons who “friend” you. They’re people who really care about who you are.
Beginning about a year ago over at EroticMadScience.com I published a series of posts about creating erotic art called “on making your own“, in which I urged people to do just that. I now have a year’s more experience, having written and published an entire graphic novel (as well as a fair amount of additional bespoke art) and I have decided to revisit the subject for a more general audience here at ErosBlog. The first few posts will be about the good that making your own does for you and for others. And then I hope to follow up with a series of posts with more practical advice for those of you who want to make your own.
So why should you try to make your own erotic art? Fun, friends, and philanthropy.
This post is about fun, just by yourself.
We all have busy lives, I am sure. But try this exercise. Block off some time for yourself. Sit down with whatever means of writing you feel most comfortable with whether it’s pencil and paper or your computer or even your manual typewriter if that’s what helps set the mood for you.
Now think of something that really turned you on. Go on, there’s something there. If you’re like most people there are dozens or hundreds of things there, but just think about that one thing for now. Now try to write it down. Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing down is “good.” Don’t worry about whether it’s absurd. Or “immoral.” And don’t worry about what anyone will think. Not your partner, not your parents, not your children, not your friends. No one. For right now, this only about you. Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing will “last” — that’s not the point. Have a paper shredder or secure delete program right at hand if it will help you relax. Just let whatever it is unspool in your head like film running through a projector and try to describe in your own words what you are seeing and hearing, or feeling, tasting, or smelling if your mind runs that way.
There, you did it. And how do you feel?
I’ll tell you how I felt the first time I tried, which was rock-hard (I’m a dude, so that’s not an uncommon response) and aroused beyond all measure, as much or more so as I ever was during any act of either solo or partnered sex I ever had. (If you’re curious as to what strange fantasy pushed me to these heights, it was a variant on the scenario eventually illustrated here.) Your reaction might not be quite so extreme as mine, but I’m willing to be that there’s something there, and that you may well be on the brink of some rather serious enjoyment right now.
If you wish to retire to your chambers for a little while now, please be my guest. Pleasure is not so common in life that we can afford to just throw any of it away.
The point here is that the more you were able to let go and write, the more fun you doubtless had. And the more you practice doing it, the easier it will become. The act of writing will be an adventure of transformation and discovery as you find new ways of finding pleasure in your own imagination. As Susie Bright, who has more experience with this sort of thing than I’m ever likely to have, put it in How to Write a Dirty Story:
Writing sex scenes will make you excruciatingly aware of your own body. As you compose your work, you will search your memories to find the most sensitive and lasting observations. You’ll remember what you’ve seen and felt in the most acute way. The strength of your imagination is what makes the fiction come to life; and if you’re writing at your best, you’re going to internalize those stories — when you’re writing them, they feel real.
Now who wouldn’t want a piece of that? A few years ago I wrote here at ErosBlog about Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” thought experiment, expressing a bit of skepticism about Nozick’s firm conclusion that we would not want to plug into the amazing science-fictional machine that could give us any experience we wanted. Well, there’s some good news for those of you who might want to plug in to the experience machine for a least a little while. You don’t have to wait for superscientists to make one. You already have one within you. It’s just a matter of working your imagination sufficiently to access it.
And that, I hope everyone will agree, is a lot of fun.
But there’s far more fun to be had with friends than alone, and that will be the subject of my next post.
All of you reading this who’ve ever wanted to put out a publication that reflects their own erotic vision, kindly raise your hands. (In my imagination, I now see a mighty forest of raised hands.) In middle life I have observed that I am not getting younger, and so I decided to take the publication plunge.
The result is The Apsinthion Protocol, which I wrote and Lon Ryden drew. Life might seem normal at Gnosis College, where the undergraduates pass halcyon days in study, frolic, and humiliating fraternity rituals. But behind its ivy-covered walls lurk faculty mad scientists who look out at their reckless, oversexed students and think, “what outstanding fodder for my work they would make!” Weird experiments that would never pass muster with the human subjects research committee are undertaken, and soon comely coeds are melting in ecstasy. [Editor’s note: That “melting in ecstasy” bit is emphatically not metaphorial. — Bacchus.] But when a senator’s daughter goes missing, things begin to spin out of control.
If you think this pulpy, porny concoction might just be your test tube of tea, I have good news. It’s all available for the great price of free. You can get a reasonably compact (~47MB) PDF file of the entire 205-page comic via direct download by clicking on the graphic above (or here) and you can also get high-resolution PDFs, CBZ comic book archive versions, and E-book reader (*) versions of the comic by visiting the master download page. And it is also archived online here. (And not only is this comic free, it’s also published under a Creative Commons license, so not only are you free to download, you’re free to share to your heart’s content.)
And so what am I going to do now that I’ve achieved this curious life’s ambition? Well, surely I’m not going to stop at just a single volume. For The Apsinthion Protocol is projected as the first of a series called Tales of Gnosis College. So I think I’ll get busy serializing the second volume of the series, Study Abroad, starting…today!
(A note on E-book readers. Comics-to-ebook conversion is still a bit of experimental technology for me. I’ve made several versions for the standard Kindle and they seem to look decent, but please understand that your results might vary by device. If you have a different device, it might be possible for me to customize a version for that device. If you would like me to try, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you as soon as I reasonably can. Happy reading!)
Since basically forever the world’s porn-haters have gone prospecting for some causal link between porn and Something Bad, and for the most part they drill dry holes. But boy do they never give up. Thanks to alicublog I’ve just been treated to a rather inventive attempt at finding a new Something Bad.
Jennifer S. Bryson, director of something called the “Islam and Civil Society Project” at the Witherspoon Institute (an Opus Dei-linked theocon outfit in Princeton, New Jersey) has taken notice of the (alleged) possession of pornography by Islamic terrorists and generated 2067 words of vaporings entitled “Pornography and National Security.” Her evidence of a casual link between pornography and terrorism? Well, none. And she even admits this.
I do not know what link, if any, exists between terrorism and pornography, but I do think this question warrants attention…
Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own national peril.
Ohh-kay. It’s pretty clear that she’d just love to find some.
What is going on here? One is of course tempted to mock, and it is very good to yield to that temptation, if only for a little while. I could write my own essay:
I do not know what link exists, if any, between buttsex and earthquakes, but I do think the question merits attention…
Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own seismic peril.
(Do you feel the earth move, dear reader?) And one is also tempted to be cynical. The Witherspoon Institute might be but a humble branch of wingnut welfare (albeit with a prestigious address), but even so it seems likely you have to put forth at least a simulacrum of effort before Robbie George will sign your paycheck.
But some deeper analysis is warranted, I think, because two things are going on here. I do not wish to accuse Ms. Bryson of a deliberate deception in writing this essay: on the evidence of her writing, she seems rather too dim to manifest the self-awareness necessary for that sort of Machiavellianism. But nonetheless I can see through the rhetorical tricks, which she would have soaked up from her environment.
First, we have here a prime example of the rhetorical phenomenon known as “JAQing off.” (How apprpriate in this context.) The term is derived from the phrase Just Asking Questions, and it’s the cowardly and dishonest strategy of attempting to insinuate a proposition into the minds of readers by striking a pose of false epistemic modesty. It’s perfectly obvious that neither Ms. Bryson nor her theocon paymasters are motivated by anything like intellectual curiosity here. They hate porn (and sexual liberty generally) and will smear it in any way they can. Getting more people to “just ask questions” about an imagined link, the more people will begin to think that there might actually be a link.
And more deeply, calling for “more studies” is also a classic trick that one might call “hoping to pick future cherries.” (Also appropriate in this context.) In a stochastic world if you study any relationship between Variable A and Variable B enough times and in enough ways that there will be at least some studies that show a relationship between A and B. You don’t even need badly-designed studies or intellectual dishonesty for this to happen — the work of chance and sampling will make it happen. There will just always be some false positives if you just run enough tests. Of course, the Witherspoon Institute folks are pining to get their hands on one of those, so that they can blast it out to the world with a press release and, they hope, hyperventilating media coverage “PORN CAUSES TERRORISM! Study says.” AHH! Somebody think of the children!
Of such things are the careers of suceessful propagandists made. But I urge you, dear reader, not to be fooled.
Russell Blackford on his blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club brings our attention to this short YouTube excerpt from the short 1989 film Visions of Ecstasy, which was (and I believe, still is) banned in the United Kingdom. I think it well worth watching, though due warning for squick:
Sometimes there are subtitles that make me wonder, “Were they trying to be this funny?” I spotted one recently in the 1965 Italian sci-fi movie La Decima Vittima that was clearly ErosBloggable.
That’s Ursula Andress, attempting to vamp Marcello Mastroianni to his doom. If she succeeds, doubtless millions of American women will have go on unsatisfied.
Bonus movie trivia: Do you know those gun-brassieres worn by the fembots in Austin Powers? Well, I’m pretty sure this is the movie that invented that concept…
Facebook has been on my personal list of Things Infamous ever since they crushed Violet Blue’s porn-free, ToS-honoring “Our Porn, Ourselves” discussion group out of existence, so it was with some pleasure that I was able to note a column by Sheril Kirshenbaum up at Bloomberg today entitled “Blame Facebook for Your Divorce.”
Divorce is apparently declining among most age groups of Americans, but it has more than doubled for people over 50. There are many possible reasons for this but at least one researcher thinks that social networking might be one of the causes.
Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University, Sacramento, suspects that online connections may lead to growing numbers of what she terms “accidental affairs,” meaning they involve people who don’t set out to have a physical or emotional relationship outside their marriage. Kalish studies couples who reunite after years apart.
Before there was an Internet, when someone wanted to track down a past love, he or she had to go through the effort of locating a friend or relative to make contact. “Unless they were single, divorced or widowed, they just didn’t typically do that,” Kalish told me.
But now there’s the possibility of better living through technology.
But now the ghosts of romance past are alive and well online, popping up on chat services and sending greetings on Facebook. In the 21st century, old friends are virtually at our fingertips, and a seemingly harmless email sent to someone with the innocent intention of “catching up” can quickly go further. Many of those who engage in accidental affairs tell Kalish that they had happy marriages before they strayed. “They still bear responsibility for the affairs, of course; no one made them write, call or meet in a hotel room,” Kalish said. “But these are probably people who would not have cheated years ago, even with a lost love.”
The column then devolves into some pop-psychological speculation.
Facebook might not care if it annoys Dr. Faustus, and probably they’re right not to care. But now I guess they’re going to have the the bloodhounds of family values snappin’ at their rear ends.
They’d have been better off siding with the angels to begin with and leaving Violet Blue’s group alone, so I say.
Celluloid is an essay in pure visual storytelling — something that is quite difficult, or at least so my own experiments with it suggest to me — but which McKean pulls off with great ability and confidence. The story is very simple: a woman comes home from work and finds that her partner will not be home as he is working late. She undresses, bathes, and then finds a projector and a bit of film. Out of curiosity she threads the film and runs the projector and finds projected a stunning erotic dreamworld which she then…steps into.
I am almost loathe to produce an image from the book because to do so seems somehow an injustice or a misrepresentation because McKean shifts fluidly among so many different artistic techniques and styles in this book. But I’m utterly beguiled by it and want you to be too, so here is one, right at what I take to be a critical moment in the story’s plot.
Astonishing. It’s a pricey book, I fear, but something not-to-be-missed by those who either want exceptional artistic erotica, and those who enjoy seeing the comics medium show its true power.
I can’t confess to generally have a weakness for 1950s blond glamourpusses, but I make an exception for one now only slightly remembered, Barbara Payton. Probably only one movie she starred in is much remembered: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye(1950), in which she played opposite James Cagney.
But her career went down rather than up from there. By the next year she would be starring in movies like Bride of the Gorilla and from there she would spiral into scandal and alcoholism, and she would be dead at 39. She tugs at my heartstrings, though, perhaps in part because I have a weakness for tragedy and also perhaps in part because before she flamed out she also starred in an obscure British science fiction movie called The Four-Sided Triangle of which I might be one of very few fans, possibly because to me it is a stunning example of mad science personal identity porn, a micro-genre of which I am also probably one of very few fans, but a very devoted one for all that.
But for more general appeal, we can note that even as her career was in decline, Barbara also posed for some stunning photographs taken on Malibu beach in 1952 by Andre de Dienes. John O’Dowd, in his biography Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story, reproduces a few.
Big-time science blogger PZ Myers has a post reminiscing about a type of business known in his youth, but now largely vanished.
Maybe you don’t remember 70s-era porn shops. Maybe you weren’t even born then. But the like of these beasts is something that we’ll not see again. They were beautiful.
Yes they were, in their own strange way. But you’ll have to read further in the post to find out what he was actually looking for. (As a hint, I spent much of my youth looking for the same sort of thing…)
I think — though I am not 100% certain — that the video excerpts a recent Geneva production by Olivier Py, with Marc Laho in the role of Hoffmann and Maria Riccarda Wesseling as Giulietta. You can find a French-language libretto here.
It just goes to prove what Anna Russell told us so long ago, that the beauty of Grand Opera is that you can get away with anything as long as you sing it.
I was more in in the camp of arguing, “Kids should be taught to honor their sexualities, to demand the right to feel pleasure (with the enthusiastic consent caveat!), and to value sexual diversity, because sex is a good thing. It’s part of being human. Pleasure is how we know we’re alive.” A more radical, pro-liberty, pro-pleasure approach is the only way to win this argument.
Mark Kleiman, one of our more distinguished academic analysts of crime has a short post on the incidence of forcible rape as reported in large-scale victimization surveys over the last generation. The news is good: rape is down in that period — way down. From 2.8 per 1000 population in 1979 to 0.5 in 2009. Kleiman comments that he doesn’t know what has caused this dramatic and welcome change, but then adds:
But the theory that pornography causes sex crime would seem to have a hard time surviving comparison with the data.
As blogger and amateur porn creator I’ve found myself indulging in stuff that some people find squicky or at times even horrid. I have any number of reasons for why I feel no need to apologize for my activities. One, easy to articulate, is that it’s just a brute fact that eros is an outlaw. There’s another, though, which has long lingered in the back of my mind which I haven’t made all that explicit up to very recently, when I’ve found someone who did it for me.
Very intense blogger Sister Y, in a post which at the moment is currently my second all-time favorite (after this) rightly calls out people for what she labels “cheery social policy.”
Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy.
The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life – a pleasant life – is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to ignore – and perhaps can’t even conceive of – the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us.
There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life – weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines – strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary – life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm?
What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them – the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem.
(Read the whole thing, but only if you’re not easily offended by people who aren’t optimists.)
Reading these paragraphs, something clicked for me, because it “squicky porn” could easily fit onto the list with “drugs, prostitution, gambling, and suicide” as stuff that helps un-cheery people keep their heads above water, hedonically speaking. In my own life, during some of the long, dark periods it probably did have that role. Keep this in mind: something you dislike, something you even find revolting, might be to someone else the difference between keeping going and going under.
Half a lifetime of observation confirms to me that we inhabit a society poisoned by optimism. We belittle the problems of people for whom life is suffering by pretending that with a bit of therapy here or a bit of social reform there or turning to Jesus yon that almost everyone can achieve happiness. Wrong. Dead wrong. Many people have very unpleasant lives, and this unpleasantness is pretty much intractable. Ask Sister Y if you don’t believe me.
The mental model of prohibitionists — at least, those who are not just sadists but who have some fragment of compassion in them — appears to be something like this: life is basically good for everyone, and so if we somehow coercively take away what they call “vices,” (drugs and porn and all) then people will be left with good lives, perhaps better lives. Again, wrong. For many people, life is just not good. The very things you call vices might just be what gets them through their days — or nights.
So there’s another reasons, should you need one, to stand up for the stuff you don’t like. It’s not just that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like then by the time they come for the stuff you do like you will have already lost. (Thought that in itself is an excellent reason.) It’s that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, you’ll see not just lives blighted, but lives ended.
Folks with even just casual knowledge of twentieth century European art know George Grosz (1893-1959) as a brilliant and caustic political satirist.
(Found at The Reality-Based Community.) What has been less well known until very recently was that he was also a prolific eroticist, with inclinations toward the grotesque. This image which I found in Hans-Jürgen Döpp’s The Erotic Museum in Berlin seems to anticipate futanari.
Döpp dates this watercolor to circa 1940, obviously too early in history for Grosz to have access to manga. The Wikipedia article on futanari suggests that within Japan itself there are artistic representations that anticipate futanari, and of course there are artistic representations of hermaphrodites in European art that go all the way back to Ovid’s recounting of the myth of Salmacis (and likely further). Grosz would almost certainly have known of the latter, and possibly of the former as well.
Though looking at this arresting image I am inclined to wonder whether Grosz came up with it through cultural transmission much at all. Maybe there are just certain ideas that inevitably boil up out of human consciousness, and this is one of them…
Just in time for tentacles month over at Erotic Mad Science, I stumbled across these odd things in front of the Williams College Museum of Art, and of course I can stop to pull out my mobile phone and grab a picture.
Hitherto I had been unaware that there was such a thing as hentaisculpture. It has the look of a permanent installation, too.
I’m not sure which currently-active philosopher falls into the category of “most recommendable” for ErosBlog’s readers, but I’m pretty sure that Neil Sinhababu would need to make the shortlist at the very least. He is a prominent defender of ethical hedonism. He once wrote a paper called “Possible Girls,” which is possibly the sexiest use of David Lewis‘s modal realism hypothesis evah. (And he is also co-editor, with Brian Leiter, of the recent volume Nietzsche and Morality. What a guy!)
But what really finally inspired me to get off my lazy butt and write a blogpost about young Professor Sinhababu was a blogpost of his own called “The Optimal Distribution of Lust.” Riffing off a post by Kay Steiger (key phrase “Women who discount men because they are short are, well, kind of bigots.” — and yes, I feel the tug of the sentiment even if it’s kind of not in my interest to since I’m 6’2″.) Sinhababu does a quick, clean bit of moral reasoning to conclude that it would generally be a lot better if we could all lust a bit more broadly, or perhaps a bit more unusually.
This might be a little tricky to bring about, but there is something we can do.
So if one of your female friends confesses an attraction to short men, express your admiration and tell her that more women like her would make the world a better place! And if one of your male friends expresses his desire for a heavier-than-average woman, for goodness’ sake don’t make fun of him! And I literally mean for goodness’ sake — for more good things to happen, we need currently unusual preferences to be more widespread in people.
The whole post is well worth reading. And the predecessor post about awesome sex dreams downloaded into your brain ain’t bad either, whether or not you agree with its politics.
Busy, busy comics artist Lon Ryden will not rest just drawing his own The Perils of Penelope Pornstarr and my own Tales of Gnosis College. He’s let his imagination loose and created a series called “They Want Our Women,” a series of vignettes which show us just why those pervy little aliens are so eager to abduct comely human females. It’s for SCIENCE! Example:
And there’s more where that came from, you can bet your jetpack. You can look for them at Lon’s DeviantArt site, but if you really want the full-on uncensored versions, take a quick flip through this index: 0123456789AB. (I would guess that “B” is my favorite after the one depicted above, evidence that even pervert aliens suffer from management problems, but do peruse them all.) And if you like what you see, you can get more Lon also at his personal site or if you want something to hang on your wall that will start some really interesting conversations, buy his stuff.
Think those Victorians were all stuffy? Well, here’s a read for you: Deborah Lutz‘s Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. It’s a rich text which I shan’t attempt to review here. Instead I’ll dwell on one little thing it brought to my attention which by itself made the book worth its purchase price.
In 1862 Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) a distinguished poetess and sister to the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti published a volume called Goblin Market and Other Poems. The title poem (you can find the whole text here) was about two sisters Lizzie and Laura who would sleep
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
All very innocent, I’m sure. Here is the cover illustration by brother Dante Gabriel.
Unfortunately not all is well, for goblin men with succulent fruits and tempt Laura. Paying the goblin men with a precious lock of her golden hair, Laura goes, well, hog-wild.
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gather’d up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turn’d home alone.
“Suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more.” Obviously this cannot be good because hey girl, it’s the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Queen Victoria and FEMALE PLEASURE BAD!
And of course Laura promptly starts wasting away, unable to hear the call of the goblin men anymore or get any fruits. But fortunately redemption is available in the form of an act of sacrifice by heroic sister Lizzie, who seeks out the goblin men, silver coin in purse, to buy more fruits. The goblin men try to force fruit into her mouth and basically beat her up but Lizzie resists to run home covered in juice and declare to her sister
She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
Redeemed by this act, both sisters can now grow into proper womanhood. I am not making this stuff up, people. This was children’s literature from 150 years ago, but today — and not just for people who read ErosBlog — it feels almost impossible to read it as such. Which I guess goes to show that certain kinds of innocence really do go out of the world. (Playboy in 1973 apparently redid Goblin Market with rather ribald illustrations, but I have been unable to find usable pictorial excerpts.)
Thank you, Professor Lutz! And I’ve barely even gotten to all the stuff about Algernon Charles Swinburne yet…
What do folks with great artistic talent do when they’re not on the employer’s clock? Well here’s an example. Illustrator Nate Wragg has done a lot of work for Pixar, including backgrounds and concept art (I believe especially on the end titles for Ratatouille.) And he has also done this:
An explanatory caption tells us what is going on here:
Use Technology to Collect the Women. Mission Briefing: A planet from a distant galaxy has been discovered. It is said to be inhabited by the most beautiful women in the universe. Upon our arrival, it’s possible these beauties may be hostile and resist our peaceful advances. If we are to bring them back to our world, we must use technology to collect the women!
In the midst of a search for representations of posthuman women I found instead a remarkable gallery of divinities. Just two examples:
and
They are the work of Chinese artist Li Zhuang Ping (b. 1948), and gorgeous as they are there is just a little bit of controversy about them because the model for all of them, it turns out, is his own foster daughter Li Qin. Father and daughter:
I got and read a copy of John Gilmore’s L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times in the course of trying to learn more about the tragic story of actress Barbara Payton, one of whose characters is prominent in a post over at my other blog home. I was a little surprised when I found the first plate was one of porn actor John Holmes, in a scene of almost primal innocence. It’s a striking image — I’m sorry I don’t know the name of the actress.
After innocence, the fall. It’s well known that the lives of porn actors sometimes do not end well.
Also the lives of bus drivers, tax accountants, and housewives. Remember that.
Bacchus has a long running-series here called whyrichmenbuyboats. I think I get the point, but my recent stumbling across this art by the Ukrainian artist Alexey Lipatov makes me wonder whether a seaplane might not make an even finer acquisition.
The Magic Christian (1969) can’t be said to be a particularly good movie by any stretch of the imagination. It would seem to have a great deal of promise, having been based on a novel by Terry Southern and having brought together a remarkable amount of comedic talent. It has an interesting premise — a very bored, misanthropic billionaire named Sir Guy Grand adopts a young derelict to be his son, and together they go about using Sir Guy’s money to pay people to humiliate themselves in various ways. (“The Magic Christian,” by the way, is a supposed ship, not a person, created by Sir Guy as one of his more elaborate pranks.) In practice, the movie is something of a mess. But I can still think of audiences for it, to wit:
(1) People who want to see what is arguably the high point of Ringo Starr‘s film career, at least in movies not featuring the other Beatles. (Oh, c’mon. There must be at least some of you out there in Internetland.)
(2) British absurdist comedy fans, since this film represents a bridge of sort between comic generations. For the earlier generation, Goon Show mainstay Peter Sellers plays a principle part, and Goon Show principal and writer Spike Milligan has a cameo, and if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that occasional Goon Show guest John Snagge can be heard in a voiceover. For the rising new generation, Monty Python members John Cleese and Graham Chapman contributed material and appear in bit parts of their own.
(3) Those of us who want Fetish Fuel! There’s tons, and that’s why I’m writing this up for ErosBlog. I can’t possibly pick out everybody’s possible favorites, but I’ll focus on two.
First, can you really say you’ve lived if you haven’t seen Hamlet’s soliloquy done as a striptease?
Second, the “engine room” of The Magic Christian turns out to be a mock-up of the rowing deck of an oared galley, complete with galley slaves. Topless female galley slaves…
As long as we’re doing Victorian fetish fuel I can’t resist putting in my own little contribution.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has a rather notorious aphorism “Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!” (“You go to women? Do not forget the whip!”) So it was in literature. In life, things were rather the other way round, and we have the photographs to prove it.
This was taken in 1882 in Lucerne, and here it’s Nietzsche himself who’s one of the pony boys (the other is Paul Rée). Lou Andreas-Salomé wields the whip. This picture can be found in lots of places on the web, although it was brought to my attention by Julian Young‘s new Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography.
Okay, ErosFans, let’s test your publication acumen. Where do you think the following might have appeared?
There must be something in the water here in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because last night I dreamt of an encounter with a very muscular African-American centaur, an orgiastic experience with — gasp — drunken members of the opposite sex and (as if that weren’t enough) then being asked by my hostess to wear a white wedding dress while giving a scientific keynote presentation. “Does it make me look too feminine?” “Not at all,” she assured me, “it’s a man’s dress.”
If you guessed something porny I commend you on your browsing habits.
But if you guessed Scientific American give yourself a gold star.
I owe this bit of fine weirdness to my recent discovery of Dr. Jesse Bering’sBering in Mind column at Sci Am, a discovery which I in turn owe to Dr. Bering’s being interviewed this past weekend on Bloggingheads.tv’s Science Saturday feature by John Horgan.
Now Dr. Bering has recently completed a book on an the empirical epistemology of religion called The Belief Instinct, but for some reason Horgan just wanted to spend the whole hour talking about sex. (Some people are like that, I guess.) Which is just fine, because Dr. Bering can talk very fluently indeed about sex and all the fun psychological research that’s going on there. You have to love a gay psychologist who will write a column with the title Top scientists get to the bottom of gay male sex preferences. In another column Dr. Bering recounts doing research in the files of the Kinsey Institute on the origins of people’s kinks in childhood experiences. (He uncovers the story about the origins of a “rubberphile” which was really something.) Dr. Bering promises us he’s writing a book on the subject, tentatively entitled Perv. (I hope he keeps the title.) I get the sense that Dr. Bering is working from the intuition that people’s fantasies and experiences are one of the best windows into the mind we can find.
As I reflected on all this, it occurred to me: who needs the Kinsey Institute? What are I and many of you and millions of other people doing on the Internet but writing about fantasies and experiences? Some of us might be doing it more elaborately than others, but even the humblest Tumblr reblogger is creating an image of a mind, in showing the world what it was in the vast visual record available to it that turned that mind on. Collectively we are all creating one of the widest and deepest pools of raw sexual self-report data humanity has ever known.
And that, in turns, brings my mind back to legal matters. Here in the United States there is a legal test called the Miller test, after a Supreme Court case, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), which holds that in order to be obscene (and thus lacking protection as free speech) a work must, among other bad attributes “…taken as a whole, [lack] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” (My emphasis.)
How many of us realized we were contributing to science? But we are. All our content has serious scientific value, whether that’s part of our intention or not. And that’s another bit of armor against those who would harm us.
In their research they asked 16 women to “self-stimulate” until they achieved orgasm, while lying under a blanket in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Despite the clinical surroundings, all the women were able to achieve their goal, mostly in less than five minutes — although some took up to 20.
Professor Komisaruk went on to find that women have it better than men, maybe.
“In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands each time they orgasmed. Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart,” Professor Komisaruk said. “So the evidence is that woman tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several of them.”
And that’s where the snark set in: “I’m glad we have science to tell us that, Professor.”
Of course, what we have here is a very old theme. We have mythology to tell us this as well. You all do remember Tiresias, yes?
Tiresias, in the course of an adventurous life, managed to be both a man and a woman at various times, and as a consequence of his experiences got drawn into a dispute between the Head God Jupiter and Mrs. Head God Juno about whether males or females get more pleasure out of sex. Ovid recounts the story in Metampohoses III 316-338.
Dumque ea per terras fatali lege geruntur
tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi,
forte Iovem memorant, diffusum nectare, curas
seposuisse graves vacuumque agitasse remissos
cum Iunone iocos et “maior vestra profecto est,
quam quae contingit maribus” dixisse “voluptas.”
Illa negat. Placuit quae sit sententia docti
quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.
Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva
corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu;
deque viro factus (mirabile) femina septem
egerat autumnos. Octavo rursus eosdem
vidit, et “est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae”
dixit “ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,
nunc quoque vos feriam.” Percussis anguibus isdem
forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.
Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa
dicta Iovis firmat. Gravius Saturnia iusto
nec pro materia fertur doluisse, suique
iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte.
At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam
facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto
scire futura dedit, poenamque levavit honore.
While these things were brought about on earth because of that fatal oath, and while twice-born Bacchus’s cradle remained safe, they say that Jupiter, expansive with wine, set aside his onerous duties, and relaxing, exchanging pleasantries, with Juno, said “You gain more than we do from the pleasures of love.” She denied it. They agreed to ask learned Tiresias for his opinion. He had known Venus in both ways.
Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two large snakes mating in the green forest, and, marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said “Since there is such power in plaguing you that it changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I will strike you again, now.” He struck the snakes and regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he was born with.
As the arbiter of the light-hearted dispute he confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturnia, it is said, was more deeply upset than was justified and than the dispute warranted, and damned the one who had made the judgement to eternal night. But, since no god has the right to void what another god has done, the all-powerful father of the gods gave Tiresias knowledge of the future, in exchange for his lost sight, and lightened the punishment with honour.
So take that, Science Guy! A mere poet got there first! (I’ll have to leave it to Bacchus to explain how he manages to be born twice.)
But of course, since I’m characterized by Faustian curiosity I had to dig a little deeper into the case of Professor Komisaruk, and found that he actually has a potential technology coming out of his research which is using these fMRI images to learn to think yourself to orgasm. Using images of your own brain to provide feedback, you learn to do what you otherwise would have required actual frictive contact with your own body to do. He discusses the possibility in a short video clip I found online (look here if the video does not embed properly):
Your own brainscan as porn! Aside from being as triumphant a vindication of Rule 34 as I have ever seen, that’s cool beyond belief.
When we look to long-established liberties to which we can appeal in order to vindicate people’s right to create, share, and distribute erotic representations, it’s most normal to appeal to something like freedom of speech or (more rarely) that of the press. That’s all well and good: erotic representations are a kind of speech and are often reproduced or distributed through some contemporary analogue of a printing press. What I want to show here is that creating and sharing erotic representations is covered by another ancient liberty, that of freedom of association. Add that to freedom of speech and of the press, and we have suspenders and a belt for our right to porn.
Freedom of association is guaranteed both by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (as “the right of the people to peaceably assemble”) and Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m not exactly how far back we can trace the right in Anglo-American law. It doesn’t seem to appear as such in the great 1689 Bill of Rights, although the closely-related right to petition for redress of grievances very clearly does appear therein, a fact duly noted by Sir William Blackstone in the opening chapter his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765).
Now while it’s sure fun to get together with your fellow human beings, there’s a serious and deeper purpose behind freedom of assembly. Like freedom of speech and of the press it’s a core political right for any society that wishes to claim to be anything other than a despotism. No power on earth is great and benign enough to guarantee to you that you will never find yourself living under laws or within a culture you find hateful or oppressive. But any society that any other than a fool (or perhaps a lesser herd animal) would want to live in will concede you the right to seek out others like yourself who might be similarly aggrieved, with whom you might band together in hopes of finding peaceable means — such as electing sympathetic people to office, or persuading others to change their minds about what kind of person you and people like you are — of changing laws and culture. Though it is an ancient liberty, freedom of association is not an inherently conservative cause, and though it holds open the possibility of cultural change it is not a liberal cause. It’s the cause of any society that does not wish to be a tyranny. Or, for that matter, any society that values elementary stability. People denied the outlet of organizing and persuading others have a way of retreating into alienation and anomie. Or taking up arms against the world.
So freedom of association really matters. But here’s an important thing about human sociability: expressive and political association frequently begins with something humbler than itself. People don’t (normally) just wander into some open public space and begin clumping up to debate the latest Senate Bill, or whatever. Rather, they get out and meet each other in more specific social spaces, often with rather non-political purposes. They get together down at the local tavern to drink beer and watch the game. Or in a league to go bowling. Or at a quilting bee, or book group, or house of worship. It is in a great constellation of humble-yet-important outposts of civil society like this that people actually do most of their meeting one another.
Let us now make two observations:
(1) There are goods of association involved in most ordinary forms of association. Association isn’t just four bare walls and some people inside of them. There are specific, often shared, goods that people want to enjoy, either jointly or at least in the company of other: the beer and game on the T.V. down at the neighbourhood tavern, or bowling, or quilting, or books, or whatever collective observances are actually going on in that local house of worship. For lack of a better name, let us call these the Soil of Sociability, because it is in this loam that people’s associations with one another grow.
(2) People talk to each other when they associate, and this leads to the discovery of common ground, common concerns, and common consciousness. When you meet enough people, you often discover that what for you alone was just a vague uneasiness, a Problem That Has No Name, or an eccentricity that set you at odds with the world might not have been so idiosyncratic as you thought. Others may share it. And perhaps if others may share it, it may be time to start organizing to better your own situation. Call this consciousness-raising the Fruits of Sociability, because they come out of meeting people.
We get the Fruits of Sociability from the Soil of Sociability, at least often. I’ll maintain that if you take away the Soil of Sociability you really are interfering with freedom of assembly, even if you leave some bare, formal right to associate intact. Consider:
“You veterans can get together in a hotel meeting room and talk about your gripes with the government. But no beer and pretzels. No bingo night either.”
“You Catholics can get together in a church and talk about God or something if you really want, but we’re prohibiting using wine to celebrate Mass.”
“You homosexuals can meet in a hall and talk about gay stuff if you really must. But no cocktails. And no dancing.”
Take away the fun of meeting, and people will stay isolated from one another, this taking away the Soil of Sociability, and impairs freedom of association in an unacceptable way. And that won’t wash. To see why not, consider by analogy how much free speech you think you would have if someone told you that would could say anything you want, but only if you say it in (proper, grammatical) Latin, anything else being subject to strict censorship. Even if you yourself are the equal of Cicero, you’d have to admit you wouldn’t be able to communicate very effectively in the contemporary world. Those who prevent the Fruits of Sociability from coming into being would do well wash away the Soil of Sociability. Taking the joys out of getting together is a tool of tyrants.
So what does all this have to do with our right to porn?
It’s pretty clear that a there a lot of us out there who are members or either actual or potential sexual outgroups in this world. Some among the readers might have full-fledged identities as outgroup members (for example, by being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered). Others might just have unusual kinks that consume a lot of their energy and attention, and as someone who runs a site of his own devoted to one such I pretty much fall into the latter. And just like veterans or Catholics or just the guys down at the tavern, we’d like to get together with other people who might be like ourselves. If we do, our consciousnesses might indeed get some raising about a culture and set of laws which we might indeed find oppressive — if you’re kinky, you’re likely to find a lot of people out there who want you suppressed, if not by the force of law then by that of public opinion. Many of us would like to change that.
But what are our social spaces? Some of us are thick enough on the ground, at least in sophisticated urban areas, that we can find literal places in which to congregate and enjoy the Soil of Sociability. LGBT people, for all the stigma and persecution they’ve had to endure from the larger society in past years, have at least had this advantage in places. (Readers should recall the existence of a Greenwich Village watering hole called the Stonewall Inn.)
Others of us are more thinly scattered than LGBT people, but at least since the Internet there have been virtual places of association: the BBS, the Usenet group, the blog with its comments section, the online forum, social networking sites. A lot of people meet in these spaces. And what is our Soil of Sociability? Well, unfortunately you can’t serve drinks over the Internet (I’m sure many of us wish that were a feasible technology). But there are very important things you can share, things that bring people into the spaces for purposes of enjoyment: stories, artwork, personal reflections, fantasies, and anecdotes, all of which in a sexual context are likely to involve erotic representations. That’s what people come in for.
Back in February (with, I must add, considerable encouragement and support from Bacchus) I launched a site called Erotic Mad Science, a place of stories (my own) and images (mostly borrowed, but some created by my commission) devoted to a certain kind of kink. Since then, I’ve received in comments and e-mail a certain sentiment that always gives me joy when I see it, the substance of which is something like:
Thanks for this: before I saw it I thought I was the only person who thought like this.
No, my friend. You are not the only one. And you and I together are not the only two. You might have come in to look at naughty pictures, but now you’ve come away with a new friend and perhaps a spark of awareness. Both of us are less isolated than before. Whatever we are, there are others like us, and sites like this are there to help us get together.
But suppress those erotic representations — all those naughty pictures and sites — and you’re suppressing the existence of the space. And thus our freedom of association. Work the chain back the other way, and you get to a right to those representations.
Want freedom of association? Then you need to let people share their porn in peace. ‘Nuff said.
Few things are finer than a crisp, sunny October morning in Manhattan (*). You can encounter the darndest things just going to work. Like I did yesterday. Fortunately I had my little camera ready:
This vehicle was used somehow in promoting an off-Broadway play, which has now closed. (On 10/10/10, no less, which shows a strange sense of humor on the part of the porn gods.) In addition to the helpful information on the side, it has the proud slogan “Truth, Justice, Porn” painted on the hood. And I found it parked, rather closer to Broadway than the play itself ever seems to have gotten.
You know, I suspect that in most places this vehicle could not just be parked just off a major street for any length of time. But New York is just different, I guess.
So I was going about my bloggy business the other day, in hot pursuit of art that caters to one of those weirdo kinks that I happen to have. This kink is sufficiently strange that I was obliged to deploy a Wonderflonium-driven polyglot search technique (the more direct approaches having yielded meagre and disappointing results), and among other things it turned up a Chinese-language business-news article illustrated with this:
Whoa! What is going on here?
Now basically I’m just not good at Chinese at all, having learned what very little I know rather late in life (curse our Eurocentric education system!), but Google translate (always an iffy proposition, to be sure) suggests that what is going on here is a sales demonstration for shower gel taking place in a shopping mall in China.
Like anyone with experience in the more cutthroat parts of the business world I’ve always had admiration for those who will go the extra mile to make the sale, but this really does top all. I also appreciate how these women get the would-be customers involved in the pitch:
You know, I hate malls for the most part. But some genius has obviously contrived a way to make me hate them a whole lot less.
Also, is it just me, or does the presence of the pixelation and censor-bars make this whole scene seem louche in a way it just wouldn’t if they had been absent?
And as for the mad science search that brought me to this fine example of business journalism? Well, as it turns out, I also found what I was actually looking for. Win!
Bacchus’s recent photographic foray into what is now Indonesia sent me to a dusty back shelf of my own library to dig out this:
That’s Malcolm MacDonald, the Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, with two distaff representatives of the Dayak people, published in John Drysdale’s Singapore: Struggle for Success. Drysdale doesn’t give an exact date for the photograph, but MacDonald was a high colonial official in Southeast Asia between 1946 and 1955. He had a reputation for informality and fraternizing (ahem) with non-Europeans, which offended his fellow colonialists no end.
Browsing through that extraordinary internet source of interesting stuff GoodShit I came across a post that centered on an image, a naughty postcard done by a now relatively obscure artist named Donald McGill.
And I had an immediate shock of recognition, even though as far as I can remember I had never seen the work of this artist before. How can that be?
The answer is “George Orwell.” My impression is that Orwell is probably best known in the United States as the author of a satire called Animal Farm and a dystopian novel entitled 1984. That’s a shame, it seems to me, because it means that Orwell is best remembered for what are arguably his least distinguished literary accomplishments. It is really as a memoirist and an essayist that Orwell really shines. And Orwell wrote an essay called The Art of Donald McGill (1941) in which he really showed us what he can do. Where possessors of lesser intellects would simply have turned up their noses at saucy seaside postcards, perhaps with dismissive remarks about how they were “trash,” Orwell here, as he also did with crime novels and boys’ weeklies, dove in and tried to read the social significance of naughty postcards. A sample:
…[T]he McGill post card–and this applies to all other post cards in this genre–is not intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire, for instance, or La Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is always promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even ‘sophisticated’ society. The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed.
It is a measure of how evocatively Orwell writes that he can make a reader more than half a century later recognize a visual image just through words. I can only envy the vigor of Orwell’s prose, but I have always hoped, at least, to be able to emulate his sense that there is something important to be gained by mining what others might dismiss as culture’s “low” ephemera. (See! There is too a legitimate reason to write post after post on Roger Corman movies!)
I commend the entire essay (link above) to your attention. And I am pleased to note that the Telegraph has now made a small gallery of McGill postcards available online.
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.
It will probably surprise no one that I am a great admirer of work of Roger Corman, the exploitation cinema genius whose work I’ve celebrated at my other home. So it’s a special moment for me when new editions of some of his cult classics are published. And what do I watch first, once Humanoids from the Deep arrives? The bonus-material interview segments, of course, because I’m as big a nerd as ever drew breath (and damn proud of it, too).
These particular interviews are introduced with a short segment, containing some footage from one of Humanoids‘s most notorious (and therefore most memorable) scenes.
The segment has a voiceover done by the sort of voice which we would have called back when I worked in radio, “ballsy.” (It was a less politically-correct time, rather like the time when Humanoids itself was made.) The voiceover text:
They are not human. But they hunt human women. And not for killing. Humanoids from the Deep. The 1980 sci-fi monster movie from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Things go horribly wrong, when a Canco fish cannery experiment with trout growth hormone accidentally mutates into depraved human-like creatures with the ravenous appetite to procreate with the village of Noyo’s virile women. Featuring a haunting soundtrack by renowned composer James Horner and terrifying special effects creations by Rob Bottin, Chris Walas, and Kenny Myers. Humanoids from the Deep lives on today as a Corman cult classic!
Wow! Sounds like a really cool…wait, what? Rewind, replay…
..to procreate with the village of Noyo’s virile women.
Virile women? So the horny homicidal gill-men are coming out of the sea to what, indulge some sort of weird gender-crossing fetish?
Well, that’s not really what the movie seems to be about. Are they perhaps suggesting that the women of Noyo have unusual strength and courage? Maybe that’s a little better: at least two female characters in the film successfully fight off the attacking gill-men. But seriously, if that’s the case, it’s horrible sexism. Sorry guys, but nothing about being courageous and resourceful in the face of danger requires possession of a penis. So I hope that’s not what the writers were aiming for here.
So Dr. Faustus scratches his head and wonders about this counter-intuitive word choice. The best guess I come up with is that either the copywriter or the voice-over actor was aiming at the much more plausible “nubile” and missed, coming up with the rhyming “virile” instead.
Or is perhaps something more subtle still going on here? Need moar (lexicographical) dakka! Fortunately I have an Oxford English Dictionary handy, and the OED is definitely the BFG if you catch my drift. So I hauled down Volume XIX (Unemancipated – Wau-wau) and took a look.
Great Dagon! There actually is a secondary definition (2b) that might fit, albeit one marked as obsolete:
Of a woman. Nubile. Obs. 1648 HEXAM II, Manbaer… a maide that is Mariageable or ripe for a Husband, or Virill.
Who woulda thunk that the copywriter for exploitation cinema would have been so literate?
About a year and a half ago I brought up the example of author Anne Rice in a a post here about the role that religion (Roman Catholicism in particular) likely played in the development of many people’s erotic consciousness — Rice’s in particular. The post was provoked by a discussion of Rice’s highly public conversion to Christianity.
I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of… Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
A somewhat snarky commenter was moved to ask “Does this mean I can enjoy The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty again?”
For my part, I doubt I can improve any of this by further commentary, so I shan’t try. Hat tip on this one to Andrew Sullivan.
It’s for real, from a 1938 Merrie Melodies cartoon called Katnip Kollege, and if it isn’t an example in getting crap past the radar, then I shall eat my copy of Chuck Jones’s memoirs. If you don’t believe me, try to imagine two human actors in the posture and position of these two funny-animal cats (named “Johnny Cat” and “Kitty Bright,”) and think about what would be involved. Then think about the fact that pretty much every frame of this animation had to be painstakingly drawn by someone, right down to Johnny Cat’s wandering hands. To be sure, the studio execs and the viewing audiences in 1938 might not have been as quick on the uptake: the audiences in particular would not have been able to parse the animation frame-by-frame with software, and certainly no one in 1938 would have had Omaha the Cat Dancerto educate them about certain…possibilities inherent in funny animal characters.
Still, more evidence that our dirty minds have always been working…
If there’s a great American humorist who hasn’t gotten a shout-out here at ErosBlog but surely deserves one, it’s S. J. Perelman (1904-1979). Not only was he often slyly naughty-funny, but he also co-wrote (with Ogden Nash) the book for One Touch of Venus, so really, what more could you ask for?
Now recently a wise old friend sent me a snippet of Perelman’s relevant to my own strange interests and I made merry with it over at my other Internet home. [As the old joke goes: “And then Merry went home.” — Bacchus] Digging into its provenance a little further later I was I able to come up with something of perhaps more general interest.
The snippet was the lead in to a short piece called “Captain Future, Block that Kick!” first published by Perelman in the New Yorker on January 20, 1940, a satirical “review” of what (I think) is a fictitious work of Space Opera detailing the adventures of a space hero and his companions. In the course of this review, Perelman makes the following genre-savvy observation:
In pulp fiction, it is a rigid convention that the hero’s shoulders and the heroine’s balcon constantly threaten to burst their bonds, a possibility which keeps the audience in a state of tense expectancy.
(The counterintuitive word choice balcon always keeps me laughing.) Perelman goes on to lament:
Unfortunately for fans, however, recent tests reveal that the wisp of chiffon which stands between the publisher and the postal laws has the tensile strength of drop-forged steel.
Perelman is referring to the statutory survival of the Comstock Act, which makes it a Federal felony to mail “Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance…” a subject whose history I’ve been able to touch on before here. This crap is still on the statute books, apparently, see 18 U.S.C. 1471.
So having bowed to the shade of S. J. Perelman, let’s all take a moment to thank Cthulhu that we’re living in the Internet age.
Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual enterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.
Anyone who writes fantasy, even just as a hobby, will get whacked on the jaw by the real world from time to time, and I’ve just been so whacked. I confess to occasionally using an imagined modern harem as a locus of erotic fantasy. Imagine my surprise at an author coming out with an account of having been an actual harem girl, right at the end of the twentieth century. Well, there is such. Jillian Lauren has apparently done exactly that. Her new book is Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.
As a teenager rebelling against her middle-class, suburban New Jersey upbringing, Jillian Lauren dropped out of NYU and began first stripping and then doing escort work in New York. Eventually she received an offer to become a “guest” of Prince Jefri, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, a North Borneo sultanate that opted not to join the Malay Federation in 1963 and ceased to be a British dependency only in 1984. The country has substantial oil wealth, tightly controlled by its royal family. Which means that even younger members have a lot of money to spend on pretty women.
The harem that Jillian Lauren ended up joining wasn’t the enclosed prison of enslaved beauties imagined in Orientalist fantasy. Its 40 or so members were there voluntarily, on temporary stays in guesthouses on the Prince’s estate that would end with their being given “gifts” of jewelry, phenomenally expensive clothing, and envelopes of cash. (Though Jillian Lauren notes with her keen eyes that art alluding to the tradition of Orientalist fantasy would hang on the walls of the cottages — very postmodern.) While they stayed they would attend nightly parties with the Prince. At some point, some woman or another would get the nod to go off with the Prince. Women who pleased the prince more would get greater gifts and might be invited to stay on for longer. Unsurprisingly, this was a system rife with internal gossip and backbiting. Fiona, a more experienced member of the harem, tells Jillian at one point (p. 175):
Are you here to make friends? That’s a mistake. I’m not your friend. Robin [Prince Jefri] is not your friend. Those morons [some of the other girls] are not your friends. The money is your only friend.
Sage advice, as it turns out.
I wouldn’t say the money was a bad friend. Jillian left Brunei with a lot of it, returned to New York, endured various boyfriend tribulations, succeeded (some) as an actress, sought her birth mother (she had been adopted as an infant), and then returned for another tour of duty in Brunei. It makes for gripping reading, and it’s a testament to Jillian’s powers as a writer that the story of her life outside the harem just as engaging as that inside. This was a rare one-sitting book for me, and it’s 339 pages and I’m not the world’s fastest reader.
Though I confess it does leave me perhaps a little wistful that by the age of twenty Jillian managed to pack in more interesting experiences than I had had by twice that age.
There’s usually a passage one takes away from a book and chews over for some time after putting it down. This one was mine, a reflection of Jillian’s on being a sex worker:
There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on the strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten about between the black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. The persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl.
She then concludes, though “…that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one making the major life decisions for you.”
I’m just a pseudonymous sex blogger, something which by any measure involves vastly less risk and commitment than being any kind of professional sex worker, and yet I sometimes think I know a little of what Jillian is thinking here…
Very highly recommended.
As a bonus, those of you lucky enough to be subscribers to In Bed with Susie Bright can hear the inimitable Susie herself interviewing Jillian Lauren this week and next. (And those of you who aren’t yet so lucky might want to try getting so, hint, hint…)
As spring turns into summer (here in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) my ErosBlog consciousness turns to…flowers.
The fair flower as a metaphor for female genitalia has a long pedigree indeed: one of my favorite examples occurs in Le Nozze di Figaro. The rather twisty plot of this opera revolves around the attempts of the Count of Almaviva — who has (rather to his regret) renounced his droit de seigneur — to seduce Susanna, a maid in his household betrothed to Figaro. Figaro and others (including the Countess) engage in energetic shennanigans to try to prevent this seduction. Three and some hours of delightful music result.
At one point, Figaro brings on a chorus of young peasants, largely for the purposes of embarrassing the Count and getting him to confirm his renunciation of his unjust privilege. They sing:
Giovani liete,
fiori spargete
davanti al nobile
nostro signor.
Il suo gran core
vi serba intatto
d’un più bel fiore
l’almo candor.
Blithe maids,
Scatter flowers
Before our
Noble lord.
His generous heart
Has preserved intact for you
The chaste purity
Of a still fairer flower.
“A still fairer flower.” You know what we mean…
You can listen or download the music as an mp3 here if you wish.
In the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keefe would pick up on the connection between flowers and feminity quite suggestively.
But little did I know until recently that art was imitating life all along. It was PZ Myers who put me onto the case. Here is a photograph of a real flower, provided to the world by the botany people at the University of Wisconsin:
Browsing through the big, big web today I came across an article about the sorry state of journalism by Maureen Tkacik in Columbia Journalism Review. Not ErosBloggable? Well, it does key into a theme Bacchus has explored here before, about how old media is screwed. Tkacik was working a “youth marketing” beat and managed to turn up the following story.
One of the companies in my “youth” sector, the mall chain Abercrombie & Fitch, made a weekly practice of purging its stores of hourly sales associates it deemed to be less than, in corporate parlance, “brand positive.”
The purgees were identified, a former regional manager explained, every week at corporate headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, during a conference call held specifically to critique photographs taken that week by the chain’s hundred or so district managers of all the “brand representatives” they had encountered in visits to their stores. The photos were uploaded onto some sort of company intranet, but my source told me his boss preferred printing them out on paper, so he could circle flaws, draw mustaches, scrawl racist epithets, etc. The source said braces, minor breakouts, the faintest possibility of weight gain, showing up to work in a prior season’s ensemble, wearing shoes that had not appeared on the list of authorized footwear for that season, and/or belonging to an ethnic minority could all be grounds for immediate dismissal from the ranks of Abercrombie & Fitch’s minimum-wage cadre of demand creators.
Not a bad story, no? But word got back to Abercrombie & Fitch’s lawyers and “crisis PR” people and before our intrepid reporter knew it, she was fired.
Must keep the corporate overlords happy, after all.
Looking for work, Tkacik took up a job (part of a bit of freelancing she was doing to try to get a new job) in a rather different kind of workplace.
The stranger thing about phone sex, though, was that the training program was more rigorous and extensive than any I’d encountered in journalism. There was a day and a half in a classroom learning such phone-sex fundamentals as the “hot statement” and the “ego stroke,” daily feedback sessions with supervisors who listened in on calls, a mandatory creative-writing contest for the best Halloween-themed fantasy scenario, refresher courses to hone fluency in more exotic proclivities, individual binders in which we recorded our progress in this stuff and collected, as per instruction, magazine clippings–Penthouse letters, perfume advertisements, etc.–whatever we found erotically inspiring. When my supervisor’s boss learned I was writing a story, he unfurled all the usual legal threats, but when it was published, the company ordered hundreds of reprints to dispense to new hires at orientation. They did not expect you to be some innate phone-sex genius, but they had full faith that you could get immeasurably better, especially if you wanted to, and they genuinely seemed to take it as a given that people wanted to become better at things they did.
I could comment at length, but perhaps I would do best just to refer you to the closing sentiment offered in another old Bacchus post: “Proof, if you need it, that there are still professions in the world where character and reputation matter.”
Bacchus recently ran a post showing a bear and man in what used to be known as a compromising position. From this image he drew the lesson “Surprise buttsecks is a risk to which nobody is immune.” No doubt, though my own delving is leading me to the more general conclusion that bears are really, really wont to misbehave.
Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism when it appeared, and re-reading it today it is not hard to see why. A book primarily about the British experience in the First World War, it is one of the most beautifully written and evocative scholarly books on war I have ever encountered, strange as it may seem to call a book on horror and tragedy and waste “beautifully written.” It’s a rare example of a book that I think every English speaker who aspires to be well-educated ought to read.
So to my considerable delight, I discovered that Sterling Publishing has recently put together a handsome illustrated edition of Fussell’s classic. My copy arrived in the mail last week, and I have been examining it with great interest since. I even found something of interest for ErosBlog.
Fussell has a section entitled “Mars and Eros,” in which he discusses, among other things, the way in which the homoerotic tradition in Victorian and Edwardian Britain influenced the way the war, and in particular soldiers in the war, were perceived and represented. (The ways in which art, particularly literature, structures people’s experience of events is a central theme of the book.) This is a rich topic, worthy of whole books in itself, and the compilers of the new edition came up with a picture of this memorial as an illustration:
This is the “Boy David” memorial to the Machine Gun Corps in London. The inscription on it reads “Erected to commemorate the glorious heroes of the machine gun corps who fell in the Great War.” And fell they did: according to the Wikipedia article on the MGC, of 170,500 officers and men who served in the First World War, 12,498 were killed.
More than all the adult men in the town I grew up in. More than all the male students at a pretty large university. Most of them young, some of them probably still in their teens. Cut down.
And they are memorialized with this:
A beautiful boy. An erotic image of one, I think few would deny.
Inappropriate on a war memorial? No. Entirely appropriate. A reminder of what war takes away.
When asked to pick the Shakespearean title that best described their first sexual encounter, 28% chose Comedy of Errors; 23% chose Midsummer’s Night Dream; 22% chose Much Ado About Nothing; 21% chose All’s Well That Ends Well; and 6% chose Rape of Lucrece.
I’ve sung the praises of Vittorio Giardino’s exquisite comic-book erotica creation Little Ego recently over at Erotic Mad Science and I’m still so much in love with his work that I can’t but help but add a post over here at ErosBlog on the same subject. This is so especially because there’s now an edition of Little Ego with yet-more-fetching illustrations from Ego’s dream life:
It’s Ego’s astonished expression at her transformation that really makes the picture and shows Giardino’s mastery.
And also, Bacchus is frequently accompanied by satyrs, right? So surely a comely part-centauress must also count as a high-quality companion…
Well, Ol’ Robin Hanson sure knows how to put out the Dr. Faustus bait, that’s for sure. In a recent post at Overcoming Bias he asks a question (developed in conversations with Robert Wiblin and Katja Grace) as to why there are no sex prizes for significant humanitarian accomplishments. Why are there no charities offering sex to people who do great things?
Good question, Professor Hanson. I mean, think of it. Two things seem obvious to any thinking person. First, sex is motivational. People really want sex. People will make fools of themselves for sex. People will take nigh-suicidal risks for sex. Second, there are some real problems with the world that might be solved with better technologies that someone might feasibly invent. A few examples:
Globally perhaps 1.5 million children die every year from illnesses that would be prevented through reliable access to clean drinking water, so anyone who came up with a cheap, readily available water-purification technology would save an immense number of lives.
Globally perhaps 2 million people die from AIDS/HIV infection every year, so again, any vaccine against HIV, if sufficiently cheap, would save an immense number of lives.
Imagine how much faster things might go if the engineers and scientists working on projects like cheap clean water or cheap HIV vaccines or cars that drive themselves were working toward the promise of sex at the end. Millions of lives might be saved. Millions!
The point of Professor Hanson’s post is to wonder why charities don’t offer sex prizes to people who do great things. Pure Dr. Faustus bait, here. Where Professor Hanson and his friends ask “Why?” and where probably most of the rest of humanity asks “What the fuck?” Dr. Faustus asks “Why not?”
Hanson points out that we probably find the idea of sex prizes repugnant because we want people always to have the alternative to refuse sex if they don’t want it. Fair enough, I’ll accept that compulsory sex is repugnant. But I don’t accept that offering positive incentives to people is repugnant, so imagine the following:
A philanthropic organization creates a corps of beautiful young people — say college age — who commit to providing sex prizes to people who do good for the world. They might be like the collection of young people in Search for Beauty only not so all white.
(Bacchus, do you think we might be able to dredge up one of those old Search for Beauty screenshots so the readers will know what I’m talking about?)
(Thanks, buddy!)
They could join up with the organization (call it “Sex for Humanity”), work out, get sex-training from professionals, and offer themselves to the scientists and engineers who would prevent future human suffering. They could even have a website with teasers to further incentivize innovation. There could be all sorts of prizes: from hot dates for graduate students who successfully defend good theses to month-long stays at “take you to heaven and back thrice a day” resorts for the scientists who actually make the HIV vaccine.
Of course, no one would be obliged to have sex as part of the program, but as I’ve noted, positive incentives are not coercion. We could even get distinguished institutions into the act.
As you’re probably aware, elite universities in the U.S. now expect “community service” from their applicants as a plus factor in admissions. Well, offering sex as an incentive to make the world better would be a pretty awesome form of community service. Thin of it: if you are young and beautiful and the prospect of holding yourself out for sex so incentivizes the scientists working on clean water that it becomes 0.01% likely that we get a solution in this area, your activity has an expected value of 150 childrens’ lives per year. That ain’t moral chicken feed, and it would surely deserve a big reward. Perhaps Princeton could announce that any young person who completed a successful tour of duty in Sex for Humanity would get a huge boost in their admissions prospects.
I mean, it all works, right? You have young people — human beings at the very height of their vigor and beauty — that is combined with being at the very height of their idealistic desire to make the world a better place — that is combined with institutions that really want to show how good they are for the world by having as a term of their admission “community service.” What’s not to like?
And for those of you who think it’s immoral to incentivize people with the prospect of sex, answer this: which do you care about more, “morality” or those poor little children dying of diarrhea around the world?
So get off your collective elitist ass, Princeton! Children are dying out there! Admit those idealistic young sex workers!
Bacchus’s recent Crepitui Ventris post brought back a memory which I’m obliged to try to turn back into a post of my own.
A few years back I had to the opportunity on a quiet Sunday afternoon to stop in at the King Cole Bar in New York’s St. Regis Hotel with some cash in pocket and a thirst for a well-mixed drink. Since it wasn’t too late I was able to plop myself down in front of this picture:
And order one “martini, dry, please.”
A very excellent martini was promptly served, unfortunately with a challenge from the bartender.
“If you can tell me what Old King Cole has just done, that drink is on the house.”
Well, it wasn’t as if I was in much doubt about what Old King Cole had just done. But, my good sir, this was a very distinguished bar we were talking about here. Sacred space. I would sooner have stampeded cattle through the Vatican than make a vulgar reference to human flatulence in front so well-mixed a martini as was then sitting in front of me.
(Well, actually, I’d probably stampede cattle through the Vatican just for fun, if the curious opportunity to do so were ever to present itself. But surely y’all get my meaning here.)
“Un, I think I’ll just pay for the drink, thank you.”
And then, of course, I had to get all smartass on the guy.
“Do you mind if I ask you a rather…sensitive question?”
“Not at all, sir. We aim to please.”
“It’s about martinis, actually.”
The barman nodded gravely, while I composed my face in the look of gravitas necessary for certain distasteful subjects.
“I have heard,” I began, “from certain knowledgeable individuals, that there are these days some rather wild young people who are ordering martinis that are mixed with…” and here I attempted my best impression of a man suppressing a shudder “…vodka.”
“I’m afraid that’s true, sir,” replied the barman.
I looked down at my drink and shook my head sadly. “We live in troubled times.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the barman with absolute coolness before taking another drink order.
Well, this is Erosblog, so we should in that case really move our attention to another of Dr. Faustus’s New York favorites, to wit Keens Steakhouse. If you’re ever so unlucky as to be stuck in the environs of Penn Station (great Cthulhu preserve you if you are) your walking-distance options for delicious or even edible food more or less come down to a large number of Korean restaurants and Keens. And you get to drink in front of Miss Keens:
Following hard on the heels of Bacchus’s most recent post I cannot but offer the following, a summary by the University of
Hawaii Professor of Anatomy, Biochemistry and Physiology Milton Diamond of what social science research has to say, in sum, about the effects of porn.
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20-24 and 25-34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.
In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists.
With a kicker added, perhaps not all that counterintuitively:
What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing.
Reflect on that, gentle readers. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan who cheekily labels it “Douthat bait.”
Historic Rahway, New Jersey may bear the distinction of being the boyhood home of Milton Friedman, but the libertarian principles that eminent economist spent his life espousing might be a little wan these days in his hometown.
It seems that Eliza Gonzalez and family decided to take advantage of recent snowy weather in the Northeast United States to make a Venus de Milo-esque snow sculpture on their front yard, which apparently most of the neighbors liked, at least according to this TV news report. But someone, of course, had to ruin the fun by making an anonymous complaint to the police, who in turn complained to Ms. Gonzalez, who responded by covering the sculpture up with a bikini top and a sarong.
The irony of the situation, as Ms. Gonzalez told the BBC (oh, grand, now the Brits and the whole world get to snicker at us prudish Americans again) is that the sculpture looked “more objectified and sexualized” than before the cops showed up.
I’ve been less fecund than I ought to be over here at ErosBlog in the past few weeks, having been consumed by a wee project of my own but I can at least offer up a small illustration on a subject dear to my heart, that of philosophy. In particular, the great Aristotle being ridden by Phyllis.
From Blog Leituras Favre, which represents quite the challenge, as it appears to contain posts written in (at least) French, Spanish, and, Portuguese.
In my unending (and possibly futile) quest to keep up with conversation around the office water cooler I’ve been catching up on the last few seasons of Dexter on DVD. I confess to being entertained. For the most part it comes across to me as an expertly-done black comedy, even if I find the flashback scenes to Dexter’s early childhood one of the most depressing things I’ve seen on a screen this side of Grave of the Fireflies.
And, just the other night, I got an ErogBloggable joke out of my viewing.
For those of you who don’t know the premise, Dexter is built around the adventures of an anti-hero, Dexter Morgan. Dexter is traumatized in early childhood by witnessing a horrific crime, and grows up to become a sociopath. He’s an unusual sociopath, though, because his adoptive father, a Miami police officer, recognizes Dexter’s sociopathy and successfully channels it by imbuing Dexter with a “Code,” a set of behavioral norms that permit Dexter to kill, but only other killers.
So Dexter ends up working as a forensic scientist for the Metro Miami Police Department, while at the same time functioning as a serial killer. It’s a complicated life, but for the most part Dexter successfully manages to deflect suspicion from himself by adopting a normal, nice-guy persona.
Except that not everyone is fooled. Dexter has an on-the-job enemy in one Sergeant James Doakes, a profoundly troubled soul but also the only cop in Miami who suspects that Dexter is Up To No Good. And this conflict sets up my bloggable moment.
The relevant piece of script I’ve transcribed as follows (I have omitted one line of dialog and made one description sort of vague to avoid spoilers):
INT. DEXTER'S LABORATORY - DAY
DEXTER is viewing his computer screen.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I'll be okay. I followed the
code. The stalk was good. [Dialog
line omitted to avoid spoiler.]Â Or
maybe I took pity on my victim.
CLOSE-UP: DEXTER'S COMPUTER SCREEN
Shots of one of Dexter's would-be victims.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I mean sure he's a heinous killer,
but he also bumps into walls.
BACK TO SCENE
Sergeant DOAKES enters the laboratory. As he does so,
Dexter hastily changes the view on his computer screen to a
topless blond woman.
DEXTER
Hey, sergeant.
(snaps his fingers)
Thanks for supporting the bowling
team.
DOAKES
Fuck you. Where's my blood report
on the Maynard victim?
Dexter hands Doakes a folder containing a report, which
Doakes then leafs through.
DOAKES
(glancing at Dexter's screen)
So what's that, a titty site?
DEXTER
Oops. Caught me.
DOAKES
Bullshit. What the hell were you
were you really doing in here?
DEXTER
(pointing at the screen with
two fingers)
The tits are right there.
DOAKES
Yeah. But in ten years you've
never rented a single porn title.
DEXTER
Huh.
(smiles, turns to face Doakes)
How would you know? Call me an
office crazy but your humbling
interest in my personal life could
be misinterpreted as harassment in
some circles.
DOAKES
So report me.
Doakes starts to leave.
DEXTER (V.O.)
I could think of easier solutions.
DOAKES
(while leaving)
Nice tits.
Doakes leaves, closing the door behind himself.
Now of course Doakes’s line about Dexter’s viewing habits or rather lack thereof has an obvious surface meaning: “I know you don’t look at porn, so I know you’re up to no good in here,” and also serves to reveal something about Doakes’s character, namely his doggedness in trying to figure out Dexter.
But as I saw this I read a second layer of meaning under Doakes’s comment, to the effect that in today’s day and age, it is your not being interested in porn that is evidence of your being a dangerous creep. An intriguing comment about the mores of today that the writers might slide this in as a joke, and expect the audience to get it!
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’sThe 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.
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 perhapsreadersofmypostshereat ErosBlog mighthavenoticed.
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 unusual rather than impossible, because I suspect there are people in the world who really would jump in the not-quite-perfected matter transporter or whatever given the chance, but they are rare. It’s the brave and splendid “yes” that’s the turn-on pivots off.
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?
The great Italian novelist Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) was surely no stranger to the world of eros for many reasons. Perhaps the one closest to my own heart was that he wrote a novel entitled Il Disprezzo which would be made into a film by Jean-Luc Goddard called Le Mépris in 1963, which provided Brigitte Bardot an opportunity to steam up eyeglasses in art-house cinemas everywhere.
So it was no surprise to find that among Moravia’s possessions was this exquisite glass sculpture designed by Renato Analue.
And of course I just had to share.
My initial reaction might have been “What a remarkable abstraction!” had I not seen it in Hans-Jürgen Döpp’s The Erotic Museum in Berlin.
I was the pleased recipient this week of a consignment of books by the philosopher Michel Onfray which included L’invention du plaisir: fragments cyrénaïques. Good stuff there, such as many variants on Aristippus’s retort to those who remonstrated with him for patronizing the courtesan Lais: “I possess Lais, but am not possessed by her.” Also an appropriate epigram by Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human (#104): “No life without pleasure; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life.” But, shallow fellow that I am, I was immediately struck most by the ErosBloggable illustration that the good folks at Livres de Poche found for the cover, and which I now pass on to you:
A vase painting from about 430 BCE, “Woman watering phalluses.” Invention of pleasure indeed.
I have long held in my mind the question of what one might do if one has a fetish whose object cannot actually be found in one’s environs. Foot fetishists and hair fetishists in some ways have it easy — feet and hair are everywhere. Even a necrophiliac can raid a morgue or a graveyard. But what if the object of your erotic attraction are hot nymphets from around Polaris? You would then appear to be seriously SOL, my friend.
Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish is a book about a man with this sort of curious problem, one Mercury de Sade, a computer programmer living in turn-of-the-twenty-first century New York. Mercury de Sade is really into aliens.
But of course there aren’t any aliens for Mercury de Sade to get it on with, even in New York, and so he is led down some dubious paths in life: weird sexual fantasies, philosophical studies, various digressions and tangents and, oh yes recruiting (or abducting) teenage girls whom he designates as “Ninfas” and attempts to “convert” into aliens.
Mercury de Sade’s odd life is reflected in an odd literary structure. There are a long sequence of short chapters classified as Alien Sex Scenes (ASS), or Mercury de Sade’s fantasies of sex — often nonconsensual — with various imagined extraterrestrial beings, Methods of Deterrestrialization (MOD), or Mercury de Sade’s attempts to make Ninfas into aliens, Lessons in Exophilosophy (LIE), where are essays on the idea of alien life in the history of ideas (including such figures as Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and so on), and various philosophical reflections called Digressions and Tangents (DAT). There is one of each of these for every one of the twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet, thus 96 short chapters in all. One can read these linearly, or one can partition the book in other ways. For example one could read only a history of ideas by starting with LIE 05 (Descartes) and proceeding through LIE 23 (Barthes). Or if one wants to read the rather squalid tale of Mercury de Sade converting an abused girl named Charlotte into “Ninfa XIX” you could read the MOD sections straight through. Or if you just want fantasies of alien sex, read the ASS chapters in any order one pleases. Though you might miss a little in doing that — for example, Voltaire’s imagined Micromégas, and a being 120,000 feet tall from Sirius (LIE 09), and Mercury de Sade’s fantasy of attempting to have sex with an equally large alien woman (ASS 09).
As you can probably guess, there’s a lot for many people in this strange book, especially if you have something for grays or little green men or alien giantesses. In general, the alien sex fantasies are quite imaginative. The answer to the question “what do you do if your fetish is just impossible” seems to be “lots of things: philosophy, fantasy, and maybe kidnapping.” I especially like the conceit that philosophy can be a result of thwarted sexuality: Nietzsche must be smiling, up in philosopher’s heaven. I am a little puzzled why a computer programmer like Mercury de Sade (evidently a very able programmer, as he is able to afford a loft in Manhattan and those were not cheap in 2001) doesn’t try more with virtual reality, video games, or other technologies that would seem germane. (That’s where I would be, if I had Mercury de Sade’s fetish and his skills.) Still, worth a read if it sounds like your thing.
Seeing the positive response created by my post containing James Montgomery Flagg’s “The Fencer” (or perhaps, as one commenter suggested, “Puss in Boots”) I thought it only fair to include an image of another, slightly different naked person with a sword for those who enjoy that sort of thing. I should hope that it will please those for whom “The Fencer” might not have been quite what they were looking for in a swordsman, as well as those of expansive tastes.
The character is named Roger Hawke, and he was painted by Barb Rausch (1941-2001), appearing on the back cover of Wimmen’s Comix #16. Eat your heart out, Flagg!
Well, those intrepid science journalists John Horgan and George Johnson were at it again on Science Saturday this weekend, trying to boost ratings by talking about sex, a phenomenon which we’ve noted before here at ErosBlog. This week they took on the issue of pharmaceutical sexual enhancement, and the segment makes agreeable viewing.
Save that I must, for the sake of our journalistic honor, note that among the subjects they discuss are flibanserin, about which I can only say you read about it here first on ErosBlog and the incredible (non-)vanishing of the G-spot about which I can also say that you read about it here first. Go us!
I am quite sure that all of our American readers and many others besides will be familiar with this choice bit of visual history, executed by James Montgomery Flagg:
Though perhaps you didn’t know that the same artist produced this image:
Now de gustibus non est disputandum of course, but if you really wanted to get me to show up at a recruiting post, I think I know which martial image I would use.
The 2010 New Year’s card sent by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to its donors contains this year a credo on free speech written by the great Neil Gaiman which concludes
…if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.
Bacchus’s manyrecentposts on 3D SexVilla along with my occasional kibitzing have twigged an interesting memory from my own past, one about an antecedent (if a fictional one) to the cool 3D toys now becoming available.
Some family vacation sometime in the early 1980. I’m in adolescence, with all that implies for family vacations. Generally not good stuff: family vacations in my natal family had a fair amount of “Look, kids! It’s the World’s Third Most Famous Tree! Let’s pull over and take pictures.” Not too exciting when you’re fifteen or so, which is a time when I’d frankly have rather been at home holed up with whatever good bad books I could glean from my hometown public library’s fantasy and SF paperback rack. But one thing that was on the road was motel cable television. We’re not talking porn here, not by a long shot. But we are talking cheesy PG rated movies, including one I saw about one minute of before being summoned off to see the World’s Second Most Famous Tree. At the time I did not know what it was. Only much movie watching later would I be able to identify it as a clip from Looker (1981).
A nude model (played by the actress Susan Dey is being scanned.
And then she is rendered as a 3D computer image:
I felt a tremendous erotic charge out of watching this scene and couldn’t get it out of my adolescent mind for days. Not only was I in a state of reverie past caring about the World’s Second Most Famous Tree, but I kept turning over in my mind possible technical details of scanning and rendering a 3D object (preferably an erotically attractive one, of course) from a series of 2D images. I made only some progress.
If nothing else, I came away with a far keener appreciation of the merits of trigonometry than I previously had. Perhaps if they had moving scan, I might have been much more zealous about calculus!
I confess there are things that I read that surprise me, like this:
There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.
This particular science writer is Carl Zimmer. And he ain’t kidding about the amazing duck (well, actually drake) penis.
One hesitates even to guess what an analogous organ on a human being would be — six feet long, maybe? In any event, as a longtime propounder of the wonders of the natural world here at ErosBlog, I was promptly hooked by Zimmer’s blog post.
And oh man, is it something else. The weirdness only starts with the drakes’ giant clockwise turning penises, not really matched by ducks’ giant counterclockwise-turning vaginas. There’s also a tale of brutal intra-species sexual competition, complete with activities that could plausibly be called mass sexual assault by drakes on ducks.
But what you really need to do is scroll down and see the video of drakes being induced to have high speed erections and ejaculations. That’s like pretty much nothing I’ve ever seen on the Internets, and I wasn’t born yesterday.
Don’t watch in fullscreen mode if you’re squeamish about such things!
I have long had an item on my Internet searching to-do list, perhaps too long delayed by the fact that I’ve spent as much of my leisure hours as I have thinking about sexbots and gill men and so on. That item was to track down a famous performance by the soprano Maria Ewing done at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden sometime in the early 1990s. Oh, don’t groan. She very much deserves a place of honor here, because of her performances in Richard Strauss’sSalome.
Now, it’s well known that the burning erotic core of this overheated-to-begin-with opera (based on a play by Oscar Wilde is a performance by Salome of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils, performed for her stepfather (and great-uncle) Herodes, the Tetrach of Judea (busy man). Herodes is clearly trembling with lust for Salome, and Salome is in turn nursing a less-that-healthy obsession with the prophet Jochanaan, who is imprisoned in a pit in Herodes’s court.
Performance convention for this high-art striptease since its first performance in 1905 has been for the singer-actress depicting Salome to end in a body stocking.
Maria Ewing’s performance starts conventionally enough:
And there’s a conventional amount of taunting of Jochanaan in his pit:
But in the end Ewing, shall we say, defies the traditional performance convention:
And it is just glorious. Pictures I can present here do it little justice. You can readily find video of this on YouTube: one example is here:
In the end, Salome insists on being brought the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter. Herodes, having given his word, has no choice but to comply. Salome’s triumph was the subject of a famous illustration by Aubrey Beardsley.
Bonus! Searching for Maria Ewing turned up an arguably even steamier performance by Francesca Patanè in a Rome production of Salome.
Given my technophilia it was a given that I would read Bacchus’s In Thrall to the Machines post from yesterday, and equally given that I would follow the link for the Hitachi Magic Wand whereupon, on a page dominated by a comely nude model prominently displaying Hitachi’s doubtless fine product, my eyes were drawn straight away to…
For North American use only, on 110-120 volts. Do not use with a voltage converter. Any use outside of North America voids warranty.
And immediately I started wondering “Oh yeah? What happens if I do use a voltage converter? Are the untoward consequences legal in nature? Technical? Sexual?” (Note: I am not recommending anyone actually try this.)
And why am I looking at this piece of text and not at the pretty girl? Hmm. Do I have perhaps…unorthodox obsessions?
Though the second thing that came to mind was perhaps a little more normal, at least for anyone who was an adolescent guy once.
As the robot famously said to human paramour “Earth women who experience sexual ecstasy with mechanical assistance always tend to feel guilty.”
Readers may be interested to know that filmsite.org has an illustrated history of sex in cinema, which begins here and runs for fifty-five pages after that. Talk about an enjoyable time-waster. Or a good way to make the dreary winter afternoon much less dreary.
Hat tip to GoodShit, a blog that truly lives up to its name.
A little while back in a post on media technology I mused a bit about audio erotica. Well, this past Friday I managed to get a bit more concrete experience with the format.
Picture this, if you will. In the cold, pre-dawn darkness a battered, schmutzy commuter train grinds its way across one of North America’s grittier industrial landscapes. The train is full of morose-looking men and women on their way to a day’s toil in Metropolis. Some doze fitfully, some clutch styrofoam cups of coffee, some scowl at that morning’s Wall Street Journal. You can tell just by looking at them that every last one of them would really rather be somewhere else.
Except for one man, who blogs in his spare time under the name of Faustus. Faustus is grinning from ear to ear. Why? Because on Faustus’s hip there rests a media-playing BlackBerry, wired to Faustus by a small set of headphones. And if you could hear inside the buds resting snugly in Faustus’s ears, you could hear something like this:
I activated the Amatory Capacitors, and a crackling noise filled the air. It joined in pleasing counterpoint to the Vibratorium’s hum and Mrs. Hargreaves’ groans and gasps as my Ontological Engine woke to life, powered by the trickle of Vital Energies she was emitting.
Yes, indeed. Circlet Press, since 1992 the world’s leading (arguably, world’s only) exclusive purveyor of science fiction and fantasy erotica, has entered the podcast era by putting out a four-part MP3 version of Vinnie Tesla’s story “The Ontological Engine, or, The Modern Leda.” (You can have a lot of fun just mining that title for sly references. The story appeared earlier in the Circlet anthology Up for Grabs: Exploring the Worlds of Gender, edited by Lauren P. Burka.) Mad science, flagellation, Victorians Gone Wild, sex machines, erotically-inquisitive monsters, and the power of female orgasm harnessed to questionable purposes. Seriously, what’s not to love here?
To be sure, it does do a lot with the whole Mad Science thing, which discerning ErosBlog readers have perhaps noticed is somewhatupmyalley.
And perhaps most attractive of all, the first part of four is available for free (mp3 download here with the remaining four parts available for a very modest outlay. If audio erotica or steampunk erotica or Mad Scientists are your thing (or if you just hate your commute and need to liven it up a bit, maybe?), you owe it to yourself to have a look.
I mean, I suppose I should really be off researching a challenging question posed by Bacchus in his recent post on twittering but before I get to this, I just have to share an image that showed up in a routine feature in the UK newspaper The Telegraph as part of their humorous “Sign Language” series of curious images found by Telegraph readers abroad.
The Italian text means something like “service here without tails.” Beyond that, I do not know what it means.
All I could think about was that it served as a fine graphical illustration of a point made by Bacchus in a classic post of his.
Bonus: I found this essentially at random following a link at Pharyngula which leads to a Telegraphstory the interest of which is almost transparent for an ErosBlog audience.
A little while back, in the course of a post on the possibility that computer technology will soon make fantasy-to-image conversion easier and more satisfying, I mentioned a minor phenomenon I called “SW enthusiasm,” people interested in scenes or instances of women shrinking down to doll size or smaller, and even indulged in a bit of it myself, spinning out a whimsical piece of script in that vein.
Shortly after doing it, I recalled seeing a brief video clip that falls squarely into the SW enthusiasm thing. I recalled it as part of a video collection of some kind, and also that it was incredibly cheap, cheesy, and weird. I considered the possibility that it was some sort of fantasy that got turned into a pseudomemory, but on reflection that didn’t seem quite right, because my fantasies would surely have had better special effects, at least in my mind’s eye.
Well, it’s the glorious age of the Internet, which means that with a certain amount of head-scratching and Google searching and perhaps a small outlay of cash, you can sharpen up strange old memories. And so I did. The clip indeed exists. I saw it in a compilation called Bad Girls in the Movies. And it sure is cheap, cheesy, and weird. My best efforts at transcribing its script would go something like this:
INT. A CHEESY MAD SCIENCE LAB - DAY
GIRL SUBJECT is lying nude on a black-topped table. SUBJECT
#2 stands to one side, wearing what looks like a towel.
ANNOYING ROBOT stands at the head of the table, while
MOUSTACHE GUY stands guard in the background.
ANNOYING ROBOT
(turning from side to side)
Roger this! Roger this! Roger
this! Achieve!
(Note: At least, that's my best guess as to what Annoying
Robot is saying. The voice is processed to sound "roboty"
and isn't very clear.)
CLOSE-UP: MAD SCIENCE GIRL AT HER CONTROL PANEL
MAD SCIENCE GIRL flips several switches and pulls a lever.
CLOSE-UP: GIRL SUBJECT ON THE TABLE
A series of shots showing Girl Subject shrinking down to
about eight inches tall.
CLOSE-UP: MAD SCIENCE GIRL AT HER CONTROL PANEL
Mad Science Girl throws several more switches.
BACK TO SCENE
SUBJECT #3 is now standing next to the table, removing
something that looks like a hospital gown.
Mad Science Girl goes to the table and picks up the shrunken
Girl Subject.
(Note: In this shot "Girl Subject" is obviously a Barbie
Doll or similar sort of doll used as a prop.)
The lab door slides open and TOM comes in, carrying some
sort of futuristic-looking clipboard. He looks down at the
shrunken Girl Subject.
TOM
Not two more.
MAD SCIENCE GIRL
Hi, Tom.
TOM
Hey, careful there!
Tom takes Girl Subject into his hands.
TOM
Poor little things. Just for
making love.
CLOSE-UP: GIRL SUBJECT HELD IN TOM'S HAND
The lower half of Girl Subject's body is wrapped in Tom's
hand. Her hands are held up.
GIRL SUBJECT
This horny bitch dropped me!
BACK TO SCENE
ANNOYING ROBOT
Fornication without sanction!
Fornication without sanction!
Forni...
TOM
(cutting Annoying Robot off)
Don't you ever give anyone a break?
Annoying Robot salutes (?) Tom and leaves the Mad Lab.
I can represent what happens here in some pictures, albeit of regrettably low quality.
The girl on the table.
The girl shrinking.
The girl being picked up by Mad Science Girl.
And being held by Tom.
What I’m still scratching my head about is where on earth is this oddity from? What’s the context here? What strange practice is Tom referring to about shrunken people being “just for making love?” Is this something that the SW enthusiasts of the world really ought to know about?
I would be delighted if anyone could tell me, hence the bleg. I have confidence that it is addressed to the readership best in the world for addressing questions of sexual weirdness.
And even if you can’t tell me, inventing your own movie into which this scene might somehow fit (so at least not every line of dialog seems like a bizarre non-sequitur) might also be a lot of fun.
I suppose if I really wanted to I could spend my lunch hours surfing for porn, but surely for a sex blogger that would be a busman’s holiday. So instead I end up reading papers like this one written by philosopher Joshua Knobe and two physicist colleagues entitled “Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology” (PDF version here.)
Knobe and his co-authors summarize part of their argument as follows:
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws.
Well all very interesting, one might think. There are any number of challenging philosophical implications here. An inflationary universe raises tricky problems for epistemology (because, among other things, you might be a Boltzmann Brain) and causes real headaches for people like me attracted to aggregative consequentialism in ethics, as Nick Bostrom has pointed out (see his paper “Infinite Ethics,” pdf link here). These are the sort of things that keep weirdos like Faustus up at night, and not in a good way either. What’s the ErosBloggable significance here?
Let’s draw out a little of the Erotical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology, shall we?
In an infinite universe characterized by inflation, the only limit imposed on what can happen is physical law, and that’s not a very strong constraint, at least relative to the way that we think about the world. Events that have any positive probabilities, even tiny ones, even ones that require triple scientific notation to describe, happen — indeed, they happen infinitely many times. And this includes some very weird events, like fully concious brains appearing right out in the vacuum of space as a fluctuation out of the background thermal equilibrium.
If that can happen, then there’s a peculiar implication, which is that it is very hard to write anything that’s really fiction. Because anything that could happen that doesn’t violate (maybe) a few conservation principles could be happening, indeed is happening. Imagine your bizarre story as a movie. In some region of the universe, there is a fluctuation that creates frame one of the movie. In the vast, vast majority of these, things dissolve back into the equilibrated ooze, to use physicist Sean Carroll’s description. But in a tiny number of regions relative to the first, we get another fluctuation that is frame two of the movie, and so forth.
And so it would seem to follow that somewhere out there in the universe women are mixing their DNA with honeybees to become sex assassins. Somewhere a police detective is having his dead girlfriend replaced with a sexy robot, and not noticing. Somewhere a coed is being put in erotic peril by being accidentally-on-purpose shrunk down to two inches tall. Every weird transaction that for us is just something pulled out of 3D SexVilla is something real people are doing somewhere. Not on the earth we know, but somewhere in the inflating universe.
And of course, there are an infinite number of copies of you dear reader, engaged in almost any thing your imagination can throw up (keep in mind those pesky conservation laws, although if your kink centers on breaking the laws of physics, you win Faustus’s Weird of the Year Award), and vastly many other things besides.
Think on that while you go to sleep tonight. Pleasant dreams!
And still more evidence that you learn something new every day.
Like most ErosBlog readers (I assume) I was familiar with with John Wesley (1703-1791) as a prominent eighteenth-century churchman and theologian, one of the founders of the Protestant denomination known as Methodism. Something I didn’t know was that Wesley was in his lifetime also the author of a popular book on natural medicine called Primitive Physic, emphasizing cures for illness that would not rely on physicians. Unusual, but not too surprising, I suppose. But as I read through the article on the subject, I found that Wesley had some interesting advice for curing tuberculosis, at least in men. The advice itself isn’t all that unusual, but Wesley’s mode of expressing it is, well…
In the last stage, fuck a healthy woman daily. This cured my Father.
A robust mode of expression rather unlike that of the many Methodists I’ve met in my lifetime. Best guess as to why is that the imperative verb was regarded as less coarse in the eighteenth century and earlier than it subsequently became, not having acquired the secondary connotation of harm it subsequently acquired. It seems, for instance, that at least as the seventeenth century approached, the name “windfucker” was used as a common term for the kestrel, a name perhaps inspired by that hovering bird’s characteristic mode of flying (the Oxford English Dictionary gives a 1599 use “The kistrilles or windfuckers that filling themselues with winde, fly against the winde euermore.”)
Or maybe old John Wesley and his reading audience were just a little more dirty-minded than we would expect. Anyone who knows should certainly comment.
As I headed into the office on the morning of this recent Friday the 13th I had an intuition that interesting news would await me. It did, in the form of a headline on Bloomberg: “Desire Drug May Prove Sex Really Is All in Her Head.” Sometimes the news gods are kind.
The gist of this story is that the German pharmaceutical firm of Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, needing a new revenue source to make up for those which is likely to lose when its patents expire on Mirapex and Flomax, surveyed a large number of women over 18 and discovered that among many of them, ebbing sexual desire was seen as significant cause of distress. Boehringer’s answer has been to begin trials of a new drug called flibanserin, which by blocking serotonin and triggering dopamine production is supposed to amp up the libido. Boehringer is supposed to be presenting results at the upcoming meeting of the European Society for Sexual Medicine, starting Monday.
A big win, perhaps? Humanity has sought aphrodisiacs since it climbed down from the trees. The big difference is that we might just be closing in on ones which can be clinically proven to work, with all the fun that might entail.
But of course, these moves are controversial. The problem seems to really stem from an annoying distinction between therapy and enhancement uses for drugs. Many people believe that it’s okay to use drugs to treat “illnesses” or restore “normality,” but not to use them to just enjoy yourself (or make yourself smarter, stronger, etc.) So advocates of drugs like these are forced into the dodge of claiming that they exist to treat something called “Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder.” Critics can then point out that there is no universally (or perhaps even generally) accepted standard for what the “right” level of sexual desire is, and further that there’s something a little nasty about stigmatizing people with the “wrong” level as somehow pathological and in need of treatment. On one version of this view, hypoactive sexual desire disorder is just a made-up condition to allow Boehringer to sell drugs and make money.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is to acknowledge that the critics may have a point but then to ask whether we should care that much. Why should we rely on men in white coats to tell us what the “right” level of sexual desire for us. Shouldn’t we deliberate for ourselves and make our own judgments about what degree of sexual desire will make our lives go well and, having so deliberated, aren’t we entitled to have our judgment respected? (Reflections like this one show just how coercive and illiberal the therapy/enhancement distinction potentially is.) Shouldn’t we decide for ourselves whether our sexual desire should be enhanced or, for that matter, reduced if it so suits us, without having to pretend we’re suffering from some sort of disease?
Of course, I would also offer a caution here, to the effect that perhaps what we really want to enhance is not desire but pleasure. If you think about it enough, enhancing just desire by itself is a peculiar goal. Wanting is not the same thing as liking, even if the two are often intimately connected. Having stronger desires could be a positive problem if you lack the means to satisfy them — you might just be letting yourself in for a more frustrating life rather than a more fulfilled one. And perhaps satisfaction of desire isn’t really all that great just by itself and unaccompanied by the right hedonic state. Haven’t you ever fulfilled a great desire in your life only to feel at least somewhat disappointed in the end? It seems more plausible to think that it’s the hedonic state itself that matters: isn’t it wonderful when something happens to us for which we had no antecedent desire (perhaps because we did not even know it existed before experiencing it) but which was a source of joy when it happened (a major point in favor of skilled lovers, yes?).
Though of course, I see no reason to think that flibanserin or other future additions to the pharmacopoeia won’t also enhance pleasure. If so, good times ahead.
I realize, of course, that strictly speaking fictional characters don’t have birthdays, but since since Wikipedai gives the date of November 13, 1915 as the release date for Louis Feuillade’sLes Vampires, today is as good a time as any to extend a sort of birthday wish to one of my all-time favorite cinematic characters.
The eponymous Vampires of this extraordinary ten-part silent serial are not the undead bloodsuckers of Nosferatu or Dracula or even Twilight but rather a shadowy criminal order that has infiltrated the bourgeois order of troisième république France, against which it plots and executes crimes of breathtaking audacity and sophistication. With bombs and poisons and anesthetic gas and portable, surprisingly concealable artillery they kidnap and steal and kill. But one man, crusading journalist Phillipe Guérande, fights to expose and destroy the Vampires’ reign of terror. Phillipe is brave and resourceful and moral and patriotic and clean. He also lives with his Mom.
It is really the anti-heroine Irma Vep that is the reason to watch this landmark of world cinema. Created by the actress (as well as pioneering writer and director) Musidora (1889-1957), she sets me a-tingle from the moment she appears in the third episode of the serial as a chanteuse. Even in flickering sepia tones and without a word of dialog of her own, she dazzles with a range of expressions in the first seconds the camera shows her close up.
Irma Vep is aggressively amoral in her willingness to pursue her ends — one of the movies’ original and still one of their greatest bad girls. That alone would make her intriguing and attractive. But she’s also an unambiguously sexual character as well. Even in France there were pretty strict limits to what Studio Gaumont could put on the screen, but still they managed to suggest rather a lot. Irma Vep’s preferred costume for break-ins and burglary work is something called a maillot de soie, which covers almost everything, but is remarkably revealing.
A remarkable shot, not just for what Irma Vep is daring to wear, but the for the pose she is daring to strike — she has no fear of the man she is confronting. I understand this costume was something of a scandal when it was first put on screen.
It also shows that perhaps Musidora did not look like Hollywood thinks female sex symbol ought to look.
Screw Hollywood. Give me Irma Vep any day.
Irma has quieter erotic moments as well. Look at her here with her lover Moreno (one of perhaps several she takes in the serial).
Fans of erotic mind control fantasies might wish to take note: Moreno is an early practitioner of your kink, it seems.
Kohl-eyed Irma manages to be striking even in moments when fate has her down. Here she is, making an escape under a blanket from her pursuers.
Unfortunately, in the end, the good guys win. Philippe and a squad of French cops capture the Vampires. Philippe’s fiancé manages to kill Irma Vep. But note that at least Irma dies shaking her fist at her enemies.
Quite the antithesis of submissive good womanhood. We could use more anti-heroines like Irma.
Seeing as the typical ErosBlog reader might have tired of my predilection for sex-mad cephalopods I’ve resolved to move back into my own phylum and provide for your enjoyment — bat fellatio.
And no, I’m not referring to someone’s mining-out the none-too-deeply-buried-to-begin-with subtext of the relationship between a certain costumed hero and his sidekick. No, I really mean actual bats. It seems that a group of Chinese scientists have been prying into the intimate habits of a little fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx that nests near their university campuses in Guangdong Province and, well, perhaps I’d best just let the abstract to their paper do the talking.
Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.
No jokes, please. This is science in action.
Our intrepid researchers even included a snippet of video of the bats going at it. I’m not sure whose idea it was to add porny music to the video. Maybe that’s also science in action.
Much like Bacchus I have no shortage of images in my head which I’d like to have out in the world, and also like him I have neither any real skill, nor any talent that I can discern, for doing my own drawing. So needless to say I’ve been following Bacchus’s recentposts on 3D SexVilla with considerable interest. Now, there have been software engines for creating high-quality graphics around for quite a while, but my own sense is that you have to be pretty damn good to get results like this:
(“The Seventh Time I Died,” by Scandinavian artist Johan Flood, gallery of his work here.)
And naturally, as a committed Linux user, I hold out high hopes for the development of MakeHuman, which can also produce impressive Poser-like results:
Still, I suspect that this engine won’t be all that simple to use.
But simpler things are surely coming, and that will mean significant changes. The point of this post will be to speculate about them a bit. There’s reason for optimism here.
The hope is that whatever interfaces we have will be easier and cheaper to use. That seems almost sure to happen, and when it does, it will mean that the sort of publicly available kink out there will be stranger, and better, and kinkier than before, because you’ll have not just thousands but millions of weird imaginations at work. That means a lot of fetishes and a lot more strange little communities of sexual interest. It was Voltaire, I think, who once remarked that if you have two religions in land they will cut each other’s throats, but if you have thirty there will be peace. As in religion, so in sex, maybe. It will be hard to have oppression of sexual minorities when pretty much everyone is part of some sexual minority or another.
A possible further social implication might be an escalation of interest in transhumanism. Once people can see vividly all the strange and wonderful things that might happen, the more they might be interested in enhancing themselves in ways such that these things could happen.
And there may be deeper technological implications as well. I’ve mulled over a suggestion made by Bacchus that perhaps in a decade or so we will have artificial intelligence (AI) engines capable of turning natural language scripts or instructions into illustrations.
That’s a tricky thought to get my brain around. Although it’s not really my thing, I sat down and composed a little bit of script in honor of the latest little weird community of interest to catch my eye out there on the internet: the so-called “shrinking woman” (SW) enthusiasts. (There really is something for everyone out there.)
Page 1
Page divided into six panels, divided into two tiers of three. All of these are set in PROFESSOR STRANGE’S laboratory.
Panel
Description
Dialog
1.1
Voluptuous coed STACEY is stepping into the TRANSPORTER CHAMBER, which is about six feet tall and roughly ovoid in shape. Stacey is wearing shorts and a v-neck t-shirt with PRINCETON written on it.
Caption: A demonstration for the skeptic!
STACEY:
Professor, are you really sure this is safe?
1.2
A full-on view of Professor Strange. He is wearing a white lab-coat and sitting behind a complicated-looking control panel of some sort.
PROFESSOR STRANGE:
Perfectly safe, my dear. We are only going to demonstrate by transporting you across the room.
1.3
View of the Transporter Chamber. A FLASH is seen in place of where Stacey was standing in Panel 1. SFX: ZZZAP!
CAPTION: Transported!
STACEY:
Well, okay, if you say so, but…EEEK!
1.4
View of a different Transporter Chamber across the lab. Stacey’s clothing is sitting in a heap on the transporter pad. Professor Strange is standing just to one side, scratching his chin. Note that Stacey cannot be seen in the panel.
STACEY (balloon with tiny words):
Help…
PROFESSOR STRANGE:
Fascinating…the transport algorithm spontaneously differentiated between biotic and non-biotic material.
1.5
Close up view of the heap of clothing. Stacey has shrunk to about two inches high. Her clothing did not shrink with her (thus leaving her naked). Professor Strange’s hand (huge in this scale) is lifting Stacey up.
STACEY:
Hey!
1.6
Professor Strange is holding the tiny Stacey out at arms length and is looking at her, eyebrow raised.
STACEY (balloon with tiny words):
What have you done with me! Put me down!
PROFESSOR STRANGE:
This promises to be most interesting…
(The HTML tables above reproduce a script layout by Celtx, which is a very cool (and free) tool for writing screenplays, comic book scripts, etc.)
Now the above script probably isn’t your thing either, but bear with me. There would be a lot of detail to fill in here. Is Professor Strange a Mephistophelean figure or a Jerry Lewis-like nutty professor? Is his laboratory a Bond-villain lair? An antiseptic academic space? A steampunk setting? Is Stacey an anatomically-implausible comic book cover babe? Or perhaps short and zaftig? Blond, red-headed, brunette, raven-haired? European? Asian? African? I imagine you were filling in all the details as you read the script, probably in the way that you found the most gratifying.
Now in my experience (admittedly limited) in working with professional artists, I’ve prepared written descriptions to which they’ve responded with multiple pencil sketches and a query: which among these best captures what you’re looking for? It’s a process that often reveals pleasant surprises, bits of self-knowledge that I didn’t have before. (Though, to be sure, it’s also expensive, at least when I’m paying the commission.)
Now a really good AI engine would probably not just stop at turning out drafts based on your scripts. A really good AI engine will learn about you, improving its searches over time to read what you give it and turn out things that are better and better, more and more like what your mind is searching for, things you find more and more appealing. A really good AI engine — and this might be a few decades further down the road from what Bacchus first suggested to me — would be a partner, something (perhaps we might even call “it” a someone) that serves as a partner, something that builds up within itself an image of your own erotic consciousness and imagination.
(I realize now there must be artists out there beginning to gnash their teeth. Sorry guys. Feel free to imagine a future in which AI engines manage to replace the annoying writer. Maybe I deserve it.)
And that’s significant, because it’s a step forward for both you and the machines. Nietzsche wrote an aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: Grad und Art der Geschlechtlichkeit eines Menschen reicht bis in den letzten Gipfel seines Geistes hinauf. Someone’s sexuality reaches to the very top of his or her spirit. Most likely he was right. You create a record of yourself, not just in pictures, but in intelligent software. If there’s ever to be any hope of overcoming death through indirect mind uploading, as Paul Almond has proposed, this could be an unparalleled record of yourself, the recording that reaches right to the top of your spirit.
Bacchus’s Saturday post had to do with a new technology for erotica of the future. I must confess that I found it exciting to read: the potential there is immense, whether for massively multi-player erotic gaming or social networking or just creating and sharing stories and scenarios according your own idiosyncratic fancy. Excelsior!
As I read the post, I was reminded of the fact that my technophilia tends to swing both ways (make of that what you will, with my blessing). I like not only present technologies and the promise of future better ones, but also past ones. And I was reminded of a careless remark I once made to Bacchus in correspondence to the effect that whatever technology of representation anyone creates, its use to make and distribute porn cannot possibly be far behind.
Not quite right, I thought on reflection. Of course, it’s arguably true about our ability to sculpt in stone.
(The Venus of Laussel probably from about 20,000 B.C.E., original in the Musée d’Acquitaine, Bordeaux.)
Or our ability to draw things:
(The Cosmic Union of Geb and Nut, detail from an Egyptian papyrus, circa 1,025 B.C.E.)
Or even our ability to paint on drinking vessels.
(The Brygos Painter, who flourished around 480-470 B.C.E., Erastes Soliciting an Eromenos, original in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)
These are all ancient examples. And we can of course think of modern examples. It seems almost too obvious to point out that there was precious little lag between the invention of photography and people taking their clothes off for the camera, or between the creation of moving pictures and someone making a sex movie. And of course, we all know that the Internet is for porn. (Will I ever get tired of linking to that post? Nah.)
And I don’t doubt, of course, that as soon as someone figured out how to write, someone was hard on their heels writing dirty stories, at least once the medium of writing because common enough that it was out of the hands of a small caste of priests and scribes, and maybe before even then.
But of course further reflection turned up some really important exceptions. Broadcast television and radio, naturally. I am pretty sure that the earliest decades of radio and television weren’t all that racy anywhere by contemporary standards (I would be happy to stand corrected if I am wrong about this.) One might argue that radio is by its nature not all that well suited to erotic representation, although I think that the existence of actual audio erotica like Susie Bright’s Cyborgasm would belie this claim. (Also, I like to amuse myself with thoughts of possible alternate reality old-time radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly Get It On or Amos & Andy & Ted & Alice.)
More likely, it seems that broadcast radio and television came into their own as technologies at a moment in history when in North America and Europe, Christianity was going through the last phase in which it was hegemonic with respect to public policy. As we’re probably aware this religion has some rather special views on eros and sexuality, ones summarized by Nietzsche in his aphorism “Das Christenthum gab dem Eros Gift zu trinken: – er starb zwar nicht daran, aber entartete, zum Laster.” Since broadcasting by its very nature is something easy for anyone to monitor — and anyone includes the public authorities. There was of course a large non-Christian world in the early twentieth century as well, but this consisted largely of rather poor countries, many of which were dependencies of some kind of the United States or various European powers, or countries indulging various collectivist state-building enterprises. The governments of the latter class of countries sure weren’t interested in having their miserable serfs citizens distracted by eros, except insofar as they could be induced thereby to generate more laborers and cannon-fodder. So radio and television, in their advent, were unsurprisingly chaste.
I suppose of course there was always amateur radio, complete with transmissions in Morse code:
I would guess that the following image, Nastassja Kinski with a big old snake, would be pretty familiar to ErosBlog readers.
Today’s Sunday meditation is on why the image is so striking and has so much staying power. I think it goes beyond how beautiful Nastassja Kinski is, or even the rather too-obvious phallic symbolism of the snake.
It is probably no accident one of culture’s founding myths is that of a woman who gives in to a temptation offered by a serpent. (There are, of course, too many tellings of this story to count, but I shall here prefer that of the great cartoonist J.B. Handelsman, which begins as follows. Handelsman throws in a question that shows him not just to be a great cartoonist, but an astute theologian as well.)
Fear of snakes runs very deep, most likely hard-wired into us by our evolutionary past. Is it much of a wonder that a serpent should have been the guardian of knowledge? For only in overcoming the natural and learning not to fear what we have been wired to fear can we have higher knowledge.
And perhaps pleasure also: just as many forms of pleasure involve overcoming hard-wired forms of disgust (think about eating oysters, and whatever sexual analogies you wish to branch out to therefrom) there is pleasure in learning to overcome disgust.
And unsurprisingly, there are records of this in the artistic record. Bacchus has blogged about thisbefore, but there is a remarkable tradition of eroticism involving women and snakes especially.
One of my favorites here is a sculpture by Auguste Clésinger (1814-1883), called Femme piquée par un serpent, “Woman bitten by a snake.” The original is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The snake is absent, but his effects are not, and the subject herself is looking curiously ecstatic.
(Click image for larger size.) Another view of her:
An interesting bit of trivia on the side: this sculpture was made from actual body casts (ASFR fans, take note) of Clésinger’s model Apollonie Sabatier, an extraordinary woman reputed to be part of the inspiration for Charles Baudelaire’sLes Fleurs du mal.
Another example is a remarkable painting of Lilith done by the British artist John Collier (1850-1934).
What a snake! Readers are invited to suggest their own images in this theme in comments.
One of the first rather nasty movies I got by accident as a teenager came from a very straightlaced video store in my very straightlaced Midwestern home town. (I grew up somewhere that was nowhere near as remote as where Bacchus grew up but still, Paris it wasn’t.) The video sleeve (we’re talking the heyday of VHS here) was only mildly lurid looking. The title was The Emerald Jungle. I half suspect my local video store proprietors may have confused with with The Emerald Forest which, by comparison, was a rather innocuous adventure movie.
Innocuous this video release was anything but. It was an off-the-deep-end movie, filled with gratuitous sadism, nudity, religious insanity, and rape. But these almost seem like a sideshow compared with the central theme of the film, which was cannibalism. Yes, I had in fact stumbled on an obscure U.S. release of Umberto Lenzi’sMangiati Vivi. (Literally, “Eaten Alive.”) A core member of the canon of the Italian jungle cannibal genre, in which pretty much everything goes, as long as it’s exploitative.
(Subsidiary bleg: if anyone knows why, exactly, the Italian film industry produced not just a few movies, but a whole damn genre devoted to jungle cannibalism, I’d love to know why.)
One actress in Mangiati Viv I’ve had in my head, Me Me Lai. She shows up in a few jungle cannibal movies, often in fairly bizarre scenes. For example here she plays a young widow, forced by the leader of a religious cult to copulate with her late husband’s three brothers, “in order that the marital bond should be broken, leaving her free to marry again.” (No, I don’t understand it either.)
In the end, her character is captured by cannibals, killed and eaten. Don’t watch that scene anywhere near lunch.
In a similar movie, Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, this time directed by Ruggerio Deodata , she plays a native girl abused and dominated by oil prospector Robert Harper, played by the Italian actor perhaps best known for dubbing Darth Vader into Italian.
In the end, her character is captured by cannibals, killed and eaten. These jungle cannibal movies do get repetitive. In fact, I’m pretty sure the footage was taken directly from a different jungle cannibal movie.
Of course, Me Me Lai didn’t just appear in jungle cannibal movies. I remember her also from a movie called Crucible of Terror. There is, I suppose, a certain ASFR appeal here, as her character, instead of being killed and eaten, is made into a bronze statue in about the most horrible way you can imagine.
But unless you’re really into Me Me Lai or ASFR completism, I’d give this one a miss if I were you. In the hands of an Umberto Lenzi or better yet, a Lucio Fulci this one might have pivoted off its premise and been a minor horror classic. As it is, one might as well just called it Crucible of Terribleness. Unlike many of the movies that it has been my pleasure to blog about here, this one really lacks the courage of its demented convictions.
But I still think about Me Me Lai. She must have been a real trooper, especially in those jungle movies, where she’s naked or nearly so for much of her screen time, and acting amidst heat and humidity and insects — I’ve been to some of the places where her movies were shot, and believe me, it can be exhausting just to take a walk there. She comes across as quite the professional.
But little seems to be available about her, except that she was born in 1952 to an English father and a Burmese mother. After appearing in Lars von Trier’sThe Element of Crime in 1984, she stopped acting and, as far as I can tell, disappeared from the public eye.
Hence the bleg: does anyone know what became of her?
As part of my life-quest to learn more stuff I have recently been reading Why Women Have Sex by UT Austi psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss. The book is a popularization that grows out of a research program represented by a paper called “Why Humans Have Sex.” (PDF here.) (The transition from “humans” in the academic version to “women” for the larger audience shows that the authors, even if they are professors, understand something about marketing.)
There’s a great deal of interest here, since the authors are able to draw on a massive database of anonymized responses to questionnaires from (mostly) sexually active women. But one thing in particular caught my eye on first reading.
In mid-book there is a discussion of a phenomenon known as the Coolidge effect: male animals of many species will achieve sexual arousal much more rapidly in the presence of a novel female than in that of one with which they have just mated. As Meston and Buss put it:
…if you drop a male rat into a cage with a willing female rat, he engages in enthusiastic copulation. He will mount her repeatedly until he is completely tired out and ready for the rhetorical post-ejaculatory “cigarette and nap.” But if you replace his former sexual mate with another willing female, he becomes randy all over again. In fact, every time you replace the female with a new female, the male show shows renewed vigor and begins copulating afresh. He will keep going and going with new females until he nearly dies of exhaustion.
(The basis for the name “Coolidge effect” is, by the way, a (or perhaps “the only”) charming story about Calvin Coolidge, which I won’t retell here because Bacchus has already blogged about it before.)
Now of course one is inclined to ask whether this intriguing effect applies to human beings. It’s not an obvious leap; men are not rats (usually). Before discussing the matter like the responsible scientists they are, Meston and Buss have this to say:
To test the Coolidge effect in humans, most universities would not allow researchers to run an experiment to see how many times a person can get aroused and have sex with different people…
And of course I had two immediate reactions.
1. Silly universities! Don’t they realize that the advance of science requires committment and sacrifice?
2. Most universities? Doesn’t that imply that there are at least some universities that are willing to have the volunteers lining up outside the door for this sort of critical research? Which ones? O Meston and Buss, please tell us which ones they are! Or at least, please tell the appropriate journalistic authority to incorporate this critical information into their rankings.
As I was tooling about the suburban wastes I was pleasantly surprised to hear NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday devoting nearly five minutes of coverage to the New York Burlesque Festival. A transcript of the story (complete with pictures, even though they are SFW) is here, along with a link to the audio in NPR’s pop-up player.
It would not have been that long ago that the sort of earnest middle-class professionals who listen to National Public Radio would sooner have died than even admit that burlesque is an art form. Now, the view that is not just an art form but a liberatory one can get a respectable journalistic airing among them. We have come a long way.
And also, we have an excuse to stick in a picture of Dita von Teese. She might not have been in the story, but she’s one of the arch-practitioners of burlesque today. And anyway, is there ever a bad time for a picture of her?
Today I got yet another object lesson in how (1) anything might be grist for the ErosBlog mill, (2) you learn something every day and (3), the Internet is a marvelous thing.
I was passing my commute with Chris Wickham’s new book The Inheritance of Rome, a demonstration of the sort of superman historical erudition that people like me can only dream of having. As my train was pulling in to its dismal destination, I came across the following passage in Wickham’s discussion of the rise and fall of the Umayyad Caliphate:
The Ummayyads had a terrible press after their fall in 750. They were seen…as luxurious degenerates, enjoying themselves in their palaces, and ignoring the needs of government. They certainly built luxurious palaces, some of them survive, in the Jordan valley and on the Syrian/Jordan fringe, as ambitious in their own way as al-Walid’s mosques, and in two cases (the stuccoes of the Khirbat al-Mafjar outside Jericho, the frescoes of the Qusayr ‘Amra bath-house east of ‘Amman) they show profusion of human forms (often naked and female) that do not look very ‘Islamic.’
Google image search time!
I turns out there are many splendid images available of Qusayr ‘Amra, and the frescoes, though not in good shape, really are remarkable. Here is one I found from at L’académie de Lille. First one:
And another:
Professor Wickham is certain right to put “Islamic” in quotes, for these images certainly seem contrary to a stereotype of Islam as a sex-negative, iconophobic religion.
Via Pharyngula comes the news that some concenred Christian has been carefully thinking over an issuedear to my heart, that of sex with robots.
Turns out, he’s against it. Well, color me surprised. Money quote:
Sex with robots is coming and it’s going to happen soon – probably within 40 years. The only thing holding it back at this point is the technology. Legal barriers do not exist, and moral barriers are eroding rapidly. Its advent will signal the impending end of the human race as “perfect” mates replace the imperfect ones we now have. In order to stop this perversion from destroying the human race, we must act now to change attitudes toward virtual sex of all kinds, including pornography.
Wasn’t this a Futurama episode guest starring Lucy Liu? I think I liked that better.
It is a privilege and pleasure to be able to commend to the attention of ErosBlog’s readers the new anthology Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories edited by Susie Bright. There are fifteen short stories here, sharing an ostensible thematic link to the gothic or at least the supernatural. There is an exquisite erotic idea at the core of every one of these stories, and that makes this slim volume a delight to peruse. If your imagination runs to the gothic, you will find plenty to fire it here.
I might quibble a bit with the characterization of the entries in this anthology as “dark erotic stories.” Some of them are a little dark, although if your idea of a dark story is something like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and your idea of the gothic is exemplified by the sort of thing seen in my last post but this one you might find many of these stories actually somewhat on the cheerful, even somewhat uplifting side. That’s certainly what I felt at the end of Tsaurah Litzky’s “The Witch of Jerome Avenue.” (Perhaps I am too much in love with that story’s New York setting for my own good, and there also might be something in the final paragraph that I don’t fully understand.) Even Greg Boyd’s “Pandora’s Other Box,” which might be read as a cautionary tale of being careful what you go looking for in a strange city, hardly left me feeling terribly disturbed. There was more pleasure than horror for me here; the erotic certainly dominated the darkness, although the longest story in the anthology, Francesca Lia Block’s “Lay Me out Softly,” certainly did have its share of actual chills.
In a way it’s tricky to write too convincingly about an anthology like Bitten because for me what this sort of literature belongs to is a larger genre that for lack of a better term might be called the literature of extraordinary surprise. The protagonists of these stories are off encountering not just what they didn’t know was, but what they probably never imagined could be, until they encountered it. But unlike the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose stories might also be said to belong to the same overgenre, but who is perhaps the most anti-erotic writer there is, at least until Michel Houellebecq picked up his pen) the surprise isn’t horror, but pleasure. This is a good literary trick to pull off, and it’s pulled off here quite well. However, precisely because these stories do belong to a literature of surprise, it is also very difficult to write about them without generating spoilers, and I don’t want to do that to ErosBlog’s readers. So instead, all I can urge them to do is go buy the book.
I can, however, offer one sentence from my favorite story in the collection, Ernie Conrick’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” a tale which, in addition to being a very clever anatomizing of what lurks behind the exteriors of married middle-aged, middle-class professionals, expresses one of the most philosophically profound sentiments I’ve seen in a naughty story. (I might be biased in thinking so, because at roughly the same time I was reading Bitten I was also reading Ben Bradley’s Well-Being and Death. You can get a flavor of the latter by seeing Bradley’s “diavlog of death” with Roy Sorenson.) I think I can offer it without its being a spoiler:
The tragedy of existence, he mused, is not that it lasts too short a time but that it lasts too long.
Possibly wrong, although sometimes the opposite of a deep truth might also be a deep truth.
For bonus self-discovery points, I suggest reading the whole anthology and asking which stories moved you the most. You can then have a better sense of what kind of weirdo you are. (Dear reader, kindly do not ask me not to think that you aren’t some kind of weirdo.) And do also give Susie Bright’s recent reflections on supernatural erotica a look-in as well.
Seeing as Bacchus has recently posted on both witches and art that is rather irreverent toward Catholicism now is probably a good time to offer an illustration of an 1888 work by Albert von Keller, about whose work as an eroticist I’ve blogged about here before. It is the ominously-titled Gothic fantasy Hexenverbrennung, or Witch Burning.
There is plenty of room for shock here, but the thing I find most striking is the expression on the victim’s face.
Not the fear and agony one would expect. Evidence perhaps that ecstasies of martyrdom are not limited to strictly Catholic contexts.
21. Whores relieve millions of people from unwanted stress and tension.
to the humorous
36. Whores have the guts to wear very big wigs.
to the explicitly political culmination.
40. Whores are rebelling against the absurd, patriarchal, sex-negative laws against their profession and are fighting for the right to receive financial compensation for their valuable work.
But I guess I must just be some sort of economist manqué, because what really stuck with me was
6. Whores have careers based on giving pleasure.
Any artist, indeed any worker of any kind, should be proud to say the same thing about herself. You can read the whole thing at Annie Sprinkle’s site here.
It was G.W.F. Hegel, if I remember right, who wrote that the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. He meant this as a commentary on the Self-Understanding of the World Spirit in History or some such Deep Important Germanic Thing, but here I’ll just apply it to dirty comic books instead, and how you don’t really know the significance of something when you first encounter it.
It was in a dingy used bookstore, in a decaying New England industrial town, that I encountered in my late teens a truly bizarre-looking comic book called The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. I opened it up and found…a pretty young woman being forced to strip at gunpoint by a Nazi (hmm, Erosblog familiar theme there, then tied to a helicopter. Well, I thought, that’s certainly different.
But I could deal. I mean, I was eighteen and in college and all sophisticated about sex, right?
Well, wrong. I think I was somewhat disturbed by the fact that in Episode III our heroine Phoebe is killed, and in Episode IV her corpse is stolen by a cult of necrophiliacs…but somehow later on she is resurrected by an Eskimo shaman and then she proceeds to have a endure a series of perils and humiliations that take her all over the globe. She is converted into a makeshift torpedo by some gay white-slaving submarine pirates:
She is captured by shoe fetishists:
She is enslaved and abused by Asian communists:
And so on. There is a mad tattoo artist and a guild of lesbian assassins, among other things. Feeling somewhat disturbed, I didn’t buy the book, a decision I regretted for years thereafter, because copies of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist would prove very hard to find in subsequent years.
But what I didn’t realize then is that Phoebe is satire, and absolutely brilliant satire at that. (ErosBlog’s astute readers will have picked this up from individual panels already, of course.) She was written in the mid-1960s by Michael O’Donoghue who would later go on to comedic glory as a writer for National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. She was drawn by Frank Springer, who would go on to a future as a distinguished artist at Marvel comics. And her adventures were first published in Evergreen Review, one of the most daring serious publications of its day (so much so that it was once denounced by Gerald Ford on the floor of Congress). Everything that O’Donoghue can think of is a target here, from old Perils-of-Pauline like movie serials to James Bond movies. Needless to say, the optimistic consumerist culture of the postwar United States is well skewered.
Indeed, by the end, O’Donoghue is even satirizing himself and his own bizarre sense of humor.
If you can ever get a copy of Phoebe, treasure it, because there’s really nothing like it. I read it now and wonder how I could have missed all the obvious jokes.
I suppose the answer is just too obvious. Because I was eighteen years old and this a comic book whose heroine spends about eighty of its ninety pages naked, that’s why.
Afterthought: If you are an eccentric billionaire looking for a project with which to make your mark on the world, please consider financing Phoebe as a movie. Thanks, and now back to your regular ErosBlog programming.
Jason Chan might have been hacking my brain two years ago, but more than a century before that Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-1905) was peering into my dreams:
I had many excellent philosophy teachers back in the day, and one of the excellentest of the bunch was Robert Nozick (1938-2002).
Perhaps one thing (among many) for which Bob will be well remembered is a thought experiment, called the Experience Machine, which he first outlined in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). It begins like this:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life’s experiences?
(Fuller text here for those who wish to pursue the experiment in more depth.)
Bob thought it was pretty obvious that you would not want to plug into the machine: it would be “a kind of suicide.” And he and others have drawn various philosophical conclusions — that positive experiences are not what we do or should primarily value, that pleasure is not the (or even a) cardinal good, and so forth. (Sometimes this all gets amusing: watching conservative lawyers like John Finnis wheel out this thought experiment in hopes of banishing forever the Evil Doctrine of Hedonism reminds me of a character in an old movie brandishing a cross to try to ward off Dracula.)
Now the thought experiment of the Experience Machine does not lack for problems. For one, there really are people who just disagree with Nozick’s intuition. I once knew a woman who, when I told her about the Experience Machine, reacted with “Where can I get me one?” I suspect there are readers of this blog who might feel the same way, since precisely because they are readers of blogs like this one, they have a keen appreciation of all the really cool experiences there are to be had.
(This woman was a really fun person, by the way, and… Okay, Faustus, enough daydreamy reminiscence. Back to philosophy class.)
There are deeper and more philosophical objections to be made to Nozick’s thought experiment. At least in so far as it’s meant to attack hedonism, it ignores a subtle but really very important distinction between a machine that would give us any experience we want and one which would give us those experiences we would most enjoy. (A refutation of hedonism would require that we would not want to plug into the latter kind of machine, a point which I might try to explain in a later post).
Given my own interest in these matters, I was greatly pleased to see that George Mason economics professor and Marginal Revolution co-proprietor Tyler Cowen (1962 – Forever I Hope), in his intriguing new book Create Your Own Economy likewise sees fit to address the Experience Machine with a bit of skepticism.
…I’m not quite convinced by Nozick’s critique…. Perhaps my skepticism stems from my background as an economist and my profession’s emphasis on “choice at the margin,” to cite that theme again. The choice is not “Fantasy: yes or no?” but rather “How much fantasy do we want in our lives?”
Cowen is writing to defend the virtues of what he calls “human neurodiversity,” the value created by the differences different people have in their ability to have experiences and process information due to different neurologies. He focuses largely (though not exclusively) on the values and virtues of what he calls “autistic cognitive profiles,” and notes that in an important sense he (and perhaps everyone else) is already plugged into an experience machine: we structure our inner lives with stories about ourselves and benefit in real ways from certain kinds of self-deception. If these issues interest you, the book is very much for you (it was for me). You can also see Tyler Cowen in a Bloggingheads conversation with Fly Bottle blogger Will Wilkinson largely about the book here. Do check it out.
But fundamentally I would love to hear from readers about their intuitions in reaction to Nozick’s though experiment. Would you plug in? And if so, for how long?
Versatile photographer and photojournalist Kevin Warn has produced, among many other things, a striking series of underwater images of which I found the following to be particularly visuellement frappant.
There are many pleasures to reading Agnès Giard’s L’imaginaire érotique au Japon, but I think the one I like best is finding artists I’ve never heard of before. The one I want to share today is Kiyoaki Kanai, a painter with a lush classical style and a decided taste for kink. With due warning that some stuff there might be a little harsh for some tastes, and also the the Japanese-language linkage might be hard to follow, I can strongly recommend his site and provide herein some of the nicer samples therefrom. As Giard quite rightly remarks, “son art est populaire, épique, visuellement frappant.”
Starting on the relatively vanilla side, Kanai imagines a near-future version of the Summer Olympics to which certain… improvements have been made:
Even I might watch.
But of course much of Kanai’s work indulges a taste for bondage, often in fantasy or “historical” settings.
Mad science? Possibly with a little bit of ASFR flavoring? Check.
You can see how this artist managed to catch my eye.
And Kanai certainly has no fear of being even weirder. I must say I had a tricky (if hardly unpleasant) time trying to imagine the sequence of events that led up to whatever is going on in this painting:
There’s Japanese text on the accompanying index page but sadly I don’t read Japanese, and this is what came back from Google translate:
With the outcome, “Solis” is far away from the universe’s super heroine came to earth to protect the peace.
Formidable opponent this time, but the fate of Darisu Solis Witch of the universe, accompanied by his dogs came a nasty slider evil octopus impundulu Passerat and space.
Solis Darisu defeat the purpose, is to conquer the Earth. Tokyo has already become a sea of fire, mankind’s greatest pinch!
Squirrel-Soviet and lose! Solis with the outcome!
“Mankind’s greatest pinch!” Sounds rather painful.
I hope we don’t have to wait too long before Google translate manifests certain… improvements.
A little while back when Bacchus posted a picture of Lisa Kirk on crutches I took one look at it and thought “I bet that woman has a really sexy…voice.” (Yes. I do know I’m weird, thank you.) And a peek at the Wikipedia article that Bacchus linked to indicated that Lisa Kirk was not just any singer, but a contralto, which is a very rare (to say nothing of sexy) voice type.
Must investigate further, I thought. Through the miracle of modern commerce I managed to swiftly get ahold of a CD copy of Lisa Kirk Sings at the Plaza. I was not disappointed.
Boy does she ever have sexy voice. Follow the link above for samples.
In addition to an astonishing contralto, Lisa Kirk (at least in this recording) cultivated an appealingly Bad Girl stage persona, as can be seen from the lyrics added to the version of “Anything Goes” she performs. Cole Porter didn’t write them (although I bet he might have approved). They have a feel about them that would make an ErosBlog anthem. (And I bet seemed pretty naughty back in 1958 when Kirk recorded it.)
Do you know that I know so many people that can’t let themselves go?
Can not let themselves go.
Well I’ve always believed that he who hesitates is lost!
Well, why wait?
Now you just take me, for instance.
I eat when I’m hungry,
Sleep when I’m tired,
Do what I want to do
When I’m inspired.
I laugh when I’m happy,
Cry when I’m sad
Although I’m a lady
I cuss like a fool when I’m mad.
(I do! I invent things.)
I smoke when I’m nervous,
Drink when I’m dry.
If some guy looks good to me, I’ll give him the eye.
No ring on my finger,
No everynight bow,
With me anything goes.
When it behooves me,
I sleep in just pyjama tops.
I’m taking chances I suppose.
Anything goes.
Who’s to know
Where my pyjama-jama stops?
When I’m in bed,
Restin’ my head,
The boy never hardly ever shows.
Anything goes.
So when some night I spend an hour
With someone who’s got the power to curl my toes,
Anything goes!
Tear up the rules!
Kick off the news.
Stand on my ear my dear,
Play dominoes.
Now let’s make it clear my dear,
Here, anything goes.
A rose is a rose is rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,
I suppose.
Anything goes.
Anything.
Anything goes.
Anything!
After hearing that I felt inclined to say like Eloise “Oo, I simply adore the Plaza.”
That splendid fictional cynic Captain Edmund Blackadder once remarked that one of the greatest coups in theatrical history occurred when the manager of the Roman coliseum thought of putting the Christians and the lions on the same bill. That coup was not just an innovative approach to popular entertainment. It was also the source of some remarkable erotic art.
In a book everyone ought to own, Hans-Jürgen Döpp and Joe Thomas’s 1000 Erotic Works of Genius I encountered the following remarkable painting, “Victory of Faith” (1891) by Irish painter George (or St. George, sources vary) Hare (1857-1933):
Two about-to-become martyrs sleep peacefully in a rather chaste-looking embrace. In the background, the lion who is the instrument of their soon-to-be martyrdom glowers hungrily.
I would suppose that the interest of a healthy, well-adjusted lion in our two heroines would more likely be gustatory that sexual, though experience has taught me that you never really know about theater people.
George or St. George Hare is obscure enough a painter that I couldn’t even find a Wikipedia entry on him. The original of this painting hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne. One internet commenter I googled, quoting another source, remarks that “…the depiction of naked women in chains seemed to hold a SPECIAL INTEREST (my caps) for Hare, and he returned to this subject frequently.”
Two women watching a third, newly-made, emerge from some sort of apparatus under the direction of some kind of scientist, possibly a mad one. The painting is entitled, “Birth of Venus.” I had never seen it before (that I could recall, anyway), but it Chan did it as a cover of Imagine FX in June 2007.
And I got this uncanny feeling, because in 2008 I had written a work of experimental fiction that included, among other things, an implied scene in which two women watched a third, newly-made (recreated, actually) emerge from some sort of apparatus under the direction of some kind of scientist, possibly a mad one. The scientist character referred to she-who-emerged as a Venus.
Naturally intrigued, I surfed over to Jason Chan’s site and found over there quite a lot of pretty stuff to look at (and recommend you go there and look too). The painting that struck my eye was this:
A raven-haired woman in the (possibly amorous) embrace of a tentacled beastie. The pulling-off of the shoulder strap of our heroine’s garment by the tip of one of the beastie’s tentacles is a detail insisted upon by the artist.
And later in the same piece I wrote a scene in which a raven-haired woman found herself in the (pretty definitely amorous) embrace of a tentacled beastie. The pulling-off of the shoulder-strap of our heroine’s garment by the tip of one of the beastie’s tentacles was a detail duly insisted upon by the author.
I could swear I never saw this painting before putting fingers to keyboard, either.
My uncanny if hardly unpleasant viewing experiences occasioned the following exchange between me and Bacchus.
Me: “Who is this Jason Chan guy, and how did he hack my brain back in 2007?”
Bacchus: “Dude, you obviously forgot to wear your tinfoil helmet!”
Me: “Dude, if I wore a tinfoil helmet, how would I pick up all the interesting transmissions?”
Do not be too alarmed, dear reader. I should tell you, even without your having to follow the link, that she’s not a human actress but a comics character, named Savita Bhabhi. And she’s “dead” because she’s been banned by the Indian government.
Bhabhi is the Indian version of a MILF. Though in literal terms it means your “brother’s wife” that is not the meaning here. For an Indian youngster his first fantasy is normally the newly married hot woman in the neighborhood who is referred to as a hot Bhabhi. Hence it seemed only natural that our hot heroine whom the entire neighborhood lusts after be called Savita Bhabhi.
Hot indeed.
Savita makes for interesting reading. This is certainly hardcore, albeit not very kinky. (In one of her own dreams she is menaced by some dacoits, but they don’t stay menacing for very long.) It’s appealing to see this voluptuous, mature woman having so many adventures which she seems to be pretty clearly in charge of.
I do not know why she has been banned. Porn is generally illegal in India, and much of Indian popular entertainment looks pretty chaste to my relatively untrained eyes. Or, at least it does to a first-order approximation. I’ve seen my share of Bollywood movies, and these have contained no sex, no nudity, no kissing even. Though they have featured gorgeous actresses wearing saris in a way that brings the phrase “poured into” to mind performing in extended musical numbers. Which often are set in the rain for some reason: go figure.
Pete Tombs, in his offbeat survey of world cinema Mondo Macabro (which it has been my pleasure to reference here before indicates that there is something of a Malayalam-language sex film industry in Kerala . I have not yet been able to nerve up to walk into my local video store and ask the clerk if he could recommend anything in Malayalam.
All the same, I still don’t quite grok the prudery of Indian officialdom. Don’t they realize their country is home and mother to one of the world’s great artistic treasures, as well as one of the most extraordinary pieces of erotica ever created, the temple sculptures at Khajuraho?
Clearly Savita’s inspiration runs deep into the history of Indian art. I hope the government does not intend to ban that as well.
I have a very learned friend, a gentleman and a scholar whose knowledge of South Asia far surpasses anything I shall ever have. I asked him about Savita. He commented that he thought that it was an exaggeration and perhaps meaningless to see her as “India’s first porn star.” While porn is illegal in India, it does in fact circulate in many forms. There is definitely a Malayalam-language sex film industry and, more surprisingly (to me, anyway) there is also a homegrown porn industry among Pashtuns. The Pashtuns are also the primary ethnic constituency for the Taliban, which just goes to show that the World is Very Complicated. My friend noted the existence of “…samizdat cartoons that circulate during the carnivalesque Hindu festival of Holi, in which the participants in all sorts of exuberant acts are often political figures.” [Bacchus intrudes with an editorial bellow: “Pictures! I want pictures!”]
That sounds to me like a cultural tradition which should be exported.
My friend noted also that in the Shimla picture reproduced above, Savita appears to resemble a 1980s Bollywood superstar Sridevi. And also that that the vermilion in her hair is the mark of a married Hindu woman (this is also fairly obvious from the underlying text of the comic) — every act she performs with the reader’s surrogate subject is an act performed in deception of her husband, “your” fictive elder brother figure.
He had much more than I could cover in this blog post — he should be blogging with us!
But is Savita really dead? Don’t count on it. From where I blog anyway, her site seems very much alive. Go have a look.
Thanks to Blog Lord and serious beard-fancier Andrew Sullivan I can pass on a link to an article that charmed me: writer and artist Kris Saknussemm on “My Ten Favorite Fetishes“, something that he’s clearly devoted quite a lot of attention to.
It begins:
Having studied sexual fetishes for twenty years (which is itself a kind of fetish), I’m long past the investigation of shoes, pain, vomit and rubbing up against people on the subway. My first real job out of college was working as the circulation manager for the Spectator, a Bay Area adult-entertainment publication, which was fueled by classified advertising — often for very distinctive “services” and interests. While there, I became acquainted with a number of memorable characters: Peg Leg, a one-legged call girl with a very full dance ticket (and some remarkable prosthetic attachments); The Coach (gym shorts, silver whistle, clipboard); and a sexually ambiguous individual who just called him/herself “The Sneezer.” (I’ll let you use your imagination there.)
And only gets better from there. What’s not to love? Read the whole thing.
As an exercise to squeeze a little additional pleasure out of the article, you can ask yourself how many of these you’ve either (1) practiced or (2) thought about enough to try to write down a fantasy or scenario involving them or at least potentially appealing to people interested in them. I did this for myself. I came up with four.
Only four? Must. Work. Harder.
And try to be a little more open-minded, perhaps.
Not sure if I’ll ever really get to the one about peanut butter, though.
“When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tell me about his latest research, my standard reaction is ‘No way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.”
Exactly right. For my money, Robin has more provocative ideas per day than most people will have in their whole lives.
And he’s done it again, this time in a way I hope will be of interest to readers of this blog, in a pair of posts over at Overcoming Bias. One is titled “40% of US Moms Unwed” followed by “Who Cares About Unsexy Men?” (Answer: Robin Hanson does. And no, dear reader, it is not because Robin is himself an unsexy man. He once had a commenter ask “Can I mate with you now?” Robin cares because he’s good guy.)
The conjecture Robin is advancing in these two posts might be summarized as follows: societies which have monogamous marriage as a strong institution are good for men who are unsexy, that is to say, unattractive, unartistic, unathletic, low in wealth or social status, and so forth. The reason is that even an unsexy man can offer something to a woman: commitment and support, both to her and to any children they might have. Since men and women exist in roughly equal numbers, they can pair off and even unsexy men can have a reasonable chance of marrying. (For a similar argument, see Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal.) But if women prefer to rear children alone, then we might tip into a different equilibrium. If women are no longer interested in what unsexy men have to offer, we end up with a fierce competition among men for sexual access to women, and a lot inequality among men. Sexy men will end up effectively polygynous, while unsexy men will be cast into the outer darkness of celibate despair.
It is a bleak projection and one that Robin himself doesn’t like. I suggest interested readers look at the underlying posts. What struck me most was the great outpouring of comments generated, two of which I reproduce here.
Some suggested that a turn to porn is the way to go; of these, one of the more interesting is the one here:
I’m so darn nurturing, but not sexy, so what I do is go over to my sister’s house and play with her little babies until I am all out of love, then I go home and watch amazing porn in peace and quiet. It’s a good life, I hope all the unsexy men adapt as well.
We at ErosBlog should be honored to provide a public service.
But perhaps best of all was the very first comment on “Unsexy Men”, in which the commenter came up with a one-word answer to the problems of unsexy men:
As part of my continuing activies as a low-brow, wrong-thinking cinéaste I’ve recently been re-watching Creature from the Black Lagoon. Much of great quality has already been written on this movie, so I’ll leave off with just one picture and two comments.
The creature, paralleling and getting an eyeful of Kay, who was played by Julie Adams.
(1) Creature from the Black Lagoon was released in 1954. Are there now, around America and perhaps around the world, unusual numbers of sixty-ish men with a fetish for white, one-piece bathing suits? I would not be surprised if there are.
(2) If you’re an adult with any sort of better nature, you certainly can’t approve for what the Creature has in mind for Kay. (And if you don’t know what the creature has in mind for Kay, there’s always Humanoids from the Deep (1980) to spell out what couldn’t be made explicit in 1954.) But if you have ever been an adolescent boy, you’ll at least always be able to understand the Creature’s point of view.
I continue to venture through pre-Code movies made in Hollywood, to see what might be of naughty interest there. This week I came up with Search for Beauty (1934).
Our heroes are Olympic athletes Don Jackson (played by Buster Crabbe) and Good Blond Girl Barbara Hilton (played by Ida Lupino). Their antagonists, a trio of grifters: two rather dim con artists and a not-so-dim Bad Brunette Girl Jean Strange. Jean, who is played by Gertrude Michael) (who we last saw on ErosBlog singing “Sweet Marihuana”), fronts for a racy “fitness” magazine, and then takes over a “health hotel.”
The opening of the movie contains not just stock footage of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics but both men’s and women’s locker room scenes. The men’s scene contains the earliest guy-butt shot I know of in a mass-release Hollywood movie.
Leading man Buster Crabbe was an All-American swimmer in real life. He would go on to become the first cinematic Flash Gordon as well as Buck Rogers. This movies dares not just to ask, but also to answer, the question “what does he look like in the shower?”
Pretty good, as it turns out.
The big gag about the “health hotel” is that manly Don combs the world for the best male and female athletes from the United States and the British Empire to serve as “instructors,” and we all know what our trio of grifters hope that will lead to.
(Cranky digressive rant: In the mind of whoever wrote this movie, “The British Empire” apparently meant only the United Kingdom and the pre-war Dominions (i.e. Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand), and the only athletes worth looking at anywhere were white. This in spite of the fact that India, at least, though part of the British Empire in 1934, sent its own teams to the 1932 Summer Olympics. Their mixed race (to the best of my ability to tell, by reading its roster) field hockey team took home gold medals. But there’s nary an athlete of visible African or Asian ancestry to be seen herein. Internal response to cranky digressive rant: Dude, it’s 1934. Do you really expect both racial enlightenment and guy butts in the same 77-minute movie?)
Anyway, once all the beautiful young people are assembled, they’re obliged to put on a gratuitous Art Deco style musical number, so carefully coordinated that one wonders if it didn’t inspire Leni Riefenstahl. The homoerotic element is not neglected, naturally.
The plot of the movie cranks forward from there, given a bit of crackle by the fact that it’s largely a battle of wits between Good Blond Girl and Bad Brunette Girl. Good Blond Girl wins in the end, with a bit of legal trickery that probably violated local Blue Sky laws (but hey, who’s counting), winning both corporate control of the health hotel and the heart (and excellent pecs) of Buster Crabbe. All ends happily for our heroes. They even get a bad visual pun to end the movie with.
But perhaps that’s not my favorite detail. That would be the pair of shots depicting the fate of Bad Brunette Girl, who is forced to “exercise” at the end of the movie. Take a close look at one of her “instructors” in the background.
No, a closer look:
Even in the pre-Code era, movie studios had censors. All I can say about whoever watched this movie is “dock that censor a day’s pay for napping on the job.”
Robert Burton, vicar of St. Thomas Church in Oxford and perhaps literature’s most spectacular depressive, reviews the classical poets on the subject of men in love in The Anatomy of Melancholy(1621):
Another, he sighs and sobs, swears he hath Cor scissum, a heart bruised to powder, dissolved and melted within him, or quite gone from him, to his mistress’ bosom belike, he is in an oven, a salamander in the fire, so scorched with love’s heat; he wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged, if he might be strangled in her garters: he would willingly die tomorrow, so that she might kill him with her own hands.
Last year, Bacchus blogged about a fetish map created by Franklin Veaux which I was delighted to behold. Bacchus provides a detail and Franklin the whole map and I highly recommend your having a look yourself.
While you’re looking, I want to suggest an exercise for you. Find something on the map that you think is a little weird, or maybe even a lot weird, but something that you can reasonably believe there is actually a group of people into, whether in actuality or just in fantasy. Then as a thought experiment, ask yourself how many of the people in this group are “out” about their fetish, in the sense that they tell their boss, their co-workers, their neighbors, and members of their families about it, compared with the number who are “out” about more “normal” sorts of sexuality that might be manifested by, say, having a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Do you think “probably not that many?” I think that. But why not that many?
The obvious first-order explanation is that many fetishes are stigmatized: if you’re out about being into something weird, people will avoid you, gossip about you, exclude you from their company, not hire you for jobs, and so on. And that’s probably true. But what is the source of the stigma? Why is weird equated to bad?
Conservative moral sentiments and religious doctrines doubtless explain some of the stigma. Psychological research of the sort done by Jonathan Haidt suggests that conservative are wired up with intuitions about purity and disgust in a way that liberals, who focus primarily on fairness and harm avoidance, are not. (This is an oversimplification of Professor Haidt’s views, but should do for here. Readers interested in more detail can read a PDF version of one of his major papers here.) But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because I don’t think people are that “out” to their secular, liberal, nonjudgmental bosses, co-workers, neighbors, and family members either. Even if your same-sex partner would be welcomed with open arms at the company picnic or the family reunion, your RealDoll will probably not be. My aim is to offer a conjecture as to why that might be (and maybe throw in some naughty pictures along the way).
Begin with the observation that sex involves both imagination and physics, but these are not always equally proportioned in all the things that one might do. As a rough general principle, the more imagination dominates over physics, the weirder what you’re doing is likely to seem, at least to people outside your practice. Sex with your spouse does not strike anyone as weird. Through in some extra imagination, say sex where your spouse pretends to be Elizabeth I (where your spouse is a woman) and you pretend to be Sir Walter Raleigh (if you are a man) strikes most people as a little weird. Making it even more imaginative, say if you are a man who pretends to be Elizabeth I while his wife pretends to be Sir Walter Raleigh — I’m not sure exactly how that’s supposed to work but never count out human ingenuity with props and costumes — will probably strike most people as weirder still.
Among the weirdest things in human sexuality are those in which the imagination has to take over entirely (or almost entirely, since they might be coupled with the de minimis physics of masturbation), because their realization is technically impossible. You can dress up in a fursuit and roleplay, but you cannot actually transform into a furry. Some people might play at freezing games, but something like this cannot be made to happen:
Not, at least, short of someone’s mastery of truly Promethean nanotechnology. (And by the way, I hope the technology is Promethean enough to be reversible, becasue otherwise this strikes me as something not at all nice to do, even to a voluntary submissive.)
Some other things I am somewhat at a loss to figure out how someone would role-play, like this inflation fetish shown in Agnès Giard’s Le Sexe Bizarre (p. 117):
Dialogue: Tiny woman in a basket beneath: “Hey! It’s my turn to be the balloon after we get past the mountains!” Inflated woman above: “Whee!!! Just give me ’til we hit the coast.” No, I can’t say I really understand, except that somebody clearly took the trouble to create this image and write the dialogue, so presumably it matters to him or her.
If you enjoy weirdness, you have a fair amount of imagination. And imagination is a good thing, right? Well, as it turns out, it depends on which perspective you’re occupying.
The problem is this: much of life is drudgery. It’s true on the job. Even in high-powered professional jobs, much of what you’re doing from minute to minute involves close concentration on stuff that is going to be boring. Corporate recruiters may like to represent their workplaces as venues of free-spirited creativity, but the reality of what goes on there is very different and no one more than a year or so out of school will be fooled. Proofread that contract. Check those figures in the spreadsheet. Spot check the work of your subordinates to make sure there are no errors. Decipher the squiggles on the chart. And it’s true at home as well. Much of your time there will be spent paying bills, doing dishes, cleaning up. Even time spent with one’s children is often pretty tedious. Unfortunately, diligent performance of drudge-work is a large part of what other people really want from us. Your boss really, really wants you to check those figures accurately. Your spouse really, really wants you to look after the kids.
But if you have powerful imagination, especially a powerful sexual imagination, then the opportunity cost for drudgery is going to be high. Imagination competes with diligent drudgery for time and mental energy. The more imagination you have, the better the hedonics of imagination, but that means that for every minute of drudgery, the more pleasure foregone. And what does the most basic economics of opportunity cost tell us about what happens when the opportunity cost of X goes up? Precisely. Less X.
So if you advertise that you are sexually weird, you might be inviting people to draw the inference that other things being equal, you will be a worse employee or spouse or whatever than someone whose interests are more conventional (think golf, or lawn care, or something). You will face temptations to slack off that other people won’t have. Other people won’t like that.
Is it any wonder, then, that people who are weird go to some lengths to conceal the fact?
It saddens me, because I guess I’m sort of weird myself. (I mean, here I am, spending part of Sunday morning on social-psychological conjecture.) I don’t have a ready fix, even if I wish I did.
Okay, I promise no more octopuses for a while, unless there’s popular demand. A gill-man might be in the future, though.
Instead, inspired by Bacchus’s post of a fetching smiling showgirl a few months back, I’ve decided to go rummaging around deep in the history of movies to see what might be interesting. Unsurprisingly, there was some pretty racy stuff in the early era of talkies, it turns out, before the pokenoses got the upper hand in 1934 and imposed the Production Code, sometimes known as the “Hays Code,” after its author Will H. Hays, who had previously achieved distinction as a national luminary as the chairman of the Republican Party and campaign manager for Warren G. Harding.
This post’s subject is Murder at the Vanities (1934). The core plot isn’t anything special: murder, blackmail, horny cops, lovebirds threatened by a dark secret, etc. All a pretty normal day at the office if you work in New York. But what makes this movie especially entertaining is that the plot plays out backstage during a Broadway musical, which gives the moviemakers all the excuse they need to put on a long series of musical production numbers.
Musical production numbers filled with scantily-clad showgirls, of course, as the tableau vivant in the opening number “Where do They Come From (and Where Do They Go)?” makes clear (click image for larger version):
The “girls in boxes” image in the background makes me wonder whether this movie doesn’t deserve a shout-out in the ASFR community. [Bacchus: ASFR…wuzzat?]
The musical contains an “island fantasy” scene as well, complete with a chorus of scantily-clad nereids.
And watching this scene, I kept thinking of an audience, in some local movie palace in Bridgeport or Kalamazoo or Duluth, really getting its money worth for a few hours away from the Depression and the small-town grind. More specifically, I thought of an imagined fifteen year-old boy in the audience, desperately hoping that it’s dark enough because, well, you know why.
Enjoy this while it lasts, kid. It’s 1934. Mr. Hays and his Code are coming down. Probably you’re not going to see anything this sexy on a movie screen for another thirty years.
But the number that really struck me was a “Mexican fantasy” scene, with a song called “Sweet Marihuana.”
Another tableau vivant, this one with topless, albeit chastely-posed, chorines representing cactus flowers, I guess. Might we have a closer look? Well, of course.
The lyrics to the song:
Soothe me with your caress,
Sweet marihuana, marihuana.
Help me, in my distress
Sweet marihuana, please do.
You alone can bring my lover back to me.
Even though I know it’s all a fantasy.
And then, put me to sleep.
Sweet marihuana, marihauna.
As the late, great Anna Russell would say, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
Bonus attraction: Duke Ellington himself, and his orchestra. They get a number in which they run the white boys right off the stage.
Is there nothing those naughty octopuses won’t get up to? PZ Myers over at Pharyngula came up with this image yesterday:
If I read Myers caption correctly, whatever these octopuses are up to is interspecies contact, as it involves a male Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis on top of a female Benthoctopus.
Notorious dogmatic atheist posts cephalopod bestiality tentacle photo on the Internets, oh noes! Somebody alert Dr. James Dobson.
Only fitting. Other little boys seemed to want to grow up to be Batman or G.I. Joe, but I wanted to be Victor Frankenstein.
Levy’s is a good book, though not as exciting as I might have hoped. Levy divides his book neatly into sections on Love and Sex. Love comes across as somewhat ploddingly earnest, an exposition of the almost-obvious. People get attached to objects, don’t they? They very much love their non-human pets, don’t they? They already get attached to robot pets like Tamagotchi and the Sony AIBO. So we can probably expect that when there are humanoid robots that act at least sort-of human, the attachments will get all the deeper.
Yes, I can see that. Even as of 2001, some robots were already looking pretty human:
In the second part, Sex, things do perk up a bit. There’s a lot of good history and exposition here of devices and potential technological precursors to full-fledged sexbots: virtual reality, sex dolls, vibrators and other sex machines are all covered. There’s even an eye-opening account of the teledildonic pleasuring of Net Michelle by Violet Blue at the New York Museum of Sex in 2005 (see p. 267). There are also extended discussions of why men and, perhaps more interestingly, women pay others for sex.
Levy, himself an expert in artificial intelligence, thinks that robots sufficiently appealing to humans to be not just exotic sex toys but something like real partners will likely be in production by about 2050, which might be right — it’s in any event less optimistic than “singularity is near” estimates put out by the likes of Ray Kurzweil. And Levy also thinks that prevailing social trends will make robot sex and possibly even human-robot marriages much more acceptable.
(You mean we have to wait another four decades before you can buy your own robot Selena off of Amazon.com?)
(Life is not fair.)
I’ll offer a technical quibble, which is that the kind of artificial intelligence necessary to make a robot good enough to want to marry would be such a formidable technological breakthrough that we really would be living in an entirely different technological universe, possibly a post-human one in which it would become unclear how or even whether a distinctively human concept like “marriage” would apply. Another possibility, one which Levy himself does not discuss, is that we might be able to make human-like robots whose intelligence rests on modified human whole-brain emulations rather than on hand-coded artificial intelligence. This possibility is one which I’ve written about on ErosBlog before and which is the fictional premise behind the ripping-good science fiction novel Saturn’s Children (by Charlie Stross), which is the book you ought to be reading if you really just want to have fun with this topic.
Though the mention of Saturn’s Children brings up an additional, cautionary thought. In Stross’s novel, ordinary biological human beings die out completely, probably in large measure because robots are more fun to be with than people. Depending on your point of view, you might find that rather sad.
After posting on Invasion of the Bee Girlslast week I pondered for some time about the “what else is there in the soft sci-fi/hard sexploitation genre?” (Perhaps it’s a stretch to call it a genre, but to my mind anyway it deserves recognition.) And then a light bulb went on. Of course: Robotrix! Another movie that clearly has the courage of its demented convictions.
Naturally this “Category III” product of Hong Kong’s extraordinarily prolific Golden Harvest motion picture company seemed worth blogging on.
The movie runs something like this: an hyper-rich Middle Eastern potentate is hosting a international contest in Hong Kong among different robot design teams — the winner gets to design the potentate’s “robot legion.” When the American entry malfunctions and starts running amok, the potentate is rescued by a female robot created by Japanese engineer “Dr. Sara.” Congratulations all round, to Dr. Sara, her robot, and her other robot assistant “Ann,” who looks exactly like Amy Yip.
It’s a no-brainer that Ann looks exactly like Amy Yip. Since Yip was probably the most JPEG’ed starlet in the East at the time of this movie’s release (1991), there would certainly have been an abundance of, uh, physiometric data on which to base a simulation.
All is not well in Hong Kong’s robot community, unfortunately. The potentate’s playboy son has been kidnapped by a sinister, leather-clad figure (played by Billy Chow). In the course of the kidnapping, policewoman Selena Lam (played by Chikako Aoyama) is gunned down. A videotape left at the scene reveals the connection. The kidnapper is mad roboticist Ryuichi Sakomoto. The reason he’s mad is that he’s been excluded from the competition by his government. A videotape left at the scene of the kidnapping reveals his sinister plan. Sakamoto has killed himself and uploaded his mind into the leather-clad kidnapper who, as it turns out, is one very tough and nasty robot.
Well, there’s nothing for fighting a robot like a robot, and Dr. Sara has a plan. The plan involves uploading the mind of now-dead Selena into one of Dr. Sara’ female robots. Hurrah! Mad Science Transformation scene!
Happily it isn’t just Selena’s mind that transfers over.
[Bacchus intrudes in his role as photo editor: “Hey, we’re getting screwed by the wide angle shots here. Can we get a digital pan-and-zoom, please?”
“Ah, that’s much better.” — Ed.]
All well and good in itself, but meanwhile things are getting even worse, because robot Sakamoto turns out to be an utter psychopath, who seems to devote most of his time to raping and murdering prostitutes.
The Hong Kong police assemble a team consisting of Dr. Sara, Ann, robot Selena, Selena’s clueless cop boyfriend Joe, and a group of comic-relief cops to deal with these various crises.
Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t time for at least one hot date between Joe and Selena.
I should like to note that there is a long dinner plus and extended sex scene between Joe and Selena. Bizarrely, Joe is completely unaware at this stage of the movie the Selena is a robot (no one has bothered to tell him that the biological human Selena is dead and buried). From this I can only conclude that either:
(1) Dr. Sara’s technology is really, really good; so her robots can convincingly emulate the way a biological woman looks, acts, feels, smells, etc., or
(2) A horny-enough man will just not notice that someone has turned his girlfriend into a robot.
Ann, who’s always been a robot, asks Selena the next day about her hot date, and concludes that she might like to try sex with a human. (I’m sure hearts stopped all over Hong Kong when she uttered that line.) Meanwhile, someone on the Hong Kong police decides it might be a good idea to have Ann pretend to be a prostitute in order to lure in the killer of prostitutes.
Of course it’s a good idea.
Much death, destruction, and insulting-to-physics martial arts battles later, the police finally subdue and capture Sakamoto, who is transported to Dr. Sara’s laboratory, partially disassembled, and subjected to what former Vice President Cheney and the New York Times like to call “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” to reveal the whereabouts of his kidnap victim:
The cops head off to rescue the captured prince, while Dr. Sara announces that she’s staying in her lab to “study” Sakamoto.
And here we arrive at the Lesson of the Day. If you ever happen to have a partially disassembled, psychopathic humanoid robot in your laboratory, do not store its head anywhere near its body, unless you want to get yourself into a really sticky situation.
Because it might have developed wireless.
And then something like this can happen:
Followed by bad bondage physics like this:
Followed still further by things I shall leave to the reader’s imagination, although the movie itself doesn’t. Needless to say, it’s tough on Dr. Sara:
The cops return, There’s a big battle in which Selena is “killed” again. Then another battle which is the end of Sakamoto. Another lesson: if you are a criminal robot and a large part of your composition is ferrous metals, do not place your criminal headquarters in a junkyard where they have one of those giant magnet-on-a-crane thingies. You’re just asking to be pwned.
There’s even a happy ending of sorts, because before leaving Hong Kong Dr. Sara builds a new version of Selena with her memories and personality restored from backup, but only back to the moment of Selena’s first resurrection. The happy couple bicker comically as Dr. Sara and Ann drive off into the sunset, or at least off to the airport.
There’s enough weird stuff in this movie having to do with personal identity to keep one of Derek Parfit’s graduate seminars going for a whole semester, and in fact I think I’ll suggest the idea to him if I should run into him again. Derek might not be all that impressed by the concept, but for my money this movie would earn the price of its admission on any one of its three female leads alone.
Naturally, I welcome suggestions of any similar material in the comments.
Having had the pleasure of recently posting on real octopus sex, my naughty mind naturally turned to the question of what else I might be able to post on in the “sexy female invertebrates who kill their mates.” And that of course, takes me right back to my beloved domain of weird cinema, in this case to Invasion of the Bee Girls, released thirty-six years ago this Monday.
As tireless (but never tiresome) weird movie web reviewer El Santo so aptly puts it, we have in this strange movie evidence that the popular culture of the early 1970s was completely out of its mind. A mad scientist is abducting the women of a small town and running them though a bizarre procedure involving radiation and lots and lots of bees. The women then turn into “bee girls,” who in turn kill men through sexual exhaustion.
One twist: the mad scientist is a beautiful woman, played by Anitra Ford.
Now there’s a great deal of gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence packed into this flick’s 85-minute runtime, as well as a great deal that simply beggars belief. I won’t review it in detail since I think El Santo (among many others) does a bang-up job doing so already. But I did want to at least show a bit of its main bee-girl transformation scene, because this in particular is a jaw-dropper.
Mad Scientist Lady and her crew kidnap the wife of a corporate scientist. (The wife is played by Anna Aries.) After sedating her and stripping her naked, they dose her with radiation:
A process which our victim seems to find not unpleasant, actually.
They then proceed to cover her in some sort of honey-like goop…
And place her in a chamber with (all you insect fetishists, prepare to be delighted) an awful lot of bees, who enclose her in a cocoon.
After all this and a bit of fun penetrating radiation treatment, our victim emerges, astonished and transformed, and a newly-made bee girl (note compound eyes). Mad Scientist Lady seems quite pleased.
I’ve watched this scene any number of times and still marvel that someone obviously went to a lot of trouble to script it, set it up, and shoot it. I wish I could have watched that being planned (“Okay, next we’ll put her in a chamber full of bees! Yea, that’s it!”)
We get bonus cheesecake later on when Mad Scientist Lady attempts to subject Miss September 1967 Victoria Vetri to the same treatment.
But unfortunately for science a Government Agent Hero Guy played by former Marlboro Man William Smith bursts in and rescues her, killing Mad Scientist Lady and her coven of Bee Girls in the process. Which is too bad. I was rooting for the Bee Girls.
I am hard pressed to think of any other piece of soft-sci-fi sexploitation that has the same utter courage of its demented convictions as this movie does, and I wonder (and in fact, sort of regret) that there aren’t more like it. Speculation and suggestions for further related viewing are welcome in the comments.
Bacchus has a long and remarkable history of uncovering and posting artwork that explores erotic imaginings occasioned by octopuses, for example here or here or here and (perhaps the grandmother of all such images) here. Is it any wonder that I’m honored to call myself his friend?
Reflecting on all this fun tentacular weirdness the other day brought to mind a passage that appears near the beginning of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. It’s a passage from another book called How They Do It quoted by Pinker as an example of the remarkable ability of human language to describe completely novel and weird circumstances. And yes, it’s about real octopus sex:
When a male octopus spots a female, his normally grayish body suddenly becomes striped. He swims above the female and begins caressing her with seven of his arms. If she allows this, he will quickly reach toward her and slip his eighth arm into her breathing tube. A series of sperm packets moves slowly through a grove in his arm, finally to slip into the mantle cavity of the female.
Well, when I read a passage like that, I cannot but think of Hedley Lamarr’s excited exclamation in Blazing Saddles: “Kin-ky!”
Real octopuses can outdo even hentai artists in strange.
And it does get kinkier still. If you want a really bang-up tale of promiscuity, gender confusion, and sexual cannibalism, you really cant do better than this Pharyngula post on the interesting mating life of the blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata.
If we may paraphrase Lily von Shtupp: “Is it twue what they say about how your species is…gifted?”
The splendid image of Yaoi divers recently posted by Bacchus got me thinking along thematically-related lines. While I realize that Yaoi is meant to be male homoerotic materials intended for viewing by women, it’s a natural leap to homoerotic Japanese material intended — as far as I can tell, anyway — for men.
Which means, of course, that I have the opportunity to post this image by the artist Gengoroh Tagame, who has quite a line going in that sort of thing:
I am struck by the pretty, flowered robe, I must say.
If you like this sort of image, I’m please to be able to tell you that Tagame has a whole site available for your perusal.
Browsing yesterday evening through Pete Tombs’s Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around The World I came across across a full-color plate of a familiar image. Yep, it was the racy Batgirl which Bacchus had recently posted here at ErosBlog. Apparently she’s part of a promotional poster for a Turkish movie called Uçan Kiz:
From Tombs we can take the information that Turkish movie-makers were unusually aggressive in their borrowings from American popular culture: Tombs provides information on a Turkish version of Star Wars, a monster movie that includes among its characters a “Kaptan Kirk” and a “Mr Spak,” and something else which he describes as “a mildly kinky version of Bewitched.” Sounds like fun!
But browsing further, I was intrigued to discover a promotional poster for a Mexican Batgirl as well. The image is not as exciting as what Bacchus found, but is still I hope not devoid of interest:
More evidence, as if more is really needed, that some ideas have universal appeal.
I wish to take critical notice of, and commend to the attention of ErosBlog readers, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton’s new How Women Got Their Curves and Other Evolutionary Just-So Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), which I have just recently finished reading. If you have any interests in the state of our scientific understanding of sex, it’s a book for you.
Barash and Lipton face a set of intriguing conundra when trying to understand why human women are built they way they are. If you think of a woman (a man also, but that’s a subject for another time) primarily in terms of designing working animal plumbing and wiring, you’re going to be in for some rather remarkable surprises once you meet any actual women. Other mammalian females occasionally break down and replace their uterine linings, but only adult human women do so in such a metabolically costly way every month. Why? Most other female mammals openly advertise (at least to other members of their own species) their fertile periods and sexually receptive only then, but for the most part even human women themselves are unsure of when they are fertile. Why? Few other animal species have anything more than traces of female orgasm (and most do not have even that), but in human women orgasm is a gloriously common fact of sexual life. Why? Other female mammals manage to suckle their young just fine without carrying around large adipose deposits around their milk glands all their adult lives. Human women have breasts. Why? Finally, there seems to be no metabolic why an animal’s fertility should cease when it has decades left to live, but any woman who lives long enough will undergo menopause. Again and always, why?
Now refreshingly Barash and Lipton come out right up front and admit they don’t have the answers to any of these questions. They admit that they are collecting conjectures — informed speculations (unless you’re Desmond Morris, in which case, silly speculations) on the questions I’ve laid out above. And on all of these questions there is a lot of conjecture — there’s a little text-box in every chapter for each of them, and in most cases the box has at least ten items. This is fine. Science necessarily begins in conjecture; it is then in careful gathering of data and the willingness to allow your beautiful hypotheses be slain by ugly facts that it distinguishes itself from other, less-reputable forms of epistemic activity.
One notable feature of the conjectures on offer here is that a discerning reader may see the emergence of an increasing number of conjectures having to do with signaling and screening, rather than just plumbing and wiring, as to why women are made the way they are. An example: back when I was a student in high school (the dark ages, I know) the best my biology teacher could come up with for why women have orgasms was a variant of the inelegantly-named “uterine upsuck” hypothesis: female orgasm had something to do somehow with helping sperm get up to eggs and do their baby-making work. The evidence for this conjecture is very weak: it’s basis in physiological data is very thin, and in any event anorgasmic women seem to be just as fertile as orgasmic ones. A much more promising conjecture is that female orgasm is a screening device, something that evolved to help women discriminate between desirable and undesirable mates. (The exposition of this particular conjecture got a favorable notice from economist Robin Hanson, who perhaps deserves the title of Dean of Signaling, over at Overcoming Bias.)
Likewise, female breasts might be signals (whose evolutionary development subsequently got a boost from runaway sexual selection). Since human men provide at least some resources to their offspring (usually) it pays them to be at least a little bit choosy in mate selection. Any human female can say things like “I am young and healthy and therefore a good mate,” whether it’s true or not. But it’s much harder to fake the ability to accumulate and carry around a lot of extra healthy-looking fat, unless you really are young and healthy and therefore a good mate: breasts would therefore be a good example of a costly signal in evolutionary terms, rather like the peacock’s tail.
I cannot help but note another conjecture offered by Barash and Lipton. Obviously I cannot say whether it’s true or not, but I must say it certainly resonates with me. This is a conjecture about concealed ovulation: the fact that usually even women themselves do not know whether they are in a fertile period. This might be called the Consciousness Conjecture, and it was advanced originally by a biologist named Nancy Burley. It runs something like this: sex is fun, pregnancy is not. Pregnancy is especially no fun if you’re a hunter-gatherer on the move much of the time, and what is more, for most of human existence, childbirth was at once excruciatingly painful and often fatal. Women (or proto-women) were conscious and observant and took note of all these facts and would avoid having sex when pregnancy would be likely to result. Concealed ovulation emerged in an evolutionary move that allowed genes to propagate themselves because women wouldn’t know when they were fertile — in short, it evolved out of a conflict between women and their own genes. (Thus an early example of what psychologist Keith Stanovich calls The Robot’s Rebellion.)
A brief review can’t really do justice to all the charms of this little book. Columbia University Press has made an extended excerpt available on the book’s web-page here and the full chapter from which it comes in PDF format here. I would be remiss in reviewing for ErosBlog without including a picture or two. After all, what book on sex and science would be complete without a picture of lions mating? Not this one, clearly.
Kudos to you if you can guess the conjecture about human female sexuality this picture is offered in illustration of!
And naturally, no discussion of women and their curves would be complete without one of those breathtaking south Indian sculptures of Parvati. Barash and Lipton of course offer one (though not exactly this one):
(And if you look up neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s Reith lecture on the origins of art in the human brain which Barash and Lipton are referencing there, you’ll be rewarded with yet another one.)
I realize of course that a book of biological conjecture about human female sexuality might not be everyone’s cup of tea. “Those silly scientists,” some might say, “they can’t figure out even the commonest things.” But I for one take a different view. Books like this one are evidence that science is nowhere near its end, and that even in the most ordinary (if intimate things), there remain fascinating and deep puzzles to solve.
And I submit that, my dear readers, really is sexy.
Casting about for something that will improve their ratings on this weekend’s Science Saturday diavlog, eminent science journalists John Horgan and George Johnson hit on the bright idea of talking about “sex chips,” neural implants that improve orgasm. And from there, they wandered into all sorts of peculiar sex-and-science related topics. Naturally, having once written an ErosBlog post on this theme I couldn’t resist giving a listen. I must confess that what follows is surely eleven of the most hilarious minutes ever to be recorded on Science Saturday.
And before I hear you all grumble “Faustus, you setting the bar for comedy far too low here,” I suggest you watch it for yourselves:
(Note: The Bloggerheads.tv linking-and-embedding system has a clip length limit, so the clip above is only the first eight of the recommended eleven minutes. You’ll be invited to finish viewing on a remote website if you watch all the way through the embedded clip, or you can navigate this link now.)
I don’t think I can add much more, except that the book John and George are referencing is Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and also that when George makes a comment to the effect that “they’d better encrypt that remote,” I can only observe that the erotic artist was there first:
As today, May 8, is VE day, it seemed only appropriate to contribute a timely ErosBlog post.
I have always admired Paul Fussell as one of our most elegant writers on war. An infantryman gravely wounded in France in March 1945 who went on to become a Professor of English, Fussell has given us three magnificent books on the British and American experience in the First and Second World Wars: The Great War and Modern Memory (about the First World War), Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, and Fussell’s own memoir of his experiences as a soldier and after, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.
Wartime contains a chapter entitled “Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Far Too Little,” which might be of especial interest to ErosBlog readers. Fussell comments on the sparseness of erotic material available in the British and American world of the 1940s:
“Now, when the urban newsstand flaunts its pornographic wares which, if not heady enough, can be eked out with materials available at the nearest Adult Bookshop, and when your local X-rated film theatre routinely and legally depicts scenes formerly viewable only at stag parties, it is impossible to realize that things were once quite otherwise….There was no Playboy_ or Penthouse or Hustler and certainly no Squeeze, Rapture, or Adult American Dreambook. The sexiest magazine generally available was probably Esquire, with its drawings by “Petty” and “Varga” [sic?] of languorous girls with immensely long legs — thought more exciting then than now — and precisely delineated breasts.”
One wonders how our boys in uniform got through the war at all. Fussell goes on to say:
“Throughout the war the London Daily News ran a comic strip depicting a scantily-clad ‘Jane,’ much relished by the troops. Only on VE-Day did she go so far as to take off everything. This created a sensation, and many were not sure what they thought about it.”
I’ve often wondered about this particular May 8, 1945 strip. You can find some stuff on the Internet about Jane, but my casual search didn’t turn up the strip to which Fussell was referring. I had always imagined some sort of erotic payoff for the victors.
In a sense this turned out to be true, but not as I had imagined. Recently I acquired a book that contained the strip as part of its center plates, right adjacent to a portrait of a smiling Clement Atlee. (The book is Peter Clarke’s The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire.)
Jane prepares to celebrate VE-Day.
This leads to an unfortunate scene…
..that concludes with a joke in dubious taste.
Echoing a sentiments found in Clarke and Fussell, I must say that there seems to have been quite a shift in social mores between then and now. Or even between then and 1970. In 1945, a Playboy pictorial would have been beyond the pale. But something that looks suspiciously like a group assault on a young woman was the occasion for a joke in a widely-read newspaper.
As I was walking down an avenue on a pleasant spring evening in the metropolis I call home, I encountered on the side of a bus shelter a poster advertising a forthcoming effort from Pixar, which has been given the title Up. Well, nothing wrong there. I’m sure it will be a fun movie for the whole family, even if Pixar has been assimilated into the Empire of the Mouse. Except that I couldn’t help but think “didn’t I blog on a topic related to this somehow, just the other day?”
Yes, I did.
As it happens, there is a major softcore porn effort called Up! put out by the same Russ Meyer who gave the world Supervixens on which I had just blogged.
Not one of his better efforts, for my money, even if we do get to watch Kitten Natividad frolicking about sunshiney northern California wearing naught but a smile, But the point here is not film criticism. It’s more like company criticism.
Granted, the Empire of the Mouse has it headquarters in Southern California, so it surely unfair to expect them to exhibit a Germanic degree of historical consciousness, even about film. But really, do none of those highly-paid executives know how to use Google? Or Wikipedia?
There are people out there, whom I lampooned in what is probably my most controversial ErosBlog post who certainly do know how to use Google. And I have a feeling that when they Google this one up (so to speak), they might be a little less than happy about the family movie they think they’re researching.
Looks like we’re into a serious thing about Uschi Digard these days at ErosBlog. A serious good thing.
Russ Meyer once said of Uschi that she “…had the dedication of a Watusi gun bearer. She’d do anything. She’d run over bare coals and cut glass. I mean literally. She was that kind of chick.” (From Jimmy McDonough’s fine biography of Meyer, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, p. 240, which also gives us the interesting bit of information that Uschi spoke nine languages.)
What better opportunity (as if I needed any excuse) to go into the library and bring back some images from Uschi showing her dedication in Meyer’s Supervixens. Uschi shows up as SuperSoul, the lonely “mail-order Austrian wife” of an isolated farmer, who put her to work.
Milking a cow.
(Yes dear readers, the whole sequence is filled with symbolism just as heavy-handed as that, almost a burlesque in itself.)
Inevitably, since this is a Russ Meyer film, things swiftly turn to a literal roll in the hay with the hired hand.
Which SuperSoul unsurprisingly finds satisfying.
Hired hand is then chased off by pitchfork-wielding farmer angrily denouncing him. “Desecrator of connubial bliss!”
Watusi gun bearer, we salute you!
(Bonus movie trivia point: Supervixens launched the career of a now-veteran character actor who has appeared in everything from The Blues Brothers to Austin Powers. Kudos to you if you can name him without peeking on the Internet!)
Bacchus in a recent post made a kind reference to an earlier post of mine in which I included an image of a somewhat controversial painting by Albert von Keller entitled Im Mondschein. In retrospect it was a bit of an odd choice for me to have included that image in the sequence. It probably worked thematically, although it was a little odd historically. (Also, it was so beautifully painted while at the same time being more than a little transgressive, so really, how could I resist? I have scans of concept sketches and related material for Im Mondschein, so if there’s interest, it might get its own post later.)
But this got me to thinking. Although Albert von Keller was a fairly minor painter who barely rates even a paragraph on Wikipedia, he did produce some fairly remarkable images as an eroticist. Since I have the scans, it seems appropriate to pass them along, with perhaps some minor commentary.
Von Keller certainly had his moments of boldness, as can be seen from this small scan of his Akt am Strand (1874, model Cella Bertender):
Not too remarkable as a nude but note closely: a little tuft of the model’s pubic hair is displayed. For rather a long time the conventions of European painting dictated that the female nude didn’t have pubic hair. Or genitalia. Von Keller’s example of it isn’t the first — Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde precedes it by eight years, but it’s still an unusual work for its time.
Von Keller wasn’t usually this bold, especially early in his career. Like so many other artists, he could always find a good pretext for an erotic painting. Allegorical figures were one:
That painting is a study preliminary to a painting entitled Akademische Freiheit (Academic Freedom, 1888). I realize that all of us present and former academics must be saying to ourselves “If only academia had such freedom!”
Biblical themes were also a rich source of inspiration. Here is a study for a painting of Judith und Holophernes (dated 1895):
To my mind Judith has a rather scary expression, contemplating what she is about to do to Holophernes. But my favorite von Keller on biblical themes (which I have only in monochrome, I fear) is his Adam und Eva (1900):
Just what is Eve looking down at, with such an interested expression?
Von Keller certainly did well by classical themes as well. One good example, especially for its lovely use of light and color, is this Urteil des Paris (Judgment of Paris, 1891):
I must admit to a certain amount of puzzlement as to who’s clothed and why in this picture. Obviously it’s no accident that Aphrodite has turned up naked; clearly she knows where her strengths lie. Athena in back appears to be clothed. Is she, as a goddess connected with law and justice, waiting her turn in queue before disrobing? Or is it simply a measure of character: as a get-those-law-school-applications-in-the-mail type of deity, she is naturally more modestly dressed? Stranger still is why Paris is unclad. It makes perfect extrinsic sense, of course. What viewer doesn’t enjoy contemplating a beautiful nude young man? But it is a little harder to make sense of in terms of the internal logic of the picture. Did remote antiquity have an unusually balmy climate? Were proper laundry services in short supply at Troy? Is there some sort of we’ll-show-you-ours-if-you-show-us-yours game going on with the Olympians? I invite readers to speculate, at least as long as they don’t tell me something boring, like it was just artistic convention that Paris shouldn’t be wearing anything.
As his career went on, it appears that von Keller got bolder with both his theme and styles, painting some remarkable straight-up female nudes without apology. Consider this Kaskade (1910, model Gisela von Wehner):
And finally, in 1915, nearing the end of his life, another, much franker Eve:
The model for this last was Anni Söldner, identified by von Keller scholar Oskar Müller as “das letze Modell Albert von Kellers.”
A career perhaps worthy of more attention, indeed.
Reflecting back on my boyhood time in Italy, already a source for ErosBlog material, I came across another memory perhaps worth sharing. Tagging along this time in the Galleria Borghese, where we came across the Venus Victrix of Antonio Canova (1757-1822).
This sculpture is famous in no small measure because the model for it was Paulina Borghese, née Pauline Bonaparte; that is, Napoleon’s younger sister. It would be no exaggeration to say that she had led a rather colorful life.
But that’s not really what stuck in my head. What really stayed in my boyish mind was an apocryphal anecdote told by the accompanying art-history lecturer.
When this sculpture was unveiled, Paulina’s contemporaries were scandalized, of course. One of them was overheard to ask “Paulina, how could you?”
“There was a stove in the room,” was her demure response.
It’s a depressing fact for anyone who works with erotic materials that one’s historical record is a good deal thinner than it is for other scholars and artists. A long history of social stigma and legal repression has meant that much of the visual and literary record of the erotic past has been lost: at worst burned or buried in a landfill, at best stuck deep in some dead-tree archive, kept under lock and key by its curators. We owe gratitude, therefore, to those intrepid scholars who are at least able to get into the archives and haul forth what’s there for more general view.
It will come as no surprise to readers of ErosBlog that early nineteenth-century Americans had as healthy an appetite for spicy stories and naughty images as anyone else since our Pleistocene ancestors sat around campfires and painted on cave walls. And it’s no surprise also that the most commercial of American cities produced an extraordinary group of entrepreneurs able and willing to feed that appetite. Professor Dennis gives us back some of their names and also much of the cleverness with which they combated a legal regime that grew steadily more hostile to the publication of erotic materials. Professor Dennis restores to life characters like William Snelling, George Wilkes, and George Wooldridge, who pioneered the publication of what were then called “flash weeklies,” basically newspapers that published scandal news, including whatever racy details their reporters could dig up. When hauled into court on charges of obscene libel, they would cheekily declare that such publication was necessary to protect public morality: how else, they would argue, are we to protect New Yorkers against the depredations of its immoral elites, save by the threat of public exposure? The flash weeklies would also provide guides to the erotic underworld, including biographies of prostitutes, complete with their places of work, descriptions of their physical attributes, and sometimes even accounts of the services they offer. This could be justified as a means of allowing people to “avoid” them.
Of course, no history of erotic publishing would be complete without the occasional naughty image of its own, and Professor Dennis does provide a few rather interesting ones, e.g.:
Ironically, that rather appealing image is one of a few that adorn a book called The Secret Habits of the Female Sex by “Jean Dubois, M.D.”, which in fact was devoted to propounding a popular bit of nineteenth-century pseudoscience, to wit the view that masturbation would make you go blind, insane, feebleminded, etc. Then as now, sex was what sold.
But probably the greatest hero entrepreneur among antebellum New York pornographers would have been the legendary publisher George Akarman. The late twentieth century brought us the Internet, which clearly isfor porn. Our Victorian antecedents didn’t have an Internet, but they did have the U.S. Post Office, which was the Internet of its day. Well before the Civil War, Akarman realized that by sending his naughty books through the mail, he could (1) evade local law and law enforcement and (2) dramatically expand his market beyond the New York area. And so, more than a generation before Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck sent out the first number of their famous catalog, a New York pornographer was in the process of creating what must have been one of the world’s first mail-order businesses. More evidence, as if any more is really needed, that porn is an engine of progress.
But Akarman didn’t confine his attention just to distribution. In 1856 he also created Venus’ Miscellany, possibly the first erotic magazine in the United States. A prominent feature of this publication was a letters column, and this column provided what is possibly the biggest historical surprise in Professor Dennis’s book: letters, putatively from respectable middle-class women, celebrating female sexual adventure and autonomy. A very different vision than we usually receive of Victorian womanhood, or even of Victorian pornography. “Though one strongly suspects that Akarman was the author of these confessions,” Professor Dennis notes, “his emphasis on first-person female narrations of erotic desire and his affirmation of women’s right to sexual satisfaction are bracing, nonetheless.”
Thanks to the efforts of Akarman and his fellow entrepreneurs, Professor Dennis is able to report, soldiers fighting for the Union were well-diverted by mail-order erotic materials during the Civil War. (So porn played a role in ending slavery, too? Sweet!)
Unfortunately for the industry, one of these soldiers was a young Anthony Comstock, an individual for whom the term “pokenose” might have been invented. Doubtless suffering from the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy and possibly also annoyed that racy materials were more interesting to his fellow troops than the Bible study sessions he was attempting to lead, Comstock devoted his life to becoming an anti-porn crusader.
And a most effective one he was, as Professor Dennis also shows. By 1873 Comstock had gotten an Act of Congress named after himself forbidding the use of the U.S. mails to “obscene” material (which of course included not just racy material but also bona fide medical information on sexual health and contraception) and gotten himself appointed a postal inspector, from which role he acted as the Nation’s Censor-in-Chief. And Comstock too was a pioneer, of law-enforcement techniques that would become all too common in Prohibition and the War on Drugs: questionable testimony from informants, possibly planted evidence, and actions that look suspiciously like entrapment. He and his fellows managed to seize and destroy a lot of material. He was so successful in his zeal that, as Professor Dennis notes (sadly, to my mind) that erotic materials from late nineteenth-century America are difficult to find, even in private archives.
Professor Dennis gives us yet another act of historical memory, a fine and poignant one, in retelling the story of one more individual, Elena del Varto, an impoverished widow entrapped by one of Comstock’s henchmen into posing for some naughty pictures. Though in frail health and having a child to support, she was sent to prison for a year. Whatever one thinks about porn, one cannot but shed a generous tear for Mrs. del Varto and reflect on what it tells us about the “morals” of the anti-porn crew, then as now.
An excellent read, as legal history, inspiring narrative, and cautionary tale. Highly recommended.
I realize that on any number of occasions Bacchus has expressed skepticism about the validity of the distinction between “porn” and “art”. Perhaps such skepticism is well founded. But in the spirit of friendly controversy, I shall offer an explanation of the distinction.
Bertrand Russell once introduced the concept of “emotive conjugations,” meaning that the words we use are determined by the person of the speaker. His example was as follows:
I am firm.
You are stubborn.
He is pig-headed.
The concept transfer nicely into the porn-versus-art debate, to wit:
I enjoy the erotic arts.
You get off on porn.
He is addicted to horrible smut.
Though perhaps the distinction doesn’t apply to absolutely everyone. Cue the classic Tom Lehrer song!
A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.
In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.
Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?
Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?
I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.
What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vividaccount of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.
Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.
But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.
Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:
And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.
No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:
That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.
I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):
These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.
For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.
Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.
Just last week I finally caught up with listening to the audio made available for the 2008 Singularity Summit. Interesting times might be coming, and soon.
One of the principal speakers was Ray Kurzweil, who for some time now has been promoting the idea that exponentially-improving information technology will at some point in the fairly near future allow humans to transcend biology. Either we’ll end up with computers so powerful that we’ll end up merging with them and living in a virtual reality, which, since we’re in control of it, and have access to artificial intelligences that can do things much better than we can, might as well be a virtual paradise. Or, alternatively as Neil Gershenfeld suggests at the Summit, computers will effectively become so small that physical matter itself will be as programmable as computer code.
All of which is very exciting if you’re into erotica, because it means that whatever fantasy you’re into can be made to simply pop out of the landscape whenever you like.
You want a gynoid to join you on the green? A volcano lair full of sexy catgirls? A romantic, soulful tentacle monster to call your own? Well, in the not-so-far future all these could be yours. That is is the future is a view taken by Marshall Brain, who also spoke at the Summit (albeit on a slightly less sexy subject). Among the various essays available on his website is a short book called The Day You Discard Your Body which in turn contains a chapter called “The Lure of Porn” which suggests that by the mid-21st century at the latest lots of people will be spending all their time in what is in effect a fully-immersive gameworld with sexual attractions that put even the most vivid porn now available to shame.
Brain’s is only one example. With little effort one could find many, many others. Is a giant video game what the future really looks like?
Although I can’t deny the appeal of such a great video game, I am going to suggest that, at least for the further future, a far more radical possibility will be realized.
It begins with the realization that once technology gets powerful enough to reprogram physical matter and create greater-than-human intelligence, people themselves can be re-engineered. The likely first step will be a fine-grained emulation of the human brain. A working group at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute has produced a technology roadmap for this process (their long technical report is available in PDF format here) which gives a mean estimate of perhaps sixty years before this event happens. After that, the Kurzweil project of really reverse engineering the brain seems unlikely to be far behind.
The first-order erotic possibility that would naturally seem to be that you can step beyond just playing the greatest video game ever and play at being someone else. When we get good enough at re-doing the brain wiring, you can take a turn at not just looking like someone else, but experiencing the erotic possibilities inherent in what they are. Deirdre McCloskey, in her memoir of transitioning from male to female Crossing, says that “Most people, if they could magically do it, would like to try out the other gender for a day or a week or a month.” Right on, Deirdre! I most certainly would. Well, in the world with enough technology, you will be able to do just this, and you won’t have to rely on magic anymore (But note that Eliezer Yudkowsky cautions that a real switch of genders might be a bit more complicated than many people imagine.) And you needn’t just limit yourself to being a different gender. You be a whole new creature. Why just play at being a furry (or just play with virtual reality furries) when you can be one? Or that soulful, romantic tentacle beast, for that matter.
But I suspect that even this isn’t sufficiently radical to embrace the possibilities of the future. What lies beyond changing ourselves is the effacement of the very distinction between erotic and non-erotic experience.
What could this possibly mean? To begin with, fix in your minds that the huge hedonic rewards associated with good sex aren’t some necessary consequence of the laws of physics or the ontology of the world. They’re accidents of our evolutionary history as a species. Erotic experience piggybacks on structures — both anatomical and neural — that originally arose because they were functional in getting our ancestors to make babies. In civilized societies, the connection between erotic experience and physical reproduction is now only occasional, but the links to the old structures remain. Much of the wiring is still there, even if it’s powering stuff that was non-existent and un-imagined (I think, anyway) in the time of our Pleistocene ancestors.
But once we reverse-engineer the brain and learn how the wiring works, there’s no necessary reason to leave it unchanged. We can pull the wiring for erotic pleasure and rewire it for other purposes. Our purposes. No longer need it be the case that we experience orgasm when we’ve fooled some old brain structure into believing we’ve done a reproductive act. Why shouldn’t orgasm happen when we do other things? Like when we’ve written a story. Or proved a theorem. Or finished a tax return. (It is a measure of my fathomless cynicism that I think humanity will defeat death before it abolishes taxes.) What good thing happens is a consequence of how we’re wired, and I am sure people will want to redo the wiring.
While it might seem somewhat counterintuitive to many ErosBlog readers, I don’t spend all that much time with porn.
Oh, some, certainly. In the wide world of erotic materials there are many things that I find appealing. There are many other things that are not all that appealing. Should I come across something appealing, I might spend some time with it, and if I can think of something that strikes me as clever to say about it, I’ll write a post for ErosBlog. If it doesn’t appeal, I move on to something else. There’s plenty to do in life. So, rarely does such consumption take up a very large part of any given day, and it takes up no part of many other days. Certain other porn-relevant activities, like work on a piece of eros-heavy fiction that I hope will eventually see the light of publication in some form, take up some hours more (after all, I do try to practice what I’ve preached before), but it is still not a huge commitment of time.
So why am I writing for ErosBlog, trying to find nice things to say about the enterprise of which it is a part? That’s the subject for today’s Sunday sermon.
There are personal reasons, of course. Bacchus is an old friend, and it is a pleasure and a privilege to have been invited to contribute here. I like digging into my library and coming up with curiosities to spread around the world; they are sources of wry enjoyment for me and I hope they will be for others, as well. There’s also a little spark of happiness — known to every writer — at seeing my byline, even if it is just a nom de blog.
But there’s something else, more fundamental than the reasons above.
At the core of what I value in life is a kind of mental freedom. Freedom of the imagination. Freedom of the intellect. Freedom to create, and to enjoy what we have created. If you don’t share this value, then what I feel for you is not hatred, nor even contempt. Something more like pity seems appropriate, because you are misguidedly disdaining one of the best things sentient existence has to offer.
Now, where freedom of the imagination is concerned, porn is the hard case. The creation and consumption of porn exercises such freedom in a very fundamental way. “Porn dreams of eternal fires of desire, without fatigue, incapacity, aging, or death,” as Camille Paglia once so memorably put it. Since porn is connected with pleasure, and pleasure (if it is not to become stale) is intimately connected to innovation, in porn the imagination lives and lives hard. (You! Up there in the upper gallery! Stop your snickering! This is serious.)
That being so, there’s a lot of hate directed at the particular exercise of freedom called “porn.” There are plenty of people out there who would like to see it crushed, or, if not crushed, then forced to live in a ghetto of despised and proscribed content. But why should I worry? Even if the anti-porn people get their way, my life will worse, but not unbearably worse. There would still be plenty to do in life.
But there’s a problem. As a consequence, perhaps, of letting my own intellect and imagination run free, I have formulated my own rather naughty opinions, which, while they aren’t particularly pornographic, certainly seem to piss off a lot of people. For example, I am a freethinking atheist, and atheists may well be a small minority (in the United States, anyway) to which attaches even more negative animus than attaches to gays and lesbians. Atheism alarms and appalls lots of people who are loud and proud about their own confessional allegiances, but who expect me to be as silent as can be about my lack of same.
Beyond my religious view, I have my own share of still stranger views, such as wanting, like Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, to be posthuman when I grow up — so much so that I would regard my own existence as a dismal failure if this possibility were to be blocked, for humanity at least if not necessarily for me personally. Posthumanity is an aspiration which has already alarmed and appalled plenty of folks both left and right, and I fear the day cannot be far off when there are people who want not just to halt the march of technology toward the achievement of posthumanity, but to eradicate the very ideas out of which the desire to be posthuman grows.
I have some additional ideas which are still stranger than either atheism or posthumanism, and which will probably alarm and appall people all the more. Sounds like a blog in the making, but that’s a project for another day. Let me return to the subject at hand.
The analogy between my position and that of the pornographer should be clear. There are a lot of people who want to crush porn because porn alarms and appalls them. Once the principle is established and precedent is set that “what alarms and appalls (even if it does not harm) us, we may crush,” my own future will not be bright at all.
I never want to find myself — whether on Earth or in Hades — beginning a lament that starts like this:
“First they came for the pornographers, and I was silent, because I wasn’t much of a pornographer.”
So I am proud to write here out of solidarity. As one of the most noble of all Americans once said, we must hang together, for if we do not, we shall surely hang separately.
Via Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolutioncomes word that Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman has gotten hold of a data set on the number of broadband subscribers per zip code who pay for adult content. Professor Edelman breaks down the numbers for us by state in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The porn-consumption winner in all categories is: Utah!
I was mildly surprised by this; perhaps I am too easily surprised.
Professor Edelman provides an analysis of what drives subscriptions, which gives me an opportunity to come up with an additional winner for most (unintentionally?) funny social science inference I’ve seen in a while:
The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p=0.848). However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular, a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.
This competes for attention with:
Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in ‘blue’ states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the ‘red’ states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.
I’m afraid I have no idea what any of this means, really, but what are comments sections for if not interesting speculation? You can read the original paper in PDF format here, but remember, Faustus cheerfully reads academic papers so that you don’t have to!
Postscript: I can’t help also noting that the fourth paragraph of the paper contains a pleasing scholarly corroboration of my February 15th thesis that porn is an engine of progress.
When I blogged up what I thought was a fairly harmless and charming little remark from Steve Landsburg earlier this week, at least one of ErosBlog’s readers got at least a little bit perturbed. How dare I, or perhaps more accurately how dare Professor Landsburg, suggest that it’s okay for a minor to go surfing freely around the Internet, wherein she might encounter not just sexually explicit images, but {shudder} evil nasty porn?
A fair enough question, and one worthy of another one of my Sunday sermons.
Whenever someone gets up to defend the application of J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle — the view that the coercion of others can only be justified by self-defense and that we’re not allowed to force others to do or refrain from doing things for their own good — someone else will invariably hop up and ask, in plangent tones, “won’t anyone please think about the children?” (“Who will save the wee bairns?”)
What they mean by this is that if we allow adults full liberty to enjoy certain things like erotic materials, then Poor Innocent Children will also get exposed to them, and that this will be some sort of Very Bad Thing. So maybe we need to restrict the liberty of adults, at least to the extent of building high walls (real or virtual) around the Very Bad (if Poor Innocent Children will see it) Thing.
Hmm. Sounds like the putative well-being of children provides a very handy pretext for action by those who are not so much concerned to protect the well-being of children, as to extinguish the liberty of adults. And I don’t doubt that it is used exactly as such a pretext, much of the time. But let’s grant that those who would defend children — the Knights of the Wee Bairns, shall we call them? — are, in this instance, acting in good faith. Is there a harm here that merits our attention? Is Professor Landsburg’s daughter in some terrible danger from the Internet?
The Knights of the Wee Bairns, at the very least, want paywalls and adult filtering around “bad” content; some of the more maximalist among them want this content to disappear entirely, of course, and not just from the Internet.
People who fret about the danger that Internet porn supposedly represents to children most likely fear that free access to it will endanger their own ability to transmit their values and worldview to their children. This possibility is the “harm” that they fear. Perhaps their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Maybe something children see on the Internet will affect their values or worldview in ways their parents won’t like. Too bad. In a free society, children are not robots to be programmed by their parents. You’re not entitled to demand that anyone else build a wall around anything just because of the worldview you want to transmit to your children.
I’ll sharpen this claim with an example, pointed right at myself. I am a religious nonbeliever. I am robust in my non-belief, and apologize for it to no one. It would be grounds for substantial disappointment, no, actually it would be grounds for considerable soul-searching and condign self-reproach, if either of my own daughters were to end up as some sort of evangelical Christian, because for my money that means they ended up believing something that is almost certainly false and probably pernicious as well. But I do not, not for one minute, think that this means that someone who runs a website devoted to Christian apologetics should be required to put up an age-determining wall, or require a valid credit card before visiting his site, or put some sort of objectionable content flag in his HTML code so that Atheist Net Nanny can filter out his content, with its explicit promotion of a worldview and values I’d rather my own children not end up subscribing to.
If we must censor content based on its potential to change some child’s values or worldview to something her parents won’t like, then there will be precious little liberty for anyone.
“Oh, but that’s not what we mean,” say the Knights of the Wee Bairns. “We’re only against porn, which is bad. We don’t mean to stifle vigorous debate in a free society. We don’t want to extinguish the liberty of adults. We think that children will be harmed if they see certain images or read certain stories. We insist only that there be some walls across the Internet, so the kids can’t get access to this sort of material.”
I would begin by noting that there really is no such thing a harmless wall across the Internet. The wall will never be truly voluntary. It will invariably be enforced by legal and social sanctions, which means that some content will disappear, simply because it isn’t worth the trouble or the risk of the provider to deal with the compliance burden. Other content, which should be available to all, will end up behind such a wall. To site just one prominent example, it’s been clear for years that Net Nanny and the censors keep material having to do with sexual health away from the teenagers who could really benefit from it.
So there’s a real cost to building walls across the Internet. Is there a corresponding benefit, in the form of harms avoided to minors who happen to view porn?
No.
There are many reasons why I think there is a strong prima facie case why there is no such benefit, no avoided harm to minors. Among the two strongest are the relative resilience of minors and the fact that things on the Internet don’t really change the incentives associated with real-world behavior.
Does viewing stuff — even nasty stuff — make children into nasty adults? Where is the evidence? Let’s look at some history. About two generations ago there was, you might recall, a huge conflict called the Second World War. Children living in the United States experienced this conflict largely as a series of deprivations. But tens of millions of children living the vast zones between the North Sea and the Volga, between Hokkaido and Java, experienced the war as terror — bombings and shellings and occupations and persecutions. Nothing anywhere on the Internet is as obscene as what happens in the real world when a war sweeps through. And what became of this generation of children? Some were psychically scarred for life, sadly. But most of those tens of millions grew up in the postwar world to have pretty normal lives, no more prone to criminality or dysfunction than human beings generally. Children can be, and are, pretty resilient. And keep in mind that Internet surfing, unlike having your country bombed or invaded, is voluntary. Anyone, children included, who encounters a distressing image can always just surf away.
Meanwhile, the real world continues to impose its set of costs and benefits, and these will be more powerful shapers of human behavior than what children or teenagers see on the internet. Out in meatspace, aggressive sexual conduct toward non-consenting others can lose you your job, ruin your reputation, and even land you in jail. Poorly-timed pregnancies can derail your life. HIV infection can kill you. None of these hard facts change, no matter what you’ve seen on the Internet, and people, including underage people, know this. Costs are real. People’s behavior is highly sensitive to cost. Homo economicus might be a crude approximation of actual human beings, but he’s a hell of a lot better than the “monkey see, monkey do” psychology that seemingly can be attributed to many fear mongers about porn.
“But you still might be wrong!” cry the Knights of the Wee Bairns.
Sure. Anything might be wrong. But if the mere theoretical possibility of harm is enough to forbid someone from doing something, then there really will be no liberty for anyone. That much should be too obvious even to require exposition.
All the same, I have no desire to be a dogmatist or an armchair theorist. I’ll respect anyone who civilly disagrees with me. And I’ll go one better than that. I’ll even agree to change my mind, provided that someone can honestly meet the following challenge:
Begin by defining a Bad Life Outcome as something that is uncontroversially bad to happen to someone. I mean bad in a thin sense. It has to be an outcome that pretty much everyone would agree would be bad. In defining bad you don’t get to cheat and load into the concept of “bad” something distinctive about your own worldview. I know that if you’re a die-hard Democrat you might think turning into a Republican or if you’re a Christian you might think becoming an atheist is a bad life outcome, but these don’t count: these outcomes are only bad relative to your specific worldview. Spending your life in prison, or dying of some terrible disease at 25, are Bad Life Outcomes as defined here.
Now suppose further a hypothetical experiment. Take 200,000 nine year-olds. Assign 100,000 of them at random to a Control Group and 100,000 to a Test Group. The Control Group has to spend their time on the Internet until age 18 with Net Nanny filtering out most (surely not all) of the bad old porn on the Internet (along with quite a lot of other stuff, probably). The Test Group gets uncensored access to the Internet until the age 18.
If you can tell me what the number of Bad Life Outcomes will be in the Control Group and the Test Group, and give me a convincing explanation as to why a skeptical and competent social scientist — someone like, oh, Steve Landsburg, say — should credit your numbers; oh, and furthermore, if the rate of Bad Life Outcomes in the Test Group really is materially larger than in the Control Group, then I will cheerfully change my mind.
Browsing through some more of Jasper Sharp’s Behind the Pink Curtain this lovely weekend I came across a discussion of Sachiko Hamano, who is an unusual figure in that she is not only a woman director of Japanese “pink” films, but also describes herself as a feminist. Sharp thoughtfully includes an image from her immense (possibly as many as 300-film) oeuvre:
That’s actress Yukari Sakurada, seen engaged in interesting activities in the shower, in the even more interestingly-titled Greedy Housewives 2: Take Me to Heaven Technique (2003).
There follows a curious discussion of whether Hamano’s work can really be called anything like feminist, given that it (according to Sharp, anyway) is more raunchy even than standard pink fare, whether the fact that Hamano’s heroines are highly aggressive, perhaps even insatiable, somehow makes up for this, etc. etc.
All this film-criticism splooge went more or less right over my head though, because all I could think of was this:
That’s Uschi Digard in the shower, as seen in every teenage boy’s favorite, the “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” segment of Kentucky Fried Movie (1977).
Some ideas just have a universal appeal, I guess.
Postscript: I wonder if anyone is ever going to attempt to make Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.
Like any good writer of sermons I took the trouble to consult scripture before sitting down with my pen for ErosBlog. In this case, the scripture I consulted was the University of Rochester economist/math deity Steve Landsburg. He seemed like a pretty obvious choice. After all, did he not use his Everyday Economicscolumn in Slate to present evidence that Internet porn actually reduces sex crimes, and write a popular economics book with the becoming title of More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics?
But what was most heartening of all was some advice Professor Landsburg offered his daughter in print in an earlier book inspired by her:
“Surf the Internet. I’d much rather you getting your pornography from cyberspace than by rummaging around your parents’ bedroom.
“In fact, I’m glad the net makes it easy for you to get ahold of things other people would prefer you not to get ahold of. Family values crusader Donna Rice complains that ‘any child with a computer can access vile pornography in a matter of seconds. And once they have seen it, it can never be erased from their minds.’ You betcha, Donna. The Internet is the natural enemy of those who are out to erase other people’s minds.
“Let’s be honest. Access to pornography is not one of the costs of the Internet, it’s one of the benefits. The whole purpose of the Internet is to facilitate communication and thwart those who would hamper the free exchange of information.”
— From page 215 of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You about Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Free Press, 1997).
Everyone should be so lucky as to have a dad willing to offer advice like that.
I mount the pulpit again for another Sunday sermon.
There is a common accusation cast against pornography, indeed against erotic arts of any kind, indeed against anything resembling a hedonistic theory of value, that it encourages people to be passive, to be mere consumers, couch potatoes even. I am in the pulpit this week to tell you that this is not true.
I’ll coin a term to cover the broad concept I need: neophorics, the bearing of the new — to represent together invention, creation, discovery, innovation — that lie at the heart of progress, whether in the sciences or the arts or in engineering. And I shall use an older word — hedonics — to represent the art of achieving enjoyment (and correspondingly avoiding suffering) in sentient experience. That the erotic arts and practices are a big part of hedonics I doubt many readers of ErosBlog will deny.
The key to understanding here is that hedonics and neophorics are intimately connected, as entwined with each other as the coupling snakes seen by Teiresias of old. Each needs and drives the other, and would wither without the other.
Hedonics needs neophorics. A simple thought experiment should make this clear. Take your favorite fantasy, the thing that makes you really hot, your best personal X in the language of earlier sermons. Eliezer Yudkowsky at one point offered “living in your volcano lair with a bevy of sexy (and presumably eager, skilled, and willing) catgirls” as an example of one that someone might have (it’s not my X and I don’t think it’s Eliezer’s X either, but it’s a good example). Now ask yourself: is that all you would want to do with the rest of your life? Or if the fond wishes of transhumanism are realized and you become effectively immortal, is that all you would want to do for the next thousand years? The next million? Wouldn’t there come a point at which you would get bored? Feel a lack of achievement? Wouldn’t your life be much better — even in purely hedonic terms — if you could be surprised by things at some point? Get outside your lair and meet something or someone that wasn’t a catgirl? There will always come a point for the sort of beings that we are at which something new will be needed in our lives. That’s one reason why I urge people who can to get busy in the arts and create new erotica.
But what’s more, hedonics drives neophorics. The quest for pleasure is a mighty force for innovation. I cannot think of any artistic medium aside from absolute music (and maybe not even that) that has not been pushed forward by the drive for erotic satisfaction. As soon as the Greeks figured out how to paint on vases they were painting amazing orgy scenes on them. As soon as the camera was invented someone took his clothes off in front of one. The Internet really is for porn, like the song says, and certainly wouldn’t have been built out as fast as it was had people not wanted to look at naughty pictures or share naughty stories.
And it’s not just erotic pleasures that drive achievement. Centuries ago there were great voyages of exploration motivated by…the search for fisheries? The quest for new fields in which to plant barley? No, by search for cheaper and better ways to get pleasure commodities, silk and spices. No one ever perished for want of the taste of cinnamon or the touch of silk, but many men nonetheless risked their lives to get these things. And out of these voyages grew mighty forms of commerce,not just in silk and spices, but in other tangible forms of enjoyment: coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, sugar, wine, spirits, and lets face it, opium and other drugs.
And the neophorics will go on and on, driven by hedonics. Right now we are just scratching the surface with new media like video games. Immersive virtual reality is probably yet to come. And who knows? Maybe someday some clever bioengineer will actually deliver up a catgirl.
The lesson to take away? There is nothing passive about porn. It is an engine of progress.
Having as I do a fondness for cinematic oddities, a favorite weekend diversion of mine is to peruse my dusty library for things I haven’t seen before. Today’s venture came up with the following from Jasper Sharp: Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (Godalming, UK: FAB Press, 2008). A production company called Kokuei, which started making films for the Japanese Ministry of Education, made two movies on a “girl Tarzan” theme called Valley of Lust (1963) and Cave of Lust (1965). According to Sharp, nothing survives of these movies except a handful of publicity stills. But what stills! For the pleasure of ErosBlog readers, I post my favorite from Cave of Lust, the actress Aki Ema, together with a monkey companion:
I feel the inclination to mount the pulpit for another Sunday sermon.
Last week I wrote that a cardinal virtue of the erotic arts in whatever form we might create them, is that they allow us to explore and enjoy our “Xs” — those deep sources of pleasure that we discover in ourselves, possibly with the help of those very arts themselves. And they allow us to do this in a civilized fashion, even if it should happen that our Xs are something that it would be imprudent, immoral, illegal, or impossible to explore in reality.
I write from the perspective of True Virtue, one that I hope my readers share. I concur in David Hume’s lovely formulation, in which:
“…[s]he [virtue] declares that her sole purpose is to make her votaries and all mankind, during every instant of their existence, if possible, cheerful and happy; nor does she ever willingly part with any pleasure but in hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their lives. The sole trouble which she demands, is that of just calculation, and a steady preference of the greater happiness. And if any austere pretenders approach her, enemies to joy and pleasure, she… rejects them as hypocrites and deceivers…”
And I hold also with John Stuart Mill’s noble and exalted guide to public policy, his “very simple principle…that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” Footnote
True Virtue is most friendly to people who want a sex-positive society. Let people do what will make them happy, tell them that they being cheerful and happy is right and that pleasure is good and, well…you can figure out the rest.
But we or obliged to face an unpleasant fact, which is not everyone subscribes to the True Virtue.
If you live in the United States certainly, and in much of the rest of the world most likely, you are living alongside a lot of people — let us give them the handy label the “Pokenoses” — who believe they are licensed, whether by religious conviction or secular ideology or just a plain old lust for bossing others around, to tell others that they may not enjoy their Xs, not even fantasy, not even if they harm no one, that they must police even their inner thoughts, that they must throw away pleasure, no matter how badly their lives are otherwise going.
There are not people who believe in living in a sex-positive society. They clearly believe that everyone else is required to live as if their Pokenose religion is true.
What is to be done? Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that “between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.” Holmes, who was wounded at Antietam, might have known whereof he spoke.
So if you want a sex-positive society, does that mean that you should pick up the sword and go to war?
I would not so recommend. The Pokenoses are many and their resolve is strong. The outcome of any such struggle would be in doubt, and its morality something worse than in doubt. So great is the suffering that attends war, that rarely is it worth the price.
Happily there is an alternative to picking up the sword, one well worth the effort.
We all have Xs, and the erotic arts are our opportunity to explore and enjoy those Xs. For whatever your X is, you are almost certainly not alone. Create art about an X that gives you joy and you will have a means of giving others joy.
We all have Xs. Even the Pokenoses. Nature — so stingy in other respects — is at least generous in her provision of oddity and weirdness.
Even the Pokenoses will stumble upon art, however hard they try to shun it.
And when they do, lights might go on. Even a Pokenose can realize that they have something to lose in a society in which people are supposed to police their inner thoughts.
And then maybe they won’t be Pokenoses any more. One wins so much more in bringing joy than in threatening pain.
We won’t win everyone. There will always be a few die-hards. But few people are entirely dead to joy.
Don’t try to conquer. Seduce. Don’t pick up the sword. Pick up your pen. Get yourself a copy of Susie Bright’sHow to Write a Dirty Story and learn from it. Write! Create! Share!
If you want to live in a sex-positive world, get out there and make the world a sexier place.
Footnote: The quotation from Hume is taken from his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Ch. 9, Pt. 2. It is a favorite for Faustus, especially because Hume, contrasting his doctrine with that of his opponents, remarks that “The dismal dress falls off, with which many divines, and some philosophers have covered her [virtue]….” Virtue standing naked before us is beautiful. Perhaps if le bon David were with us today, he’d be guest blogging at ErosBlog. (He would most certainly be blogging somewhere.) The quotation from Mill is of course from On Liberty, Chapter One.
[Introduction by Bacchus:Remember Faustus? He’s agreed to guest-blog from time to time, as the mood may strike him. I’m enormously pleased to welcome him aboard.]
Yesterday being the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, also known as Super Sunday, a sermon seemed in order. So I mounted my pulpit and began sermonizing…
Bacchus wrote a discussion of porn back in 2003 in which he defended porn on the grounds that there are a lot of people who are on the margins of society for whom more conventional forms of sexual conduct — that which involves an actual partner — are unavailable. I don’t disagree with anything that Bacchus had to say back then. There really a lot of people out there who are unfortunate in some way. And indeed, pretty much most adolescents — a focus of Bacchus’s discussion therein — find themselves in this position. I am most sympathetic to this discussion. I have two daughters who are very young now, but they will not remain that way. Certain fires will kindle pretty damn soon (as adults measure time). I would much rather that they spend their teenage years — their early and middle teenage years, at least — reading with one hand instead of fooling around with greasy, graceless boys. (I know I am being tough on greasy, graceless boys with this attitude. But I do not think I am being unjust. I was a greasy, graceless boy myself once. Try to trust me on this, young gentlemen, better thing are coming for you in a few years. And in the meantime there is plenty for you to read with one hand yourselves, much more than when I was one of you, so count your blessings.)
But I want to take a step beyond Bacchus and argue that porn (and other products of human creativity that produce sexual arousal, call them art, erotica, whatever) are still more valuable than this.
Almost everyone has at least one something, call it an “X,” that can provoke intense pleasure when somehow experienced. The “X” is whatever it is that can sound the deepest and most resonant notes in our inner erotic music. An “X” might be a person, or a kind of person, or a practice, or a fetish, or a storyline, or even a concept. Some people — often people with especially vivid imaginations — may have many X’s.
Now suppose you’re a successful, relatively fortunate grown-up. You find yourself in the lucky space of possibilities that ranges between “being happily married” to “being a silver-tongued seducer” in which socially appropriate sexual partners are normally available. What then?
Nature sends us into the world with all sorts of X’s. Maybe your X lines up neatly with your actual situation in life. But then again, maybe not. The world is full of people — competent, successful people — with X’s that are imprudent, or immoral, or illegal, or indeed outright impossible. Maybe you have a thing for inappropriate would-be partners, or for non-consensual interactions. Perhaps your X is being a pirate — or being taken by pirates. Your X might even be monumentally weird — at least to others. There are people who claim to have been turned on by the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Violet blew up into a giant blueberry.
If this is your X, I do not recommend your trying to blow up an actual girl in this manner.
So what should you do?
Well, as it happens the world is full of hard-working artists — and yes, I do think that they deserve to be called artists — writers, models, actors, photographers, illustrators — who are working hard to provide you with at least a simulacrum of your X. And if you can’t find that simulacrum out there, we live in a remarkable era of DiY, where you can write it, or Photoshop it, or draw it (with lots of software to help). And then, you are so inclined, share it with others.
There are those who will counter that if you can find a desirable partner, that you should not try to enjoy your X. “You can have socially-acceptable sex with at least someone,” they will tell you, “so you should confine yourself to that. Isn’t that good enough?”
To which I would respond, how many of our lives are so good that we can just afford to throw away pleasure?
