December 27th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Alors To You, Too…
Comic book sex is always dirtier when they talk in French:
Sex Blogging, Gratuitous Nudity, Kinky Sex, Sundry Sensuality
December 26th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture
The words I wrote six and a half years ago to celebrate the launch of Sex and Submission seem almost naive, now:
If you like your sex at all kinky, you’ll have noticed that genuinely kinky hard core porn is very hard to find. Bondage and spanking photos are a dime a dozen, but how often do you see a pretty woman in a leather collar with her wrists tied giving a big sloppy enthusiastic blowjob? Or bouncing happily up and down on some male porn star prong with her wrists clipped to the D-rings on her collar?
I’m not saying you can’t find it, but it’s not common and it’s rarely commercial.
Not only has the commercial production of explicitly-sexual BDSM porn exploded since I wrote that, but a great deal of stuff that already existed in obscure physical-format publications has found its way onto the web since then. And the web has continued to do its webby thing, constantly shuffling up and exposing to public view deep layers of our cultural history that were well-buried and almost completely invisible just a few years ago. So what once seemed radically uncommon now seems (in retrospect) to have been all over the place. Of course, it never actually was “all over the place”; it existed but it wasn’t available in any practical sense.
I was reminded of this by an old Europorn magazine cover I just encountered on Tumblr. The magazine is called Perverted Orgies #3 and the cover features a woman in bondage being screwed from behind while she sucks another man’s dick, while two more men fumble with details of her bondage. (You can see it here for however long the Tumblr link may last.)
I first saw that image before there was a World Wide Web. It was floating around on the UseNet image groups, in the form of a tiny little .gif about 250 pixels wide. It was a rectangle with an oval mask, so the actual image area was an oval about 200 pixels wide by maybe 110 pixels tall. But there was no way to tell that it was a magazine cover or what magazine cover it was — and even if you knew, the magazine it came from was doubtless long out of print, available only in the physical store of a dealer in old porn, if you could find one in your locale who had one of the sure-to-have-been-a-small-number that were ever printed.
The internet didn’t have a thing to do with the creation of this image. It’s older than the internet. But somebody with a primitive scanner liberated a low-resolution version of this “item of culture” from the bonds of paper, way back in the late 1980s, and put it on the internet. And then, with the marches of time and progress, somebody else with a better scanner did it again, in high resolution with better color fidelity, less cropping, and better preservation of the limited provenance info that is inherent to the magazine cover. And now the daily churn and ferment of the modern web brings it to the surface, from time to time and place to place, where it’s likely to be spotted, in time, by most everybody who is interested in seeing a thing like that. And I’ll wager (though I have not done the exercise) that a few minute’s effort spent typing that magazine information into torrent search engines would yield a more-or-less complete scan of the magazine.
For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape. But that’s a project that seems only to be accelerating. No day passes when I do not marvel at some internet find, some cultural treasure that “I can’t believe somebody put this on the internet!” But they do, and they (the whole world!) do more with every day that passes.
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December 24th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Revelations In Early Cinema
Dr. Faustus blogs:
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 least glimmerings 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 historian Eric 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.
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December 22nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Happy New Year!
I’m a week early in saying so, but:
Happy New Year!
Saying it now instead of next week because I’ve been in a bit of a minor funk regarding the progress and direction of our sad old world, and this heartwarming photo is the first thing I’ve seen that actually gives me some hope for the new year:
Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, left, kisses her girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2011 after Gaeta’s ship returned from 80 days at sea.
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December 22nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Britney Spears Circus WHAT?
So the other day I was out with The Nymph as we did a bit of Christmas shopping at our not-very-local discount department store. I checked out alone before The Nymph was done, so that I could pass the contents of my basket across the laser scanners without subjecting those contents to The Nymph’s eagle eye. And as I stood there, my eyes fell upon a display of awful-looking fragrances.
One of which, my brain refused to believe, until I looked again.
The name was, I shit you not, “Britney Spears Circus Fantasy.”
It’s a real thing. You can Google it.
Let me indulge in understatement: I am not confident that the brand image this evokes in the popular mind is the brand image that was hoped for and intended.
The lady is not known for her highbrow tastes. What’s more, by many accounts she enjoys kink and kinky public spectacle. She appears on (some of) her fragrance packaging in a tightrope-act dress, twirling a parasol — but surely she doesn’t expect anyone to think that is her actual circus fantasy? I know the first thing that came into my head involved a sad clown, a bearded Bavarian knife thrower in lederhosen, and one extremely well-trained elephant. Or maybe something involving, you know, pony ears and nipple bells?
Image credit: Panels are from a Dofantasy comic called Roman Circus, by Ares.
What does your Britney Spears circus fantasy look like? Ladies and gentleman, step right up, the comments are open!
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December 20th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
“Man On Dog” Paranoia
It’s not just Rick Santorum you know. The spurious but supposed association between gay people and bestiality crops up (in the fevered corners where “cultural conservatives” worry about sex) all the time. I agree with this author:
“Someone just needs to alert them that gay bears are not actual bears.”
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December 20th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Cardinal Bibbiena’s Erotica
Slate has an entertaining article (but no photos) by the man who wheedled access from the Vatican to see the 1516 bathroom decorated by Rapheal in the pagan Roman erotic style:
In 1516, the Renaissance master Raphael decorated a bathroom within the Papal Apartments with erotic frescos. Today, the wicked gallery is called the Stufetta della Bibbiena, the “small heated room of Cardinal Bibbiena,” after the worldly official who commissioned the work.
…
We passed through Bibbiena’s original bedroom, now a sanitized meeting room, and stopped in front of a small wooden door. Poised with the key, the monsignor was momentarily perplexed. “We open up the Stufetta very rarely. Almost never.”But then we were inside. That tight, vaulted room—twice as high as its 8-foot width—was covered with cavorting naked deities. Raphael had designed his frescoed panels like a graphic novel, recounting the adventures of Venus, the goddess of love, and Cupid, the god of erotic desire, for Cardinal Bibbiena to admire as he lounged in his hot tub. At knee level, the original silver faucet was crafted into the face of a leering satyr. One panel showed the naked goddess stepping daintily stepped into her foam-fringed shell. In others, she admires herself in a mirror, lounges between Adonis’ legs and swims in sensual abandon. A couple of the frames, even more risqué, have been destroyed. One, recorded by an early visitor, showed Vulcan attempting to rape Minerva.
Embarrassingly, I had to ask the monsignor to stand aside, so I could get a proper view of the most notorious image, of the randy goat-god Pan leaping from the bushes with a monstrous erection. I was shocked to see that the image had been vandalized. Someone had etched out Pan’s manhood and filled in the gap with white paint. This, of course, made the object even larger and more noticeable—another parable about the futility of censorship.
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December 20th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Not Porn? Ha!
That’s foodie-person Nigella Lawson covered in caramel there. She says it’s not an erotic image. Rachel Kramer Bussel politely explains why she’s fulla shit.
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December 19th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Beast Of Burden
He looks a little bit oppressed by the load, but all in all, I think he’s bearing up well:
From alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.vintage.
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December 18th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
The Sex Bicycle
Finally, exercise made fun!
(And since that’s a tumblr link, here’s a backup link for ya.)
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December 16th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Shiny Stuff On Your Ceiling
I’m really too young to have experienced the High Cheese era of mirrored bedroom ceilings, although I did (just once) have the dubious pleasure of encountering one. It was at an aging and astonishingly out-of-the-way resort property where the Nymph and I booked the “King Room” in order to enjoy the en suite jacuzzi, and we found the place (though very comfortable) not to have been renovated since the days of disco.
This does not diminish my amusement at the “travels and stores in a mailing tube” version:
I suspect James Lileks is correct to suggest that only hashish could make that bearable!
The key words: “Mirror-like,” which means not a mirror at all, and “travels in a mailing tube.” So you can bring it along on your first date. This was the 70s, after all: you’d meet someone at the fern bar, go home, get the funky portable mirror out of the back of your van, put it up with double-sided tape, love the one you’re with, and let her check your back for problem moles. Bonus fun points if you were both completely pounded on Moroccan hashish, looking up, and the thing detached and floated down.
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