From classical times right down to the modern age, people have understood that playing games in the nude is the best way to have maximum fun. The storied Olympic Games of ancient Greece were thus conducted free of textile hindrances, a legacy upon which 20th-century “naturists” drew heavily in defending their al fresco coed naked ball games:

Across the ages, prudish objections to nudity in gaming have been deflected by the claim that undressed “exercise” or “sport” or “physical culture” has nothing to with, you know, squalid old sticky sex. But this claim, although tactically useful in defense against the Grundies, has always been a blatant lie. Absolutely the oldest monkey game of all is to make up excuses for displays of prowess and physical beauty. It’s the fast smooth road to both sex and status!

Fine artists have never been able to decide what is better: men and women naked at play together, or a canvas like the one above by Alfred Schwarzschild that focuses on a bunch of naked ladies playing, er, with themselves. More tits makes for better ogling, didn’t you know? Fortunately, comic postcard artists like O’Neil and Pedro reject these dubious dichotomies. They understand that we want and need to see a bit of sexual tension, whether the game is nudist women’s basketball, or some skeevey barely-a-game shenanigan dreamed up by the men at the camp to get some feelie hands-on time with their feminine comrades in physical culture:

You might be like me, though, and be too much of a body-shy introvert for nudist games (or for any other public naughty-bits flapping). When I’m up for nude games that aren’t happening in my own home, I naturally turn to the twin miracles of display screens and electronic gaming. (Sites like Best Sex Games and Best Porn Games offer a convenient intro to an enormous spectrum of arousing electronic amusements.) The alluring nature of electronic screens was not lost even on nature-loving, sun-worshiping nudists of the old school; or so a famous photograph tells us. Sony used this image of naturists, seemingly transfixed by electronics with their implements of “physical culture” gaming still in hand, to advertise one of its early portable televisions:

Fortunately for sedentary people, there’s lots of precedent for conducting intellectual games in the nude, too. (Computer gamers of minimal sartorial habit, though not often accused of intellectualism, will nonetheless be pleased to hear this.) My best evidence for the proposition that any kind of game can be played nude for the purposes of display and status enhancement is this famous 1963 photo of celebrated French artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess in public with the delightfully-endowed naked-person Eve Babitz:

I rest my case.

The fine art of the subtweet is defined (well, I’m defining it here now) as tweeting about somebody without an @ mention, so that they won’t know you’re tweeting about them. It has degrees and variations; sometimes you’re carefully not directly responding to a specific tweet, sometimes you’re just gossiping about a person behind their back but in public. Carried to the next level, you can do it by taking your comments to an entirely different social media platform.

I guess that’s what I’m doing here, with an added layer of obfuscation-by-time-delay. This post has been deliberately left to languish in my drafts for quite some little time. By now, even if you think it might be about a tweet you once made, it could more likely have been about somebody else’s tweets, and that’s how I want things; I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by stomping on their honest joy and enthusiasm. I’m going for harmless snark, here.

Because recently I’ve seen several different tweets from different people in a common theme, and that theme has been delight in having “found” their partner’s prostate. And every time I see that on Twitter, I have to sit on my fingers, lest I type some variation on “Oh, dear, how long was it missing?”

Yes, I am a bad person.

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Here’s another one of those delightful occasions when one of the “filler” photos from a porn photoshoot unexpectedly turns out looking like a fine art photograph. Check out the contrasting emotions on our model’s face as from the “safety” of a small barred cage she watches cruel things done to another model during a Real Time Bondage interactive BDSM live show (the March 8 show):

There’s a measure of sadistic appreciation and enjoyment on her face, I think; and yet perhaps a dose of apprehension too. Will it be her turn, next, to be taken out of the cage and tormented?

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Hey everybody, about six weeks ago when I posted Enjoying A Chained Man, I wound up exchanging emails with Molly Ren from Stuffies, who volunteered to assemble a guest post roundup of links and imagery featuring submissive men. Since that’s an area where ErosBlog is traditionally weak, I was delighted to encourage her. Here’s the result!

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Guest Post by Molly Ren
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Via Man Crush of the Day: This guy looks like he conveniently had too many at a frat party. ( link )

This gent isn’t being particularly submissive, but I’m jealous of that blow-up dolphin.

Androphilia posts a mix of non-sexual fine art and naked people. This photo is of a man deepthroating a foot.

Fuck Yeah Slave Boy provides this illustration of a delicate boy suspended in bondage.

Here’s a simple photo of someone with their hands bound behind their back.

Flickr user Cigno Nero has taken some beautiful photos of a man tagged “Ale“, some of which (like this one) barely hint at sex.

I have no idea where this .gif of a bound man hopping out of a closet is from.

And then there’s dilemma rope bondage.

My Daguerreotype Boyfriend posts non-pornographic images of hot men from the Victorian era. This dude appears to be handcuffed.

There’s also the perennial favorite, Male Submission Art, which is curated by Maymay. His image descriptions have gotten rather heavy, lately, but he still has good taste in images.

Also, this picture of an androgenous rider passionately kissing a centaur is one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen. I thought of Erosblog when I first saw it. Tumblr banded together in the notes to discover the name of the original artist, George Leonnec.

— MR
====================

Thanks, Molly!

I’m liking Roger Ebert the blogger way more than I ever liked Roger Ebert the TV movie reviewer. Apparently after last week’s blog about Playboy (which I mentioned here), he got a lot of flak because he (horrors!) included a Playmate photo in the blog post and didn’t include a NSFW warning for timorous puritans.

Well, his most recent blog post begins as a spirited defense of his posting the photo without an NSFW warning:

As a writer, it would have offended me to preface my article with a NSFW warning. It was unsightly — a typographical offense. It would contradict the point I was making. But others wrote me about strict rules at their companies. They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo? I wondered. Context didn’t matter. A nude was a nude. The assumption was that some people might be offended by all nudes.

I heard what they were saying. I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size (above) and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I’d still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.

This left me feeling more responsible, but less idealistic. I knew there might be people offended by the sight of a Playmate. I disagreed with them. I understood that there were places where a nude photo was inappropriate, and indeed agree that porn has no place in the workplace. But I didn’t consider the photograph pornographic.

He goes on to contrast our puritanical American attitudes about nudity with more relaxed standards prevailing in Europe, and to make a favorable comparison of the artistic merits of the photo with various bits of classical fine art that would have raised no eyebrows. The only weirdness about the piece is, after essentially defending the photo and his publication of it without a warning tag, and gently ridiculing at length the poke-noses who complained, he wraps the whole article up with two unexplained sentences in which he apologizes and says he won’t do it again:

In the future I will avoid NSFW content in general, and label it when appropriate. What a long way around I’ve taken to say I apologize.

What a long way indeed, Roger — and nothing in your blog post prepared us for that jarring and inconsistent conclusion to an otherwise fine if somewhat rambling blog. Is that something the Chicago Sun-Times told you they wanted to hear you say?

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This is what we all like to see: skill, enthusiasm, professionalism, and gusto, as applied to the fine art of sucking a dick.

A little more of this in the world and there’d be a lot less nonsense.

Two days ago I got a very good marketing email. This man pegged it, with brevity, clarity, simplicity and most importantly, with being on target about something I’m actually interested in here at Eros Blog, which is vintage nude photographs:

Hi!

I wanted to share a personal project that I thought you might like. A few years ago I started restoring nude 1950s pinups – I posted the restorations and the backstory at www.50nudes.com. I hope you enjoy the photos.

Cheers!

The only reason this is a “very good” marketing email instead of a “perfect” marketing email is the “personal project” terminology. While doubtless true — the restoration work is obviously a labor of love – the fellow is selling fine art prints of his work. I don’t think our man was trying to fudge that obvious commercial fact, but to make this the truly perfect marketing email, he might perhaps have omitted the word “personal”. But that’s just a style point; the judges at this point are arguing about whether it’s a 9.8 or a perfect 10.

His restoration work itself is beautiful, as these before-and-after details will show you:

I love that he’s included nice scans of his originals for comparison to the restorations, too.

On the other hand, I heartily dislike the fact that he’s blasted his logo across the originals, thus despoiling artifacts that are not his own creative work and appearing to claim something that’s not his to claim. But that’s a sin virtually everyone in the vintage photo business commits when they go online. It’s also a recognized peeve of mine, that I can and will be crochety about as a vintage image collector, without investing my cranky reaction with too much emotional weight.