November 1st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
His Face Between Her Breasts
Every man understands this impulse:
Artwork is from the cover of Sexopolis #10.
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October 31st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Dancing For A Rough Crowd
“Trick or Treat” is a rough game in the City of The Dead; you knock on the wrong door and you’ve really got to hustle to earn your way back out to the street in living condition. Candy? Yeah, good luck with that:
Art is from the cover of a horror pulp.
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October 30th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
“Hey, Mister, Wanna Fight?”
I came across this topless boxing cutie while researching the faux-vintage pumpkin flapper photos yesterday. Our boxing babe, I think, may genuinely be vintage in her origins.
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October 29th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
That Burlesque Halloween Flapper Chick
A little while ago when @whoresofyore tweeted the above photo out under the hashtag #VintageHalloween I knew I was finally going to have to get off my ass and get this shit in order. I thought I might get something special for my patrons out of it (which didn’t happen, in the event) but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more.
Here is (was) my problem.
I’ve been seeing that photo (and several more from the same series) every Halloween for many years. And why not? The flapper-esque blonde is cute as a button, her tits are perky, and the burlesque Halloween thing is too fun and cute and Betty Boop not to love.
So, my first-stage reaction was “I need to track down that whole series of photos. It would make an awesome Halloween gallery. And if it’s really as old as the some of the clues would indicate, it’s bloody amazing; I want to know more about where these photos come from!”
Sadly, my second-thoughts reaction was “There’s something wrong here. The Halloween iconography is too modern; this is 1950s cheesecake pinup staged as late 1930s burlesque produced with 1920 flappers published by 1900s postcard publishers. Just a whole mishmash of subtle anachronisms.”
My particular problem was with the ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and black cat and happy-skeleton stuff all brought together in one display. You see all of these elements in Halloween imagery going back at least to the Victorians, but a comic erotic burlesque of them? My first mental/visual reference for a thing like that would be the painted cheesecake pinups of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I would be really excited to find them all in a real-photo pinup postcard series from then, but from decades earlier as these photos superficially appear to be? That would be…astonishing.
But hey, a cynical skepticism, no matter how well-informed, is no substitute for doing the work, which for a project like this is quite considerable. Basically, my method is recursive image searching; I start with the first image, and while searching for the largest, best, most-original scan of it, I also look for any pages that offer any provenance, and I also look at all of the “similar images” that the image search engines throw up, saving anything else from the series that turns up. And then I proceed through each of those in stepwise fashion, doing the same for them. It’s a slow, often-tedious, and painstaking process.
There were early indications that something was hinky about this image set.
One thing that bothered me was that diamond “MG” logo. It’s very much like the logos used by photo postcard publishers going back to the turn of the twentieth century and before. Only, a logo like that is typically the initials of the publisher, it’s a handy reference, and it’s usually easy to Google. Those two letters in quotes, “postcard”, and Bob’s your uncle. Collectors and auctioneers are all over that shit. Here? Nothing.
Another thing that bothered me was that as an iron rule, the best-quality scans I was turning up were always 805 pixels wide. That indicated a common digital place of entry onto the internet. Theoretically possible if these photos were from, say, a set of postcards in the hands of a collector, with no other exemplars known; but in practice, usually genuine vintage photos exist in a wide variety of (usually small and terrible) scans of different sizes.
More subtly but also damning, no provenance for any of the photos from the set was turning up. They were widely distributed in copy-and-paste collections of vintage photos, usually mixed with genuine vintage photographs from the “French postcard” and burlesque eras. But nobody had ever taken the time to curate these together into a common gallery. This could just an artifact of digital decay (there’s an awful lot of the adult internet gone missing from the 1997-2007 era) but sometimes it means that the source was known and that the folks doing the copy-and-paste felt constrained from acknowledging that source. But why, if the photos were truly vintage?
As is usually the case, there was just one clue, a single fragile provenance, one person who took the time to drop a credit, that broke the entire mysterious case wide open. One of these images, on a Tumblr that has not yet gotten autoflagged and force-vanished behind the Verizon #pornocalypse Tumblr-porn event horizon, had a link credit to a Deviant Art source, where the photo had been posted more than a dozen years ago by a photographer from the Ukraine who has not been back to DeviantArt since 2005. The photographer went by “MGstudio” (note those “MG” initials) and gave their URL as marthasgirls.com in their DeviantArt profile. Martha’s Girls is a website I vaguely remember; it’s defunct now, but for many years and until sometime in 2016, it ran an old-fashioned subscription paysite selling “The finest emulations of vintage erotica and pin-up, spanning the period from the Victorian times to the 50s pin-up era.” Ding ding ding ding DING! The mystery is solved.
So these are modern, not vintage; they are a formerly-available commercial porn product by an unknown photographer from Dnipropetrovsk whose artistry I quite admire. My hope is that by assembling them here, it will be less likely for future enthusiasts to make the all-too-easy mistake of believing them to be vintage. If you know of more photos from this series, please let me know!
Happy Halloween, and enjoy!
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October 28th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Share Our Shit Saturday! #SoSS
As I explained yesterday, today marks the start of a new meme for sex bloggers and anybody else producing adult content on the free/independent/open/ web. There are no rules per se; but the general idea is that you use your open web platform to highlight some porn stuff you admire that’s on somebody else’s open web platform. The price of using these old-fashioned #pornocalypse-resistant “real websites” is the difficulty of getting links, traffic, and attention; the purpose of this meme is to ameliorate that difficulty a little bit. Without further ado:
- Here’s a guest post at Girl On The Net’s blog by porn performer Charlie Ten talking about her view of ethical porn — something that we don’t talk about enough, mostly because it gives the mindless porn-haters too many opportunities to spout their anti-porn nonsense. But it’s still an important conversation, when you can find people of good will, willing to to have it.
- The 99th episode of Elust at Molly’s Daily Kiss deserves a shout-out in this first #SSoS because the Elust enterprise is a detailed, high-quality, curated sort of project that’s very much in the same spirit. #SSoS is by no means a new concept; we used to call this sort of things “link roundups” and they were a major blog-sociability concept back when social-media was barely dreamed-of. By my lights, Elust is an honored veteran and survivor from the olden days. Elust takes submissions, too!
- I’m linking to Bex’s Five Easy Ways To Give A Blowjob With A Condom for a nostalgic reason that might make sense to nobody else. Way back in 2003 I linked to a ridiculously pornified set of “how-to” photographs of a woman putting a condom on a man’s dick with her mouth; some years later, after that link was long broken, I rescued those photos using the Internet Archive, and they are now on ErosBlog But they are, no question, more porn than how-to. Bex’s post offers a two-minute video on condom application by mouth that’s far more useful from an educational perspective. Highly recommended.
- The world needs more blogs like The Rialto Report, which bills itself without false modesty as “oral history, audio, photo, and documentary archives from the golden age of adult film in New York, and beyond”. The post I’m sharing today is an interview with Steven Ziplow, who is the author of 1977’s The Filmmaker’s Guide To Pornography — perhaps the first-ever textbook of adult film-making. In the best Rialto Report tradition, a complete downloadable copy of the book is included in the post.
- Ms. Naughty has been making porn websites since 2000 (!) and this summer she wrote an article called Six Things Today’s Internet Could Learn From Old School Porn Websites. As she says, “there was a time when porn did its best to be respectful to the surfer and tried hard not to piss them off because we knew that a happy, non-harassed surfer was more likely to trust you and to buy something.” She’s not wrong.
October 27th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
To Survive The Pornocalypse: Share Our Shit Saturdays (#SoSS)
It’s been a #pornocalypse kind of week here at ErosBlog central, between the Patreon news (and there have been further developments I haven’t updated, but nothing that changes the essential core of the story) and the unwelcome but unsurprising news that the ErosBlog twitter account is shadowbanned. For them as don’t know, that latter thing means I’ve been partially stealth-muted; my tweets no longer show up in any twitter searches (even for people who have found the hidden default hide-the-porn settings and turned them off) and when I address people by @name who don’t already follow me, they can’t hear me. So, yeah, I’m now in the same category as nazi bots and people who yell fuck at verified accounts all day, woot go me. Why? Fuck if I know, call it pornocalypse and move on, I have better things to worry about.
Such as: worrying about how the free and independent open web (which means, those of us whose stuff is on our own domains and servers, not on some “free” social media site or blogging/picture service that can change the rules without notice) are going to survive long enough that we’ll still be here when the rubble stops bouncing. Because this shit cannot last. Blockchain tech and peer-to-peer and strong crypto and supercomputers in every pocket and software radios strong enough to bounce streaming video off of hobbyist drone balloons in the jet stream and more awesome cryptoanarchist shit of that sort that I’m too old and slow to understand: it’s not just coming, it’s already here, it’s just not been patched together properly yet. And when that happens, Facebook is dead. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard? Dead. Patreon and all the other crowdfunding middlemen? Dead. Twitter and Google? Dead. Oh, we’ll have things that look like social media and payments and search and crowdfunding, but they won’t be gatekeepers, they won’t be censors, and they won’t suck more than a microfraction out of any transaction. Because if they try, they’ll be ignored and replaced in real time.
The trick, as it’s always been, is to survive in the meanwhile. Head down, shoulder to the harness because the mules are dead, do the work. If you can’t rely on social media, don’t trust it and don’t invest in it; but use it for what it’s still good for, and be ready to skip briskly to shore (or to the next boat) when the party barge you’re on today gives its final gurgle. And above all, keep your home island solid.
Girl On The Net, always brilliant, made a very smart post about this a few days ago in response to the unhappy Patreon news. In Sex Blogger SOS: Share Our Shit, she points out first the problem:
Patreon is not the first — and it definitely won’t be the last — company to try and purge adult content from its platform. Tumblr has done it, Twitter does it in drips and drabs (stripping adult content from search, banning accounts with adult avatars and headers, etcetera), Facebook has always been a giant prick about adult content so no change there. Payment providers are usually clear from the outset that they don’t want our money. Ad platforms like Google Ads and Amazon Affiliates don’t want our traffic or money either. No one likes us. We’re just too goddamn sexy.
Alongside being really fucking difficult to make a living from, adult content is also really difficult to market.
And then she offers a solution:
However, when platforms like this strip ‘adult’ from their services, they are banking on the fact that you won’t care. That it won’t make a difference to you because adult content is embarrassing and shameful: no one’s going to share a link to their favourite porn site, or their favourite bit of erotic writing, so really who’s going to notice if all that shit disappears?
I’ll notice, gang. I will notice. And I hope you will too.
So here’s my SOS: share our shit. Share your favourite posts, images, videos, tweets, facebook updates. Links to porn sites where people can pay for amazing stuff. Recommend great erotica to your friends. Make it clear to large platforms that the consumers who click on Amazon and Google ads, who buy clothes and books and video games: these consumers also enjoy porn! And erotica! And other forms of sex! It is not utter fantasy, just a boring and simple truth, that the venn diagram of ‘consumers’ and ‘adult consumers’ is a circle. This is important because when platforms push sex content into a silo they’re effectively telling people that sex is different to anything else that humans do. It should be separate. We should take a surgical blade to our brains and our lives and neatly slice sex from the rest of it.
So find your favourite sex content, and share that shit. Retweet it, promote it, email it to your friends. While we’re getting stripped from search results and pulled from Patreon and told that we can only do our thing on Facebook if we shroud it in censor bars and euphemism… we’ll see you sharing our shit, and it will help us keep going. It will bring more people to our websites, and perhaps help us either make more money or build more traffic and that in turn will keep us going too.
She’s aiming this plea outward, rhetorically speaking, from the sex blogger community, and I think that’s smart. But I think it makes almost as much sense internally. We who have our own websites could stand to do a better job of strengthening our internal networking, not just with the passive and outdated “blogrolls” that are becoming rare (with good reason, since few read or click them anymore) but by means of more active engagement with each other’s writing and work. To that end, I am proposing a new blog meme.
I’m going to call this one “Saturday Share Our Shit” (#SSoS) and I imagine it as something like the old link roundups that used to be popular. But I want this one to be optional, occasional, fun, and easy, much like Follow Friday in its heyday. So you don’t have to do it every Saturday, it isn’t mandatory, there’s no set amount of links or set amount of discussion for each one. I’m thinking maybe three links with a sentence or two about each, but here’s the core notion: you put this on your own website, not on a tumblr or a blogspot or facebook or any other social media. And the content you share and promote? Should likewise be content that’s on the independent web, not on anybody’s “free” social media server anywhere. Once your #SSoS post is up on any given Saturday, then, sure: promote the shit out of it on any social media that will allow the promotion. That’s a given. But this meme is all about promoting what’s left of the open web, on what’s left of the open web. And then we use social media to promote our content, instead of using our media to promote their content. Capiche?
I’ll see you tomorrow!
Update: In honor of the fact that I haven’t been able to keep the hashtag straight twice in a row yet, which bodes poorly for the notion that anybody else will either, I have uttered a lordly proclamation:
I hereby further declare in my capacity as Bacchus, Lord of Drunken Misrule, that hashtags #SSoS or #SoSS are both and each perfectly fine.
— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017
See also:
This revolution has room for two hashtags!
— ErosBlog Bacchus (@ErosBlogBacchus) October 28, 2017
In short, don’t worry about it!
October 26th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
Light Fuse And Get Away
This is not, as it would at first appear, what the engineering wags used to call a “Wernher von Braun divorce” — indeed, the device our svelte maiden is strapped into is not even a rocket, despite all appearances:
According to Weird Universe, that’s Miss Margaret Travis, preparing with something less than full enthusiasm to demonstrate something called the Shapson Aquaplane at Santa Monica, California in 1935. It was, supposedly, a crank-operated device allowing a swimmer to achieve a speed of 12 knots through the water, although it seems not to have caught on as a technology.
Here’s a newspaper clipping and photo featuring a different model and swimmer, one Bobbie Sperry, whose facial expression suggests she’s even less impressed than Ms. Travis with inventor S. Shapiro and his whizbang device:
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