For several months now the noise around virtual-reality porn has been growing louder and louder in my inbox and on the porn-business social media feeds I see. Although market penetration on VR headsets is still short of what the porn companies selling these products would like it to be, headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists and everybody I’ve talked to thinks that if 2016 wasn’t quite the breakout year for VR as a ubiquitous consumer technology, 2017 almost certainly will be.
Meanwhile we are seeing development of robustly useful aggregation sites like the one at VR Porn, where they tell me their goal is to bring all the adult VR content from all the different VR porn studios together in one convenient place. They offer free short trailers and clips and the usual links for purchasing the full product. The trailers and sample stills are decently high-resolution and give you a good idea what you are getting, as in the case of this WankzVR video starring Marica Hase:
What really sets VRPorn.com apart is that they have also compiled an enormous catalog of free sex-themed VR downloads, including CGI animations, anime-type short movies, and free porn-game apps that run on the various VR platforms. It’s the first place I’ve seen that offers a well-curated and useful collection of adult VR free content to complement their paid VR porn offerings, and although the free stuff varies in quality as you would expect and is frequently short and/or fairly simple, some of it is visually very fine indeed, like this elf-girl riding the viewer cowgirl-style:
Remember up at the top of the post when I mentioned that VR headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists? I learned some more about that when I began to peruse the VRPorn.com blog, which focuses not just on the porn but includes updates about the burgeoning VR industry as a whole. According to the post Weekday VR Update: November 14, 2016, this is to be the first year when headsets will be discounted on Black Friday:
This is the first Black Friday where VR head mounted displays, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, will see some Black Friday love. The first of which is Best Buy, who plans to offer a $100 store credit when a consumer purchases an Oculus Rift head mounted display. Second, Microsoft will also be offering a $100 store gift card with the purchase of either an Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive through their Microsoft Store.
The blog at VRPorn.com may actually be one of the site’s more amazing assets. It’s not an afterthought or a parade of press releases; it’s a content-rich stream that includes things like this incredibly-detailed review of a third-party VR game being developed via Patreon that’s called VR Titties. The review is like 25 paragraphs long with dozens of screenshots, a level of detail that is perhaps necessary given the number of customization sliders in the game:
But my point here is that these guys are VR porn enthusiasts. Yes, they want to sell you some porn for your VR headset, but they are also obviously and genuinely interested in all the sexy things you can do with it. It’s the first site I’ve seen with such a useful mix of resources, and should be a regular stop for any VR afficionado who reads ErosBlog.
This image is credited: Feminist Art Program, Fresno State University, CUNT Cheerleaders, 1970-1971.
I couldn’t turn up anything definitive about what in particular the FAP was trying to communicate with this image; the best information I found was this:
In 1970 Judy Chicago took a one-year teaching position at Fresno State University (now California State University-Fresno) and started the Feminist Art Program (FAP). Her and twenty-plus students — all women — held classes off campus (in former military barracks) and basically set up their own curriculum. Their focus was on developing a visual language to talk about their experiences as women and how gender had conditioned their lives.
There’s a famous 1931 German film called Mädchen in Uniform about a repressive Prussian-style boarding school for young women. Let’s allow B. Ruby Rich writing in Jump Cut to help frame the movie’s context for us:
If we are to understand Maedchen In Uniform fully, it is important to keep in view the society within which it was made. It was the celebrated milieu of Berlin-avant-la-guerre, the Berlin with dozens of gay and lesbian bars and journals, the Berlin of a social tolerance so widespread that it nearly camouflaged the underlying legal restraints (which were to grow, rapidly, into massive repression).
Although Mädchen is primarily understood in our time as an early film about lesbianism, and is most notorious visually for a kissing scene between student and instructor (of which more later), the film is said to have been primarily appreciated by its contemporary German audience for its anti-authoritarian sentiments. From an IMDB review:
Though the film goes as far as it can in its theme of (awakening) lesbian feelings and sexual feelings of young girls in general, shifting emphasis automatically meant concentrating on the theme of the cold and inhumane authoritarian (Prussian) way of life and upbringing, a way of thinking still present in the Weimar republic and in 1931 already considered a danger to the young republic. Then audiences were more interested in this aspect than in the sexual one… A political stand this film certainly takes not, but, as the original title “Yesterday and Tomorrow” says, this film makes a plea for a more liberal and humane society. Of course the film was banned after the Nazi take-over (though for some obscure reason Goebbels liked the film “as film”).
Here’s Rich in Jump Cut again with more to say about that:
Most important to the film’s reputation through the years has been its significance as an antiauthoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film. To be sure, the film has suitable credentials for such a claim. Any film so opposed to militarism, so anti-Prussian, so much in support of the emotional freedom of women, must be an anti-fascist film. Add to such factors the fact that the film was made on the very eve of Hitler’s rise to power, just prior to the annexation of the film industry to Goebbel’s cultural program, and the legend of Sagan’s proto-subversive movie is secure. In emphasizing the film’s progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film’s central concern with love between women.
In my considered opinion, overlooking that must have taken considerable effort!
And what of the celebrated kissing scene in the dormitory?
Here’s the clip:
Rich in Jump Cut is much better than me at describing what we just saw there:
The scene is set in the dormitory on Manuela’s first night in the school. It is filmed with the soft focus and radiant light of a Romantic painting, say one by Friedrich. The lights are even dimmed, by Fraulein von Bernburg herself on-screen, to make the scene more seductive to the viewer. All the girls are poised on the edge of their beds, kneeling in identical white gowns, heads upraised to receive the communion of her lips touching their foreheads, which she holds firmly and ritually as she administers each kiss.
Rich again:
This extreme fetishizing of the kiss, by both the nature of the teacher’s gestures and director Sagan’s cinematographic style, is emblematic of the unspoken codes of repressive tolerance. The kiss is permitted, to each alike, but it is at once the given and the boundary. Nothing more may be allowed or even suggested, although the tension of that which is withheld suffuses the scene with its eroticism of shimmering light and grants the teacher her very power. The kiss is the minimum and the maximum, a state of grace and a state of stasis. The entire equilibrium is founded upon this extreme tension – which is snapped when Manuela, overwhelmed by the atmosphere and her feelings, breaks the rules. She throws her arms around Fraulein von Bernburg’s body in a tight embrace and receives, not a punishment, but a kiss. A kiss, not merely on the forehead, but full on the lips.
Without spoiling the subsequent plot of the movie for you, it ends surprisingly well, with no tragic suicides or dire fates. But Rich, writing in the 1980s about this 1930s film, makes an argument about the movie’s ending that’s still compelling today:
The bells and bugles that sound periodically throughout the film, casting a prophetic pall upon the love of Manuela and Fraulein von Bernburg, are waiting just outside the gates for us as well. The ending of the film can be interpreted as a warning to heed to forces mounting outside our narrow zones of victory and liberation. When, at the film’s end, the Principal appears to be defeated, she exits through a darkened hallway. But at the end of the hallway is the light of the outdoors, site of the buglers and the patriarchal forces mobilizing against any such victory.
The Nazis didn’t just ban this film, they tried to burn all the copies (source). Fortunately, they failed; some prints had already been dispersed outside Germany, and a very few of those survived the war.
Yes, yes, of course you do not need to ask: “Cranberry Bag Vent Hole” is available to be the name of your next punk band. You may have it; I give it freely.
According to an article in New Scientist, there’s a gay dentist from Taiwan who wants to give people the opportunity to remake their mouths for better oral sex:
Dentistry, for example, considers three functions for the oral cavity: aesthetics, pronunciation and mastication. “There is another function, sex, which is never mentioned in the textbooks,” says Ku. “I’m from the gay community and I realised that the medical school is a very patriarchal system, very serious, and the professors are very traditional, particularly in Asian countries. So I wanted to approach that relationship.”
Instead of treating disease and restoring normal function to the mouth, Ku imagines dentists enhancing it along one particular line, the act of performing fellatio. To do this, he created retainers which offer a more intense sexual experience for your partner.
Of course, Ku’s vision of better blowjobs through mad science encompasses more than just a few silicone dimples for the roof of your mouth:
The dimpled retainer is just stage one of Ku’s imaginative vision. Further iterations involve the introduction of living tissue onto the prosthetic for a more lifelike feel, and ultimately grafting these living protrusions into the mouth cavity for a permanent upgrade to your oral prowess. While tissue engineering exists for restoring normal sexual function, such as lab-grown vaginas, this would take the practice into the arena of human enhancement.
“With this design no one knows you love oral sex,” says Ku. “But in the second part of the project we change the appearance of the mouth, to show your sexual preference by your appearance.” Like birds with specialised beaks, Ku imagines a world where we don’t simply embrace our diverse sexuality, but mould our bodies into a vibrant expression of it.
