Yesterday Bondage Blog posted excerpts from Peter Acworth’s recent essay about (as Bondage Blog called it) Coming Down From The Upper Floor. Apparently Acworth had a WTF moment in which he asked himself why there was “a giant portrait of me wearing a tuxedo in a gold frame?” That would be this portrait:

The fleshly frame around the gold frame goes at least part of the way toward answering that question, doesn’t it?

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One girl, one soft-serve ice cream machine:

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Not quite 10 years ago, I started exchanging emails with The Nymph after we met on a forum. When she finally decided to travel (a considerable distance!) so we could visit (me having a more inflexible job than her at the time) her sisters pitched a considerable fit because they thought that as “some man on the internet” I was probably going to dismember her and stow the parts in plastic trash bags; they’d seen it happen on some breathless television show, you understand.

Well, that’s not quite how it went, and we’re still happy together. So you’ll understand why I have considerable sympathy in me for this tale of a 19-year relationship that began on Prodigy and really got going with a first date that ended with a ride home to the folks in a police car:

My parents weren’t concerned that they never paid for my Prodigy usage nor did they understand why there never seemed to be any long-distance charges for calling the boy I’d met from New York City on the teen discussion message board.

Our parents didn’t mind us chatting online or talking on the phone, which we did for hours at a time thanks to a phone-phreaking acquaintance, and they didn’t object to us meeting in person. They just didn’t want to put much effort into making it happen.

I realized if I was ever going to hang out with the boy of my angsty, riot grrrl dreams, I’d have to do it on my own.

After yet another explosive fight with my parents, I told them I was going to the deli down the street to grab a sub, but instead, I called a taxi from a payphone. Before I left, I told my uncle where I was going and swore him to secrecy.

The taxi took me to the Trenton train station, which began my long trek to the wilderness of Staten Island–a place so backwards that it wasn’t totally wired for cable TV until the early 1990s. Even today, wild turkeys roam the streets.

From Trenton to Hoboken to the World Trade Center to the Whitehall ferry terminal to the Staten Island ferry terminal, where the boy was waiting for me in the arrivals hall decked out in his finest clothes of a Skinny Puppy T-shirt and Docs…

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Somebody has too many sex machines:

Found at Fifi’s place.

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Lydia Lee shares her bewilderment about choking scenes in porn in this post. The scenes exist, I’ve seen ’em. But I’m with Lydia on this one: I don’t understand why they’re supposed to be sexy. The best theory I can come up with (when the choking is done with a penis in the throat instead of hands around the neck) is that maybe it’s supposed to be somehow affirming of the vast size and virility of the male schlong. But as Lydia writes:

I know asphyxiation is a turn-on for many. It’s also dangerous alone because some people actually die, so having a partner — I suppose — is better than doing it alone and possibly dying. Still, I don’t see what’s sexy about it. There. I have had my Pollyanna moment. Though now I’m curious if there’s site dedicated to chokin’ man-bitches out?

That last is an interesting question, actually. I’d expect to find it in gay porn, which presumably has its own gonzo niches. More interesting from a gender-politics perspective would be a femdom version. I trust Rule 34; these things are probably out there. If they’re not, that would say something very interesting indeed about the gender politics of choking.

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More than five years ago, I posted a scan of a much-folded topless centerfold photo of a young and rather perky Sophia Loren. A helpful commenter partially identified the movie and volunteered that the topless scenes existed only in the French release. But I was not the porn researcher then that I am now, and I never followed up.

Well, it’s time to do that.

First, here’s a better-quality version of that same semi-nude photo, minus creases and branding:

The movie, it turns out, was Era lui… sì! sì! from 1951. (That means “It’s him… Yes! Yes!”) It turns out that they took quite a few different versions of the topless publicity shots, with slightly different posings, against that same background. Most were in black and white (at least the versions that have been published) like this one:

Exceptions exist, like this magazine spread (note the staple). However, the rather-fanciful color palette makes one wonder about subsequent colorization:

The caption to this next pair of shots (which appear to be scanned from a magazine) offers some confirmation of the “for the French version of the movie” tale, quoting Sophia Loren as saying:

“For the French version, they wanted me to have my chest bare. I did not want to but … I was hungry. After the scene, they come and say they must do some still pictures of me with nothing on top. I thought it had to be.”

Note the bikinis in the bottom “tame” version of the shot above. They appear to have been the costume for the non-French version of the actual movie, too. See this harem-girls scene:

Shall we take a moment at this time to sympathize with the actors playing the two harem guards standing there in the background? “I got a bit part, but nobody will ever see me — I’m standing in the background next to the hookah behind a bunch of half-naked harem girls! And they are all sooo hot!” “Shit, man, you might as well get cast as a potted plant!”

Anyway, in case you were wishing that harem scene I just showed you didn’t have the stupid flowery bikinis, don’t worry. We’ve got you (un)covered:

Now, how’s that for a more-adequate exposition of the whole “Sophia Loren topless in an old movie” blog post topic?

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As you already know, Dr. Faustus is at once a busy blogger and a patron of the arts. I am delighted to report that he also gave me a generous commission as soon as he learned of my new porn research and attribution service. He writes:

If you’re like me, you find yourself frequently enchanted by the gorgeous parade of erotic imagery that spills forth all over the Internet, yet often puzzled, vexed even, when confronting some especially appealing image that seems to completely lack provenance. It sits there in cyberspace, titillating you and raising questions: “Who created this?” “What was its original context or meaning?” and of course the all-important “And where can I find more like it?” There are a lot of image-search tools in the world, Google and Tineye and so forth, but there’s still something formidable about having a human being – a human being with a highly-developed erotic consciousness and an ability to identify with those of fellow human beings – look into matters.

…

As some of you already know, I run a bunch of tumblr blogs on the side, one for erotic mad science/sci-fi images, one for somewhat-ickier-than-usual erotic mad science/fantasy images, and one for miscellaneous erotic imagery I just happen to like. (And if you must know, I also run three PG-rated tumblers, devoted respectively to libraries, cities, and examples of cool classic technology.) I sifted through my erotic tumblrs and pulled down twenty images that I enjoyed but which I wished I could know more about. Shipped to Bacchus, and within a few days had at least something on all of them.

I owe thanks to Dr. Faustus not only for his patronage and his faith in me, but also for omitting to mention that my record was not really 100% on his commission. My own assessment was that I more-or-less failed on three of his twenty images, being able to find out little or nothing about them. But I sent him 17 attribution reports I was proud of, and he published three of them in full with his post. So that’s the place to look if you want to see some examples of what to expect from my little service.

As an update on that, several of my other paying customers to date have seemed more interested in “how do I find more like this” than in the “tell me what this is” service I’m currently offering. So I’m tempted to branch out. Is the world ready for personal porn concierges? Should I become a Rule 34 consultant?

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