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The Sex Blog Of Record
January 2nd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
From an article on the difficulties of starting a soft-core erotic printed-on-paper magazine in the modern world: “…attempting to recreate an aesthetic that died years ago in an industry that is collapsing in a medium that is declining.”
Yeah, that’s about right. Good luck with that!
December 30th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Every year around the holidays, we are likely to encounter at least one image of a woman trussed up and prepared for roasting, complete with apple in her mouth. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, and much depends on how the image is presented. But if it ever seems just a bit too much Hustler-magazine woman-in-meat-grinder for you, maybe it will help to put the apple in a male mouth for a change?
Image credit: Divine Bitches. More here.
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December 28th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
First, go read Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists (for a classic example of the braying mob trying to troll a fifteen-year-old girl off the internet by making rape jokes about her). It’s old hat to anybody who frequents internet discussion communities that lack consistent moderation, but it may be eye-opening to many of you because:
Many civilized people abandon communities like this LONG before the discussion falls to such a low level.
My mother was right about some things and wrong about many other things, but she was right about this: Who we are is, at least partially, defined and created by the company we keep. If you participate in a community that allows its tone to be set by a seeming majority of internet fuckwads, you may be a bit of an internet fuckwad yourself. If you didn’t start that way, the culture of fuckwaddery (like any other) is somewhat contagious; and even if your personal immune system is stronger than most, there’s still guilt-by-association to contend with.
There are ways to keep internet discussion communities non-toxic, but they all require substantial human effort. Sometimes it’s a moderation team with endless time, patience, and discretion; sometimes it’s a community moderation scheme backed up by a community with enough shared values in common to give the up-voting and down-voting some coherence. Sometimes (and this was more common in those legendary days of yore before all the assholes got on the internet, just ask any grey-bearded nethead and he’ll tell you, at length) a non-toxic internet discussion just happens, for a few hours or a few days or a few months. But that never lasts. Whatever the means by which non-shitty conversation happens on the internet, there usually comes a time when it stops happening, when the internet fuckwads begin to dominate the discourse, and all the interesting people get driven away.
The only exceptions I’ve seen have involved that “substantial human effort” I mentioned. Autocratic moderation or informal majoritarian censure, it takes work to keep a conversation civil after the fuckwads have begun to accumulate. And once that work begins to fail, as inevitably as Rome did, you’ll soon find that many of the conversational participants who made the conversation worth having are silenced or driven away by the booming echoing fuckwaddery.
I’m never seen a community recover from that.
So, once the conversation descends below a certain level, it may fairly be asked of the remaining participants: if you don’t consider yourself an internet fuckwad, why are you still there?
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December 27th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Comic book sex is always dirtier when they talk in French:
December 26th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
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 22nd, 2011 -- by Bacchus
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
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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