For an ErosBlog first, how about linking to the an article from Foreign Policy magazine? That’s what I’ve got for you today. The story is The Militarization of Sex and it’s about how Hezbollah in Lebanon has encouraged and expanded use of the mutaa temporary marriage institution to maintain its social control. The article makes it sound there’s a whole Craigslist-style mutaa scene:

Hezbollah’s legitimization of mutaa has created semi-official channels that Lebanese Shiites use to hook up. Hassan, a 30-year old Shiite from Beirut’s southern suburbs, is a high school teacher. He graduated from the Lebanese University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and considers himself secular but supports the resistance as a political, not a religious, movement. He is enthusiastic about the initiative taken by a number of Hezbollah party members and supporters to act as matchmakers between couples, and sometimes turn their shops, bookstores and workplaces into meeting places for young men and women.

“My cousin, a hard-core Hezbollah supporter, finds pleasure in using his mini-market as a hub where both men and women refer to him to hook them up in a temporary marriage. He even has Excel sheets to help him organize and control the contacts, and of course he practices temporary marriage himself,” he added with a smile.
…
There is also no shortage of ways that Shiite men and women make contact to form a temporary marriage; sometimes, the experience ends up bringing them closer to Hezbollah. Ali, for example, is a 26-year old man from southern Lebanon who has “temporarily married” a number of girls in the last two years. “I usually meet them in Hezbollah’s public library or the center, where young men and women gather to attend religious and political preaching,” he explained.

The men and women are put in separate rooms, but he finds a way to communicate. “If I want to approach a girl, I ask her for her number and call her later, but mostly I get approached by girls who directly ask me if I am interested in temporary marriage,” Ali said. “Although they are veiled from top to bottom, you can always guess how she looks like from her face and eyes,” he added with a wink.

And then there’s the female perspective:

Zahra, a fully veiled 25 year-old Shiite woman who is completing her master’s degree in English literature, comes from a family of Hezbollah supporters and party members, and has been a lifelong Hezbollah member herself. She explained that she practices temporary marriage because it is a religious duty.

“I take good care of myself, and make sure I look perfect every time I go into a mutaa marriage because I should please my husband, temporary or not,” she said. “It is my religious duty to do so. God allowed this kind of marriage for a reason, and I never question God’s wishes.”

Zahra is divorced and believes that Islam has acknowledged sexual desires for both males and females, which is why temporary marriage is permissible. “It is also a religious duty to fulfill your sexual desires,” she insisted, noting that temporary marriages with women whose husbands had been killed fighting Israel were especially encouraged. “[T]hose who satisfy widows of martyrs have more reward in heaven,” she said.

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.

I’ve always been a sucker for double and triple entendre. The completely deniable filthy joke (“Only the dirtiest-minded person could possibly think I meant that!”) is the best.

Which is why I am delighted by this excellent shirt design:

The words, alone, might be a bit obnoxious. But with the clouds and rain? Why, it’s a simple celebration of His guiding hand behind every natural phenomenon. A pastor’s daughter known for her environmental consciousness (and who has a deep streak of mischief) could wear it with aplomb, and nobody (but her father, of course) would dare to say “Boo!” to her about it.

I love it.

And then there’s this holiday gem, perfect for every cookie-baking mother you know:

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Whatever I was expecting from my new Twitter account, I can tell you truly, I did not really anticipate it would be a fertile source of answers for that age-old question: What should I blog about today?

And yet, this morning in my Twitter stream I found the following, any one of which I could churn into a full blog post on a slow day:

• @violetblue asking “wondering: what sex toy changed your life?” My flip-sounding answer (but it’s true!): “WordPress. (And its ancestors.)” The beauty of Twitter is that I can just say that and let people unpack it for themselves, whereas if I said it here, I’d need eighteen paragraphs of exposition. But @MollyRen has part of it: “Sex blogs changed my life. For the 1st time I found out what people were *really* doing, met awesome people through them.”
• @mistressmatisse linking to her Stranger column about shooting for Kink.com The excellent quote I would have used to pad a link-post about this item:
  

  Before we began shooting, I asked Bobbi about her limits. She eyed me a little warily. “Don’t slap me in the face–someone dislocated my jaw that way. And don’t call me a stupid whore or spit in my face.”

  I was slightly taken aback. It isn’t that I’ve never done those things. (Except the “stupid whore” part; I don’t like that brand of verbal humiliation.) But I wouldn’t do them to someone I just met unless he or she very specifically asked for that. I suppose it’s different in porn, but I assured her that wasn’t my style of domination.

  So Bobbi and I got along just fine.

• @rollertrain (Rollertrain! I’ve missed you terribly since you left us for art school and moved to a not-many-words PG-13 Tumblr…) passing along a link that informed me of a woman who died after elective buttock-enhancement surgery.
• @MollyRen again, this time her profile link: “Stuffies: A blog about food and sex“. Leading directly to a question for Faustus: Do you suppose feederism, with its sometimes interest in controlling body size/shape in a real and concrete way, has anything in common with the fantastical shrinking women and inflation fantasies you’ve blogged about? (And, yes, I’m aware of the awkwardness of specifying “fantastical fantasies” — but how else to contrast a fantasy that cannot come true, from the great many achievable ones?)

All that hit me inside of ninety seconds, whilst I was still blinking the sleep from my eyes. My head, it’s swimming I tell you!

I scoffed. I balked. I dug in my heels like a crochety old person. Kids these days, and their newfangled fads. It will never amount to anything, I said. Waste of my time. If I wanted to send funny little short messages, I’d have texting enabled on my cell phone. Blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, the world kept right on changing without me.

Slow I may be, but I am finally figuring it out: people I find interesting are having conversations I want to know about, and they’re doing it on Twitter.

So, here goes. My Twitter name is: ErosBlogBacchus.

Better late than never, eh?

It’s not every day that one of my favorite and longest-running sidebar-linked sex bloggers does a porn shoot with my favorite porn production company. In fact, it’s never happened before. So, I’m delighted to announce that Mistress Matisse’s shoot for Kink.com (at their Everything Butt site) has finally gone live.

Now, mind you, given our long virtual association, it would strike me as a little bit weird to show you the closeups of Mistress Matisse cheerfully shoving a huge black dildo up Bobbi Starr’s butt, no matter how much of a hottie you think Bobbi might be (which she totally is). And, to be honest, the free photos and trailer from the shoot don’t show us as much of Mistress Matisse as I was hoping for. As is typical, the focus in a Kink.com shoot is on the submissive in a large majority of the pictures. Fortunately, as a stalwart affiliate I get some extra perks, including member access to the shoots when I need it. Which is how I can bring you Mistress Matisse in living color [note: the Everything Butt image I had here at first has been replaced, at her gracious but emphatic request, by a different image she provided, because she thought the EB image unflattering]:

Here [we return now to the originally-scheduled Everything Butt photos] she is in the world’s most barren office, hard at work with the cutting-edge info tech of the early twentieth century:

Whatever her job, though, you cannot argue with perks that include Bobbi Starr:

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A helpful reader sent in this link to a collection of scans from John Willie’s famous Bizarre magazine: