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The Sex Blog Of Record
November 23rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
I continue to be impressed with the way that mainstream journalism continues to improve its coverage of adult topics. The swift, painful, and on-going ass-kicking that pre-internet commercial journalism has received in the internet age probably has something to do with it, but hey, I’ll take it.
The latest example to catch my eye is this neutral “local business profile” piece in the Las Vegas Weekly, profiling Paradise Electro Stimulations, makers of the P.E.S. line of electrosex (e-stim) toys. Not long ago, a company that makes products with names like “Rectal Pacifier” and “Corona Stimulator with Focusing Pods” would not have gotten the usual “meet our corporate citizens” friendly-profile treatment. Instead, they would have got a sneering “look at these perverts” article if they got mentioned at all.
I’m liking the 21st Century better and better:
Paradise Electro Stimulations, a company founded in the Bay Area but now based right here in Las Vegas, has been bringing erotic electro stimulation (e-stim, for short) to curious adults for more than 20 years. Described by its manager as “the best kept secret” in town, I visited the company headquarters and its adjoining sex shop (that’s The Studio) to see what the (ahem) buzz is about.
First things first: What is e-stim? Erotic e-stim is the use of low-frequency electrical stimulation on the tissue and nerves of male and female genitals.
Most importantly, it isn’t about pain.
“The automatic assumption is shock, cattle prod, Taser, electric fence,” says Anna Fay, who has been doing marketing, customer service, research and development and almost everything else at P.E.S. for nearly a decade. “With this product, it’s not about shock.”
She adds, “You can torture someone by edging them, keeping them from climax, but it’s not about inflicting pain.” Actually, many customers are able to achieve a hands-free orgasm using P.E.S., Fay says. If that’s torture, sign me up.
The simplest form of e-stim comes in the form of electrodes you can insert into the body, as well as various rings. For more advanced users, self-adhesive electrodes are also available. All the electrodes are connected to a power box with knobs to control the pulses and frequencies.
The story goes on in that vein for awhile — the reporter even grasps an electrode and reports on the sensations — before concluding on a pleasure-positive note:
Whatever the reason that first brings customers into the store, Fay says few have hesitations at the checkout stand. “I’m amazed at people who come in completely cold and jump right in,” she says.
I’m less surprised. People will do (or pay) anything for the promise of more pleasure. That they’ll ante up for e-stim isn’t much of a (pardon the pun) shock.
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November 20th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
A couple of weeks ago I kvetched mildly about the limited “furry” support in the 3D SexVilla software I’ve been playing with, saying:
Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion.
Now, mind you, I’m aware that this is a little bit like complaining that the dancing bear isn’t much of a square dancer and couldn’t do-si-do his way out of a wet paper bag.
Doesn’t matter. This is the 21st century, my software toys are supposed to do what I tell them to. Fortunately, that’s generally just a matter of waiting for the next update. And so it proved in this case. Guess what? Now with Bunny ears!
This time around, it’s not “You’re the girl, so you have to be the bunny” either. Guys can wear the ears too, and will if properly cajoled:
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November 19th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Mistress Matisse was writing about her shoot earlier in the week for Everything Butt, when she diverged onto a tangent about anal hygiene. (Bluntly: how to wipe your ass.) She wrote:
I myself have been playing with people’s asses for a long time, and I am a little casual about it. No, I am not into scat. Yes, if you want me to play with your ass, you should definitely clean it up. (I cannot tell you how many boys I have seen over the years who did not even wipe themselves properly. I’m serious. I think little boys do not get trained about wiping themselves as much as little girls do, or something.
Here’s how you do it, gentlemen. While you are still sitting, wipe, and then look at the toilet paper. Is it dirty? Drop it, get a fresh handful and wipe again. Repeat this until the paper shows no smudges. Is that clear? The while you’re sitting part is important because it means your ass is more spread open and thus easier to clean.)
When I saw that, I boggled, and then I went back and read it again. Nope, still boggled.
So: “No. No, that is not clear. Not at all clear. In fact, it is perfectly perplexing.”
I refer specifically to the charge that one should conduct this operation while sitting. More specifically: What? The? Fuck?
I am somewhat larger than the average bear. Mistress Matisse, doubtless, is somewhat smaller than me (this is understatement). But I still do not understand how she, or anyone else, can wipe their ass whilst still sitting firmly on the toilet, unless: 1) they have been endowed with the mysterious power of passing their hand (and bumwad) through porcelain as if it were air, or 2) they have an ass that is less than six inches wide or nine inches long.
I have numbers to back this up. I went to my bathroom and measured my toilet seat. It is standard; I know this to be so because I bought it from Wal-Mart. The hole in the seat is an ellipse, approximately 8.5 inches on the minor axis (width) and 11 inches on the major axis (length).
The diameter of my hand across the base while grasping a wad of paper in a loose fist is approximately four inches. This, admittedly, is much larger than usual; I have huge hands. Let’s divide that by two — I’ve met women with hands half the size of my own.
So, thus. Assume that one positions the organ of excretion approximately over the center of the hole, for symmetry and avoidance of extraneous mess. While sitting in that position, in order to reach through the hole and into the bowl (where the area to be wiped is positioned, if one follows the Mistress’s directions) there would need to be a gap larger than two inches, somewhere.
Let’s rule out going in from the front (might work for a woman if she had two elbows and rubber bones, but a man has complicating topology.) One side or the other might sort of work, albeit inefficiently due to the orientation of the axis of the butt crease; but that would require sitting on the throne in a significantly lopsided way, with the business at hand being more than two inches off center — a bad idea given that we’ve only got just over eight inches to work with here.
No, I assume that she’s proposing to reach around and go in from behind, to take advantage of local topological conditions. And that means that her instructions will only work for people who have, when sitting, butt cheeks that occupy at least two inches less than the five and a half inches present between the center of the seat hole and the rear edge. So, doing the math, 5.5 minus 2.0 equals 3.5. Quod erat demonstrandum; if, when seated, your butt print extends more than three and a half inches to the rear of your anus, Mistress Matisse’s instructions are not practical.
When I was four years old, I was about that size, and used a procedure much like the recommended one; but not once I grew even unto the size of a middle schooler.
From all of this we must conclude one of two things. Either Mistress Matisse is considerably smaller than hitherto suspected, or by “sitting” she means some version of that squatting/hovering/crouch maneuver that lithe women are said to use in deeply disgusting public bathrooms. Which would certainly be possible, only why didn’t she say so? And why would she go to that extra effort, when, even standing, it’s really not that hard to wipe until, as she puts it, “the paper shows no smudges”? (Personally, and this will be TMI if nothing else so far has been, I’m a fan of those moisturized cleansing wipes that come in a discrete plastic tub for storage on the top of your toilet tank. They do a much better job than paper.)
Or, just as possible, there’s some flaw in my assumptions. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody wipe their ass from any less than about thirty feet away, and that would have been outside under hunting camp conditions where no throne was present and no ass play was incipient. Maybe everybody but me shits into the front two inches of their toilet, directly onto the sloping porcelain above the water line (accepting the extra cleaning burden) to leave room for just such post-elimination procedures. I dunno.
What I do know, what I already knew, is that women are alien creatures, who sometimes speak to us in what sounds like the language we know, but the words (individually clear and distinct) convey nothing but confusion and perplexity when considered together.
November 18th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Some of the user-generated galleries at Met Art are spectacular. Case in point: Bath time!
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November 17th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Following neatly from my last post which mentioned the “castle of kink” maintained by Kink.com in the Old Armory building in San Francisco, Mistress Matisse (who went down to San Francisco to do a shoot) painted a delightful (if somewhat surreal) word picture of what it was like to spend the night there. This is not the jacuzzi in the infamous Grotto at the Playboy Mansion, that’s for sure!
I want you to imagine an enormous warehouse. Huge. Big enough to comfortably house, say, a DC-9. It might be even bigger, but the bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling only dimly illuminate the raw and rather dirty walls and concrete floor, so the furthest corners simply fade into unmeasurable blackness.
There’s some detritus here and there — pallets, tarps, boxes — but it’s mostly empty, except for four cars parked in the center of the room, and in one far corner, an RV. A gallery runs around the perimeter of the room, at second-floor height. The lights don’t reach it, so it’s impossible to see what — or who — is up there.
And in one corner of this vast, chilly room, there’s a hot tub. And in that hot tub, quite alone, and naked, is me — lounging against the jets and smiling to myself at the oddity of it. Here I am, in what is arguably the kinkiest place in town, and I am engaged in that most vanilla of all the pseudo-sexy experiences, hot-tubbing. Alone. Edgy, huh? Not so much.
I am choosing to ignore the fact that there is a security camera nearby, and there is a security guard sitting, with a bank of screens in front of him, just a few hundred feet away from me. He’s around a corner, out of sight, but there is no door between us. But what the hell – if the camera is on, and he sees me – well then, he sees me. It seems silly to cavil, when after tomorrow, he’ll be able to very easily buy much better quality images of me. (However, he has been strictly polite and professional to me, not so much as a flicker of anything else, even when we had to go exploring together to find this hot tub. He himself was unaware that it here, and while his English seems fluent enough, he literally did not know the meaning of the phrase “hot tub”. He seemed a little confused even when I pulled off the cover and showed it to him, splashing my hand in the water. But he shrugged and left me to it.)
Soon I will get out, dry myself, and go up the stairs and down the long hallway to the little dormitory-style room I was assigned and go to bed. My shoot doesn’t begin too early, but I have a feeling the building will come to life tomorrow morning and be a very different place than the silent, echoing place it is now.
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November 16th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
There’s a long and pedestrian business article here about the decline of the Playboy empire and the signs (faint though they are) that Hugh Hefner may finally, at age 83, be tired of maintaining his playboy image. But what struck me was the abject cluelessness of the last three paragraphs, two of which (after subtracting a paragraph of standard-story boilerplate filler) propose Kink.com’s Peter Acworth as the next “Mr. Playboy”:
But if Hefner sells up, who might take his place as Mr Playboy? The leading contender is Midlands-born Peter Acworth, a former Barings banker and founded of Kink.com, a suite of S&M and bondage-themed websites.
Acworth, 39, says he got the idea after he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all. So I basically just ripped off that idea.”
It’s a long way from bunny ears; Kink.com’s brand icon is a forked tail.
On the one hand, it’s illuminating that Kink.com should be considered one of the strongest brands in porn, that it could be compared to Playboy in any fashion. But this business writer — although clear on the meaning of the Playboy brand — has obviously failed to grasp the central branding connotations that have made Kink.com what it is today. Playboy has always had an iconic individual (Hefner) living it up with the models, with a wink and a nudge as to the propriety of same. (To be fair, Playboy’s photographers have a reputation for running clean and professional shoots.) But Kink.com is known for being holier than the Pope when it comes to professionalism and clean dealing with its models. It needs this reputation because of the edgy nature of its kinky material. Trying to cast Acworth in a Hefnerian role — something he’s shown no sign of wanting — would be an epic disaster for the brand.
It’s probably true that we’ll see Acworth, along with a rich cast of his dominant hirelings, being waited on hand and foot by naked slaves once the forthcoming reality-show site The Upper Floor (think Roissy meets Real World) goes live on the top floor of his San Francisco Armory castle of kink. But for Hefner-level striving-after-celebrity, he’d need to pull up at the Erotic Exotic Ball in a carriage pulled by a dozen prancing pony girls, and I don’t think we’ll see him going there.
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November 14th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
Screw controversy, how about something we can all get behind? Like, say, this Wallace Wood drawing of a woman (but, er, what about the two antennae on her brow?) being carried off by a couple of giant ants?
Via alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. cartoons.
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