We are indebted to World Sex News Daily for finding the link to this very thoughtful article by a London art critic about (I would say) the hypocritizing influence a “fine art” label has on our perception of smutty images:

Not far from the strip joints of Soho is an image of a child having sex with an adult that can be seen for nothing any day of the week. The child is a boy of about 10 or 11, completely naked, his backside raised and partially turned to the viewer. The adult is a young woman, also naked. She is slipping her tongue into his mouth; he is squeezing her right nipple between his fingers. Not only is the boy clearly underage, but this sexual abuse of a minor turns out to be incestuous, too — the woman is actually his mother.

Anyone can view this scene between the hours of 10 and 6 throughout the year. There are no cordons or barriers, no advance warnings. Children are actively encouraged to look. The police have never shown the slightest interest. Indeed, practically the only people who have tried to censor Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid are the Victorian moralists who painted over the nipples.

What is going on in this bizarre gridlock of limbs? At the National Gallery, where the painting hangs, there is general agreement that nobody agrees. The picture was probably painted for a French king known for “his lusty appetites”, in the euphemism of the gallery guide; but it may also incorporate a warning against depravity: the howling figure on the left is commonly held to personify terminal syphilis.

Now, I submit that when you look at reproductions of the image — away from the milling crowds, out of its frame, in a different context, all of which could describe equally well the conditions in which it was painted — you cannot help but notice that a child is explicitly fingering an adult. It may be that you are struck by this in the gallery too, in which case you have probably also observed that your fellow visitors manage to notice no such thing. We are either blind to — or very good at ignoring — the sex in old master art.

Also:

We would never remove these paintings from the National Gallery or the Louvre. Not only are they prophylactically sealed against affront by virtue of time and status in these cathedrals of sanctified art, but they have the figleaves of myth on the one hand — not real people, only gods indulging in the usual revolting ways — and moral content on the other. To the pure of mind, everything is pure; filth is in the eye of the beholder.

And in any case, these are paintings not photographs. They have passed through someone’s imagination; they don’t stand in one-to-one relation to reality. They are what we might call fictions. But that, alas, apparently no longer stands as a legal argument in the English-speaking world. Witness two recent cases in America and Australia.

In Australia a man was convicted of possessing child porn in 2008. The offensive images showed Bart and Lisa Simpson engaged in lewd acts. The defence argued — as we all might — that the Simpsons aren’t real children, never mind that they are bright yellow, have only four fingers and very oddly shaped heads. The judge ruled that “the mere fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was not a ‘person'”.

In America, last December, Dwight Whorley appealed against his jail sentence for knowingly receiving pornographic manga cartoons involving the rape of children. These were defined as “obscene visual depictions”. The judgment — Whorley versus the United States of America — is extremely finely detailed and involves numerous other counts, including downloading obscene photographs of children, all of them indicating the defendant’s paedophilia — but what it makes clear is that the court allows no distinction between “actual” and “virtual” pornography.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Bronzino (or the National Gallery, to be precise) might be in trouble were a case to be pursued before such judges in America.

It’s an Elvgren classic witch to put you in the mood for your Halloween festivities:

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Tomorrow being Halloween, are you having a pumpkin fisting carving party at your house tonight?

Image courtesy of Gothic Sluts.

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Ever since last week’s post on 3D SexVilla I’ve been trying to decide whether the whole thing is just a transient gimmick, or whether it’s a tool sufficient to allow non-artists to create and share visual instantiations of their fantasies. If it’s the latter, and if it catches on, it could prove to be quite a phenomenon — one I think is potentially important. (I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I can visualize things I’d like to see, but there’s no way to instantiate them in visual form short of hiring an artist or spending a few years in art school. Sufficiently good computer software will be an important step in solving this.)

One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how open the product is. If the design work that users do can be readily saved and shared, there’s likely to be a fan community that grows up around the product, as there long has been around the quite-a-bit-harder-to-use and (IMO) not-for-the-non-artist 3d-modeling tool Poser.

Thus I was heartened to see the following in the summary of recent changes to the latest release of the 3D SexVilla software:

All New Pose Editor

Our software engineers have spent countless hours fine-tuning this ‘Pose Editor’ release. It’s an exclusive powerful new in-game motion control tool featuring a collapsible user interface with tons of sliders and controls that enables you to create your own poses, however and whatever you want. It’s an updated mannequin model rigged to allow precise and exacting control of body positions, joint positioning and rotation editing as well as new 3D face shaping, mouth and tongue morphing animations and hand gestures.

Poser Editor allows you to also import poses from the Gamerotica community or from Daz3D/Poser based BVH exports. Using standards based BVH allows you to quickly import existing animations and convert them to 3D Kink and create and watch some of the most advanced sex animations possible.

Still no word on whether the local save formats are usefully exportable/shareable, but the standards-based imports is, at least, good news.

Field-expedient masturbatory aids are not unheard of in male sexual experience. Indeed, this is perhaps an understatement. And just as in any other field of human endeavor, there’s always this one guy who goes all alpha-geek perfectionist.

In the realm of the home-made pocket pussy, that man is called Pafnuty Kingdom Shacknasty (well, he calls himself that) and Always Aroused Girl has found him, hunted him down, and forced him (delicious torments, I’m sure) to write an instructible worthy of Make magazine, complete with color glossy photographs:

Make Your Own Sex-Toy: A Pocket Pussy Polemic Part One
Make Your Own Sex-Toy: A Pocket Pussy Polemic Part Two

Like all true geniuses, PafShack (as I shall call him for short) labored in the wilderness for many years, perfecting his Promethean gift (and convincing himself of its perfection) before returning to share it with his fellow man:

I spent several years, from about 2000 until about 2004, working on the problem in depth, trying out dozens of designs. I tried polyethylene bags, elastomeric fire hose liners, foam rubber wrapped in various kinds of tapes, rubber surgical wraps, condoms, bicycle tire inner tubes, and probably things I’ve completely forgotten about.

I started out knowing nothing about what design parameters I should incorporate, and by sheer natural selection, discovered what worked, what didn’t, and why. I’ll save you the history of the Great Chain of Being and cut right to the chase; namely what I believe to be the design of the Perfect Pocket Pussy. After I demonstrate how to build it, I’ll compare it to what is widely hailed as the best commercial design, which is evidently still the Fleshlight.

First off, I discovered that two very important parameters are porosity and resilience. Foam rubber fulfills both of these needs nicely. Zip on down to the local big box hardware store and buy a length of foam rubber pipe insulation. Note that pipe insulation is also made in polyethylene. You want foam rubber. The difference should be immediately obvious both by looking at it and by touching it. I bought a 6 foot length for $5.77.

There’s more of this, quite a lot more, which you can read for yourself. I’m satisfied to provide a photograph of the finished product:

Just as interesting to me as the technical details, though, was the promise (quoted above) that PafShack would compare his PPP (“Perfect Pocket Pussy”) with the market-leading Fleshlight. I blogged about the Fleshlight almost seven years ago, but I’ve never actually seen one; nor, in that seven years, have I happened to stumble across any really critical review, in which the negative features of the Fleshlight were discussed along with its allegedly positive ones. (There might be a blog post in that fact alone, or even two; perhaps one about the rarely-violated taboos men observe in writing about their own sexuality, and another about the ways in which widespread affiliate marketing generates an ocean of bland one-sided marketing prose about products, mostly puffery that tends to drown out genuinely and useful writing about such products.) In any case, PafShack’s comparison of his PPP with the Fleshlight turns out to be the most useful review of the commercial product that I’ve ever seen:

First off, the Fleshlight is expensive. The base model I bought at the local sex emporium was $65. Compare that to the cost of materials for my version, which would run around $5… [T]he “breech” aperture is very small, resulting in a very “tight” feel. My first outing with the unit using Astroglide resulted in several realizations. First off, you need to be fully erect to even insert your penis into the unit. Not useful if you want to use it to help get you started. If your penis comes out of the unit, it’s hard to get it back in without using your other hand. This is a negative, as your other hand is usually holding a magazine, mouse, or remote. You don’t want lube all over those! The unit is so tight that lube tends to be pumped down, i.e. the Fleshlight acts as a sort of squeegee, or windshield wiper. In my case this resulted in the dreaded Lemon Song Conundrum, which I hadn’t experienced in years with my own designs. I had to constantly keep adding lube to the muzzle to maintain optimum lubrication. It caused pain in my urethra, and in fact resulted in a searing pain on orgasm.

On the upside, the material “Cyberskin” appears to be slightly porous, which is good. But the unit has to have a rigid plastic casing, because the Cyberskin is so intrinsically floppy that it won’t support itself, unless it was made much thicker all along its length. This means that the rigid plastic tube prevents any manipulation of the tube morphology. All you can do with it is manipulate the angle of attack and rate of oscillation. The Fleshlight is heavy. To maintain the tightness of the aperture, and the overall “feel” of the unit, a large mass of Cyberskin is packed into the first few inches of the breech.

I tried to weigh the Fleshlight; it’s beyond the range of my Ohaus student balance. It’s more than a pound and less than a kilogram. In contrast, my own PP weighs just 58 grams! While the Fleshlight is certainly slick, and has no adhesive discontinuities like my own design, it’s also “lifeless” in the sense that no fine manipulation of the shape of the tube can occur. It’s perfectly homogenous; twisting it does nothing, it feels just the same.

I suppose it could be made to suck, if one adjusted the rigid plastic top cap just so, I didn’t even bother to try.

My own PP is also built with a porous material; foam rubber. It’s naturally resilient, like Cyberskin. It’s able to be custom fit to the user. If it ends up feeling too loose, add rubber bands. If it ends up feeling too tight, just keep on using it; being foam rubber, it will tend to compact. The BOPP adds enough stiffness to where the unit will not collapse, yet is vastly less massive, and therefore allows a much greater range of subtle and sensitive control. Your control hand can alter the tube’s shape allowing continuous variation of stimulation. Held at the top, the tube can be closed off, and suction applied at will. Used with a 50-50 mixture of hair conditioner and water results in virtually no Lemon Song Conundrum.

The downside? As with all sex toys, you must wash and dry the thing. The inner surface will degrade over time, due to ordinary usage. The foam will become less resilient.

Yes, I know it’s a boast, but I believe I have developed the greatest male masturbation toy of all time: This is my lasting gift to the betterment of mankind. To masturbate with your hand is to revert to the Neanderthal.

Thanks PafShack for for your years of toil on behalf of all mankind. And thanks to AAG for coaxing the story out of him!

Update: AAG did a more diligent job than most of erasing all trace of her blog and its posts when she departed from the adult internet, so the links that were in this post were broken beyond my ability to repair. If she, or PafShak, or anybody else who for any reason still has an archive of PafShak’s tutorial ever sees this, please by all means drop me a discreet copy to post up in full!

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When I saw this artwork by Franz von Stuck, of course I was sharply reminded of the recent post Faustus wrote about ladies and snakes:

Stolen from an Italian comic book cover found on alt. binaries. pictures. erotica. cartoons: