I don’tknow what event this lovely body paint is in honor of, but isn’t it pretty?

Of course, looking at that photograph you pretty much have to wonder what kind of paint job the girl on the right has under her toga.

Topological improbabilities aside, I was thinking about The Nymph today as I drove around doing errands. We were on the phone until late last night and continued our pattern of having an increasingly hard time hanging up on each other.

I realized today that some time ago I passed without conscious decision through that stage of imagining-with-trepidation our first meeting, and have now moved squarely into the stage of unreservedly wanting it to happen, the sooner the better.

That’s the more emotional side of my personality talking, and for the time being it’s got the microphone in an iron grip. The intellectual side still squawks and yammers from stage right, hissing and blubbering in a bad Smeagol voice about great folly and about silly masters who fool themselves and about the bad ends to which romantic adventurers are prone. The intellectual side of me has been very handy for projects like organizing my economic life and keeping body and soul together, but “intellectual me” has a terrible record of being as useful as a eunuch at an orgy when it comes to making decisions about matters of the heart. Resolved: ignore that timorous bastard for the duration.

Here’s an amusing item that’s supposed to be a ca. 17th-century “impressing rare and antique wax anatomical model representing the external feminine genital organ.”

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Wow. It seems that long ago, Madison Avenue used to have the cojones to aim their marketing squarely at alpha males:

Advertising tagline: “You never know what results you’ll get until you try!”

I have been ignoring the Naomi Wolf antiporn article as utter nonsense. No need to rail against it for this crowd.

But I simply must link to Eric Raymond’s cogent comments — they are too blunt and too true to ignore. I’ve excerpted heavily, you need to read the whole thing:

You show me a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I’ll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.
…
Show me a young woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn for a man’s attention and I’ll show you one of two things. Either (a), she’s having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn’t notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she’s not having sex with that man.

There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf’s informants’ reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don’t deliver.
…
Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is “no”, then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.

On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this.

This is pretty basic stuff. Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.

The most astonishingly delicious new blog just linked to me: Belle De Jour: Diary of a London Callgirl. The writing sparkles – so much so that one is tempted to believe this might be a literary endeavour. But the voice is authentic-sounding, so I take this one at face value. Very readable! I loved this:

Located what sounded like an excellent, small, discreet agency (word of mouth, as they say). After email contact and sending my photos, I finally arranged to meet the manager at the dining room of a central London hotel….

“How will I know you?” I asked. “What do you look like?”

“When I was younger everyone used to say I looked like Brooke Shields,” she said.

“Ah, you must be very beautiful then.”

“No, I am old and decrepit. Now people say I look like Daryl Hannah.”

What fun.

She sent me this picture to give me a giggle:

Women and duct tape, what’s not to like? She knows me well.

What, when I said “a picture” you were expecting something else?

As it happens, she did send me a picture of herself last night. And yes, it did have a thematic connection with the above photograph. But y’all don’t get to see it, because her face is visible.

I’m such a tease….