Beauty Is Pain

We’ve known for awhile that women will go to great and painful lengths to meet standards of beauty that, most often, other women dreamed up. KarenO demonstrates, in the realm of underarm hair waxing:

That looks like a beauty regimen that only a masochist could love!

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The Return Of Anne Rice’s “Beauty”

Word has been kicking around the internet that Anne Rice is working on a fourth “A.N. Roquelaure” novel, although as far as I can tell she hasn’t actually said (despite my post headline) that it will necessarily be a Beauty novel. News of the new erotic novel is great for fans who feared that Rice’s kinky side was gone for good when she found religion; and even though she renounced her Christianity back in 2010, she was sufficiently equivocal about doing so that nobody (I think) ever expected another kinky erotica novel out of her.

It turns out that she’s been talking about the new book on her FaceBook page since at least December 30, and she says she’s working on the book now. (I’d provide links, but of course FaceBook is broken-by-design where the rest of the internet is concerned.)

Here’s something interesting she said in a 2012 interview about her motives in writing the original Beauty trilogy:

I wrote it because I thought most pornography was 1) Victorian classics revived and repackaged or 2) hack work by people who didn’t share the fantasy. So I decided to write the pornography I wanted to read, to prove that good S&M porn could be done without murder, burning, cutting or any kind of real physical harm; that a delicious pornography of detailed S&M games — dominance and submission, humiliation and love — could be made, all of it with elegance, refinement, and some romance. I created a fairytale kingdom of luxurious chambers, gorgeous costumes, and handsome and beautiful royal slaves, a world filled with romance, some intrigue and a lot of detail as to sexuality. I wanted it to be fun.

My interest in pornography started early. I came of age in the sixties when there was more interest. At that time Grove Press re-issued many Victorian porno works, including Victorian S&M materials, and they also took the world by storm by publishing The Story of O, a new work from France.

When The Story of O came out in the sixties that was an underground event. I loved it. But I found it grim. I wanted with my pornography to write something that was not grim, some playful fantasy in which the “slaves” were presumably enhanced by their “service” and admitted they enjoyed it, where the relationships between the dominated and the dominating were fluid. I think I achieved it with the Trilogy. I don’t think anyone sees it as grim. That was one very strong impulse. I was dissatisfied with all I read; I was striving for a more comfortable, flexible, durable fantasy.

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Butter And Baloney

From the 1528 account of a Roman prostitute named Lozana who also provided beauty treatments for female clients:

“By mistake we burned off all the hair from the private parts of a lady from Bologna, but we put butter on it and made her believe she was right in style.”

Discovered here.

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Shy But Beautiful

A random Tumblr find:

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Did You Catch The Aerial Fisting Finals?

Here’s Dr. Marty Klein on Those Beautiful Olympic Bodies. And he’s right — it’s astonishing how professional commentators can blather for hours about the virtues of the athletes without ever once seeming to notice their beauty:

Yes, their commitment to excellence is inspiring, their tenacity is beyond comprehension, their personal stories are (occasionally) fascinating. And there’s that whole agony-of-defeat thing from which we seemingly just cannot turn away.

With all the statistics, superlatives, and medals, does nobody notice–these men and women are good-looking!

Viewing this fortnight’s competition out of Vancouver, there are bodies for every taste–short and tall, wide and narrow, Nordic, African, Asian. We even have competitors from the planet’s genetic melting pots, such as Mongolia, Nepal, Montenegro, and Israel.

But with all the enthusiastic commentary (and equally enthusiastic blather) coming at me in High Def, I’ve yet to hear, “Now that is a gorgeous young man,” or “Wow, she is a really attractive young woman,” or “Oh my, I think I’m in love!”

True, many competitors are bundled up in snowsuits. But those tights are so tight that you can tell which of the men are circumcised. Besides, what about the figure skaters? A small army of designers makes a fortune imagining outfits that will be very, very sexy–while judges, commentators, and audience deny that that’s the intent.

Yes, yes, of course we’re admiring these people for their performance, not their eroticism. But are they really so separate? Surely, health, talent, youth, and performance under pressure are erotic. And just as surely, any emotionally healthy athlete relates to his or her body erotically, just as non-athletes do.

It wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it weren’t so blatantly absent.

It’s worth mentioning that they used to conduct the Olympics naked. (The chair will entertain a motion at this time all in favor say “aye” any objections hearing none motion carried.)

I do wonder, though, whether some of the blindness to Olympic hotness isn’t informed by the media-culture obsession with thinness. A lot of Olympians are muscular to the point of being “thick-bodied” from the perspective of the people that think they need to airbrush away the hips of already-skinny models. I’m old enough to remember when Mary Lou Retton went bouncy-bouncy-bounce through all of our lives (and through a great many adolescent fantasies; I could, but won’t, provide detailed anecdotal testimony). You could tell, even then, that the media-culture gatekeepers thought her legs were too big; they didn’t think she was pretty enough to brighten our boxes of Wheaties, and they were — as any rational man of the right age can tell you — fucking insane.

Beauty And Beast, Evolving

Via 2blowhards comes the welcome news that evolution is making women more beautiful. I’m sure that’s something we can all get behind.

Unfortunately, “…men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.” Evidence, perhaps, for George Williams’s view that evolution by natural selection is an “evil” process? You be the judge.

The Vigin Mary, Nude In (Mexican) Playboy

I am not making this up. Mexican Playboy did a photo shoot of Maria Florencia Onori as the Virgin Mary, and the result was a bunch of pissed-off Mexican Catholics.

I myself think Maria is beautiful, and don’t have a lot of time for Christians who despise female beauty to the point where they freak out when it’s associated, however indirectly, with their holy figures:

I got this from Violet Blue, who has many more details.