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The Sex Blog Of Record
Sunday, September 15th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
The slinky topless babe could be a nightclub dancer anywhere in the 20th-century world, but according to the March 1962 issue of Fury magazine, this one with her two accompanying shirtless male burlesque performers was in the cosmopolitan city of Beirut:
Clearly the man who thought he was Lebanon’s first male stripper back in 2010 was insufficiently informed about his own country’s rich cultural history!
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Wednesday, April 12th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
In August of 1973 this uncredited cartoon appeared in California Girl magazine. It blends the legend of William Tell with the vaudevillian tradition of having a pretty girl way too fucking close to the action when demonstrating feats of accuracy for entertainment purposes:
The caption reads “You want to shoot an apple off my WHAT?”
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Sunday, February 5th, 2023 -- by Bacchus
Is it too much, if we have two posts in a row about Parisian cabaret dancers? No, don’t be silly, of course not!
I don’t know much about this cutie-pie panther girl, but the August 1967 issue of Cancans de Paris magazine identified her as Susan Sampson.
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2022 -- by Bacchus
Does it count as “trick riding” if you have to tie yourself to your horse? No matter, the people who paid good money to see this Lady Godiva act won’t care:
Via Bondage Blog.
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Saturday, July 9th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
Sadly I have less than zero information about this old studio-type color photo portrait. The title says it all: an extremely fit topless burlesque dancer doing a veil dance. Really, what more do we need?
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Saturday, April 24th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
This is a detail from a sardonic cartoon by Eduard Thony in the March 22, 1926 issue of the German magazine Simplicissimus:
There’s a caption that’s been translated as “The only stimulating thing about this review is the audience — the women aren’t completely undressed.”
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Friday, October 23rd, 2020 -- by Bacchus
Do you remember the scene in Blues Brothers (shit, that movie was made 40 years ago) where they find themselves performing in a chicken wire cage at Bob’s Country Bunker? Which turns out to be a very good thing, when the patrons start throwing beer bottles?
I would argue that these Parisian showgirls (via Bondage Blog) are exhibiting a little bit of the same energy. I assume that the Venetian blinds are to create mystery, not protect the showgirls from hand-thrown missiles, but I’m not 100% certain:
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Thursday, February 27th, 2020 -- by Bacchus
Remember that crazy Thanksgiving where Wonder Woman and her girls were ritually slaughtering and eating each other? For some odd reason, these hungry showgirls capturing and sorta eating one of their own
reminds me of that:
Let’s transcribe that for posterity:
One Blonde A La Carte
Night after night the chorus cuties at the Latin Quarter night club in New York dance a terrific cannibal number that whets the appetites of all the male customers present. However, the dance has its effects upon the chorines themselves, through the power of suggestion. It was inevitable that sooner or later fantasy should become reality to these gals, in accordance with the best psychological precepts. And the grim reality is something to take pictures about. It came about this way. One night it was impossible for the girls to go out between shows for their usual snack, as the rain was falling in torrents. Lightning crackled in the air and the thunder sounded like the crashing of B-29 bombs on Tokyo. Now, everybody knows that rain, lightning, and thunder ruin a girl’s permanent, to say nothing of her disposition. Yet what to do? The girls were getting hungrier and hungrier. Then it happened, as it was bound to happen. Two lovely show girls, Kay Evans and Evelyn Lewis, started eyeing a particularly juicy morsel of a blonde, Margie Noble. The same idea occurred to them simultaneously. Their glances met and they exchanged a nod of understanding. If the next show was to go on, they simply had to eat. So, when the opportunity arose a short time later, they captured the unsuspecting Margie backstage, with the interesting consequences pictured herewith.
This delicious story comes from the October 1945 issue of Laff magazine.
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Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019 -- by Bacchus
At some times in some places, strippers and burlesque dancers were prohibited by law from showing their nipples. Of this necessity, they often constructed a virtue: wearing pasties with tassels, and doing things with the tassels that were sure to delight and astound male audiences.
Illustration is from the April 1963 issue of Striparama magazine.
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Monday, February 18th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
Catgirls have always been popular! According to Au carrefour étrange, these sparkling sequin-covered leopard girls graced one of the great burlesque halls of Paris, such as the Lido, the Carrousel or the Folies Bergère:
The photo is by Daniel Frasnay from the 1960 German book Paris Review.
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Monday, January 14th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
There are parts of the world even today — or so say travelers’ tales — where people think being carted around by human-powered rickshaw is a perfectly-reasonable mode of transportation. How true this remains in 2019 is not a thing that I have researched, but as a matter of historical fact, it was certainly once a commonplace.
Sadly I do not think in any time or place it has been a commonplace for rickshaws to be drawn about in public by pretty women tricked out as ponies, complete with tails. This rickshaw ponygirl photo, I suspect, is from a burlesque show of perhaps a hundred years ago or more. Don’t look so surprised — pony burlesque was a thing back then:
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Wednesday, April 4th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Edward Hopper famously used only his wife as a model for his nude paintings, as in this one called Girlie Show:
Here’s the study for the painting:
(In both cases, click the displayed detail for the uncropped artwork.)
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Sunday, October 29th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
A little while ago when @whoresofyore tweeted the above photo out under the hashtag #VintageHalloween I knew I was finally going to have to get off my ass and get this shit in order. I thought I might get something special for my patrons out of it (which didn’t happen, in the event) but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more.
Here is (was) my problem.
I’ve been seeing that photo (and several more from the same series) every Halloween for many years. And why not? The flapper-esque blonde is cute as a button, her tits are perky, and the burlesque Halloween thing is too fun and cute and Betty Boop not to love.
So, my first-stage reaction was “I need to track down that whole series of photos. It would make an awesome Halloween gallery. And if it’s really as old as the some of the clues would indicate, it’s bloody amazing; I want to know more about where these photos come from!”
Sadly, my second-thoughts reaction was “There’s something wrong here. The Halloween iconography is too modern; this is 1950s cheesecake pinup staged as late 1930s burlesque produced with 1920 flappers published by 1900s postcard publishers. Just a whole mishmash of subtle anachronisms.”
My particular problem was with the ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and black cat and happy-skeleton stuff all brought together in one display. You see all of these elements in Halloween imagery going back at least to the Victorians, but a comic erotic burlesque of them? My first mental/visual reference for a thing like that would be the painted cheesecake pinups of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I would be really excited to find them all in a real-photo pinup postcard series from then, but from decades earlier as these photos superficially appear to be? That would be…astonishing.
But hey, a cynical skepticism, no matter how well-informed, is no substitute for doing the work, which for a project like this is quite considerable. Basically, my method is recursive image searching; I start with the first image, and while searching for the largest, best, most-original scan of it, I also look for any pages that offer any provenance, and I also look at all of the “similar images” that the image search engines throw up, saving anything else from the series that turns up. And then I proceed through each of those in stepwise fashion, doing the same for them. It’s a slow, often-tedious, and painstaking process.
There were early indications that something was hinky about this image set.
One thing that bothered me was that diamond “MG” logo. It’s very much like the logos used by photo postcard publishers going back to the turn of the twentieth century and before. Only, a logo like that is typically the initials of the publisher, it’s a handy reference, and it’s usually easy to Google. Those two letters in quotes, “postcard”, and Bob’s your uncle. Collectors and auctioneers are all over that shit. Here? Nothing.
Another thing that bothered me was that as an iron rule, the best-quality scans I was turning up were always 805 pixels wide. That indicated a common digital place of entry onto the internet. Theoretically possible if these photos were from, say, a set of postcards in the hands of a collector, with no other exemplars known; but in practice, usually genuine vintage photos exist in a wide variety of (usually small and terrible) scans of different sizes.
More subtly but also damning, no provenance for any of the photos from the set was turning up. They were widely distributed in copy-and-paste collections of vintage photos, usually mixed with genuine vintage photographs from the “French postcard” and burlesque eras. But nobody had ever taken the time to curate these together into a common gallery. This could just an artifact of digital decay (there’s an awful lot of the adult internet gone missing from the 1997-2007 era) but sometimes it means that the source was known and that the folks doing the copy-and-paste felt constrained from acknowledging that source. But why, if the photos were truly vintage?
As is usually the case, there was just one clue, a single fragile provenance, one person who took the time to drop a credit, that broke the entire mysterious case wide open. One of these images, on a Tumblr that has not yet gotten autoflagged and force-vanished behind the Verizon #pornocalypse Tumblr-porn event horizon, had a link credit to a Deviant Art source, where the photo had been posted more than a dozen years ago by a photographer from the Ukraine who has not been back to DeviantArt since 2005. The photographer went by “MGstudio” (note those “MG” initials) and gave their URL as marthasgirls.com in their DeviantArt profile. Martha’s Girls is a website I vaguely remember; it’s defunct now, but for many years and until sometime in 2016, it ran an old-fashioned subscription paysite selling “The finest emulations of vintage erotica and pin-up, spanning the period from the Victorian times to the 50s pin-up era.” Ding ding ding ding DING! The mystery is solved.
So these are modern, not vintage; they are a formerly-available commercial porn product by an unknown photographer from Dnipropetrovsk whose artistry I quite admire. My hope is that by assembling them here, it will be less likely for future enthusiasts to make the all-too-easy mistake of believing them to be vintage. If you know of more photos from this series, please let me know!
Happy Halloween, and enjoy!
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Thursday, October 12th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
There’s many a girl that would kill for a ski sweater that shows her nipples off to such good effect:
Artwork is from the cover of Betty Rumba #2 from Comic Burlesc.
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Thursday, September 21st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
It should come as no surprise that burlesque houses were always looking for dodges to placate the censors. This cartoon from an Australian men’s magazine has a little fun with that process:
The caption reads:
“No, but suppose she represents the victory of the United Nations over the forces of evil and oppression… Then we could get away with it!”
From the October 1948 issue of Man Junior, viewable in its entirety at the Internet Archive:
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Sunday, June 25th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
The above photograph of famous burlesque performer Sally Rand appeared in the March 12, 1934 issue of Time magazine, along with the shocking news that the infamous cult of nudism had tried to buy her endorsement:
In Brooklyn, where she was appearing at the Paramount Theatre, famed Fan Dancer Sally Rand revealed that she had been offered “a big sum” to indorse nudism. Said she: “The offer shocked me. I know that if I endorsed it, a lot of fat old men would join the cult just to see me without fans. it made me sick that my lovely dance should be confused with such things. All the nudists I ever saw had scratches all over their rear ends where they had been sitting on thorns.”
The quote raises an interesting question: in what context did Sally Rand see the scratched naked bottoms of nudists, if she was not already a member of “the cult”? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Thursday, April 7th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Long ago in a galaxy far far away, Jar Jar Binks tried to pick up some extra cash by dancing in burlesque shows:
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Wednesday, February 11th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
In the 1970s photographer Susan Meiselas followed carnivals around New England, taking photos of their striptease dancers. (It’s my impression of the times that the relative ratios of “strip” and “tease” probably varied with the jurisdiction where the carnival found itself.)
This photo via Juxtapoz.
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Friday, January 17th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
This is a postcard from the Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance:
Prance, ponygirl, prance!
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Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Conundrum: can we still call them “topless dancers” if they are wearing top hats?
From Usenet. You can find this image all over the web, “claimed” and watermarked in various ways, but it appears in actuality to be 1920s and German.
Friday, March 23rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
“Your money or your prettiest son!” That’s what she’s about to demand, with a sliver of steel at your throat:
They don’t make highwaymen like they used to…
Via Wicked Knickers.
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Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
As I was tooling about the suburban wastes I was pleasantly surprised to hear NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday devoting nearly five minutes of coverage to the New York Burlesque Festival. A transcript of the story (complete with pictures, even though they are SFW) is here, along with a link to the audio in NPR’s pop-up player.
It would not have been that long ago that the sort of earnest middle-class professionals who listen to National Public Radio would sooner have died than even admit that burlesque is an art form. Now, the view that is not just an art form but a liberatory one can get a respectable journalistic airing among them. We have come a long way.
And also, we have an excuse to stick in a picture of Dita von Teese. She might not have been in the story, but she’s one of the arch-practitioners of burlesque today. And anyway, is there ever a bad time for a picture of her?
No, I didn’t think so either.
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 -- by Bacchus
From Usenet.
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