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The Sex Blog Of Record
Saturday, October 1st, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
All of you reading this who’ve ever wanted to put out a publication that reflects their own erotic vision, kindly raise your hands. (In my imagination, I now see a mighty forest of raised hands.) In middle life I have observed that I am not getting younger, and so I decided to take the publication plunge.
The result is The Apsinthion Protocol, which I wrote and Lon Ryden drew. Life might seem normal at Gnosis College, where the undergraduates pass halcyon days in study, frolic, and humiliating fraternity rituals. But behind its ivy-covered walls lurk faculty mad scientists who look out at their reckless, oversexed students and think, “what outstanding fodder for my work they would make!” Weird experiments that would never pass muster with the human subjects research committee are undertaken, and soon comely coeds are melting in ecstasy. [Editor’s note: That “melting in ecstasy” bit is emphatically not metaphorial. — Bacchus.] But when a senator’s daughter goes missing, things begin to spin out of control.
If you think this pulpy, porny concoction might just be your test tube of tea, I have good news. It’s all available for the great price of free. You can get a reasonably compact (~47MB) PDF file of the entire 205-page comic via direct download by clicking on the graphic above (or here) and you can also get high-resolution PDFs, CBZ comic book archive versions, and E-book reader (*) versions of the comic by visiting the master download page. And it is also archived online here. (And not only is this comic free, it’s also published under a Creative Commons license, so not only are you free to download, you’re free to share to your heart’s content.)
And so what am I going to do now that I’ve achieved this curious life’s ambition? Well, surely I’m not going to stop at just a single volume. For The Apsinthion Protocol is projected as the first of a series called Tales of Gnosis College. So I think I’ll get busy serializing the second volume of the series, Study Abroad, starting…today!
(A note on E-book readers. Comics-to-ebook conversion is still a bit of experimental technology for me. I’ve made several versions for the standard Kindle and they seem to look decent, but please understand that your results might vary by device. If you have a different device, it might be possible for me to customize a version for that device. If you would like me to try, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you as soon as I reasonably can. Happy reading!)
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Saturday, August 13th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
Russell Blackford on his blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club brings our attention to this short YouTube excerpt from the short 1989 film Visions of Ecstasy, which was (and I believe, still is) banned in the United Kingdom. I think it well worth watching, though due warning for squick:
This seems to play with tropes we’ve seen a lot before on ErosBlog, and which some people play with in even more extreme ways than we see here. Is it erotic? Religious? Blasphemous? Is there really a deep difference?
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Monday, April 12th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
When I sat down to read this post, I felt as if Dr. Faustus had blogged here before about the legendary actress Hedy Lamarr. If so, my search appliances have failed me today; but I’m probably thinking about his post on Erotic Mad Science, in which he mentions her “very bold nude scene” in the 1933 movie Ecstasy. Her Wikipedia entry states:
In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý’s notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face and long shots of her running nude through the woods gave the film notoriety.
The trigger for this post was the appearance on Kinky Delight (originally from Milk & Honey, via Erectus) of a large and attractive still photo from that movie, featuring Hedy, one breast bared, looking emotively at the camera:
ErosBlog’s standard 320-pixel image width makes for an unsatisfactory panorama in this case; for a much larger version, click here or on the photo.
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Saturday, April 10th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I’ve never done psychedelic drugs, but I grew up in a sort of odd little backwater of the counterculture, so I’ve always known plenty of people who did. My external impression has long been that these drugs “mess you up” in a fairly specific way — namely, nobody who has ever done a lot of them seems to be any damn good at fitting in, following the rules, or sticking to convention. Since I myself am something of an anarchist, I don’t regard that with any particular dismay. If LSD makes you unfit to be a cubicle rat, why, that’s a problem for corporate recruiters, but I’m not sure anybody else should give a damn.
Thus I was interested to read Annie Sprinkle’s article How Psychedelics Informed My Sex Life and Sex Work, in which she explains that she took to sex work in part because LSD had freed her from from convention:
At sixteen, I finally had my first real sexual experience. On that same night, I also had my first mescaline experience. My boyfriend Van was twenty-six. He owned a hippie coffee shop. He was kind, adoring, and wise. We rode his motorcycle to his beach house for the weekend. He offered me a hit of mescaline. We each took one. I half expected him to turn into a three-headed monster at any moment like with LSD, but the mescaline was more gentle and more sensuous than acid. We walked on the beach, hand in hand, and it was a magical experience. I’d never seen so many stars in the sky; the ocean waves and sand were filled with phosphorescent algae. The world was covered in multi-colored glitter. Van kissed me and I couldn’t tell where my body started or ended next to his. I felt big love.
After a romantic and transcendental evening on the beach, we went back to his place and he treated me to my first cunnilingus experience. Perhaps it was just timing, but the mescaline was definitely an aphrodisiac. I felt so open, aroused, and trusting. Each touch was amazing. It was the most ecstatic experience I had ever had. A few weeks later, when I turned seventeen, I happily got rid of my virginity with Van. I was expecting intercourse to feel as overwhelming and transcendental as a psychedelic experience. Nice as it was, it didn’t feel that way, although later in life it would. At eighteen, I was living a hippie lifestyle in Tucson, Arizona. I did more mescaline, more LSD, and became wildly sexually adventurous. In a famous Playboy magazine interview in 1966, Timothy Leary exclaimed that LSD was the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered. I don’t remember having much, if any, sex while tripping on acid. I did not find LSD conducive to wanting to be intimate or to be touched, although I’ve talked with plenty of people who have had mind-blowing sex on LSD. However in retrospect, I see that my drug experiences did free me up from following convention. When most of my schoolmates went on to college, I ended up working in a “massage parlor.” To everyone’s surprise, especially my own, I found my calling! I was already breaking laws by smoking pot and taking psychedelics (which I felt should be legal), so to do illegal prostitution was not that much of a stretch. I believed prostitution should be legal also, and became involved in the prostitutes’ rights movement. I enjoyed my “work” and it fit my needs at the time.
She also had this to say about MDMA/Ecstasy:
By the mid-’80s the Great Dying was well underway; AIDS had taken its huge toll on my community. I’d lost many friends and lovers, and was trying to cope. Being a very sexually active gal, I was desperately searching for new, satisfying forms of sexuality, which could be enjoyed without exchanging bodily fluids. I signed up for a three-day Sacred Sex workshop led by a Tantra teacher named Jwala. At the workshop, my workshop partner gave me my first hit of Ecstasy, and that’s exactly what I experienced–ecstasy. It’s no wonder “E” is extremely popular in the “sex community.” Before MDMA became illegal it had been used successfully during marriage/relationship counseling sessions. Therapists found that partners were better able to communicate with each other while on MDMA. It reduces performance anxiety to zero and creates a yummy, lovey-dovey feeling, and a nice shift in consciousness. Needless to say, I became a convert — to Tantra, and to Ecstasy.
I continued to take Ecstasy, once, twice, or three times a year. Jwala taught me about how to do ritual, about “preparing the space,” and stating one’s intention before making love. I used those same techniques when I would ingest a substance, which really helped make the experiences more satisfying. I mostly preferred taking Ecstasy alone. I used it as a tool for self-evaluation. Usually I would spend some time making love with myself and doing “sexual healing” on myself. The first time I did “E” alone, I fell deeply in love with myself for the first time, which was very good for me as I had a relatively low self-image. This helped me transition out of working in prostitution and appearing in mainstream porn films, and into doing more of the kind of work I wanted to do at that point. I also found myself desiring to connect with women, both sexually and in my work. I started making “feminist porn.” The second time I did Ecstasy, I heard a voice tell me to quit smoking tobacco, which I then did permanently, after 25 years of a heavy smoking habit. Another time, I sat naked in front of my mirror and looked at my repressed anger, and let it surface. I hissed like a snake for several hours, and witnessed my inner Medusa in a remarkably non-judgmental and fearless way. I realized how sexual energy and anger are connected. I realized that in order to go to the next level of my sexuality I needed to learn to better express my anger. I practiced, and sure enough, I learned to have long, extended orgasms. When I then produced and directed my own video, The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop (1992), I captured myself having an extremely intense five-minute-long orgasm. In retrospect I realize that I used a lot of psychedelic imagery in the video. The project was quite successful.
Although I did have some wonderful orgasms on Ecstasy, the experience of Ecstasy was not so much about orgasm or sex, as it was about looking deeply into my Self–heart, soul, and psyche. Each time I took Ecstasy I retained some key piece of information that I could utilize to grow as a person, and expand my (sexual) horizons. I found the lover I had been searching for so long–me! When I took it with lovers, I could feel a sense of empathy with my lover without doing anything. I experienced my body as a temple, and sex as prayer. Ecstasy took me into my heart the way that psychedelics took me into my mind and spirit. Also when on Ecstasy I would sometimes have wonderful, long “crygasms.” Ecstasy showed me a deeper kind of love, which I was inspired to create more of in my life, without the drug. And I did. A lover of mine who had studied Tantra in India for several years, told me that with Ecstasy “a person could get to similar ecstatic and spiritual places that took Tantra yogis a lifetime of strict disciplines to get to–if they were lucky enough to ever get to those states.” There is of course a down side to Ecstasy. I had some miserable hangovers. I slept with my best friend’s husband when I shouldn’t have. Oops. Some folks let down their guard and have risky, unsafe sex, and I’m told that a few people have had medical emergencies with extremely serious consequences.
I regard it as something of a pity that anecdotal, experiential writing about drugs isn’t more common. The social taboos against describing drug use in neutral or positive language seems to me to be far stronger than the social taboos against using the drugs in the first place. All of which tends to cede the literary field to the purveyors of hysterical reefer-madness morality plays — a development which does no good at all if you believe, like I do, that it’s best to provide people with good information and then leave them the hell alone to do what they will.
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Sunday, March 29th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.
In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.
Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?
Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?
I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.
What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vivid account of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.
Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.
But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.
Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:
And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.
No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:
That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.
I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):
These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.
For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.
Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.
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