Auctioned For Harems
Monday, November 4th, 2024 -- by Bacchus
Just another Orientalist harem slave auction fantasy! This one is a detail from an illustration in the pages of the November 1957 issue of Courage magazine:
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The Sex Blog Of Record
A Visit To The Harem
Sunday, December 4th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
I count nine ladies of the harem. No wonder they look bored!
Art is by Eugene Reunier.
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Orientalist Witchy Women: Loving, Fighting
Monday, September 26th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
At first glance, this orientalist artwork by Schem looks a bit like a harem catfight to me, although it might just be a vigorous lesbian orgy. It’s hard to say!
The small amount of context I have might tip us toward the orgy theory. The artwork illustrated an article in the June 1938 issue of Le Journal Secret: Review D’éducation Sexuelle. Story title was L’Amour Sorcier chez les Arabes which, going strictly from English cognates, might mean something like “Sorcerer’s Love among the Arabs.” Presumably there’s nuance and connotation I’m missing?
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Smug In His Harem
Sunday, October 3rd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
You gotta wonder how a pasha or a sultan or a sheik with eight veiled-but-topless women in his harem has the energy or inclination to put all his smug self-regard into the experience of the fancy cigarette he’s smoking:
You gotta wonder, that is, until you find out that this artwork is tobacco-company propaganda: it’s a detail from a 1950 advertisement for Abdulla No. 7 ‘Virginia’ Cigarettes.
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A Bath In The Harem
Saturday, January 26th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
These photos push lots of buttons for micro-fetishes (or at least, recurring themes closely attended to) here at ErosBlog. I’ve always had a soft spot for images featuring opulent bathrooms and fancy plumbing. Furthermore, I’m quite partial to en déshabillé women at their ablutions. Plus, since these photos show harem-induction preliminaries from a 1960s soft-porn version of the Victorian classic The Lustful Turk, they push not only all the general Orientalist harem-fantasy buttons that lurk throughout the Western literary imagination, but the very specific power-over fantasy that’s often summarized (among men, at least, and sometimes with a wink and a leer) as “have that one bathed and sent to my tent.”
*Smack!*
Hey, what’s that sound?
That, it turns out, was the sound of me writing myself smack into a brick wall. Uh, ouch.
I initially drafted this post a few months back, and found that I couldn’t post it. So I wrote a little note to the future and buried it in my drafts folder:
In early October 2018 as I am writing this, it’s looking a lot like the United States Senate is about to vote to put a rapist on the United States Supreme Court. Which means — I just discovered — that my over-fifty cis-male privileged white thoroughly-calloused nerve endings are feeling just a tiny bit raw about rape culture. In fact those nerve endings are feeling too raw, it turns out, to post Victorian-era rape porn (reimagined as 1968 soft-core sexploitation) in order to mine it for fetish fuel.
And that is not a limit I ever expected to set for myself.
I don’t even think I’m setting it now. Not once and for all, not for all time. I have more than once characterized my editorial goals here at ErosBlog as unabashed and unapologetic male-gaze writing about porn, while striving not to be a complete dickhead to and about women. Rape fantasies, and rape porn that embodies and depicts those fantasies, are enjoyed by men and women both (I do not say “alike”) and their role within rape culture is complex and controversial. I’ve cheerfully and noisily waded into those controversies in the past, with my trusty shield of “well, actually” in one hand and my slippery staff of mansplaining in the other. When it comes to porn that encompasses elements of rape culture, usually my reflex is to publish and be damned. For reasons. Damned good ones, I think.
But not today, dickhead. Not today. Not in early October 2018. Because if my not-so-very-touchy nerves are currently so raw about rape culture that I flinched at a bit of light-hearted “have that one bathed and sent to my tent” harem tomfoolery — a meme that I’ve cheerfully deployed at least four times previously — then I don’t need to ask a rhetorical question about how it’s going to feel to the women in my audience today, the day that women are lining up to be arrested at the United States Senate as Susan Collins blathers at length about what a fine and innocent man Barty McBoof is.
I don’t need to ask, because I already know. Today is just not the day for it. I’ll put this post in my queue with a hold note. I’ll post it on a happier day for women, or for the United States, or for the world. An election day, perhaps, or an impeachment day, or an indictment day, or an embolism day, or an infarction day, or a “resigns to spend more time with his family” day.
So, if you’re seeing this — nice day, isn’t it?
I woke up this morning in a sunny bedroom with the notion that having yesterday watched a powerful woman teach the president of the United States a badly-needed lesson in manners and Constitutional governance did indeed qualify today as a nice day. Cheers!
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Naked In The Harem
Monday, March 10th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
There’s a passage near the beginning of the erotic classic A Night In A Moorish Harem in which our hero, a British navy captain cast adrift off the coast of Morocco and offered sanctuary by the residents of a conveniently-placed seraglio, begins to get acquainted with his rescuers:
They were brimful of mischief and were evidently bent on making the most of the unexpected company of a young man. Inez put her hand on my sleeve. ‘How wet you are,’ said she. ‘It will not be hospitable to allow you to keep on such wet clothes.’ My clothes were perfectly dry, but the winks and smiles that the young ladies exchanged as they began to disrobe me led me cheerfully to submit while they proceeded to divest me of every article of clothing. When at length my shirt was suddenly jerked off they gave little affected screams and peeped through their fingers at my shaft; which by this time was of most towering dimensions. I had snatched a hearty kiss from one and all of them as they had gathered round to undress me. Inez now handed me a scarf which she had taken from her own fair shoulders. ‘We can none of us bear to leave you,’ she said, ‘but you can only kiss one at a time; please throw this to the lady you prefer.’
Good heavens! Then it was true, that all of these beautiful women had been accustomed to be present when one of them was embraced. ‘Ladies,’ said I, ‘you are unfair. You have stripped me, but you keep those charms concealed which you offer to my preference. I am not sure now if you have any imperfections which you wish to keep covered.’
The ladies looked at one another, blushed a little, then nodded and laughed, then began undressing. Velvet vests, skirts of lawn and silken trousers were rapidly flung to the floor. Lastly, as if at a given signal, every dainty chemise was stripped off and some of the most lovely forms that ever floated through a sculptor’s dream stood naked before me. Was I not myself dreaming, or had I in truth been suddenly transported amid the houses of the seventh heaven?
For a while I stood entranced, gazing at the charming spectacle. ‘Ladies,’ said I at last, ‘it would be immodest in me to give preference when all are so ravishingly lovely. Please keep the scarf, fair Inez, and when I have paid a tribute to your fair charms, pass it yourself to another, till all have been gratified.’ ‘Did he say all?’ cried a little brunette. ‘All indeed!’ cried the rest in chorus, bursting into laughter. ‘Every one,’ said I, ‘or I will perish in the attempt.’
Spoiler: He does not perish in the attempt.
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Madonna In The Harem
Sunday, November 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Unscathed Corpse has posted all 32 of the 1977 Madonna nudes acquired by Bob Guccione and recently up for auction. Perhaps the least explicit — but to my eye, the most intriguing — is this harem-girl getup:
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The Happy Sultan
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
A Georges Pichard illustration for Flaubert’s Pierrot au Sérail.
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The Life Of The Orgy
Saturday, January 26th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
“Those two? They get invited to all the best orgies in this town.”
Via Kinky Delight.
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Eros Is An Outlaw
Monday, October 25th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Your lesson for today, courtesy of Dr. Faustus at Erotic Mad Science:
Eros is an outlaw, a bandit, a scoffer at decencies. That’s why so much of erotic fantasy takes place in settings that are beyond the reach of morality somehow, some of which are not at all nice: the savage tropics, the oriental harem, the depraved convent, the women’s prison. Nazisploitation is just a development of this. If you embrace what you are, you’re going to find some things that will make other people pretty unhappy. Face it, live with it, and flourish.
Amen, Brother Faustus!
This was in reference to a fifteen-second clip from a Nazisploitation movie that once caused our Mad Doctor to “withdraw promptly into the privacy of his own chambers.”
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Very Lubricious ‘Toonery
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Filenames from Usenet suggest this is from a comic called Ferocious Harem. Google confirms that such a thing exists, but doesn’t illuminate me much. It’s purdy, though:
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Kidnapped For Harems and Brothels
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 -- by Bacchus
One of the things I love about mid-20th-century American men’s magazines is that they were trying so hard to be sleazy. The result? Lovely illustrations of the girl next door in dire peril, looking as though she’s buying a nice Halloween costume at Macy’s with a most irregular assortment of fitting assistants:
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Some Girls
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 -- by Dr. Faustus
Her revolt against the pruderies and sentimentalities of the world was evidence, to begin with, of her intellectual enterprise and courage, and her success as a rebel is proof of her extraordinary pertinacity, resourcefulness and acumen.
—H.L. Mencken, writing about what we would today call a sex worker, in In Defense of Women (1922)
Anyone who writes fantasy, even just as a hobby, will get whacked on the jaw by the real world from time to time, and I’ve just been so whacked. I confess to occasionally using an imagined modern harem as a locus of erotic fantasy. Imagine my surprise at an author coming out with an account of having been an actual harem girl, right at the end of the twentieth century. Well, there is such. Jillian Lauren has apparently done exactly that. Her new book is Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.
As a teenager rebelling against her middle-class, suburban New Jersey upbringing, Jillian Lauren dropped out of NYU and began first stripping and then doing escort work in New York. Eventually she received an offer to become a “guest” of Prince Jefri, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, a North Borneo sultanate that opted not to join the Malay Federation in 1963 and ceased to be a British dependency only in 1984. The country has substantial oil wealth, tightly controlled by its royal family. Which means that even younger members have a lot of money to spend on pretty women.
The harem that Jillian Lauren ended up joining wasn’t the enclosed prison of enslaved beauties imagined in Orientalist fantasy. Its 40 or so members were there voluntarily, on temporary stays in guesthouses on the Prince’s estate that would end with their being given “gifts” of jewelry, phenomenally expensive clothing, and envelopes of cash. (Though Jillian Lauren notes with her keen eyes that art alluding to the tradition of Orientalist fantasy would hang on the walls of the cottages — very postmodern.) While they stayed they would attend nightly parties with the Prince. At some point, some woman or another would get the nod to go off with the Prince. Women who pleased the prince more would get greater gifts and might be invited to stay on for longer. Unsurprisingly, this was a system rife with internal gossip and backbiting. Fiona, a more experienced member of the harem, tells Jillian at one point (p. 175):
Are you here to make friends? That’s a mistake. I’m not your friend. Robin [Prince Jefri] is not your friend. Those morons [some of the other girls] are not your friends. The money is your only friend.
Sage advice, as it turns out.
I wouldn’t say the money was a bad friend. Jillian left Brunei with a lot of it, returned to New York, endured various boyfriend tribulations, succeeded (some) as an actress, sought her birth mother (she had been adopted as an infant), and then returned for another tour of duty in Brunei. It makes for gripping reading, and it’s a testament to Jillian’s powers as a writer that the story of her life outside the harem just as engaging as that inside. This was a rare one-sitting book for me, and it’s 339 pages and I’m not the world’s fastest reader.
Though I confess it does leave me perhaps a little wistful that by the age of twenty Jillian managed to pack in more interesting experiences than I had had by twice that age.
There’s usually a passage one takes away from a book and chews over for some time after putting it down. This one was mine, a reflection of Jillian’s on being a sex worker:
There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on the strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten about between the black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. The persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl.
She then concludes, though “…that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one making the major life decisions for you.”
I’m just a pseudonymous sex blogger, something which by any measure involves vastly less risk and commitment than being any kind of professional sex worker, and yet I sometimes think I know a little of what Jillian is thinking here…
Very highly recommended.
As a bonus, those of you lucky enough to be subscribers to In Bed with Susie Bright can hear the inimitable Susie herself interviewing Jillian Lauren this week and next. (And those of you who aren’t yet so lucky might want to try getting so, hint, hint…)
To Make A Harem Girl
Thursday, March 25th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
Long before Photoshop, magazine art directors were doing fun things with scissors. Want to put Bettie Page on the cover of your magazine as a harem girl, but don’t have that photo? No worries! Take another photo of her, plus a photo of a different girl in a harem outfit, get the art guys to draw a cartoon sultan, a hookah, and some fruit, then get out your scissors and Kraft paste and go to town!
This 1957 magazine cover courtesy of the Drake’s Way tumblr.
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Sex In The Harem
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
The panels below are details from an unknown French-language graphic novel that appears to feature lustful adventures in some sort of harem:
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