I never would have made it as a gay person — for lots of reasons, probably. But my poor color vision would surely have doomed me, in a social world where a precise kink-nuanced hookup depended on being able to distinguish pink from robins egg blue:
In the heyday of Usenet there were a lot of hanky code lists that circulated, and I never knew how many of them were “real” in the sense that every shade and flagging variation was a thing in actual use — as opposed to somebody writing erotic literature in the form of a fantastic list of the flags they’d like to use or encounter. But this list has a credible-looking source printed right on it. Wikipedia has an entry on Samois, which seems to have been the real deal.
My long experience with porn advertising sales puffery extends all the way back to the era of porn magazines with unsupportable lurid headlines sold at sleazy newsstands in shrink wrap. I don’t care how loudly the headline proclaims “EXXXPLICIT ANAL PENETRATION!!!”, there’s a good chance she’ll be bent over a couch and the magazine will show you nothing but a view of her astonished face. That’s how grim the porn scene used to be, back when explicit porn came mostly from Europe and didn’t sell for cheap.
Thus I do not mind sharing my untrusting reaction to a porn shoot calling itself Filthy Young Harlots Blindfold Orgy. How filthy can we count on them being? Are they even genuine harlots? Will there be blindfolds? Is it truly an orgy? You see, I have questions. Nevertheless, I genuinely want to extend my congratulations to the title-writer, because that’s a title that makes me want to learn more.
I’m not sure where exactly the train compartments are this well-upholstered and this empty, but I guess it helps long train journeys pass more pleasantly:
This analingus artwork is a detail from an illustration by an unknown artist (thought perhaps to be Berthommé Saint-André) appearing in an edition of Pibrac: Quatrains érotiques de Pierre Louys.
I have young relatives who are millennials. Their dating rituals seem more complicated than the ones I remember: not worse, often better, but definitely more complicated. That said, mismatched expectations are hardly a millennial phenomenon. I feel like I, myself, have been on dates worse than this one:
Photograph (yanked most unfairly from its context) is via this gallery from Twisted Visual. Trust me, things get hotter after the Infinite Jest reading!
There’s a famous 1931 German film called Mädchen in Uniform about a repressive Prussian-style boarding school for young women. Let’s allow B. Ruby Rich writing in Jump Cut to help frame the movie’s context for us:
If we are to understand Maedchen In Uniform fully, it is important to keep in view the society within which it was made. It was the celebrated milieu of Berlin-avant-la-guerre, the Berlin with dozens of gay and lesbian bars and journals, the Berlin of a social tolerance so widespread that it nearly camouflaged the underlying legal restraints (which were to grow, rapidly, into massive repression).
Although Mädchen is primarily understood in our time as an early film about lesbianism, and is most notorious visually for a kissing scene between student and instructor (of which more later), the film is said to have been primarily appreciated by its contemporary German audience for its anti-authoritarian sentiments. From an IMDB review:
Though the film goes as far as it can in its theme of (awakening) lesbian feelings and sexual feelings of young girls in general, shifting emphasis automatically meant concentrating on the theme of the cold and inhumane authoritarian (Prussian) way of life and upbringing, a way of thinking still present in the Weimar republic and in 1931 already considered a danger to the young republic. Then audiences were more interested in this aspect than in the sexual one… A political stand this film certainly takes not, but, as the original title “Yesterday and Tomorrow” says, this film makes a plea for a more liberal and humane society. Of course the film was banned after the Nazi take-over (though for some obscure reason Goebbels liked the film “as film”).
Here’s Rich in Jump Cut again with more to say about that:
Most important to the film’s reputation through the years has been its significance as an antiauthoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film. To be sure, the film has suitable credentials for such a claim. Any film so opposed to militarism, so anti-Prussian, so much in support of the emotional freedom of women, must be an anti-fascist film. Add to such factors the fact that the film was made on the very eve of Hitler’s rise to power, just prior to the annexation of the film industry to Goebbel’s cultural program, and the legend of Sagan’s proto-subversive movie is secure. In emphasizing the film’s progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film’s central concern with love between women.
In my considered opinion, overlooking that must have taken considerable effort!
And what of the celebrated kissing scene in the dormitory?
Here’s the clip:
Rich in Jump Cut is much better than me at describing what we just saw there:
The scene is set in the dormitory on Manuela’s first night in the school. It is filmed with the soft focus and radiant light of a Romantic painting, say one by Friedrich. The lights are even dimmed, by Fraulein von Bernburg herself on-screen, to make the scene more seductive to the viewer. All the girls are poised on the edge of their beds, kneeling in identical white gowns, heads upraised to receive the communion of her lips touching their foreheads, which she holds firmly and ritually as she administers each kiss.
Rich again:
This extreme fetishizing of the kiss, by both the nature of the teacher’s gestures and director Sagan’s cinematographic style, is emblematic of the unspoken codes of repressive tolerance. The kiss is permitted, to each alike, but it is at once the given and the boundary. Nothing more may be allowed or even suggested, although the tension of that which is withheld suffuses the scene with its eroticism of shimmering light and grants the teacher her very power. The kiss is the minimum and the maximum, a state of grace and a state of stasis. The entire equilibrium is founded upon this extreme tension – which is snapped when Manuela, overwhelmed by the atmosphere and her feelings, breaks the rules. She throws her arms around Fraulein von Bernburg’s body in a tight embrace and receives, not a punishment, but a kiss. A kiss, not merely on the forehead, but full on the lips.
Without spoiling the subsequent plot of the movie for you, it ends surprisingly well, with no tragic suicides or dire fates. But Rich, writing in the 1980s about this 1930s film, makes an argument about the movie’s ending that’s still compelling today:
The bells and bugles that sound periodically throughout the film, casting a prophetic pall upon the love of Manuela and Fraulein von Bernburg, are waiting just outside the gates for us as well. The ending of the film can be interpreted as a warning to heed to forces mounting outside our narrow zones of victory and liberation. When, at the film’s end, the Principal appears to be defeated, she exits through a darkened hallway. But at the end of the hallway is the light of the outdoors, site of the buglers and the patriarchal forces mobilizing against any such victory.
The Nazis didn’t just ban this film, they tried to burn all the copies (source). Fortunately, they failed; some prints had already been dispersed outside Germany, and a very few of those survived the war.
This artwork appears all over the web in ten thousand uncredited places. It’s been circulating so long in so many different forms that it was extremely hard to track down a credit. But at such tasks your humble narrator excels, and I persevered until successful: according to The Village Voicein 2004, it’s artwork by Mirko Ilic.
I’m unsure of many things. I don’t know what sort of pretty mer-monsters these are, I don’t know why they are on display in an ornate tube, I’m not entirely certain what they are doing to one another although I have a “firm” suspicion, and I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would see fit to exhibit this eye-catching spectacle to curious children. But the truly burning question in my mind is this one: has Dr. Faustus been alerted?
What’s above is a detail from a work called “Angels”, by artist Arthur Berzinsh. Berzinsh is perhaps most famous as the fellow whose fart-bubbling cherubs confused and delighted hundreds of thousands of credulous folk on social media:
Here’s another great reason to love the internet: a large digital collection [gone now, here’s the Wayback machine URL proving I didn’t dream it] of On Our Backs, the lesbian magazine from the 1980s and 1990s (I’d call it “seminal” if that word weren’t so manifestly unsuited to carrying the freight I need carried) published by, among others, Susie Bright.
The collection is from Independent Voices (“an open-access collection of an alternative press”) and though it doesn’t claim to be complete, it is very substantial, containing 68 issues of the magazine. (Gaps in the collection are evident from the numbering, but how many of them coincide with publication gaps is something I can’t easily check.)
Enjoy!
2019 Update: I’m sorry to report that Independent Voices has removed public access to the On Our Backs collection, for stated reasons that strike me as reflecting either cowardice or insincerity. It can be humiliating when the #pornocalypse comes for you, and not everybody is willing to admit when it happens.
Austin and Bambi share a mutual interest in being very clean, there’s no other explanation for all this:
Pictures are from a 2003 “Hustler Classic” photoshoot that was just reprinted in the November 2015 Hustler magazine, available in print or online via Digital Magazine Access.
While working on some porn research for one of my Fiverr clients, I came across this lovely bit of mutual breast stimulation artwork by artist Caffeccino (who has a Patreon offering you can support):
According to Rare Historical Photos, which link features several additional related photos, pictured is a 1930s scene from the lesbian nightclub Le Monocle in Paris. We are told that “The name Le Monocle derived from a fad at the time where women who identified as lesbian would sport a monocle to indicate sexual preference.”
Rule 34 is real. If a thing exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions. And it turns out that hot Mormon girls are no more immune to the rule than anybody else. MormonGirlz is a website featuring young LDS ladies breaking the law of chastity (most typically with each other) for your viewing pleasure. In one recent update (look for “Sister Davis & Sister Price, Washing And Anointing”) two devout members of “the church of sexy saints and latter-day sinners” get sidetracked by lesbian lust during something called the endowment ceremony:
The endowment is a symbolic journey, during which temple-goers are introduced to a room the represents the celestial kingdom. Before they are endowed, they are washed and anointed with consecrated oil. The person being anointed is completely nude except for an open robe that the person performing the ordinance lifts to anoint the breast, the belly and the loins. On this occasion, Sister Price will be washing and anointing her companion, Sister Davis. Davis knows Price wouldn’t dare violate the holy temple with impure thoughts or deeds, but when she’s standing in from of Sister Price, totally nude, with goosebumps from the cold and her nipples rigid from rubbing against her robe, she can’t think of anything but the taste of her companion’s wet pussy.
Sister Price puts a little oil on her fingers and begins the ritual. She explains the washing and anointing, then touches Sister Davis’s forehead and eyes, pronouncing a blessing on each. When she gets to her huge, perfect breasts, she forgets her lines and starts to grope them…
By the time Sister Price reaches Sister Davis’s loins, they both know where this is going. Sister Price lets her hand linger on her companion’s pussy. She runs her hand up her thigh and then rubs her crotch. She gets on her knees to bless her legs and feet, and Sister Davis decides it’s time to get things started. She puts a hand on Sister Price’s head and guides it up into her pussy…
Now tell me truly, people: when was the last time you saw pleated skirts in a porn?
Reluctant though I am to spend much time eroticizing the rolling human rights disaster that is our real-world criminal justice system, it strikes me that these pictures from Caged Tushy are sufficiently “pornified for porn’s sake” for us to safely ignore the political voice that never shuts up in the back of our heads. (Or is that just me?) You can just tell that this corrections officer is getting ready to take a highly personal interest in potential contraband smuggling:
A string of pearls, a glass of red wine, a little belled-and-collared submissive with a hungry mouth and deft hands who makes you spill your red wine… really, it’s not a bad way to spend your Friday night!
Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose own daughter was a lesbian, according to medieval Arabic writers, is supposed to have examined his daughter’s labia and surrounding veins and to have concluded that her lesbianism was due to “an itch between the major and minor labia” that could be soothed only by rubbing them against another woman’s labia.
From Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women by Sahar Amer, in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (2009).
Galen was renowned for centuries as the greatest doctor who had ever lived. But that doesn’t mean he was actually all that good.
Also: readers may remember that Galen’s previous appearance on ErosBlog where his name was invoked as part of a husband’s appeal for buttsex during pregnancy:
Thy size repels me, whilst thy charms invite;
Then, say, how celebrate the marriage rite?
Learn’d Galen, Celsus, and Hippocrates,
Have held it good, in knotty points like these,
Lest mischief from too rude assaults should come,
To copulate ex more pecudum.
I found these hungry girls in a bizarrely-British 1995 porn magazine called Ravers (Vol. 1, No. 11) and they caught my eye because they were the only people in the mag who genuinely appeared to be having fun:
“Animal Planet got two teams of experts helping these dumbass tigers fuck so the species won’t die but not one of y’all lazy fucks can FedEx me a lesbian?”
I confess that I’m a bit at sea when it comes to understanding precisely why a bit of harmless topless fun with a box of wine and girl-kissing should be a stock trope used to justify extreme punishment in the scripts for spanking movies. Nonetheless, that’s the way of the spanking-porn world, and we get to enjoy moderately-debauched all-girl orgies as a consequence of it. Fair warning: don’t click any links if you are squicked by severe caning welts or are still wobbly (after all these years!) on the concept that porn models can have agency:
I cannot stop laughing this reaction shot of the outraged headmaster:
Why isn’t this ugly outraged mug a photoshopped internet meme by now?
And then it’s all outraged sputtering and “Bring out the vaulting horse, girls, now me and my cane are going to have an authoritarian party and you dirty little sluts are not going to enjoy it!”
IMO, instead of going all Singapore on their asses, the dude would have been better off just kicking back and watching the show unfold on the security cameras. But maybe that’s just me.
Pictures are from the promotional stills gallery for Wild Party Three, as seen at Lupus Spanking.
Update: Apparently Lupus is now defunct, so I’ve removed those links. Spanking Blog has the slightly complicated explainer.
‘How do you do? I’m Mir…’ She stopped and plucked at her tongue with her thumb and forefinger, ‘…Miriam Margolyes. Sorry about that, I was licking my girlfriend out last night and I’ve still got some of her cunt hairs in my mouth.’
That’s actor Stephen Fry remembering how he met actress Miriam Margolyes, as quoted at Femdom Resource.
Saying it now instead of next week because I’ve been in a bit of a minor funk regarding the progress and direction of our sad old world, and this heartwarming photo is the first thing I’ve seen that actually gives me some hope for the new year:
Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, left, kisses her girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2011 after Gaeta’s ship returned from 80 days at sea.
On second inspection, I realized that the ladies here are most probably wearing leather or cloth masks. But upon first viewing, I thought I was looking at goggles… which would upgrade the scene from “charmingly kinky” to “over the top, deeply kinky, I hope they have servants to clean up the mess” territory:
It is now my fondest hope that this blog post will eventually become the number one Google search result for the phrase “Enema Goggles”.
There’s something (unintentionally?) hilarious about the Lesbian Army porn site. The room is cheap, the girls are Slavic pretty, the gear is Red Army surplus, and the plot lines are a novel mix of boot camp, military hazing, and cartoony “here’s your rubber dick, congrats you’re lesbian!” lesbianism:
The knowledge that these pictures are from the oh-so-innocent introduction to a steamy lesbian BDSM / dungeon fantasy detracts nothing from the harmless all-American pleasure of a nice low-angle closeup on a practicing cheerleader:
These days, ErosBlog gets a lot of PR emails, from folks with mainstream publications (whether still printed on dead trees expensively coated in glossy clay, or migrating rapidly from that sinking ship onto the cheaper high ground of the virtual internets).
There’s a few fundamental best practices for internet PR professionals. Mostly, they seem unaware of them.
One fairly basic politeness (that you’d think their mommas would have taught them) is to make an introduction. A PR professional ought to introduce himself or herself and say who they represent. They almost never do this; they just breezily offer up the link they are trying to promote and sign off with “Julie” or “Bob” like you are their close friend who never heard of them before.
This is a professional mistake, because the line between “internet PR professional” and “spammer” is dangerously thin. The only sure way to avoid crossing it is to actually forge a relationship with the people you’re marketing to. And relationships, as everybody should know who ever had a momma, start with an introduction. In meatspace, you walk up, offer your hand to shake, and say, “Hi, I’m Roger Eurace, I do PR for a couple of magazines and I like your blog, I think we’ve got some common interests.” In email, you can’t shake hands, but that first line “I’m Hugh Gepenies from Big Richard Magazine, and [eight words making it clear this is not a form letter sent to dozens of people]” is absolutely essential.
Why? Because if you open with your spam-ish marketing message, and it’s not individually tailored to the recipient, it’s a dead give-away that you likely did spam the same email to dozens or hundreds of people. And that makes you a spammer, and a spammer is a type of thief (thief of attention, thief of time, thief of computer resources).
Worse yet, by not introducing yourself as a marketing professional, and by breezily signing your first name as if the recipient of the email already knows you, you convey the impression that you’re hoping to pretend to be a friend, or another blogger. That’s petty fraud, or would be if it weren’t so annoyingly, transparently obvious.
No organization who hires a PR professional wants their brand associated with petty thievery and fraud. But alleged PR professionals often don’t understand internet values, so they don’t understand that their small deceits and attempted frauds work at cross purposes to their primary goal of getting positive internet attention.
Finally, a true PR professional doesn’t waste time trying to promote something that’s likely to actively annoy the target of the contact. Which means, spammy bulk mailings become impossible; the PR person actually has to read the blogs he or she is marketing to. That’s good, because spamming a blogger with a link that’s likely to annoy said blogger is more likely to get you mocked than it is to get a link to the client’s website.
Enter Stephanie.
This morning I get this email:
> Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:48:52
> Subject: ‘Flirting with Disaster’ in DETAILS
The subject line alone trips my bullshit filters. The word “disaster” suggests one of those breathless mainstream “the dangers of dating” articles — as a pro-sex sort of publication, Eros Blog doesn’t focus much on sexual disaster, especially when it’s portrayed (as it too often is) as the inevitable consequence of unzipping your zipper. Moving on:
> From: Stephanie Kim {Stephanie_Kim@condenast.com}
> To: bacchus@erosblog.com
Ayup. Corporate marketing. Conde Nast has some good titles, I’m still reading.
> Good Morning-
>
> Have you ever encouraged your significant other to explore their
> bi-curiosity?
Gosh, that’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not totally beyond the pale; it’s fair coming from a personal friend, or somebody who is on my blogroll that I’ve exchanged emails with before. But from a stranger?
Note the utter lack of an introduction. Note also there’s nothing in this intro that would have prevented mass-mailing this email to a dozen or a thousand or ten million other bloggers.
Next we get to the meat-like substance in the can of spam:
> In the January/February issue of DETAILS, we share the surprising
> and unintentional consequences.
>
> http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_7783
Right ho, and you just proved you’ve never read ErosBlog. Spammer.
The consequences of “encouraging your significant other to explore their bi-curiousity” are deeply unpredictable. From an upside of endless wild three-ways to a downside of relationship-crushing rejection, you just never know until you try. If any of the possible outcomes are surprising, you weren’t being a clear-eyed sexual grown-up when you decided to take a whack at the bee-hive shaped pinata.
But we saw the “Flirting with Disaster” title, didn’t we? So we already know that this is a standard main-stream magazine “ZOMG, sexual adventurousness is dangerous” waste of time. Another in a long line of sex-negative propaganda pieces, all of which exist to prove that if you step out of your grey-flannel suit, you’re a doomed sinner who will surely suffer your just desserts of heartbreak, divorce, and damnation.
At this point the only thing we don’t know is how deep in the water this particular journalistic failboat will be.
Remind me again, why anybody who reads ErosBlog would think we might want to link favorably to an article talking about the manifest and obvious dangers of sexual openness and adventurousness?
Back to Stephanie, who (it turns out) has been winding up for a bit of fatuous condescension:
> Please be sure to link to our site should you post anything.
And you be sure to put covers on them magazines, it would sure be bad if they were flappin’ around on the news stands and nobody knew what their titles were!
Thanks for telling me how to do my job, lady. Thanks a bunch. I’ve been blogging since 2003 — how long have you been marketing dead tree magazines on the internet?
> Thank you for your consideration!
>
> Best,
>
> Stephanie
She might have rescued herself, from mockery if not from spammer status or mission failure, if she’d bothered to add a second line to her signature, something like “PR Assistant, Conde Nast Magazines”. But no, she’s come this far hoping I won’t think too hard about who she is, and she’s now trying to slide away from the contact without me ever noticing that she’s never said.
Enough about Stephanie. How full of fail is her proffered link?
Well, first of all, it’s important to remember that print magazines have lots of pages, so they can sell lots of ad space. And so, when they migrate to the web, they tend to take tiny little nine-paragraph articles and split them up across three different web “pages” to generate a bogus high volume of “page views”. It’s an annoying industry standard. Some magazines do this in print, too, splitting articles up with lots of jumps so you’ll have to page through the mag a lot of times. Recreating that physical pain in electronic form is just one of the many ways that the fading print dinosaurs are failing to adapt, and one of the biggest reasons why it’s a rare print magazine website that’s worth a bucket of warm spit.
Let’s move on to content. Remember the carefully gender-neutral hook in Stephanie’s email? “Have you ever encouraged your significant other to explore their bi-curiosity?” Well, ladies, have you?
Sorry, that was bait and switch. Stephanie has apparently heard of bi-curious men, but the reader of the article she’s promoting never will. The subheader under the “Flirting With Disaster” headline makes that clear: “Want your girlfriend to try a little sapphic action? Be careful what you wish for.”
There’s not a single word in the article about bi-curious men. “sapphic action” (lack of capital letter in original) sets the tone. Here’s a little word cloud of lovely phrases from the article:
“sapphic action” “conjugal bed” “Owen’s wife dropped the pink bomb” “lesbian awakening” “lesbian-obsessed guy” “do a shot of the Tila Tequila punch” “give girl-on-girl a try” “walk on the wild side” “Sapphic-themed sex” “chick-on-chick action”
I look at these things so you don’t have to. Sorry, Stephanie, it’s not worth a link.
