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The Sex Blog Of Record
Sunday, December 25th, 2022 -- by Bacchus
I don’t have a good link to go with this photo or much context, so I choose to believe what we’ve got going on here is a luxury bed-and-breakfast inn (perhaps not quite the most reputable, but very swank) whose owner refuses to countenance the idea that any guest visiting alone over the holidays could possibly want to sleep alone. It’s theoretically possible to refuse the turn-down-and-tuck-in service but these ladies will pout most powerfully. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
Merry Christmas!
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Tuesday, August 24th, 2021 -- by Bacchus
This placard is said to hang on the wall of a rare bookstore (in both senses of that phrase) in London. I can see why a bookseller would display it, but the advice is more truly directed at the patrons of sex workers, and I think it good:
The quote is attributed to John Selden and appears to have been published in his posthumous and sometimes-questioned Table Talk.
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Monday, August 2nd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
This artwork illustrates the story Inevitable Man by Michel Villon, as appearing in the November 1935 issue of La Paree, a surprisingly spicy journal for men. The topless ladies are not, at it might appear at first glance, catfighting; instead they are hanging out in a hot room in Saigon, drinking liquor and helping one of their number pack her luggage for a new adventure.
Here’s the bit from the story that we see depicted in the artwork:
It was too hot for even the thinnest of clothes, and the three girls lolled about on the wicker furniture clad in only their underwear. Paulette was eighteen, and as yet untouched by the ravages of the sun and heat. Her hair was the color of spun gold, and it hung almost to her waist. In spite of the heat which filled the large, comfortable room, she was never for a moment still. Several shabby suitcases lay open, on the matting on the floor, and it was the packing of these which kept her moving.
Fanning herself languidly with a palm-leaf fan, Yvonne said, “I suppose the future wife of Captain Jacques Renaile will soon forget the two girls with whom she lived in Saigon, nein?”
Paulette straightened. “Jamais!” she said intensely. “How can you say such a thing, Yvonne? After all you’ve done for me? Taking me in when I had no one else to go to. Looking after me. Helping me to find work.” Tears formed in her lovely eyes. “I don’t see how you could think of such a thing,” she finished.
Marie patted her bare shoulder. “Yvonne was only teasing you, ma cherie,” she said soothingly. “We know you won’t forget.”
…
Marie returned to her position behind the drawn Venitian blind. Suddenly, she stiffened.
“Yvonne!” she said excitedly. “Come here! Quickly!” Yvonne and Paulette joined her. Together, they peered through the chinks in the blind.
Standing on the pavement, outside a large office building across the street, was a man. He was tall, broad shouldered, bronzed and dressed in white duck. He was fanning himself with a pith helmet. He was extremely handsome. Yvonne was the first to break the silence. She said,
“So he’s back again! Sacre!”
“Nom de Dieu! Roger Blake,” the unfamiliar words sounded strange on her tongue. “And I swore I’d kill him the next time I saw him.”
“I did, too.”
“Who is he?” demanded Paulette, excitedly.
“He is a man,” replied Yvonne. “An American. He is the French representative of some big American concern, and he travels for them. He has made fools of half the women in Saigon. I felt like the lowest cocotte after he was through with me.”
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Sunday, May 2nd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
Today I learned that among Lenin’s many crimes, he specifically ordered that hundreds of sex workers be shot. Worker’s revolution? Sure, but only for the correct sort of workers:
“It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.”
Due to an ambiguity about whether a specific Russian word means “making drunk” or “being drunk”, this more sensible-sounding translation is also offered:
You must … organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes, drunk soldiers, former officers and the like.
There’s some historical ambiguity about how many of the sex workers were actually shot (as opposed to being terrorized or deported) but any public discussion of the question so rapidly fills up with tankies dreaming up creative justifications to excuse/absolve Lenin of his crimes, that it’s not an easily-researchable question for non-historians.
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Saturday, March 23rd, 2019 -- by Bacchus
This plaid-shirted fellow seems a bit dumbfounded by his options, in this fine little brothel lineup:
The art is from the cover of Il Montatore #112.
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Thursday, January 24th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
The amenities at this fancy brothel are spare, but very classy: matched pair of sex workers, nice drapes, a plush bed to get laid upon. A silver pitcher, a single glass, and a priapic table to set them on. Just what a wealthy hedonist needs, and nothing more:
A couple of sources say this is 18th-century erotic art, but I couldn’t nail down much provenance beyond that.
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Sunday, June 3rd, 2018 -- by Bacchus
He told his wife “No, dear, don’t have the cook hold dinner for me. I’ll be working late and then I’ll just dine at my club before I come home.”
Artwork is by Umberto Brunelleschi.
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Monday, April 16th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
There’s a whole suite of reasons why I haven’t been posting at all about the rolling disaster for sex workers and online adult speech that is the FOSTA-SESTA bill signed into law by President Trump last week. For one thing, I was waiting to make sure His Vicious Randomness actually did sign it; for another, I’ve been busy with an exhausting rescue dog ongoing mini-crisis on the home front. Third reason: despite this being rather like the #pornocalypse on steroids from an adult free speech perspective, the primary negative impact is to sex workers, who are losing their livelihoods and are in many cases at risk of losing their safety and perhaps their lives. I’m not qualified enough or knowledgeable enough about sex worker issues to write about that, but writing about free speech issues while ignoring sex worker carnage is clearly shallow and wrong. Balanced against that, I’ve had multiple actual sex workers dropping into my Twitter DMs going “Hey, when are you going to write about FOSTA-SESTA? Do you need more info? How can we help?” Which is flattering — apparently they have more faith in my ability to write about their issues than I do — but also highlights the desperation that’s out there, as too many sex workers feel like they are being “vanished” from the internet with nobody much noticing or caring or speaking up.
On top of all this, in the last few days we had the likely final frost for the year in my part of the world, which means that a sensible person of constrained financial means who mostly eats vegetables really ought to be spending every waking minute in the garden putting seeds in soil, not pounding a keyboard about a problem that’s not going to go away before the midterm elections at the absolute earliest. So, yeah. There are lots of reasons for my sense of paralysis, even helplessness, when it comes to writing about SESTA-FOSTA just now.
But I do have a lot to say. Sex workers aside (and I’m not putting you aside!) this is an enormous threat to online adult speech; it offers, and is already being used as, an excuse to justify the blue-nosed pornocalypsing tendencies of every online community and platform out there. I am on this. I am with you. But I am also just insanely busy trying to survive and keep my critters alive.
For today, I can offer this roundup of helpful links, the mere titles of which are informative, and the reading of which should be eye-opening and instructive to anybody who has gotten this far without having previously been aware of the FOSTA-SESTA disaster:
- FOSTA-SESTA’s real aim is to silence sex workers online: Under the cover of trafficking, sex workers are being silenced (Engadget article by Daniel Cooper, April 11)
- Congress just legalized sex censorship: what to know — “sex work” is not another word for trafficking (Engadget article by Violet Blue, May 30)
- New Legislation Forces Sex Workers Back to Streets and Strips Away Internet Freedoms in One Swoop: The SESTA-forced end of a Craigslist personal ads era means big problems for sex workers (Alternet article by Rick Riley, April 15)
- The lies about sex trafficking that brought down Backpage: Powerful myths about sex work are behind the war against Backpage (Salon article by Noah Berlatsky, April 15)
- Strange Fruit: How Sex Trafficking Laws Affect Consensual Sex Workers (Louisville public radio broadcast on WPFL interviewing trans activist and writer Londyn De Richelieu, April 15)
- No One Wants To Listen To Sex Workers (Washington Post opinion column by Molly Roberts, April 10)
- Sex News: FOSTA-SESTA damage continues (Tiny Nibbles link roundup by Violet Blue, April 14)
More soon!
Sunday, March 11th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
My friend Dr. Faustus called my attention to podcaster and essayist Dave Booda, whose article Why Sex Workers Should Replace Dating Coaches struck me as very much the sort of thing I like to highlight here at ErosBlog:
Going food shopping hungry can be a bad idea. When we’re hungry we make poor decisions about what to buy because we’re preoccupied trying to satisfy our urgent needs.
This is also true of dating, it’s hard to be calm and collected when you haven’t gotten laid in a while. I have a lot of love for the men who hire dating coaches, so what I’m about to say is said with a massive amount of compassion and understanding.
Most of the men who seek out dating coaches are desperate as fuck.
Many of these men are at the end of their rope, feel completely helpless and are excruciatingly lonely. Now imagine that guy trying to have relationships with women from that place. It’s a massive hurdle to overcome.
It’s also a catch twenty-two, because that desperation is precisely what’s stopping him from getting his needs met. “Relax and act cool” is an easy thing to say when you have an abundant love life, but it’s ridiculous advice for a man who hasn’t gotten laid in a year. The best male dating coaches can do is help that guy “fake it ’til you make it” but that process is slow and frustrating, not to mention it trains him to repress things like authenticity and honesty.
Now imagine that instead of finding a man to help him he goes to a quality sex worker. She can help meet his physical and emotional needs on day one, so now when he goes out into the world he feels nourished and fed versus starving and desperate.
I am middle-aged and old-fashioned; a lot of my mental baggage around sex work was formed decades ago in a society that could not discuss sex work without spitting. So I’m perhaps too aware how much freight is carried by the word “quality” in Dave Booda’s phrase “quality sex worker.” (His essay goes on to address this.) It’s far too easy for me to summon mental images and stereotypes of sex workers who would not — to put it mildly — outperform dating coaches by any metric. These tired attitudes of mine are balanced, fortunately, by my whole Twitter feed that’s full of bright, funny, compassionate, skillful, sexy, and talented sex workers. And I think the man has a real point: for many a desperate young person, these professionals would offer better value than a dating coach could ever hope to.
Saturday, January 13th, 2018 -- by Bacchus
Coming in just under the Saturday wire, my first Share Our Shit Saturday post of 2018 with a focus on sex workers and products:
- Liara Roux (“Professional bisexual cutie & indie porn director/producer” says her Twitter profile, “Your Travel Sized Sweetheart” says her website) is someone that I knew I owed a favor, because of her tweets at the right time that got me up to speed on the slow-rolling Patreon #pornocalypse stuff. In that moment she was just a Twitter handle to me; I didn’t know her from Adam’s off ox, and could not have picked her out of a photo lineup at a drunk tank. Eventually I discovered that she was posting catch-your-breath cute photos on Twitter. Her breaks-all-the rules, video-animated, music-playing website is the most persuasive example of a professional woman’s anchoring web presence I have encountered, but be warned: it’s mesmerizing. It’s lucky I’m not a rich man, else I might soon be a rather poorer one.
- In case you have somehow missed it, one of my oldest blogfriends Mistress Matisse has masterminded and is marketing an intimacy-enhancing cannabis-based sensual lube called Velvet Swing. Currently only available at select legal cannabis retailers in the state of Washington, so I don’t in-person know anybody with experience of the product. But Mistress Matisse has just about the lowest bullshit-quotient of any sex worker I’ve ever encountered on social media, and she’s convinced me that she poured her heart into creating and getting this stuff onto the market. I believe in her and she believes in Velvet Swing, and that’s good enough for me.
- Adroitly multitasking camgirl Haylee Love manages two dildos, a buttplug, and a vibrator, while rocking a collar and cat ears. Sheerest talent, gentlemen, on display at Sensual Liberation Army.
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Tuesday, September 19th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
The artwork of these particular scholarly beauties comes from the cover of an Italian pulp with a title that suggests these ladies aren’t just smart, they actually have a sound financial strategy to fund their higher education, and one that’s not so very rare, either.
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Friday, August 25th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
From Kinky Delight, but I believe this must be artwork by Georges Pichard:
It’s gotta be Friday night, or maybe the fleet is in?
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Sunday, May 7th, 2017 -- by Bacchus
This illustration is said to depict one of the “tattoos of prostitutes” from The Female Offender by Lombroso (1893):
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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Whatever you may think of the ethics, morality, or aesthetics of sex work, the prohibitionist approach doesn’t work any better in the context of sex than it does in the context of booze, guns, or drugs. Prohibition of sex work puts sex workers at risk, even when criminal sanctions are aimed at the clients rather than the providers. And that, according to Margaret Corvid, is Why It’s OK To Pay For Sex:
This essay isn’t about how nice my sex work clients usually are, how sex work can be therapeutic, or how we sex workers often work with disabled clients. It isn’t about the etiquette or morality of paying for sex, and it doesn’t offer advice to prospective clients or their loved ones.
These things are sometimes important and vital to this discussion, but the biggest reason that paying for sex is okay has nothing to do with convincing anyone that it’s a virtuous, liberatory, or feminist act.
Paying for sex is okay because if you’re for shaming and arresting our clients — owing to the fact that you think sex work is, for lack of a better word, gross — you’re for putting sex worker lives at risk in the name of a misguided moralism.
…
White feminism — tone policing, All-Lives-Matter spouting, pumpkin-spice-drinking white feminism –thinks it knows what’s best for everyone who isn’t itself, including sex workers, and it’s happy for the police to help it press its points home, no matter how many of our lives it destroys in the process.
Intersectional feminism, however, tries to have a different relationship with police. We’ll critique them, but we don’t turn to police as a tool to transform our racist and sexist society. Intersectional feminism demands that it’s okay to sell sex and to pay for it, because no other approach serves the human rights of sex workers and the reduction of risk and harm in our work.
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Tuesday, April 7th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
I have this little theory in which I apportion some of the blame for our culture’s hatred of sex workers. The people I apportion it to: sexually-manipulative wives. In my most recent expression of it, I wrote:
A long time ago in the context of a discussion about porn, I advanced a theory about the historical antipathy between wives and sex workers. This theory seemed so uncontroversial to me that I didn’t think it needed expanding, explaining, or defending; rather, it was the rock-solid background against which I set my argument about porn. Here’s what I said in 2003:
Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men.
Mistress Matisse has another theory. If following the money is an analytic principle that seems wise to you, then her theory may have considerable appeal:
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Monday, March 2nd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
It’s no secret that many sex workers prefer to draw a line between their personal and professional lives, with “don’t date the clients” being a very common (if nonetheless sometimes disregarded) self-precaution. But why, exactly? Well, as Maggie McNeill explains, the answer includes all of the reasons you would expect, plus one or two that I would not have thought of, including:
Guys who imagine that sex workers’ sex drives are higher than those of amateur women, or that they’re always more open-minded about preferences and kinks that they’re not being paid to indulge.
That would be an easy (if unreflective) mistake to make, and as Maggie says, such a situation could “be hard for either party to tell apart from real affection.”
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Tuesday, January 20th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
A long time ago in the context of a discussion about porn, I advanced a theory about the historical antipathy between wives and sex workers. This theory seemed so uncontroversial to me that I didn’t think it needed expanding, explaining, or defending; rather, it was the rock-solid background against which I set my argument about porn. Here’s what I said in 2003:
Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.
Encoded in that paragraph is my proposition that nobody is entitled to demand the benefits of sexual exclusivity if they aren’t willing to satisfy the sexual desires of their partner. Since 2003 I’ve learned that this isn’t a gendered proposition, but I’ve also learned that the pathology of demanding an unsatisfying exclusivity is even more common than I had thought. Incompatible levels of sexual desire are common, and there are many non-monogamy (or monogamish) relationship models couples can use to cope with them. But it is both wicked and unjust for a partner to insist upon sexual exclusivity without also taking responsibility for actually having enough sex to make the relationship mutually satisfying. And this sort of wickedness and injustice? It’s dirt-common.
I was reminded of all of this by an essay in Vice by sex worker April Adams. She writes:
Dear wife,
I don’t know you, but I know that it’s possible that your husband will cheat on you with a sex worker. I say that because I am one, and I am not short on clients.
But not your husband, you say, not him! Other husbands, sure, but your relationship, your sex life, is different. You had a threesome with your college roommate ten years ago. You get a sitter and head to Vegas every August. You have that special thing with Law and Order marathons. You have a great marriage!
Let me ask you: When was the last time you had sex three times in a week? When was the last time he complained about that? Don’t you think that maybe it’s possible that he’s instead taken the problem out of your hands, which is to say into mine?
After a lengthy articulation of the reasons such a state of affairs might not actually be all that maritally-threatening, Adams concludes:
I’m not saying it’s your job to keep him happy. I am saying maybe you don’t want to sleep with him that often. You’re busy, or stressed out, or he doesn’t do it for you anymore. I get it; he almost certainly doesn’t do it for me.
That’s the point. I am the secret ingredient in a lot of healthy marriages, because when he’s seeing me, both of you are getting the amount of sex you want. As long as you leave his cellphone alone, you might make it to your 50th anniversary. You’re welcome.
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2014 -- by Bacchus
One of the clearest markers for “this story in the press about sex work or sex workers is lazy bullshit” is that oft-cited statistic about 13 being the average age of entry into sex work. A statistic that never comes with a citation, it’s just one of those things that every lazy journalist “knows”, and everybody else with a brain who thinks about it for more than ninety seconds knows cannot possibly be true.
Think about it. If 13 were the average age, there would have to be a whole lot of younger, even prepubescent child sex workers out there. They would be turning up on the nightly news in droves every time the police announce another “rescue” sweep of sex worker arrests. And yet, strangely, on the rare occasions that police do “rescue” (arrest) an underage sex worker, it’s always an older teen nearing adulthood. If the “13 is the average age of entry” statistic were true, that would not be the case.
Don’t take my word for it. After we all suffered for years from the idiocy of that endlessly-repeated bogus statistic, Chris Hall (the Literate Perversions guy) has written a detailed take-down in The Atlantic. I hope every journalist who continues to lazily parrot the bogus statistic in future gets jammed with a thousand instances of this link via FaceBook, Twitter, email, and every social media channel they use.
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Saturday, April 16th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’ve described my goal here at ErosBlog as blogging about sex and porn with an unapologetic, unabashed male gaze … while striving not to be a complete dickhead about sex, about women, about porn models, about sex workers. The degree to which I succeed may be debatable, but I’ve never felt a lustful-yet-respectful male gaze was an impossible or unreasonable goal. I’m aware, yes, of a political camp that equates gaze with disrespect, or with objectification that in its own turn is equated with disrespect — but as a political matter, I categorically reject those views, and attempt to refute them, by example, to the best of my ability.
So you’ll appreciate the fascination with which I read this from Miss Maggie Mayhem:
The young man I pass who looks me up and down and gives me a sincere smile and eye contact does not have the same intentions as the car filled with young men matching my pace and shouting at me as I walk down the street. Respect is not indicated by abstaining from a sexual gaze. Respect is recognizing the fact that it might not be mutual and being alright with that and not acting in a way that imposes it on another human being against their own desire and autonomy. To say that you shouldn’t ever look at a stranger across the room and get turned on is to say that you shouldn’t ever fall in love at first sight.
You preach it, sister!
Friday, September 11th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
In yesterday’s mail came David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin, Jr., eds. Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Love, Life, Money, and Sex. And while I’ve barely had time to crack it open, the first thing I see is a very short article by the magnificent Annie Sprinkle (Ph.D., even!), entitled “40 Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes.”
There’s a lot here, that run from the prosaic
21. Whores relieve millions of people from unwanted stress and tension.
to the humorous
36. Whores have the guts to wear very big wigs.
to the explicitly political culmination.
40. Whores are rebelling against the absurd, patriarchal, sex-negative laws against their profession and are fighting for the right to receive financial compensation for their valuable work.
But I guess I must just be some sort of economist manqué, because what really stuck with me was
6. Whores have careers based on giving pleasure.
Any artist, indeed any worker of any kind, should be proud to say the same thing about herself. You can read the whole thing at Annie Sprinkle’s site here.
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Saturday, June 4th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
Mistress Matisse has written an excellent short essay on why prostitution is not inherently wrong. It’s hard to argue with her points on women’s ownership of their own bodies, and it’s puzzling to me that self-described feminists, who are all about body self-ownership when it comes to the reproductive side of sex, can’t understand the same point when it’s applied to sex for money-and-pleasure.
My favorite paragraph:
That, to me, is the part of being a sex worker that’s most apt to be damaging: the pressure, the name-calling, the marginalization and isolation she may encounter. If she internalizes those beliefs – and for many women it’s hard not to – she will start to hate herself, and with self-hatred comes a host of other self-destructive behaviors. But I think it’s not the sex with men that’s damaging these women, it’s being told they’re bad, dirty sluts. And I think it’s unfortunate when the people calling them that think of themselves as feminists. That’s not any brand of feminism I want to be a part of.
And just for the record, I would pay good money to be there watching in person while someone tells Mistress Matisse to her face that she’s a bad, dirty slut.
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