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The Sex Blog Of Record
Friday, October 28th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
Susie Bright can call it “a tewwible sex ed book” if she wants to, and yeah, it had some serious flaws. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that without considering what you are comparing it to. As one of the most widely sold sex ed books of its generation (in a class with perhaps one other member, I’m thinking of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask) and in a world where there was no sex information freely available to minors, Joy of Sex became “the first serious sex information we ever saw” to a lot of people of my generation. Whatever its flaws (and I remember dismissing parts of it as “some serious hippy shit” reading it as an adolescent more than a decade after its publication) it was a lot better than Hustler magazine, which can stand in for the only other sort of sex info available to rural youngsters at that time. If there were better sex ed books likely to be on the open stacks of a public library in small town America before 1985, there weren’t many. Maybe Our Bodies, Ourselves? Not in our library, no indeed.
Those cheesy illustrations, though? There’s a story behind them:
Think of The Joy of Sex and chances are your mind will drift to an image of a man with a bushy beard and a woman with hairy armpits.
It’s not a photograph, but the nearest thing to it in pen and ink.
In early 1970s Britain, photographs would have been too risque. But hand-drawn illustrations based on photographs? Maybe society was ready for that.
“We were a bit nervous when we took this on,” remembers one of the book’s illustrators, Chris Foss.
“The publisher had to write a contract which confirmed that they would pay our defence if some old fart decided to make an issue out of it.”
…
Joy of Sex art director Peter Kindersley calculated that the quality of the art work would shield the publishers, Mitchell Beazley, from prosecution.
The images were graphic – they showed genitals and countless sex positions – but they were also artistic, and tasteful.
…
Before the artists could start work the team had to find models to pose for them.
Plan A, explains Mr Kindersley, was to use models from London’s Soho district – the hotbed of the capital’s sex industry.
“We found all these people who started posing, but halfway through the pose they would ask for an extra £100 ($160) – it was just complete chaos,” he says.
There was some difficulty finding a workable Plan B. As the project approached a dead-end, it was the book’s other illustrator, Charles Raymond – responsible for the colour artwork – who came to the rescue. He volunteered to do the modelling himself, with his German wife, Edeltraud.
Chris Foss, who was responsible for the book’s black-and-white illustrations, took the photos. The book’s author, Dr Alex Comfort, had given them dozens of positions to get though, and all were done for real over two hectic days in early 1972.
…
The miners were on strike and they had only limited light to work with before the power cuts would plunge them into darkness.
“We’d say: ‘Charlie, we’ve only got another 20 minutes,'” recalls Mr Foss. “And he’d say: ‘Oh I’m terribly sorry’ and he’d go off to prepare himself to perform again, and Edeltraud would go: ‘Charles, Charles, please, please come on, we only have 10 minutes, please two more positions.’
“So it was all quite fraught shooting the positions – but it worked.”
The same kind of matter-of-fact approach applied in the post-production.
“I remember Chris and Charles coming into the office with all these absolutely explicit photographs,” says Mr Kindersley.
“And we all stood round saying: ‘That’s a good one, yeah that’s very good.'”
All of which makes me wonder: who has those photos now? That would make an art book!
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Saturday, March 20th, 2010 -- by Bacchus
I’ve been reading Susie Bright since she published a kinky lesbian porn mag, back in the pre-internet era when “computer porn” meant dialing up to a BBS and watching a dirty picture appear on your screen line by weary line at (if you were rich and lucky) 14400 baud.
When I first encountered her On Our Backs magazine, I was newly arrived in San Francisco and I was just looking for porn. San Francisco: “Porn, we haz it.” But why was I reading Susie Bright’s lesbian porn mag?
Because then, as now, she was a voice for sexual freedom. It didn’t matter if her subject matter (lesbian stuff) didn’t have much (any) intersection with my life. And that “not mattering” is one of those things that never change. Here’s Susie, writing about a new movie I hadn’t heard about, about a band I never heard of, and a cultural scene I never knew existed, but making the whole thing worthwhile anyway because she’s (still) really writing about sexual freedom:
Let me make something clear that the movie only hints at: The Runaways band would not have happened, could not have been conceived, without the Underground Dyke Punk Groupie Slut culture that stretched from the San Fernando Valley to the bowels of Orange County.
What is wrong with saying that? Do dykes never get to claim anything? Is the historical lens going to stay coated with Vaseline and excuses FOREVER?
I’ll tell you why dyke rock’n’roll legacy is important. Because in order to stand up to the shitheads who tried to keep young women out of EVERYTHING, you had to NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THEIR SEXUAL APPROVAL.
You had to NOT want to get married and have babies with a nice boy. You had to be FINISHED with “virtue.”
We did not care if the guys called us “sluts” and accused us of “wishing you had a dick.” We were beyond wishing; we did whatever we wanted.
A lesbian in the ’70s was thought of as someone involved in mainstream feminist politics or the folky Back-to-the-Land milieu. Most girls I knew in the punk scene couldn’t relate to that, or thought of it as their mother’s trip. We were urban, we were not into politics as usual. Everyone called themselves “bi,” although that was really code for: don’t tell me what to do.
My favorite lines in the piece, though, are these:
The Democratic Party lesbians took one look at my lipstick and leather and flipped out. “You are a slut! You are an operative of pimps and pornographers! The S/M white slavers are controlling you!”
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Sunday, September 20th, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
It is a privilege and pleasure to be able to commend to the attention of ErosBlog’s readers the new anthology Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories edited by Susie Bright. There are fifteen short stories here, sharing an ostensible thematic link to the gothic or at least the supernatural. There is an exquisite erotic idea at the core of every one of these stories, and that makes this slim volume a delight to peruse. If your imagination runs to the gothic, you will find plenty to fire it here.
I might quibble a bit with the characterization of the entries in this anthology as “dark erotic stories.” Some of them are a little dark, although if your idea of a dark story is something like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and your idea of the gothic is exemplified by the sort of thing seen in my last post but this one you might find many of these stories actually somewhat on the cheerful, even somewhat uplifting side. That’s certainly what I felt at the end of Tsaurah Litzky’s “The Witch of Jerome Avenue.” (Perhaps I am too much in love with that story’s New York setting for my own good, and there also might be something in the final paragraph that I don’t fully understand.) Even Greg Boyd’s “Pandora’s Other Box,” which might be read as a cautionary tale of being careful what you go looking for in a strange city, hardly left me feeling terribly disturbed. There was more pleasure than horror for me here; the erotic certainly dominated the darkness, although the longest story in the anthology, Francesca Lia Block’s “Lay Me out Softly,” certainly did have its share of actual chills.
In a way it’s tricky to write too convincingly about an anthology like Bitten because for me what this sort of literature belongs to is a larger genre that for lack of a better term might be called the literature of extraordinary surprise. The protagonists of these stories are off encountering not just what they didn’t know was, but what they probably never imagined could be, until they encountered it. But unlike the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose stories might also be said to belong to the same overgenre, but who is perhaps the most anti-erotic writer there is, at least until Michel Houellebecq picked up his pen) the surprise isn’t horror, but pleasure. This is a good literary trick to pull off, and it’s pulled off here quite well. However, precisely because these stories do belong to a literature of surprise, it is also very difficult to write about them without generating spoilers, and I don’t want to do that to ErosBlog’s readers. So instead, all I can urge them to do is go buy the book.
I can, however, offer one sentence from my favorite story in the collection, Ernie Conrick’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” a tale which, in addition to being a very clever anatomizing of what lurks behind the exteriors of married middle-aged, middle-class professionals, expresses one of the most philosophically profound sentiments I’ve seen in a naughty story. (I might be biased in thinking so, because at roughly the same time I was reading Bitten I was also reading Ben Bradley’s Well-Being and Death. You can get a flavor of the latter by seeing Bradley’s “diavlog of death” with Roy Sorenson.) I think I can offer it without its being a spoiler:
The tragedy of existence, he mused, is not that it lasts too short a time but that it lasts too long.
Possibly wrong, although sometimes the opposite of a deep truth might also be a deep truth.
For bonus self-discovery points, I suggest reading the whole anthology and asking which stories moved you the most. You can then have a better sense of what kind of weirdo you are. (Dear reader, kindly do not ask me not to think that you aren’t some kind of weirdo.) And do also give Susie Bright’s recent reflections on supernatural erotica a look-in as well.
Friday, October 12th, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Remember my Strap-On Sex, Circa 1910 post in which I teased Susie Bright about inventing the strap-on dildo? Well, now (courtesy of Vintage Lust, a fresh-but-promising trove of vintage sex pictures) we have yet another fine vintage image of lesbian strap-on sex:
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Monday, May 21st, 2007 -- by Bacchus
Susie Bright has created an Amazon list of must-have sex stuff, and in explaining the list, she’s dashed off several valuable mini essays on vibrators (wall current rules, battery-operated sucks, The Rabbit isn’t all that), lube, and the history of the sex toy industry. The lube portion I particularly like, because she simplifies down to the essentials:
Sex educators are famous for a particular cliche: “communication and lubrication” are what make people happy in bed. But truer words were never spoken.
So, given that essential fact, what lube do you get? My Amazon list is a little truncated because of what I could list on their site.
Vegetable oil is fantastic. Pre-AIDS, it was my lube of choice. If you’re aren’t using condoms, get your favorite oil– almond is really nice, maybe add a little coconut to make it creamy– and go at it. Or just grab the olive oil off the kitchen counter if time is of the essence. It feels great, it won’t hurt you, it’s sexy…. who could ask for more?
For water-soluble lubes, I always liked Probe because it has no taste! The biggest hassle with commercial lubes is that they usually taste AWFUL and make oral sex completely undesirable.
Are there other taste and scent-free lubes? Yes, Probe is my old tried-and-true. Works great with condoms, doesn’t make you ill, doesn’t cause cancer… what a treasure!
However, sometimes you need a lube that goes BEYOND. Sometimes the drugs you’re on, or menopause, can turn you into a prune. How do you get that high-flying crazy slippery feeling that goes on and on and on?
Silicone lube.
That’s why I recommended Liquid Silk for my desert island. It also is the first lube that makes hot tub and shower sex possible and even fun. It’s not water soluble– you’ll have that slippery feeling in your vagina or ass for several hours. But the slickness is so intoxicating. Just don’t use it with other silicone products or they gum each other up! Get that spatula out of your hot tub!
I do, however, find an important omission in Susie’s discussion of power sources for vibrators. She writes:
1) Electricity is essential. I don’t care what sex toy retailers say about battery-operated vibes– the main reason they push them is because they are dirt cheap, (wholesale), and they are lightweight to ship and transport (without the batts, of course!). A Hitachi magic wand is only marked up double its cost to the retailer… so if it’s $40, maybe they paid $20.
But a battery vibe might be a dollar to them and they’ll sell it for $10 or $20.
This reasoning has nothing to do with how it feels, or if women can get off on it. And the “sound” of batteries vibrating against plastic doesn’t mean it’s powerful. They can make an awful racket and not deliver any appreciable sensation.
Can women get off on battery-vibes? YES, some can, some are their mother’s darlings– I’m not on a crusade to get rid of them. But the reason they are hyped the way they are is because of money, not because of universal sexual satisfaction.
The vibrators that are produced by the mainstream appliance manufacturers like Hitachi and Wahl, were originally introduced as “massagers.” They’re quality appliances that will last years and years. I still have the first ones I ever bought in 1981. They have warranties. They have a following that’s been going for decades, based on technology that’s over a century old now.
I always hated selling a woman a battery-operated model for her first vibrator because there was a 50% chance she’d find the whole thing a hoax. However, if I sold her a motor-driven or coil-operated electric model, she’d come out of the ‘try-out’ room with this amazed look on her face, and say, ‘OH! I GET IT NOW!”
I agree wholeheartedly about the puny vibrations you can get from a couple of “C” or even “AA” batteries. When I’ve got a vibrator in one hand and a lady’s labia and clitoral hood in the other, I want some serious jiggle and buzz. “Can you feel it now?” is not the game I am here to play. I have pink bits to vibrate and I want them V*i*B*R*a*T*e*D, not tickled. (For tickling, I have feathers.)
On the other hand, as any roofer can tell you, there isn’t an electrical outlet handy under every current bush, and dragging a power cord behind you is a pain in the ass. The same technology that lets a guy with a tool belt and a hairy ass crack drive sheet metal screws for forty minutes at the top of a sixteen foot ladder (rechargeable ni-cad or lithium-ion batteries, ta-dah!) makes a perfectly acceptable power source for a vibrator. I’ve raved before about the Phantasy Sinnflut, which is a tool-grade rechargeable vibrator that any man could be proud to dock on its charging base in the garage next to his DeWalt drill and his Makita reciprocal saw. It’s nobody’s budget option, but it’s handier than anything with a cord, safer in the shower, and functionally far beyond anything with a disposable dry cell in it.
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