Friday, 12 March 2010
| 12:00 am
| Toys
One thing the impressive MyStim system has been missing is a solid metal, traditionally-shaped butt-plug. Well, our tushies can now rejoice as we welcome the MyStim Butt-Plug! This heavy medical-grade aluminum wonder is a somewhat squat diamond shape, giving you that lovely streeeetched out feeling as you insert it up to the widest point (1-1/2″ on the Small, 2″ on the Large), then that “ahhhh” as it smoothly guides you back down its slopes to the narrow neck.
A nice wide flange makes sure that’s where the insertion fun ends, but of course this is the world of estim, so we’re really just getting started! Turn on your MyStim Digital Power Box (not included) at any point in the insertion process to help things along — the change in polarity comes about a quarter of the way along the plug, meaning you don’t have to get the whole thing inside before you’ll feel the current. The heft of the metal body is a sensation all in itself, but once you’ve got a pulsing current going the MyStim Butt-Plug has the potential to make you go out of your mind with joy. This is one toy we can really get behind!
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Thursday, 11 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Videos
Porn and thrillers can be a tricky combination, since it’s hard to maintain suspense when you have to take a break every fifteen minutes or so for a sex scene. Director Francois Clousot manages to marry the genres in Last Call, a film conceptually reminiscent of the 1997 David Fincher film — both involve a main character caught up in surreal machinations they don’t entirely understand, bent to the will of a shadowy conspiracy.
In this case the victim involved is Brad Armstrong as a nice guy going out for a night on the town with a friend. His friend stands him up, but he meets Kaylani Lei, and before long he’s in bed with her . . . and he’s a lucky guy. Kaylani is always hot, and she’s never looked better — sultry, passionate, and tight, with a body that never quits.
Unfortunately for Brad, she steals his wallet, keys, and phone, leaving him stranded in a bad part of town to make his own way home. He wanders the streets and has a strange interaction with Tori Black, who seems to be a street person/hooker/lunatic. Tori plays crazy/funny extremely well — she steals every scene in which she appears, and she’s adorable while she does it.
Brad eventually makes his way to a sleazy sex shop staffed by Mikayla Mendez and Alektra Blue and begs to use the phone. He has trouble reaching anyone who might help him . . . but Mikayla wants to suck him off, and Alektra listens in on the extension while he narrates the action, making for an odd combination of phone sex and actual sex. Those girls ditch him too, though, and the phone stops working, so he’s back out on the street, where he spots Kaylani in his car, and chases her into a building and rides up in a freight elevator. At the top, Tanya James and Bridgette B. appear, dragging him out of the elevator before boarding it themselves and proceeding to make out — and they lock Brad out once he tries to join in, giving us our one girl-girl scene.
We get a glimpse of the conspirators in the form of Tori Black and Eric Masterson — she’s not crazy after all, or at least, not entirely crazy, as they discuss the progress of their night’s persecution. Little is illuminated, but that’s okay; soon they start fucking, and Tori’s just as much fun in the sex scene as she is in the other scenes.
Brad finally stumbles into the final sex scene, an orgy with Alektra, Kaylani, Mikayla Mendez, and Randy Spears. It starts with just Randy on a couch, getting a blowjob from Kaylani, surrounded by guys in monk robes holding candles, but gradually the other characters join in.
Now, maybe stumbling around from sexual interaction to sexual interaction doesn’t sound so bad, but the film does a good job of conveying Brad’s confusion, worry, and sense of real physical peril. It might be the only porn movie I’ve seen where the main character says “Not again” whenever sexytime shenanigans start — he knows he shouldn’t do it, but he just can’t help himself.
Stick around after the hallucinatory orgy scene for an explanation of why Brad was subjected to this ordeal. The explanation doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, but surreal persecution fantasies are allowed to be confusing. It’s a dark, twisty thriller with a combination of plot and hot sex that should keep you watching.
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Toys
One thing I’ve never understood about most e-stim (that’s electrical stimulation, for those who don’t know, and, no, it’s not necessarily painful) toys is why more of them aren’t made with a handle. Well, the MyStim Mighty Merlin Dagger Dildo has come to the rescue! With a sturdy, long, flanged plastic handle, you can wield its impressive 7″ of gently undulating medical grade aluminum with confidence!
E-stim toys work by sending a current through the body via the shortest direct route between the two poles on the toy. On the Mighty Merlin, this change in polarity is marked by a black line that happens about 2″ along the shaft — so you only need to insert the toy past that a bit to feel the current. Since the shaft isn’t too terribly wide — about 1-1/16″ — you can use the current as part of your warm up, even in anal play (assuming 1-1/16″ is within your warm up range); the handle even serves as a flange. How strong/ prickly the current is can be controlled by your MyStim Digital Power Box (sold separately). As your muscles relax, insert the toy deeper, and the current goes with you, letting you get deeper than other estim toys where the polarity change is further along.
Finally, the Mighty Merlin is simply the best if you have a partner helping you out. That handle protects their hand from the current, so they can probe you with confidence (mighty wizard laugh optional).
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Tuesday, 9 March 2010
| 12:36 pm
| Culture
Why is the “sex writer” field so dominated by women?
I’ve been thinking about this question for many years. The publisher of this very blog brought it up in a conversation we were having, and it’s been on my mind off and on ever since. It came up again at a recent salon of sex writers and activists; it came up yet again, although more obliquely, in a conversation I was having with a porn writing friend of mine.
Why is the “sex writer” field so dominated by women?
There are exceptions, obviously. Arguably the most famous and influential sex writer right now is the sex advice columnist Dan Savage. And there are others, of course: David Steinberg, Dr. Marty Klein, Charlie Glickman, I could keep going. And of course, there’s plenty of dumb, generic, Maxim-magazine type sex writing from men; in some senses it’s silly to complain about sex writing as female-dominated, given how much of the dumb crap there is. But it does seem as if sex writing — serious, intellectual sex writing, at any rate — is one of those rare fields that’s largely taken up by women, and in which women are both more visible and more generally respected.
And thinking about this question is making me think about the suspectability of male sexuality.
I think that when women write about sex, we’re assumed, in some ways, to be dispassionate observers. Of course we get targeted as sluts and whores and whatnot. But we’re also seen as bringing a fresh perspective to the subject, and a cooler eye, and a more thoughtful point of view.
When men write about sex, on the other hand, they’re assumed to be drooling horndogs.
Of course men have sex on the brain, this assumption goes. They’re men. They think with their dicks. That’s what men do. Who cares what they think about sex? We all know what they think about sex. What men think about sex is that they want it.
The very fact that sex is seen as a primarily male experience makes male sex writers, paradoxically, seem less serious. Our society sees sex as being about maleness: male desires, male insecurities, male satisfaction. Our culture is sexually obsessed with women, of course; but it’s sexually obsessed with women as — and I’m turning into a ’70s lesbian feminist as I write this — the objects of desire, rather than the subjects of it. Sex is seen as a male topic. But therefore, we all too often assume that we know what men think about sex, and how they feel about it. Male sexual desire is assumed to be simple: an animal urge to put a dick in a wet hole. With, occasionally, some variations in the way of orientation and paraphilias. And I think this makes it harder for male sex writers to be taken seriously. Anything they have to say on the subject is likely to be seen as suspect.
Now, I’m not writing this to complain about the terrible unfairness of this reverse discrimination. Yes, this is to some extent unfair. It’s unfair to men to assume that the only thinking they do about sex is with their dicks, and that they therefore don’t have anything to contribute to a serious conversation about it. (Also, I feel compelled to point out, men aren’t the only ones who sometimes think with the little head instead of the big one. Believe me, I speak from experience.) But given how much regular discrimination women deal with in almost every other occupation, I’m not crying a river over the fact that this one little field of endeavor has a more female stamp on it.
That’s not the point of this.
The point of this is twofold. One is this: I, selfishly, want to read more of what men have to say about sex. I want to read more about the varieties of male sexuality, from people who are living it from the inside. I want to read more about the varieties of female sexuality, from people who are seeing it from the outside. I want to read more about how men feel about this “animal urge horndog” label they’ve gotten stuck with: to what extent they think it’s true, to what extent they think it isn’t, how the reality and the unreality of it weave together in their experience of their sexuality. Sex is too interesting and too important a topic to limit most of the serious thought about it to one gender. And in addition to hearing what men, qua men, think about sex, I want to hear what individual men think about it: what Dan and David and Marty and Charlie and so on have to say. Sex is too interesting and too important a topic to limit the voices who can talk about it seriously to the voices that are attached to vaginas. (Psychological and emotional vaginas, as well as the physical ones.)
A porn writing friend of mine was talking with me recently about a story he’d written; a kink-themed story, in which a male character was using economic leverage to take sexual advantage of a female character. My friend found this fantasy scenario hot (as do I — hoo, boy!) . . . but he was finding himself somewhat uneasy about it as well. In particular, as a good feminist, he felt uneasy about eroticizing these gender dynamics and the economic power that men have over women.
And yet, if the story had been written by a woman, telling the story from the female victim’s point of view instead of the male perpetrator’s, I doubt that he would have felt any qualms about reading and enjoying it. It bugged me a little that he felt that way about writing it. It made me wonder how many other good male porn writers had considered writing stories like this, had even started to write stories like this . . . and had stayed their hand, for fear of being seen as, or indeed for fear of being, drooling sexist male horndogs who just want to take sexual advantage of women. If so — that sucks. I, selfishly, as a fan of kinky porn in which men do fucked-up things to women, would like to read more stories like this that are written by men. I know what this fantasy feels like from my end of it. I want to learn more about what it feels like from the other end, from thoughtful feminist men who get off on it, too.
So that’s my first point. My second point is this:
I’ve lived my whole life dealing with the various and sundry ways that female sexuality gets demeaned, by being ignored or trivialized or assumed to not exist.
Thinking about this topic is making me realize the various and sundry ways that male sexuality gets demeaned . . . by the mirror image of that process. It’s making me realize that the amplification of male sexuality — the funhouse mirror that takes the image of a man and distorts it into a drooling tongue and a hard dick — has the effect of demeaning it as well.
And that sucks for all of us.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2010. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Tuesday, 9 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Videos
Couch Surfers: Trans Men in Action is a high point in the genre of transmen porn. It doesn’t hesitate to head straight for the action, with transguy Mark van Helsing and cis-gendered-boy Peter Pleas getting together before the opening titles even appear: Mark gets a rim job, then goes down on Peter, and Mark straps on a big cock and fucks Peter in the ass, and there’s a little making out, too — all this in the first, oh, two minutes of the film.
Next up on the fated couch (which one can only hope was at least spritzed with Febreze after the day’s shoot was done) are Lube Boy (I see superhero potential!) and Ian Sparks, who start to make out but don’t get far before Ian Foxe joins in. He assumes a kneeling position, works a cock in each hand, and sucks them while they kiss. They all work through various positions, including Foxe getting simultaneous cock in his mouth and ass, and bio-guy Ian Sparks even dons a strap-on (because obviously two dicks are better than one).
The action transitions to another couch with Ian Sparks joining transguy Brett McCloskey for some mutual rub-and-tug. They take turns sucking one another off until Brett goes down on all fours to get reamed, followed by cowboy riding.
Dex Hardlove strolls in to take things to the next level with a feat of fantastic excess: both Brett and Ian get on all fours while Dex slips his lubed-up fists into their asses — simultaneously! There follows a merry messy lubed-up festival of jerking off, working the balls, and orgasms galore. Dex keeps working over Brett while Ian Foxe joins in the fun — Brett takes cock from both ends, and obviously enjoys all the attention. Dex is an adroit top, and doesn’t skimp on the dirty talk or ass-smacking, either.
The free-flowing action of one scene moving seamlessly into the next is broken up when we return to couch number one with Cupid and Peter Please making out ever-so-briefly before CJ Cockburn joins in. It’s a quiet, intense threeway (especially compared to the noisy — but also intense — scene immediately previous), with everyone pressed together on the couch, kissing, sucking, licking, fucking, jerking, face-sitting, and generally exploring one another thoroughly and with great delight.
While production-wise this is a rather no-frills affair — I mean, the marquee sets are a couple of couches! — the action is top-notch, the sex inventive and genuine, and the boys and bois hot. There’s an extra disc of bonus features, and a brief, informative guide called the “First Timer’s Guide To Playing With Trans Guys” (for those who want to play the home game.) Couch Surfers is genderfuck extraordinaire. Don’t miss the action.
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Monday, 8 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Videos
Are you already a relatively accomplished cocksucker, but looking to expand your skillset, learn some new tricks, or make fellatio into more than just foreplay? Then Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Advanced Fellatio might have some good pointers for you. Tristan assumes you already know how to get on your knees and lick and suck, and that you can handle a basic 69, and that you know whether you’re a spitter or a swallower — this is the advanced class.
After the usual anatomical lecture, Tristan runs down some advanced blowjob positions, including:
“Sword swallowing,” with a woman in bed on her back, head hanging off the edge of the bed, while the man stands and fucks her face (or lets the woman hold his hips to control his thrusting; “Standing 69,” where the man stands, holding the woman upside down with his face planted between her thighs, and she hangs down to suck cock — good for strong men and/or petite women, obviously; “Reverse 69,” with the woman laying face-up on the man’s body (he’s also face up!), and essentially doing a backbend to get his cock in her mouth while he eats her out. Only the young and nimble (or circus acrobats!) need attempt, and it looks more like stunt-fucking than something that would actually be fun, but it’s definitely not a move you see often; And classic “deep throating,” with the caveat that a lot of women have trouble suppressing the gag reflex . . . and the rather hot recommendation that you practice controlling the gag reflex with a dildo as necessary. I’d add that you should let your male partner watch while you practice. So he can, um, understand your plight.
All those techniques (except for practicing with dildo; Satine Phoenix, Adrianna Nicole, and Charley Chase don’t need practice) are demonstrated in hot scenes that usually end with some straight fucking, so it’s not entirely a fellatio extravaganza. Those ladies, their partners, and various other porn stars also weigh in with their opinions on what separates a good blowjob from a great one.
While the educational content here is on par with other Vivid Ed releases, the production seems a little more slapdash — the menu isn’t as sophisticated as usual, there’s no watch-the-sex-scenes-only option, special features are unusually few, and it has a less linear, more cobbled-together feel. That actually results in there being more sex on screen, since there’s no “workshop” section with Tristan addressing a crowd, though some of the snippets of sex get repeated two or three times. But that’s okay, too; they’re good snippets.
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Sunday, 7 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Comix
One of the nice things about erotic comics is their ability to transform fantasy into visual reality on the page. Another nice thing is how they take naughty stories and add images, upping the ante no matter how you’re wired. And nowhere have I seen such stellar examples of both of these perqs than in the latest Best Erotic Comics. Edited by former Blowfishie Greta Christina, Best Erotic Comics 2009 contains some of the hottest, most cutting-edge and downright creative comics to pass across my desk. Think an adorable, tiny sprite would be huge fun tucked inside your pussy? Best Erotic Comics 2009 takes you there. Ever thought getting sucked off by a squid would be incredibly hot? Best Erotic Comics 2009 has that visual for ya. Wish you could do more than just fist your boyfriend up the ass? Oh yeah, Best Erotic Comics 2009 goes there. Artists include Alison Bechdel, Gary Baseman, Peter Kuper, Junko Mizuno, Gilbert Hernandez, Ellen Forney, Toshio Saeki, Colleen Coover, and Quinn among others. No matter your orientation, fetish, kink, or fantasy, you’ll probably find it drawn out for you in exciting new ways in this fabulously filthy collection.
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Saturday, 6 March 2010
| 10:00 am
| Videos
I never get tired of AbbyWinters.com videos — natural amateur Australian lesbians in very minimalist scenes, usually just a girl or two and a camera. There’s none of the posing or pretense you usually see in girl/girl films, and there’s a refreshing sort of innocence, too. These are pretty, pleasant, laughing, happy girls making love (and occasional small talk) together, and they’re a pure pleasure to watch.
Girls in Ecstasy features three long scenes, each with a different couple, all with a very different vibe. We begin with blonde Anneke and brunette Larissa cuddling on the couch, nuzzling and snuggling, gradually moving on to gentle kissing, with lots of close-ups of kissing, glimpses of panties up a denim skirt, and the slow removal of clothes to reveal some nice sexy underwear; it’s almost half an hour before they’re completely naked, but they’re both gorgeous, so it’s worth the wait. It’s an almost totally wordless scene, just a few whispers of encouragement, and it’s a slow, tender build to licking, fingering, scissoring, and snuggling — we even get to see some lovely cuddly afterglow.
Blaire and Joannie are a lot more giggly. They’re both blonde and busty, though Blaire is the overall curvier and more lush of the two. It’s a chatty scene, but they don’t skimp on pleasuring one another, with lots of kissing (tongue piercing!), fingering, attention to one another’s breasts, cunnilingus (piercings down there too!), and sixty-nine.
Anabela and Maria are cute brunettes, one crawling into bed with the other, and they’re neither quiet nor giggly — they’re intense. They start making out passionately, with real sexual hunger — devouring each other, sharing smoldering looks, fingering each other hard, and very demonstrative and vocal all the while. There’s scissoring, sixty-nine, and no end of orgasmic joyful noise.
All three scenes — which are quite long, the film as a whole is over two and a half hours — have some behind-the-scenes material at the end, with more conversation, discussion of past performances, their opinions about the scenes, funny bits (one girl names various slang terms for vagina, some of which I’d never heard before), and interviews . . . often with naked girls showering, which is, I think, how all interviews with hot girls should be conducted. Girls in Ecstasy is an enormously pleasant film, one that — in addition to titillating — also makes you happy.
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