The XXIX Summer Olympic Games are underway in China, and the television and internet are filled with images of spunky gymnasts, dedicated marathoners, and, of course, swimmers who go so fast they appear to violate the laws of physics. What better way to celebrate sixteen days of athletic excellence than to look at pictures of nude and scantily-clad athletes?
Fleshbot got into the spirit before the Opening Ceremonies even began, collecting “20 Hot Summer Olympic Athletes”, with sexy shots of female athletes including soccer players, pole-vaulters, and fencers. (See me avoiding the obvious lewd jokes about the latter two sports? That’s because I respect excellence!) Fleshbot soon followed up with “21 Nude Olympic Athletes”, featuring athletes in the altogether, with lots of gymnasts and one trampoline gymnastics competitor — nude trampoline gymnastics would be just about the most perfect spectator sport ever invented, wouldn’t it? Though probably a bit rough on the athletes.
Porn sites, always happy to sexualize anything dominant in pop culture, have gotten into the Olympic spirit. Reality Kings organized — that is, paid some women to participate in — their 1st Annual Naked Olympics. While I applaud the idea, and appreciate topless wrestling, nude archery, and, uh, competitive three-way fucking while wearing horseback riding gear, I must quibble with their understanding of history; after all, the athletes in the early Greek Olympic Games competed nude, so the real 1st Annual Naked Olympics happened in, oh, 720 BC. I swear, sometimes it’s like gonzo porn sites don’t employ fact-checkers at all!
Some other porn sites celebrate athletic excellence all year long; like the Naked Gymnasts blog, which employs a rather broad definition of “gymnast” that includes, say, women tied up and bending over — but there are some real nude gymnasts, contortionists, and dancers celebrated there occasionally too.
Nude team sports are even more fun — consider this gallery of nude ladies’ basketball, and admire their spirit even as you wonder how they expect to compete at the highest level when they’ve only got four players on the court.
And, because I’ve been so female-centric in this post, I’ll leave you with video of some naked male basketball. All right, so it’s not exactly sexy. In fact, it’s only one naked guy, and he’s not pretty, and he uses his nudity as a weapon on the court. I think he’s a walking, talking, traveling personal foul, somehow made incarnate. But the slam dunk is pretty funny.
Until next time, “Citius, Altius, Fortius!” (That’s the Olympic motto — “Faster, Higher, Stronger” — for any non-Latin speakers out there.)
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Wednesday, 20 August 2008
| 8:59 am
| Industry
Making headlines this month is the revelation that legendary German-speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka owned porn. This is according to a book by James Hawes, who appears to be the same James Hawes who wrote a very likeable 1996 crime novel called A White Merc With Fins. Kafka’s penchant for the porno, however, has reportedly been known to Kafka scholars for years, and the Telegraph article says Hawes “said he had made no claims to have discovered Kafka’s penchant for pornography and brothel visits, but had explored why Kafka scholars had chosen to virtually ignore the topic.” Hawes rips into Kafkaites not for trying to cover up his porn interests, but for not exploring them as central ingredients in Kafka’s life. Kafka experts, meanwhile, have fired back at Hawes with a mix of deadpan dismissal and histrionic defensiveness. The response to Hawes accusations seems to prove his point.
Said Hawes to the Telegraph: “[The critics] have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff.”
When I hear “very dark” associated with pornography, I give myself a high-five, and here the Telegraph says we’re talking about, among other things, “images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.” Ach du lieber!
But the Telegraph article quotes Ranier Stach, another Kafka expert as being outraged by Hawes’ “outrageous marketing play,” claiming the so-called porn was “playful.” A baby emerging from a sliced-open leg? I want to know who Herr Stach has been playing with.
Outraged posts by my friends M. Christian and Violet Blue got me interested in this issue, with Violet saying “Of course Kafka checked out porn and had to stash it; it’s a time-honored tradition.”
But was Kafka’s porn known or unknown to scholars, and is this whole thing a cheap ploy to sell Hawes’ books? At press time the Wikipedia article on Franz Blei ridiculed the contrversy, referring to the Hawes story as a “Silly Season press story,” which, like Kafka’s work, gave voice to a nameless existential horror I’ve known all my life — I never knew the term Silly Season, but I always wondered why round about early August, so many fur seals wear bowler hats. But I digress.
Why Franz Blei? A friend and collaborator of Kafka, Blei edited some of the porn in his friend’s stash. In 1905 and 1906, Blei edited two private magazines, Amethyst and The Opals, described by Wikipedia as “mildly pornographic.” They included classic poems by French poet Paul Verlaine (about whose asshole, incidently, Verlaine’s lover Arthur Rimbaud occasionally wrote poetry) and images by Aubrey Beardsley. Kafka apparently had a subscription.
The Wikipedia article references its statement that the journals were “known about by Kafka scholars for many decades” to the Times Online piece, which says nothing of the sort. Instead, that piece focuses on Hawes’ portrayal of Kafka as different than popular and critical consciousness generally portrays him — as a tortured loner who was, as required by his very genius, sexless. Hawes says none of that is true, and in that as far as I am concerned he is very, very right.
Kafka was certainly a man of extraordinary complexity, and he was far from “just” a tortured loner if he was one — which I don’t think he was. He certainly harbored deep and troubling thoughts. He accused his father of emotional abuse throughout Kafka’s childhood, and most biographers seem to agree he suffered from depression and anxiety.
But anyone giving a serious read to his only short novel, “The Metamorphosis,” must be struck by the bizarre humor of it all. Kafka also had a tendency to write unbelievably complex sentences with a humor that would be impossible in any language other than German. This sort of thing is not the behavior of a tortured loner, but of a writer amused by the possibilities of language. For my money a vein of hilarity runs through Kafka’s other works. What’s more, whether or not he was tortured, Kafka was part of a literary clique, as evidenced by his friendship with Blei. He had intense personal relationships.
Does that mean he rubbed one out to images of a hedgehog performing fellatio? Maybe, maybe not. Quite frankly, my own porn stash, if anyone cares, has more than a few things friends sent me that would I would be exceedingly unlikely to wank to.
Did Kafka wank? Of course he did. He was a genius, and wanking’s smart stuff, my friends. Since the history of art is the history of sex, and vice-versa, a serious discussion of Kafka’s porn belongs in any discussion of his life. And if Hawes is just grandstanding and trying to hype up interest for his book, then I’ll give him this, for which I’m grateful: At least he got Kafka back in the newspapers.
Thomas S. Roche blogs about music, politics and hunting Bigfoot at thomasroche.com.
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Thursday, 14 August 2008
| 2:21 pm
| Videos
Especially Fleshbot!
Thanks to them for such nice words about Crash Pad Series, Volume 2: Unlocked and Bride of Sin! Of course, you can find all of our Blowfish titles over on our catalog website.
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(Regarding the title, “LitFic” is a term for mainstream literature — you know, the respectable stuff — most often used by those who write genre work like science fiction or fantasy. So “LitFuc” is, um, literature about fucking. Maybe I should leave the neologisms to the pros.)
What prompted this column? Kafka’s porn. Yes, the author Franz Kafka, a writer so influential that the adjective to describe his work, “Kafkaesque,” has been appropriated by hipsters the world over, wrote hardcore kinky porn. One of the world’s leading Kafka researchers discovered the smut, and says it’s not for the faint of heart: “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action . . . It’s quite unpleasant.” (I personally wouldn’t equate bestiality with lesbianism, or call the latter inherently unpleasant, but I guess a lifetime spent studying Kafka might skew your perceptions of normality a bit.) Some of the smut will be published in the researcher’s book Excavating Kafka. And now next time you see a couple of drunk girls kissing in a bar, you can fairly exclaim, “That’s so Kafkaesque!
This next bit isn’t strictly literary, so much as extra-literary, but I’ll get there: Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which was adapted into a film, which then inspired various spin-off films, most famously The Bride of Frankenstein, starring Elsa Lanchester with an improbable hairdo. Now photographer Aleksey Galushkov has re-imagined the Bride as a scantily-clad beauty, without being cheap or exploitative, and while retaining the feel of the original! It’s actually quite beautiful. And to bring things back to the literary, there’s another re-imagining of the Bride I should mention. Elizabeth Hand, one of the most talented writers and prose stylists working today, has written The Bride of Frankenstein, a vision of what the Bride’s life might have been like if she’d survived the events of the film. Check it out.
And no column about smut and the written word would be complete without one of Melissa Lion’s “Sticky Pages”, where the literary blogger digs into fiction and extracts the dirty bits for your perusal. This time the book under discussion is The Sexual Life of Catherine M, “the memoir of French, art critic Catherine Millet. She was also a connoisseur of the orgy and anonymous sex. The book itself is a detached account of so much of the sex she had. And it’s a lot of sex. The sex is on nearly every single page. Some of it is hot, some of it is uncomfortable, some of it, despite the content, is antiseptic in its cold observation.” Interested? Click the link to read the passage that kept Melissa up awake nights. It’s totally Kafkaesque.
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Tuesday, 12 August 2008
| 12:00 am
| Industry
Back in February, California Assembly member Charles Calderon proposed levying a 25% tax on porn. Calderon’s Assembly Bill 2914 would have added a quarter of the sales price to your favorite dildo, porn DVD or copy of Hustler, not to mention any dirty download you purchase within California from anyone doing business within the state of California. That bill has just died in committee.
Hooray for a well-deserved death, I say, and I hope it was agonizingly painful. But the very fact that such a tax could be proposed is, to put it mildly, a little creepy to me. As a lifelong Democrat now used to hearing anti-porn tirades from Republicans, I find the fact that Calderon is a member of no organized party infuriating. It recalls for me the glory days of the ’80s when you were as likely to see attacks on porn from the left as from the right.
Calderon claimed that the law would generate hundreds of millions in tax revenue, which the state could use to mitigate the “secondary effects” of the porn industry. Calderon’s Chief of Staff Tom White was quoted in UC Davis’s paper, the Cal Aggie as claiming “There is a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse in the industry, STDs, mental health problems and pregnancies. The industry is such that oftentimes people get burned through and come out with nothing, no job skills or education, so they need job training or state services.”
Similarly, Stephen Yagielowicz’s XBiz article on the bill’s defeat quotes Diane Duke of the Free Speech Coalition: people called by Calderon to testify before committee “were telling lies about the industry; that people were committing suicide and that drugs were rampant on the set.”
Hey, I’m all for state services being available to porn performers, but the very idea that “the industry” leaves people burned out and messed up after a period of making between $200 and $3000 for a few hours’ work seems pretty suspect to me. Plenty of former porn performers are indeed scarred and messed up by their time in the biz; so are plenty of former temps, and they make $15 an hour if they’re lucky. And does targeting sexual speech in order to generate cash for phantom services the State does not provide really fall within the boundaries of reasonable government? Of course not, and commentators from the right of center to the pro-porn-but-anti-bad porn lobby agree, for wildly differing reasons — as do members of the Assembly. That’s probably why the bill died such an ignominious death — which pretty much everyone expected it to, maybe even Calderon.
Then why did someone like Charles Calderon introduce such a bill? Calderon, in 1988-89, was part of the “Gang of Five,” a group of conservative Democrats who tried to stage a hostile takeover of the California Assembly from then Speaker (later San Francisco Mayor and current mayor Gavin Newsom’s mentor) Willie Brown. Calderon then served as the first Latino Senate Majority Leader in the California State Senate. Now back in the Assembly, it’s pretty clear that he’s bucking for the conservative pro-family vote in an era when many conservative groups feel Republicans aren’t anti-porn enough — or more accurately, aren’t effectively anti-porn enough. The recent assertions by “pro-family” groups that the Feds should prosecute “mainstream obscenity” goes hand in glove with this kind of attitude; the porn industry itself is what these forces object to, not any particular kind of porn.
But if you’re going to start pointing fingers at industries that cause problems, you’ve got a long list of products that cause more trackable and concrete problems than porn. Take the alcohol industry — which does business in an area not protected by the First Amendment. That’s the principle behind San Rafael’s Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog group that tries to publicize the costs of alcohol abuse, from drunk driving to underage drinking to disease and lost work days. I’m far from stoked about jacking up alcohol taxes for a lot of reasons: the specific damages are ill-documented, the industry is already regulated, alcohol taxes amount to a poor tax and if you’re going to be jacking up poor taxes, why stop with alcohol? Let’s tax the chips and soft drinks and other processed crap they sell at liquor stores in poor neighborhoods where residents don’t have cars to hit the nearest Whole Foods for some organic arugula, capiscio?
But my principle objection to a porn tax is actually not affected by my love of porn, or the fact that I make my living working in the porn industry. Rather, I object to a porn tax because porn is legal. Calderon and his cronies claim porn does damage, fine — prove it. Then introduce a bill to outlaw, not regulate it. But if the government doesn’t have the political will to outlaw an industry, proposing crippling and bizarre taxes is ultimately nothing more than an attempt for do-gooders to make an end-run around the mores of the majority. Porn could never realistically be outlawed in the US. Pointing to ill-defined and in many cases fraudulent “secondary effects” is ridiculous.
This sort of thing reminds me of an ill-advised lawsuit filed by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, late in the Clinton years. HUD sued gun manufacturers on behalf of people who lived in federal housing projects, because those people were getting killed by guns. Back up a minute — the federal housing projects were funded by HUD. HUD was unable or unwilling to ensure that they were safe. So they sued gun manufacturers. Weird.
Peoples’ reaction to the HUD gun lawsuit of the late ’90s invariably reflect their opinion on gun rights and the supposed right to bear arms in the Second Amendment. Similarly, attitudes toward Calderon’s Porn Tax are governed by peoples’ ideas about porn. It’s reassuring to me that the bill was so overwhelmingly criticized — almost nobody seemed to like it. But the mere fact that Calderon got his claims out there in front of legislators and the general public is a bad sign.
People have once again heard the impossible to prove but difficult to disprove claims that porn does abstract damage. Next time free speech advocates have to face down another lunatic like Calderon, some people will remember those claims and won’t remember, or won’t accept, their totally unsupported and unsupportable nature. Every half-assed feint by pro-censorship groups has the potential to do damage. Let’s hope Calderon’s doesn’t do too much.
Thomas Roche blogs about spanking, Dungeons & Dragons, and South Ossetia at www.thomasroche.com.
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Sunday, 10 August 2008
| 12:00 am
| Toys
Want a nice sleeve that feels good inside, doesn’t look too graphic on the outside and doesn’t smell like, well, processed petroleum products? The Sidekick #1 Elastomer Sleeve is just the thing. Smooth, shiny elastomer on the outside (read: it doesn’t look like a plastic pussy), the Sidekick #1 is covered on the inside with caressing nubs (we show it turned inside out, the better to admire its soft caressing nubbiness). At 6-1/2″ long, it’s long enough to accommodate most average-sized men, but the 100% phthalate-free elastomer is stretchy so if you do hit the closed end, it will stretch with you a bit (not to mention the added sensation of the tip of your dick hitting a soft, pliant surface, ahhh!). The closed end means suction-like action, which is the closest thing we’ve found to “blow-job action” since we tested the Head Honcho Sleeve. And the Sidekick #1 is the color of tropical waters on a sunny day, which is pleasing all by itself. The Sidekick #1 will have you saying “Holy nubby goodness, Batman!”
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Saturday, 9 August 2008
| 12:00 am
| Supplies
We have an unusual new lube this week, and those of you who are bored with the same-old sexy sensations might want to check this out. I’m calling it the Icy Warm Menthol Lube and, unlike other stimulating gels (such as the Kama Sutra Intensifying Gels or the O’My Clitoral Stimulating Gel) this one can actually be used as a lube, which means you’ve got a lot more surface area being tingled by the icy sensations. Upon application, it feels cool on the skin, blow on it and it goes from cool to icy. Brrr, but in a good way. It’s water-based, and, as I said, can be used as a lube for sex (it’s even safe to use with condoms), and the friction from fucking will increase the sensations of the lube. I have heard that it turns to a warming sensation after awhile, but it didn’t happen for me — just thought I’d mention it in case you notice it warming up! As a lube, it stays slippery for a good while and can easily be re-slipperfied (yes, I just made that up) by adding a bit of water (or spit). A cool new way to add a bit of tingle to your sex life!
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Friday, 8 August 2008
| 12:00 am
| Culture
If ever a book was tailor- made for me to enjoy, this is it.
I’m a huge science nerd. I’m a huge sex nerd. How could I not love a book called Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex?
Well, let me tell you how. Exactly.
First, I should disclaim for a brief moment: Bonk is not a terrible book. The subject matter — the history of the scientific study of sex, and some of the more interesting examples of its current state — is a compelling one, loaded with fascinating ideas both about sex itself and the appallingly/ entertainingly conflicted attitudes society has about it. And the author — Mary Roach, celebrated author of Stiff and Spook — is no slouch. She’s a thorough researcher and a clear, chatty writer, adept at taking complicated and potentially boring scientific ideas and making them accessible to the lay reader.
Please note that I refrained from making a childish, Beavis and Butthead- esque sex joke about the “lay” reader.
Which brings me to the problem.
The problem is this: The author’s attitude towards sex is annoyingly adolescent, bouncing back and forth between giggling and gross-out. Especially when it comes to some of the more unusual or extreme sexual variations she’s writing about.
And that really gets up my nose. It’s irritating; it’s insulting to my intelligence . . . and it leads to some actual misinformation.
Take this. From the introduction, discussing the fact that she injected some of her personal experiences into the book:
My solution was to apply the stepdaughter test. I imagined Lily and Phoebe reading these passages, and I tried to write in a way that wouldn’t mortify them. Though I’ve surely failed that test, I remain hopeful that the rest of you won’t have reason to cringe. (p. 18)
Well . . . no. Why would I cringe? I’m reading a book about sex. Why would I cringe at descriptions of the author’s sexual experiences, or responses, or participation in sex studies?
In fact, I did cringe when reading this book. Repeatedly. But it wasn’t because the author was being too sexually explicit. It was because she was clearly cringing herself.
Or this:
One research team collected specimens of “the expulsion [female ejaculate] and asked outsiders to characterize it. It is a testimony to the generosity of the human spirit that these volunteers both smelled and tasted the specimens. (p. 198; emphasis mine)
Hey, you know what? I have both smelled and tasted female ejaculate. And it didn’t require any “generosity” on my part. I was, to put it mildly, happy to do it. Admittedly it wasn’t in a laboratory setting . . . but the point remains that not everybody would need to search for the generous spirit in their hearts in order to take part in this experiment. If Ms. Roach is grossed out by female ejaculate and would need to buck herself with the spirit of volunteerism in order to smell and taste it, that certainly doesn’t make her unqualified to be a sex writer . . . but her blithe assumption that everyone shares her reaction is a pretty big strike against her.
Or this:
I’m not saying there’s a link between Catholicism and sex toys. I’m just saying I’ve got a brand-new interpretation of Isiah 49:2 (”The Lord . . . hath made me a polished shaft”). (p. 216)
Tee hee. You said “shaft,” Beavis.
And my final example before I move on:
In one of the sections on erectile dysfunction, Roach has a longish and fairly detailed discussion about cock rings (pp. 136-237). But the discussion focuses almost entirely on cock ring mishaps — trips to the emergency room and whatnot — resulting from too-tight cock rings made of too-rigid materials.
And nowhere in this odyssey of penile disaster does she mention that the majority of cock rings are flexible and removable: made of stretchy material such as leather or rubber, and fastening with snaps or laces or Velcro or some such for easy removal. If you read Bonk and had never heard of a cock ring before, you wouldn’t come away thinking, “Hm, interesting, that could be a nifty alternative to Viagra.” You’d come away thinking, “Who in their right mind would do something that stupid?” And you’d come away misinformed.
I don’t know if Roach didn’t know about flexible/ removable cock rings, or if she simply chose not to mention them because the disasters were funnier. And I don’t much care. Either excuse is, well, inexcusable.
I understand that she’s trying to present her subject with humor. That’s not the problem. I’m all in favor of the humor, and have even been known to apply it to the topic of sex myself from time to time. But there are varieties of humor available to a writer other than adolescent fits of grossed-out giggles. And they’re rather more appropriate to sex writing . . . both for an adult writer, and for an adult audience. I hate, hate, hate sex writing by writers who seem embarrassed by their topic.
It might be easier to talk about what this book does wrong by comparing it to a book that does it oh so right. The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction is hilarious. It had me laughing out loud on roughly every tenth page . . . a feat that Bonk almost never accomplished. And at no point in the book did I get even a whiff of a sense that the author was embarrassed by her topic. Quite the contrary. Rachel Maines approaches sex in general, and the history of vibrators in particular, with an earthy, blunt, clear-eyed gaze, and no embarrassment whatsoever.
And that absolutely does not interfere with her humor. Heck, it’s the foundation of it. Maines is vividly aware of how laughably absurd sex — and people’s reactions to it — can be. But she doesn’t find the very existence of sex to be the source of the laffs. Her humor isn’t the humor of discomfort. It’s not the unnerved giggle of an adolescent; making light of sex to dilute its importance, and making a show of being repulsed by it to deflect the powerful hold it has.
Roach’s humor in Bonk, alas, is exactly that. Not all the time . . . but way, way too often.
And while it doesn’t make Bonk completely unworthy, it does turn it into an interesting but irritating book . . . when it could have been a truly great one. I have rarely opened a book with so much excitement and anticipation. And I have rarely closed it with so much frustration at the opportunity it missed.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. By Mary Roach. W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06464-3. Hardcover. $24.95.
The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. By Rachel P. Maines. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-801866-46-3. Trade paper. $17.95.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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