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If you are on Twitter, we are, too! We’ve just started using Twitter to let our loyal customers know about breaking specials and news. You can find us tweeting at BlowfishTwitter.
I’ve talked here about my very first vibrator, but a gal’s favorite vibrator can change over time, location and mood. For a while, I was in love with a bullet (this was back when all bullets were connected to a control box and were not replaceable; we’ve come a long way, baby). But it kept getting crimps in the wire and shorting out, making me sad at first, then irritated, then broke from replacing it over and over. So, I looked into other small vibrators, and found the Pocket Rocket, which is small (great for direct clitoral stimulation) and has no wires to crimp. Yay! It became my best friend for years, until I finally got myself a Hitachi Magic Wand, and to this day is the one travel toy I take with me on all roadtrips, vacations and long meetings (kidding on that last one)!
I tell you all this in order to introduce this week’s new vibrator, the Waterproof Duckie Massager. It’s got the same body and internal battery structure as a regular old Pocket Rocket Mini Massager, but with an adorable duckie head. Not only is this yellow bird cute, but it gives you even more surfaces to rub yourself against; the soft rubber beak is perfect for direct clitoral stimulation, or for running over other sensitive bits. It’s also, like real ducks, completely waterproof, which means you can take it in the tub with you without fear of destroying your toy. The dial in the bottom is a bit tricky to turn if your hands are wet, though, so you might want to get this guy going before you hop in. Surprisingly strong for such a small vibe, and it fits in your pocket like a tiny duckling would (not that we suggest filling your pockets with real ducklings, of course). This is one little vibe that is all it’s quacked up to be!
If a picture is worth a thousand words, that means if I could find just the right two-fifths of a picture, I could finish my whole column in record time! But, because I believe in going above and beyond in terms of providing value, I’ll point you to several complete and uncut pictures instead. Funny pictures, even!
The kerfluffle over the recent ill-conceived (if arguably well-intentioned) Open Source Boob Project could prompt a long discourse here about sexual spaces, personal boundaries, the strange assumptions many men make, and so on, and you can follow the link above if you want to read some things in that vein (plus a full overview of the whole strange affair). Me, I’ll just do as a few others I saw online did when faced with such a messed-up situation, and point to this classic Bob the Angry Flower comic about the male obsession with mammaries. Pretty much sums it up, yeah.
Publishing industry blog Galleycat recently hosted a contest to caption a naughty New Yorker-style cartoon of a nude couple skydiving in, um, let’s say “intimate tandem.” The caption “Do you think we have time for one more?” won, and it’s not bad, though the science geek in me likes “Well, sorry, but it takes me longer than 32 feet per second squared to come!”
This instructional chart of “Sexual Positions (for the lonely and the loveless)” covers a whole range from the practical to the sublime to the disturbing, illustrating such masturbatory methods as “The Microwaved Melon,” the “Mary Lou Retton,” and “The Ball Pit at the Chuck-E-Cheese” (the last is rather advanced, of course).
Something Positive is one of my favorite webcomics, and it tends toward character-driven arcs, but every once in a while writer/artist Randy Milholland busts does a great single-panel comic. Most famous, perhaps, is his D&D-style stat sheet for Redneck Trees, which feature a unique combat method known as “Improved Anal Plundering.” More recently, he had a comic about research suggesting a link between frequent masturbation and a reduced incidence of prostate cancer which covers the subject far more amusingly than any news article I could link.
Finally, an installment of xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” about fun with mistranslations of the Kama Sutra, always a favored topic around these parts.
There were other artists. Some were men, some were women, and she didn’t sleep with all of them. Just most of them. The labyrinth’s path extended out, twined around her body, all pieces of a path towards an unknown destination. Her own path now traveled over the southwest, as convoluted as her tattoo, from place to place, from person to person. Each of them added something to her, and she took it in, made it her own. A different woman might have lost herself on her travels, forgotten why she’d left, and why she was going. But not her.
Read “Maze” in Fishnet, Blowfish’s always-free journal of erotica.
One of the first interviews I ever did, back in the mid 1980s, was with poet, memoirist and singer Jim Carroll, author of the quintessential streetwise NYC memoir The Basketball Diaries. In addition to being a beautiful, insightful and deeply poignant book, Diaries is bad-fuckin’-ass. With its explicit details about drugs and sex, it was was one of my early experiences of living on the edge, an entrée into a world that I found infinitely more exciting and adventure-filled than the boring suburban nightmare I’d just spent seventeen years wanting to get the fuck out of. As the author of this classic street story and lots of poetry and NYC-school punk songs about cool shit like heroin and prostitution, Jim Carroll had become my hero, and I hung on his every word. One seemingly minor thing he said has stuck with me for 20+ years because it seemed so banal and yet was incredibly illuminating to me — and it came at the end of an era.
I’ll paraphrase it here, because the quote was cut by an economy-minded college newspaper editor, and my cassette tapes have long since demagnetized. Carroll said something like this: “When I’m writing poetry, everything about my physical surroundings becomes part of the experience. For instance, I find that if the typewriter ribbon is running down, it profoundly affects the way I’m writing.”
I remember my ears going pop-pop when he said that, the way they do in moments of sudden and agonizing clarity. I’d spent a year or so in college-level creative writing classes at that point, but had never heard one of my fellow writers describing this concrete experience, which I’d had since my early writing days — not with typewriters, but with fountain pens.
When, at 12, I sat down to write my fantasy epic, I’d spent my ill-gotten lawnmowing gain on cheap fountain pens and a half-dozen colors of ink. I could only write fantasy in fountain pen; for whatever reason, I had to go through that archaic ritual of loading, blotting, scribbling and smearing in order to get any creative juice flowing. What’s more, I had to have a variety of ink colors, or the sensual details of the writing just never showed up. When my epic hero was in his pseudo-medieval metropolis, dark blue ink would do, but if he was on a pirate ship sailing legendary seas the ink needed to be the peacock-blue of a Caribbean ocean. When he slogged through the depths of a magic forest, the pages had to be rendered in green ink or the chapter never got going. When he delved sword in hand into the dark, dusty realms of an underground cave system, the ink had to be brown. Once he’d gone deeper, far enough into the ground to reach the outer reaches of the domain of Evil, it was black ink all the way. After that, the poor sonofabitch found himself punching through the darkest subterranean depths into a fantastic hell — and there in the savage realm of smoke-belching damnations, the ink was always red.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but I wasn’t drawing comic books or rendering any sort of narrative pictures — this was just text, pure and simple, but the sensual details of the page were critical. It wasn’t just ink color. I had a desk packed with different types of paper I traded off with. Eight-inch-by-ten-inch paper conjured a different feel of story than eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. College rule inspired differently than wide rule. I even once used unlined paper because the hero had traveled to the land of the magical air beings, above the clouds, where everything was all white and open and there were, if you’ll forgive me, no rules.
What does any of this have to do with sex? Well, when it comes to Jim Carroll, the author who created such loving sensual depictions of the streets of New York and the scents and sensations and textures and tablature of drug use, that particular author could reasonably be placed in the tradition of sensualists — small “s” — that includes such writers as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Poe, Octave Mirbeau, and, yes, the Marquis DeSade. Carroll himself is anything but a porn writer, though he often deals frankly with sex. But once you start talking sensuality and writing, pretty soon you have to end up considering sensual masterpieces like Venus in Furs, The Pearl, and The Story of O. One of the themes running through those works is the empire of the senses, the idea that physical experience is as real as mental, and that the former can be captured in and communicated by the latter — by writing.
I have no idea if Pauline Reage wrote The Story of O on a typewriter or by fountain pen, or if she switched her ink color from peach to ruby-red as her heroine’s cheeks went rosy with punishment. But I know what happened to my epic fantasy stories when I hit puberty.
I’d been reading increasing volumes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan books, and the many comics based on them. I was well aware that certain fantasy worlds had people who really didn’t wear a whole lot of clothes, and my fantasy universe relocated itself from the pseudo-Medieval-Europe of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to the exotic reimagined occult antiquity of Howard and Michael Moorcock — which would surely trouble Moorcock greatly, as he’s long been an antiporn crusader. There, people wore loincloths and thigh-high boots, with tight leather halters for the women; straps went across their chests to hold their weapons and occult tattoos etched across their half-nude bodies indicated the complex demands of their warrior castes. Years later I would attend Folsom Street with a weird sense of déja vu.
Sensual details became even more important as I switched from G to XXX fantasies; in the new fantasy world, incense burned in demonic temples; the scents of magical drugs came wafting from pavilions in my pseudo-Orientalist opium dream.
Meanwhile, my heroine turned female, and in each new environment came a crew of fantasy extras ready to pleasure, punish or gangbang her. She was every bit as fierce a warrior as the male avatar who kicked ass in my pre-pubescent fantasy stories; she just sometimes happened to lose. When she did, the story got at least as interesting as it did when she won. Stripped naked and felt up by the mud people? Brown ink, of course. Seized by dryads and subjected to a little forced forest girl-girl? Green ink, naturally. The blues got a little complicated — when the dryads handed her off to the naiads, her riverbound ravishment was related in deep-river indigo, but her later debauchment on a pirate ship was rendered in Caribbean blue. In these early erotic stories, written by a virgin, the groundwork was laid not just for all the porn I would write afterwards, but, frankly, for all the sexual and sensual experiences I would ever have.
I’ve now written a whole lot of porn novels (something more than 30 and probably fewer than 40 — sheepishly I must admit that I lost count some time in the early naughties) and not one of them has been scrawled in fountain pen. But whether it’s the black-to-gray progression of a typewriter ribbon, the color of the ink in my pen, the feel of QWERTY under my fingers, there’s a direct connection between the sensual experience of putting down words, and the sensual details that fill the writing.
Spring has sprung, at least in some parts of the country, and as the weather warms up young and old fishies alike start to perk up and frolic (do fish frolic?). Whether you’re searching for a new paramour or getting gussied up for a new roll in the meadow with a favorite lover, we’ve got a whole new patch of smell-goody products to help you feel great. The Kama Sutra Petite Pleasures line features adorably small versions of some of our favorite products, which is just perfect if you’ve always wanted to try them out, but didn’t want to shell out for a full-sized jar. Or, if you already love the products, these are wee enough that you can take them along with you on your next picnic!
Start your evening off with a light dusting of Honey Dust, an edible powder that leaves a tasty shimmer on the skin. It’s light enough to use as a replacement of your daily powder (or nightclub body glitter, though it’s not quite that sparkly!), and sweetly scented just enough to sprinkle in your sheets to make your bed that much more enticing. Once you’ve lured your new love home, relax them with a sensual massage with the sinfully delicious Body Souffle. Very light, it leaves the skin soft and silky instead of greasy, which your partner will appreciate. It also tastes heavenly, making their skin into an even sweeter treat! If you want to take things up a notch, consider rubbing in some Oil of Love, then blowing lightly across the skin to activate the unique warming sensation. A very titillating experience, especially when used on your more sensitive bits. And, finally, for the artistic love, we now offer Kama Sutra Milk Chocolate Body Paint. This is the single-jar version of the most popular flavor from the Lover’s Paintbox. Just dip the supple paintbrush into the tasty chocolate and design your path to paradise!
Looking for something a bit more substantial, perhaps something to give as a truly romantic bridal shower gift? The Kama Sutra Sweet Celebration Box is a sumptuous collection of treats, ideal for creating the perfect honeymoon evening. With full-sized containers of Vanilla Cr•me Oil of Love, French Vanilla Cr•me Body Souffl•, and Pleasure Garden Massage Oil, they’ll not only have options, but run no danger of running out of yummy stuff to rub one another with for their whole trip. The Sweet Honeysuckle Boudoir Puff comes in a pure white satin bag and is infused with sparkly Honey Dust (perfect for her to dust herself with before a romantic candlelit dinner) and the lightly fragranced rose petals can be scattered across the bed for a decadent lover’s romp. It all comes in a lovely pink box, adorned with stamped metal decorations. A simply beautiful way to say “I love you guys, now go have fun loving one another!”
We’re all big fans of a woman’s touch here at Blowfish. The Best Women’s Erotica 2008 is erotica written about, for and, for the most part, by women, and, of course, there’s lots of women touching and being touched all over the place in these stories. But if you think that’s just too narrow a category, then you have another think coming! These stories feature experienced women, naive women, strong women, and tender women having sex that’s rough, messy, gentle, voyueristic . . . you get the idea. With stories by Alison Tyler, Morticia Catherine, R. Gay, Lola David, Miel Rose, George Storey, Xan West, Cerise Noire, Scarlett French, this is women’s erotica at its very best.
So there’s this trope I sometimes see in monogamous relationships. (In particular, I see it in advice columns: it came up in a recent Savage Love column, and I’ve seen it more than once in the Dear Abby/ Ann Landers ouvre.)
It goes like this: “My partner has a friend. The friend’s sexual orientation is towards the gender that my partner happens to be. Is it reasonable for me to be jealous? Should I permit this friendship to continue?”
(Or the reverse: “I have a friend. The friend’s sexual orientation is towards my gender. Is it reasonable for my partner to be jealous, and to want the friendship to end?”)
Okay. In trying to make this generic and gender- neutral, I’m being a little obscure. So let’s clear it up and make it specific: “My wife has a new friend from work, a straight man she sometimes goes to basketball games with. Should I be jealous?” Or: “I’m a straight woman who’s developing a friendship with a lesbian. My husband is jealous. WTF?” (Both real examples from real advice columns, btw. Dear Abby stupidly advised, “By no means should you permit your wife to attend basketball games with another man”; Dan Savage, much more wisely, suggested that the husband of the woman with the lesbian friend should get a first class ticket for the clue train.)
Now, I’m not going to get too deeply into the obvious. I’m not going to get into the craziness of the idea that any and all friendships will eventually turn sexual if the sexual orientations line up right. I’m not going to get into the fucked-upedness of the notion that people should choose their friends entirely on the basis of gender, for the sole purpose of avoiding possible sexual attraction. I’m not going to get into the absurd paranoia that even the slightest hint of sexual attraction in a friendship will eventually overwhelm it with uncontrollable passion. (Hey, for some of us, having a little attraction for a friend makes a friendship more interesting . . . even when we have no plans whatsoever to act on the attraction, ever.)
And I’m not going to point out that, according to this theory, gay men could never have gay male friends, and lesbians could never be friends with other lesbians.
I’m not even going to get into the borderline- evil concept that people in relationships have veto power over their partners’ friends. This is just R-O-N-G Rong, stupidly and evilly wrong, in all but the most extreme circumstances. (”My partner is making friends with the man who tried to murder me.” Okay, you have veto power. Everyone else, shut up. Your partner is a free agent, with the right to make their own damn friends independent of you.)
Here’s what I want to say instead:
So what are we bisexuals — chopped liver?
According to this theory, bisexuals could never, ever have any friends at all. We couldn’t be friends with gay men, straight men, straight women, lesbians. And we definitely couldn’t be friends with other bisexuals. According to this theory, the fact that we’re attracted to both women and men makes us ineligible to be friends with anybody, of any gender, ever.
No, that’s not quite true. We could be friends with non-monogamous people, and with single people. But once those single get into monogamous relationships — blammo. That’s the end of that friendship.
I’m not just writing this to point up the stupidity and irrationality of this particular form of jealousy. I’m writing it to point up the stupidity and irrationality of bisexual invisibility.
We used to be a culture that assumed heterosexuality. We still are, to a great extent. But even when we don’t assume heterosexuality, we are still, far too often, a culture that assumes monosexuality. We are still a culture that asks, “Is he gay or straight?” We are still a culture that sees a woman dating a man and says, “Wait a minute — she’s straight? I thought she was a lesbian!” (Or a woman dating a woman, vice versa.) We are still a culture that ignores the Kinsey scale, the spectrum of sexual orientation — and the shifts that many of us make over that spectrum throughout our lives.
And this assumption leads to some truly convoluted errors in logic. I recently wrote about an example of this here in this blog, about how the “Is sexual orientation a choice?” debates almost always ignore bisexuals . . . since even if bisexuals are born bisexual, we still have some degree of choice about which direction to take our lives in. And the bisexual wars in the lesbian community led to my favorite piece of Alice in Wonderland political logic ever: “The lesbians will decide who is a lesbian.”
I can see why people tend to overlook bisexuals. Our existence does poke holes in a lot of conventional wisdoms — especially when it comes to sorting our society by gender and sexual orientation.
But . . . well, that’s actually my point. The existence of bisexuals pokes holes in the sorting of our society by gender and sexual orientation, pointing up ridiculous contradictions and convoluted logic that would be hilarious if it weren’t so annoying.
So maybe we should quit sorting our society by gender and sexual orientation.
And maybe we should start with our friendships. And the friendships of our spouses and partners.
Which are none of our damn business anyway.
The makers of Corruption, one of my favorite porn films of recent years, have worked their magic again, this time with Upload — a movie that manages to combine my love for science fiction with my love for really nasty hardcore enthusiastic sex. There are a dozen sex scenes, a plot that’s worth watching, some really clever ideas, and a million special features. Forget replay value; it’ll take you hours just to watch this thing once, and if you’re like me, you won’t even be tempted to fast-forward to the sexy bits. The production values are staggeringly good, and if the science fiction ideas are kind of old and familiar to a jaded SF reader like me, well, they’re no more behind the curve than mainstream science fiction epics, and a hell of a lot more fun. The plot involves Eva Angelina as a rogue agent with the future Digital Security Agency, a sub-section of the Department of Homeland Security devoted to policing “sims”: basically cartridges that people can slot into their necks, which permit them to experience fully immersive virtual-reality simulations. (If such technology ever actually exists, of course it’ll be used first and foremost for porn. Porn is always at the cutting edge of entertainment technology. •William Gibson’s famous adage about the unpredictability of technological applications goes “The street finds its own uses for things,” and quite often, that use involves sex.) Quite often, of course, those are hardcore porn. There’s some cat-and-mouse stuff involving Hillary Scott as a fugitive, and some cop drama stuff involving Eva and her ostensibly straight-arrow partner Derrick Pierce, and the genuinely engaging story only serves to make the incredibly hardcore sex that much more satisfying. How hardcore? Here are just a few of the sex acts you’ll see this huge cast take part in: five-guy-on-one-girl gangbangs; double penetration; double anal; cum-swapping; pissing; real BDSM; fisting; slapping; choking . . . I could go on. Gonzo fucking with a glossy sensibility and a good story: it’s like porn utopia!
Then there are the extras. There are two disc’s worth. (That’s on top of two discs just for the film itself, which runs over four hours.) There are extensive behind-the-scenes extras, and they convey just how seriously Eli Cross took this production, and how very much he demanded from his actors. His work ethic seriously paid off. This is the best movie I’ve seen . . . since the last Eli Cross movie I saw. (My understanding is that the regular version — the non-Director’s Cut — is about a quarter of an hour shorter and lacks some of the peeing, fisting, and more hardcore bondage, but is otherwise pretty much the same.)
So, I just watched Broken, starring Sasha Grey, directed by Dave Navarro, with a script — and it really is a script — by Navarro and Sancho. The phrase that comes to mind is, “This is fucked up, right here.” There’s some incredibly over-the-top weirdness at play. For instance: Sasha Grey takes a cumshot in her mouth, then goes into a bathroom, spits the come into a spoon, cooks it, fills a syringe with it, and injects it into her arm (offscreen, but we see her tie off her arm with a rubber cord, so it’s not really left to the imagination). During Sasha’s intense scene with Mark Davis, there are Italian subtitles . . . for no obvious reason. The next sex scene has Jenna Haze and Tommy Gunn in a hackneyed porn set-up: he’s the pizza guy, she’s the girl who wants to pay for pizza with poontang. But most of the non-sex action is on fast-forward, with sped-up voices, and soon we discover this is just one scene of many being shot on a porn movie set. (Yeah, it’s all pretty meta.)
Pretty soon we’re dipping in and out of those other scenes, and it’s like watching a porno that’s come unstuck in time. It’s some seriously non-linear narrative . . . except it’s not particularly narrative, being mostly just fucking. 45 minutes of fucking! Eventually performers amble over into one another’s scenes, and they’re not just breaking the fourth wall — it’s like they’re breaking the floors and the ceiling, too. Ultimately it’s an orgy, sort of, with wandering cameramen and sound guys occasionally appearing, going about their business. It’s hot . . . and hard to follow . . . and sometimes a little annoying. But it’s not boring, lazy, or ordinary. You get more fast-forward moments, random intervals of black-and-white and even photo-negative shots, and a pervasive sense of strangeness. It’s awesome and exhausting.
The next scene is kind of relaxing, by contrast — Audrey Biton and Marco get together backstage, fucking on and around a director’s chair, and there are some very spankable moments. The weirdest thing here is Audrey licking some come off a mirror, and really, in this flick, that hardly rates a mention.
Finally we get Sasha coming home to Mark Davis, ambushing him with a shotgun (no subtitles this time!), making him kneel, strip, put a condom on the gun, and bend over. What happens next is . . . well, I’d honestly hate to give it away. Let’s just say the meta-qualities of the film continue, and the ending is both shocking and completely justified by what came before. (And also, just maybe, transforms those Italian subtitles from a bit of pointless weirdness into a hint.) This is an ambitious movie, though I couldn’t tell you whether or not it entirely succeeds . . . that would require me knowing what the creators were trying to accomplish! An argument for the dehumanizing power of porn? A cautionary tale about the kind of broken personalities that sometimes gravitate toward the adult film business? A simple character study of a rather disturbed mind in an often-disturbing business? A case could be made for all those, and more. Regardless of what it means, it’s worth watching.
I worked ever so briefly as an advertising copywriter, and my boss always said that good, effective advertising wasn’t about telling lies or tricking customers — it was just “the truth told well.” Kind of a nice thought, huh? But if you can tell the truth well with the addition of cocks and boobies, then I say that’s the truth told even better.
Consider this ad campaign created by French college students protesting the lack of student housing, which forces them to keep living at home, featuring a couple of healthy young people screwing in bed between a set of sleeping parents. The text, translated based on my two semesters of college French, reads “Some pretend that students don’t have housing problems . . .” Who knows, in France, this might even be an effective argument!
Here’s another ad with a social conscience, this time encouraging people to eat more fruits and veggies. Yes, that is a woman made of broccoli — and, what, squash? — shagging a dude made of carrots. I feel healthier just looking at it!
Not all advertisements are aimed at making the world a better place, of course — most just want to sell you a product. And it’s not exactly strange for a condom ad to be sexually explicit, but this poster for Manix Endurance condoms is just too damn weird not to link. The painting, titled “Marathon,” depicts a surreal world of disembodied cocks that participate in sporting events, a land of boob trees and stocking bushes and cock-hungry birds . . . it’s like something out of Bosch, only with more smiling bow-tie wearing bunnies.
And here we have some good old-fashioned masturbation humor, with a mom horrified to discover her son, who happens to be an anthropomorphic M&M, licking himself. Well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?
I always thought Aston Martins were classy cars — I mean, James Bond drives one! — but they’re the first car company I’ve seen suggest that buying their vehicles can transform a woman from a mere mom into a MILF. And here I thought expensive cars were only for male midlife crises!
And, finally, a bit of old-school advertising from a simpler time, as seen at Eros Blog: Now! It Can Have Fur Around It! Well, yes. Yes, it can.
Until next time, shop wisely!