Friday, 31 October 2008
| 6:25 pm
| Culture
I’m not usually a fan of exhibitionism. Not the secret kind, anyway. I worked as a stripper years ago and enjoyed the work — erotically as well as professionally — and I’m perfectly happy to strip for a lover, pose and perform for them, etc. But the sort of sneaky, secretive, “fingering under the restaurant tablecloth/ fucking on the picnic table that you hope nobody can see” sort of exhibitionism has never done it for me. I’m not comfortable with the consent issues raised by involving people in my sex life who didn’t agree to be involved. And besides, the fear of being caught doesn’t make me excited. It makes me anxious, distracted, unable to concentrate on the business at hand. It’s one of those kinks that I more or less understand intellectually, while being totally baffled by it emotionally.
But I’ve been discovering an exception.
That exception is writing porn in public.
Like countless other writers with laptops — and like countless writers with typewriters and pens before us — I’ve discovered the joy of writing in cafes. It’s a great way to avoid both the claustrophobia and the easy distraction of working at home all day.
And I’ve discovered that there’s something uniquely hot about sitting down at a cafe, opening up my laptop, and setting to work on a dirty story. Something that makes me finally get what it is that turns people on about secret exhibitionistic sex.
Part of it is that, without actually feeling unethical, it feels sort of naughty and bad. Like I’m getting away with something.
Breaking rules is almost always exciting . . . an excitement that can easily be turned sexual if you squint at it just right. And when you grow up in a culture that condemns almost anything sexual as wicked and forbidden, it’s hard not to think of the wicked and forbidden as naturally sexual. But when you live in San Francisco in the sex- positive community, it’s awfully hard to feel like anything you’re doing is wicked or forbidden. We’re all so damned accepting.
But writing porn in my neighborhood cafe? That definitely feels naughty. I love writing about ex-Catholic women seducing their priests, and sex workers being drawn into sadomasochism by their customers, and high school slumber parties gone wrong . . . when, as far as anybody knows, I’m just working on my Ph.D., or my manifesto, or my screenplay, or whatever it is people do on their laptops in cafes. (Yes, I know. Some of them are probably writing porn, too. Don’t harsh my buzz. Anyway . . . that’s also kind of hot.)
Add to that the fact that I almost inevitably get turned on when I write porn. If I’m not, it’s a clue that I’m not doing it right. So you take the “secretly writing dirty dirty porn in broad daylight in a public place” aspect, and you add the “getting wetter and wetter by the minute in broad daylight in a public place” aspect . . . and it definitely makes me feel hyper-sexual, like an insatiable slut getting fingered in the back seat of a car because she can’t wait ’til she gets home.
There’s something else going on though, too. In an odd way, even though the public-ness of a public space is somewhat distracting, it also provides a curious focus.
See, when I’m writing porn at home alone, there’s nothing to stop me from reaching for the vibrator when I get turned on. Which is a good time, of course — writing porn puts my sex fantasies into sharp, intense focus, and I love jerking off when I do it — but it does tend to derail the writing pretty damned fast. My porn is always better if I can hold off on masturbating to it for as long as I can. It’s frustrating . . . but the frustration amps up the intensity of the scenario I’m trying to create, makes me focus extra-hard on the details and the motivations and the subtle emotional shadings.
And when I’m writing porn in public, I don’t have a choice. I can’t just jerk off as soon as I start getting turned on. (Not if I want to go back to that cafe, anyway.) I have to keep my attention on the writing. I have to channel my arousal away from my clit and into my story. Writing in public forces me to have the discipline that I don’t always have at home.
Writing porn in public gives me focus in another way as well. When I get deeply involved in a raunchy fantasy, deeply turned on by it — and then remember where I am, and take a sip of coffee, and look around me at the barristas and the cafe art and the people playing chess — the contrast is like diving into a cold pool after sitting in a hot sauna. And getting back into my dirty story is like climbing back into the sauna. The shock of it wakes me up, makes me pay attention. It makes me feel intensely conscious of how I feel in my skin, intently present in the here and now.
And that’s always a good place to write from. Porn or otherwise.
So now I’m curious. Am I the only one? If you’re a sex writer — professional or amateur — do you ever write porn in public? And if so . . . what is that like for you? Is it harder than writing at home? Easier? Some of both?
And those of you who do like secret exhibitionism — the actual sex kind, not the “writing porn in cafes” kind — is this at all how you feel about it? Does it make you feel hyper-sexual and slutty? Intensely focused and conscious of the here and now? Frustrated in a way that winds up your arousal? Like you’re getting away with something naughty? Something else entirely?
Prurient minds want to know.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Last week I wrote about some sexy illustrations/drawings/etc. online, but ran out of space before I could move on to the wondrous world of animation, which deserves its own column anyway. So, on to moving pictures!
When it comes to the world of cartoon porn, you can’t get much more vintage and venerable than the adventures of Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, a cartoon reportedly created in 1928 as a collaboration by a number of animation greats to screen at a private party for illustrator Windsor McCay. You can see the entire dirty little short film at the link above. It involves the eternally tumescent title character getting it on with another man, a woman, and a cow, plus the sexual antics of assorted well-endowed animals. The Wikipedia page has some more details about the project, including possible animators involved. Eveready Horton is to hentai as Steamboat Willie is to modern Disney cartoons. It’s wild.
Speaking of hentai (pornographic animation, usually Japanese), I might as well mention YouHentai.net, which is basically YouTube for Japanese cartoon porn — you can see lots of samples of all sorts of nasty and/or hot cartoons there. Schoolgirls, maids, nurses, elf-girls, and more. (Alas, last time I checked in on the site they seemed to be having technical difficulties, and I hope they aren’t headed for the scrapbin of internet history . . . then again, since their entire structure is dependent on apparent copyright violations, I guess that’s a possibility.)
If YouHentai is being uncooperative, fear not — there are lots of other sites where you can see Hentai clips. The almost-intuitively-named HentaiClipss.com links to many — though, as with any thumbnail gallery post, you run the risk of falling into a rabbit hole of link farms, and it can be tricky to find actual content, so browse carefully! There are buried treasures out there, if you can manage to dig them up.
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Thursday, 23 October 2008
| 11:18 am
| Culture
Sorry for the inflammatory headline. No, I’m not going to talk about John McCain’s purported affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. There’s not enough evidence, and in any case, I just don’t care all that much.
No. The scandal I’m talking about today is John McCain’s record on issues having to do with sex.
Which is, in a word, scandalous.
Let’s break it down, shall we?
John McCain’s record on birth control and abortion rights is so bad, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund gave him a zero percent rating. Zero. He opposes requiring health care plans to cover birth control. He opposes restoring family planning services for low-income women. He supports the global gag rule, which bans overseas family planning organizations that receive US funding if they provide abortions . . . or if they even provide information about abortions. He thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned. He has voted against a woman’s right to choose 125 times.
John McCain is a strong supporter of abstinence- only sex education in the schools — a program that has been shown to be loaded with gross misinformation, and totally ineffective to boot. And he voted against programs to help prevent unintended and teen pregnancies.
John McCain voted to prevent people living with HIV and AIDS from permanently immigrating into the United States.
John McCain supports blocking libraries from getting federal funding unless they block access to sexual material on their computers. He supports — in fact, he sponsored — a law that would essentially require Internet service providers to become porn police . . . and that would slap them with a $300,000 fine if they fail to report images on their sites that the Department of Justice decides are illegal.
John McCain’s record on gay rights is consistently dismal. He has opposed every single gay rights measure of recent years. He opposes same-sex marriage, and supports the Defense of Marriage Act. He even opposes domestic partnerships and any sort of recognition of same-sex partnerships. He is opposed to gays serving in the military. He opposes adoption by same-sex couples. He thinks employers should be allowed to fire people simply for being gay.
Oh, and just by way of contrast?
Barack Obama firmly opposes abstinence- only sex education, and supports science- based, age- appropriate sex education. He’s a co-sponsor of the Prevention First Act, which seeks to prevent unintended pregnancy and increase access to contraceptive services and information. He supports increased federal funding for science-based HIV-prevention programs. He supports the distribution of condoms in federal prisons. He supports the repeal of the travel and immigration ban on people with HIV. He opposes the requirement that one- third of funding for HIV prevention overseas go to abstinence- only- until- marriage programs. He supports adoptions by gays and lesbians. He voted against the Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
I’m just saying, is all.
I’m saying this:
For someone who talks so much about freedom, and protecting Americans’ freedoms, John McCain sure doesn’t seem to care very much about our freedom to do whatever we want in our own fucking bedrooms.
I am sick unto death of politicians who use the word “freedom” as if it were some sort of meaningless mantra. I am sick unto death of politicians who talk about freedom without actually caring about what it means. I am sick unto death of politicians who whip up patriotic fervor by shouting about America’s wonderful freedom, and then do everything in their power to undermine our actual freedom at every turn.
And John McCain is one of those politicians.
Look. I know there are a lot of issues facing us this election. And even I don’t think sex is the most important one. There’s the economy. Health care. The war. Global warming. The preservation of civil liberties. There are a lot of issues facing us, and each of us has to decide for ourselves which ones we value most highly.
But if you’re a Blowfish customer, and a reader of the Blowfish Blog, chances are that sexual liberty, sexual civil rights, sexual health, and access to sexual information, are some of the issues that you care about. When you go to vote on November 4, you should at least bear these issues in mind.
And even more broadly than that:
Freedom is not some patriotic abstraction. Freedom is a living principle, with real, nuts- and- bolts effects on our everyday lives. And the freedom of consenting adults to pursue happiness in the privacy of our own bedrooms (or living rooms, or dungeons, or whatever) is one of those freedoms. The Supreme Court said so.
Yes, individual freedoms have to be balanced against the needs of a society. We don’t have the “freedom” to bash in people’s heads with hammers. And when those needs conflict, reasonable people can sometimes disagree about where that balance should lie. But if the principle of freedom means anything, surely it means that the choices consenting adults make about where we stick our private parts, and with whom, and in what configurations, are nobody’s business but our own.
And if an elected official doesn’t respect even that most basic nuts- and- bolt freedom, then why should we trust them to protect any of our freedoms? If an elected official is willing to toss around the word “freedom” to inspire knee-jerk jingoism with no respect for the actual principle behind it, and in fact regularly undercuts that principle to suit their personal inclinations or political aspirations, then why should we trust anything they say at all?
I’m just saying, is all.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Before the advent of cheap photography (and presumably the widespread availability of women willing to be photographed naked), there was a brisk trade in sexual illustrations, from Tijuana bibles to erotic etchings. The art of sexy illustration is still with us, of course, and some of the more hardcore porn you’ll ever find is erotic comics and cartoons — especially in the realm of, say, BDSM, there are things you can do in a drawing that it would be impractical or painful or outright impossible or expensive to do on film. So let’s look at some sexy pictures, shall we?
First, Shunga, the ancient Japanese art of erotic woodcuts. You can see a gallery of Shunga here, including the picture above, of a woman being pleasured by an octopus — it’s vintage tentacle porn from 1820!
On to something more modern: Siriguana’s fantasy art, a whole ebay listing of erotic pin-ups featuring characters from Catwoman to Red Sonja — I’m especially fond of Goth Supergirl.
While we’re on the subject of fictional characters in compromising positions, consider the incredible strangeness of Transformers Yaoi. Yaoi is boy/boy erotica, usually comics. Transformers are, you know, Robots In Disguise. It’s a whole website with fan art featuring male robots getting nasty with one another. The run of Femtoy magazine covers — the Transformers equivalent of Playgirl — is especially impressive and odd. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a robot bugger another robot. The internet is truly a palace of wonders.
Finally, I give you the weird-ass illustrations of Art Frahm, as compiled by James Lileks in his famous website “Art Frahm: A Study of the Effects of Celery on Loose Elastic”. Frahm was a successful commercial artist from the 1940s to the ’60s, but he will be forever remembered for his series of “Women in Distress” pin-ups featuring women in public with their panties inexplicably fallen down about their ankles. The women generally look startled or mortified; the men leering and lecherous. And, for some reason, in most of the pictures the women are carrying grocery bags in which stalks of celery are visible. Any attempt to comprehend the complete fetish that surely lurks behind these works is doomed to failure, but the art certainly speaks for itself. Wikipedia has more on the life of Mr. Frahm, should you find yourself fascinated.
Next week I’ll continue in the illustrative vein, but with a focus on animation — tune in!
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Tuesday, 21 October 2008
| 11:18 am
| Industry
As Halloween approaches, I believe there’s no better way to celebrate the Season of the Spooky than with than a little tentacle porn.
If you spend any time around pervy science fiction people you’ve almost certainly heard the term. If you have heard of it but never seen it, well, it pretty much spells like it’s sounds. Tentacle porn is a particular genre of hentai, or Japanese pornographic comics and animation, in which women are attacked and raped by tentacled monsters or, less commonly, buggy non-human monsters in general. In western pop-culture writing about tentacle porn, the genre is usually traced back to a single image: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by the great Japanese painter Hokusai. Hokusai painted the image in 1820 for a shunga, which were pillow books sold as pornography or to marriage manuals for newlyweds — apparently wedding nights were very interesting in Japan in 1820. Hokusai’s painting, and the prevalence of tentacle porn in Japanese erotica, often serves as proof in many western minds that tentacle porn is something planted deep in the Japanese character, and proof that residents of those mythic isles are really, really weird.
Yeah, maybe. That’s either made a less or more cogent observation by the fact that what gave rise to the modern genre of tentacle porn in the 1980s was the Japanese legal system, which forbade hot dong-in-damsel action. That’s right — Until very recently you couldn’t show (or weren’t supposed to show) fucking in Japanese porn. According to the SAQ (Seldom Asked Questions) page at QuirkyJapan.com, that’s why artist Toshio Maeda says he came up with using tentacles as a stand-in for cocks, basically getting as close to intercourse as he could without running afoul of Japanese law. The rape aspect followed, I guess because, hey, logically, who’s cheerfully going to fuck a tentacle monster, right? And the rest is history. The animated film Urotsukidōji, based on Maeda’s work, remains the standard of the genre and its biggest influence; it’s known in the west as “Legend of the Overfiend.” Later movies derived from Maeda include La Blue Girl and Demon Beast Invasion. They and their many imitators have proven very popular with Japan and are well-known by many pervy American anime freaks.
The non-consensuality of tentacle fucking seems pretty common, but then, most hentai features some pretty reluctant chippies, who very often seem to enjoy themselves despite their protests. For this reason, many people consider consider tentacle porn just an extreme example of the bodice ripper — in the fantasy, a woman (or, more rarely, a man) ravished by tentacle dicks has no choice but to enjoy herself, and since her emotional connection to the perpetrator, as with romances, is thereafter unbreakable (for good or ill), the tentacle fuck forms a fitting lynchpin for any good story. In the American-made comics of of Beyond Bent, which are obviously derivations of the Japanese genre but add a violent, all-American touch, being violated by a tentacle often includes impregnation. That seems to make the stories even more like weird entries in the romance genre, except in romances the knocking-up usually takes place after the curtain’s drawn.
What does tentacle porn mean? The censorship story is all well and good, but it can’t explain the interest in tentacle porn in the West. For my money, tentacle porn is about two principal things: sexual variation and horror, with both rape fantasies and consensual tentacle-fucking being alternately part of that horror. Rape, or more properly ravishment, is an old fantasy stand-by, and getting off on fucking a tentacle monster is just as much a transgression as those other two most popular horror transgressions: killing or being killed.
Then, at risk of being glib, there’s the degree to which tentacle porn really is, maybe, about some deep part of Japanese culture. Apart from tentacle-fucking itself, many other works from Japan have explored sex with monsters. For what it’s worth, I think it has to do with the prevalence of the Shinto religion in Japan. Many Westerners forget that Japan is not a Judeo-Christian country; there are only about 1-3 million Christians in a country of 127 million. For many Japanese Shintoism and Buddhism coexist, with Shintoism being the indigenous Japanese religion. Shintoism interacts with Japanese mythology, which is rich with demons, beasts and transformations. Clearly tentacle porn is an interpretation of the world as being full of mystery, fear and excitement — exactly like mythology.
If you’ve been tempted to have a little Halloween monster-fuck of your own, check out the Blowfish page non-realistic dildos page. After all, what could be a better alternative to a boring Halloween party than a slick-n-slimy monster fuck? And if you want to get really authentic, dress up like a schoolgirl.
Thomas Roche blogs about vampires, werewolves, and Milton Berle at thomasroche.com.
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The human form — often naked and occasionally in the midst of carnal acts — is a favorite subject for the visual and plastic arts, from fine art to lowbrow pornographic scrawlings. Here’s a look at a few artists who do arresting, memorable work that just happen to have sexual aspects, and who are kind enough to put some of their work online for all to enjoy . . .
First, someone with a Blowfishie connection. I originally knew of Richard Kadrey as a science fiction writer (we even have the same literary agent), but he’s also a photographer of some note, and he shot the cover for the very first Leviathan catalog for Blowfish back in 2003. More recently he’s been doing nude/fetish photography with science fictional and surreal touches. He says, “Science fiction and the human body are inextricably linked through velocity. Both forms (the flesh and the word) are hurtling toward a future that is probably a hundred times weirder and more unexpected than anything we’re yammering about today.” SF blog io9 put together a gallery of his images with some alluring, disturbing work. (When you’re done looking at that, go buy his novel Butcher Bird.)
Photographer Virgiliu Narcis specializes in images that combine the human and the inhuman. His pictures of women with zippers for vaginas and men with sausage-grinding machines in their crotches are clever visual jokes, but some of his other images are much more profoundly strange, while others are simply gorgeous. See a generous sampling of his photography at his website. I’m especially fond of the one with the apple in the birdcage . . .
Stuart Allen gets credit for one of the cleverest concepts, interrogating the very nature of what constitutes a pornographic image. His “pixlporn” series is a collection of digital images of nude celebrities, from still images and screengrabs from film, with subjects including Halle Berry, Paris Hilton, Amanda Peet, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Shia LeBeouf, among others. The twist? Each image is an incredibly zoomed-in detail that consists of just a few pixels from each image, maybe 4, maybe 9, maybe 16, with the result being a few usually flesh-colored blocks (though each is tagged with its subject and source, like “Matt Damon’s Ass,” “source, film: The Talented Mr. Ripley” or “Pete Wentz’s Penis,” “source, Stolen Cell Phone Photograph”) It’s not lascivious, but it’s smart and funny, and smart and funny are in much shorter supply than lasciviousness on the internet. When you get right down to it, all of us, from gorgeous celebrities to pudgy online columnists, are just collections of pixels . . . at least when you look at us online.
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Tuesday, 14 October 2008
| 12:00 am
| Industry
No sooner have I written about the the perils of sex with artificial intelligence than a company called MyYoungFriends.com is launched. My Young Friends is a paysite with an “interactive chat system that offers more than 50 unique, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chat bots, designed to imitate real teenage girls.”
According to the XBiz story, My Young Friends press release, “new technology allows bots to generate “natural language conversational phrases” that closely mirror the process used by the human brain . . .. To make things interesting, agents have been created in the form of voluptuous young girls over the age of 18, to provide stimulating, erotic and exciting chat for all those lonely people out there wanting friendship, someone to talk to and to share their lonely lives with.”
Like chatting with an AI sexbot isn’t creepy enough? Like anyone seeking cybersex with a chatbot can’t get it for free by visiting AOL or Yahoo and getting assaulted by the army of chatbots proclaiming coquettishly “Hi Baby checkout mi site!” Like the online porn industry hasn’t already made it painfully obvious that providing you with real-time human interactions is just too much of a pain in the ass, seemingly proclaiming “Hey, pal, if you want to talk to a real person haul your ass down to The Gold Club, like nature intended.”
I’ll admit it, I’m a chatbot luddite. The idea would strike me as very creepy even if the site wasn’t called “My Young Friends.” But my purpose here is not to address the vagaries of barely legal porn; on the contrary, I could give a fuck if the chippies at MyYoungFriends.com are actually virgin sluts in Vancouver chatting with me on the morning of their 18th birthday, or if in fact they’re 55-year-old male chatbots in Omaha wearing mail-order pegnoirs and their wives’ perfume, pretending to be 18-year-old girls. These are AIs, I got it, surely programmed by a team that wants to hook you so you’ll stick around to the tune of $19.95 a month. And for all their talk of “natural speech” and “5.5 million phrases,” they know where there taboo sexual content is buttered. And when it comes to taboos, what is it, exactly, they’re selling?
To find out, you need go no further than to check out the “introductions,” or maybe they’re more like “confessions,” of the 55 fantasy women at MYF.
Take, for example, Shannon. Says she:
I’m Shannon . . . I dream about fucking monsters . . . buckets of monster piss and sperm . . . huge tentacles in my body . . . split by slimy, dripping beaks . . . green monster shit . . . share my fantasy . . . grow with me.
Too true, Shannon — who doesn’t fantasize about green monster shit?
Shannon seems like a gimme — she’s the robot embodiment of the girlfriend into tentacle porn, in some respects the Holy Grail of anime-obsessed antisocial male geekdom. Or maybe she’s just a male rape fantasy, a line drawing and a press release.
On the other end of the dom-sub spectrum, check out controlling bitch Melissa:
I’m Melissa . . . Sexual talk disgusts me . . . if I have sex with you I will control you . . . never disagree with me . . . I can use 5.5 million phrases to have authority sex with you . . . in my eyes you are dirty - I will not be interested in your attention.
Wow, even their marketing copy sounds like botspeak! Once you get inside I’m sure it’s every bit as fascinating, and infinitely more random, which conversations with bots tend to be. But the marketing copy reads pretty much like what you’d see advertising a phone sex company. Where phone sex involves confessing your fantasies to an actual human being, who may or may not be doing her laundry while she’s pretending to give a rat’s ass, here the interaction is with a bot who is guaranteed to be processing 5.5 million phrases while she’s giving a rat’s ass. And the big plus as presented by MYF, I think, is that the user can confess his (always his!) most bizarre fantasy to the barely-legal chatbots of MYF and not have to worry about eliciting the disgust of another human being. Bots may judge you — assuming they’re programmed to do so — but their distaste clearly doesn’t carry the same weight as that of an actual person. Or does it?
Whether or not reaction or acceptance is what’s being sought, I can’t get out of the programmer’s mindset here: Far from being “actual” fantasy women, aren’t these sort of artistic extensions of whoever programmed them? If I have an intimate interaction with a bot programmed by somebody am I not actually jacking off (and/or being jacked off by) that person, rather than “Melissa” or “Shannon,” even if the AI bot is programmed to use “natural language” phrases like “I’m 21, blonde, 5′6″” — instead of “I’m a programmer doing this for the money?”
No more, I suppose, than, when reading a porn story or looking at a porn drawing, one is having a sexual interaction with its maker. You kind of are, and you kind of art. Art and fantasy take on lives of their own. And when you’re fucking a bot, you’ll never really know whose fantasy life you’re living — yours, the programmer’s, or some weird disembodied sexbot on a server in Singapore, dreaming of green monster shit.
Thomas Roche blogs about monsters, mystery viruses, and Wil Wheaton at thomasroche.com.
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