Contact form, and a portrait of the writer

Lovely girl, just behind me. Heart of stone.

Lovely girl, just behind me. Heart of stone.

This blog is getting readers. I’m very pleased. Jerusalemmortimer.com has been going for quite a while now, and it’s nice to know all those words aren’t just hitting a wall somewhere and sliding down to the floor.

It does mean I have to be a little more careful about fixing my first drafts before I post them. I used to put stuff up unedited and un-proofread, and fix it a day or so later, because it didn’t matter: I knew no-one was reading it anyway. Now I’ve got readers I’m more careful about making sure the posts make sense. 

As for you readers, I’d love to hear from you now you’re out there. I’ll answer questions, and probably even grant the odd blog topic request. 

There’s a Contact Us button, for writing to me. (There’s no “us”; this vast blogging and research empire; it’s just me.) Ask me anything! 

Keith Haring: Spanker, sort of dommy

haringI knew a woman who’d fucked Keith Haring a few times. As she tells it – I’ve got various good reasons for believing her, by the way – it was a bit more than a one-nighter, but less than a relationship. He was more famously into guys, but there were women too.  

Anyway he’d spanked her, a lot. After the first night he tied her as well. He hadn’t asked for consent, but he’d sort of paused before going on, in an “is this ok?” sort of way.

 I guess that’s about a half mark, for bdsm ethics.

But she felt okay and that’s the best indicator. Everything else is more about politics than people. I trust people more. 

That’s all I’ve got, today: a meaningless anecdote about a dead New York artist. I’ve been working and my brain’s nearly off-line.  

The cruel and the meek: how we read sexual images

wigheadThe drawing in yesterday’s post, showing a domme and her shaven-headed, corseted submissive, is one of the first bdsm images I ever saw. It’s an illustration in the book, The Cruel and the Meek, which was the most forbidden and wonderful thing I’d ever seen, in my small country town.

I couldn’t face the clerk with it, and he  wouldn’t have sold it to me anyway. I was too young for a book like that.

He didn’t know there were confirmed and determined 11-year old perverts stalking his streets and haunting his bookshop. One junior pervert, anyway. So I stole the book, and bought lots of other books off him later to salve my conscience.  

I knew in my own mind what I wanted sexually, and I’d built fantasies that included my imaginative image of what a kneeling submissive girl, for example, would look like. But this was the first time that I’d seen visual representations of fantasies that were like mine, but were made by someone else.

Spock-Saavik pon farr: apparently, they're having sex. Ah, the magic of touch.

Spock-Saavik pon farr: the finger touch symbolises their mental link. Apparently, they’re having sex. Saavik later retired from Starfleet to write a manual sex sex manual. 

That made them important. An image that someone else creates seems to have far more sexual power than an image that you create in your own mind, even though the image you create is more likely to reflect the specifics of your own tastes.

I suppose we’re hard-wired to respond more to someone else’s sexual touch – which can include mental touch with words or images – than our own.

Otherwise we’d all prefer masturbation to sex, and we’d become an endangered species. Fortunately, most of us would rather be touched by someone else.   

So I paid a lot of attention to that first touch from a like-minded, or at least like-kinked, mind. The thing that struck me, I think, was the presence of two contrasting messages.

Some of the details were “hard”, like the submissive girl’s tight corset and her shaven head. I thought that would make it hard for her to leave the house; she’d have to wait every day until her Mistress came home. It never occurred to me that she could just put a wig on. I’d never seen a wig except for obviously fake joke ones. The way her Mistress rests her feet, in fetishistically high-heeled shoes, on her naked head was also “hard”.

But the image as a whole is “soft”. The Mistress relaxes in her chair, and the submissive rests below her, providing her footrest. It’s a scene of sexual tension, but also of peace; it’s a domestic image of a couple quietly together. They seem to be lovers as well as Mistress and submissive. Perhaps, after the Domme has whipped her submissive, and the submissive has pleasured her Mistress, and perhaps been allowed to come herself, they might walk in the park in the evening, hand in hand. 

So the image helped to shape what I wanted and expected from bdsm. But then, I shaped what the image meant, at least what it meant to me, so that’s only natural.  

The Cruel and the Meek

This is an illustration from a fairly trashy book about bdsm, The Cruel and the Meek.

It’s got comic elements: The caption, “The shaven head, black patent leather, tight corset and fetters, typical of a sado-masochistic relationship”, is priceless. It also has a certain sexual power. Anyway, I’ll talk about it more tomorrow.

wighead(Funny that the artist used the name “Wighead”, by the way. Did s/he have a skull-shaving fetish?)

Wedding night theme

wedding spankThis is a meme that turns up quite often in vintage spanking erotica: the wedding night spanking. It’s usually presented as something that’s playful, and a bit silly/sexy. 

At the same time, there’s an element of “teaching the new bride her place” about it that isn’t actually consensual.  In the context, she’s unlikely to have chosen what happens on her wedding night, so it’s more about patriarchy than bdsm. 

Having been serious for two paragraphs, I’m afraid I have to add that for reasons that have nothing to do with sexual politics, I like the tilt and presentation of her bottom, her eyes, and the way the picture hints at bondage by showing the straps of her shoes a little loose, so that t’s easy for the viewer to see her shoes as tied together. (Hmm, there seems to be strips of something black across her wrists as well.) 

His jacket is kind of cool, too. I have one of those, but don’t usually wear it for domming purposes. Maybe I should. 

Appropriation

archie_spanks_veronica_01There are things I could write about this, about how people take corporate-owned images and characters and turn them to their own meanings and uses. And how excellent that is, even when the art-work is amateurish, or the politics of the new meaning is as dodgy as the corporate stuff.

This one has better art than usual, and that’s all I’m going to say, today. 

I’m going to be busy for a few days. There’ll still be a post a day, I hope, but it wouldn’t be very wordy. 

Nailed it for the cameras

I read in Fortean Times (“so it must be true”) that a few years back a group of those Philippine Christian worshippers who have themselves nailed to crosses at Easter time were pleased, at first, to see that they’d been joined by a young Japanese man.

Crucifixion season in the Phillippines. More painful than Civil War re-enactments?

Crucifixion season in the Phillippines. As painful as Civil War re-enactments?

He, like them, was dressed in a loincloth, and he had real nine-inch  nails driven through his hands and feet to keep him up there. So they thought he was a Japanese Christian, and he, like them, was there to share an experience with the late Jesus, and thereby acquire some of his holiness.

They wondered a bit, though, about the make-up and the film crew. And they weren’t pleased at all when they discovered that he was a Japanese bondage film star, and he was shooting a porno.

Every action that they took, he took too. The only difference between them was the narrative inside their heads about the meaning of they were doing.

It’s a parable.