Halloween salute to hurricane girl

Posted on November 1, 2012 by jaime

I grew up in one of those places where you take your shirt off and go to the beach if the temperature gets up to 18 degrees. And where you’re a piker if you don’t go for a swim, in the ocean, on mid-winter’s day.

So I know that people died in Hurricane Sandy, and I’m not underestimating that, but still, the human truth is that when I saw pictures of the winds and the huge waves, and the lights going out, I thought, “That looks like fun! I’d love to be out in that!”

I was watching tv coverage of the aftermath, and in the background of one of the shots there was a girl at the stormy seaside, in a bikini, with a busted umbrella. The camera operator didn’t notice her and they just panned on. She was only on-screen for a couple of seconds.

But if ever there was a right response to something as solemn as a natural disaster, that was it. I’m really surprised that she doesn’t seem to have become more of an internet thing, because I’d love to know the rest of the story.

Anyway, whoever the hell you are, bikini in the storm girl, salute to you.

“Clitoris” in Victorian – or Edwardian – literature?

Posted on October 23, 2012 by jaime

in the 1980s Grove Press published what they said were volumes two and three of “A Man with a Maid”. They claimed that all three volumes were written in the late Victorian age, or perhaps early Edwardian in the case of the last two volumes.

I think Volume 1 really is an Edwardian bdsm classic, but I suspect that the second and third volumes are modern fakes, written for Grove Press by some anonymous forger.

If it is a modern(ish) pastiche, it’s a good one. It feels more authentically in period than the book “Beatrice” did. “Beatrice” was published as a long out-of-print piece of Edwardian porn, but turned out to be written by a guy who wrote for Penthouse. It’s not a bad hoax, or a bad book, but I was never convinced that it was Edwardian, or written by a woman.

But the supposed second and third volumes of “A Man and a Maid” feel reasonably credible as Edwardian writing, to me. Or they did until a sequence in Volume 3 in which the hero, the redoubtable “Jack”, is buggering some freshly tawsed and obedient girl, keeping her happy by stroking her “clitoris”.

The word “clitoris” did exist at the time, but it was a medical term. If a porn writer wanted to mention a clitoris, he’d write “her little bud”, or some other indirect phrase, letting context do the rest.

I don’t know of any other instance of the word “clitoris” popping up in an erotic scene, until the 1970s.

“Clitoris” probably escaped the medical textbooks and got into pop culture through the Masters and Johnson books on human sexual response, big sellers in the 1970s. Writers felt they should mention clitorises in sex scenes, to show they were up to date, but they were still a bit awkward with it. For example, there’s a scene in some pulp thriller from the early 1970s in which the hero plays the heroine’s body like a beautifully tuned violin, as chaps in books tended to do in those days, before he triumphantly “entered her clitoris”. Yeow!

So: it is likely that we’d find an accurate and casual reference to a “clitoris” in Edwardian erotic fiction? Probably not. So volumes 2 and 3 of “A Man with a Maid”, published by Grove Press, are forgeries.

I could be wrong. Does anyone know of any examples of the word “clitoris” appearing in fiction written before, say, 1970?

Identities

Posted on October 8, 2012 by jaime

Wystan Hugh: he laid his sleeping head next to a heater, by the look of it.

WH Auden once said that he couldn’t really see why gay men would want to live in a “gay community”. He wasn’t against having a “community” in the sense of a group which you can attach yourself to when you need to exchange information, meet potential lovers, or defend your interests.

He wanted to be able to live as a gay man – he might have preferred “homosexual man” – without harassment or discrimination. He wanted there to be places where be could safely meet other homosexual men. Those places should be protected, not harassed, by police, local authorities and so on.

You can call a group that works to ensure those things a “community”. If you like.

What he thought was silly was the idea that gay men should define themselves first and foremost as gay men, and hang around with gay men in particular, in social and cultural settings. For example, Auden loved opera – even the ones where he didn’t write the libretti – but although he’d go to the opera with his lover of the time, the other guests could be straight, gay, or celibate in any combination, so long as they were informed, interesting and pleasant people.

I have similar feelings about bdsm. I remember the real sense of relief I felt when I said, mostly but not only to myself, that I was a dom (some doms spell it with a capital “D”, which seems silly, too), that it was an important part of who I am, and I’m not going to repress it, or let it be unexpressed in my relationships.

So in that sense bdsm is an identity, or one part of my identity.

But I’m also someone trying to write, a social policy consultant, occasionally a public relations hack, a man, a vaguely left-wing person, supporting public services and progressive income and company tax, and a passionately libertarian person. And I’m heterosexual. And I’m a dom.

But I don’t spend much time hanging out with the bdsm community. I hang out with individuals I’ve met through bdsm, but there has to be more in common than just sharing an interest in bdsm for me to feel any significant connection with someone.

I suspect that we need politics more than we need a community.

Election special: Mitt Romney and bdsm.com (also bondage.com)

Posted on October 2, 2012 by jaime

I‘m going to interrupt the Vampire Girl anecdote for a couple of days. Think of the gap as dramatic tension.

Don’t talk to the hand.

Fact! Mitt Romney has accepted election funding from David Staton, owner of Friemnd Finder Networks Inc, who own bondage.com and bdsm.com. That’s amusing, but more worrying is that he’s also signed the Morality in Media pledge to crack down on erotic material in the media, including the internet. He just wants to shrink Government down till its small enough to get into your bedroom, your bookshelf and your computer.*

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter except for the comedy hypocrisy, because it seems reasonably clear that on November 6th Romney will win all the honours and powers that a Presidential Silver Medallist accrues.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/02/15/426391/romney-anti-porn-pledge-ignores-contribution-pornographer/?mobile=nc

* An Aaron Sorkin.line. But he used it at least twice, so I can use it once.

Indian hotel for English gentlewomen

Posted on June 10, 2012 by jaime

In the north of India, where it’s still warm but you can see the mountains, there is an old hotel. It’s not open to the public. It’s full of English women public servants, aged from their late 20s through to, oh, 80 or so. Apart from the hiking and other healthy activities, there are two things the regulars come to do: smoke opium, and, mostly for the younger members, have sex with each other.

I dropped by because a friend of mine’s sister lives there. He’d asked me to drop off some gifts from England. (Gloves, gingerbread, a riding crop, and tampons for her younger girlfriend.) She – my friend’s sister, that is – has retired and intends to stay till she dies. Others, like her girlfriend, just come to spend a few weeks there each year, fucking in the day and dreaming pipe dreams in the night. Or vice versa. Membership’s by invitation only, and they don’t advertise.

My friend gave me the errand partly as a favour, because he knew I’d find the place astonishing. They showed me around, since they don’t dislike men (conditions apply), and they don’t get many visitors. It is an extraordinary place. You may be wondering where older women go, who prefer women, and who don’t have close family connections. I know where about eighty of them went.

I’ve been as specific about the location as I’m going to be.

A l’eau, c’est l’heure! John Jones, the spanking sailor

Posted on May 27, 2012 by jaime

There’s a story from Australia. A naval officer, John Jones, was holding spanking sessions with a young woman who was a junior sailor on his ship, the HMAS Sirius. He claimed she needed extra training, and spanked her over his knee, on her clothes at first and then bare bottom.

There’s been some discussion on bdsm sites over whether the relationship was consensual. Those who argue that it was consensual point out that the sailor went back for more, even after he’d spanked her bare bottom, and also invited him into her home so he could spank her there.

John Jones

That kind of argument would have more merit if he wasn’t an officer and she a low-ranked sailor on the same ship. At that point there’s no way a court-martial could treat it as a personal, sexual arrangement. I don’t think Jones ever actually made “bend over” an order, in the naval sense, but he was pulling rank. Rank among other things, to get all “as the actress said to the bishop” about it.

The young woman finished up complaining and helping the navy to get a sound recording of him saying something incriminating, so she can’t have been completely happy. Though that probably wouldn’t have been enough to get him in so much trouble, if it wasn’t that he was in her chain of command, at least indirectly.

The media reports have been careful not to say anything about her side of the story. For example, I can’t help wondering if she ever thought it wasn’t sexual. At least sexual for Jones. It’s an odd situation, though.

Some of the foolishness on both sides seems almost impossible to believe. For example, the officer had a collection of bdsm and spanking porn videos on his work computer. That’s extraordinary. So is his trying to argue that the spankings were non-sexual, for guidance purposes only, once the navy’d discovered the porn collection.

Anyway, this isn’t one of the occasions where I feel inspired to rush in to support the hapless bdsm person.

Intermission: Betty Boop (boop a doop)

Posted on May 7, 2012 by jaime

Paramount announced on 23 March 2012 that they’re finally going to release all the original Betty Boop cartoon films made in the 1930s. (That’s all of them; she made her debut in 1930, and her final film in 1939.) It’s about time.

Pirate girls: Jessica in bondage, Betty as dominatrix

Betty Boop’s interesting because she was just about the only animated cartoon woman to be sexy, 58 years before Jessica Rabbit. And though she was never promoted by a company with the power and reach of Disney, who squeezed every buck (and all the character) out of the Mouse and the Duck, she’s probably more popular right now. And a hell of a lot cooler.

Betty, not blue. 82 years old, and in better shape than Mickey and Donald

Part of the reason that the owners of her image seem to have tried to bury her is that she was always a bit sexier than the studios were comfortable with. So the studios sulked while Betty and her fans went out to play together.

The Betty Boop revival wasn’t driven by the people who own her image. Lions Gate Entertainment isn’t producing any new Betty Boop product. In fact Betty Boop hasn’t been seen in a movie since she turned up for a few seconds in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Her last film before that was in 1939. (There were a couple of crap TV specials, which we’re going to ignore.)

But studios can’t hide her, or clean her up. In her later cartoons she wore more, and played with pets rather than men; they dumbed her down and they domesticated her. Somehow it never took. She remained Max Fleischer’s original and independent creation, Betty Boop the little sexpot with a taste for surrealism. People who’ve never seen a Betty Boop movie still know that she’s a bad girl. A bad girl with a heart of golden mush, and defiantly sexy.

But even the “official” Betty enjoyed the company of disciplinarians

Pirate Betty reveals a taste for light discipline.

You do get Japanese knock-offs that only exploit her cuteness, giving us a Hello Kitty version of the Boop. But generally she’s still about sex, often with a slightly fetishy flavour.

Betty in bondage

There’s her knowing echoing of Marlon Brando’s famous bike and leathers pose from The Wild One, the tee-shirts of her saying “If you’re going to ride my ass, you could at least pull my hair”, and the tee-shirts and posters showing her in bondage, or posing as a dominatrix.Though the original, official Betty products occasionally had her tied up, too.

Somehow she’s refused to go away, or let her owners change her. Sure, she’s a male creation, and you could go all deconstructive on her excellent ass; but her feistiness (weird word that, or what?) was real. For example, the first Hollywood film to raise the issue of workplace sexual harassment was a Betty Boop short. More importantly, she was one of the sexiest women ever to have been made entirely of ink and pixels.