The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg: “The image of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth) appears again in no. 261 where [Swedenborg] sees in a vision a fiercely burning coal fire that represents the ‘fire of love’. Then he is with a woman whom he wants to penetrate, but the teeth prevent him entering her. We know now that the image of the vagina with teeth is found in folklore, notably in Japanese folktales and also in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes in South America.”
The Patriarch’s Nuts: Concerning the Testicular Logic of Biblical Hebrew: “I seek to uncover the way a gonad linguistic economy stretches out to include courage, strength, fear and trembling, active participation in their own right, and the pressing need for males to bind them up and protect them from harm (usually rendered with the innocent ‘girding one’s loins’). From there I pass to the subtleties of yarekh, exploring the way this semantic cluster gives voice to the inner workings of a complex spunk economy. In particular, this section deals with the ‘yarekh shake’ (Gen 24:2 and 9; 47:29); the excruciating knee in the nads experienced by Jacob in Genesis 32.”
From a review of The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism: “Sarra Lev’s article “Sotah: Rabbinic Pornography?” is a remarkable analysis of the rabbinical description of the ritual performed on a woman suspected of unfaithfulness to her husband. Although Lev hints at the fact, and scholars such as Ishay Rosen-Zvi showed, that this ritual is probably an imaginary construct of the rabbis (using an actual biblical text), for readers of the Mishnah for close to two millennia, the ritual was very real.”
“Following his self-creation from Nun, [the ancient Egyptian god] Atum created his children Shu and Tefnut by masturbating. This may seem impossible but Atum was a bisexual god. He embodied both the male and female aspects of life. Therefore, his semen contained all that was necessary to create new life and deities. The Egyptians called Atum “Great He-She” and his name meant “the complete one.”"
In lieu of any good Baal orgy pics, this shot from Caligula (1979) will just have to do.
“The story told in Genesis about Eve and the serpent has a larger religious and political context which is the real historical struggle waged by the prophets of Yahweh and the indigenous Canaanite cult of Baal. Baal … was the son and consort of the Mother Goddess Asherah. … In the story of the temptation and fall in Genesis 3, Baal is represented in his potent serpent form and exposed as a seducer and deceiver and as Yahweh’s evil adversary. … In Hosea’s story can also be discerned some essential features of the cult of Baal which, when combined with other brief references found scattered through the Old Testament, reveal, at least in the eyes of the patriarchal Israelites, that it was strongly associated with women. It is also clear that the cult was not principally that of Baal but also that of his mother-consort the goddess Asherah (or Ashteroth, or Astarte). In Judges 2:13, 3:7, 10:6, and 1 Samuel 7:4, 12:10, the Israelites are accused of abandoning Yahweh and “serving the Baals and the Asherahs.” … That it was principally women who were involved in the cult of Baal/Asherah is made clear from passages in Jeremiah 44.”
“The Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs are bas-relief carvings in a massive red-basalt outcropping in the remote Xinjiang region of northwest China. The artwork includes the earliest—and some of the most graphic—depictions of copulation in the world. Chinese archeologist Wang Binghua discovered the petroglyphs in the late 1980s …. The cast of 100 figures presents what is obviously a fertility ritual (or several).”
“Women’s reproductive fertility peaks for a few days in the middle of their cycle around ovulation. Because conception is most likely to occur inside this brief fertile window, evolutionary theories suggest that men possess adaptations designed to maximize their reproductive success by mating with women during their peak period of fertility. In this article, we provide evidence from 3 studies that subtle cues of fertility prime mating motivation in men, thus facilitating psychological and behavioral processes associated with the pursuit of a sexual partner. In Study 1, men exposed to the scent of a woman near peak levels of fertility displayed increased accessibility to sexual concepts.”
“Olfactory Ability to Detect Ovulatory Cues: a Function of Biological Sex, Sexual Orientation, or Both?” “We asked women not using hormonal contraceptives to wear a T-shirt for three consecutive nights during their follicular (ovulatory) and luteal (non-ovulatory) phases. Male and female participants of differing sexual orientations then rated the T-shirts based on intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness. Heterosexual males were the only group to rate the follicular T-shirts as more pleasant and sexy than the luteal T-shirts.”
“Here we show that the MHC [major histocompatibility complex] influences both body odours and body odour preferences in humans, and that the women’s preferences depend on their hormonal status. … Each male student wore a T-shirt for two consecutive nights. The next day, each female student was asked to rate the odours of six T-shirts. They scored male body odours as more pleasant when they differed from the men in their MHC than when they were more similar.”
“Previous studies in animals and humans show that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours and that females often prefer odour of MHC-dissimilar males, perhaps to increase offspring heterozygosity or reduce inbreeding. Women using oral hormonal contraceptives have been reported to have the opposite preference, raising the possibility that oral contraceptives alter female preference towards MHC similarity, with possible fertility costs. Here we test directly whether contraceptive pill use alters odour preferences.“
“The first pheromone party in New York City, conceived of the event as a new twist on speed dating, with pop science thrown in. The idea is that if a T-shirt’s odor arouses you, you’ll be sexually (and maybe emotionally?) compatible with its wearer.” Report at TheDailySmell.
“The reasons why the breasts of women are on the chest,” Henri de Mondeville wrote to the King of France in the 14th century, “whereas other animals more often have them elsewhere, are of three kinds. First, the chest is a noble, notable and chaste place and thus they can be decently shown. Secondly, warmed by the heart, they return their warmth to it so that this organ strengthens itself. The third reason applies only to big breasts which, by covering the chest, warm, cover and strengthen the stomach”. … There’s a theory about the specific suckling technique the breast engenders, which develops the muscles needed for speech.”
“Participants were then repeatedly shown images of boots (a non-arousing stimulus to most heterosexual guys), immediately followed by images of sexy naked women (an arousing stimulus to most heterosexual guys). After repeatedly showing the men boots followed by nudes, the men eventually started showing arousal in response to the boots alone!”
“Sylvia Plath maintains that “every woman adores a Fascist.” Susan Sontag’s famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics? Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination.”
“Alternative Lifestyles Revisited, or Whatever Happened to Swingers, Group Marriages, and Communes?“: “Those on the fringes, specifically, swinging, group marriages, and communes, have been largely ignored over the past two decades. … This neglect presently continues in spite of the evidence that swinging and communal life may be as prominent, and even more so, than in the past four decades.”
“About two thirds of the fifteen … vampire stories which were published in this quarter of a century between “Carmilla” and Dracula figured the female vampire. Clearly in both the art and literature of this period, women and their bodies incited particular social anxiety which was manifested through the metaphors of blood and vampires.”
“A frequently mentioned subtext in vampire movies is that of the vampire as homosexual. Occasionally the theme is covert as in the many adaptations of Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story “Carmilla” including such diverse titles as Hammer’s exploitation, The Vampire Lovers (1970) with its graphic lesbian and heterosexual sex scenes, Roger Vadim’s soft porn art house Blood and Roses (1960).”
“Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s groundbreaking novella “Carmilla” (1872) furthered this idea in the medium of literature by introducing the first lesbian vampire type even if certain diversionary tactics were used to bracket the truly subversive theme. Roger Vadim’s film Blood and Roses (1960) was the first adaptation of “Carmilla”.”
Musidora as Irma Vep in “Les Vampires” (1915-16)
“The return of the Vampire — tall, dark, and irresistibly male — has not yet revived interest in a surprising phenomenon of the 1960s and early 70s: the lesbian vampire film. Although the archetypal vampire in this culture is Dracula, often accompanied by submissive brides and female followers, lesbian vampires have a long and worthy history in literature, legend, and film.”
‘Seduced and abandoned: Lesbian vampires on screen 1968–74′: “Between 1968 and 1974 there was an extraordinary proliferation of lesbian vampire feature films. … Critical work on these films has tended to follow the work of Bonnie Zimmerman and Andrea Weiss who suggested that … these films employ a structure of bisexual triangular desire wherein the heterosexual couple are threatened by the lesbian vampire only to be reunited at the end of the film – thus alleviating men’s fears …. A close analysis of the films, however, indicates that although some do employ the structure of bisexual triangular desire, the critique established by Zimmerman and Weiss is extremely impoverished.”
Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen & Delphine Seyrig in “Daughters of Darkness” (1971)
Freud anticipated by Stoker? ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’: “The count, undeniably long in the tooth, attempts to hoard all the available women, leaving the younger generation, his “sons,” no recourse but to rise up and kill the “wicked father”.”
‘“The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist‘: “The film’s literal translation is repeated during the scene of the exorcism, where Linda Blair’s head rotates a complete 360°, thus eliminating the ambiguity of the text which is not so explicit. In the novel, by contrast, Regan’s contortions can be read as the hysteric’s orgasmic seizure, her apparently anatomically impossible head-spinning finding a precursor in [Charcot's patient] Augustine’s “fantastic” contractures during which “her neck would suddenly twist so violently that her chin would pass her shoulder and touch her shoulder blade.”"
“The following appears in the Life of St Paul by Jerome, chapters 7 and 8: ‘All at once he beholds a creature of mingled shape, half horse half man, called by the poets Hippocentaur. … ‘Holloa! Where in these parts is a servant of God living?’ The monster after gnashing out some kind of outlandish utterance, in words broken rather than spoken through his bristling lips, at length finds a friendly mode of communication, and extending his right hand points out the way desired.”
“Sleep paralysis is occasionally known as Old Hag Syndrome, taken from the superstitious belief that an “old hag” sits on top of her victim’s chest while he or she sleeps. The hag renders them immobile and breathless, and indeed many sufferers experience a sense of suffocation. Guy de Maupassant appears to describe an episode of sleep paralysis in his novel La Horla“
“Vision of Faust” of Walpurgisnacht by Luis Ricardo Falero (1878)
