Photo by Inez van Lamsweerde

Guide to 150 NY brothels in the 19th Century: “Only this palm-sized book, published in 1870 and long hidden away at the New-York Historical Society, did not confine its anonymous critique to the quality of wines or the ambience of the 150 establishments listed between its covers. Rather, it defined its role as delivering “insight into the character and doings of people whose deeds are carefully screened from public view.””

“Nineteenth-century middle class reformers were surprised when young women who traded sex for money observed that they only did what wives did, and without having to clean house, too. Elizabeth Clement builds on this connection between marriage and prostitution by focusing on the evolution of “treating” in early twentieth-century New York City. She attempts to discover why and how prostitution and treating came to divide so sharply that we now believe prostitutes and their customers engage in behavior that is outside the bounds of “decency,” while teenage girls who trade sex for a movie are just behaving naturally.”

Addresses of 135 San Francisco brothels in 1937: “The San Francisco Examiner reported in March 1937 that private investigator Edwin Atherton, hired by the city to investigate police graft, delivered a list of 135 long-term brothels, called “resorts,” to the Grand Jury investigation police corruption, finding bordellos in neighborhoods from South of Market to North Beach.”

“And in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, more and more women have … been looking to professional domination as a possible source of income.”

"Civil Defence" by Ed Weston

52-year-old NY prostitute will soon retire

Prostitution in 19-Century New Orleans: “These “fast females” lived violent, public lives. But underneath it all was a harsh economic reality. “No work, no money, no home,” one prostitute said, describing the choices she had.” Storyville opened in NOLA as a “segregated district of legal prostitution.” More here.

FORA.tv – Porn, Peep Shows and Public Space. What is the relationship between public and private within evolving urban and commercial environments?

Photos of Lili St. Cyr.

From a medieval mural

Image from here. “Workers restoring a medieval communal fount … in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima discovered a curious mural hidden behind a whitewash layer. It depicts a tree heavily laden with … phalluses under which eight or nine women stand in various poses and large black birds fly. Experts think the fresco dates to 1265 …. The experts who carried out the restoration have been accused of sanitising the mural by scrubbing out or altering some of the testicles, which hang from the tree’s branches along with around 25 phalluses. “Many parts of the work seem to have been arbitrarily repainted,” said Gabriele Galeotti, a town councillor who has called for an investigation after seeing the finished work.”

More about that Tuscan mural: “We have an image of two women who appear to be locked in serious combat over one of these phalluses, so this supposed fertility symbol that ought to bring life and goodness is in fact bringing strife to the people fighting over it. More importantly, there is a woman on the left side of the mural … standing quite demurely, until you realise that she’s being sodomised by one of these phalluses. You can’t get pregnant by sodomy – it’s the ultimate in non-fertility.”

“Medieval Obscenities examines the complex and contentious role of the obscene … in medieval culture from late antiquity through to the end of the Middle Ages …. The essays examine topics as diverse as Norse defecation taboos, the Anglo-Saxon sexual idiom, sheela-na-gigs, impotence in the church courts, bare ecclesiastical bottoms, rude sounds and dirty words, as well as the modern reception and representation of the medieval obscene.”

A course in medieval sexuality: “I am trying to offer “samplings” of four inter-related things …: 1) how sex and sexuality are treated in medieval texts (literary and otherwise), in both “official” and more subversive registers; 2) how sex and sexuality in the Middle Ages are analyzed in contemporary medieval scholarship; 3) how sex and sexuality are historicized in contemporary critical sexuality studies; and 4) how sexuality and sexual identity have been taken up by some contemporary artists.” Here’s the syllabus.

“Albrecht Classen argues in his recent monograph that the chastity belt is nothing more than a myth that has been propagated throughout the centuries. To prove his point, Classen meticulously retraces the making of this myth by carefully reading the relevant secondary literature dealing with the chastity belt literature that dates from the eighteenth century onward.”

Scene from 'Up the Chastity Belt' (1971)

“Gerald [of Wales] sexualizes this bond between the Irish and their culturally revered beasts, insisting that through coitus with their livestock Irishmen had engendered numerous man-animal hybrids, Hibernian minotaurs. … Gerald also wrote of a woman who had sex with a lion and another who lay with a goat. So great was his distaste for the subject that he even illustrated the bestial encounters in prurient detail.”

Tony Perrottet on the Vatican’s pornographic bathroom: “Like his peers, Bibbiena was entranced by the ribald pagan imagery that was being unearthed in Imperial Roman ruins. He asked his friend Raphael to decorate his lodgings in the fashionable classical style, complete with naked nymphs being spied upon by lusting satyrs, with no anatomical detail hidden. Subsequent residents of the Vatican Palace were unimpressed.”

Speaking of the Vatican … “Weltbild publishing group is co-owned by 12 German dioceses which have now agreed to sell their share in the profitable enterprise as soon as possible. They decided on the move because Weltbild’s book range includes steamy pulp novels with titles like Boarding School for Sluts and The Lawyer’s Whore.“

“By the late Middle Ages, chaste marriage had emerged as an attractive model for pious laypeople who, for whatever reason (including an arranged marriage), had been unable to take up a formal religious occupation. Perhaps the most notorious example was that of the married mystic Margery Kempe, who basically bought off her husband by agreeing to cover his (considerable) financial debts if he would discharge her ‘marriage debt’ and agree to stop having sex with her.”

“One was the burial of a female, with which archaeologists found a bag of 17 dice.  It was prohibited for women to play dice in the Medieval era, so … she may have been a prostitute, buried with a symbol of immorality. The other burial … may have been that of a witch.  … Seven curved nails, each about 4cm long, were found in her mouth.  In addition, 13 more nails were found in an outline around her body, which the archaeologists suggest reflect her being nailed to the ground by her clothing.”

“Zika discusses the relationship between vessels, like cauldrons, and women’s sexual organs. Women’s sexuality was associated with unruliness and destruction, so it was sufficient merely to depict sexualized women; there was no need to additionally picture them engaged in malevolent acts to signify witchcraft, so powerfully depicted for example in Hans Baldung Grien, A Group of Witches (1514) or his Weather Witches (1523).”

"Witches' Sabbath" by Luis Ricardo Falero

Hildegard of Bingen’s 12th-century description of orgasm: “When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings forth with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it.”

“The inquisitional register of Jacques Fournier from the years 1318-1325 … reaches far beyond the topic of heresy. It encompasses various details about the common life, including sexuality and sexual morals. This case study reconsiders the normdeviation model on the basis of four Fournier’s trials dealing with sexual morals: that of Beatrix of Lagleize, Peter Vidal, Arnold of Verniolles, and Grazida Lizier. Sexual morals of these four people are certainly very different from the morals required by Jacques Fournier.“

“In 1700 Abbé Jacques Boileau, a Parisian canon and doctor of theology at the Sorbonne, published a vigorous critique of the practice of religious self-flagellation. Titled Historia flagellantium, the treatise railed against the pagan origins of voluntary flogging, its lack of biblical precedent, and especially its ability to “awaken unchaste movements” in the body.”

“St. John [of the Cross], like other mystics such as St. Theresa of Avila, used the language of courtly love to describe his relationship with Christ. He also discussed, with rare candor, the sexual stimulation of prayer, the fact that mystics experience sexual arousal during prayer. With the male Christ of course, this amounts to a homoeroticism of prayer.”

'Satyress with a Putto' by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

It’s hard to believe the results of a questionnaire in which 34% of the respondents say they’ve had sex with animals. This study was done in Brazil, which leads one to wonder how much they have in common with Colombia, where it’s not uncommon for men to have had sex with donkeys (if this Vice video is to be believed — WARNING: man-on-donkey action in the last two minutes of the linked video).

“Why does semen glow in the dark?” And could that trait somehow be used to stop sperm theft? “Mr. Pressil’s former girlfriend and domestic partner, Ms. Anetria Burnett, supposedly secreted Mr. Pressil’s used condoms to a fertility clinic, which then used Mr. Pressil’s sperm to inseminate Ms. Burnett.  Ms. Burnett subsequently gave birth to twins. Mr. Pressil took a DNA test that proved he was the father and then began paying child support of $800 per month.”

“Female ejaculation and squirting/gushing are two different phenomena. The organs and the mechanisms that produce them are bona fide different. The real female ejaculation is the release of a very scanty, thick, and whitish fluid from the female prostate, while the squirting is the expulsion of a diluted fluid from the urinary bladder.”

“Controversial in that the thesis of [The Technology of Orgasm] has been almost universally accepted and embraced by the mainstream press and the sex toy industry, while at the same time being quite seriously critiqued by historians of sexuality. In her book Maines contends that the vibrator was regularly used by doctors to treat “hysteria” which they had previously been treating by manually stimulating women to orgasm.”

From the new movie "Hysteria" (based on Maines' theory)

“In two experiments, we showed that memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch, a sexually dimorphic cue important for mate choice because it not only serves as an indicator of genetic quality, but may also signal behavioural traits undesirable in a long-term partner.”

“John L. Locke … argues that men and women have radically different ways of speaking … because they have radically different evolutionary needs. Men, he argues, use antagonistic speech, or “duels,” to show off their strength and prove themselves to women. Women, meanwhile, use quieter speech patterns to bond with each other.“

“Even girls who are having a one-night-stand want to cuddle and kiss and become anxious about what their male partner is thinking of them, or whether they still find them attractive. On the other hand, the interviewed men largely declared that they usually wanted to eat, urinate or sleep after sex.” Here’s a pdf of the cited paper, “Variation in Reproductive Strategies Influences Post-Coital Experiences With Partners”.

“”When a woman has an orgasm,” he explains, “the pH of her reproductive tract shifts in a way that favors sperm that enter her at that point.” Why is this so important? Sperm competition. In prehistoric times, according to Ryan, women had “multiple lovers at any given ovulatory cycle, even in any given sexual event”.“

“[Terri Conley] disagrees with the various forms of scientific evidence indicating that men have a stronger, biologically-evolved sex drive than women. Her alternative explanation …  is that both men and women are motivated by an equally strong interest in the physical pleasures of sex. It is just that men anticipate that casual sex will usually be pleasurable, while women do not anticipate that casual sex will be physically pleasurable unless a number of conditions are met.” A critique.

“Studies have confirmed that women are overwhelmingly more likely to cheat on their partner during the two or three days of ovulation. … Here’s the rub: The idea of what constitutes “the best man” also changes during that time. The good news is that you’re pretty safe for about 27 days of most months. To be fair, if her body chemistry is artificially altered by birth control pills, this instinct may be tempered.“

“In lab studies, women who are in fertile stages of their cycle are more likely to go for men who look healthy, self-confident, and masculine, which tend to be markers for good genes, but also for infidelity. … Women on the pill do indeed select men who look like they will be more reliable and steady. But outside the lab …. the team found that women who had met their partners while on the pill reported less sexual satisfaction but greater general satisfaction than women who had been off the pill. In other words, their partners were good fathers and good providers, but not necessarily on fire between the sheets.”

“Swami et al (2007) looked at WHR [waist-to-hip ratio] preferences among males in Spain, Portugal, and the UK.In all three countries BMI, not WHR, accounted for the most variance in perceived attractiveness. … This paper also has a great summary of methodological issues with prior WHR studies (e.g., the use of two dimensional line drawing, failing to control for BMI). Cornelissen et al (2009) looked at patterns of British male gaze fixation during attractiveness judgments of pictures of women. Men tended to look at the upper abdomen and face, not the hip or pelvic area.”

Sophia

“Each additional sexual partner increased the odds of infidelity by 7% while increasing years of education seem to decrease the risk by 10%. Very roughly speaking each addition partner negates the benefit of a year of education with regard to infidelity risk.“

“Paternal grandmothers will therefore share more genes overall with granddaughters than with grandsons (the authors calculate an overall genetic relatedness of 31% with granddaughters but only 23% with grandsons). … The results of this study matched the predictions beautifully. In all seven populations grandsons survived better in the presence of maternal rather than paternal grandmothers (p = 0.0081) while granddaughters survived better in six of the seven populations when they received assistance from paternal instead of maternal grandmothers (p = 0.0046).”

“A kiss puts two people in very close proximity. Our sense of smell allows us to pick up subconscious clues about the other person’s DNA or reproductive status. Biologist Claus Wedekind found that women are most attracted to the scent of men who have a very different genetic code for their immune system in a region of DNA known as the major histocompatibility complex. Pairing off with a male who has a different set of genes for immunity can lead to children that will have a higher level of genetic diversity, making them healthier and more likely to survive.“

“We investigated salivary testosterone levels in men watching (n = 26) versus participating (n = 18) in sexual activity at a large U.S. sex club. Subjects averaged 40 years of age and participated between 11:00 pm and 2:10 am. Consistent with expectations, results revealed that testosterone levels increased 36% among men during a visit to the sex club, with the magnitude of testosterone change significantly greater among participants (72%) compared with observers (11%). Contrary to expectation, men’s testosterone changes were unrelated to their age.”

“Both men and women become more religious when seeing same sex competitors. We discuss several possible explanations for these effects. Most broadly, the findings contribute to an emerging literature on how cultural phenomena such as religiosity respond to ecological cues in potentially functional ways.”

“Assuming that these studies are correct (more on that in a minute), and that sex is good for your health, then the obvious next question would be, how should you arrange your sex life so as to maximize the health benefits?“

“According to a case report from cardiologists Yarlioglues et al, a married couple deliberately ate some mad honey “for reasons of sexual performance”. … The toxin in mad honey is gryanotoxin. It acts by potentiating the opening of sodium channels, which are found both in the heart and the brain. This may be why it produces a combination of cardiovascular and psychoactive effects.”

Dancer Lisbeth Gruwez, choreographer Jan Fabre:

By Jan Saudek

“The three most notorious courtesans of the age–known as the Les Grandes Trois–were Emilienne d’Alençon, Liane de Pougy, and Caroline Otero, called “La Belle Otero.” Like many other top courtesans and middling prostitutes, the three women earned the bulk of their infamy as actresses in such places as the Folies Bergère.”

A guide to Parisienne prostitutes of the belle époque: “This slender opus has rightly enjoyed an underground cachet among academics for its wealth of human detail, providing … names and addresses of Paris’ most alluring clubs, nightspots, and private boudoirs of 1883. … Only 169 copies of the guide were printed “for private distribution”. … Today, Pretty Women is extremely rare, with only three original survivors. One of them happens to be in the New York Public Library, kept safely … in the Rare Books Division in Midtown.”

“Even now, legends of Edward’s [King Edward VII's] appetites filter through Paris. … According to Maisons Closes, or Shuttered Houses, the classic study of Paris’ brothels written in 1958 by [Robert Miquel], the Prince of Wales grew so obese in middle age that he commissioned the construction of a fauteuil d’amour—a “sex chair”—to be kept in his favorite luxury brothel, Le Chabanais. This bizarre device allowed him to have sex without crushing the poor girl with his enormous bulk.”

“The most interesting features of the bed room were the copper tub decorated with a half-swan-half-woman, in which Bertie [King Edward VII] liked to bathe with a prostitute or two in champagne, and a chair, a siège d’amour (love seat) actually, in which the overweight Prince of Wales could do…well…whatever he wished with the cocotte of his choice.”

“Colin Jones and Emily Richardson reveal a little-known collection of obscene and irreverent 18th-century drawings targetting Madame de Pompadour, the favourite mistress of Louis XV of France.”

“One of the most distinctive features of the urban culture of the nineteenth century — a feature which … distinguishes it sharply from the urban culture of the present day — was the existence of prostitution on a scale so widespread and so obvious as to cause considerable alarm to contemporaries.”

“The Cautionary Tale of Elizabeth Kenning (c.1790–1829): … Elizabeth “grew very desperate and determined on revenge.” Instead of regretting her loss of virtue, “from the seduced I became the seducer.” She moved into a brothel, where she was entirely “initiated in the ways of infamy and vice” and began to “lay snares for defenceless youth.””

“London’s Most Famous Prostitute, ‘Skittles’: … Of the estimated 80,000 prostitutes plying their trade in London in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most famous was Catherine Walters. Known by the nickname of ‘Skittles’ (possibly because she worked at a bowling alley near Park Lane) she was, it has to be said, more than just an average prostitute.”

Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire: “The incidence of venereal disease in the military caused grave concern.  Reluctantly, the government attempted to solve the problem through the … Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1867, and 1869.  Concerned about the physical and moral health of the military and its readiness to shoulder imperial burdens, these statutes attempted to resolve the problem by dealing with the prostitutes, not their customers.”

The Secret History of Georgian London: “One Sunday in January 1769, Alderman Drybones paid a pretend virgin called Nell Blossom 20 guineas for the pleasure of deflowering her. Sir Harry Flagellum paid ten guineas to be beaten by Bet Flourish or Miss Birch from Chapel Sreet, and Colonel Tearall paid ten guineas for ‘a modest woman’ who would let him do what he liked with her.” From another review: “[Jane Austen] was actually very aware of the dangers to poor, unprotected women of the predatory nature of the London sex industry. … In Pride and Prejudice, the spiteful old ladies of Meryton were also well aware to the fate reserved for those who publicly strayed from the strict moral path and were most disappointed when Lydia, happily living in sin with Wickham in London, was retuned, safely married.” And more: “At about the same time, the most famous erotic novel of the time was released. Fanny Hill by John Cleland shows the progress of a harlot, but unlike the unhappy heroine of Hogarth’s series, Fanny has a happy ending as did many of the women of ill repute of the times.”  And finally (another literary connection): “That there was a bright side to sex in the Georgian city was shown by the astonishing success of The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, celebrating the low life of Macheath and his harlots. However, Mary Young, who was the original Polly Peachum, came to no such cheerful reprieve at the end. … She was hanged at Tyburn in 1741.”

"Syrinx" by Arthur Hacker

“Paleolithic phallic art suggests that many early European men scarred, pierced and tattooed their penises. The practice appears to have been most common in France and Spain around 12,000 years ago.”

““Penis enlargements are now in seventh place among aesthetic surgery procedures for men,” said Sven von Saldern, the president of the German Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. “That surprised even us.”“

“Extramarital Affairs May Increase Risk of ‘Broken Penis’” but if you have broken your penis, you can put off surgery for a week or so.

“Making Up Koro: Multiplicity, Psychiatry, Culture, and Penis-Shrinking Anxieties: This paper considers the formation and development of psychiatric conceptions of koro and related genital retraction syndromes from the 1890s to the present. … Cases under consideration, additional to the first Dutch descriptions of koro, include the ways in which koro was identified in white western cases, and the 1967 Singaporean koro epidemic. Following a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have addressed the same material, attention is also paid to the recent genital-theft panics in sub-Saharan Africa, considering the implications of the differences between koro and other genital-theft panics.”

From last summer, Jesse Bering on autofellatio.

“The lap dance found its way into the pages of The New Yorker by 1993, and entered the even more rarefied air of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. The definition—“an erotic dance or striptease performed close to, or sitting on the lap of, a paying customer”—only underscores the language’s sad inability to capture the reality of lived experience.”

“Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Justice: A Comparative Law Casebook is a collection of domestic court cases addressing legal issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.  It presents more than one hundred judicial decisions from every region of the world and analyzes the role of international and comparative law in cases involving such topics as the criminalisation of sexual conduct, gender expression and cross-dressing, employment discrimination, freedom of religion and non-discrimination, and partnership benefits and recognition.”

“This article examines the ways in which female same-sex desires were represented across a range of nineteenth-century European medical writings.“

Heidi van Horne

“What Women Want” from porn — James Deen, apparently

“How the Joy of Sex was illustrated“

From 2009, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton on the scientific mysteries in women’s sexuality: “It is sometimes claimed that we have reached the “end of science,” that we pretty much know all there is to be known, and as a result, from now on it is simply a question of mopping up. Not so. Some of the greatest, most challenging scientific conundrums are very close to home, among human beings: our species, our mysteries, ourselves. As it happens these enigmas are especially real when it comes to women’s sexuality.”

From Cracked, who invented porn movies, sex magazines, etc.

By Jan Saudek

Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts, “The classic that goes all the way!”

In her review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes and D. B. C. Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland, Jenny Hendrix uses “pornotopia”, a lovely word that I thought she had coined. But it turns out to have been introduced by Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians, first published in 1966. He used “pornotopia” to mean “that vision which regards all of human experience as a series of exclusively sexual events or conveniences.” Even if you’re not into reviews of Baker’s and Pierre’s books, you should still look at Hendrix’s review just to see the great painting “Ghosts of Liberation” by Terry Rodgers (more of his work here).

From a review of Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity: “The projection of Rome as the home of the orgy is related to its position in ancient and modern thought as a ‘pornotopia’ … , and the introduction to Part I asks how that status was achieved: what aspects of Roman antiquity helped secure its position in the West’s sexual fantasies? The subsequent chapters in this section each explore one element of this fetishisation.”

La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick, by Antonio Vignali, edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton: “La Cazzaria, a Sienese dialogue written sometime between 1525 and 1527,is a dirty little book. As indicated by the English translation of its Italian title, this is a book about sex, though not just about the male member. It is also about assholes, cunts, and balls (to use the rude expletives translated from the Italian), about their relationship to one another and their relationship to church and state.“

'Nude on a Pink Divan' by Rene F. X. Prinet

More reading nude paintings

“The entire last half of the nineteenth century, a femme-fatale fog that [Mina] Loy struggled to lift, crawled with Sphinxes, a Symbolist totem of feminine sexuality and emasculation, and as is more apparent in Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx” that she is a beast to be tamed. … Loy saw little difference between her liberated time and Wilde’s. She felt women were still seen as voids made enigmatic by their sexuality, a mystery modernist men were only too eager to fill and solve (see: Ulysses, Women in Love, Nadja, Il Fuoco, etc.).”

“Franz Blei, author, editor, and translator classics of erotic literature, is known today as a supporter of important German modernist authors such as Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Robert Walser. However, during his lifetime he was decried as a “pornographer.” And although Blei wrote commentaries on the erotic/pornographic illustrations by Franz von Bayros, Aubrey Beardsley, and Felicien Rops, and edited the journals Amethyst and Opale, which contained provoking texts and images, Blei would not have felt comfortable with this description. Instead, Blei saw himself as a champion of the formal quality of erotic literature ….”

A long piece from 2008 on Catherine Millet

Gabrielle Wittkop’s books seem worth looking into: “In German, she published in 1985 Unsere Kleidung (“Our Clothes”), a refreshingly fetishist history of European fashions which was never translated. … One of her best novels, La Mort de C., had been published in 1975, the story of the death of an English homosexual tourist, Christopher, in the brothels of Bombay, a city that fascinated Wittkop. … Her book about the 18th century’s macabre follies around [Venice's] lagoons is Sérénissime assassinat, a glorious evocation of rapturously immoral sexual deviations and inventive poisonings, published in 2001.”

From Bookforum, a list of the best literary raunch. And here’s an earlier list of the best sexy books. The “Index of Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related Books” at the Complete Review. A list of “literary sex ed for escorts“. Finally, “The Best Literary Sex Scenes Not Penned by a Great Male Novelist“

By Franz von Bayros

Sex strikes are inspired “by Lysistrata, the Greek play in which Arisophanes’s heroine calls for women to abstain from sex to end the Peloponnesian war. … In Pereira, Colombia, in 2006, the girlfriends of gang members held a widely publicised “strike of crossed legs” vowing to give up sex until their partners gave up violence. Last year, the city’s murder rate saw the steepest decline in Colombia, down by 26.5%. … One sex strike lauded as a straightforward triumph was held in Kenya in 2009, when women’s organisations protested against political infighting.”

“Live Nude Girl” Sheila McClear, who used to dance in a peep show and now writes for the New York Post (more)

“Students stripping: The recession brings stories of students turning to the sex industry in order to pay their school bills and loans.”

“Why do women become sex workers, and why do men go to them?“

Survey says … Men go to strip clubs to relax.

Carrie Pitzulo on Playboy: “Quite literally, in its early years Playboy responded to the era’s masculine crisis by disparaging marriage and womanhood, by saying that men were victims of a marriage-obsessed culture and of castrating women who were taking over the country. But that attitude was pervasive in America in the 1950s.”

UCal Press has a book on sex work in upstate NY called Neon Wasteland: “This path-breaking book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated “rust belt” of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, Susan Dewey shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity.”

And UChicago Press has  a book on prostitutes, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex: “Elizabeth Bernstein examines the social features that undergird the expansion and diversification of commercialized sex, demonstrating the ways that postindustrial economic and cultural formations have spawned rapid and unforeseen changes in the forms, meanings, and spatial organization of sexual labor.”

“Sex work for middle classes: Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class sex workers, this essay considers the relationship between the class-privileged women and men who are increasingly finding their way into sex work …. This essay concludes by exploring … the emergence of `bounded authenticity’ (an authentic, yet bounded, interpersonal connection) as a particularly desirable and sought-after sexual commodity.”

Photo by James Auger

Katie Roiphe on Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes: “Through its series of surreal vignettes, House of Holes takes on a culture entranced by pornography, a culture that sees and feels in fragments; it dwells on the twist and fetish, and investigates generalized emptiness and banal sexual searching and exhilarating trysts in a comic, alarming, celebratory, orgiastic portrait of Internet-inflected sexual desire.”

Meg Wolitzer on House of Holes: “The novel captures the craziness and reduction to babbling babyishness of people experiencing surreal acts of sexual pleasure.”

Sam Sacks on House of Holes: “The childishness of House of Holes is based on a popular style of online pornography that is created, in large part, for children. Baker might not have meant it, but his book panders to the turn-ons of high schoolers, and with a galaxy of Internet porn to browse, those kids wouldn’t read it if it were assigned in their English classes.”

The copy editor’s style sheet for House of Holes, listing its many novel porny phrases.

Hmmm … a site called “Sex in Christ: Sexuality according to the word of God.” Here’s a bit from one of the posts there, which is called “Fisting and God’s Will”: “The sex act called fisting is a source of confusion and misconceptions for many Christians. This is unfortunate, because it means that many Christian men and women are depriving themselves of what could be the most spiritual sexual experience of their lives. … Fisting actually has a scriptural precedent, as we will show.” From their post on BDSM in a Christian marriage: “We believe that a man can adopt a submissive and servile role and allow his wife to dominate him sexually, if it is absolutely clear that outside of the bedroom, the husband is the spiritual head of the marriage.” And they’re into anal sex big time: “Are you saving yourself for your wedding night? The Devil wants you to fail, that’s why he puts stumbling blocks in your way. But God wants you to succeed, and that’s why he has given us an alternative to intercourse before marriage: anal sex.”

V. I. Lenin: “It seems to me that the superabundance of sex theories … stems from the desire to justify one’s own abnormal or excessive sex life before bourgeois morality …. This veiled respect for bourgeois morality is as repugnant to me as rooting about in all that bears on sex. No matter how rebellious and revolutionary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois. Intellectuals and others like them are particularly keen on this.”

Here’s a great site, ‘Erotic Art’. Looks like it was put up last spring. It has pages devoted to particular artists and a history of erotic art. They also have a blog. They have lots of Franz von Bayros‘ prints, more of which are available here. This site has many of the classics, inc. Bruno Schulz. Finally, ‘Art of the Beautiful Grotesque‘ is cool (it’s also on Posterous).

Here are two Tumblrs full of erotic art (mostly classic, old pictures).

Fifi Chachnil presents her new lingerie collection with help from the dancers at the Crazy Horse (Paris).

Charlie Sheen’s friend, porn star Bree Olson, reacts to one of Marcel Duchamp’s urinals.

Psychedelic body painting in Times Square. Here’s more about the body painter,  and here his is on Vimeo.

Body painting in Playboy

Salvador Dali’s nudes, and here’s  a Dali pic from Playboy. And here’s Dali’s Skull (1951):

Myla DalBesio, whose art show involved giving lap dances to the viewers. Here’s her blog.

Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture. Rodin put the sex back in sculpture. The Erotic Art site has a page devoted to Rodin.

A swinging Klimt show in Vienna last year: “During the day visitors to the Secession contemporary art museum walk among the mattresses and erotic paraphernalia of the “Element6″ sex club to view masterpieces by Klimt, who once scandalised Edwardian Europe with his sexually explicit art. By night, the “swingers” return to carry out orgies among the artworks.”

Angie Dickinson

“Tumblr, as a user-directed medium, releases porn from those traditional visual cues. It allows the viewer to look at porn without feeling like she is, you know, looking at porn.”

“San Francisco … is the perfect home for an institution like the Center for Sex & Culture [CSC]. I spoke with another institution, its co-founder, Dr. Carol Queen.”

“Spermatorrhea (an excessive discharge of semen) was such a source of panic in the mid-19th century that there were even cases of suicide among those who had convinced themselves – or been led to believe – that they were suffering.“

Declining sperm counts? “According to their results, global sperm counts had dropped by 50% in the five decades before the report.“

Male infertility and the missing coat: “Sperm wears a protein coat that helps it sneak past the female immune system – or it should. Going coatless could be a major cause of male infertility.”

“In this video from the University of Surrey … the first research project Hegarty discusses is … on the categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness, including the inclusion of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association from 1952 to 1973. Hegarty’s interest is in how the rise and fall of the Rorschach test as a psychological instrument related to efforts to detect and diagnose homosexuality as a mental illness during this period. “

“Waxing . . . is the most common method for extensive depilation, and complications include burns, mechanical folliculitis, infectious folliculitis, other infections of skin and soft tissues, and contact dermatitis and/or vulvitis. Removal of hair causes skin microtrauma, with inoculation of pathogens and subsequent mechanical spread of infection.“

“The finding that regular moderate intake of red wine is associated with higher FSFI scores for both sexual desire, lubrication, and overall sexual function as compared to the teetotaller status is intriguing. While this finding needs to be interpreted with some caution … it nevertheless suggests a potential relationship between red wine consumption and better sexuality.”

Photo by Chema Madoz

pdf: “Right Orbitofrontal Tumor With Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign”

“It’s what women have been telling men for decades: stimulating the vagina is not the same as stimulating the clitoris. Now brain scan data has added weight to their argument.“

“For the peahen, choosing a mate who has a beautiful long tail increases the chance of her male offspring growing one, and so also be attractive. Of course, for her there is very good reason to be choosy. Males can and want to spray their sperm around willy‑nilly, but producing an egg and offspring levies a prohibitive tax upon her metabolism.”

“The monkeys live in groups of three to nine, in which multiple adult males mate with a single breeding female and then cooperate to raise her young. This mating system, called polyandry, occurs in less than 1 per cent of bird species, and is even rarer in mammals.”

“Spider sex is unusual in that males transfer their sperm to the female on small limbs called pedipalps. … Dr Aisenberg and Dr Barrantes observed the process 17 times in pairs of Leucauge argyra. On the 14 occasions a sexual plug was made, the female produced it without assistance from the male. On ten of these occasions the male’s pedipalps then seemed to get stuck while he was transferring the sperm … and he had great difficulty freeing himself. In two of those ten instances, he was eaten as a result.“

“Some male insects also give females what’s called a spermatophylax to increase their chances of mating. A spermatophylax, which can weigh up to 30 percent of a male’s body weight, is essentially like a really good snack attached to their sperm.”

“Pornography, Society, and the Law in Imperial Germany“: “The view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society’s pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object.”

Uschi Digard

New Zealand vs. Fiji in a game of naked rugby

Bert and Ernie are not gay (according to a press release).

Transhumanists discuss sexbots for women.

Sex in the stands at a Red Sox game, captured on film by an ESPN cameraman.

“Mistressdom, like celibacy, is a crucial lens through which to explore how women relate to men other than in marriage; mistressdom is, in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage. Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere.”

A gallery pinup collection of Bettie Page

Anita Berber (photo by Madame d'Ora)

Anita Berber — “Goddess of the Night”

Following up on an earlier post, here’s more about nude dance that has artistic value:

Clips & pics from All That Jazz, and my own brief note on this masterpiece.

“Being in constant intimate contact with beautifully honed and tensile bodies, stimulated by music and choreography of sensual intensity … ballet dancers are not surprisingly creatures who spend much of their professional lives on high sexual heat. However great the artistic spirituality involved, what we are talking about here is an animal process of courtship and arousal. The result is obvious: … dancers, male and female, are in such a state of readiness that they will grab at anything in a skirt or trousers, leotard or legwarmers.”

There’s that old bogus dichotomy — art is spiritual, sex is animal. This thinking leads to the denigration of nudity as somehow excluding artistic value — as soon as the clothes come off it’s just “animal” and not real art. That’s what happened at Celly de Rheidt’s trial in 1920, where the court said that her work had no artistic merit. Unlike Berber and Claire Bauroff (who were both trained in ballet), de Reidt hadn’t trained as a dancer. Certainly her husband saw the dancing as just a way of making money. I don’t know if de Rheidt had more artistic aspirations. Her costumes suggest that she might have.

Celly de Rheidt (middle) 1923

Here’s a description of some of her performances: “One notorious production, eventually banned, took place at an establishment named the Black Cat Cabaret, run by Celly de Reidt [sometimes spelled "de Rheydt"] and her husband, [Harry] Seveloh, a former army lieutenant. It featured nude girls in sacrificial Aztec ceremonies, or mock bullfights, or scenes of naked novices being humiliated by lesbian nuns in strange rituals.” p. 15, Ian Buruma, “Faces of the Weimar Republic –pdf” in Glitter and Doom.

A review of “Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!” by the Dave St. Pierre Company, Pina Bausch’s “pornographic illegitimate children.” This 2011 performance caused quite a controversy when the naked male dancers entered the audience and climbed over people.

An art-show catalog called Trude Fleischmann: a Self-Assured Eye includes Fleischmann’s nude photos of the dancer Claire Bauroff (1925), which are said to be a “watershed in nude photography.” Bauroff publicly displayed these photos in Berlin prior to her dance performance there, leading to a scandal in which the photos were seized by the police. In the catalog, Frauke Kreutler says the pics were a “watershed” because nude models had previously been anonymous, so that their photos were seen as depictions of some abstract Woman, an ideal, rather than of any particular woman. Bauroff was one of the early artists to go before the public in all her naked, identified individuality. In Kreutler’s words, “Whereas the nude models … hitherto have mainly remained anonymous, the subject now is an internationally acknowledged dancer, known by name …. Anonymity and bashfulness, which have formed the cliche of womanliness, give way to self-assurance and directness.” (p. 115)

Claire Bauroff

But even before Bauroff, there was the dancer Olga Desmond:

Olga Desmond ready for her sword dance

A summary of Olga Desmond’s career.

Judith Mackrell on the history of nudity in dance: “For Isadora Duncan … the body was sacred. When she abandoned corsets, danced barefoot and occasionally let a bare breast spill out of her loosely draped tunic, Duncan wasn’t simply serving the cause of dance, she was celebrating the human spirit. And her inspiration, as well as her notoriety, led to more dancers stripping off in the name of high art. Canadian Maud Allan became a superstar of Edwardian Britain thanks her near-naked Salomé routine.”

Here’s a clip from an earlier work by the Dave St. Pierre Company called “La pornographie des ames”, which I saw and loved: