Benny Hill, Lisztomania, and the barmaid’s outfit

Benny Hill got his start at The Windmill Theatre, which “was infamous for its risqué dancing girls and nude tableaux but it was a tough crowd for comedians who would make up part of the show. Not too many patrons were there for the jokes. … Hill had a strange relationship with women. He was very confused about the accusations of sexism in the latter part of his career. … But society around him had moved on and an elderly man surrounded or chased by very scantily-clad women made for uncomfortable viewing.”

From the FAQ section at Science Cheerleader: “The Science Cheerleaders are professional cheerleaders pursuing science careers who playfully challenge stereotypes, turn everyone onto science by encouraging participation in citizen science activities, and inspire the 3-4 million U.S. cheerleaders to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and math.”

“Now, thanks to The Icelandic Phallological Museum, it is finally possible for individuals to undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion. The Icelandic Phallological Museum contains a collection of more than two hundred and fifteen penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland.”

On Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975): “The girls tear and claw at Liszt, who whips a harp from out of nowhere [and] … inspires them to summon out his trouser snake with a sweet siren’s song. Their lilting calls yield totally unexpected results as Liszt’s member expands and expands, finally ending up at a length of about ten feet.” Liszt is played by Roger Daltrey, the Pope is played by Ringo Starr. Somehow, Wagner and Hitler also get into this movie. Here’s a frame that I copied from the previously linked Cine-Miscreant:

The Rhine maidens in "Lisztomania"

“After outlining Marcuse’s theory of the role of Eros in social life, I discuss two pornographic Web sites that combine eroticism and social critique. I argue that Marcuse’s work is valuable for its emphasis on the intersection of sex, technology, and capitalist economy, but that it needs to be supplemented by a focus on masculinity and the male body in Internet pornography.”

“Jacobs describes an experiment in which she and a group of her students went to a Starbucks coffeehouse in Shenzhen to search for sexually explicit media on the Internet. The aim was to see what they could access through mainland China’s Great Firewall. “We were there for 30 minutes and we found all this porn using an Internet connection in a public space.” Pornography has been officially banned in China since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. …
Subcultures of user-generated or DIY pornography have evolved on the Internet as a result.”

From Dyan Elliott’s The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500: “The impact of Bernardine spirituality among the early Beguine mystics provides the impetus for a sensual, embodied, and ultimately eroticized bride of Christ. The tendency to express this spirituality somatically perhaps culminates in the matrimonial embellishments of later pious widows such as Bridget of Sweden and Dorothea of Montau.”

Karmen MacKendrick: “It is hard to see how one might have an obligation to others to feel the bite and burn of a well-wielded whip …. It is just as hard to see how it makes sense to say that one could have the right, just for oneself, to be broken out of that self, slammed against the sturdy boundaries of the ego until they break. … This shattering, exteriorizing intensity is an otherness that arises from within the focus on the body and its pleasures. … We, at least since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch first eyed the Lives of the Martyrs … have been inspired by images of the saints: Teresa, unspeakably joyous as the cherub’s arrow pierces her entrails; … Sebastian, serene with his multiple arrow-piercings; Catherine stretched and broken on the wheel.”

"Monna Vanna" by Franz von Stuck

According to Anne Dufourmantelle, “Philosophical ideas, like sexual enjoyment, exceed our control and can only come to us unbidden. Both offer the illusion that we can escape time and mortality into the timelessness of thought or the ecstatic moment of the sexual encounter. In sex we try to overcome our separateness and to connect with someone else. Likewise, philosophy tries to grasp a hidden world order in which everything is connected. Most importantly, in sex, one encounters another body, another world outside one’s own, and this unseats and transforms.”

“Although neither Severin nor his creator [Sacher-Masoch] appears in David Ives’s wildly intelligent and sometimes frightening new play, “Venus in Fur” (at the Classic Stage Company), it helps to have some knowledge of the novel and its author …. This sexual roundelay about power and powerlessness, about the imagination butting up against so-called “reality,” is played out by two contemporary characters.” That review’s a couple of years old.

Have you seen the article in the Atlantic about Jaroslav Flegr’s work, which links schizophrenia and car crashes to a brain parasite that we can get from cats? According to that article, male rats that have the parasite behave in more risky and even self-destructive ways and are more attractive to female rats than the more prudent males are. Well, now the folks at Improbable Research have linked to another of Flegr’s papers, which is called “Dominance, submissivity (and homosexuality) in general population. Testing of evolutionary hypothesis of sadomasochism by internet-trap-method,” (here’s the pdf of that paper).

“Subcutaneous Penile Insertion of Domino Fragments by Incarcerated Males in Southwest United States Prisons: A Report of Three Cases: … In each case, an incarcerated Hispanic male or fellow inmate filed a domino into a unique shape for placement under the penile skin. Utilizing the tip of a ballpoint pen or a sharpened shard of plastic to create a puncture wound, each man inserted the domino fragment into the subcutaneous tissue of the penis. … Conclusions: Incarcerated males put themselves at risk for injury and infection when attempting penile enhancement with improvised equipment.” (via Improbable Research)

“The editors, who are also contributors to this book, begin by identifying themselves as “part of a generation of women currently entering the workforce as professors, researchers, lawyers, and other professionals who also worked during some part of our lives in the sex industry” (xi). “Flesh for Fantasy is devoted to destigmatizing the sex industry, illuminating the labor conditions of strippers, and revising the cultural connotations of exotic dance” (xxxii). It challenges the patronizing attitudes about sex work that have characterized most, but not all, feminist discussions until very recently.”

“The distinction drew a line between sex and gender. Sex referred to the reproductive categories of male and female, and it was a useful biological concept, applicable to humans, nonhuman animals, and plants. Gender, on the other hand, indicates the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and traits of male and female. … The French philosopher Michel Foucault set the agenda when he lamented … that “the notion of sex made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle.”"

“On the evening of May 29 [1912] at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris the audience was scandalously titillated (or titillated scandalously) as they watched Nijinsky’s erotic pleasure dancing the lead to Claude Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. The audience was captive to and captivated by the great exhibitionist in a dark brown and white costume designed by Léon Bakst and based on a Greek satyr … enthralled with his erection the size of a tree trunk.” Here’s Nijinsky about to scandalize Parisians by simulating masturbation with a nymph’s scarf:

Nijinsky as the Faun about to pounce on a nymph's scarf

“Barmaid’s risqué outfits cause gender divide in Italian town: … The female mayor of the town has called the 34-year-old barmaid a threat to public order, because her miniskirts, high heels and skimpy tops are drawing male customers from up to 70 miles away, who clog up the nearby streets with their cars and park illegally.”

“A how-to guide for better masturbation that hangs in Skidmore College bathrooms is steaming up the campus in more ways than one. The [guide], published by the college’s Center for Sex and Gender Relations, encourages masturbation as “a great way to relieve some of the stress that comes with classes, finals and the never ending homework.” The poster shows a map of the body’s erotic zones and offers suggestions for heightening self-pleasure.”

David Barash on “The Evolutionary Mystery of Female Orgasm” Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Uncanny photo erotica by a Russian artist.

Here’s a kinky scene from the 1963 film of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. The cast included Peter Falk, Leonard Nimoy, and Shelley Winters. The actors in this scene are Ruby Dee and  Peter Brocco.

Weimar to postwar links

“Reexamining Weimar Germany via the Politics of Prostitution” — a review of Julia Roos’s Weimar through the Lens of Gender.

On Magnus Hirschfeld: “This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868—1935), an early campaigner for ‘gay rights’ avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897—1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power.”

A German lesbian film from 1931: “I’m going to be talking about Mädchen in Uniform (1931). It’s not the first girl-on-girl kiss of cinema (Marlene Dietrich snagged that one in Morocco in 1930) and it’s not the first time the idea of a real life lesbian had been portrayed (see aforementioned Pandora’s Box, 1929) But it WAS the first time something this lesbian graced the silver screen. … It’s nearly impossible to get a good print of the film anyway  because when the Nazis came to power, they banned the film and attempted to burn all existing copies.”

Berlin’s Lesbische frauen — on a 1920′s guide to Berlin’s lesbian clubs: “Equally chic, but definitely more late-night was Le Garconne on Kalkreuthstrasse, owned by Susi Wanowski, the former wife of a Berlin Chief of Police but now the lover and manager of Wiemar-era wild-child, Anita Berber.”

Some info about Berber in a clip from Berlin — Metropolis of Vice:

“Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich” by Terri J. Gordon, from a collection called Sexuality and German Fascism.

“The Man Who Started the Sexual Revolution”: “Twenty years later, his curia-like Vienna Psychoanalytical Society was attracting a new generation of followers after the war, among them an impecunious student from the provinces, Wilhelm Reich.”

“Sixty Years of Beate Uhse”: “In the early days of her company, the target groups of this entrepreneurial woman celebrated as the “orgasm muse,” “sexpert” and “love slave of the nation” were not hedonists or the sexually adventurous, but women rebuilding Germany from the rubble of the war.”

“Sexual science and self-narrative: epistemology and narrative technologies of the self between Krafft-Ebing and Freud” : “Starting from the psychiatric problematization … of the concept and the object called ‘sexuality’ in the second half of the 19th century, it attempts to show a series of continuities and discontinuities between this kind of reasoning and the birth of psychoanalysis in the first years of the 20th century.”

"Procuress" by Otto Dix (1923)

A note about the Freud-Spielrein-Jung film, A Dangerous Method: “In many ways, the film is a well-made hybrid of ideas movie, masterly costume drama, and, frankly with Knightley onboard and some spanking sex, a touch of S&M soap.”

“Verfolgt takes place in present-day Hamburg and tells a story about fairly ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. It shows their discovery of sadomasochism – gritty, awkward, human, unpretentious, and ardent.”

“Nothing in theatre elevates the identity of actor over character more completely than nudity. Yet as a performance or spectacle, nudity remains a form of masking, insofar as it amplifies the desire to discover, to expose something hidden by clothing.”

The Museum of Sex posted some old erotic art by Franz von Bayros, and here are some amazing erotic bookplates by the same artist.

The science of (mostly) human sex

‘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:

oiled nude ballet dancer contortions, posted with vodpod

Goddesses, Succubi, snakes & a Canadian biker

John Collier's depiction of Lilith

Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us about Hate Speech. “The major distinction that I found between cultures that tolerated and even openly appreciated depictions of sex and those that found them somehow shameful was in their views of the nature of the divine. The Greek gods and goddesses were themselves highly sexual creatures.”

“The deity he addressed as Ishtar was the same one fifth century B.C. historian Herodotus called Aphrodite. The author of the Biblical Book of Kings fulminates against her as “the abomination Ashtoreth.” Her name changed with every change of frontier and tongue, but her nature, seductive and violent, stayed the same.“

“In Greece Lilith is the goddess of the black moon …. She was also revered as a fertility goddess, helping to conceive children and grow crops. Legends and myths about Lilith originate in ancient Mesopotamia …. Judeo-Christianity has replaced the old mythology with a new mythology: Lilith as succubus …. the mother of all succubi, a stealer of children and a seductress of men.”

Depiction of Lilith with snake on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

“The notion of a lilith as a demon is probably Assyrian (say around 700 BC), incorporated into Isaiah by way of the ancient Israelite contacts with the mythologies of Babylonia and Chaldea. The Assyrians had three female demons, Lilit, Lilu,and Ardat Lilit. There’s little doubt that the Hebrew lilith-demon mentioned in Isaiah was a folkloric adaptation of the Assyrian demons.”

“[Lilith's] clergy is described as being “temple prostitutes” according to some historians. This belief changed over time, with Lilith (or succubi in general) becoming the “divine whore” according to men, described as being a tall beautiful, obsidian-skinned, bat-winged female …. This creature then seduces men and kills them.”

“[Eve] seduces Adam and becomes therefore an ally of the serpent …. The snake [refers to] older mother and fertility goddesses like Ishtar or Astarte. The snake was a very old and powerful symbol of fertility and life.“

Nastassja Kinski

Kenneth Anger on Lucifer Rising (which is on YouTube): “Lucifer is the Light god, not the devil – the Rebel Angel behind what’s happening in the world today. His message is that the key of joy is disobedience. Isis (Nature) wakes. Osiris (Death) answers. Lilith (Destroyer) climbs to the place of Sacrifice. The Magus activates the circle and Lucifer – Bringer of Light – breaks through.”

“The film opens with Isis and her consort Osiris; we also see Lilith, played by Marianne Faithfull, and an adept played by a Canadian biker named Hayden Couts, and Anger himself plays the Magus, abolishing Chaos … all cut with footage of volcanoes erupting and images of Huggins as Lucifer in a rainbow-colored jacket. Here my grasp of the esoteric symbolism fails me….”

Myriam Gibril as Isis in Lucifer Rising

“Head of patron saint of genital diseases to be auctioned in Meath” Ireland. “Saint Vitalis of Assisi was an Italian hermit and monk who died in 1370 and became a saint despite an early life marked by licentiousness and immorality. In a bid to atone for his earlier sins,  he went on pilgrimages to various sanctuaries and eventually became a Benedictine monk and later lived as a hermit, living in utter poverty near Assisi. After his death he became known as a patron against sicknesses and diseases affecting the genitals.”

Celestial bodies, Rampling and Playboy’s influence

“Women in both countries [USA and New Zealand] rated mesomorphic (muscular) and average male somatotypes as most attractive, followed by ectomorphic (slim) and endomorphic (heavily built) figures. … In both countries, the image lacking any trunk hair was rated as the most attractive, with a steady decline in attractiveness as hirsutism became more pronounced.“

“An extensive experiment was conducted using high-quality photographic stimulus material, several systematically varied figure parameters (weight, hip width, waist width, bust size, and leg length), and a large sample of 34,000 participants. The results showed that women prefer slightly wider hips, a narrower waist, and longer legs than men (highly significant but small effects). A clear difference was found with regard to the ideal bust size: 40% of men but only 25% of women preferred a large bust.”

“Physical Attractiveness: the Influence of Selected Torso Parameters” — “Front-view line drawings of male and female physiques were rated for attractiveness. Both subject sexes rated female physiques with greater curvature as less attractive. Male subjects’ ratings were unaffected by breast size while female subjects showed slight negative evaluation of large breasts. Both subjects sexes rated broad shoulders as attractive in male physiques. Greater chest muscularity resulted in slightly higher attractiveness ratings; waist slimness was also judged attractive, particularly in female subjects.”

“Although in his later years Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) vehemently rejected astrology, he earlier used it in a variety of ways, but primarily to provide further evidence for positions to which he had arrived by other means. One such early use appears in his commentary on his friend Girolamo Benivieni’s love poetry, the Canzone d’amore, of 1486-1487. In the passages discussed here, Pico presents an intensive Platonic natural philosophical analysis based on a deep astrologically informed understanding of human nature as he attempts to explain a perennial question, namely, why one person is attracted to a certain person (or people), and another to others.“

“In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates …. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner’s body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.“

In Bachelors and Bunnies, Carrie Pitzulo argues that Playboy has a “surprisingly strong record of support for women’s rights and the modernization of sexual and gender roles.” Scott McLemee discusses this book and other works on Playboy. And here’s a piece in Vanity Fair about the Playboy clubs: “Bunnies who worked in New York and London remember serving various Beatles. Tony Bennett was a regular in New York, as was Johnny Carson, who then became a “rabitué” of the Los Angeles club, as Playboy would style it, after The Tonight Show moved west in 1972.”

“A sexual diary seeks to hold on to experiences not only by recording—crystallizing them through obsessive inscription—and sharing them with others, but through the repetition of more or less the same experience again and again. Generally the pornographic project is to repeat a series of moments of supersaturated meaning.“

“This essay examines L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L’Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. … Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. … The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites.” A French translation of L’Alcibiade.

“While the film The Night Porter, which was originally released in 1974, ostensibly portrays a detailed account of the development of a sado-masochistic relationship, it may also be read as a political metaphor. The film’s director and writer, Liliana Cavani, explicitly links the two protagonists’ obsession with each other as originating in an earlier shared experience within a concentration camp. … This paper is a detailed psychoanalytic exposition of the development and nature of that relationship.“

Charlotte Rampling in "The Night Porter"

There are a couple of Rampling stories in this post

“In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman’s lived experience.“

A sequel is rumored to be in the works for the 3-D Chinese porn film 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy

Here’s a good history of pelvic surgery, with gruesome attempts from the ancient world into the early 2oth Century.

One of the men mentioned in that history was James Marion Sims, an early gynecologist. He’s touted as a great man in Alabama, but there’s a less favorable view of him due to his experimental surgeries on slaves.

“Of the 55 transsexuals who participated in this study (52 male-to-female and 3 female to male), 7.5% showed a prolapse greater than or similar to ICS-POP stage 2, and 3.8% required surgical intervention. For bladder symptoms, 47% reported voiding difficulties, 24.6% urgency, 17% urge incontinence, and 23% stress incontinence. Fecal urgency and incomplete emptying of the bowel occurred in 9.4% and 7.6% of patients, respectively. In addition, 23% reported that they were never satisfied with their sexual function.“

Topless duels, sauciness, & patriotic sex

Topless dueling

A German kids’ show gives tips on how to hide an erection (YouTube clip)

Dear John, “a magazine for men written by women“

Chester Brown‘s graphic novel, Paying for It: “The book begins with a record of Brown’s slow disillusionment with the concept of romantic love, then follows his carefully planned and budgeted forays into the world of being a john.“

“Prostitution 2.0: The Changing Face of Sex Work” (pdf)

On the history of “the tits tee”

A review of Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe

Jean M. Auel, author of Clan of the Cave Bear, has a new book: “Sex turns out to be central to The Land of Painted Caves: ‘What does a Cro-Magnon woman do if she finds herself pregnant, but doesn’t know the cause? Was it because she bathed in a stream, ate certain foods or had relations with a man?’“

A review of Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, who wrote gay erotica under the name Phil Andros

A. Chee on sex in the writing of Jame Salter

Source

Diana Athill‘s old stories about happy-go-lucky quickies: “For Athill’s characters are innocent opportunists, finding sexual encounters where they can and for the most part enjoying them in the moment at face value.“

“[Angela] Carter gets away with shamelessly exploiting sci-fi B-movie conventions for serious aesthetic and ideological purposes. In some of her other works Carter uses structurally primitive kinds of narrative (the fairy tale, pornography) in much the same way: she taps into their basic structural and mythological power as a way of roiling the waters of the unconscious … then proceeds, by means of hyperbole, irony, structural reversals, and the layered development of character, to give those obvious stories thematic complexity and density.”

Keeping the British End Up — a re-issue of a book on those saucy 60′s & 70′s British sex comedies, which featured such memorable actresses as Sue Longhurst and Sally Faulkner. Faulkner later appeared in the lesbo vampire movie Vampyres.

Sally Faulkner in Confessions of a Driving Instructor

On 1970′s pornographer, Al Goldstein

Benjamin Franklin on why older women are preferable: “Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.“

Franklin also features in One Nation Under Sex, a new book by Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, according to which “Ben Franklin helped save the American Revolution by seducing French women, Dolley Madison slept around, …. Abe Lincoln liked to share beds with men … and Eleanor Roosevelt’s lesbian affairs helped her become a crusader for equal rights.“

Franklin attended meetings of the Hellfire Club in England, where he met John Wilkes, an English radical who inspired the American revolutionaries, who “loved books, booze, sex and freedom,” and who co-wrote the porn poem, An Essay on Women

“Taking Virginia editor James Jackson Kilpatrick’s publication of The Smut Peddlers in 1960 as a starting point, this article shows how southern segregationists used the battle against pornography to build a constitutional coalition determined to prevent the Supreme Court from wresting further power from the states, this time under the rubric of upholding morality – itself a front for undermining civil rights.“

“Oral sex puts men at risk for oral cancer“

Academic sex scandals, from the dominatrix English professor at the University of New Mexico to a squirting demo at Northwestern to the strippers in the class at La Salle University to the emeritus professor of surgery who recommended giving semen to women on Valentine’s day instead of chocolate (and whose off-color humor triggered a major overreaction)

“If beautiful people have more daughters, and if physical attractiveness is heritable, then it follows that, over time, women become physically more attractive than men.“

A study connecting sex to cardio health and more naked opera

Ludmila Tcherina

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse: “‘He was not a pornographer, in any sense,’ says Dreyfus. ‘He was always trying to imagine some ideal representations of desires.’”

Links to some naked opera from recent years

Vagina: a Cultural History by Naomi Wolf will soon be available

The Kinsey collection of films at Indiana University is in an old bowlling alley

Liberated sexuality wrecks the social order but “if liberated sexuality is world-destroying from the mythic, fundamentalist point of view, it is world-creating from a pluralistic one.“

An analysis of women-in-prison flicks: “This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized — feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream.”

About those 19th-Century free-love communes in upstate New York and the northwest: “This essay explores the politics of social and geographical location in several histories of the 19^th century American and Pacific Northwest free love movements.”

Ludmilla Tcherina in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann:

On the Flash Press — “racy” “libidinous” male weeklies in 1840s New York

“The high priestess of free love … Victoria Woodhull: spiritualist, blackmailer, wife, prostitute and the first female presidential candidate“. Woodhull’s bio

“Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930′s — Part I“

“Praising the mound of venus: … While there are great artists that have given the vulva praise in art such a Georgia O’Keefe – the vulva does not get’s it due compared to the male member when it comes to praise and adoration.”

“Erectile dysfunction (ED) is considered a well-established risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) …. Our results suggest that a low frequency of sexual activity predicts CVD independently of ED and that screening for sexual activity might be clinically useful.“

An amazing production of Tales of Hoffmann:

Schéhérazade, Sir Henry Head and the Ladybirds

Cover for an LP by Scheherazade

I wish I knew what artist made this cool cover for a recording by a Japanese band called Scheherazade. I hit upon it while looking for images of the ballet Scheherazade, based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. The choreographer was Michel Fokine. The ballet’s first performance starred Ida Rubinstein and Vaslav Nijinsky.

Findings from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (a 140-page pdf)

“There has been a transition for women in direction towards a stereotypically ‘male’ personality profile, but not at the expense of traditionally socially important female traits. Comparisons in psychological profile subscales showed an increase in dominance, exhibition, aggression and achievement.“

“Using … data from a high-fertility polygynous human population of Senegal, we first show that extraversion, a personality dimension predicting men’s mating behavior in this population, is associated with inter-individual differences in testosterone profiles, with men in the top quartile of extraversion distribution having 29% higher testosterone levels.“

“This study conducts an exploratory investigation of various post-coital behaviors that the authors propose may reflect the divergent adaptive reproductive strategies of each sex as understood from an evolutionary perspective.“

‘What the presence of attractive young women can do to men‘

The scientific case for masturbation — 4 theories about its adaptive function

The best cover for a Scheherazade LP or cd, c. 1963.

“A recent study suggests that daily masturbation and ejaculation can reduce the amount of accumulated DNA damage in sperm by 12%.  Therefore wasting sperm into a sock can actually improve the mobility of sperm and increase fertility.” Here’s the study

Some history of masturbation: “Freud famously concluded a 1912 symposium on masturbation for the Psychoanalytical Society in Vienna by saying, ‘I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing–that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible.’“

Mind Hacks posted on erotic asphyxia. Here’s a review of the literature on autoerotic deaths between 1954 and 2004. Here’s a pdf of the first paper that I could find on this topic (in the British Medical Journal, 1960). After a gruesome description of the circumstances in which four men had died, the authors venture a Freudian hypothesis — somehow, the men wrapped themselves in plastic in order to simulate a return to the womb. (!) Then the authors make a more sensible claim: “A much less elegant and more superficial explanation is that these people were trying to achieve some undifferentiated thrill or excitement from partial suffocation or anoxia. This factor may have existed but it does not explain the transvestism, sexual arousal, or complete enclosure of the body. It is an interesting reflection that the sexual impulse in man is so protean in its manifestations that a technical advance resulting in a new packaging material can result in a new perverse manifestation.”

Here are some more recent (but equally sad) cases involving less typical autoerotic causes of death: “These modalities include ligature around the thorax or abdomen, plastic bags covering the face, electrical current, inhalation of a toxic gas or chemicals, or partial or total submersion, known as aquaerotic asphyxiation. This study highlights 11 cases of atypical autoerotic death, including asphyxia with a plastic bag, electrocution, and inhalation of butane and nitrous oxide (N2O).” Two more atypical cases: “We here report the case of a 34-year-old man who died due to asphyxia, secondary to body wrapping in the largest and most complex plastic bag ever involved in a published case of autoerotic death“; and “Unusual death of a 24-year-old man, involving propane inhalation and plastic bag suffocation, is described.“

Back to a less depressing topic: You get a sense of the erotic nature of Scheherazade from this review of a perfomance by Anna Kisselgoff in the NY Times (Jan. 18, 1981). Kisselgoff summarizes part of the narrative as follows: “The wives bribe the chief eunuch to release the slaves who spring out to make love to the women. The leader of the orgy is Zobeide’s ‘golden slave’ …. It is common to think of ‘Scheherazade,’ with its frank acknowledgement of sexual passions, as an early expression of Freud’s century. To most Anglo-Saxon audiences at the time, it was inconceivable that a powerful queen would bother with a black slave. Russians brought up on tales of Tartar harems and white princesses had no trouble with the idea.” Here’s Yvonne de Carlo as she appeared in a 1947 movie called Song of Scheherazade.

Yvonne de Carlo in Song of Scheherazade (1947)

“Based on the results of my study, there is a percentage of women (just over 30 percent) who feel powerful when performing fellatio. Apparently some women find it empowering and believe that it can wield a lot of power.“

Sir Henry Head’s self-experimentation: “We then discovered that the glans penis responded to cutaneous stimuli in that peculiar manner with which we were already familiar from our study of the first stage of recovery after nerve division. … When … [the tip] was dipped into water at 40° C, no sensation of heat was produced, but [Head] experienced an unusually disagreeable sensation of pain. … But, as soon as the water covered the corona without reaching the foreskin, both cold and pain disappeared, giving place to an exquisitely pleasant sensation of heat.“

“For women not using hormonal birth control, it would appear that some information regarding female fertility appears to be encoded in gait.“

“Women with higher estradiol levels in the peri-ovulatory and luteal phase of the menstrual cycle were correlated with higher senses of desirability and a lower relationship commitment in women.” But SciCurious has objections.

Yvonne de Carlo in her most famous role as Lily Munster

“In a study of 443 women, a pair of British researchers discovered that women were more likely to make impulsive purchases during the weeks between ovulation and menstruation, known as the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle.” Here’s the study

“Now let’s look a little deeper into the action of those neurotransmitters [dopamine and oxytocin] and how we can manipulate their action to extend the neurological orgasm for as long as possible.“

A device for accurate breast volume measurements

William Saletan on anal sex

Angus McLaren, an academic explorer of the history of sexuality

“A woman’s race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status impact whether health care providers recommend one of the most highly effective forms of contraception.“

On Carl Djerassi, inventor of the pill

Vogue‘s first celebrity models

Alexander Lee’s ‘Short History of Desire‘

A list of abortions in literature

More about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Depicting the harem as a home rather than as a sexual prison, books written by women from the progressive elite of late Ottoman society challenged the prevailing stereotype of harem women as ignorant, indolent odalisques whiling away their days awaiting their lord and master.“

Ida Rubinstein in Scheherazade (1910) .jpeg by M. Evans & Theatrex

Male bonobos need their mommies to help them hook up with female bonobos

“The male [chimpanzee] will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit … dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices. … [S]he sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.“

“Exposure to a chemical found in food packaging and other plastics, BPA, can reduce the quality of men’s semen” More here

“A non-stick coating for a substance found in semen dramatically lowers the rate of infection of immune cells by HIV“

Female boa constrictors can reproduce without mating: “Large litters of all-female babies produced by the “super mom” boa constrictor show absolutely no male influence — no genetic fingerprint that a male was involved in the reproductive process.“

“But there is an interesting property of sea squirt pornography and local oceanography that may have consequences in the debates surrounding marine reserve design.“

‘The Ladybirds: the world’s first and only all-girl topless band‘; more here.

Slut-o-ween, unmasking and Christoph Haizmann

Sexy Halloween Costumes

A history of the phantom penis

Edith Wharton’s erotic tale

The original vamps

Carny strippers in the 50′s

Lady Gaga and the death of sex

Clarisse Thorn asks why men who are honest about their sexual needs are demonized

Subterfuge, spies and scarlet women

Can people mask their orientation? Perception of sexual orientation based on facial cues

Alexa di Carlo unmasked. I fell for the Alexa persona, and now I feel dumb and creeped out. Belle de Jour and Dr. Petra Boynton reflect on this scammer in this comments thread. More here and here.

A 1994 doctoral dissertation called ‘Exorcism Seekers: Clinical and Personality Correlates’

“When Max Eastman visited Sigmund Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria, in 1926, he noticed a print of John Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1825) The Nightmare hanging on the wall next to Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Anatomy Lesson. Freud did not refer to Fuseli’s most famous painting in his writing, but his colleague Ernest Jones chose another version of it as the frontispiece of his book On the Nightmare, a scholarly study of the origins and significance of the nightmare theme. However, the nightmare did not fit easily into Freud’s model of dreams as wish fulfillments.” Here are some reflections on Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which, according to this pdf, is “the consummate image of sexual terror.”

Hipocresia by Felicien Rops

Cacodemonomania: “The experience of having had intercourse with the devil ….“

Freud’s reflections on the case of Christoph Haizmann, a 17th-Century painter with cacodemonomania

Some items about Freud’s treatment of the Haizmann case

More about Haizmann in the History of Psychiatry

An old blog devoted to sexy witches

Confessions of a Porn Addict — The Devil is a Woman

'Sin' by Franz von Stuck

“Malleus maleficarum means ‘Hammer of Malefactresses’. Maleficus (fem. malefica), the adjectival noun for ‘malefactor’, had become the common term for ‘wicked magician’, but the two Dominican friars who compiled and published this book in 1486 used the feminine form because they asserted that most of the adherents and practitioners of this satanic heretical sect were women.“

The final issue of the first volume of a neat new journal called Psychology and Sexuality. Most of the papers are about psychological theories of sex from the 1700s until the early 1900s. On a related note, here’s the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

“The Natural and the Normal in the History of Sexuality“

“Using [fMRI], we identified the common and distinct brain systems processing the value of erotic stimuli and monetary gains. … Whereas the anterior lateral OFC, a phylogenetically recent structure, processes monetary gains, the posterior lateral OFC, phylogenetically and ontogenetically older, processes more basic erotic stimuli.“

“Men (and women) in black uniforms“

Beatrice Knop as the evil stepmother in Snow White

Tracy Clark-Flory against raunchy Halloween costumes

“In Defense of Slut-o-ween“

Porn stars discuss horror movies

Ewa Aulin, etc.

Ewa Aulin

Ewa Aulin, a Swedish actress, appeared in some Italian 60′s movies and in Candy, a terrible 1968 film. How could a movie with Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, etc. be terrible? Well, most of the movie is on YouTube and it ain’t pretty (e.g., it’s loaded with ethnic stereotypes). But Ewa looks good in all her pics, and I really like her voice. She abandoned her acting career in the early 70′s and (apparently) became a teacher.

Moving on, here’s a list of Liz Langley‘s top 10 stories on Alternet.

A couple of Psychology Today posts on kink and fetishes.

Loads o’links from Neuroanthropology’s ‘Sex Round Up’, including a link to a study about what kinds of porn videos women prefer

Bombshells of the 60′s

Interesting Retrospace post (and comments) on 70′s ‘porn chic’

ht Vintage Ladies tumblr

Alan Moore’s book on the history of porn art

Bookkake reports on the Victoria & Albert Museum’s acquisition of some 1840′s porn by James Gillray, and links to an earlier Bookkake post on Thomas Rowlandson’s lascivious drawings from the same era

I finally watched this interview with Brooke Magnanti, and she’s so much hotter there than in still photos of her

The case of ‘the haunted scrotum’

The Daily Beast on the legal dangers of rough sex