More risqué ballet

Posted by lilech on August 4, 2011

Anita Berber (photo by Madame d'Ora)

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:

Concerned clerics, Swedish sex changes and more MRI sex

Posted by lilech on July 4, 2011

Observational study of ‘Bicyclist’s Vulva’

Norwegian sex priest suspended for his book on sex in the Bible, in which he wrote that it “reeks of horniness, lust and pleasure, and is an endlessly rich tale of sex that can stimulate people’s own sex lives.”

The strange, sad tale of the overstimulated Rector of Stiffkey, a “prostitutes’ padre” who tried to “save” wayward young women and who was killed by a lion

“Thoughts of death led both men and women to say that they’d be more likely than controls to go ahead with the one-night stand, thus showing how a subtle change in sexual symbolism can alter the relationship between morbid thoughts and sexual desire.“

“Two studies, including an ecologically valid study of online dating advertisements, provided evidence for men’s production and women’s evaluation of humor in romantic contexts. A third study revealed that women’s evaluations of potential mates’ humor are predictive of their romantic interest. Moreover, this article shows that preferences for and perceptions of humor are associated with preferences for and perceptions of intelligence and warmth.“

Inclusive fitness and kin selection in an account of homosexuality’s survival value

“The intelligent homosexual’s guide to natural selection“

“Just How Naughty was Berlin? The Geography of Prostitution and Female Sexuality in Curt Moreck’s Erotic Travel Guide“

Anita Berber

Anne Tamar-Mattis argues that ‘intersex’ should be kept out of the DSM, which leads her to oppose expanding the concept of gender identity disorder.

In Sweden, opting for a sex change entails consenting to be sterilized, since “if a woman becomes a man, she should not be able to become pregnant as a woman.” Some are trying to change this law.

A stats professor has a “learning experience” occasioned by a transvestite cardinal (a bird, not a cleric).

While writing about The Story of O, Susan Sontag “compared the ratio of first-rate pornography to trashy books within the genre to “another somewhat shady subgenre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.” She also maintained that like science fiction, pornography was aimed at “disorientation, at psychic dislocation.””

From Just Jaeckin's film version of The Story of O

Naomi Wolf: “We now know that porn delivers rewards to the male brain in the form of a short-term dopamine boost, which, for an hour or two afterwards, lifts men’s mood and makes them feel good in general. The neural circuitry is identical to that for other addictive triggers, such as gambling or cocaine.” NOTE ADDED (July4): See the refutation at Mind Hacks.

Another orgasm in an MRI: “”This kind of research is incredibly useful,” says Heiman. “Orgasm is tied into the brain’s reward system and likely other important systems as well. There is much we can learn about the brain, about sensation, about how pleasure works and probably much more from this one physical response.”"

“One interesting ability that Kamisaruk found … is that some women … were able to “think themselves” to orgasm. Without using any external stimulation, women closed their eyes and, using only sometimes erotic imagery but just as commonly very random and abstract thought processes, achieved an orgasm that was indistinguishable from orgasms achieved through self-stimulation.“

Scicurious on rat studies that clarify how antidepressants interfere with ejaculation

Annie Sprinkle likes Chester Brown’s comic-strip memoir of being a john

Risqué ballet

Posted by lilech on June 13, 2011

Claire Bauroff (photo by Trude Fleischmann)

There’s a long history of trying to keep art apart from sex. Especially in the English-speaking world, as soon as the sexual element comes to the fore the work is likely to be dismissed as porn. This is especially clear in dance. When someone’s described as a dancer, I catch myself wondering whether she’s a ballet dancer (or practitioner of some other artistic form of dance) or “just a stripper.” If the dancer’s clothes are off, then the dance is about sex only and therefore it isn’t art and the dancer’s “just a stripper.”

This habit of thought is of course bogus — nude dance can approach some pretty ambitious artistic, moral and spiritual aims.

This is a central theme in Karl Toepfer’s book, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. Toepfer devotes a chapter to nacktballett, or naked ballett. It was practiced initially only in private as a kind of exercise by dancers in (for example) Ida Herion‘s school in Stuttgart. It isn’t clear who first went public with the art form in the Weimar era. Claire Bauroff is associated with nacktballet, but (according to Toepfer) she seldom danced nude, and her association with nacktballet is mainly due to the photos of her in nude dance poses by Trude Fleischmann.

Anita Berber certainly gave public, nude dance performances with an artistic purpose. She had trained as a ballet dancer, but much of her work was in a more modern, expressionistic dance form. In spite of her artistic aims, she was hounded by the authorities, who assumed that nude dancing could only be stripping and therefore not art.

Celly de Rheydt was a true practitioner of nacktballet, but was put on trial in 1922. In spite of her artistic achievement, she was convicted of lewdness.

There are today more examples of artistic nude dance. The performers seem to agree that the nudity heightens the sexual dimension of their art. So sex does indeed come to the fore in their work, but that only makes it better art. A good example is the work of Dasniya Sommer, who’s interviewed here (in German).

She put her expertise in Japanese rope bondage to use on the set of Romeo Castellucci’s production of the Wagnerian opera Parsifal (which involved the rope suspension of some peformers). Here’s a review of Castellucci’s Parsifal.

Then there’s Karina Sarkissova, who was fired by an Austrian ballet company after she posed in the nude for some photos.

Karina Sarkissova

LiveLeak.com – full nude ballet, posted with vodpod

Celestial bodies, Rampling and Playboy’s influence

Posted by lilech on May 25, 2011

“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.“

Courtesans and whores’ biographies

Posted by lilech on May 22, 2011

Marisa Berenson as Lady Lyndon

“[Princess] Dorothea [Lieven, née von Benckendorff] devoted herself tirelessly to the welfare of Russia, assiduously sleeping with every major statesman on the European stage, including Metternich, ‘the first statesman in Europe’, George IV and each successive British prime minister bar George Canning, whom she saw as a plebeian with no manners.”

Harriette Wilson, a very busy courtesan, was less discriminating. Before publishing her memoirs, she “wrote to everyone she intended to name, making clear that there was still time to edit them out in return for £200. Many decided that this blackmail was cheap at the price, among them the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister, George Canning.” Wilson “was not beautiful … but exuded sex appeal and vivacity. Barely educated, she studied hard to ensure that she was attractive to gentlemen of a more intellectual bent, reading in short order, Seneca, Rousseau’s Confessions, Racine’s tragedies and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. ‘I allowed myself only ten minutes for my dinner,’ wrote this ambitious young girl.”

Another famous prostitute who wielded a dangerous memoir was the Dublin madam known as Mrs. Leeson (aka Peg Plunket)

Julie Peakman has written about the ‘whore biographies‘ penned by Wilson, Leeson and others. Here’s a discussion of one of Peakman’s articles on this 18th- and 19th-century genre.

Perhaps the most interesting of the British courtesans of this era was Grace Dalrymple Elliott, about whom there’s a book called My Lady Scandalous by Jo Manning. More here.

Scene from Stanley Kubrick's 'Barry Lyndon'

There’s a bawdy folk song about another prostitue of that era, Kitty Fisher

Charlotte’s girls — 18th-century prostitutes in the employ of Charlotte Hayes, who appears on Wikipedia’s list of British brothel keepers

Here’s an on-line copy of Horace Bleackley’s 1909 book, Ladies Fair and Frail; Sketches of the Demi-Monde During the Eighteenth Century, with chapters on the more famous 18th- and 19th-century British prostitutes

“Over the lifespan of the [Men and Women's] club (1885-1889), discussions ranged from sexual relations in Periclean Athens to the position of Buddhist nuns, to sexuality and its relation to marriage, prostitution, and friendship.“

Hogarth's depiction of the orgy scene in 'Rake's Progress'

The Royal Dildo — nasty, pornographic rumors about Marie Antoinette

A blog post on the history of Parisienne brothels, inc. Le Chabanais

This looks interesting: “Prostitution, in Rosenthal’s view, confronted the core controversies of eighteenth-century capitalism: luxury, desire, global trade, commodification, social mobility, gender identity, imperialism, self-ownership, alienation, and even the nature of work itself.”

Here’s a bookseller’s list of books on courtesans

And now for something completely different:

Topless duels, sauciness, & patriotic sex

Posted by lilech on May 2, 2011

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 catch-all catch-up post

Posted by lilech on April 7, 2011

Gina Lolabrigida

“In the earliest records of human religion, castration was regarded as an act of devotion. Moreover, the ritual of circumcision is still followed by many modern religions. … CONCLUSION: The ritual of castration evolved into circumcision as a less-invasive and bloody procedure than castration.“

“Tally is short for Tallywacker, a British nickname for penis. It is also the nom de Internet of a 55-year-old, heterosexual, happily married attorney in Tennessee who is at the vanguard of the foreskin restoration movement. With evangelical zest, he shares his story, and a sequential series of photographs of his penis.“

“According to the original commitment–skepticism hypothesis, women err on the side of underestimating prospective mates’ commitment to avoid the high costs of pregnancy without support. … Confirming our predictions, … postmenopausal women did not show a bias toward underinferring men’s commitment intentions.“

“The current study demonstrates that exposure to a sexily dressed woman increases single men’s likelihood of noticing status products in a visual display.” (pdf)

“[We used] one of the most compelling visual cues of female sexual attractiveness (low waist-to-hip ratio) to test the influence of news anchor sexualization on audience evaluations of her as a professional and their memory for the news that she presents. Male participants saw the sexualized version of the anchor as less suited for war and political reporting. They also encoded less news information presented by the sexualized than her unsexualized version.“