Strange yet compelling

This is mainly an erotica blog. But I have other interests, including human rights, which are relevant to this post. And every once in a while something weird pops up and I feel compelled to share.

The link below shows a man stripped naked, restrained and being subjected to torture.

If this was a consensual BDSM scene, it wouldn't be to my taste but no doubt many people would find it exciting.

What if it were actual footage of a CIA 'enhanced interrogation'? Would that change the frame of reference for you? Would it change your mind about its eroticism?

What if there were an overdubbed commentary, a conversation between the interrogator and his prisoner, in which they explained what they were thinking at each point? Would that be interesting? What if they were joking with each other about the torture, the way you might expect if contestants in a game show were sharing their thoughts about a particular round in the show? Would that make it weird, rather than erotic?

I have no reason to believe the footage isn't of an actual CIA enhanced interrogation, though the titles and end credits clearly aren't theirs - 'special collector's edition'? And the video is part of the Reporters Sans Limites journalists Youtube feed.

The name given, Abu Zubaydah, is real enough though (he has a Wikipedia entry). And if it isn't actual interrogation footage, it's certainly consistent with accounts of how they're conducted and, specifically, how Zubaydah was treated. I'm assuming the overdubbed conversation is added as a satirical commentary on what 'enhanced interrogation' means in practice. It does kind of rub it in that this is inhuman and degrading.

For me, the important point is that things we might engage in consensually for our own perverse enjoyment become hugely morally problematic (to put it mildly: I should more properly say outrageous breaches of human rights) when done in a different framework, of legally-sanctioned actions carried out by state officials against those they have in custody.

But you can make up your own mind. Here's the link to the video on Youtube (opens in new window).

How does the framing of an activity change its meaning? What do you think?

Some erotic art links

In the wake of the 'Holly' thing (previous blog post) it struck Velvet that people might be interested in a bunch of fairly eclectic books on erotic art. The ones she particularly likes, all of which are below as Amazon.co.uk links, are:

Erotic Fantasy Art. Published 2008. A variety of styles including painting and digital artwork with some 'how-to' information. Nothing very explicit, but many of the images are certainly suggestive and draw on a wide range of influences. There's a 'look inside' function on Amazon.


The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women in Photographs. From 2005: 480 pages and 78 photographers featured, including the well-renowned Eric Kroll and Emma Delves-Broughton (there's a collection of hers also listed below) along with half a dozen other extremely well known others. This is 'erotic' rather than 'kinky', as you'll see from the Amazon 'look inside' function.

The Mammoth Book of New Erotic Photographs. Published 2010. It is mammoth (480 pages, 500 images from 70 photographers). The editor is crime columnist for the Guardian newspaper and Literary Director of London's Crime Scene Festival, though how much this affects the choice of pics is something I wouldn't want to judge...


The Worlds Greatest Erotic Photographs of Today. Published 2009. Sorry, I don't know a whole lot about this one but Velvet likes it...


Kinky Nature Dark Erotic Fashion Photography. Photography by Emma Delves-Broughton, with tasteful takes on various fetishes and fetish clothing styles. Published 2010. I remember this making quite a big splash when it was published. Oh, and 'dark erotic' can sometimes mean 'sexy horror'.


Artcore: v. 1 (Erotic Art). Includes paintings, digital art and comic/manga style images and is described in the blurb as 'depraved', 'deplorable' and 'delightful'. Vol 1 goes back to 2004 and there are several subsequent volumes if you like this one.

So there you go. Quite a few different takes on eroticism among this lot. Have fun!

Dead Girls, androids, gynoids: the future of sex is already happening

A few days ago I got an email from a SF magazine with an article about Dead Girls. It led to a certain amount of strangeness.

Dead Girls is a 1992 ‘post-cyberpunk’ novel by Richard Calder, the first in what came to be known as the ‘Dead trilogy’.

Hence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Calder_(writer)

I've heard of Calder but don't know that much of his work, but there's a Wikipedia entry on him. It briefly discusses the book and the trilogy, and observes:

A notable theme running through his work (most notably the 'Dead' trilogy) is agalmatophiliac male lust for young female gynoids, as well as the darker undercurrents of British national culture.

What?

Wikipedia again:

Agalmatophilia [...] is a paraphilia concerned with the sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object. The attraction may include the desire for actual sexual contact with the objects, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with the animate or inanimate instances of the preferred objects, the act of watching encounters between the objects themselves, or sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object.

Meanwhile, the term 'gynoid' was coined to mean a robot that appears human and female. The original term for a human-appearing robot, android, has a root meaning that implies maleness.

Wikipedia has a short but intriguing discussion of gynoids that says:

Female-appearing robots have also appeared in real-life, with early constructions being crude. The first gynoid was produced by Sex Objects Ltd, a British company, for use as a "sex-aid". It was called simply "36C", from her chest measurement, and had a 16-bit microprocessor and voice synthesiser that allowed primitive responses to speech and push button inputs.

So the first gynoid was intended as a sex aid? How original! You'd never have guessed, would you...

However, there are several more recent gynoids, mostly made in Japan, South Korea and China. They include:

Aiko (Wikipedia: 'an attempt at producing a realistic-looking female android. It speaks Japanese and English and has been produced for a price of 13000 euro'),

Actroid ('designed by Hiroshi Ishiguro to be "a perfect secretary who smiles and flutters her eyelids"'),

EveR-1, EveR-2 and EveR-3. EveR-3 (i.e. Eve Robot 3) was shown to the public in 2009. It's not completely human in form, since long skirts hide wheels, but strangely in early 2010 it appeared in a Korean play, 'Robot Princess and the Seven Dwarfs'. An article in Broadway World says:

The robot who goes by the name of EveR-3 (Eve Robot 3) has taken a starring role in various productions last year including 'Dwarfs' which played to sold-out audiences. EveR-3 is five feet, two inches tall, and has the ability to communicate in Korean and English, and can express a total of 16 facial expressions. Due to her popularity, EveR-3 is scheduled to star in more productions later on in the year.

HRP-4C. Made in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science Technology, it (she?) has actually been used as catwalk model in a fashion show. It stands 5ft2in with Japanese facial features, 30 motors in her body and 8 motors in her face; can walk, move, blink and talk like a human and express emotions of anger and surprise. Apparently the programming details are to be released publicly so 'everyone can contribute to new moves for the robot'. Am I overly cynical about what 'moves' male teenage nerds are likely to programme...? Even if your own copy will cost about $250,000 or £160,000, rather beyond their price bracket...

There's a Youtube video of HRP-4C that's slightly weird and disturbing, human in some respects but not others. And a strange moment when the robot answers a question with a slight incline of the head and a raised eyebrow as if to say 'Are you taking the piss?' The question was in Japanese so I can't tell you what it was! Check the right sidebar of the Youtube page for a bunch of other gynoids and androids, though...

Finally, there's Meinü. First reported in 2006, the name (in full, Měinǚ Jīqìrén) literally means 'beautiful-woman robot'.

It’s not entirely clear where all this leads, except that we can expect agalmatophilia to become a significant thing in the future – because already, for example, we have teenage boys whose idea of an ideal partner comes from video games rather than real life. And if it’s an established fetish, we can also expect manufacturers to devise gynoids that will exactly fulfill that fetish.

Time frame for this? I’m guessing less than a decade for a fully-functioning, sexually-responsive gynoid to be available for not a lot more than a few hundred pounds, probably from the major online stores (yes, Amazon already sell sex aids so there's no matter of principle to be discussed there...).

And what about androids? Well, presumably there’ll be a demand, from women and the gay market, and eventually it will be met. But I’d guess manufacturers will see gynoids as the larger market and go there first.

Anyone else care to offer any thoughts on the development of robot eroticism in the near future? As robotics develop, should we be thinking about artificial intelligence rights in parallel with human rights? Could these cover areas like sexuality??

Do you really want to be 'Master'?

Go on many bdsm-related social networking sites and chatrooms, and you'll find guys there who call themselves 'Master' So-and-so. I've never been convinced that a dominant should give themselves that title: I've always seen it as something others give.

I don't think I'm alone in this.

I know a sub who's often online in chatrooms and chatted up by men whose online names are 'Master' something or other. Her usual line is to ask politely on what basis they call themselves 'Master'.

This can lead to quite long exchanges in which she establishes they have no MA or MSc qualification; are not a master in a vocational sense (e.g. master baker, which is a recognised title), and are not recognised within their bdsm community as being a 'bondage master' or whatever.

She then points out that the other use of the term 'master' is an honorific title for young boys who have not yet reached the age at which they can be called 'mister' - and asks whether, in that case, they'd still like her to call them 'master'...

Personally I've always preferred to hear 'Ouch!' and 'You bastard!' rather than 'Please Master!' but maybe that's just me.

(Sorry about the lack of posts, I've been away for a few days but normal service is now resumed.)

Lenny Bruce, comedian and general bad boy

I've been ill recently and spent some of the time re-reading some old Lenny Bruce stuff on my bookshelves. For those who don't know, Lenny Bruce (Leonard Alfred Schneider, 1925-1966) was an American comic who started working as an MC in strip clubs, doing comic turns between the girls. His sharp sense of hypocrisy and injustice in American society worked into his act and often made him a target for law enforcement, including a couple of obscenity trials.

Notable Lenny Bruce quotes:

“I’ve been accused of bad taste, and I’ll go down to my grave accused of it and always by the same people, the ones who eat in restaurants that reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

“The kind of sickness I wish Time had written about, is that school teachers in Oklahoma get a top annual salary of $4000, while Sammy David, Jr. gets $10,000 a week in Vegas.”

“If something about the human body disgusts you complain to the manufacturer.”

“If a titty is pretty, it’s dirty but not if it’s bloody and maimed.”

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”

“I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I’m going to be if I grow up.”

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses. “

If you're interested there's an official Lenny Bruce website maintained by his daughter Kitty.

Bruce was a bad boy. He was, for example, a long-time drug user and his death was due to accidental overdosing on morphine. But he was a bad boy in many other respects as well. Here's the sexy bit I rediscovered in his biography: it comes from early in his career, when he was MCing for stripper's at Duffy's club in Los Angeles. Philly Joe, a drummer in the club band, hears Lenny's voice in his ear. 'When you finish this set come straight back in the dressing room - and have your cock out!' And then...

'...when the last ker-plunk had sounded from his drums, he'd be advancing on the dressing room with his fly unzipped. Whipping out his schlong, he'd stand breathless before the maroon drapes. Then he'd enter the dressing room in precisely the condition Lenny desired. There before him is a sight to make a man ship over. A big naked stripper is kneeling in the middle of the floor, a bandage over her eyes, her hands bound behind her back, her mouth wide open waiting to receive the first cock that comes through the door. As Philly Joe, now a robot man, dips his wick, he hears Lenny giggling hysterically in the closet.'

From Ladies and Gentlemen - Lenny Bruce! The Ultimate Biography. Albert Goldman with Lawrence Schiller. Pan Books, 1976 - pages 166-7.

I'll maybe post a couple of other bits in a day or two...

When having a pulse is a problem...

This isn't my story, but it's a good one. Velvet was out today doing a photoshoot of fetish gear - we have some friends who sell it and they want pics for their website. One of the items was a nipple clamp, which was being modelled on an actual nipple. And she gets the macro lens for a really good closeup shot and keeps having a problem with the focus.

'What's wrong?' asks the model.

'Well,' says Velvet, 'you've got a pulse.'

Everyone there laughs. I'm sure you get the joke, too... But there is a serious point, because the depth of field with a macro lens can be only a millimetre or two and the even with a flash, the model's pulse was enough to keep throwing the image out of focus.

So when you next look at any fetish photography, stop and think how technically difficult some of the shots might have been to take with a live model...

No, I can't show you the eventual successful pic. Not yet anyway. But the idea of this exchange is cool enough that you shouldn't be surprised to find it in one of my stories at some point in the future.

The whole thing in six words

Over at Wordpress.com they have a tagline that says: 'It’s rumored that Ernest Hemingway considered his best work a simple six-word quip: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” '

Velvet Tripp and I came up with:

Submissive, shared. Two dominants. Three fantasies.

And:

Abducted. Blindfolded. Whipped. Fucked. Extraordinary satisfaction.

And:

Male voyeur, masturbating. Who'd have guessed?

Any offers?

Strange but true...

How can bookshelves be erotic, or pornographic?

Is it the promise or suggestion of what might be lurking on the shelves? The nature of the space, with many hidden alcoves? The comfortable, worn furniture on and against which sexual conquests and deeds might be accomplished? The semi-public location, perhaps a large room with high ceilings and large windows? The transgression of fucking loudly somewhere that's supposed to be library-quiet? Is it the same erotic impulse in each case, or a different type of desire that's called up by different kinds of bookshelves?

Or is it just me and my imagination?

Check it out: Bookshelfporn at Stumbleupon

I feel a story coming on...

A personal history (first part of many)

This isn't going to be a very sexy post even though at some level it is about sex.
I've been thinking a lot lately about links between personal and sexual identity, and political and theoretical accounts of sex. I've been prompted to do this because as a writer, I'm trying to get a clearer view of where I'm coming from in my writing and the kinds of ideas that inform my writing. Many of these are not in and of themselves about sex or 'the erotic', but they inform the way I understand what sexuality and eroticism is.
We all, I guess, are influenced in our world view by a range of things we've read, seen or experienced over the course of our lives and I started trying to identify what, from my own biography, has been most influential in terms of my own perspective.
It turns out to be a real mix, and not the kinds of things I might have expected. There are academic books, human rights concerns, mainstream fiction, erotic fiction, some fairly edgy films, some experimental/arthouse films, some bits of paganism (which I came into contact with only in the last five years or so) and no doubt a bunch of other things I'll remember as I write this.
What follows isn't a complete list of influences. I haven't for example, included the comic book porn I discovered in a second-hand bookshop when I was about 14 – though I can still remember the cover, which involved a Nazi officer, Gestapo or SS or some such, whipping a woman tied and suspended spreadeagled with her clothes reduced to a few strategic rags. That was probably the first time I realised the stuff going on in my head went on in other people's heads too. Which I guess is also an admission that I'd probably had fantasies involving bsdm since the age of - well, I don't really know, but probably even earlier than primary school. While finding the comic (which I didn't buy and have never seen since) was an eye-opener and a bit of a head trip, it wasn't something that informed my values or principles and that's what this piece is about.
As a warning, this is going to end up being quite a long 'memoir' over a series of posts. And I've started with the dryer stuff, some of the academic influences.

Existentialism
Yes, I was a precocious teenager and yes, I had read Sartre's Being and Nothingness by the time I was 15. Existentialism asserts that there is no intrinsic or hidden meaning in the world around us, and we have to create this meaning for ourselves. As a baseline position that's fine, though of course all of us grow up in a world where things are 'explained' to us and we are inducted into sets of moral values, ways of defining situations and even the language and terms with which we understand the world. This comes to us from the weight of cultural history communicated by parents, school, etc. But it alerts us to the idea that things could be otherwise than we are currently being persuaded to see and define and value them. The most precious asset any of us has is the ability to think for ourselves. That might not be very sexy in itself but for me it meant my ideas about sex were as good as anyone else's, and I shouldn't accept anyone else's moral codes on trust.

Freud, Marx and psychoanalysis – the Frankfurt School and others
The Frankfurt School of philosophy was basically a bunch of social philosophers with interests in Marxism and Freudianism who worked out of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly, they reacted to the rise of Nazism by getting the hell out of Germany while they could, in the mid/late 1930s, because by background (some had Jewish associations) and political views they were pretty much sitting targets for the Nazis.
Principally I encountered Herbert Marcuse (indeed even went to one of his lectures in the UK many, many years ago – which dates me as well, Iguess). His Eros and Civilization (1955) is a vision of a non-repressive society. Marcuse sees capitalism (though in hindsight, one could make the same argument for almost all political systems) as seeking to repress our instincts.
At one level socialisation and taming of the Id is necessary – a society in which instinctual violence is a routine way of solving problems would not be a clever direction to follow. Yet to what extent is sexual regulation necessary?
Briefly, nonconsensual sex is problematic and does need some level of regulation. Yet respect for individual choices in terms of sexual freedom – by which we're largely talking about multiple relationships, polamory, bdsm and other fetishistic sexual practices, and full acceptance of gay/lesbian/bi sexual identities and practices – is a way to liberate creativity and authenticity in life experience.
There's a balancing act here. On the one hand, as Freud claimed, 'Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.' Sexual energy is channelled into creating political and economic systems. On the other hand, releasing sexual energy into sexual channels is one of the key ways individuals are able to develop their own identities.
I wouldn't propose this without a number of important qualifications. Many of the key artistic and literary works in our history were, actually, produced in periods of political repression and are to some extent the product of repression (and the need to find ways to critique repression). Many more were produced by individuals whose own sexuality was fucked up, and to some extent express their fucked-upness for our understanding, interpretation and education. I'm thinking, for example, of Richard Burton and TE Lawrence. But the general theme and questions seem to me to be as relevant as they were when I first read Marcuse's work.
There were others who were never part of the School but whose ideas nonetheless ran somewhat in the same channels. Wilhelm Reich was one. He was a strange bunny, initially a psychoanalyst who had worked with Freud. He moved to Denmark, then Sweden, then Norway to escape the Nazis (Jewish background again, and communist until he was thrown out for being too radical). He even had to leave Denmark for Sweden because he ran into trouble for 'corrupting' Danish youth his his 'German sexology'. He settled in the US in 1939 – where again he had occasional brushes with law enforcement and at the end of his life was imprisoned, sadly because one of his assistants had violated New York state laws relating to the alleged health benefits of his 'orgone accumulators'. He died in prison in 1957.
To be sure, he lived in difficult times and living inside his skull must have been a difficult and tortured existence. I'll start by dismissing all the orgone therapy and bion stuff out of hand. In his later life, let's say by the 1940s, he was very likely quite mentally ill. What principally interested me were his earlier publications, The Mass Psychology of Fascism for example. It seemed to me when I first read it, and seems to me still, that authoritarian rule survives on a fiction – that a 'strong' state and 'tough' laws (including on sexual relations) can create social stability, which many people are prepared to sacrifice personal freedom for.
Bottom line on all this: there's a message in here about understanding and appreciating the role of instability, and about how trying to follow any rules other than your own conscience is not only self-limiting but self-defeating. I guess in my mind this gells with the stuff I read on existentialism and to some extent forwards to ideas about paganism. There's also a recognition that there are links between our sexual life at an individual level and the mass structures of politics and economics - even if the precise nature of these may not always be clear. At one level. of course, they can be traced to very clear concerns about legitimacy and inheritance but I'll deal with this in a later post. For now, what I want to stress is the insight that mass social structures are often based on psychological and sexual repression, but it's unclear what benefits flow to individuals from the current 'balance' between repression and tolerance.
Incidentally, Reich's personal papers and unpublished manuscripts were, in accordance with his will, kept private for 50 years after his death and thus became publicly available in 2007 – so it may now be time to revisit his work.

Carl Jung
While we're on the subject of social psychology and psychoanalysis, at one point I was also interested in Carl Jung. No, I haven't read all 19 volumes of his collected works. But the bits I have read and understand seem to me to be sensible, in particular the general assertion that repressed/unconscious material is not necessarily sexual in orientation (which doesn't mean none of it is sexual, of course); that in order to understand the archetypes that are the stories we tell ourselves about our world and ourselves, and the complexes that motivate us, we need to maintain a creative dialogue with our unconscious through (among other things) interrogating our dreams, and questioning the assumptions of dominant norms and worldviews. Shutting ourselves off from these things results in a life that is also shut off from human meaning.
Jung's study of symbolism is something I'll come back to in later posts.

Mix'n'match academia!
I'm sure the idea of mix'n'match Sartre, Marx, Freud, Jung, Marcuse and Reich will be anathema to some, and it's hardly a basis for a clear and consistent theoretical perspective on life, the universe and everything. But all this stuff does point to a couple of broad principles. Firstly, meaning in life is never pre-given; we have to construct it and think for ourselves about what we're doing and why. And secondly, there is something about mass society that seeks to channel and constrain sexual energy and libido in very repressive ways. Some of this control is necessary for society to exist at all, and yet much of it is unhealthy at an individual level. It may not stultify creativity; in some instances it might even stimulate it, since creativity is that kind of creature – but often creative production under such circumstances comes at very great individual cost. And in general, a freer and more tolerant society, one in which wider forms of sexual expression are possible without repression, is going to be much more fulfilling and healthy for the individuals who make up society.
This blog is to some extent a 'work in progress' and I'll put up more stuff in the future covering, among other things, more academic material (postmodernism for example), plus literature, film, music, paganism and maybe even comedy.
As always, I'm interested to debate points I've made here and learn from what kinds of influences others can trace in their own lives. So comments are always welcome...