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Mad Men: the dominance of Don Draper

May 132013

I’m surprised at how much material from AMC’s Mad Men I find for this blog. First there was protagonist Don Draper’s masochistic sessions with a prostitute who slaps his face. Then there was the episode “Mystery Date”, which showed that Don was trying to be faithful to his wife, while a toxic cocktail of lust, fear and rage boiled inside him. Meanwhile, other characters had their own reactions to sexual violence.

And now, in “Man With A Plan”, Don goes full on dominant. Since the season began, he’s been having an affair with his downstairs neighbour Sylvia, the wife of a heart surgeon. While Don’s been lacking in sales meetings, he makes up for it by expertly playing on Sylvia’s Catholic guilt, setting her up for their trysts in the maid’s room.

Open letter to Pinterest: Do you have a problem with male nudity?

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Apr 252013

The following is a copy of an email I sent to Pinterest after they removed one of the images (replicated above) from my BDSM History board.

To whom it may concern:

On April 25, 2013, I received an email informing me that one of the images in my Pinterest account had been removed. The explanation was, “The reason is, it looks like the pin may have had nudity on it.”

The image in question was created and distributed by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and features actor Jensen Ackles nude and kneeling in such a way that his arms and hands obscure his genitals, wearing chains and with a whip on the floor. The copy reads, “Whips and chains belong in the bedroom, not in the circus.”

PETA has a long history of using sexually suggestive or explicit imagery in ads and publicity stunts to advance its animal rights cause, though many have questioned the efficacy of this tactic. I chose this image to illustrate PETA’s use of sadomasochistic imagery, part of a recurring trend of sadomasochistic imagery being used in persuasive media such as advertising and propaganda. This is part of my historical research.

A cursory search of “peta” on Pinterest will display numerous other examples of PETA’s advertising, featuring nude or nearly nude men and women (mostly the latter) in sexually suggestive images. This is in addition to countless other pins featuring nude or nearly nude adults in sexually suggestive or explicit settings.

I am at a loss as to why this particular image in question was removed. The only way it differs in degree or kind from many other images on Pinterest is that it features a nude male in a vulnerable position. Am I to understand that an unclothed man is somehow more nude, or the wrong kind of nude, compared to an unclothed woman? Even if the people are posed in such a way that their genitals are not visible?

I understand the necessity of enforcing rules regarding sexually explicit imagery on a service such as Pinterest. However, I do not understand the logic of this particular instance of enforcement, and I do not consider this removal to be just or fair or consistent with the content of Pinterest.

Please explain to me why this particular image is not permitted. I have attached a copy.

Examples of other PETA ads found on Pinterest.

The recurring image of monster carrying woman in film

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Apr 042013

My Retrospace has a feature on the “monster carrying woman” shot, so ubiquitous in horror/Gothic film that Famous Monsters of Filmland remarked upon it.

Review: Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, edited by Lori Perkins

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Apr 032013

Perkins, Lori, ed. Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey. Benbella Smartpop, 2012 Amazon

Much like Christian Grey himself, the Fifty Shades trilogy is everywhere, overwhelming and relentless, dominating bestseller lists, metastatizing into countless imitators, and spawning an entire industry of gifts, CDs, boardgames and other branded merchandise, plus a feature film. Through sheer repetition and ubiquity, we find ourselves trying to accommodate it, even to make excuses for its flaws and offences. Some of the authors in this essay collection try too hard to put a positive spin on Fifty Shades. Even the collection’s editor, Lori Perkins, says:

Some have wondered how a “classic” can be so “poorly written.” But I contend that it is not poorly written, but rather written in an everywoman’s voice, a necessary part of its success I once worked with an author who used plebian language…. When she returned my edits, she told me that she did indeed know the word “simultaneously,” but when she was fantasizing, she always used the phrase “at the same time as,” and she knew that her readers did as well. [Pg.3]

EL James’ prose is not “plebian” or “in an everywoman’s voice”, it’s just plain bad. You don’t need an MFA to read or write good prose or hot prose.

The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy, ebook edition

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Mar 292013

Revised, edited and expanded, The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy is now available in ebook format for Amazon Kindle, with more formats to come.

Saved from the slave auction in Band of Angels

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Mar 202013

Band of Angels (1957), dir. Raoul Walsh, wri. Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts IMDB Wikipedia

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks

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Mar 142013

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Directed by Don Edmonds, Written by Langston Stafford IMDB

Collection of Allen Jones “female furniture” and other images

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Mar 032013

Here’s a blog post on the work of artist Allen Jones, best known in kink circles for his sculptures of women as furniture (aka “forniphilia”), but also a designer of fetish attire.

The sculptures appeared in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Jones also designed some costumes for the film that weren’t used.

Django Unchained: the suffering black female body

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Feb 232013

Django Unchained 2012, writer/director Quentin Tarantino, IMDB

(Spoilers ahead)

Briefly, Django Unchained is about a slave in the Old West, before the Civil War, who is freed by, then partnered with, a German bounty hunter, Dr. Schulz. They set off on a quest (explicitly compared to the German legend of Siegfried/Sigurd) to recover Django’s wife Broomhilda from a plantation known as “Candie Land”.

The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy: afterword

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Feb 052013

After writing more than 87,000 words on this trilogy (some of it excerpts), what can be said?

Someone once asked me if Fifty Shades had any good points. I thought a moment and said, “It’s very good at making money.”

That’s ultimately what is most baffling about Fifty Shades: its phenomenal commercial success, particularly in light of its inferiority to so many other romance or erotica books on the market. You’d think people had never read a sex scene before. Why it is so popular is a mystery, even after reading the entire thing.

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