Apr 152016
- The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance (TASHRA), a San Francisco non-profit community research organization, launched the first ever national survey to examine the impact of kink sexuality on health and healthcare usage: Survey
- The KinkyCast has an interview with Nancy Ava Miller, founded of PEP and instigator of many American BDSM organizations in the 1980s and 1990s. In the pre-Internet era, she used the medium of dial up phone communication for counselling and for entertainment.
- Salon discusses Robert Mapplethorpe’s domestication as an artist, from his posthumous demonization in the late 1980s by cultural conservatives to his high-art gallery displays today. The article suggests that the culture wars have shifted, and North Americans are more comfortable with homosexuality and sexually explicit imagery now. Today’s flashpoints are things like transgender issues. I would argue that the sexually explicit images are still contested, but the discourse has shifted from a sin model to an addiction model.
- The Other has a short history of John Sutcliffe’s Atomage fetish magazine/catalog.
- A French blog has scans of a Japanese bondage magazine, Uramado (meaning “rear window”), a competition to the older Kitan Club. The excerpts run from 1958 to 1964. Uramado included bondage, but also just straightforward nudes, unlike Kitan Club.
- Gloria Brame asks on her blog whether Internet anonymity is a good thing for the BDSM culture anymore. I would say that a major factor in the development of the BDSM culture was the anonymity of the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet has changed since then, becoming far more of a real of surveillance for both governmental and commercial agencies. There is transparency, of the people but definitely not by or for the people. Online communities in which identity is known and fixed still suffer from the problems of harassment and trolling and so on, while the lack of privacy may inhibit people from self-expression in the way they used to. While I would like to see more BDSM people come out of the closet, it should not be forced upon anyone.
- Ralphus.net has a collection of 1960s men’s adventure magazine stories, not just the scanned covers but the complete transcribed stories as well. IMHO the entertainment value of these artifacts is largely in the lurid art and the hyperbolic headlines (e.g. “1,000 Naked Beauties for the Chamber of Horror”). The actual story will almost certainly be a disappointment.
