Nov 192018
- Fetish art master Eric Stanton had a daughter, Amber Stanton, who is an artist in her own right.
- Speaking of Stanton, I just got Richard Péres Seves’ new biography of him, and it looks great. Here’s the review on The Fetishistas.
- The Sexing History podcast has an episode on the new medium of phone sex in the early 1980s. One of the topics the interviewees discuss was that for a lot of gay men in the period, who weren’t in major cities, this was the first chance to talk to another man about their sexuality. This probably also helped people who had kinky, non-normative sexualities like BDSM and fetishes too.
- On a related note, the Wellcome Collection has a display of the 1980s UK practice of phone booth sex work solicitation cards. Just over half of them included BDSM services.
- A few months before the launch of A Lover’s Pinch, I got a call from the NPR show Radiolab. They asked me about the evolution of ideas of consent in BDSM, and while they didn’t use any of my interview, I did get a “thank you” in the episode notes of their three-part series on sexual consent (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). I was puzzled by one of the interviewees in the third part talking about how she was reluctant to use a “red” safeword in a public scene even if the situation called for it, because it could lead to her top being ostracized even if there was no negligence or malice. I had always understood that calling “red” does not necessarily mean the top did anything wrong; it could be because the bottom is experiencing something unexpected.
- In New Zealand, which has much more liberal laws regarding sex work than the USA or Canada, sex workers are taking the lead in teaching about consent.
- Aeon.co has a more in-depth discussion of sexual consent.
- Kinkly provides another, going back to 1990.
- One of the things I’m curious about is BDSM in non Western cultures. Desiblitz has a profile of Asmi, an Indian submissive female. I don’t have the cultural context to assess this in detail, but I am curious about how Asmi’s submissive desires interacts with a culture with more traditional views of female roles.
- Paste magazine has a list of BDSM mainstream films, including a few I hadn’t even heard of but sound interesting for the Celluloid Dungeon project.
- Dazed magazine has another list of sexually experimental films, though only some could be described as “kinky.”
- Gloria Brame’s Educators Directory just posted the Mistress Michelle Peters collection of vintage BDSM photography, pulled from straight and gay magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s. Most of them don’t have dates or identifications of the people in them, but definitely a source for future research.
- With all the talk of mainstreaming kink and BDSM, in mass media products, it’s easy to lose track of BDSM’s queer radical history and revolutionary potential. When Pat Bond, Terry Kolb, Cynthia Slater and others were putting together the first modern kink organizations in the early 1970s, there were pretty far from what most people would have considered “normal.” Slate has a short essay on the innovations made by kink communities and their value in a heteronormative, vanilla-normative society.
