Sep 292019
- Harper’s Bazaar has a short photo essay on the kink look in high fashion, going back to the Versace 1992 bondage collection, though obviously this could go back much further.
- Pup play is enjoying an upsurge in popularity lately, and PuppyPlay.info has a short timeline on the kink, going back to 1912 which claims is the date of the earliest known fetishized animal roleplay. (This seems unlikely to me, as I would think there must have been art or photographs of fetishized animal roleplay in the 19th century, if not earlier; e.g. “mounted Aristotle”.)
- We’ve already seen Robert Yang’s Hurt Me Plenty, which simulates the BDSM interaction from the top’s perspective. Now, there’s Dominatrix Simulator, a VR game in which the player takes the role of a submissive (male or female), facing the dominatrix. The VR system can even tell if the wearer is kneeling correctly or incorrectly.
- The New Books in History podcast profiled Benjamin Kahan’s The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality, about the great paradigm shift, in which all sexual deviancy fell out of discussion to make way for the homo-hetero binary.
- The Porno Cultures podcast interviews Laura Helen Marks, author of Alice In Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic. She discusses how 19th century fiction influenced 20th century pornography.
- In an interview on The Advocate, comediennne Margaret Cho talks briefly about her experiences in a lesbian BDSM collective and its response to the AIDS crisis.
- OZY magazine profiles Jaya Sharma, the only woman from the BDSM community in India to be out in public life. She was the co-founder of the Kinky Collective, which does kink education in major Indian cities. It also talks about the class divide between English-speakers and non-English speakers.
- In honor of the 2019 Folsom Street Fair, a brief history of San Francisco’s Folsom district.
