Aug 152020
- Here’s a 2007 interview with Tim Woodward, founder of Skin Two magazine, in which he talks about Operation Spanner among other topics.
- I’ve often commented on the use of eroticism within propaganda, and I found a prime example in the Honest Erotica page on Austrian artist Gottfried Sieben. After traveling through Eastern Europe, at the time dominated by the Austro-Hungarian empire and threatened by the Turkish empire, he self-published illustration portfolios showing fez-wearing Turkish soldiers capturing and raping shapely, nude white women.
- The Loose sex history podcast has a great episode on brothel culture in the Storeyville district of New Orleans at the turn of the century. Inspired by the recent world’s fair, sex workers leaned heavily into performing the sexual stereotypes of nations of the world, and certain sexual kinks were coded into certain nations. E.g. “French” women provided oral, and the supposedly savage “Viennese” (i.e. German) women would eat raw meat or make a fake cow out of cloth and tear it to shreds before onlookers.
- It looks like COVID-19 will be an issue for another year, at least, and that affects the kink culture like everything else. In Germany, a Berlin bondage club and erotic massage club, Quälgeist (“Tormenting Spirit”) won a court case to reopen. However, the court decided that both customers and employees must keep their faces covered. The state-sanctioned brothels, by comparison, must stay closed, as BDSM sex work is deemed safer than other forms of sex. (New York Daily News, Irish Times)
- London After Dark was a 1954 British paperback written by Robert Fabian, who worked as a police constable and detective. His book included a chapter titled “The Problem of Perverts” which described a sex worker known as “Red Katy” who specialized in humiliating male clients. “They pay her hundreds of pounds per week, to the accompaniment of a stream of vituperation and abuse from her—and they like it!” Fabian also described the “queer” districts where men posted personals like “Female impersonator (amateur) wants instruction in escapology,” and claimed that sadistic men would invariably escalate to the murder of children.
- Vice looks into the history of leather chaps as fashion and fetish. They began as a practical item to protect horse riders from heavy bushes, and were linked to the swaggering outlaw machismo of bikers in the 1950s, and therefore to gay men. This eventually led to Christina Aguilera’s leather chaps in her infamous 2002 “Dirrty” video.
