Sep 172023
- Rolling Stone profiles the latest iteration of the anti-porn movement, linking husbands’ porn consumption to “betrayal trauma” in wives. The illustrative anecdote is a woman who makes her husband promise to keep his eyes closed during the sex scene in Oppenheimer. “For the anti-porn movement, the use of the phrase betrayal trauma takes porn from a personal decision to one of active mistreatment.”
- Cartoonist Kayfabe looks at the hardback edition of John Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline.
- The Ohio Players were a funk/R&B group that originated in the 1970s. At a time, record album covers were becoming more than just a platform to display the artists’ faces. They were a frontier for graphic design, sexual explicitness and the aesthetics of the black body. The Ohio Players were notorious for putting sexy images in their album artwork, including bondage. Photographer Joel Brodsky shot model Pat Evans in a black leather bikini, posing with a bullwhip in a victorious pose, on their 1972 Pain album. The next albums, Pleasure (1972) and Ecstasy (1973), continued the theme, with the edgier stuff hidden below the fold of the album cover.
- Notches Blog writes about the peculiarly sexual accounts of alleged demonic possession of women in England in 1645-7. It’s interesting to compare these accounts to the “transverberation” allegedly experienced by St Theresa of Avila about a century earlier; both described sensual, bodily visitations from supernatural beings. However, Theresa was canonized, while the women of the witch hunts were brutalized.
