Jul 162019
- The Historical Blindness podcast has an episode on the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, an absurd porno-Gothic piece of anti-Catholic propaganda from the 1830s.
- German industrial metal band Rammstein has a long history of sadomasochistic themes in their lyrics and music videos, along with other transgressions.
- Earlier this year, Jack Thompson made history as the first trans person of colour to win the title of International Mister Leather. “I am all the things I am all the time.”
- Bustle has a short history of the corset, though it skims over the more fetishistic aspects.
- One of the more disturbing developments I’ve witnessed in the past few years is the rise of choking, and specifically non-consensual choking, in vanilla sex. Breath control is risky and frightening enough when done with proper consent and technique. But this is men incorporating it in sex with women with none of that, says the Atlantic.
- Videogames are a relatively young medium, and only recently have people begun using them to explore issues of identity and sexuality. Bobbi Sands’ “visual novel”, Knife Sisters, covers kink and BDSM, but has a hard time buying advertisements or getting funding because of its sexual content, even in relatively liberal Sweden.
- The blog The Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context has its own interesting study of the history and psychology of sadomasochism.
- Leo Herrera, who made the gay alternate history film The Fathers Project, wrote an essay considering our present, possibly-post-HIV world, and its increasing cultural conservatism in the form of “community guidelines” on Tumblr and Facebook.
