Christian does call Ana on her childish attempt to make him jealous, all the while dragging her into a restaurant and ordering a full meal for her, plus haranguing the server. (This guy deserves the Tyler Durden special sauce on his order.)
In the first book of the Fifty Shades trilogy, an emotionally damaged one-percenter attempted to coerce a college graduate into an abusive relationship (which she had no understanding of or desire for) through a combination of seduction, bribes, deception, stalking and emotional blackmail. She finally realized that she was neither submissive nor masochistic, returned his gifts, and left him. The end.
Hopefully Anatasia Steele would have realized there are other men in the world, that there are other options than a false choice between slut and old maid, and perhaps she might even experimented with BDSM with some other person who is not so deranged and compulsive.
Except it wasn’t the end.
Brooten, Bernadette J., ed. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Although Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders have always recognized the difference between slavery and marriage between men and women, they have sometimes applied concepts from slavery to marriage.
Pg. 8, “Introduction” by Bernadette J. Brooten
As previously discussed, tickling is a strange phenomenon that I believe may have something to do with BDSM. Another Slate article:
Its importance begins in infancy. “When people say they hate being tickled and there’s no reason for it, they forget that it’s one of the first avenues of communication between mothers and babies,” he says. “You have the mother and baby engaged in this kind of primal, neurologically programmed interaction.” Or the father: I tickle my son; he shrieks; I tickle him more; he shrieks more; I tickle him yet more; he starts wailing. I apologize.
In a sense, this is our first conversation—how we manage to talk with someone despite being preverbal. The content here is socioemotional, and as a form of social binding, it preceded the development of language, Provine says.
New research suggests that many mammal species tickle (or can be tickled), including humans, chimpanzees, squirrels, elephants and even rats. There’s a back and forth to tickling play that suggests the back and forth of BDSM: figuring out the boundaries between pleasure and pain, between intimacy and invasion, between the self and the other. It’s a symbolic attack.
Roman Scandals is a 1933, pre-Hays code musical starring Eddie Cantor and featuring elaborate set piece dance number choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Presumably a parody of Biblical and/or classical Hollywood pictures like The Sign of the Cross (1932), Scandals gives up any pretense of drama and goes straight to the sexual decadence. The means dance numbers on elaborate sets performed by dozens or even scores of women dressed identically (the “Goldwyn Girls”, including a young Lucille Ball). If you want to have large numbers of scantily clad women moving around in a situation of high drama, you can’t go wrong with a slave market or auction scene.
Spoilers ahead
…the function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic eating, the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer the gods a substitute (symbolic) sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The sacrifice is needed not to secure any special favors from the gods, but to make sure that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which concerns the balance of the entire universe: if the gods remain hungry, the whole cycle of cosmic life is disturbed.
Slavoy Zizek, Living in the End Times
It’s time for the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco (I know because Peter Labarbera is outraged again). Here’s the history of this magnificent event.
Goal for 2013: attend Folsom Street Fair.
Comics Alliance has an essay by Sarah Horrocks on Guido Crepax’s trippy bondage/erotica comic Bianca. Crepax is probably best known outside of Italy as the artist of the Story of O and Emmanuelle comics adapations.
Like Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, Bianca is more obsessed with artistic execution than with sexually arousing its audience. In fact, I think that for the most part, Bianca fails as porn. Indeed, if it were more successful as porn, it would probably be in print in English.
