Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.
Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.
If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link, or a paragraph for each category and/or write your own introduction.
For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s more appealing for readers.
Here’s an Example of Elust 179 published by Sex Worker Search with unique comments for each post.
Strub, Whitney. 2011. Perversion for Profit : The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Amazon
I’ve been reading Whitney Strub’s book, and despite its age, it is still very relevant in explaining the culture war over pornography in American politics. One of the things he details is though American history is littered with censorious firebrands like Anthony Comstock, those moral crusaders frequently stumbled over the problem that the majority of Americans don’t care very much about pornography as an issue. Men like Comstock and Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature could mobilize a small, but vocal minority.
As Strub tells it, when the neoconservatives and the New Right rose to cultural power in the 1970s, they had to reconcile their belief in small government, free markets, and libertarianism with more culturally conservative allies, particularly evangelical Christians.
Thought it sought a socially conservative, generally religious voting base, the New Right was heavily corporate-sponsored, and such groups as the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress recognized the value of neocon thought in legitimizing their project of deregulating American markets even as they reregulated American morality.[Pg.190]
We’ve seen this strange-bedfellows alliance ever since, creating people who believe the Invisible Hand should rule everywhere except areas like pornography, abortion, and queer issues.
In 1979 the New Right organizer Paul Weyrich had come dangerously close to admitting the movement’s emphasis on social issues was a shallow commitment designed to garner evangelical votes while obscuring the substantive procorporate agenda of New Right politicians: “Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” he said. Certainly the corporate benefactors of the New Right’s organizational superstructure valued profits over ideology; Coors, for instance, was headed by a reactionary zealot whose donations largely funded the important Heritage Foundation. But when the company recognized the consumer power of the gay market in 1979, it unhesitatingly ran ads in the gay paper the Advocate. [Pg.191-192]
More than 40 years later, we still see the same dynamic, even if the names have changed: trans people instead of gay people, puberty blockers instead of abortion, “cultural Marxism” instead of “the permissive society”. The 2023 brouhaha over trans streamer Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light suggests that the free-marketers sometimes back down when challenged by the cultural conservatives. Donald Trump himself embodies this contradictory political alliance: a man with multiple wives and a history of sexual indiscretions, who has been on the cover of Playboy magazine, can somehow be favored by the Christian right and even more reactionary forces. Grifters and quacks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson constantly stoke culture wars over issues of sexuality and gender, anything to drown out considerations of economic policy from the discourse.
I’ve said it before, and I hope I’m wrong, but I still think it’s only a matter of time before BDSM takes the place of trans in this particular social-political complex.
Margaret Qualley as Rebecca and Christopher Abbott as Hal.
Sanctuary is a 2022 drama film directed by Zachary Wigon and written by Micah Bloomberg. IMDBAmazon
This essay contains spoilers.
Sanctuary resembles David Ives’ stage play Venus in Fur (film adaptation by Roman Polanski): it focuses on two people in a single location, and deals with the constantly shifting power relations between a man and a woman.
Hal (Christopher Abbot) is the heir of a hotel empire. He’s about to be appointed the CEO after the death of his father. In the luxury suite of one of the hotels, he meets with Rebecca, who at first appears to be a lawyer who will interview him for the position. This escalates into a humiliation scene of Rebecca watching while Hal cleans the toilet in his underwear.
The Leather Boys is a 1964 British “kitchen sink” drama film about the working-class motorcycle club culture of the early 1960s. While featuring little explicit sex of any kind, it does provide a glimpse of the leather-clad biker culture of the time in the UK. It was also an early sympathetic treatment of male homosexuality in British film. Amazon
Sigel, Lisa Z. 2020. The People’s Porn : A History of Handmade Pornography in America. London: Reaktion Books. Amazon
In the early 21st century, we think of pornography as a ubiquitous, mass-produced, and corporatized phenomenon. Sites like PornHub present the viewer with vast quantities, individually tagged according to theme and sexual act. Advances in video production and distribution technology means almost anybody can make and consume sexual content with a high degree of technical quality and specificity.
Sigel’s book explores an entire history of what might be called “craft” or “artisanal” erotica, produced in single items or small sets, and using a wide variety of media, from carved whalebone to modified mass-produced photos to handmade garments. Many of the items discussed in the book aren’t “erotica” in the usual sense, i.e. items intended to arouse the viewer, perhaps as an aid to masturbation. These artifacts, such as a carved wooden figure of Abraham Lincoln with an erection, might more accurately be described as “adult novelties”.
The Betwixt the Sheets podcast discusses sex in ancient Mesopotamia. While only loosely related to BDSM, this discussion does examine how different practices of sex and gender can be in other societies, and how modern-day historians can project their own misconceptions into the past.
Jessie Meadows wrote a critique of Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation, which shows how “porn addiction” discourse ties into old Calvinist ideals of self-denial and hard work, and into modern neoliberal ideas of self-regulation. This is one thread going into the neo-puritanism rising in modern society.
