My interview with Tristan Taormino on her Sex Out Loud podcast went well. It’s on all the podcast services now, such as Google Play, iTunes and Spotify.
May 062019
Apr 302019
Body Double is a 1984 psychological thriller directed by Brian DePalma.
Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is a struggling actor who loses a job in a vampire movie because of his claustrophobia. He’s then kicked out by his girlfriend who’s with another man. Down on his luck, Jake agrees to house sit for a friend. The luxury house comes with a view of a beautiful woman in another apartment, who dances nude every night.
When Jake witnesses the woman’s murder, but he suspects he has been set up as a witness. He infiltrates the LA porn scene to find the body double of the murdered woman
Apr 282019
The Piano Teacher (2001) is a drama about the relationship between a sexually repressed middle-age woman and an aggressive younger man. This is what happens when an incautious masochist encounters a real sadist.
Apr 262019
I’ll be chatting with Tristan Taormino of the Sex Out Loud podcast about A Lover’s Pinch on May 3rd, 2019, at 5PM Pacific. I ran into Tristan at Kinkfest 2019 and had a great time talking with her.
Sex Out Loud on
Apr 182019
Lasting Marks is a short documentary on the infamous Operation Spanner case, in which gay men in 1980s Britain were arrested and tried for consensual sadomasochism. I should point out that the documentary is mostly scans of newspaper articles and legal documents, with a voiceover interview with one of the accused.
Apr 172019
- The Dig History podcast has a couple of relevant episodes on, first, the career of the “great American censor”, Anthony Comstock, whose influence is still being felt today, and second, the history of rape and consent in culture in the law and culture of early America, showing that consent, as we define it today, is a very recent development.
- The Guardian has posted Lasting Marks – the 16 men put on trial for sadomasochism in Thatcher’s Britain, a 15-minute documentary on infamous Operation Spanner case, in which 16 gay men were arrested for consensual sadomasochism in the 1980s.
- We’re still struggling to get the police-judicial system to understand BDSM. A recent case in San Francisco demonstrates this, in which a man was assaulted during a BDSM scene, and was told by police and lawyers that it didn’t count.
- The Black Party, a NYC-era gay circuit party with a strong BDSM element, has a forty-year history, but it’s struggling due to rising rents.
- There are a handful of articles on BDSM subcultures around the world, especially in places that are less tolerant of sexual difference, such as the Kinky Kollective in India (podcast), the Phillipines, and Turkey.
- The GOOP lifestyle brand, known for selling jade eggs for vaginal insertion which may cause bacterial vaginosis or life-threatening toxic shock syndrome, now sells BDSM gear, specifically a nude leather bra and thong and a black leather flogger. Shows just how acceptable BDSM has become, among a certain affluent segment of the population.
- Bonding is an upcoming comedy/drama series on Netflix about a gay man who works as a assistant to a professional dominatrix.
- Rick Castro, whose career of fetish photography goes back to 1986, has an exhibition at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, CA.
- Fashion has turned its wandering eye back to the fetish subculture again.
Apr 172019
I’ll give my History of BDSM presentation on May 11th, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Admission by donation. No dress code.
Location: Maritime Labour Centre, 1880 Triumph Street, Vancouver, BC
Graciously organized by Metro Vancouver Kink. Followed by their monthly play party with fully equipped dungeon space.
Apr 172019
See you in Portland OR.
Apr 172019
In my research, I’ve observed patterns in the past that we still see today.
For instance, in the 1830s, a woman named Maria Monk turned up in New York City. She claimed that she had been held prisoner as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, where she had been subjected to bizarre tortures and told to sexually serve the priests who entered the convent via an underground tunnel. Any offspring of these unions would be baptized, strangled and disposed of in lime pits.
Continue reading »Apr 172019
Because they didn’t live up to Clive Barker’s original novella:
He had anticipated this moment so keenly, planned with every wit he possessed this rending of the veil. In moments they would be here—the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure.
He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for them. The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals. Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them, decorated with the kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine—the product of seven days’ collection—stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of self-defilement. On the right, a plate of doves’ heads, which Kircher had also advised him to have on hand.
[…]
The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handful of humans had ever known existed, much less tasted—pleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that knowledge, wouldn’t he? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling and remain unchanged.
