Saturday, May 31, 2014
Friday, May 30, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
After The Costume Party
In her stockings after the costume party. She went as a 1920s flapper. And to be historically accurate, she said, she didn't wear panties with her stockings.
I didn't know if that was, in fact, historically accurate. But I wasn't going to contradict her. So I told her if we we going to be historically accurate, we should have anal sex, since in the 1920s they didn't have the pill, and doing it in the butt was a common form of birth control.
That is only partly true, but she was in too good a mood to argue details.
Labels:
anal,
couples,
drunken,
flashing,
girlfriend,
historic,
lingerie,
quickies,
true stories,
unshaven
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Friday, May 23, 2014
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Nettie and Egon, A Century Apart, A Connection, An Homage
Here is one of the most lovely images of Nettie Harris, which says a lot, since dozens of the best photographers have shot her, and she's helped create probably hundreds of photos that will someday be seen as the masterpieces of this time.
It is, of course, the nature of Art History. So much of it is hindsight. Like seeing the work of Egon Schiele. He was a protégé of Gustav Klimt. His work, often self-portraits and women, noted for their twisted bodies. Some say he was a fore-runner of 20th Century Expressionism. Schiele began to explore not only the human form, but also human sexuality. At the time, many found the explicitness of his works disturbing.
Today, the sexuality of the work isn't shocking. Rather, we can see that he was just a pioneer of erotic art.
It is exactly a century since Egon made his now classic erotic work. This portrait of Nettie, holding a book of his work, is a fitting tribute, that I am sure would thrill Egon.
Nettie Harris by John Running |
Seated Nude, with elbows propped, 1914 |
Green Stockings, 1914 |
Kneeling Girl, resting on both elbows, 1917 |
Seated Woman, with bent knee, 1917 |
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Monday, May 19, 2014
Little Birds
Two self-portraits taken in 2013 by Brittany Market, from her "In Rooms" series. Perfect.
The book on the ground is, I assume, Little Birds, by Anais Nin, from which she quotes: "We do not see people as they are. We see people as we are."
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Saturday, May 17, 2014
My Name is Jamie
I've been revisiting the TV show "My Name is Earl" on Netflix, just for fun. And it reminded me how sexy in a sexy-trailer-trash-way is the character Joy Turner, played by actress/model Jaime Pressly.
If you don't know who I am talking about, let me help. Here's a couple sizzling shots of Miss Pressly.
For those inspired to research more, here's a lead: she posed nude for the March 1998 and February 2004 issues of Playboy, as well as the May 2006 issue of Allure. Several of these photos were republished in the Playboy Nudes special in december of 1998, and sort of oddly enough, a retrospective of sexy shots in the January 2002 issue of Playboy (Croatian edition).
Thank you, Jaime.
Friday, May 16, 2014
An Ode To Hairy Female Armpits
One of the best articles to have been written on the subject, which seems to be getting more attention these days. Or, as the author points out, no wonder there is a "backlash" against the draconian shaving standards of today.
Here are a few excellent quotes:
"...whether armpit hair is lauded or loathed at any particular moment is just a matter of social mores, rather than anything deep-seated."
"...the hairless trend is a very recent phenomenon, a cultural construction that’s more about peer pressure than considered decision-making."
I believe the original article is here. But here is the article in full, for your reading pleasure:
AN ODE TO FEMALE ARMPITS
by Martin Robinson
I am not a pervert or a hippy or a serial killer, but I recently discovered that I find women’s armpit hair sexy.
Here’s what happened: over Christmas, my girlfriend and I took the opportunity to slob it up. Barely left the house, rarely changed clothes, drank anything displaying surface tension. One morning, my other half lifted up her arm, and said, with a filmy glint in her eye, “Check this out.” There it was: a smooth dark rug.
She did it to deliberately repulse me, just as I will sometimes show her the odd testicle while she is eating. Yet – hah! – it didn’t repulse. No sir. It may have been the way she was so cocky about it, but I dug it. “I dig it,” I said, unsure why I was slipping into beatnik speak, possibly because her armpit resembled Bob Dylan.
I felt compelled to touch her pit-fro, and tentatively did so. It didn’t bite me. It was velvety and not at all unpleasant. Disregarding what could have been seen as a feminist triumph, my girlfriend called me a pervert, and further access was denied. But the incident made me think.
Is armpit hair on women really so bad? I’d never truly encountered it before, and just assumed I’d be appalled. Having discovered it’s actually all right, you have to ask why it’s such a taboo. In 2012, a Swedish woman accidentally revealed a hairy armpit on live TV, and a screen-grab of it went viral on social media under the general theme ‘Laugh at the freak’. Why do we see it as so disgusting? Why have girls I’ve spoken to suggested they’d rather sport a swastika tattoo under their arms than a bush? Why has ShortList’s art editor been gagging as he’s been laying out this very feature? Why should we even care?
Well, from Armpits4August (‘Movember for chicks‘) to Cameron Diaz’s body hair-promoting book, the ultimate female taboo is cracking and hairy pits are coming your way…
HAIRY HISTORY
So what’s wrong with women’s axillary hair, to give it its medical term? Some religions reject body hair on both men and women altogether, but for Western secular types, the problem is less clear. Is it unhygienic? No, in fact it helps prevent bacteria breeding on the skin. OK, removal lessons the risk of pubic lice, but who’s still sleeping with 17th-century prostitutes anyway?
Is it simply so bloody ugly it’s just a basic human urge to hack the stuff off? Well, no, many areas in the world don’t mind it; South-east Asia, China, Latin countries, Grimsby…
Is it an accepted standard of beauty from the dawn of time? No, it’s gone in and out of favour throughout history. Total hairlessness was prevalent in Ancient Rome and the Renaissance and reflected in public art from those times, but that worked the other way too: female body hair was a private sight, a forbidden secret. And therefore pretty goddamn sexy. Michelangelo couldn’t put hair on the nudes in the Sistine Chapel as they tend to frown upon masturbating in church. When Goya broke the rules with his proudly pubic ‘Nude Maja’ in 1800, the Spanish Inquisition locked it away for being obscene (ie too friggin’ hot, señor).
OK, so is armpit hair off-putting in a primal way, given the fact that hairiness is more associated with men? Well, you’d think it would be in our primal instincts to be actively attracted to female armpit hair, since it signifies sexual maturity.
“Hair would suggest that our mating would be profitable,” says evolutionary science writer Professor Jesse Bering. “So why would something that signals sexual maturity actually be seen today as unattractive? Well, we do have an attraction to youth, so a combination of other sexual characteristics, like obviously developed breasts, coinciding with hairless armpits, might create the overall impression of youth, but relative youth that’s not indicative of reproductive immaturity entirely.”
OK, so a desire for youthfulness may overwhelm a desire towards armpits, but that doesn’t explain the deep modern repulsion for them. Bering says their biological role is just not significant enough anymore to withstand fashion. “Armpit hair would serve as a primitive odour trap which would help to perpetuate the wafting of pheromones. But the role of pheromones in human sexual behaviour is small, or at least unknown, so it’s maybe not enough of a biological force to have any cultural effect. Culture can prevail.”
There you have it. It’s an evolutionary leftover, so whether armpit hair is lauded or loathed at any particular moment is just a matter of social mores, rather than anything deep-seated.
Taboo-busting comedian Lenny Bruce put it perfectly during a bit on female armpit hair at his Carnegie Hall concert in 1961: “Why is it in bad taste? Is it from a theological point of view? Is it blasphemous? No. Is it hygiene? No, it doesn’t relate to hygiene at all, if it related to hygiene then you’d have to be consistent and shave the eyebrows, the head, the schmushka, the whole bit. So it does not relate to hygiene at all. What does it relate to? Style, that’s all. It only relates to fashion…”
Bruce was anticipating the late-Sixties hippies here, and indeed female armpit hair was perfectly acceptable into the Seventies. Mark Tungate, Paris-based author of Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed The Way We Look, says, “I remember when I first came to Paris in 1979 as a schoolboy.
There were a lot of dark-haired French girls on the Metro in sleeveless dresses. Some of them had hairy armpits, which provoked pangs of pre-pubescent lust. It’s not difficult to work out why – it was like seeing pubic hair on public display. But this was the tail-end of the Seventies, when feminists displayed body hair as a protest against male oppression and the ‘norms’ of beauty.
“Actually women have been shaving for centuries,” continues Tungate. “For aesthetic and hygienic reasons. However, it will come as no surprise to learn that in the Western world, mass shaving of armpits by women was provoked by the beauty industry. Short-sleeved dresses became fashionable around 1915, which is when Gillette created its first razor for women – the Milady Décolleté – and ran a massive ad campaign to support it. The beauty industry has been encouraging hair removal ever since.” In this case, all it would take is for Kate Moss to weave daisies through her armpit hair at Glastonbury and within days every woman would have permed pits.
GROWING SUPPORT
A 2005 study of UK women showed 90 per cent removed hair from their underarms and legs, and 80 per cent from their pubic areas. A recent university study in Australia showed 76 per cent of young women undergraduates were shaving off everything. There are reports of young men growing up unaware that women are even capable of growing body hair.
It’s getting absurd, so no wonder a backlash is underway.
Armpits4August is a charity event drawing attention to polycystic ovary syndrome, a symptom of which is hirsutism. They say, “We believe the shame people feel about body hair is a consequence of a society [with] narrow beauty standards … there is no ‘normal’ pattern of body hair for men or women.”
Then there’s Cameron Diaz, who recently put her body hair in the public forum, declaring in her new Body Book that “pubes keep the goods private” and are “pretty draping”. Well, she’s Cameron Diaz, she could have Brian Blessed’s entire head down there and it’d still be sexy, but she makes valid points that the hairless trend is a very recent phenomenon, a cultural construction that’s more about peer pressure than considered decision-making. Naked vaginas are the Emperor’s New Clothes.
You can also blame porn. In that world, you shave off hair to reveal more to the camera, but porn is so all-pervasive today, its style has gone mainstream. A new generation are following its aesthetic standards. This also explains the return of the mullet. Some experts, like Professor Gordon Gallup from the University Of New York, have said this shaved ideal suggests latent paedophilia. That seems a stretch. I believe it’s just a fad being followed, and one we should question. Is it really that sexy? Doesn’t an overly-groomed woman seem a bit professional, a bit uptight. Surely sexiness is a lack of self-consciousness, about not giving a sh*t what anyone thinks?
A chemical-scrubbed and cut-back mound may look like an invitation to porn heaven, but the amount
of prep required hardly suggests wild abandon. The famously banned author Henry Miller – often unfairly branded a misogynist just because he slept with anything that blinked – wrote something that stuck in my mind: “I want a woman who sh*ts.”
Nice. But his point was he wanted honesty, not pampered people pretending the mucky realities of being a human being don’t exist. We may all soon be sporting Google Glass, but we’ll still have to nudge it to one side to pick our noses.
If we can see that hairlessness is mere fashion, not a deep-rooted taboo, then it can be changed. If you’ll agree with me that this porn ideal is a bit weird and, if it continues, sex will resemble two manatees wrestling, then it may be liberating to try something different.
PRAISE THE PITS
I’m not saying you should force your missus into growing some – it’s her choice, yeah – but if this backlash is happening, then men should support it. After all, how long before we’re shaving our armpits, too? Male hairlessness is no longer restricted to gay culture – everybody is hacking back now, and it’s only a matter of time before it all goes. And then we’ll be spending 20 per cent of our days shaving and the remaining 80 per cent itching.
No, let’s not run away from our animal sides. Encourage your partners, and let’s get some growth out there. I look forward to a time when a man and a woman can take off their clothes and not be nude. Free to fall into a hairy embrace and be stuck together forever in a Velcroish predicament.
That’s my vision. Who’s with me?
Certainly not my girlfriend:
“You can stop writing that piece, I’ve shaved them. It was disgusting.”
Cheers.
Labels:
artistic,
girlfriend,
historic,
public nudity,
shaven,
true stories,
unshaven,
wife
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
In-Rooms
Here's one of my very favorite photos from Brittany Markert, a photographer, director and cinematographer living in Brooklyn.
"In-Rooms" is her current photography project, which, as she describes "utilizes the confined and often anonymous space of a room to spotlight the emotional and surreal aspects of the human experience."
Growing up, Brittany was fascinated with abandoned buildings and hotel rooms. She'd try to imagine the people who had once been there, and piece together their mysterious histories into her own narratives.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Hit Record, I'm Ready
A super sexy shot that tells a story in its implications. A wife dressed in lingerie and heels, on her knees, ass up and exposed to the camera. The camera carefully set on a tripod, and plugged in (no need to worry about the battery dying). It's turned on, ready to capture what happens next...
More of this couple's work can be found here.
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