I happen to think Tattoos are really erotic - if they're the right ones of course. I mean, I'm not into tribal, or Chinese script you think says "love" but really says "shit" because the guy in the shop was having a go at you, but there are some truly beautiful tattoos. I have always wanted one for myself - maybe I will get up the courage one of these days. Usually when I tell friends I would like to get a tattoo they say, "sure, but think about how ugly it will look when you're 70!"
My answer to that is, pretty much all of me will look ugly when I'm 70, so who cares if the Tat has drooped a little?
I like the idea of writing, but then when I look at the tats below, I think I'd prefer an image.
What I will probably do - what I think would be REALLY amazing - is to let the artist decide what to put on my body, so that I made myself a canvass for their artwork.
Perhaps that's why I haven't done it yet, because I really need to get up the courage for that.
Below are some I found on the net that I really like. I have credited the blog where I found the image under each image and in the link.
I love the way Elise (Veerle Baetens) wears her tats in The Broken Circle Breakdown - she looks especially amazing in the bikini scene.
This is a small post dedicated to one of my favorite films, Quills.
Despite all my feminist leanings, left wing ideologies and passion for sexual freedoms, I happen to be a mad keen reader of the works of The Marquis de Sade.
Why do I love him? I don't know - well I do, but it's tricky to defend, because he does represent something terrible in many ways. But I think his writing is courageous, even if mad, and I think his madness is an artists madness borne of intense frustration more than anything else.
Of course, I never knew him personally, nor did i get locked in one of his cages. (worst luck)
When I first saw Quills, it revealed that other people saw in him what I saw, and it speaks to that mysterious passion (some) women have for (some) men who insist on dominating them.
According to Foucault, it is not the restrictions we have placed on discussing sexuality that have caused problems in our sexual lives, but rather the way we approach the conversation. Sex is one of those things that is talked about almost constantly, and yet everyone has an experience of it being unexpressed. This is Foucault dilemma, citing problems such as labels as part of the misscommunication about sex, so that people need to "understand" what something like "homosexuality" is, rather than dealing with these connections in different ways.
No where is this more accurate than in the area of orgasms.
Even though orgasms have been studied and talked about in the most exhaustive fashion, they are still a giant mystery. I am old enough to have lived at a time when many women didn't have orgasms. I haven't done the research, but I would hope that even if a partner can't provide, that women are able to get an orgasm from their own bodies these days, and are far more willing to try than they were decades ago.
Female orgasms are still filled with a radical mystery, however, especially when we try to use pop-scientific explanations for their existence. Male orgasm is easy to explain, because it is accompanied by ejaculate, but why do women orgasm? I have been told it is because it opens up the womb to be more receptive to sperm etc, but what remains confounding is the niggling problem of the clitoral orgasm, that happens without penetration. Why is there a part of the body that provides the height of sexual pleasure that has absolutely nothing to do with getting pregnant?
It is for this reason, the clitoris remains such a problem, and why for years it was ignored, and even in some cultures removed. It is a subversive little organ whose existence stubbornly insists that we look at sexuality differently from our safe definitions around reproduction. No matter how you explain it away, it is still there, and it still defies rationality. Even Freud, one of the first to openly say women experience orgasms, considered the clitoral orgasm to be juvenile, and the height of sexually mature fulfillment for a woman was to experience orgasm with a penis inside her.
This seems like a joke now, and yet the female orgasm remains a problem because of its refusal to be easily categorized.
I have to thank Nancy Friday for her books over and over and over again. Not only are they open and honest, but they end up being very sexually thrilling. They include their own passions.
I've added this video of her in an old interview. It's not great, but its so lovely to see her talking about her important and interesting books, and also to see how far ahead of her time she was. Here she is talking about women taking the initiative. It is still something women have trouble with, and she is right when she says men need to understand how to turn women down with grace and gentleness.
If you are unfamiliar with Nancy Friday, check out her books which, even though old now, are still fantastically relevant and thrilling to read.
A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get. - Adam Phillips
Through all my sexual travels, experimentation, playfulness, in the end I've come to the conclusion (and I'm willing for life, experience or a really good argument to talk me out of this) that monogamy is the most most intensely erotic, most subversive, dangerous exhilarating and exciting form of sexual relationship.
I have been married before, but my first marriage was very ... traditional. I met my husband through the church in the course of our years together, we both left and once we put religion behind us, our differences became much bigger than our sames. Lust, while sexually consistent was not exciting in that marriage, and I really didn't experience sexual thrills consistently until I left that situation.
Given my experience, I was quite anti marriage, and particularly anti monogamy. I followed all the contemporary ideologies on the subject: not natural, against human instinct, impossible, the death of lust and desire etc. It was a few years later, that I fell in love with a man who was the first true monogamist I had ever met.
He would say to me: You are every woman I have ever had and you are every woman I will never have.
Monogamy for him was a work of art. Sex didn't die with its declaration, it was born with it. For him, sexual expression was a dangerous, exciting thing, that had to include deep intimacy. We included sex in all our moods, we did it when we hated each other as well as when we loved each other, and talked about it a great deal. We used it as a form of expression of the relationship, and tried, within the bounds of love and decency, to never refuse the other. Part of our relationship was a promise to each other to be completely responsible for our own sexuality, to bring it to the other, and be as open and vulnerable as we could. Sex with this man was by far some of the best I ever had, and it taught me a great deal about the beauty, passion and terror of properly expressed monogamy.
The relationship was only a couple of years long, but I have used the model we created as a template for all my future relationships. It has not always been successful, because it is a huge, radical thing for a person to commit to themselves at that level, and then to bring that to a relationship is even more shocking, but I do know every one of my encounters has been greatly enriched by the efforts to realize it. I don't like to talk too much about my current relationship, but it goes without saying, this is something we are both very deeply committed to.
Radical monogamy, does not necessarily have to last forever, but it is the most exciting connection I've ever experienced with any human creature.
Each of our relationships is different, and we are different in each of them. this is what makes monogamy so perversely interesting. - Adam Phillips.
While I agree that love and lust are completely different things, it is when they are combined that I derive the greatest satisfaction from both. I do not confuse lust with desire - desire is the feeling of wanting someone or wanting something to happen, whereas lust is the focused desire for a specific person or object. Desire is ephemeral, something that bubbles to the surface via our subconscious, planted there from a misunderstood childhood gesture or a now far faded memory of some event whose pattern far outweighs its significance. Lust is a force.
Lust
Lust can be manufactured. It can be controlled, focused, used as a tool for passion. Lust is something you can find in any person, object or thing. It's real, immediate, happening to you now. Lust is the concentrated drive of a collection of moods - desire, habit, force, demand, insistence, passion, excitement, courage. Lust magnifies itself if you are willing to let it take over.
Love
Love is something else entirely, but when love and lust are combined, the sexual connection becomes so much larger than a perfunctory mechanical action. Sex is a truly remarkable thing, because the mood behind it can turn the same action from an act of deepest love to an act of deepest hatred and violence. Lust is the mechanism to channel that force. You can lust out of anger, hatred and a desire to permanently wound. You can take those types of actions on a person, and find lust in them.
Sex from desire usually bores me. I have little or no time for the "attraction" to the person on the street, the work colleague or man in the bar. That sort of sex is an escape, like junk food or bad TV, and it is very rare that those sorts of encounters leave us feeling enriched.
Love and lust combined are a deep exploration of the erotic. They include an ocean of feeling and adrenaline fueled experience. If you love someone, but your lust for them seems to have evaporated, the exciting thing about that is that it is there, laying dormant like a volcano, ready to explode at any time.
You've heard that rather tasteless joke by Woody Allen haven't you - that one about eroticism is using a feather and kink is using the whole chicken? I may be taking a bit of poetic licence with that one, but it is something that I find rather amusing.
Sexual fetishes are complex things, and greatly misunderstood. When I was in the BDSM scene, there were people there who were experimenting (I fell into that category) and there were people there who didn't properly understand themselves and were trying to understand why they were attracted to something extreme (I fell into that category as well) and then there were the fetishists, those who knew as early as two years old that they were sexually different.
Kink is most interesting when you're dealing with someone with a true fetish.
Coincidentally, when I was first discovering practicing kink, a straight freight I had all my life came out to me about his foot fetish. It had been a great contributor to the death of his marriage ("it's disgusting, don't even talk to me about it" was what he lived with) and he lived in terrible misery with it. It was a consuming thing, overwhelming. If he sat in the wrong place in a crowd - such as in a cinema, or meeting at work - and a woman was in view allowing her shoe to slip down her foot and dangle off her toe, he would have at best a painful throbbing erection, and at worst, evident spillage.
My friend described being a small child, and calling his "teddy bear", "tessy bear", and dancing Tessy up and down his body as if she were walking over the top of him. His kink was connected to powerful women, and he adored Madonna for her overt displays of sexual power. He had been caught around the age of five several times, hiding under the display frames in department stores, sliding his hand out in the hope a woman would accidentally tread on it in her heels. Something like that, and the consequential masturbation, could satiate the fetish for a small while, and ease the throbbing need of it.
We were good friends, I was experimenting with sexuality and was not in any monogamous relationships, so for a while I agreed to walk on him, as he'd never had that before. It only lasted a while, his possessiveness and sexual intensity didn't suit me, and It was accurate to say that I was more interested in the sex (it was fascinating) than in connection romantically with him, so inevitably it imploded in a horrible dark intensity that even our friendship didn't survive. I'll always have a tender place for him, though, He's a very special, deeply intelligent man and I treasure the time I spent with him in my life.
In many ways, I envied him. Imagine being that clear about what you wanted sexually? All the time. Imagine if a desire controlled you to that extent? This is what fascinates me about kink. Men and women are definitely driven by desire, and they think about sex "all the time" but not to the point where you can orgasm at the sight of a naked foot, and mostly these drives are part of the noise of our mind, part of the day, and you "find yourself "crotch watching" (a truly embarrassing habit I have) or "cleavage glancing" or fantasising over bottoms. I'm not talking about these kinds of things.
I have felt the ecstasy of teen female transcendent love - and that is probably the closest one can come to a real fetish like my friend had. I think back very fondly on our lovemaking - it always involved me standing on him, hurting him in small ways, demanding he do things, and inevitably punishing him for non-compliance. Probably the best word to describe it was intense. It was a very intense experience, but one I am very grateful for having had.
According to Anias Nin, Jealousy is part of the pleasures of sex and love - or at least part of the intensity. the jury is still out on the reasons for jealousy, with some thinkers arguing it is a completely natural phenomenon and others stating it is culturally specific. We don't know for sure, but we do know it occurs in many different forms, even in infants as young as five months old who feel possessive toward a parent.
Sexual jealousy involves desire for another person. it is entirely subjective, that it, it is judged solely on the rules and values of the jealous person. It involves a person you feel passion for acting in a way that implies infidelity, although as I said it is connected to the values the jealous person is placing on their behaviors, not on the behaviors themselves.
There are many attempts at biological explanations for jealousy, ranging from the male's need for paternity rights to the females role as discriminator (the one who chooses the mate) fighting to have her rights upheld, but there aren't really any explanations for manipulative jealousy, when one member of a couple will use jealousy to solicit a response in their partner. This sort of behavior doesn't wait for a real threat to enter the equation - it creates them, and is therefore difficult to explain in terms of biological patterning.
Another problem with the biological approach is that women and men with low self esteem experience more jealousy than women with strong self esteem. If jealousy was a protective strategy to preserve the sanctity of the biological placements, this wouldn't be the case.
I have been a very jealous woman in the past, and I found that it related to two things. One was my low self esteem, and the other was a deep understanding of my partners motivations and the experience of rejection when they felt the need to go somewhere else for the thrill and ego boost of romance. For me it was always centered around betrayal. I could never understand why my partner would indulge in flirtatious sort of behavior, rather than take responsibility for their feelings, communicate with me and deal with it within the relationship.
What I found, was in almost every case where I expressed jealousy, the person I was in a relationship with would use it against me, taking many opportunities to deliberately evoke my jealously. Obviously these were not great relationships, but I was often shocked to find the more vulnerable I allowed myself to be, the more I confessed to my jealousy, the more these people would work to keep it alive.
For me, the only thing that rescued me from the jealousy merry-go-round was self esteem. Realizing that I am determining my fate and that I can genuinely choose to not be jealous, and take practical steps that prevented me from obsessing about a partner. I "just don't think about it" anymore, which is, ironically part of what keeps the fidelity strong in my relationship. I can definitely let myself get jealous of my husband, but I won't, and he seems to respond well to the maturity and respect.
This is a short spot. Just a few quote from Henry Miller really.
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we can never give enough is love.- Henry Miller
I first fell in love with Henry Miller through Anais Nin. I had heard of him of course, but had never had much reason to read him. When I started to read Anais Nin, I fell in love with Henry Miller and it was then I started to read him. One of my favorite books of his, is his letter to Anais Nin, published under the title "A Literate Passion." It was the first time I caught a glimpse of the love and passion I was desperate for in my own life, and the first time i really started to believe it was possible.
If there is going to be any peace, it will come through being, not having. - Henry Miller
Then I was able to track down the wonderful film version of Henry and June, which ended up being one of my favorite films.
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference. Henry Miller
Everything I carry away from Henry is enormous. If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh I say, "I have heard Rabelais." And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine. - Anais Nin
G is for Garden of Eden.
Well, here we are again, back at Religion. It always amazes me how connected sex and religion are.
The good ol' Garden of Eden is back in the cultural spotlight with Darren Arenofsky's film Noah, which imbues Noah with the desire to take the world back to the perfection of Eden. For Noah, this means no humans, only animals, and through the course of the film, Noah has to find a way to feel compassion for human creatures. However, the Garden of Eden is firmly established as the image of idealistic perfection.
And yet, despite the burden of sensuality weighing over the Apple, as we first saw at the start of this A - Z adventure, The Garden is a symbol of eroticism in itself. For starters Adam and Eve are naked. Then you have the name itself: Eden in Aramaic means "Fruitful" or "well watered", or in the Hebrew interpretation, "Pleasure". This is The Garden of Pleasure.
Adam was originally in the garden alone, however, when he expressed loneliness, he was provided with his help mate, Eve. If you look into the literal translations of "Adam", you will notice the word used to describe the original creature is "human" and it changes when Eve is moulded from the rib. It is much more likely that what the text really said, was the creature was a "human" and god put it into a deep sleep and split it in two, creating a male and a female, two parts of the same whole. Of course it has been convenient for the church to retain the idea that male was first, female second, but this is not consistent with the ancient text.
Given this information, it is most likely that sex was involved between Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, (probably plenty of it) and it was monogamous sex. In the true, original tale, sex is a RE-joining, back to an original.
Due to the implied safety and comfort of the Garden of Eden, it is supposed that Eve and Adam together experienced the ideal sexual congress, without knowledge of anything ugly to taint or alter their passion.
It doesn't matter if you are religious or not, the metaphor, mythology or history of the Garden of Eden is primarily one of the very first humans enjoying their sensuality without any external interference.
I'm not into smearing a body with food and licking it off.
I love food.
I love bodies.
But combining the two actually turns me off. Banana's out of vagina's, grapes in belly buttons, whipped cream on nipples, chocolate on curves, fraiche on flesh and strawberries slithering their way down panting chests or quivering bellies does nothing for me.
I'm not sure why, but I have tried, many times to correct this abnormality, but when it comes to food, I prefer the pre-sex sensuality of eating, rather than combining the two.
Ten Sexy Food Eaten as Food or Food as metaphor moments in Erotica:
10. I loved the sexual reference in Blue is the Warmest Color to the freshly shucked oysters having the same consistency as an aroused vagina.
9. Chocolate covered strawberries. I know its a really obvious choice, but while I don't like licking either of these off my lovers skin, I ADORE watching him (or her in the past) eating them in front of me.
8. Asparagus, Chili and Oysters. Why? Asparagus because it is high in potassium, fibre, vitamins B6, A and C, thiamine and folic acid. Nutrients in asparagus boost histamine production, necessary for the ability to reach orgasm in both sexes. Chili have capsaicin which stimulates nerve endings to release chemicals, raises the heart rate and triggers the release of endorphins to give you a natural high. Oysters are high in zinc, which increases sperm and testosterone and oysters also contain the hormone dopamine which increases libido.
7. This lovely scene from Chocolat - remember what those little chocolate beans do to her husband?
6. Pop cultural food metaphors, such as zucchini, melons, bananas and cucumbers:
5. Vorarephilia - even though I am not into eating things off my lover, there are two exceptions that I have never tried that I do think look very beautiful. The first is impossible, but I love the erotica around it, and that is vorarephilia which is not the same as cannibalism or vampirism, but a specifically sensual fantasy that is impossible to enact.
4. The second kind of eating off the body I do like, is Nyotaimori, which is more like using the female body like a table.
3. Jesus and Mary Chain's song Just Like Honey, one of the best songs about "eating out down below" as Madonna calls it. There are too few songs celebrating cunnilingus, but this is definitely one of the better ones.
2. In one of the best examples of the transition from Porn to Erotica, and it also happens to involve food, Goodnight Nurse take the infamous song Millkshake by Kelis (which could be said to carry its own irony anyway, or be a female pandering to male porn) and turn it into the aggressive, nasty sound the song genuinely evokes.
For me, this is an excellent example of erotica, because of the brains behind the transition.
1. Babettes Feast. Never, in the history of cinema, is the sensuality of food so perfectly displayed. I highly recommend this film. Watching it changed by attitude to "home cooking" forever, and it is a film that I find myself thinking about regularly. It is truly beautiful.
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