Hookup App

X MARKS THE SPOT
_________________________________________________

Need a Trim?

BUSH VS. NO BUSH
___________________________________________________

What Turns You On?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Sweet Spot

Demi Moore


Striptease__1996

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle__2003


44 years old in 2006

THE SWEET SPOT
by Adam Sachs
[GQ - Aug.09]

Somewhere between puberty and Cialis is that perfect moment in a single man’s life when he can date the broadest age group, when he can sleep with 23-year-olds—and their mothers—without being called a creep. He just has to know the rules

“ARE YOU DYIN' ON ME, old man?” the girl says with a sweet, cruel smile.

I am not dyin’. I am coughing.

Trying to muffle another, I spit out a hacking hee-hawish sound:
KARGHHA-HAAA! The laugh-cough is an unconvincing piece of theater, like someone trying to brightly yodel their way through a bout of diarrhea. “Don’t die, old man,” she purrs soothingly, “not right now.…”

Yes, please, not now. Not while she is, unaccountably, here in my bed, making jokes at my expense. She’s lovely. Naked. Twenty-two. She could read to me from Mein Kampf or throw pebbles at my head and I would still consider this an excellent morning to be alive. It occurs to me that I have lived a full 1.5 decades’ more mornings than she has. When she was born, I already had a driver’s license and beginner’s beard. Now I’m a 38-year-old, newly unmarried, formerly baby-tracked bachelor whose friends have summer homes and pictures of pink-cheeked toddlers posted in their Facebook profiles.

How did our paths cross here? The answer is a hitherto uncharted territory in the life of a man, the Sweet Spot, when suddenly you find yourself free to date anyone from recent college graduates to near re-tirees. It begins sometime after your thirty-fifth birthday, though the precise moment is impossible to identify. Suddenly, the pool of available women you can feasibly sleep with expands to include everyone—and her mother. If you are a female born sometime between the launch of Sputnik 1 and the release of Evil Dead II, we could conceivably be getting a drink later.

The Sweet Spot isn’t about love or even happiness. It’s just an observation of fact: For a presumably brief but glorious spell, the man in his late thirties can date more women of more fascinating types and circumstances than at any other time in his life. The discovery is like waking one day to read in the science section of the Times about the existence of a new planet made of salted caramel with rivers of flowing bourbon. For once, good news about getting older! In fact, it’s a fucking miracle.

Young women write their names on napkins in bars, talk earnestly to you about Proust until 6 a.m., and demonstrate Cirque du Soleil–ish tricks with their legs. (At 22 everyone’s a contortionist.) Older women look at you like you’re a warm appetizing pretzel that they probably shouldn’t indulge in but what the hell. Then there are the women your own age. They’re the most suitable and almost always the most fraught. They kill you with their eyes, tell you flat out they’ve smelled your type before, even when they’re sliding next to you into the homeward-bound taxi.

A while ago, two women visited my apartment on successive nights. They sat in the same chair. They ate the same ragù I’d made and frozen for these impromptu dinners. The redhead stayed over. The blond did not. The redhead was talkative, never slept. The blond was skeptical but amused. The blond had a kid about the same age as the redhead. The fact that these two would find their way into my life at all still seems to me slightly surreal, part of the dizzying luck of the Sweet Spot.

A friend of mine is 42, a long-term bachelor who loves the company of women but who flees at the first hint of domesticity. (He’s been at this longer than I have.) I asked him where he saw the age range of the Sweet Spot. “I’ve been with women in their fifties, and as long as I find them attractive, age absolutely doesn’t matter,” he says. “Bodywise, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I appreciated them younger, but not too young. Below 23 or so seems dangerous. I mean, ‘Dude, I just fucked a teenager!’—that is not a high five I want to be on either side of. And I’ve found that if you’re just looking for a fuck buddy, the older-wiser gals are so much better in bed.”

The paradox of the Sweet Spot is that so much of your success depends on your being manifestly Mr. Wrong. Take the 22-year-old who heard the death rattle in my cough. She’s smart, new to the city, on her way up in the world. I am peculiar and old, seasoned with my own special blend of baggage, bruises, and bloat. Not, obviously, boyfriend material. She doesn’t have to think very hard before she jumps in bed with me, because she doesn’t take me that seriously. There’s no need for the standards she’d apply to more suitable mates: Is this person reliable? (I’m not.) Can I picture a future with this guy? (You can’t.) What will my friends think? (They’ll laugh.)
For the 22-to-28 set, I am the Novelty Fuck. What someone like me brings to the deal is an apartment without roommates, and what passes for experience—the kind of little life things (wine-list familiarity, better shoes, less-awkward oral sex) that accrue to someone during those extra 1.5 decades the way sea barnacles attach themselves to a rusty old pier. Maybe most important, the man in the Sweet Spot comes with the unspoken promise that he will not linger. When she’s ready for less novelty, he’s gone, no hard feelings.

For the older woman, he’s another kind of escape, a harmless indulgence, and wrong in a whole different way. For husband material or even a steady date, she’ll look to someone older and more stable—someone with a track record of an orderly life. There’s a woman who comes to see me now and then. She is divorced and lives in the suburbs with her young son. With girls in their twenties, there are endless nights out and 4 a.m. booty calls. By contrast, the divorcée calls the week before. In her large Goyard overnight bag she brings rib-eye steaks marinating in Ziploc bags, a bottle of red, something expensive to wear to bed. After dinner we sit around and talk about travel and divorce. Never once do we mention seeing each other in circumstances other than these infrequent house calls. “I remember this,” she says, looking around my small apartment. “I remember your life.” For her I am the Vacation Fuck, a reminder of a time without so many adult responsibilities and a little fun with someone who isn’t offering or expecting anything more.

A newish friend of mine—let’s call him the Very Smart Man—I met in Buenos Aires. The VSM had sold some businesses and moved to Argentina to start some new ones and figure out what life is supposed to be about. Along the way, he learned how much more interesting he’d become with age. “When I was 25, I had no clue what I wanted,” he says. “So the girls who knew they wanted a family and kids weren’t interested in me. And the girls who wanted something nontraditional were fucking drummers and getting lower-back tattoos. But at 39, I am fucking fascinating.”

In the interest of research, I called another young lady I’d had some fleeting involvement with last year. Nothing much happened, but I’d always liked her and respected the way that she looked at me like I was a total idiot. She wasn’t shy about addressing our fourteen-year age gap. “First of all, I never thought you were stupid,” she says kindly. “But you were surely full of shit.” She agreed that “with an older guy, you forgo the normal screening you might apply to a prospect for a long relationship. Dating someone older is like dating a flight attendant—not someone you’d commit to, but they’re fun to be around.”
The scary, alluring thing about women my age is that we’re not necessarily wrong for each other. And so the suitability calculus is always applied: Am I a good bet? Am I fixable? The honest answer: Who knows?

What we all realize, though, is that the baby clock is real, and so these relationships tend to get intense fast. The road forks two ways: marriage or tears. If you were committed to living out the Sweet Spot for as long as it lasted, the kindest, most honest thing to do would be to avoid any marriage-minded woman in this middle demographic. But compatibility is hard to ignore. I asked a 37-year-old I dated how it looked from her end. “I think I like people or I don’t,” she said. “The unfair part is I now have to make quicker decisions about whether someone is capable of being serious with me. The stakes have changed even though I don’t feel like I have.”

My own fear is that, spoiled by choice, I’ll just keep chasing the fun until it isn’t fun anymore, until I’ve become so adept at charming my way into and out of emotional entanglements that where I end up is nowhere. The Sweet Spot is sweet precisely because it can’t last forever. There is a line between Happy-Go-Lucky and Oily Perma-Bachelor, our own ticking countdown to cheesiness and desperation. Maybe the line isn’t a particular age but a vestigial hope that there’s someone out there we can truly connect with. “The fear,” says a friend of mine who is eternally unsatisfied but tirelessly optimistic, “is that while we’re busy pursuing this porn life, the real thing is love and making a family, and that’s all passing us by.” Writes the VSM from Buenos Aires: “I do sometimes worry that I’m not going to have a chair when the music stops. But part of me thinks: Keep it up for as long as possible and hope to die young.” I’m pretty sure he’s not joking.

ADAM SACHS wrote about how to survive a long night of drinking in the April issue.

On Your Knees

FACE TIME
[Savage Love - Jne.09]

I am a fairly successful man. I don't make bank like Wall Streeters back in the day, but I haven't been hungry since college. My girlfriend is younger. We met when she was in grad school. Like many recent grads, she's not steadily employed, in debt, and driving an unsafe car. So I support her, house her, feed her, and pay her bills (medical, etc.). She needed to pay off her credit-card debt—28 percent interest rate!—so she took work stripping and later as an escort. Through escorting she was able to pay off her credit-card debt in a month.

Now some guys would find this distressing, but I found it kind of hot. Here's the thing: After she paid off her credit-card debt, she stopped escorting. I'd like her to continue part-time until she finds a career. She's mixed on this. We would like to buy a house and make things more permanent, but our income isn't enough to do that if she's making waitress wages. I guess it boils down to this: I would prefer to be with a sex worker than a waitress. I'd rather she make $200/hour on her back than $10/hour on her feet. She says she has issues with sex work. What do you think?

Perhaps I'm Mildly Perverted


I don't think it's up to me, PIMP, or you. And I would hope that your girlfriend, who's financially dependent on you at the moment, doesn't return to sex work because she feels coerced.

But I can certainly appreciate your point of view. There are men out there who're turned on by the idea of their girlfriends/wives having sex with other men; some men are turned on by the idea of their girlfriends/wives being paid for sex. You're clearly one of those guys. And you're within your rights to share this information with your girlfriend and to try to convince her to return to sex work. Because your fantasies of sex work—of her doing sex work—turn you on. And, again, that's fine. But you could make a more convincing case, PIMP, if you were better acquainted with the realities of sex work.

You should start sucking off strange men for money.

You'll have to service men, I'm afraid—while lots of men fantasize about being paid to have sex with women, there's a fatal supply-and-demand problem. Simply put: There are just too many men out there willing to give it away for free. That created a glut on the supply side, which has distorted the market, as there's more than enough free straight cock out there to meet the needs of straight women.

So you'll be giving head to dudes, PIMP. And after you've choked down a few hundred loads, you can go back to the girlfriend and say, "Sex work isn't so bad!" with some credibility. And if you keep doing sex work after you've sucked off scores of men you're not attracted to—men who may or may not have treated you with respect, men who may have very different standards of personal hygiene than you do—that might convince your girlfriend to continue to pursue sex work for your amusement.

Good luck.

Torn About Porn

Sasha Grey


Porn!...is Not Allowed?




Pornocalypse Now
by Douglas Haddow
(Excerpt)

Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. Just as the war on terror mainstreamed the notion of war without actual war, the pornography industry has successfully popularized sex without sex. [...]

And so it began. My virgin eyes were submerged into an ocean of luma-chroma sex acts and the outrageous poetics of consumerist eros: turgid hard-ons mechanically harpooning seeping vaginal canals and gracefully spraying sperm streams atop mountainous titties with their omnipresent nipple peaks. [...]

But the tasseography of the news ticker was of no interest, the television had become redundant and outdated. I was 14 and a friend had just gotten a 14.4 US Robotics dial-up modem – our ticket to unchecked informational freedom and, more importantly, thousands of pictures of naked women.

In tune with my demographic dropping its collective nutsack, pornography transformed from a primarily physical medium into a limitless stream of easily accessible imagery. Production costs bottomed out, profits exploded and a booming transnational porno industry came into its own.

The mass appeal of Deep Throat-era sex cinema hits was resurrected in the form of downloadable masturbation resources. Only now, rather than experiencing sex media in a gender-inclusive mainstream setting, Internet pornography catered primarily to the individual male’s niche desires. Jerk-off fantasies were the dominant leitmotifs of the early Internet – its raison d’être. The Internet was, and still is, for porn. In the ever-expanding webiverse, pornographic imagery supplied the perfect vacuum in which blogs, social networking and YouTube could come into existence. Buoyed by this exponential growth and the backing of media conglomerates like News Corp, the production of hard-core video increased by 700 percent from 1992 to 2005, with worldwide revenues clocking in at nearly $100 billion. Porn had officially arrived, and its enviable profit margins forced “legit” mass media to gradually conform to the aesthetic of its fleshy contours.

It was as if the white noise of consumerism had turned a shade of hot pink. All of a sudden the leader of the free world was evoking Peter North via René Magritte à la “this is not a blow job.” Soon after, the world gasped as two giant metal phalluses penetrated the twin monoliths of capitalist civilization. A blockbuster snuff film to ring in the new century, the “I can’t look but I must” sensation of the 9/11 tape loop would go on to serve as the stylistic precursor for 2 Girls 1 Cup. [...]

A Wisconsin-born, cowboy hat-wearing opportunist, Max Hardcore took advantage of the mid ’90s amateur boom and has steadily pushed the limit ever since. His work foreshadows the style of video (no plot and little pretense) that now dominates Internet upload sites: an increasingly violent performance style dubbed “abuse porn.” [...]

I continue to surf, looking for a video that features Sasha Grey, who should be calling me for an interview at any moment. Grey, 21, is the porno industry’s public relations wet dream come true. She has already performed in over 100 adult films and stars in Steven Soderbergh’s arthouse feature The Girlfriend Experience. She’s slated to be the “next Jenna Jameson,” and might be the first porn star to successfully convert her adult video (AV) celebrity into a legit acting career. What interests me about Grey is that she represents a notable shift in the pornographic ideal – she doesn’t project the typical persona that we’ve come to accept as the standard AV schtick. She’s young and calculated and delivers performances that are provocatively masculine. A quick Google reveals that her personal brand is rooted in the alternative. She’s done an American Apparel advertising campaign, promotes herself as a quasi-postfeminist intellectual and frequently name-drops the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The first video that pops up is titled Sasha Grey Anal. I click play figuring it will provide a good warm-up for our phoner. It starts with a close-up of Grey’s lips and she is directly addressing the viewer:

“I want to be your sex slave, I want you to hurt me, I want you to make me cry. I’ll do anything, anything at all, whatever you want, I’m such a fucking whore, I need to train, I need to be broken, I want you to fucking hurt me.”

A couple of minutes later some dude is holding the camera and staring down at Grey, who is staring up at us while giving one of her trademark ‘throat fuck’ blowjobs. She sounds like she’s choking, and the dude starts to drag her by the hair with his cock still in her mouth.

Then the phone rings, not in the video, but in my apartment. It’s her, the real Sasha Grey, as opposed to the porno-world Sasha Grey flickering on my laptop.

“What does the word pornographic mean to you?”

“To me it’s not just people having sexual encounters, or pictures of people having sex in magazines. More than half of the news we see on television today is pornographic because it’s not real news. It’s pure junk for the mind…They are manipulating the audience to feel a certain way. It’s all encompassing. American Idol is pornographic, completely exploiting people’s talent or lack of talent for television ratings.”

On screen, Sasha is gagging on a dildo that the dude has just pulled out of her ass. “Choke yourself on it” he says. I skip ahead a few minutes and Sasha is presenting to the viewer a rather apt existential dilemma:

“Is that what you fucking want? You want this filthy whore’s tight little asshole?"

The real Sasha Grey says in my left ear:

“… I think we’re still very repressed, especially in America. It comes back to what does pornography mean. In Europe there are more films that have to do with sexuality than violence and here in America it is the opposite. And I think we can sell sex all day on television, in magazines and on billboards but when it comes down to it people are still afraid to talk about their sexuality …”

“So are we lacking an important dialogue?”

“Definitely, It’s still embarrassing. If you try to speak with a Midwest housewife, or a young 20-something from the Midwest and say cunt or pussy she is going to freak out, even if you say vagina – for some of them, the word vagina is a disgusting, vile word. You have to say ‘down there.’ It’s really bizarre.”

The calm, thoughtful tone of her voice creates an unsettling sensual cocktail when mixed with the vacancy of her pixilated hazel eyes, an oasis of “the real” in a desert of unreality. [...]

The Sasha Grey brand is an ideal vehicle for the normalization of porn because she’s a willing industry activist who genuinely believes that the consumption of her videos promotes a positive understanding of sexual health.

But has our outlook on sex become so pornofied that we’re willing to accept 20 minutes of vacuous anal sex as sex-positive edutainment? Although porn has been embraced by feminists looking to shrug off the failures of the Dworkin era, the discussion that predominates current analysis of the medium tends to ignore the nature of the industry’s core demographic: males, aged 18-29.

If the average porn consumer – a male North American, Japanese or European 20-something – were to walk into a doctor’s office and receive a virility exam, the results would be abysmal. Due to our toxic living standards and the prevalence of untested chemicals in the social environment, the male gender has recently entered into rapid physiological and genetic decline.

In affluent, industrialized nations, the birth of males has dropped every year for the past 30 years. Genital defects, learning disabilities, autism, ADD and a variety of other afflictions have all skyrocketed in males while remaining comparatively low in females. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the male plight comes down to that which is essentially synonymous with the pornographic: sperm. The average Gen Y bro has a sperm count that is 50 percent lower than his father’s and, of the few spermazoids he does have, 85 percent of them are genetically damaged. According to Dr. Fernando Marina, fertility expert at Barcelona’s CEFER Reproduction Institute, if this trend continues, all men will be infertile within 60 years.

On a genetic level, the male gender is crumbling, which almost seems natural when one considers the fragmented state of modern masculinity. [...]

Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution. [...]

The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.

Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?

As our surroundings become inundated with pornographic imagery aimed at keeping us plugged into the feedback loop, it’s easy to get distracted from what’s going on beyond all the hot pink noise. It’s in this fog of fake fucking that man sleepwalks closer toward an abyss of genetic implosion, environmental destruction and total economic collapse.

But crisis can precipitate change, and what needs to occur now is the genesis of a new “masculinism” – a philosophy of man that embraces the achievements of feminism and strives to reconnect with the real.

Since the beginning of America’s recession, over 80 percent of those who’ve been laid off have been men. This ironic byproduct of pay inequality provides a couple of great opportunities: the chance for a radical shift in gender relations, and the chance for men to rediscover how to subsist outside of the tyranny of consumer ease.

__________________________________________________
COMMENT [adbusters.org]

I found the article interesting. Only yesterday I was sitting with mostly male mates at a pub and we got on to discussing porn and strippers, as the proceeding night had seen some of us attend a buck’s night for another friend, which consisted of stippers, topless waitresses and porn all night. Let me tell you, I hate going to buck’s nights. Beer and boobs is not the penultimate or ultimate experience in my life…maybe I’m wrong and will have an epiphany watching Xporn at 2am?!

It turns out, every guy at the table, gets nothing from porn or strippers.

I personally find nothing more lonely and emasculating than ‘rubbing one out’ while watching some porn via my laptop. I’m not a prude, conservative or born again. It makes me feel sick, not liberated that I can find free porn on the internet. I used to think that it was great. If I were horny and needed some release but didn’t have anyone to help me. After some time I realised it made me feel even more alone than before. Even more isolated from humanity. How foolish I was to believe that I could find an intimate connection with a recording of people whom I don’t know, and watch them fuck each other? How did I get this idea in my head that it could be something worthwhile to do with my time?

At the moment I have a girlfriend, and I have noticed that some of my actions in the sack have been influenced by the porn I have watched on the web. I do not watch porn now. I just went online to read some more on Sasha Grey, fortunately I only lasted about 2 mins and found something more positive to do with my time like get back to studying for my MA.

I’m not sure who is worse off, guys or girls in this dilemma. We have created it equally (I think) as there needs to be at least 1 female in each video. Are they victims, part of the puzzle or equally involved? Instead of hipsters harping on about how bad the world is and shopping themselves into nirvana, we can as the sages say ‘cultivate the opposite virtue’. Hey, it could be fun to actually stand up and become who we are meant to, not conditioned by the veils of ignorance and media hype to consume. We have a choice, it’s basic and fundamental. Don’t forget that. You either tune in to porn or do something else with your very valuable but brief moment on this earth. Porn is not going away. But it doesn’t mean you have to watch it or engage with it. It’s a monster, just like the ones that used to hide in your closet or under your bed.

Good luck…to all of us!!!

Peace

People talk about how women are treated as a result of guys watching porn and expecting to be able to engage in degrading acts. But what is this doing to men? How are we supposed to feel and act when it seems most of the porn out there is violent in some way?

And when does it become violence (with a bit of sex) ? And not porn with violence?Someone sent me a link to ‘ultimate surrender’. I thought I had seen everything until I was watching women fight each other for the right to fuck the loser.

Wo, my head spins just wondering about what lies around the corner.

Know the Ropes

Cupboard Cat


Milk & Honey







Japanese Bondage
Kinbaku is the word for "erotic bondage" or Kinbaku-bi which means "beautiful bondage". Kinbaku (also Sokubaku) is a Japanese style of sexual bondage or BDSM which involves tying up the bottom using simple yet visually intricate patterns, usually with several pieces of thin rope usually hemp or jute (generally 6 mm or 8 mm in diameter).

The word Shibari came into common use in the West at some point in the 1990s to describe the bondage art Kinbaku. Shibari is a Japanese word that literally means "to tie" or "to bind". It is used in Japan to describe the artful use of twine to tie objects or packages.

Japanese Bondage (kinbaku) is said to differ from Western bondage in that, instead of just immobilizing or restraining the bottom, the bottom gains pleasure from being under the pressure and strain of the ropes, squeezing the breasts or genitals.

The aesthetics of the bound person's position are also important: In particular, Japanese bondage is distinguished by its use of asymmetric positions to heighten the psychological impact of the bondage. There are examples found among Western bondage enthusiasts such as John Willie.

Western full-body bondage also uses long lengths of rope and the type of rope has changed over the years: cotton was used early on, then nylon became popular in the 1980s or 1990s, followed by multi-filament polypropylene (MFP) ropes. Compare this to Japanese bondage techniques, in which multiple pieces of natural vegetable fiber rope (hemp, jute, or linen) of 7 meters are used. Traditional Hojōjutsu the martial art employed by the Samurai uses no knots whatsoever, while modern Japanese-inspired Western bondage uses relatively simple knots (requiring only about two to five types.).

With its roots firmly in Japan, Kinbaku has gained popularity, being taught by teachers (sensei) all over the world.


The origins of Shibari were not erotic or pornographic - it was a Japanese form of imprisonment, used by Samurai (approx 1400s-1700s). There were four basic principles:

- Not to allow a prisioner to slip their bonds
- Not to cause any physical or mental injury
- Not to allow others to see the techniques
- To make the result beautiful to look at

It was in the late 1800s/1900s that the true erotic bondage evolved into the many facets of what you can find today.


LeeZu Baxter by Newdoll

Bondage for Sex
There are a lot of books out there for people interested in exploring bondage. A lot of ties look good, but if you want to actually have sex with your partner many of them won't leave you the access you need. This book is the first that I've found to lay out ties that allow for easy sexual positioning.

The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage
"Rope Bondage." Say those words out loud at a party, and most conversations within earshot will likely pause or stop. However, this is often a misunderstood art, an ancient craft that can convey a variety of meanings and experiences for those that choose to explore it, whether you opt to tie or be tied.

Two Knotty Boys Showing You the Ropes: A Step-by-Step, Illustrated Guide for Tying Sensual and Decorative Rope Bondage
The "boys" have a perfect background: an industrial rigger and a climber, both backgrounds require safety as the basis for everything. The both love bondage and have taught many, many classes. This means they have learned how to teach the techniques to hundreds of others. It shows in the layout of the book. Simple step by step photos that match the written instructions. No matter what the level of the reader, this book will make you better.


Vogue Paris Calendar 2007

Fetish

Shibari: Japanese rope bondage
Shibari means "to tie or bind" in Japanese. In the 1990s this word became the term used in Western culture to describe the Japanese art of Kinbaku (sexual bondage). [bondage.com]


Once used to describe objects and charms, "fetish" now has very different connotations.


Role play is about control - either having it or relinquishing it.


Vacuum Cube_$1,049.95


Madame S


Fetishism is like normal sex (if in fact "normal sex" exists) - it's whatever works for you.

[pics: dockera.com]


FETISH
by David Bramwell
(excerpt)

Introduction
To the outsider looking in, the fetish scene can seem risible, intimidating, degrading and even dangerous. After all, why would anyone in their right mind dress in clothes that made it hard to walk, subject themselves to a painful flogging, put their partner on a leash, or degrade themselves by licking a stranger's boots? Isn't the fetish scene just some ridiculous freak show?
And of course, in many ways it is. But to dismiss fetishism as a gimmick or fashion is to totally miss the point; it is in fact a new and evolving erotic language. It exists outside of the everyday world of TV, junk food, piped elevator music, celebrity gossip, the intrusion of cell phones and all that deadens our senses.

To question why a masochist likes to be beaten is to ask why a mountaineer likes to climb. Isn't it the experience of life many of us are seeking?
Whether through intense sadomasochistic play or scaling a mountain, it's the challenge, endurance, and sheer exhilaration of feeling alive that draws people in. And one of the many attractions of the fetish scene is that by subverting gender roles, blurring the distinction between pain and pleasure, turning violence into expressions of love, tenderness and devotion, it transcends the duality of everyday life and allows us, for a time at least, to be someone entirely different. For others, like the destitute painter driven by passion to continue with his art despite hardship and failure, fetishism is simply a desire within that refuses to be ignored.

Fetish definition
The word "fetish" derives from the Portuguese feitico, meaning "false power". It was first used in the 15th century by European colonialists to describe the objects, charms and dolls used as talismans by many of the African tribes they encountered.
These "fetishes", revered and worshiped by the tribespeople, were believed to have strong, magical powers; an idea dismissed as superstitious nonsense by the colonialists, who viewed such practices as un-Christian.
In their eyes the Africans were worshiping false idols, and the word "fetish" became used as a term of mild ridicule.

What is a fetish?
You may prefer big breasts to small ones, fellatio over penetrative sex; enjoy the feel of satin against your skin when lovemaking or dressing up in kinky underwear to give your partner (and yourself) a bit of a thrill. For most people these kinds of activities add excitement to bedroom games, keeping the libido alive. If, however, you regularly fantasize about ritualized erotic scenarios, or have some item you consider an essential part of your sexual play (you regularly fantasize about being dressed in leather and tied up for intercourse, for example), then this may be considered as a fetish.
While fetishism was once defined as the eroticizing of inanimate objects, such as stiletto heels, rubber or whips, nowadays it's widely considered that pretty much anything can be fetishized.

Since the early days of Freudian psychology, many theories have been developed in an attempt to explain fetishism. That it's linked to traumatic childhood experiences and the sexualizing of our fears remains the common theory.
Other theories link fetishism to overbearing parents, or drone on about how crawling at our mother's feet as babies can lead to the eroticizing of shoes. And while theories of this kind are worthy of consideration, they all seem to be rather stark - a bit like a scientist trying to tell us that love is merely a survival instinct, the result of chemical changes in our brains. Fetishism can't be explained away any more than love, music, dance or drama. It's a mysterious ritual, a performance, a private play between two or more people; an act of worship, both absurd and sublime.

As the Hindus say, "Life is a musical; the point is to dance." And when you take part in a fetish ritual you re-enter that world of the subconscious and you get lost in the dance.

Fetish Terminology
>B&D - Bondage and discipline.
>BDSM - Bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.
>Contract - A verbal or written formal agreement between sub and dom/domme.
>Dom - A male dominant. Also known as a master.
>Domme - A female dominant. Also known as a domina or dominatrix.
>Dom/me's disease - Known on the scene as when "a domme gets her head stuck so far up her ass she has to have it surgically removed," i.e. is too egomaniacal.
>D&S - Domination and submission.
>Newbie - A newcomer to the BDSM scene.
>Play - To take part in fetish/BDSM-related activities with a partner or others.
>Play space - Any place that is regularly used for S&M games.
>Power exchange - The surrender of a sub's independence to his or her dom/me.
>Pro domme - A professional dominatrix.
>RL - Real life.
>S&M - Sadism and masochism.
>The scene - The whole arena of BDSM and fetish, the clubs and groups that promote it, the people who play, and the philosophy behind it.
>Slave - Another word for submissive, although to some it can refer specifically to a submissive who is in a longterm BDSM relationship.
>SSC - Stands for Safe, Sane and Consensual.
>Sub - A submissive in a relationship. Also known as the bottom or slave.
>Switch - A person who enjoys playing the role of both sub and dom/me (although not at the same time, obviously).
>Training - The ongoing process of teaching and learning that takes place between a slave and his or her owner.
>Vanilla - A person who isn't into or interested in the fetish scene.

Fetish Dictionary
The fetishizing of particuar objects or scenarios is also sometimes referred to as "paraphilia"; this chapter details a few of the more unusual paraphilias:
>Acomoclitic - Hairlessness
An acomoclitic (or smoothie) favors hairlessness, particularly in the genital area.
>Agalmatophilism - Mannequins
An agalmatophile is a person who eroticizes scenarios related to mannequins, robots or motionless bodies.
>Coitus Interfermoris - Rubbing
Better known as frottaging, dry humping or scrumping, this involves non-penetrative sexual gratification through the rubbing of the genital area against those of a partner's while one or both are fully clothed.
>Forniphilia - Furniture
This is a form of sexual objectification in which the dom/me turns his or her slave into a piece of "human furniture."
>Pygophilia - Ass Worship
Another one almost exclusive to the guys, this is the unadulterated joy of kissing, licking, caressing and worshipping a lady's bottom; it's also known as "booty worship".
Fetish by David Bramwell

Also:
Fetish Books
9 Sex Fetishes You Probably Didn't Know Existed
10 of the Most Bizarre Sexual Fetishes on Earth
Fetish Nation
Fetishlink
House of Harlot

Honey, I'm Home

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

HUGH JACKMAN wears his movie costumes while having sex.

The 'Australia' actor - who has two adopted children with wife Deborra-Lee Furness - often keeps his outfits from films including 'X-Men', when he played sexy mutant Wolverine, to impress in the bedroom.

Hugh - who has been named the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine - said: "It's easy with my wife. She loves the idea of me coming home in costume because it makes her feel like she's having an affair in a good way.

"When we met, I was cast as a prisoner with tattoos and she'd say, 'Don't take your tattoos off tonight!' and I'd be like, 'All right!' But what works best with her is the stockbroker look."

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Trailer
Hugh's Costume Sex

What Turns You On?

Ruthie Davis Patio peep toe pump
(revolveclothing.com)

The Box

Porcelain Twinz

THROUGH a couple of flukes (acquaintances, a cousin involved in the ownership) I’ve ended up at The Box twice in one week. The Box is a club in downtown Manhattan. It has a live burlesque show and a drinks list featuring $13,000 champagne (did I read that correctly?).

As with many such places, The Box adheres to a mystical door policy. On Visit #1 I was told to say “SUGAR RAY” as a password. On Visit #2 I was not allowed inside until my cousin poked his head out the door and identified me like a perp in a police lineup. Casual humiliation: a staple of the nightlife.

On both visits the atmosphere inside reminded me of an Edith Wharton novel. It is moneyed, socially complex, and devoted to elaborate carousing. The club is full of thoughtful details: paper bags of popcorn, servers in old-tymey costume, live music and a red velvet curtain. There are bottles of Grey Goose the size of rain sticks. It is the kind of thing that sends a ticker tape of WHOA! through your mind.

It is a bizarre place to be - a spectacle with all the theoretical implications of that word. “Fellini-esque circus” works too. Like any cultural Petri dish, The Box felt emblematic and puzzling all at once. Worthy of a witness, certainly, and some documentation. I’ll give a little overview of the show we saw on Visit #2 (it was mostly the same show as Visit #1, but shuffled around.) Analysis will follow.

The first act (though it changes from night to night) had a Persian theme. There was a naked blonde babe wriggling on a chaise while a sultan tickled her with a pink feather. Throughout the room men leaned toward their friends and said, “Check it out.”

Oh, a brief interruption. On the first night we’d been seated in a balcony booth. The second night we were on a sofa directly in front of the stage. From the balcony, the performers had appeared perfect. From up close the show was less magical. You could see backstage, for one thing, and you could tally the natural flaws of the performers’ bodies: stray zits, heavy makeup, pubic stubble.

After the Persian act a contortionist came onstage and balanced his entire body on a strap-on penis attached to his assistant. Cool. Then there was a medley featuring a comic midget and some vaudeville renditions of Billy Idol and Rolling Stones songs.

The best acts were the ones with some sort of intellectual component. A girl dressed as Hitler performed a skillful striptease that felt like antique political satire. One routine had a dancer in traditional costume emerge from a Matryoshka doll to perform a Russian dance. At one point she lifted her dress, squatted over a pedestal, and ejected a mini doll from her vagina. (Cue hooting.) More traditional dance. As a finale, she squatted again over the ejected doll and hoovered it back up. The final routine that I can remember was incest-oriented. Details elided here.

Now, let me ask you a question. Do you have a switch in your head that you can flick in order to extinguish moral judgments? Like for when you go see stand-up comedy or a Wayans brothers movie, or when you listen to George Carlin on headphones? There are certain things you can’t enjoy, I mean, without suppressing your moral responses. Turning off the switch is the equivalent of playing a game: you acknowledge that it is a temporary situation in which certain rules need to apply in order to have fun.

Well, The Box presents quite a challenge to this switch. There is so much to delight in: the naked girls, the atmosphere, the drinks, the show. And yet, there is so much to panic over! One thing that is apparent from the start is that There Are No Rules For the Rich. Inside the club you can smoke cigarettes and ash them on the floor, straddle your boyfriend amid 300 strangers, laughingly refer to the financial straits of third-world countries and do drugs. No one is held accountable for their bad behavior. Outsiders like us will always find such an atmosphere uncomfortable. At some moments it felt sinister.

“Decadent” might be the exact word for The Box. I should clarify, though, because “decadent” is so often misused as an adjective. Molten chocolate cake, for instance, is not decadent (though it is tasty.) For something to count as decadent, it has to have a strong element of waste and disregard. A touch of pre-apocalypse. Images that recurred to me at The Box: sinking of the Titanic, court of Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas II.

With the economy dissolving into paste, the bar for decadence is falling. Things that used to seem like standard elements of celebrity glamour (private jets, $30,000 handbags) are quickly becoming distasteful. What was glitzy is now gauche. I wonder how Kanye West will adapt.

And what about The Box? Hard to say. When we took the J back to Bushwick at 4 AM (sprinting from the subway stop all the way home because it was the first chilly night of the season), I had that metaphysical hangover you get when you’ve snooped through someone’s journal or eaten your roommate’s peanut butter straight from the jar. Bad feelings, both.

In Which the Password is "Sugar Ray" by Molly Young

What Turns You On?

Julie Becker
(inkedmag.com)

What Turns You On?

(incredimazing.com)

One Man's Floor is Another Man's Ceiling

Perfection
by jjjohn (flickr.com)

From the many, many call girls I've worked with, the number one request from dudes (other than "can we fuck with out condoms" and "can I have a blow job") is "will you pee on me."

It's a way common straight male fetish - but many dudes don't want to ask their wives to do it, and many wives, once asked, are like "no fucking way."

Call girls often like it, because it's less work/risk/effort/whatever to pee on a guy than to fuck him or suck his cock. -drunkexpatwriter

gawker.com/5052926/ashley-dupres-first-days-as-a-hooker