Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
What I've Learned from Erotica
The latest Mischief Books blog posting is up.... and here's an excerpt
Chrissie Bentley, contributor to The Visitor, Confessions, Submission, My Secret Life, Sex & The Stranger, At Your Mercy, Shameful Thrills, Exposure, Improper Conduct and Girls Girls Girls and Underworlds and Holiday Affairs
There’s a short novel in that question, but I think the most intriguing lesson has been how liberating it is, not in a sexual manner (although some people might say that too), but in terms of treating different situations as though they are an erotic scene, and just going full bore for what you want to get out of them.
I’ve also noticed that people who know I write are more likely to confide in me—and lose some of their general conversational filters, as well, which is something I explored in my. contribution to Confessions....
Chrissie Bentley, contributor to The Visitor, Confessions, Submission, My Secret Life, Sex & The Stranger, At Your Mercy, Shameful Thrills, Exposure, Improper Conduct and Girls Girls Girls and Underworlds and Holiday Affairs
There’s a short novel in that question, but I think the most intriguing lesson has been how liberating it is, not in a sexual manner (although some people might say that too), but in terms of treating different situations as though they are an erotic scene, and just going full bore for what you want to get out of them.
I’ve also noticed that people who know I write are more likely to confide in me—and lose some of their general conversational filters, as well, which is something I explored in my. contribution to Confessions....
read the rest here
Sunday, December 9, 2012
The Weather Outside is Frightful
so let's all go on vacation...
Here's a book to read on the plane
Includes my story "Welcome To Spain"
Buy it now!
Here's a book to read on the plane
Includes my story "Welcome To Spain"
Buy it now!
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Talking About The First Time
I think we all remember the first blowjob we ever gave. But do we remember why we gave it?
"The few studies that exist on oral sex among teenagers indicate that although teenage girls perform fellatio more often than in the past, they do so without pleasure, usually to please their boyfriend or to avoid the possibility of impregnation."— Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Back in my early college days, in those oh-so distant late-1990s, I found myself reading and furiously disagreeing with a book called The Body Project. “An Intimate History of American Girls” is the subtitle, the author is Joan Jacobs Brumberg, and in as much as it crams close to 170 years of adolescent teenaged female sexuality into 214 pages, you can guess it’s a fairly swift read.
It is also a fairly conservative one. Well-meaning in content and scholarly in tone, the book nevertheless came down firmly in favor of the notion that, when it comes to sex, teenagers really don’t know what they’re doing, what they want, or what they are getting themselves into. A generalization which includes those who patently did. Either way, I have to admit, I came away from The Body Project with what I would describe as a seriously bad taste in my mouth. And not because of the things I’d been putting in there, either. Although, according to what I was reading, nobody would have blamed me if that had been the cause.
You’ve read the quote that opens this piece, and the second clause - yeah, I’d go along with that. Blowjobs are great birth control, provided you don’t kiss him with a mouthful and then have him go down on you. I’ve counted three “friends of friends” who got pregnant that way, and who am I to say it’s an urban myth? As excuses go, it’s a lot more interesting than the old burst condom.
The first clause? To please the boyfriend? Well, you can’t argue with that, either, because you’d hardly be doing it if you thought it would piss him off. (And we’ll get to that later.)
But “without pleasure?" Which leads into the author’s next assertion, that the first blowjobs a girl gives are usually a result of coercion....
Okay, them there’s fighting words.
A few years ago, I was interviewed about my erotic fiction writing and asked why so many of the stories I write focus on first time oral sex. I can’t remember how I responded at the time, but working on another project more recently, and rereading The Body Project in pursuit of some background, I think I know the real answer to that question.
I wanted to disprove that statement. Not for the benefit of the author. Not even for personal satisfaction. I wanted to disprove it because I cannot (or do not want to) believe that the majority of people receive such an unpleasant introduction to an act that is...fill in your own adverbs here, but I’ll go with “intimate,” “beautiful” and “fun.”
Now, I’ll admit I’ve heard some horror stories, and I brushed against one in another article I wrote here, recalling “the first time you were making out with a guy and he put his hand on the back of your head and... push[ed] your face down to his cock.”
Which can be traumatic (or so I’ve heard). But it can also be the hottest thing you’ve ever experienced.
Some girls resist, others shrug and say “what the hell.” Some will never overcome their initial distaste. Others get used to what are indeed an array of funky flavors and odors...my first time, my first shock was being sure that I could smell pee. Only faintly, but it was definitely there and I rifled through every past fantasy I’d ever had, and every word I’d ever read, for the tiniest hint of a warning that such a sensation awaited me. I never found one. But I mentioned it to a friend one day, and another and another, and the fact is - boys? I hate to tell you this, but...
I digress. Some girls resist, others shrug. And others still have been waiting all relationship-long for him to signpost his desires so strongly. Because, among the manifold signals that modern culture sends out about the importance of fellatio in a relationship (okay, it may not usually be phrased quite so politely), there are also a few that leave some room for doubt, and not only the (old-fashioned?) notion that nice girls don’t.
There was an episode of [italics|Friends] broadcast...I’m not sure when, but I want to say it was around the same time as I read that book. I don’t remember the title, I don’t remember the plot. But I do remember Monica making a remark that could be construed as a reference to her love of blowjobs, and Chandler responding that he was sorry, but he just didn’t like them.
Pause. Freeze frame. Collective intake of breath. A. Man. Who. Doesn’t. Like. Blowjobs.
It was a joke, right? An ironic twist, a thoughtful contradiction. Or...
...it’s true. Again, thanks to the predominant theme of my fiction writing, I have struck up e-mail conversations with a number of men who have admitted in the course of detailing their fantasies, the acts that they don’t consider fantasizing over at all. “I have never cum from a blowjob.” “They just don’t feel good.” “I let her do it because she wants to, but it doesn’t do much for me.”
Again, at first I thought such comments were a joke. But they’re not. And you know what? It must take an awful lot of courage for a guy to stand up, even via the anonymity of the internet, and admit that alone of his species in our super-sexualized world, he does not care for what every erotic writer, ever porn star, every learned sociologist describes as the gold at the end of the male sexual rainbow. Again: A man who doesn’t like blowjobs. Okay, and there are icebergs in Hell.
I’m not going to say that my first time was with a Chandler. Far from it, as it turned out. But I still waited until I’d been invited before doing what I’d spent so long dreaming of, and here’s something else you don’t read about too often. That first time, nobody expects the girl to be certain exactly “what to do next.” Well, I don’t believe guys are that sure, either. Not in my experience, anyway. And so the two of us lay clamped, unmoving, together, his cock in my mouth or my mouth round his cock, and both of us thinking “okay... what happens now?”
You figure it out fairly quickly, of course. It may take a few minutes, it may take a few tries. But you get there in the end and, so long as nothing takes place that you consider untoward, there’s a lot of other first times to look forward to. And many more to learn about from stories and pictures and clips on the tube-sites, but best of all from your own imagination. Yours and his.
But you don’t forget your first time, no matter how many times you do it in the future. That first breath, that first taste, that first stretch, that first thrill. The first scrape, the first bite, the first thrust, the first gag. The first spit, the first swallow, the first time you cum...
So here’s a thought. A couple of years ago, I was co-editor on an anthology called The Bad Girl’s Sweet Kiss, in which a couple of dozen fiction writers recalled (or invented) their first experience of either giving or receiving a blowjob. How fascinating would it be now to hear the same stories, told by our family of non-fiction writers.
To repeat what it says in The Body Project, “few studies...exist on oral sex among teenagers,” from the past or into the present. It’s time, I hope you agree, to change that dour scenario.
It is also a fairly conservative one. Well-meaning in content and scholarly in tone, the book nevertheless came down firmly in favor of the notion that, when it comes to sex, teenagers really don’t know what they’re doing, what they want, or what they are getting themselves into. A generalization which includes those who patently did. Either way, I have to admit, I came away from The Body Project with what I would describe as a seriously bad taste in my mouth. And not because of the things I’d been putting in there, either. Although, according to what I was reading, nobody would have blamed me if that had been the cause.
You’ve read the quote that opens this piece, and the second clause - yeah, I’d go along with that. Blowjobs are great birth control, provided you don’t kiss him with a mouthful and then have him go down on you. I’ve counted three “friends of friends” who got pregnant that way, and who am I to say it’s an urban myth? As excuses go, it’s a lot more interesting than the old burst condom.
The first clause? To please the boyfriend? Well, you can’t argue with that, either, because you’d hardly be doing it if you thought it would piss him off. (And we’ll get to that later.)
But “without pleasure?" Which leads into the author’s next assertion, that the first blowjobs a girl gives are usually a result of coercion....
Okay, them there’s fighting words.
A few years ago, I was interviewed about my erotic fiction writing and asked why so many of the stories I write focus on first time oral sex. I can’t remember how I responded at the time, but working on another project more recently, and rereading The Body Project in pursuit of some background, I think I know the real answer to that question.
I wanted to disprove that statement. Not for the benefit of the author. Not even for personal satisfaction. I wanted to disprove it because I cannot (or do not want to) believe that the majority of people receive such an unpleasant introduction to an act that is...fill in your own adverbs here, but I’ll go with “intimate,” “beautiful” and “fun.”
Now, I’ll admit I’ve heard some horror stories, and I brushed against one in another article I wrote here, recalling “the first time you were making out with a guy and he put his hand on the back of your head and... push[ed] your face down to his cock.”
Which can be traumatic (or so I’ve heard). But it can also be the hottest thing you’ve ever experienced.
Some girls resist, others shrug and say “what the hell.” Some will never overcome their initial distaste. Others get used to what are indeed an array of funky flavors and odors...my first time, my first shock was being sure that I could smell pee. Only faintly, but it was definitely there and I rifled through every past fantasy I’d ever had, and every word I’d ever read, for the tiniest hint of a warning that such a sensation awaited me. I never found one. But I mentioned it to a friend one day, and another and another, and the fact is - boys? I hate to tell you this, but...
I digress. Some girls resist, others shrug. And others still have been waiting all relationship-long for him to signpost his desires so strongly. Because, among the manifold signals that modern culture sends out about the importance of fellatio in a relationship (okay, it may not usually be phrased quite so politely), there are also a few that leave some room for doubt, and not only the (old-fashioned?) notion that nice girls don’t.
There was an episode of [italics|Friends] broadcast...I’m not sure when, but I want to say it was around the same time as I read that book. I don’t remember the title, I don’t remember the plot. But I do remember Monica making a remark that could be construed as a reference to her love of blowjobs, and Chandler responding that he was sorry, but he just didn’t like them.
Pause. Freeze frame. Collective intake of breath. A. Man. Who. Doesn’t. Like. Blowjobs.
It was a joke, right? An ironic twist, a thoughtful contradiction. Or...
...it’s true. Again, thanks to the predominant theme of my fiction writing, I have struck up e-mail conversations with a number of men who have admitted in the course of detailing their fantasies, the acts that they don’t consider fantasizing over at all. “I have never cum from a blowjob.” “They just don’t feel good.” “I let her do it because she wants to, but it doesn’t do much for me.”
Again, at first I thought such comments were a joke. But they’re not. And you know what? It must take an awful lot of courage for a guy to stand up, even via the anonymity of the internet, and admit that alone of his species in our super-sexualized world, he does not care for what every erotic writer, ever porn star, every learned sociologist describes as the gold at the end of the male sexual rainbow. Again: A man who doesn’t like blowjobs. Okay, and there are icebergs in Hell.
I’m not going to say that my first time was with a Chandler. Far from it, as it turned out. But I still waited until I’d been invited before doing what I’d spent so long dreaming of, and here’s something else you don’t read about too often. That first time, nobody expects the girl to be certain exactly “what to do next.” Well, I don’t believe guys are that sure, either. Not in my experience, anyway. And so the two of us lay clamped, unmoving, together, his cock in my mouth or my mouth round his cock, and both of us thinking “okay... what happens now?”
You figure it out fairly quickly, of course. It may take a few minutes, it may take a few tries. But you get there in the end and, so long as nothing takes place that you consider untoward, there’s a lot of other first times to look forward to. And many more to learn about from stories and pictures and clips on the tube-sites, but best of all from your own imagination. Yours and his.
But you don’t forget your first time, no matter how many times you do it in the future. That first breath, that first taste, that first stretch, that first thrill. The first scrape, the first bite, the first thrust, the first gag. The first spit, the first swallow, the first time you cum...
So here’s a thought. A couple of years ago, I was co-editor on an anthology called The Bad Girl’s Sweet Kiss, in which a couple of dozen fiction writers recalled (or invented) their first experience of either giving or receiving a blowjob. How fascinating would it be now to hear the same stories, told by our family of non-fiction writers.
To repeat what it says in The Body Project, “few studies...exist on oral sex among teenagers,” from the past or into the present. It’s time, I hope you agree, to change that dour scenario.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Curl up for the holidays with the Nympho Librarian
Eleven seething tales of scalding raunch set in that most sacred of sexual sanctuaries - the public library. After hours, off the cuff, behind the bookshelves or under the desk, The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories is the book that defies the Dewey Decimal System. It ought to be filed under Red Hot Erotica. But you'll keep it under 69.
Buy it now!
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
“When I grow up,” I once told my journal, “I want to be a hooker.”
I was a slow starter in the sex stakes. I realized very early on that a name like mine was worth its weight in gold when it came to attracting boys’ attention… that it was the nomenclatural equivalent of a pair of big tits. But I also knew that I wasn’t interested in boys. I wanted men and, quite frankly, I didn’t have a clue about how to get one. I certainly wasn’t going to start walking up to strangers and introducing myself, although, in my fantasies, I did it all the time – “hi,” I’d say. “I’m Jenny Swallows, and I do.” And I was fairly certain that I would. Swallow, that is. But I didn’t know for sure because I’d never had the chance.
So, I decided to become a hooker.
Looking back, I hadn’t really thought it through. How much would I charge? How would I find clients? And how would I weed out the icky guys, so that all my clients were the same handsome studs that gyrated through my imaginings? I didn’t know, so I didn’t worry about it. All that mattered to me was what happened once all that was taken care of…. And it went something like this.
He was usually tall, blonde and occasionally English. A businessman in town for a few days, and he’d got my name from a friend. We’d meet in the lobby of his hotel, a swish joint in Abilene, and he’d wine and dine me at the best restaurant in town. Then a cab back to the hotel, an elevator up to his suite, and that’s where it would start, with me dropping to my knees before him, and resting my cheek against the erection that our earlier conversation… as I outlined everything he would get for his money… would have set in motion.
He’d be torn between desire and embarrassment – what if the lift should stop, and someone should come in? “Well,” I’d reply, as I unzipped his pants, “they’d see what a handsome prick you have.” And it would be handsome, well-shaped and uncut, long and thick but not so fat that I wouldn’t be able to fit it in my mouth. I remembered watching a porn film once, where the guy was so huge that the girl could barely get the tip in her mouth without dislocating her jaw. I wanted to suck the whole thing.
“Not here,” he’d gasp.
“Well, where?” I’d reply, as I licked his shaft from balls to bell end, then ran my tongue around the crest.
“We’re almost at my floor.”
“I’m almost at the top,” I’d say, and I’d give his helmet a long, deep kiss. But he was right, we were almost at his floor, so I’d zip him back up and then patiently wait while he found his door key and let us into his suite. Candlelit, with champagne already on ice – you see, I told you I hadn’t thought any of this through properly. But it was my dream, so there it was, champagne and candles and a pair of pants that vanished the moment we got into the bedroom, and now there was nothing to stop me.
I push him back on the bed, his legs hanging over the edge for me to kneel between, my elbows resting on his thighs as his cock rises unaided towards me. I clutch it with two fingers, gently move it towards my mouth, and then I begin to suck.
And suck and suck and suck, until he is so close to coming that his entire body is in ecstatic spasm. Then I pause and wait for the moment to pass, allow him to gain control once again. And then I start once more.
I rarely wore a wrist watch, and there was no clock that I could see. So I don’t know how long it lasts for. But whatever he paid me, he’d get a minute for each dollar, and believe me, I wasn’t cheap. A two hour blowjob? Three hours? Four? I didn’t mind, and neither would he and when, at the end, I finally did let him come, it was like placing my mouth over the end of a hosepipe and then turning the water faucet on full. Except it wouldn’t be water, it was honey and liquor and candy and joy, and every drop tasted better than the one before.
And he’s paying me? Unbelievable!
I’d stay the night, or what was left of it regardless, and maybe we’d fuck or he’d eat me or whatever. But I’d have got what I came for, and the rest was just a bonus. Fuck, the cash was just a bonus. But I’d never heard of hookers who gave it out for free, so I didn’t let it bother me. Plus, it was better than working.
Or so I used to think. Until I found a proper job....
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Convenient, Elegant and Fun
We'll get the bad news out of the way first. The packaging looks good but it is flimsy flimsy flimsy... by the time my order had made its way through the mails, bumping against another toy in the same box, the pleasure kit's casing looked like a bag of cat treats going three rounds with a dog. All of which I mention only if you're thinking of giving this as a gift. Nothing says "oops" like a battered box.
Ah, but then we open it up and...
Read more at Eden Fantasys
Ah, but then we open it up and...
Read more at Eden Fantasys
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Intimacy - You Can't Fake It
Bombarded by imagery of sex and death, politics and disaster, life - like the movies - sometimes feels like it's lost all grip on what matters. Some ruminations on the meaning of intimacy, seen through the lens of a forty-five year old subtitled Swedish movie.
It always surprises people when the conversation turns to pornography and I tell them that the first blowjob I ever saw on screen was in film class. Director Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious Yellow was the fare of the day, a late sixties Swedish movie whose reputation, sadly, precedes it wherever it is mentioned. Because of the fuss surrounding its content, because of the controversy that greeted its US release, and because of the bans that so many communities bound it with, anybody today who has heard of it usually shrugs it aside as a dirty film. Well, it is Swedish.
In fact, it is a political movie more than a sexual one. Its motives and messages being bound up in that same ferment of student unrest and discontent that flavored so many movies of the age, from Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil to Easy Rider and beyond.
Yet there it is. A sex scene that is clearly not your usual “put on the body stocking and think of cold custard," and following the conclusion of the main course, heroine Lena Nyman leans into her love and plants a kiss on his flaccid penis.
That’s it. A kiss. No penetration, no devouring. The moment is over in a moment. Yet every guy in the class was howling for the movie to be paused and wound back a few seconds, and I suspect that half the girls in the class felt the same way silently. And whatever the stated purpose of the class may have been (it was indeed something political) was immediately subverted to a more fascinating discussion on the role of reality in the cinematic experience, which was the professor’s intention all along, albeit one that must have been (and I would guess still is) extraordinarily difficult to frame.
Reality in the movies is, after all, subjective. No matter how much ketchup and prosthetics, special effects and effective screams might be lavished on a scene, still we know that all the dead bodies got up and walked off the moment the director cried “cut.” There was, in the mid-1970s, a media panic concerning the supposed existence of genuine snuff films making it onto the underground circuit, but nobody was ever able to conclusively prove one, and the fuss died down in the end. A situation with which few people would disagree, one hopes.
Love scenes, too, are difficult, at least if the director wants to remain within the realms of anything approaching the mainstream, and that has always been one of the underlying reasons why we even have a XXX industry today. There is a line that does get pushed every time Hollywood squeezes another glimpse of naked body past the censor (and it is not that long ago that full frontal male nudity was strictly prohibited), but we still have a long way to go before erect cocks and gaping pussies will be flashing across the Multiplex screen. Again, a situation with which few people would disagree.
The fact is, though, it is an industry that is built upon blurring the distinctions between fantasy and reality, which is deemed to have failed miserably if we are not, at least for the length of the movie, convinced that a monster icequake has just unleashed a horde of vampire spiders onto a sleepy city, believability is crucial.
Watching Lena (the character shared her first name with the actress) make love with her married boyfriend Börje, the viewer does not even consider the possibility that the action is “real.” Nothing suggests it, the camera does not gloat. It is the kiss, and only the kiss, that lifts the scene out of the mundane and into the memorable. And even today, with all this and more just a mouse click away, that scene still possesses the capacity to surprise, or even shock. Not because of what it is, but because of what it depicts.
Intimacy.
That is the magic word that is lacking from so much modern film - and yes we are talking mainstream and XXX now. We see people love, we see people die, we see people fuck and suck and do everything we can imagine to one another; we can pause and drink in the details, we can go slo-mo and make a simple cumshot last for hours.
But what we cannot see - or, if we can, it is overwhelmed by everything else that is happening - a single, simple moment of genuine spontaneity, mindless of lights and cameras and action. And it doesn’t even matter if the scene had been scripted, and Lena’s action was as calculated as any of the movie’s other set pieces. The fact is, Sjöman’s camera caught a moment that today still stands as one of the most nakedly honest ever framed on a cinema screen, and it is that which the viewer still reacts to.
I Am Curious Yellow reached American shores in 1969, two years after its Swedish release, and three years before Deep Throat ushered in what cinema historians describe as the age of Porno Chic, a brief period in time when out-and-out pornography was being screened and discussed in media circles far removed from its traditional seedy haunts.
And in as much as it did cause such a fuss (it was banned in Massachusetts, while a Texas movie house was burned to the ground in protest at it screening the film), it might well be considered one of the building blocks upon which the modern industry, or at least our acceptance of it, is built.
Which seems a peculiar fate for a movie whose greatest crime, then and now, was not to show a forbidden act, but to depict a sensation that we all crave. Intimacy itself has been devalued in modern culture, the word slipping so far from its actual meaning that celebrities now deliberately pose for “intimate” photographs, and songwriters spill their putative guts to convince us how much they mean what they sing.
But line any of them up with those few seconds of celluloid, and then decide for yourself who is telling the truth. And tonight, when you settle down with your partner, ask yourself again which moment means the most.
The one where you repeat the same pattern, the same words and actions, that have always constituted love-making as long as you’ve been together?
Or the one where you just leaned over and...whatever...simply because you felt like it?
I know which one I’d choose.
In fact, it is a political movie more than a sexual one. Its motives and messages being bound up in that same ferment of student unrest and discontent that flavored so many movies of the age, from Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil to Easy Rider and beyond.
Yet there it is. A sex scene that is clearly not your usual “put on the body stocking and think of cold custard," and following the conclusion of the main course, heroine Lena Nyman leans into her love and plants a kiss on his flaccid penis.
That’s it. A kiss. No penetration, no devouring. The moment is over in a moment. Yet every guy in the class was howling for the movie to be paused and wound back a few seconds, and I suspect that half the girls in the class felt the same way silently. And whatever the stated purpose of the class may have been (it was indeed something political) was immediately subverted to a more fascinating discussion on the role of reality in the cinematic experience, which was the professor’s intention all along, albeit one that must have been (and I would guess still is) extraordinarily difficult to frame.
Reality in the movies is, after all, subjective. No matter how much ketchup and prosthetics, special effects and effective screams might be lavished on a scene, still we know that all the dead bodies got up and walked off the moment the director cried “cut.” There was, in the mid-1970s, a media panic concerning the supposed existence of genuine snuff films making it onto the underground circuit, but nobody was ever able to conclusively prove one, and the fuss died down in the end. A situation with which few people would disagree, one hopes.
Love scenes, too, are difficult, at least if the director wants to remain within the realms of anything approaching the mainstream, and that has always been one of the underlying reasons why we even have a XXX industry today. There is a line that does get pushed every time Hollywood squeezes another glimpse of naked body past the censor (and it is not that long ago that full frontal male nudity was strictly prohibited), but we still have a long way to go before erect cocks and gaping pussies will be flashing across the Multiplex screen. Again, a situation with which few people would disagree.
The fact is, though, it is an industry that is built upon blurring the distinctions between fantasy and reality, which is deemed to have failed miserably if we are not, at least for the length of the movie, convinced that a monster icequake has just unleashed a horde of vampire spiders onto a sleepy city, believability is crucial.
Watching Lena (the character shared her first name with the actress) make love with her married boyfriend Börje, the viewer does not even consider the possibility that the action is “real.” Nothing suggests it, the camera does not gloat. It is the kiss, and only the kiss, that lifts the scene out of the mundane and into the memorable. And even today, with all this and more just a mouse click away, that scene still possesses the capacity to surprise, or even shock. Not because of what it is, but because of what it depicts.
Intimacy.
That is the magic word that is lacking from so much modern film - and yes we are talking mainstream and XXX now. We see people love, we see people die, we see people fuck and suck and do everything we can imagine to one another; we can pause and drink in the details, we can go slo-mo and make a simple cumshot last for hours.
But what we cannot see - or, if we can, it is overwhelmed by everything else that is happening - a single, simple moment of genuine spontaneity, mindless of lights and cameras and action. And it doesn’t even matter if the scene had been scripted, and Lena’s action was as calculated as any of the movie’s other set pieces. The fact is, Sjöman’s camera caught a moment that today still stands as one of the most nakedly honest ever framed on a cinema screen, and it is that which the viewer still reacts to.
I Am Curious Yellow reached American shores in 1969, two years after its Swedish release, and three years before Deep Throat ushered in what cinema historians describe as the age of Porno Chic, a brief period in time when out-and-out pornography was being screened and discussed in media circles far removed from its traditional seedy haunts.
And in as much as it did cause such a fuss (it was banned in Massachusetts, while a Texas movie house was burned to the ground in protest at it screening the film), it might well be considered one of the building blocks upon which the modern industry, or at least our acceptance of it, is built.
Which seems a peculiar fate for a movie whose greatest crime, then and now, was not to show a forbidden act, but to depict a sensation that we all crave. Intimacy itself has been devalued in modern culture, the word slipping so far from its actual meaning that celebrities now deliberately pose for “intimate” photographs, and songwriters spill their putative guts to convince us how much they mean what they sing.
But line any of them up with those few seconds of celluloid, and then decide for yourself who is telling the truth. And tonight, when you settle down with your partner, ask yourself again which moment means the most.
The one where you repeat the same pattern, the same words and actions, that have always constituted love-making as long as you’ve been together?
Or the one where you just leaned over and...whatever...simply because you felt like it?
I know which one I’d choose.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Not Your Standard Fuck Flick
It's close to forty years now since movies like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and, best of all, The Opening of Misty Beethoven burst onto the scene with what American cinema regarded as an hitherto unimaginable combination - plot and porn! It was a brief flowering, one that nodded towards the tremendous advances taking place in European XXX cinema at the same time, but which was swiftly cut down again by any number of factors, ranging from increased legislation to the arrival of VHS, and onto the questionable insistence that audiences really didn't want plot. They wanted sex, and the more of it, the merrier.
That latter picture hasn't really changed too much, with the consequence that even the most carefully schemed out sex movie (and there's a lot of them around) is forced to double its running time by dragging every XXX scene out for fifteen, twenty minutes... at the end of which, almost without fail, you've completely forgotten what the actual story is. Thank goodness for fast forward buttons.
Throat: A Cautionary Tale might surprise you, then.
Read more at Eden Fantasys
That latter picture hasn't really changed too much, with the consequence that even the most carefully schemed out sex movie (and there's a lot of them around) is forced to double its running time by dragging every XXX scene out for fifteen, twenty minutes... at the end of which, almost without fail, you've completely forgotten what the actual story is. Thank goodness for fast forward buttons.
Throat: A Cautionary Tale might surprise you, then.
Read more at Eden Fantasys