Sexology on Sunday…

Another year draws to a close. Not the best year, that’s for sure. A rough year in work and sometimes in emotions. But I have been gratified how people all over the world look at this blog on a daily basis. Today it’s been viewed everywhere from the United States to France, Brazil to Korea, from Austria to Canada to India to Sweden to Argentina…

So I sit down to post with a glass of Jameson at my side. My drink is Irish, my pen name is Irish, but my cock is Jewish. L’chaim! 

I got ahead in my weekly writing for DDF Productions so I could relax over this second holiday weekend in a row, but I ended up spending time on the computer anyway. I’m like a Siamese twin with my laptop, oh well. (Check out DDF’s blog here, it uses much of the XXX adult website copy I write for them and has links to my newsletters.) But I did get out to the flea market where I found a very interesting vintage paperback version of a sexology book first published in 1924, Sex and Life by W.F. Robie, M.D.

The book’s typeface looks like that of the original 1924 edition.

The inside of this 1965 paperback looks like a facsimile of the original edition, with illustrations by Gustave Doré of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, from his illustrations for John Milton’s Paradise Lost…

Strikes me that Dore is the perfect illustrator for sexology books wherein men and women wander in search of erotic knowledge.

I started paging through it last night and found myself absorbed in a case history which was presented in the form of a “sexual autobiography” by one of the doctor’s correspondents. It details the story of a man born in 1888, and how by 1917 his sexual life was lived in erotic fantasy, with him occasionally masturbating about women he was infatuated with, but how he never found a female companion to love and have actual sex with. What made him unusual was how he claimed to only masturbate about women with whom he was frustrated in love and could not ever get involved with. He didn’t find pictures or burlesque shows or vaudeville stimulating–only the mental images of the women he wanted but couldn’t have. It wasn’t like they were “teasing” him and then “denying” him in the modern sense of that fetish–one girl in particular simply had no interest in being his sweetheart.

Of course he didn’t use the word “masturbation” so freely, but mixed it up post-Victorian style with terms like “auto-erotism” and “erotic reveries” and referred to his moods of “voluptuousness.”

I’m now reading a section of letters between the doctor and a female correspondent from around 1919, wherein she asks him first about a “friend” who had syphilis, and then later confesses that she was the victim of the disease, and that she was only too ashamed to admit it in her first letters. This section really brings to life the terror that people lived in vis a vis venereal disease back in those pre-penicillin days, and also reminds me of the helpless terror of AIDS that swept society in the late 1980s.

Ironically, when I opened the New York Post today, there was an article about a new book called The Men on My Couch by a contemporary psychologist, Dr. Brandy Engler, who deals a lot with the problem of guys in the Big Apple today. You can find the article here.

I wonder what it would be like to go to a pretty shrink…wait, I wrote an ebook about that called Mommy’s Little Dunce! Although the shrink in my story was not a PhD. but a dominatrix/quack.

People’s lack of psychosexual insight and information always leads them into sticky waters (pun not intended, but let it stand). Today we understand that masturbation doesn’t cause blindness or hair on your palms, and of course syphilis can now be cured (with penicillin starting in 1947), but we have other sexual problems in our modern world which Dr. Engler’s patients deal with and which she writes about in her book. Check out the link to the article above, and you’ll see what I mean. So even though the dilemmas are different over the span of 125 years, from 1888 to almost 2013, the search for answers and the relief of erotic anxiety continues.

One reason I enjoy reading psychology and case histories is that it’s both illuminating and sometimes inspires me in the erotic fiction I write. Between Dr. Robie’s book and the Post article, an interesting theme has emerged in my mind from reading about the problems of men and women around World War One and the Age of the Fiscal Cliff, and I hope to explore it in some new stories. But I don’t want to say what this theme is until I actually see if I can work it into stories. I am a big fan of the theory that if you talk about your writing, it just remains talk. First write, then talk–that’s more my style.

Even one of the Dore illustrations from the Robie book, of Adam watching Eve sleep, could spur a tale…

These illustrations were probably very titillating back in their day, the mid-1800s.

Check out the Wikipedia page on Gustave Doré, there is some cool stuff there. Also check out Dark Classics, a cool art site where I found the Adam and Eve pictures.

And please check out my Amazon page here and enjoy the free samples of my femdom erotica, like the aforementioned Mommy’s Little Dunce (about a guilty fortyish porn writer who gets spanked for his literary sins), She Made a Cuckold on Black Friday (about a holiday shopping trip one man would never forget) or my latest, Learning to Be Cruel Part 2, which is subtitled “Punishment by the Book” and has my submissive hero teased and disciplined in a huge bookstore! If you like the free samples, please try the complete stories for only $2.99 each, which can be read on Kindles or even on your computers and mobile devices with the apps.

This is one of my best stories–very kinky yet very funny.

My fascination for Asian girls bubbles over in this one! I write from the groin as well as my brain.

This is the epic sequel to my top-selling ebook Learning to be Cruel. An exciting Asian dominatrix returns to rule the narrative!!

So that’s what’s been on my mind these last couple of days. I hope 2013 will be better than 2012 in many ways! I hope you have a Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

 

Let’s “time travel” back to the hornier 1950s Times Square!

I did a little time traveling last Friday night. Yes, it’s possible if you have the right tools.

The first tool was a mystery novel written in 1951 (the year I was born), and which I found in this 1956 Dell paperback edition at the flea market a couple of weeks ago. By Friday I was well into it, and since it takes place in a seedy hotel in Times Square, I thought it might be fun to go to Times Square and get a cup of coffee somewhere and finish reading it while surrounded by the ghosts of bygone Broadway.

Without this cover, I doubt I would have bought the book.

The cover painting, by William Rose, perfectly captures the ambiance of the novel, which contains a shady lady who’s up to no good in a sleazy hostelry somewhere between 6th Avenue and Broadway, maybe on 47th Street–which I know from my NYC history was noted for its number of dive hotels. Here’s the 1970s version of the same book, from a different publisher–compare them:

Nicely done cover, but the 70s feeling is totally anachronistic to the 50s story.

Although the latter cover is well executed, and actually includes a clever plot element (the dog), it is totally out of sync with the 1950s aura of the tale. I doubt I would have bought the book with this second cover.

Anyway…for info about where you can find the 1956 Dell version or the 1971 Paperback Library edition, go to the cool site Fantastic Fiction here. (I made a cover scan of my own copy of the book, but the Fantastic Fiction one looks better so I borrowed it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, time traveling. Well, I went to Times Square and I thought I’d have my coffee at the McDonald’s at 46th Street and Broadway, one of the few semi-seedy places still there. This McDonald’s just can’t help but retain some aura of existential angst, literally being situated right smack in the center of the legendary vortex of so many Gotham dreams, triumphs, failures and hopes. (It’s around the corner from Actor’s Equity, after all.) But the McDonald’s was so impossibly crowded last Friday night that I decided to go back home and finish my book there while having Chinese take-out.

It wasn’t as crammed as New Year’s Eve gets, but Times Square gets really clogged with humans around this time of year, and it can feel really lonely if you’re solo and not in a posse of your own friendly humans. So I ankled it back to my apartment. On the way, though, I walked by a souvenir store at 48th Street and Seventh Avenue that used to be a big porn theater where they held premieres back in the 70s and early 80s (yes, gala premieres of X-rated movies, complete with stars, red carpet, and Klieg lights). The only thing remaining that gave proof of that theater having once been there was the sidewalk in front of it, into which porn stars placed their hand prints and signatures–people like Gloria Leonard, Tiffany Clark, and Samantha Fox. Whenever I had visitors from out of town in recent years, I would walk them by that sidewalk and show them the foot-traffic-faded names. But last Friday I noticed, for the first time, that the handprints and signatures were gone, replaced by fresh pavement.

Here is a photo I made in 1995 of that location when it was still the Show Follies theater, with Peep Land next door. I met a couple of pretty hot peep show girls in that joint…but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, in the foreground of the pic I framed a current phone booth advertisement featuring Christy Turlington, one of the supermodels of the time. I always like the contrast of porn with mainstream media’s methods of titillation.

Christy Turlington’s sultry ad for Calvin Klein was as sexy to me as anything in the porn shops across the street. (Click to enlarge.)

When I got home with my Chinese take-out (I prefer moo goo gai pan, aka chicken with mushrooms), I decided to watch a little something on the DVD player while eating. And this turned out to be my second tool for “time traveling”–a bizarre and cheesy 1959 exploitation movie about the white slavery racket called The Naked Road. Because would you believe it? At the very end, there was a great shot of Times Square back in the 50s, complete with a marquee for the Globe Theater showing something called “Spice of Burlesk.” Felt like I was right there on the Great White Way, as the lights of Broadway used to be called in those days.

I really wonder what that “Spice of Burlesk” was. Maybe it’ll turn up on DVD one day? (Click to enlarge pic.)

So at least my eyeballs ended up traveling back in time thanks to The Naked Road, which is available in a six-movie set called Weird-Noir from Something Weird Video and Image Entertainment here on Amazon. (I don’t work for them, but I frequently see their movies and have written about them elsewhere.)

Sleazy flicks, just the way Uncle Irv likes ‘em! (Click pic to enlarge.)

After I watched The Naked Road, I went back to finishing The Murder That Wouldn’t Stay Solved, which was a very entertaining and enjoyable mystery full of colorful New York dialogue and characters, written by an author I had never heard of before, but whose works I will seek out again. He wrote this book under the moniker Hampton Stone, but achieved greater renown as George Bagby–although his real name was Aaron Marc Stein. He lived from 1906-1985. Look him up on Wikipedia under George Bagby here. He wrote about a hundred novels.

So thanks to his book and the footage in The Naked Road, I felt like I got to spend a little time in 50s Times Square–and it’s my pleasure to share it with you.

 

Porn scribe’s diary 7/3/12: No mood for strippers…

Sometimes I have the urge to just jot down a few thoughts or observations about my day, without doing an elaborate post with illustrations. So without further ado, and for what it’s worth, here is the new and ongoing PORN SCRIBE’S DIARY, which will pop up every now and then as a post.

7/1/12

After all the years I’ve spent going to strip joints, and I’ve been going to them in one form or other since 1971 (saw my first and only authentic old-time burlesque show that year, during college in the Midwest), am I losing my taste for it? I got dressed the other night to go out and have a little lapdance fun, feeling the need for some female companionship; but by the time I walked down to the street near Times Square where the club is located, I’d lost my desire for it, turned around, and went home. Picked up a fried chicken dinner and went home and watched D.O.A. with Edmund O’Brien on Channel 13, which just happened to be on.

Why didn’t I go to the club? Possible reasons: 1) Didn’t want to spend the money, which I can ill-afford these days, and 2) Kind of dreaded having vacuous conversations with dancers which only facilitate the transfer of my money into their g-strings, and 3) Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, and I shouldn’t make a big deal out of this. The next time I do go to a club and see a cute dancer I like (especially if she’s Asian), all these downsides will be forgotten.

Still, as it turned out, D.O.A. was well-worth watching for the umpteenth time. One of the great films noir. And bad girl Laurette Luez, menacing O’Brien, was as sexy as any stripper I would have seen on any stage last night. O’Brien is such a great actor that each time I see this movie, I notice new aspects to his performance. One of my fave thespians, hands down.

Well, maybe I will toss in a picture or two when I can for these little diary entries, if finding ‘em isn’t too taxing for a mini-post! Just want you to see what I’m talkin’ about close up when it comes to Miss Laurette.

 

A “soundtrack” for Sardax…

I feel the work of an erotica writer (or call it smut or porn too, if you wish–I’m fine with them all) can sometimes be analogous to that of a film composer.

Often the writer creates a story completely out of his imagination and it is illustrated by an artist-rendered picture or a photograph. In that case, the illustration brings a visual dimension that the story can only suggest. But on other occasions, the writer is called upon to provide amplification for photographs, in the “girl copy” that accompanies pictures. The words bring a literary dimension that the pictures can only suggest, just as good film music brings extra dimensions to cinematic images. Soundtracks for movies use music and audio effects, and “literary soundtracks” for images use words to evoke emotions and fantasies.

Here are two examples of “girl copy” I wrote for a pictorial commissioned by me when I was editing Leg World. I called the model “Sandra Scarlett”–as far as I knew, she hadn’t picked a nom de porn, so I gave her one. The photos were shot by noted erotic photographer Jana Krenova.

Scenario is a reverse strip: Sandra primps for a date with “Stud Male” while naked “Slave Male” watches obediently in the bathroom.

“Slave Male” is represented by camera’s point-of-view, and “girl copy” expands scenario beyond bathroom.

The pictures of Sandra were taken for the October 2008 issue of Leg World, and Jana also shot Sandra for the cover (which you can see in my archives here.) Ms. Krenova did many terrific pictorials for me at Leg World and for Dian Hanson when she edited Leg Show. You can see more of Jana’s work on her own site, BestLegShow.com.

Sandra now also appears as “Sandra Sanchez” on HotLegsAndFeet.com and other sites for which I write newsletters and web copy at DDFNetwork.com.

I am a very big fan of classic film music, by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rosza, Alfred Newman, Jerome Moross, Franz Waxman, Erich Korngold, and Elmer Bernstein. I often listen to their music when I work, as well as to ragtime, house music, Big Band, and classical piano and symphonies.

Check out one of my favorite pieces of film music here, the opening credits from David and Bathsheba, setting the scene for a tale of exotic and dangerous Biblical romance. See this excellent movie if you have the opportunity.

Now this is what I call a movie poster!! And the music lives up to it.

Now, I recently had the pleasant experience of writing a story to accompany a picture by the noted British fetish artist Sardax on his site The Femdom Art of Sardax here. I used various details in the picture to imagine a story around it which was entitled “The Pit.”

Dreaming up a story for this picture was right up my alley!

A woman counting money…a barefoot woman reading…the color of a domineering woman’s blouse…my story took off from these things to imagine a sensual, psychological, and emotional experience for the man in the center of picture, in awe over the feet of the woman sitting above him.

One thing I like about Sardax’s work is that his mastery of expression and detail gives his work a narrative quality that is very appealing to a writer’s mind.

There are more than a few pictures on his site that have written accompaniments, these “literary soundtracks” which accentuate and bring extra psychological and emotional components to the images. Most of his pictures don’t have words, but the ones that do have some excellent and evocative prose.

It’s amazing how just a few lines or paragraphs underneath some of his pictures really expand on the already powerful fantasies he depicts through his skills with drawing and color alone. One of my favorites is “Lucky Man”:

In the copy that accompanies the picture, the young wife expresses her dissatisfaction with her older husband, and lays out a “contract” with five items which pretty much encase him in a cocoon of total slavery to her. She emphasizes:

“I am in charge. Your role in this relationship from now on is to obey me, and work to make my life easy and pleasant. Is that understood? Do you accept these rules?”

He is more than happy to acquiesce and feels lucky to do so, as the brief but potent story elaborates the “contract” point for point.

Sardax recently completed a series of gorgeous pictures illustrating the early femdom novel Venus in Furs, and they are some of his most dramatic and striking images. They are now on his site.

I hope to write more for Sardax, and of course will let you know here if and when I do.

Getting back to the idea of an erotica writer providing a “soundtrack,” one of my happiest accomplishments when I wrote porn screenplays from the 1980s through the early 2000s was to suggest the use of an actual musical soundtrack, of Rossini’s overture for The Thieving Magpie as the score for an X-rated movie I scripted in 1988, The Bitches of Westwood. The director, Ron Sullivan aka “Henri Pachard,” liked my idea and we had ourselves a very jaunty soundtrack which perfectly accompanied this porn take-off of the Jack Nicholson/Michelle Pfeiffer movie The Witches of Eastwick.

In this parody, the late John Leslie played the devilish role Jack Nicholson did in the original.

I think the writer Anthony Burgess, most famous for A Clockwork Orange, said that if he weren’t a writer, he would have liked to be a film composer. I feel the same way sometimes (although being a film director is even more appealing and was my original career “goal”). Anyway, give a listen to The Thieving Magpie overture here on You Tube and imagine it as accompaniment for a hardcore sex comedy!

(Well, holy shit. As I went to You Tube to find the music, I discovered that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the 1970 movie, used it too. That was a film I hated for its violence when I saw it and never watched again, but I wonder if after that the first time of hearing The Thieving Magpie it perhaps nestled in my subconscious for years after…until it seemed to me the perfect accompaniment for my own take on, shall we say, rambunctious devilish behavior?)

In any case, music has always influenced my work, whether overtly or subconsciously. When I worked for GCR Publications in the 1980s, I used to sit in my office and sometimes listen to Big Band music as I assembled issues of Cheeks, Girls Over 40, Stag, or For Adults Only. One of the associate editors said he always thought that the Benny Goodman number “Goodbye” (composed by Gordon Jenkins) well expressed my personality. Either that’s true, or I played it so many times in my office that it became indistinguishable from who I was. But my personality did partake then, and still partakes, of some of the melancholy embodied in the tune, which can be found here in a recording on You Tube.

This is a still of Benny Goodman from the 1943 movie “Stage Door Canteen” which I found on Wikipedia.

And this is me around the time I was always listening to “Goodbye,” playing dress-up at home in the “film noir” mode:

Pic was taken in 1985 or 1986 in my book-crammed apartment on West 46th Street in Manhattan’s Times Square. Moved out in 1990 to try a less “film noir” lifestyle in Astoria, Queens; didn’t like it, though.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself. I shouldn’t call it “film noir dress-up” because I had a lot of vintage clothes (still have some of them, in fact) and donned them often, not as “costumes” but as my regular wear. In many ways, “noir” is the way I look at the world…as a place where people, even with free will, are too often puppets in the hands of destiny…where men are subject to the wiles of femmes fatale (truly)…and sometimes I call myself a “film noir” kinda guy. Anyway, this picture was taken in the 1980s when I lived in a Times Square walk-up where many years earlier in the 1950s prominent burlesque agents actually had their offices. (I discovered this recently by looking at the agency ads in old burlesque trade magazines and seeing the address where I used to live.) So it is very possible that peelers like Tempest Storm or Jennie Lee, or models like Bettie Page, at one time or other crossed the threshold of the very same apartment I dwelled in thirty years later! No big deal, just strikes me as kinda cool.

———-

I found the David and Bathsheba poster here, and The Bitches of Westwood boxcover here.

The images of Sandra Scarlett from Leg World October 2008 courtesy of Magna Publishing Group Inc. and Jana Krenova.

The use of “The Pit” and “Lucky man” pictures are courtesy of Sardax.

 

Memories of the porn trade, Part 4…

In 1989, after six years at the helm of various magazines at Charles “Chip” Goodman’s GCR Publishing, I became a freelancer again. This began my most productive period: while editing magazines such as Cheeks, Girls Over 40, and Sex Acts for Goodman on a freelance basis, I also did interviews and articles for George Mavety’s group of publications: Black Tail, Over 40, Big Butt, Oriental Dolls, Leg Show, with an occasional piece in Juggs or Tight.

Among the many porn superstars I interviewed in the 1990s and early 2000s was the great and amazing Vanessa del Rio!

I also wrote for Montcalm Publishing, doing porn star interviews through the 90s for Fox, as well as their “Video Views” review and gossip column. I did articles for Montcalm’s Gallery as well, including a rare interview with the legendary 1950s leg and foot photographer Elmer Batters that helped bring him back into the public eye and eventually led to the re-publication of his classic work in Taschen editions.

It was a real pleasure to interview Elmer in the mid-90s. I was a fan. Back in the 70s, I ordered his leg mags via mail & joined his Royal Order of the Garter!

And in my “spare” time, I wrote original screenplays for big-budgeted adult films such as Masseuse 2 and Masseuse 3 for Vivid Entertainment.

I think I interviewed Mimi Miyagi more than any other actress.

While I did all this work, I indulged my passion for strippers by hanging out at the strip clubs around Times Square, craftily enjoying myself without spending too much money. How did I do this? By getting to the clubs earlier in the evenings, before the big spenders usually arrived, I found the girls were more willing to hang out with the less financially well-endowed, such as yours truly. I got conversation and lap dances without going into hock, and I enjoyed the company of many attractive dancers of all types.

People ask me sometimes if I got sexually or romantically involved with porn stars or models over the years. I didn’t. Basically, I made a decent and dependable living as a freelance writer and editor with many steady accounts, and I did not want to risk losing that business by mixing it up with pleasure. I’m just a regular looking bald guy, no movie star type, and always feared it would be too easy to get a reputation as a sleazeball if I hit on the women I interviewed about such delicate subjects as how they liked to give blowjobs or take it up the ass. Now, if I had liked somebody and she’d come onto me, I wouldn’t have been averse to some fun–but it rarely happened, and when it did a couple of times, it was from somebody I wasn’t really attracted to. Sigh. Make that a double-sigh…anyway, I think my general low-key demeanor discouraged hook-ups from happening and prevented the models from thinking of me as a potential lover. My avuncular “Uncle Irv” mode did not encourage seduction. I was friendly, humorous, professional, but I made an effort not to come onto anybody. Instead I saved my horniness for the strippers and dominatrixes I visited in my leisure hours.

Jeannie Pepper was one of the sexiest girls I ever did a feature on...

But back to my work. In the course of doing interviews, I became a whiz at transcription. Being a little obsessive-compulsive, I was meticulous about transcribing the words of my subjects accurately. And when I edited the transcripts down, I worked hard to make sure I conveyed the exact essence of what they had to say. Maybe I went overboard, and was a little too self-important about it. I sometimes tend to take things too seriously.

When I think back, maybe I could have had some fun with some porn stars and models if only I’d loosened up a little and didn’t follow my rule of not mixing business and pleasure so strictly. It sometimes got me a little depressed when I went home after an interview in the studio, to have held in my natural impulses to joke around and flirt with some of these beautiful women. But what’s done is done.

B-movie queen Julie Strain was a fun, lively interviewee...and tall! I love tall gals.

Some of the more interesting pornstresses I interviewed were Vanessa del Rio, Jenna Jameson before she became a star, the late Kristi Lynn, Jeannie Pepper, Alicia Rio, Mimi Miyagi, Dominique Simone, and Alisha Klass. I interviewed 1950s burlesque legend Tempest Storm for Leg Show, as well as the famed dominatrix Mistress Midori. I also interviewed B-movie queens like Monique Gabrielle and Julie Strain.

This is a film from around the time I interviewed Jenna Jameson, when she was first making waves on the adult entertainment scene.

I enjoyed doing interviews, and they made up the bulk of my output; but my favorite thing remained writing fiction. That’s what I became a writer to do. I wrote scores of tales for magazines such as Swank, Genesis, Just 18, Girls of the Orient, and Shaved. Almost all the editors I worked for were open to quality storytelling mixed with hot sex, not just boring “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” hardcore prose; and I had a good time dreaming up all kinds of sexy yarns, some funny, some serious, some melodramatic; some vanilla, some kinky. I spoofed James Bond in a series of “James Wand Sleaze Thrillers” for D-Cup (naturally the spy met lots of busty gals) and I wrote perverted fairy tales like “The Fetish Voyage of Sinbad” for Leg Action. I penned a series of incredible stories for Leg Show, some of my best and most personal, several of which I am going to reprint as ebooks (such as “Mommy’s Little Dunce,” which is now available on Kindle at Amazon).

I interviewed classic burlesque queen Tempest Storm when she was in her late sixties, still performing and even posing for a Leg Show pictorial.

In 1993 the Goodman adult magazines, based in Manhattan, were sold to Magna Publishing in New Jersey, so I started commuting out there to assemble Cheeks, Girls Over 40, Sex Acts, and eventually Leg World; but as a freelancer I only went out there a few times a month. Meanwhile I continued to work most of the time in New York City, where I went to photo studios to do interviews with the models or to supervise pictorials and cover shoots for my own magazines. Yep, I was very busy throughout the 90s and well into the 2000s, but the adult magazine business started being seriously affected by the Internet around 2005-2006 and budgets started getting cut, magazines closed, and editors let go.

I interview Alisha Klass twice, probing for the root of her utter fascination for anal sex! She's also famous as a "squirter."

It’s funny; in 2002 I was interviewed with a number of my porn colleagues for a New York Times article entitled “A Demimonde in Twilight” here, and I optimistically implied that porn magazines would never be replaced by computers, because who can take a computer to bed for some one-handed fun? Ah, how short-sighted of me not to be able to imagine the iPad or mobile devices, which have changed the ways and means by which porn can now be delivered and enjoyed. But as a guy weaned on magazines himself, truly a lover and collector of magazines–I can’t really be blamed for my loyalty and affection for printed pages, and for the stories and photos which parade across them.

 

Will Krysten Ritter lock American men in chastity cages…?

…because she sure looks like she COULD!

So what’s the real meaning of this ad for the new American ABC-TV show Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt 23?

Let’s see…the mischievious, manipulative look…the scarlet temptress lipstick…the perfect and expensive manicure…the black clothes (with shoulder pads!–are we back in the 80s yet?)…the costly bracelet on her lazy wrist…

Yep, it doesn’t look to me like she is just offering her key to some lucky stud, but rather teasing some sexually submissive guy who’s addicted to giving her money in a financial domination relationship (he probably paid for the lipstick, manicure, clothes and bracelet), and who’s also agreed to let her put a chastity device on his penis, like a CB-6000S..and she’s holding the key! 

Sure, it’s SUPPOSED to look just like a sexy girl waving an apartment key, femme fatale style, but it sure looks a lot more like the images of dominatrixes who tease and tempt guys on the Web in video clips, telling them they’re going to put their slaves in penis cages to break their nasty self-abuse habits…and as a weekly columnist for the Domme Dose, where I write Notes of a Rebel Subbie, I think I’ve developed a certain radar for femdom content hiding in the sheep’s clothing of mainstream entertainment…

And let’s put it this way: an episode about Miss Ritter’s character putting some dude–maybe some CELEBRITY dude–into a chastity device would be hilarious!

In fact, I think an entire situation comedy about a sweet girl who’s rooming with a stern dominatrix who puts her slaves into chastity cages and drains them of money by getting them addicted to video clips and buying her expensive presents would be something worth watching indeed.

Meanwhile, let me see if I can hang this picture on my bathroom door. How kind of the free newspaper AM New York to use the ad for a wraparound on their edition yesterday!

The picture is carefully positioned four feet above the throne for ease of contemplation and analysis.

Why do I sometimes feel I’m living in a burlesque sketch?

———————

P.S. I don’t work for anybody selling chastity devices, and merely included the link above for your interest, erudition, and entertainment.

 

Erotica discoveries at NYC flea market…

Lately I’ve been practically chained to my laptop. It’s not good, I spent too much time on it. Between doing my freelance writing for porn magazines and websites, and blogging here about my erotica career and commenting on other erotica sites, as well as blogging and tweeting to promote my Kindle ebooks (partly also to attract more writing clients whether in erotica or other genres), I am living more in cyberspace lately than in reality.

So to “decompress” I force myself to go out and walk around and enjoy the weather like other humans. I went to a flea market today because browsing is one way I can always relax, and I found a dilapidated ex-library book edited by Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin entitled Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970. It’s full of illustrations of paintings and photographs and is catnip to my amateur sense of scholarship. Happily, it was only $2–a reasonable price, given that some of the pages were missing.

One thing I found in it is a reproduction of a stereoscopic slide from the 1850s showing a topless woman ironing her clothes:

The homey details of her hairdo and chemise really make this stereo photo a true time-travel experience.

I particularly like shots, from whatever time period, that show scantily clad women doing ordinary things. In fact, only a few days ago one of my favorite sites online, Erotic Amusements, posted vintage shots of a girl in the 1960s doing her ironing. You can see it here. I found it very stimulating!

Another image in the book is this reproduction of a lithograph from the 1830s. It was in a chapter discussing the eroticism of corsetry in the 18th and 19th centuries, and all the imagery it inspired. The caption was: “The Lover As Lady’s Maid,” which of course is a theme that is very popular nowadays in a somewhat different form in the “sissy maid” fantasy of the feminized man (sometimes a cuckold) who helps his mistress get dressed.

Is he really her lover, or is he getting her ready to go out with another man? We can almost hear the rustle of her petticoats.

I also found an 1940s anthology of articles and fiction about the theatrical profession called All-Star Cast, edited by Sally Deutsch, and read a 1940 piece called “Strip-Tease” by a writer named George Weller. It was about a Kansas City burlesque theater being harassed by detectives as a way to show how upstanding and moral the local government was. It really brought the sounds and atmosphere of an old burlycue venue to life, especially showing how the dancers and comedians had to alert each other to be on the lookout for the law. It was full of dialogue that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old Warner Brothers film. The kicker at the end of the piece was how the detectives were getting all stirred up because the star peeler was living with the comedian. Thinking they’d get her on some kind of immorality rap when they burst into her living quarters, they were disappointed to discover that the peeler was lawfully married to the comedian, and the comedian’s creaky old stage partner was actually the peeler’s father! What they thought was a sleazy illicit threesome turned out to be a wholesome domestic situation. But, as one of the theater personnel says, the detectives had “naturally blue” minds–meaning, in burlesque parlance, that they were dirty-minded.

Every time I see a “Neo Burlesque” show nowadays (not lately, but I used to go quite often) I think of how hard the old time strippers had it, unlike the modern day burlesque chicks who strut their postmodern routines in hip, socially acceptable venues. Back in the day, ecdysiasts lived and worked under the disdainful and disapproving eye of a society that considered burlesque a form of pornography…a society that was ready to toss them into jail for taking off their clothes onstage. George Weller’s article brought this point home vividly.

So it was good day at the flea market and I got some exercise. Nice to mingle among the crowds–and it was very crowded. But as you see, I’m back at the computer now!

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SPEAKING OF EBOOKS…

Why not give one of my Kindle stories a try if you have an ebook reader or a Kindle application on your computer? MOMMY’S LITTLE DUNCE is my latest release. It’s pretty kinky…definitely for advanced readers of fetish stories, although beginners will find it fuel for new fantasies!

She looks understanding...compassionate...but spanks a grown man fiercely!

Or why not try SPELL OF DOMINANCE which has five complete short stories and is more suitable to those of you who are dipping your toes into the femdom pool? Not that experienced kinksters won’t enjoy it, too.

She knew my every dirty thought as I wrote these stories! And her eyes followed me around the room!

Just go to my Amazon page here to see them all. Enjoy!

 

A delightfully & historically sinful corner of Times Square!

As I said in my last post, I wanted to tell you the significance of the corner of 46th and Broadway. Well, where the American Eagle Outfitters store now stands in Times Square at that intersection…selling among its stock the Aerie brand of provocative underthings for young ladies…

…this once stood: the Follies Burlesk theater!

The Follies, conveniently located next to America's favorite restaurant, Howard Johnson's!

I found the Follies shot at a cool blog called The Whiskey Barrel.

In today’s pedestrian plazas in Times Square, you can pull up a chair and watch the digital tease show that looms above you like a parade of young giantesses.

The burlesque queens of yore could never dream of such grand displays!

I remember the Follies, which was there well into the 80s. Somebody said the name was changed to the New Paris Theater; I don’t remember, but that’s entirely possible. I just remember it as the Follies, and that’s what I always called it; where I saw strippers like the busty blonde bombshell, the late Joey Karson, back in the early 80s. I remember me and my managing editor at the time, Sid Pauli, once running into porn legend George Payne in the doorway of the Follies and having a nice chat about the adult movie biz. I think the Follies closed just before the late Lisa de Leeuw, one of my porn favorites, was about to headline. I remember how disappointed I was. Luckily, I got to meet Lisa on one of my first trips to the adult video conventions in Las Vegas, but it would have been fun to see her bodacious redhead beauty cavorting on the Follies stage.

If I recall correctly, the Follies was managed for quite awhile by a guy whose mother was a famous stripper back in the 40s and 50s.

Below is the old time sign of the Follies as I remember it in the 90s and after, and how it still hung until finally the demolition of the building made way for the structure that is there today and houses the American Eagle Outfitters store. I found this shot on a tumblrblog called Art Is The Opposite of Death.  

That's the sign I remember, which stood until the bitter end in all its lovely, dilapidated glory.

So I guess this corner of 46th and Broadway was the perfect spot for a modern day version of a girlie show, except in its modern, digital, socially acceptable form.

For eight years in the 1980s, I lived a half a block away too, right in the middle of the sleazy tumult of pre-Disneyfied, pre-cleaned-up Times Square…the era when the girlies were still whirling there. But that’s the subject for future posts.

This corner was also the location of a famous gay burlesk venue, the Gaiety Theater, and you can read all about it on the great urban history blog Vanishing New York. Their post also has a shot of the box office of the Orpheum, a heterosexual “taxi dance” hall which stood on the spot at one point as well. One day I’ll write about my own experiences at the last few taxi dance halls that still dotted Times Square in the 70s and 80s.

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The American Eagle Outfitters billboard shots were taken by yours truly. Copyright 2012 Irv O. Neil.