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.
