The hypnotic power of lipstick teasing…

There was an interesting moment in the 1949 noir film The Third Man, which I watched tonight on Turner Classic Movies. The main female character, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli, below) is awakened in the middle of the night by the International Police in post-World War 2 Vienna, to be taken down to headquarters for questioning about her forged passport. Several policemen of different nationalities wait while she dresses, and then as they all leave her apartment, one of the officers very solicitously says, “Your lipstick, mademoiselle,” and hands it to her.

A tiny moment, but it made me wonder about the officer and why he had such a desire to be solicitous. One could almost imagine an entire short story about that officer. Perhaps he wanted some contact, however brief, with this beautiful unattainable woman. Perhaps he simply saw himself as being kind. Perhaps he felt sorry for her being detained and wanted to assuage her dignity. Perhaps he felt it was his duty to remind Anna that, in her distress, she had made an oversight and forgotten this essential item. Or perhaps it gave him an erotic thrill to pick up, carry over, and give her the tube of lipstick…

Lipstick fetishism may be even more popular now than ever because of the Internet. There are many interesting clips online where models and dominatrixes tease the viewer in closeup as they apply and blot their lips.

I read somewhere that if a woman applies her lipstick in front of a man she is not already intimate with, it signifies that she is not interested in getting intimate with him at all. Perhaps it is a way of belittling him, of taunting him with her lack of interest in him as a lover, by performing this erotic act in front of him–as if she doesn’t care about its effect on him. I wonder if that’s true, or is just a generalization.

If done in front of a man a woman has no attraction to, the act of applying lipstick can be such a powerful spectacle that it is one of the most twisting and torturous of teases. The lips are painted in such a way to remind the man of the blush of the woman in sexual excitement…yet, performing the act signifies that she is uninterested in pursuing that excitement with him.

In the 1946 movie The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner applies her lipstick in front of John Garfield to make him think she’s not interested in him–even though she is. She does it as an act of contempt–knowing it will spur him to desire. Yet there is clearly part of her that does not, at first, want to get intimate with him.

Again, I don’t know if this is true or a generalization. I have been with women who applied lipstick in this way, and they were definitely not interested in me sexually (although they were my friends).

Pursed lips, like the ones above, are a powerful symbol of female judgment…and perhaps of arrogance.

But it is the image of the “kissy” lips below, the lips that combine the loving condescension of a maternal figure with the playfulness of a lover, that can truly engulf the eyes and loins of a susceptible man in a whirlwind of erotic confusion…or bliss!

It is no coincidence that one of the tools of the “hypnodommes” now popular on the Web–women who play the role, in video clips and audio files, of erotic hypnotists for submissive men–is lipstick teasing, the sight of which can put a man in a horny trance.

I like lipstick teasing. That’s the primary reason I put together this post–simply to assemble a sexy little gallery of delectable pictures I found around the Web. And my desire to do this was set off by that scene in The Third Man…an effect I’m sure the filmmakers did not intend.

Or did they…? 

 

A little cleavage goes a long way…

I went to a memorabilia show last weekend, and one of the dealers had a copy of this 1962 Popular Library paperback movie tie-in edition of The Phantom of the Opera. That cover offers a nice pulp fiction come-on, even if it is a photograph instead of a painting.

I came upon this at age 11, as my interests were shifting from monster movies to monster mammaries.

It was too expensive to buy and scan for myself (the dealer wanted $18, and even if I negotiated down to probably $12, it would have been too much), but I found an image of it at the site of the horror film magazine Rue Morgue here.

I had a copy of this edition back in 1962 when I was eleven. It was inadvertently lost when my mother sold the family house many years later. I never finished reading the book, but this cover was of endless fascination to me in my early teens. The bold way the otherwise demure Heather Sears looks at the camera–the bold way her decolletage exposes two inches of cleavage and the top of the spherical terrain of her momentous tatas–kept me coming back to admire in hallowed secrecy this treasured volume.

It was just two inches, but a little cleavage went a long way in those days. Come to think of it–it still does. I have a bit of a fetish for cleavage, and I actually find it more sexy than bare breasts (not that I don’t like bare breasts a whole lot too).

I didn’t see the movie until years later. It was a minor version of the story, but both Heather and Herbert Lom were good in their roles. As was Decolletage in the role of Decolletage! 😉

Hmm, this is all making me rather silly…I better stop while I’m still ahead.

 

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.

 

“Naughty porn writers must stand in the corner!”

This is the fate which a beauteous no-nonsense lady enforces with stern but compassionate discipline in my story Mommy’s Little Dunce, available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.

Few artists can capture the allure of legs in nylon like Sardax! This image © Sardax.

Recently I got a nice comment here from Sardax, the great British femdom illustrator whose work is known worldwide. When I wrote fiction for editor Dian Hanson’s Leg Show back in the 90s and early 2000s, I was fortunate that Dian had Sardax illustrate a few of my tales of submissive men and the glorious women who dazzle, befuddle, and punish them. One of my epics was Mommy’s Little Dunce which I’ve just re-published as an ebook, but with a cover design of my own since I don’t have the rights to Sardax’s picture. Another reason for using a different cover is that all my ebooks are designed to evoke the crude but evocative cover styles of the underground fetish story pamphlets once sold in adult bookstores or through the mails.

I don’t claim to be any kind of artist but this cover of my own does capture in its primitive way the feeling of the lady in the story…

 

However, Sardax and I exchanged a few emails and he graciously gave me a mention on his site The Femdom Art of Sardax with a little excerpt of the story and links to my Amazon pages. It all just went up today and I’ve got more hits on this blog than ever before. Thank you, my dear Sardax! He encouraged me to put up his original illustration, which you see above on the top of this post, so I could share it with my readers.

In the November 2008 issue of Leg World…

…I reviewed his book The Art of Sardax in my ErotiCulture column, below. Because of newsstand magazine censorship restrictions in some areas, I couldn’t reproduce the cover of the book, which would have been considered too kinky and humilating–so I chose to illustrate my review with one of the interior illustrations. If you click on the image, you can read the entire review (and two other interesting ones). But for your convenience I have also reproduced it below with the original cover of the book, which is now out-of-print and sells online for approximately $240 a copy!

Here the review reprinted in its entirety, with a copy of the cover of this now out-of-print and very collectible book:

In some areas on our planet, images of a woman walking a man like a dog are considered too kinky for newsstands.

THE ART OF SARDAX

Review by Irv O. Neil

The British artist Sardax specializes in femdom imagery, and the girls and women in his pictures usually exhibit a calm, half-smiling detachment as they put slave males through their paces. Although Sardax is quoted in the intro to this book as saying that he doesn’t like to draw “pinup type” girls, his women are often quite pretty and it is unnerving to see such cuties placidly and harshly dominating submissive males with a variety of skills and methods.

The “Sartopian” female may exist in the artist’s imaginary but superbly rendered utopia of female domination and male obedience, but modern life has caught up with the fantasies of this skilled draughtsman. Without consciously being aware of it, or even knowing of Sardax’s existence, many contemporary young women seem to exhibit the haughty attitudes, air of privilege, and bemused arrogance of the Sartopian domina. Women in “real life” may not physically manipulate men with the same bizarre fetishistic flourishes as the women of Sardax do, but their aura of conquest comes across nonetheless. It seems to me that many females today want to figuratively, if not literally, put males on their knees.

Published by the Erotic Print Society as part of their Great British Erotic Art series, The Art of Sardax is an excellent 160 page compendium of the artist’s various treatments of the theme of women controlling men. Few others can depict as well as Sardax such a variety of boots, stiletto shoes, seamed stockings, corsetry, lingerie, and especially the delicious strain of womanly hips and derrieres against taut and shiny skirts. He is also adept at evoking historical scenes: eighteenth and nineteenth century women in the tight-waisted dresses of those eras, or dressed like pirates or buccaneers, complete with tri-cornered hats. Whether he’s creating a scene in color or black-and-white, and whether it’s a young woman in a peach baby doll nightie cramming a construction worker’s mouth with a strap-on dildo, or a ponytailed Japanese girl in a demure white dress teasing a thirsty slave with a glass of water, Sardax projects before us a dark world where susceptible men are slaves to perfect yet ruthless beauties. It can be a merciless world too, where sometimes the prospect of even an orgasm as reward for endless obedience is in doubt.

The Sartopian male is helplessly entangled in the emotional and erotic webs spun by these women. Yet the spectator is often guided to feel, largely by the brief stories accompanying the drawings, that these men have complicity in their submission. They hope and lust to be dominated, no matter how ambivalent they may come to feel about it later. Instead of the vainglorious orgasmic bliss they thought they would achieve in hooking up with such gorgeous creatures, they find themselves instead waiting for a humble sniff of a domme’s tennis sock, or a glob of frigid ice cream sliding between a girl’s teasing toes, or the scrape of a mistress’s blood-red nails against their yearning scrotums. In the world of Sardax, a young man takes a beauty to the prom, and discovers that she is going to use him in an experiment in group femdom with her friends. He finds himself completely nude before these merciless beauties, who are still splendid in their prom gowns as they have their way with his naked behind.

But here is the most unnerving thing about the seemingly cruel Sartopian female. Sardax clearly suggests, often through the enigmatic smile on the girl’s face, that she might actually be kind in her cruelty, with her icy demeanour the exact kind of syrup a certain type of man wants on his sexual sundae. In one of the mini-stories that accompany the pictures, a doughy middle-aged man enslaved to a young woman says: “I love her and I hate her…I cannot stay here, and I cannot leave.” This phrase echoes a famous epigram by the Roman poet Catullus, written two thousand years ago, in which he bemoaned the strange mystery and emotional pain of loving and hating a woman at the same time. The kind of woman who inspires such passion—whether she lives in Sartopia, modern Manhattan, or ancient Rome—is more than simply human: she is also goddess and monster, human and spider. In her presence, you never tread neutral ground. Welcome to Sartopia, a place as eternal as Rome itself, not a country but a state of mind which has existed ever since fabled Eve first gave Adam the apple, and which Sardax explores in this beautifully designed volume. The Art of Sardax will arouse your libido, but also inspire you to examine and analyze the ever-curious ecstasies of female domination and male submission.

ErotiCulture review ©2008 Irv O. Neil

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I hope you’ll visit him online at The Femdom Art of Sardax here!

And I hope you will also check out Mommy’s Little Dunce, the story of a porn writer who feels bad about his profession and needs special spanking and humiliation therapy to get over his psychological and sexual hang-ups. It’s available at Amazon’s Kindle stores in the U.S., UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. Just click on the link in the country of your choice. The book, which is in English, can be read either on e-readers or on your computer with the free Kindle applications for PC or Mac. Enjoy…

 

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.

 

Femmes fatale, dangerous heels, and pulp fiction thrills!

I had a pleasant weekend, especially in two ways. Firstly, I went to a big comic book convention in New York on Saturday and had an enjoyable day of hanging out with my friends, some of whom had tables selling their art or pop culture memorabilia. One of my friends, Marcus Boas, specializes in paintings of beautiful women, warriors, and sword-and-sandal scenes in the genre of heroic fantasy. A few years ago when I was editing Leg World magazine, I commissioned this painting from him to illustrate a story I wrote, a tale which I may reprint soon as an ebook:

The image was inspired by the actress Chelo Alonso, who starred as evil queens, conniving dancing girls, and fierce swordswomen in 1960s Euro epics.

You can find see more images of Marcus’s work here at the Kaso Comics site. Explore the full site here;  tell ’em Irv O. Neil sent you if you contact them!

I’m not much of a fan of contemporary comics, but I occasionally buy older ones published in the 50s or 60s, so I picked up a couple of Classics Illustrated for $3 each. I go for reading copies, not pristine collector’s items.

The Hamlet in particular had some striking artwork inside. Ophelia looks like a real babe...but there I go again! 😉

I also found a copy of Weird Tales with a Margaret Brundage cover. I thought it would be fun to read the stories in the original format. The magazine’s interior wasn’t in the greatest shape, but definitely readable. At least the cover looked pretty good. I managed to negotiate the price down.

This was the magazine that published many stories by Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Brundage is legendary for her provocative, kinky cover art for this magazine, and in fact a book entitled The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage, Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art, is soon to be published about her work from Vanguard Publishing. You can find more information about it here.

So it was a fun show and I got a few goodies to entertain myself. But if I seem to be in a “public relations” mode today, referring you to artists and publishers, it’s because of the second nice thing that happened over the weekend.

A terrific site called Femdom Artists, which I’ve had on my blogroll for some time and on which I frequently comment–for quick reference, you can find it here–was kind enough to run a few of my ebook covers in a post. I concoct these covers myself, even though I’m not much of an artist. The simple style and bold colors I use are meant to evoke the naughty underground femdom porn booklets of yesteryear that you’d sometimes see in smut shops or get via mail order.

A sweet girl who knows how to use her power to dominate...

A kind but firm therapist gives "maternal discipline" to a guilty 40ish porn writer in this tale.

Femdom Artists must have great traffic, because I got more visits to my own blog than I ever have in the nine months I’ve been doing it. Although I’ve always had a steady flow of visitors daily, from all over the world, this was a definite spike. And I thought since more people are looking at EROTICA IS MY TRADE, at least for the moment (as an experienced blogger elsewhere, I know the increased traffic won’t necessarily last), I thought I would also direct them to the work of my friends (Marcus) or publishers whose books I’ve enjoyed (Vanguard).

What’s also interesting to me is that while two of the sister sites of Femdom Artists, Femdom Blogs and Female Led Relationships, recently ran a couple of written items on my work, without pictures, it wasn’t until the ebook covers were displayed in the Femdom Artists site that I got a lot more hits on my blog. Visuals communicate far more immediately today than words, it seems.

I’m happy to say that even though my drawings are crude, they accurately convey each heroine’s personality. If you look at all my covers, you’ll see that each lady looks different.

I try to write erotica, porn, smut, or whatever you want to call it, that has lifelike characters.

So that was my weekend. And just to prove that erotica these days isn’t just on blogs or ebooks, but out in the open where everybody can enjoy it, let me conclude with a couple of Times Square sexy billboard photos I’ve taken recently.

Here’s a Jessica Simpson high heel shot that just went up near 49th Street and Seventh Avenue:

Maybe younger people wouldn't consider such heels femme-fatalish, just normal footwear in the Age of the Woman! I prefer the noirish interpretation.

And here is a shot of the electronic billboards at 46th and Broadway, always a source of saucy delight to tourist and New Yorker alike:

In Japan, there are entire magazines devoted to young women in panties teasing the readers. Maybe we're headed in that direction? Hope springs eternal! 🙂

In an upcoming post, I’m going to have more to say about the symbolic significance of the corner of 46th Street and Broadway, and why it is appropriate that there are pictures of scantily-clad females at this particular location! Stay tuned.

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(The billboard photos are Copyright 2012 Irv O. Neil.)