Who does it better...?

Marilyn Monroe

Lindsay Lohan

Sketch: Strive

American Areolas

Why do companies who are ostensibly selling clothes, such as American Apparel, run so many advertising campaigns with models who are aren't wearing any?

 

I mean, seriously.  This ad could easily be selling boobs, peroxide or cloning technology, but clothes? What clothes?  Who the hell is looking at the clothes?

See also:

• American Apparel Model Excitedly Bares Her Breasts

 

Ho-hum

Italian photographer Toscani decided to put out a calender that is just shots of female groins.  I think this is hilarious.  Less so because he has some pseudo-literary bullshit explanation to do with the hypocrisy of high fashion. 

"I wanted to deglamorize the classic fashion industry photos, where women totter in high heels wearing bright red lipstick... and everything is revealed apart from the genital triangle, the real heart of seduction."

Blah, blah blah. I think he should have just cut the crap and done a calender of close up split beaver shots as if to say: here you are, that's what you really want right?  And see who would own up to it.

But frankly, I think he looks like a smug bastard who is trying to pretend his beaver calendar has some kind of higher artistic purpose.

Ice Ice Cry-Baby

Vanilla Ice has recently been talking about how he broke up with Madonna (back in the day) because of her provocative book "Sex". Specifically because:

"...I was hurt to be an unwitting part of this slutty package."

Because dude has standards, right?  None of this nudity, objectification and sex appeal business for him. Not then, and not now....

Blonde Bombshell

I like pinups, but there is a time and a place for them.  IMHO, showing a naked pinup holding a bomb to an underage boy is probably not one of them. [link]

Oy.

I realised Tom Ford revitalised Gucci, has a best-selling high fashion brand, blah blah blah.  However his signature look seems to involve nudity, oil and rampant objectification.  All with a nudge and a wink so you can either like it, or like it ironically. You know what? There is another option.

I dearly hope that Santa brought Tom Ford some subtlety for Xmas.

How to tell whether you have 'fostered an environment'....

Kennesaw State University Interim Provost W. Ken Harmon showed a remarkable lack of insight when he stated:

"Kennesaw State fosters an environment where students are encouraged to report inappropriate and unethical behavior."

He was responding to the fact a lecturer in an accounting class stripped naked in from of the class on November 30th, and one of the students reported the incident to university officials on November 3rd... three days later.  Three weekdays.

That's some environment you've got going there, Ken.

The possible relevance of nudity to accounting was not explained in any of the stories. Perhaps to illustrate the importance of thinking outside the Jocks?

Classic Covers: the Glorious Pool

Oops, we forgot to get cover art done for that smutty swimming pool book.

Eh, just trace over Miss August.  Nobody will know the difference.

What about the background?

Some basic shapes, bright colors, scribble in some grass there....

Bingo.  That'll do.  Nobody buys these things for the covers after all.

Human Furniture Video

Valley Lodge
"All of My Loving"
music video.



Directed by Dave & Rory. Produced by Margaux Ravis. Valley Lodge is Phil Costello, John Kimbrough, Rob Pfeiffer, Eddie Eyeball, and Dave Hill.

See also
Art :: Human Furniture by David Blázquez

Cover Story

Her: "Why is he wearing so many clothes?"

Him: "Why is she wearing so much make-up?"

Book Review: The Collected Erotica

My copy of The Collected Erotica: an Illustrated Celebration of Human Sexuality Through the Ages was provided by Eden Fantasys this book can be purchased here, and they are a good source of all kinds of erotic material.

The Collected Erotica is a gorgeous book; trade paperback sized, with glossy white paper and lush full color illustrations. This work is collected from a previous set of three books edited by London-based Charlotte Hill and William Wallace. However the writing voice of the "narrator" throughout is unmistakeably a male one (with something of a fixation on erotica with clerical and religious themes, not that there is anything wrong with that).

The format is that of an art book with extensive long excerpts fairly briefly introduced and discussed by the editor. Each page also features pull quotes and illustrations. At 400-pages long most people will certainly get their money's worth. The overall effect is a technicolor buffet of what intelligentsia considered worthy erotica--with an epicenter somewhere in a later 19th century but examples stretching from antiquity to the modern day.

And by the modern day I mean 1996, because although this is an updated 2007 edition it does not seem to include any material beyond the early nineties. And by "what the intelligentsia consider erotica" I mean there is a severely disproportionate emphasis on accepted classics such as Moll Flanders, the Story of O, Lady Chatterley's Lover and the works of Henry Miller. This collection might be more informative for those who have not already read those works in full.

The back flyleaf states of the editors that "[t]heir desire is that this collection should be should be enjoyed as widely as possible, and as much by women as men." Well, that is entirely possible but the content reflects the proportions of the materials available, not the interests of a diverse audience (e.g. many female nudes, very few men). Also, this is a collection of erotic material that is historic or has artistic or literary pretensions. It is a world in which magazines, pulp paperbacks, pin ups, movies, and the internet in its entirety do not even exist.

There is nothing wrong with that but I think it would be naive to present the collection is representative by any demographic variable, including gender. The only female writer referred to at any length is the darling or the literati, Anais Nin, whose biological sex is treated somewhat as a curiosity--it seems that the many anonymous artists and authors are presumed to be male. Homosexual material is given reasonable, but not extensive, coverage thanks largely to Oscar Wilde. Other nations are covered in the areas traditional for such works, the Karma Sutra, Japanese prints etc. But this coverage is deft and evocative given the few pages each particular subject gets in such a dense collection.

The voice of the original text that is interspersed with the excerpts is surprisingly uniform and lively, but it is highly gendered and not in a SNAG or metrosexual way. At its best it this text has pathos and humor that helps pull together all the disparate material samples. For example I was particularly struck by the following description of antique erotica photographs: "However charming or erotic Victorian photographs are , whatever magic contemporary chemicals and lenses have made of flesh tones, they always have a poignant quality. These were people who once lived, who crimped their hair, who tried not to laugh at the photographer's props. Now they are symbols of the fin-de-siecle: a reminder of the 'great vital constants' -- sex and death" [pg. 139]

But on the less charming side this narrator make some rather unenlightened comments such as implying that Casanova's promiscuity indicates "underlying homosexuality". In fact, from a fully modern point if view some of the narrator's statements seem hopelessly uninformed, for example: "...would a woman find [a well written homosexual encounter] positively erotic as men do lesbian scenes?" Quite how a historian of erotica could fail to know the answer to that question, I do not know--for yaoi/slash/MM has a history of its own that even the casual of observer of the genre would tend to stumble across. The same ironic, almost Victorian, blinkers reappear with the statement "[m]ale interest in female masturbation has no real counterpart in women."

These perspective make sense only to a person who limits their interest exclusively to the high art realms in which female "agency", as artist or consumer, is very poorly represented. To generalise from this paucity to conclusions about women per se is, at best, naive--and at worst indicative of an "underlying sexism" that runs thought even books with an overt mission to be enlightened about sex and sexuality in both the ancient and modern world.

The greatest asset of this book is also its greatest limitation: refinement. There is the homosexuality of Greek vases, but no Tom of Finland, no Mapplethorpe. The black-and-white semi-nudes of China Hamilton appear multiple times, but no Marilyn Monroe, no Betty Page. The Collected Erotica is a good "starter" book for the curious neophyte, but only part of your complete diet if you truly want to understand the full breadth and depth of our erotic traditions--high-, low- and middlebrow.

The Gaze, prequel

I came across my initial sketch for the Gaze today (top right).

Yes, it is on lined paper...

I was in a staff meeting at the time.

(Bad Emily)

The Gaze

[click on picture to emlarge]

A centaur with a difference.

During a visit to the 'House on the Rock' tourist attraction in Wisconsin a friend (you know who you are) pointed out this carousal not-horse.

I apologise for the poor quality of the picture but the damn thing was spinning around rather quickly under conditions of near darkness. It is one of 250-odd (and I do mean odd) carousal figures on what is billed as the world largest indoor carousal.

Anatomically speaking you must admit this this centaur lady is made of pure, 100% WTF. But then the House on the Rock is pretty high grade WTF throughout. (More about that later).

Objectified fur a Good Cause

Jamie Bamber digs bears. You heard it here first. Oh and I heard it from Mrs. Giggles.

5 Weirdest Animal-Related Pinups

#5) Unbearable Lightness of Bimbo: A manically cheerful blonde rides a gloomy, rather anthropomorphized, polar bear. Fortunately she seems to have a custom made halter for the purpose.

#4) A New Kind of Bunny: Polly Borland riffs on the animal motives of pinup posing--with spooky results.



#3) Things not to do with Photoshop: Meercat Manor will never be the same....
#2) "Macro": step away from Google. You don't really want to know.



#1) I am probably sick for even categorising this artwork as a pinup. But... oh well. I am having trouble finding the original, does anyone remember the artist's name?

Sexting

Sometimes we don't need a new word for something--if it isn't a new thing.

Sexting.

There have always been horny teens. There have always been ways of fixing an image. There have aways been ways of transmitting an image--even if you had to chisel it on a rock and attach it to a very hefty carrier pigeon.

If a 16-year-old girl takes a picture of herself and sends it to someone, where is the victim? And in the absence of a victim, where is the crime? I am as against child porn as anyone but can there even be such a thing as remote self-child-abuse?

Syncronic-icity, Classic Back Cover

A few days after I drew this:



This book turned up in the mail in a lot of old paperbacks I got off ebay. It is the back cover, so I didn't see it before the book arrived. Deja voodoo.



Actually as the covers of sleaze paperbacks go, this is rather nice. The front cover is a little more... overt.

Classic Covers:

Mrs. Love's psychiatrist was only mildly concerned about her lack of eye contact.

The fact that she came to sessions with a polar bear skin rug was odd, but some peculiarities were only to be expected.

That she was otherwise enirely naked wasn't even that unexpected, Freudian psychology being what it is.

But there was one thing that distracted his mind... one thing he dare not ask her about...

Where, for the love of God, were her nipples?