Forte Da
The erotic worlds we build are a curious interweaving of language and images. Most of us have done a shit-ton of borrowing. From the first time our mothers speak to us, and from the moment we manage to get our unwieldy, infantile tongues to cooperate just enough to spit out that first word, we are enveloped in an alien language, not of our making. And while the pains and tickles and chills and comforts may be truly ours, we are all bound to use that foreign tongue to express what we feel and what we want.
Prodigal
It’s always breathtaking. The plunge into the underwater world of humid Phnom Penh. Even within the ramshackle sterility of the airport, the air feels dense and full of fertile smells: durian, urine, algae, damp concrete. Then out past the surly immigration officers and bored, flabby customs officials and into the afternoon swelter of humanity. People […]
The Cypher Dom: Christian Grey and the Failure of Visual Media
I guess you have to thank a bad book and a mediocre film if it engenders thought on the subject of the textual and visual portrayal of eroticism. The success of Fifty Shades of Grey has certainly brought a debate about BDSM, stalkerish males, passive women and the compromise of bad sex for love into […]
A Writer’s Seduction
This is an erotic story about stories, about writing, about writers and readers. If you came to this page believing yourself safe or immune to my seduction, perhaps it is because you need to. Perhaps you are a lover who wants to be taken and ravished. Perhaps you hope to come away believing yourself the […]
Shooting Molly
Molly Moore wrote a post about photographing and being photographed nude. On twitter, she joked that she was proud to say she’d taken my cherry. Because it was the first time I’d ever photographed a willing, nude model. I’ve shot performance art that contained nudity, but that’s different; they are already offering up what they […]
The Jouissance of the Other: Envy disguised as Prejudice.
This week, I changed browsers. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but actually it was a chore. I’ve been a Firefox fan for a very long time. I love it for a lot of reasons. It’s an excellent browser and if they charged money to own it, I would have gladly paid. Then Mozilla made […]
Writing The Erotic Phenomenologically
You know how you’ll go for months, even years, without thinking about something and then you’ll stumble across it three times in a day? Yeah. One of the biggest problems with being a writer is language. Yes, it happens to be the tool we work with, too, but never the less, there is an aspect […]
To See is to Be Seen
Apparently I said something deeply offensive when I tweeted that, among the many functions that sex serves, one is to see yourself through the eyes of your lover. When it finally occurred to me why the statement might be offensive to some people, it depressed me. It’s political, of course. Although I realize it is […]
The Long Hard Look
“…at the core of human being is an exhibitionistic impulse: in order for us to see ourselves we must be seen.” Alessandra Lemma on Lacan* Whether you believe in universal truths or you acknowledge that they are negotiated and constructed within cultures, it matters not. It is useful to entertain their existence. Being an atheist, […]
HandSome Devil
For me, it’s not his eyes, or the face, or the pecs, or the ass… It’s the hands.