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 […]
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 […]
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.
The Privilege of Choice
I received a lot of gratifying comments on my last post on the subject, but it reminded me that I perhaps had an obligation to balance it. The wired world has become a mosaic of communities who share common interests. There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you […]
Gender and Sexual Orientation: Authoritarian Desires to Label
I recently got caught up in a discussion on twitter with the charming Louise Sorensen over this article: “What Science Knows About Homosexuality.” As much as I applaud any survey of scientific research on a subject, I have to say that there is an undercurrent of assumption in a lot of the scientific literature that […]
Porn, Consent and the Singular Integrity of the Sexual Experience
There is a very interesting article in the Atlantic, “The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even For Consenting Adults“. Being the Atlantic, although thorough, it also relates some very dogmatic and (to me) quite offensive responses. But the author has written a fairly well-reasoned piece. It is all in response to this […]
Abyssal Depths – The Art of the Mindfuck
The topic of the mindfuck has been on my mind of late. I’ve had ongoing discussions with @DarkGracie on the subject, and a lovely face-to-face conversation about it with two people from different ends of the power spectrum: MisterGryphon and Mollena. I’d like to state up front that what follows is a very personal understanding […]