Mr. Pinup

An adventurous English friend named Belinda, searching some years ago for sensual ecstasy in the East, once described finding a special salon in upcountry Thailand, where she was invited to allow herself to be restrained quite naked on a cedar table and have three young female attendants gently apply a sweet-smelling unguent to her more delicate parts. The trio silently withdrew, bidding my friend to keep still. Seconds later she heard a door slide open, then a rushing sound, and felt the air itself throbbing with movement. She was then swiftly overcome by pleasing physical sensations of an almost unbearable intensity.

She lifted her head slightly, and was just able to see why: portions of her body had become suddenly covered with thousands upon thousands of brilliantly colored captive butterflies. All of them were engaged in licking away the ointment with what felt, as she later said dreamily, like a million tiny tongues.

Things like this just don’t seem to happen in Dubuque or Stow-on-the-Wold. And as Richard Bernstein suggests in his provocative and intriguing book “The East, the West, and Sex,” it is tales like this that over the years have helped construct today’s notion of the East as a sensual and sexual paradise. Tales of the odalisque, the harem, the seraglio, the concubine, the geisha and the Kama Sutra have all become combined in the past century or so into a sweetly perfumed mélange of exoticism and eroticism, presenting “the Orient” as a realm of languor and loucheness, where concupiscent curds run in the streets and nostalgie de la boue is perfectly de rigueur.

via Books of The Times – Exploring Lands of Erotic Fantasy and Their Reality in ‘The East, the West, and Sex,’ by Richard Bernstein – Review – NYTimes.com.

Last year Craigslist, which lists 18 employees on its “about us” page, made somewhere between $20 and $80 million dollars. So why is its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, so p.o.’d about sex ads in alt-weeklies?

Because these bottom-feeding free publications are making an erotic comeback in the classifieds biz, with an assist from law enforcement.

Buckmaster has even taken to the blogosphere to air his frustrations with alt-weekly encroachment. In a recent post, he lists several titles of adult ads he found on backpage.com, a collection of classifieds sites owned by Village Voice Media (VVM). “Cum lay your hotdog on my bun for memorial day” (Dallas); “Let me put you to bed backdoor available $80″ (Columbia, S.C.); “An Irish blowjob and a cum showering rainbow” (New York). He links to a screenshot of the last ad, which has photos of a woman performing fellatio.

via Will Craigslist’s New Stance on Adult Ads Save Alt-Weeklies? – City Desk – Washington City Paper.

Despite a threat from Islamists, two Pakistani brothers stealthily manufacture fetish and bondage wear, earning more than $1 million a year from their Western customers.

via Facebook | Videos Posted by The New York Times: World: A Pakistani Underworld.

THIS is it, Melvin thought: Craigslist is about to get me killed.

A recent divorcé who lacked the money and confidence for a conventional date, Melvin, 35, had been lured to a stranger’s apartment by the promise of anonymous sex. He had already done this at least a dozen times, using classified ads he had placed on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist.com, with no problems.

But this time, all he found was a dark, scary room.

via Craigslist’s Casual Encounters Section Draws Sexual Risk Takers Through Anonymity – NYTimes.com.

BAGHDAD — Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it.

Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.

Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them.

via Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways – NYTimes.com.

Hartzell Spence, a writer who as founder and executive editor of Yank magazine during World War II helped introduce the term ”pinup,” died on May 9 at his home in Essex, Conn. He was 93.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Yank was the first to use the term as a noun, in 1943, but Life magazine used ”pinup” in 1941 as an adjective — for a girl, of course.

The 2.2 million American soldiers who raptly awaited their weekly black-and-white glimpses of Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr and other beauties wearing lingerie or swimsuits and come-hither expressions, are not known to have lingered over etymology.

via Hartzell Spence, 93, Dies; Pinup Pioneer – The New York Times.

By Troy Patterson

via Wetlands is the “2 Girls 1 Cup” of novels. – By Troy Patterson – Slate Magazine.

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Spend a few years living in San Francisco and the city’s many public celebrations of sexual transgression will no longer shock you. But Sunday’s New York Times profiles a community located on Folsom Street, home of the world’s largest BDSM and leather fair, that registers as subversive to even longtime residents like myself: a commune dedicated to the female orgasm. One Taste Urban Retreat Center aims to start a female-focused “slow-sex movement”; it’s much like the “slow food movement,” only it is lady parts that are being savored.

Bright and early each and every morning at One Taste, roughly a dozen fully clothed male residents caress the nether lips of half-naked women. It might sound like the stuff of most straight women’s fantasies — save for the fact that eye contact is banned, the men are known as “research partners” rather than lovers, and it all takes place in the same room. It’s an orgy of orgasmic meditation, also known as “OMing.” Devotees explain it as “hydration” of the self and a strengthening of human connection. That search for intimacy, however, does not include reciprocation: At this stop, only ladies are allowed aboard the Orgasm Express.

Over at XX Factor, Jessica Grose rhetorically asks: “This is not to say that a woman‘s orgasm isn’t an important thing, but isn’t it horrifically self-absorbed to join a commune dedicated to the pursuit?” Initially, I, too, had a negative response. Imbalanced eroticism doesn’t sound very sexy to me, and I also had a frightening flash of anti-feminists declaring the commune proof of the real feminist agenda: making men sexually subservient. But, and here I risk revealing myself as a California caricature, I generally like to take a “whatever tickles your pickle” approach to other people’s sexuality.

via All hail the female orgasm – Broadsheet – Salon.com.

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This weekend saw not one but two stories on woman-centered sex clubs, one focused on the meditative achievement of the female orgasm and the other on wearing cat ears and boning on leather beds.

One Taste, profiled by Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash in the New York Times, is a San Francisco residential center where 38 men and women learn to create “the orgasm that exists between them.” They do this through what they call “morning practice,” a 7 a.m. ritual in which couples gather in a room, the women strip to the waist, and the men “stroke” them until they orgasm. The couples don’t have to be dating — they call each other “research partners.” Participants call the practice “orgasmic meditation,” and say it’s more about “the ‘hydration’ of the self” than about sex. The bulk of the article, though, actually discusses whether or not founder Nicole Daedone has a Svengali-like hold on her students.

Killing Kittens, covered by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe in the Times of London, sounds a little racier. This London sex club is also female-focused — a man can’t get in without a woman. But the women in attendance have to be “conventionally good-looking” and one in three applicants is turned away. Once they’re admitted, they can attend the club’s high-class parties, frequently held at members’ homes, where they can drink champagne, have sex with their partners or with new men or women, or just watch activities like an amateur porn director “buffing his bits” against porn stars in the shower. Drugs and cameras are strictly forbidden, but Hunt-Grubbe and a friend found both on their respective visits. And although condoms are provided, the screening process checks for hotness but not for STDs. Founder Emma Sayle says Killing Kittens is “about women – not alpha females who storm up to men – but feminine and sensual ones who can go and dance around in their underwear and drink with no pressure and no expectations, just free to feel sexy and have fun.”

via Sex And The Cities: A Tale Of Two Sex Clubs.

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Lena Chan sounds in on her past, present and future as a racy sex blogger.

by College Candy

Lena is the author of SexandtheIvy.com, a blog about sex and dating at Harvard University. She started blogging back in 2006, sparking immediate controversy on campus and off. Lena received lots of attention for her saucy ways and has since been featured as a commentator on college sexuality in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Salon, and Playboy Radio. She currently blogs at TheChicktionary.com.

Harvard’s Sex Blogger On Sex And The Spotlight – YourTango.

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