Behold— my first attempt at a Blog Carnival.
The theme is sex positive radical thought, but it might be more accurately titled: "Sites I Couldn't Stop Thinking About, So I Had To Go Back and Look Again."
In each case, it's not just the one posting that's remarkable; every writer/editor on my list is an artistic and original force to be reckoned with.
I also found myself drawn to a few sites that are picture-centric, while others are entirely wordy. For example...
1. Ars Erotica: The Erotic Art Museum: Wally Wood Gallery
This isn't a blog, it's a superbly rendered and collected gallery of squirm-worthy erotic art. Be prepared to spend hours.
2. Greta Christina's Blog: Sexual Freedom In A Shopping Bag: “Sex And The City”
I'm
not saying non-monogamy is for everybody. I'm not saying it's the
perfect answer to all problems in all relationships. I'm not even
saying it would have solved this couple's problems. But if a central
problem in a relationship is that one of you really likes to fuck
around and feels stifled when you can't -- if one of you truly loves
the other and wants to stay with them, and at the same time genuinely
feels that you can't be true to yourself if you don't have the freedom
to be a big slut -- then non-monogamy should at least be on the table.
It might not work, your partner might not consider it, it might not be
what you ultimately want... but at the very least, the concept should
cross your mind.
But it never crosses Samantha's mind. Samantha -- the proud slut, the
sexual adventurer, the one of the four friends who supposedly has the
most sexual knowledge and experience -- seems to have never even
considered this option.
And none of her friends suggests it to her.
3. Part Two Of The Adventures: HoboStripper
I never miss a day of Tara. She is a stripper who lives in a van down by the river. In this chapter, she is interrogated outside of Wasilla by the fascist insect that preys upon the working girl proletariat:
My mom and her husband were going the same way I was, so we decided to loosely follow each other and get pizza together a couple hundred miles down the road. I left her house first and hurried to get ahead of them so I didn’t fall too far behind when I stopped to get gas. Except that I went the wrong way, and when you go the wrong way, the road runs into a military base...
4. Debbie Nathan: Kids and Comstockery, Back (and Forward) in the Day
There's nothing like a dose of eye-opening US sex history from Citizen Nathan:
Ah yes, children and porn. Children
consuming porn, I mean: a venerable American past time. Did you know
you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our
nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned.
Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named
Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street and First Avenue in New York City’s
East Harlem, was busted on obscenity charges. His arrest happened after
notorious vice Czar Anthony Comstock, sneaking around town undercover,
watched while Eliseo “gleefully showed his rot” to some children.
What sort of rot? Eliseo, according to Comstock, “Dealt in most sacrilegious and blasphemous books & papers. Awfull!”
5. Naked HitchHiker - ErosBlog: The Sex Blog
In another lifetime, Bacchus, the genius of ErosBlog, would have been the erotic picture editor of Life magazine. He has the touch— and his gleaning is extraordinary.
6. Editrix: What's Wrong with Just Having an Orgasm?
Editrix is a very wicked copyeditor who can't leave four-letter words or their punctuation marks alone.
"I'm not sure which would be more difficult: forcing yourself to have an orgasm or forcing yourself to accept that orgasm can be a verb. But, hey, that's just me."
7. Recipes for Trouble: Thoughts on Queer Culture, Writing, Feminism and Transgender
This site is really a gorgeous food and photography blog. Except that its author has a very radical mind about sex. She just wrote a book called Comfort Food for Breakups, which seems destined for infamy. Her sex-rad P.O.V. gets thrown in with the tomatoes:
Could it be that transgender politics is in an early kind of post-colonial nationalist stage? Something akin to the ‘lesbian nation’ of the 1970’s?
8. The Elusive Threesome: Marx in Drag
This is a story about the heterosexual canard, the menage a trois:
I call it the "Joey Tribiani Syndrome," as in Joey from the show Friends. Joey, like most straight men, talks about a threesome with two women as if it were Mecca, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the brass ring, a winning three-point shot at the buzzer, the sudden-death field goal… well, you get the idea.
This drooling and high-fiving over the girl-on-girl action is as much a part of performing straight masculinity as it is to drop one’s gaze into the plunging neckline of an ample-bosomed woman. If the topic comes up and you’re a straight guy and you don’t high-five your buddy, you might as well comment on the draperies and change the subject to hair products.
9. Pretty Dumb Things: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008
Since the year that it took me to read Infinite Jest (I read it at night, after stripping, in short and manic bursts while waiting to come down from the whirlagig night, while counting with an absent mind the throbs of blood in my pounding feet; I read it doggedly, I read it devotedly, and I read it disliking every artifice, even as I fell in love with it as a whole), I rarely go a day without summoning an image from the novel.
The veiled face of the shrouded beauty, the P.G.O.A.T. The boys playing Eschaton. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants perched above the rim, observing all that America has become and pondering its imminent demise.
Last Friday, David Foster Wallace hung himself. I can’t not imagine his hands tying the knot. I can’t not wonder about his suicide note. I can’t not think of his wife finding his body, a thing once loved passionately and now blue and bloated and suddenly horrific. My mind goes that way, and not just because my family history circles around a long and rococo tradition of finding our loved one’s bodies in similar hideous states. What can I say? I read a lot.
An acquaintance of mine took a class with him. My acquaintance said that DFW was an unbelievable asshole, pompous and difficult and contradictory. My acquaintance was once embroiled in an altercation with DFW that ended only once DFW head-butted him in the solar plexus. I consider my acquaintance a lucky man. Were I once head-butted by DFW, I would have a story to tell until I died.
10. Silent-Porn-Star: Fanny Brice's Baby Snooks
I love the silent movie era, I love film history, and I go for erotic film analysis in a big way. So, of course, I love this blog:
"Baby Snooks (with Hanley Stafford as "Daddy") was performed on television only once (and this was Fanny Brice's only TV appearance too), on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars in 1950, one year prior to Brice's death.
There is a large difference between discussing a punishment,
a la Edith Ann, and showing a grown woman dressed as a child over the
knee of her daddy figure, like Baby Snooks; the image has erotically
charged elements.
At the base of this humor is prettified misogyny and/or glorified
cuckolding. It's all good & fine for adult role-play
sex-scenarios, really; but as entertainment one really ought to be
aware that's what they are enjoying.
11. What it Feels Like to Hurt a Man Until it Makes You Have an Orgasm: Bitchy Jones’s Diary
Bitchy Jones is a most convincing sadist without a trace of porno cliché:
I have never seen any fem-dom porn stuff where the woman is all panting and moaning, except when she is getting more trad sexual stuff like she’s masturbating or getting licked.
I have never seen a dom woman just start moaning and wobbling from a guy getting on his knees or crying out in pain.
Have you? Is this something only I do?
Or do I need to watch more porn? – I get scared off by the shoes a lot.
Am I way out of control of myself? I’ve had to walk out of the room before when the guy just got on his knees for me because I was so overcome and about to fall off the (metaphorical) pedestal.
I get a lot turned having d/s sex— and when I am turned on I like to kiss. Mouth fetish. I like sticking things in men’s mouths. My tongue is my favorite of those things. These pain-flavoured kisses while he’s *hurting* are the best kisses.
I like it when he screams into my mouth.
Like?
I adore it when he screams into my mouth.
12. The Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Sarah "You Can't Blink" Palin Cupcakes
13. Pharyngula: Ridiculous Sanctimony
"The state of California now issues gender-neutral marriage licenses: they simply register the legal relationship of "Party A" and "Party B", where the relevant individuals fill out their actual names. That sounds reasonable and straightforward to me — it's a state-mandated contract.
Wouldn't you know it, though, there has to be someone offended by it.
In an utterly absurd whine, Rachel Bird and Gideon Codding are stamping their selfish, privileged little feet and bleating that they are soooo upset about this.
And to Bird and Codding, that is unacceptable. "We are traditionalists - we just want to be called bride and groom," said Bird, 25, who works part time for her father's church. "Those words have been used for generations and now they just changed them."
Bird and Codding have refused to complete the new forms, a stand that has already cost them. Because their marriage is not registered with the state, Bird cannot sign up for Codding's medical benefits or legally take his name. They are now exploring their options, she said."
14. What Happens in Staunton Won't Stay in Staunton: Sex In The Public Square
A nasty little obscenity fight in Vermont, with the feds trying to pull a quick and dirty constitutional shred:
"I want to make clear why, whether or not you ever plan to travel to Staunton, VA you need to care about this case. The reason: Unlike Las Vegas, the place Staunton's prosecutor most fears, what happens in Staunton isn't so likely to stay in Staunton."
Up next to host the Sex Positive Carnival is Radical Vixen - don't forget Vixen organises the Sugasm every week too, so it would help a great deal if you could send her your submissions with the subject heading "submission for the feminist carnival."
Here's the home of the Feminist Carnival of Sexual Autonomy and Freedom, if you'd like to see the other carnivals that've been hosted so far.
