Erotic Anarchy

A photographic exploration of Tokyo’s sex clubs from the early 1980s by Nobuyoshi Araki.

Tokyo Lucky Hole is a huge volume of photographs documenting the sex clubs of Shinjuku.  The pictures come from a variety of clubs, from the early no-panties coffee houses to specialized perversions such as a club where the patrons lie naked in port-holed coffins and are masturbated by “mourners” sitting atop.

Many of the photographs are taken in and around the public areas of the clubs and document the shows and environment of the clubs, which seem to range from merely titillating or just plain silly to live sex shows where the performers fellate volunteers from the audience on stage or mount them; a bit like a sex-positive circus.

Another common theme is candid snapshots of the performers, most laughing or smiling, all enjoying themselves.  The prologue explains that the sex scene of the early 1980s opened up to amateurs: students and housewives who could make good money in a fairly non-threatening environment of these sometimes very silly venues.  Their good spirit shows through in the pictures.

The most explicit theme is photographs taken in private rooms of patrons and performers engaged in various sex acts: mostly oral or hand jobs, but plenty of plain sex as well.  The images give the sense of being un-staged and candid, and as a result are  amusing and erotic and entirely un-pretentious.  And sometimes very funny, as when a woman’s group scene ends with her peeing at a man shielding himself with an umbrella.

The book is a 700 page, comprehensive documentary of a unique period of sexual history.

TwistSF  is a very stylish sex club, modern and attractive.  One enters through an unmarked door into a lobby with a rest room and coat check.  Alcohol is strictly BYOB, one leaves the bottle under the care of staff (who seem to monitor for excessive consumption).  There’s four partial levels on two complete floors.  One floor is  a dance club where people tend to remain at least mostly clothed, the other is a sex club divided into areas suitable for 2-10 or so people each. Continue Reading »

If you want beautiful pictures of beautiful women tied up, this is the book for you.  It’s all shibari, all beautifully lit and shot in black and white.  The pictures are all excellent, all perfectly composed.  While the subject is bondage, the subjects appear serene or even laughing; this isn’t a book about rape fantasies, in fact it is hardly a book about sex.

While most shots include bare breasts and erect nipples, and many include genitalia, there is not a single “pink” shot (or whatever the greytone equivalent would be) in the entire book.  There’s one slightly incongruous picture of an MF couple with the man’s hands firmly clasped over the woman’s breasts and dots of what looks like hand lotion on the woman’s abdomen that seems to be intended to signify semen.  Perhaps.

It is a book for beautiful, almost sculptural pictures of women and rope.

“The skull in the cage knows: the real bars are behind the eyes.”

Cafe Flesh is a classic (really) adult film that developed a signfiicant cult following.  The basis of the following is a little obscure given the actual quality of the film and story line, however it does stand out from most movies with cum shots on screen as having a premise and a plot, the storyline being more complex than some mainstream cinema… though not exactly challenging those mainstream movies that might have a chance at an award.

The story line is that there has been a nuclear war and in the post haulocost world people have become either sex negatives or sex positives.  Sex positives can have sex (unlike bay-area sex positives who talk about sex all the time but never actually have it) and are required to by law to inspire the “caged desire” of the sex negatives.   This is posited as and might even be read as a nominally “deep” statement about the nature of human desire and the repression of the same.  OK… not too deep but still, it is a porn movie.

And “adult” it is:

• The first sex scene is MF, quick cum shot.
• The second also MF, also a quick cum shot.
• The third is FF, sort of cut short (no female ejaculation here, but this was from the bush era, and not the political one, not even the first).
• The fourth: MMF, slightly longer to accommodate the necessary permutations.
• The fifth: MF, with “Ric0″ the agent of change.
• The sixth: FF, a plot driven moment of tremendous magnitude.
• The seventh: MF, Rico drives the plot to its abrupt conclusion.

Overall it is actually a nominally watchable movie, though there’s some intrinsic schizophrenia in any movie that attempts to marry a plotline with an effort at arousing the viewer in a prurient way; Cafe Flesh straddles the two somewhat uncomfortably.  It is to the creator’s credit (I think) that it succeeds more as a plot-driven movie than a porn movie, not to imply any absolute figure of merit to that success, rather a relative one.

Nurse me is one of the better Hentai titles: the animation is pretty good for the genre, there is a comprehensible story, and there’s a lot of sex.

On the downside, most of the sex is non-consensual, though the story arc is predicated on the heroine discovering heretofore unknown sexual predilections and thus the non-consensual humiliation and sexual degradation to which she is subjected a journey of self-discovery.  One would not have to be an angry feminist to characterize the premise as a male fantasy with little grounding in reality.

The story line has some complexities which make it stand out, there is a conflict (yes, a real psuedo-literary conflict) between the protagonists desire to live up to the model of the nurse who gave care to her favorite uncle and the demands placed on her by the training program to which she has enroled that she might achieve the (literally) saintly objective.

This sainthood is something of a black mass, repleate with enemas, lacivious head surgeons taking her virginity, more experienced lesbian nurses, and low-class rapists (who get their “cumuppance” in the form of a martial art’s coin throw to the erect genetilia).  Still, the heroine is a good nurse and takes each trial in stride and explicit detail (without censoring).

Didier Carre’s Stainless Ladies is a nicely produced book of women with transparent dildoes in their vaginas.

There’s more to it than that, of course, but flipping through the images, the prevailing impression is of attractive, muscular women with perfectly shaved pudenda (though not all completely) and clear dildos of various shapes inserted, mostly vaginally, though a few anal insertions are included.

All of the photographs are perfectly lit, carefully composed, artistically posed.  The models are all naked, their only costumes partially inserted.  If their faces are visible, they look directly at the camera.   The pictures are erotic, but in a somewhat clinical way.  The women are gorgeous, but more sculptural than sexual.

youporn is one of many video sharing sites in the gist of pornotube, redtube, xtube, xnxx, yuvutu etc.  youporn seems to be one of the best.

Video performance is good, video quality tends to be excellent (basically standard MPEG4 via flash like all sites seems to use now).  There’s a wide variety of content and navigation is pretty straight forward.

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Dahamane’s Porn Art 2 is a pictorial essay of Chloe Des Lysses’ willingness to engage in anal sex.  It seems like every other picture is her with someone’s penis in her ass, while she smiles pleasantly at the camera as if posing for a snapshot.

The pictures are sharp and clear and well composed, thematically tied by that pleasant smile.  Almost all are explicit, showing clear penetration, dominated by pictures of anal penetration:

• Anal: 17
• Oral: 8
• Object: 5
• Vaginal: 4
• Cum shot: 3

Continue Reading »

Shortbus is a really fun movie, a slightly saccharine morality tale of finding happiness and redemption by discovering what sort of sex each of the characters needs and then really enjoying it.  We saw the movie in the theater shortly after the premiere in Toronto (which we missed).  It is funny, adorable, touching, and genuinely erotic.

We ran into John Cameron Mitchell in Mexico City at the film festival there and he told us that the marching band in the movie had nothing that he knew of to do with San Fransciso’s Extra Action Marching Band, but that’s sort of hard to believe when you see them.

We also talked with  Paul Dawson, who was very charming and friendly.  There’s something very leveling about meeting people in distant places.

It’s a great movie for anyone who feels sex should be fun, and probably even better for those who don’t.

Kinky Salon has been around for a long time but we’d never been because they tell people they have to dress up.   The theme of our first visit was jungle night; almost all the men were wearing some variant of the pith helmet thing.  The women weren’t awfully jungly, but something sexy generally suffices.  Our apprehension about having to dress up was misplaced.

The advertised difference between Kinky Salon and Club Kiss (located in the same venue) is that Kiss is screened for attractive people and as a result it tends to be populated by superficially better looking people who are a bit more overtly exhibitionist and pretty much everybody is there to have sex most of the night.  Kinky Salon is much more of a social experience and many people are not there to have sex at all, rather to be with friends in a comfortable environment. The  attendees are not bad looking, but even in the play rooms there may be more people socializing than actually doing it.

Those that do engage in sex acts are a bit less in the mode of doing show-off sex than at more sex-oriented sex-clubs where they tend position themselves such that the genitals are visible.  I don’t think I saw anyone else’s genitals all night…

There were several female couples there, which is very unusual for a nominally straight sex club, but kinky salon is actively gay friendly.   Gay male clubs and straight clubs are very rarely integrated for complex psychological issues that have everything to do with straight male insecurities.  While there may be some gay men at kinky salon, a friend who goes just about every week says she’s only seen a few male gay couples and they usually don’t come back.  Then again, with all the options gay males have and most overtly catering to their needs, a straight club could seem uptight and boring and pretty pointless.

Gay women seem less well served by the community and the effectively zero pressure fun party atmosphere seems like it would be pretty comfortable; still single females are rare and female couples rarer still.  Like every US club, there seems to be nearly zero spontaneous interaction between people who don’t know each other already, though as always, a receptive female can have as many males or couples as she’s interested in.