How much wonder do we miss?

As if wonder is snow & we are all kids staring up at a smoke grey sky, our mouths wide with waiting for that quick, crystalline tang to kiss our tongues.

For each kiss we catch, how many do we miss?

But, isn’t wonder everywhere— 

In the way shy surrender to the certainty of needing tinges the lids of eyes & cheeks with a pink pre-blush patina.

& afternoon light softens the bare, oft-hidden skin below the smooth up-tilt of a chin.  

Wonder: the finger slid slyly between lips & teeth—careful to touch nothing.

I have never understood the ubiquity of facial cum shots.

Yes, I know:

“[E]jaculating into blank space is not much fun, [whereas] ejaculating over a person who responds with enjoyment sustains a lighthearted mood as a well as a degree of realism.”[i]

There is little better illustration of the first point than Andres Serrano exceedingly dull Ejaculate in Trajectory series

However, the veracity of the first point does not extend to the second automatically.

I suspect Faust wishes “degree of realism” to reference concern over what happens to ejaculate when intercourse involves at least one male bodied individual. But, realistically, this is a foregone conclusion in most scenarios involving participants practicing responsible sex. It only becomes when the participants becomes irresponsible—and the majority of porn falls in this latter category.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a prude by quite a stretch. I want my porn to be gloriously irresponsible. The issue I have is when porn is blatantly irresponsible and then points to the tradition of facial cum shots as evidence of its responsibility.

I don’t mind seeing come. In fact, I rather like it. But it has always been a turn off for me to watch a man squeezing seed from his shaft onto a smiling female face like someone trying to get the last of the toothpaste from an already empty tube onto a toothbrush. But that isn’t even what really bothers me, it’s the fact that the man gets off and the woman settles with having her pleasure merely encoded into her semen besotted Mona Lisa smile.

As Wikipedia’s blurb on Cindy Patton’s criticism of the cum shot summarizes nicely:

“[I]n western culture male sexual fulfillment is synonymous with orgasm and that male orgasm is an essential punctuation of the sexual narrative. No orgasm, no sexual pleasure. No cum shot, no narrative closure. In other words, the cum shot is the period at the end of the sentence.”[ii]

Pornographers most certainly do view the male orgasm as “the period at the end of the sentence.” But just because I think that is bullshit—the male orgasm should be a comma in a fucking German paragraph running for fifteen pages.

Still, my own bias aside, there are absolutely more aesthetically interesting means of displaying the requisite thick, milk white discharge while also facilitating mutual pleasure.

Take the above picture as an example:

First, note that in keeping with the usual the pornographic modus operandi the camera is a foot too close to the action. Although, to the image makers credit it does not rely on the usual visually bankrupt knee-jerk overuse of extreme close-up to titillate. As such, excepting her amputated shin/ankles, the woman’s entire body is within the frame.

Taken perhaps a full minute after orgasm, we see the aftermath of the stud pulling out after filling the woman with his seed; it slowly seeps from her, pooling on his abdomen.

Look at the expression on their faces—if it is not exactly pleasure it is still both intense and compellingly arousing.

Though for me this is moment the scene begins, not where it ends.

In his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche—bear with me—suggests Athenian drama as the highest form of human art due to its seamless fusion of the two most basic human tendencies; he termed these: the Apollonian (critical) and the Dionysian (libidinal).

Perhaps, this is not a bad way of beginning to analyze whether and to what extent a work of intended as pornography can transcend the intention of its creation and be seen as art.

This image suggests an approach to me because I have two very equal and opposite responses to it that can more-or-less be mapped along axes of critical and sensual responses.

Looking at this image with a critical eye I appreciate that, excepting for her knees and feet extending beyond the edge of the frame, this young woman is presented intact within the frame. If she were to feel so inclined she could get up and walk away.

She is aware of herself being seen at the same time she refuses to engage the spectator by closing her eyes and positioning her feet in a way which ensures the focal point remains her body as a whole not just her vulva.

On the other hand, the kitchen backdrop is hell of problematic. Whether intended or not, it portends an unchallenged allegiance to prevalent patriarchal attitudes.

Technically, the image is over-exposed and would have benefited immeasurably from the photographer taking a half step back before clicking the shutter. Also, the bright light falling on both the subject and the wall behind her flattens the image.

My libidinal response to this image is less conflicted. This woman is my decidedly my type: petite brunette with Eastern European features and barely-there breasts; and wonder of wonders, she has pubic hair—a hairless pubis can be breath-taking when it is the exception not the rule but I prefer hair down there.

But I cannot read this either as an Apollonian or Dionysian. My gaze drifts until it locks in on the slight glimpse of the hollow held by her labial folds. Then her set against the (cold?) wood floor reintroduce the angle at which her porcelain legs. My eyes scan upward and I find myself faced again and again with another human who desires (and is desired), dreams(is dreamed of) and needs (and is needed).

(via captio)

A not insubstantial number of images indelibly imprinted on my mind have been made by Traci Matlock and Ashley MacLean—or, as they are perhaps better known: Rose and Olive of tetheredtothesun on Flickr and Nerve.com photo blog fame.

One cannot talk about Rose and Olive without addressing process. As I recall, they their work was always intended as a collaborative undertaking: Rose shot Olive and Olive shot Rose. The subject of the resulting image became the final authority on whether or not the image would ever see the light of day. In this way the subject is also a co-author of the work—an especially clever fuck-you to the proprietorial expectation of traditional male spectator.

Their work rings truer than most, resonating with a sense that this moment was something that happened just as you see it here.

The result has always been in my opinion some of the most sexual explicit photographs—if not so much in content, in implication—I have ever seen.

It’s possible to dismiss it as cloyingly exhibitionist, but the trust between the two is too wide-eyed in its unwaveringly dedicated sincerity.

captio:

Meanwhile, in my train-travel-wetdream…

Photo by Pavel Kiselev

Wasn’t it Blake who noted the naked body of a woman is more a measure of heaven than any man deserves?

The first thing I notice here is not the very attractive—and even more naked—girl looking over her left shoulder at the landscape beyond the window against which she is leaning. What I see is a photograph taken inside a train.

I love trains. I am not a ‘railien’ or ‘railfan’, not by a long stretch. But there is something about trains that makes me smile. You would think this would have lessened some after spending around six hundred hours a year for five years traveling via rail.

It hasn’t.

Admittedly there are good days and there are bad days but over time I have learned a simple fact: I am rarely as focused and alone with my own chaos in as when I like this lounging Aphrodite stare out as the passing landscape blurs.

Commuter trains do not offer opportunity for much repose. And being naked on a train is not really something I had considered; however, the prospect of lurching vibrations shivering every inch of skin does is incredibly appealing to me.

And oh Jesus fucking Harold and Maude Christ, to make love and then savor the scent of shared bodies while everything around you hums until you start to make love again.

There is a lesson here about sharing everything.

Even the loneliness of being together.

UPDATE: Another image likely from the same series.

UPDATE 2: And another…

UPDATE 3: And another one, and another one…

(via captio)

Giving and receiving oral sex ranks near the top of the list of mind-blowing human experiences—no pun intended.

Watching oral sex wherein one is not a participant is another story. It isn’t so much the repetitive nature—fucking is a highly repetitive action, after all—it’s the lack of enthusiasm with which it is undertaken.

With the exception of extreme scenes (Sasha Grey’s irrumatio routines spring to mind), can you remember a blow job scene that got you totally hot and bothered? No. Because most play out like perfunctory warm up exercises performed as a requisite prelude to The Main Event.

Any trace of boredom with the proceedings is countered here by the lurid red of the lipstick, the bubbles in the spit thick on the cock shaft. There’s tenderness and violence in the way he holds her chin as she guides his glans towards the unseen tip of her tongue.

There is an urgency and, simultaneously, a surrendering.

Years ago a fellow film student gave me an unsolicited but, as it turned out, prescient piece of advice: the question of whether a close up will do more than a medium shot, is really a question of what the audience will ask as a result of the lack of context in the close-up; and, are those questions the best questions for them to ask at that moment.

This is one of only a handful of instances where the close-up is preferable.

Emmet Gowin Edith Danville, Virginia 1971

When I study Gowin’s work I am always struck by its deep reverence. Whether his subject is his wife Edith, or various members of her family or his later aerial landscape, each image is treated with the same quiet wonder.

In Edith Danville, Virginia 1971, Gowin’s wife stands in the doorway of a dilapidated shed and pisses on the floor—the scene is handled with a quiet awe rather at odds with ‘taboo’ of enjoying the sight of someone urinating.

Whether intended or not, it strikes me that this is reverent watching is not at all unlike the way pissing is commonly depicting in pornographic media.

The actress informs her partner she ‘has to pee’ and moves several steps away to stand with her legs spread wide or more often than not to squat. With this movement her body transforms from the discrete catalogue of penetrable orifices and denuded erogenous zones it is likely to have been presented as for most of the scene to something whole and complete. She gazes down at her cunt, or looks away from the camera like Edith—breaking her near constant, self-conscious awareness of the spectator. She begins to piss but by the time she remembers she is expected to be self-conscious, the camera has begun to zoom in on the fluid ensuing from between her legs.

‘Having to pee’ is, unequivocally, a need. Given the raison d’etre for porn—manufacturing male pleasure—admitting that women have needs is unusual. Admittedly, sexualizing yet another aspect of female bodied experience is problematic, but for me that is trumped by how hot it is when porn—however tenuously— implies the truth: nothing provides more pleasurable than meeting the needs another.

Pavel Flegontov – December 13

bendmeover:

I spend a lot of time preoccupied with notions of community—how to foster, improve and sustain them.

I was raised in an insular, religious cultish community. It was neither the best nor the worst situation; it was just another thing that happened to me.

Somehow, I managed to survive it.

It’s now just shy of two decades since I cut ties with that life. It has been for the best, without question.

But I would be lying if I denied frequently feeling rootless—a tumbleweed tossed wherever the fuck the wind blows.

It’s not the group sex that gets me—although I am not opposed to that by any means; it’s witnessing the shame and stigma my former community directed toward any expression of sexuality transmuted into a sublime collective experience.

Source: tendrebulle.fr

porny:

Kennedy Kressler

I had no idea who Kennedy Kressler was two days ago; now, I can’t get her out of my head.

Most images of her are garbage, portraying her as receptive, wide eyed and winsome, performing for the pleasure of a stereotypical straight male spectator.

This makes me EXTREMELY uncomfortable. I do not know Ms. Kressler; and while I certainly wouldn’t piss and moan at the prospect of an introduction, chances are she wouldn’t give me the time of day. Yet, there she is in almost every picture staring out at me with feigned intimacy and come hither eyes.

I am not faulting her—she is good at what she does.

I prefer her in the above image. Despite the typical pornographic trappings—her positioning toward the camera to provide an unobstructed view of her bald vulva, the lack of imagistic context (is she curled up, masturbating in a lawn chair for any reason other than to provide a photogenic backdrop?)—her gesture is interesting. By spreading her outer labia with both hands she offers a more intimate view. This is, however, not her primary motivation; instead, she wants to be better able to tease her clitoris with her fingertip.

In so doing, her self-conscious eye contact with the spectator is broken and she focuses on her own sensations instead.

Photo by Nan Goldin

Here Goldin nicely subverts the woman as the focus while men are hidden/implied trope rife in depictions of sexuality.

I am not really a fan of Goldin but I appreciate how she makes a guy getting a handjob the focus of the piece and its still something that heteronormative folks can find sexy as hell.

And even though it isn’t, I like to think that he has already climaxed and his intense physical reaction is a result the person wearing the bracelet refusing to stop stimulating him post-orgasm.