group sex – Page 3 – Acetylene Eyes

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

From the standpoint of technique, this image is garbage-the composition is illegible, the cant muddles an sort of visual flow and considerations of inclusion vs. exclusion by the frame edges are irredeemably random.

But, there is at least one positive thing I can say about it: I’m feeling the tone.

I’m not entirely sure I can articulate what I mean. It has a lot to do with personal context.

The last several weeks have been difficult.

I won’t get into all of that, just what’s relevant to this post: witnessing the religious right’s response to Black Lives Matter & Djingo Unhinged the lack of consistency in application of beliefs, lapses in reasoning and application of basic logic has been intensely triggering for me.

I attended an Evangelical Xtian high school. It was every bit as heinous as it sounds–probably more so, to be honest. The current climate transports me back a quarter of a decade and I feel just as confused at trapped.

I don’t think you fully understand the capacity for evil, the gravity with which hatred blooming from a misguided sense of Xtian duty motivates these evil and venally corrupt ass hats. I’ve seen it. I still bear far too many scars from it.

And like that I’m back in the thick of the same shit I’ve been trying to outrun for most of my adult life.

I feel like I always thought escaping would be enough. I never thought it would come to a point where I would need to stand and fight. I feel so clumsy and ill-prepared. For all my articulation w/r/t this project, I’ve not made that much progress is my life as far as communicating my thoughts to my peers, being open and forthright with regards to my sexuality and desires.

I adore the simple openness of this image. Yes, it’s most likely a prelude to a group sex scenario. (I think that’s part of what appeals to me about the notion of group sex is a safe space where you can perform your sexuality instead of reducing it to labels or incomplete verbal descriptions.

I feel so much of who I am is tied up in that morass. And I struggle with knowing the line with where withholding it is dishonest as opposed to necessary/appropriate.

It reminds me of something a follower told me recently. Apparently Dan Rather interviewed Mother Theresa for 60 Minutes or something. He inquired what she said when she prayed.

She responded: Nothing. I listen.

Taken aback, Rather followed up: what does God say then?

Nothing. He listens too.

Source: balcon6

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

People speak to me about boundaries.
This is work. That is play. This is public. That is private.
This is for friends. That is for lovers.
I don’t understand imaginary lines in the sand.

I want to know the ones like me. Daughters whose mothers
Left them to wolves, trusting the tutelage would
Lead–one day–to understanding the words
tattooed over their shivering hearts:

There are no lines. There are no boundaries.
A horse will run until it dies.
And death, death is better than dreaming about
what it might’ve been to run free.

kink.com – Title Unknown (2007)

I’m cagey when it comes to posting this.

First of all: the above is so technically inept that the light of baseline proficiency won’t reach it for a million years.

Second: it’s a property of kink.com; on a good day I’m–shall we say– unenthused about their products (which tend to be a bit extreme for my taste).

Third: kink.com has an established prerogative of turning a blind eye to coercion–a fact that rankles me.

Fourth, there’s the issue of consent. While, I haven’t viewed the video from which the above still ensues, given the image presented–devoid of any sort of grounding context–I have fundamental concerns about the responsible presentation of verbal affirmation, safe words, etc.

Given those extensive reservations, then why the hell am I going ahead and posting it? Simply put: despite my reservations, I find it really, really hot.

The reason why I feel this way has to do with several situations not unlike the above which I have experienced. I’ve written about one previously, the other involved a junior high class mate quite literally beating the piss out of me and subsequently squatting over my face and grinding her ladybug undies against my mouth several times before spitting on me and leaving me crying on the floor of an empty classroom.

The first time was different. I repressed it for quite a while but it surfaced a little more than two years ago. I still can’t remember all the specifics but I do have an idea what transpired.

I have mixed feelings about it. I had no personal agency and further was unable to consent to the proceedings but I was also extremely aroused by what I was asked/made to do–a fact that ended up figuring into the proceedings.

It’s probably a mark of privilege but even though I feel extremely weird about what happened, it doesn’t even break into the top ten of childhood trauma.

And I am not at all sure what to make of the realization that this event ended up changing my wiring. I make that observation based upon the fact that I spend a great deal of time craving the opportunity to re-experience a situation like the one depicted above. Except in this iteration, to be able to consent and have the option of withdrawing consent at any point during the exchange.

It’s as if the original experience itself was neither good nor bad but the way it was approached and handled was intensely problematic. And I guess I feel that while I definitely got something out of the encounter, I feel that re-staging it allows me the opportunity to exert control and agency in a situation where previously I was powerless.

It’s like the option of choosing it renders it just another part of who I am instead of something that happened to me.

That distinction somehow feels vital to me.

Source: rebelmind3d

Barahona Possolo – Sweet (2013)

I love this.

Stylistically, it wouldn’t be out of pace displayed side-by-side with any of Caravaggio’s biblical paintings. (In fact, there would be a reasonably interesting paper comparing/contrasting the influence of both Caravaggio (with a distinction between his biblical vs mythological work) and Klimt‘s paintings after 1900 in Possolo’s work.)

Granted, such explicitly suggestive depictions don’t really exist in the Western Art Historical Canon. There certainly aren’t rigidly errect penii in Caravaggio–however, I believe there may be a few lurking in Klimt’s criminally under-appreciated sketches.

But my point here (as well as with this blog) is there is no reason there couldn’t be/shouldn’t be graphic depictions of sex in art.

And that’s not to say this completely works. Ostensibly, the fellow on the top left is ladling honey out of one of wide mouth wine glass with a wooden spoon and letting it drip onto the engorged glans of the man on the lower left. (Note: the wine glass bears more than a passing resemblance reminds me to a similar object in Vermeer’s The Wine Glass.)

On the right half of the frame, you have the exuberantly performative excitement/delight of the guy on the top and the transfixed and lets be honest clearly thirsty AF woman on the lower right.

Some of the other facets are much more difficult to decode. Like–there’s a feeling that all the men in the image are aware of each other but the woman seems oblivious to everything except the honey marinated hard-on. (Let’s be honest, that is the locus here.) This conjecture is at least supported by the strange elf like ears all the men have.

I’m not really sure what the bumble bee on the woman’s flank indicates either–given the context of the image it seems it could speak to her sexuality and contrast that against the seeming ambiguity of the elf-eared ones; yet if that’s the case there are potential ways in which it could be interpreted that the image erases gay, lesbian and bisexual women. (And that’s not ever cool.)

But what really strikes me about this image–and like so much of the way my brain works this isn’t an association I would have made if I hadn’t read this article several days ago–the way he of the honey slicked dick breaks the fourth wall reminds me of the way Robert Mapplethorpe performs a similar action in (arguably) his most notorious image. It’s as if both are saying: this is who I am. But in the case of this painting there’s an insouciance and arrogance in contrast to Mapplethorpe’s studied gravitas.

Source: possolo

Sources unknown – Titles Unknown (20XX)

I have mixed feelings about this photoset.

Part of it hinges on inclusivity. Yes, kudos for representing a panoply of sexual behavior–i.e. group sex (something by which I’ve grown increasingly fascinated) circumcised vs. uncircumcised, shaved vs. unshaved and oral/vaginal/anal.

But the problem becomes more glaring because of the inclusion of the lesbian scene. I’m not opposed to spread-so-wide-the-viewer-can-see-the-urethra shots; but I can’t shake the fact that this is essentially a lipstick lesbian scene–like so much of things pertaining to depiction of lesbian culture–played out in a way which appropriates a portion of the spectrum of female sexuality that notably has fuck all to do with men and stages it as yet another location for male pleasure.

I’ve started to draft a modification based upon this set where I replace the lesbian image with this image–because it would fit aesthetically–but also it just seems more legitimately about documenting pleasure than the appropriation of pleasure as aesthetic.

Then I’d also need to add at least one image to combat the stifling heteronormativity–probably something like this.

However, in doing that you lose something of the charm of the photoset–which is probably the entire reason I ever noticed it in the first place.

Excepting the retro looking sixth image from the top there’s something approaching consistency in image quality. I won’t for a second argue that it looks like all the images were made by one person. (There’s at least a hundred reasons that’s not the case.)

Yet, the images do feature–across the board–one of two things: a sort of surrender to extremity of sensation or a loving attention to detail. For example: the way she’s reaching behind her head to stroke his side in the second image, the way the visible top quarter of his member is covered with the sheen of her juices in the third image, the way it she’s trying to catch every last drop in the fourth image, the bracelet on her right hand in the fifth frame, the way she’s trying to do all the things at once in the sixth image, the visible bubbly spit in the seventh image, her tongue, its piercing and her expression in the eighth image and the way the angle of the light accentuates the texture of her skin in the tenth picture.

And I guess what it boils down to is not only that these are all scenes that I think warrant more expansive consideration but I also feel there exactly the sort of stuff that would provide a solid grounding for an examination of how documenting people fucking in explicit and graphic ways is hardly antithetical to Capital-A Art.

Also–the longer I run this blog–the less out-and-out porn I consume. But when I do consume it, I want it to present sex as anything but rote or by the numbers. I’m interesting in consensual experimentation and extremity.

Laurent Benaim – Title Unknown (20XX)

This is an ambitious photo. Nine people–five men, two women and two others of indeterminate gender beyond the frame edge boundary–focused on pleasing one woman.

There are two prominent compositional strategies working here:

First, the image can essentially be divided along a diagonal axis (lower left to upper right); this renders a dark side (upper left) and light side (lower right); within this there is, of course, a sort of yin and yang where light portions in the dark half and vice versa more or less balance each other out.

Second, since any three non-co-linear points can form a vertices of a triangle, heads–and to a lesser extent limbs–imply suggested re-framings.

You’ll note that these implicit triangles favor directing the viewers gaze to what’s happening between her legs as opposed to emphasizing the expression on her face–which appears strangely resigned to the proceedings.

I almost want to give credit for effort seeing as how within this triangulation there is a calculated inversion of the light and dark that over-arches the composition–the dark hair vs bright faces and how this shuttles the gaze around the photo.

However, the angular dynamics are undercut by the fact that the frame is essentially centered on the woman’s crotch. (A slightly wider angle of view or a shift in frame that centered on either the woman kissing her left thigh or her right knee would make this more logical consistent.)

Yet, despite the fact that looking at this too long makes my pubococcygeus muscle clench because of the visual overstimulation, I do really like that fact that although this is explicit, it isn’t graphic; there is no visible private bits.

And I do really love the way the woman in the upper half of the frame has latched onto the main woman’s nipple while just to her left someone out of frame has the main woman’s wrist pinned to the floor.

Source: laurentbenaim

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

My first partner loved the show Friends.

At the time, it seemed like a fair trade off. She’d ‘suffer’ through the latest von Trier or the odd early Bresson and in return I’d hold her while she giggled at the vapid banality of Joey and Chandler. (With hindsight, I definitely got the short end of the stick, but…)

There’s this one episode where the white cis men discover that they are getting free porn via their cable provider. They think it’s a stroke of luck but as things progress they begin questioning how it effects their perception of reality. If I remember correctly, Chandler mentions how while interacting with a teller at the bank, she never offered to take him back to the vault and seduce him.

It’s a knee-jerk, made-for-sitcom parsing of the ethics of porn w/r/t gender representation. But it does suggest a point (to me at least) that I feel is worth exploring; namely: whether the frame is an edge or a boundary.

In the case of the porn that Chandler and Ross were consuming, the frame is an edge. It is separated, so much as to be cut off from reality. However, due to the non-critical consumption–this fantastical representation of a reality that is at a remove from the one either inhabit, they begin to question why their world isn’t like the one they spend the most time considering.

In other words, when you spend too long studying a world unlike the world in which you live (without keeping in mind the fact that you are watching a discrete fantasy), you begin to note discrepancies.

However, some work–and the above image definitely fits in this category–where the frame is a boundary not an edge; a broader reality exists outside the frame. There aren’t people with stock, archetypal designations acting on sets. There are reminders that there are people, places and things beyond the limited view provided to the audience.

This is cool because there’s more hinted at beyond the frame’s boundaries. There are at least 5 people in this scene. Likely six, including the person taking the picture. (And the proximity to the action of the camera person, suggests that they are a participant in the proceedings.)

I love that the one guy is wearing stockings–which note have clearly been pulled on and off enough times that their is a rip opening in the left thigh–and cowboy boots. His scrotum is clearly still irritated from being recently shaved. And the hand that is presumably tracing it’s way up the right arm of the woman eyeing the camera. It all speaks to both the immediacy and intimacy of the moment but also that it exists within the context of a broader world beyond the outer boundary of the frame.

Source: futursx