group sex – Page 4 – Acetylene Eyes

Take Me To Your Bedroom – Untitled from A Bottle of White series (201X)

From the outset, I should mention that I have way, waay too many feels about this image to approach it critically. There are a number of things that in all probability are highly problematic with this frame–but I’m not really able to go there.

Why? Well, where to even begin…

I flat out do not understand why the parameters for being ‘normal’ and ‘well-adjusted’ so frequently demand a sort of pre-dissociative state. It’s like this is the compartment where my work experiences go, so let me put on my work person-mask and get down to tit. Oh, this is the cubbyhole where my personal experiences go, let me put on my personal person-mask. We are ourselves perpetually for the time between our mothers and some maggots, why are we so damned and all fired determined to equivocate?

I know it’s not always that simple to dodge such equivocation. I mean consider our language. What percentage of our words describe visual stimulus? There’s words referencing a spectrum of light to dark, the totality of color, texture, etc. With sound we have a widely varied set of linguistic indicators–but (and I don’t know this for certain, I’m merely thinking out loud) there’s probably half the available words that describe what we hear than the total of words to name what we see. Smell and taste being a physiological response with overlap, feature much of the same language–which again is only a fraction of the total available sound describing words. When we get down to touch–what’s left: hot, cold, dry, wet, hard, soft, rough and smooth, essentially.

I know there are exceptions and that I am committing the most grievous sin of generalizing here but it feels like we use this sort of either or dichotomy when it comes to touch as a means of ordering shades and tonalities that do exist between extremes but are very difficult to fit to words.

For example: it’s very difficult to express concern, empathy and sympathy to someone who is grieving. We reach for stupid cliches–I’m sorry for your loss. How the fuck can you be–the nature of my feeling of loss is goddamn singular you fatherfucker! That’s part of what sucks so much is it’s a burden that only one person can carry.

I know there’s the whole sexist society coloring things as far as the experience of physical things go–the bullshit virgin whore dichotomy–another either/or for you. And you can’t discount that as it seeps its toxic way into everything. I’d like to think there’s another way, somehow.

It’s easy to point at monogamy and other aspects of patriarchal heteronormativity as roadblocks. And I’m aware that a counter-criticism can be leveled against me that I’m just cratchety because I am terminally unrequited. But honestly, although it’s true that I do feel terminally unrequited, I do not sit around all day bemoaning the fact that no one wants to fuck me. What frustrates me is that I almost never know the right words. I’ll frequently try to explain what I’m thinking or feeling to someone and they’ll be like, yeah, sure, I get it. And I’ll be like do you? I have no idea. With touch it’s clearer… or maybe that’s a poor way of putting it. If touch is misunderstood, the misunderstand is like a jolt of electricity–there’s no ambiguity as to whether or not things haven’t been muddled somehow.

As usual, I’m abstracting. Let me try to be concrete: during my Junior year of college was one of the three times in my life I’ve been suicidal. I was very close with my flatmates–even though I’d known not a one of them prior to moving in with them. Amadine (not her real name) had the room next to mine. I wasn’t as close with her as some the other five, but she was always staggeringly kind to me.

Everyone knew I wasn’t in a particularly good place but I think Amadine was the only one who picked up that it was actually a far worse place than I was letting on. With only maybe two exceptions, for three months, she would get up just before I was leaving for the day and stand in the hallway between me and the front door. She’s spread her arms and say sleepily: hug. And she wouldn’t budge until I complied.

The first couple of times I was furious with her. Everything about it felt manipulative. But since she always went out of her way to be so exceedingly kind, I couldn’t really justify how angry her insistence made me.

At first, she’d end up just hugging me. I refused to hug her back. She’d hold on until seconds before I felt like I might actually murder someone and then she’d step aside and let me leave.

By the end of things, I virtually lived for those morning hugs. She’d always be the last one to let go and would hold me for as long as I let her.

Her hugs weren’t passive either. She was attentive with something I can only refer to as openness and presence in the moment. Sometimes it felt as if she was trying to comfort me, other times calm me, other times still it was very clear that she felt sad and needed to feel connected to someone.

So while the polyamory/group sex implication of the image above appeals to me, what I appreciate most about it is the emphasis on touch and the ambiguity as to whether or not it’s merely intended as physical or if it’s also sexual (and if it is the latter, the openness to reciprocation absent any expectation for it.)

I’d like to be this open about myself, my body and my desires with those who matter to me. There are just for me times that words will always fail to convey what a touch (simple, sexual or otherwise) can. Sometimes you need to hug, be hugged, slap or be slapped, kiss and be kissed, come and be made to come. It doesn’t have to be about romance or love or lust, it can just be a profound need to communicate something in a way that is immediate and entirely clear.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (19XX)

I’d have posted this because it’s solely one of the most creative positions I’ve ever seen.

And yes, it’s a textbook example of #skinnyframebullshit due to the diminution of the overall context; namely, the ostensibly male legs protruding into the lower left third of the frame seem to suggest this is a group sex scenario transpiring in some teenage parental basement recast as an after school late-60’s rock and roll shangri la.

Then there’s the young woman’s breathtaking expression: a blissed out surrender to overwhelming stimulus, mind-expanding chemicals amplifying the almost magical ability music has to vibrate the soul raised to a level of transcendent crescendos of physical pleasure.

I’m actually extremely curious as to the photographer responsible for this. I’d likely disagree with him on a number of technical considerations, but this single image causes me to suspect he probably considered the pleasure motivating the performance to be the point; not the other way round.

Come to think of it: add pleasure over performance to remember empathy to my list of commandments for pornographers.

[↖] Rus Khasanov – clip from Pacific Light music video (2013); [↗] John B. Root – still from Girl’s Fun (2009); [↙] Source unknown – Title Unknown (XXXX); [↘] Rus Khasanov – clip from Pacific Light music video (2013)

Ejaculation as fluid dynamics: proof of concept.

FeminismoPornoPunk – Documentary still from Public domain porn version (2008)

Catalan Theater Directory Roger Bernat staged Public Domain in 2007. The underlying notion being to eliminate the audience/actor distinction.

[Public Domain] is (like) a life-size board game in which the spectator is more than just a pawn. Theatre-maker Roger Bernat assembles a group of people – the audience – on a square. Who are they, where do they come from and what is their relationship to each other? They walk across the square while listening to a series of questions and instructions on their headphones. Some are more innocent than others. The same can’t be said for the result; through the participants’ simple movements, small groups start to form in the audience. These micro communities expose underlying social patterns and tell a tale that Bernat carefully orchestrates. While [Public Domain] starts off looking like a 3D poll brought to life, the project ends up transforming into a bizarre fiction.

Maria Llopis reimagined Bernat’s concept as DIY porn for the Beatriz Preciado curated Arteleku in Donostia, Spain one year later.

…

I’m an extremely sexual person. However, I’m also aware that as someone who passes for straight, white and cismale–although I would never claim any of those terms in self-identification–I experience a degree of privilege.

As someone who passes, it’s assumed that I fit squarely into the cismale heteronormative default. I don’t though. I care very much for others’ autonomy in self-identification but the truth is I’ve never found label words especially useful. About the only label I don’t dispute is the distinct of being a ‘switch’ on the D/s spectrum.

It’s difficult to lack a readily available means of expression. On the one hand I want to distinguish myself from what I may be perceived as being by others. But how do I do that in a way that isn’t appropriative at the same time as also not being entirely fucked up and entitle?

I can’t say I’ve discovered anything that works. But I have definitely learned the importance of safe spaces–and not just safe spaces for me but spaces that are safe for myself and inclusive and safe for others, too.

At present this fits the form of a tweak to the ubiquitous Golden Rule: do unto others only as the would of their own free will and volition do unto you. (Being that I am on the autism spectrum, this isn’t the most effective coping mechanism…)

The above image suggests several things:

I can’t look at this and not flashback to that scene in The East where the anarchist kids are playing spin the bottle. It strikes me that there’s huge overlap between that space in the one above; an emphasis on intimacy, connection and using consent and negotiation/re-negations to test/push through largely arbitrary boundaries. (It’s also enormously helpful–not to mention fucking wonderful–that The East includes a queer perspective!)
It also reminds me of Stranger by the Lake (a great film for it’s artfully graphic depictions of gay sex and is currently streaming via Netflix). With the world growing increasingly compartmentalized, sex is everywhere but unless you are a multinational corporation or resemble the board of said multinational corporation–whether or not you have access to similar mountains of cash in your private life–there is increasingly no viable venue for safely and consensually engaging with sex on a non-conceptual, tangible level. I think the idea of creating such space is important. But it’s hardly new. The LGBTQAAI community has fought tooth and nail to create such spaces.

This relates to the above image insofar as it is very clearly a safe space, concerned with sexual expression that insists on equal space for queerness.

It also doesn’t feel as if it’s about exhibitionism. That’s a huge thing for me. I am hardly shy. Truth told, there’s like maybe three things I would never consider doing in front of a camera. But I am not an exhibitionist. I don’t have any sort of problem with exhibitionists. But I am not happy with my body. However, for better or worse, my sexuality is tied to the body I have. (I regret very little in life but I wish that I’d done something like appear on I Feel Myself–although they probably wouldn’t take me and I’d have to do something more in line with Gentleman Handling, unfortunately… stupid biologically male body.)

I wish I knew where I could find spaces like the ones this image points toward. I would love to be able to express my sexuality more openly in a fashion that was neither intrusive or entitled.I wish there were more spaces like this–focused on rejecting mass marketed fantasies and instead projecting DIY ethos and creating for ourselves the truthful and open spaces for complicated expression we most want to see in the world.

Interesting, the lack of such space is perhaps the biggest obstacle I face in my own creative work. i patently object to the myth of the rock star photographer. I think the vast majority of Tumblr photographers (good or bad) use fine art nude photographer as a pretext to appropriately channel sexual energy. I have an immense problem with that–not in and of itself but if that’s really your goal then at least be up front about it.

I love looking at naked bodies just as much as the next person. But I am more interested in the correlation between you and your body–with particular emphasis on your negotiation of your own sexuality. I want to ask what turns you on–not as any kind of prelude so much as I find it endlessly, almost transcendentally intriguing to understand how someone else experiences something that profoundly moves them. I’m curious as to what their experience of puberty was like, how they masturbate, whether or not they’d be comfortable with showing me? Is it okay if I show them?

I can’t approach photography except as collaboration between equals. The subject has just as much of a stake in things as does the photographer. And as far as my own work goes, what affects me is conveying something of the highs and lows, the narrative of what it is to be a being with a carefully considered inner life, hopes dreams and aspirations but who is also tied to an inconvenient simultaneously autonomous and desiring body.

It seems simple enough but it goes back to the question of would the person I am asking realistically ask the same in return from me. So far my life so far has demonstrated the answer is a resounding no.

Source Unknown

The composition here is certainly not The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp; but at least it’s thoughtful enough to present a legible staging: 16 seemingly male-bodied persons in 4 groups–3 threesomes & 2 couplings.

There are:

4 instances of fellatio
2 handjobs
1 soixante-neuf situation, and
1 occasion of anal penetration.

It is unclear what the gent whose stroked erection marks the center of the frame is doing with his hands between his two attendants legs. (Cradling their testicles? Fingering their asses?)

And I can’t help thinking that the photographer must have had some decent art historical chops due to the pose of the fellow who is licking the reclining gent in the white shirt’s scrotum, is too much like Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus to be accidental.

Further this isn’t the worst example of the whole proximity/participation thing I am always kvetching about w/r/t close-ups.

Yes, the camera hung back to front load explicit content into the frame. But that’s probably less due to an aesthetic concern than a a necessity borne of limitation– i.e. scarcity of equipment/skill required for its operation.

Take a minute to consider each of the 4 groups independent of the others–again the composition makes this fairly easy to accomplish. What would close-up really add? Reducing the totality to a metonymy of explicit action. Does that add anything? Does seeing the sheen of saliva on an stiff cock bestow some kind of hyper-real synesthetic sensory stimuli?

Whereas in a wider shot bodies not only move in relation to each other, they retain evidence of being ground in their particular form of life.

letmedothis:

saw a crappy screenshotted version of this photo I originally uploaded.
Don’t understand why someone would do it that way.

A wide-oh mouth spreading vents vocalizations to stem rising tide as if moans lessen the straining pressure. The protruding angle of wedged elbow hinge and the shift of wrist raise strange and secret maritime Braille poems between yawing thighs. Another arm stretches to press a finger into parted lips up to the second joint.

…

The first pornography I saw was a gift for my fourteenth birthday from Charlie.

A year younger than me, Charlie was really Kyle’s friend. Despite our parents efforts to ensure their kids maintained our own non-redundant age-appropriate friends, Charlie and I were thick as thieves.

So when I demanded a miniature golf/slumber party birthday celebration, Charlie and I finagled getting him invited over the same night to keep Kyle from feeling neglected.

Charlie had discovered his father’s stash of girlie magazines and he had cut out an assortment of images from the few he had managed to steal.

Except for being fourteen instead of ten or eleven, it was entirely prosaic.

That’s why I claim my second experience with pornography as my true first.

….

Every summer my parents invariably got sick of us not being in school and would hand off Kyle and I to whomever would take us. And despite Charlie being the kid who all the parents considered to be deeply troubled, his folks were always willing to host a rowdy bunch of teenagers.

Also, it didn’t hurt that Charlie’s older sister Caitlyn was just a few year’s older than me. Granted she was boy crazy cheerleader who wanted to be a vet and made a point of volunteering at an animal hospital four days a week. But even though we had nothing in common, I never disabused my mom of the notion that we were friendly.

After all getting scuttled at Charlie’s was generally held to be the best thing ever. And with Caitlyn giving me a wide berth, Charlie’s folks being so permissive and the fact that I could have as much privacy as I wanted or be one of the boys depending on my mood was thrilling.

On the second to last day of our stay, Charlie convinced Kyle and I to accompany him to a place he called The Fort. We got all the necessary gear together: Charlie grabbed a box of shells and his dad’s shotgun. I was assigned the Daisy BB pistol which consumed CO₂ cartridges at roughly the same rate we consumed Mountain Dew.

Kyle wasn’t happy I got the pistol. And he actually had a point. I was hand’s down the best shot with it—able to hit a grape at thirty feet; but I had constructed a shockingly functional shoulder holster from some RJ-11 wire we’d found discarded.

Kyle, against bitter and vociferous objections ended up stuck with the rifle.

We set out across the back yard toward the woods lining the property.

The trek itself was mild to moderately pastoral with some Appalachian grace notes thrown in for good measure. We climbed fences, crawled along a fallen tree over a lazy creek.

We only stopped once.

We’d been angling through a rolling meadow when I spotted to Jersey cows staring at us from behind a barbed wire fence maybe sixty feet from us. Charlie saw them too and handed me the shotgun, motioning for holstered pistol.

I handed it over and watching him draw a bead down the barrel on the rightmost cow, fired—a whiz-click sound; missing high and right. He reloaded before firing again: a palpable hit. The cow didn’t seem to mind.

Charlie handed the pistol back wordlessly communicating: your turn. He reclaimed the heavy shotgun. I raised the pistol, aimed, breathed in deeply, halfway out and squeezed the trigger. The cow snorted and shook her brown head so I fired again.

I passed the pistol to Kyle who for all his pissing before now wanted nothing to do with it. Charlie was adamant he take a shot. Knowing Charlie we wouldn’t have gone a step further until Kyle at the very least shot in the direction of the cows if the darkening of the sky along the horizon didn’t so thoroughly telegraph the approach of a gathering storm.

The Fort, as it turned out, was less northing more and nothing less than a northeastern style farmstead, its wood panel exterior warped and waterlogged. It been white at one point; however, the paint had long since fallen away, revealing the ugly wasp daub grey siding. Scorch marks spread char-black up and out from the second-story windows.

Inside, there was only enough drywall left to imply the boundaries between rooms. Charlie headed upstairs, my brother trailing after him.

I moved room to room. But with the exception of dead leaves piled in corners, discarded beer cans and a grime-matted mauve hoodie ground into the floor beside a mangy, dust-encrusted mattress there was nothing to see.

The stairs sighed under my weight. And I heard a faint hissing, like rain against the side of the house as I climbed.

The stairs opened onto a picture window which Charlie stood centered in facing out. I realized the sound wasn’t rain; he was pissing out the window.

The second floor was completely open end-to-end: charred floor, rafters and dead light drifting dustily in through a handful of dormer windows.

Charlie’s stream of urine ebbed then stopped.

He turned away from the window; I looked away down the length of the open room where a dozen plus knee high stacks littered the floor.

I approached the nearest stack. A bespectacled young girl—too young?—smiled up at me; her glasses and face were lined with thick, white fluid. A second before what I was looking at dawned on me, I realized this girl bore a startling resemblance to a classmate on who I had an outsize crush. This girl had the same glasses, same playfully innocent smile and nearly flat chest.

The other stacks revealed comparable material, a hodge-podge of hardcore mainstays (Hustler, Stag, Swank) as well as more off-beat fare with highly questionable legality (i.e.70’s vintage Color Climax).

I was in a daze and it Charlie a minute to take a green object from him.

The object consisted of a thin, green scarf carefully wrapped around something square-ish. I unfolded the top two flaps, followed by the two beneath it to reveal a stack of Polaroids.

The first two were only clear enough to offer a general impression of what was depicted: high school kids having sex on the ratty mattress downstairs.

However, the focus in the third image was stunningly crisp: a girl, maybe fourteen, naked except for an open, button front shirt, cradled by a second girl—naked except for panties—who crouched beside her. The second girl’s left nipple was pinched tightly between the first’s bone-white teeth. The cradled girl’s right elbow was clasped behind her knee. The fingers on the second girl’s right hand where laced together with the first girl as she helped her hold her knees wide for the naked boy between them. The cradled girl’s right held the boy’s cock, covering the head; a forked trail led from a small pearlescent pool on her abdomen—the longest branch stretching across her flat chest to just below her supersternal notch.

With the angle of view the second girl and boy’s body formed an ellipsis framing the first girl.

I was too overwhelmed by what I saw to discern whether or not I liked it. Not knowing how I felt about what I had seen made me profoundly uncomfortable.

I flipped through all the Polaroids once before wrapping them up and handing them back to Charlie. His expression asked what I thought. The roar in my ears was deafening, I couldn’t think so I ran down the stairs and out of the house.

Outside, I circled the building aimlessly. I picked up a black spray pain can. Stood it on a white rock Grabbed the pistol, shot, reloaded, shot again until the can spewing the rabid black foam.

The boys were inside for a while. But before we headed home, Charlie took the pistol from me and gave it to Kyle. Who in turn offered me the rifle but clutching the shotgun, Charlie advised him that it was better if he held onto both.

With each step, my wire holster swung awkward and empty against my body.

…

In my life, maybe half-dozen things have caused such overwhelming sexual arousal as that third. It wasn’t just that I felt an affinity for the content and or the execution hauntingly beautiful; what got me was the openness.

Keep in mind that at my Xtian high school admitting to suffering any sort of sexual appetite let along a non-standard deviant one was forbidden. Anyone who even intimated as much was castigated.

And while I have no way of knowing how matters turned out for the people in that Polaroid, I believe with all my heart, mind and soul that sharing that kind of intimacy with others is the only truly sacred thing in this world.

It’s like asking: is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night? But instead of telling about it, you take the questioner by the hand and show them your answer.

Source: letmedothis.com