Tag: lesbian

Anonymous – Two women engaged in oral sex (c. 1895)

With the invention of the daguerrotype in 1839, photography was
enlisted in the production of pornography. By the 1880s, when
developments in photographic technology brought cameras into the
middle-class home, amateurs could produce not only their own portraits
and snapshots but also the means of their own arousal. This pocket-sized
photograph is one of some 50,000 erotic images – professional and
amateur – that pioneer sexologist Dr Alfred Kinsey began to collect in
the late 1930s, working with difficulty around obscenity laws and codes
of ‘public’ morality. Taken not in a conventional studio but in a homey
Victorian bedroom, this representation of cunnilingus was probably
intended for illicit heterosexual male consumption, though one hopes
that at least a few women managed to put it to good use. The woman
sitting demurely on the bed wears an apron, indicating that male
fantasies about the sexual availability of domestic servants was
operative in the production of the image. Unlike in most erotic
photographs of the period, the face of the sitting women has been
crudely blacked out.

–Catherine Lord, Art & Queer Culture (New York: Phaidon, 2013), 59.

(via @lesbianartandartists​)

Source: lesbianartandartists

Author unknown – Title Unknown (192X?)

Things I like about this:

  1. The corner of the room behind the divan at the left edge of the frame;
  2. The wallpaper,
  3. The way genitals in encircled by open mouth a smidgen north of the exact center of the frame;
  4. The garter with white bow relieving the black stocking of weight that would’ve otherwise unbalanced the composition;
  5. The way she’s looking at the camera;
  6. The eye moves over this in a very interesting fashion–left to right (taking in the tableau), upon reaching the right edge, there is a much more forcible momentum right to left–the backward trajectory reinforces the joining of bodies and then the angle of her hear and the downward jutting of her right arm creates this whipping loop where the viewer’s gaze cycles counter clockwise from arm, through rump, through the nexus of connection again and again.
  7. Zoom in close and you’ll see that the sort of silver highlights throughout the image are actually a result of where fingers pressed into the emulsion leaving the oily residue of fingerprint.

Lastly, a counterpoint on the why the eye parses this frame: there is no sense that there is a continuity beyond the edge of the frame, thus the exclusion of the woman on the left’s right forearm and hand represents an amputation, a symbolical removal of autonomous agency. (Her foot is similarly maimed.) No matter the cleverness of the way the work cycles the gaze–these women are definitely meant to perform for the male gaze.)

Source: oldtimepleasure

Source unknown – Title unknown (19XX)

Homoerotic imagery in
the visual arts has historically been hidden, destroyed, and censored –
so too the documentation of artists’ sexuality when that includes the
possibility of same-sex relationships…
Documentary evidence of a person’s sexual activities is, in many cases,
rare, regardless of the personal’s sexual orientation. In the face of
little or no information, everyone is assumed to be heterosexual unless
proved otherwise. When asked Can you prove she was lesbian? why do we
not respond, Can you prove she wasn’t?
                   — Jim Van Buskirk, “Between the Lines: The Often Fruitless Quest for Gay and Lesbian Materials,” Art Documentation 11, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 167-170, 167. (via lesbianartandartists)               

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[↑] neverlaandss – start somewhere (2015); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [-] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [←] Boris Demur – Poem Flag of Spiral Deterministic Chaos in Spiral Yin Yang from Spiral Poems of a Flag series (20XX); [→] Carlos Cruz Diez – Title unknown (20XX); [_] theworldwithinthewords – for more than this is mind #12 (2017); [↖] Michael Storyteller – Stuck in the middle again (2015); [↗] Le Cam Romain – aida & jordan, paris (2015); [↙] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X) [↘] X-Art – In the Blind feat. Little Caprice (2014) … [↑] Source unknown – Title unknown feat. yhivi (201X); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↓] Jonas Mekas –  As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

The way I use Tumblr is that I follow the blogs I follow and once every day I scan my dash until I get to the point where I start repeating stuff from the previous day. I like what I like as I go.

On weekends, I treat my Likes page as if it were a smaller version of my daily dash and I pull from that into Drafts.

What governs the decision to save something to drafts is almost always more of a feeling of “I need to showcase this post” more than any notion of having something structured to say about it, as it were laying there ready made in my brain.

Frequently, things make it into Drafts and I just can’t figure out what to say about them or where exactly they fit.

The above started as an effort to clear out my drafts–which is beginning to become downright cumbersome to manage. It was strictly a counting exercise. One person. Two people. Three people. Then it morphed and became not exactly storyboards but sort of a loose thumbnail index of some sort of artsy porn video.

(A digression on process. I am not in a good place right now–mental health-wise. It’s actually really bad. I feel like I have nothing really to say about anything. It’s partly that my head is a mess. And partly that it’s becoming more and more clear that my ability to express myself sexually with another human is no longer something I have recourse to in this life. Whatever. Sucks to be me, I know–but what this exercise has demonstrated to me is that there is some merit to the creative advice that you just have to force yourself to sit down and do the work. I do think there’s some truth to the idea that sitting down and staring at a blank page for eight hours day in and day out is actually very detrimental. But I think it takes a while before you get to that point–like maybe three days. The problem is we frequently won’t sit down because we expect the outcome will be negative. You gotta make time to do the work.)

Anyway, I won’t argue that what I’ve stitched together here is good or even interesting but it did suggest several thoughts.

I wonder what the ratio is of production of pornographic vs Hollywood features  in any given year? Probably at least 10-1 (porn to features), right? That’s a lot of content. I wonder why more artists don’t use it.

I mean I know some do. There’s those memes where you take porn scenes and photoshop over them so it looks like a starlet is eating an ice cream cone instead of fellating some stud. (Or, if you prefer things more arty….check out Brian Steinhoff’s Porn for the Whole Family series.)

It’s no secret that a veritable litany of art legends hired sex workers as models. So there’s even a precedent for this sort of thinking. But what I’m interested in–and another essay I’m unlikely to ever actually get around to writing: pornography as taxonomy.

Rogier Houwen – [↑] Women Kiss (201X); [↓] Title Unknown (201X)

The second photo here dates from late 2012 at the latest. I suspect the upper photo was made around roughly the same time.

Houwen’s style has morphed–with his more recent work focusing on interrogations of photographic process and deconstruction of traditional darkroom technique. It’s not exactly original or even innovative but it’s still interesting. (For example: I unfortunately can’t access the sectors of my memory banks where the name is stored but there is a notable fine art photographer who worked in almost exactly the same vein as Houwen is now who was active primarily in the mid-aughts. That artist’s work is of a much higher quality but I still appreciate Houwen’s soulfulness–it contributes a vitality to his work that I always found lacking in the work of the hot shot photographer whose name I can no not even remember.)

I’ll stay in my lane though. Houwen’s work–at least circa the epoch of the above work–is reminiscnet of Patricio Suarez. Not how both skew darker in terms of dynamic range and both feature a strong preference for backlighting. (This allows them to do some fascinating things with the boundaries between shadow and light, i.e. the way the woman in the lower photo above is separated from the background by a halo of mid-tones around her right shoulder, neck, hair and back.)

It’s not exactly correct but I think the difference has something to do with the raison d’etre for the photo. In Suarez’s case the photo is indicative of a feeling–the chicken hatches the egg. Whereas with Houwen, the feeling is the egg from which the chicken hatches.

Steven Meisel + Bruce Weber – Safe Sex Is Hot Sex campaign (1990)

Generally speaking, I am loathe to take taxis. My legs aren’t broken and with enough time I can walk just about anywhere I’m inclined to go. (Or, I can walk to a subway that will then take me to where I want to go.)

Recently, thought my flight got in super late and I had to be at work at 7am the next morning–so I cabbed it. Since I don’t take taxis, I don’t know if it’s just a NYC thing but the cab played this like 7 minute loop of commercials again and again.

One of them was an anti-drug campaign encouraging parents to talk to their kids about drugs. The premise was these teens in idyllic teen settings being–ostensibly–teens before asking the camera overly earnest questions about drugs.

The only reason I even noticed the commercials was because I was seeing it for like the fifth time. And like the third time I saw it, I’d remembered how it occurred to me late last year exactly how appallingly racist a lot of the anti-drug propaganda was in the mid-to-late 80s.

So it was through that filter that I saw the commercial and I realized something about almost all anti-drug adverts: their bread and butter is conflating drug use and drug abuse (two linguistically distinct terms–and that’s for a reason).

When you see things that way there’s only one option: eradication and selling that entails an abstinence only message. (Anyone who’s bothered to do any research into methods of decreasing drug use and abuse, knows the only statistically proven means of accomplishing this is through emphasizing harm reduction/education.)

But there’s more to it than all of that. The thing that struck me about the commercial I saw in the cab was that the kids in it were impossibly uncool. Like I remember seeing ads of this ilk when I was a teen and I just thought they were normal kids like me.

Yet watching the commercial I was like–these kids are lame as fuck. There’s this charmed naivete that each almost certainly had to be coached by the director to achieve. The notion that nothing bad ever happens in this world, nothing ever hurts and that if you trust in society’s virtue, you will be rewarded. And that’s just–such bullshit.

It’s not that abstinence (whether referring to drugs or sexuality) is a bad thing, it’s just how folks are or aren’t wired. The notion that if you teach someone about something they are more likely to do it is such rubbish. Education allows you to make more informed choices–it’s that simple.

And that’s what I love about these ads. Instead of being like sex is scary and should be avoided their like: sex is awesome, have as much as you can but be safe. It’s refreshing to see someone get it right for once.

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

Regardless of what you think of my notion of #skinnyframebullshit, there is never, under any circumstances, ever any justification for capturing video in portrait orientation. None. Period. End of story.

That I’m giving this a pass should signal just how amazing I find this clip in spite of the shitty execution and poor quality this is one of those rare moments when porn bothers to show not only how I like to fuck but how I like to be fucked (and in the same video, OMFG). But it also makes me feel seen and like my sexuality isn’t just something that’s impossibly inconvenient to 96% of the rest of the world.

Also, trying not to come, coming anyway and then being so at the mercy of your feelings and connection with the other person(s) that there’s no time for  a break or respite and you end up coming again quickly and with such force that you literally feel the strain from how hard you clenched up for days afterwards.

Swoon. (To whoever made this–thank you. Also, please keep making stuff like this. It matters.)

Chunae – Title unknown (2017)

There are hundreds of reasons I LOVE these two illustrations.

The first image recalls Tammy Rae Carland’s Lesbian Beds series. So that’s automatically #AllTheFeels territory.

But the attention to detail is just so beyond on fleek in these.

Let’s just start with the first image. Note: the pictures on the walls. Two of the two women as a couple. The no smoking sign. The succulent on the window sill. The slippers toe-to-toe. The discarded socks. The position of the cat. The iPhone on the night table.

Everything is so perfectly balanced between an idealized, stylish living space that is just lived in enough to not appear staged.

The second image is less economical but offers two additional bits of information. These women are married–that’s them in their wedding gowns on the wall. Also, the brunette is supportive of the blond’s creative streak. (Also note how the light from the window casts their shadows against the far wall.)

Sequentially, I’d wager that the second image came first but I prefer it the way I have it here because for me I feel like you have the have the intimacy suggested by the first image for the sharing of space and time to be as meaningful as it appears in the second image.

Also, to use the vernacular: this is #goals for me. Maybe one day I won’t be so irrevocably alone. (Probably not though.)