Tag: oral sex

Peter Hujar – The Piers (198X)

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.”
—Jose Muñoz

I apologize in advance: this will be scattered. But by attempting to get at something I don’t really have any idea how to say, I’m fighting against my default setting of shying away from the prospect of saying things poorly and making a cluster fuck of everything.

The above quote came to my attention a little over a month ago when Andy Wachowski came out as Lilly. (The statement she released is exceptional and very much worth the read.)

Like any truly revelatory insight, Muñoz admonition has never really drifted much further than the periphery of my thoughts since then. I’ve thought about it as Republican controlled state legislatures enact hateful and hypocritical legislation against LGBTQ folk–or, as I think of them: my people.

A good number of these laws are couched with a simple premise–protecting religious liberty. Nevermind the fact that religious freedom is firmly and irrevocably protected by the first damn amendment of the constitution. Nevermind that these strictures are specifically designed to protect those who would chose to pervert their religious beliefs as a means of justifying indecency and bigoted hatefulness towards those with whom they disagree.

If one examines this impetus from the standpoint of armchair psychology, it’s easy to dismiss hate as a defense mechanism against engaging with difficult questions regarding individual agency, institutional sexism/homophobia, what the fuck notions of gender and sexuality actually entail in theory and/or practice.

I don’t buy this perspective. If nothing else that famous study that Chomsky was involved in where he suggested that with the depth and complexity of the ability of your average everyman to engage with sports statistics suggests that the galling lack of familiarity with world politics among the average citizen has less to do with any inherent ability and more to do with a lack of engagement.

This is something I encounter frequently with my family–who are all very conservative if not also fervently religious.

For example: my mom and I argue all the time about this or that consideration. Invariably, she adopts the stance that the end of the world is nearing and there’s nothing to do but get right with ‘God’.

I think that’s really the larger problem. The focus of so many people is on the destination–instead of the journey. So many folks are innured with this belief that a life of piety leads to eternal reward.

It’s not that I don’t buy that–being raised in an Evangelical Xtian milieu really programmed some fucked up shit into my head that I’ve had a hard time completely shaking; no, it’s more that I object to the lack of personal agency and responsibly this perspective seems to very nearly universally foster.

But what does any of this have to do with Hujar’s photography?

I think it’s easy to dismiss his work as hedonistic and transgressive for the sake of transgression (not that the later is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself). Yet to do so, seems to be to miss an opportunity to study the world through someone else’s eyes.

There’s an unflinching, non-judgmental immediacy to Hujar’s work. The ugly, the beautiful, the graphic, the mundane–and always a reverential quality to the gaze, employed with rigorous consistency across the work.

Hujar always manages to find the few glowing embers scattered among the ashes–not unlike the mythical phoenix.

…

Finally–on a personal note: I’m extremely interested in the way both Hujar and Tress use doors, apertures and other openings as a means of interrogating notions of participation vs voyeurism. Additionally, I find their impetus for exploring abandoned, ruinous locations to be starkly different from folks nowadays who seek to document similar scenes as a means of projecting an internal state externally or as a means of serving a particular tonal ambiance or aesthetic.

As someone who dabbles in urbex activities, I feel a resonance with the queer use of neglected spaces far more than I do with the glut of shooters making highly stylized nudes in empty warehouses, asylums, etc.

To me there’s something extremely gratifying about people seeking out liminal spaces to not shrug off or externalize their feelings of marginalization but to feel connection in spite of them. I may be projecting but there is something thrilling about embracing what it is to be alive and free and to stage that in an environment which so clearly exemplifies death and decay so perfectly resonates with the little death some of us pursue as a means of coming to terms with the on big death towards which we inextricably slip.

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.

The Art of Blowjob – Title unknown feat. Camille Crimson (201X)

So much of porn is an either or proposition. Gay or Straight. Softcore or Hardcore.

It’s not the extremes necessarily bother me. Sometimes I really want something like this as a ‘palette cleanser’.

Usually though I’m more like Goldilocks when it comes to porn in general and straight porn in particular–I want something that’s somewhere in the middle.

Alas, I find myself alienated more often than titillated.

That’s why I want to single this out. Depictions of oral sex in straight porn tend to be either passive and perfunctory or gag-inducing extreme irrumatio.

This appeals to me. Yeah, it does have that even illumination characteristic of porn but there’s some natural shadowing, too; but, it’s a pretty frame. (I’d have liked it even more if the camera was maybe a foot and a half back–but that’s splitting hairs.)

But the aesthetics aren’t what draws me in. What gets me is that these people seem to really want to be doing what they’re doing. He’s thrusting upward and she’s sliding downward. To be blunt–it’s representative of what sex is like when sex is at it’s best: collaborative.

Who knows if the rest of the scene continues this sort of feeling? Either way I’d still be interested in knowing where it’s from… so if anyone has any idea, please pass the info along.

Source: sex-girls-passion

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

The way I feel about the Marquis de Sade is not unlike how I feel about hentai–downright irresponsible in its extremity but at the same time relevant and necessary due to its radical openness to a dizzying spectrum of non-traditional experiences.

It’s like that infamous Terrence quote: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, or for the non-Latin kids: I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me.

Sure, that doesn’t go along way to explain tentacle sex, and I’m not going to start going out of my way to become familiar with hentai but I do feel that there’s a virtue to obsessively cataloging depravity in all it’s shapes and forms.

Yes, it’s easy to see that sort of thing as a checklist or map–a curriculum for sexual deviance. But, two counterpoints: if so, why bother–I mean isn’t the fun of it at least partly in the novelty? And, those who insufferably follow maps and extant formulas obsessively, lacks the proper imagination to truly embrace depravity.

I feel like–at its best–hentai manages to invent simple, straightforward means of depicting expressions of sexuality that are like nothing I’ve ever seen before and also vaguely synesthetic. For example, looking at this it’s almost as if I can feel it as if I were there.

Unfff.

Nobuyoshi Araki – Untitled (19XX)

After college, I moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I’m not talking McGuinness & Nassau, either. We’re talking practically under the Kosciusko Bridge.

It was a 15 minute walk to the Nassau G and either 13 or 18 (depending on traffic) to the Graham L.

By New York standards, my room was enormous. But I shared a wall with a Dave Grohl wannabe sax player who constantly practiced atonal three note arpeggios at odd hours.

I was only working part time and after commutation expenses, it was a struggle to make rent each month.

At the time, my significant other was in a similar place. We spent a lot of time walking–which really and truly is the best way to get to know this city. We’d hang out at hip bars sipping a beer between us. Anything that was free and appealed to our mutual creative predispositions was a draw. But if you’ve spent any time in this city, you know it’s not a place you want to be poor.

It took us two months to discover the New York Public Library. Not the one with the Lion’s guarding the stairs but the one that’s caddy corner and a block down. Over the next few months, we spent hours there pouring over their photography section.

We scanned work the likes of Steiglitz, Friedlander and Goldin.

Thing was–and I swear I’m circling back to the image above, hang in there–the selection lacked any sort of breadth and instead focused on an obsessive depth. The number of fucking Araki’s books exceeded a plethora to the exponent of plethora.

I remember three things about the work:

  1. An image like this except with an orange and black flower with petals more like a daisy and Araki himself squatting beside the suspended model.
  2. It was the only thing besides Goldin where sexuality figured in any denotative fashion in the photos,
  3. I preferred Goldin even though I found her work exploitative.

My opinion w/r/t Goldin has evolved rather dramatically; my thinking w/r/t Araki has, yes, shifted but it’s less pronounced and far more complicated to explain.

See: on a purely formal level his work is on-point. His compositions are impeccably executed and his work is hugely influential: would Wolfgang Tillmans be a name anyone knew if Araki hadn’t shot highly styles hair and eyes? Probably not. (Also, the shit he shoots that subtly skewers skewers fake sets in high profile fashion shoots–looking at you, Tim Walker–are about as good as polemical provocations get.)

I can’t even really argue that Araki should pursue more aggressive edits. If he’s published it, it’s almost certainly publication worthy. My primary continued objection to his work (beyond the aggressive heteronormativity of it) has to do–synchronously enough–with an idea I encountered more or less concurrent with my first encounter with the work: William Ian Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust. In it he attempts to analyze why humans experience feelings of disgust.

One of his points is that profusion is–almost counter-intuitively–a potential locus for disgust. I don’t completely recall the rational underlying this assertion but it absolutely serves in application to my queasiness regarding Araki: there’s too much that’s too good.

The thing that’s especially galling is the fact that almost seems to be the point of the exercise. And I’m no less sure how I feel about that now than I did eight years ago.

Source: about-eli

Molhada & Quente – Untitled (2014)

I’ve mentioned my fascination with depictions of ejaculation several times. Mostly it’s the synesthesia wherein watching ejaculation results in a sympathetic resonance. Even without that freezing the essentially random trajectories and their illustrative fluid dynamics is just fucking endlessly intriguing to me. (Further, I think due to the customary highfalutin pretense of fine art photography wanting to explore questions of pornography without being pornographic has caused ejaculation to be a woefully under explored photographic motif.)

I have mixed feelings about the above image. On the con side of things:

  • the close-up framing diminishes contextual clues as to locations and circumstances
  • in tandem with the shallow, low contrast tonal range there is an even further disjunction from interpretable visual cues–rendering the image little more than blow job on a beach.
  • if proximity to the subject comprises a spectrum of voyeur to participant, the camera is–in this case–without question: participant.

By the same token, most of the cons also contribute–at least tacitly–to a knee-jerk efficacy. For example:

  • Although the close-up is a poor creative decision, it does bestow depth and dimensionality to the stream of semen.
  • the tonal range is distinctly reminiscent of some early twentieth century photographer whose name–despite four cups of coffee–I cannot currently retrieve.
  • the caption accompanying and the Molhada & Quente’s mission statement–which I have not reproduced here–it would seem the proximity of the camera to the action was intended more as POV documentation first for the couple and second for mass consumption.

It is entirely understandable why this was shot the way it was–arguably even justifiable. And I’ll never suggest it’s not an interesting image, though I would argue against suggestions it is good. My point is merely the potential for it to be good or even great is built-in. Should the camera have been backed two feet away from the proceedings, it would’ve been indubitably clear that this is public sex.

And I admit I am a context whore but in this case I thing more context also equals a more transgressive document–a result of which I will always be vociferously supportive.

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I really, really wish I knew where this is from because it is quite possibly perfect.

Let’s start with the color: the walls are an eggshell that go white in the daylight key lighting, peachy in the spill splashed behind his left hand and hazes towards blue gray as it nears the edges of the frame. His pants and her skirt (?) are black; her top is white and his top is grey. These muted colors punch up the skin tone rendering a spectacular range in both parties skin tone.

That alone would be enough to make me swoon but there’s more: the way his shoulders are cantilevered against the wall as she pulls his center towards her is almost certainly a visual rhyme with one of the most exquisite studies of figuration motion in the western art historical canon–Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo.

Source: Unknown

First thing I notice the yellow top.

The second thing I notice is the hair of the young woman in that yellow top. I think she’s v. cute. (As an aside, if I thought for a second I could rock hair clips like that, I would totally steal her style.)

Third, I notice the strategic use of color. Against the offset/bleach effect skin tone palate, the aforementioned yellow top, matching lipstick (nice touch) and the triangulated repetition of BIV spectrum tones–biggest hair clip, eye shadow and scrunchie–all stand out.

It’s definitely some #skinnyframebullshit; but so far it’s 3 points in favor, one against.

Now, to say ‘I have hang ups w/r/t oral sex’ would be an even money contender for the prestigious Understatement of the Year™ award.

These hang ups extend–quite naturally–to depictions of oral sex.

And not just to depictions of oral sex but depictions of sex in general. There’s the simple fact that fucking vs fucking so as to provide maximal visibility to a third party feature all but mutually exclusive concerns.

The truth is I am less concerned with what I see than how it is shown to me.

And I don’t think it’s just me, i.e. a snooty, artsy-fartsy (how I loathe that term and those who use it) snob who only likes B&W films with Russian subtitles that fewer than five people have seen.

Communication/checking in with your partner is just OMFG so fucking hot–a shy does that feel good? or an imploring do you like it when I [insert action]? go a long, long way. Especially considering the typical porn trope involving first time encounters.

But it would also be great if oral sex was treated as it’s own distinct sex act–instead of a preliminary ahead (sorrynotsorry) of the main event. For example: just once I would love to see a cishet boy ejaculate prematurely and after catching his breath, shift his focus to using his fingers, tongue and/or staying erect to attend to his partner’s pleasure.

Source: goo.gl