Tag: shaved

Source Unknown

I would never claim this is a great (or even good) image: the off-kilter composition and offset flash suggest equal parts luck and artsy pretension.

And from a standpoint of image politics, it’s problematic for all the usual reasons: frame edges ‘cutting up’ and ‘immobilizing’ the three young women along with implicit kowtowing to the porn manicured male gaze that expects a smooth, depilated pubis.

I am not willing to give this a pass. However, I do appreciate the focus on a FFF threesome–something I wouldn’t mind seeing more often. Especially, if like this image, unfeigned desire (closed eyes, flushed faces and chests) and intimacy (holding hands, reaching caresses, giving and receiving of pleasure) feature in the proceedings.

Source: sexhappy

The earliest instance seems to be this post; beyond that your guess is as good as mine.

This image demonstrates at least a cursory concern for composition. The focal point of the image is not the center of the frame. There is a consistence in the angle and space allotted to the outside-edge-of-the-tub/floor and the inside-of-the-tub/tile wall. The model is watching what is happening in the frame not searching for approval from the viewer. She is presented nearly whole in the frame. Lastly, the flash is exposes the white fiberglass perfectly, stopping short of overexposure.

I love that this young woman is still wearing stockings and cute top. Along with the polish on her nails, the image retains color that levels out what would have otherwise been the tub being too white or her skin blanched.

There is clearly an urolagnia element to this scene. Yet it is– for me at least–mediated by the geyser-like appearance which although certainly urine echoes tropes surrounding female ejaculation.

In other words, some forethought and technical skill went into making this image. It’s gritty and transgressive but quality is not sacrificed just because its content features fetishistic elements.

Clips from the first part of this scene can be seen on XVideo.

***

My first instructor in film school was a regal woman of Indian sub-continental extraction. On the first day while I second guessed all the decisions that had brought me there, she went around the room, greeting everyone by name with a Namaste + a bow; she explained it meant the spark in me acknowledges the spark in you.

***

About a month ago, an acquaintance/friend was chatting with me. We had been talking about a number of superficial things when the topic suddenly shifted to childhood trauma. I had to figure out ways to deal with [the] darkness, and they were definitely not healthy, she said.

***

When I was eight I was preoccupied with black holes. They intrigued me because light could not escape them.

I wondered if one could focus darkness in the same manner as a flashlight focused light + and the respective beams were pointed directly into each other which would win out?

***

Why isn’t there a word for the darkness in me will not turn away from the darkness in you?

There is but it is not a word. I speak it with lips, with tongues + touch. And while I speak everything is dew wet—new and true.

***

This darkness in me stares into the darkness in you.

Source: collection-nu

graeandresen:

cutter painties – Copyright © Græ Andresen

Normal
0

false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin-top:0in;
mso-para-margin-right:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt;
mso-para-margin-left:0in;
line-height:115%;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Garamond”,”serif”;}

A former flat mate—who despite being super rainforest crunch is still a friend—claims all conflicts arise as a result of unmet needs.

I chalked it up to hippy naiveté. And I would have dismissed it outright if not for the implicit critique of what qualifies as need.

Needs, to her, included the basics: food, water, shelter and clothing as well as safety, fulfillment and love. She argued being alone or unfulfilled in life causes suffering no more or less physically debilitating than hunger or thirst.

Of course, she went on to use the notion as an aide in unpacking geopolitical concerns—an at best reductive approach—which resulted in me dismissing the idea.

I’ve been re-evaluating that decision. It’s partly as a result of learning that in a month I’ll be laid off from perhaps the only job I haven’t utterly reviled. And the one thing making me not despise this job was learning first hand that I was dead wrong to dismiss my friend’s ideas because when it comes to interpersonal relationships in small groups/communities are concerned, meeting or failing to meet individual needs makes all the difference in the world.

Thus, all this messy brain spew gets entangled with this image. 

I can’t claim to be a cutter. On the other hand, claiming I have never cut myself seems a more egregious mistruth. I look at the few small scars that have yet to fade and they do not seem like they belong to me. I never cut to see myself bleed or to feel anything, I cut because in those trance-like moments there was a very real feeling that I was cutting through my body in order to reach something I wanted to destroy with the totality of my being.

It’s the strangest things to feel nothing when presented with my own case; yet, when faced with a cartographic account of similar travels, I ascribe meaning ex nihilo: maplines of unmet needs.

I identify with everything in this image. The clenched fists self-restrained, tightly cinched and pinned by panty elastic to her hips. The three day stubbly growth on the mons pubis—an outward effort to adhere to perceived norms.

There’s further resonance for me: yesterday, I left my desk to wander the deserted world where I work. With all the doors propped open I wondered in an out of buildings. I wasn’t aware that I’d had any destination in mind until I found myself standing in the doorway of the now empty room where the young woman upon whom I have a crush slept, woke and struggled over the nine months. 

All that remained was a silica gel pack against the baseboard, a small sheet of cream cardstock gatefolded with different flavors of tea printed on each section, the corner of a blue and white Nestlé plastic wrapper, a few pennies scattered among a litter of baby dust bunnies. Fingernail clippings on the desk and bureau; sequins and a Bobbie pin in otherwise empty drawers. Three or four Kleenex in a CVS pocket pack behind the mirrored medicine cabinet door above the commode and thin white bar waiting in the shower soap dish.

Presence in absence, it’s the obverse are I’ve known for so long—I no longer cut my body, no longer want to destroy, I just want to break through to reach someone, anyone, to touch and in the moment give a portion of what was given to me back to you.

Source: graeandresen

passius:

I have reservations about this image: it can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s entirely preoccupied with titillation or intimacy.

For example, the blocking emphasizes the clean-shaven vulva and anus for the benefit of the male gaze. Not to mention the #skinnyframebullshit—probably enacted to counteract heavy handed illumination as well as suggesting a moment outside space and time. (As visual shorthand, I’ve never felt such a tact work especially well; with maybe the exception of the seamless flashback scenes in The Frighteners—which if not exactly sensible were at least a novel technical exercise.)

However, there are at least two things I appreciate: the stripped down, stepped out of mound of clothing on the floor and the intensity of the intimacy between the two women. The clothing clearly speaks to what happened prior to the moment this single image was captured; it understands seduction as a process, not a single, discrete and isolated event. The chemistry and raw passion these women exude is thoroughly authentic and awesome to see. And in combination with the glimpse the discarded clothing offers of what preceded, this intimacy foretells a great deal of what will happen next.

In other words, there are clear elements of a story; or, put crudely: an incident with a beginning, middle and an end. After all, seductions are essentially narrative.

And if a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then why shouldn’t image makers tell a story, make a poem or preferably both all at once?

The oft trotted proverb goes: good artists borrow; great artists steal.

Whether it was T. S. Eliot or Picasso who provided this sentiment and regardless of any inherent merit, this has become a prima apologia for shitty artists the world over.

With its focus on a scene unfolding in a room lit from frame left, this image ostensibly borrows from Vermeer. Yet, unlike Vermeer—whose canvases present their subjects en media res: reading the final lines of a letter, pouring milk—this woman actions are ambiguous, her pose highly contrived in an effort to appear natural; however, consider what situation might require her to so pull her gown up around her shoulders and face away from a readily available mirror in order to stare down at her nude body?

I would be very surprised if the individual responsible for this image was unfamiliar with Vermeer. However, borrowing here from Vermeer is like asking a friend to lend you a designer sweater to wear with your new backless red dress. 

The theft that does work is from an artist I would wager is unknown to the image maker: Velázquez—Las Meninas specifically

Mirrors have a way of fucking with subjectivity. Velázquez depicts the subject—that is, the king and queen—only in a faint reflection; the scene instead focuses on the artist—presumably Velázquez himself—painting. At the same time, note the painter is considering both his subject and we the spectators.

The mirroring in the image above is less complicated but does produce, if accidentally, an interesting effect. By angling the camera so it views the reflection without being itself reflected, as well as the inclusion of the reflection of the young woman’s face reflected from a smaller mirror along the so-called fourth wall gives the room an implicit dimensionality. An implicit dimensionality that, in effect, deletes the physical presence of the camera from the scene; muddling matters of subject/object, observer/observed along with the questions of exhibitionism and voyeurism accompanying them.

Source: suxum

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.

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…