slide-2-unlock – Acetylene Eyes

@sugarmagnohlia – mood indigo (2016)

For those of you who don’t know, Sugar (Magnohlia) is one-half of @slide-2-unlock–the best couples sex blog on Tumblr. (King is the other half; both are breathtakingly beautiful humans. Full disclosure: the linked image of King always makes me drool. ALWAYS.)

Following their story over the last year and a half or so has been a constant source of fascination. Unlike most couples blogs, they relay the good, the bad and the ugly with the same careful, honest attention. It’s in this way that you’re truly able to see the breadth and depth of their commitment and passion for each other.

A while back King reported that Sugar was struggling with mental health issues and needed to step back from slide-2-unlock. It’s been inspiring and humble to watch her fight off her demons and slowly but surely emerge from the ashes of the way life can try to burn you to the ground.

I’m not 100% sure of this but it seems that Sugar has started to use her interest in image making as a tool to help beat back some of the darkness. Her work has evolved and improved at an unprecedentedly pace. (Really, her recent work with the incredible Kyotocat is among the best work from either.)

I love the way this image appears to be riffing on Duane Michals.

Also: I’ve featured one of slide-2-unlock’s photosets before. It resonated with me strongly because Sugar bears more than a passing resemblance to an erstwhile partner that I’ve never managed to completely get over. Given the intensely personal nature of that resonance, I was worried about appropriating the image. I reached out to Sugar and she gracefully allowed me to reblog the photoset with my personal commentary appended.

Anyway, by way of update, there’s still a lot to work through and figure out but my former partner and I are tentatively working on reconciling in order to get back together. I feel like I may be jinxing something but admitting it but it’s all so unexpected and disarming that I can’t help but shouting it from the rooftops–or in the case posting about it on Tumblr.

Source: sugarmagnohlia

Slide to Unlock – Laundry Day (2014)

[Recalling] the Chinese legend that says that when a boy and a girl are destined for one another they are tied together forever by a red thread.

Viola Di Grado (70% Acrylic 30% Wool)

Slide to Unlock is a tumblr documenting the sex life of a thirty-something married with children couple living in London.

They’ve earned attention due to their submissions to NN and (more recently) their intense sex tape.

Typically, I’m not super fond of the couples’ sex blog thing. The whole She/He thing rarely strives for anything beyond the knee-jerk archetypal. But I’ve found myself warm to the way this couple presents the sex they have as a multifaceted part of a highly connected, communicative relationship. When I view their images, I can’t shake the feeling that if I could zoom in to the sub atomic level, that I’d see the red thread tying him to her.

That alone makes it stand head and shoulders above any other couples blog (or 95% of porn, for that matter).

Also, there’s the fact that both are all kinds of twitterpated making levels of sexy as fuck. Especially her, who I–I have to confess–has always for me borne a more than a casual resemblance to the one to whom I am tied with red thread. But in this sequence, it’s like the resemblance is even more pronounced. And I’m reminded of the way we two made love but it also foments memories of what it was like to share the burden of day in/day out exigencies. How touch figured into everything we did inside the bedroom or out. Her fingers tracing the circle of skin between my t-shirt tail and jeans while I saute vegetables–her kids pretending to do their homework so they could side eye us meaningfully from the kitchen table. We held hands more than we didn’t.Almost every day for two years I woke up with the palm either niched in the small of her back or laying against her stomach, the first segment of my fingers nestled into her pubic fringe. And doing laundry together in that bizarre, huge but always empty Greenpoint laundromat. The coy, surreptitious teasing.If anyone had seen us they would’ve guessed we were in the first days of our relationship and not that nearly 700 day one’s.

I find this sequence to be devastatingly arousing not only because they remind me of her but because they remind me of what it was like with her, there is no room left to doubt their truth.

Source: slide-2-unlock