Tag: video

Mary Ellen Strom – Nude #5, Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar (2005)

Mary Ellen Strom’s meticulous restaging of Gustave Courbet’s The Sleepers (1866),
a classic depiction of lesbian sexuality for the benefit of the
heterosexual male viewer, is projected at the size of the original
painting. Strom’s intent is to re-embody, literally, a territory that
was not only the location of male desire but also the prerogative of
male artistic production. Strom’s models are her peers – contemporary
women artists. Her nudes have names. They collaborate with Strom in
making lesbian pleasures available to lesbians, among other viewers.

–Catherine Lord, Art & Queer Culture (New York: Phaidon, 2013), 219.

Source: lesbianartandartists

Mr. Man – Explicit Masturbation in Mainstream Movies (201X)

On the one hand: this is a v. poorly titled super clip–I am familiar with about a third of these scenes but none of them are from mainstream movies. (Ken Park and Shortbus are as close as you’re likely to get to mainstream and they were niche, art house hits at most.)

On the other hand: with mainstream releases continually pushing the envelope on what it’s possible to depict w/r/t sexual exchanges in movies, it is nice to see work which includes explicit masturbation as a valid mode of sexual expression.

That these scenes exist at all is a pleasant and radical corrective to the heteronormalized dude meets lady character–the latter who exists with little more depth than straight up eye candy or some sort of motivational force for the male protagonist’s redemption arc. (Further it challenges the prevailing notion that if there is full frontal nudity, it will favor boobs and bush but exclude penii.)

Yet this also–queerly, in my mind–presents masturbation as an act on a spectrum ranging from decadent self-pleasure to something that is complimentary to interpersonal sexual expression, i.e. the scenes where folks masturbate as a group, or for a consenting audience or as a way of ersatz participation in an orgy setting.

In other words: there is this notion that masturbation is what one does when sex is not available. But this presents masturbation as just another (infinitely varied) form of sexual expression–and that is something that resonates strongly for me.

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I think this video may be the porn clip that I have watched the most in my entire life.

Technically, it’s flawed. But the technical doesn’t matter so much when the sex is so thoroughly and legitimately haute.

From their seemingly coordinated ink: his Judge me, her Justice; to the inversion of the porn trope where the starlet furious rubs her clit while a muscle-bound stud uses his erect cock more like a gas powered chisel than a tool meant (among other things) for providing sexual pleasure; and–my personal favorite, the way she licks his semen off his tummy and then gives him a sample of the mess he’s made.

Unffff. (Also, this clip gave me a thought for a performance piece I’d like to enact at some point. I think it could be positively scandalous…)

Cao Yu – Fountain [excerpt] (2015)

In physics, there is what’s termed the ‘observer effect’. It suggests that by watching (or, I suppose, more accurately: by attempting to measure certain phenomena) the mere act of watching changes that which is observed).

I was unfamiliar with this performance before @psyche8eros featured it–I am super impressed with it, not just in and of itself but also because of how it plays the varying experiences and perspectives of the viewer against each other, and is sharpened in the process.

Fountain pivots on lactation–a physical process.

I’ve known many folks who have been pregnant. Most of those have experienced some degree of anxiety with regards to the question of whether or not to breast feed.

There’s the questions regarding how the body changes during pregnancy as well as post-partum. Concern over whether one’s body can accommodate breast feeding. As well as the social stigmas associated with breast feeding. (Just think back to the most recent manufactured outrage about a new parent breast feeding their child in public and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.)

This removes feeding of any progeny from the equation and merely illustrates the physicality of the process. And I’m of the opinion that most of the folks I’ve known with such anxieties, would’ve been reassured if they had been able to watch this.

Thus a pregnant viewer is likely to see this video through a very specific filter.

Is this just made for pregnant folks? Hardly.

I think it’s interesting to consider several conceptual points: yes, it’s about lactation but about lactation less any sort of consuming progeny.

In that way it’s not so unlike heterosexual pornography–where procreation is not procreative but focused instead of documenting the pleasure associated with the process. The lighting, milk-droplet dotted flesh and decontextualization are all borrowed from pornography.

So yes, you can see it as lactophilic in nature. (Although I think to see it as only that requires a certain degree of privilege, since the decontextualization–porn-y or otherwise–makes the proceedings about the body, not in any objective way, but by bearing witness to a mechanical process of the body.)

The coup de grace is how the title ties the depiction of process into the art historical tradition of objects (instead of process) as the purpose of art.

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.)

Source unknown – Title unknown (200X)

It was the perfect picture of utter spirituality
and utter degradation. I was fascinated and could not turn away my eyes.
By watching them I in effect permitted their mating to take place and
so committed myself to accepting the consequences—all because I wanted
to see what would happen. I wanted in on a secret.

–Annie Dillard, The Force That Drives the Flower

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

It feels like this clip’s raison d’etre is: Beautiful Agony is cool and all but wouldn’t the format be improved by a more DIY approach.

As you can see there’s trade offs. this avoids BA’s almost universal flatness by setting the action in what appears to be a field in the waning light of the evening golden hour.

Instead of the crisp, clear sound, gusts of wind completely exceed the range of the on-camera mic–resulting in cringe inducing soundtrack blow outs.

Also, I don’t really understand the framing. Yes, it allows reasonably wide coverage wherever the subject moves. But the tripod in the lower right corner is distracting.

Perhaps that’s the point: a sort of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket-esque meta commentary (the numerous dolly shots that track camera men shooting similar tracking shots); but it comes off as a little too ambiguous to successfully tic that box.

Criticisms aside there are some goddamn fucking phenomenal things to celebrate here. When the sound is clear, there’s texture and timbre to it that conveys a blush worthy degree of explication to any otherwise implicit image. Further, it’s lovely how the cruddy video renders the patina of sweat in the dying light.

But as if that wasn’t enough where this clip actually comes into its own, is when you realize the seemingly orgasmic echoes are the result of a second woman–who is very much like the woman we are watching, positioned facing a camera mounted on the tripod visible in the lower right corner.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

@knitphilia one of my all-time favorite Tumblr’s and one of the  the handful of the few I sort of know AFK, posted several years ago that:

Beautiful [A]gony was possibly the first (visual) porn I looked at unironically.

I suspect there are a good number of folks out there with similar experiences. I know I’d pretty much sworn off porn until I discovered I Feel Myself.

Lately, I’ve been feeling conflicted about even IFM. For example: this clip by Anabel. It’s definitely hot–I love watching folks give themselves pleasure. But there’s this one cut away to a close up of her vulva, ostensibly to demonstrate how aroused she is. It’s a beautiful shot and you can see that she is really, really wet.

But I feel like that localizes pleasure at the genitals. And from a standpoint of porn to which I’m likely to personally masturbate–I prefer something like Clayton Cubitt’s Hysterical Literature with Stoya (Lord God Almighty, the thought of her hands as she’s orgasming makes me get weak in the knees) or the above–which I love everything about: it looks like shitty iPhone video but with a little focus on framing and lighting, the aesthetic suggests a VHS dub that has been watched so much it’s wearing out; it’s far more graphic in concept than execution and the way she keeps masturbating vigorously throughout her orgasm is remarkable. (At a certain point my nervous system shuts down and I literally can’t keep going because my body locks up. The way her body responds is exactly what happens to me when someone else makes me orgasm and keeps going beyond the point where I couldn’t have on my own. It’s been 6.5 years… I can’t tell you how much I miss it.)