Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Diane Patterson likes a spicey read but wants the sex to mean something, dammit. Nice passage:

I am one of those readers who is very, very happy about the boom in erotica in books. I don’t always want explicitness in my sex scenes, but when I do I prefer graphic. The problem has been, however, that erotica seems to mean, “As many combinations as possible, with a minimum of one per chapter.” (E.g. anything by Black Lace, which doesn’t publish novels so much as Twister games set in print.) I don’t want to see every character banging everyone and anyone; I want there to be some plot-worthy purpose to all this sex going on. It’s like black comedy: it still has to be comedy. Erotic novels still have to be novels.

* Alt-porn starlet Sequoia Redd thinks that Abby Winters, I Shot Myself, and Beautiful Agony have added a lot to the eroticism and porn market. Nice passage:

I did not make it to the AEE or the AVNs this year, but when I heard about what the team at Abby Winters were going to go there to do I felt like screaming “Hell YES, finally!”. A group of empowered, healthy, intelligent women challenging men to play speed chess, performing yoga, and engaging their fans in an arena where young women are usually exploited in an unhealthy way, how awesome?! This is exactly what the morons in the porno industry need to see.

Peter especially should appreciate this Sequoia posting. (NSFW)

Interesting to learn that Sequoia was inspired by the film "Dangerous Beauty." It's one of the rare straightforwardly sexual films that many women like. A few others: "Lie With Me," "The Lover," and "Sex and Lucia."

* Semi-related: I blogged about a bunch of books about sex by women.

Best,

Michael

My complaint is not identical to Diane Patterson's, but is related.

I haven't read any erotica in years, but I remember, back when I used to, that with the exception of Joan Elizabeth Lloyd, and a smattering of others, almost no-one out there was publishing or even uploading to the internet, erotic short stories or novels, where the protagonists were husband and wife. Why is that? Is sex between two married people really so boring, that no-one wants to fantasize about it? For my part, I find husband-wife erotica far more interesting than reading about people meeting at parties or bars then screwing, office romances, or outright orgies, swinging, etc. But I must be in the extreme minority here. (Maybe things have changed, but I haven't bothered looking into it for years; Patterson's complaint leads me to believe things haven't, though.)

Posted by: anon on May 24, 2008 7:18 AM

Husband-wife sex? As sex-fantasy material? These days that sounds pretty kinky and XXX-treme.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 24, 2008 11:49 AM

michael did you see "intimacy"? i'm trying to think of some sex movies that a female friend of mine liked besides that and "lie with me". she liked the sex scene in "pola x'' but not the movie. umm...

Posted by: t. j. on May 24, 2008 12:05 PM

Alas, Michael, all too true... Except, of course, when they run a porn site together, showing themselves going at it on camera. Then they get a billion hits...

Posted by: anon on May 24, 2008 7:05 PM

Ahhhh, Sequoia, you are a gem among women!

Posted by: Peter on May 25, 2008 1:28 AM

Michael,

These people are boring. They belong to the childless society, and they are just looking for a way to fill up their time.

I really enjoy most of the postings on 2Blowhards, but this stuff... I don't know what to make of it. What is interesting about spoiled kids trying to out-outrage one another so they won't notice that their lives are completely empty and meaningless?

The cult of absolute self-absorption isn't working. People don't have something better to do than have children. When I say things like this, people automatically assume that I mean that they shouldn't go crazy with sex. That isn't what I'm saying.

I just returned from the Philippines, where I was commonly surrounded by a couple of dozen kids. The Philippines is a far sexier society than the U.S. Life offers real drama, not the made up drama of spoiled kids play acting. And sex is just wild in the Philippines.

The people in this posting have reached the absolute dead end of the cult of the individual. They aren't interesting. They are incredibly dull. Is anybody noticing this besides me?

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on May 26, 2008 8:26 AM

ST, I partially agree with you, in that it's almost always the people without children who engage in this type of behavior beyond the age of 25. But I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. People play different roles in society, so I say God bless the childless and their navel-gazing (literally) ways, as with 3 kids, I don't have the fucking time and/or energy for that. It's nice to peek in on those who do.

However, here's a taboo topic, perhaps. When speaking with childless couples, my wife and I are almost always struck by how trivial and adolescent their concerns and activities are. We can't help it and don't mean anything ill towards them. Some of them are our closest and oldest friends. Still, there it is.

Posted by: JV on May 26, 2008 1:07 PM

The people in this posting have reached the absolute dead end of the cult of the individual. They aren't interesting. They are incredibly dull. Is anybody noticing this besides me?

The nadir of that cult having been reached in this week's NYT magazine and its puncture-my-eyeballs-I-can't-read-anymore "essay" by a young thing of stupefying vapidity, emptiness, vacuity, vacuum-hood, nullity, nothingness, nichts, shallowness, self-absorbed-with-no-self-to-be-absorbed-aboutness named something or other doing something or other and having some kind of something or other non-life in some kind of public.

Hmmm. For some reason, I can't seem remember her name...

Posted by: PatrickH on May 26, 2008 10:43 PM

T.J. - I found "Intimacy" pretty dreary, though I certainly wouldn't have missed it. How did you react to it? Interesting to hear from you about "Pola X," the sex in it was pretty sexy ...

ST -- I'm with JV on this. Not only does it take all kinds, but we get all kinds whether we want to or not. May as well take note of how a few of them carry on. Plus, well, if it weren't for the self-centered and the exhibitionistic, would we have any performing arts at all? I like watching people put on shows, and I love much of the work of showbiz people, high and low, and I've enjoyed performers as friends and acquaintances. But there's no use pretending that most of them are "normal." If they *were* normal, they wouldn't have much of a drive to go on stage, let alone fly to Australia to do photoshoots for Abby Winters. Anyway, enjoying their spirit, their looks, and some of their shenanigans isn't the same as saying "Go and do likewise," is it? To my mind, the main source of the problems you describe so well isn't the carryings-on of bohos, it's what mainstream society makes of them. Why on earth are so many normal people these days modeling so much of their behavior on the ka-razy misbehavior of fringe nuts? I certainly don't blame that on the fringe nuts, who are just living as fringe nuts will tend to live. I think a lot of normals have, for whatever reasons, lost a lot of their common sense.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 27, 2008 1:05 AM

I am a little late to this party, but, I agree with both ST and MB.

ST - self absorbed, vacant people? Yes, you bet.
MB - Fringe nuts are just being themselves.

Like I always said: "The problem with Germany in the 1930's wasn't Hitler, it was everybody that decided to follow him."

I can not tell you how many people I knew growing up that saw the pot-smoking, mud-fucking Woodstock concert as the pinnacle of human achievement.

A small percentage decided that Tuning In and Dropping Out was the right thing to do. A much larger percentage decided to follow them.

Posted by: Ian Lewis on May 27, 2008 12:29 PM






Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?