While continental Europe displays a fully adult attitude towards sex, and America’s is distressingly teenage, the UK hovers in a zone where almost everything’s okay as long as it can be laughed at or hidden. How we got so delightfully messed up is the subject of ‘Crumpet’ - a recent documentary which traces British attitudes to sexuality from the end of World War II till the present day.

Emulating American culture on post-war budget, in a world when American and UK artists could have separate hits singing the same song simply because people didn’t know what was happening on the other side of the pond, Britons created a brand of glamour loved by people still eating rationed food into the 1950’s. Paired to a traditionally ribald national sense of humor, a then healthy home-grown film industry, and a pre-feminist outlook, which made it okay for women to exploit their assets, we developed a culture of naughtiness where the girl next door could, and should, be ogled not for art or beauty but simply for fun.

It’s a great show and a treasure trove of cleavage shots and sexy older women. I disagree with the host, the age of crumpet isn’t dead yet. Have you seen any Axe advertising lately?

125 Magazine.

Writing this blog is getting harder. Not for a lack of content, but as I find it harder to find porn I want to expose my psyche to and share with the public. Porn is broken but Michael Moore’s not about to make a movie about it (and, if he did, who’d pay to see a man whose ass has its own tidal flow talk to pornsters?). Like healthcare, porn won’t cease to be. It’ll just continue to become less like what we want and pay for, and more like an impenetrable profit engine controlled by large companies with little taste, understanding or decency.

It’s not that I have any problem with porn conceptually. It’s the product which is such a disappointment. Stupid people, stupid ideas and stupid attitudes. Sure I could tell myself the old first amendment trope about people’s right to do mornonic things but why bother when the material’s so painful to watch? What about my right to decent entertainment? Where’s the porn for people who don’t think Jackass 2 was fantastic entertainment?

The ‘good stuff’, subject of this and other blogs, isn’t so great either. For every Seska Lee there’s an alt-porner with a blog, an undergraduate understanding of feminism, and a chip on her shoulder about being fat cranking out unwatchable ‘alt-porn’ featuring tattooed hippies with such a shallow sense of porn history they actually believe their doing something new. I’m not jaded. Dave Naz, Comstock (you mouthy wanker) and countless independent websites I salute you, but why should the mass of porn be so awful and the best of it so average compared to anything but major studio dreck?

This attitude, which I used to think was mine alone, is well articulated by Don Hazen in “Pornography and the end of Masulinity” at Alternet. Like me he’s a hungry man, tired of kibble and asking ‘Where’s the beef?’ Why should it be so hard for any woman who’s not actively turned on by being degraded and roughed up to find any porn she’s into and why should not craving violence be seen as suburban? If it were a question of niches it’d be easy to counter. When I go to the movies I can watch something other than slasher pics, teen sex-comedies and sequels but when it comes to porn it’s increasingly a question of ‘…any color as long as it’s black.”

Increasingly I find the most interesting depictions of sexuality come from the mainstream. 125 magazine’s ‘Cinema’ issue has pictures by Rankin and others (shown here) which tell a deeper, sexier more interesting story in a frame than however many unnecessary ‘Pirates’ sequels will ever manage. Anyone without a tabloid brain can think more creatively than the people producing mainstream porn and the audience which loves what they’re getting is vastly outnumbered by those who’ve given up on porn or, like me, find it depressingly hard to sift.

by Rankin

by Rankin

I say it’s time for an Environmentally Friendly Porn label. Some way of knowing that material so labeled won’t insult our intelligence, artistic sensibilities or the people involved in its production. Nothing to do with censorship, just a mark of quality and a rejection of the prevailing younger, harder, nastier sensibility. An alternative to alt-porn, stunt-porn and stupid-porn minus a fog of pretension designed to hide its masturbatory intent.

Who’s with me?

(NB: Bah… humbug. Kids…)

Antea & Christina courtesy of Viviane’s Sex Carnival

The best of this week’s sex blogs by the bloggers who blog them.

This Week’s Picks

Don’t think..
“As you read this, you reach for your cock and stroke it slowly, in anticipation of our eventual meeting.”

I’ll be out in 2 mins, I’m just brushing my teeth…
“One centimetre at a time, he slid oh so slowly into me and then retreated out again.”

We all have Secrets
“I’ll give you a little reminder - it was when he and his wife were making me cum so hard that I blacked out.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
Iris Bahr’s Festive World

Editor’s Choice
Letter to a Lover

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

A scene from “Sex Life of Robots”.

Michael Sullivan’s movie, the Sex Life of Robots, has got so much press I haven’t bothered to pile on with my hilarious robot-sex comments or, um… you know - jokes about metal cocks and stuff.

Unfortunately the prudes at YouTube have taken down the nudity free film, so if you’re looking at last week’s links with your trousers down you’re out of luck. Thankfully Wired Magazine seeking easy ways to increase traffic from sex searches, in a service to transformer fetishists free-thinking art lovers has reposted the movie in whole. Normal service resumes.

Link

Clearly superior Japanese Porn Star technology.

Wired’s posted a gallery of photos from Japans “Adult Treasure Expo”. They report the 150,000 attendees were a disappointment to organizers banking on at least 50,000 more. It’s pretty obvious why. From the photos this looks just like every other porn expo. What’s needed is a lot more Japanese flavor. Robots, schoolgirl pantie vending machines and octopus porn. Regardless, I still want to go.

Link

The Idler, a magazine dedicated to chillaxin’ (like that kids?), has published its ‘Carnal Knowledge’ issue with a cover by Damien Hirst.

To my educated eye I see a metaphor which shows America (the cucumber) trapped in Iraq (breasts) while trying to ease its passage with the blood, sweat and tears of soldiers and the Iraqi citizenry (the vaseline). Yeah… I’m pretty sure that’s it.

I’m still waiting for my copy but I can be pretty sure there’s sex inside.

Sex toys come in shapes as obvious as cock and as innocent as duck but never, until now, inspired equally by bowling and the deathstar.

It’s hard to know if the Vibromasseur is of a size where sticking it into your vag/man-gina seems like the most obvious thing to do, but they make a big deal out of highlighting the ‘virgin’ plastic and non-porous silicone used in its construction so have at it, the thing’s splashproof.

I’ve never really understood the pleasure of mechanical vibration but I don’t have a clitoris and know I’m missing something. The lack of any obvious pricing on the Big Tease Toys site suggests the Vibromasseur’s not cheap, but with glass dildoes going for over a hundred dollars a pop it’s not out of the question to charge for something with more functionality than a soda bottle. As soon as I get my review copy I’ll tell you all about it (in black please).

Link

In the age of the web it’s hard to trust the veracity of wacky stories you can’t find a link to. Ironically, the world doesn’t seem real unless it’s represented digitally. John Hind’s Motorworld column for ‘Top Gear’ Magazine is packed with more sexual potential than the combined bras of Girl’s Aloud. I can’t find online ‘proof’ of any of this stuff but if you think that makes stories this good less likely to be true I pity your lif in a world devoid of stuff like this:

“The deputy sheriff of Snow Hill, Maryland, was arrested for allowing a woman to pose naked on the sheriff’s squad car, while the deputy sheriff of Martin County, Florida, was fired for spending his days filming women in bikini’s showerig on the beach. In one day alone six officers were suspended in Mesa, Arizona, for having sex in their squad cars. But topping the lot, in Urbandale, Iowa, an officer was fired after fellow officers realised he was driving around with a battery-operated sex device inserted in his rectum.” Top Gear Magazine, September 2007.

I could consult the local press in all the places Hind references but as a writer for the UK’s most popular car magazine he’s unlikely to be pulling crap off the web without bothering to fact-check. Then again…

“A 20-car pile-up ensued in Arkansas City when a woman, believing she was experiencing ‘The Rapture’ screamed “Jesus is back!” and leapt cheerily through her moving car’s sun roof. The woman, a Christian, had thought that 12 blow-up sex dolls, filled with helium, which had floated over the highway in front of her, were fellow humans rising to heaven.” Top Gear Magazine, August 2007.

Damn.

More shaggy dog stories can be found in each month’s UK print edition. (Editors of Top Gear, if I can make up more interesting car-sex stories than Hind do I get a job too?)

by Eldon Dedini.

If you’ve never picked up a copy of Playboy you’ll be surprised to know that most of it isn’t over-retouched photos of fading stars and wannabe celebs from the flyover-states. In between the demi-porn is a magazine which reads like Vanity Fair - if Vanity Fair was edited soley for the benefit of Harley Davidson dealers and cigarette manufacturers.

One Playboy staple is the ‘erotic’ cartoon and one of the most famous practitioners of the genre is Eldon Dedini. Though racy when Playboy was the only porn magazine you could legally own, today most of his stuff is sweet enough to share with your Dad. Who probably remembers it from the first time around ( take my word for it, asking him might be weird.)

Metafilter’s published a rough guide to Dedini online. If you get fired for looking at it you’re probably out of an environment that’s not doing much for your soul.

Image courtesy of Kitchen Girls.

We’re doing this for the 100th time. That makes Sugasm the most effective online community of sex-bloggers who aren’t actively involved in having sex with each other in history. Kudos all round and massive, un-repayable thanks to the quiet and gorgeous energy behind the Sugasm Radical Vixen whose name says it all.

The best of this week’s blogs by the bloggers who blog them.

This Week’s Picks

Do you want me…?
“The shiver that runs through you tells me everything I need to know.”

Love that ass (his perspective)
“But as long as we are in here, she submits to my command; to my every whim.”

Hubb and Spoeker
“He was good for show and good in bed, but an asshole in the real world.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
125 Magazine, Alternet and Enviromentally Friendly Porn

Editor’s Choice
The very best of Sugasm…. so far

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

See also: Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundup each Tuesday and Friday.