Literature & Genre

So what is the point of literature, anyway? I learned in an English class long ago that the purpose of literature is to represent the human condition, a definition that I think works well enough. The purpose of literature is to grasp the totality of human experience, condensing it into a readable microcosm. A true work of literature attempts to construct a universal narrative of all humanity as viewed through the prism of a finite number of subjects, whether a relatively small number (even 1) or a large Tolstoyan cast. So a work of literature has to contain a little bit of everything: education, aspiration, love, sex, work, failure, disillusionment, all the things people find in their lives.

Genres are born when people focus on particular aspects of the human narrative and either diminish or exclude other parts, and the focus becomes its characteristic action or setting. In its most degenerate form, a genre text completely stops the narrative in order to indulge in its characteristic action. Consider the first attempts to make video games literary: all the story happens between the missions, which exist simply as shoot-em-ups or RTS conflicts but don't make any difference to the plot, other than that you succeed (plot advances) or fail (plot does not advance). And how many musicals have song/dance numbers that basically say "I love her (him)"? From a literary standpoint, these things are a waste of time, no matter how much you may personally enjoy them.

Now, pornography. In narrative pornography, there's some plot, but it's completely broken up by sexual encounters involving every combination of characters on the screen. The sex scenes go on for a while, often emphasizing the mechanics of the act, and there's nothing at stake narratively.

In All Ladies Do It, it's completely different. The narrative never stops, and in every sex scene, the characters have something at stake. The most instructive is the very explicit scene when Diana is giving her husband Paolo a blowjob about midway through the movie. The scene shows all the parts working together, but never do they become mechanical, and the scene shows us how this couple's emotional and sexual lives mesh, how they were under different understandings of what their relationship was. The fact that narrative is more important than titillation is shown when the blowjob breaks off because of the emotional tension between Paolo and Diana.

Tinto Brass knows how to film asses. He brings the camera in low and focuses on them, bare or clothed, making them extremely enticing and arousing. That notwithstanding, he is not a pornographer, but someone who tells stories about sex that do not shy away from sex. I'm not saying All Ladies Do It is a great movie and that everyone should run out to see it, but it's an important counterpoint to movies like Belle de Jour, in which the erotic is dealt with without any explicit sex or nudity at all.

Tinto Brass: Pronounced br-ASS

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm a pervert. It bothers me a little, because I really don't want to be thought of as this totally depraved guy. Fortunately, there are men like Tinto Brass, whose "art" shows that even if I am perverted, I'm not alone.

I had seen CALIGULA a few years ago and thought it was pretty sexy, but not all that interesting otherwise. I recently saw COSI FAN TUTTE, and was actually struck by it. Not only is it very sexy, but it's an interesting movie about love, marriage, and sex, and how hard it is to balance the three. Like all Italian movies that I've seen, it lags about three quarters of the way through, but there are a number of really touching scenes where the characters have to confront, and overcome, the tension between their perversions and their love.

The basic story rotates around a wife, played by the extremely cute Claudia Koll, who begins to desire anal sex after this guy almost gives it to her in the bathroom at a party. Her husband, on the other hand, has a fetish for the stories she tells him about her having sex with other men. He thinks they're all made up, but many of them are true. He won't give his wife anal sex because he doesn't like the thought of it. When she meets the man from the party in Venice and he gives her what she wants, she tells her husband about it, and at first he's turned on, but then he realizes it's not a story, but the truth, and he gets mad.

I've read descriptions where people want to call this movie porn, but it's not at all. It is explicit, and it does have a lot of sex, but it's not pornographic. The reason why it's not is, I think, essential to the way genre works, and I'll address the functionality of genre in an upcoming post.

Jack Vettriano: Romance and Erotica

Jack Vettriano is an artist who's been making quite a name for himself in the art world these days, either as an object of admiration or of scorn. He does narrative pictures that appeal the way that genre fiction appeals. The paintings feature people living a life grander and better than our own, but that we can allow ourselves to enter. I mentioned how Klimt allows his male audience to enter the painting. Notice how Vettriano creates a similar effect for both men and women in this painting. He has placed these ambiguous figures on an endless plain of misty dreamscape. This is typical of his day scenes, which have a quality of nostalgia.

Vettriano's night scenes are entirely different animals, however. I largely think they speak for themselves, but if you'd like I can tease out some of the more luscious features of this work.

Prurient Versions

As I said, at work I’m doing a series on “beautiful at any size,” starting with the thin ones and going up to the zaftigs. I have another series of entries I want to do for Pleasure Domes, but in between, I’m going to produce special versions of my work saying what I really think but can’t say for commercial and/or just general decency reasons.
Gustav Klimt is one of these artists that I learned about in college, not because of my art appreciation class, although he was there, but because I had a girlfriend who was super into him. The only thing is, I can’t remember which it was, because the things I remember being said about him are connect with looking at the art, not at her. I can’t even remember whether it was a serious girlfriend or just a casual short-time thing, but I remember that my feelings about Klimt come from this girl.
The secret to Klimt's enduring popularity is his ability to take the internal life of his figures and project it into an external image. Klimt works with bright colors and abstract shapes to create a visual image of the emotional state felt by the people he represents. His most popular image is also his most extreme in this regard. In The Kiss, Klimt reduces his human figures to their absolute minimum, in terms of realistic representation. We see their hands, their faces, a shoulder, some feet, mostly focusing on the areas of intense awareness during the moment of kissing. Oddly, Klimt actually does something similar to porn, which is, I guess, a fundamental characteristic of the male gaze, he almost erases the male figure. The man’s face is hidden, while the woman looks out at us. Oddly, too, although the emotions in the picture are of a passionate, lip-to-lip kiss, the man is actually kissing her on the cheek. Why? Because this frees her lips to be puckered at us, so that we as male viewers can place ourselves in the picture as kissing her, feeling her hands, her shoulder, the warmth of her flesh on our flesh as the two bodies dissolve into warmth that almost interdiffuses.
When Klimt does portray a more complete human figure, as in this detail from Sea Serpents, it is most likely a waify, almost emaciated woman, the sort of person we might mistake for the anorexic actress, and it shows how women with a bad body image can imagine they are overweight even when they are deathly thin. In a body of this size, any amount of fat can look out of proportion, such as the woman's thigh. But Klimt shows us this woman is comfortable, so secure that the strength of her eyes challenges us to enter the roiling sea of her emotion. Her expression really is what makes this picture, it’s a don’t-you-dare expression that also says, dare, dare, dare.
Klimt also shows us in this Portrait of Emile Floge that proportion can be easily maintained with the proper clothing, clothes that give volume and femininity to a slender frame. I love the scarf that gives volume to the neck, the puffy sleeves that make the arms appear more fleshy. Good stuff.

Whoring on the Cheap

I've been riding the 15 and 15L east Colfax buses in Denver pretty much every day for almost three months now, and I've seen a lot of things. In the back of the bus, it's not unusual for people to pass around bottles of beer or whiskey. One sad SoB gets on the bus every day with a big can of Milwaukee's Best in a brown paper bag. He drinks the beer over about the first half of the ride, then passes out from the alcohol. Kissing, fondling, fighting, it's all pretty standard fare, and almost none of it gets you kicked off.

Nor, apparently, does picking up a prostitute. Actually, the guy had picked her up before they got on the bus together to ride to the motel or whatever. How do I know she was a working girl? Well, I don't know, but she wore the uniform: short, stretchy, red skirt (slightly worn), big hoop earrings, heavy face makeup, runny black tights, and very high heels. I've seen her around before, and this seems to be her normal outfit. She also hangs around a lot outside of Kitty's East.

But this is the first time I've seen her with a john. He was a big guy, call him John Candy. The two of them got on the bus, and John sits down in the last available seat, letting this little girl, who looked like she was barely legal at best and lived on a diet of meth and menthols, stand. Then a gentleman offered her a seat next to John, which she took. The two of them rode together in absolute silence, not making eye contact, like a weird parallel dimension version of The Graduate, for about 15 minutes. Then she stood, told him the next stop was theirs, and they got off.

Weird.

It happened yesterday

It was a windy day in downtown Denver. I saw a woman walking in a dark outfit. Black, double-breasted wool coat, short wool skirt, mid-thigh length, in a large plaid pattern of black and brown, some tassels. A wraparound. Her hair was up, tight, in a bun. Her step was prim, measured but quick on her long, slender black heels. Black tights, black hair, she was a fine black line against the grey faux marble of the post office.

Then the wind kicked up and played in her skirt as the wind will do with any wraparound. Panicked, she fought to keep it down, but the wind blew fiercely, its fingers loosening the strands of her hair from the bun, and I could see her slowly giving in to the raw power of nature, something in her rising to its primal call. It enrapt and unwrapped her with its passion, and she succumbed, lifting her hands, smiling, tossing her head to let her hair trail free behind her.

And I, sitting in my car, a simple machine, pure prosthesis of my body, saw that the light had changed. I pushed the clutch in deep, thrust the knob forward and felt the barely-lubricated gears enmesh with rough strife. The gas pedal goes down, reaching back into the engine to pull the throttle lever. The mouth of the carburetor opens, gasping, gasping. The engine surges faster and faster, four flat cylinders bucking wet with oil thin from heat and friction. RPMs go up, the valves roar, roar, roar as I race through the intersection. Then the clutch goes deep again, the engine sighs, and she is gone. I do not look in the rear view mirror.

She's Got Legs

In a new, but hopefully continuing feature, we offer the following guest column:

In the days when cinematic skin on display was in short supply and America was young and innocent, much attention was paid to a great pair of “gams.“ But the legs seem unappreciated these days. In recent years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in a particular bar with a certain group of gentlemen, appraising waitresses well-known for their various…endowments, yet little time was devoted to the legs. Being a well-known and self-admitted “ass man,” why do I spend so little time pondering the legs that are carrying these asses around? It’s a mystery.A quick web search reveals that legs are still well-appreciated by some. The “celebrity legs hall of fame” has recently inducted the lovely Kate Beckinsale:Yes, those are nice legs. Notice how the boot accentuates that vast and shapely terrain, with the eye traveling up and over the knee and along the thigh. On those occasions when we did discuss legs in the aforementioned bar, they were often clad in nearly knee-high boots. Boots and skirts…that was a combination we were particularly fond of. But a very short skirt, without boots, sometimes leads to less focus on the leg itself and more pondering of what is under the skirt.Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time among the right female crowd to gain adequate appreciation. Our leggiest friend moved away too soon. But looking at Kate Beckinsale, I want to learn more. Maybe start at the bottom of the legs and work my way up. Eventually I’d reach places that, to me, are more interesting, but I think the long journey would be worthwhile in itself.

--Name and address withheld

Noses

I've noticed that most of the time poets describe a woman's face they leave her nose out of it. For example, Byron, in "She Walks in Beauty," describes the gal's cheeks and eyes and of course her smile. Shakespeare generally talks about his "woman"'s eyes and cheeks and lips, which is pretty conventional. Even the Song of Solomon, such a wonderfully diverse description, with lines like "Thy teeth are alike a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing, whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them," has pretty much nothing to say about the nose. I guess the conventional wisdom is that the best that can be hoped for in a woman's nose it that it go unnoticed.

Not so! A woman's nose is one of the places that her face becomes unique, that it really gets its character. If I may again be allowed to call attention to Scarlett Johansson:

This is not necessarily the best picture of her because she's not smiling, but it's advantageous because you can see her nose is, well, a little bulbous. It's part of what makes her so adorable, and, more than that, it makes her seem so real, so normal, so approachable, although I probably wouldn't dare. I guess the rumors are that she has had her nose done to make it a little smaller. These rumors are pretty ridiculous, in general, but I can't ever say for sure.

But it wasn't Scarlett's nose that made me think of this topic. I've been on kind of a nose kick lately, noticing a lot of attractive women with kind of off noses on the bus or whatnot. And I can't say exactly what it is about them that draws me to their faces, but I think the answer might be in the woman whose nose I really noticed, the one that kicked this whole thing off, I think.

Hanging around with (Dr.) Nog one evening we had a few beers and watched a grindhouse trailer compilation. One actress who did a lot of these ragged-edge productions was Christina Lindberg. Her most famous movie is They Call Her One Eye, which Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill. But she was also a Playmate, and really considered a great beauty for her day. Here's a picture of her that captures what, I think, made her affect me:

per my blog action day post, she's a, well, a natural woman. )cringe( Seriously, though, she's wearing mascara, and probably many other cosmetics, but look at her face. Not only her nose, which is obviously sizeable, but also the lines on her face, natural lines around her eyes and nose and mouth that make her face seem soft, like the petals of a flower just unfolded from inside the calyx. It's part of what made her such a great pick for exploitation films. She became an icon of corrupted innocence.

Consider this pic, as well:

Just natural beauty in soft light, beauty engrossed in beauty, looking at the flower, breathing its sweetness.

And this quality can transfer to other contexts as well. Consider this picture from Huge Real Boobs:

Although this pic, chosen partly to comply w/ my 70s PG self-rating, does not display the combination of her nose and smile that make her so winning, I hope you can see what they do. They make her seem real, and though I don't know whether her boobs are real or not (and I'm not sure "huge" is the size adjective I'd choose, either), I feel that they are, because I feel that she is real. Because of the imperfections of her nose.

Why Guys Like Porn

Okay, so this may seem obvious and some of it is.

The main reason guys like porn is that it's easy. We're lazy, and bedding a woman is a lot of work, especially if you're starting from scratch at the bar or wherever. If you're lucky, you might stumble on a woman looking for a revenge fuck for her cheating hubby and you just happen to be chosen. But for the most part, you're mostly just gonna get her number. Then you gotta call her, plan a date, go on the date, not make any mistakes (either coming on too strong and looking like a desperate creep or not strong enough and seeming like you've got no testosterone), and maybe get a kiss. A guy I know who went to strip clubs described them as "cheaper than a date, and with a lap dance." Two, three, four dates (months?) later and what're you at, second base?

And if you've already got a woman in bed, it's not that much easier. First there's your schedule, and her schedule, and her "schedule" to juggle. And then there's the whole "mood" issue, which is as bad as a date. Come on too strong and she's not ready yet, or not strong enough and all you get is a cuddle. Or you might've worked up a good wheedle that generally gets you what you want, but makes you feel low anyway.

Whereas porn you just have to hit "play."

And then there's the simple fact that the women in porn are not the women in your life. They're numerous and different, stimulating for the simple fact that they're another woman you get to see naked.

But the main reason guys like porn is something beyond this, something deep and emotional, a real need guys feel that porn generally answers better than most flesh-and-blood women. I discovered it as a result of a chance find that I like to talk about, so I'll repeat here, even though the two or three people who read this blog already know it.

One cold winter morning I was coming home from a long, grueling graveyard shift at the ghetto 7-11 where I worked, and though it was after 7am it was still dark. Garbage day. The dumpster full as I walked down the alley to the back entrance to my apartment building. But there, beside the dumpster, a huge stack, 3 feet tall, of magazines. It only took one glance to know they were porn, so I scooped up a huge armful and went inside, suddenly warmed.

It turned out to be Hustlers, some of the Barely Legal variety. Although I don't like Flint's politics or humor, the porn is not bad at all. And in one of the Barely Legals there was a photoplay of a man and woman having sex on a streetcar. One of the shots, which is burned into my memory, was a closeup of the woman about to give the man a blowjob (I think at the time they weren't allowed to show actual genital-genital or genital-lip contact). I don't remember much about the things you associate with a blowjob, the lips or the cheeks. What I remember is her eyes. They were wide, mediterranean blue eyes, and their expression could only be described as worshipful.

The cliche goes that men love women for who they are, while women love men for who they could be. And a consequence of that is that women often remind us of just how far off that ideal we are. Porn women don't do that.

Oh, sure, they may say "harder" or "faster," but it's by way of encouragement, not in a needling way, and when they get it harder or faster, they say "oh, yeah."

Part of the problem is that most of us guys aren't really worshippable material: we're not Adonises, or whatever. But most of the guys I know worship the women in their lives, and they're no Venuses. We're not asking for it all the time, maybe just (half?) an hour every couple of days. And if we got that, there'd be a lot less demand for porn.

According to Oklahoma Law:

"Nudity" means the:
a. showing of the human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks with less than a full opaque covering,
b. showing of the female breast with less than a full opaque covering of any portion of the female breast below the top of the nipple, or
c. depiction of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state;

These Kids Today

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I just thought I would take advantage of Blog Action day to write a quick note that natural women are beautiful. Not just the hippies who don't wear bras (that can be nice, although, as I've noted, there are some places I think it's best for a woman to shave), but really all the women who let themselves be who they are. A smile and a wink is all you need. And if you can't wink, a smile will do.

Another Apology

Sorry I haven't been maintaining this as I'd like, but here's a related blog I have to maintain at least three times a week. Today's entry is dedicated to our friend Kip.

Hats!

I have always liked women in hats. From my mom's friend Laura down to J-Lo, there's just something about them that gets my motor going. I remember in High School this girl named Cheri started wearing a hat, I guess it was a porkpie hat, and there was something irresistable-ish and untouchable at the same time. I've been thinking about it a lot and I've come up with a theory. Let's start with Casablanca,where Ingrid Bergman wears so many lovely hats over the course of the movie. I've always been particularly taken with this one:

I couldn't figure it out before, but look at it now, how it encloses and defines her facial space, gives a powerful downward sweep to her glance. It embodies the strength she uses here to shut Bogey out, to pay Rick back for being such an ass. Tonight, though, she will come back to his place, prepared to shoot him, but she doesn't. Instead, she melts in his arms and asks that he think for both of them. Of course, in that scene, she isn't wearing a hat. I think hats in old movies accentuated the strong-but-yielding character of a woman, the woman who is soft, but not weak, feminine but not stupid or vain. We know Ilsa will have the courage to get on that plane because of her hat

See how it makes her equal to him. He throws down the challenge of what she must do, and she accepts, although not without an arousingly feminine show of emotion.

I think this is part of why women's hats have gone somewhat out of fashion. With the strides feminism has made, they're attacked on both sides. From an antifeminist perspective, strong women are too threatening these days, so the parity given women by hats is discouraged. From the feminist perspective, the implicit softness under the hat is disparaged.

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing, but the dominatrix quality of my teaser image, I think, can't be denied.

Hats can also add mystery to a woman, which, as you know is my favorite thing. As the inimitable Bergman in Notorious
Again, how masculine. Her entire dress here alludes to masculinity without becoming androgynous. Beautiful, seductive, and strong despite her predicament.

But they don't always have to be masculine to be strong. Sometimes the power is in the mystery.

And sometimes it's in playfulness.

And, of course, the right hat can make anyone look good:

Coming Soon: Hats!

Jail Bait

In some populations, about 90% of the attractive women are high-school aged. Not coincidentally, these are also populations where teen pregnancies are high, women are often forced to raise the children alone, and consequently wear themselves out very early. If you're among one of these populations, and you're looking at a piece of hot ass, chances are it's off limits.

Especially hot asses, because they tend to develop sooner. Breasts take a little longer to fill out, sometimes not coming in until a woman is in her 20s or even 30s ('strue!)

But anyway, my point is that the other day I was watching the news, and they were demonizing some guy (in his 30s, I believe), who had gotten involved with a 16-year-old girl. He's a criminal, yes, and he deserves to be punished. But the amount of vilification they were heaping on him seemed a bit excessive and it made me think back to my pal Hesiod and what he'd said, about men who shouldn't get married until they were 27 or 30, but they were supposed to marry a woman somewhere in her teens. And I started thinking about many of the historical cultures I knew and about our probable evolutionary history, and it occurred to me that for most of this time, men were probably allowed or even encouraged to get involved with really young girls.

This day and age is different. Ideally, we want women to have time to reach emotional and physical maturity before they start putting their bodies through the hardships of sex and its consequences. I think the laws are good ones and should be enforced. Of course, when you start working at a place that sells tobacco and alcohol, they tell you how hard it is to tell the age of a person buying. That's why you're required to ask for ID at the counter. I think it's a little much to expect a guy to ask for ID in the bedroom. If he suspects something, he'll ask her if she's of age, and odds are she'll say yes. Still, err on the side of caution, or be prepared to pay the consequences.

But I think the vilification and the hatred and the long-term monitoring should be saved for the real sexual predators: rapists and pimps and makers of underage porn who combine sex with violence or money to turn it into an exploitive act.

Anybody who was in it for mutual pleasure and engaged in only consensual acts should be punished, because they should know better, but we shouldn't treat them like inhuman monsters.

I Must Increase My Bust

I Must Increase My Bust

I'm not normally a YouTube user, but I stumbled across this video while doing research for work. Go ahead and start the video while you read the commentary, but you might rather do without the sound.

I've mentioned before my early experience with pinups, so it's natural, I think, that I'm interested in anime women. This video highlights one great feature of anime women: their breasts. It doesn't really get started until you get out of the club, but once it gets going it doesn't stop. Note how wonderfully the animators show off their movement. This is a real treat, because they move in ways that no woman would let her breasts move in real life--it'd be too painful.

See the warrior woman with the high split in her skirt? Anime is great at this--giving women impossibly long legs and skirts slit indecently high--a design I've only known one woman to attempt.

Nice also are the shots of men looking at the breasts--they serve to reduce the perv factor by stressing that it's only normal for men to respond this way to such lovely sights. I particularly empathize with the bearded old man on the pole, eagerly scanning the crowd for cleavage.

There is one problem here, though. In their zeal for big breasts, the animators have made them too rounded, too globular. While I suspect that this is the result of the fantasy element of anime making the brests stand out the way they'd never do in real life, the effect is to produce something akin to artificial breasts in shape, making them a little less appealing. The movement, too, is over-exaggerated, and ruins the firm-but-yielding impression of solidity one gets from looking at real breasts.

Overall, though, an enjoyable little film.

An Apology

Guys and other fans, my apologies for being so remiss in my postings. Truth is, I have a job where I write about stuff like this all day. Here's an example of my work, with the promise that I'll get back to the Pleasure Dome very soon.

The Science of Beauty: Youth

Why is it that supermodels, singers, and Hollywood starlets keep getting changed out every few years in favor of younger models? How is it that Britney Spears, barely 26, is being seen as fat and old? Science tells us she's past her prime, sexually, since female reproductive fertility peaks at age 22. And now, especially since she's reproduced twice, her fascination to the collective male ego is on the wane.

But is that all there is to it? And if it is, why doesn't she just go gently into that good night and stop trying to shake her groove thing on the boob tube? And why can't the rest of us, past our sexual prime, do likewise, even if we have also reproduced and are engaged in a significant personal relationship that is generally fulfilling? Why do we insist on trying to maintain our youthful appearance?

Beauty Is Youth, Youth Beauty

First of all, it's hard to dispute the connection between the fading beauty of youth and the peak of sexual fertility. After about age 22, a number of significant changes happen in the face that decrease attractiveness in women, many of them making women's faces seem more masculine. The lips begin to lose tissue, making them thinner and flatter like men's lips. Also, the chin becomes more pronounced with age, also like a man's. Youthful eyes are wide and clear, and young women have high, arched brows, but with age the eyelids and the brow both droop.

In addition, the complexion begins to change, from smooth and lustrous to blotchy, wrinkly, and dull. All these things provide undeniable signals to the opposite sex that we are past our reproductive prime.

But Is that all Ye Need to Know?

But if that's the case, why don't we jus let ourselves go after we've found our soulmate and after we've successfully reproduced?

First of all, human reproduction is a long process, and is not considered complete until our children have children, so we're conditioned to try and keep beautiful as long as possible. (Not to mention pestering our kids: "When am I going to have a grandchild?")

Second, humans practice what anthropologist Desmond Morris called "supersex." In using the term, he is not saying that human sex is particularly better than that practiced by other species, although it's certainly true in some cases. What Morris is referring to is the fact that sex is not just sex. It's pretty much never just about reproduction: it's about bonding and emotional attachment. And more than that, sex is not just the act itself.

Unlike our closest relatives, the bonobos, human beings do not practice casual sex to bond the greater social body. Instead, we have substituted a thousand semi-sexual rituals to do that bonding work for us, from dancing to the hundred acts of casual flirting in which we engage every day.

And because these rituals are all linked to sex at their base, when we begin to feel ourselves becoming less sexually attractive, it is no wonder that we might feel socially insecure, even if we have no overtly sexual motives or goals. This anxiety is heightened by the numerous images of ever-youthful women supplied by television, magazines, and billboards that invade our personal environment and make us feel we are in direct competition with them.

She Cannot Fade:

For Ever Wilt Thou Love, and She Be Fair!

Fortunately, in this modern age many of the overt signs of aging can be, if not reversed, then diminished to a point consistent with maintaining our self esteem against the thousand needling doubts we cannot help but feel every time we look in the mirror or in the face of someone looking at us, their eyes darting over our face, making unconscious judgments about it.

It is possible to combat shrinking lips with a combination of injectable fillers and/or a lip implant.

A broadening chin can be corrected with a facelift, neck lift, or a chin implant. Often these procedures work together to complement one another nicely

The drooping of our eyelids can be corrected with eyelid surgery (blepharoplasty), and the contracting of the brow can be combated with a brow lift. Wrinkles can be smoothed with a facelift, brow lift, neck lift, or injectable fillers and laser collagen replacement. Finally, numerous treatments exist to keep our skin lustrous, smooth, and fair, including chemical and laser peels, facials, and microdermabrasion.

If you are interested in remaining a friend to man when old age has wasted this generation, consult the website of facial and ocular cosmetic surgeon Dr. Robert Fante and the Fante Eye and Face Center in Denver, Colorado.

Public transportation romance I

There’s a guy who gets on the bus about the same time as me, a little before 6:30 in the morning, and, like me, rides all the way to the end of the line. He’s quiet, reserved. He looks like Paul Giamatti in Sideways, only more so: bigger in every way. He’s taller, wider, darker hair, going grey, and with scruffier stubble, although all these things work together to maintain his proportionality to the Miles character. He also has a notebook that he scribbles in the entire bus ride, so I imagine he’s working on this monstrous novel.

There’s a woman who gets on the bus, too, older, about an average build: nothing much to speak of. She dresses nice, emphasizing her ass which is fairly toned, and trying to conceal the age in her face. She wears sunglasses and a scarf on her head in inclement weather. Her hair is dyed red, but fading a little bit, shoulder-length, and wavy. If she reads, it’s only the paper, but she doesn’t ride that long, so she mostly sits and looks out the window.

They both get off at the same stop, and transfer to the same bus, the one I ride. She gets off at my stop. He rides on.

Yesterday, on the second bus, she wasn’t looking out the window. She was looking across the bus at the Paul-Giamatti guy scribbling in his book. He was sitting in front and across from her. At one point, he looked up from his notebook, and glanced back over his shoulder. Their eyes met, and there might have been just the fraction of a smile before they both looked away.

Is this the first spark of a brilliant flame that will illumine the lives of these people? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.

Office girls; or, The Cruel Trick of the Universe

You only have to be in an office a few days before you run into the office flirt. Usually a young woman, somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five, not especially attractive, but cute. Generally a little on the heavy side, although she carries it well. Coincidentally, she is also engaged, or in a relationship so serious she's certain he'll propose any minute. This is what makes her a flirt. She's enjoying a sudden burst of confidence coming from her impending bride status. She's been the center of so much preparation, that she kind of believes she's really the center of everything for a while. And besides, she's free to play with every man she comes across because there's nothing at stake. She knows nothing's going to happen, and that's the way she likes it: a game where the move of the moment is all that's in the balance. A lower cut neckline, a shorter skirt, maybe leather, maybe plaid, all serve to enhance the play, but they mean nothing. She has, for a few short months, mastered the essence of flirting.

This is the cruel trick of the universe. On your deathbed, in the instant of your last breath, an angel sits on your pillow and tells you the secret of life.

Carnivals

Today I went to a local carnival, celebration thing, a festival focusing mostly on food, but with music and rides and games and things. It was a real feast for the eyes. Labor day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, and all the women were breaking out their most revealing blouses and sun dresses to wear them one last time before they get put away for another year to make way for sweaters and heavy wool skirts (which are nice, too. I look forward to sweater season, as I look forward to all seasons, because, really, there's nothing to complain about. Reminds me of a little verse:

My love in her attire doth show her wit

It doth so well become her

For every season she hath dressings fit

Winter, spring, or summer.

No beauty doth she miss

When her robes are on,

But beauty's self she is

When all her clothes are gone.

Or something like that. Sometimes I say these poems so often, I kind of make up the words.)

But it was beautiful: scoop necks with little lacy frills around the decolletage; dresses in bright colors with narrow straps, and full skirts; tight pants; shorts that were so short and tight they threatened to suddenly become wholly inadequate skirts at any moment. Women in sunglasses of all shapes and sizes, broad sun hats, and even one who struck me as singularly beautiful in a revolutionary cap, with her hair pulled back very tight to match the dramatic energy of her walk. Not to mention the one with a jewels nestled in her cleavage. All colors: purples, reds, blues, and lovely greens. Purest white to gothic black. Delightful, not necessarily for itself, but for the memory it inspired in me, the memory of the first time I felt almost overwhelmed by my lust for women.

I was in middle school, aged 12 or 13, and I was traveling with a couple friends of mine. One of their mother's had a business conference in Anaheim, so we were invited along to keep him company and go to Disneyland.

I don't know what exactly happened in me, but suddenly the world was like a smorgasbord: girls! Girls! GIRLS!! Everywhere I looked, there was some attractive girl or woman, somewhere in age between, I don't know, eleven and fifty.

Obviously, I was in the throes of puberty, but why it should suddenly hit me so powerfully and so suddenly, I don't know. But most of my memories of the trip are of looking around with a desperate longing at all the beautifully arrayed women. I was more shy then than now, but still I tried my hand at flirting whenever the opportunity arose. There were a couple of promising contacts, but neither of my friends were interested (it turns out one of them was gay), so the promise never came to more than a smile, a wink, a glance over the shoulder.

We stayed in the park until quite late, after the electrical parades, when almost everyone had left, when there were so few people that you could ride the rides again and again and again. By the end of the day, I became so bitter with frustration that I would sit down on a bench and just look at the garbage strewn here or there. They did a good job keeping the place clean, but I focused on what little bits slipped through the cracks. I got a little cynical. All of society, I thought, was just a thin facade, a lie, painted over the desiring beast within us all.

Since then, my hormones have obviously mellowed, and I'm married, and I've had, if less than my fair share, a healthy dose of sexual exerience, so things like this don't upset me as they used to. But sometimes I miss that bitterness, because it was companion to a pure hope that I'll never feel again. The hope that true love and great sex, completely interdissolved, ever-fresh, and all-renewing, can be mine if I can just get this girl--this girl--to look at me and smile.

Skirts

The skirt is an inherently sexist piece of clothing, so much so that it became a sexist metonymy for woman. Why do I say this? Well, let's look back in history.

At one time, men and women wore pretty similar garments on their bodies. One reason for this was that people didn't have the material or the know-how to make complicated garments, so the easiest thing to do is just wrap a bit of cloth around you. But there's another equally practical reason. People didn't used to have toilets, so they pretty much squatted down wherever they were to let loose their bowels. Having used squat toilets, I discovered something: pants are completely impractical. Trying to put your pants down around your ankles while keeping them out of the line of fire is really difficult. Much easier is a skirt or sarong or whatever that you can just tuck up out of the way.

And just as the skirt allows an easy flow of matter out, so it also, possibly, allows easy access from the outside. Skirts are designed to make women sexually accessible, to help promote them as possible sex objects.

With that understanding, I have to say that I love skirts. And really not for the reason that I just gave. What I like about skirts is the way they amplify the motion of a woman's hips. Sure, tight pants can show off a woman's ass to good effect, defining each cheek and emphasizing the offset of their motions, but a soft skirt of light material changes every step into a shiverous tidal wave of voluptuousness. Short skirts are okay, but often when they get short, they get rigid, and they transform a woman's walk into a mechanical tilting back and forth with no fluidity.

And it's impossible to talk about skirts without mentioning the automatic speculation about what women might or might not be wearing underneath. And the subconscious glances men cast about to try and catch a glimpse of that which would otherwise be concealed. This does not mean that we're all perverts with mirrors or cameras on our shoes--far from it. Doing something like that is not only ungentlemanly, but it also takes all the fun out of it. Seeing up a woman's skirt is like a sunshower on a hot summer's day: unexpected, arresting, and invigorating. And it's just as innocent.

Think about Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, and how innocent and flirty her relationship with with Tom Ewell is. That's the level at which skirts excite men. Playful and pure, they conceal while holding out the promise of revealing the mystery that is woman.

Breasts in Film and beyond

Now, it would seem that filming breasts so they look good wouldn't be hard. Heck, guys love to look at 'em, so just put 'em on the screen and let 'em be ogled. But like so much in cinema, it's not just a matter of point and shoot. There are good techniques and bad techniques for showing off breasts in film, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about what I think works . . . and what doesn't.

1. Bigger isn't necessarily better. I like big breasts. Of course. Who doesn't. But should they all really be Easy Money huge? I don't think so. Recently, I was writing about facial plastic surgery for a web site, and in doing my research the temptation to look at before and after pictures of breast augmentations was too strong. So sue me. Oddly enough, it wasn't really an erotic experience. But it was an aesthetic one. It really gave me a chance to look at breasts in a detached, formal way. I mostly paid attention to shape, trying to grasp what exactly it is about it that so entrances me. Skin and gravity warring over the distribution of lipids reduces and sometimes inverts the convexity of the top and accentuates it on the bottom, producing a shape not unlike an ocean swell. It's so easy to imagine bobbing up and down there, a thought accentuated by the fluid movement of them when a woman walks. Having looked at possibly hundreds of photos, I've decided that C-cups are best. Purely from a perspective of balance, this is the point at which the weight of the lipids pulls the breasts down to give them a full appearance, but not so much that they appear to sag.

2. Cleavage is always good in movies. And who doesn't like it in real life? Let's get real: what's better than cleavage? But in the movies, it's especially good. Something about the lighting or the camera angle or just the fact that you can stare without feeling like too much of a creep: it pretty much always works.

3. Let them be free. Shout it from the mountain on out to the sea, peace in the valley, breasts got to be free. Just as you wouldn't gag a full-voiced actor like James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman, you can't keep breasts so tightly bound that they can't wash like hypnotic waves over the viewer. Let 'em move. Naturally.

With those three rules understood, let's look at some noteworthy moviemakers and/or films.

Russ Meyer--of course we've got to talk about the man who's known for his fetish with breasts, but unfortunately he often violates all three of my rules. Because he's interested in big breasts, which require lots of support, they are rarely allowed to move freely, nor does he shoot them to properly show off their movement.

Andy Sidaris, on the other hand, while generally dismissed, is a man who really knows how to make a movie that's pretty much about breasts. Although his films are often labeled 3B: Bullets, bombs, and breasts it's really the latter that makes his movies worthwhile. If anything, because they're pretty poor movies altogether. Hard Ticket to Hawaii, for example, has piss-poor plot, character development, and special effects. Most of the action sequences are lame and boring. But there's something satisfying in watching our heroine battle it out with a mutant snake and an evil assassin when every move she makes shivers through her breasts. And he knows how dumb his movies are, making them only eye candy.

Pedro Almodovar really doesn't belong on this list, since he's a real filmaker who makes really good films. But he merits mention because of what he did with Penelope Cruz in Volver. Bravo, my good man.

And let's not forget David Lynch, whose metafilm strategies manage to strangely de-eroticize the lesbian love scene in Mulholland Drive, despite the presence of breasts.

A few other notes:

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is worth watching for Caroline Munro's cleavage alone.

Megan Fox was a great distraction in Transformers, but not enough to save that movie.

Marilyn Monroe's breasts look great in Some Like it Hot, but it's so hard to decide who's better in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: her or Jane Russell.

It was so sad to lose Lake Bell from the cast of Boston Legal.

Scarlett Johansson's breasts aren't too big because she's beautiful and well-proportioned and sometimes she can act.

Put all Hope out of your mind.

And masturbate as little as possible. It drains the strength.

With that little bit of wisdom from Papillon, I'd like to move on to sharing a little classical wisdom from Hesiod on things related to this blog.

First his somewhat erotic description of the muses:

Their soft feet move in the dance that rings

The violet-dark spring and the altar of Zeus.

They bathe their lithe bodies in the water of Permessos

Or of Hippokrene or of god-haunted Olmeios.

Which seems to promise that their lithe bodies could be coming to some water near you, although they have been gone from me for some time. Hesiod also tells us of Venus:

From her come young girls' whispers and smiles and deception

And honey-sweet love and its joyful pleasures.

And on marriage:

The right time to bring a wife to your home

Is when you are only a few years younger than thirty,

or just a few years older. This is the right time for marriage.

Five years past puberty makes a woman a suitable bride.

Marry a virgin so you can teach her right from wrong.

Choose from among the girls who live near you and check

Every detail, so that your wife will not be the neighborhood joke.

Nothing is better for man than a good wife.

Miscellaneous advice:

It is not good for boys twelve days or twelve years old

To sit on that which is motionless,

For such an act unmans even a man in his prime.

A man should not sleek his body with a woman's bath water,

For in time even this is cruelly punished.

Do not piss as you stand and face the sun,

but do it after the sun sets and before it rises.

Sire your children when you return from a feast of the gods.

In your house do not sit by the hearth

With your genitals exposed and bespattered with semen.

Ah, advice as bronze as the day it was printed. And something we can all agree on.

Hair, Pt. 2

Hair down there was featured in all the porn that blew through my yard. It naturally became associated with the truly incomprehensible acts being portrayed therein. Then, when I moved from porn on the wind to the pinup phase of my development, it disappeared. Breasts were always in full view, but pubic hair was generally concealed by garments or strategically positioned legs. Except in a few images, where hints and wisps of it emerged here and there to imply the greater mysteries beyond. And they were mysteries, because even in the actual Playboys of the day, you saw hair, but little real anatomical detail. (Of course, Penthouse showed everything, but in a way that ruined it for me.) The hint was magical, though. I remember one image of a woman crouching to drink from a hose. The water splashed onto her white blouse, making it translucent, and her legs were spread, so that you could see up one leg of her very short cutoff jean shorts. Not only could you see hair in there, but a few strands emerged and caught the sunlight. Here was a mystery whose furthest edge was bared to the sun, but still concealed. The mystery of the pussy is essential to the masculine erotic imagination. For us, our dicks just hang out there all the time, but women, even when they are naked, are concealed. Like angel wings, the pudenda enfolds around the secrets of female sexuality: clitoris, vagina, and all the subtle forms we both long and fear to touch.

Personal preferences aside, there are very good reasons for liking one or another style of grooming. The purpose of pubic hair is to catch sexual fluids and expose them to air so they evaporate and spread hormones on the breeze. In other words, pubic hair is kind of designed to get wet and smell. So, if you want to have sex with as little messy fluids as possible, and you're concerned about odor, you've definitely got to do something about the hair. That's your choice, but once you start down the path, you might end up with something like Daniel Evans Weiss describes in The Roaches Have no King:
A summary of my depressing examination will suffice: her labia majora were cool and dry. The footing around her clitoris was firm, and the clitoris itself was tiny. Disappointed by her odor, her texture, her talc . . . I stuck my head into her vagina. Oh, there were powerful tastes in there. One was vinegar. The other was a poor chemical imitation of strawberry. She had poured herself a TV pussy, which is probably exactly what her tin-can husband liked.

But me, I like my deep romantic chasms to be savage places.

Hair

Now, it may be because I grew up in the 70s, but I think a head of >ahem< long, beautiful hair is essential to a woman's beauty. I've already mentioned my mom's friend, Laura, and how she helped develop my sense of beauty in a woman. She was a small woman, and, in addition to the big sunglasses and floppy hats of the day, she had really long hair. In my memory, it's the color of a nice pilsner, and it flows like one: cool in the sun as it fills the curve of the glass.

So I've always loved long hair, the way its tendrils trace the shapes of women's bodies, frame their faces, and become mischievous arrows that point here, to cleavage, here to the hollow of the throat, here to the ass. Here's a bit from the Rubaiyat that I think captures the intoxication of hair:




Perplexed no more with human or divine
Tomorrow's tangle to the winds resign
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The cypress-slender minister of wine.

Most of my girlfriends have had long hair, and mostly blonde or red-headed, from coppery and fiery to pale straw-colored. I've only dated one brunette, but, paradoxically, she's the one I married. Go figure.

But there's other hair to talk about. Let's look at some literature, such as Eliot's contribution to the subject:
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?

Oh, presume, presume, my good man. I've always thought this a nice little bit about the paralyzing enticements of desire. And I love the hair, so soft visually, implying the touch, but never reaching it.

And this bit from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North:


Mrs. Robinson was a buxom woman and with a bronze complexion that harmonized with Cairo as if she were a picture tastefully chosen to go with the color of the walls in a room. I would look at the hair of her armpits and have a sensation of panic.

Okay, so as Americans, hairy armpits are not exactly a turn-on. I remember being shocked by the pictures outside a Greek porno theater where the women had completely natural armpits. I just have a hard time dealing with that. But Salih captures something here, with his "sensation of panic" (although the words are a translator's), an effective euphemistic truth akin to Updike's "it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron." Stomach, indeed. He's making the connection between a woman's armpit and her pudenda, a really logical connection that was also used effectively in Cronenberg's Rabid. Making that connection, it makes sense that Americans would move from shaven pits to shaven nethers, though it really is a shame, since, as I said, I'm a fan of hair. I recently came up with a new theory on why, which I'll share in another post, since this one is getting long.





I'll close with another quote from Salih on hair:





This last idea converged in my mind on the tiny hairs on her right arm near to the wrist, and I noticed that the hairs on her arm were thicker than with most women, and this led my thoughts to other hair. It would certainly be as soft and abundant as cypress-grass on the banks of a stream.





Or a sacred river.

A spot of poetry

Oh, and one more thing. Lately, I've been infatuated with this Millay poem:

Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold.
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot.

Shiverous, huh? So true and beautiful and harsh all at once. It captures the tragedy of the sensuality of the progress of love.

Or maybe it's just peach season again.

Spanish Television

I don't have cable, but that's okay. Now I get three times as many stations as I used to, although two-thirds of them are Spanish, religious, or home shopping networks.

Flipping through the channels, I realize one thing Latin TV programmers know: everything is better if you put a woman with great cleavage and a short skirt in it. Take for example the show Que Dice La Gente? (What do the people say?) on Telefutura. Basically, it's The Family Feud, but not only do they add a couple of skimpily-clad women who walk on stage periodically, but they dedicate the first half of the show to a competition between variously-named groups of attractive men and women. This time, it's Las Venus vs. Los Adonis. And the women dress great. Tops that really show off their busts, short skirts or shorts, sometimes tall boots, and, dios mio, sometimes even hats that, I think, really do something special for a woman's face. Here's J-Lo in something of the style, although not quite right. Actually, I like this image because she reminds me of my mom's friend Laura, who I knew when I was very young, and was my first image of what a sexy woman was like.

Desire

I say this blog is about the beauty of the female form, and it is, but the aesthetic appreciation of woman is inextricable from desire. A man cannot look at a woman and believe she is attractive without feeling the beginnings of longing.

There are three pieces of fiction that I think capture man's desire in all its inglorious polymorphity: "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," by Irwin Shaw. "Mr. Durant," by Dorothy Parker, and Jazz by Toni Morrison. You may not agree, but each of these authors captures the sometimes subtle, sometimes unconscious, but always automatic and always detailed attention men pay to women's bodies. It may seem perverse, and perhaps it is, but it is the way we are made. The Picture of Dorian Grey also has something to say on the depths of depravity created by publicly denying our passions.

The nature of desire struck me again today as I was walking downtown in my new old home at lunch time and after, when the streets were full of women of all manner of beauties. Hard, able bodies with stern faces and pulled-back black hair. A smooth-walking French girl in loose, flowing pants that quivered all up and down her long, long legs. And then her, standing out in a group of ten office girls, all tightly done up for work, but she had a body whose promise of pleasure could not be stifled or silenced as she hurried down the street, her breasts registering the impact of step after step after step.

Perhaps I am a pervert, but what is beauty for if not to be seen and enjoyed?

Back Up

In the past I've talked about breasts as ass-analog, necessary since we're upright-walkers, a theory most people are familiar with these days. What isn't talked about as much is that the ass, as we know it, is also a product of our upright carriage.

If we take a look at most apes, they rely on color more than size to call attention to the female ass. Baboons have mostly flat asses, but colorful, and when the female goes into estrus, her, ahem, cunny is so red, well, you might even say it glows.

Of course, chimpanzees, our closest neighbor sexually, do rely primarily on size to call attention to the ass. Especially during estrus, when the female's entire ass region blows up into a huge balloon.

Flash forward to humans, who needed to reinvent our entire musculature for walking upright. Guess what we needed more than anything else: lots of muscle in the ass. For chimp-like minds, this would look like a female who is constantly in a state of estrus, always ready for sex. And coincidentally, she is. Humans are among a very select group of species whose females don't go through "heat" per se, but are constantly cycling. I wonder whether the ass led to that, since males were getting too many false positive signals, so the more successful females were those that turned the false positives into true positives.

Ah, ass, is there any better example of form and function?

The wisp of a smile

Like everything else about a woman, her smile is mysterious. It's hard to say why it affects us so. It's a simple matter, the curve of her lips, the rise in her cheeks, maybe a flash of her teeth. Part of it, of course, is like the look in her eyes: it shows us she's listening, attentive, warming to our company. But it seems a waysign pointing us on to more. A smile is so often the prelude to a kiss.

There are two smiles I really like. The first is the light smile, that comes and goes like sun-dappled shade beneath the spreading branches of a wind-touched tree. Youth, energy, eagerness all go along with this smile, and, of course, the need for constant entertainment. She lets you know the second she isn't having fun. And fun is what this smile is all about. A little flirt, a little play, just for tonight and maybe the next day, but there are no worries here.

But if a woman is to have a serious smile, it should be an arch smile. There should be something of the diabolic there. With this woman, you never know how you're doing, and you probably don't want to know. She's taking you where she wants to go, and after you've been there, there's nothing to do but log the memories and count your losses. Almost always, there's nothing you can lose that's more precious than the memories.

These are rare and special pleasures, but almost any woman's smile is worth taking a moment to say hello and put out the invitation of your own smile, and maybe add a little compliment.

The Most Intriguing Part of a Woman

I had a girlfriend who said that the most intriguing part of a woman was the hollow at the base of her throat. On her, it might have been.



Okay, that's not exactly fair. She had really, really great pale blue eyes that could emote complex configurations of emotion like no one else I've ever known. No emotion with her was unalloyed, it was always happy-confused-terrified-melancholy, or sad-bemused-whimsical or something. And she had kind of a cute face around those eyes, but her body was unfortunate, just too wide and squat and bulky to ever really be attractive. I could go into detail, but I'll leave it at that to be kind.







Also, she was not the brightest star in the Southern Cross, either. Look at this image of Eva Green from Casino Royale and let me know what you find most intriguing:

I promised poetry on the blog, so here's some Greek ribaldry:

Sing with me a slim lass,
Pierian Muses.
You touch to beauty all
that your song chooses.
Lovely Bombyka, a gypsy
others may see:
bony and sunburnt, but
honeypale to me.
Dark the scrawled hyacinth
and the violet,
but those are the flowers that first
in a wreath we set.
Wolf goes after goat,
goat after clover.
Storks go following ploughs,
I'm your true lover.

Pinups

Now that the awkward first post is out of the way, I can forge on ahead with my subject, posting daily as long as my enthusiasm holds and my wife doesn't find out. Of course, if T doesn't like me posting on these subjects, maybe we can sit down and talk about them. That'd be fine with me, but I don't think it's going to happen.

You guys that know me know I spent my kindergarten and 1st grade years in a neighborhood where porn just drifted by on the breeze. Perhaps this accounts for my perversion (or healthy honesty) on the subject of the female body. But most of that stuff was just raunch, the kind of thing that'd be good much later for choking the chicken, but really didn't teach me anything about beauty.

What did teach me about beauty was a discovery I made a little later, a collection of Vargas' paintings for Playboy. Really a beautiful magazine, it was dozens of paintings of women in mostly softcore poses showing off what they had. Sort of. Few of the pictures had more than a hint of pubic hair. Mostly they were this sort of thing. But they really hit me. I looked at them again and again and again until the magazine disappeared, mysteriously. A tragic loss.

But these women became a benchmark for me. Curvy, mostly busty, luxurious and playful, they were sexy, but they were more than just sex objects. Maybe it's just me, but I read a lot of personality into the banal one-liners, the fixed expressions, and seductive postures.

Recently, I've really come back around to an appreciation of pinups. they're erotic art of the sort that in the days of ancient Greece would be all over the walls, and sculpted everywhere, art that very simply acknowledges the fact that sex is normal, natural, and vital, and that, hey, men love to look at women (and in the case of Greece sometimes men) sexually. In ceding the pinup from the realm of accepted male culture, we've given up our right to be men without being considered perverts. And we've become pushed more toward the tawdry end of erotic art, the really graphic pornography which is cheap and easy to produce and which encourages us to have only one, very base, erotic response.

Now, I like my base erotic response as much as the next guy, but sometimes all I want is the cheer that comes from looking at the nicely balanced shape of a beautiful woman. A lopsided smile on my face, a skip in my heart, and a twinge in my crotch are sometimes just what I need to get me through a bland day, and it's sad that it's not allowed.

Fortunately, there are still artists at work out there. Here are a couple of my favorites. Andrew Bawidamann does a lot of really good work, much of it military-themed, plugging into the notion that the pinup is an integral part of the US military tradition. His work captures a lot of what's best about pinups: the innocence, the fun, the stylized beauty. I like what he does with movement and shape. His women's breasts and butts do what they're supposed to do when the women move in inertial and non-inertial frames, if I may get physical.

Frank Cho is a comic book artist, but, really, his work is ideal for pinups, at least partly because his writing isn't that great. But, boy, he does know how to draw a hot woman. This is not the picture I wanted to put here (I wanted to show my ass-men friends what he can do with plump posteriors), but my scanner is on the fritz, so it'll have to do. Besides, this particular picture captures again the spirit of the pinup, although in the peculiar fantasy world of Sheena.

Let's call that good for now.

Nothing like the sun

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Test Post

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea