Bruno Dayan

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“The painter sat beside his model mixing colors while he talked about the whores that had stirred him.  His shirt was open, showing a strong, smooth neck and a tuft of dark hair; his belt was loosened for comfort, a button was missing from his pants, and his sleeves were turned up for freedom.

He was saying, ‘I like a whore best of all because I feel she will never cling to me, never get entangled with me.  It makes me feel free. [...] Somehow or other even the hair of a whore seems impregnated with sex.  This woman’s hair… it was the most sensual hair I have ever seen.  Medusa must have had hair like this and with it seduced the men who fell under her spell.  It was full of life, heavy, and as pungent as if it had been bathed in sperm.  To me it always felt as if it had been wrapped around a penis and soaked in secretions.  It was the kind of hair I wanted to wrap around my own sex.  It was warm and musky, oily, strong. It was the hair of an animal.  It bristled when it was touched.  Merely to pass my fingers through it could give me an erection.  I would have been content just touching her hair.’

[Anais Nin, Little Birds]

In the comments, etre asked about the Clayton Cubitt video: “This may seem inordinately curious, but I’ll ask anyway: both your outfit and veil-headgear are unusual, the latter perhaps more so – is there a story there?”

She’s referring to the long portrait I posted on my tumblr a few days ago, but I’ll repost it here:

Clayton Cubitt is an editorial and art photographer based here in New York (and a ludicrously talented one at that), and he’s been producing what he’s calling “long portraits,” video portraits running about five minutes in length. They work as a study of minute facial expressions, so when we talked about doing one, this obviously posed a problem.  How do you create a portrait of someone you can’t really see?

To answer your question: the shirt is mine, by Calvin Tran.  I like black, so it seemed appropriate. The mask is by Katie James, Clayton’s partner/lover/soulmate.  She created the face mask herself, and she used another piece of fabric – a transparent top – to cover my face, and then brought the mask down over it. I wouldn’t say that there was a story behind it, and it was more of a masking decision than a conceptual one, but I like that it looks like I’m a widow in mourning. I think we all liked that. It’s appropriate, because there’ve been losses worth mourning, ties I’ve been forced to sever.

Here’s a beautiful long portrait he shot of the model Lambchop listening to a sad song:

For more on Clayton Cubitt, see his Vimeo channel here.  And his portfolio here.

The last time I was in Paris, I walked into a bookshop and found Catherine Breillat’s Pornocratie on a display table.  Breillat’s known for her controversial films which often use sexuality to explore other dimensions of the human condition, among them Romance (1999), Sex is Comedy (2002), and Anatomy of Hell (2004).  Anatomy of Hell was the film adaptation of her book Pornocratie, or Pornocracy, a book thick with theory and sexual violence, and in top French form, it was both lauded and reviled when it came out. I’m not crazy about the book itself, but it’s worth mentioning because it was a best-seller in spite of the controversial rhetoric and sexually explicit, and violent, imagery (which, by the way, pales in comparison to American Psycho). When I wandered through that bookshop in Paris, it was on display among philosophical texts, which aligned the work with Bataille and Ballard. The other day, I saw it on display at a small bookshop in Williamsburg, between Barthes and Deleuze. It used to be available on Amazon – I did a search for it last week – but now it’s gone.

The way books are published and sold has been on my mind lately because nobody seems to know how to deal with, or sell, sexual subject matter in the States.  Sure, we have erotic texts that are intended to arouse the reader, and that genre of literature usually gets its own isolated aisle. But sexuality is often used as a means to explore deeper themes, or to expand on philosophical discourse, or to access internal experiences, psychology, emotion, spirituality. Sometimes sexuality is political, legal, historical, or grounded in current events, and can take the form of fiction, memoir, history, essay, poetry. Identifying something sexual as “adult” is clumsy and arbitrary, like some clunky algorhythmic Miller’s test. But that was Amazon’s earliest explanation for the filtering – it was looking for a way to filter out adult content from its search results.

What made me think of this is a post at Dear Author, in response to the Amazon disaster.  Right now, if you go to Amazon and search “homosexuality,” your first hit will be A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Jane’s deduced that the books are being filtered according to their meta data, and the meta data consists of short-hand descriptors and categories.  Gay and Lesbian categories are certainly being filtered, possibly erotica and sexuality as well.  Since many books fall into multiple categories, a book that’s concerned largely with feminism but manages to fall under the Gay and Lesbian tag, even by a stretch, is filtered out.  And the categorization seems a little arbitrary and counter-intuitive in some cases.  A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality doesn’t include any references to homosexuality in the meta data.  It’s categorized as a Christian book, a sociological book, a textbook, but not as a book that deals with homosexuality itself, in spite of the title.  Other books that address parenting and homosexuality are identified immediately as “gay and lesbian,” and parenting falls in as a subset. Presumably these are all marketing tactics, but because Amazon is targeting these categories, the outcome looks less like marketing – with the aim of reaching a target audience – than censorship, as interested buyers will have a hard time finding the books they’re seeking.

At Feministing, a publisher was able to reach Amazon for an explanation, and got a strange one, but one that confirms the original response that Amazon’s taking down the visibility of what it considers to be “adult” literature.  This is from the publisher’s email to the author of Full-Frontal Feminism:

Basically he said that amazon has been experimenting with the way they dole out content specifically so that people who are searching Harry Potter or whatever won’t run into links to products that might be offensive.

…It’s super fucked up, but apparently he’s saying that Amazon is a bully when it comes to stuff like this and it’s all about sales for them and it’s not about censorship. [He said t]hat they love you, love Seal, but that this is mandated from their bosses, who essentially want to be Walmart.

…He also said no human is responsible for the decisions per se, and that it’s all about tagging and feeds which are constantly being tweaked. He does think that amazon will retweak the tags based on the uproar that happened over the weekend.

So the logic is that through this filtering approach, Amazon is hoping to appeal to the largest possible market by hiding content that could be considered offensive.  That might make sense if Amazon were sanitizing its entire product list, but as others have noted, sex toys are readily available, as well as soft and mainstream pornography, heterosexual erotica, sexually explicit films, sexually explicit photo books.  Why it’s targeting homosexuality as a category remains a question, and a pretty disturbing question at that. But then, it’s also targeting books deemed erotic, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Some think Amazon’s been hacked; I’d like that to be true, but it’s unlikely.  Since its representatives are responding and taking ownership of the situation (apart from the PR rep who claimed it was just a ‘glitch’), it sounds as though the company’s moving toward a general sanitization of its stock, like Blockbuster (back when it was relevant) and Walmart. Whatever it is, I’m going to stop using Amazon.  I could call it a boycott, but it’s really just because it’s lost its use value. Amazon’s benefit was its comprehensive selection. Take that away and what’s left? Shipping costs and a wait period, presuming you’re able to find the book you need in the first place.

Oh, and in case you have the urge to read Breillat’s book, it’s available at Powell’s, my new go-to site for lesser-known books.

*

Update:

Amazon’s PR rep cites an internal error:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Same PR rep denies that the site was hacked.

Oh Amazon, you spectacular fuck up.

For those who haven’t heard yet, Amazon just removed a large number of books from its sales rankings and its search listings.  Best sellers are being removed from best-seller lists. It isn’t entirely clear why these books are being removed, but it looks as though they’re selectively targeting gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction, as well as books with “adult” content.  What constitutes adult content? Apparently classics, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as non-”adult” texts like Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism.  Yet Surrender the Booty 3: The Search for More Arse has been left untouched. Maybe they’re just weeding out the good stuff to keep the bar nice and low.

For more, see the twitter buzz: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=amazonfail

A post on the subject by Heather Corinna.

A list of some of the de-ranked books.

And the freshly coined term: Amazon Rank

Update:

Here’s a post with a good summary of the situation and its implications.

Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times wonders why American Psycho is fine, while Unfriendly Fire, a study of military policy, is not. (via sexerati)

Someone just suggested that I password-protect the last post, so I did.  It’s ironic: it’s about risk and prostitution, and they suggested that I just exposed myself to more risk in doing so… so, you know… fuck.

If you’re looking for advice on the risks of prostitution, let me know and I’ll send you the password. (That said, I don’t know how useful it is.)  debauchette@gmail.com

Otherwise: on sex work more generally, I encourage you to check out Calico’s post, “Seven Things I’ve Tried.”

This is interesting: Details has an article about a man who repairs ‘Real Dolls,’ those eerily lifelike sex dolls that look as though they weigh a ton and cost between $6,500 and $50,000 a piece. For Ryan Gosling fans, the Real Doll played a key role in Lars and the Real Girl, a film that explores themes of trust, attachment, and displaced intimacy (but no actual doll sex). I know I’ve wondered what happens to these dolls when they get manhandled day after day, because I’m perversely curious that way.  That said, when I read the article and the kind of damage that’s been done, I was pretty disturbed. The article is here.

Something else I’ve come across is the packaging and selling of erotic experiences.  Killing Kittens, the London-based sex party/community, is selling adventures, like a “film experience” (where you create or take part in a porn video), and a “kidnap experience” (where, well, you’re kidnapped). It’s a fascinating idea, and it’s interesting how they manoeuver around the sex laws.  Roleplay is a hugely interesting form of sex work, but it, like domination, treads very closely to the line that separates play from prostitution. Maybe in the UK the laws are more clearly defined.  If so, I should contemplate a move.

Update: On the subject of Real Dolls, a reader just directed my attention to the work of artist Anoush Abrar and his Realdolls series.

Update 2: Another reader pointed me in the direction of Elena Dorfman, who shot a series called Still Lovers. These images are particularly intimate.

Update 3: Love this: in the comments, drichmond includes a link to an article about Oskar Kokoschka’s lifesize replica of his ex, Alma Mahler, which he treated as a substitute for the real woman. Kokoschka writes: “I had hired a horse and carriage to take her out on sunny days, and rented a box for her at the Opera in order to show her off.” Man-Made Woman, by Jon Stratton.

The article mentions Bellmer’s dolls, which have always fascinated and disturbed me, much in the way the Details article did with its images of distorted and dismembered limbs.  Which reminds me of a video Susannah called my attention to called ‘Headache‘ by Aneta Grzeszykowska, in which disembodied limbs probe a woman’s torso.

I love receiving suggestions from readers.  I really appreciate them. (And as a sidenote, I’m not happy with the photo formatting with this particular template, particularly since it makes labeling very difficult, so I’m going to do some tweaking over the next few days.)

I’ve had domination on the mind lately.  It started when I thought through sleeping with men other than Gabriel, sex without strings. Since it could be a mindfuck for the average stranger, I thought it would be best to find someone who likes to be treated like a fucktoy, as a sexual preference.  That way he gets his kink satisfied, I get off, and there’s no risk of drama or attachment.  This got me thinking about sexual domination.

Which led me to read about the state of domination in New York. Since I’ve been preoccupied with escort news, I didn’t notice that the local dungeons have been heavily targeted this past year.  Most recently, the upscale dungeon Rapture was shut down after a bust for prostitution. When I read this in a typically misleading NY Post article, I’d assumed the vagina had made an appearance.  In reality, the domina was busted for offering a ‘prostate massage.’ In other words, she would have inserted a gloved finger into his ass. That, according to the law, was sex and therefore an offer of prostitution.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again that the strongest piece of advice I received when I was starting out was from a client with a background in law, who said that if the cops want to bust you, they can.  It was an Orwellian thought, and I responded with a lot of “what ifs” but each time he shook his head with, “Seriously, if they want to bust you, they can.”

Escorts post disclaimers on their websites, some even ask visitors to click an online agreement that they aren’t a cop, or that they understand that there’s no offer of sex for money.  A well-known and now-fallen agency had their escorts bring small slips of paper to each encounter which stated that any act that took place would be a consensual decision between two adults and in no way related to the financial transaction, which the client would sign. Another agency made claims that it was a matchmaking service, and only charged for the arranged meetings between pretty girls and potential suitors. These were attempts to stay within the law, but as every single one of my attorney clients have said, they don’t hold up.  They just impart a false sense of security.

So this is one of many reasons why I support the decriminalization of prostitution.  The argument against it usually draws up peripherally related crimes like human trafficking, but that only calls attention to the importance of creating a separation between these acts and a more clearly defined articulation of the (perceived) crime.  Prostitution, as it’s defined, is a deliberately vague crime that gives law enforcement the latitude to prosecute a dominatrix with an outstretched fingertip and a college girl using Craigslist for a fling to cover her bills, and it’s used to bring down politicians with adulterous pastimes, and it’s used to shut down apartments with more foot traffic than the average home.  It reduces the protection of prostitutes by preventing them from reaching out to the police when a real crime happens, like theft, blackmail, stalking, and assault. Human trafficking is a very real crime that needs to be addressed separately, and resources should be applied accordingly, to protect the rights of human beings, not to prosecute the consensual behavior between two private citizens. Which is why I’m so easily irritated by pseudo-feminist claims that prostitution should be banned because prostitutes – like children – can’t offer consent, and need the big bad law to protect them from themselves. Which isn’t a very feminist thought at all.

On another subject within the subject, I’ve been defining sex within an open, open-ish relationship, sex that’s sex (beyond the finger-fuck of a prostate probe), but sex that’s sex without cheating, because cheating is less about sex than it is about the act of covering it up.  I keep meaning to fuck someone else, but each time I get close, Gabriel drives me into the mattress, ankles overhead or locked within the metal bars of his headboard.  Then, when we’re apart, he gets horny over the thought of me sucking someone off in his absence. We’ll make it happen. If we’re apart enough, we’ll make it happen.

The New Year’s off to a busy start.

And here’s something: Clayton Cubitt’s video, or maybe Katie’s video, or maybe Katie’s friend’s video:

As a godless fornicator, I spent my Xmas with my ankles overhead. I hope you all had a merry holiday as well.

I’m glad to see the AA ads getting press.  I saw that the excellent Refinery29 wrote it up a few days ago, and now I’m seeing blips and notes from NBC, AVN, a few business sites, and some nicely drawn blogs. I’m glad in part because I like the AA ads, but also because I dislike North American nipplephobia. When I lived in Europe, I saw bare breasts sell windows, shower products, and jeans. When I moved back to the States, a woman was kicked out of the National Gallery for breast feeding (yet a museum is not a museum without a solid inventory of bare tit). I want to see more breasts because there shouldn’t be any shame in a conspicuously exposed nipple.

But more than that, I like the candor.  I’m a little tired of the coy push-and-pull that we teach young women, as if they should play up their sexuality but ultimately recoil from sexual activity, resulting in our classically conflicted nympho-puritanical views: we’re sex-saturated (advertising, porn) yet we’re also sex-avoidant (MPAA, morality laws). If we’re talking about depictions of women, I want to see more of this, of women looking you in the eye and fucking owning their sex. I want to see more women like Sasha Grey and Charlotte Stokely.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new AA ad for my site. They’ve got me very intrigued about the next one.

And apropos of nothing, except maybe the holidays, I’m getting a lot of mileage out of Gabriel’s headboard.  It’s made of steel bars, which means I can reach back and grip it when I’m on my back, or reach forward and hold it for leverage when I’m straddling his hips at strange angles. It’s good. It’s solid.  It’s making me rethink my position preferences.

Happy New Year to you all.   Me, I have some resolutions to draft.  Among them, more posting.

Like Jimmyjane?  Of course you like Jimmyjane.  You love Jimmyjane, because they make beautiful vibrators with excellent inscriptions like this:

I just got word that they’re having a sale. It’s 25% off orders of $100 or more (so, most orders).  You just need to include the code “Enjoy” and do it before January 5th 2009.

Buy one of their superlong blindfolds, tie up your fucktoy, and have your way with them.

Or buy a vibrator, get it engraved with something dirty, and slip it into your lovefriend’s purse.

Or build a private pleasure arsenal.

Or tip your favorite blogger.

I’m alive. I’ve been derelict. And flu-ish. And busy, but in the best of ways.

Prague was phenomenal.  It’s hard to give much of a summary of the experience, since my memory is a strange superimposition of daytime treks through museums and evening drinks with strangers and nighttime dirty talk with Gabriel. It’s an overlay of cobblestones and street lights and fellatio.

At some point I met up with a friend and we went out for Czech food before hitting a Cuban bar. The waiter tried repeatedly to get me to order some kind of animal joint, like a knee or an ankle, and when I paused to consider it, my friend shook his head hard. “Don’t do it,” he said. I guess he’d tried it the night before and it was about as disturbing as you’d expect from a boiled joint, so I went for some kind of meat dish with dumplings that was heavy-as-lead delicious. Later that night, after the Cuban bar and another wander through the city, I fell into a cycle that would repeat for the rest of the trip: I’d have a drink, feel the sudden need for sleep, call it a night, and then wake up promptly at 3am, dazed and horny.

One of those nights, I opened my laptop and found Gabriel online some seven time zones away. “So how many cocks have you sucked?” he asked.

Gabriel and I have been doing this tango.  He loves my slutty impulses, but I constantly question whether I should act on them, even with his support. I’ve run into this problem in the past.

I had a boyfriend with similar tastes a couple of years ago, someone I saw while I slept with clients. I never told him that I was a prostitute, but I did tell him that I was sleeping with other men.  And while it wasn’t the deepest relationship, it worked beautifully for the time that it lasted.  It worked for him because he was emotionally unavailable, and it worked for me because my clients left me emotionally exhausted. And it worked because he never asked too many questions about how I spent my evenings. Except for the sex.

We developed a strange routine. He’d come over to my apartment late at night, when I’d be in the middle of doing something quiet, like reading. A little drunk and a little coked up, he’d strip out of his clothes and pull out his cock. And then he’d ask questions about the sex I was having with other men, and I’d answer him slowly, meting out details while he jerked off to the sound of my voice. He’d ask how many men, how often, what I did, what it felt like, whether I came.

Sometimes he’d open his eyes and tell me to strip, slowly, while he watched.

Sometimes he’d get on top of me and grind against my body while I spoke.

And over time, he got more aggressive, and took that sexual aggression out on my body.  I fueled it, and if he drew back, I’d goad him until I was pinned down by all four limbs.

But he was always conflicted after he came. He’d apologize and fumble with his clothes, or he’d feel depraved and worry that there was something wrong with him and his kink.  At one point, I asked him about this, why he felt so much anxiety after sex, and he said that he hated that I wasn’t faithful, but the thought of it turned him on, and he hated that, how much it turned him on. Even when we were apart, he’d call (drunk and a little coked up) asking me to talk.  (“Tell me stories,” he’d say.)  And even when we broke up and he entered another relationship, he’d call with his cock in his hand, hoping to hear that I’d been on a sexual rampage.  But that night, when I asked about why he felt so conflicted, he said something I’ve remembered ever since: “After I come, I just want you to tell me that everything was a lie.” He wanted to hear about the men I’d slept with – he just didn’t want any of it to be true.

Gabriel is turned on by the idea of me sleeping with other men, and I’m turned on by the fact he’s turned on.  He’s my perfect perverted complement – I like being overwhelmed with cock, and he likes the idea of me being railed from all angles.  I like the idea of him watching and jerking off, or fucking me with the memory still fresh in his mind and mine.  We talk about sleeping with other people and sharing the experiences with one another, and I love his intensity when we talk about this. When I think through the possibility of carrying it through, I always stop short and wonder if he’ll regret it. If anything, I’ve learned to question the things that men say when they’re drunk or hard, and while Gabriel is never drunk, he is always hard.

Which might mean that he’ll never regret it at all.

I suppose we’ll never know until we do it.