The practice of foot binding began in the Sung dynasty (AD 960-1280) in China, reportedly to imitate an imperial concubine who was required to dance with her feet bound.’ By the 12th century, the practice was widespread and more severe: feet were bound so tightly and so early in life that women were unable to dance and had difficulty walking. When a girl was about 3 years old, all but the first toe on each foot were broken and the feet bound with cloth strips that were tightened over the course of 2 years to keep the feet shorter than 10 cm [~4 inches] and to bend the sole into extreme concavity. Foot binding ceased in the 20th century [banned in 1912] with the end of imperial dynasties and the increasing influence of Western fashion.

{ Public Health Briefs | PDF }

In Chinese culture, bound feet were considered highly erotic. When walking, women with bound feet were forced to bend their knees and balance on their heels; the resultant unsteady, swaying movement was attractive to many men. It was also believed that the gait of a woman with bound feet would strengthen her vaginal muscles.

Although Qing Dynasty sex manuals list 48 different ways of playing with womens’ bound feet, many men preferred not to see uncovered feet, so they were concealed within tiny, elaborately embroidered “lotus shoes” and wrappings. […] This concealment from the man’s eye was considered sexually appealing in itself, though it had the practical grounding that an uncovered foot would give off a foul odour due to chronic fungus infections and potential gangrene. […]

bound feet limited a woman’s mobility to such an extent that she was largely restricted to her home and could not venture far without the help of watchful servants. She was rendered almost totally dependent on her menfolk, which appealed to male fantasies of ownership. A woman with bound feet was also seen as a desirable wife because she was assumed to be obedient and uncomplaining.

{ Dance’s Historical Miscellany | Continue reading }

Confucius lived before the Christian Jesus is said to have been born […] Adeline Yen Mah asserts that, “every Chinese person wears a Confucian thinking cap … just as foot binding once bound women‟s feet, Confucian’s teachings have quietly and surely bound women’s lives for centuries.” Confucianism was at its peak centuries before Ming Dynasty rule; […] Confucianism revolved around the belief that a man was the leader and a woman‟s priority was to be obedient to that man […]

Females in Chinese society were regarded as menial entities; continually demoralized, degraded, humiliated, ignored—which created intrinsic silence. The silence was second nature and women simply accepted mistreatment because they did not know anything different. This was a paradoxical situation since women were a remarkably prevalent motif in Ming Dynasty paintings. A woman could speak eloquently, sing, and play music, as shown in paintings, yet their individuality was stripped away

{ The Callous Fate of Chinese Women During the Ming Dynasty (2011) | PDF }

Sophia Urista apologizes for peeing on fan. The rocker ordered the man to lie down on his back before she unbuttoned her pants, popped a squat and relieved herself on his head. Sophia Urista isn’t first rocker to urinate onstage

[U]ntil recently, there’s one group of potential Biden voters who have not been the subject of voter outreach: kinky, submissive male Trump supporters with humiliation fetishes.

Now, thanks to a Las Vegas-based professional dominatrix named Empress Delfina, this once-overlooked voting bloc is covered—and may be voting Biden. By force.

Her ad for this service reaches out to these potential Biden voters as follows: “Here’s your chance to get berated for being the degenerate Trump supporter you are. I reverse the brainwash you’ve succumbed to that made you into a Simple Stupid Drone. By using lethal mind fucking language and making you repeat dumbass chants like your Bullshitter in Chief made you do to warp you into submission, I transfer your ownership to me for my personal gain and entertainment. Embrace that you need to be saved from being a Trump-bot. Call now to begin your Trump Conversion Therapy.”

At $1.99 a minute, business is booming. […]

“Half the guys just want to argue. They’re not open to getting converted at all. They just call to start berating my liberal politics. And I’m like, ‘Hey, if you want to pay me $1.99 a minute to argue with me, go right ahead.’ […] But the other half is actually open to being persuaded.”

{ Daily Beast | Continue reading }

Physical pain represents a common feature of Bondage and Discipline/Dominance and Submission/Sadism and Machochism (BDSM) activity. This article explores the literature accounting for how painful stimuli may be experienced as pleasurable among practitioners of BDSM, and contrasting this with how it is experienced as painful among non-BDSM individuals. […] The experience of pain in this context can bring about altered states of consciousness that may be similar to what occurs during mindfulness meditation.

{ The Journal of Sex Research | Continue reading }

The woman, who calls herself Theodora, is a financial dominatrix, which means clients — many of whom never meet her in person — derive sexual pleasure from giving her gifts and money. Exchanges of money can range from several dollars in “tributes,” as they are called, to gifts of more than six figures. Some clients even become a “human ATM,” meaning they give her complete control over a bank account. […] Last year she made over $1 million in cryptocurrency alone.

{ MarketWatch | Continue reading | @TheOnlyTheodora }

You shoot a lot of BDSM stuff. How did you get into that scene?

One of my neighbors was heavy into it. I took a photo of my neighbor and she posted it on some website and a lot of people liked it. After that people started to want me to take their photos. They basically inducted me into the New York tribe of BDSM people. The induction was interesting. They invited me to this dude’s house and all the girls were on their knees as servants. Basically I had sex with this dude’s wife and this other dude’s girlfriend and then they said, “You’re an honorary member.”

[…]

What’s with the guy getting barbequed?


[…] The guy, Jim, gets off the plane from Texas in a white denim mini skirt and he’s all excited. The girls wash him down, shave all the hair off his body and strap him down to the spit and the barbequing begins. The basting took 40 minutes, then they lit the coals and he roasted on the spit for about three and half hours and got pretty cooked. When it was time to take him off he was yelling that he didn’t want to get off. He wanted to stay on there until his skin was legitimately burned.

{ Ian Reid interviewed by Chris Nieratko | Continue reading + BBQ video }

production still { Tsai Ming-liang, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, 2006 }

{ The Secret World of Men Who Dress Like Dolls }

{ Pierpaolo Ferrari/Maurizio Cattelan }

Here you are on January 7th finding out about the perfect calendar. It was put together by “The Fertile Earth Foundation” and it features months and months of beautiful women covered in shit.

Fertile Earth is a Miami-based hippie clusterfuck that encourages people to compost using their own organic waste. Grow a potato from your poop. That sort of thing.

{ Caity Weaver/Gawker | Continue reading }

The death of an autoerotic asphyxiation fan ended up providing science with some valuable observations of what happens during choking.

On Twitter recently, I’ve been highlighting some really bad ideas courtesy of the medical literature. From injecting vaseline into your own penis, to pumping compressed air up your rectum for a joke, people have tried it and they’ve ended up on PubMed as a result.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

A new study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggests there’s a link between bestiality and penile cancer.

During the research, led by urologist Stenio de Cassio Zequi, 492 men from rural Brazil were examined. 118 of these men had been diagnosed with penile cancer. 45 percent of the group that suffered from penile cancer had sexual relations with animals.

Of those men who had sexual relations with animals, 59 percent reported having sex with animals for one to five years and 21 percent had been doing it for more than five years. Sexual interaction occurred as often as daily and included animals such as horses, cows, pigs, and chickens.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

{ Watch the video }

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos.

All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel Histoire d’O, the full truth was finally made public. Even then, some still considered it the most shocking book ever written. When the book came out, its purported author was “Pauline Réage,” widely believed to be a pseudonym. Although shocking for its graphic depictions of sadomasochism, the novel was admired for its reticent, even austere literary style. It went on to achieve worldwide success, selling millions of copies, and has never been out of print. (…)

Desclos (or, rather, Aury, as she became known in her early thirties) was obsessed with her married lover, Jean Paulhan. She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter. (…)

Story of O, the title of the English edition, is an account of a French fashion photographer, known only as O, who descends into debasement, torment, humiliation, violence, and bondage, all in the name of devotion to her lover, René. Over the course of the novel she is blindfolded, chained, flogged, pierced, branded, and more.

{ Guernica | Continue reading }

photo { J. Kursel }

Don’t worry about me; I’ll land on my feet. I don’t regret coming here, even though I’ve been laid off now. In fact, my only regret is that you haven’t come to visit the Beacon Journal. I would have loved to piss on your shoes.

{ What fired or resigned journalists wrote to their bosses on the way out. | Slate | Continue reading }

Urolagnia is a paraphilia in which sexual excitement is associated with the sight or thought of urine or urination. The term has origins in the Greek Language (from ouron, urine, and lagneia, lust).

As a paraphilia, urine may be consumed or the person may bathe in it.

Urolagnia is sometimes associated with omorashi. Omorashi is a fetish subculture recognized predominantly in Japan, in which participants experience arousal from having a full bladder or a sexual attraction to someone else experiencing the feeling of a full urinary bladder.

In the hanky code, urolagnia is symbolized by a yellow bandana in the right or left pants pocket.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ 1. 2029 | Thanks Daemian | 2. Mimi }

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) was an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist.

He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) [book cover], a notable series of case studies of the varieties of human sexual behaviour. The book remains well known for his coinage of the terms sadism (from Marquis de Sade whose fictional writings often include brutal sexual practices) and masochism (from writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partly autobiographical novel Venus in Furs tells of the protagonist’s desire to be whipped and enslaved by a beautiful woman). (…)

In the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing divided “cerebral neuroses” into four categories:

• paradoxia: Sexual desire at the wrong time of life, i.e. childhood or old age

• anesthesia: Insufficient sexual desire

• hyperesthesia: Excessive sexual desire

• paraesthesia: Sexual desire for the wrong goal or object, including homosexuality (”contrary sexual desire”), sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, paedophilia , etc.

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and that any form of desire that did not go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, because pregnancy could result.

He saw women as sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized in women as “sexual bondage,” which, because it did not interfere with procreation, was not a perversion.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

SHOW by Henry Horenstein, published by Pond Press, features images of fetish, drag and neo-burlesque performers. Shot in underground clubs in Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, these intimate and clever black and white photos capture the pasties, fishnets and lipstick kisses of the superstars of neo-burlesque, including Dita Von Teese and Murray Hill.

{ Book Signing and Film Screening of Henry Horenstein’s SHOW, Tuesday, May 11th, 6-8 pm, Clic Gallery, 424 Broome St, NYC }

related { Clic will be presenting a special exhibit of Ron Galella’s most famous shots in June, to coincide with the HBO release of the documentary SMASH HIS CAMERA. }