November 16, 2008
I hate it when bloggers post the silly searches that lead people to the bloggers’ blogs.
Yet I am posting this one. Enjoy, all ye who seek nudes womens in harems.
More Orientalist Art, this time Vincenzo Marinelli’s “The Dance of the Bee in the Harem”.
June 1, 2008
I wouldn’t presume to collect all the resources on polyamory out there. Other people have put together websites that have tons of information, and in this case, as in most, google is your friend.
However, I did run across something the other day that I wish I had read about 18 months ago, before Robbie and I started to get involved in what we persist in calling “the others stuff”. We (meaning I) couldn’t decide if we (I) wanted to have relationships or flings, to be with men, women, couples, or moresomes, to play separately or together . . . and every step of the way was an opportunity for confusion, miscommunication, and hurt feelings.
I feel much better about this issue now, in part because things are going well between us and I don’t feel insecure; in part because, looking back on what we’ve done, he’s actually played things safe and that gives me confidence in him; and in part because I now have read this: a list of practical monogamy tips from the folks over at freaksexual. This couldn’t be a better list of things to discuss–it’s a list of things you should think about, but might not.
If you are just dipping your toes into the topic, I’d suggest you start here, here, here, here, and all the places those places link to, in addition to buying your very own copy of the Ethical Slut. Happy reading!
Above: party people are part of a panoramic pic by Will Pearson
Edit: Robbie reminded me about Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up–the book and the website. One of the very best places to start.
May 5, 2008
We have a celebration coming up. A big one. I’ll be writing more about it soon . . . it’s an anniversary of several kinds.
So I asked him last night. “I’m trying to prepare something special. Which would you rather have . . .
” . . . a French Maid . . . “
” . . . or a Japanese serving girl offering sake?”
I could hear the wolfish smile on the other end of the phone and his voice came back smooth as butter, the way it is when he has something really fiendish in mind for me, something that is going to make my input basically irrelevant. “Mmm . . . you choose.”
Uh, okay. Er, maid then. The French kind. No, the Japanese kind . . . no, wait . . .
(Photo by Ellen von Unwerth, found via a tip from Gloria Brame . . . woodblock print by Ando Hiroshige, c. 1850, found via google.)
February 19, 2008
The painting on the banner of this blog is part of one by Jean-Leon Gerome, a French Academic painter whose success was at its height just prior to the advent of the Impressionists.
His work is scattered all over “Seraglio Letters” for a reason. Gerome painted harems–lots of them. (Seraglio, in case you were wondering, is not what my lover likes to be called–it’s Italian for “harem.”) He painted naked women, glowing, pale and dark, in all sorts of marble baths and cloistered chambers.
He was only one of the painters of his day to indulge in “orientalist” fantasies–imagining sex elsewhere, in foreign climes, with slaves and dancing girls, instead of at home, in proper bourgeois Paris. Odalisques are orientalist art–odalisque being a westernized version of a Turkish word for chambermaid.
Where the Impressionists–Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, –portrayed the prostitutes of Paris, Gerome painted Turkish and Egyptian women at market, for sale, at the baths . . . and this, along with his disapproval of the Impressionists, made his work a target for modern critics.
Still, he has his admirers. (F’rinstance Ridley Scott finds him inspiring–which counts for something.) I would not say that I’m a fan, exactly; but when my mind–and possibly yours?–turns to fantasies of auction blocks . . .
. . . . . and gilded cages . . .
. . . Gerome’s are the settings I see. Today, after all, we might call the below a little girl-on-girl interracial BDSM action . . . or, if more PC, perhaps bisexual power-exchange in a multicultural society. Either way, the purpose is without question to titillate.
How’s it working for you?
Letters from a Seraglio 
