Category Archives: female sexuality

Snuff (2008) Chuck Palahniuk

My first exposure to Chuck Palahniuk was the film Fight Club. My second was picking up the novel Haunted and reading the epigraph “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust,” a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Masque of the Red Death.” My third exposure was Diary, a novel I started to read and stopped reading around page 30 for reasons I forget.

The first and second exposures were enough to canonize Chuck.

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Today, I present you Chuck’s latest novel Snuff, about a porn star on sabbatical, her attempt to break the world record of serial fornication and a portrait of three of the men obliging her in her attempt.

I was a huge Stephen King fan between my twenties and my thirties but if I still would be such an avid reader today, Chuck would replace Stephen. Stephen is a mere horror author while Chuck belongs in the tradition of the fantastique and the grotesque, genres which overlap with horror but which are more of a celebration of the ambiguity and ambivalence of expierence.

Back to the novel.

Since the book industry misses something akin to IMDb.com (although LibraryThing [1] comes close), which allows viewers to rate films, we resort to a randomly picked review [2] by minor writer Lucy Ellmann for the The New York Times who does not like the novel:

“What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.”

Don’t you just love this? Negative criticism which makes you feel like reading the books involved. Lucy Ellman conveniently forgets all of the sensationalist writers from the past.

Introducing French Book Covers

French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.

A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.

I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.

Introducing Colette Calascione

From various Flickr members.

Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.

This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.

Les téléclitoridiennes

The story of Princess Marie Bonaparte is as least as strange as that of her contemporary, Serge Voronoff who grafted monkey testicle tissue on to the testicles of men while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJG_Qct-mY]

Princesse Marie directed by Benoît Jacquot

Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) was a French psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud’s escape from Nazi Germany.

According to the 2008 book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach, Marie first consulted Sigmund Freud for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later described as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse. After conducting research on women’s orgasms, she concluded the reason was the distance between clitoris and vagina. She called those, like herself, the “téléclitoridiennes” — “she of the distant clitoris.” She then attempted to “cure” her own failure to orgasm by having her clitoris moved, surgically, closer to her vagina; although the removal worked, the reattachment was not successful. It was to Marie Bonaparte that Sigmund Freud remarked, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”.

Her story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud and how she helped his family escape into exile was made into a television film, released in 2004. Princesse Marie ^YouTube was directed by Benoît Jacquot and starred Catherine Deneuve as Marie Bonaparte, and Heinz Bennent as Sigmund Freud.

World cinema classics #48

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWHOhoFgs84&]

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) by Marco Ferreri [off-line]

I’ve been waiting quite a long time to be able to show a clip of Tales of Ordinary Madness by Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe), one of the most devastatingly beautiful films to have crossed my retina when I saw it about 5 years ago.

Memorable scenes include Ornella Muti putting an oversized safety pin to some rather startling uses, and a listful cat and mouse game between Ben Gazzara and Susan Tyrrell which results in Gazarra’s arrest when you least expect it. Some hold the Ornella Muti scenes as some of the most erotic ever confided to celluloid, I’ll take the Tyrrell/Gazzara encounter any day.

The film’s title and subject matter are based on the works and the person of US poet Charles Bukowski.

Do not disturb

“Can desire, the anticipation of pleasure, ever truly be photographed? No one has done it as well as Chas Ray Krider, and no one has equaled his blend of salaciousness and subtlety.” — Esparbec, writer, Paris 2007

A new book by “Motel Fetish” Chas Ray Krider

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Chas has a blog with photos like this one. His latest book, Do not Disturb, was published by French imprint/bookseller La Musardine. For a good Esparbec cover, click here.

She knows

Girl with a cup (1850), by Danish painter Constantin Hansen

It’s one of those paintings one finds on the web, they talk to you, you find them 2 weeks ago, they compel you to write about them two weeks later.

A little of Vermeer, Chirico and Balthus in this painting of a girl drinking from a cup. Her gaze is half interrogation and half wonder, but a defiant gaze nevertheless, as if she knows more than she’s willing to admit, and more too, than you would expect her to. There is quite a bit of sadness too, sadness not so much of a girl, but of a grown woman trapped in the body of a girl. As with many interesting 19th century works, it’s hard to tell, is it a kitschy guilty pleasure or just a good painting?

The sexually frustrated woman

I believe it was Dutch gay fiction writer Gerard Reve who said: “Gij zult het cliché niet schuwen”, which translates in English as “Thou shalt not eschew the cliché.” It is this phrase which has provided me with a rationale for liking stereotypes, archetypes and tropes. For today’s cliché I’ve chosen the sexually frustrated woman. There are two species of sexually frustrated women, the single female (also known as the spinster) and the one in a relationship. We will focus on the second variety as much more information – albeit still limited in comparison to the average frustrated chump – about her is available.

Some quick and dirty research over the course of an hour or so yields our first stereotype of the sexually frustrated woman in Egyptian mythology in the persona of Nephthys. Closer to home and our present age we find her most evidently in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the story of a woman who gets a lover because of her husband’s impotence (a similar plot element is found in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves).

To illustrate her today, I resort to Brian de Palma 1980 film Dressed to Kill and the character of Kate Miller played by Angie Dickinson.

Kate is a married housewife and mother who has just tried to seduce her therapist (played by Michael Caine) who rejects her advances. Later that day as shown in the majestic scene above, we find Kate in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (one of de Palma’s body doubles: the Philadelphia Museum of Art is provided its interiors) and for ten minutes without any dialog she has an unexpected flirtation with a mysterious stranger. Kate and the stranger “stalk” each other through the museum until they finally wind up outside, where Kate joins him in a taxi cab. They immediately begin to have sex right there in the cab, and their experience continues at his apartment.

Let me share that scene with you. One of the most erotic scenes in 20th century sinema, without an inkling of nudity:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIaUt5KcxzI]

However, the sexually frustrated housewife – like many “final girls” before and after her pays dearly for her transgression. She discreetly leaves while the man is asleep, but not before she rifles through some of his papers and discovers that he has a sexually transmitted disease. Mortified, Kate leaves the apartment and gets in the elevator, but on the way down she realizes that she’s left her wedding ring on the stranger’s nightstand. She rides back up to retrieve it, but the elevator doors open on the figure of a large, imposing blonde woman in dark sunglasses wielding a straight razor. She slashes Kate to death in the elevator.

Unsolved trivia: I’d liked to find the titles of the two first paintings (the one with the woman’s face and the one with the monkey) Kate is enjoying while she is sitting on the bench in Philadelphia Museum of Art. If you know, let me do to.

This film is the 45th entry in the category World Cinema Classics.

In search of strange women

The Strange Woman

Introducing Laurie Simmons

Walking Gun, 1991

Laurie Simmons (born 1949) is an American artist, known for such works as Walking Gun, 1991. Her recent work is explicit in nature (see [1], [2] and [3]) and involves cut-out montages.

Tip of the hat to Lemateurdart

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