Joys of spring

[imomus]

It is now undoubtedly spring where I am, and possibly where you are too. Spring is, of course, the season of birds, bees and blossom. So I thought I'd make a little round-up of erotic themes today, starting with some arbitrary awards for some shunga I like. These are the ancient, venerable, venereal images the Japanese call "pictures of spring".

Award for the prettiest people in a shunga
Goes to this Utamaro image. Cool hat, nice yukata, sir!


Best supporting octopus award
He looks a bit like ET, says Hisae! I like his headband, and the fact that he can use his limbs as anything he wants them to be, and the fact that his head-veins look so phallic.


Special "Never mind the length, feel the width" award
The shamisen player has hidden talents in this picture by Eizan.


Best incidental detailing
I like the shelf of ornaments and the angles and perspective in this Koryusai image. A glimpse of domestic life in Japan circa 1780.


Gritty realistic details award
Goes to this image of the rapid expulsion of vaginal air known by some as a "queef".


The closest the West has come to the unabashed joy of the shunga tradition is in a didactic textbook called The Joy of Sex, "edited" in 1972 (my favourite year for just about everything, you may have noticed) by Dr Alex Comfort. He was abashed enough to pretend just to be the editor when in fact he wrote the whole damned manual, and even posed for the Polaroids that formed the basis for its funky drawings.



As we learn from Ariel Levy's recent New Yorker article about The Joy of Sex, Dr Comfort was actually fucking his wife's best friend in the pictures. (Artist Charles Raymond has clearly been instructed to make Comfort look a bit younger in the drawings, possibly to disguise his identity.)

Ariel Levy isn't too impressed, even with Dr Comfort's rejuvenated self: "The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance. In some of the pictures, you can practically smell him. (The smell is unpleasant.) It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast..."

In other sex news, I note with pleasure the emergence of Bookkake, an erotic publisher and reading group in London. If The Joy of Sex was billed as a "cordon bleu guide to lovemaking", the Bookkake blog brings things full circle, recommending "the physical pleasures of breadmaking".

"The French word “baguette” literally means stick or rod," the blog tells us, "baguette magique is the Magician’s wand, itself a stand-in for the phallus". This food-as-sex logic explains almost the entire output of contemporary Japanese television.

Finally, I recommend heartily the sex lectures of Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University -- a sexy bearded feral man of the kind Ariel Levy abominates. Lots of interesting things come up, so to speak, in Lecture 1 and Lecture 2 of his Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality, but I'm just going to recount one small detail.

Let's say you're researching the incidence in human sexuality of a taboo sexdeed, one that's even possibly against the sexlaws. How to make your experimental subjects confess, when they fear persecution and even imprisonment by authorities who see the deed differently than they do?



Easy, says Sapolsky. Let's say 10% have done this taboo sexdeed, 90% haven't. Tell your subjects that those who have done the taboo sexdeed should answer the question honestly, ie confess to it. Add that those who haven't done the taboo sexdeed should toss a coin. If it comes up heads, they should say they have done the sexdeed, whether they really have or not. If it comes up tails, they should say they haven't, again regardless of what they've actually done.

This randomizing process will allow the people who have done the taboo sexdeed to confess it, knowing that they have an alibi, should they be challenged, in the shape of the coin. As long as they understand the rules, everyone who did the taboo sexdeed should confess. The researcher then just needs to double the number of people who say they haven't done the non-taboo deed -- everyone else has done the taboo deed.

Neat, huh? These beardy men are clever with their digits!

Comments

[robotdeer.livejournal.com]

The octopus is kind of cute in a please don't rape me kind of way.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

I love how Japanese renderings of octopi tend to give them a little headband.



The inclusion of a headband on the best supporting octopus makes it 10x funnier.

Also, the way Ariel Levy reproachfully describes Dr. Comfort as feral just reaffirms my relative happiness with and place in the queer bear subculture, which tends to value just those traits she finds repellent.

I remember snousle quoting her description a while ago, saying that it explained a lot about his taste in men.

[robotdeer.livejournal.com]

(http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v11/robotdeer/?action=view&current=250px-Parodius_MSX.jpg) I also like them with the Japanese cheering fans.

[choan.livejournal.com]

There's a great Kuniyoshi print of octopi at play, hats & headbands & all, in the current exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. There are some really cute comic porn prints too.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

omg, I love this so much.

The box in the upper right reads "Ryuukou Tako no Asobi." Asobi is play, tako is octopus, and by Jeffrey's J-E dictionary, (http://www.gokanji.com/cgi-bin/j-e/sjis/dosearch?sDict=on&H=PW&L=J&T=%97%AC%8Ds&WC=none) ryuukou is "fashion; fad; vogue; craze." Trendy octopi at play!

[birdgerhl.livejournal.com]

that's so great.

b.x :)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Does the bear subculture also embrace long hair and beards, or is it mainly relegated to just beards? In my experience, bears tend to have close cropped hair. The long hair/beard combination seems to be the province of straight men.

The straight women I know who spend a lot of time with 'mainstream' gay men tend to be freaked out by hair and beards, too.



I rather like my plumage. Finally feel like 'myself', whatever that means.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Ariel is right about one thing: the girl in Comfort's book is extremely cute.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Does the bear subculture also embrace long hair and beards, or is it mainly relegated to just beards?"

In my experience, the majority of guys on the bear circuit prefer cropped hair, but there isn't a rule about it, unless I missed that memo.

If you look at alternative gay mags like 'Pin-ups' (which is mostly cubs), most the guys on there dont have cropped heads.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

You're right, the bears do skew towards having shorter hair, but there are some exceptions, often enough at the intersection of bear and geek, or bear and metalhead, or bear and biker. Enough that I've had some guys encourage me to grow my hair out, especially after they find out that it used to reach the small of my back.

I grew it out in highschool in emulation of the hot alterna-rockers I was seeing on MTV and at my school. Eventually, I grew tired of the maintenance involved and went back to the buzzcut I'd had since the 3rd grade.

[robotdeer.livejournal.com]

and probably to a lesser extent bear and grunge. I think the whole "bear" style/statement is making dirty look a little cleaner. It is like taking Grizzly Adams and trimming around the edges.

[olamina.livejournal.com]

Ariel is an awesome person, but I get the sense that she is the sort of lesbian who might give that description to nearly any man.

Thanks for the links. Yay sex!

[(Anonymous)]

It was not so much the beardy men that struck me, more the beardy vaginas. Momus, what are your thoughts on the recent trend for women to shave off all their pubic hair? Do you find it an appealing look? Is this as big among Japanese women as it is in the West?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I like body hair on women (the Japanese word for pubes is chinge). I also prefer when they don't shave under their arms -- though I realise this is heresy in America. My reason is that I like to glimpse in a woman's underarm area a sort of preview or substitute view of her sex.

[(Anonymous)]

Chinge is for men. Mange is for women.

[choan.livejournal.com]

Japanese (contemporary) pornography certainly seems to steer clear of the hairless look. And the few Japanese women I've talked with on the topic find the Western obsession with shaving bizarre.

[theartoflamb.livejournal.com]

ay momus

there is a (japanese?) artist that was in the recent APT5 at GOMA in brisbane australia. MASAMI TERAOKA, who paints pictures similar to those you show here but places western elements within them, for example, condoms, burgers etc.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"This food-as-sex logic explains almost the entire output of contemporary Japanese television."

Yes, there's way too much pussy on Japanese TV.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Picasso made some really beautiful drawings of sex, but never painted any. They're really wonderful and all with minotaurs and other mythological creatures. But you're right that most Western artists don't deal with sex. Jeff Koons did his photos with his wife; Mappelthrope had his lovely photos; but most artists make allusions to sex, or just show individuals before or after sex. It's odd how the West fetishizes the female nude, but doesn't deal with sex.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

You need to bear in mind that those prints weren't openly displayed as art in Japan, they were pornography for personal consumption. Erotica/pornography has always been extremely popular and probably always will be, it's just that people don't tend to hang it on their walls or in art galleries.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

My point is that there are few examples of sex in the Western fine arts. Picasso is a notable exception. Mapplethorpe's sex photos were not meant for galleries - at first. Sex doesn't really pop up in fine art until a hundred years ago, and when it does, it is almost always a close up of the nude female form (think of Courbet's "Origin of the World"). Most famous Western nude paintings were distinctly made for personal consumption.

"pictures of spring".

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Is there any Tanka or Haiku to accompany this imagery from that period?

Re: "pictures of spring".

[choan.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of erotic senryu (the popular, often comic version of haiku), some of which are utterly filthy. A guy called Robin D. Gill has a great self-published collection of them entitled "The Woman Without a Hole – & other risky themes from old japanese poems"
http://www.paraverse.org/newbooks.htm

A couple of examples touching on earlier themes:

ぬっと入れる所が天の美碌なり
that moment / you slip it in - a gift / from heaven

うじゃうじゃけたように女はおやす也
like ripe fruit / swollen and oozing, women / get aroused

おしい毛をけいせいみんなひんむしり
what a shame / the pretty whore pulls out / every last hair

女房が蛸で亭主がうなりだし
an octopus wife / he does the groaning / every night

[creativespark.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Well, I do have to agree that the gentleman in pic 1 is extremely dapper.
=) Marc

erotica/porn/etc

[(Anonymous)]

I just love these old Japanese erotic prints, especially when involving seafood/light shining out of vaginas.

Have you read that hipster writers article on porn yet? I think your thoughts are needed again!

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/83/pornocalypse_now.html