The rhesus monkey experiments of Dr. Harry Harlow live in legend as breakthroughs in the study of primate socialization, but there is a tragic (and some argue unethical) edge to his methods. Harlow did a lot of work on isolation, often keeping baby monkeys away from mother and playmates, to see how it affected development. In one experiment, he offered two “dummy mothers” to a baby—one made of wire that produced milk, and one made of soft cloth that didn’t; he found the babies would cling all day to the cloth mother, ignoring the nourishing mother except for feedings.

Sandra Hoyn’s photo series “Jenny’s Soul” shows the same yearning “contact comfort” Harlow discovered in the monkeys. Sort of…

Hoyn’s photographs shows the behind-closed-doors life of a middle-aged man, “Dirk” (a pseudonym), and his “wife” Jenny, a realistic silicone sex doll. Hoyn has attributed an entire personality to Jenny, whom he loves dearly, and says he prefers to his previous marriages (he does not specify if these marriages are with real women or Real Dolls). Oddly enough, Jenny is not maintenance-free. She’s heavy, and must be rolled around in a wheelchair, and she requires bathing and powdering once a week. He describes their relationship thusly:

“Jenny gives me security. I never want to live without her again. I am moved by her words. The purity, serenity and honesty of her speaking.”

Despite Dirk’s apparent diligent care, Jenny’s silicone is degrading—she’s “aging.” Dirk is unfazed though, and completely devoted to caring for her. Though he dreams of taking her out in public, he keeps his marriage a secret, aware that what makes him most happy would leave him totally ostracized.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Once upon a time, masturbation was said to make you blind or lead to hairs growing on the palm of your hand, now it is claimed onanism will have serious consequences for men in the hereafter.

During a television interview in 2000, self-styled Muslim “televangelist” Mucahid Cihad Han told viewers that men who masturbate will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife. (What I wonder, happens to women’s hands?)

Han’s bizarre warning took place during a Q&A session with viewers when he was asked for advice by a viewer who “kept masturbating even though he was married.” Han initially looked puzzled by the question, but after the interviewer repeated the sticky question Han urged the man to “resist Satan’s temptations” and added:

“Moreover, one hadith states that those who have sexual intercourse with their hands will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife, complaining against them to God over its rights.

“If our viewer was single, I could recommend he marry, but what can I say now?”

Frankly, I’m at a loss.

When Han tweeted this interview to his 12,000 followers on Saturday, he “was mocked on Turkish social media,” according to Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News.
 

İstimnâ (Mastürbasyon) Caiz mi? ''Elini nikahlayan mel'undur kıyamet günü eli hamile olarak gelir.'' Hz. Muhammed https://t.co/VAbLblHanG

— Mücahid Cihad Han (@mucahid_han) May 24, 2015

 
In its report on the story, the paper queried Han’s interpretation:

“Istimna,” the Arabic term for masturbation that Han also referred to, is a controversial issue in Islam, as there have been varying opinions on its permissibility throughout history. The Quran has no clear reference to masturbation and the authenticity of many hadiths is questionable.

Despite Han’s assertive religious stance, only a limited number of Islamic interpretations categorize masturbation as “haram,” while most of others call it a “makruh” (disliked) act. Many of the mainstream Islamic interpretations even allow it in certain conditions, like if the act could be used to avoid the temptation of an extramarital affair.

Han, who has more than 12,000 followers on Twitter, was mocked on Turkish social media on May 25, after newspapers published his latest television “fatwa.”

“Are there any hand-gynaecologists in the afterlife? Is abortion allowed there?” one Twitter user asked, while mentioning Han’s Twitter user name.

“So you think that being pregnant is a God-given punishment?” another user asked.

We have the video of Mr. Han’s interview, but alas no subtitles and still no answer regarding women’s hands.
 

 
Via the Hurriyet Daily News.
 

 
When streaming players boast about their huge numbers of channels, I’m generally even less impressed than I am by the “wealth” of offerings on the grossly overpriced wasteland that is cable TV. I have absolutely no use for thousands of impossibly granular channels like The Christian Comedy Channel, Firewood Hoarders, NRA Women, and Cruise Addicts. Those are all real. But in their favor, I don’t have to pay $75 a month to not watch them.

But sometimes, that nanoscopic specificity does pay weirdness dividends. The Shout Factory channel proffered by the music/video label of the same name holds some treasures, as do the handful of channels that compile old cartoons that have passed into the public domain. And not so long ago, I ran across a channel, called Stop It Or You’ll Go Blind!, devoted exclusively to old sex ed films, with some “educational” exploitation thrown in. (Why is “Sex Ed-sploitation” not a term? It’s a thing, it needs a word…)
 

 

 
Unsurprisingly, a lot of these are a riot. There’s “Miracles in Birth,” a graphic depiction of live births shot in grainy black and white so blown-out it looks less like a miracle and more like outtakes from Begotten. There’s “Dance Little Children,” a creepy VD scare flick directed by Carnival of Souls auteur Herk Harvey, which teaches us all a valuable lesson about not letting slimy rich dudes boink us on the first date. The 1938 Sex Madness, Dwain Esper’s follow-up to Reefer Madness is streaming, as is the bizarre Test Tube Babies, a tale of swinging and sterility. And the ‘60s classic “Perversion for Profit” is there, the notorious and INSANE 30 minute anti-indecency screed in which L.A. newsreader/talk show host (and, later, NewsMax columnist *shudder*) George Putnam blames pornographers for everything from juvenile crime to child molestation. The brilliant thing about “P4P” is that if anyone actually held on to even half of the smut rags displayed for *ahem* viewer edification, they could be an eBay millionaire today.
 
More after the jump…

 
If you’ve ever so much as glanced at any Beetle Bailey strip involving General Halftrack leering at his secretary, the buxom Miss Buxley, you won’t be all too surprised that Mort Walker, the creator of the comic, at some point dashed off a few strips that, ah, were not intended for publication in a family-oriented newspaper.

The strips are pretty harmless, but they are unmistakably about boners and fellatio. So there’s that.

These comics appeared in a Swedish book about Beetle Bailey. Apparently the Swedes dig Beetle Bailey, where he is called “Knasen.” According to Google Translate, “Fräckisarna som stannade på skiss-stadiet” refers to something that is “cheeky” that “stayed at the sketch stage,” and “Varning för Snusk” means “warning for smut,” which is hilarious.

Varning för Snusk! You have been warned.
 

 
More smutty ‘Beetle Bailey’ after the jump…

 
That startling movie by Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, Kids, turns 20 years old this year, indeed older than all of its characters. It’s rare to see a movie with a worldview this bleak enter the popular discourse so brazenly, and that the movie is just as bracing now as it was then would tend to indicate that the conscious act of infecting someone with a fatal disease is never going to be anything less than a massive attention-getter.

Among its other virtues, Kids introduced the world to such talents as Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.

Supreme is offering a special suite of skateboard decks and shirts to celebrate the movie. The tees feature the movie’s closing summary statement—“Jesus Christ. What happened?”—on the back. The items are already available in L.A., London, and NYC, and online consumers get their first chance to buy them tomorrow (May 21).

Here’s Supreme’s somewhat literate press announcement:
 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Larry Clark’s debut film, KIDS, the portrayal of NYC youth’s escapades in the early 90’s. Some were offended by the raw and anarchic world Larry Clark documented, for those that weren’t, the film became an important document of the time, place and culture.

Through photographing skaters in NYC, Larry Clark came to meet the film’s writer, Harmony Korine and star, Leo Fitzpatrick. The rest of the cast was pieced together with a variety of downtown New York characters including original Supreme team riders Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter. It is a testament to KIDS cultural impact that it resonates today just as much as it did in 1995.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary, Supreme is proud to release a collection of items featuring stills from the iconic film KIDS. The Collection will consist of a Hooded Sweatshirt, Long Sleeved T-Shirt, two graphic T-Shirts, and three Skateboards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via The World’s Best Ever

 
When I was a kid growing up in Edinburgh during the 1970s, I became aware of a cinema called the Jacey on the city’s main thoroughfare Princes Street. It was difficult not to be aware of the Jacey—with its brightly lit foyer, white-painted exterior and beautiful French-styled windows—it looked like some kind of respectable brothel or a dodgy gentleman’s club—which wasn’t too far away from the truth, as the Jacey was an adult cinema showing imported Scandinavian porn and American sexploitation movies.

Outside, directly visible to all passing trade, were small framed windows where customers could view the promotional photographs, lobby cards and posters for the forthcoming attractions. Like many inquisitive schoolboys, I stopped here on the way home from school (for purely educational purposes, of course…) to view the photos of scantily clad men and women in black & white or garish colors frolicking as nature intended. This display became like a kind of barometer for me as it reflected the “atmospheric” changes in public taste for adult entertainment. At first, there was the innocent healthy lifestyle documentaries on nudist camps with fit youngsters playing games, stretching muscles and touching their toes. Then the more specialized films from Sweden with young blondes quieting their existential angst with spontaneous sexual adventures with strangers. Then American movies that mixed bad sex with bad acting and bad dialog. On occasion, there were screenings of arthouse films by Pasolini (Canterbury Tales) and Fellini (Satyricon)—perhaps the titles had suggested more than these films delivered? The Jacey closed around May 1973, its last double-bill was I Am Sexy and Do You Want To Remain a Virgin Forever?

As this “golden age” of seventies blue movies waned there arrived the awful British sex comedies that regularly starred Anthony Booth (father-in-law of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) and a host of respected character actors (including Beryl Reid, Roy Kinnear and Richard Briers), and even employed the writing skills of Monty Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

The audiences seemed to change too—from old men to liberated and progressive young couples to teenage boys their first flush of lust. This was a time when virginity was still considered “sacred” and sex before marriage was generally discouraged—which made having a porn cinema on Edinburgh’s most famous and busiest street an odd comment on what was deemed acceptable. Edinburgh was then a very genteel city, and “sex” for most of its middle class citizens was what the coal was delivered in.

Then again, apart form their saucy taglines, most of these films rarely had anything as explicit than can be found on the pages of Tumblr today. This collection of 1970’s sexploitation posters covers all the bases—from nasty stag films, to smut movies starring Batman‘s Adam West, to the saucy comic Brit flicks.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

“Poultry mood for dream couples—finally, a poultry product for her and him!”
 
A company in Germany called Friki recently unveiled a puzzling product—two chicken cutlets, one “For Him” and one “For Her,” in a single package, with pink and blue coloring on the package to distinguish them visually. The kicker? The man’s version is spicy, while the woman’s one is mild. 

If you go to this page on Friki’s website, you’ll see the picture at the top of this page, with a caption in German that translates roughly as follows
 

Tender “minute” chicken cutlets, finally in typical female and, on the other hand, in typical male flavor-profiles ensure that poultry enjoyment will now be more fun than ever. The new dream couple comes in the flavor varieties “Fruity Lemon/Spicy Chili” and “Spicy Tomato/Spicy Peppery.”

 
In the first pair, fruity lemon and spicy chili are (according to the text and the colors) appropriate for the lady and the gentleman, respectively; I haven’t seen a picture of the second pairing yet, and I suspect it hasn’t even been manufactured yet.
 

Photo by Alice Atmega on Twitter
 
This one merits a huge eyeroll for sure. I like spicy food and I’ve not noticed this to be a particularly gendered issue. I’ve met plenty of women who enjoy spicy food, and I’ve met plenty of men who prefer milder fair. And I bet you anything that the wonderful women of India and Mexico can handle spicy food just fine. In my estimation this has something to do with Mitteleuropa above everything else—if I may indulge in a bit of cultural stereotyping of my own, I spent several years in Austria, with occasional visits to Germany, and that experience left me with the impression that the German-speaking world as a whole has some difficulties with spicy food, not so much that they don’t like it (they do not) but that they have a kind of phobia about it, as if the worst thing that could happen to you is that you eat a little vindaloo when you were promised tikka masala.

For what it’s worth, Charlotte Haunhorst of the respected newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote an editorial about this with the hilarious title “Hört auf mit der Hühnerkacke!” (“Stop the chickenshit!”). She thinks that the whole controversy has been concocted by Friki as a media ploy, although she does confess that she gets irritated when she orders a fatty breakfast and the waitstaff somehow assume that the bacon was ordered by her male companion.
 

 
Interestingly, there’s a clear precedent for this. The Kühne company has put out “his” and “hers” pickles, with the names “Gurken Madl” and “Gurken Bub”—that is, “Pickle Girl” and “Pickle Boy.” The jars come in pink and blue, with the girls’ one being “knackig und lieblich” (crisp and sweet) while the boys’ one is “knackig und kräftig” (crisp and strong).
 

 
via Nerdcore

Porn was a different beast in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Often times, actors, looking for their “big break,” would do adult films under assumed names to make rent while struggling to land legit roles. In the history of porn, only a small minority of stars, such as Jenna Jameson, Traci Lords and Ginger Lynn, were actually able to make the transition from “blue movies” to the “silver screen.”

The Rialto Report is an online historical archive of information related to “the golden age of porn” (mostly ‘70s and ‘80s) in New York. It’s an excellent, exhaustive source of interviews and articles related to the subject. If the topic holds any interest for you at all, you’ll want to check them out by following the previous link.

Prior to the shot-on-video, amateur quickies of today, it could be argued that porno flicks in the ‘70s—especially in New York—made some attempt at “real movie” production value. Indeed, many of the actors in these films were poor souls who had come to the Big Apple seeking fame, but were struggling in bit parts for little-to-no money. As Deep Throat star, Harry Reems, told Rialto Report:

In the beginning, I could get $150 for a few hours in a sex film – compared to next to nothing for appearing for weeks in an off-off-Broadway play. These X-rated films helped prolong my existence as a struggling actor, and therefore increased the chances that I’d eventually get a big break.

Rialto Report has tracked down several headshots of these struggling actors “before they were porn famous,” for a two-part series.

I have to admit some amount of ignorance when it comes to many of the actors featured there, as I’m no expert on ancient porn loops—but a few of them were instantly recognizable, even with my personally limited knowledge (basically limited to woods porn and 10th generation VHS dubs at teenage friends’ houses). Maybe it’s because the male actors “worked” more, but I recognized far more of the men than the women. If you ever watched any porn from the ‘70s or ‘80s ever, then you are bound to recognize some of these.

Here are the ones I found instantly recognizable:
 

Jamie Gillis. Real name, Jamey Gurman. Shown here as “Jamey King.” One of the most prolific male porn stars. His interview at Rialto Report can be found here. Gillis played “Burt The Enema Bandit” in the unbelievably sleazy 1977 film, Water Power.
 

Shelley Graham, better known as Georgina Spelvin, star of The Devil In Miss Jones. Her Rialto Report interview can be found here.
 

Joseph Nassivera, better known as Joey Silvera got his start in adult films in 1974. He currently is a leading director of transsexual pornographic films.
 

Sue Rowan, better known as Bree Anthony, who appeared in many adult films in the mid-1970s. As “Sue Richards,” she was also the editor of High Society magazine for a short time.
 

Taija Rae entered the adult film industry in 1983. According to Rialto Report, the first part of her stage name, came from an Asian cocktail waitress with whom she worked before porn. The last name, Rae, was a tribute to Fay Wray.
 

Ronald Hyatt, better known as Ron “the Hedgehog” Jeremy—for better or for worse, he is the most recognizable male porn star of all time. He has an unbelievable 1,405 (both porn and “legit”) film acting credits to his name.
 
Via Rialto Report

 
Ah, ye olden days of analog porn! During that barbaric, pre-Internet, pre-VCR era of smut, one had to make their way to actual theaters—most of these venues were “adult,” but some were just local cinemas (or even drive-ins) that played the dirty stuff late at night (Imagine being a gleeful teenaged boy—or angry parent—with a house situated behind a drive-in showing X-rated films).

Below you can see some great ads for vintage skin-flicks which (for obvious reasons) could usually only be promoted with handbills or in alternative papers. The aesthetics are delightfully trashy; obviously they couldn’t run explicit images, and the limitations of size and newsprint really relegated the ads more to “design” rather than “art.” Still, there’s excellent use of lascivious little scenes, combined with a whole lotta’ sensational font-work. My favorite is the one with the quote on censorship by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—sort of makes one feel perversely patriotic, doesn’t it? There are some classics in the mix—the Deep Throat ad is surprisingly humble, while Behind the Green Door is modern and arty. For fun I’ve included Fritz the Cat which, while not a proper porno, was advertised alongside other X-rated material.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Before she graduated from ‘80s Danceteria artperson prominence to national infamy in 1990 as a member of the so-called “NEA 4,” in what was at the time a boisterous national controversy/idiotic conservative shit-fling about obscenity in the arts, the performance artist Karen Finley made two 12” dance singles of unparalleled vulgarity and shock value, with Madonna collaborator Mark Kamins (RIP 2013).

The first was 1986’s “Tales of Taboo,” an unsparingly profane rant set to dancefloor rhythms, demanding sexual satisfaction in the bluntest terms possible. Madonna could coyly sing “Like a Virgin” all day and rake in huge cash, but Finley’s much more forthright chant of “get me off, suck my nub, suck my tits, suck my clit” freaked people the fuck out. Which was to the point, to a point; Finley’s performance work dealt explicitly with themes of female disempowerment and heavy catharsis, and “Tales” was recorded in response to what she saw as disco’s trivialization and subjugation of women. In Gillian G. Gaar’s She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll, Finley is quoted describing the song as

…extremely radical. I think that in terms of music history it was really the most aggressive in terms of changing the position of the female to a dominant sexual position.

Not safe for work, even less safe for Belgian waffles.
 

 
In 1987, Finley released the LP The Truth Is Hard To Swallow, which featured music on side one and her career-defining performance piece “The Constant State of Desire” on side two. If you saw Mondo New York, that was the piece she performed in that doc. (I was fortunate to obtain admission to see her perform it at a festival shortly after the NEA imbroglio made her show an extremely hot ticket; it was powerful stuff.) The Truth LP, alas, did not contain “Tales” (though the CD version had all four cuts from the 12” as bonus material), but side one was largely in a similar vein. Then in 1988, Finley dropped her second 12”, “Lick It.” It’s pretty much exactly what you’re thinking, and its coincidence with the ascendency of acid house helped make it a legit club hit. (Also, “Tales” proved to be tempting sample-bait during that period, and clips from it it featured prominently in the genre-defining “Theme from S’Express.”) Here’s the “Radio Mix”—though I still wouldn’t listen at work if I worked anywhere other than Dangerous Minds.
 

 
More tales of taboo, after the jump…