Ah, the Magic 8 Ball: that old classic dimestore novelty oracle. You simply ask it a question, give it a shake, and the answer “mysteriously” appears in a blob of blue liquid in a small window on the underside of the ball.

Well, FINALLY, someone combined the classic pastimes of divination and ass-play. Ladies and gentlemen: The Magic 8 Ball Butt-plug.
 

 
Etsy seller GlowFYourself has created a butt-plug with a Magic 8 Ball attached to the “outside” end. Simply insert the plug, have your partner ask a question, and then give it a little twerk. Your answer will be revealed. The ball knows all.
 

 
“Will this hurt my anus?”

“Signs point to yes.”
 

 
The Magic 8 Ball Butt-plug is only $30—cheap!—from GlowFYourself.

 
Being taught by Christian brothers from an early age, my sex education amounted to little more than “If you do it, it’s a sin and you’re going to Hell. If you don’t do it, you’re still going to Hell—because you’ve thought about doing it anyway and that’s still a sin, you dirty little bastards.” My father was more pragmatic—“I’ll tell you all about the birds and bees when you’re thirteen.” When I hit my teens, he said, “Well, if you don’t know it by now, then you never will.”

Sex education was embarrassing for both sides of the equation. Parents didn’t know what to say, while a lot of the kids could have probably taught their elders a thing or two. Still nobody between the generations really wanted to talk to each other about sex—well, unless they were Swedish because everyone knew the Swedes talked about sex all the time. That and flat-pack furniture—or so we believed back then. It was the 1970s and nothing had really progressed, though everyone acted as if it had.

Nowadays, things may be far more open and sex ed taught with the same verve as say woodwork or math or citizenship. But the difficulties of discussing sex, sexuality, and the changes arriving with puberty were very real for many people in the ye olden days. I know. I was there.

So imagine my surprise to find that Americans could once upon a time pick up an LP from their local record store that either gave youngsters sex advice or parents tips on how to discuss the subject with their offspring. Albums parents could even hide in plain sight amongst their easy listening collection—somewhere between Bert Kaempfert and The Sandpipers. These well-meaning discs included a priest (Father Filas) advising parents on what to tell their children about sex (like HE would know); the host of Kids Say the Darndest Things Art Linkletter narrating the story of “Where do I come from?”; and a Dr. Morris Fishbein giving advice to growing girls.

This, people, was once a thing. 

What I’d like to know—did anyone (aside from Madlib perhaps) actually listen to these records? And if so are they still traumatized?
 

 

 
More goofball sex ed albums, after the jump…

 
In the early 2000s Julia Rickert and Derek Erdman were spending their time online suckering “pervos” into calling them by pretending to be a phone sex hotline. More out of curiosity than malice, they decided they wanted to try to get the horny males they been observing from the Internet sex chat rooms they were frequenting to call them for a little closer interaction. They used the name “Kathy McGinty” as their alias. The picture of “Kathy” they used to lure their subjects was “a racy picture of a young girl curled up on a bed with her underwear showing,” which you can see above.
 

 
Despite their desire to have horny strangers call them, they tried to think of a way that they could interact with “Kathy” without actually having to interact with them at all. They were luring creepy guys at their creepiest, so quite understandably, they were eager to contrive a safe barrier between the two parties. Erdman eventually came up with the idea of using a sampler to pre-record a bunch of canned statements that they could use to simulate their side of the interaction. Rickert recorded a whole slew of dialogue, including a hot ‘n’ heavy version of orgasm that would get inserted into various points of most every conversation.

The results are something like “DEVO meets the Jerky Boys,” but even that intriguing description doesn’t quite do justice to the bizarre results, as random dudes try to have sexytime with a blocky female voice who starts out saying “You have a sexy voice,” but eventually blurts phrases like “No, I’m only 12,” “Taco Bell tastes sooo good,” and “I might be having a miscarriage!”

Actually, “If Marco Rubio started a robot sex hotline that malfunctioned…” isn’t the worst description.
 

 
A bunch of the recordings were passed around as a CDr but eventually, Erdman and Rickerts put out a regular CD you can buy with money.

On his website Derek Erdman provides the clearest explanation of what it’s all about:
 

If you spent any time in an internet sex chatroom in early 2001, there’s a slight chance that you may have come in contact with Kathy McGinty. Julia and I were getting our laughs by chatting online with horny cretins to see how many ridiculous comments they would tolerate before they would ignore us. We lured them with a fake profile that featured a racy picture of a young girl curled up on a bed with her underwear showing. (The name McGinty came from the song “Pat-Trip Dispenser” by The Fall; I’m not sure why we chose Kathy.) Before long, chatting was not enough. We wanted to hear what these guys sounded like, and so encouraged them to call our house. As neither of us actually wanted to speak to them, “Kathy” told them to leave voicemail messages, promising to call back if they were “sexy enough.” Some of these early callers are on the CD. When this source of amusement had lost its novelty, Julia wished aloud that there was a way to converse with the callers without having to talk to them, and I remembered a Yamaha SU-10 sampler that I had lying around. We rigged a phone to the sampler, came up with a series of phrases, and recorded Julia saying them. It took some time to get it right, but there was no shortage of callers. We’d be chatting with 10-15 callers at once, while 5 would be calling on the phone. The online trap was simple: we’d get chatted-up because of our provocative phone picture, we’d say that we were ready for action and that we wanted to get off over the phone. Sometimes it was 30 seconds tops. I controlled the sampler, which was kind of tricky. I’d listen on a muted cordless phone while pressing the buttons for the appropriate phrases. Sometimes it took a little time to find the right button, so there’s an unnatural pause in conversation. It mattered little though, most of the guys that called were already worked-up. We’d stay up all night robot-talking to pervos. I remember once one of them actually “finished” because I could offend him off of the phone, and it kind of gave me a stomach ache.

A blogger named “Seedy” whose website is regrettably defunct points out that “the sheer ridiculousness and comic value of Kathy’s responses are equally matched by (a) the sheer incredulity of the callers and (b) their inability to admit the obvious, namely that they’ve been had. When Kathy seemingly orgasms into ecstatic oblivion at the slightest provocation (“Hello, is that Kathy?”) or starts conversing in tongues, a whoring hostage to the devil, the game should be up. But these guys are so desperate to get their rocks off that even the knowledge that their liaison is with a burn victim or a minor (‘I’m 12 years old’) doesn’t prevent them from pumping the pork sword (‘I’m not a child molester, but I’ll fuck you’).”
 
Continues after the jump…

 
This is how it was back in the sixties and seventies. No Pornhub. No XVideo. No HD stuff. No downloadable porn just a keystroke away. If you wanted to watch a porno flick in Moosefart, Montana, or keep a stash of uncensored 8x10s in your bedroom closet, well you had to check the small ad pages in adult magazines like Follies, Frolic, Nugget, Dude, Rogue, Gent, Knight, Bachelor and Adam. This is how horny young Americans—like your dear old dad and granddad—entertained themselves before the tsunami of free digital pornography starting getting piped into the home like a utility.

Being born, raised and still living in Scotland, my knowledge of yon Americana is informed by what I’ve read in books, histories and what have you. Of course, over here there is obviously a similarity of experience. One man who built his porn empire on mail order adult entertainment is David Sullivan.

Sullivan is an economics graduate who started his adult entertainment empire by selling glossy pix thru the mail. He then moved on to mail order home movies and “marital aids.” Sullivan was so successful that he ended up running 80% of the UK’s adult mail order market. He also owned several sex shops, a line of hardcore magazines (up to 50% of the UK market), successfully produced several pornos and soft core movies—the latter best known for starring the legendary Mary Millington and a host of British comedy talent.  He diversified into newspapers (Sunday Sport) before becoming the largest shareholder in two soccer clubs—first Birmingham, now West Ham.

When working in the adult entertainment business, Sullivan thought of himself as a “freedom fighter.” He was once tried and sentenced to 71 days imprisonment for living off immoral earnings—which is a kind of catchall charge to punish pornographers. He has no “embarrassment” over his time in jail telling the London Evening Standard in 2010:

“I’ve made a lot of people happy,” he says. “If I was an arms manufacturer or a cigarette manufacturer, and my products killed millions of my clients, I’d have a bit of doubt about the whole thing. I was a freedom fighter. I believe in the right of adults to make their own decisions.”

The 1970s were a boom time for adult mail order entertainment. When I was a student at the University of Glasgow back in the 1980s, the campus was split between the men’s union—the Glasgow University Union—and the women’s union—the Queen Margaret Union. While the QMU opened its doors to both male and female students, the men’s union remained until the early eighties, a bastion of male chauvinism. At the time, the “men’s union” was best known for its world champion debaters and for screening something called the “Freds.”

The “Freds” were the Tom and Jerry cartoons produced by Fred Quimby. A couple of these classic animations provided the intermission entertainment between two mail order blue movies screened for the edification and enjoyment of a select band of GUU students. The “Freds” supposedly stopped after the union opened its doors to women, but it was always rumored the “Freds” were still be screening by a group of recalcitrant students somewhere within the walls of this famous baronial building. Fans of the “Freds” went onto become politicians, lawyers, bankers, successful CEOs and apparently even a priest. But with the arrival of video home systems (VHS) the end was nigh for the boom in mail order adult entertainment. And today with the Internet, even magazines like Playboy have stopped bother to publish nude pictures in its pages. So for those too young to remember, and for those who do remember and perhaps did partake, is a small selection of classic adult entertainment ads from the sixties and seventies.
 

 
“Privately” printed mags? Oh my, this is not the kinda smut grandpa wanted you to find in that locked box in his basement after he died.
 

 
Bernard of Hollywood must have been the place to go for “Authentic, unretouched stags of well known gals before they reached the top. Rare thrillers all.” Sounds like something out of a James Ellroy novel…and the WTF ad with sweaty, wide-eyed hepped-up pervo freak? Looks kinda rapey.
 
More vintage adult ads, after the jump….

Man in Arctic Mask

In the 1992 techno-thriller Sneakers starring Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier, the viewer is treated to a quick shot of a braille issue of Playboy magazine, a possession of the film’s sole blind character, “Whistler,” played by David Strathairn. The shot is played for laughs, but braille editions of Playboy are a real thing; on eBay they are rather pricey, fetching prices of $30, $40, $50 and beyond—one optimistic seller is asking $400 for a single copy of the April 1992 edition.

It’s not known whether Lisa J. Murphy was inspired by the braille Playboy, but she came up with quite a different solution to the question of providing blind people with sexual gratification via printed matter. A resident of Canada, Murphy has produced a book called Tactile Mind: A Book of Nude Photographs for the Blind/Vision Impaired, which is “a handmade thermoform book consisting of 17, 3-D tactile photographs on white thermoform plastic pages with the visual image and descriptive Braille accompaniment.”
 

 
After publishing the main book, she followed it up with a smaller set of images she calls Tactile Atelier Bookmark. Referring to her picture of a woman’s posterior with panties on, which you can see below, Murphy said, “The butt was really hard to sculpt. I wanted to get it nice and even and give it a feminine softness so it would actually feel like a woman’s butt. It took me days to sculpt all the curves right, but I’m told it does feel like a woman’s butt in a G-string.”

Incidentally, Murphy does not use the word pornography to describe her work. We’re a blog, what can I say?

Each book costs $255 Canadian (about $180 U.S.) and can be ordered directly from Murphy’s website.
 

Untitled
 

Naked Pink Elephant
 
More tactile erotica for the visually impaired after the jump…

 
On August 9th 1979, Germany’s operatic punk diva Nina Hagen caused what was dubbed “the scandal of the year” on the Austrian afterhours political affairs discussion program Club2 when she demonstrated several optimal positions for penetration and female masturbation for the home viewing audience.

The (fully-clothed, sorry!) action took place after she got into a heated argument about the female orgasm with one of the guests. I don’t speak German, but it’s pretty clear for all to see who lost the debate and it’s not Nina!

The ‘scandalous’ clip—and more—after the jump…

 
Someone clever on Airbnb is renting out what looks to be a pretty ordinary NYC apartment space in Manhattan’s West Village as a “Netflix and Chill” room. To quote their ad: “We bring the famous ‘Netflix & Chill meme’ to life and offer it as an IRL experience that people can rent for a night.” So they can binge watch. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The fundamentals for a night of movies and sex are all present, including a laptop, an HD projector, a bed with cute Netflix bedspread and pillows, a “fully stocked” mini-fridge containing champagne and various other types of alcohol, and so on. There’s also a nice shower.
 

 
Remarkably, there’s no mention of prophylactics in the ad, which would at least have been self-aware considering that some of the earliest invocations of the phrase “Netflix and chill” (going back a whopping two years now) used visuals of condoms in order to get the cheeky point across.

Continues after the jump…

Night Tide

A Lovecraftian poster for an odd 1960s mermaid thriller starring Dennis Hopper with a freaky cameo appearance by Marjorie Cameron, the bohemian witch of Los Angeles.

This is a sampling from a private collection of rare, massive 40” x 60” posters that were printed on cardstock for drive-In movie theaters.  More posters and related merchandise are online at hautecampe.com (“Archeaologists of the Strange”).  All are for sale at auction until February 8, when the bidding closes.

Haute Campe offers a collection of original rare, vintage film posters from the 1940s-1970s originating mostly from drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. Most of the posters went through a single distributor called National Screen Service, hence the “property of N.S.S.” at the bottom of 99% of the movie posters printed in the 20th century!  While many posters were destroyed by the elements and others were pulled off the wall by collectors, a great many returned to the distributor’s archives and piled up for many many years. 

We were fortunate enough to be able to acquire a large part of the archives and the treasures were fantastic, including rarely-seen posters that were for small run promotions and exceedingly impossible to find sizes like the gorgeous and massive 40” x 60” silkscreens created for drive-in movie theaters.

This is a selection from the latter part of the alphabet. You can see A to N at an earlier post here.
 

Ordered to Love

An American distributor purchased a historical film and repackaged it as a Nazisploitation thrill; the fact that the movie was years old at this point was sold to the audience as the film having been “censored until now!”
 

Please, Not Now!

A towel-clad Brigitte Bardot stuns in this incredible 1961 Pop Art poster.
 

Rasputin the Mad Monk/The Reptile

A giant poster advertising a 1966 Hammer double-feature where theatergoers would get their own Rasputin beard!
 

Runaway Daughters
 
More after the jump…
 

 
In 1953, Bettie Page posed for a guide to striptease entitled “This is as far as you can go,” in the Christmas issue of Carnival magazine.

Carnival was “a magazine of excitement” and Bettie P. was photographed to help its readers understand the laws pertaining to what they could or could not see, or rather what a stripper could or could not show when it came to stripping. Seven states permitted striptease, each with its own code, though there was often considerable leeway over what was permitted in a strip show depending on local ordinances.

In America striptease can be traced as far back as the carnivals that traveled across country.  The earliest striptease star was Charmion, who had a famous “dis-robing” act from around 1896 in which she stripped on a trapeze. This was later filmed by Thomas Edison in 1901—see below.

Here’s Bettie Page’s seven state guide for strip-teasers—“This is as far as you can go.”
 

 

…in Kansas.

You’ve got to be covered from thigh to shoulders, but you don’t have to use a horse blanket. To strippers, knowledge of local ordinances is vital.

...in Florida.

Coverage must resemble bra and panties whenever possible. What happens in the heat of summer is fun, too.

Bettie Page reveals more rules for stripping, plus Thomas Edison’s film of Charmion stripping, after the jump…

“How do you say “Ron Jeremy” in Latin?”

An arachnid encased in amber was found in a rather, er, comprising position to say the least. The discovery was made in Burma.

A harvestman of the species Halitherses grimaldii was discovered sporting a massive erection, a position it had been stuck in for the past 99 million years. What’s more, the creature was so uniquely endowed that scientists declared the find a brand new family of arachnids — a move based mostly on the shape of its penis

Apparently the outsized spider penis is like no other:

The researchers used photography and 3-D imaging to study the preserved harvestman, focusing special attention on the penis, which extended to almost half the length of the unfortunate male’s body. The erect appendage possesses a distinctively heart-shaped head and a twisted tip, meant for delivering sperm to females via a hole near their mouth.

Sadly, there was no female partner found near the arachnid. Scientist speculate that perhaps the two were separated during the throes of passion or that the spider’s big ol’ erection was due to increased blood pressure while trying to escape the sticky resin. Whatever the case, I feel bad for anything that’s had a 99-million-year-old priapic problem. Yikes! Talk about painful…

Via Discover Magazine and h/t Nerdcore