To his public the Belgian artist Luc Lafnet (1899-1939) appeared the epitome of a garret-dwelling bohemian—dressed in a cloak, floppy hat, brightly colored cravat, with an unruly beard, Trotsky glasses and a portfolio of sketches under his arm. But looks are often deceiving—for Lafnet was best known as a painter of fine watercolors and most especially for his beautiful paintings and interior designs created for the walls of the monastery at Pont l’Abbé d’Arnoult and several churches around Paris.

But even this disguised a further truth about Lafnet as he had a secret and more lucrative life as an illustrator of erotic literature. Like most artists who earned a living from porn, Lafnet used several aliases to produce his work—most famously “Jim Black.”

As Jim Black, Lafnet created many powerful works of BDSM art—in particular his etchings for Florence Fulbert’s Dresseuse d’hommes (1931) and Sophia Furrya’s Les geôles de dentelles (1933). In these as in much of his other erotic artwork, Black depicted Amazonian women thrashing men with whips and belts—humiliating them, degrading, even making them endure some forced feminization. The women are always in control—the men errant young that must be chastised and put in their place.

Lafnet also had a highly respectable and influential career as cartoon/graphic book artist. Unfortunately his career was tragically cut short after the death of his daughter in 1938—an event from which he never fully recovered—dying himself the following year.
 

 

 
More whip-cracking erotica from ‘Jim Black,’ after the jump….

 
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long before Playboy and Pornhub and even the camera democratized pornography, the world of erotica was primarily the preserve of the wealthy. Those rich gentleman who could afford it were able to purchase illustrated volumes of limited edition books—-notorious novels like Fanny Hill, or salacious volumes of erotic poetry or even historical guides to sex. These books were limited to one or two hundred copies—this exclusivity meant they were very, very expensive. The stories and the poetry were often times just incidental—an added bonus if you like—to the main attraction: highly explicit and beautifully produced illustrations of all kinds of sexual shenanigans.

The master illustrator of such porn was Édouard-Henri Avril—who produced some of the most beautiful yet full-on erotic illustrations. Little is known about Édouard-Henri Avril other than the usual facts of birth and death. He was born in France on May 21st, 1849. He was the son of a policeman. He fought in the Franco-Prussian war, was wounded in 1870—for which he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur—after which he returned to his art studies. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On completing his studies he began his career as a commercial artist. But Édouard-Henri also had a secret career as a pornographer.

It was the offer of illustrating Théophile Gautier‘s novel Fortunio that led Édouard-Henri to his secondary career as an artist of erotic illustration. To avoid any family scandal, he adopted the pseudonym “Paul Avril” for this work—which was a tad confusing as he already had a brother called Paul. However, the little known “Paul Avril” was soon the leading artist of the rich man’s dirty books.

His most famous works are those for John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1887)—the notorious banned tale of a woman of pleasure, Les sonnets luxurieux de l’Aretin (1904), Gautier’s Une nuit de Cléopâtre (1894), Daphnis et Chloé (1898), Flaubert’s Salammbô (1906),  and De figuris Veneris (1906)—an anthology of ancient Greek and Roman erotica compiled by Friedrich Karl Forberg.

Unlike most porn—or at least modern porn—the couples in Avril’s erotica are enjoying each other’s pleasure—as writer TM Bernard notes:

Notice the rapture on the faces of the women, something not usually something seen today, where everything is hot and furious, and a woman’s pleasure is often depicted as secondary to the man’s (and the viewers’). What’s more, the images reveal a total lack of pretense or shame. Whatever is being shared and experienced together is mutual and pleasurable.

This is classic porn. Probably why it cost so much.
 

Frontispiece to the ‘De Figuris Veneris: A Manual of Classical Erotica’ (1906).
 

Male masturbation.
 

Sex with a strap-on dildo.
 
More illustrated literary porn, after the jump….

‘Patty’ poster available at WestgateGallery.com
 
Although the notion of rushing a “cash in” product to market to capitalize on a story or scandal in the headlines isn’t exactly a new thing, even in the more freewheeling 1970s a porno “cash in” was still, historically speaking, a fairly novel phenomenon. Case in point, when publishing heiress Patty Hearst was abducted by the left-wing terrorists known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.

If you weren’t around then or need a refresher course, on February 4th, 1974, Patty Hearst, then a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley was abducted from her apartment by the SLA, a radical leftist urban guerrilla group led by escaped convict “Field Marshal” Donald DeFreeze. She was raped, beaten, constantly threatened with death and basically brainwashed/coerced into participating in various highly illegal activities, including an infamous April 15, 1974 San Francisco bank robbery, helping to make improvised explosives and driving a getaway car.
 

 
Hearst was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with another SLA member on September 18, 1975. At her police station booking she listed her occupation as “Urban Guerilla” and asked her lawyer to “Tell everybody that I’m smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.” Hearst was just 87 pounds when she was apprehended, and despite being described by the prominent psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer, who examined her, as “a low-IQ, low-affect zombie” and clearly having suffered psychological and physical trauma, she was convicted by a jury of several crimes and sentenced to decades in federal prison. Jimmy Carter commuted her prison sentence after 22 months served and Bill Clinton gave her a full pardon in 2001. Hearst appeared in two John Waters films and has been active in charity fundraising, concentrating her efforts towards pediatric AIDS.

The Hearst story was quite a big deal in the mid-70s, daily frontpage news, on the cover of TIME, Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post and People and the subject of frequent TV news stories. You could buy “special edition” magazines devoted to Hearst’s travails next to the TV Guide and Reader’s Digest at the grocery store checkout line. And there were two, arguably three, exploitation films made about her at the time.
 

 
The most curious of the three was a film simply called Patty (no last name is ever mentioned) a mockumentary that came in hardcore XXX-rated, softcore X-rated and R-rated versions. The only “star” worth mentioning was 70s porn stalwart Jamie Gillis and the film was directed by Robert L. Roberts the same low budget sleaze auteur who gave the world Sweet Savior, the 1971 “love-thrill murders” Manson Family-themed exploitation film starring former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue as a shaggy hippie cult leader.

Essentially Patty seems like it was a bunch of sex scenes with various pairings (group sex, lesbian, interracial and even a little girl-on-snake action according to a VARIETY review) held together with a framing device of “a Freudian psychologist and four of his colleagues” (along with the director himself) conversing about “Patty.” The film’s tagline was “The story of a revolutionary, told in highly erotic terms.” NY Times film reviewer Vincent Canby dubbed it “a frisky romp.”

According to the Temple of Schlock blog, the film had been considered “lost” but that:

The negative for all three was rescued from a condemned movie theater in New Jersey almost seven years ago and sold on eBay to a DVD company on January 14, 2008. A DVD/Blu-ray will hopefully come out sometime soon.

(Apparently a 2017 release has already been announced by Synapse, but with no further information available.)
 

 
And then there is Tanya AKA Sex Queen of the SLA a comedy directed by one “P. Duncan Fingersnarl” (Nate Rogers) in 1976. Here’s what one reviewer on IMDB said about it:

This film is a fun spoof, based on the real-life 70s Patty Hearst kidnapping. In the movie, a young affluent woman named Charlotte Cane, is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her kidnappers are a group of radical revolutionaries, who are holed-up in a grungy hideout, in the Oakland ghetto.

They’re a mixed-race bunch, who are committed to camaraderie, and saving the ‘people’ from the oppressive ‘insect pig’ capitalists. This band of freedom-fighters, are also dedicated to having lots of sex with each other. There’s plenty of juicy sex scenes, including both interracial and lesbian trysts, between the group members. The sex in this film, is very graphic indeed, including showing lots of male full- frontal nudity.

Charlotte gets caught-up in the lustful antics of her kidnappers, and has marathon sex sessions with them all. She enthusiastically enjoys her newly uninhibited sexuality, that the kidnappers have awakened in her. Charlotte also becomes sympathetic, to the radical extremist cause of the group. She even renounces her name, choosing to be called Tanya instead. So, Tanya has to decide if she really wants to return to her former affluent, sheltered existence, when she gets the chance to do so.

 
More after the jump…

A pack of British condoms—sometimes known as ‘johnnies.’
 
Condoms in one form or another have been around since 3,000 BC. The Egyptians used layers of material—most likely a loincloth—to cover the penis to prevent pregnancy. Most men used potluck. Contraception was usually left to the women to deal with—plus ca change. Most men used a hasty withdrawal or practiced anal. Up until the fifteenth century there is some speculation of the limited use of oiled silk and sheep’s intestine as a form of barrier protection. This mainly by those who could afford it.

Circa 1564, the first documented mention of condom use appears in a medical text about syphilis called De Morbo Gallico or The French Disease by Gabriele Falloppio. A linen sheath tied with a ribbon was used. Falloppio apparently carried out an experimental trial on some 1100 men to test this form of contraception.

By the 1700s condoms were still made of leather or animal intestine. These were kept and washed after use. The big turning point was the vulcanization process patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844, which led to the manufacture of the first rubber condom in 1855.

For many decades, rubber condoms were manufactured by wrapping strips of raw rubber around penis-shaped molds, then dipping the wrapped molds in a chemical solution to cure the rubber.

These original vulcanized condoms were reusable but uncomfortably thick and unfortunately stank of sulphur, a bit of a mood killer.

It wasn’t until Julius Fromm had the bright idea of using glass molds dipped into rubber solution did condom manufacturing become widespread. This was quickly followed by the production of Latex—“rubber suspended in water”—in 1920 and the modern condom went global.

Condoms were sold in tins or paper packets—many of which had purposefully “elegant” designs, a few of which can be seen below.
 

Early circa 1910 condom tin.
 

 

The Sheik—a highly popular brand—the brand name allegedly inspired by the Rudolph Valentino movie.
 
More fancy condom packaging design, after the jump…

Got Milk?
 
Mortierbrigade is an independent and integrated communications agency based in Brussels. Their motto is “confuse and conquer” which probably explains why their best work subverts the ordinary to make it interesting and original—which in turn explains why they have won over 250 industry awards. (They also run a hotel for trainees too—but that’s another story.) So not your ordinary run-of-the-mill bunch of creatives.

Recently Mortierbrigade linked up with Belgian humor magazine Humo (see what they did there?) to create an eye-catching and off-the-wall advertizing campaign that juxtaposed two seemingly innocent adverts into something far more saucy and subversive. Let’s call it “accidental porn”—where two incongruous images create…well...see for yourself….

Mortierbrigade and Humo clearly managed to convince their leading advertisers—such as Lidl, the Lotto, etc.—to play along.
 

 

 

 
More accidental porn, after the jump…

 
Venezuelan artist Luigi Rodriguez claims he has always been intrigued by orgasms. So he decided to study his own. The result is an unflinching hyperrealistic sculpture of his own face during orgasm—which he calls “Pure Luigi” or We Come As We Are.

Based in Madrid, Rodriguez spent most of this year learning the necessary skills to create his orgasmic self-portrait. He wanted “the finished artwork to be as close to real life as possible, so it was completely honest.”

It was a challenging and difficult process which Rodriguez admits took him outside of his comfort zone—putting himself in a highly “vulnerable state.” This exploration led Rodriguez to the conclusion that at the point of orgasm “we lose ourselves in the moment, removing all layers of fear, judgment and ego, revealing a face that represents who we are in the most pure state.”

“Pure Luigi” is certainly a powerful work of art. Rodriguez is keen to collaborate with others on further hyperrealistic sculptures—so, if you’re interested you can contact him here.
 

 
More of Rodriguez’s orgasmic self-portrait plus a video of him at work, after the jump…
 

‘Pornokratès’ (1896).
 
There are few nineteenth century artists as controversial or as profoundly shocking as Félicien Rops. Even more than a century after his death, his “blasphemous erotica” can still cause great offense in a world of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Rops was born in Namur, Belgium in 1833, the son of a wealthy cotton dealer. He was home schooled by a private tutor before attending Jesuit college where he excelled at art. However, he hated the intense Catholic education and quit college at sixteen. He then went onto finish his education at Royal Athenaeum. His talent for art flourished and he achieved some early success as a caricaturist for the student magazine Le Crocodile and local magazines. But it was as a lithographer and etcher that he proved his technical brilliance and unparalleled artistic talent. He co-founded with Charles De Coste the satirical magazine L’Uylenspiegel (1856-1863). They mercilessly attacked Church and State, the bourgeoisie and artistic pretensions. The magazine made both men (in)famous—Rops was even challenged to a duel after one particular provocative attack.

He married, had two children (one dying in childhood), separated from his wife and moved to Paris in 1862. His arrival in the City of Lights changed Rops dramatically—he was like a wide-eyed yokel driven to excess by the thrill of the metropolis. He began to draw and paint with a fevered intensity the world he inhabited. He exhibited some of his work back in his hometown of Namur in 1865—in particular a portrait of a female absinthe drinker (La Buveuse d’Absinthe) which so outraged critics and civic figures that he was denounced by an official rebuke for prostituting his pencil in “the reproduction of scenes imprinted with a repellent realism.” The response pleased Rops—though he described it as akin to being spat upon—as it meant he had found his right subject matter: the dark and neglected and unacknowledged underworld of everyday life. This led Rops to co-found the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts—a group set up to promote “realism” in art in 1868.

Another key event was his meeting with the writer Baudelaire, whose work confirmed many of Rops’ personal beliefs. He illustrated Baudelaire’s banned volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal and became one of the resident artists of the Decadent Movement—though he also had a place in the Symbolist camp.

The Decadent Movement was a loose collection of artists and writers who came to prominence in the last two decades—or fin de siècle—of the 1800s. The term Decadent was originally intended to be disparaging—but Baudelaire and Rops considered it a suitable description of their lifestyle and work. The Decadents were in revolt against the constrictive and petite bourgeoise morality of the day. But even this doesn’t quite tell the complete truth. Though Rops had rejected much of his Catholic upbringing—he had some lingering religious beliefs. He was a Freemason—and some of his work was highly anti-Catholic. Take a look at his pornographic re-imagining of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa being “penetrated” by the lance of the seraphim. He had a fear of women but was for a time happily married and then lived in a menage a trois with two sisters. He was intelligent and rational but was also superstitiously obsessed with the occult—in particular the power of the Devil. He railed gainst the petite bourgeoisie and against fame but harbored a desire for success—on his own terms.

The novelist Péladan said of Rops in La Plume (1896):

Three hundred subtle minds admire and love him, and this approbation of thinkers is all that matters to this master; if a man of the middle classes, one of those for whom popular works are written and who actually read them, should happen to show a liking for one of his works, he would immediately destroy it.  As a patrician of art, he wishes for no other judges than but his peers, and not out of pride.  The best token of his modesty is the fact that he is so little known and that is how he wants it, because he knows that Art is a druidic cult which receives into its ranks all minds that rise high enough.

While the author JK Huysmans described Rops as:

...not confined himself, like his predecessors, to rendering the attitudes of bodies swayed by passion, but has elicited from flesh on fire the sorrows of fever-stricken souls, and the joys of warped minds; he has painted demonic rapture as other have painted mystical yearnings. Rops has not confined himself, like his predecessors, to rendering the attitudes of bodies swayed by passion, but has elicited from flesh on fir the sorrows of fever-stricken souls, and the joys of warped minds; he has painted demonic rapture as other have painted mystical yearnings.

Rops described his work as “structured mainly around the themes of love, suffering and death, with the central unifying theme of the woman, la femme fatale in the full meaning of the word.” According to Rops the la femme fatale is:

Satan’s accomplice, [a woman who] becomes the supreme attraction which provokes the most extreme vices and torments in Man, a mere puppet.

This image is repeated throughout Rops work—and even when man attempts to repress his desire—as in his painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony—where (as Sigmund Freud notes) he has “placed Sin in the place of the Savior on the cross”

He seems to have known that when what has been repressed returns, it merges as the repressing force itself.

Rops’ work has been described as blasphemous, sadistic, sexist, misogynistic, pornographic, debased and even cruel—but that strikes me as responding to the effect or the surface rather than the substance of his work—which is far more complex and far more telling of Rops’ own fears and anxieties.
 

‘La tentation de Saint Antoine’ (‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’) (1878).
 

‘L’Incantation’ (‘The Incantation’) (1878).
 
More of sex, sadism and satanism, after the jump…

‘The Night Bird is to porno what Studio 54 is to disco!’ Of course it is…

If you’re looking for just the right movie poster—one that simply screams YOU (or even someone else’s name)—then you should probably head over to our expert friends at the Westgate Gallery, one of the very best curated selection of groovy movie posters anywhere on the Internet.

Westgate Gallery—named after a seedy 70’s porn theater in Bangor, Maine—is now having a sale—and not just on their “Golden Age of Porno” merch, either, but the entire store (they specialize in cult films, XXX and particularly lurid Italian giallo posters) is 40% off. If you know someone who is a big cinema buff (or retro porn addict?) they will love a gift from the connoisseur’s dream selection at Westgate Gallery:

SILENT NIGHT, BOOGIE NIGHTS!   It’s going to be a Merry XXX-mas for everyone on your Naughty List!  Online original movie poster boutique WestgateGallery.com has just launched our 2nd annual BLACK THROAT FRIDAY 40% OFF ORGY OF SAVINGS!  With the largest collection of illustrated/art-style original XXX movie posters commercially available, you can follow The Erotic Adventures of Wall Candy from its white-coater/marriage manual-skanky storefront beginnings with Rene Bond and Tina Russell through the heyday of porno chic superstars Marilyn Chambers, Annette Haven, Seka, Veronica Hart, Kelly Nichols, Vanessa Del Rio, Desiree Cousteau, Constance Money and Serena through the heavily hairsprayed princesses of the VHS home-video explosion including Ginger Lynn, Lois Ayres, Christy Canyon, Amber Lynn & notorious fake-ID enthusiast/Redondo High dropout/amnesia sufferer Traci Lords!  Pick up saucy Pop Art classics by Chet Collom, Tom Tierney, Olivia DeBerardinis, Armand Weston, Elaine Gignilliat and mysterious airbrush queen Penelope, some for under $20!  And our exhaustive archive of large-format Italian posters for American, French, West German & Danish hardcore humpfests is a dazzling array of lush masterworks (and a few hilariously kitschy hair-salon stunners guaranteed to heat up any boudoir, by the same top Euro commercial artists—Enzo Sciotti, Mafe, Aller, Morini, Sandro Symeoni & Mario Piovano—responsible for the thousands of non-porn Italian posters.  Another WG exclusive:  an extensive collection of ravishingly restored, linen-backed one-sheets ready for framing, which, like everything else in-stock, are 40% Off through Dec 24.

 

‘Dental Nurse’—makes a great gift for your dentist or dental hygienist. Or maybe not. No.
 

‘il Vizio di Baby’ AKA ‘Baby’s Vice & Ramba’s Greed’
 

‘Proibito’ AKA ‘Babylon Pink’
 
More, more, more after the jump…

 
The field of sex toys with an explicit rock music tie-in is a relatively new one, but if you think about it, it would be odd if a band who released an album called Orgasmatron and a song called “Vibrator” didn’t have a line of sex toys. Clearly, this was the kind of thing Lemmy and the gang gave serious thought.

My colleague Ron Kretsch introduced readers to Lovehoney’s line of Motörhead-themed vibrators last year, so this isn’t exactly a new topic for us. The four products that were made available last year were tributes to Ace of Spades and Overkill—all of them vibrators—with prices ranging from $26.95 to $54.95.

But when they come out with new Motörhead models, well twist our arm, it’s our pleasure, nay our responsibility to let you know. Not for nothing, but the Orgasmatron thing was just lying out there waiting for something to give. Sure enough, Lovehoney has three new products, a glass dildo in both clear/black and black/gold which is a tribute to Bomber, and an “Orgasmatron War Pig Wand Vibrator.”

Here they are, beauties all:

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

Bettie Page on the cover of ‘Eyeful’ magazine.
 
One of the best parts of my gig working as a writer for Dangerous Minds is the fact that I get to share things that I love with all of you groovy readers. While I honestly don’t have a favorite topic (though it’s probably a toss up between Black Sabbath and vintage Van Halen), I really do love writing about vintage magazines. I’m still a huge connoisseur of tangible media and whenever I can I like to pick up old magazines—a trick I learned from a successful colleague of mine. It’s an exercise that almost always leads to me stumbling on something I can blog about.

Such is the case with today’s post about Eyeful magazine which got its start back in 1942 purporting to be a vehicle for the cause of “Glorifying the American Girl.” Publisher and journalist Robert Harrison, who would later launch “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world,” Confidential, promoted the magazine using the following words “Gals, Gags, Giggles.” Someone being a fan of at least one of those three things is a pretty sure bet. Harrison’s come-on worked and the cheeky magazine would have a nearly thirteen-year run under Harrison’s reign as one of New York’s most successful publishers. Another reason Eyeful was a hit was the fact that most of their models were burlesque dancers who clearly knew how to make the image of a housewife or “girl next door” be sexy and appealing without showing any actual nudity.

Of the numerous famous faces who graced the cover and appeared in silly sexist pictorials inside the magazine was the iconic Bettie Page who, according to the book Bettie Page Confidential by Bunny Yeager appeared on and in Eyeful while she was still working as a secretary on Wall Street trying to save money for acting lessons. Awww. I’ve included images of covers of Eyeful that feature actual photographs which were not as common as the classic illustrated covers that routinely appeared on front of the magazine. I’ve also posted some tongue-in-cheek humor pictorials from Eyeful such as “How Strippers are Hired” and “How to Train a Wife.” Har har har. If you are a collector of girl-centric magazines, copies of Eyeful are pretty easy to come by.

As I mentioned previously, although there is no actual nudity in the images that follow, they are still fairly NSFW. YAY!
 

 

A picture from inside ‘Eyeful’ magazine.
 

 
More after the jump…