The great Kurt Vonnegut.
 

“An erect penis has no resemblance to the kind that they have seen on statues in parks or on small boys paddling the seashore.”

—Authors of An ABZ of Love, Sten and Inge Hegeler on what it is like seeing a penis for the first time.

 
Inge and Sten Hegeler were a bit like the Danish version of Masters and Johnson, the transformative American research team that revolutionized human sexuality. Hegeler was a psychologist and author who specialized in sexology. In 1948 Hegeler published the book Hvordan, Mor? ( How, Mother?) which was considered one of the first books of its kind to detail such direct, honest advice on how to provide sexual education to kindergarten-aged children. After getting his own psychology practice up and running he and Inge would go on to publish a few other notable books including one that Kurt Vonnegut kept on his own library shelf, An ABZ of Love.

Vonnegut was so taken with the publication that he wrote a letter to his wife letting her know where she could “find” the book in his library. The book itself, which was self-published by the pair in 1962, was exhaustive when it came to its range of information. And I mean they covered everything including topics that were (and are still by some) considered taboo which made ABZ a rather boundary-smashing publication that voiced a clear, positive opinion about equality and its relation to gender, color or one’s sexual identity. They were also fond of using proper words such as “cock,” “pussy” and “fuck” to describe specific actions or attributes within the book’s nearly 300 pages. No wonder Vonnegut adored it enough to write his wife a love-letter of sorts about it. In fact, here’s a short epigrammatic passage from ABZ that sounds a whole lot like Vonnegut wrote the advice himself.

So there are two paths we can take: one is try to deny and suppress our emotions and force ourselves to think sensibly. In this way we run the risk of fooling ourselves.

Hi ho. At this point, it seems pretty clear to me that everyone should own a copy of An ABZ of Love. It is also quite possible that there are many among us that could use a little refresher course on the ins and outs of what we all think about every single day, sex, as it just doesn’t come in one flavor. You know like vanilla? I’ve included many illustrations by Krag from the vintage book, which has been published in fifteen different countries, along with their often amusing captions below. Many are NSFW.
 

Text reads: “It is possible to be lonely in a group, too.”
 

 
More after the jump…

 
I was a little squicked out when the auction of locks of Marilyn Monroe’s hair was announced last year, so this is just straight up weirding me out.

The same auction house, the legendary Julien’s (“THE AUCTION HOUSE TO THE STARS!”) has announced its latest in a series of Hollywood Legends auctions. this one featuring loads of property from the estate of Patrick Swayze. Especially, um, devoted fans can bid on his hockey uniform from Youngblood which, yes, includes athletic supporters, and on his banana hammock from Keeping Mum.
 

A still from Keeping Mum. Before you go drawing any conclusions just based on that, Rowan Atkinson and Dame Maggie Smith were in the film, too.

In addition, as seems to be the case with practically every celebrity auction they do, there’s a passel of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, much of which is pretty run-of-the-mill, until you get to her chest and pelvic x-rays.
 

 

 

 

 

A Marilyn Monroe pelvic X-ray dated November 9, 1954. Information ghost printed in the upper right of the X-ray reads “Cedars of Lebanon Hospital/Drs. E. Freedman and S. Finck/ Name Di Maggio, Mrs. Marilyn/ No. 50612 Date 11-9-54/ Ref. By Dr. L. Krohn.” Dr. Leon Krohn was Monroe’s gynecologist.

17 by 14 inches

The provenance is interesting—“As a radiology resident at Cedars, a young doctor obtained this X-ray and one other, of Monroe’s pelvis. When he taught students, he used these X-rays to ensure that they were paying attention.“ OK, actually pretty funny, but I’d prefer not to speculate on why else someone would collect something like this. Images of Monroe’s chest have been around since 1947, though this is another level of exposure beyond mere toplessness. As for Ms. Monroe’s pelvis, that remained a bit more demure. But as I’m neither a woman nor a doctor, I’m out of the loop on gynecological techniques and instruments, and so I’m in the dark as to what exactly the apparent device is in the x-ray. Are we seeing an IUD insertion here? (Asking for a friend.)

Anyway, the auction takes place on April 28th. If you’re going to bid on these Monroe items, good luck to you, I guess, and please keep your reasons to yourself.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
You can buy two locks of Marilyn Monroe’s hair. Seriously.
Psychedelic Day-Glo screenprints of Marilyn Monroe by ‘Last Sitting’ photographer Bert Stern
A Marilyn Monroe-themed house is up for sale and it’s batshit crazy-looking

 
In 2013 Spike Jonze released a daring and fascinating movie called Her, set in an indeterminate future in which Theodore Twombly, ably played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with the operating system on his phone, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who goes by the name Samantha.

According to recent research undertaken by Mindshare and J. Walter Thompson, a surprising number of smartphone users fantasize about just such a relationship. The report, which is titled “Speak Easy: The Future Answers to You” (does it?), covers a wide array of research into user attitudes about speech recognition and natural language processing with a focus on voice hardware products such as the Amazon Echo.

In a section called “Craving Intimacy,” the report looks at the desire of users to have a “deeper connection” with their “voice assistants.” A majority of users (60%) understandably affirmed that vastly improved comprehension on the part of the devices would greatly increase the propensity to use it.

 
This rapidly becomes a tricky area, the report’s authors point out, because as the abilities of the voice assistants and the integration of services increase, the potential for fraud or abuse also increases dramatically, which means that the services require a significant degree of trust—and trust is an inherently emotional aspect of human life that also requires a willingness to be vulnerable. As one focus group member said, “You can build trust by, hopefully, making sure no one’s ripped off while giving them access to do amazing things.”

Is it any wonder, then, that some users have started to fantasize about a sexual relationship with Siri or Alexa? Not surprisingly, according to neuroscience experiments discussed in the report, “the emotional response to voice assistants is considerably lower than for both a face-to-face human interaction and a touch or text interface,” which is chalked up to the “rudimentary personalities” of Alexa or Siri, but users’ comfort level with their assistants increased with the benefit of further exposure and familiarity with them.

And where familiarity and comfort go, intimacy and sex cannot be far behind:
 

Over a third (37%) of regular voice technology users say that they love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person. Even more astonishing is that more than a quarter of regular voice technology users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant.

 
To be precise, “26% of regular voice tech users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant.”

In October, the Telegraph reported that personal voice assistants were frequently being used by “some men” who wanted to “talk dirty.” Ilya Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, a company in the UK, noted that the behavior was seen most often in “teenagers and truckers without girlfriends”:
 

This happens because people are lonely and bored…. It is a symptom of our society. As well as the people who want to talk dirty, there are men who want a deeper sort of relationship or companionship.

 
Eckstein also stated that such people “want to flirt, they want to dream about a subservient girlfriend, or even a sexual slave.”

A woman tasked with working on that Microsoft’s Cortana product has said that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” addressed the voice assistant’s sex life. 
 
via Dazed
 

 
Part the First, being the tale of a haunting in rural England in the 1920s.

Almost a hundred years ago now, out on the fields and winding lanes by Curry Rivel in Somerset, there came stories of the ghostly apparition of a woman who walked at night. A woman dressed in black, her face sinisterly veiled. It was said that anyone who ever looked upon this specter’s face, looked into her blackened soulless eyes, would be struck dead on the very spot where they stood.

Who was this ghost?

Some said she was the spirit of an old governess who had lost her charges in some terrible accident—most likely drowned by the old weir—who now roamed the misty meadows and hedgerows looking for their bodies to bring them home once more. Others said she was an evil wraith looking to snare the unwary soul.

When children wouldn’t go to sleep at night, their mothers told them to close their eyes or the woman in black would find them out and feast upon their bones.

Terror gripped the sleepy village. It became so bad that some would ne’er leave their houses after sundown for fear of meeting the dreaded woman in black.

For four years, this ghostly figure was seen by moonlight drifting over fields, wandering brambled lanes, waiting at the crossroads for hellbound travelers.
 

 
Then one night, a group of men gathered in the local pub, the King William Inn. The sightings of the woman in black had been more frequent of late and the villagers said that when the black specter is seen three times in a week someone was going to die….
 
Find the secret of the ghostly woman in black, after the jump…

 
From its sweatshop hidden somewhere in deepest depths of New York’s Chinatown, the evil Super Sucklord has been pumping out a range of highly collectible bootleg figurines, art works, trading cards and pop culture mashups since 2015.

The Sucklord is artist Morgan Phillips who is the boss of toy company Suckadelic—best known for its range of film & TV spin-off figurines in particular its Star Wars collectibles. Among the many other goodies available are a series of one-off artworks created by the Super Sucklord called Sucpanelz.

Sucpanlez feature Action Figures paired with vintage print magazine covers, adverts and print materials which are then mounted onto wooden panels. Currently there are two series available: Celebrity Sucpanelz—featuring the likes of G.G. Allin, Kanye, Robin Williams and Johnny Cash among others, and Sex & Drugs Sucpanelz—which is kinda more self-explanatory.
 

 

 
See more of Super Sucklord’s scintillating Sucpanelz, after the jump…

Frank Zappa live at TTG Studios, 1966 (via Zappateers)
 
It must have been thrilling, the teacher threading the film into the projector and the Mothers of Invention bursting out of the chalkboard in full color. The instructional movie Sex in Today’s World, a/k/a Sex in the Sixties, presented by Focus Education, Inc., incorporates a few short clips of the Freak Out!-period Mothers driving an LA audience into a Bacchic frenzy.

Román García Albertos’s valuable Zappa videography says this footage was shot at Hollywood’s TTG Studios in 1966 for broadcast on The David Susskind Show. The videography suggests Sex in the Sixties was originally broadcast on ABC, but judging from the number of splices toward the beginning of the version on YouTube, the source is a sex-ed print that saw legit classroom use.
 

The Mothers live at TTG Studios, 1966 (via Zappateers)
 
Something Weird included Sex in Today’s World in the collection Sex Hygiene Scare Films, Volume 2. Here’s the synopsis from their catalog:

Sex in Today’s World (color), “an examination of sex in the 1960’s,” is a time capsule which neatly captures many of the conflicting attitudes of a cross section of people—doctor, psychologist, professors, students, and preachers—caught in the sexual turbulence of 1966. The so-called Sexual Revolution happened so quickly and with such across-the-board pervasiveness that this little film, like most of the people interviewed, seems not only dazed, but trying to catch its breath. It also includes some great glimpses of mid-sixties adult book stores, 42nd Street in its glorious grindhouse heyday, Bunnies doing a go-go at a Playboy Club and, most surprising of all, concert footage of FRANK ZAPPA and THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION! The inevitable conclusion: Yeah, there’s sure a lot of sex out there!

See for yourself, after the jump…

A trading card from the ‘Grindhouse Girls’ set put out by Rigomor Press in 1992.
 
This set of sexed-up trading cards featuring strippers and exotic performers from the 50s and 60s was put out in 1992 by Rigomor Press who also put out a few other controversial trading card sets such as Incredible True Life Murderers in 1991 and The World’s Most Hated People in 1992.

The Grindhouse Girls set contains images of well-known adult performers such as Blaze Starr and Maria Villa who performed her exotic act with a snake. The black and white images are a fantastic throw-back to when adult performers used pasties, big hair, and kooky gimmicks to sell their sex appeal. Best of all, like many other vintage trading card sets, when you flipped the cards over you could assemble a giant puzzle—but instead of scene from Charlie’s Angels, you get to put together a picture of “Goddess of the Jungle” Naja Karamuru who was considered to be Brazil’s answer to Jayne Mansfield. Karamuru was a superstar of the burlesque scene back in the 50s and 60s and like Maria Villa, she shared her stage with a number of snakes including two pythons and a cobra. I’ve included images of all twenty cards from the set which occasionally come up for sale on auction sites like eBay if you’re interested in acquiring one for yourself. Though there isn’t any real nudity, strippers and pasties generally equal NSFW.
 

 

 
More ‘Grindhouse Girls’ after the jump…

A vintage 80s ad for Italian fashion brand, Fiorucci featuring Divine. Art by Richard Bernstein

“Went to Fiorucci and it’s so much fun there. It’s everything I’ve always wanted, all plastic.”

—Andy Warhol diary entry for December 21, 1983

Although Fiorucci was a global brand, it was the NYC store where Elio Fiorucci’s visionary day-glo retailing vision was best realized. Everyone from Jackie O to Andy Warhol spent time hanging out and shopping at Fiorucci—a glammy New York store that was fondly referred to as the “daytime Studio 54.” From the late 70s and most of the 80s the clothing brand founded by Elio Fiorucci in Milan was a fashion trendsetter and can be credited with many looks that defined the era. Like primary colors and “neon” fabrics, form-fitting “stretch” denim jeans and the accessories that were worn by a young Madonna, thanks to Fiorucci’s art director, jewelry designer Maripol who styled her iconic look. (Ms. Ciccone even performed at the store’s 1983 anniversary party). Maripol also dressed the likes of Grace Jones and another New York fashion icon, Debbie Harry. Keith Haring would draw on the walls. Kenny Scharf did his first art show there. Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine had office space in the store for a while, too, and it was pretty difficult to turn up at the store—across from Bloomingdale’s flagship on 59th and Lexington Ave—and not see someone incredibly famous.
 

Madonna and her dancers
 
And since this is New York we’re talking about, one of the store’s most popular employees (he was the manager) flamboyant performance artist Joey Arias appeared with David Bowie and Klaus Nomi on what would become one of the most infamous episodes of Saturday Night Live on December 15th, 1979. Because everybody was somebody in New York back then. Fashion designer Betsey Johnson

I was recently made aware of the fact that earlier this month high-end UK retailer Selfridges debuted a pop-up shop where you could actually purchase items from Fiorucci’s classic clothing catalog. Everything from the brand’s famous denimwear to an accessory I have been obsessed with since I was skating around the roller rink to Sister Sledge (who sang about the store), Fiorucci patches. Selfridges even provided a service where you could have a vintage patch, which were created in 1984, affixed to the item of your choosing. If you missed that, like I sadly did, the store is now carrying a number of new Fiorucci items including some cool, vibrantly colored t-shirts with the brand’s neon, zig-zagging logo on the front. Below I’ve posted an array of images from Fiorucci ad campaigns, marketing posters as well as a few of the vintage patches sold at the Selfridges’ pop-up store.

Sunglasses are encouraged to protect your eyes. Some are NSFW.
 

The famous Fiorucci logo
 

 
More after the jump…

“Falling Stars” (1897).
 
Sometime in the mid-1870s, while living in Paris, the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy produced a series of erotic illustrations. These pictures featured men and women having a right old time fucking and wanking, sucking and licking. What inspired Zichy is unclear. A mid-life crisis? A raging hard-on? The current fashion for erotic illustration? Or perhaps wealthy patrons looking for some “dirty pictures”?

Most of these ink drawings lay undiscovered until after Zichy’s death in 1906. They were then collated together and a selection published in a book entitled Liebe (aka Oh, Liebe) in 1911. This nicely produced volume caused a bit of a stir. Zichy might have been pleased—he had often caused controversy with his work. His most famous picture was the demonically-charged anti-war painting “The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction” (1878). This painting was banned by the militaristic French authorities as deviant propaganda. He also managed to offend many Catholics with his work “Autodafé” (1868), which depicted the horrors of Spanish Inquisition. That said, Zichy was a very respectable artist. He painted the portrait of Lajos Batthyány, the first Hungarian Prime Minister. He was commissioned to produce paintings of the Empress of Austra, “Queen Elisabeth Laying Flowers by the Coffin of Ferenc Deák” and “Drinking Bout of Henry III.” He also supplied 27 illustrations for the poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin in 1881.

Zichy was born in Zala, Hungary on October 15, 1827. He started out studying law before taking up a career as an artist. He traveled to Vienna where he became a pupil of the painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Under Waldmüller’s recommendation, he became a teacher. He then became a court artist for the Russian Tsar Alexander II. When he left St. Petersburg, he traveled around Europe before settling in Paris circa 1874.

Another intriguing question about Zichy’s erotic illustrations is whether he worked from life models? The drawings look more than just the work of some fevered imagination—most noticebly by the fact Zichy’s couples appear to be enjoying each other as equals and not portrayed as mere titillation for the male gaze. He also depicted gay sex and masturbation—which would have been shocking at the time. His style of drawing, the clear lines, the soft penciling, would influence succeeding artists producing similar erotic illustrations.
 

“The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction” (1878).
 

“Autodafé” (1868).
 
See more of Zichy’s erotic artwork, after the jump…

A painting by Seiu Ito depicting the art of erotic Japanese rope bondage, Kinbaku.
 
Tokyo-born artist Seiu Ito didn’t start his career as an artist by tying people up and painting or photographing the resulting scene, rather he excelled using other mediums to express himself such as metal, creating carvings out of ivory, painting and eventually sculpture. When he was thirteen Ito traded in his given first name of Hajime for Seiu. It was around that time that Ito started to draw images of women bound with rope known as the erotic Japanese art of Kinbaku or “tight binding.” Then, sometime in the early 1900s, perhaps 1907 when he was in his mid-20s, Ito took a job as an illustrator for a local newspaper and was quick to succeed as an in-demand artist for several different publications.

Prior to rope bondage becoming a form of erotic sex play, it was widely used during what is referred to as the last traditional period in Japan, the Edo Period (1603–1867) to bind and restrain criminals and other kinds of captives. And it was the erotic version of being tied up like an outlaw that made Ito a rich man. Although he was married several times during his life, that didn’t stop Ito from having affairs with other women, some who he kept as mistresses for long periods of time. Ito’s collection of women would become the primary subjects for his paintings and kinky photography which included erotic suspension. One of Ito’s more well-known and questionable images (and there are many) is of his then-pregnant wife (his second) Kise Sahara. Ito photographed and painted an image of a very pregnant, partially nude Sahara bound with rope, hanging from the ceiling by her feet.

Sadly by the time the 1930s arrived the Japanese government had long been busy banning artistic types and intellectuals as well as routinely censoring print media. Ito struggled to survive as an artist. Later his home and much of his work was destroyed in the Great Tokyo Air Raid. The work that survived the devastation helped solidify Ito’s dubious title as the “Father of Modern Kinbaku.” As you might imagine Ito’s work is the subject of several books as well as the 1977 film Beauty Exotic Dance: Torture! in which Ito plays himself to the hilt. Many of the photographs and paintings below are naturally NSFW. 
 

 

 
More after the jump…