Tag: sex

A virtually undetectable penis

Seth Anderson0 comment

I don’t know, is that something you’d put on your resume1 ? Especially since it is your employer saying it about you?

Lonely Zenith

The constantly offended assholes at the Parents Television Council have complained to the FCC about the brief, accidental nudity on last week’s Survivor Gabon episode, in which Marcus’ genitalia was briefly visible during a challenge.

Citing the the accidentally broadcast of Libra’s “fuck” on Big Brother 10, the PTC says in a press release that “CBS has once again decided to violate the public trust,” and calls the flash “shocking and purposeful.” Because seeing a human body part will forever destroy their souls and the souls of the precious, innocent children who happen to be Googling about penises, the PTC wants an apology and for CBS to hunt down the person who dared let this happen. People: It’s a penis, and it’s only shocking to those people who don’t get to see one regularly, either their own or someone else’s.

[From reality blurred + CBS calls Marcus’ penis “virtually undetectable”]

The Devil and Pope

Don’t the PTC folks have anything better to do? Rhetorical question, of course. And to think, if Sarah Palin becomes President (or even Vice President), the Christian Taliban will have a high ranking politician on their side, taking their phone calls, and expanding their hateful message.

Footnotes:
  1. CBS lawyers responded “This was a completely unintentional, inadvertent and fleeting incident that was virtually undetectable when viewed in real time. In the first 24 hours after the broadcast, before freeze-frame images were widely posted online, we received one viewer comment from the 13 million who watched the telecast.” [↩]

When Doves Cry

Seth Anderson0 comment

More precisely, this is what happens when Republicans are in charge of a government they profess to despise – total and complete failure to govern.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

[From Wide-Ranging Ethics Scandal Emerges at Interior Dept. – NYTimes.com]

Hey, but according to the polls, Americans are still evenly decided if they want 4 more years of this sort of leadership or whether they would prefer having a government that attempts to serve the country (versus the Republican mentality of crony capitalism and ethical considerations be damned).

John McCain and his little red Corvette, Sarah Palin, would fit right in to this mentality, since they’ve already expressed their joy to reward lobbyists with federal money whenever possible.

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing probes of the troubled program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency has had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, the new set of reports raises questions about the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

In one of the new reports, investigators conclude that a key supervisor at the agency’s minerals revenue management office worked together with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.

Two other reports focus on “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” and unethical behavior in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in the form of oil and gas rather than cash royalties.

The Interior Department dropped all pretense of being anything other than a division of the oil and gas industry. I wonder what does happen in the Bush White House since Bush and Cheney both consider themselves part of the oil industry taking a short sabbatical, and why exactly did Jeff Gannon make all those hundreds of visits to the White House?

One of the reports says that the officials viewed themselves as exempt from [ethical] limits, indulging themselves in the expense-account-fueled world of oil and gas executives.

In addition, the report alleges that eight royalty-program officials accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

The investigation separately found that the program’s manager mixed official and personal business, and took money from a technical services firm in exchange for urging oil companies to hire the firm. In sometimes lurid detail, the report accuses him of having intimate relations with two subordinates, one of whom regularly sold him cocaine.

The culture of the organization “appeared to be devoid of both the ethical standards and internal controls sufficient to protect the integrity of this vital revenue-producing program,” one report said.

There are plenty more details in Charlie Savage’s article, including this lovely tidbit:

two of the highest-ranking officials who were targets of the investigations will apparently escape sanction. Both retired during the investigation, rendering them safe from any administrative punishment, and the Justice Department has declined to prosecute them on the charges suggested by the inspector general.

Cheney would have instructed Bush to pardon them anyway…

from the (redacted) document covering Gregory Smith, page 19:

The RIK employee recalled that on one occasion in late 2004, Smith telephoned her repeatedly asking for drugs. She said she provided cocaine to him early that evening, but he continued to call her. Eventually, she said, Smith traveled to her house and wanted her to have sex with him. She said he also asked her if she had more cocaine, and she stated that she did not but that someone who was staying with her might. She said Smith obtained crystal methamphetamine from one of these individuals and she watched him snort it off the toaster oven in her kitchen. The RIK employee also said she and Smith engaged in oral sex that evening.

update: the actual documents (PDF) are available at ProPublica.org and are quite a fun read.

Some of these files are quite large, so beware.

In a cover letter (PDF), Inspector General Earl Devaney details the “culture of ethical failure” in the department.

In the first report (PDF), investigators focus on Gregory Smith, the former program director of the royalty-in-kind program. As the Times reports, “The report accuses Mr. Smith of improperly accepting gifts from the oil and gas industry, of engaging in sex with two subordinates, and of using cocaine that he purchased from his secretary or her boyfriend several times a year between 2002 and 2005.”

The second report (PDF) look at the Interior officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil. From theTimes: “The report found that 19 officials — about one-third of the program’s staff — accepted gratuities from oil companies, which was prohibited because they conducted official business with the industry.”

And the third report (PDF) focuses on Lucy Denett, the former associate director of minerals revenue management, who allegedly manipulated the contracting process to steer a contract to her friend Jimmy Mayberry. Mayberry pleaded guilty to conflict of interest charges earlier this year.

I could only imagine the sustained gnashing of teeth if this scandal could be linked to a Democratic client. Since it only involves Republicans and oil industries, it will get a mention or two in passing, and be off the news cycle by the weekend.

Little Red Bike

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia” (Michael Gray)

From Michael Gray’s excellent book, the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Buckets of Rain (from Blood on the Tracks):

The closing track on the Blood on the Tracks album, this is an immensely likeable, modest song of barbed sanity. A blues- structured work, it also neatly conflates other old song titles within its lyric, as when Dylan sings


‘Little red wagon, little red bike / I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like’.

In a genre so riddled with sexual innuendo and double entendre as the blues, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery or the porn shop, and this is a good example. One long-term Dylan collector was told years ago that the phrase ‘little red bike’ was a blues term for anal sex: which certainly puts a different perspective on Dylan’s lyric. But it is not a common blues term: there isn’t a single ‘little red wagon’ in Michael Taft’s Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance.

‘Little Red Wagon’ is, however, a recording by the pre-war blues artist Georgia White, and by a happy coincidence the very next track she laid down at the same session is called ‘Dan the Back Door Man’.

I’ll never hear that song quite the same again.

From the official Bob Dylan lyric site:

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

The Most Happy Bordello

Seth Anderson0 comment

The historic bordello district was slightly south of where I currently reside, the city still has certain residues of days gone by, if one knows where to look.1


“Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Karen Abbott)Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul sounds like an interesting overview of the period.

The Most Happy Bordello – WSJ.com:
One doesn’t hear much nowadays about bordellos, also known as cathouses, brothels, houses of ill repute or simple whorehouses. When I was an adolescent in Chicago, in the early 1950s, the trip to such a place was a rite de passage for nearly every male youth of unambiguous appetites. In my day the chief such institutions, operating on assembly-line principles, were to be found outside the city, one in Kankakee, the other in Braidwood. Students at the University of Illinois relieved the tedium of their sound liberal arts or business educations by visiting establishments in Danville, birthplace of Dick Van Dyke and Bobby Short.
…But the great cathouse era of Chicago was in the first decade or so of the 20th century. This era and those cathouses have now been described with scrupulous concern for historical accuracy and in clear, lively prose by Karen Abbott in “Sin in the Second City.” Lavish in her details, nicely detached in her point of view, Ms. Abbott has written an immensely readable book. “Sin in the Second City” offers much in the way of reflection for those interested in the unending puzzle that goes by the name of human nature.

Ms. Abbott’s account of fleshly sin and the response to it in the city of Chicago in the early 20th century centers on a bordello known as the Everleigh Club, which even now is talked about in Chicago by men interested in the sporting life. The club was the creation of two sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, who themselves had earlier worked the hard trade of harlotry in Omaha and elsewhere.

The Everleigh Club opened on Feb. 1, 1900, and closed on the morning of Oct. 25, 1911. In between times, the sisters accrued assets, by Ms. Abbott’s estimate, worth more than $20 million in today’s dollars, while their establishment acquired world-wide fame as one of the wonders of the city of Chicago, which, in the words of First Ward Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “ain’t no sissy town.”

The Everleigh Club was a cathouse with a vast difference — it was more like the Ritz, with, of course, added attractions. Sumptuous food was served (entrées on the buffet included guinea fowl, pheasant and broiled squab), music both serious and popular played while a basso continuo was supplied by the popping of champagne corks, and the downstairs décor included a gold piano that set the sisters back no fewer than 15 grand.

Unlike their consoeurs in the Levee, as the whorehouse district on Chicago’s South Side was called, the sisters Everleigh enforced a high standard of luxury, carefully culled their clientele and monitored the behavior of staff. They also treated their girls — known as courtesans, and sometimes as the butterflies — with fairness and an utter absence of cruelty, which was far from the case in other houses in the Levee. Girls working at the Everleigh Club made more than a hundred dollars a week, a fine wage at the time. To give some notion of the general tone of the place: While customers were upstairs frolicking with the girls, downstairs their suits were being pressed.

Although Ms. Abbott does not describe what went on in the girls’ rooms chez Everleigh, she informs us that corporate accounts were available to good customers, and she chronicles the gaudier scandals. These include one of the Marshalls Field, of the famous department-store family, being shot in the Levee; and, later, Herbert Swift, of the great meatpacking family, dying of unknown causes after supposedly departing the Everleigh Club with one of its girls. The heavyweight champion Jack Johnson served time in jail under the Mann Act for transporting an Everleigh butterfly named Belle Schreiber across state lines.

The characters of Minna and Ada Everleigh and their thoughtful way of going about their business are intricately delineated by Ms. Abbott, who, I think it fair to say, views them affectionately and with measured admiration. But her book is ultimately a saga of a clash between the forces of vice and those of reform in the city of Chicago. In this battle, reform has right but absolutely no humor on its side — right, that is, if one assumes that human weakness is easily eradicated through the changing of institutions.

The methods proposed for dealing with the extensive prostitution in Chicago early in the last century were, first, to segregate it in a particular part of town, and, second, to root it out and eliminate it altogether. Ministers, ambitious young lawyers set on forging political careers, anti-smoking campaigners, temperance workers, the B’nai Br’ith, vegetarians, and others on the side of sweetness and light naturally enough went for complete elimination.

I did finish reading this book several months ago, well worth reading if you have a chance.

Footnotes:
  1. reposted because there is something wrong with the original movabletype post from 2007 [↩]

Franz Kafka porn brought out of the closet

Seth Anderson0 comment

Surprised Kafka’s porn stash took so long to emerge.

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer’s saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

[From Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet – Times Online ]

Raindrop Porn
[Raindrop Porn will have to suffice unless I find any graphic goodies on the internet]

and the stash, kept locked with a key only Kafka had, was apparently pretty racy

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”

He added: “Perhaps Kafka’s biographers simply don’t like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this… way in the vital early stages of his career

As far as I can tell, the book is only available in England at the moment. American Puritanism at work.

“Excavating Kafka” (James Hawes)

a different title by James Hawes is available in the US, maybe covering some of the same topics:

“Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (James Hawes)

Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.

Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:

*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.

*Kafka was lonely.

*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write.

*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.

*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.

*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.

*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.

*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.

James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers—scholars, biographers, and tourist guides—have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he’ll take no prisoners in the process.

Running While Black

swanksalot0 comment

Welcome to the Dark Side

Welcome to the Dark Side


Bob Herbert is wise to the John McCain strategy – campaign not on ideas, but on insinuations and falsehoods. A typical Karl Rove disciple, in other words.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.

Since then, Senator McCain has only upped the ante, smearing Mr. Obama every which way from sundown

[From Bob Herbert- Running While Black – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

and

John McCain needs no evidence. His campaign is about trashing the opposition, Karl Rove-style. Not satisfied with calling his opponent’s patriotism into question, Mr. McCain added what amounted to a charge of treason, insisting that Senator Obama would actually prefer that the United States lose a war if that would mean that he — Senator Obama — would not have to lose an election.

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

…

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.

Of course, political campaigns are blood sports, nonetheless McCain is just slime of the worst Republican variety.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHXYsw_ZDXg

Netflixed Caligula

swanksalot1 Comment


“Caligula (Three-Disc Imperial Edition)” (Analysis Film Releasing Corporation)

Shipped on 01/09/08.

Malcolm McDowell portrays the infamous emperor who wielded godlike power over ancient Rome while at the same time sleeping with his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy). Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud co-star in this film produced by Penthouse Magazine editor Bob Guccione and written by Gore Vidal. Warning: This unrated edition contains explicit sex, nudity and violence as well as disturbing imagery. [From Netflixed: Caligula]

Yikes. Easily the worst movie I’ve seen in years. Not even good porn, unless you like late 70’s Penthouse Magazine lesbian porn, or scenes of group (male) masturbation. I couldn’t make myself watch the whole thing, apparently there was even more over-the-top action to follow.

My two word review: cocaine-inspired megalomania. Apparently, Bob Guccione locked everyone except for sycophants out of the editing room, and cut and pasted footage so it is even more confusing. Gore Vidal sued to get the title changed from “Gore Vidal’s Caligula” to “Caligula”, though his name is still on the credits. Even as straight-out camp fun, this film wasn’t fun.

Roger Ebert’s review is classic:

“Caligula” is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame.

I wanted to tell them … what did I want to tell them? What I’m telling you now. That this film is not only garbage on an artistic level, but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience. “Caligula” is not good art, It is not good cinema, and it is not good porn. [snip]

You have heard that this is a violent film. But who could have suspected how violent, and to what vile purpose, it really is? In this film, there are scenes depicting a man whose urinary tract is closed, and who has gallons of wine poured down his throat. His bursting stomach is punctured with a sword. There is a scene in which a man is emasculated, and his genitals thrown to dogs, who eagerly eat them on the screen. There are scenes of decapitation, evisceration, rape, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia.
[snip]
“This movie,” said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, “is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.”

Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bee Jays
[Bee Jays – click to embiggen]

Eric Alterman notes that the corporate media hasn’t changed much since 1999. Even then, facts were less important than sensationalism.

Back in 1999, I noticed what I thought was an epidemic of stupid reporting about teenage blowjobs. Much to the chagrin of my editors at The Nation, I wrote a column called “Blowjobs and Snow Jobs,” in which I argued that some of the worst reporting you’d find anywhere could be found on this topic, much of it in The Washington Post (for reasons about which I declined, and continue to decline, to speculate). I had no position of the topic, save the desire to point out that per usual, many of the people in the MSM and all of the pundits spouting, ahem, off on it, had no idea whatever they were talking about. Read the column and enjoy the hysteria now that the data are in. According to a study written up in Newsweek of 15-to-19-year-olds by the Guttmacher Institute, “teen sexual behavior in general hasn’t changed much since 1991. Just a little more than half the teens studied had engaged in oral sex, only 5 percent more than had engaged in vaginal sex. Most teens who had had oral sex had also had intercourse, and only one in four teen virgins had had oral sex — not exactly the makings of a teen oral sex epidemic.” … According to the study’s author, Laura Lindberg, ‘There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners.’ ” And remember this: ” According to a study published in the 2005 Journal of Adolescent Health, teens who had taken abstinence pledges were six times as likely to have engaged in oral sex as teen virgins who hadn’t taken the pledge.”

Of course, the moral of my story is only partially about blowjobs. Reporting this crappy is, alas, the norm, not the exception. It’s just as evident when the topic is Bush, McCain or Obama, when one takes the trouble to look carefully.

[From Media Matters – Blowjobs and Snow Jobs revisited: Teenage (journalistic) wasteland ]

I’d posit that matters have only gotten worse since 1999. Though maybe not much. From the original article:


The Washington Post has twice succumbed to fellatio fever in recent months. One of its best columnists noted that Gore adviser Naomi Wolf “brags in her book


Promiscuities

[that] she was rather adroit” in the oral arts as a teenager. This is slander–Wolf “brags” about no such thing. She does say that as a young teenager she listened to her girlfriends’ older sisters brag about their abilities, but she makes no claims for her own prowess. When I contacted the columnist in question, he admitted that he had never seen the book and was quoting someone who made this claim on Imus, who in turn had not read the book but had seen it “in a wire story.” When the subject is blowjobs (or Naomi Wolf), that’s good enough.

(Washington Post article behind pay wall, but abstract is here, I think.)

Sex Life of the Giant Squid

Seth Anderson1 Comment

A recently caught giant squid in Australia [click to embiggen, if you dare!]

As a sort of addendum to a previous post, the odd sex life of a giant squid is titillating scientists.

Group sex
He says the reproductive habits of giant squids are particularly interesting and will be the focus of much study.

“[We will look at] whether it has been mated or not. Whether it is a male or female.

“Giants have very strange sexual behaviour where the male has a metre-long muscular penis that he uses a bit like a nail gun and shoots cords of sperm under the skin of the female’s arms and she carries the sperm around with her until she is ready to lay her big jelly mass of a million eggs.

“[We want to find out[ whether they gather somewhere together to mass-breed.

“If we get some sperm out of the arms of this animal then we can do paternity studies and see if was multiple males that are mating with her or single males.

[From Scientists probe giant squid sex secrets – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)]

Everyone gets excited about different things, glad someone can drool over discovering a massive muscular penis.

Anti-Janet Jackson

swanksalot0 comment

Janet Jackson at least had a nipple guard on when she flashed the prudes of America.

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
“I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

[From Flier angry after TSA makes her remove nipple ring – USATODAY.com]

Personally, I try to avoid Lubbock as often as possible. Lubbock or Leave It, as it were.

Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring.

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

“After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove,” Allred said in the letter.

Allred said she might consider legal action if the TSA does not apologize. Hamlin was publicly humiliated and has “undergone an enormous amount of physical pain to have the nipple rings reinserted” because of scar tissue, Allred said.

Hamlin said her piercings have never set off an airport metal detector.

“The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary,” Allred wrote. “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.”

Well, except for Janet Jackson’s nipple.

Bootylicious

Seth Anderson0 comment

Some ass news from the UK

African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus
“African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus” (Rachel Holmes)

The more things change….

Flesh made fantasy
Rachel Holmes on the Hottentot Venus – a South African showgirl with an irresistible ass.

The body of Saartjie Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, has had greater influence on the iconography of the female body in European art and visual culture than any other African woman of the colonial era. Saartjie, a South African showgirl in the early 19th century, was a small, beautiful woman, with an irresistible bottom. Of a build unremarkable in an African context, to some western European eyes she was extraordinary. Today, she is celebrated as bootylicious.

…
Billed as the Hottentot Venus, Saartjie first performed in Piccadilly on September 24 1810. Dressed in a figure-hugging body stocking, beadwork, feathers and face-paint, she danced, sang and played African and European folk songs on her ramkie, forerunner to the tin-can guitar. Slung over her costume was a voluminous fur cloak (kaross). Enveloping her from neck to feet, it was an African version of the corn-gold tresses of Botticelli’s Venus – and every inch of its luxuriant, curled hair was equally suggestive.

To London audiences, she was a fantasy made flesh, uniting the imaginary force of two powerful myths: Hottentot and Venus. The latter invoked a cultural tradition of lust and love; the former signified all that was strange, disturbing and – possibly – sexually deviant. Almost overnight, London was overtaken by Saartjie mania. Within a week, she went from being an anonymous immigrant to one of the city’s most talked-about celebrities. Her image became ubiquitous: it was reproduced on bright posters and penny prints, and she became the favoured subject of caricaturists and cartoonists.

and here is a factoid not discussed much in history books of Georgian England:

Bottoms were big in late-Georgian England. From low to high culture, Britain was a nation obsessed by buttocks, bums, arses, posteriors, rumps – and with every metaphor, joke or pun that could be squeezed from this fundamental distraction. Georgian England both celebrated and deplored excess, grossness, bawdiness and the uncontainable. In Rowlandson’s cartoon, amply proportioned white Englishwomen are depicted trying to plump up their already big bottoms in imitation of Saartjie, who loftily presides over them all.

Saartjie’s instant celebrity owed much to a coincidence between the Georgian fascination with bottoms, the size of the derrière of Lord Grenville, and the British tradition of visual satire. The aristocratic Grenville family were famed for their huge bums. The nation was rife with speculation that Grenville would become prime minister and his Whig coalition – known as the broad-bottoms or the bottomites – take over parliament. An engraving by William Heath depicts Grenville dressed as the Hottentot Venus. In another, by George Cruikshank from 1816, Saartjie’s profile is compared with that of the Prince Regent.

–
I wonder if Ms. Baartman makes an appearance in Pynchon’s Gravities Rainbow?