Photos of Exotic Dancers from the 1890s

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12 Curious Vintage Sex Books

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Criteria for a Good Sex Scene

The Huffington Post tells you how to write one.

Writing About Sex

Writing about sex can be uniquely powerful — and perilous. A group of novelists, memoirists and poets tell the New York Times about working blue: what novels first inspired them, what nouns they strive to avoid and who they think writes sex best.

From the piece...

RACHEL KUSHNER: I don’t think of sex as any more difficult to write about than any other human behavior. Writers fail or soar at anything. Everyone thinks about sex, engages in it. It’s the secret we all share. Just acknowledging its constant presence in people’s thoughts is a good direction for a novelist. Of the books I like, it could be argued that sex is infused into every cadence, even if never explicitly. And “not explicit” doesn’t mean that the prudish kiss leads to the prissy dissolve, but that characters are motored by desire.

The Portraits of Erotica Authors

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The Kama Sutra - There's an App for That

State-of-the-art technology has transformed illustrations from the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit sex manual into pop-up holograms.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Each image can be seen from all angles, meaning users are offered a complete view of the guide's sexual diagrams.

The free app comes with a new version of the text, which is based on ancient Indian Hindu philosophies and is believed to have been written about 2,000 years ago.

The Kama Xcitra promises to help couples master positions from the book and ensure they are brought "closer to the action than ever before".

Kate Moss Reads "50 Shades of Grey"

The 10 Sexiest Books of All Time

The list, care of Flavorwire.

The Awkward Art of Writing about Sex

Sam Lipsyte discusses it for the New Republic.

From the story...

Ever since the "earth moved" in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and probably long before, people have enjoyed a good snigger at bad sex scenes in books. We love to gloat over any writer's failure to properly render the emotions and mechanics of Eros. There are many ways to botch it, of course, and more and more prizes for doing so. There are online forums about how to better imagine what, with a certain numerical austerity, used to be called the beast with two backs. There are also unanimous opinions about what diction and manner to avoid. (Words like "shaft" or "gazongas" are obvious no-no's, but so are aching leaps toward lyricism, unless you manage the rare graceful landing.)

We delight in the comedy of bad sex writing, probably because it corresponds to the comedy of our bodies, which are, minus the most gorgeous 1 percent, not nearly as delectable and confident as we might fantasize. That's why this sentence, from an old pornographic novel called Her Willing Young Boys, is sublime: "Even so, Angelina continued to thrust herself upon him, reaching climax after climax, her come glistening in the rays of late afternoon sun that poured through the window." It is the humorless reach toward poetry (if only the possibly pseudonymous author, Betty John, had mentioned "coins" of sunlight, or better, "shafts") and the subsequent fall to the reefs of mediocrity that get us chuckling. And we can all find examples of "serious" writers doing not much better.

18 Sex Books with Weird Covers

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Library Love

Who is the sexy librarian and where did she come from, anyway?

From a piece on Lit Reactor...

Librarians have been around as long as there have been libraries, but women entered the workforce en masse in the late 1800’s. Perhaps it was the much smaller salary we received compared to our male librarian counterparts (or just some bad fashion sense), but the stereotype of the middle-aged, frumpy, spinster librarian with her hair in a bun has been with us ever since. Christine Lutz’s Master's Thesis on librarian stereotypes traces how librarians and their (mostly male) administrators have dealt with this image problem for the last one hundred years. The typical “fix” was to hire young, attractive women and promote them in library literature and marketing. 

At this point, I believe, the dichotomy emerges. Let’s consider what the librarian and library represent. Librarians are role models for scholarship and behavior. In public libraries, they are stand-ins for teachers and enforce a certain level of quiet and restraint with young patrons. In academic libraries, they are sometimes seen as the embodiment of knowledge.  A fascinating article by Gary and Marie Radford equates libraries with prisons and librarians with guards. They see the library as an environment of fear, in which surveillance and control are a constant, and the librarian is in a position to deny and humiliate the patron. 

I think the enduring power of the librarian stereotype and her role in the collective sexual imagination draws from this place in the psyche. We discard the de-sexualizing elements of the stereotype (frumpiness, old age) and retain elements of authority (conservative work “uniform”, glasses). The result is a sexualized power image that clearly appeals to both men and women.

50 Shades of Grey...The Workout

Teacher Draws Fire for Writing Erotic Novel

50 Shades of Grey...

...the board game.

The Ten Best Sex Guides

The list, care of the Guardian.

First Time Sex Writing

Jesse Bering discusses it on the Outlet.

From the post...

I was a sophomore in high school the first time I ever wrote about sex. There was a girl—let’s call her Wanda—who was serving at the time as something of a lily-white beard to my ninety-pound homosexual carcass, a clumsy, rather malodorous suit of meat tailor-made for the manufacture of two speciality adolescent male products: sebum and semen. The first, I know now looking back, oozed out of my pores to lubricate the magnificent apish pelage that once covered my ancestors’ bodies, but which now pools impotently into pustules on the glistening faces of today’s teenagers. And semen, of course, has its obvious reproductive function that even at my most naive I understood perfectly well. But believe it or not, scientists are only now beginning to fully understand that our testicular output is about more than just baby-making. In fact, only about five percent of a seminal emission consists of spermatozoa; the rest is an incredibly rich, chemical-filled, psychopharmacological concoction that many scientists believe can tweak and manipulate the bodies, minds, and behaviors of those inseminated. These astonishing facts, and other scientific tidbits, I explore in some detail in my new book Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?


Back to lily-white Wanda. The gossip, at least, was that she was not as lily-white as she appeared, and I liked her as much for her sordid reputation as anything else.

And in Today's Book Burning News

Let's all torch 50 Shades of Gray, yes? It's vile.

From a piece in the New York Daily News...


A British charity is proposing a mass burning of copies of E.L. James' "50 Shades of Grey," the sexy trilogy that is easily the most popular book of the season, charges that it is pure trash aside.

The burning is being organized by Clare Phillipson, who heads Wearside Women in Need, an organization that battles domestic abuse. It is based in Washington, England. The bonfire is scheduled for Nov. 5, and Phillipson appears to be collecting volumes for the occasion. However, it is unclear if she needs a permit from municipal authorities to hold the burning.

Her main objection appears to be that the power dynamic between Ana Steele and Christian Grey borders on the abusive. One imagines the books' delving into BDSM does not thrill her, either.

The Top 100 Strangest, Suggestive and Steamy Vintage Comic Book Panels of All-Time

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Shades of Parody of Shades of Gray

Soon there will be 50 parodies and knock-offs of 50 Shades of Grey. Check out some of them, here.

10 Hottest Sex Scenes in Literature

The list, care of the Houston Press.