Today is a big day for our favorite teen TV stars of the ’90s. First, Steve Urkel got a job hosting a weird game show on the SyFy Network. And now, Blossom star Mayim Bialik — who we recently celebrated as a child actor who grew up to be awesome — is blogging about sex. In a post for a Jewish parenting site called Kveller, Bialik (who identifies as a Conservadox Jew) explains and extols the Torah’s insights on sex. After pointing out that the holy book provides a surprisingly accurate guide to ovulation and enumerating the virtues of the mikveh (a ritual bath), she makes a case for Judaism as the sexiest of all religions:
Judaism loves love. We love sex. We are told it is a mitzvah to make love and to especially make love on Shabbat, when God’s presence is close. A woman’s right to sexual satisfaction is detailed in her ketubah, her marriage contract, independent of pregnancy.
Read the rest of Bialik’s thoughtful post here.
The Hairpin has posted three excerpts from the new, seventh issue of the fantastic arts magazine Dossier, and they’re pretty juicy. Asked to contribute the story of their first sexual experience, over 50 cultural notables responded — including Richard Kern, agnès b., and Miranda July, who describes her premiere lay as “so poor that he did not even have a bed.” See her entire, typewritten letter after the jump, and read the others here.
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Susie Bright has had a slew of jobs during her life, but the title “sexpert” seems to fit her best. The co-founder of On Our Backs, the first erotica magazine run by women, has an abundance of life experience to share in her new memoir, Big Sex Little Death. New York readers have the opportunity to see Doug Henwood interview Bright at The Strand this Thursday at 7pm, so head over and razz her about the book. In the meantime, click through for Bright’s thoughts on everything from regulating sex workers to the Egyptian protests.
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Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now is an intense and effective psychological thriller, acclaimed at the time of its release and only more respected with with each passing year. It has also been the topic of a long-standing controversy: a key sex sequence between stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie was rumored to be, well, not quite simulated.
At long last, we’ve got a credible source confirming the story: Peter Bart, the Variety editor and film commentator, was a Paramount executive during the film’s production, and claims in his new book, Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex), that he visited the set on the day that the scene in question was shot. While watching, he writes, “it was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were fucking on camera.” Sutherland has denied the writer’s claim, but if Bart is telling the truth, then Don’t Look Now would presumably mark the first occasion of unsimulated sexual intercourse in a mainstream motion picture. With that belated honor bestowed, let’s take a NSFW look at some of the other boundary-breaking sex scenes of cinema.
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On a recent episode of his Savage Love podcast, Dan Savage indulged in what has become a Yuletide tradition: railing against Christmas-themed erotica. His implicit objection to Santa-hatted self-pics and the like is simple enough to understand; he thinks Christmas just isn’t sexy. He’s not alone, and most of these Sex Scrooges are right — there’s nothing inherently libidinous about a holiday centered on tree ornamentation, elf labor, and Jesus. But a handful of films have dared to forge an alliance between Christmastime and Sexytime.
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A post-apocalyptic, paranoid, Baroque fantasy, Zenith is set in a future in which geneticists have eradicated unhappiness, giving rise to a black market in pain-inducing drugs — and one man’s self-destructive quest to break through.
A visually stunning art-house Blade Runner for a generation in thrall to sex, violence, conspiracy, and urban tribalism, the film fits its “retro-futuristic steampunk thriller” tag-line perfectly. Its many plot twists innovatively even cross over into social media, drawing viewers into the mystery at its heart with engagement far beyond the film itself.
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Four years after it was banned from US release for its explicit content, Destricted brings together creative — and graphic — musings on sex and porn by artists including Marilyn Minter, Matthew Barney, and Richard Prince.
Among the DVD’s eight film shorts are Barney’s “Hoist,” a decidedly erotic take on man vs. machine; Minter’s “Green Pink Caviar,” featuring a woman kissing, sucking, and licking in extreme close-up; Prince’s “House Call,” a revision of a voyeuristic 1970s porno; and Larry Clark’s “Impaled,” for which he interviewed Gen Y-ers on their experiences with porn, then presented the reality of their fantasies. Together, the films are sexy, disturbing, and beautiful, all at once.
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Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in the New York Times entitled “The Naked and the Conflicted” calls out contemporary authors for being prude snugglers, and praises mid-century males for being pervy sex fiends. The article, complete with handy graphs, decries the current generation of literary greats as too obsessed with irony and ambivalence to let its characters (or themselves, she hints somewhat heavily) enjoy sex or their own virility. Citing David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Chabon, among others, she writes:
The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé.
Now wait just one minute.
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Today at Flavorpill, it seemed like everywhere we turned there was more dreary weather and book bloggers posting items about love, sex, and gender. (PS: A quick thank you to Carolyn Kellog for posting about our Granta contest pegged to Eleanor Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, which clearly falls under the sex category.) We know none of you want to discuss the weather, so let’s cut the foreplay and get down to it. Read More »
Rachel Kramer Bussel hosts a monthly reading series at Happy Ending Lounge called In the Flesh that features the best erotic writers sharing sexified stories. Each month has a different theme — Virginity, GLBT, and Comedy Sex, to name a few — that readers use as a jumping off point for titillating the audience with steamy, lust-filled tales. For hours-long aural sex and free cupcakes from Baked by Melissa, In the Flesh provides a treat to all who (ahem) come. Read More »
