Dear Sasha: I have a real thing for 1950s pin-up-style film and photography, mainly the stuff featuring bondage and incarceration scenarios. One thing I find very curious is this: If I’m to believe that great cultural barometer, television, the ’50s were awfully puritanical. So how the hell did they get away with this sort of thing, and how did this stuff come to be so popular? » Mmm… Bettie
Dear Mmm…,
Across cultures, people seem to have always enjoyed sexual imagery with aggressive plots, but how that interest relates specifically to the kind you like is connected in great part to a man named Anthony Comstock. Comstock was a store clerk in New York who, somehow, after some thorough public indignation (read: unsettling horniness over something he deemed inappropriate), managed to find himself the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which was chartered in 1873.
As the book NYC Sex: How New York Transformed Sex in America says, the society “would come to define obscenity in purposefully broad terms, so that it included erotic images, literature and performance, information about methods of birth control and anything that might be considered blasphemous.” Fast-forward around 75 years to the ’50s, and pornographers and others profiting from the sex industry continued to work under laws created by Comstock and his peeps. (Incidentally, Comstock began losing a bit of credibility when he tried to have a doctor arrested for some medical texts depicting the human form, but his legacy lives on.)
As I’ve said before, oppression is the mother of invention, and Irving Klaw, who photographed Bettie Page frequently, was very careful to follow guidelines about nudity to avoid scandal and prosecution. What he and many of his colleagues realized, as NYC Sex also points out, was that “violence escaped censorship more readily than sex.” This is not to say that some of these things didn’t fall under scrutiny and people were fined and jailed, but there you have it, Mmm…, the overall state of America, in a nutsack. Violence: yes, sex: no. How little censors truly understand about the complexity of desire.
By the way, this book would probably be of great interest to you both intellectually and erotically, but it looks like it’s only available through the Museum of Sex in New York, as it accompanied their inaugural show. You would probably also lose your fucking mind at the museum itself. Check out some of their exhibitions at http://museumofsex.com/exhibitions/.
Dear Sasha: I am in need of a person to do the work of a female sex surrogate for an adult man. Surrogacy is illegal in Canada and I do not have the budget to travel to a U.S. state where the practice is allowed. » David
Dear David,
It looks like sexual surrogacy (a therapy where the practitioner has physical and sexual contact with the client) is not exactly illegal in Canada, it’s just not openly available. As Vena Blanchard, the head of the International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA) says, “This is because people are unsure about the legality and don’t want to be the test case, not because there’s any statute against it.”
While IPSA has no members in Canada, they do have an outreach program. Basically, you’re looking at intensive therapy referral, where your therapist (and you’ll need one to get a surrogate), sets you up with a surrogate whose travel expenses you pay to come to your city for up to two weeks. “Alternatively,” says Blanchard, “the client may chose travel to another location, such as California, to work with an established therapist and surrogate team in America. California Intensives are the most common and easiest to arrange.” Guess Comstock’s deeds didn’t really stick on the West Coast, eh?
Unfortunately, this is going to be a costly venture no matter how you look at it—simply applying for the program costs $300 (U.S.)— but it’s a reliable investment. Surrogates have amazing success rates with rapid ejaculation, abuse issues that are impeding intimacy, and midlife virgins who are incapacitated by their secret status. As an advocate of surrogacy, Blanchard is extremely articulate around other issues she can’t treat—knowledge that is invaluable to finding appropriate care. www.surrogatetherapy.org.
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