<\/p>\n
Hemo the Magnificent<\/b><\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about blood lately.\u00a0 Wait!\u00a0 Don\u2019t turn the page!\u00a0 Not morbidly, and not violently.\u00a0 Something else.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about how blood — like sex, a basic, miraculous life force — has been turned around in our consciousness, so that instead of associating blood with life most of us associate it instead with death, violence, emergency, fear, danger, trauma, and disease.\u00a0 Like sex.<\/p>\n
We make all these negative blood associations so automatically that we don\u2019t even think it\u2019s strange that we do so.\u00a0 And yet blood most basically represents life, not death.\u00a0 Ask any cell in your body.<\/p>\n
These days I find myself wanting to push myself past a reflexive panic response to blood.\u00a0 When I\u2019m able to do that, I find myself intrigued with blood in a way that I can only call sensual and erotic.<\/p>\n
Have you ever taken a moment to appreciate blood in an erotic way?\u00a0 Thicker than water, you know.\u00a0 Rich, brilliant, beautifully red, passionate — life itself.\u00a0 Think about it.\u00a0 Is it necessary to drown in blood negativity?\u00a0 Beyond all the Hollywood violence and the newspaper gore there\u2019s what an early PBS science special appropriately dubbed Hemo the Magnificent.<\/p>\n
The other day I cut my finger with a knife — by mistake, not too seriously.\u00a0 I jumped of course, and hurt and got afraid, but after I got over the initial shock and surprise I took a minute to just notice the simple fact of the blood, beading up through the tear in my skin.\u00a0 I let it be beautiful, wonderful — delighted in it, feeling extremely sane and also somehow quite beyond the pale, both at the same time.\u00a0 Of course I took it into my mouth.<\/p>\n
In Erotic by Nature<\/em>, Donna Ippolito writes about her conflicted feelings about being sexual while she\u2019s having her period, that place where blood and sex so frequently intersect:<\/p>\n “Fearful, wanting to hide my blood, I lie tight.\u00a0 Your tongue to me, licking at my cunt, everywhere tasting.\u00a0 Fearful, I lie tight, whispering stop, won\u2019t you stop.\u00a0 I lie tight, wanting to close my legs, hide the shame, the feeling I am an odor and a stain.\u00a0 I lie tight, fight the blood, squeeze shut my pleasure, hating the blood.\u00a0 I try to push your head away.”<\/p>\n What woman does not know this association of blood with shame, the woman\u2019s curse, the sign of being unclean?\u00a0 And yet her lover, blissfully unperturbed, happily buries his face in her wet, red cunt and comes up smiling:<\/p>\n “It lifts to look at me.\u00a0 All smudged, it lifts.\u00a0 My blood is all over your face, I say, touching it….\u00a0 You wear my stain exultantly.\u00a0 I could bloody your pale hair with my cunt, the blood covering everything like some kind of joy dust.”<\/p>\n Seeing his delight, she moves beyond her own repulsion:<\/p>\n “I open my legs, offering you not my cunt but my blood.\u00a0 And you take all of me with pleasure….\u00a0 Blood soaks the sheets and I don\u2019t care.\u00a0 It\u2019s only blood<\/em>….\u00a0 Eat blood, know blood, see blood, taste blood.\u00a0 I lie in it, lie against it on you, feel it damp….\u00a0 You are so smooth this way, slippery and deep….\u00a0 I am spilling my cunt, spotting small brilliant flowers.\u00a0 I am ripe, dripping, and my blood sings, the song slapping between us.”<\/p>\n I remember a time with my partner Helen when, instead of simply tolerating her menstrual blood, we both got to a place of completely reveling in it.\u00a0 It was one of those breakthrough, liberatory moments.\u00a0 Before long we had blood all over the sheets, all over both our bodies.\u00a0 We watched wide-eyed as my bright red cock moved in and out of her.\u00a0 We made bloody handprints on each others\u2019 chests, fingerpainted red designs on each others\u2019 limbs.\u00a0 By the time we came up for air, the room looked like it had been the site of a massacre, and we were hysterical with the vividness of it, and with knowing how far we had traveled from the mindset of someone, say, who might walk into our scene from the outside.<\/p>\n I think there really is<\/em> something fundamentally erotic about blood.\u00a0 Not about violence (let me be very clear), but about blood itself.\u00a0 Why do I feel that saying this puts me more out on the edge than anything I have ever written in this column?<\/p>\n Pat Califia understands, I think.\u00a0 In her story, “Vampire” (from her book, Macho Sluts<\/em>), she writes of a woman who seduces a reluctant vampire under a full moon in a dark alley.\u00a0 When the tension between the two women has gotten all but unbearable, the seductress makes<\/p>\n “two slashes at the place where her breasts came together, a little \u2018v\u2019 that fit into her cleavage.\u00a0 The blood immediately started to rill, and she cupped her hands under her breasts to help her corset push them close enough together to gather it and keep it in a pool.\u00a0 She knew that she was as beautiful then as she ever would be — her head tossed back, her mass of curly, blonde hair being rearranged by a breeze, her white throat, shoulders and breasts exposed, and the red color of the thread of blood just barely distinguishable from the ebony of her dress in the darkness.”<\/p>\n Veronica Vera talks about how she was eroticized during her Catholic childhood by all the vivid images of Christ bleeding on the cross.\u00a0 Raelyn Gallina makes prints of the cuttings she does on people\u2019s bodies, frames them, and exhibits them as blood art.\u00a0 Blood\/life\/eros — all blended together in a thick, red soup.<\/p>\n In the fear-ridden 90s we have learned to associate sex and blood with AIDS, and blessed touch with molestation.\u00a0 One after another, the most fundamental manifestations of life are being culturally recast as symbols of danger and death.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it time to take them all back — blood not least of all — before we lose the basic ability to distinguish life from death?\u00a0 Who knows, maybe we\u2019ll even see the day when fathers stop passing out in horror when they witness the bloody miracle of their children being born.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n An Ode to Spandex<\/b><\/p>\n I have to take this opportunity to wax poetic about an exciting new line of spandex playgear that photographer Mark I. Chester is making, playclothes that I want to personally recommend as delightful enhancements to all sorts of sex play.<\/p>\n Mark has for some time been distributing form-fitting spandex bondage bags — tight, black, stretchable mummy sacks that you can stuff a partner into, that bind a person very nicely to him\/herself from head to toe.\u00a0 The thick, heavy-gauge spandex presses your legs tightly together, presses your arms firmly to your sides, making sure that every inch of your skin is continuously sensitized and stimulated.\u00a0 Just being in the bag is a noteworthy sensory experience, even if no one ever so much as touches you.<\/p>\n To get into the bag, you bunch it all up and start at the feet — like putting on nylons except that it\u2019s your whole body that gets swallowed up as the material stretches taut.\u00a0 You pull the smooth spandex up over your legs and hips (or your partner\u2019s legs and hips), letting the compression work its way up your body.\u00a0 With your hands at your sides, the bag gets stretched up around your torso and shoulders, then over your head (the claustrophobic may skip this part), completely enveloping you in close darkness, the material clinging tightly to your nose and mouth, your forehead and chin.\u00a0 When the drawstring at the top is pulled tight and tied shut, the mummification is complete.<\/p>\n There is one opening in the bag, at the crotch — a little ring with its own drawstring, to tie around your cock and balls, if you\u2019re a cock and balls sort of person — loose or tight, whichever you prefer.\u00a0 Very nice, for bagger and baggee alike.<\/p>\n Visually, the bondage bags are a total wonder, turning any person — male or female, tall or short, thick or thin — into a magnificent example of sculptural modern art, an exercise in pure form.\u00a0 But the main thing is how the bag feels.\u00a0 There\u2019s the wonderful feeling of compression and confinement.\u00a0 There\u2019s the delicious cool feeling of the spandex against your skin, and the contrasting musky warmth and smell of your own sweat.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the magnification of sensation that the spandex brings, a heightened sensitivity all over your body.\u00a0 Once you\u2019re in the bag, every finger touch, every palm stroke, every full body press, every scratch, every pinch, every slap, becomes a multiplication of itself — many times more delicious and more intense than ordinary contact.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the helplessness, of course.\u00a0 When you\u2019re in the bag, you\u2019d better be with a partner who wants to take good care of you, treat you nicely, and keep you from hurting yourself.\u00a0 If you lose your balance, you\u2019ll topple over, no two ways about it.\u00a0 Make sure your partner is good at paying attention to details like balance and gravity, no matter how turned on they get looking at you and playing with you.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the other side of the coin, of course — the fun of being the person who gets to take charge of the person in the bag.\u00a0 You have them in front of you, at your disposal, beautiful and vulnerable, looking and feeling deliciously smooth, sleek, and sensual.\u00a0 Nipples are incredible through taut spandex, not to mention lips.\u00a0 Try pressing a finger between someone\u2019s lips through the stretch of the material, or a tongue.\u00a0 Try kissing them lightly or tracing a finger delicately over their lips until they twitch.\u00a0 Spandexed asses, large or small, are incredible to fondle, spank, or paddle.\u00a0 And of course there\u2019s the trussed cock and balls so nicely tied and delineated, or the cunt to be probed by pushing between resisting thighs that simply cannot open to let you in, no matter how much they might like to.<\/p>\n Maybe you get the idea.\u00a0 I have been in bondage bags any number of times, and bagged others many times too.\u00a0 Even put two people in a bag together one time.\u00a0 Helen and another woman standing pressed together — face to face, mouth to tit, hand to cunt — getting more and more turned on by the minute while I and the other woman\u2019s partner steadied the two of them, kept them from toppling over, the two of us a mere fabric membrane from the smell and sound of two women getting hotter and hotter, unable to do anything more than put our hands on both their beautifully sculpted asses, trying to draw their sexual energy in through our palms while a dozen people watched with rapt attention.\u00a0 “Bet you two wish you were in here,” the women teased as we admired the outlines of their forms sliding over each other.\u00a0 Indeed we did, though the tension of being so near and yet so far from the wet sweat sex of them as they dipped and moaned and eventually came was itself swoon material for weeks afterwards.<\/p>\n I\u2019m getting carried away, as I often do when I start talking about the bags.\u00a0 The news is that there is now a whole line of this sex enhancement gear, including hoods, bondage bags with internal confinement for the arms, two-legged open-crotch bags, double-zippered sleepsacks, and bodyform catsuits that leave the arms and legs free to move while completely encasing them in heavenly spandexitude.<\/p>\n All the variations are put together with the care that Mark gives to everything he does.\u00a0 “I use an expensive, thick, luxurious, four-way spandex that stretches tremendously in all directions,” he explains.\u00a0 “I use a special thread and stitch to make this the longest lasting spandex gear you can buy.”<\/p>\n Last month, Mark threw a Friday the 13th Fetish Party to inaugurate his new venture, a typically wonderful Folsom Street Gallery affair, complete with guides to help the curious try the gear, a model striking seductive poses in a catsuit, and Spectator\u2019s Carol Queen and her partner Robert demonstrating how creatively sexual two people can be inside the confines of the loose-fitting bondage sack.\u00a0 Watching the two of them cavort inside the mystery of the sack was like something out of an animation festival, a new form of modern dance, the ultimate in minimal privacy combined with blatant exhibitionism.\u00a0 Take a bondage sack with you to your next social party.\u00a0 If you and your partner get the urge to be sexual, you can simply climb inside and do what you will, leaving the external world behind in see-no-evil bliss.<\/p>\n Curious?\u00a0 You can get more information by writing Mark I. Chester, P.O. Box 422501, San Francisco, CA 94142, or by calling (415) 621-6294.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Daughter of On Our Backs?<\/b><\/p>\n San Francisco has spawned yet another sex magazine, this time a slick new “magazine of lesbian enjoyment” called Girlfriends<\/em>.\u00a0 The first issue of the 48-page bi-monthly journal hits the streets nationally June 20th, with an ambitious first printing of 10,000 copies.<\/p>\n According to its “mission statement,” Girlfriends<\/em> is “dedicated to exploring and promotion all aspects of lesbian enjoyment,” including lesbian culture, politics and sexuality, “in a beautifully designed color, glossy format.”\u00a0 The magazine, we are told, “will feature an editorial character that is highly personal, sex positive, and unafraid of controversy; a design aesthetic that is fun, accessible and contemporary; and high quality artwork by recognized photographers who have captured the cultural diversity of queer women.”<\/p>\n The magazine was started by several women previously on the staff of On Our Backs<\/em>, the ten-year-old, pioneering journal of unapologetic lesbian sexual entertainment, who cite “personal and professional differences” with On Our Backs<\/em> as their reason for wanting to start a magazine of their own.<\/p>\n Heather Findlay, former editor of On Our Backs<\/em>, is editor of the new mag, Diane Anderson is Associate Editor, Zannah Noe is Photography Editor, and Bonnie Simon is Art Director.<\/p>\n When I spoke with Diane Anderson, she made a point of acknowledging that On Our Backs<\/em> is “an enormously important magazine that has played a major cultural role for lesbians.”\u00a0 Obviously she feels that there is room and need for a new magazine as well.<\/p>\n Anderson found it hard to be specific about how Girlfriends<\/em> will be different from On Our Backs<\/em>.\u00a0 She did say that the photo layouts in Girlfriends<\/em> will have a different aesthetic from those in On Our Backs<\/em>, what she described as “simpler, more like traditional pin-ups, but with a lesbian aesthetic.”\u00a0 What is a lesbian aesthetic? I asked.\u00a0 Again she had trouble finding words, but said that, for example, not all of the models “will conform to traditional cultural notions of attractive women.”<\/p>\n Each issue of Girlfriends<\/em>, Anderson said, will feature three pictorials:\u00a0 a four-color centerfold, a black-and-white portfolio featuring the work of one erotic photographer, and a fashion-oriented spread.\u00a0 She said that Girlfriends<\/em> intends put serious money into its photo shoots, paying models and stylists as well as photographers.<\/p>\n Regular features in Girlfriends<\/em> will include columns on queer parenting and lesbian sports, a “Girlfringe” column on the lesbian leather and s\/m scene by Spectator<\/em> writer Trish Thomas, and a “Girl Talk” advice column by regular Spectator contributor Pat Califia.\u00a0 The first issue also features Village Voice<\/em> columnist Donna Minkowitz and photography by Phyllis Christopher and Zannah Noe.<\/p>\n According to Anderson, Girlfriends<\/em> has received advance orders from outlets in 27 states.\u00a0 She expects its first run of 10,000 copies to sell out quickly.\u00a0 Single issues go for $4.95; subscriptions are $24\/year.\u00a0 For more information, call (415) 995-2776, or write to Girlfriends at P.O. Box 713, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n June 24, 1994<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1994 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Hemo the Magnificent<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about blood lately. Wait! Don\u2019t turn the page! Not morbidly, and not violently. Something else.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking about how blood — like sex, a basic, miraculous life force — has been turned around in our consciousness, so that instead of associating blood with life most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}