A feature inside the last 2011 issue of Intervìu by writer Alberto Gayo called to mind comments received about my compilations Reveries and Cool Brass. The latter especially.
Maybe what Reveries sparked finally ignited in Cool Brass.
The theme behind Gayo’s article: women taking responsive roles in erotica. A focus: Femme Fatale, a photo compendium by Finn Reka Nyari. Apparently Ms. Nyari’s lens exposed more than female forms offered up as living mannequins awaiting domination or mere male regard.
You know. The usual.
No need to reduce Nyari’s work into a “chicks in charge” trope nor express amazement that her female subjects are participatory rather than just posed to submit. Yet in male-centric societies (oh, like ours) isn’t it uncommon to see women portrayed and accepted at an equal level of desire and fantasy as men? That is, not palsied by sexual hysteria or made insanely ravenous by welling urges or finding utmost delight in simply being vessels needing filling until bursting.
Don’t those descriptions represent the photo spreads in every Hustler ever printed? Blah. Hustler bores me. Can’t even fake laughing at the cartoons.
Seems Nyari’s women have taken matters in hand. They’re not devoured by male prerogative. At least not until their own demands are sated. Even then not so much. Which from what I’ve heard is some kind of sexual heresy.
This is how I got in Dutch with several male correspondents. Having read the seven stories comprising Reveries and Cool Brass, each remarked the notable females, Paz Duarte and Marianne Messing, failed filling his ideal. At least the ingrained image during sequences where women swap carnal favors with men.
Strangely enough while the women entwined in Twisty‘s (Cool Brass) Sapphic interlude maintained the problematic view of being led by their own promiscuity, none of the detractors complained. Wonder why?
That Paz and Marianne as well as Honor van Ruysselberghe, who romps in Reveries‘ One Above and One Below, and both sex workers in Marianne, A Friend From Germany, a Cool Brass episode, just didn’t lay there and spin like horizontal dervishes annoyed my diligent proctors. To them, Paz, Marianne, Honor and the others were doing fine until they sought, found and took their own gratification. As if pleasure is solely reserved for males.
Isn’t the whole act supposed to be an exchange? A matter to be teased upon, thereby raising expectations, lifting results and stretching satisfaction.
That’s just a device to prolong the argument. These stories deliver but in an unconventional manner.
Flipped, though, the crazy trails and turnoffs which irritated guys women readers got. In more ways than one, to be sure.
Plausible females, instead of the kind who had been reduced (or pumped up) into pneumatic sex kittens, reaped decent shares of distaff approval.
From what I’ve gathered, numerous women paging through Reveries and Cool Brass appreciate that Paz and Marianne just aren’t there only to perform as male playthings. Or most insultingly, simply exist to be real live blowup dolls. Women like this duo exact equal or greater measures of fun as due, not gifts.
Perhaps resonating hardest in these stories isn’t the absence of shame through which women pursue fulfillment and reach exhaustion, but in their ultimate sense of this being conventional behavior.
Nothing compelled. Slight degradation. No humiliation. Few second thoughts? Sure. Heavy regrets? No way. Instead maybe a little end-phase arrogance. The kind every real man claims his own. Or should.
Reveries and Cool Brass. Like photographer Reka Nyari, neither promotes the same old, same old.
http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Brass-ebook/dp/B0067DD5K6/