Off topic

Some rather strange comments have appeared beneath Laurie Penny's anti-princess rant in the New Statesman, not all of them clearly related to the subject in question. For example this from "Mr Divine", responding to "Buckskins":

I miss Stuart too .. we had some great moments. He'll look back and realise that the engage he had with me was a pivotal moment in his life. That and his new girlfriend.

The whipping scene was ace, him trying to pull me off my camel, and me whipping him on his tiny willy with my diamond tipped whip. Those were the days. But I miss his Big Issue stories and unique perspective on todays events.

Was I hard? I was hard and I was soft. You were just soft soft to him. I made him angry, and I made him laugh at himself and at those words that made him angry. He said more than once how much he enjoyed his engages with me. Of course he liked you because you were nice to him, but he loved me because I made him laugh and cry.

The site could probably do with some moderation. Just saying... Read the rest of this article

Why privacy isn't just for the rich

Cross-posted from Heresy Corner

The Daily Mail - along with several other respectable news outlets - brings us the story of Faith-Anne Lesbirel, primary schoolmistress by day and "kinky dominatrix" by night, whose unconventional second job has now led to a dressing down from the General Teaching Council. Found guilty of "unacceptable professional misconduct" (is there such a thing as acceptable professional misconduct?) she has received a two-year reprimand. She has, however - as the Mail was forced to report - "escaped being struck off." The panel also displayed a perhaps unexpected - and welcome - degree of enlightenment when it concluded that her essentially private activities did not make her a danger to children.

By most accounts, indeed, she was an excellent and well-loved teacher, working at a school in Milton Keynes. But she was also into things like domination and sploshing, and as "Mistress Saffron" advertised her services online, both on her own website and on a forum for like-minded people called "Informed Consent". It was this advertising, we are led believe, that got her into trouble. The report quotes the tribunal's ruling that "the reputation and public standing of the profession was placed at risk by your choosing to initiate and run such a website and indeed the exposure of this did in the event damage the school and the profession." The clear implication is that the "publicly accessible" nature of both her website and the online forum was responsible for bringing her activities to the notice of local parents, who complained to the school. And that her exposure was therefore her own fault.

That isn't really what happened.

Faith-Anne Lesbirel - who was also known as Faith Hamilton - carried out her BDSM activities for a long time without any of the parents or children finding out. And there was little reason why they should have found out. Informed Consent might be "publicly accessible", in the sense that anyone can view its contents without registering as a member, but it unlikely that many people would come across it without at least having a pre-existing interest in the subject. The same goes for her Mistress Saffron website. This is a niche area of the web, inhabited mainly by mistresses, their clients, and the odd tabloid journalist. Her two identities should have remained quite separate, as long as she observed a certain degree of cicumspection.

Faith may have been a victim of the Max Mosley scandal. Those who are in a position to know believe that she was betrayed by "Woman E" - also known as Mistress Abi, "Michelle" and latterly Mistress Kiera - the dominatrix who secretly recorded the goings-on in that notorious Chelsea basement as part of the News of the World sting operation. You may recall that the relationship between "Abi" and the newspaper went sour after she was unable to provide Neville Thurlbeck with cast-iron proof that Mosley's party had had a "Nazi theme". In an interview with Sky News, she said that she had never claimed that there was a Nazi theme - it was all a product of Thurlbeck's lurid imagination. Whatever the truth, it seems that the Screws pressed her to provide some additional titillating information to justify their payments to her. And so she gave them Mistress Saffron the kinky schoolteacher. Who was supposed to be a friend of hers, as well as a fellow member of the Milton Keynes dungeon sorority.

The story appeared under the headline "Miss gets strict with PVC punters" and was illustrated with pictures taken from her website. The paper predicted, not as is happened inaccurately, that "parents of the kids she teaches would go ballistic. While they’re reading their youngsters Winnie the Pooh at bedtime, their teacher is hard at it as a Miss Whiplash hooker."

The involvement of Woman E has never been officially confirmed, I should say (though the coincidence of time - May 2008 - and place - Milton Keynes - is striking). What is beyond doubt is that it was the exposure of Ms Hamilton/Lesbirel in the News of the World, not her website, that led to her departure from the school - leaving her out of a job and the children, to whom she was devoted, confused and upset. To the News of the World, it was all in a day's work, of course. As Clair Lewis - longstanding friend of this blog - says in a statement released today by the campaigning organisation CAAN, "some media people remain unconcerned about smearing people and the dangers this poses. Shame on them."

With Mosley's lawyers breathing down their neck, ruining the career of an unknown schoolteacher represented a much safer strategy than continuing to pursue that increasingly threadbare scoop. Faith-Anne Lesbirel wasn't going to sue them for invasion of privacy. She was in no position to get a super-injunction from Mr Justice Eady. She certainly didn't stand ready to petition the European Court of Human Rights to demand prior notification of embarrassing revelations. The most someone like her can hope for is a positive ruling from the largely toothless Press Complaints Commission.

Sadly, with celebrity exposés now threatened by the advance of privacy law we may see more stories like hers, with the press attempting to justify their prurient interest in people's private lives because they happen to be teachers, nurses, social workers or police officers. And while professional bodies continue to have widely-drafted - some would say discriminatory - policies against "bringing the profession into dispute", anyone falling foul of a tabloid "outing" may well face much more devastating personal reperpercussions than the fleeting embarrassment of some footballer who has visited a hooker. Read the rest of this article

By viewing this post, you're breaking the law

That's if you're in Britain, that is. In other parts of the world, you may be OK - though probably not. It depends.



This rather worn print, by the early nineteenth century Japanese master Eisen, is currently being offered for sale by Fuji Arts with a starting price of $245. I wouldn't advise you to buy it, though - there might be a problem getting it through customs. Or else the police will knock on your door five minutes after the postman has dropped it through the letterbox.

Eisen is best known for his charming prints of elegant kimono-clad beauties, but in old Japan there was also a lively trade in exquisitely drawn but absolutely filthy pornography, coily known as Shunga ("spring pictures"). Almost all the major artists produced shunga, including the most famous of all, Hokusai, whose Dream of the Fisherman's Wife depicts a woman being groped and orally pleasured by two octopuses.

This one, by contrast, shows a woman trying to juggle the joint attentions of a man and her baby. Sociologically it raises some interesting questions. Were living conditions so cramped in pre-Meiji Edo (now Tokyo) that such scenes were commonplace? Is the woman a prostitute, or is the man her husband? Is the picture intended to be comic, or did Shunga-buyers get off on that sort of thing? (Another picture up for sale on the same site shows a woman receiving cunnilingus from a horse, which is certainly comic. And Hokusai's tentacle porn is just hilarious.) Perhaps there are deeper ideas at play: the baby may be there as a reminder of the possible consequences of the sexual act, or the picture may express male ambivalence about the dual role of woman as mother and lover, or male fear of being usurped by his offspring in the woman's affections. And why does he look so bored?

My purpose here, though, is to draw attention to the probable illegality of the picture under one of New Labour's recent laws. Section 62 of the portmanteau Coroners and Justice Act 2009 (which I discussed here) makes it a criminal offence to be in possession of a pornographic image of a child, however unrealistic, which "is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character - which porn is by definition, of course. Being "in possession" includes looking at something on the internet. The offence also (ss 7) covers depictions of "the performance by a person of an act of intercourse or oral sex with or in the presence of a child." That is certainly what is going on here. It's no defence that the work in question is artistic (as the Eisen might possibly be considered to be). "Pornographic" is defined as "produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal". Art historians agree that that was, indeed, the main purpose of Shunga.

This blog is not hosted in the UK, and I've deleted any versions of the image I may have had briefly on my hard-drive. So I'm safe, I think. But I'm sorry to say you're guilty. Go on, give yourself up. Read the rest of this article

Something Dark

Daryl Champion sent me the following press release about his new magazine, SomethingDark

SomethingDark (SDk), a new cultural webmagazine, has just been published after nearly two years in development. Issue 01 is available online for free in a format that occupies a unique space between the internet and a print publication. SDk takes full advantage of an innovative format to deliver its avant-garde mix of dark glamour and eroticism in photography, art and edgy fiction; of poignant nonfiction and criticism; and of exhibition, film and book reviews – all in the social, political and economic context of today’s disturbed world.

SDk additionally strives to be a valuable resource and, concerned with the world around us, is also a forum for re-assessing what is of value in contemporary society. How is SDk innovative? Unlike most news, magazine- and journal-style websites, which depart from their print-published counterparts in format, look and feel because they were developed with by-now conventional website design in mind, SDk has been developed with the format, look and feel of a print magazine. Yet, being fully html-coded – indeed, pushing that technology to the limit – it also offers the full dynamism of the internet, especially in a complex system of internal linking, that flash sites cannot deliver. Feet back on the ground. If your taste in culture leads you to shaded woodlands replete with nymphs and satyrs, an expanse that must be treated with respect lest an unmindful step finds you teetering on the edge of an unimagined place, then SomethingDark is here. Or there’s McDonald’s.

I've taken a look. The picture sums up the contents quite well - if you like tasteful erotic photography and writing this may be for you. The first issue includes, among other things, a feature devoted to the work of Scottish photographer ArtPunk and a long critical analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe. The website is beautifully done and very easy to use. Read the rest of this article

A creative solution to hospital funding

In these days of enforced budget cuts and national austerity, any idea for raising additional cash for government departments is welcome. One intriguing possibility was raised by the Conservative MP for Portsmouth North, Penny Mordaunt, in a Commons debate yesterday on the allocation of departmental budgets. She questioned the principle that departments and public sector bodies should be able to supplement their income without losing taxpayer funding, and had an unconventional example to illustrate her point:

A second scenario might see a Department creating an income-generating activity that failed to deliver value for money or came at the expense of the statutory service that that Department was charged with carrying out. I will give the House a quick example from real life, not "Yes Minister", although it could well have been used for that. When I was a director of Kensington and Chelsea council, I discovered that one of our local hospitals was hiring out one of its closed, but fully equipped, wards to a film company to use as a film set. To add insult to injury, the movie was a pornographic one. Although I cannot claim to have seen the final picture, as I understand that these things are no longer claimable on parliamentary expenses, it was a big-budget affair and it generated substantial income for the hospital-but apart from cheering up a few of the in-patients, it could not be said to be contributing to the objectives of the primary care trust.

I don't really understand Ms Mordaunt's criticism. It doesn't appear that the "fully equipped" ward was needed for patient care, in which case it was lying idle and was a drain on resources. So its utilisation in another capacity strikes me as very much contributing to the objectives of the PCT - the money raised was presumably spent on better healthcare for patients. It sounds like an excellent idea, and it's nice to know that there is (or was) sufficient money in the British porn industry to make big-budget films and, indeed, to pay top price for the use of locations.

There must be many opportunities for such creative use of resources. Perhaps it would create political controversy if under-used schoolrooms were hired out to makers of corporal punishment videos, but what of all our courtrooms or, for that matter, prisons? The Palace of Westminster itself - no stranger to sexual hi-jinks - would make an excellent venue. Indeed, one enterprising former Labour MP, Nigel Griffiths, starred in his own impromptu Commons set photostory last year (though was admittedly unaware that his antics were being recorded by the News of the World).

Indeed, Government and the porn industry already have much in common: they're both based on screwing people for money, after all.

But which was the hospital, and what was the film? According to the BBC report (which quickly went viral) the incident referred to must have happened before the present health trust was formed in 2002. Nicholas Cecil of the Standard, moreover, has "established" that the location was St Charles Hospital in Ladbroke Grove. But I'm most indebted to "Paddy the Greek" commenting on the Standard article, who thinks that the film may have been Pirate Deluxe: Xtreme desires, directed by the pioneering female pornographer (and fetish specialist) Tanya Hyde. It was originally produced in 1998, which fits. I've no proof, but I did find the following synopsis of the production, which starred Monique Covet, Silvia Saint and Laura Angel:

Already an icon on the busy British fetish scene, newly acquired Tanya Hyde proved a timely shot in the arm for the Private porn emporium with this inaugural effort for their Pirate Deluxe line.... The first of several high voltage fetish features Hyde bestowed upon the company before she took wing with her own Harmony Concepts label, XTREME DESIRES provides half a dozen vignettes of varying intensity, albeit usually on the high end of the scales, highlighted by the director's imagination and ingenuity, which in turn seems to have inspired the female cast to perform well above and beyond the call of duty....

"Doctors" finds beautiful bespectacled nurse Silvia Saint pleasuring patient Laura Angel, in stir-ups for easy access, until medics Kevin Long and Tony De Sergio (the notorious British bisexual performer billed as "Jay Alexander" on gay projects) join in the fun.... Revisiting medical territory, "Nurses" has French John B. Root discovery Fovéa and the returning Mona resplendent in latex nun's habits, exchanging less than pious glances over supine patient Frank Major's bandaged physique, then draining his vital fluids with doc Mike Foster providing an additional appendage before death bells solemnly and irrevocably ring out.

I've omitted descriptions of the non-hospital related scenes, but the full information can be found here. And here's the rather explicit back-cover photo. You have been warned. Read the rest of this article