Note: The enclosed erotic male image is considered perfectly "safe for work" since it only shows body parts that straight men don't realize are sexy.  All links, however, lead to other NSFW posts.

Note to Rep. Weiner and... pretty much every other man who thinks it's the height of creativity to snap a pixie of their peepee and call it erotic, here's how you do it.

Australian sex-blogger and frequent erotic self-photographer GeekyVamp reposts another woman sex-blogger, Musingsandmischief's repost of a male self-photographer, Isinpi's photo.

Photo by Tumblr user Isinpi.

Oh wow, mr Isinpi,

this pic deserves to be reblogged the shit out of. Well played sir, well played…

musingsandmischief:

Beautiful picture, no wonder I keep seeing reblogs with you getting tumblr ladies weak at the knees.

isinpi:

I can’t decide which one, so fuck it I’ll post two. Hands, clavicle, lips, and scruff in one photo.

Source: There May Be Tits There May Be Banter

It's not that women don't think penises are sexy.  Or that penis bulges veiled behind athlete-gray underpants are sexy.  A surprising number do.  But what seems to be an even more surprising number of women prefer a bit more context -- as, in fact, would most men if they too were regularly innundated with random unsolicited closeups of solicitous women's vulvas.  Once context is established (and believe it or not, intentionally visiting a porn site establishes some kind of context) then one has a great deal more latitude.

But for out of the blue imagery?  Even when you want to preserve your anonymity?  Well.  If you follow the link to his Tumblr post and check out who's already followed and/or liked the photo you'll find that as of this morning (the photo was posted this morning) fifteen women (and no men) have indicated their approval and several, like GV and MAM have reposted it to their own erotic-photography blogs.

Hint, maybe?  Clue perhaps?

The funniest thing?  I could be mistaken but I'm guessing that Rep. Weiner could post and tweet photos like this all day long and the likes of Andrew Brietbart would never register it.  Or if they did they wouldn't register it as anything but some kind of artsy-fartsy east-coast liberal noodlings.  Because, you see, it wouldn't be porn for men.

Now I don't happen to think there's anything wrong with porn for men per se. And of course there are plenty of women who are downright cheerful about consuming it (and of course men who aren't.)  But that's not the point.

The point is, it seems to me, that if you're interested in women, and if you're going to go around sending random, unsolicited photos of yourself to women, then maybe you should take, oh, five or ten minutes to find out what women find most eye-catching about men.  And try sending that instead.

Especially if you're going to send them via Twitter.  Because, you see, while in the ancient history that was the world before Twitter (i.e. July, 2006) and before Tumblr (i.e. 2007) it was quite a bit harder to find out what sort of erotic images of heterosexual men women preferred.  But nowadays?  If you were interested you could find out pretty quickly.  But you would have to be interested.

Update: While watering the planter boxes just now it occurred to me that I might sound like I'm claiming I know this photo but not that one will work as "porn for women."  I'm just saying that if you want to know what works, look at what women are saying works!  Same's true, obviously, about all manner of other kinds of decisions, sex-related or not, about what works for all kinds of people.  Even when you think you know what should work for other people.

Also, this post obviously isn't supposed to be an enlightening tract on how people, in Congress, in power, or otherwise, should and should not impose themselves sexually on those who have not indicated it would be appreciated. 

Jill Filipovic says

In the aftermath of the Anthony Weiner weiner-scandal, the Washington Post asks women what kind of sexts (as they kids say) they’d appreciate receiving. Women ™ say:

“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.

“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.

“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.”

Get it? Cleaning is so important to women it’s basically pornography! Haha oh women, with their clean laundry and their distaste for sexual pleasure and the male body.

Source: Feministe

Back when I was posting a lot of nude and/or erotic self-photography I went ahead and tested the hypothesis that women would rather see men folding laundry or making beds.  The results were positive but most of my non-domestic photo series were considerably more popular.

At any rate, based on my past experience I think whether photos of men folding laundry or making beds can be sexy has a lot more to do with the men and a lot less to do with the laundry.*

All photos by figleaf (hey that's me!) Posted with a Creative Commons license. .

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

* Note: if you're going to put rose petals on a bed there's a good chance you're going to have to use bleach to get the stains out.  Or else, I guess, use rose-colored sheets.

Don’t ask how I got here, or why, but I’m in New York tomorrow (Thursday) and early Friday. I arrived in time to catch the last hour of NYC Feministing Happy Hour, sponsored by the bloggers at Feministing and ParadigmShift NYC (their motto: “Use the F word.”)

As usual I was too shy to introduce myself to anyone I hadn’t met before (if there’s anything more useless than being a shy extrovert) but then someone else, another newcomer, introduced herself just as I was about to leave. We talked for a few minutes and then I saw Rachel Kramer Bussel (who for some reason I keep running into all over the country) and suddenly had two people I could introduce. :-) And suddenly, ice broken, we had a nice conversation about erotica for women.

Rachel’s got a new book out, and I mean literally just out — she’d just gotten copies herself, called Fast Girls: Erotica for Women. I didn’t take a copy, though she generously offered me one, because I seriously don’t know when I’d have time to read it. But it looked pretty good.

It was good to talk with her about that — she felt a little singled out last year by Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd in their issue-advocacy blog Erotica Cover Watch. Madden and Lloyd were forcefully advocating for what they called “man candy” on the covers of books and magazines when their content is written by and for heterosexual women. The tendency in the publishing industry, even for highly-progressive women-owned, women-focused publishers, is to put women on the covers. Rachel is generally sympathetic to the sentiment but said that when she’d brought it up in the past publishers told her that in genre-branding terms consumers assume men on the cover signal that the content is written for gay men while women on the cover signal more general-purpose porn… which incidentally may contain gay-male content. Rachel, who’s pretty pragmatic about it (and points out that authors and editors rarely get more than “no, not that one” veto power over covers anyway) while Madden and Lloyd were specifically trying to rock that boat.

Anyway it was pretty clear that whether that was the intention or not she felt like she was being attacked and not just her ideas. I personally happen to believe, strongly, that Madden, Lloyd, and others are right that that boat needs to be rocked I think it’s also important to remember that the people on the receiving end exist as, well, people as well as online personas. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should back off when we feel strongly that someone else is mistaken. It does mean, though, that our posts often have more impact than we imagine.

For the record, Rachel’s new book does have the genre brand of a woman on the front cover. What struck me, though, is there’s another picture of the same woman on the back and in that one she’s making direct, intelligent, and confidingly confident eye contact with the reader. Which, if publishers are going to insist on their genre cliché‘s might be a nice way to “brand’ the sub-genre of erotica for women. Assuming their faces are shown at all — not a safe assumption in the first place — women on the covers of most general-purpose erotica are generally shown looking inward or away.

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Oh, and because I stayed to talk instead of shyly going home early I was there for a raffle drawing. And I won a gift certificate for my choice of writing and ethical-leadership workshops from the Woodhull Institute! Which looks cool but also looks like they’re all set in New York (one’s in San Francisco) so if you’re interested and in or near New York and you’d like a $100 discount to one of the workshops drop me a line and I’ll mail you the certificate.

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Shyness notwithstanding I had a great time. Maybe next time I’ll introduce myself to someone else first. :-)

Terri of Geek Feminism Blog says

You’re probably all familiar with the inverse law of fantasy armour for women: the less the armour covers, the more it somehow miraculously protects. Liz Walsh writes and draws the entertaining web comic Tao of Geek and I quite enjoyed her story about Naomi campaigning not for sensible armour for women, but in equal cheesecake for her male barbarian character.

The story starts here and if you don’t have a whole lot of time, you should at least check out the final punchline here.

Read the quote in context here.

Two good ones from the middle of the series (click to see them full-size at Tao of Geek.)

Further on in the series Walsh makes not one but two points in dialogue. A couple of passers by say “We don’t want female characters covered up” and “We like looking at pretty women” and Walsh’s character Naomi replies “No one’s saying you don’t! I don’t want to cover up women, I want to have sexy armor for all.” To which the uncomprehending passers-by repeat “We like looking at pretty women.”

Oh, and extra credit for the slash-fic reference here. (Note: Hmm… I wonder if slash fiction, which can be barkingly pornographic, continually flies under the bogus Rules of Desire is because even though both authors and readers are overwhelmingly female nearly all the the sex in slash fiction is between male characters.)