Monday, February 1, 2010

FEBRUARY 2010 The Sex Issue


Cover illustration by Ethel (the cleaning lady)


FEZ Sez
'BORED & LONELY'
1 MILLION BC
'FOOD PORN'
'JUST FOR FUN'
'THE SEX RANT'
'BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE NOT NECESSARY'
'SEX IN THE CINEMA'

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Contributors
Munky Harris, Charles C. Aitken, Dave Schwan, crassnsilly, Zed,
Craig Middleton, Phillip@Baste, Bobby Wildside & Circusmouse.
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by Munky Harris
FROM that iPhone in your pocket to the flashy red sports car you've got your eye on, everything we buy is for sex. Consumer choices subtly - and sometimes not so subtly - reveal our misguided attempts at winning over the opposite sex by projecting an alluring image to attract sexual partners. We consciously try to trick ourselves into being pure when in fact our subconscious is well aware of its actions in leading us into sexual conquest. No doubt about it, sex sells - let's face it, that's exactly why you made a beeline for this, our sex issue, you grotty little pervert.
So, sit back, slip into something more comfortable, set the dial for the controls of your mangina and enjoy this super edition of your favourite fanzine.
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"ANOTHER ONE?!" he blurted out. How many 'bored and lonelies' did that make, in this, only his first week? With so many unsatisfied women around, the non-stop pussy train will soon be full steam ahead.
Joining an adult dating site had been a stroke of genius. The women were much like him- just looking for a good time. No more of wasting his time down that meat market at Bella Vista. These women were far sexier and far more uninhibited, too. Some of the photos were just pure porn. He just couldn't believe it.
Unfortunately, there was one drawback which threatened to scupper everything. Sure, he was getting plenty of attention, and even some very interesting offers, but he couldn't reply to any of the mails he received. Each time he tried to move things forward up came a message "upgrade to see your emails".
This became increasingly frustrating. Not wanting to use his only credit card (the card he shared with his wife), he searched for ways where he wouldn't have to use it. First, he placed his email address in every section of his profile in elaborate ways that would not be picked up by any site administrators. He even placed it on a photo. Satisfied that he had beaten the house, he sat and waited. He waited a long time. He wondered if he had been too clever. Perhaps, too cryptic.
Over the next few weeks, the mails and winks gradually fizzled out, until he went a whole six days without so much as a flash of flesh. In a twist of fate, as he was planning what to do next, his wife walked into the room unnoticed. She looked over his shoulder at the computer screen. It didn't take long for her to work it out. They had a huge row that lasted for longer than he was on the adult website in the first place. Eventually they divorced. He now spends his evenings ogling the meat at the Bella Vista.
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Ah, sex, or " the old in-out " as the charming Alex put it in 'A Clockwork Orange', all those years ago.
We tend to make such a fuss over sex, that most basic and necessary of animal instincts. The fact that it can be so pleasurable, almost addictive, has something to do with it. Down through the ages certain groups of control freaks have attempted to place control-orders on the sexual activities of women in particular, effectively banning that pleasure and relegating sex to the 'for procreative purposes only' bin. "Just close your eyes and think of England". Some sex-nazis in certain clans and groups are still known to brutally remove the clitoris from young women. Men cop it too. I lost my foreskin to a doctor and his scissors as a baby. For those who were circumcised and who believe in heaven, do you think you will meet up with your clit or foreskin just inside the pearly gates ?And what about homosexuality? So much denial. I believe it was that old arse-bag Queen Elizabeth I, who was so square that she just could not accept that two women could get it on and actually enjoy it, sex that is. And the Catholic Church, that veritable house-full of anal-intruders and paedophiles still outlaws homosexuality, and the pope blows a gasket at the mere mention of the word 'bottom'. He probably blows his load too, in his papal pants, the kooky old nazi bible basher. I hear that he still squeezes into his old Hitler Youth uniform on Hitlers' birthday and goose-steps about the house, drunk on apple schnapps and begging to be spanked by a fit young choir boy.
Even our government has its sexual hang-ups. They are censoring the internet, blocking smutty images and those deemed un-viewable and un-Australian by some mole-eyed puritan lurking deep in the bowels of the Classification Board. They have the nerve to make a fuss when the Chinese government block access to yoga sites and whatever but then feel it necessary to protect us all from sites that only a very disturbed minority bother viewing in the first place. I expect this type of thinking from little Johnny Howard and his silly mates, not from the Labor Party. Whilst the basics of sex and sexuality remain pretty much the same, there are changes taking place in some areas. Back in the 60's the supermodel Twiggy caused a sensation when she wore a mini-skirt to the Melbourne Cup(I think), and without stockings! The old biddies and prune-faced puritans would go blind, burn up and go straight to hell if they set eyes upon the race day fashions of the average woman today. "The less, the better" said a young woman at the last cup meet. And the bits you cannot see have also gone through a transformation of late. Silicon breasts and tattoos are old news. Lately hair styles have spread to the pubic regions. The Brazilian is the way to go now. Wax jobs and depilatory creams are all the rage. Sexuality-wise this look is a little suss. Having done it to myself and various girlfriends,so speaking through experience, the end result is that you both end up looking like pre-pubic children again. Why this is a turn-on can only be answered by the individual.
Porn has become almost mainstream lately, too and, coincidentally, was at least partially responsible for the Brazilian craze. Women in this industry were the first to remove their pubes, leading, I guess, to more men asking their partners to experiment. More women are viewing porn according to recent surveys and they are also becoming more involved in the production of female-friendly porn, not only in front of the camera but behind it also, in the role of producers and directors, etc. And sex is still selling everything, from clothes, beer, cars, watches, movies, toothpaste and baby food.
Kids are having sex at earlier and earlier ages. Little boys whose balls have barely dropped are getting girls and even women, teachers and babysitters, pregnant and having children who will be more like little brothers and sisters to these young parents than actual offspring. Boys as young as five are sexually assaulting their school friends and youngsters are raping women old enough to be their grannies. One day soon we'll hear about the new- born baby boy, who upon exiting his mother, cracks a stiffy, jumps back on top of mum and slips her a length. All before the doctor has slapped his arse and cut the umbilical chord. Sex, what more can I say?!
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HUMANS are the only species who perform recreational sex with each other. Occasionally, humans perform recreational sex with other species, but in the majority of cases, it is the human involved who makes the first move. (If you have been the subject of an amorous approach from, say, a llama on heat, you are a very special person) We can feel very smug about all this. All the lower species are driven by is the need to reproduce. They don’t even know why they are doing it, compelled by hormones to continue the evolutionary process. Humans are driven by a compulsion to brag about our sexual exploits: the quantity, the frequency, the energy expended, rather than the quality. Still, we can, so we do, unlike wombats, or those daft ephemeral moths which spend 17 years asleep in a tree, then come out for a shag, and die almost immediately afterwards. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, in an age when recreational sex, especially among unmarried people was almost a crime. Huxley’s vision of a benign totalitarian utopia turns everything on its head. Babies are produced in factories, while workers are encouraged by the state to take drugs and shag as many different people as possible. Yes, Huxley invented teenagers. Unwanted pregnancies are only frowned upon in the book because of what is seen as a sloppy approach to contraception. As one character says: “Everybody’s happy nowadays.” Well, it does sound like fun. Humans are also the only species to include homosexuality. If it didn’t already exist, you couldn’t make it up. Homosexuality is nothing more or less than recreational sex. Its gradual acceptance, or tolerance by the rest of society during a climate of increased political correctness, has led to a worldwide Gay culture. You can listen to Gay music in Gay bars or go to a festival of Gay theatre. What does it all mean? What is Gay music? Does it use Gay notes played on Gay instruments? Whatever next? Gay food eaten with Gay knives and forks? Similarly, we are the only species who have prostitutes. This is just weird, when you think about it. You pay somebody to have sex with you. But what is sex? Where does it begin? I mean geographically. Holding hands isn’t sex, nor is a peck on the cheek. But penetration is. So it must begin somewhere in between. Exactly how far does the hand have to travel from the knee towards the genitals for it to begin? These days we have a huge menu of sexual preferences to choose from. You can dress in a nappy or let somebody hit you, or shag a sheep or a dead person. These activities rarely produce children. If you don’t want to participate, you can watch other people/sheep doing it on the internet. When the internet started to become popular, anyone who said they had spent hours online was immediately suspected of being a serial pornographer. But the idea of recreational sex is so prevalent, everywhere you look, that we are all pornographers, active or passive. The allure of recreational sex is used to try to sell us all sorts of things. The pretty girl draped over the car bonnet isn’t offering the promise, to you and only you, not any of your fellow oglers, the chance to settle down and have a family. She wants you to associate her product with sexy sex, no strings attached. Half the time you were having sex with her (like that’s going to happen, you ugly saddo) you’d have your eyes shut, so she ceases to be pretty. She’s offering you a Brave New World. If you buy the car.
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We all know sex sells. And switched-on marketing managers know that both male and female sexuality draws attention to a huge range of diverse products- from cars and men's tools to women's clothing and cosmetics. And the newest sensation that has entered the sexuality market is something every person on the planet can relate to - food. Combining food and sex has created a whole new industry - food porn. Yup, you heard right, food pornography. Believe it or not, food and sex are closely related. Not only are they both billion-dollar industries but they are both huge in the passion arenas. Think about it - the human body reacts in similar ways when anticipating food as it does to sex. Hunger can almost be likened to being horny with its insatiable desire for immediate relief and its anxiousness when starving and being on the lookout to relieve that anxiety. And, oh, the bliss afterwards. There are many, many more similarities between the two.
Think about the question: Does size matter? Of course it does. A lot of hungry people favor quantity over quality. There is something about a two-for-one or all-you-can-eat buffet that excites us and drives us to eat vast amounts of food we would not normally consume. Similarly, many people opt for the quantity over quality approach to sex, rooting anything with a heartbeat regardless of the physical appearance and having sex anywhere…. the car park, the library, on the patio, in the shed….The type of food you eat can also reflect the type of sex you have and the type you prefer. Studies have shown that the steak-and-mash consumers tend to practice straight-up missionary style of sex whereas the more adventurous palette indulging in spicy and exotic foods tend to be more adventurous in the bedroom. Not only do we like to eat food but we love to watch it as well. With cooking show presenters like Nigella Lawson or Giada De Laurentiis, both buxom beauties well versed in the subtle seduction of the viewer, today's cooking show has become a classic porn substitute. Nigella is well known for her flirtatious manner of presentation and the overt sexuality of her presentation style has led to her be labeled by several commentators as the “queen of food porn”. And that title is a compliment! In most cooking shows, you'll see that the host firsts describes in a flirtatious and mouth-watering way the menu that is to come.The ingredients most often are caressed when introduced and handled ever-so-gently, sometimes letting the viewer watch while the foods are gently washed and then towel dried.Then we watch as the food is squeezed, kneaded and cut into delicate shapes and sizes, all the while watching the host sip a glass of wine, giggling and being ever so chatty.Then we watch as the food is thrust into a sizzling pan and is stirred faster and faster and faster in a climactic whisking frenzy until it is ready. When it is ready to be served, the food is glistening and steamy and the host tops it all off by closing their eyes, opening their mouths wide and moaning and groaning while smacking on the food. These 'arousing' examples of steamy morsels of food dripping with juice and glistening close-ups of exotic ingredients elaborately prepared and displayed and fondled over has made food media the new porn industry.Wikipedia says: "Food porn is a provocative term variously applied to a spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, cooking shows or other visual media, foods boasting a high fat and calorie content, exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat or the glorification of food as a substitute for sex". Researchers have discovered that in much the same way that pornography can be a substitute for real sex, food porn is seen as a substitute for actually cooking and eating. Similarly, in much the same way that pornography may display feats of performance that average people would not attempt, food porn often features exotic ingredients and spices and excessively elaborate recipes and preparation. The film, 9½ Weeks, started a fad of incorporating food into erotic play, although we all know that's been around for ages. Who hasn't tried licking off the chocolate or cream on certain body parts??? Food porn has become particularly prevalent in blogs relating to food, where it is a term for photography and writing about food that is done in a decadent and borderline erotic style. Food photographers today know that making the food they are photographing look sexy is sure to put them in high demand as food photographers, an art which has also increased with the dawn of food porn.We live in a culture where food is no longer just fuel for our bodies. Much of the food we consume is not really food at all but a combination sugars, fats, chemicals, food additives and all things totally unhealthy. We consume these products by the ton, not because we are hungry but because they just taste soooo gooood. But this culinary madness does not come without a price. Obesity rates in the world are on the rise, which in turn has caused a new epidemic of eating disorders and fat-related illnesses. The ironic thing about food porn is if people would eat less, especially those non-food items, and have sex more they'd be in great physical shape! You know which side FEZ is rooting for…
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Ever wanted to be in a porn flick? Plenty of people do, but don't because they feel they lack the equipment. Good news perverts. That's all gonna change. The future is now. No, really. It is. Come with me and I'll explain.
The porn industry, though no great technological innovator itself, is certainly no slouch in grasping new technology when it becomes available. Production houses like Pixar and Dreamworks in the USA and IG Production and Square Enix in Japan, have continued to consistently raise the bar in 3D animation during the past decade, not just in story telling, but production techniques, culminating in James Cameron's recent epic Avatar, which has picked up the baton with amazing CGI special effects (but unfortunately, dropped the baton on story telling). Avatar makes prolific use of motion capture, where actors wear special suits in a green studio, and their movements are then translated to computer generated models.
We all know how to thrust and gyrate our pelvises, so imagine wearing a motion capture suit and your movements used to animate a porn star version of yourself, and then also having the capability to change your physical attributes without expensive surgery.
Get that enormous cock you've always wanted and no more problems with erections either. For the ladies, your cup size is only limited by your imagination. The first 3D porn to hit the net used, very crudely, software called POSER, which had default figures that could have their genitals manipulated, resulting in monster cocks and even more monstrous tits.
Early animations were very rudimentary, too. As in the real world, as the techniques and software improved, so did the quality of pornimation (as it is now known), until very recently, when clips of 3D humanoid aliens having sex, animated using mo-cap, appeared. Of course, you know what this means, don't you? Yep, real flesh and blood pornstars will have to look for a real job.
I admit that there are thousands of exhibitionists out there that don't give a fuck what they look like, just as long as someone is watching. But just as Poser brought the ability to animate 3D people to any sap who has a home computer, software is being created right now to bring mo-cap to your bedroom. You may even see it on Playstation one day, albeit with an R18+ rating. Does anyone remember the early 90s when Virtualreality was all the rage and everyone's thoughts turned to how it could be applied to sex? Well, that day is coming. It's just a matter of imagination.
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“..for pornography offers fantasy and sustains desire for ever-promised but never-found gratification. It guarantees that no representation will ever satisfy desire while maintaining a desire for the representation itself.” Bette Gordon, ‘Variety: The Pleasure in Looking.’

Sex in cinema sells, and the customer, though never completely satisfied, will always come back for more. Men will sit through ninety minutes of any movie to see the latest ‘so..hot..right..now’ actress strip down to her underwear or simulate a sexual act. What arouses a male when watching a sex scene depends on his fetish. His fetish depends on whatever he associated with sexual arousal during his ‘awakening’. Women don’t have fetishes, apparently!
In the cash cow of cinema sex there are niches to fill, the next installment of American Pie, (an update of Porky’s, 1982) dishes out T and A (that’s tits and ass) for the horny teenager market eager to hit the slow-mo and pause button on the DVD player. The other big seller, the ‘erotic thriller’ (blame that on Basic Instinct 1992), provides ample close ups of seductive, fake plastic tit, knife wielding secretaries peeling off for the unknowing victim.
Sex in cinema is dominated by the Vanilla scene, that is ‘normal’ heterosexual sex between a man and a woman. Conventional cinema gave us the ‘male gaze’. A man enters the screen, he looks at a woman, we see what he sees, a variety of camera techniques are employed to turn the woman’s body into a fetishized object: a pan up of her long legs, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (1990), a close up of her ass, Robyn Givens walking off a train in A Rage In Harlem (1991), Shannon Elizabeth’s pert breasts in American Pie (1999), and occasionally female genetalia, Sharon Stone’s crossing leg scene in Basic Instinct (1992).
The sexual act itself in cinema is usually void of eroticism, especially if done too convincingly, see Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball (2001). Examples of the exception to the rule employ a bit of ‘kink’: the ‘actual’ fellatio scenes from In the Cut (2003) and ‘In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Penelope Cruz’s bar romp scene in Jamon Jamon (1992), and basically every sex scene in Last Tango in Paris (1972). For extreme, yet honest examples of on-screen sex, see films by Catherine Breillat.
The fetishization of clothing has a popular demand as it feeds certain tastes: Kim Basinger stripping down to her silky satin slip in Nine and a Half Weeks (1986), Light S&M in Secretary (2002), White panties in Black Snake Moan (2006), School uniforms in D.E.B.S. (2004). My recommendation is to check out the films of Tinto Brass, particularly The Voyeur (1994).
The future of sex in films, both as a marketing tool and inevitably as a masturbatory aid is safe for the moment I think. But seeing as the internet offers instant access to hardcore porn. I wonder if consumer habits will or have changed. I have no desire to conduct such a survey or Google statistics, and even though I’d save time by surfing the .....tube channel for instant gratification, I’m still happy to sit through ninety minutes of any movie to see the latest ‘so..hot..right..now’ actress strip down to her underwear. Am I only one? I wager not!
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FEZ next month:
"WAR"
Oh yeah, what is it good for?! If you have any idea let us know about it for your chance to win a prize.

Congrats to 'that cartoonist guy, y'know, the one who takes things far too seriously' for winning last month's prize.

Contributions to:-
fez@randompress.com.au

1 comments:

Fezzmasher said...

Kaboom

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