Escaped Pleasure – Soundtrack for a Fetish Lifestyle

Born from a passion for fetish and a passion for music, Escaped Pleasure is a music project with a difference. Although described officially as “chill out electronica”, each track is written and produced by a fetishist, with fetish in mind.

It might be the result of a day spent lounging in a favourite catsuit that inspires a long, relaxing background groove that helps you to float away into your destination of escape. It might be a play session that inspired a more intense beat that both excites and scares, or it might be just a beat that you can chill out to and shoot photos.

Inspired by the sounds and grooves of people like Massive Attack, Moloko, John Mayer and Prince; Escaped Pleasure’s aim is to add a little groove and beat into your fetish life. Designed with lifestyle people in mind, it can be heard at clubs and lifestyle events around the world.

The product of a mainstream music producer who by day writes music for the masses (see his masked portrait here), Escaped Pleasure came about through being bored by using the same old music for SM scenes. Watching fetish films, it became obvious that the same old vanilla music was used time and again. Our music producer decided to write something new, tailored for his private passion.

You can commission Escaped Pleasure to create a bespoke track or set of tracks just for you. With a commission comes an initial meeting, so that he can determine what elements of music work for the client. Then he will go away and create the tracks. Whether it’s for a play session, a photo session, a private party or even the soundtrack to a your home made film, having a unique set of music to set your scene is a deeply sexual feeling and will make a huge difference.

Want to hear the sounds of Escaped Pleasure? No problem – hear nine tracks here… www.reverbnation.com/escapedpleasure

Then contact them to discuss your project at escapedpleasure [@] yahoo.co.uk

Eroticon – The Right to Write Erotica (and Read It)

Eroticon 2012, a one-day conference held in Bristol on Saturday 3 March, was billed as the UK’s first conference for erotica writers and sex bloggers.

Sessions, panels and workshops ran from half past nine to five o’clock. Highlights for us were the first and last panel sessions, “Identity, ethics and sex blogging”, and “Sex and the media”. Zoe Margolis, founder of the personal sex blog “Girl With a One Track Mind” (2004) and author of the book of the same title (2006), stood out in both panels as a passionate and committed advocate of a concerted, coordinated effort to counter regressive – and sometimes oppressive – social attitudes and those institutions, such as mainstream media, that support and promote them.

Margolis, who began her blog under the name of Abbey Lee, used her own experience of being ‘exposed’ by the Sunday Times in 2006 to illustrate the urgency of the need to work towards reforming these regressive social attitudes. She told how she was “hounded by the press for weeks”, during which time she, her family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues and even casual acquaintances endured continual harassment and invasions of privacy and offers of payment to reveal information that could prove damaging to her reputation.

Margolis provided a stark insight into the mentality of those who persecuted her when she revealed to conference delegates that the hate mail she received as an anonymous blogger – “cunt, whore, slut” – became, after the exposé, “cunt, whore, slut – and I’m going to rape you, I’m going to kill you”. She lost her job, was driven to the verge of a breakdown, but endured and recovered her composure to the extent that she could continue blogging, now under her real name, with the same objective: to express a woman’s desire for sex without shame or embarrassment.

Her blogging, however, changed after the exposé – from a completely free and liberating form of writing to a more formal and inhibiting process of, for example, gaining permissions and allowing those who might feature in her writing to edit relevant texts. Margolis advised: go beyond not putting potentially identifying information on the internet by deliberately laying a trail of false information. She then made a point regarding blogging ethics: don’t expose other writers and bloggers.

A question from the floor by erotica author Scarlett French queried whether anonymous writing might be counterproductive by perpetuating negative stereotypes of sex. Co-panelists in the first session, sex bloggers Mina Lamieux and Molly Moore, stressed there could be many practical reasons why writers of such material might desire anonymity, including the possibility of losing custody of children. Lamieux also insisted that society will “put you in a box”, and Margolis presented evidence that women sex bloggers and erotica writers often choose anonymity because they fear damning judgment.

Panelists for “Sex and the Media” reached early agreement that mainstream media were the dominating force in the representation of distorted and clichéd images of women and sex in society. Margolis offered one explanation for this: journalists are lazy and will quickly resort to “the easiest stereotype”.

Session two saw author and editor Maxim Jakubowski take to the stage to present a writing workshop. Best known in the genre by his longstanding editorship of the Mammoth books of erotica, Jakubowski emphasised that erotica can and should be literary, but that ninety percent of all fiction writing is “crap”. He maintained that the explosion in e-books and self-publishing is driving down both the quality of fiction writing and the remuneration being paid to writers by publishers.

Jakubowski said erotica is the same as other genres of fiction: a story is required. Also required are character development, an emotional landscape, and the creation of atmosphere. He advised that gratuitous vulgarity should be avoided. He stressed the importance of show, don’t tell, “the classic axiom of fiction writing”, which, he said, makes the difference between surprise and predictability.

After outlining select recommended rules for quality fiction writing, Jakubowski then discussed some “don’ts”, which centred on “the four deadly sins” of underage sex, nonconsensual sex, bestiality, and incest. He recognised the very sensitive nature of these topics, but questioned their taboo status, which he asserted was determined by very subjective “artificial boundaries”. He proffered that “the four deadly sins” are aspects of human sexuality and are realities of life, so therefore should be accepted as subject matter for writing, concluding that “there should be no rules, you should be able to write what you want to write”.

The publishers’ panel in session four extended the discussion of taboos and ventured into the field of censorship. Several urgent mentions were made concerning mid-February ultimatums issued to e-publishers by the online cash payment company, PayPal, regarding erotica. E-publishers, including the world’s biggest e-book publishing and distribution platform for independent authors and publishers, US-based Smashwords, were given only a few days’ notice to purge their erotica categories of certain types of fiction or face closure of their PayPal accounts and forfeiture of all monies in their accounts.

Jakubowski said that such issues of censorship were prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon world, which appeared to have a more jaundiced and repressively moralistic view of erotica than many European countries. He asserted that the best erotica today is being written in France and Italy. In France, for example, Jakubowski said erotica is not a genre separate from creative fiction, and that erotic work of a very high literary quality that eclipses most of what appears in the English-speaking world is regularly produced by well-known mainstream writers. Elaborating, he said it is almost an honour in France for established writers to occasionally write an erotic work, and that when they do, such work is received well and is reviewed seriously.

Richard Eadie of erotica publisher Silver Moon concurred with Jakubowski, saying continental Europe does have a more “grown-up” approach to erotic writing; he added that the British tabloid press “has a lot to answer for”.

Hazel Cushion, founder of London-based Xcite Books, said that, despite her imprint’s strict guidelines to publish within the subject-matter boundaries set by the likes of Amazon and PayPal, she had one book “pulled”, and that since establishing Xcite in 2007, publishing erotica has been “getting harder and harder” due to corporate censorship. Cushion also said she had one of her female authors outed by mainstream media, resulting in the author declining to write a new book when invited.

Author Monique Roffey offered sound advice to the increasing numbers of aspiring writers who are now by-passing the traditional world of writers – dealing with publishers and editors, and having work professionally edited and/or peer reviewed – in favour of self-publishing, e-publishing and blogging. One particular nugget was this: editors with a good reputation are known in the world of serious writing, so seek one out to help you improve your work.

Award-winning erotic photographer John Tisbury, in his workshop on basic photography, added his own perspective to Jakubowski’s and Eadie’s views on how Anglo–Saxon attitudes to erotica can differ substantially from those in continental Europe: when doing outdoors erotic and nude photo shoots in the United Kingdom, he is likely to be confronted by offended members of the public or reported to the police. Outdoors UK shoots not only require the location to be private, he said, but specific permissions for land use need to be sought because if relevant parties recognise the location from published photographs, legal action against the photographer can ensue. For these reasons he conducts most of his outdoors nude–erotic shoots in Spain.

Other sessions were:

“Going indie, self-publishing”, by MK Elliott;
“Convincingly queer”, by Aisling Weaver and Josephine Myles;
“Taking your writing beyond the page”, by Scarlett French;
A technical workshop on establishing a blog using WordPress, by Michael Knight;
“Marketing your work”, by Victoria Bliss and Lucy Felthouse;
“Starting with podcasting”, by Michael Knight.

Sessions and workshops ran concurrently and wound up with “Sacred Kink”, a demonstration of sensual corporal punishment by London Faerie. This was followed by an accomplished burlesque performance and drinks party.

Delegates and presenters travelled to Bristol for the event from all over the United Kingdom and the United States. More than three-quarters of Eroticon delegates were women, and fourteen of the eighteen presenters – more than ninety-seven percent – were women.

Eroticon 2012 was sponsored by erotica publishers Total-E-Bound, Andrews UK, and Silver Moon, and by sex toy retailers Lovehoney and Coco de Mer.

The conference is the brainchild of erotic author Ruby Kiddell, who said she was extremely pleased with the conference and the positive reception it has received. Her inspiration for Eroticon “was born of seeing a need for bloggers and writers to have a safe, non-judgmental and inspiring event in which to discuss their writing, hone their skills, and network”. She said that another Eroticon in 2013 is assured.
by Daryl Champion for SomethingDark

This is an edited version of the full report, which can be found in the SomethingDark news section here -
www.somethingdark.eu/news/72/Eroticon-asserts-the-right-to-write-erotica-and-to-read-it.html

SomethingDark is here – www.somethingdark.eu

Ruby Kiddell is here – www.eroticnotebook.co.uk

Le Bal des Vierges ténébreuses – Paris 17 march 2012

This event is a celebration to launch publication of “Drucila, solitude d’une prédatrice” the debut novel by Ursula Del Aguila. Brought to you by Les Editions des Vierges ténébreuses and la Toile de Pandore.

Creatures from the XVIII and XIXth Century: Kink Counts and Countesses, Victorian Ladies and their Gentlemen, Steampunks, Dandies, Frankensteins, the Living-Dead, Gothic & Fetish Freaks, Ghosts and Vampires all come to haunt the dark labyrinthine chambers in the subterranean medieval cave of the Saint Sabin in Paris on the 17th March…

WHEN: Saturday 17 March 11pm
WHERE: Les Caves Saint Sabin
50, rue St Sabin
75011 Paris
Métro Bréguet-Sabin
Website: www.lescaves.org
Access information: www.lescaves.org/venir_nous_voir.htm
HOW MUCH: 15 euros with a drink

STRICT DRESS CODE ADHERING TO THEME
Join the event on Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/214235182004932/
Join the event on Fetlife: www.fetlife.com/events/91757/v2

Entertainment throughout the night:
Wandering “Vierges ténébreuses”,projection of Maria Beatty’s movies, photo exhibition by Lou, book signing of “Drucila, Loneliness of a Predator” by Ursula Del Aguila, the “Torture Chamber” led by Rachel Bathory, fire breathing, magicians and an erotic + macabre performance by AJ Dirtystein.

Music by DJ Paws & Claws et Ma PublicTherapy

Francais

Les Editions des Vierges ténébreuses Avec la Toile de Pandore présentent:

**Le Bal des Vierges ténébreuses**

Les Caves Saint Sabin
50, rue St Sabin
75011 Paris
Métro Bréguet-Sabin
Website: www.lescaves.org
Access information: www.lescaves.org/venir_nous_voir.htm 

Avec DJ Paws & Claws et Ma PublicTherapy

Costumes freaks, créatures des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: comtes et comtesses libertines, Victorian Ladies et leurs gentlemen, Steampunk, Dandies, Frankenstein, Morts-vivants, gothiques, Fetish, fantômes, vampires et vampiresses, venez hanter les voûtes sombres des caves médiévales Saint Sabin…

Avec des Vierges ténébreuses déambulantes, des hommes-objets, projections des films de Maria Beatty, une expo photo de Lou, Ursula Del Aguila qui signera son roman “Drucila, solitude d’une prédatrice”, une chambre à tortures animée par Rachel Bathory, cracheurs de feu, magiciens, et une performance sanguinolente de AJ Dirtystein

15 euros avec une boisson
DRESS CODE STRICT

Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/214235182004932/
Fetlife: www.fetlife.com/events/91757/v2

www.viergestenebreuses.com
www.latoiledepandore.fr

London Fetish Fair – The Original Monthly Market and Party

London Fetish Fair is the world’s first regular monthly fair devoted to all things fetish. It’s on the second Sunday afternoon of every month, in a spacious open-plan London venue with neo Victorian decor. There’s free private parking, kinky cabarets, beginner to advanced BDSM workshops, gastro pub and a great bar serving everything from real ale to cocktails. Oh, the diversity! Read more

Prince Charles to Improve the Environment – for Honour Fetish Store

Prince Charles has revealed plans to create a vibrant urban regeneration plan for the Waterloo area of London. Charles visited Lower Marsh, home of Honour, one of London’s leading fetish stores. There has been a market there for over 150 years and local planning officials are considering four sets of proposals for revamping the famous street.

The nearby station is used by over 85 million passengers per year and Kirsty Allsopp, ambassador for The Prince’s Foundation, said she would like to see them contribute to local businesses “If you were sitting in Lower Marsh and seeing all this stuff whizzing around you, but not able to attract people to come into your place, it would be very frustrating.”

Ella, manager of the Honour store, refused to say whether Charles had slipped in to get something saucy for Camilla, or a corset for a corgi.

The Honour store is at http://www.honour.co.uk/catalog/honour-shops.php

Dream Visions – Surrey’s Dungeon and Photography Studio

Dream Visions is a photo studio with a difference. You can hire it as a well equipped studio for all kinds of fetish photography – using the dungeon setting if you wish.

You can be the photographer and bring your own model, or you might like to shoot with Latex Model, the specialist in rubber.

Or the owner of the studio, award-winning pro photographer Angelica, can take the photos for you.

Just want to play in a dungeon? No problem – you can simply hire the space to have fun and try out the floggers, paddles canes, vaulting horse, cage and stocks to your heart’s content.

Dream Visions is located near Gatwick and it’s easy to reach from Surrey and South London. Especially convenient – it’s fast and easy by train from London Victoria.

Check out the options on the website here www.dream-visions.co.uk

American Ecstasy – Barbara Nitke on the Golden Age of Porn

NEW YORK (February, 2012) – Launched with no fanfare, Barbara Nitke’s crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter raised over $9,000 in the first few days. Firm in her belief that there is a large audience for the book, she intends to self publish American Ecstasy, and take it directly to the public. The book is a memoir in pictures and words of the twelve years she spent working as a stills photographer on porn movie sets in New York in the 1980s.

“It’s hard to imagine now,” Nitke says, “but back in the 1980s people lined up outside of real movie theatres to watch feature length sex flicks. It was the Golden Age of Porn. There was a thriving X-rated movie industry in New York City, and that was where I got my start as a photographer.”

Her American Ecstasy book is a nostalgic view of those heady days. The photographs, while undeniably sexual, reach far beyond the usual sex machine image of the industry to reveal the touching humanness of the actors. Often shot between takes, when the actor’s porn star masks were down, the images are deeply intimate. Disheveled, semi-naked starlets huddle together between takes, staring out into the distance with combat soldier stares. A paunchy director, wearing a baseball cap, comes into the frame to give Nina Hartley a few notes on her performance. The actor underneath her keeps right on going.

The book also includes stories Nitke wrote of the day-to-day life on the sets, and clips from extensive interviews she conducted with the porn stars of the day. In an essay for the book, art critic Arthur C. Danto writes, “From reading these verbal ‘shots’ of life in the porn world, one realises that the scenario is as rigid as those of commedia dell’arte. Instead of Columbine and Pierrot, one has the needful housewife and the pizza boy, delivering initially the pie, and then himself…”  He also compares her photography with that of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Nitke is seeking $25,000 to self publish the book, and is offering rewards for those who contribute, which range from classic postcards to prints of the photos, and of course copies of the book itself.

Campaign and project video -
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990714042/american-ecstasy-photo-book

Barbara Nitke, http://www.barbaranitke.com, is a New York art and commercial photographer best known for her compassionate view of alternative sex. Her career has taken her from behind-the-scenes of hardcore porn sets in the 1980s, to fetish in the 1990s, and into the private lives of sadomasochists for the following decade. She also does photography for mainstream television shows and the fashion industry. Her work has been shown and collected worldwide.

Contact Barbara Nitke
917-670-4304
Barbara@BarbaraNitke.com

Latex Model – for Latex Photography

Latex Model is a professional model with a passion for rubber. She has a vast collection of rubber from designers including Bondinage, Inner Sanctum, Breathless, Skin Two, House of Harlot and Honour.

Not just dresses – the collection includes full enclosure, hoods and catsuits. You can also bring your own outfits for her to wear – she’s dress size 10 and shoe size 6.

Based near Gatwick airport, Latex Model often works at the nearby Dream Visions studio (which has a dungeon setting) or she can travel.

Full details at www.latexmodel.co.uk

House of Tolerance – Film Review

House of Tolerance is a film about a Parisian brothel, L’Apollonide, at the dawn of the 20th century. The film stays within the walls, creating a sense of rich-coloured claustrophobia for the girls and the audience. This is made particular use of in their one day out, when the colours become vibrant citrus and you share their sense of release as they frolic and take the piss out of their clients.

The big surprise of this film is that, although having all the elements to make an erotic film, it isn’t. Breasts, corsets, beautiful women, a pet panther, champagne baths and sex don’t add up to eroticism, although they do add up to a sensuality of colours and textures, which some reviewers have compared to paintings by Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec.

The film is ultimately about the deep bond between the girls that live and work together, sharing each other’s hopes and fears. The ‘emotional skeleton’ of the film, as Director Bertrand Bonello calls it, is the girl who encounters a sadistic client who leaves her with a mouth like the Joker in Batman.  Bonello admits that he was haunted by this image from the 1928 film ‘The Man Who Laughs’ directed by Paul Leni, originally a novel by Victor Hugo. This moment in the story recurs thanks to the music-like rhythm of the storytelling.

The film has been quite rightly praised for its soundtrack, perhaps because the obvious instrument would have been the accordion, but instead you are blasted with the gritty-gorgeous ‘Bad Girl’ by Lee Moses and ‘The Right To Love You’ by The Mighty Hannibal.

House of Tolerance was shot in a castle in the suburbs of Paris, in which the cast lived and filmed. Bonello said that he wanted to recreate his childhood in Nice, ‘I was a kid with many intellectuals, painters, writers sleeping on the couch. Maybe that fed me a lot, I am like Proust and his madeleine’, he jokes, ‘running after that again and again.’ And as for the surrealist image of the sperm tears? ‘Should I say the truth or not?’ Bonello asks. He decides to go for it. ‘I received a text from someone who had that dream. I have no imagination, but I like that it’s a dreamy image, something very realistic and the same time because you feel like the girls are being filled up all day and you can cry it out at night.’

Philip French writing for The Observer commended on the non-fiction aspects of the film. He wrote ‘there is enough detail about money, cosmetics, hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases, theatrical deportment and authentic camaraderie to qualify the film as a kind of documentary.’ The official non-fiction elements of the story include the two letters, the first from the madame begging help when the rent is put up, the second to a man who is supporting his favourite girl, but no longer wishing to see her, since she has syphilis and he doesn’t want to infect his family.

Each prostitute, as well as the house itself, which the director said was also cast as a character, has her own fate. Particularly interesting is the opium addict who starts the film saying ‘I could sleep for a hundred years I’m so tired’ and ends the film still a prostitute, but a hundred years later in contemporary Paris. Some critics have argued that this is a statement about the eternal, unchanging nature of prostitution, but Bonello says that for him, who was looking at the girl in the shot, rather than at the background, it was more an attempt to say ‘this girl’s destiny is to be a prostitute forever.’

By Tessa Ditner

House of Tolerance
Production year: 2011
Country: France
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 122 mins
Director: Bertrand Bonello
France – Color – 125 mins -1:1.85 – Dolby SRD
Cast: Hafsia Herzi, Céline Sallette, Alice Barnole, Adèle Haenel, Jasmine Trinca, Iliana Zabeth, et Noémie Lvovsky. Judith Lou Levy, Anaïs Thomas, Pauline Jacquard, Maïa Sandoz, Joanna Grudzinska, Esther Garrel. Xavier Beauvois, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Jacques Nolot, Laurent Lacotte. Production: Les Films du Lendemain
Distribution: Haut et Court

For more info and video, see… http://en.lapollonide-music.blogs.dissidenz.com/

Two Very Special Dungeon Pieces – for Sale at Bargain Prices

The Rackmasters make superb, top quality dungeon furniture, as good as you will find anywhere. We chose them to equip the dungeon at the 2011 Skin Two Rubber Ball held on the vintage yacht, HMS President and we were highly impressed with the workmanship and design

The Rack Masters have two really special pieces only, for sale at bargain prices, due to a cancelled order. If you want something really impressive, that will make your dungeon stand out from the rest, here’s your chance…

Spanking Bench: £350
This hand crafted spanking bench is made predominantly from tulipwood and features a meticulously pinned lining and a powder coated steel foot

Vaulting Horse: £400
With high grade covering over 50 mm of padding, this will appeal to those seeking domination for longer periods

The jacking mechanism allows the entire top section to be raised and the torso to be stretched. It comes complete with a detachable base unit. This in conjunction with the jacking mechanism provides significant flexibility over how high the top surface can be raised. This means it’s adjustable to suit taller or shorter subs – a useful feature we have rarely seen

Sold together at discounted price of £650

Buyer will need to collect from Cambridgeshire area

Contact Rackmasters at tywr@hotmail.co.uk

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