FOR WOMEN WHO LIKE HOT MEN AND INTELLIGENT THOUGHT www.filamentmagazine.com
Lovely men Saucy fiction Smart reading
e u s s I t e W e Th
Dianora Niccolini
Did her male nudes inspire Mapplethorpe?
LADY PIRATES
Swashbuckling women of the 1700s
Sex in water
What wet sex guides don’t tell you Plus loads of slick articles and dripping wet men
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Illustration Olga Dmitrieva windfreak.deviantart.com
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Pirate women Cornelia Grey introduces the forgotten women pirates of piracy’s golden age. On a ship somewhere in the stormy Caribbean, a pirate stands, sword in hand, proudly surveying his booty. He taps his wooden leg on the deck, adjusts his eye patch and chats with a neurotic parrot perched on his shoulder. His recent prey, a young maiden in a lacy gown, observes the sea and sighs, wondering what will become of her. It’s a scene made familiar by countless films and book covers, but what if the woman’s role in this scenario were something other than the powerless victim? Dr Jo Stanley, editor of Bold in her breeches: women pirates across the ages, explains that of an estimated 5,000 pirates active during the golden age of piracy from 1650 to 1730, only three have been confirmed as women, although many more may have gone unreported. Women were, of course, always part of sailors’ and pirates’ lives on land, as mothers, lovers, wives, prostitutes, seamstresses and nurses, among other professions.
Women not welcome on ships A long-standing marine superstition had it that women onboard would anger the sea and bring bad luck. Some captains went as far as punishing smuggling a lady onboard with death. This rule only applied to flesh-and-blood women; the sea seemed fond of half-naked wooden women – a finely carved female figurehead was thought to bring any ship good fortune. The superstition was perhaps grounded in practical considerations; the presence of a woman among so many men for months at sea could lead to conflicts and tensions that might divide the crew’s loyalties. Captain Bartholomew Roberts’ pirate code of conduct of 1720, read: No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them. If any man were to be found seducing any of the latter sex, and carried her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death (...) to prevent ill consequences from so dangerous an instrument of division and quarrel.
And yet, women found ways around this prohibition. ‘Recent studies have shown that a surprising number of women went to sea,’ says David Cordingly, author of Women sailors and sailors’ women: an untold maritime history. Wives of captains sometimes accompanied their husbands and on occasion, if necessary, took over
a silver tube for urinating. Her gender was not discovered until 1706. Transvestite women of the time seemed to adopt male dress for practical reasons: because men had choices that women did not. Julie Wheelwright, in Bold in her breeches, says that these women ‘appear
Transvestite women of the time seemed to adopt male dress for practical reasons: because men had choices that women did not. command of their ships. Many freelance sailor women chose to disguise themselves as men, going on to successful careers in the navy and, sometimes subsequently, as pirates. While most were unmasked in a few months, some were able to keep their secret for decades.
Dressing as men Avoiding discovery as a woman would have been particularly difficult in the cramped environment of a ship, where no privacy was to be found at any time. Perhaps some women had an accomplice, a trusted male comrade who knew their identity and would help keep the secret – perhaps in exchange for sexual favours. Women tightly bound their breasts and wore large clothes – it wasn’t often that pirates had the chance to change their clothes, at any rate. Some got to the point of devising a false penis to avoid detection when urinating. In The tradition of female transvestism in early modern Europe, Rudolph M Dekker and Lotte C van de Pol report the case of Catharina Linck, who worked as a mercenary in Saxony in the 1700s and even got married while disguised as a man, having devised a leather-covered horn for a penis and testicles made from pig’s bladder. They also tell of Christian Davies, trooper and sutler for the 4th Dragoons of the British Army from 1693, who was said to have used
largely unconcerned about changing the society that produced the inequity which they felt most keenly in their lives... they traded roles rather than forged new ones.’ Pirating wasn’t a vocation or a stand for freedom, but simply a means for survival in the face of lack of opportunity and unemployment. Violence could grant a better lifestyle: ‘In the absence of anything else, it was a way out,’ says Dr Stanley. Piracy was a job option always available. Some women might turn to it out of familiarity after living in close contact with seafarers –fathers, brothers or lovers. Others might have turned to the sea when they couldn’t support themselves, as an alternative to prostitution or workhouses. Still others might have ended up on a ship as a result of a series of accidental circumstances. It was both chance and escape from societal constrictions that pushed two of the most famous 18th century women pirates to go to sea: Mary Read and Anne Bonny.
Famous women pirates: Mary Read and Anne Bonny Mary Read was one of many poor working class women who dressed as men to work at sea. Born in England in the late 1600s, she had to dress as a boy from an early age when her mother – abandoned by her husband before she conceived Mary –
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Aquatic erotic Does the typical wet sex guide leave you with a few questions, like how get around the water solubility of lube? Kitty Stryker sheds her swimwear and gets to the bottom of it all.
Sex on the beach sounds great in romance novels or depicted in From here to eternity, but sand in your nether regions can make for a more abrasive reality. Still, watery lust abounds in myth and pop culture – just think rakish pirates and neatly pressed seamen, or sirens singing sailors to their shipwrecked graves. And what about Mr Darcy, emerging from a lake, wet shirt clinging to his chest? If any of these tick your boxes, you’ll want to keep reading.
Back in the realm of the human, water is often used as an instrument of torture. The middle ages are notorious for the forced dunking of suspected witches by way of
constraints of our bodies by supporting us, it makes otherwise impossible sexual positions available. Don’t wrap your legs behind your head in the local swimming pool just yet. Water sex can be a struggle at times and there is lots to consider. It’s difficult to keep a condom from slipping off when submerged in water, so safer sex is difficult. Lubricant, both natural and water-based, will wash away, hindering penetrative play. Chlorine isn’t great for genitalia, and bathtubs are often not big enough for two. So what is a wannabe water nymph or merman to do after exhausting the possibilities of the jacuzzi or the showerhead?
Watery lust abounds in myth and pop culture – just think rakish pirates and neatly pressed seamen, or sirens singing sailors to their shipwrecked graves.
Aqua vitae Water is often characterised as feminine. In astrology, water signs are considered to be empathetic, imaginative and intuitive – all sensual traits. The Lady of the Lake, Nimue, rises from the depths to offer King Arthur his sword Excalibur. The ebb and flow of the tide relates to the movement of the moon, also feminine in myth and legend, and equally mysterious.
the cucking or ducking stool, or indeed the slow, agonizing anticipation of the Chinese water torture dripping on the forehead. The lack of external wounds left from torture involving water has made the practice just as prevalent in recent times, from waterboarding in Guantánamo to water cannons in riot control operations.
While it may be linked to the feminine, water isn’t always gentle, and neither are the spirits within it. Russian folklore tells of Banniki – malevolent spirits known for raping and killing those who wander into a bathhouse alone at midnight. Selkies are shapeshifters who shed their seal pelts to reveal human forms. The bean-sidhe is a female spirit who sits by the water to wash the bloody clothes of those about to die. Many bodies of water were considered to house a faery of some kind who would claim a sacrifice in exchange for safety.
Although these frightening associations can give water a powerful resonance, it is just as often used to heal as to harm. Steam rooms and hot springs have been used since Roman times to aid relaxation. Watsu is a form of physical therapy, a muscle stretching technique that uses water to help the practitioner manipulate the body. By using the body’s natural tendency to float, Watsu helps people with limited range of movement access the benefits of other types of stretching, like yoga. Similarly, because water releases us from the usual
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Relaxing into the mood
1. Do some reading Feeling a bit wet behind the ears? Let’s start with some foreplay: reading erotica to your lover while they’re in the bath or while you share a hot tub. Feeling the hot water relaxing the muscles while listening to some well-written smut can be the perfect way to start out an evening of romance, whether with a partner or without. There are actually waterproof erotic books available nowadays, with stories ranging from romantic to filthy and cater to all sorts of orientations and inclinations, so you’ll no doubt find something to soap your dish. 2. Have a spa In Sex is fun: creative ideas for exciting sex, Kidder Kaper suggests recreating a spa experience in your own home. Try drawing
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a warm, scented bath for your lover and using a warm cloth to gently massage and wash is incredibly hot. You can massage shampoo and conditioner into their hair while they relax, and use a pitcher to rinse their hair. Don’t forget to have a nice warm robe for them to step into afterwards – and a freshly made bed, just in case. 3. Toys An exciting follow up to waterproof erotica is a waterproof toy. There’s now a huge assortment of waterproof vibes out there. They’re fantastic for use on your clitoris underwater, but you can also try using it on the head of his cock, or holding the vibrator in your palm while you let the tingle travel down a finger for use around nipples or other sensitive bits. Make sure the toy you’re using is waterproof, not simply water resistant, or you’ll kill the buzz, as it were.
simply rinse away. The solution here is silicone lubricant – just be sure not to use silicone lube with a silicone toy, as they’re not compatible: the lube can dissolve the surface of silicone toys,
Your wet-and-wild toybag
• directed-flow showerhead
• waterproof vibrator (not silicone if using with silicone lube) • waterproof erotica • silicone lubricant • suction cup accessories – handles, footrests, cuffs • fluffy towels
4. Slip and slide While you’d expect a wet and wild encounter to add more, well, wetness, the opposite is true: natural and water-based lubricants
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Dianora Niccolini
Maven of the male nude Photographer Dianora Niccolini is said to have destigmatised the male nude and paved the way for major names like Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. Still photographing men at age 75, she speaks with Filament about her career. Born into a well-known Florentine family in 1936, Dianora Niccolini grew up in Italy during World War II, immigrating to the US with her family aged eight. At 18 she left home and went to New York City to study art. Her main passion was ballet throughout her late teens and early 20s. It was not until 1963, aged 27, that she took up photography.
of the great art of the Renaissance. I particularly loved Michaelangelo’s statues of men with their powerfully muscular bodies. I chose and still choose to photograph muscular men in their prime. I love to make them look like statues.’
It was working as a medical photographer, photographing the distorted bodies of those who were seriously ill, that inspired Niccolini to begin photographing the body in a state synonymous with beauty and health. She first started photographing female nudes, then moved onto what became a lifelong obsession: the male nude.
Niccolini’s early associations with masculinity were not all positive. She describes her father as ‘a chauvinist of the first order. Growing up, I remember hearing my father tell my mother that she should obey him because he was the master of the house. My mother refused and constant battles for power ensued. I think I wanted to see men in a more vulnerable, less scary way.’
Florentine masculinity
The male nude goes public
Priding herself on stretching artistic boundaries, she attributes her love of art, creative daring and the male nude to her Florentine upbringing. ‘Growing up in Florence gave me a different perspective on nudes to that of many Americans. The streets of Florence are filled with male and female nude statues,’ Niccolini recounts. ‘The museums of Florence house much
Male nude photography is now relatively commonplace, appearing in photography journals and anthologies sold in art bookshop. Forty years ago it was a different story, Niccolini says, the photographic male nude was considered homoerotic pornography. Fine art galleries refused to exhibit them. ‘I couldn’t believe that exhibiting male nude photography was
I photographed a Baptist minister’s penis in the woods in between lectures he was giving on celibacy. Issue 8
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Marriage isn’t what it used to be. Samantha Fraser looks at how those couples who choose to marry are increasingly doing so on their own terms. Illustrations by Christina Williams. Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911 It may be that as long as marriage has existed, humour poked at it has also thrived. Philosophers, poets and proverbs have commented on the trials and joys of wedded ‘bliss’ for centuries. But is marriage playing the same role in our lives now, and if not, why? Marriage was perhaps a product of agriculture, arising around 10,000 years ago as settled farming developed and staking your claim on your land, property and wife suddenly became important. According to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in Sex at dawn: With agriculture, virtually everything changed; the nature of status and power, social and family structures, how humans interacted with the natural world, the gods they worshipped, the likelihood and nature of warfare between groups, quality of life, longevity, and certainly, the rules governing sexuality. While hunter-gatherer sex had been modelled on an idea of sharing and complementarity [sic], early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction. Thousands of years later, many of us still grow up with marriage as a primary goal, even as we move further from village-based agricultural societies and ‘traditional’ relationship structures flex and develop. It’s easy to see why women up until the late twentieth century felt compelled to marry, even those like Virginia Woolf who also pioneered alternative relationship models. Marriage conferred respectability; there was little power or security without it. Even in the developed world, few careers were open to women and owning property was difficult. To own a credit card in the 1950s a woman had to have her husband’s permission, meaning she had to be married to be even considered. In the developed world these overt discriminations are now largely behind us. Women are now more likely to be the primary
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bread-winners in a relationship, for example – in the UK, 22 per cent of women are the primary or sole earners in their homes. Stay-at-home dads are surprisingly common too – in Canada, one in eight stay-at-home parents are men. So much for the prehistoric agriculturist lifestyle, then. Live-in relationships between unmarried partners are also now more widely accepted. Since relationships and roles are changing so swiftly, why are many of us still choosing to utter the words, ‘til death do us part’, and how free are we to choose who we marry and make marriage what we want it to be?
Pushing for a wedding Jacqui, 28 and Lee, 34 from Toronto, Canada have been together since 2004 and were married in 2009. Jacqui says of their differing ideas on marriage: Marriage has always been important to my husband. Conversely, it has never been something of importance to me. I genuinely believed I would never get married. A signature on a piece of paper does nothing, in my view, to change a relationship. I felt the same amount of commitment to my husband before we were married. It was her now-husband’s feelings on the matter that led to a change of heart: When [Lee proposed to me] for a third time, on the beach in Cuba, I agreed to get married as long as we didn’t have to deal with the whole production of a wedding. I proposed in turn that we do it that week while we were there and he agreed. My thinking was that if marriage was so unimportant to me but so very important to him, why would I not give him something that clearly meant so much?
There are some like Jacqui who do not feel a strong desire to tie the knot, yet are still very aware of the external influence (even from one’s own partner) to do so. This influence may not just come from immediate sources and the overwhelming prevalence of married couples. The role of weddings in popular culture could play a role in dictating how couples behave. The aspiration of growing up and having the dream wedding, suburban life and soulmate is reflected throughout countless current reality TV programmes like
that sometime in the near future they will be able to live together, but for now they seem to have found something that works for them, even though it may seem odd to others. It’s interesting to note that such a marriage, where two people live apart, would be deemed inadmissible in most countries for immigration purposes.
Many-splendored thing Johnny, 29 and Patricia, 24 from California had been dating for two years and wed in a small, non-traditional ceremony at City Hall. As Patricia is a sex worker, the couple felt
If marriage was so unimportant to me but so very important to him, why would I not give him something that clearly meant so much? Bridezillas, Rich bride, poor bride and the perfection-obsessed wedding/plastic surgery show Bridalplasty. Royal weddings like the Wills & Kate affair continue to make headlines worldwide. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is that marriage rates are falling in most western countries. The British Office for National Statistics shows marriage in Britain hitting its lowest rate since records began. Yet the Office of National Statistics, UK reports that when they researched people who were cohabiting or married in 1991 and those same people in 2001, four in five were still with the same person ten years later. With marriage per se becoming less socially expected, it follows that those choosing to marry are doing so in their own way. Jacqui and Lee, for example, live in separate residences as her career keeps her in the city while he stays in the house that they coown, located three hours away. They hope
that getting married was a way to prioritise their relationship in a real and permanent way. Patricia says, [We] view our marriage as a radical act, since prostitution is so stigmatized and many sex workers have such a hard time finding people willing to build lasting relationships. We wanted to make a statement that sex workers can be in loving, long-term, committed relationships. They also date other people, attend polyamory discussion groups and see a couples’ therapist to further improve their communication skills. When asked what value they see marriage having in today’s society, Johnny answered, Actually not much. It is an antiquated, bizarre ritual that is unfortunately necessary to enjoy certain civil rights. We are not religious and don’t care much for social norms.
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In hot water Photography Shami Kiely
Lee, 24 and Manx, 25, both of Melbourne, Australia How was the shoot? Lee Amazing! I didn’t think too much going into it, we just wanted to capture an intimate moment. It turned out better than expected! Manx So much fun! Shami made me feel so comfortable, and of course playing with Lee was tons of fun!
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Showering with a friend is clearly a great way to save water. What else would you recommend? Lee Showing with a friend lets you keep the good high pressure shower heads! Skinny dipping in the ocean or a creek could be another one. Manx Showering with more friends!
What’s your favourite water-dwelling creature? Lee Seahorses are beautiful, elegant and proud. The man takes on the parenting role in a rare gender swap – good on the blokes. Manx Platypus!
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