When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:

I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.

And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.

Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps.  Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.

And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.

(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)

I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching.  “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition.  Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail.  But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground?  What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots?  To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline…  Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots.  Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon.  But perhaps I speculate too much?

That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of  the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.

But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream.  Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion.   A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off.  Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version.  (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)

So maybe this is really Michiko’s pirate dream?