Tag Archives: harem

Harem bath 3D

Well, poor Marie, her usefulness in Colonel Madder’s plots now at an end, ends up getting haremized for her troubles.  And her new life — curiously paralleling Iris Brockman’s — begins with a bath.

There are worse ways to get started, I suppose, even if Marie’s experience isn’t exactly smiley.

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(Proximate image source GoodShit.)

Now harems and baths are obviously a subject that appeals to me, since they’ve turned up in posts here before, illustrated either with classical art or photographs.    For a bit of visual inspiration here I’ll turn in another direction, which is CG art.  I found a relevant example in a set of CG harem pictures at site called verywierd.com (yes, that is the correct spelling).

Now this is not ideal in any number of ways, but there’s still some appeal here.  CG is getting better all the time, and for the thaumatophile or anyone else who is into things that are so weird that they would be prohibitively expensive (or just plain impossible) to actually photograph or film and costly to create as hand-drawn art, it remains the great visual creation hope.  So let’s not be too critical of CG just yet — let’s lend it a hand instead.

And hope that perhaps it will soon get as good as hand-drawn art.

(Found at  The Abyss.) [Faustus May 11, 2018: The site appears to be lost.]

I was inducted into a harem…

What does it say about morality that so much human energy is put into imagining someplace where we are rid of it? All four of the stories in Study Abroad involve a certain leap into some realm beyond good and evil. and Bridget’s involves one into an imagined world that has had a pretty deep grip on the erotic consciousness — at least of Christian Europe and its cultural offshoots — for hundreds of years.  In the age of Google, it takes a matter of seconds to peer back into the artistic record and see the story.  I make a tiny, tiny nod to political correctness in imagining that Bridget goes there of her own “free will,” (or does she?  — there are layers of complicating detail), but otherwise, I simply indulge the story whose record is so abundantly available. The visual image of nubile slaves, up for sale, voyeristically inspected:

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904), "The Slave Market"

That of the odalisque, a subject so popular in European painting that there must be hundreds of examples, of which this is perhaps the most famous:

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 -1867), "La Grande Odalisque"

The image of life in a place of sensual indulgence:

Gérôme again, "The Harem Baths"

And I must of course note, that this visual tradition continues in cinema, and interestingly not just as male voyeurism.  Perhaps the first important male sex symbol in film, Rudolph Valentino, really broke into the public consciousness in The Sheik, a story of the abduction and seduction of an aristocratic white woman in the mysterious orient.

Rewatching _The Sheik_ just recently I was struck at the extraordinary charisma that Valentino projects through the screen, even through flicker, silent, sepia-toned images now almost 90 years old. What male Hollywood actor working today would even be fit to shine Valentino's shoes?

And the whole theme continues onward.  See related Erosblog posts here, here, here and here. Who am I, humble scrivener that I am, to decline to expropriate such a tradition?

The dance comes from here…

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children” (1927)

And with respect to Bridget, where did you think the dance came from, or where might it be going?

Hans Zatzka (1859 - 1945), "The Harem Dancer"

Gaston Guédy (1874 - 1955), "Dançarina de harém"

A theme continued in a more modern visual idiom here, here, and here.  Enjoy!