You know, when I started a site called Erotic Mad Science I’m pretty sure I would not have predicted that within seven months of starting there would be at least four posts tagged “washing machine.” Shows how little I know.
As best I can tell, it’s a British commercial for a mobile phone provider in the UK.
I don’t know the movie, but this DVD cover sure seems to promise mad science:
Found here. The back-cover blurb, if perhaps in need of a little editing, does not disappoint:
Suspenders and a belt.
Image delving for sexy girl robots for a slightly different purpose from this post, I came across a number or articles on the machine depicted to the left. It’s “Moaning Lisa,” a robot which you can manipulate to bring to a simulated orgasm.
Well, that might be mad science enough just on its own, but what really caught my eye was that one of the best articles on this innovative piece of technology was on Synthtopia, a site devoted to electronic music, under the headline “Moaning Lisa: The Most Bizarre Electronic Music Instrument Ever.”
Quoth her inventor, Matt Ganucheau
The process leading to a female orgasm is a uniquely delicate challenge for both sexes leaving it a mystery to most men and women. Moaning Lisa is an instillation that examines this complex process by simplifying it into an almost game-like state. With Lisa, as in life, there are no instructions on display. This leaves each participant to discover how Lisa’s true sexual potential is unlocked.
Wow. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t embed appropriate video.
Matt Bell reporting from 2007 Arse Electronica:
The presentation of Moaning Lisa:
One has to love an audience question like, “So when are you going to release Moan Moan Revolution?”
But what really motivated posting this (somewhat) old news is that I hadn’t seen it before, and it was yet another reminder of how other people are thinking what you’re thinking. Do you remember Tanya Yip’s rather unusual experience of being taught to sing better by being played like an instrument?
Tanya whips off her sweatshirt and casts it aside, then reaches back and undoes her bra-strap. Her bra hangs loose.
TANYA
Locrian! Please…
And, following that, her subsequent fantasy of becoming an instrument?
Sometimes I wonder if there are any unexplored erotic ideas.
That Strangeways’s elaborate, will-subverting sex machine involves the temporary growing of a golden “second skin” on its occupants is a fantasy that has a pretty obvious origin, one that I and probably millions of others encountered on television as an adolescent.
Yep, Goldfinger (1964). Probably no one could have gotten away with showing that much of Shirley Eaton in a mainstream movie (or in 1970s-80s television) had she not been wearing all that gold paint. But as it was, they could, and she because the stuff that erotic dreams would be made of, for decades.
And perhaps even today. There’s at least one guy out there who’s seems to have been far more influenced by this scene than I. (Possibly Drake at Medusariffic was also more swayed by it, although Drake’s A.S.F.R. thing involves the whole woman turning to gold, rather than just being coated with it.) This is a German artist who’s taken for himself the name of Goldfinger and made an entire fetish of the gold body paint thing, with spectacular results. Like this…
And this…
And (oh my) this…
I was directed to Goldfinger’s fetish work by this post by Michael Blowhard, which links to all sorts of other good stuff, including the only example known to me oferotic Russian-language hip hop that uses an accordian. [Update on May 6, 2018: The old link appears to be long-since broken, but you can find the video in the Internet Archive. You can find the Russian-language lyrics here and the English-language lyrics (with some mistakes that don’t account for the fact that some of Nastya’s exclamations are in Italian) here.] Really.
Sometimes catching little snippets of a sci-fi story is highly evocative, perhaps even more so that the story itself. I had something of that experience a few months back when Bacchus at ErosBlog sent me a link to this posting of an oddity over at the online fanzineShowcase.
The point of the posting is to show us something form an old British magazine called Zeta, published in 1968.
This issue was devoted to a weird science fiction story. It was hard to make much sense of the story from the post (probably because the story didn’t make a huge amount of sense to begin with) but there were some intriguing text-image combinations, including one of a woman in a machine:
“What are you doing to me?” Now, I think that the story here is actually that this woman is being abducted as part of a weird all-woman Mars Needs Women-type scenario. But the curious thing is, I think I find the text-image combination here more erotic if I don’t have, or can put out of my mind the original “genuine” context, because it is at that point that one’s imagination can go to work and start filling in the story that I like.
And I hope that perhaps it can also be the basis for beginning to fill in the story you like.
It can be a serious mistake to piss off a bunch of nuns, especially if said nuns maintain enough bondage dungeons in their cloistered spaces that they have to be given numbers. Willie has already found out that you trifle with the Magdalene College nuns at your peril, and Professor Rebecca Waite is about to learn the same, the hard way. As Rope Guy over at Bondage Blog once observed
Enraged nuns. With ropes. It’s never pretty:
…they seized the luckless wight,
And began to exercise their spite;
They tied him to a tree, that grew
Within the yard, of mournful yew,
Then went to search with indignation
For instruments of flagellation.
Ouch. He’s quoting a much longer poem, the whole of which can be found here.
And as for the fact that Professor Waite is eventually delivered back to campus with her clothes freshly laundered and folded? Well, I guess I couldn’t quite avoid alluding to this little scandal…
I recall that back when I was in college a lot of my fellow students were spending time I would have spent deep in the library instead working with various complex and expensive exercise machines with the aim of making their toned and fit selves even more toned and fit. So it’s with no small pleasure that I can now pay tribute to their efforts by writing a scene in which Jill Keeney, already an athlete at Gnosis College,gets in training for her espionage mission with appropriate machines.
The sex machine is of course its own kind of thaumatophile vision, and it has inspired an entire site and at least one entire book, as well as coverage in Agnès Giard‘s Le sexe bizarre:
There’s even some fantastic video art on sex machines, such as “Noosphere,” by the sci-fi eroticist Yann Minh.
This topos too has a long and distinguished pedigree. Dare we ever forget Duran Duran’s famous Excessive Machine, which was so singularly unable to overcome Barbarella?
Sort of the high point of Jane Fonda‘s career, if you ask me, so I am happy to be able to pay tribute to it.