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Average Customer Review: Number of Reviews: 1

A reader from Oakland, CA , October 14, 1998
the encyclopedia of all things kinky in North America
A fabulous resource for anyone with a libido, this all-new 5th Edition of THE BLACK BOOK includes hundreds of listings -- from sex clubs to stores that sell whips and chains, swingers' gatherings, bed & breakfasts that cater to cross-dressers, makers of 'watersports' videos, on and on. Anything in the world that would embarrass your mother or make your pastor blush, it's in THE BLACK BOOK. Thoroughly indexed, with full contact information for every listing, and a mind-boggling array of lists in the back -- leather bars, lesbian hang-outs, sexy websites. If you believe sex should be a celebration, this book is New Year's Eve. Simply the best resource there is, on the actual practice of unusual sex.

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Average Customer Review: Number of Reviews: 2

A reader from New York , April 21, 1999
A stimulant for personal growth
The author has taken extraordinary care not to let his personal orientation shade the message he offers in this book. I highly recommend it to all on the path towards a deep understanding of their sexuality and how it relates to western society and culture.

The book begins with many personal disclaimers and definitions that should serve as a guide for those of us less informed to the need for a healthy acceptance of human diversity. Examples and metaphors for characteristic situations are given in abundance and allow the reader to intimately relate their own being to the author's observation of the kink society.

The parts of the book dealing with group and organizational structure are useful beyond their application to kink communities, and provide a framework for understanding the difficulties the kink community has in gaining acceptance as a valid part of society. The comparisons to the queer movement are especially useful and valid.

The author also nicely balances metaphysical explanations with more "scientifically" derived prose that should satisfy a broad spectrum of readers.

A reader from USA , October 4, 1997
A grand leather-bound volume - in paperback
If you are curious about the "why" of kinky sex, without having to read pornography, this is the book for you. Ivo Domiguez gives a sweeping insider's tour of the world of leather and S&M. He covers the subject not as an abberation but as another axis on the measures of human sexual orientation.

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Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews , April 15, 1993
Few books come with warning labels, but this one does: ``Readers should not attempt any of the activities described in these pages.'' Why not? Because the outr‚ sexual practices described by the Brames (she: a former therapist; he: a former archaeologist) and Jacobs (a freelance writer) in this bold report carry psychological and, often, physical risks--though that hasn't stopped the two-hundred-odd practitioners whom the authors interviewed, nor the millions who share their passion for sexual dominance and submission (D&S). All D&S, the authors explain, involves a ``power exchange'' in which one partner ``tops,'' or dominates, and the other ``bottoms,'' or submits--whether through bondage, wrestling, whipping, body-piercing, etc. After running through the history of D&S scholarship--with expected nods at Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis--the Brames and Jacob present an overview of the practices themselves, which range from infantilism (the bottom often wears a diaper and sucks on a bottle) and depersonalization (the bottom may act like an object, perhaps a footstool, or an animal, most often a pony) to spanking, cross-dressing, foot fetishes, enemas, branding, and so on. The authors discuss the methods, psychological bases, and historical backgrounds of the practices, each of which is illuminated by interviews with practitioners who speak with great seriousness (``Deliberate, ritualized infliction of what we call pain can change the relationship of the body and that which lives in the body,'' says Fakir Musafar, who likes to dangle from trees by way of ``fleshhooks''). And as for the risks, nearly all of these sexual outlaws identify with the ``Scene'' (the vast D&S underground that's highly self-aware: Two thousand infantilists, for example, belong to a ``Diaper Pail Fraternity'') and with its credo of ``Safe, Sane, and Consensual.'' The definitive guide to the sexual styles of those who walk on the wild side. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description
A breakthrough in sexual literature, this work is a complete, comprehensive user-friendly guide to and tour through the world of alternative sexual lifestyles. While the topics are exotic and erotic, the authors handle each one in a sensitive, thorough, analytical, and fascinating way and manage to explain a secret world to those who might wish to visit.

Synopsis
A breakthrough in sexual literature, this work is a complete, comprehensive user-friendly guide to and tour through the world of alternative sexual lifestyles. While the topics are exotic and erotic, the authors handle each one in a sensitive, thorough, analytical, and fascinating way and manage to explain a secret world to those who might wish to visit.

Gloria has recently published an erotic bdsm novel: Domina. 

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Reviews
The publisher, Greenery Press , June 4, 1999
Where sex, spirit and power convene...
Are sex and spirit really at war -- or can a woman achieve spiritual growth through the practice of erotic domination? Prose and poetry by women, men and transgendered inividuals of all sexual orientations, both dominant and submissive: Pat Califia, Drew Campbell, Dossie Easton, Carol Queen, Cleo Dubois and more.

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LIBRARY JOURNAL
"only Califia writes with such explicitness and honesty as to make gays and lesbians as well as straights squirm in their chairs. But while Califia can make you embarrassed, angry, indignant, afraid, or aroused, it is not without higher purpose Highly recommended."

CAROL QUEEN, THE SPECTATOR
Pat Califia "casts a loving, though never an unrealistically rosy, eye on all the different characters in the sexual diaspora"

THE ADVOCATE
"Califia has been banging out sex essays since 1979, promoting our right to fornicate, encouraging us to expand our sexual perimeters, and reminding us that our desires are not unnatural"

DOROTHY ALLISON
"Here you go-a decade of Pat Califia's journalism-lucid, intelligent, brave and true. Next time you hear someone talking nonsense about sex radicals, refer them to this book. For all the talk on the subject, Pat's definition is the only one that makes sense to me. The real thing without the tedious bullshit and self-serving obscurity that characterizes so much writing about sex."

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No reviews are available for this work. If you have read it how about sending something in?

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Reviews
Amazon.com
Ever since "masochism" was coined in the late 19th century by Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, it has been misconceived as sadism's weaker counterpart, but Anita Phillips, editor of the British academic journal Interstice, explodes this myth, arguing that masochism is "highly autonomous." The art of acting out masochistic fantasies, she writes, is "being hurt in exactly the right way and the right time, within a sophisticated, highly artificial scenario." Phillips turns to Freud, Jung, Foucault, and Leo Bersani to fashion a new definition of masochism, delving into popular culture to demonstrate both its necessity and the major influence it has had on Western culture--from David Lynch's Blue Velvet to Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose, as well as the martyred images of Christ in the New Testament. She argues that masochism is a healthy part of the human psyche that takes secret pleasure in enduring imagined and real suffering at the hands of another when the subject knows that gratification is the ultimate outcome. Written with wit and authority, A Defense of Masochism is sure to provoke some highly charged discussions on the nature of sexuality. --Kera Bolonik

From Kirkus Reviews , September 1, 1998
With wit, grace, and theoretical rigor, Phillips ventures into the black vinyl depths of masochism and reclaims it. In Phillips's view, the very concept of masochism has been misunderstood for some years now, stripped of import and culturally defused in a way that benefits no one. Her ``project,'' as she defines it, means rescuing masochism from - its identity as a sickness, as something pathological, and setting it back into the context of diverse human experience and artistic creativity.'' To do so, Phillips, editor of the British journal Interstice, takes an erudite approach, reconsidering the literary history of the term and its gradual perversion by an army of psychiatrists. From her perspective, masochism cannot be equated only with the death drive - it has too much to do with life. Perhaps her most compelling argument focuses on the link between creativity and masochism, in which she connects the intricacies of creative sublimation to the complexities of masochistic desire. And all artists, Phillips dares to suggest, are masterful masochists. In her definition, the term doesn - t apply to sexual practice so much as to a desire for self-shattering experience, anything that tears down ego-boundaries and releases the individual into a kind of bliss, or jouissance. And masochists, she writes, are adept at seeking out such experiences, taking in the whole life-and-death cocktail: hardship, pain, pleasure, ambivalence, ecstasy. Phillips makes insightful connections, using her intelligent, conversational prose style to defuse complex ideas. Although Phillips does go so far as to explain the very stylized rituals of S/M exchanges, her purpose is merely to emphasize their symbolic import, not to reduce masochism to an acceptable form of kinkiness. Instead, she hopes to simply take the pejorative sting out of the word, and examine the way in which masochism can infuse a single individual with multiple possibilities. A fascinating argument for the power of masochism to integrate Eros and Thanatos, dark and light, desire and its inevitable loss. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Synopsis
In this provocative expose, Anita Phillips intelligently rescues masochism from the clinical discourses that have named it a pathological sickness and returns it to a context of diverse human experience and artistic expression. What emerges is a fresh and fascinating modern view of longing, curiosity, and eroticism.

From the Publisher
Praise for A DEFENSE OF MASOCHISM: "It seems odd to say that a book on the subject could be charming, but A DEFENSE OF MASOCHISM is. Phillips has a wonderfully undogmatic way about her, and a sense of vigorous joy.... The relationship of sexual masochism to religious self-mortification, and the importance of masochism in romantic love are particularly well done....Riveting stuff." Carmen Callil, DAILY TELEGRAPH

"There are still a number of misconceptions about masochism and prejudices about masochism, most of which Anita Phillips dispatches here with aplomb...." --INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"[Phillips's] description of the way a masochistic fantasy plays out is both illuminating and exciting." --Sarah Dunant, THE TIMES

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Customer Comments
Average Customer Review: Number of Reviews: 2

BigOld@aol.com from Chicago, IL , September 26, 1997
A Leather Must Read
Leatherfolk's author list includes some of the best known names in the leather community: Dorothy Allison, Geoff Mains, Sam Steward, Jack Fritscher, Mark Thompson, Guy Baldwin, Wickie Stamps, John Preston, Pat Califia, Joseph Bean, and others. The writing is honest and insightful. (This is not another how-to manual.) I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking SM roots; this book offers history, politics, spirituality, and anthropological self-study.

A reader , March 11, 1997
A must read for all those in, or interested in, Leather.
This is one of the 4 or 5 books that I always recommend to people who ask me for a reference on the Leather Lifestyle, its meaning and history. This is also a book that I personally use whenever I need to refresh my own memory of events and protocol. If you have any questions about what the Leather Community is about, you need to have this book on your bedside table. --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

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Book Description
The New York Times called "Modern Primitives" "the Bible of the underground tattooing and body piercing movement." Crammed with illustrations and information, it's now considered a classic that thoroughly investigates ancient human decoration practices such as tattooing, piercing, scarification and more.

From the Back Cover
An anthropological inquiry into a contemporary social enigma--the increasingly popular revival of ancient human decoration practices such as symbolic/deeply personal tattooing, multiple piercings, and scarification. "Primitive" actions which rupture conventional confines of behavior and aesthetics are objectively scrutinized. In context of the death of global frontiers, this volume charts the territory of the last remaining underdeveloped source of first-hand experience: the human body.

Excerpted from Modern Primitives by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. Copyright © 1989. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
MODERN PRIMITIVES #12 Modern Primitives examines a vivid contemporary enigma: the growing revival of highly visual (and sometimes shocking) "primitive" body modification practices-tattooing, multiple piercing, and scarification. Perhaps Nietzsche has an explanation: "One of the things that may drive thinkers to despair is the recognition f the fact that the illogical is necessary for man and that out of the illogical comes much that is good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion and generally in everything that gives value to life, that it cannot be withdrawn without thereby injuring all these beautiful things. It is only the all-too-naive person who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one."

Civilization, with its emphasis on logic, may be stifling and life-thwarting, yet a clich-ridden illusion as to what is "primitive" provides no solution to the problem: how do we achieve an integration of the poetic and scientific imagination in our lives? There are pitfalls on both sides, and what is absolutely not intended is any romanticization of "nature" or "primitive society." After all, advances in science and technology have eliminated much mind-numbing repetitive labor, and inventions such as the inexpensive microcomputer have opened up unprecedented possibilities for individual creative expression.

Obviously, it is impossible to return to an authentic "primitive" society. Those such as the Tasaday in the Philippines and the Dayaks in Borneo are irrevocably contaminated. Besides having been dubiously idealized and only partially understood in the first place, under scrutiny many "primitive" societies reveal forms of repression and coercion (such as the Yanoamo, who ritually bash each other's heads in, and African groups who practice clitoridectomy-removal of the clitoris) which would be unbearable to emancipated individuals of today. What is implied by the revival of "modern primitive" activities is the desire for, and the dream of, a more ideal society.

Amidst an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to "change the world," individuals are changing what they do have power over: their own bodies. That shadowy zone between the physical and the psychic is being probed for whatever insight and freedom may be reclaimed. By giving visible bodily expression to unknown desires and latent obsessions welling up from within individuals can provoke change-however inexplicable-in the external world of the social, besides freeing up a creative part of themselves; some part of their essence. (However, generalized proselytization has no place here-some people should definitely not get tattoos. Having a piercing is no infallible indication of advanced consciousness; as Anton LaVey remarked, "I've known plenty of people who have had tattooing and all kinds of modifications to their bodies-who are really screwed up!")

Art has always mirrored the zeitgeist of the time. In this Postmodern epoch in which all the art of the past has been assimilated, consumerized, advertised and replicated, the last artistic territory resisting co-optation and commodification by Museum and Gallery remains the Human Body. For a tattoo is more than a painting on skin; its meaning and reverberations cannot be comprehended without a knowledge of the history and mythology of its bearer. Thus it is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition. Likewise, no two piercings can be identical, because no two faces, bodies or genitalia are alike.

These body modifications perform a vital function identical with art: they "genuinely stimulate passion and spring directly from the original sources of emotion, and are not something tapped from the cultural reservoir." (Roger Cardinal) Here that neglected function of art: to stimulate the mind, is unmistakably alive. And all of these modifications bear witness to personal pain endured which cannot be simulated. Although . . . society's machinery of co-optation gets faster and faster: a recent issue of New York Woman reported the marketing of non-piercing nipple rings ranging from $26.50 to $10,000! No doubt further attempts at commercialization lie just around the corner . . .

This book presents a wide range of rationales, ranging from the functional ("The ampallang makes sex much better!") to the extravagantly poetic and metaphysical. The archetypes have been investigated; nevertheless, numerous practitioners are absent-it was simply not possible to interview everyone of relevance. Many of the subjects started their experiments as children: before he was 12, Ed Hardy had begun coloring "tattoos" on his peers; Fakir Musafar was enacting various primitive rituals borrowed from National Geographic by the age of 14. All share in common a creative imperative to which they have yielded in a kind of ultimate commitment: they have granted their own bodies as the artistic medium of expression.

Increasingly, the necessity to prove to the self the authenticity of unique, thoroughly private sensation becomes a threshold more difficult to surmount. Today, something as basic as sex itself is inextricably intertwined with a flood of alien images and cues implanted from media programming and advertising. But one thing remains fairly certain: pain is a uniquely personal experience; it remains loaded with tangible shock value. The most extreme practitioners of SM probe the psychic territory of pain in search of an "ultimate," mystical proof that in their relationship (between the "S" and the "M"), the meaning of "trust" has been explored to its final limits, stopping just short of the infliction/experiencing of death itself.

All the "modern primitive" practices being revived-so-called "permanent" tattooing, piercing, and scarification-underscore the realization that death itself, the Grim Reaper, must be stared straight in the face, unflinchingly, as part of the continuing struggle to free ourselves from our complexes, to get to know our hidden instincts, to work out unaccountable aggressions and satisfy devious urges. Death remains the standard whereby the authenticity and depth of all activities may be judged. And [complex] eroticism has always been the one implacable enemy of death. It is necessary to uncover the mass of repressed desires lying within the unconscious so that a New Eroticism embracing the common identity of pain and pleasure, delirium and reason, and founded on a full knowledge of evil and perversion, may arise to inspire radically improved social relations.

All sensual experience functions to free us from "normal" social restraints, to awaken our deadened bodies to life. All such activity points toward a goal: the creation of the "complete" or "integrated" man and woman, and in this we are yet prisoners digging an imaginary tunnel to freedom. Our most inestimable resource, the unfettered imagination, continues to be grounded in the only truly precious possession we can ever have and know, and which is ours to do with what we will: the human body.-V.Vale & Andrea Juno