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Category / How to start a subculture

How One Frenchman Became the World’s Most Beloved Lesbian Poet

We thought we’d heard it all when it came to imposters. Clearly, we hadn’t met Pierre Louÿs. The French writer had Europe’s literary scene eating out of the palm of his hand, and was decorated as a Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’honneur in his lifetime, two of his country’s highest honours, that would never have been awarded…

Flying Girls: A Compendium of WW2 Airplane Pin-Ups

Since the Egyptians had their chariots, the Vikings had their ships and the Zulu warriors had their shields, man has been decorating his instruments of war. War art traditionally served as a protection from evil, to receive supernatural powers from the gods and give a noble identity to each warrior. Come the twentieth century, the tradition continued,…

Lost Fetish Files of Mid-Century S&M

Note: this article includes some sexually explicit and graphic content. There’s something especially spicy about mid-century, femme-dominant S&M — and that’s saying something, considering Sadomasochism has been shaking things up in the bedroom since (roughly) 1785, when the French philosopher Le Marquis de Sade first published his erotic fantasy novel, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The…

Cinema’s First Sex Symbol was also America’s First Goth

From Mae West to Eva Green, the cinema archetype of the ‘femme fatale’ has fascinated and frightened audiences since Hollywood’s golden age. But nearly a century before Sharon Stone bore all as the deadly seductress Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, silent-film actress Theda Bara, the silver screen’s very first sex symbol, hypnotized filmgoers with her…

The 1970s Political Activist Who Invented Penis Pants

Introducing Eldridge Clever, Presidential candidate, writer, political activist, a prominent early leader of the Black Panthers, oh and inventor of the penis pants. The fashion statement the world never asked for, solved all sorts of problems according to their late inventor, Eldridge Cleaver, such as ‘fig-leaf mentality’… “Clothing is an extension of the fig leaf –…

Ladies’ Smoker Night, 1941

I think I need to step up my ladies’ night game– these gals I found filed away in the Life archives are putting us to shame! In June 1941, Life magazine’s photographer Nina Leen attended a women’s “smoker”, the term usually reserved for a men-only social gathering. The concept flabbergasted local menfolk in Milford, Connecticut, who were strictly uninvited. The…

The Last Japanese Mermaids

For nearly two thousand years, Japanese women living in coastal fishing villages made a remarkable livelihood hunting the ocean for oysters and abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls. They are known as Ama, and if you’ve dipped into Messy Nessy’s archives, you will have already met the few ladies still left in Japan that…

Paradise Lost: The Hippie Refugee Camp

Let me tell you about a place called Taylor Camp, a tropical ocean-front utopia without rules, politics or bills to pay. Anti-establishment all the way, clothing was optional and decisions were made according to the “vibes”. It was the ultimate hippie fantasy. Taylor Camp began in the Spring of 1969, with thirteen hippies seeking refuge…

We Went to a Parisian Sex Club for Swingers So You Don’t Have To

It’s a phone-less world down there in the underground lair of Les Chandelles, the infamous “club échangiste” – and something to be appreciated in itself before we get into the stuff you really want to know about. Inhibitions (and Instagram) are to be left above ground, and your time spent down there is intended exclusively…

How Can Paris Let this Museum of Music Treasure Close Down?

I wasn’t exactly expecting the world when I was emailed by a local record collector urging me to visit an endangered private music museum in Paris at the foot of Montmartre. The Phono Museum? Never heard of it. Within my network of vinyl fanatic friends and small museum hunters, surely we would have come across such…

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