A movie poster for the 1986 film ‘Reform School Girls’ with Wendy O. Williams, Sybil Danning and Andy Warhol pal Pat Ast (pictured prominently above).
 
The “WIP” (“women in prison”) film genre has several sub-genres ranging from nuns in prison to an interpretation favored mostly by European filmmakers who loved to include Nazis in their chick-centric prison flicks. Italy, Germany, and France put out quite a few WIP films back in the 70s and 80s, as did the U.S. of A. and the Philippines. When the first women in prison films made their way to the big screen they were more dramatically inclined. One of the very first films to tell the tale of a girl behind bars is Hold Your Man starring the profitable on-screen power couple of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. The film is full of some pretty salacious stuff. Thankfully, this was 1933 and Hollywood films were still getting away with more on screen prior to the enforcement of rules laid out in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 being widely adopted within the industry as it wasn’t really wasn’t policed until late in 1934. Which made a film like Hold Your Man—whose plotline involved a gorgeous blonde getting stuck behind bars while she’s knocked up with her lover’s baby—possible.

You can find WIP films in every decade but because both the 1970s and 1980s are so near and dear to my heart—and because I’d quite frankly love the opportunity to do another one of these posts—we’re going to stay put in those two consecutive decades. The genre can be pretty strange and runs anywhere from girl-heavy drama which would generally fall into the “redemption” film category to straight-up pornography. In the 1950s WIP films were heavily influenced by pulp fiction novels but it wouldn’t take long for the films to evolve (or devolve perhaps) into exploitation flicks with lots of nudity, sex, violence, rape, and notably deviant plotlines.

The popularity of the genre and its many sub-genres soared during the 70s and 80s which would bring us , Chained Heat starring teen queen Linda Blair and Wendy O. Williams’s prison warden in Reform School Girls. So now that I think I’ve given you more than a few compelling reasons to take a deep dive into this strangely complex film genre, I’ve posted a large selection of WIP movie posters that are mostly NSFW as you would expect them to be.
 

‘The Big Bird Cage’ with Pam Grier and Sid Haig
 

A German movie poster for ‘99 Women.’
 
More after the jump…

 
I suppose it was just another ordinary evening over at Bernard Montorgueil’s apartment. In the front room, there was gathered the usual array of flagellants, sadists, masochists, onanists, fellators, fellatrix, cunning linguists, sodomites and tethered cross-dressers. Each, in their own way, happily enjoying a quiet evening of sex and torture. Most of the men almost naked apart from their stockings and six-inch heels and the glitter of their nipple clamps and cock rings. The women, more sensibly, wore beautiful evening gowns, dress coats or fine tweed skirts and jackets matched by a stout pair of brogues.

It was just as Msr. Montorgueil had imagined it. For he had imagined it all and set it down on paper with a pencil. For this was what Msr. Montorgueil did most days and evenings sitting at his desk—draw pictures of men and women enjoying the carnal delights of S&M.

No one knows the true identity of Bernard Montorgueil. He was so mysterious a figure that “Montorgueil” does not merit even a full entry in Wikipedia. What little is known is that he (or she) was a French artist who produced the bulk of their erotic writing and artwork during the 1920s and 1930s. The work mainly focussed on the world of femdom-malesub with a dash or two of homoerotica and some forced feminization. Montorgueil’s work became very popular in the 1950s, where it was circulated around the underground fetish BDSM community. The drawings were originally produced in pencil and later colored for publication in the 1970s when they were collated into the volumes Dans La Maison des Amazones, Madame de Varennes and Barbara, and Les Quatre Jeudis. These books are long out of print though can be found on eBay. More recently, an edition Dressage was published.
 

 

 
More of the mysterious Bernard Montorgueil’s erotica, after the work…

Woody Allen about to pummel actress Bettina Brenna with a pillow in ‘Playboy,’ February 1969.
 
Shindai, the ancient art of Japanese pillow fighting, is also known as “bed fighting.” Which while it sounds sort of kinky, it also sounds like it could get a little dicey if you were actually angry at the person you were going to tangle with. And I’m pretty sure if the word “fighting” is involved somebody is fucking mad at someone else so there’s that to consider. Apparently going to battle with pillows is/was considered a way for couples to navigate through a domestic dispute quickly so they could get on to the “make-up sex” part after becoming aroused by pummeling your partner with pillows. Okay.

The sexy therapeutic process works like this—let’s say that your partner had been unfaithful to you. Instead of heading off to divorce court or worse, both parties engage in a pillow fight. After cutting a small slit in each pillow and a few brief ceremonial-type acknowledgments the battle can begin. If the cheater’s pillow loses all of its feathers first, they are obliged to “bow down” and touch their mate’s toes before assuming a fetal position so that the victor can beat the crap out of them with their full pillow. Which is pretty much exactly what photographer and author Jerry Yulsman—who often shot Jack Kerouac—and his pictorial of Woody Allen and actress Bettina Brenna is all about. The gorgeous actress (who is 6’1 to be precise) had just appeared in the 1968 film Funny Girl and her magazine spread with Allen was captured for Playboy in the February 1969 issue (Volume #16, No. 2).

Believe it or not, Shindai has evolved into an actual competitive sport is which is as nuts as it sounds. If you’d like to learn more about Japanese pillow fighting (because of course you do) there is a book that was published back in 1965 by author Ellen Shumaker called Shindai: The art of Japanese bed-fighting that according to one reviewer is “a light, pleasant read with lots of pictures.” Some of the images that follow are NSFW.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Emanuele Taglietti painted some 500 covers for various fumetti or Italian comics during the 1970s. His work featured on such best-selling adult sex and horror fumetti like Sukia, Zora the Vampire, Stregoneria, Ulula, Vampirissimo and Wallestein, among many others. At one point he was producing ten paintings a month for these titles.

Taglietti’s sex and horror paintings often featured recognizable charcters/actors from popular horror movies like Christopher Lee’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, The Plague of the Zombies, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. According to Horropedia, Taglietti had “a fixation” with the actress Ornella Muti on whose likeness he based the character Sukia.

Born in Ferrara, Italy, in 1943, Taglietti was the son of a set designer who worked with film directors like Michelangelo Antonioni—who was also apparently his cousin. His father regularly took the young Taglietti on to movie sets introducing him to directors, actors, and crew.

Deciding to follow his father into the film business, Taglietti attended art college where he studied design. He graduated and then enrolled at film school in Rome. He became an assistant director working with directors like Federico Fellini and Dino Risi. But this wasn’t enough for the young Taglietti. By the 1970s, he switched careers to become an illustrator for the incredibly popular sex and horror fumetti.

Taglietti signed up with Edifumetto, where he worked at designing and painting covers. His style was influenced by the artists Frank Frazetta and Averardo Ciriello. His paintings successfully managed to convey thrilling narrative with highly alluring and erotically charged action. By the 1980s, fumetti were no longer as popular. Taglietti moved onto painting and teaching. He retired in 2000 but continues to paint.

A beautiful must-have book of Taglietti’s work called Sex and Horror was published in 2015. It’s one that is well worth seeking out.
 

 

 
See more of Taglietti’s delightfully lurid artwork, after the jump…

The cover of ‘Nights of Horror’ (volume one) illustrated by Joe Shuster.
 
In 1923 Joe Shuster and his family moved away from their home in Ontario, Canada to Cleveland, Ohio. There as a youth he crossed paths with another kid his age Jerome Siegel who went by “Jerry.” The two quickly bonded over their mutual love of comic books and science fiction. They spent copious amounts of time reading anything related to the world of sci-fi they could get their hands on as well as taking in movies anytime they could.

The boys’ lives would remain closely intertwined as they entered high school where they would collaborate on a fanzine they dubbed Science Fiction. The duo split the duties of writing and illustration with Shuster taking on the drawing part and Siegel composing the stories. In addition to their own work, the fanzine also published stories written by Ray Bradbury who was just a few years ahead of Joe and Jerome age-wise at the time and a man who earned many nicknames in his life (such as “Mr. Science Fiction” by coining the abbreviation “sci-fi”) Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman’s life is worthy of several posts here on DM but we will have to leave that for another day as the story concerning Joe Shuster involves the “holy grail” of comic books Action Comics No. 1, murderous neo-Nazis, lots of sadomasochist drawings and Superman, arguably the most famous comic book character of all time that was originally conceived of by Shuster and Siegel.

Superman evolved from a character who was originally a bad guy: after suffering side effects from secret science experiments he gained various superpowers such as flying, and being impervious to things like bullets. He was also overcome by the desire to rule the Earth. Later it seems that Siegel would get the idea to make Superman a do-gooder and after getting together with his pal Joe the story of Superman as we all know it was born. Sadly, the rest of the story concerning their partnership and an idea that should have left them filthy rich involves getting ripped off, lawyers, and bad times. So let’s jump to something much more pleasant that Joe Shuster did in later in his career, fetish art.
 

An illustration by Shuster from ‘Nights of Horror’ (volume three) of a couple getting stoned that bear uncanny resemblances to “Jimmy Olsen” and “Lucy Lane” from the ‘Superman’ comics.
 
Both Shuster and Siegel had lots of side-projects writing and drawing for different magazines and comics. But unlike his friend and business partner Shuster also illustrated scenes of soft and hardcore BDSM and giant-sized women for a porn magazine popular back in the 1950s called Nights of Horror though he never signed his name to any of the work. At the time Shuster was flat broke so when the opportunity presented itself he took it out of desperation. It’s also said that Shuster felt that the explicit artwork wasn’t what he wanted to be remembered for thus his reluctance to attach his name to it. The 1950s were a very different time when it came to the idea of actions that were considered sexually deviant and Shuster’s illustrations for Nights of Horror absolutely fell into that category and then some in the eyes of most people. Later Shuster’s illustrations would become a matter of extreme controversy resulting in a case heard by the Supreme Court centered around indecency. In yet another turn of unfortunate events for Shuster a scumbag gang of neo-Nazis in New York calling themselves the “Brooklyn Thrill Killers” blamed their horrific actions on comic books, specifically Nights of Horror and as many copies of Nights of Horror that the authorities could get their hands on were destroyed. Even at his lowest, poor Joe Shuster just couldn’t catch a break.

Another interesting tidbit about Shuster’s sexy surreptitious illustrations is that they look a whole lot like characters from Superman’s orbit. There’s even a rendering of what distinctly appears to be Superman’s goofball buddy, Jimmy Olsen getting stoned with his girlfriend Lucy Lane (Lois’ sister, pictured above). Thanks to the Supreme Court debacle issues of Nights of Horror are hard to come by and generally run as high as $600 for a lone copy. Thankfully, Shuster and his excellent R-rated illustrations have been the subject of several books. IVrecommend the 2009 book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. The images from Shuster’s fetish phase below are absolutely NSFW.
 

One of Shuster’s giant girls and a whip.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

The great Kurt Vonnegut.
 

“An erect penis has no resemblance to the kind that they have seen on statues in parks or on small boys paddling the seashore.”

—Authors of An ABZ of Love, Sten and Inge Hegeler on what it is like seeing a penis for the first time.

 
Inge and Sten Hegeler were a bit like the Danish version of Masters and Johnson, the transformative American research team that revolutionized human sexuality. Hegeler was a psychologist and author who specialized in sexology. In 1948 Hegeler published the book Hvordan, Mor? ( How, Mother?) which was considered one of the first books of its kind to detail such direct, honest advice on how to provide sexual education to kindergarten-aged children. After getting his own psychology practice up and running he and Inge would go on to publish a few other notable books including one that Kurt Vonnegut kept on his own library shelf, An ABZ of Love.

Vonnegut was so taken with the publication that he wrote a letter to his wife letting her know where she could “find” the book in his library. The book itself, which was self-published by the pair in 1962, was exhaustive when it came to its range of information. And I mean they covered everything including topics that were (and are still by some) considered taboo which made ABZ a rather boundary-smashing publication that voiced a clear, positive opinion about equality and its relation to gender, color or one’s sexual identity. They were also fond of using proper words such as “cock,” “pussy” and “fuck” to describe specific actions or attributes within the book’s nearly 300 pages. No wonder Vonnegut adored it enough to write his wife a love-letter of sorts about it. In fact, here’s a short epigrammatic passage from ABZ that sounds a whole lot like Vonnegut wrote the advice himself.

So there are two paths we can take: one is try to deny and suppress our emotions and force ourselves to think sensibly. In this way we run the risk of fooling ourselves.

Hi ho. At this point, it seems pretty clear to me that everyone should own a copy of An ABZ of Love. It is also quite possible that there are many among us that could use a little refresher course on the ins and outs of what we all think about every single day, sex, as it just doesn’t come in one flavor. You know like vanilla? I’ve included many illustrations by Krag from the vintage book, which has been published in fifteen different countries, along with their often amusing captions below. Many are NSFW.
 

Text reads: “It is possible to be lonely in a group, too.”
 

 
More after the jump…

 
I was a little squicked out when the auction of locks of Marilyn Monroe’s hair was announced last year, so this is just straight up weirding me out.

The same auction house, the legendary Julien’s (“THE AUCTION HOUSE TO THE STARS!”) has announced its latest in a series of Hollywood Legends auctions. this one featuring loads of property from the estate of Patrick Swayze. Especially, um, devoted fans can bid on his hockey uniform from Youngblood which, yes, includes athletic supporters, and on his banana hammock from Keeping Mum.
 

A still from Keeping Mum. Before you go drawing any conclusions just based on that, Rowan Atkinson and Dame Maggie Smith were in the film, too.

In addition, as seems to be the case with practically every celebrity auction they do, there’s a passel of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, much of which is pretty run-of-the-mill, until you get to her chest and pelvic x-rays.
 

 

 

 

 

A Marilyn Monroe pelvic X-ray dated November 9, 1954. Information ghost printed in the upper right of the X-ray reads “Cedars of Lebanon Hospital/Drs. E. Freedman and S. Finck/ Name Di Maggio, Mrs. Marilyn/ No. 50612 Date 11-9-54/ Ref. By Dr. L. Krohn.” Dr. Leon Krohn was Monroe’s gynecologist.

17 by 14 inches

The provenance is interesting—“As a radiology resident at Cedars, a young doctor obtained this X-ray and one other, of Monroe’s pelvis. When he taught students, he used these X-rays to ensure that they were paying attention.“ OK, actually pretty funny, but I’d prefer not to speculate on why else someone would collect something like this. Images of Monroe’s chest have been around since 1947, though this is another level of exposure beyond mere toplessness. As for Ms. Monroe’s pelvis, that remained a bit more demure. But as I’m neither a woman nor a doctor, I’m out of the loop on gynecological techniques and instruments, and so I’m in the dark as to what exactly the apparent device is in the x-ray. Are we seeing an IUD insertion here? (Asking for a friend.)

Anyway, the auction takes place on April 28th. If you’re going to bid on these Monroe items, good luck to you, I guess, and please keep your reasons to yourself.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
You can buy two locks of Marilyn Monroe’s hair. Seriously.
Psychedelic Day-Glo screenprints of Marilyn Monroe by ‘Last Sitting’ photographer Bert Stern
A Marilyn Monroe-themed house is up for sale and it’s batshit crazy-looking

 
In 2013 Spike Jonze released a daring and fascinating movie called Her, set in an indeterminate future in which Theodore Twombly, ably played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with the operating system on his phone, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who goes by the name Samantha.

According to recent research undertaken by Mindshare and J. Walter Thompson, a surprising number of smartphone users fantasize about just such a relationship. The report, which is titled “Speak Easy: The Future Answers to You” (does it?), covers a wide array of research into user attitudes about speech recognition and natural language processing with a focus on voice hardware products such as the Amazon Echo.

In a section called “Craving Intimacy,” the report looks at the desire of users to have a “deeper connection” with their “voice assistants.” A majority of users (60%) understandably affirmed that vastly improved comprehension on the part of the devices would greatly increase the propensity to use it.

 
This rapidly becomes a tricky area, the report’s authors point out, because as the abilities of the voice assistants and the integration of services increase, the potential for fraud or abuse also increases dramatically, which means that the services require a significant degree of trust—and trust is an inherently emotional aspect of human life that also requires a willingness to be vulnerable. As one focus group member said, “You can build trust by, hopefully, making sure no one’s ripped off while giving them access to do amazing things.”

Is it any wonder, then, that some users have started to fantasize about a sexual relationship with Siri or Alexa? Not surprisingly, according to neuroscience experiments discussed in the report, “the emotional response to voice assistants is considerably lower than for both a face-to-face human interaction and a touch or text interface,” which is chalked up to the “rudimentary personalities” of Alexa or Siri, but users’ comfort level with their assistants increased with the benefit of further exposure and familiarity with them.

And where familiarity and comfort go, intimacy and sex cannot be far behind:
 

Over a third (37%) of regular voice technology users say that they love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person. Even more astonishing is that more than a quarter of regular voice technology users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant.

 
To be precise, “26% of regular voice tech users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant.”

In October, the Telegraph reported that personal voice assistants were frequently being used by “some men” who wanted to “talk dirty.” Ilya Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, a company in the UK, noted that the behavior was seen most often in “teenagers and truckers without girlfriends”:
 

This happens because people are lonely and bored…. It is a symptom of our society. As well as the people who want to talk dirty, there are men who want a deeper sort of relationship or companionship.

 
Eckstein also stated that such people “want to flirt, they want to dream about a subservient girlfriend, or even a sexual slave.”

A woman tasked with working on that Microsoft’s Cortana product has said that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” addressed the voice assistant’s sex life. 
 
via Dazed
 

 
Part the First, being the tale of a haunting in rural England in the 1920s.

Almost a hundred years ago now, out on the fields and winding lanes by Curry Rivel in Somerset, there came stories of the ghostly apparition of a woman who walked at night. A woman dressed in black, her face sinisterly veiled. It was said that anyone who ever looked upon this specter’s face, looked into her blackened soulless eyes, would be struck dead on the very spot where they stood.

Who was this ghost?

Some said she was the spirit of an old governess who had lost her charges in some terrible accident—most likely drowned by the old weir—who now roamed the misty meadows and hedgerows looking for their bodies to bring them home once more. Others said she was an evil wraith looking to snare the unwary soul.

When children wouldn’t go to sleep at night, their mothers told them to close their eyes or the woman in black would find them out and feast upon their bones.

Terror gripped the sleepy village. It became so bad that some would ne’er leave their houses after sundown for fear of meeting the dreaded woman in black.

For four years, this ghostly figure was seen by moonlight drifting over fields, wandering brambled lanes, waiting at the crossroads for hellbound travelers.
 

 
Then one night, a group of men gathered in the local pub, the King William Inn. The sightings of the woman in black had been more frequent of late and the villagers said that when the black specter is seen three times in a week someone was going to die….
 
Find the secret of the ghostly woman in black, after the jump…

 
From its sweatshop hidden somewhere in deepest depths of New York’s Chinatown, the evil Super Sucklord has been pumping out a range of highly collectible bootleg figurines, art works, trading cards and pop culture mashups since 2015.

The Sucklord is artist Morgan Phillips who is the boss of toy company Suckadelic—best known for its range of film & TV spin-off figurines in particular its Star Wars collectibles. Among the many other goodies available are a series of one-off artworks created by the Super Sucklord called Sucpanelz.

Sucpanlez feature Action Figures paired with vintage print magazine covers, adverts and print materials which are then mounted onto wooden panels. Currently there are two series available: Celebrity Sucpanelz—featuring the likes of G.G. Allin, Kanye, Robin Williams and Johnny Cash among others, and Sex & Drugs Sucpanelz—which is kinda more self-explanatory.
 

 

 
See more of Super Sucklord’s scintillating Sucpanelz, after the jump…