During lunch last week with Charlie Anders, Annalee Newitz, Mary Anne Mohanraj, & Jed Hartman,* I mentioned Figleaf's erotic photography. I think Annalee asked me to send her a link, but as long as I'm going on at some length, I may as well post.

From an intellectual perspective, the interesting thing about his project is his interest in supplying erotica for the straight female gaze. There's subtlety involving belts, and sometimes a little tale putting the viewer just offstage.

Figleaf also blogs about patriarchy, consent, evolutionary psychology's just-so stories, masturbation, media critique, sex work, desire, heteronormativity, contraception, taboos, sexual ethics, lust, what have you. He's a straight married man, a parent, and I find his writing earthy and smart. I like his style. Sometimes the photo is less interesting than the text:

So... a lot of guys get a little panicked when their partner asks if this or that makes her butt look fat.

The proper answer, I realized long ago, is to snuggle close behind her, wrap your arms politely around her waist, bury your nose in her hair and inhale her scent, pull your hands back to grip her hips, pull her firmly but not roughly against you, and sigh...

"Mmm, could you repeat the question?"

The variety of Figleaf's approaches to questions of sex -- cerebral, sensual, critical, playful -- comes out in his musings on posturing in porn. "[A]n *awful* lot of the cliché poses we associate with sex would actually be *terrible* positions to be in *during actual* sex." Figleaf thinks about his own experiences, and about culture and customs, and industrial vs. amateur, then addresses the reader:

Let's just say that were we ever to do more together than drink coffee and shake hands you might find me taking you by the hand, or shoulders, or by the hips, or thighs, or even hair and moving you to our mutual best advantage -- I can guarantee that *even if* for some reason there was a camera or audience in attendance we'd still be arranging ourselves for feeling, rather than necessarily looking, our best.

So far in this entry, I've rather conspicuously avoided discussing my brainstem response to Figleaf's erotica. Despite putting in time at Salon, UC Berkeley, WisCon, and the like, I'm still too shy to talk about my wiring on the public Net. But I can share this: looking at Figleaf's entries has trained my eyes to better appreciate the male form, and to better see erotic subtext in the positions of male bodies.

So when Jodi Hilton of the New York Times photographed a supine Randall Munroe in his plastic-ball pit, his inviting eyes cast upwards at the viewer, a nervous smile quirking his lips, one bent denim-covered knee showing and one hidden... sure, that picture was perfectly worksafe. Except it wasn't.

* Funniest moment to them: my face crumpling as I realized Annalee was right about the problematic portrayal of women in Anathem, or our invention of the term "Wunderscheisse" to describe things that are simultaneously annoying and awesome. Funniest moment to me: during a conversation about Star Trek-related porn, one person's offhand comment caused her partner to pause for several seconds in lifting a forkful of food, noodles arrested halfway between plate and mouth.