Exploring the Ring of Kerry

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1st International Welsh Cabaret Festival

Beautiful hats and fascinators
by Looby Creations

BIG thumbs up to the Sherman theatre for staging such a key event in a central venue. 

People worry that burlesque is just an excuse for sleazy strip-tease. In fact it is a witty caricature, simultaneously sending up our fears about sex and celebrating real women's bodies and our sexuality. With its gender bending politics and intellectual rather than physical strip-tease, cabaret and burlesque is an ideal filler for a theatre like the Sherman to put in between earnest new plays and the kids' Christmas shows, providing something that's adult and emotionally mature. 

Burlesque is the mirror opposite of strip-tease. In strip-tease, women are the objects of Desire; in burlesque we are the subjects of our own desire to enjoy showing our bodies and our selves. The 1st International Welsh Cabaret Festival showcased this particularly well with the inclusion of several male acts - who were not stripping for women in a reverse strip-tease. They were often engaging with more feminine sides of themselves, e.g. through balletic movements - again providing a subjective celebratory vision of feminine sides to identity. 

Burlesque is a liberatory subversive artform, of the kind the critic Bakhtin called carnivalesque. 

OK, enough of that, now for what I thought of the actual festival:

Consent

This post isn't exactly a review, rather it's to circulate a cool comic strip about 'consent'. The comic is aimed at guys, it explains that a woman's body is her own, and men have zero rights in it. It's helpful for women too. 

I run this blog partly to provide some fun that encourages safe sex, and shows young lads that it's possible to get a lot more in life if you ask for it politely than if you rudely try to blag women into giving you pictures of their boobs for your phone. (See my review of Peter Morgan's work.) I also run it to encourage young women to have confidence. If we as women confidently say No more often, men may realise that No does mean No and f*ck off when we don't want them bothering us. Yes, men must do more to respect women's consensual rights. As women we can take courage and be more assertive. 

From Everyday Feminism: link to rest of comic below.

Beat-Off Buddies

"Fishnet Stockings" polish 
as reviewed on HerCampus.

One of the things I like about this story by Carnevil9, is how it immediately leaps into the sex. We are straight in the action, then there is an asterism (new word I learnt this week! meaning row of asterisks) and then we get good back story.

An Anal Fantasy for You

It's not hard to guess what Rimminglover is into, LOL. 

In this tender appeal, he spells out his passion for arse. If you were wondering how to go about anal sex, here is a poetic way to find out. Rimminglover writes about what he would like to do to his lover and lingers in detail on how he would go about fingering and fucking her.