Porn for the Blind

April 14, 2010 12:02 AM

Tactile Mind is a pornography magazine for the blind. While porn for the blind has been done before, this is the first offering with raised pictures of naked bodies.
posted by grandsham (53 comments total)

Is there a reason why paper masks, paper garlands, paper belts... Is there a reason why paper arts and crafts are a common erotic theme?
posted by KokuRyu at 12:12 AM on April 14, 2010

Is there a reason why paper arts and crafts are a common erotic theme?

Tell us more. We are interested in the ways of your people.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:03 AM on April 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

Blinkin will surely subscribe.
posted by thumbsdown at 1:05 AM on April 14, 2010 [5 favorites]

I don't get it. What is the idea behind the character's costumes/outfits? Do blind people commonly have mask fetishes?
posted by Hicksu at 1:24 AM on April 14, 2010

Interesting. So.... what do moralists tell blind people will happen if they masturbate too much?
posted by MuffinMan at 1:24 AM on April 14, 2010 [29 favorites]

@thumbsdown,
Did you say "Abe Lincoln"?
posted by Phssthpok at 1:26 AM on April 14, 2010

I would not want to have to touch tactile pornography that someone else had previously been getting all tactitillated over. And at $225 CDN, those are some damned expensive pages to get stuck together.

However, I would be in favor of creating easily washable wall tiles (TacTiles?) like these. Put them up wherever blind people congregate and let the double-blind experiments unfold.
posted by pracowity at 1:34 AM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

[ macro: joke about 'rubbing one out' ]
posted by rokusan at 1:42 AM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

NSFB? A little warning, please?
posted by hypersloth at 2:32 AM on April 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

A young playboy took a blind date to an amusement park. They went for a ride on the Ferris wheel. The ride completed, she seemed rather bored.

"What would you like to do next?" he asked.
"I wanna be weighed," she said.

So the young man took her over to the weight guesser.

"One-twelve," said the man at the scale, and he was absolutely right. Next they rode the roller coaster. After that, he bought her some popcorn and cotton candy, then he asked what else she would like to do.

"I wanna be weighed," she said.

He really latched onto a square one tonight, thought the young man, and using the excuse he had developed a headache, he took the girl home. The girl''s mother was surprised to see her home so early, and asked, "What''s wrong, dear, didn''t you have a nice time tonight?"

"Wousy," said the girl.

Then the mother said "it's not right that they make fun of girls with speech impediments." There was a civil lawsuit. I'm pretty sure the outcome was discussed in a previous post.
posted by twoleftfeet at 2:44 AM on April 14, 2010 [9 favorites]

twoleftfeet: "get weighed" would be funnier than "be weighed".

I'm here to help.
posted by The Tensor at 3:13 AM on April 14, 2010 [13 favorites]

Also, in the section "didn''t you have a nice time tonight?" there is a quote mark and not an apostrophe. I fear this could derail the joke unnecessarily for strict grammarians.
posted by MuffinMan at 3:44 AM on April 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's easy to assume that people without sight are somehow neutered from other experience - that a lack of sight somehow shuts off all other senses. But even sighted people turn off the lights when they have sex. The most interesting sensual experiences don't really involve the eyes.

I light a candle. I light some incense. I stroke your back. We listen to the music. We feel the rhythm between our bodies.

If I had to choose between giving up sight and giving up sex I would give up sight.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:50 AM on April 14, 2010

"Feel good book of the year!" raves not_on_display. "Love Robot will melt your heart!"
posted by not_on_display at 4:09 AM on April 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

Braille porn is cool until you realize that those bumps aren't real.
posted by twoleftfeet at 4:28 AM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

Just feel the bumps on that!
posted by hardcode at 4:32 AM on April 14, 2010

I picture myself blind. I am forced to conclude that my main use for Braille porn would be to get adverts with the number for premium rate sex lines.
posted by jaduncan at 4:43 AM on April 14, 2010

And, obviously, this is likely to merely worsen their sight issues...
posted by jaduncan at 4:43 AM on April 14, 2010

But even sighted people turn off the lights when they have sex.

I just close my eyes and think of England.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:45 AM on April 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

I've got this terrrific idea, I'm going to sculpt three dimensional porn for blind people but I am really bad at making faces. I wonder what I can do...
posted by digsrus at 4:56 AM on April 14, 2010 [6 favorites]

If I had to choose between giving up sight and giving up sex I would give up sight.

I'm going to guess that you are relatively young. I say this with no snark intended. But wait until you are older and consider this again. I myself am 51 and would have think about this for a long time. But I believe that I would keep my sight at this juncture, given a binary choice.

As time goes by I would think that the choice will remain the same but the degree of thought necessary will drop precipitously.

At my last eye exam I was told that I have the very beginnings of cataracts. At this point they are imperceptible to me. But they will get worse. I felt a physical chill when I heard this. My sight is a precious thing. I might well rather lose my life than my sight. That's a choice I'd rather not have to make.

Pfffft. Ignore the ramblings of an old man.

Go out and get laid. Hurry!
posted by Splunge at 4:57 AM on April 14, 2010 [4 favorites]

A tactile picture of a woman dressed as a pink elephant. She wears a cardboard & paper mask, a chest plate with holes for her breasts, and paper "feet" tie around her wrists with ribbon. Her vagina is shaved, and her pregnant belly is small.

the blind have advanced tastes...
posted by ennui.bz at 5:10 AM on April 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

Someone let me know when the first copy is found in the woods.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 5:18 AM on April 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

I just close my eyes and think of England.

And this puts you in the mood? I thought you had "gotten past" your Bobby fetish, Mr. Rumpole....
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:24 AM on April 14, 2010

I n a more serious vein, I wonder if people with extreme visual disability from birth develop erotic focuses on body parts the way that the sighted do. Obviously, like most erotic things, this is hardly a constant, but many people I have known get a major erotic thrill from catching sight of -- well, almost anything -- breasts, buttocks, stomachs, necks, jawlines -- if you can see it, someone has eroticized it. But this connection isn't innate -- without sight, would anything like this develop? Are the visually disabled more likely to eroticize sounds or smells or textures? (Which the sighted do, to, but visual cues seem the most prevalent and enduring).
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:31 AM on April 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

I want to create pornography for Philip Glass with videos of a perfect faintly glowing white cone being drawn closer and closer to to an enormous black granite sphere with a sort of decelerating gravity where the closer cone gets to the sphere the slower it moves such that they never truly collide.
posted by I Foody at 5:39 AM on April 14, 2010 [4 favorites]

I might well rather lose my life than my sight.

Not trying to snark, but I don't understand how you plan to lose your life without losing your sight as well.
posted by creasy boy at 5:56 AM on April 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

...where the closer cone gets to the sphere the slower it moves such that they never truly collide.

Wasn't this a cut-scene in one of the Qatsi movies? If it wasn't, it should have been.
posted by jquinby at 5:57 AM on April 14, 2010

BBC World Service interviewed the creator of this publication and a man who has been blind since birth yesterday. The blind man, to put it lightly, tore her a new asshole.

His point, summarized: A raised photograph cannot turn me on, because a photograph itself is meaningless to me. This is a sighted person's idea of what turns me on, and it's not even close.
posted by TrialByMedia at 6:18 AM on April 14, 2010 [9 favorites]

This is a sighted person's idea of what turns me on, and it's not even close.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.
posted by Floydd at 6:29 AM on April 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

Wow. If those were actual photos and not raised images, they STILL wouldn't be sexy.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:30 AM on April 14, 2010

Wow. If those were actual photos and not raised images, they STILL wouldn't be sexy.

Wait - porn that gets sone people off others find dead unsexy. Has that ever happened before?



posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:06 AM on April 14, 2010

(sorry I lost my amusing end snark tag that was supposed to make that comment seem more funny, less asshole)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 7:07 AM on April 14, 2010

Shaved vaginas creep me right the hell out. Shaved vulvas, though, are okay (though I prefer them in their natural state). Why do so many people make this mistake?
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:48 AM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think Mel Brooks deserves some credit, as he invented this for Blinkin in Men in Tights.
posted by Malice at 7:56 AM on April 14, 2010

Look, I'm not blind or anything, but if I were, I think I'd really REALLY REALLY like (or insist on) there being some kind of huge braile disclaimer saying "THIS IS A PICTURE OF A GUY'S PENIS" before I went about touching it with my hands to find out.
posted by shmegegge at 8:17 AM on April 14, 2010

Note: Rule 34.
posted by MuffinMan at 8:17 AM on April 14, 2010

I wonder how many blind users do we have on Metafilter? Do screen reading browsers have a special User-Agent string?

This is a sighted person's idea of what turns me on

I was wondering about that. I can't imagine thermoplastic feels sexy like skin. And the scales of everything are strange, does that make it more abstract? The bunny masks, well, I have no idea what that's about but I keep thinking Bioshock.
posted by Nelson at 8:30 AM on April 14, 2010

I wonder how many blind users do we have on Metafilter? Do screen reading browsers have a special User-Agent string?

Generally, no, blind users employ a standard browser and a screen reader on top of that. So you won't be able to spot them. As you'll find if you ever try to use a non-standard browser, lots of sites don't work or won't work, so blind users use standard browsers. The WebbIE web browser for blind people I develop uses the IE WebBrowser object, so it's IE doing the heavy-lifting and approaching the web server, so to speak, and WebbIE is probably the most commonly-used web browser for blind people that isn't vanilla IE/Firefox/Safari.

I keep meaning to find out if you can detect the system "screen reader flag" is set in HTML5/DHTML/AJAX/YUI/WhateverWeb2.0, which would allow you to re-present your webpage in a more accessible format - that is, changing fancy IMG elements to which you've added carets and wordprocessing abilities back into a TEXTAREA. Oh, you can detect it in Flash, I see. Interesting.

There is a great tale of the Optacon, a mouse with a braille unit on top, being used to try to discern the Playboy centerfold (not much success, alas.)
posted by alasdair at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2010 [6 favorites]

pracowity: "I would not want to have to touch tactile pornography that someone else had previously been getting all tactitillated over."

May all your lovers be virgins!

Tactitillated is an awesome word.
posted by internet fraud detective squad, station number 9 at 8:56 AM on April 14, 2010

Who is making bas-relief porn of women peeling their outer skin away to reveal other women or men or robots or furries within, is what I want to know. Was the ADA enacted in vain?
posted by everichon at 10:07 AM on April 14, 2010

creasy boy: "I might well rather lose my life than my sight.

Not trying to snark, but I don't understand how you plan to lose your life without losing your sight as well."

That is a secret I will take with me to my grave.
posted by Splunge at 10:09 AM on April 14, 2010

@seanmpuckett

Why do so many people make this mistake?

I'm just guessing, but I bet it's because they forgot to ask you what you thought of their pubic grooming habits. Because if they asked me -- and I don't recall that happening, but I can be forgetful -- I'm sure I would have told them to do something that I now know to be wrong.
posted by Edgewise at 11:52 AM on April 14, 2010

I must have missed something. Why do people here think this is pornography?
posted by fcummins at 12:23 PM on April 14, 2010

Well there's braille Playboy (as seen in Sneakers)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:35 PM on April 14, 2010

And of course I should actually read the links...

But I'd been distracted by remembering a really disturbing horror story involving the blind and pr0n
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:42 PM on April 14, 2010

Yeah, that's about as sexy as a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet.
posted by loquacious at 12:45 PM on April 14, 2010

More seriously, I bet text erotica sites like literotica get lots of action from the blind, especially the text-with-audio posts.
posted by loquacious at 12:48 PM on April 14, 2010

I worked with blind people for 17 years. One of them was always demanding "equal rights for blind people at strip clubs." Why not?
posted by Melismata at 1:56 PM on April 14, 2010

I worked with blind people for 17 years. One of them was always demanding "equal rights for blind people at strip clubs." Why not?

There was a sketch I saw on TV years ago (Either SNL or maybe Bizarre) where I guy sits down in a theater audience. On the stage is a placard that reads "Ballet for the Blind". The guy reads the sign, and shifts uncomfortably in his seat as the lights go down. Dancers come onto the stage and, predictably, chaos ensues: missed jumps, bumping into each other, costume foul-ups, and so on. Finally the guy can't take any more.

He stands up, exasperated and starts ranting: This is wrong and exploitative! Just because they're blind doesn't mean we have to sit here and blah blah blah"

Suddenly one of the dancers stops. "We're not blind," he says. He points at the audience. "They are."
posted by jquinby at 2:15 PM on April 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

...where a guy... a guy...

EDIT BOX PLZ.
posted by jquinby at 2:17 PM on April 14, 2010

Edgewise, if you re-read that comment, I think you'll see that seanmpuckett was speaking about an actual mistake in anatomical terms (the text confusing vagina, which is internal and not usually a part that requires shaving, with vulva or pudendum, which is the external, shave-able part) rather than merely stating a preference in other people's grooming habits.
posted by Elsa at 4:30 PM on April 14, 2010

If I had to choose between giving up sight and giving up sex I would give up sight. -twoleftfeet

DUH
posted by ifjuly at 2:06 PM on April 15, 2010