Please help me figure out what these Japanese (?) women depicted in these silk paintings are doing. They appear to be in weird contorted positions, with a suspected sexual aspect, but what? These have been hanging in the hall bathroom at my parents house for years and I always wondered what the heck these girls are doing! Warning, links contain Japanese stylized painting of geisha-looking ladies with the breasts exposed…
In [url=http://brookenelson.com/sdmb/mystery_painting_1.jpg]Painting 1, the young lady appears to be standing on her head, or otherwise upside down, with her breasts hanging out. Her eyes are closed tightly and she is biting the sleeve of her kimono.
In [url=http://brookenelson.com/sdmb/mystery_painting_2.jpg]Painting 2, this lady is in some sort of horizontal chest down position, with strange folds of fabric - is that her knee or arm or what under there? What is going on in this picture?
In [url=http://brookenelson.com/sdmb/mystery_painting_3.jpg]Painting 3, it seems this lady is just relaxing with her breasts exposed, or is there something more going on there?
[url=http://www.morra-japaneseart.com/gallery/prints/05.htm]Here is an internet art gallery that sells such paintings. Some of them dating back to the early 1700s.
Link is possibly NSFW.
EDIT: Though I realize the paintings I linked to are far more explicit than the ones you did, I still believe the women in your linked paintings are masturbating.
Very interesting, I did not know this. I have seen many with bathing scenes, but showing women masturbating in such contorted positions, I have never before seen.
The ironic thing is that (I believe) most such explicit antique prints, as shown in the links, would be censored in modern-day Japan–and even the old prints (I’ve heard) are not allowed to be reproduced in modern media.
The ladies are simply lying there. They look contorted because the art style doesn’t handle perspective very well. The pictures are all trying to look up from below to her face, or down her body from above her face, but the artist is using stylized representations of body parts which aren’t based on those angles of view.
Outside of the area that we can see, they may well be masturbating, of course. It seems likely that these are images which were cropped down.
Sage rat, I can’t tell whether you’re joking.
It’s a genre called “shunga”, yes what we’d call pornographic prints, especially. These are relatively tame-- there are a lot of very explicit ones out there-- sometimes they have little insets that show how the guy and the pro met on a bridge or something (sort of like the start of a porn film where the cable installation guy arrives at the door). In the second print, for example, you see a folded set of tissue paper behind her-- this is sort of shorthand for the sort of clean-up material a courtesan would keep on hand.
Joking about what? I’m not an expert on shunga, but I am an artist, so I could only comment on the “contorted” appearance. So if you mean to say that it’s a given that they’re masturbating, perhaps you’re right. I have no idea, I just wanted to express that it seemed plausible from what other pictures I have seen.
Oh. Oh wow. Uh oh. This marine biologist’s octopus loving daughter is now quite afraid of her dreams tonight. Wow. Uhh, thanks. You know, octopissusses changes color when excited, and, um, well, my, my my…feeling faint…
