Bittersweet Sex

Bizarre Tastes

That good, healthy, natural sex is a joy, is a sentiment I subscribe to with all my heart and body. But every now and again I also love to get away from the 'meat and two veg' aspect of quotidien sex and indulge myself in a meal that is exotic, hot and spicy. China Hamilton's Bittersweet Sex is the fruit of this artists' great technical talent and vivid erotic imagination - at their most extreme.

The Twilight Zone of BDSM

In Bittersweet Sex, China Hamilton's superb, painterly photographs also form a collection, but of a very different nature. His images deliver a dark and forbidding insight into the world of bondage, domination and sado-masochism, or 'BDSM'. There are some here we would not use on this site, for this aspect of sexuality is not everyone's pleasure or interest and could well offend. Again, with some, I thought China had gone too far, but when I saw these in context, they at once became not so much violent or scary as incredibly erotic. This transformation continued as I read the accompanying short story (for Hamilton is an accomplished writer as well as a great photographer); Bittersweet Sex became an experience like gently immersing myself naked into a warm sea at night: dark, dangerous - and intensely exciting.

"The first jet of semen splashed across her tongue as he held the ejaculating organ close to her face. Then the second pulse washed the ends of her bound breasts. He sank down on his knees, watching intently as the white liquid dripped slowly from her still open lips and from the ends of her breasts onto her parted thighs."
  "So her beating started. Her body sweated, beads forming in the small of her back. The beating took time, time during which her mind wandered, always clawed back by the fire of the next, precise cut, somewhere in the distance his voice called the number of the stroke." - from China Hamilton's text

• Fantasy or reality? This superb book of photographs explores the darkside of the sexual arena
• Where de Sade's 18th century philosophy meets 21st century reality, where lust meets pain
• Enter a world apart - China Hamilton's masterful photography captures the very essence of BDSM
• Absolutely NOT for the faint of heart! Please don't order if you think you will be offended

Awarded "Erotic photographer of the year" by the Leydig Trust.

I'm no masochist, but...

Because Hamilton is a man, and depicts beautiful women being subjected to all manner of ostensibly humiliating mistreatment, the viewer can be forgiven for thinking that the action he records is directed entirely by him. From an aesthetic point of view, this is certainly true, but the 'victim's' involvement and participation are all-important, too. Unlike his photographs, the dramas played out in this theatre of submission are anything but black and white. They focus upon the nuances of the submissives' psychological and sensory explorations, the testing of limits and thresholds. As well as hurt and discomfort, sexual arousal and fulfilment is being clearly signalled by the submissives taking part. we find China Hamilton's photographs and text in Bittersweet Sex wonderfully, disturbingly erotic, just as - without believing myself to be much of a sadist or a masochist - we find The Story of O deeply arousing. Perhaps there's a little bit of the Master and slave in all of us.