A long time ago I had a girlfriend who could twirl tasseled pasties in opposite directions. She probably could do it forever. When I first found this out, I was a 22-yr-old Marine Lieutenant and, though I was drenched in self-confidence, it still made me pause to think I was involved with a woman who not only had spent the time to practice the obscure kinematics of counterrotating elastic masses, but actually owned pasties. To the best of my knowledge she had no professional use for such a skill.

From the viewer's perspective the one on the left went clockwise. The horizontal oscillation was matching, while the vertical was in counterpoint. That is, the pasties were a constant horizontal distance apart, but varied radically in the vertical. In order to initiate and then maintain the motion, the superstructure (ribcage) would have to have a sine-function horizontal motion, with a similarly timed rotation about the breastbone for the vertical motion, at a minimum, and probably some fore and aft motion at least to initiate the whole thing. I don't believe she used her hands at any point. (And she wasn't all that big, anyway.) Comparatively I'd guess this is somewhere near the difficulty of riding a bicycle to learn, and, once learned, about the same to practice.

But riding a bicycle is something that can routinely be done in public.

A few years ago, on the TV show, Northern Exposure there was reference to "the Butterfly Trick." Maybe it was "technique." Maybe it was another TV show. "The Butterfly Trick" was an implied sexual technique, and was of the category "secret knowledge." Bicycle riding is a public skill. Twirling tassels falls somewhere in between. It is not really sexual in nature. Nor is it public. Breasts are, after all, only secondary sex organs, and their primary sexual function is tactile (or maybe visual...). Their function isn't usually kinetic. I think. But in our culture, breasts aren't exactly public.

I believe mirrors serve a different function for women than they do for men. My use of a mirror consists of using it to align a straight razor on those few occasions when I shave my neck, and once in awhile I look into the mirror and smile real big - this convinces me once again that smiling isn't something I want to do in public.

But though it's of limited use for me, I often send models to the mirror to observe themselves. Varying lights, conditions of the face, see how to present to a camera, posture, etc. I imagine that the tassle twirling thing of my old girlfriend probably got started in front of a mirror. Now one of the things guys like about breasts is that they have some interesting motions, not apparently related to the rest of the torso. Anyone who's ever seen 10, the Bo Derek movie with the slow motion parts, understands that. Anyway, I figure she was in front of the mirror seeing if running in place made her look like Bo Derek (I may have the chronology wrong here, but you get the idea), got some unexpected lateral motion, added some more lateral for effect, noticed an asynchronous effect, giggled a bit, and developed the technique.

And from there I'll figure she found an older more worldly female friend to acquire some pasties as the counterrotating of the breasts could be put to more spectacular use with tassels clearly indicating the skill she'd developed.

By now you're probably wondering just how this has anything at all to do with fashion photography.

Well, here goes: extemporaneous though it is, I was wondering if there are any fashion models out there, who have tasseled pasties and can make the tassels spin in opposite directions that might want to do interesting photography TFP.

Drop me a line.

-Don