I had hoped to finish the first draft of Chapter 7 by the end of July, but that wasn’t to be. Once part of a completely overlong chapter, I mainly just knocked it down to 8,000 words and restructured a bit. I removed some redundant quotes, particularly the bits from My Secret Life.
This is mainly about the upper class kinksters of the Victorian era, and how they interacted with the psychological establishment of the era. There was an interesting dialectic between art and science in this period, with artists looking to science for inspiration about the extremes of human nature, and scientists borrowing names and concepts from artists.
Next chapter is “Every Woman Adores a Fascist”, formerly “Age of War”. I’ve decided I can’t follow a linear chronology, at least in this chapter, which covers the Nazisploitation aesthetic and the tenuous links between fascism and sadomasochism, running from at least the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the Italian Nazisploitation film boom of the late 1970s. This is one of the trickiest subjects to tackle, which can be loosely grouped under the heading of “cultural trauma play”, along with raceplay.
