For a limited time, Smart Pop Books has posted my essay “Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: 21st Century Neo-Gothic” from the essay collection Inside Joss’ Dollhouse as a free read. Get it while you can.
This is one of the first paid published pieces that emerged from my research, and I think it turned out pretty well. I am, according to one friend, “the world’s biggest Dollhouse fan”, and I love it the way you can only love a child that died young after a long struggle.
Ana continues to show her emotional maturity by teasing Christian via email, on the theory that an airplane in flight is one place where even Christian Grey can’t get to her. Her main objection to Christian’s upgrade is not the invasion of her privacy or intrusion into her life, but making her embarrassed at the airport.
More emails. Ana says everything in email that does she doesn’t say to Christian in person, and it’s hard not to read it as her being so intimidated or outright frightened by him that this is the only way she can express herself clearly. (If this story will be filmed, I bet a lot of the email communications will be converted into face to face dialog, if only to make it more visually interesting. )
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Ana wakes up with Christian gone again. She meets his housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, and goes into another jealous snit over nothing.
Why does Christian only have attractive blondes working for him? And a nasty thought comes involuntarily into my mind – Are they all ex-subs? I refuse to entertain that hideous idea.
Generally, we’ve been criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey on the grounds that it might be harmful to the heterosexual women who read it and develop unrealistic or dangerous expectations of what a BDSM relationship should be. But have we thought about it in terms of how it might affect heterosexual men?
I’m still trying to understand the “why” of this book. I can understand the appeal of the story it is telling, sort of; I concede that I’m somewhat handicapped in comprehending this work on a deep level because it is not for me, a heterosexual man. What’s really baffling is its astonishing popularity. It’s as if some niche fetish like pedal pumping, against all odds, became a hit.
The model in contemporary art nude photography: Postcard Orientalism has a short photo essay on Orientalism in early photography.
More interesting are the cards taken in North Africa. These tried to evoke the image of the harem, a fantasy of erotic mystery and subjugation. It is again believed that most of the models would have been prostitutes. Given the strictures of Arab society it is hard to imagine ordinary women posing nude; nor would photographers, who were European, have had ready access to real harems….
Of course, this very exclusion could become a source of fetishism.
Over the course of this research, I’ve looked at BDSM in prose, poetry, painting, dance, illustration, music, fashion, sculpture, film, comics, television, live drama and video games. Is there an art form I have overlooked? Yes, the most ephemeral of arts, that of scent.
The Perfume Shrine talks about the frequent references to scent in the proto-fetishists, like Emile Zola and JK Huysmans, and the first synthesis of the leather scent chemicals.
The leather note, of course, is one such artificial scent, a hybrid of “flower and flesh” created by industry. It is strangely redolent of the human skin which leather approaches, both by its texture and by its proximity to the body of the wearer whose shape it retains…
Can it possibly be a coincidence, then, that leather scents and leather fetishism are strictly contemporary, born in the same decade of the late 19th century?
Check the dates: quinolines, which lend their characteristic smoky-tarry notes to most leather perfumes, were synthesized around 1880. The first recorded Cuir de Russie was composed by Aimé Guerlain in 1875; Eugène Rimmel launched his the following year.Now, it was precisely in 1876 that French psychiatrist Alfred Binet coined the term “fetishism”; the leather fetish itself is studied in Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).
While the fetish is often considered primarily a visual phenomenon, we may be neglecting one of the most powerful and evocative senses, smell.
…Messieurs Guerlain and Rimmel sold their Cuir de Russie. The name may have referred to the Cossacks who rubbed their boots with birch, and certainly bore a virile, military or equestrian connation. But the scents themselves alluded to more private passions.
So we have an engineered scent with associations of virility, the military or the equestrian, which aligns with fetish fashion’s visual gestures towards the soldier and the equestrian.
The blog has more information on the use of leather in scent products, including Orientalized leathers, quirky leathers, butch leather, and more. Just like the material of leather, the scent of leather has changing meaning many times, sometimes worn by men, sometimes by women, and sometimes both. Just like visual fashion, scent fashion is part of the process of how we present ourselves.
Christian pays an OB/GYN to make a house call to examine and counsel Ana on contraception. This fits the Pygmalion subtext of this story, that Christian is giving her everything that an adult woman should have: computer, car, email, contraception, job, wardrobe, awakened sexuality. It’s a materialist form of initiation: I’m a “sex-having person” because I have the consumer goods a sex-having person has. Of course, this also means Christian is increasingly in control of every aspect of Ana’s life. It’s Christian Grey’s world; Ana Steele just lives in it.
It’s tempting to attribute Fifty Shades‘ phenomenal commercial success to the recession, as a version of “shopping and fucking” novels: the emphasis on brand names, the incredible disparity in wealth and status between the two leads. Ana doesn’t even have to shop for herself, much less develop her own taste and preferences; Christian’s minions do it for her. Apart from smouldering grey eyes and huge schlong, Christian’s main appeal may be old fashioned financial security. Of course, Ana would be a lousy gold-digger; she’d sign his pre-nup without reading it.
Being Canadian, I’m always interested in Canada’s contributions to the sexual edge of culture. I was delighted to stumble across the story of Justice Weekly, a true crime tabloid newspaper published in Canada that frequently included fetish letters. “…popular topics were discipline, punishment and humiliation of males (especially ‘errant husbands’ and spoiled post-adolescent children) by authoritarian/domineering females, transvestites and authority figures such as school principals, judges and law-enforcement officials.”
