Peter Tupper

“Bad Habits” My article on Maria Monk and her Awful Disclosures

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Apr 062012
 

Nude woman in nun's habit with her breasts being poked by two monkeys

My article on the strange case of Maria Monk and her connections to anti-Catholic propaganda and the nun as a fetish archetype has been published in Maisonneuve magazines 10th anniversary issue. (Print only, for the moment. And no, I don’t know what the monkeys are doing in the illustration.)

This was my first article in a national, glossy magazine for a while, and I hope this carries with it some prestige. It took several rewrites to get it done, but overall it looks pretty good. There’s only so much you can do in 1,500 words.

I had wanted to include a comparison between Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Story of O, since both are narratives of initiation. I wonder if there’s a more direct connection, if as a girl Anne Desclos (aka Pauline Reage) read some bit of Gothic pulp or anti-Catholic tract and it gestated in her mind the way Anna Freud remembered a snippet from a book about book on medieval knights and wove that into her fantasies.

An excerpt from an early draft:

While the content of Awful Disclosures and related works survive to this day mainly in anti-Catholic crank conspiracy literature, the format has been stripped of any overt political or religious message and used in a variety of pornographic works. The classic Story of O (1954), written by Anne Desclos (who once flirted with the idea of being a nun), follows a similar structure to Awful Disclosures. Like Maria Monk, O is initiated into a secret society where she is to serve her new masters sexually. The orders O receives echo the Mother Superior’s commandments to Maria Monk: “You are here to serve your masters… Your hands are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, most especially, any of your bodily orifices, which we may explore or penetrate at will… both this flogging and the chain… are intended less to make you suffer, scream, or shed tears than to feel through this suffering, that you are not free but fettered, and to teach you that you are totally dedicated to something outside yourself.”

If Disclosures uses transgressive sexuality to deliver a warning of the dangers of transgressive religion, O is a sexual fantasy built on nun-like selfless devotion. Maria Monk returns to the Protestant world to bear witness, but O throws herself deeper and deeper into the underworld, attaining a kind of martyrdom.

I also wanted to include PETA’s campaign of images of people (usually attractive women) as animals in cages or even as packed meat products, images that require only the slightest shift in optic to become pornographic.

Good Friday, imitatio Christi, and the perverse reading

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Apr 062012
 

It’s been said that Hallowe’en is Christmas for queer people, but if there’s a holiday for kinksters, it is Good Friday. This is the day when a man was tortured to death for trying to get people to be nice to each other.

While I don’t have this quite figured out yet, I get the impression that the primacy of the Passion, the story of Jesus Christ’s betrayal, murder and resurrection, was a late medieval invention, and earlier depictions of Christ in graphic art and storytelling focused on his life as teacher and miracle-worker. The violence of the Passion came later. One person I know suggested that the cult of the Passion coincided with the Crusades, violent art reflecting a violent society, or even as intentional anti-Semitic propaganda.

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Chapter 1 is done

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Apr 012012
 

It ain’t pretty, but it’s done. I completed a first, rough, provisional, tentative, preliminary draft of chapter one, about 6,000 words that runs from Roman mystery cults to the banning of flagellant companies in the 14th century. It’s far from complete, but it is something I’m ready to show somebody else.

One of the thing I realized was that I had big gaps in my narrative. I spent the last week on a crash study on medieval Christianity, the founding of the great monastic orders and the debates over flagellation and other forms of discipline. The church has never been entirely comfortable with flagellation and other forms of asceticism, perhaps because it makes possible a connection with Christ through the body, and not through established hierarchy of intermediaries.

What’s next is Chapter 2, roughly 1500 (Pico della Mirandola’s discussion of flagellation) to 1700 (the Abbe Boileu’s discussion), the disagreement over how the human body is to be viewed. The starting point is the disagreement over the St. Theresa of Avila and her “transverberation”, her eroticised encounter with an angel that repeatedly stabbed her with a spear. In another time, St. Theresa’s experience, and art depicting it, would have been sacred, but in this time, it could be seen as profane, the result of sexuality perverted by the unnaturalness of convent life.

I may extend it to the trial of Father Girard over his affair with Catherine Cadiere around 1730, but that may be saved for the chapter on sensibility.

I’m not sure that even with a good work habit I can make my deadline of a completed manuscript by the end of October. On the other hand, I have a lot of stuff already done and researched, I just need to put it together and fill in the gaps.

Penthouse’s first fetish pictorial: vintage BDSM

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Mar 312012
 

The Venus Observations blog focuses on the history of American newstand porn magazines, particularly the competition between Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler and their various spin-offs and competitors. In the mid 1970s, the major magazines were in a one-step-forward, one-step-back dance between the softcore, soft-focus, lots of pubic hair, arty aesthetic and the harder, sharp-focus, exposed labia aesthetic of later decades. Fear of alienating advertisers and censors kept editors nervous, but fear of losing market share made them experiment. E.g. a nude pictorial with a 22-year-old, very young looking model wearing a tank top with “12” on it.

Two women in fetish gear, one sitting astride the other on all fours

In February 1976, Penthouse ran its first fetish-themed pictorial.

The real barrier breaking pictorial for February, however, was one called My Funny Valentine. Penthouse had had a (comparatively) few girl/girl pictorials before but this month they published their first fetish photographs. Dressed up in leather and vinyl the girls were depicted by photographer Stan Malinowski indulging in light bondage and whipping each other.

[…]

This pictorial, in the days when this sort of fetish was very underground and not displayed as a matter of course by female pop stars, caused some controversy in the press. Letters to the magazine, however, were universally appreciative (and Penthouse did, as we have seen, publish critical letters at this point) and asked for more.

At the time, mainstream magazines were nervous about showing a woman’s anus or labia in interior pictorials or their nipples on the cover, so this must have been a bold experiment for the publishers to show this kind of underground sexuality. Perhaps they discovered, as Irving Klaw and others had discovered in earlier decades, that fetish pictorials could tap a niche market without being sexually explicit.

The future of BDSM as a subculture

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Mar 272012
 

Ribbonfarm raises an interesting point about the status of subcultures in the mass surveillance age, and that got me thinking about the status of BDSM as a subculture.

Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.

[…]

The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing.

[…]

The world of subcultures are about to be comprehensively explored, mapped, tamed and domesticated. The larger the subculture, the faster it will fall.

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Guerilla barbers of the French Resistance

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Mar 172012
 

From the Old Erotic Art Tumblr:

Half-naked women being threatened with head-shaving

This image, presumably the cover of an old men’s adventure magazine from the ’50s or ’60s, is puzzling initially. Why the shaving brush and scissors? Guerilla barbers? This is almost certainly a reference to les femmes tondues. In post-liberation France, women who allegedly collaborated with occupying fascists (especially “horizontal collaboration”) were publicly shaved bald. Like the “Nazi dominatrix” trope, this is the conflation of deviant politics (collaboration) with deviant female sexuality (“slut shaming”). Women are used as ritual scapegoats for a community’s problems (in this case, the legacy of occupation and collaboration in France) and symbolically “killed.” See Frost’s book Sex Drives

Interesting to see women-in-danger in the context of anti-fascist, “good guy” forces like the French resistance. This can be applied to just about any conflict, or to put it another way, any conflict or social anxiety can provide a framing narrative for the scene of woman-in-distress.

Nazi-exploitation: The Gestapo’s Last Orgy

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Mar 112012
 

House of Self-Indulgence has a summary of another Nazi-exploitation film, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, which by its description sounds like a take on The Night Porter. The framing story is two people walking around an abandoned concentration camp, years after the war.

Of course, I’m not saying it should be taken seriously as an accurate account of daily life at your average concentration camp during World War II. However, it’s way more honest and straightforward than the majority of the pro-war propaganda Hollywood has been warping minds with over the past seventy years. Your typical war film, especially the ones that are set during the post-war era, seem to glamourize armed combat, which I find tasteless and obscene. On the other hand, the films that make up the Naziploitation genre have a purity about them. The sole purpose of these films is to shock and offend all those who lack the common sense to stir clear of their wicked glow, and the good ones do so with no apologies.

The driving force of this film seems to be frustrated sadism.

Even though he was eyeballing her while she was being examined by the camp’s doctor and during the slideshow/rape orgy, it’s at the end of the cannibal dinner party that Conrad, and his trusty Luger P08 pistol, finally become acquainted with Lise Cohen and her dogged brand of spiritual fortitude. Frustrated by the fact Lise won’t flinch after repeated attempts to unnerve her (he does everything his drunken Nazi mind can think of to scare her), Conrad decides right then and there that his new mission in life is to make her scream for mercy.

This reminds of earlier discussions about the difference between genuine sadists and “bureaucrats of torture” in totalitarian societies. A bureaucrat just doesn’t care about the other person’s subjective experience. A sadist needs to know he or she is having an impact.

Venus in Fur on Broadway

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Mar 092012
 

Research in the previous post brought my attention to Venus in Fur, a Broadway play adaptation of the classic of male masochism, Venus im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Judging by the description, it’s strongly metafictional, as the two leads play a director and an actress auditioning for a stage adaptation of Venus. This presents an interesting angle on the story, in which Severin has an image of the cruel woman in his mind before Wanda appears and slots herself into it. This is very much a story about roles and scripts.

As I’m nowhere near Broadway, I have little chance to see this. Hopefully it will tour. I’m curious to know how this play was adapted for a mainstream audience. If female masochism is regarded as a problem, male masochism is regarded as a joke at best, and rarely if ever a sexually desirable trait to heterosexual women, at least not in mainstream media.

More French vintage bondage and flagellation

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Mar 092012
 

A quick sampling of the other posts on the A Carrefour Etrange blog:

Illustration of three need women on cushions being whipped

L’Étrange aventure de Miss Alice Simpson by Jean Bustarès, from 1922. No word on the story, but the pictures seem strongly on femsub and whipping. Illustrations by Gaston Smit alias Georges Topfer.

Illustration: woman sitting on man on all fours, second woman doing first's hair

La Comtesse au Fouet (The Countess of Whips) is more of a mixed bag, with both femsub and malesub. Illustrations by Martin van Maele. Originally published 1906.

Illustration, woman on floor facedown, second woman standing with whip

Les Malheurs de Colette by Aimé van Rod, published in 1914 (reissued 1928) and illustrated by Georges Topfer.

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