It started with a vision of torture.
According to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the genesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguably one of the most influential books in history, came in Feburary 1851 when she attended communion service. After taking the bread and wine and thinking of the Last Supper and the Passion, a vision hit her, “blown into her mind as by the rushing of a mighty wind.”
The Mondo 70 film blog has an interesting series of posts (from 2009) on exploitation classic (?) Goodbye Uncle Tom (I previously discussed the Italian director’s cut), including one that directly addresses the depiction of sexuality in this film.
I’ve described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it’s compassionate to stare at someone’s absolute subjugation and humiliation — or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah’s drunken nakedness. [Filmmakers] Jacopetti & Prosperi’s reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.
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The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director’s Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.
Goodbye Uncle Tom seems to fall into the same pit as other, 19th century attempts to humanize slaves by showing them as capable of suffering, but neglects to show them as capable of any other response to their conditions. The flipside of suffering is rage (masochism to sadism) and the film suggests that those are the only two responses for blacks, and it is only a matter of time until 300 years of pent-up rage explodes in helter-skelter.
A newspaper in Vancouver, BC, ran a story yesterday on complaints, or rather a complaint, about noise from a swing party in the suburb of Delta.
The story itself is pretty thin, but what really interests me is the comments. Most of them are people saying “What’s the big deal?” or defending swinging, but many of which display a virulent hatred of the sexually deviant (swinging, in this case) combined with a presumed knowledge about the truth of swinging.
I worked for a swinger. He was a bit of a deviant. His second wife joined him for a while, then divorced him because she couldn’t stand the lifestyle. We got all sorts of pornographic mail at work. I quit my job when he said I should try it. Creepy.
PS: Most of the photos of the men were really ugly.
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Have fun with those festering , infected, bleeding sores…down there…hope you don’t get them on your face!
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If you have this kind of lifestyle, you have a 75% percent chance of having genital herpes. You may not have symptoms In fact most people don’t.But they are still randomly infectious.
And, your kids will find out about your lifestyle eventually.You are living in a dream world if you think this won’t effect them.You could keep this a secret which is really hard to do.But if you are successful, are you prepared for the day when your son shows up to one of your parties?
Condoms fail. How many women do you know who got pregnant because a condom broke? And, you can still get STDs with perfect condom use. Check it out yourself.
I would love to tell you that there is a sexual utopia. I would love to tell you that you can have sexual adventures galore without getting your heart or body broken. Who doesn’t want that? I would love to tell you that your kids won’t take huge sexual risks that endanger their health because they see you doing it.
But that, would be a lie.…
My wife and I wanted to try this lifestyle out, and now we too are divorced. I am trying to hold together the pieces of innocence for our children, while she is claiming to them her friendships with 20 somethings make them look cool. Its a sick sick World.
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I’ve been around the block more than a few times.These things were around in the 60s.And all the people I knew who did this stuff-all eventually divorced.Disbelieve me if you like & find out yourself.Respect and communication aside, when you do this stuff, your marriage is not an exclusive relationship. Someone almost always winds up getting hurt. Usually, it’s just a matter of time. As for being uneducated as you claim, seriously, educate yourself about STDs. Condoms fail 10 % of the time across the board. You can get herpes, HPV and syphilis with perfect condom use. You can also get these from oral sex.The risks are real and include serious long term consequences including head and neck cancer from HPV.The rates of which by the way are rising rapidly.Go to any government website on STD information and get the facts.
What people do is their own business. And honestly, nobody cares in this day and age. But the truth is, there are consequences which was my point.…
yawn…swingers are just immoral deviants that are not even worth discussing..let them rot from their various STD’s and continue running away from the truth of what they truly are, which is too ugly to even contemplate
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Anyone I’ve known, and I’ve known lots, who get into that lifestyle, almost always divorce.
In the end you don’t have a real marriage, you have an “arrangement” Once the guy hits midlife, he has absolutely no reason to be faithful to you, nor to honour your marriage vows. Think about it; they meant nothing. You talk about your kids being well behaved, but so what.They are learning things that will ultimately harm them.
Your talk about the facts of life with your daughter will, of course, now have to include how to deal with the constant herpes outbreaks and then there is the tender moment when your child realizes she has genital warts. She decides not to worry about HIV because you didn’t. Then there will be the heartbreak of seeing men just use your daughter and then dump her. Your lifestyle has a price. By the time most people figure this out, it’s too late. They are old, alone with their many lovers long gone and their kids seriously messed up and an
So, the attackers claim to know the dark side of swinging, though they don’t cite anything to support this. They even presume to know more about it than the swingers themselves. I think this supposed expertise is similar to the junk science that gets trotted out by homophobes.
Well, sooner or later, somebody had to make an image like the one above.
Danny Hellman created this for cover of the 24th issue of the Cinema Sewer zine, published out of Vancouver, BC by Robin Bougie.
It’s not the only Hellman that satirizes the Iraq and Afghanistan war, viewing those conflicts through the lenses of comic books and exploitation magazines (e.g. 1). This is an obvious take on the previously discussed Israeli stalag novels and the later men’s adventure magazines, referencing the notorious Abu Ghraib pictures. The brunette woman in the background represents Lynndie England, for instance.
The Abu Ghraib pictures put Americans in a quandary. The scenario was familiar, but the ones inflicting the suffering were “us”, not “them”. How could this be? This is what Other people do. It’s telling that England, a female soldier, became the most recognizable name and face associated with this scandal, linking political deviance with female sexual deviance.
I feel somewhat disappointed that this image is too knowing, too ironic to be a genuine expression of fantasy. Maybe we need to wait a few years before the psychosocial impact of the War on Terrorism percolates up from the collective subconscious. Or perhaps the torture porn film genre previously discussed is part of that response. Maybe in North America the feared Other is not the Muslim terrorist, but the out-of-control, paranoid police state. That at any second, for no apparent reason, we can find ourselves strapped to something in a windowless room where we are utterly helpless before an unknown person. Network television is already crawling with surveillance and confinement and competition. Somewhere out there, Room 101 is ready for you.
Continuing my discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the function of violence, here’s the Room 101 scene from the American 1956 film version.
Note that the story pretty closely follows the book and the other two film versions: the electric shocks, the “How many fingers?” routine, Winston seeing his degraded self in the mirror. You can see how much of a perverse initiator O’Brien is (called O’Connor in this adaptation), guiding Winston room to room, preparing him for each stage of his descent into hell.
Silk Spectre: Did the costumes make it good?
Silk Spectre: Dan…?
Night-Owl: Yeah.
Night-Owl: Yeah, I guess the costumes had something to do with it. It just feels strange, you know? To come out and admit that to somebody.
Night-Owl: To come out of the closet.
–Alan Moore and Frank Gibbons, Watchmen, Chapter 7, pg. 28
Guernica has a historical/biographical piece on The Story of O and it’s author Anne Desclos/Dominique Aury/Pauline Reage.
As the author once revealed, the character O actually began as Odile, the name of a close friend who’d once been deeply in love with Albert Camus. “She knew all about the name and was enchanted,” Aury said. “But after a few pages I decided that I couldn’t do all those things to poor Odile, so I just kept the first letter.” Contrary to speculation over the years by feminists, academics, psychoanalysts, and general readers obsessed with the book, the name O, she said, “has nothing to do with erotic symbolism or the shape of the female sex.”
However depraved her novel seemed, Aury had set out to create a profoundly personal work of art, not cheap porn. (“That Pauline Réage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda,” declared an essayist in the New York Times Book Review.) Aury was making something new, working with conventions as no one had attempted in quite the same way. “Debauchery conceived of as a kind of ascetic experience is not new, either for men or for women,” she explained, “but until Story of O no woman to my knowledge had said it.”
Is there anything new to say about the book at this point? It defies categorization: too arty for porn, too sexual for literature, too brutal for feminism, too delicate for misogyny. A religious novel written by an atheist, indulgent in its asceticism. An erotic novel written by and for cerebral intellectuals. An anti-romance, in which the steelhard man softens, but is then abandoned for another, harder man, and so on. You generally talk about The Story of O as something unique, not part of any particular genre.
Filament magazine has an article on representations of humans and especially human sexuality in prehistoric art. While humans were making art fairly early on, they didn’t depict themselves until much later, and representation of human sexuality was even later after that, on the cusp of the transition between hunter-gatherer and agriculture.
The first definite image of a couple having sex appears as late as 10,000 years ago. Now in the British Museum, the Ain Sakhri figurine was found in 1933 in the Ain Sakhri cave in the Judea desert, not far from Jerusalem. At first glance, it resembles nothing more than a small white pebble. On closer inspection, two figures are clearly carved into it. The slightly smaller figure wraps its legs around its partner’s waist. The slightly larger figure holds the smaller partner’s shoulders, in what appears to be a tender embrace. They are clearly sitting upright, having sex.
To its credit, the article includes the disclaimer that we are making assumptions on a small amount of evidence, and that calling these images “porn” is likely a gross misnomer.
Even more interesting, one of the comments says:
sex shares many of the chemical and mechanical aspects of violence-that-leads-to-killing-and-eating but the result is the opposite of killing-and-eating. those aspects make sex disquieting because in theory at any moment it could go the other way & blood would flow instead of other fluids. then there arose that issue of “dom” and “sub” – i am in the midst of exploring “victimhood” at the moment. this one pretends its going to kill the other one, that one pretends to give up, joy for both results instead of the far more basic singular pleasure of killing-and-eating.
For the purposes of the study of BDSM, when did symbolic or play activities first occur in humanity? When was an actual act of violence replaced by a symbolic act? Is this uniquely human, or do highly social animals like primates and dolphins do it as well?
Japanese videogame blog Kotaku has an article on S&M in Japanese culture. It’s a bit more substantial than this kind of article usually is.
And it’s become increasingly normal. That isn’t to say the entire nation of Japan is explicitly practicing S&M (it isn’t!), but Japanese television has increasingly become aware of S&M archetypes. It’s not uncommon for popular male actors to admit they are M (masochistic) or beautiful female singers to say they are S(sadistic). In a recent interview, Aya Ueto, one of Japan’s most popular stars admitted that she got along with the director of a recent film because she’s masochistic, and he’s sadistic. Ueto wasn’t talking explicitly about S&M, but rather, about being dominant and passive in a working relationship. The terms can have even broader meanings, completely non sexual ones, such as, for example, being mischievous or mean for M.
Japan likes to divide people into categories and subcategories or “kei” (系
. Japanese variety shows are a pastiche of different types, whether that be male or female: there are dumb types, cool types, funny types, and usually fat or ugly types. Increasingly, the terms “S” and “M” are used as personality markers. Fans chatter online about which members of boy band (and Nintendo pitchmen) Arashi are S-types and which ones are M. Two-person comedy acts like Ninety-Nine are divided into the straight man and the funny man, but in a world where Japanese comedy is often physically painful and embarrassing. Thank comedian Beat Takeshi, whose Famicom game Takeshi’s Challenge is the most sadistic game ever made, for that.
The Secret History of Rock has a post and clips on the influence of the sword-and-sorcery (known as peplum) films, both European and American, and their aesthetic, contrasted with the stodginess of the 50s and 60s.
The formula was simple- an American muscleman playing a mythic hero (usually Hercules or one of his equivalents), an evil king or queen, a scheming priesthood bent on human sacrifice, a virtuous maiden in need of rescue and lots and lots of exposed Mediterranean flesh for every possible taste. To an America stuck in the corporate monotony of the Cold War, these films were like an explosion of pure id, an atavistic knife to the heart of a denatured West.
I would add a lot of slavery-type imagery: women imprisoned and auctioned, virtue in distress. This of course went into the Frank Frazetta-Boris Vallejo school of paperback cover art and heavy metal album covers, etc, etc.
