io9.com has published a rare (and lengthy) email interview with John Norman (aka philosophy professor John Lange), creator of the Gor series.
Norman comes across largely as you would expect from his prose: long-winded, a bit pompous, and preferring monologue to dialogue. This is a guy who would interrupt one of the innumerable scenes of a woman being enslaved to spend a half-page discussing the etymology of her name and how to pronounce it.
Apparently, you can get arrested for writing slash in China.
Police in central China have arrested 32 young women, including a 17-year-old, who allegedly wrote gay fiction for a pornographic site.
According to the Shanghai Daily, police said the site provided nearly 80,000 gay stories to a database of 600,000 registered members.
Most writers said they were paid less than 100 yuan (US$15.23) for each short fiction and some hadn’t received money yet. One writer, Long Juan, said she took the job out of “curiosity” because gay novels were quite popular online.
I assume this was some kind of pay-to-download business. Were there any men involved in this operation, or was it a by-women, for-women operation? Thus is “gay” an apt description, or is more like slash or yaoi?
From PinkPaper.com, via Rachel Kramer Bussel
Desmond, Marilyn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence Cornell University Press, 2006 Google Books
Desmond’s book starts off with telling how people objected to the inclusion of an informational panel on consensual sadomasochism at a feminist conference in New Paltz in 1997. This set off a media firestorm across the US. A similar controversy flared up in 1982 over the Barnard College conference that eventually led to Pleasure and Danger anthology, and was one of the inciting incidents in the 1980s iteration of the “sex wars.”
The New Paltz conference fifteen years later demonstrates that S/M remains an “alarming symbol,” even when its practitioners stress its contractual and consensual nature–as they did in the conference program–and even though popular culture, especially advertising and fashion (Versace, Gaultier) is saturated with S/M imagery.
Pg. 3
As such, violence against women constitutes a form of “structural violence” in the contemporary West. By contrast, the theatricality of S/M demonstrates that such hierarchies are inventions, and unstable inventions at that. Commercial and consensual S?M are aggressively policed in Britain and the United States while domestic violence has generally been tolerated in both countries as part of the status quo; perpetrators of domestic abuse, unlike S/M practitioners, are not classified as sexual outlaws.
Pg. 4
While S/M scripts parody the formations of power and fetishize the instruments of violence, such parodies and fetishistic operations frequently rely on historical configurations. Michel Foucault described S/M as a form of courtship, in which “sexual relations are elaborated and developed by and through mythical relations.”…. Premodern history offers intense opportunities for staing power in theatrical erotics since the semiotics of power relations in premodern cultures are popularly though to be crudely figured in terms of dominance and submission or starkly organized into social institutions such as feudalism or the Church…. Perhaps this is why Slavoj Zizek sees masochism and courtly love as direct reflections of one another….
Pg.4-5
Desmond cites an essay by Anna Freud, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” (1922), which follows up from her father’s “A Child is Being Beaten.” This shows an individual process of how one person takes a story and revises it repeatedly, turning it from a tale of violence to a tale of suffering and redemption.
Anna Freud’s case study suggests that narratives adapted–however loosely– from an identifiable past such as the medieval West provide a superstructure of fantasy that facilitates an erotic paradigm. If medieval scripts can be read through masochism–as Zizek sees it–or if they facilitate masochistic fantasy–in Anna Freud’s terms–perhaps the constructs of the medieval past might elucidate specific performances of contemporary heterosexualities, particularly in terms of erotic violence.
Pg. 5-6
What Desmond does in this book is trace out the genealogy of Western civilization’s views on the relationship between eros and violence.
Classical roman society was intensely hierarchical, and a Roman man was expected to keep order in his household (which included wives, family members and slaves) through words or blows. St. Augustine saw violence as an integral part of domestic order and affection, as an expression of marital love. Medieval marriage manuals, if not condoning violence against women, told women to suck it up and bear it. The consensus of laws in the period was that husbands had the right and duty to “correct” their wives physically, within some “reasonable” limit.
The root of this particular tree is Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, written around 2 CE. It’s a three-part elegy poem, with the first two parts telling the male reader how to seduce woman, and the third telling women who to act in such circumstances. Ovid wrote it in early days of imperial rule, when Augustus imposed new laws to strengthen marriage and penalize adultery, brought on by fear of declining birthrates and not enough citizens to maintain an army. (Cf. Foucault’s bio-power)
Marital reproduction thus became a legal obligation in order to further the goals of Roman conquests and colonial occupation. By contrast to such official policy, the Ars defines amor as an experience that can only take place outside of marriage, and it is completely silent on the reproductive consequences of heterosexual performance. The Ars thereby mocks the assumptions of Augustus’ marriage legislation that sexuality can be regulated by law.
…
The heterosexual script as it develops in the course of the Ars emerges from the structures of imperialism so that the praeceptor’s [instructor’s] discourse of sexual domination and conquest mimics the discourses of Roman coloniality.
Pg. 36
This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Ovid’s work, that it was meant at least in part as a satire of the newly expansionist and martial state, which intruded into private matters. A Roman would have got the joke; a Frenchman a thousand years later wouldn’t. (This ties into two other themes I’ve noticed in the history of BDSM: imperialism/colonialism, and the misreading of texts.)
There is a masochistic side to this, when Ovid advises his pupil to occasionally and strategically debase himself before his domina (mistress, or woman in charge of household slaves). “Don’t think it a disgrace to suffer curses or blows from the girl, or plant kisses on her tender feet.” (2.533-34)
This voluntary subjugation–which the praeceptor offers as a theatrical role the lover might effectively adopt–is derived from the topos of the servitum amoris. In Latin amatory poetry, the metaphor of the lover as servus to an all-powerful domina provided a rhetorical formula for expressing the emotional agency of the puella [girl]– an agency which amounted to her ability to withhold affection and sexual favors from the lover; her ability to exercise any control over her own sexuality, that is, made her all-powerful… The praeceptor only suggests the pose of the servitum amoris as a means for the lover to consolidate his power over his puella.
Pg. 46
These ideas of how a passionate relationship should be conducted were carried into the centuries that followed. The great medieval lovers, Abelard and Heloise, referred to Ovid’s works, including the Ars amatoria.
The female reader of Ars amatoria 3 who disregards the irony of Ovid’s didactic discourse would find herself situated as the object of eroticized violence in an elaborate power play in which she could only acquire recognition through submission.
Pg. 57
Ovid’s semi-serious advice mixed up with Heloise’s uncle’s instruction to Abelard that “if I [Abelard] found her to be careless, I should constrain her severely.”
I’m not quite sure what to make of the Abelard/Heloise relationship. I know there was a reference to what sounded like spanking in Abelard’s account, but according to this book, this was not unusual. In the medieval pedagogical tradition, it was considered perfectly normal for teachers to beat their pupils, and otherwise be physically intimate with them. The scandal might actually be because of the fact that Heloise was remarkably well educated for a woman of her place and time, so this student/pupil relationship, usually confined to the homosocial/homoerotic all-male world, butted up against the heterosocial/heteroerotic world.
It didn’t end well. Heloise got pregnant, Abelard squirreled her off to a convent and her uncle castrated him. They continued to write each other. (This is the when the letters by Heloise start.) Curiously, she never mentions her pregnancy or child, perhaps echoing Ovid’s silence on the subject, so to speak.
The Abelard/Heloise relationship actually reminds me greatly the Munby/Cullwick relationship. Both relationships appear exploitative and intensely hierarchical at first glance, but on further examination reveal a much more complex interplay of fantasies, roles and power.
Heloise wrote to Abelard that she would rather be his meretrix (a high-level courtesan) than imperatix (the empress). (Pg.64) This is echoed in Cullwick’s statements that she would rather be Munby’s maid of all work than his bourgeois wife. In one of Heloise’s letters, she said that their relationship was not just teacher/pupil, but also father/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, all of which were based on the classical dominus/ancilla (master/slave) relationship. (pg. 62) (This is different from the more complex roleplaying of Munby and Cullwick, in which she was often the dominant role, both as a maternal figure and as a more masculine figure than Munby.) Heloise’s letters seem like she’s trying to top him from the bottom, demanding her recognition as his submissive lover. In effect, she’s saying he owes her attention and recognition, and that he isn’t playing his role properly.
So, were Abelard and Heloise a BDSM couple as we would recognize it today? Sort of. I think the difference is, and this is something that Desmond never quite puts her finger on, is that the word punishment in BDSM should always have quotes around it. In the ancient and medieval traditions Desmond writes about, violence is used as a punishment, not a “punishment,” as a means of controlling the subordinate party. If the subordinate party wants to be beaten, then the entire strategy falls apart.
Desmond’s book does raise the idea that violence and eros in Western civilization has been coupled together at a very deep level. She cites Foucault to say that Ovid’s poetry provided a kind of script that informed other depictions of heterosexual relationships in later times, a set of theatrical gestures that could be manipulated, re-read and mis-read.
Desmond also discusses the “Mounted Aristotle”, a visual and literary reference that began in the 13th century and recurs in many different works. The most common form is a older man, whose age and dress indicates his learnedness, on all fours, with a woman riding him as a horse, often wielding a whip. The story behind it, which has no basis in classical records, is that Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great in India. Aristotle chides Alexander for being too smitten by his wife or mistress, usually named Phyllis. As revenge, Phyllis seduces Aristotle, and he agrees to let her ride him as a horse. She also arranges for Alexander to watch this. (Note the elements of voyeurism and humiliation, common in fantasies.)
I bring this up because I want to make it clear that people should not look at this particular image and anecdote and immediately say, “Aha, people in the 13th century were kinky just like us.” The mounted Aristotle was viewed in a variety of different ways and contexts, including references to contemporary politics. It was not only an erotic image. It was also a warning against the seductiveness of women, yet also a rueful admission that even the wisest of men are susceptible. Yet the perverse erotic meaning is within the image, there to be read, and provide a seed for fantasy. In a horse-based culture, equestrian metaphors would have had a lot of currency.
The fantasy of the “mounted Aristotle” shaped the language of erotic violence in medieval French and English narratives so that a cultural notion of the scandal of female dominance could be cited visually or textually in equestrian images or metaphors. The erotic potential of such equestrian fantasies remains a recognizable feature of modern power erotics.
Pg. 27
The promotional website for the book Permanent Obscurity has a brief history of fetish and bondage artist Eric Stanton and his business relationship with Irvine Klaw.
Biographical facts about his life are often contradictory and murky; and sometimes he would contribute to this misinformation personally. There’s even some question of his real name: was he born “Ernest Stanzoni” as claimed in the huge Eric Kroll coffee table book? Or is his birth name “Ernest Stanten,” as claimed by Belier publisher and personal friend and associate, J.B. Rund?
Most of what I know about the sexploitation era and the subgenre of what was then labeled “bizarre,” which today would be assigned fetish culture or kink, I’ve learned through tracking Stanton. He remains, in some strange way, a central figure for me (my own personal Dante) whose life intersected with other curious characters of the day, artists and business people, gangsters and hacks … shadowy and mythologized figures I’ve come to admire and who I never grow tired of hearing about: Irving Klaw, Bettie Page, Gene Bilbrew, Lenny Burtman, Eddie Mishkin, Stanley Malkin…. And then, of course, there’s Steve Ditko, Spider-Man co-creator and Stanton’s friend-as well as his studio mate of 10 years.
(ellipsis in original)
According to this, Stanton would self-publish and self-print his own works with his own photocopier. I’ve always been interesting in the means of production and distribution for works that had such a huge influence on the history of kink, and it seems fitting that so much of it was produced on a shoestring, in a confluence between people who were seeking a market niche and people who were seeking their kink.
PS: I’d be interested to know what Ditko, known for espousing a harsh Objectivist philosophy in his work, would have made of Stanton’s fetish art. Then again, there’s something a bit kinky in Ditko’s Objectivist characters. The Question wore a rubber mask that made him look like he had no facial features at all, just smooth skin. Mr. A, an even harsher character, wore a steel helmet that gave him unmoving, impassive features, as well as steel gloves that locked on. It struck me as fitting that a character so committed to an ideology would go to such extremes in concealing his own humanity and in not having to touch the messy, complicated human world. (Both characters were the inspiration for Rorshach in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.)
In the early years of the 16th century, to combat the rising tide of religious unorthodoxy, the Pope gave Cardinal Ximinez of Spain leave to move without let or hindrance throughout the land, in a reign of violence, terror and torture that makes a smashing film. This was the Spanish Inquisition…
Monty Python
I’ve only seen clips of the notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom (IMDB, Wikipedia, Google Video), an Italian pseudo-documentary that purportedly shows a recreation of the antebellum South with a focus on slavery. I decided to review the whole thing, and rented the director’s cut on DVD, which is not dubbed into English.
There are startling, horrifying spectacles recreated in this film, beginning with the horrors of the Middle Passage and running through the process of sale and labour, a perverse initiation narrative. There are periodic rapes and other abuses and mutilations. The overwhelming impression is an homogenous mass of brown humanity, undifferentiated by sex or age. How exactly they managed to get so many extras willing to be naked is beyond me.
Dart’s Domain has a two-part podcast (part 1, part 2) interview with Laura Antoniou, author of the Marketplace series, among other things.
Antoniou seems to be in the awkward position of being forced to debunk the myth she had a large part in reproducing, though not creating.
She also talks about the myth of the Old Guard, criticizing the belief there was an elaborate hierarchy of initiation for gay male leathermen back in the 50s and 60s, and especially critiquing the idea that this way of doing kink, if it ever existed, should be regarded as an ideal today.
What the myth of the Marketplace, and institutions like it, says to me is that a lot of people yearn for initiation. They want somebody out there to recognize their innate specialness, give them the Call to Adventure straight out of Joseph Campbell, and be swept off to the Realm of Magic. It’s what drives Harry Potter and Twilight and The Matrix. While I’m hardly an expert on the Marketplace, I get the impression that Antoniou wrote it in part to critique that myth and ended up promoting it.
Clotel is an 1853 novel written by escaped slave William Wells Brown. This is a classic abolitionist novel, much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it also borrows from the sentimental novel with separated lovers and broken-up families. It’s rather anecdotal and melodramatic, but it does explicate the idea that the institution of slavery creates misery, and furthermore, that this is not restricted to blacks.
It does give a good sense of what life was like in the ante-bellum South:
“Yes,” interrupted Huckelby [an overseer of slaves]; “them’s just my sentiments now, and no mistake. I think that, for the honour of our country, this slavery business should stop. I don’t own any, no how, and I would not be an overseer if I wern’t paid for it.”
(Were there amateur slave overseers?) I can easily imagine some white person in the ante-bellum South saying that with a mild shrug. It indicates just how entrenched the peculiar institution was in the culture of the South, so much so that people who didn’t care for it still couldn’t really do much.
Murray, Thomas E. & Thomas R. Murrell The Language of Sadomasochism Greenwood Press, 1989
This book is a glimpse of the North American scene circa 1989, only a few years before the Internet provided a widespread, anonymous channel for communication. The authors say they had great difficulty getting anybody in the Scene to talk to them at all, and those who did were highly suspicious. It’s interesting to see that only 22 years ago, the scene was this underground and secretive. Nowadays, post-Internet, the scene is vastly more overt.
The historical overview includes some interesting tidbits, including a masochistic passage from ancient Egypt: “Oh! were I made her porter, I should cause her to be wrathful with me. Then when I did but hear her voice, the voice of her anger, a child shall I be for fear” (pg. 8) There’s also the note that Petronius’ Satyricon talks about courtesans dedicating whips, bridles and spurs as votive offerings to Venus.
However, as I’ve noticed is common in such historical overviews, these are a collection of anecdotes without a unifying historical theory. This is the kind of research I want to surpass, by presenting a historical theory of sadomasochism.
The glossary was less interesting than I thought it would be. Most of the information came from personal ads in newspapers and magazines, where language was condensed for economy and euphemized to escape prosecution. Some of these were not printed in commercial publications, but posted on literal bulletin boards at adult stores. I can remember Mack’s Leathers in Vancouver in the early 90s had such a board, full of hand-written personal ads. This mode of communication seems to have become as obsolete as the candlestick telephone.
There are also a few gaps in the glossary. The authors were baffled by the reference to “John Norman” in one personal ad, even though the Gor novels have been published since 1960s.
Samuel Pepys, who was always pretty frank about his moral lapses and erotic urges, recounts buying the French classic “whore dialogue” L’Ecole des Filles, reading it and burning it. You can detect a binge-purge cycle at work.
An Oxford academic says that an otherwise obscure 18th century collection of miscellaneous poems was in print for more than a century because it included a section of erotic verse.
The finding suggests that what we think of as high art and low art was being packaged, sold and read together in the 18th Century – and raises questions about whether the popularity of other bestselling books might have different explanations.
Dr van Hensbergen said: ‘I had just finished entering details of poems typical of miscellanies of the period- satires, imitations and amatory verse, when at the end of the second volume a new title page announced the start of ‘The Cabinet of Love’.
‘To my surprise, ‘The Cabinet’ turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include ‘Dildoides’, a poem attributed to Samuel Butler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, ‘The Delights of Venus’, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and ‘The Discovery’, a poem about a man watching a woman in bed while hiding under a table.
Samuel Butler, you may recall, is no stranger to the kinky side of things. His mock epic poem Hudibras introduced the maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child” (not the Bible as is commonly believed), which is actually a reference to erotic flagellation.
This shows that in the 18th century pornography, as we would understand it today, was not a completely separate genre or category of media. A miscellaneous collections of poems might include sexual material. Something like this might have spread through word of mouth to the sexually curious.
This also brings up why I am so excited by the digitization of huge amounts of historical documents into searchable databases, which can open up new frontiers for historical research, particularly in the case of researching things other people haven’t already searched for. Overthinking It once did a semi-serious exploration of the history of Mr. T’s catchphrase “I pity the fool”, tracing it back to an obscure early 19th century book via Google Books. While this was in part a joke, it also showed the potential of new kinds of historical research.
Via io9
