Peter Tupper

Mad Men: The masochism of Don Draper

Jul 282010

In the fourth season premiere of Mad Men, Don Draper should be on top of the world. Instead, he has a ratty Greenwich village apartment, a carefully maintained pretense that his new agency has a second floor, and a standing appointment with a prostitute whom he orders to slap his face while not taking off her bullet bra.

In art, everything means something, particularly in Mad Men, in which much information is conveyed in minor shifts in behavior rather than over speech or actions. That Don hires a prostitute and has her smack his face a few times during sex is indicative of his internal state of chaos, along with almost yelling at Peggy and throwing prospective clients out of the agency when they don’t like his pitch. In previous seasons, Don has masterfully handled jittery clients and a string of mistresses, one of whom had a masochistic streak herself. His masochistic behavior is meant to indicate his decline and his self-loathing, after his divorce and starting a new agency. He’s actually becoming a bit of a cliche, the high-powered executive in a suit who hires a pro domme to dress him as a French maid every Thursday at 7pm.

However, does masochism always indicate a disordered or self-loathing mind? I don’t think it does. BDSM can be integrated into a functional life. If Don owned up to a few things to himself, he might use his masochistic sessions as a way of getting some stress relief. However, Don seems to be using his scenes the way he uses cigarettes and booze: maintaining the impression of control without any moderation. Thus, he’s not an example of healthy BDSM, not that that idea had been developed yet in the show’s current year of 1964.

Phrased another way, will we ever reach a point in which a TV character has some form of non-normative sexuality without it being some exterior sign of some inner mental flaw? A parallel with homosexuality’s depiction in mainstream instruction is instructive. It used to be that homosexuality was a problem to be explained, and it could not be an incidental aspect of his or her character. I think we’ve reached a point where gayness is no longer an overriding element of a character. Sadomasochism is somewhere on that same trajectory.

Alan Moore’s 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom

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Jul 092010

Alan Moore’s 25,000 years of Erotic Freedom is a long essay that lays out Moore’s theory that pornography should be integrated into society. It’s only relatively recently that any shame attached to erotic depiction. Before then, there was a beautiful tradition of erotic high art, which Moore says goes back to the Venus of Willendorf.

The problem started with Christianity, or rather the ascetic Christianity of the late Roman empire. It wasn’t decadence that did in the Romans, but becoming a Christian, and therefore an-erotic and xenophobic, society. There were brief flowerings in the Rennaissance and the Englightenment, but thing really went wrong with the Victorians. (This is a pre-Foucault view of the repressive hypothesis.)

Implicitly, it was acceptable to enjoy sexual imagery as long as you accepted also that such acts were sinful and felt suitably ashamed and guilty if you were in any way aroused by their depiction. This established the immediate link between the perusal of pornography and intense self-loathing or embarrassment, which still exists today throughout most of the Western world.

Pg 16

For the purposes of this discussion, there’s the problem of where does BDSM porn, and BDSM in general, fall into Moore’s schema? Is it an expression of the humanizing erotic impulse, or of the corrupting influence of violence and shame?

Even in the golden age of written and graphic pornography, with works like Fanny Hill or Gerda Wegener’s illustrations or Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings or the like, BDSM acts are frequently in there somewhere, especially flagellation, but also a well-turned high-heeled boot or shoe or the like.

In those [Victorian] times, long before the advent of the adult video outlet, city businessmen returning homeward for a wekened with their spouse or partner would call in at some backstreet establishment and pick up a gaslight equivalent: just as theater predates cinema, so too did fully scored dramatic home pornography precede the skin-flick. Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbors were agreeable. These publications came with sheet music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth rug or the horsehair sofa. (Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but was told that by Malcolm McLaren, and if you can’t rust Malcolm McLaren then whom can you trust?)

Pg. 18

This isn’t really a historical book or even an essay. It’s more like have a pub conversation with Moore where he’s spinning out some off-the-cuff theories. You don’t bring a bibliography to a pub conversation.

Just to recap, then: Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization, and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

Pg. 39

As a general rule, I think this holds up: the better the status of women in a society, the less restriction there is on sexual expression. But I wouldn’t stake my reputation on that. I’d like to see some kind of study comparing the two factors: an index of pay equity, reproductive rights, etc, versus restrictions on depictions of sexuality, sex work laws, etc. But it would involve so many subjective issues that I don’t think it would be a solid piece of research.

So, what is the relationship between a society’s sexual expressiveness and its progressiveness on a social scale?

I think that this is a much thornier and complex issue than some people would like to make it. Anti-porn feminism wanted to create the equation of “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” Sex-positive types say there’s no connection at all, that pornography actually functions as a release valve for desires that would otherwise fester into violence.

It’s said that liberal democracies are good for market economies, but market economies aren’t necessarily good for liberal democracies. I see this as analogy to the relationship between sexual expression and progressiveness.

I tend to agree with Moore’s hypothesis, and there’s a bit of a manifesto that I can get behind: that there should be ambition on the part of porn’s creators, and porn should not be consumed in shameful secrecy. These are the ideas that informed Moore’s Lost Girls trilogy, which aimed to be part of an art-porn historical tradition, to be a coffee-table-book display artifact, to invest literary and artistic skill into porn and stimulate discussion.

Still, as I historian I want a more rigorous study of the history of porn, and one that’s more nuanced too.

Virtue in distress in North Korean propaganda art

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Jul 012010

Via BoingBoing, I found a gallery of North Korean propaganda art and photos. These include variations on the standard “woman threatened by male aggression” theme, with American soldiers as the aggressors and Koreans in traditional dress as the victims.

Some of them hint at a sexual content. One shows a bare-breasted Korean woman tied to the back of a cow, being dragged by US soldiers. Another shows American soldiers using pliers to extract teeth from a contemptuously defiant Korean woman in traditional dress.

Obviously, “virtue in distress” is a strategy that can be applied to just about any conflict, international or domestic.

Carrying off white women

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Jun 272010

BoingBoing.net has a small collection of “monster carrying of woman” images.

It’s interesting to me that this image has proven highly applicable to a variety of different conflicts, both open warfare and internal cultural stress: the Franco-Prussian war, WWI, the American civil rights struggle, the Cold War. It was particularly prevalent in Hollywood films of the 1930s: Frankenstein, King Kong, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Murders on the Rue Morgue, etc. Any sense of cultural anxiety can be reflected in the image of an unconscious white woman swooning in the arms of a dark/unclean/hypermasculine figure, and in terms of rape. This ties into the failed seduction idea discussed in Sex Drives.

One of the commenters says:

I did a whole lecture on the “monsters carrying off our women” meme once. Its history in western art goes back at least as far as Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women from 1582.

It was a staple of 20th century sci-fi posters pretty much until the late 70s, when Ripley proved it was possible for a lady to defeat the big scary monster all by her lonesome.

Below is the sculpture mentioned:

If this is the ur-instance of the “monsters carry off our women” image, it’s interesting that unlike the other examples, there are three figures: the female victim, the male aggressor, and the usurped male. They are entangled together, a complicated triad. Perhaps this is the root of cuckold fantasy as well, with the third figure being the one who observes the first two coupling.

Reading by Jacqueline Carey, author of Kushiel series

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Jun 162010

Jacqueline Carey, author of the Kushiel and Naamah series of erotica/historical fantasy novels, did a reading at the local library Monday night. Though I’m not that familiar with Carey’s works, I decided to attend.

The audience was mostly young women. I have a strong impression that the up-and-coming generation of kinky women will have their “aha!” moments from reading Carey’s books. (Certainly better than from reading Gor.)

Carey did a good reading, featuring a scene of a forthcoming novel in which an alternate Renaissance-era courtesan meets with the emperor of an Aztec empire-analog. She talked a lot about her love of historical research.

Curiously, she said she didn’t consider herself an erotica writer. Her main consideration was how much of the total length of the work was given over to sex, which is a fair criteria. She also said she got in on the ground floor of the historical/fantasy erotica boom (which includes its conjoined twin genre, the paranormal romance/urban fantasy). I had hoped for more discussion on the history of erotica and where Carey’s work fits into that, but she said she didn’t know about that topic.

Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro”: Somewhere, Jean Genet has an erection

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Jun 162010

“Alejandro” is the second time Lady Gaga has visually referenced The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974) in her videos.

The first time was in the “Love Game” video, in which she wore the dark pants, suspenders and officer’s cap look Lucia wore in that iconic scene. This seemed to be gesturing towards the early 70s, post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS downtown New York City scene as an image of sexual freedom and adventure. However, the video doesn’t engage with the implications of the source image. It’s just a bit of early 70s nostalgia, bereft of any particular meaning for Gaga’s primary audience who wasn’t even born when The Night Porter came out.

The video for “Alejandro” does address the themes of the source material: the militarism, the eroticism, etc. There’s a problematic connection drawn between fascism/militarism and homoeroticism. The nun imagery at the end seems to suggest that the only way Gaga’s character can be acceptable to a fascist man is to become an asexual image of virtue, nun-like.

There’s something a bit paint-by-numbers in this, particularly considering the similarities to Madonna’s videos. Homoeroticism? Check. Fascism? Check. Bra with gun barrels? Check. Swallowing rosary? Check. Latex nun uniform? Check. It’s pretty easy to generate 15-minutes of controversy with this kind of material, without sparking any particular debate or getting people to change their minds about anything. There’s certainly a long (if not always noble) history of anti-clerical agitprop, but whether that has actually made any difference is another question.

It put me in mind of MIA’s notorious “Born free” video. (Not currently on Youtube.com) Mia’s video employs the simple strategy of depicting pogroms and ethnic cleansing, but targeting red haired men. It’s a simple inversion strategy, one that generates shock, but doesn’t necessarily spark any deeper understanding or change attitudes. This is what the philosophers and poets in the late 1700s/early 1800s did when they tried to imagine themselves into slave bodies. I don’t know if this had any direct impact on the debate over slavery, but it did eventually contribute to the evolving form of BDSM porn.

Victorian steampunk animatronic bed

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Jun 132010

From My Delineated Life, a remarkable animatronic bed.

This rosewood bed, encrusted with silver and the figures made of bronze, was created for Nawab Muhammad Bahawal Khan Abbasi V of Bahawalpur in 1883. The four figures at the corners represent women of France, Spain, Italy and Greece. With clever mechanisms, the statues were able to wink and wave fans and fly whisks. No flys on this Khan.

What’s interesting is that this artifact represents a kind of reverse Orientalism, an “Oriental” man’s fantasy of different varieties of European women.

The deeper meaning of nunsploitation

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Jun 132010

Inspired by Lady Gaga’s video for “Alejandro” (more on that later), Slate provides a run-down of nunsploitation books and films.

It includes a link to a Hermenaut article, “Convent Erotica“, that goes deeper into the nunsploitation genre, including its similarities to the “women in prison” genre.

The nun movie is the mirror of another disreputable genre, the women-in-prison movie. Both deal with women’s bodies in confined spaces, with innocence abused, with microsocieties, with the forms and channels of power. The women’s prison and the convent are sexual laboratories, the prisoners/nuns experimental subjects. Thus the emphasis on surveillance. If two people are having sex in one of these movies, chances are a third character is there to watch. Concealment and revelation, crucial issues in all pornography, take on special importance in nun movies because the convent, or more precisely the cloister, is designated as a space of invisibility. But it’s really the other way around: It’s this designation that makes the cloister so apt a set for eroticism. Just as it’s because the nun is supposed to deny her body and become invisible that she compels attention on the screen.

I wonder if nuns have fallen out of favor as fetish objects in the past few decades, as society becomes increasingly secular, and few women choose to renounce the world or are forced into convents.

I think the “torture porn” genre has stepped in to fill the gap of nunsploitation and women-in-prison films. This genre has a similarly ambivalent attitude towards women, unsteadily moving back and forth between victim, heroine and villain. There are similar elements of confinement, voyeurism, exploitation and the sense that this nastiness is happening in a hidden part of our own society.

From an interview with Thomas Fahy, editor of the essay collection The Philosophy of Horror:

I think we’ve been talking about torture in this culture a great deal recently and these films raise a very clear question: Is it ever permissible to torture someone? It’s a hell of a lot different thinking about that when you’re watching somebody torture somebody, in all of its ugliness, on-screen than when you’re watching the nightly news.

What I find interesting about them is that they’re not films about mutilating and torturing women — in the “Last House on the Left” remake, one of the torturers actually is a woman. And “Hostel” was raising a lot of really provocative questions. The protagonist who is able to escape the torture facility — in which rich people pay to torture European backpackers — had a different price charged for people from different countries and the most expensive people to torture are Americans. That speaks to anxieties that we have as a country.

However, with only a slight “shift in optic”, these stories are the basis for BDSM fantasies.

Scent of a sadist

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Jun 042010

Ah&Oh Studio created a line of perfume packages based on male writers, including George Orwell, LaClos (author of Dangerous Liaisons), Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade.

We found inspiration in the great, dark literature and distinctive, strong characters. We tried to describe the dark sides of men’s nature with line of scents named after famous writers.

Interesting that all four writers, not just Sade, could be seen as factoring into the history of BDSM. LaClos wrote about seduction and power games, and Poe about obsession and imprisonment. Even Orwell’s vision of dystopia in 1984 became fodder for masochistic fantasy.

I wonder what Sacher-Masoch or Richardson would smell like? Perhaps a complementary line of women’s fragrances: Stowe, Radcliffe, Rachilde, Reage, Rice, Carey?

Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol.1

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Jun 022010

Sooner or later, I knew I had to deal with Michel Foucault. Not only is his name pretty much synonymous with the study of the history of sexuality, he was a practicing perv himself. So, with trepidation, I checked “The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1” and read it.

I’m a concrete thinker: I understand prefer examples to abstractions. Foucault writes at such high level of abstraction, it sounds impressive, almost poetic, but I have a hard time applying it to any real world example. It’s almost Hermetic, an intellectual model so seductively attractive that it may have little or nothing to do with the real world. This is precisely the kind of thing I want to avoid in this book, but if you study the history of sexuality you inevitably bump up against this kind of rarefied, critical theory language.

Not to say there aren’t interesting ideas here. Foucault says that we need to junk the repressive hypothesis of the late 20th century, that the 19th century was an era of censorship and sexual repression. Instead, the modern age (i.e. the last few centuries of the West) is a flourishing of sexual discourse. Foucault uses Diderot’s story of “The Indiscreet Jewels,” an Orientalist fable about a sultan’s magic ring that makes women’s genitals talk about their experiences. The starting point for all this was the Catholic pastoral, manuals for taking confession that advised going into great detail about the act. Sex had to be said. In this view, Walter, the author of My Secret Life, was not unusual, but just took the compulsion to speak of sex to an extreme.

Censorship and regulation of sexuality, for example, are both aspects of this compulsion to speak about sex and skirmishes in the struggle over how and by whom it was to be spoken. When we are confronted with people who express little or no sexual desires, we concoct a clumsy designation, “asexuality”, to fit them into our scheme.

I think Foucault is on shakier ground when he imagines some idyllic pre-discourse form of sex, when trading handjobs for pennies from the village idiot was part of every child’s life (or so Foucault seems to think.)

Another interesting idea is that the sexual repressions of the 19th century began with the bourgeoisie imposing sexual restrictions on itself, and then extending those restrictions to the aristocracy and the proletariat.

Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.

Pg. 103

If sex is not only or even primarily for reproduction (and everything else a perversion), that’s a good answer to what it is for.