Peter Tupper

Iwan Bloch’s Sex Life in England

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May 122010
 

Debra Hyde’s blog has a quick look at Iwan Bloch’s Sex life in England (1934), including scans of some of the art.

Iwan Bloch was a noted author and sexologist from pre-Nazi Germany. He was a contemporary of fellow sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Sigmund Freud considered his contributions on homosexuality key to looking at sexual orientation from a non-pathological stance. I suspect it gave some level of legitimacy to Falstaff Press in the eyes of government suppression, but not much, given the fervor of the law. Although he was responsible for discovering the presumed-lost manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade and he was an early biographer of the notorious figure, so who knows.

I’d like to see this book and have a good insight into pre-WWII European sexual culture.

Photo Bits fetish magazine, 1911

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May 122010
 

I have a few 1930s-40s copies of London Life magazine, but I am still looking for Photo Bits, another pre-WWII fetishistic magazine. Debra Hyde has a few scans on Flickr.

But when I came across a copy of a 1911 Photo Bits, our consistency really hit home. Here was an early 20th-century British relic that featured — what else! — items on corsetry, female impersonation, and extreme shoes, even headlining the latter as “the cult of the heel.” That’s very similar to the tamer sections of Willie’s Bizarre, isn’t it?

Photo Bits was considered an early girlie mag, a publication that tried to straddle the mores of the Victorian era even as the world move onward. The playful bathing beauties on its cover were eye-catching and tantalizing for its day and its headline about kleptomania almost yells “women inside!” Still, if not for the fact that Photo Bits makes an appearance in Leopold Bloom’s thoughts in James Joyce’s Ulysses, I’d be hard pressed to think of the publication as edgy. But there you have it.

Academic paper on BDSM in Second Life

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May 112010
 

While I personally have little interest in virtual BDSM, it does merit study as an aspect of the history, as an example of creating shared fantasy worlds. There’s a new academic paper studying this particular sub-subculture, Topping from the Viewfinder: The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life” by Shaowen Bardzell.

From the abstract:

Photographs were sampled from thousands of user profiles of Second Life users who explicitly associate themselves with one or more BDSM communities or groups. Using visual analysis and social semiotics, I describe the visual language of these images, and with them, the grammar and symbolism of power and submission, of individual and institution, and of photographer and viewer.

Complete text, PDF

(Via BoingBoing)

The Last Two Centuries of SM

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May 052010
 

From an excerpt from Steve Lenius’s book Life, Leather and the Pursuit of Happiness:

In the first part of the presentation, Bienvenu described SM practices of the nineteenth century and how SM practices changed in the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century SM imagery was built around “soft,” essentially feminine materials such as silk, lace and fur. Participants in SM scenes either wore everyday clothes or were nude.

Nineteenth-century SM implements were simple, natural and uncomplicated—canes, switches, whips or birch rods. SM practices of the time were narrowly focused (on the buttocks, for example), ritualistic and predictable (starting with ritualistically exposing the buttocks), and endlessly repetitive (flagellating the buttocks, then flagellating them some more). Creativity and spontaneity were not the objects of nineteenth-century SM.

By the 1920s, SM had changed to a predominantly “hard,” masculine aesthetic. SM imagery of the time revolved around polished leather, latex and metals. When SM participants in the images shown by Bienvenu wore anything, it tended to be specialized fetish attire, following an aesthetic that came to be known as “bizarre.” Photographic backgrounds were urban and industrial. SM implements and situations showed a broadened focus and increasing creativity, ingenuity, spontaneity, complexity and unpredictability.

I can think of a few counter examples to Beinvenu’s classification: blood-letting seemed to have been a common practice in 19th century brothels, for instance. Still, I think there might be something to this; for example, is black leather as the default BDSM fashion choice something inherited from the post-war Leatherman culture, and not a feature of pre-WWII BDSM culture? I’m slowly working through the collection of John Willie’s Bizarre magazine, and there are plenty of mentions of rubber, but little of leather.

Leather Leadership Conference XIV in Detroit, Michigan

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May 052010
 

[x-posted from my personal blog with edits]

Even though my fatigue level started collapsing in mid-afternoon, I had an incredible time at day one of Leather Leadership. I got to meet both MayMay, founder of the KinkForAll conference, and Graydancer, of the long-running Ropecast. He actually recognized my name from my attendee badge and remembered that he had called my “Innocent’s Progress” story great erotica. I think we talked briefly about doing an interview, which would be great for promoting the Innocent’s Progress book when it drops this summer. It was a bit odd hearing the person in front of me speaking in the same voice that was so familiar from my MP3 player’s headphones.

Andrea Zanin, aka Sex Geek, gave a great momentum speech, asking whether BDSM has lived up to its revolutionary potential. She actually cited the Against Sadomasochism essay anthology published

I also got to meet Mollena Williams, aka the Perverted Negress, at her discussion on being “a minority in a minority,” She talked about her own history, and the difference between “slave auction” and “scene auction.” Williams has a way of dropping the words “shit”, as an all-purpose noun, and “fucken”, as an all-purpose adjective, into her conversation so that they don’t sound crude.

AC and I both began to fade out later on, and we went back to her ex’s place for dinner and rest. There wasn’t an official play party at LLC, but con attendees got reduced admission to the Space, a privately-operated party held at a community hall in Detroit. AC’s ex was kind enough to introduce me to MS so I’d have a date. The Space lays out a nice dinner buffet and some interesting furniture.

I’ve been enjoying the kindness of relative strangers all through this junket. Places to stay in both Detroit at Seattle, a scholarship to cover admission, a drive down to Seattle, an awesome hospitality suite at the conference, a free copy of a book, and a plane fare covered by my organization. Heck, a guy from the conference even gave me an extra meal voucher last night at the airport. This is what community means, folks. I’ve made this trip only because of the generosity of others.

It’s revitalized my connection to the community and my interest in my BDSM history book project, both presenting and even actually writing the damned thing. Thanks to still more free advice, I’m thinking that self-publishing is the way to go.

While I’m 90% decided against running for re-election in the fall (I’ve been on the board for 3 years, I’ve got my purple hearts, I need a break), I do still want to be involved. Just somewhere removed a step or two from the politics. Maybe run the web site or newsletter.

Sunday’s presentations continued to be good. I saw Lee Harrington on presenting and on TNG (The Next Generation) groups within the community. Lee started off giving reasons for TNG and other age-based groups or sub groups, but as the discussion wore on I kept hearing reasons that they weren’t much good. A 25 year old who has been in the Scene since he or she was 20 has more experience (and hopefully more wisdom) than somebody in their 40s who just tiptoed into their first munch. And predators aren’t necessarily older guys leching after young sub women. If age is no indicator of experience, good judgment, and whether or not a person is a danger, I wondered, what are age-based groups for, other than hanging out with people who get the same movie references? The best way to handle age-based groups is treat them as peripheral, entry-ways to the larger community. Anything that can make that first step into the community a little less scary is good.

I heard some interesting talk on the role of leaders in policing the community. One guy made a very bold statement that the gay community had failed to educate the new generation of gay men about HIV: “Every new guy I meet is already positive.” That got me thinking about the horror stories that circulate at these kind of gatherings, some verifiably true, some only urban legends (I hope). Have we as kinky leaders failed to get the SSC/RACK gospel out and/or failed to enforce an acceptable standard of behavior? Or is there a limit to what we can do? We can control what happens in parties, but not people’s bedrooms.

And it isn’t even the problem of education. Allena, who runs the Center for Sex Positive Culture in Seattle, and I were talking about people we know or have heard in the scene doing things that range from stupidly incompetent to outright criminal. These are not always the lone man or woman who calls himself a kinkster when he or she’s just abusive, or even the sketchy person who hangs out on the periphery of the community. These are sometimes leaders and educators, people who are supposed to exemplify BDSM, including the ethical underpinnings of the culture/lifestyle/community/sexuality. They don’t even have ignorance as a defense.

Right now, I’m writing this from inside the library at Seattle’s Center for Sex Positive Culture. Give me a hot plate and a sleeping bag and I’d gladly live here.

Future of this project

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May 052010
 

I’ve been thinking about the future of this project, including the future of this blog and what to do with all this research.

Monetizing the blog
While I don’t anticipate making a huge amount of money off this blog, I’m considering buying a pro-account on this blogging platform and putting up some add banners.

From what I can tell so far, probably the best bet is Amazon affiliate, as I can link to the books and movies I’ve been discussing. Unlike a lot of other affiliate programs, you can be paid via direct deposit, and not have to wait for more than $100 to accumulate. Direct deposit pays over $10.

However, I’m leery of Amazon ever since the Kindle-George Orwell affair, and I don’t like the way Amazon is comporting itself in the looming ebook-platform war. It’s still a better deal for low traffic sites like mine than Google A d s e n s e. $10 a month beats waiting the better part of a year for $100.

Publishing the book
The thing about research is that you can keep doing it forever if there’s no deadline to make you stop and sort-and-shape it into something distinct: an article, a book, etc. I’ve been doing that for about 5 years.

Self-publishing
Do it via Lulu.com or CreateSpace.com.
Pro: Total control of the project. Keep most of the money coming in (not that I expect much).
Con: To do it seriously would require hiring a professional copyeditor/proofreader and a cover designer. Plus a lot of work and money on getting permissions for illustrations. I would include the time and expense of doing promotion, but that’s likely to be a problem with conventional publishing. I can imagine a low-tech tour down the west coast (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco), traveling by car or bus.

Regular publishing
Keeping working at finding an agent and/or publisher in a collapsing industry.
Pro: A smaller share of possibly more money. More critical respect. Some of the post-production work done for me, though not all.
Con: Less control of project. Probably little in the way of promotion; no paid book tours for me.

Back to school
Having only a BA doesn’t count for much these days. I could go back to school and finish off an MA, using my research as the basis for a thesis. This could add some academic credibility to a book.

I’m not crazy about going back to the academic life, which I burned out of in my early 20s. Plus that means more money laid out for tuition, and it is time all of this started paying back.

Download for free
Lots of fiction and non-fiction writers have published (self or pro) print books for sale and also make their books free for download under Creative Commons. The theory is that free digital copies (PDF, PDB, PRC, what have you) spreads the work and drives sales of the print copy, whether published by yourself or professionally.

I’m also not sure how having copyrighted images in Creative Commons licensed book would work.

This appeals to my “information wants to be free” sensibility. My target audience for this book is kinky-minded academic people and academically-minded kinky people, who are probably thinly spread geographically and better approached through communities of interest.

In this case, it’s a definite case of obscurity being a bigger problem than piracy.

Everybody loves feudalism in their hearts

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May 032010
 

From a review of Michael Gruber’s novel The Good Son in Salon.com:

Details that at first seem merely quirky — Sonia’s Jungian practice, for example — prove themselves in the course of the novel to be tributaries emptying into Gruber’s theme: that enduring, atavistic longing for the meaning and passion to be found in the old ways of life. “Everyone loves feudalism in their hearts,” Theo tells himself, sounding like Greene’s Harry Lime, “which is why ‘The Godfather’ and ‘The Sopranos’ were huge hits. There has yet to be a movie about legislative markup or the courageous agents of the Federal Election Commission.” Life in “Pashtunistan” may be brutal and irrational, but for what Sonia calls “us primitives,” it’s mighty hard to quit.

That applies to the pseudo-feudal terminology of D/S.

This also ties into a section of Benjamin Nugent’s non-fiction book American Nerd. Nugent sees the pseudo-medieval society of the Society of Creative Anachronism as nerds’ idea of a utopian society: hierarchical yet meritocratic, transparent (you can tell what a person’s social role is just by looking at them), orderly, earnest, yet allowing people to go off and pursue their own interests in peace. He compares that to a group home he lived in inhabited by an amorphous, ever-shifting group of hipsters, who constantly engage in a never-ending struggle for dominance. Map that comparison onto the orderly, transparent, checklists-and-safeword world of BDSM versus the ambiguity of vanilla dating. You can see the appeal of a social world in which you can always point to the person who’s in charge.

“Your power is getting your ass kicked”: Kick-Ass, superheroes and masochism

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Apr 162010
 

From Io9.com:

…the love of violence is really the main emotion that Kick-Ass expresses. Both inflicting violence, and receiving it. When Big Daddy points out that Kick-Ass’ superpower is getting his ass kicked, you can’t help accepting that it’s true. But the movie winks at us, through an eye that’s already swollen almost shut, and says, you know, that’s not a bad superpower at all. The broken, battered young body of Dave Lizewski is the most pornographic thing in the movie, and his contusions are badges of honor.

Superheroes don’t give us much in the way of lessons about morality, or science, or whatever — they give us a context in which violence makes sense. Much like gangsters, who are the other type of non-regular people we meet in this film. You could just as easily beat people up without wearing a funny costume or being a gangster, but then it would just be senseless assault. The superhero genre legitimizes our love of brutality. And our masochism, as I may have mentioned.

You can’t really love superheroes without being a painslut, Kick-Ass says. You can’t embrace all of the illogic and pointlessness and nastiness of men and women and children thwacking each other in shiny outfits, unless you’re addicted to hurt.

I think BDSM, like superhero stories, does depend on stepping into a sort of “magic circle”, a realm in which normal rules of society don’t apply, and the action is driven by less rational impulses. The problems come when the boundaries of the magic circle gets blurry.

Kick-Ass, incidentally, does have a power of a sort. Nerve damage from previous injuries reduces his ability to feel pain. This sets up an interesting question: wouldn’t a masochist NOT want to reduce the ability to feel pain? Or is just an excuse/reason to seek out even more extreme experiences?

The use of deviant sexuality in political discourse

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Apr 052010
 

From Protein Wisdom via Racialicious comes this charming glimpse into the American political discourse:

Despite the poster’s disclaimers (“I made it a cartoon and not a photoshop and the “woman” is green. Deal, people.”), this image hits hard on one of the biggest hot buttons in the American unconscious: a black man raping a white woman. In this particular case, the scenario appears to be one of acquaintance rape. The setting appears to be the Statue of Liberty’s bedroom, and the Obama-caricature refers to “consent.” The implication seems to be seduction that became rape, that Obama is violating America by trickery and lies, but outright violence is the end result.

This goes into the tradition of war propaganda, harem fantasies based on the Greek-Turkish war, the Nazi-exploitation genre, les femmes tondues of post-WWII France, etc. : the analogy of political deviance with sexual deviance. In this case, Obama’s policies with interracial, black-male-on-white-female rape. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t mean it is a good part of political discourse.

Collective sexual fantasies accumulate around public figures, particularly political figures. Back in 2008, much was made of Obama’s youth, handsomeness and charisma, compared to McCain’s age and less telegenic personality. (Of course, even more was made about Sarah Palin’s body and sexuality, but that’s another post.)

Anyway, this cartoon goes right to the American hindbrain, the same tangled mass of race, gender and class that makes interracial porn so popular. I’d go so far to say that for every white person who gets his or her dander up about the thought of Obama symbolically raping the Statue of Liberty, there’s a white guy jacking off to the fantasy of some big black stud having rough sex with his wife. That’s the American collective anxiety, the same way that back in the 1820s Englishmen thought about Turks invading Greece.

As a side note, writing from Canada, I’m truly astonished at the vehemence of resistance to Obama’s policies, particularly universal healthcare, and to Obama as a person.

The Victorian sexual survey of Dr. Clelia Mosher

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Mar 312010
 

Continuing the tradition of eccentric and far from “straight and narrow” sex researchers, Stanford magazine has a profile of Dr. Clelia Mosher, a 19th century surgeon and feminist who advocated that women were not debilitated by menstruation. She also made a survey of women’s sexual attitudes long before Kinsey, which mouldered in an archive until 1973.

Mosher’s surveys of women born in 1870 or earlier spoke of widespread sexual ignorance before marriage, but also a strong interest in mutual sexual pleasure as a key aspect of companionate marriage.

Unlike Mosher’s other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. “She’s actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she’s really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women,” Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn’t. One slept apart from her husband “to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.” Some didn’t enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] “Thinks men have not been properly trained.”

I’d love to see if there are any interest in or fantasies of kinky sexuality in these interviews.

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