Peter Tupper

Multiple wives, multiple pleasures by Joan DelPlato

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Feb 202010
 

DelPlato, Joan. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875 Rosemount, 2002

John Frederick Lewis, The Harem 1850

As shown in the painting above (John Frederick Lewis, Hhareem 1850), there’s a lot invested in the view of the harem as fantasy. The “truth” of life in a polygynous harem in the Arab world is almost irrelevant to the way the harem, and particularly the harem woman, figured in Western discourse. Feminists saw polygyny in the worst light, while apologists depicted it in utopian terms, a model of gender relationships in which men did not have to compete for women.

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Edmund White’s “City Boy” on the early NYC leather scene

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Jan 282010
 

From the UK Guardian:

Back in the mid-60s New York had just one leather bar, and it was inconspicuous and customers would wear their normal clothes and carry a change of costume in a bag, then switch to their chaps and black leather vest in the taxi. They were terrified a friend, even a gay friend, might see them going out in this freaky rig. Sadomasochism still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky – sort of New Jersey. And elderly. As if working-class, old gay men who couldn’t compete in the real bars could look appealing in leather, or at least threatening.

….

In 1975 a hardcore S&M monthly magazine, Drummer, started publishing. It had fairly technical information about how to torture and submit to it – we read it with avidity. The whole look and smell of gay New York culture was changing toward beefier bodies, beards, and the odour of brew, harness, sweat, and Crisco. A boyfriend of mine said that New Yorkers were so pale and unhealthy looking that black leather was the only look that suited them.

The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached 21st Street and 11th Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At 5ft 10in I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at 16th Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defence – a fairly effective system. I thought back to the 50s when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby-blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not any more. Now many of us were taking judo classes.

And now the dress code was strict. The Eagle would allow “No hat other than leather cycle caps, western hats, construction hats or uniform hats. No jackets or coats other than leather or western style”.

Pope John Paul II’s alleged self-flagellation

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Jan 272010
 

A new book, Why a Saint? by Monsignor Slawomir Oder, alleges that Pope John Paul II practiced self-flagellation.

… even when he was not ill [with cancer and Parkinson’s disease], he inflicted pain on himself, known in Christianity as mortification, so as to feel closer to God.

“In Krakow as in the Vatican, Karol Wojtyla flagellated himself,” Oder writes in the book, citing testimony from people in the late pope’s close entourage while he was bishop in his native Poland and after he was elected pope in 1978.

“In his closet, among his vestments, there was hung on a clothes hanger a particular kind of belt for pants, which he used as a whip,” Oder writes.

When he was bishop in Poland, he often slept on the bare floor so he could practice self-denial and asceticism, Oder writes.

According to Slate’s Explainer column:

The Catholic Church does not officially sanction self-flagellation. But some Popes have spoken favorably of it, and passages of the New Testament have been interpreted as approving of the practice. “[S]hall not we be moved by God’s grace to impose on ourselves some voluntary sufferings and deprivations?” wrote Pope John XXIII in a 1962 encyclical. Some of the earliest references to mortification, as the practice is sometimes called, are in the letters of the apostle Paul, who wrote in the book of Romans, “If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye live through the Spirit to mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” And in Colossians, he wrote: “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature.” Devout Catholics have practiced mild self-flagellation for centuries, often with a simple belt but sometimes using the cattailed whip known as a “discipline.” Some still do. But the practice has become rare since the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s, and it’s rarely discussed in public.

Leather Archives & Museum fellowship

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Jan 042010
 

did not make the Visiting Scholar fellowship for the Leather Archives & Museum. However, the letter did say:

The search committee was impressed with your creative approach to sexual history and the potentially groundbreaking impact of your project, Beauty in Darkness.

This changes little. This project has been on the back burner for the past six months or so as I have been busy working on the steampunk erotica story collection, which I recently submitted. I intend that in 2010 I can post on this blog more often.

“I know! We’ll make porn!”: Nikkatsu’s foray into bondage erotica

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Nov 272009
 

Graydancer’s Ropecast has another interview with Master K (starting about 24 minutes in), with some recently uncovered skinny on Nikkatsu, a Japanese film studio that, faced with financial difficulties in the 1970s, turned to big budget, high production value, softcore porn features. These “roman porn” movies were a contrast to the small budget, independently-made “pinku eiga” movies.

Naomi Tani, portraying tattooed Asian woman in bondage

 

Many of these films were BDSM-themed, and Nikkatsu recruited pinku eiga star Naomi Tani, bringing her to a much bigger audience.

Sexual fantasies vs. Apocalyptic fantasies

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Nov 062009
 

Fetish Pop Culture turned up an interesting French book called La Papesse du Diable (The Devil’s female Pope) by Jehan Silvius and Pierre de Ruynes, 1931.

From a Google-translated summary:

Excellent example of the surreal eroticism of prewar, The High Priestess of the Devil (1931) appears to be due to the collaboration of Ernest Gengenbach and Robert Desnos. (Alexandrian.)

It attends to the entry into Paris of the Mistress of Asia, now Archimagesse Queen of the World, at the head of his hordes coming to conquer Europe. Theme dear to the surrealists, the high priestess of Satan is actually Isis, the wife, the mysterious, the archetypal.

Paris is upset, the streets be renamed; victory of evil forces absolute beneficial: the Great Androgyne throne at Notre Dame, the Pope prisoner is crucified on the Eiffel Tower. Everything ends with the end of the world and in a final orgy sacred General: A desire lascivious half opened the knees of women, men’s eyes gleamed. Everywhere tears, gasps, collapses paintings and cultural objects, cramp-like bristles. Dogs came from who knows where, covered the women gasped. An adolescent, arms outstretched, moaning slowly, half-stifled by four women. Three men in a corner hugged by meowing like girls entwined writhing on a couch …

So, is this an apocalyptic fantasy, the end of the world with a female Antichrist presiding over an orgy? Or is it a sexual fantasy with apocalyptic window-dressing? Is the sex sugar-coating the political/racial content, or vice versa? Books like this are a site for many discourses, and the surrealists had the eye for the end of the world, a key theme of the Gothic.

This is actually a little reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern, rationalist West invaded by the sexually deviant yet seductive East/Orient. The possibility of invasion/corruption is also the possibility of revolution and transformation.

Right now, our bookshelves and movie theatres and TV screens are crawling with the sexy undead, though often of a rather neutered strain. The dewey-eyed, sparkling-in-sunlight, heteronormative vampires of the Twilight franchise are a far cry from the polymorphously perverse, disturbing bloodsuckers of older literary incarnations. (By drawing explicit parallels between vampirism and homosexuality, True Blood at least injects a little queerness into the proceedings.)

Can a monster get worn out? Through excessive familiarity, does a monster loose its ability to frighten or inspire? Can you extract the sublimity from something? I’d like to raise Bram Stoker from the dead and sit him down in front of Twilight or The Vampire Diaries and ask him what he would think of the idea as vampires being heroes or romantic partners.

I think that on some weird, subconscious level, the threat of impurity, as represented by Dracula or The Devil’s Papess, also represents the possibility of change. Just as the classic “rape/ravishment” fantasy resolves the paradox of female desire vs. purity, the fantasy of the apocalypse resolves the need for revolution.

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