Peter Tupper

Untangling the history of shibari: The Beauty of Kinbaku

Apr 122008

Graydancer’s Ropecast includes part one of an interview with Master K, who provides the most plausible account I’ve found so far of the history of Japanese bondage (shibari or kinbaku) and its relationship to the Western/American BDSM tradition. K says there was a cross-pollination between John Willie, of Bizarre fame, and the Japanese bondage subculture in the early 1950s, with Willie’s books being distributed in Japan (legally or by piracy?) and Willie having access to books and magazines from Japan. He also says the modern Japanese bondage culture grew out of several influences: kabuki theatre, the military tying technique of hojojutsu, the use of tying as a form of physical and psychosocial torture, the use of tying in many other aspects of Japanese culture, including religion. It makes more sense to me that it would come from multiple sources, and go through an evolution that parallels the Western sadomasochistic tradition.

When non-Japanese talk Japanese rope bondage, the discourse often revolves around issues of authenticity, and there’s a certain jockeying for status in who has the most access and understanding of the “real” thing, complicated by the distance, language barrier and general insularity of Japan. It’s hard to separate this from Orientalist discourse of the erotic, exotic Far East. Graydancer makes a point of sidestepping this issue by calling what he does “Japanese-style rope bondage”

Addendum: Part 2 of the Master K interview

Addendum: Now the complete Master K interview has been posted.

Chloe “liked” Olivia: Between Women, by Sharon Marcus

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Mar 272008

Marcus, Sharon Between Women: Friendship, Desire, And Marriage In Victorian England Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Books Amazon

If “the homosexual”, as a legal and psychological identity, was invented in the late Victorian period via events like the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis and the trial of Oscar Wilde, there may have been forms of sexual identity that were un-invented at the same time. Marcus’ book suggests that, instead of looking at Virgina Woolf’s phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” and immediately assuming that the women in question were lesbians, or should have been lesbians if only their society allowed for it, “liked” may have referred to an emotionally passionate yet physically chaste form of female friendship. Far from being in opposition to heterosexuality, female homosociality was a complimentary adjunct to heterosexuality. Female friends were a standard feature of romantic novels; it was the unmarriageable types like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp who didn’t like other women.

In further search of Arthur Munby’s erection: Between Women, by Sharon Marcus

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Mar 072008

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England Princeton University Press, 2007.

I’ve run into yet another snag in the question of, Is BDSM necessarily sexual? And how do we write about people’s sexualities who are very, very different from modern conceptions?

Even the primary sources may not be as reliable as we might think. I’ve always taken for granted that Arthur Munby had little or no interest in vanilla sex, that it was all sublimated into his working-class women fetish. There’s no hint he ever had intercourse in the diaries of him or Hannah Cullwick. However, does that necessarily mean anything?

The question “did the have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted with a claim that women in the past were lovers — and it is almost always unanswerable. If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defining a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex. Scholars have yet to determine whether Thomas Carlyle was impotent; when, if ever, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor consummated their relationship; or if Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose diaries recorded their experiments with fetishes, cross-dressing, and bootlicking, also had genital intercourse…. one rarely finds even oblique references to sex between husband and wife.

Pg.43

One could add: Did Henry Spencer Ashbee write or compile My Secret Life and just never mention it in his diaries? (I don’t think he did.) And what really happened to T.E. Lawrence in De’era? (Reminds me of a joke in Blackadder, in which a character casually mentions that Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality is actually just a character assassination by a literary rival.) Even in the well-documented cases with primary sources, there’s so much room for uncertainty.

Sharon Marcus’ book about 19th century female relationships argues that “romantic friendship” between women is not just a genteel, Victorian way of saying “lesbian.” Based on her studies of “life writing”, she claims that passionate yet chaste female-female relationships existed as a complementary adjunct to heterosexual marriage. Women were known to and expected to have intense homoerotic relationships, which would develop their feminine qualities. These relationships existed within the “play of the system” of heterosexual marriage, and constituted a separate realm from actual lesbianism as we would define it today.

Marcus provides a lot of examples from diaries and memoirs of intimate encounters between women that apparently never went past first base, if that far. That suggests a remarkable degree of self-restraint. How often did two women slip over that boundary between female friendship and lesbianism? Alternatively, after reading Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, were Victorian women quietly having orgies in the parlor while their menfolk enjoyed port and cigars in the study?

Who knows? If there was an accepted social realm for intimate relationships between women, that were emotionally intense yet chaste, then there can be erotics that don’t involve genital contact or even arousal. Munby may very well have gone to the grave a technical virgin even after marrying Cullwick, having perhaps never had an erection in all his interactions with working women.

My personal theory is that Munby was aroused by Cullwick and women like her, but he blocked that out on some level, so he could maintain the pretense, to the world and to himself, that there was nothing improper about his “hobby.” Thus, to him, it wasn’t sexual.

That leaves the even more vexing question of how Cullwick experienced her relationship with Munby. We know that she wrote about flirting with and kissing men other than Munby, so she was more sexually expressive than him (or just less reticent about it.) But was what she felt when kneeling and scrubbing floors pleasure?

Sacher-Masoch’s The Black Czarina: “Blood spurted over the ermine.”

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Feb 282008

At long last, I finally found another translated work by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. “The Black Czarina” was a short story printed in the back of the 1965 Senate edition of Venus in Furs, translated by H.J. Henning. What Fernanda Savage translated as “Confessions of a Supersensual Man”, Henning calls “Confessions of an Ulta-Sentimentalist”, both of which suggest a connection to 18th century ideas of sensibility.

Unfortunately, the book says nothing about where or when “The Black Czarina” was published.

Unsurprisingly, the story reflects Sacher-Masoch’s preoccupation with cruel women (and fur), but it ties in his many other interests in a somewhat ungainly package. It starts off with a picturesque sketch of decaying Galician castles, but that doesn’t last long until: “The great Czar Vladimir is couched at the feet of his slave…. Bearskins are strewn profusely on the ground.”

Vladimir is obsessed with Narda, his slave, who was widowed after the war against Kiev, and delighted in seeing boyards fight to the death over her. The czar, passing by, claims her. However, he grows to love (?) her precisely because of her indomitableness. She says, “Kill me if you like, but you cannot force me. I mock you. You are as impotent as a child.”

To prove his love, Vladimir swaps places with Narda, sovereign and slave, then gives her absolute power for one day, sunrise to sunset.

Unlike Wanda von Dunajew, Narda requires no coaxing to take control on her special day. She wakes to have Vladimir kiss her foot, then dresses in ermine. Her first proclamation: “May my reign be a reign of peace an happiness. As long as it lasts, as far as my sceptre reacher, no man is to bear arms. In token of peace and gentleness, women will form my guard.” She orders treasury gold to be given to the people. She liberates the female slaves from the palace, who serve as her bodyguard.

Sacher-Masoch wasn’t exactly racially progressive, to wit:

“Where is the negress?” enquired Narda.

“In the dungeon.”

“Tigris? And why?”

“She killed her gaoler.”

Narda gave a sign and Tigris was brought to her. She was a superb woman who seemed carved out of ebony. A woman disquieting by the nocturnal splendour of her body of bacchante, by the cruel laugh of her feline face and the bloodthirsty sparkle of her voluptuous eyes.

“You killed a man?” said Narda in a severe tone.

The negress nodded.

“And why?”

“For the pleasure of it,” replied Tigris, grinding her teeth.

“For one day I have the power of life and death,” said the Czarina. “What shall I do with you?”

“Let me die. I cannot live here if I may not kill anybody. My heart thirsts for blood, as yours for kisses.”

“Good. Your thirst will be quenched,” said the Czarina with a shudder. “No man is allowed to bear arms in my domain. I pardon you Tigris. You will be my executioner.”

The negress let fly a savage yelp, the cry of a wild beast.

Narda is also described in animalistic terms.

The czarina and her female guards go on a morning bear hunt, and Narda calmly dispatches a bear. Then things take a turn for the odd. Narda comes across Iegor, the pragmatic and independent-minded peasant man, who is unimpressed by her.

“I hate all those who wear purple and fine linen, and harness men to their carts like beasts. We lived free…. We had no wars, and if anyone disturbed the peace of the commune, the people judged him.”

This is the kind of resourceful, independent peasant man Sacher-Masoch valorized in other writings, at least according to James Cleugh’s biography. Narda wins his loyalty until the end of the day.

When holding court, Narda hears the complaints of the people against the boyard nobles. In this case, loyalty to the czar is seen as a belief in justice and personal autonomy, compared to the corrupt and brutal boyards. Narda orders a boyard executed and quartered, with a portion given to each of four accusers. The others begged for mercy, but they are slaughtered by women archers. The dying men gaze adoringly at their executioners.

When Narda puts Iegor in charge of the army on the frontier, the czar says, “You have done what no sovereign dared to, broken the power of an arrogant nobility. For this, we thank you. But do not interfere with the rights of the Crown.” Narda pays no heed.

She holds an extravagant party at the end of the day. The boyards (presumably the ones who weren’t slaughtered) toast her. While there’s still an hour before sundown, she whips Vladimir.

Vladimir tries to cut this off, but Narda turns a temporary play into a coup. Vladimir and the boyards fall to their knees and surrender. Narda has Tigris execute Vladimir. “Blood spurted over the ermine.” It ends with a decapitation scene straight out of Salome and Judith and other stories of women destroying men, as described as Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity. Narda becomes Galicia’s benevolent dictator.

While Wanda is an agent (unwitting?) of Severin’s personal transformation (however incomplete and tentative), Narda is an agent of Galicia’s social transformation. She liberates the peasantry from the corrupt and vicious nobility and puts women, slaves and peasants in positions of authority, a classic “world upside down” scenario. Initially, this social upheaval is a liminoid ritual, a temporary period bounded by sunrise and sunset, but Narda takes the opportunity to make the ritual liminal, and permanent. Slave becomes sovereign, and sovereign becomes a corpse. Perhaps this suggests that the play of power in sexual desire, in which women have advantage, according to Sacher-Masoch, could result in real social revolution. We know that Sacher-Masoch grew up in a region wracked with recent peasant uprisings and massacres. For him, that was a very real possibility for the future, and he had a very ambivalent view of it. Perhaps his fascination with personal and social violence was a response to his wish for revolution, combined with his realization that, as an aristocrat and an intellectual, he’d probably be one of the first up against the wall. (Lord Byron had a similar conflict.)

Not a good story, as the dialogue is stilted and the characters are stereotypes, but at least I can speak with a little more authority on the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Why BDSM matters, politically

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Feb 192008

Sometimes I wonder if devoting so much of my time and energy to the culture and history and practice of BDSM is worthwhile. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, does BDSM matter any more than, say, lacross or beekeeping?

Actually, I think it does. The reason why comes from a surprising source.

I’ve been following the career of Peter LaBarbera for some time now. LaBarbera has made a career out of investigating the homosexual and kinky world and exposing The Thruth about these public depravities to the Christian right wing in the US, through venues like Fox News, the Illinois Family Institute and Concerned Women for America. His current gig is the Americans for Truth about Homosexuality blog, which appears to be a one-man operation.

LaBarbera is a part of the anti-gay media, who spread misinformation or disinformation about homosexuality, STDs and so on. He’s developed an interesting sideline in the BDSM culture, particularly public events such as the Folsom Street Fair, and posting about the shocking – shocking – things that go on there.

Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity

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Feb 092008

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture Oxford University Press, 1986.

Dijkstra’s book is an overview of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, exploring the recurring themes of artists largely forgotten today. Back then, paintings were an art form viewed by the general public in salons and exhibitions, and having great controversy for their content. In the author’s analysis, there were recurring themes of gender, class and race tangled together in art.

The mid-nineteenth century, circa 1850, saw woman as the “household nun”, the passive vessel where the warrior-merchant man kept his soul for safekeeping. Artists painted sappy sentimental images of mothers and children, nymphs with broken backs languishing in the woods, etc. Around 1870, when the first generation raised under these ideals had matured (and when decadents like Rachile and Sacher-Masoch and Bram Stoker and Flaubert wrote), they took their disappointment in their mothers and wives failing to live up to that ideal as inspiration to portray women as monsters: bestial, materialistic, lustful, full of low cunning, primitive, a snare to trap man on his path to spiritual apotheosis and transcendance of the material. Dualistic thinking combined with garbled Darwin and Schopenhauer.

The cultural leaders of the years around 1900 much preferred the depiction of a simple world of dualistic absolutes, of easily identifiable abject household nuns and monstrous devil-women juxtaposed with godlike imperial males and pitiful effeminate victims. (Pg.393)

It’s not surprising to me that the author explores themes that eventually became staples of BDSM imagery: Orientalist slave women, domineering men, an early examples of forniphilia, the amazon, the temptress, the woman-as-animal, the vampire. Dijkstra goes a little overboard, apparently suggesting that even innocuous images are informed by sexism and racism, or that any juxtaposition of woman and animal in the same painting was understood to be an allusion to full on bestiality. Masochist paintings and novels prompt him to go into a convoluted theory in purple prose about masochists as “executioner’s assistants”.

It’s not that Dijkstra is wrong, it’s that he’s a modernist: his texts have one meaning. If one allows for irony or humor or subversion or fantasy when creating or viewing images, many different stories emerge. The story of Judith and Holofernes can be an instance of female heroism, instead of just a woman consuming the spiritual essence of man to fill her own moral and intellectual vacuum. Dijkstra’s final example is the biblical tale of Salome, which in Oscar Wilde’s version is the conflict of the spiritual/speaking and hearing/man versus the material/seeing and being seen/woman, but remember that in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of the play, Wilde himself is caricatured as Salome’s manipulative mother, Herodias.

Dijkstra has one theme only: man’s sublimated hatred towards woman, which ultimately limits his analysis. He leaves out how people find solutions in fantasy to problems, how symbols that can be monstrous to one viewer or one time can be heroic to another viewer or another time. His book covers the period which I consider the very early roots of the BDSM subculture, circa 1870, the publication date of Venus in Furs and also soon after the first spate of fetishist letters in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.

EA Hanks’ column in the Huffington post sees masochism as the basis of the “surrendered wives” movement.

A lot of this hogwash so fantastically hogwashy (“Every girl inherits the princess gene which dictates her desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her,”)…

Ms. Epstein needs to come to terms with her S&M kink.

“Wha Whaaaaa?” you say. That’s right, I said it. Ms. Epstein is the “M” in the S&M. She doesn’t have a “princess gene” that dictates her “desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her” – what she has is a “kink” that makes her “want” to have her “boo boo’s kissed.”

….

But rather than act out her own fantasies of waiting upon her bed of pink taffeta, her ball gag attached to her bonnet, her Bo Peep shepherd’s staff looming threateningly over cherubic skin, she feels the need to attribute her fetish for weakness, submission, and “innocent” coyness to all women.

One of the books I read recently (wish I could remember which one) said that we tend to take male masochism as rhetorical but female masochism as confessional. That is, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs is just his elaborate fantasy or symbolic of something else, with no relation to his real life, while Pauline Reage’s Histoire de O is her deepest, darkest secret, to be taken literally. Actually, it was just the opposite, that Sacher-Masoch acted out his fantasies throughout his life, while Reage apparently kept it all in the mind.

This is why I don’t get terribly worked up about the idea that romance novels are propaganda inculcating female submissiveness. If a man can finish his corporate executive job for the day, visit a pro-domme in the evening and get “forced” into a French maid’s outfit, and then go back to work the next day, why can’t a woman take a break from her job and family by imagining getting “kidnapped and raped” by a Gothic barbarian warrior and just go back to business when she’s finished? Pro-domme sessions cost a lot more than paperbacks, but both provide a temporary relief from social norms and an opportunity to expression forbidden ideas that need not have any expression outside the “magic circle”.

(BTW, the book mentioned in the link above goes to great lengths to make clear that the sexual encounters between the lead characters are 100% consensual, according to the reviews.)

I’m a bit troubled when I hear people in BDSM speaking about maledom or femdom as philosophy or politics instead of fantasy. Somebody like the above-mentioned Ms. Epstein makes the same mistake, projecting her desires onto all other women.

Once again, I’m reminded that masochism was originally defined as a male malady, though Krafft-Ebing did include four cases of female masochists. It was about men who didn’t follow the presumed drive for power and resources, in all aspects of life, even internal thoughts. There’s a similar concern being applied to women with masochistic imaginings, that discrepancies between their actual lives and their imaginings cannot be allowed.