Peter Tupper

The character assasination of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Dec 272007

Finke, Michael C. and Carl Niekirk. One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts Rodopi, 2000

Noyes, John K. The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism Cornell University Press, 1997

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch needs better literary representation, even though he’s been dead for more than 100 years.

I still have yet to find any of his books that have been translated into English, other than Venus in Furs. There’s a whole shelf of books on Sade, both biographical and critical, but comparatively little on Sacher-Masoch. (Granted, Sade’s life was very well documented and also tied intimately to the history of the French revolution.) Here’s a guy who, in his life, was the next big thing in German literature, the successor to Goethe (who had his own penchant for self-orchestrated suffering, incidentally.)

And then Richard von Krafft-Ebing was rude enough to coin the term masochism, while Sacher-Masoch was still alive. Romanticism collided with science; science won. Whatever Sacher-Masoch’s literary accomplishments, all were forgotten, and he would be known to future generations as merely a lunatic and a sexual deviant. His ex-wife published her memoirs in 1907, further stamping him as a wife abuser.

The slavery connection, part 3

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Dec 262007

vallejo_woman_collar

I’m zeroing in on the nexus of slavery, sensibility and the nascent sadomasochistic subculture, sometime around 1800. I think this is when the master-slave terminology and imagery entered the culture. There was flagellation and the like prior to that, but I don’t think the master-slave jargon was a part of it.

I think you need a certain historical and/or geographical distance to enable the fantasy of something like slavery. Munby and Cullwick, I theorize, absorbed slavery images and literature in their childhood and youth, through books, stage plays, minstrel street performances and other media. However, in early 19th century England and other European nations, real slavery was “back then” (i.e. something in the barbaric past, practiced by “primitive” nations) and “over there” (i.e. the tropics, Africa and North America) not in the here and now. Even contemporary texts, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850), were comfortably “over there” for Europeans.

GJ Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility

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Dec 112007

GJ Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 1996 University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226037142

I finally got through The Culture of Sensibility, which focuses on the transformation of post-Restoration England and how that affected class and gender.

New wealth flooded into England, creating a solid middle class and a market for consumer goods, the “nation of shopkeepers.” When men met for business, they had to convince each other they were not thugs who would rob each other. Thus, they created manners and rituals to regulate interactions. The irony is that the wealth that made all this “civilizing” possible came from the Atlantic slave trade.

At the same time, natural philosophers like Isaac Newton and John Locke presented a new, secular model of human nature, that of sensibility. Human beings were born as blank slates and created through their experiences, which affected their nerves. Nerves were how people felt and experienced things, and if a person’s nerves would do the right things, they would feel appropriately in response to stimulus. To observe a suffering person would induce feelings of sympathy (not empathy) in the observer and naturally create a desire to help that person. Indeed, an observer of greater sensibility might feel more distress than the person who is actually suffering.

There’s a party at the Self house: flagellation and group sex

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Dec 032007

Family Portrait

Stone, Lawrence. “Libertine Sexuality in Post-Restoration England: Group Sex and Flagellation among the Middling Sort in Norwich in 1706-07” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1992, vol. 2, no.4, pp. 511-26

For a while, I’ve been saying that Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick were the world’s first consensual BDSM relationship, but they may have some competition.

…it is astonishing to discover a small coterie of middle- and lower-middle-class young professional people, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, in the ex-Puritan provincial town of Norwich, palying such exotic erotic games as voyeurism, group sex, wife-swapping, the trimming of pubic hair, and extensive bisexual flagellation. At the center of all this deviant activity was a young bookseller bookbinder, Samuel Self, who styled himself “Mr.” and was a member of that ambiguous new urban class, the pseudogentry.

Bret Wood’s “Psychopathia Sexualis”

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Nov 022007

After waiting way too long, I finally rented Bret Wood’s film Psychopathia Sexualis. It’s definitely an odd film, but worth seeing in studying our history of sexuality. Psychopathia Sexualis was a very important book in the evolution of sexuality in general and kink in particular, the first book to put the words “sadism” and “masochism” together.

Wood’s film is a set of interconnected vignettes, dramatizing the case studies Krafft-Ebing collected as well as inferred scenes. They’re shot in a style intended to suggest the early days of silent film, as if some German expressionist had tried to make a film version in the 1920s.

“Cruising” finally out on DVD

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Sep 122007

After 27 years, Cruising has finally been released on DVD. The film’s suggestion that sexual repression is more of a cause of violence than sexual expression is oddly timely, in the middle of a spate of conservative, homophobic leaders being caught with their pants down, figuratively speaking.

I’ve seen it once, years ago, possibly on TV and possibly cut. Regardless, it didn’t make a strong impression on me. I had seen the “cop/journalist enters the sexual underworld and undergoes an identity crisis” premise so many times in the direct-to-cable/video erotic thriller genre that it had become a cliche. I would like to see it again; it’s always important to see where the meme began.

I’d comment more on the film itself, if I had clearer memories of it. The only image that really stuck with me was the final shot of the cop’s fiance putting on the cop’s mirrored sunglasses and leather wheel cap, suggesting gender hybrdity and/or straight appropriation of gay imagery. How much of straight male sexual fantasy is the same as gay male fantasy, but with women instead of men?

Film Threat speaks highly of the film, saying that it’s much deeper than the imitation genre it spawned.

On one level, “Cruising” appears to be about Pavlovian conditioning. As Burns [played by Al Pacino] immerses himself deeper into the primal, extreme sensations of the bar scene, his lovemaking sessions with fiancée Nancy (Karen Allen) seem more physically aggressive. If a straight man is tossed into a sea of rough, sadomasochistic gay sex, will he begin craving this lifestyle? Will he stop appreciating the more tender, delicate advances of a woman? As it turns out, the film chickens out and never clarifies its stance on this issue of heredity versus environment (on the film’s DVD commentary track, the director admits that his movie “asks more questions than it answers”).

[William] Friedkin insists, however, that he never meant to correlate homosexuality and murder with “Cruising.” Even so, it’s easy to understand why gays would respond defensively to the film. Who wouldn’t balk after seeing their lifestyle coupled with both lurid, public orgies of rough ‘n tumble copulation and an epidemic of grisly murders?

Playing the devil’s advocate, however, perhaps Friedkin deserves to be cut some slack. The film’s terrain is clearly a limited, select subculture of the larger homosexual community, and one that did exist. Friedkin insists that most of the bar patrons featured in the film were true-to-life participants from The Day. We’re guided through heavy leather districts like Central Parks’ Rambles, and underground West Village clubs hiding between industrial meat packing plants (meat hooks dangle ominously in the foreground during several scenes).

During one hilarious sequence, customers pack a crowded bar donning patrol uniforms for a cop-theme costume night. Pacino’s character, unaware of the dress code and wearing more casual attire, is kicked out when managers accurately suspect that he’s a law enforcer. In a sea of blue police shirts, billy clubs, and dark slacks, Burns is the only real policeman in the joint – and he’s thrown out on his ear.

Gloria Brame has another take on the film, seeing it as a kind of Boys in the Band for kinky people.

You can also expect to glimpse a dangerous and unfamiliar world of leather. Sexual repression is an ugly thing and that ugliness is built into this film. These were the days before AIDS, before safe sex, and before SSC and safe words and all the other little protections that activists began to promote as a way of protecting leather people against predators. Clubs back then were raw and secretive and sleazy, filled with guilty people who led double lives and believed that antibiotics could cure every sexual disease.

Yet, despite all that, look at the men in the bar, many of whom were real players, not actors. They are a piece of leather history. They are the people who paved the way for the rest of us, who built the clubs, who opened the dialogues on SM, and who, ultimately, are responsible for taking SM out of the closet. For opening that world to public view, both the men who participated in the film and the director, William Friedkin, deserve kudos.

I have a theory that the mainstream interacts with minorities in three phases. The first is the “visibility at any price” phase, in which any kind of statement of existence is necessary, even if the minority is portrayed as clowns or monsters or victims. The second is the “really, we’re nice” phase, in which the minority is packaged as unthreatening and ready and willing to be assimilated into the dominant culture. The third is the “let’s cut the crap” phase, when internal issues and conflicts and rough edges that were suppressed in the previous stages come out. Cruising is an example of phase one. Something like the godawful film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden or the vastly superior Secretary are phase two. Kinky people still don’t have a phase three.

The dialectic of history and pornography

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Sep 062007

Oh, this is interesting. From Fleshbot:

…there’s few examples of the collusion between porn, popular culture, and history stranger or more disturbing than the series of pornographic comics produced in Isreal during the early 1960s known as “Stalags”, in which testimonies of Holocaust survivors were used as the inspiration for graphic tales of hot female Nazis, sadism and sexual torture.

Filmmaker Ari Libsker drew from his own exposure to these works for a new documentary film that examines this “distinctly Israeli genre” of porn: “I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women … We were in elementary school. I remember how embarrassed we were.” While they were ostensibly based on actual first-person accounts by survivors of concentration camps, Libsker contends that the stalags were a “popular extension” of works by the writer who gave the first account of the Holocaust in Hebrew…

This ties in well with the thesis that what is taboo becomes eroticized: slavery, domestic service, fear of AIDS. I wonder what the aftermath of the Iraq war or 9/11 will produce?

There are plenty of interesting links at the bottom of the article.

The ur-text of BDSM Sexology

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Jul 312007

Though Pico dela Mirandola’s text has the virtue of being early, the primary text of the history and science of sadomasochism is A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery by Johann Heinrich Meibom (aka John Henry Meibomius), 1590-1655. Meibom published his treatise in 1639, and it was still being referenced more than 200 years later when people tried to explain masochism.

I finally found an online copy of the complete text in English, an edition published in Paris in 1898. It’s a dense read, but interesting in several respects.

Meibom cites several examples that sexual masochism does exist, but then dismisses the arguments that this is a result of astrological influences (as Mirandola did) or local custom. He proceeds to establish a mechanistic, physiological explanation, that the loins or reins are related to the male reproductive capacity, and in certain men, especially older ones, arousal and ejaculation depends on excess mechanical stimulus to the loins.

Meibom has no psychological theory, and particularly no theological theory, for masochism. The sex act and its aberrations are purely physiological events, in keeping with the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment. God, sin, penance or mortification of the flesh has no part in it.

Three centuries after Christianity effectively banned mortification of the flesh from lay religious practice, voluntary flagellation still exists and is viewed in completely secular terms.

Gor, romantic primitivism and cult status

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Jul 302007

Dark Horse Comics is planning to release John Norman’s Gor series in reprints, the first being an omnibus edition of the first three books. Note that this is not a comics adaptation, just a reprint.

JE Remy of the blog Die Wachen views this with some degree of alarm. He’s written three (1, 2, 3) postings urging the reader to contact Dark Horse and make them stop this.

Remy cites another blog posting as to why this is ethically justified and not censorship:

I start with the axiom that people should not do bad things. I assert that publishing a bad thing is itself a bad thing, because it provides the bad thing greater exposure and the opportunity to negatively influence people that it would not otherwise have. I assert that Gor is a bad thing, because it promotes a model for human sexuality and society that in reality would result in immense harm to many people. Finally, I assert that no circumstances mitigate the harm of its republication, because the work lacks historical significance and is of questionable artistic merit not counting its reprehensible sexual politics. Q.E.D.

The argument above says that Gor novels “negatively influence people” and “it promotes a model for human sexuality and society that in reality would result in immense harm to many people.” I disagree because it assumes that, because they read these books, they will do harm that they would not otherwise do. As I’ve argued before, people don’t need any encouragement to come up with sexual fantasies that aren’t nice and gentle Furthermore, it glosses over the distinction between fantasy and reality, or even the “reality” of some internet chat rooms and Second Life neighborhoods. Goreans are never going to be any more than a lunatic fringe with no influence over anybody who wasn’t predisposed anyway.

Another bloggers, Bellatrys, does a good job of laying to rest the Norman-apologist argument that the sexism, anti-modernism, etc. only really kicked in in the later books. Her thorough multi-part analysis proves that Norman was on the maledom-femsub track from the beginning, and if anything he just lost his inhibitions in the later books. (She also provides an overview of the series’ publishing history.)

My concern with Gor is not that it’s badly written (no argument here, but that’s never been a hanging offense), that it’s sexist (it certainly can be read that way, not to mention racist and classist), that it’s politically retrograde (no argument either), or even that it has inspired a cult following. My concern is that, what could have been a sub-parr, forgettable pulp fantasy series by a hack writer with some personal eccentricities somehow became something that people take so literally, including the author.

With Sade, one can argue that he was writing to shock and provoke and/or to indulge his own fantasies of revenge on the world, and none of his books were intended to be taken literally as philosophical arguments or designs for living, even by the author. With Gor, however, there is a subculture of people who view it as a deep philosophical truth, a vision of a true way of life in a fallen world.

Norman’s books are what happens when you distill the romantic primitivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edgar Rice Burroughs down to toxic levels of concentration. I recently read The Culture Cult by Roger Sandall, who says that the discipline of anthropology has been hijacked by neurotic bohemian malcontents (ever since Rousseau) who dream of living in a fantasy world of personal and sexual freedom instead of the conformity and colorlessness of modern civil society. These romantic worlds are located in the distant past, in Africa or the Australian outback or, in Norman’s case, on a duplicate Earth hidden on the other side of the sun.

Sandall’s book has many flaws, but it did get me thinking about what he called romantic primitivism. Dom/sub is based on slavery and feudalism, two real-world social systems that are antithetical to liberal democracy. Why do we practice such social customs voluntarily?

Because they mean something to us. My theory, going back to previous postings on Turner’s theory of initiation rituals, is that people have a need for initiation rituals, for the process of finding, entering and becoming a new social role, whether temporarily or permanently. The Gor novels function as that kind of initiation, both in the protagonist’s initiation into Gorean society and the endlessly repeated scenes of women being initiated into Gorean slavery. I’d argue that Norman is not so much obsessed with slave women as with free women becoming slaves.

The Gor texts themselves function as a medium for initiation, learning the ways of Norman’s intricately detailed (though highly implausible) world and sub-Nietzsche philosophy, and then joining the sub-sub-culture of Goreans.

JE Remy seems to view the Gor series in the same terms as, say, the white supremacist epic novel The Turner Diaries (said by some to be inspiration for Timothy McVeigh), and that it should be self-evident why Gor should not be published, in the same way that some random screed about Jews emasculating the white race through fluoridating water need not be published.

Bellatrys picks up this thread too:

I find fascinating the rabid insistence on all quarters that the only reasons for loathing the books are 1) “Political Correctness” and 2) not having read (with implicit “dared to) the books themselves, but only taking the liberal zampolit’s word for their badness. If you only gave them a chance, you’d see how beautiful and noble and wonderful and liberating they are! is the cry from the Gor fans.**

It seriously not only doesn’t occur to them, but is apparently outside their comprehension that anyone could have actually read the damned things and made up their minds about them on their own. That maybe we are at least moderately familiar with the pulp genre as a whole, and are capable of doing compare/contrast on our own – and maybe, just maybe, we can make the judgment as to whether the worldview presented as “normal” in Norman’s Counter-earth is dehumanizing and degrading to both women and men on our own, based on the primary texts…

I don’t think Gor is “a negative influence” on its readers, or the world in general, or at least no more so than many, many other books. As I’ve said before, I’m a very strong supporter of freedom of expression, and letter campaigns to publishers, even against books I find almost unreadable, make me nervous.

I also suspect that Remy’s efforts are in vain. Even if there are no more reprints, the untold copies lying in various used bookstores around the world (a cursory search on eBay for “gor norman” produced over 100 items) will still be there. And eventually people will start pirating them and putting the text files online. The tarn has left the barn, so to speak.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay in 1955 called “Must we burn Sade?” Perhaps there needs to be another essay, “Must we burn John Norman?”