About 2/3rds of the way through through Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory, I’m convinced that the imagery of Atlantic slavery is a very important aspect in the evolution of BDSM. There are many, many written and visual examples of slaves being beaten and otherwise tormented in abolitionist texts. Frequently, these images become an opportunity to depict the black female body nude or semi-nude in extremis.
When I first started reading about the Munby-Cullwick relationship, I had assumed it was based on classical slavery, which I thought a well-educated English gentleman would have read about. Then, when I saw how Munby drew working class women to strongly resemble caricatures of black men, I decided it had more to do with a once-removed image of American slavery, transmitted across the Atlantic in books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and blackface minstrelry.
An in-law was kind enough to send me a copy of the Indian magazine Women’s Era, July 2006 edition, which includes an article in English titled, “Sexual Roleplaying: Elixir of Youth”, by A. Sharma.
Women’s Era is a women’s magazine in the Women’s Day vein, written in slightly stilted English. I am told the readership is primarily English-reading village wives.
Right from the beginning, the article starts from the “marriage manual” approach. This is aimed at married couples.
Sex is an important factor between two adults in a marriage, and how they deal with this aspect of their equation often has an important impact on their life as a couple. As long as the institution of the extended joint family was live in India, the earlier bumps in a marriage were never felt and the couple often settled into a routine with time. But single-unit families, increasingly popular now, means that the couple has to bond for life and give each other mental, emotional and sexual support.
…
How can sexual fantasies help in such situations, one might ask. Simple really. Fantasies do not need action, they are just in our inds and our mind is the most important tool for enjoying anything and everything. That includes sex.
What interests me is the kind of fantasies discussed in the article. Do Indian people have different sexual fantasies than Westerners?
The first one quoted is “Naughty child needs reprimand”.
This style of fantasy is more repeated in Western cultures where the teacher figure is more desirable.
I’m puzzling over what that means. Is there no pedagogic eros in India? I had thought that India would have inherited the British public education system, for better or for worse, with all the attendant psychosexual tensions and consequent fantasies. However, another inlaw reminded me that, not only does India have its own sexual traditions, but only a minority of people get a formal education.
I have to wonder if corporal punishment was as much a part of Indian culture as it was of British culture. Ian Gibson’s The English Vice says that school beatings had been banned in France in the 19th century while they were still going strong in Britain. Yet there was a lot of kinkiness in French literature. I’d like to look into that for the USA as well. I think it is just too simple to say that a culture has a lot of corporal punishment in schools (or the military in the case of societies with compulsory service) and therefore will have it in fantasies.
“Playing doctor or nurse” is pretty straightforward: authority figure, plausibly deniable physical intimacy. “A cosy threesome” is “best left as a fantasy which is never put to the test.” There’s “Casual Sex”, the “meet me in a public place and pretend we don’t know each other” gambit.
“More-risk fantasy” is where things get interesting.
From the harmless fantasy to the more risky imagination, this category for either partner could include anything. It might include a little pain, pretension of forced sex or forbidden sex. Once again, here, total trust between the couple is needed. If you are trying it for the first time, clear boundaries must be laid down and an expression or word must be kept as a last indication that one of you has stopped enjoying it.
Thankfully, the article includes some coverage of emotional safety.
Once the fantasy is played out and the desired result experienced and enjoyed, it must never be used as a weapon against the partner. Rima experienced the negative side of such a situation. She shared her fantasy with her husband Prem and they pretended that he was a master and she was a slave. However, her husband started taunting her about it and wanted to treat her as a slave all the time. It came to a state that shey needed the intervention of a counsellor.
It was a while before Prem admitted that, although he was excited while playing the fantasy, he was disgusted with it later and wanted to punish Rima. “Suddenly, our game became a dirty detail that I wanted to forget,” said Rima.
The “master and slave” bit caught my eye. I wonder which cultural tradition that came from. Was it borrowed from the 17th-19th century colonial background, which I believe is the cultural origin of modern BDSM master-slave relationships? Or was it drawn from Indian history?
The article ends on the “BDSM is good for you and your marriage” note. You’ll be in a good mood, you’ll burn calories, you’ll sleep better, your skin will be better, and it will build trust and love with your partner. To my mind, BDSM is not necessarily good for you, nor is it necessarily bad for you either. It just is something people do, and it can be done in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
For an article in a women’s consumer magazine, it was actually pretty insightful, and I’m glad they talked about emotional safety. Now if they just talked about physical safety too, I’d be satisfied.
So is there a BDSM culture in India today? The Dickie Virgin pro dominatrix guide lists pro-dommes in North America, Europe, Thailand and even Saudi Arabia, but nothing for India. The only hint I could find is a 2003 article from the Hindu Business Line about spam email calling for “ladies ONLY between 18-22 in age located in Bombay for upcoming shoots. The shoot planned in Bombay is related to BDSM & Fetish.” I also recall a woman in a PVC or latex jumpsuit on the cover of an issue of National Geographic a year or three ago, but that’s more about fashion than fetish.
Gray, Francine du Plessix. At home with the Marquis de Sade: A life Simon and Schuster, 1998.
To the Lieutenant General of Police:
Show me the legal code which dictates that fantasies executed with whores earn a gentleman tortures as long and arduous as mine! … There is no statute against what I have done… which condemns a man… to be treated which such inhumanity.
Pray, sir, tell me if the Messalinas, the Sapphos, the incestuous, the sodomites, the public and private theives… who constitute that respectable Montreuil family of which you are the slave– all knaves, whom I’ll introduce you to whenever you wish– tell me, pray you, if any of them have suffered the tortures I’ve been victimized with for thirteen years…. Isn’t it because they had money and whores to offer the judges?… Cease, sir, cease the consummate injustice you have singled me out for….
May the Eternal One someday reject you with the brutality with which you have rejected me.
Sade wrote that letter in 1785, his eighth year of continuous incarceration. Many aspects of his character comes through in that excerpt: his hyperbole, his paranoid sense of persecution, his literacy and way with words.
The author has chosen the difficult task of trying to tell a coherent narrative about Sade. This is difficult because Sade’s accounts of himself are very unreliable, full of self-inflating boasts and self-preserving lies to please the current regime. To understand his life, you have to look at the people around him: the father who had little interest in him, the mother who abandoned him, the uncles and aunts who spoiled him rotten, his inexplicably loyal wife, his formidable mother-in-law who had him incarcerated to preseve the family fortune, the various servants and staff who enabled him, the prostitutes who were both mistreated by him and saw him as as opportunity to exploit him, and the police who watched him for years.
Those police reports give a strange insight into Sade, including the revelation that the original sadist was just as much a masochist, at least physically. (Rather than being polar opposites, Sade and Sacher-Masoch had a lot in common.) In the 1763 incident with Jeanne Testard, a 20-year-old fanmaker and casual prostitute, Sade ordered her to whip him. Sade’s little chambre was full of props, including a chalice he masturbated into, ivory crucifixes hanging alongside pornographic prints and drawings, rods, cat-o’-nine-tails, pistols and a sword. He told her to utter sacreligious lines and perform sacriligious acts, like a apostate theatre director.
The Easter Sunday incident of 1768 is what really brought Sade to the attention of the authorities. He brought a 36-year-old unemployed cotton spinner named Rose Keller to one of his residences in Paris on pretext of hiring her for housework. He threatens her until she undresses, and is upset when she resists him. He holds her down, then beats her alternately with a rod and a cat-o’-nine-tails, mixed with the application of hot wax. When Keller begs him to stop so she won’t die without having done her confession, Sade said she could confess to him.
Until I read the above excerpt, I had written Sade off as a classic controlling abuser. This forced me to reevaluate him slightly. We know that Sade had a life-long interest in the theatre; he acquired a taste for drama, as well as for corporal punishment and probably sodomy, from the Jesuits. The Easter Sunday incident shows Sade’s pickiness about costuming, as well as an example of anti-Catholic parody. Even Keller’s escape from a window via knotted bedsheets has a dramatic flair.
Were these scenes something Sade had fantasized about for years before he acted them out with working women like Testard and Keller? It seems to me they were. Obviously, Sade had no idea about modern ideas of consent, and he was too much of a narcissist and an aristocrat. He had a low regard for prostitutes and was mortally offended that the official reason for his incarceration was mistreatment of them.
Sade’s phrase, “fantasies executed with whores”, suggested that what he was doing with them was not literal, but a form of play. The mise en scene was not so much about the act of hurting or being hurt, but performing Sade’s private ritual. Granted, Sade was always ready to say what was necessary to save his own skin and charm people into staying with him. He was also clearly an obsessive-compulsive, obsessed with numbers, and his compulsive swearing and blaspheming suggests something like Tourette’s syndrome. But I suspect there was something ludic, game-like or play-like, in his actions.
Thus, there actually may be a link, however tenuous, between Sade and the modern BDSM culture.
First lesson in writing: the library is your friend.
I got a copy of Thomas Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved (incorrectly cited as “Venus Preserv’d” in Emily Apter’s Feminizing the Fetish) at the library today, and read it in the dull moments at my temping job.
Venice Preserved is a political allegory about England set in the republic of Venice. The kinky stuff comes in Act III, Scene i. Antonio, a lecherous and corrupt old senator, goes to the house of Aquilina, the Greek courtesan. Aquilina tries to turn him away, as she finds him repulsive, but he pushes his way in.
Antonio addresses Aquilina by childish nicknames (“Nacky, Nacky, Queen Nacky — come let’s to bed…”) and then as “Madonna.” He disregards her insults and brags about his “eloquence” which his actions equate with bribery. He overcomes her objects with money.
Aquil. No, sir, if you please I can know my distance and stand.
Anto. Stand: how? Nacky up and I down! Nay, then, let me exclaim with the poet,
Show me a case more pitiful who can,
A standing woman, and a falling man.
Hurry durry—not sit down—see this, ye gods—You won’t sit down?Aquil. No, sir.
Anto. Then look you now, suppose me a bull, a basan-bull, the bull of bulls, or any bull. Thus up I get and with my brows thus bent—I broo, I say I broo, I broo, I broo. You won’t sit down, will you?—I broo—[Bellows like a bull, and drives her about.]
Aquil. Well, sir, I must endure this. Now your [she sits down] honour has been a bull, pray what beast will your worship please to be next?
Anto. Now I’ll be a Senator again, and thy lover, little Nicky Nacky! [He sits by her.] Ah toad, toad, toad, toad! spit in my face a little, Nacky—spit in my face prithee, spit in my face, never so little: spit but a little bit—spit, spit, spit, spit, when you are bid, I say; do prithee spit—now, now, now, spit: what, you won’t spit, will you? Then I’ll be a dog.
Aquil. A dog, my lord?
Anto. Ay, a dog—and I’ll give thee this t’other purse to let me be a dog—and to use me like a dog a little. Hurry durry— I will—here ’tis.
[Gives the purse.]
Aquil. Well, with all my heart. But let me beseech your dogship to play your tricks over as fast as you can, that you may come to stinking the sooner, and be turned out of doors as you deserve.
Anto. Ay, ay—no matter for that—that—[He gets under the table]—shan’t move me—Now, bow wow wow, bow wow …
[Barks like a dog.
Aquil. Hold, hold, hold, sir, I beseech you: what is’t you do? If curs bite, they must be kicked, sir. Do you see, kicked thus.
Anto. Ay, with all my heart: do kick. kick on, now I am under the table, kick again—kick harder—harder yet, bow wow wow, wow, bow—’od I’ll have a snap at thy shins—bow wow wow, wow, bow—’od she kicks bravely.—
Aquil. Nay, then I’ll go another way to work with you: and I think here’s an instrument fit for the purpose.
[Fetches a whip and bell.] What, bite your mistress, sirrah! out, out of doors, you dog, to kennel and be hanged—bite your mistress by the legs, you rogue—
[She whips him.]
Anto. Nay, prithee Nacky, now thou art too loving: Hurry durry, ’od I’ll be a dog no longer.
Aquil. Nay, none of your fawning and grinning: but be gone, or here’s the discipline: what, bite your mistress by the legs, you mongrel? out of doors—hout hout, to kennel, sirrah! go.
Anto. This is very barbarous usage, Nacky, very barbarous: look you, I will not go—I will not stir from the door, that I resolve—hurry durry, what, shut me out?
[She whips him out.]
Aquil. Ay, and if you come here any more to-night I’ll have my footmen lug you, you cur: what, bite your poor mistress Nacky, sirrah!
Enter Maid.
Maid. Heavens, madam! What’s the matter?
[He howls at the door like a dog.]
Aquil. Call my footmen hither presently.
Enter two Footmen.
Maid. They are here already, madam, the house is all alarmed with a strange noise, that nobody knows what to make of.
Aquil. Go all of you and turn that troublesome beast in the next room out of my house—If I ever see him within these walls again, without my leave for his admittance, you sneaking rogues, I’ll have you poisoned all, poisoned, like rats; every corner of the house shall stink of one of you; go, and learn hereafter to know my pleasure.
What’s interesting to me is the ambiguous relationship between client and dominatrix, in short, who exactly is on top here? Aquilina doesn’t like him or want him around, but he’s able to pay her to follow his script. She refuses part of the script, to spit on him, and then goes over his limit by whipping him and then kicking him out. There’s a constant push back and forth. It has a ring of truth to it, much as the flagellation scene in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, published in the middle of the next century.
Later in the play (Act V, scene ii), Aquilina threatens Antonio with a dagger as promised vengeance for the state execution of her beloved Pierre.
Aquil. Thou! think’st thou, thou art fit to meet my joys;
To bear the eager clasps of my embraces?
Give me my Pierre, or—Anto. Why, he’s to be hang’d, little Nacky,
Trussed up for treason, and so forth, child.Aquil. Thou liest: stop down thy throat that hellish sentence,
Or’ ’tis thy last: swear that my love shall live,
Or thou art dead.Anto. Ah-h-h-h.
Aquil. Swear to recall his doom
Swear at my feet, and tremble at my fury.Anto. I do. Now if she would but kick a little bit, one kick now.
Ah-h-h-h.Aquil. Swear, or—
Anto. I do, by these dear fragrant foots
And little toes, sweet as, e-e-e-e my Nacky Nacky Nacky.Aquil. How!
Anto. Nothing but untie thy shoe-string a little, faith and troth,
That’s all, that’s all, as I hope to live, Nacky, that’s all.Aquil. Ney, then—
Anto. Hold, hold, thy love, thy lord, thy hero Shall be preserv’d and safe.
Aquil. Or may this poniard
Rust in thy heart.Anto. With all my soul.
Aquil. Farewell—
Even with Aquilina’s dagger at his throat, Antonio seems to be getting off on the situation, angling for more kicks or views of her feet. It’s unclear whether he’s enough of a drunk, a fool or a fetishist that he can’t see he’s in real danger. After her depature, Antonio lies down and pretends to be dead, and Aquilina is not heard from again.
According to Apter’s Feminizing the Fetish, the first scene was the basis for the animal roleplay scene in Emile Zola’s Nana, but I suspect both can be connected to the story of Phyllis coaxing Aristotle into playing the role of a horse for her, which IIRC goes back to the middle ages, though not classical times.
I’ve been rethinking some of my ideas about Arthur Munby since I got a copy of Barry Reay’s Watching Hannah. For one thing, I found out that Munby did in fact write about switching in his scenes with Hannah Cullwick in his journals.
I have an urge to defend Munby against the criticisms of writers like Reay and Anne McClintock. He wasn’t that bad a guy, I think, and compared to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or “Walter” from My Secret Life, he was a mensch.
On the other hand, reading this disturbing profile on Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis made me think about Munby. As Susie Bright put it:
Many parent-types have asked, “Why are we at a place where the only way a young woman thinks she can be important or meaningful is to take her top off for a creep’s camcorder?”
Good point.
But many feminist daughter-types have countered, “It’s not the topless part that’s the problem, it’s the exploitation by this prick. If the women took their tops off for their own movie, their own orgasm, and their own point of view, it would be a completely other story.”
I identify with both sentiments. I made a lot of DIY “feminist porn” with my friends when we were young, and never had a single regret, nor would I ever say that “it was all a blur.” On the contrary, we had wildly ambitious goals about what we wanted to say about our bodies and desires. I still do.
Francis’ dirtiest secret is that he traffics in porno-puritanism, in sexual shame. His profit lies in young women snookered into doing something “shameful” that they will want to hide the rest of their lives— once they sober up. They have been ruined— the ultimate GGW turn-on. It’s the frisson of humiliation that makes him, and his audience, hard.
And why, pray tell, is ruination the hottest American Fantasy du Jour?
Francis manhandles the female reporter, then turns on a dime into a sweet talker. Francis’ involvement goes well beyond getting twentysomething girls to flash their boobs on camera. His fantasy narrative seems to be something like: Good girl goes to party, has a little too much to drink, starts acting like a bad girl, gets captured on camera flashing her tits or making out with the girlfriend, and (this is the important part) regrets it later. Without the regret, without the idea that the girl has fallen/jumped/been pushed out of her comfort zome, there’s no appeal for him. Professional models and career party girls who approach Francis leave him cold; there’s no potential for shame or guilt. He’s reminiscent of Sade, writing that there could be no volunteers at the castle in 120 Days of Sodom.
Francis still believes in good girls and bad girls, but he wants to see good girls acting like bad girls, and tearfully lamenting it the next day. That’s his fantasy script, and I don’t think it could be reconciled with consensuality. If she knows what she’s doing, it’s no good.
Munby was fascinated by the idea that no matter how rough and dirty and masculinized a working woman was on the outside, she retained ideal feminine characteristics on the inside. He convinced himself that Cullwick, because of her facial features, had noble ancestry, but was forced by circumstances to do the lowest forms of physical labor. That’s Munby’s fantasy script. Women who were too sexually knowing or aggressive turned him off, as did women who were ladies in appearance and attitude.
I don’t think either of these guys could conceivably settle into the negotiation and consent culture of BDSM. They need the real world power differential, which Munby has by dint of social class and Francis by dint of wealth and fame, and both have because of gender.
I like Munby enough to say that he might be able to step back a little, but I realize that’s wishful thinking. His desires were so specific in their object, and their social/historical context, that it’s unlikely he could be brought into the fold of modern BDSM.
There was a certain odd gap in my research. I had plenty of material on the Victorian era: Munby and Cullwick, Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing and My Secret Life, just to name a few things. After WWII there’s Willie, Stanton and Bilbrew, the biker/leatherman culture, L’Histoire de O, the Profumo scandal and so on.
But what happened in kink in the Interwar period? There’s the Weimar Republic of Germany, as documented by Mel Odom’s Voluptuous Panic. I also want to work in William Charles Moulton and his creation, Wonder Woman. And what else?
Furthermore, what happened in America all those years before the 40s? Why was the US apparently so vanilla compared to Europe?
After a very long time, I’ve finally finished David Kunzle’s Fashion and Fetishism. I’d say it’s pretty much the last word on corset history, though Valerie Steele’s work is a lot shorter.
There’s really only one area of Kunzle’s book I question. In the 19th century, there clearly was a subculture of corset tight-lacers, often lower-class, upwardly-mobile women, and their admirers. But were there families and schools in which women were customarily introduced to tight-lacing in their early teens, as described in the fetishist letters in magazines like Englishwomen’s Domestic Magazine and The Family Doctor? It seems clear to me that most of them were exaggerations or outright fabrications, but were all of them?
A source tells me that kink memes are slowly spreading in India.
Well, I’m looking at the July 2006 issue of the [English language] Indian Magazine “Women’s Era” (designed for lower middle class village women as far as we can tell) and there is an article in there, entitled: “Sexual Role Playing” which is definitely about “kink light”. Some of the roles suggested are: Naughty Child Needs Reprimand, Playing Doctor, More Risk Fantasy. The Naughty Child section begins: “This style of fantasy is more repeated in Western Cultures where the teacher figure is more desireable” and goes on about punishment fantasies. Playing Doctor is obvious and the section of “More Risk” says “it might include a little pain, pretension of forced sex or forbidden sex.” It also talks about safe words or signals without actually calling them that. So apparently there IS room for and interest in some kinds of kink here in India. We didn’t even go looking for this article – my wife picked up the magazine as something to read on the bus and went, “Look at this!”
I’m not sure what the magazine means by “This style of fantasy is more repeated in Western Cultures where the teacher figure is more desireable.” Do Indian people not have fantasies about their teachers for some reason? I had assumed that India had inherited the British education system, for better or for worse, which included the public school-style discipline and perhaps the attendant fantasies, but that’s just a guess. More research needed.
I had heard of this film for some time, and glimpsed a few stills here and there over the years, but I had never seen it. At long last I acquired a copy.
The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak is an awkward combination of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the art of the late, great John Willie, and the perfume-advertisement style of Just Jaeckin’s earlier soft-core porn epics, including Emmanuelle, Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Histoire d’O.
