After thinking about the Jesus courted by the Christian soul narrative, I’m leaning towards the idea that there is something specific about Christianity that fostered sadomasochism.
I didn’t get to read all of it, but Lisa Silverman’s Tortured Subjects : Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France supported this idea. Christianity has two contradictory ways of thinking about physical punishment.
For some time since I started this project, I’ve told people that BDSM, as we would recognize it, is a modern phenomenon. That is, it first appears in the 15th century, when writers outside the clergy start pondering why some men like to get whipped, and the Reformation gets underway. It didn’t exist before because the way culture viewed sexuality and play didn’t allow it.
I had anomalous data, of course, such as the story of Abelard and Heloise, who said he beat her out of love. I had planned on dismissing this as an isolated incident, and stuck to my thesis that kink is only about five centuries old.
As my research until now focussed on the 19th century, nothing came up that seriously challenged my assumption. But people kept insisting that it was older than that. Finally, the first book on Roman sexuality I got from the library (Roman Sex: 100 BC – AD 250, by John R. Clarke, 2003,Harry N. Abrams) forced me to junk all of that.
The Villa of the Mysteries is a large house in the preserved Roman city of Pompeii. Initially thought to be a brothel or temple because of the nude frescos on the walls, later archaeologists decided it was actually a private home and the art depicted a narrative about preparing young brides for marriage in the cult of Dionysius.
Reading the images from left to right around the room, the narrative starts with a woman in street clothes, then a mother with son, then a pregnant woman with a laurel crown carrying cakes, etc. The images are tranquil until a woman is startled; she draws away from something in surprise, her cape in violent motion over her.
The first image visible as a person enters the room is Dionysius sitting with his head almost in the lap of his lover Ariadne. To the right of them is an undressed woman kneeling before a large phallus in a basket, covered with purple cloth.
Up until this point, I didn’t view the images as sadomasochistic, but more as some kind of fertility rite. But then came the image that forced me to rethink everything.
Immediately to the right of the woman with the phallus in the basket is a standing female figure with dark wings. Clarke’s book identifies her as a “female demon.” Unlike the other female figures in the fresco, who are nude or in dresses, she wears boots or sandals, a knee length skirt and a belt of some kind. She’s dressed for fighting or something else athletic. Her right hand wields a cane or switch, in full backswing, apparently beating the next figure, on the other side of the room’s corner.
Here, a woman kneels, back and buttocks exposed, resting her face in the lap of another, clothed woman. After that, a nude woman dances with cymbals. The final image is a maidservant arranging a young woman’s hair in the style reserved for brides.
Although there are probably other interpretations to this work, the connection between sexual pleasure, physical pain, female grooming and fertility is clear to me. Beating is part of the process that includes ecstatic dancing, if not a prelude to it, and grooming before marriage. Bear in mind, this is a room in a private home, not a brothel or a temple, and the work may have been commissioned by and for the women of the home.
Until now, I had assumed that any cases of voluntary flagellation before the 15th century were primarily religious rituals, with sexuality component a secondary and disavowed aspect. The Mysteries Room fresco suggests that the two can’t be so neatly separated. The narrative shows flagellation as part of the marriage/fertility rite. I could argue that this shows erotic flagellation as part of a religious ritual performed once in a lifetime, and therefore isn’t a secular, recreational phenomenon like modern BDSM, but that would be a cop-out.
I have just begun to look at the Classical period, so I expect to find more items that suggest sadomaosochism goes back further than I thought.
I’ve considered the idea that there is something specific to Christianity that fostered BDSM, which no other culture did in quite the same way. It sounds good, but it’s a little too glib and simplistic to be persuasive.
But then I found something in David Kunzle’s History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1 (University of California Press, 1973) that made me think there is something fundamentally kinky about Christianity after all.
Frankly this spooks me a bit. There are conservative Christians advocating corporal punishment, and even sell specialized implements for the “training up” of children.
“Select your instrument according to the child’s size,” writes Pearl. “For the under one year old, a little, ten to twelve-inch long, willowy branch (stripped of any knots that might break the skin) about one-eighth inch diameter is sufficient. Sometimes alternatives have to be sought. A one-foot ruler, or its equivalent in a paddle, is a sufficient alternative. For the larger child, a belt or larger tree branch is effective.” Additional advice from their Web site: Switching with a length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line is a “real attention-getter.”
As one blogger wrote (conflating Catholic and Protestant traditions):
…all the theological stuff, from an outsider’s perspective, is nothing but a pathetic excuse to repeatedly assert patriarchal authority. The church has an elaborate bullying system in place to extract obedience–the church over men, men over women, women over children, and the children get to grow up to have wives or children of their own to bully. Everyone is dominated but rewarded for obedience by having someone of their very own to dominate.
In this system, women and of course children are in a very precarious spot, locked up in the house together acting out these rituals of domination and submission without much contact with the outside world to inject a bit of levity and common sense into it.
Corporal punishment in a Protestant setting doesn’t seem to figure in BDSM as much as it does in an Anglican or Catholic setting. It might have something to do with this kind of corporal punishment occuring in a domestic context instead of an instutional setting (school or church), or that it happens at a younger age than the cusp of adolesence.
The relationship between desiring erotic impact play as an adult and experiencing corporal punishment as a child is still a mystery to me. I have a suspicion that the kink subculture was born among the first generation in human history that mostly was not spanked, the Boomers.
For the record, I oppose the corporal punishment of children. The tens of thousands of boys who were “swished” at Eton and other colleges across centuries certainly contributed to the evolution of kink, but it was pointless and cruel.
I figured something like this would happen sooner or later. The BBC has a spot on the police raiding a Gorean community.
Durham Police discovered the bizarre sect after raiding a home in the area, after receiving complaints that a woman was being held against her will.
But a spokesman said the Canadian was a willing participant and the other people involved were consenting adults.
The group, called Kaotians, follow the Chronicles of Gor novels which depict a society where women are dominated.
The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.
…
“It’s one thing that everyone’s missed out on so far is, even in our organisation, if that’s what you want to call it, women can be free and they can be dominant, we don’t stop that,” [Lee Thompson, age 31] added.
“But the majority of women in our organisation are obviously slaves because women have a submissive streak in them.”
Most of the stories I’ve read on this incident have been pretty even-handed. The police also went away when they didn’t find anything criminal. This is a lot better than some other encounters between the police/legal system and kinksters.
For instance, look at the Mark IV raid in 1976 for how it could have gone. In that case, the police treatment included “handcuffing the defendants, forcing them to kneel or lie face down, then carting them in a crowded bus to jail for processing, denying them the opportunity to use the toilet, and taunting and photographing them at the police station.”
I’m not a Gor fan, although I remember reading some of those books raptly as a young perv. I even had a copy of John Norman’s Imaginative Sex for a while (copies sell for US$50 and up these days), which in hindsight most impressed me with just how narrow Norman’s sexual imagination was. Nearly all of the scenarios are just variations of the same old maledom-femsub theme. Norman’s god-awful prose didn’t help any. I seem to recall a footnote than ran on for three solid pages of a single run-on sentence, divided by dozens of semi-colons.
I think a lot of newbies find those books and imprint on them, attaching themselves to an image that’s really a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and other Orientalist/colonialist 19th/early 20th century story, just with the latent sadomasochism turned up to 11.
Gor will definitely get a mention in the book, to show how the fantasies that drove Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick in the 1850s are still operating today.
Nerve has a great personal essay on a woman’s quest to develop her sexuality after an accident paralyzed her and put her in a wheelchair. (Emphasis added)
Unfortunately, when we turned on the lights, I discovered I had bled like a sieve. Back then, I had a catheter in my urethra to keep my bladder empty. (I can now independently drain my bladder via a tiny hole in my bellybutton.) His penis had rubbed the catheter the wrong way and irritated the inside of my bladder. Blood was flowing into my drainage bag, which was lying on the bed beside me.
But I didn’t let this scare me off. A year later, the Oklahoma guy and I were deep in a serious, sexually active relationship, even talking about marriage, when a friend of mine told me I was being stalked online by several “devotees,” a group of fetishists who get off on wheelchair users, particularly those with atrophied legs and spastic muscles. I told my boyfriend about this shocking revelation and he acted surprised, weirded out and disgusted. A week later, he tearfully confessed that he was one of those freaks. I was devastated. He told me that even though my wheelchair was what attracted him in the beginning, he was now truly in love with me. I was too in love with him to break it off.
…we sat on my automatic bed and made out. He leaned over and quickly pulled up my tank, exposing my breasts. He was so deft, so confident, and clearly experienced. I let go at that point and let him explore me at will. I’m a submissive at heart and get turned on from giving up complete control. Being paralyzed makes that very easy to do, which is perhaps the one ironic benefit of my accident.
The relationship to how powerful people are in their everyday life and how powerful they act in the Scene or in bed. There seems to be no correspondence between the two, in my experience. Some people who identify as Dom are high-powered, authoritative types in the work and home lives, while others have low authority jobs.
So, what’s the relationship between a person who fantasizes about being disabled (other examples: Vicky Hooks, ParaCathy) as a form of submission and a person who is submissive sexually and disabled? If your physical circumstances require you to be submissive, does your sexuality adapt to that out of necessity?
More on disability fetishists
Laura Antoniou (alias Sarah Adamson of the Marketplace series) got me thinking with the keynote speech she delivered at the South Plains Leatherfest last February.
I’m working through David Kunzle’s “World Upside Down: The Iconography of a European Broadsheet Type” in Barbara A Babcock’s “The Reversible World.” I’m not sure if I’m actually onto something, or just following a red herring.
WUD is a genre of broadsheet published all over Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century (if not later). It was a grid of images with captions, and not a comic strip in that there is no narrative connection between the images. Kunzle identifies several inversion motifs:
1. human to human (e.g. husband to wife, master to servant)
2. human to animal (e.g. hunter to hare, peasant to ox, woman to draft horse)
3. animal to animal (e.g. cock to hen, cat to mouse)
4. animal to element (e.g. fish in air, beasts in water)
5. animal to object (e.g. horse to cart)
6. object to object (e.g. tower to bell)
7. human to object (e.g. smith to anvil)
Types 1, 2 and 7 turn up a lot in fetish porn: femdom, ageplay/adult baby, pony/dog play, dehumanization. If you look at the work of, say, the House of Gord, you can see all of these themes, particularly types 2 and 7. The “femcar” is a modern version of ponyplay, the woman transformed into a component of a machine.
I think WUD imagery is a kind of prototype of pornography, horror and other “low” cultural forms. Kunzle puts them in opposition to books of proverbs, which demonstrate conservatism and the status quo, rather than the liberation and imagination of the WUD broadsheets. They were a popular form, and were connected to the peasant revolts of the early 1500s.
So, what’s the connection to kink? Maybe, some of the people seeing these images must have interpreted them as arousing. When the 19th century rolled around, bringing mass literacy, photography and the possibility of self-created media, people who connected with certain WUD images created more of those kind of images: femdom, pony girls, etc.
So where does maledom factor into this theory. A man dominating a woman is not an inversion of normality for human history. True, but there’s an additional element of inversion. If you look at the webcomics of Dofantasy.com, there’s a strong element of class inversion:
“A gang of lifers escape from a high security prison taking a bunch of beautiful young women as hostages…”
“They are at the top. They are the most beautiful and sought after young women on Earth… They have everything: fame, money, beauty, social recognition and a brilliant future… Kidnapped at gun point, roughly shackled and obscenely manhandled they are taken into a truck full of brutal, dirty, sweaty insurgents.”
“He has spotted new prey – a rich girl who had humiliated his alter ego on the subway that very same day…. In seconds the girl is caught and smuggled into the city sewers, where the villain has his hideaway.”
“The year is 1850. The place, a cotton plantation in the deep south. Mrs Scarlet O’Hanna is a rich estate owner whose husband died recently. She has two daughters, both beautiful and both sought after by young men of marriageable age. But the O’Hannas are a proud family, too good for the other families in the district…
Mrs O’Hanna runs her estate with stern hand, punishing the black slaves with great cruelty and a certain degree of sadism…
Her husband left a lot of debts and the estate will be confiscated. The estate, according to the sheriff, includes Scarlet and her young daughters Jennifer and Melissa…”
The majority of DoFantasy’s stories map class and race onto gender. The women are generally rich, beautiful and leisured, aristocrats, professionals or celebrities. The men are convicts, rebels, or even apes with human intelligence, to add an extra dimension of inversion. This is, of course, an homage to one of the kinkiest movies ever, which is also the WUD motif turned into a feature film: Planet of the Apes and its sequels and spin-offs.
What seems to be about gender at first actually seems to be about class, and specficially class revenge fantasies, which is a key theme in WUD imagery. This is what was happening in the early 16th century peasant revolts:
“The peasant bands, supported by urban proletariats, roved freely over large areas of Germany, burning and looting monasteries and castles… Peasant leader Jacklein Rohrbach, after degrading and executing the cruel Count Helfenstein, had the Countess, a daughter of the Emperor, dressed like a beggar (that is, one of their own) and sent on her way in a dung cart…. Knights in rags were compelled to serve their fassals at table. The peasants dressed themselves in knightly raiment and mimicked rituals.” Pg. 63-64
The phrase that kept running through my mind when I watched The Notorious Bettie Page was a line from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”, part of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
I’m currently reading Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s The politics and poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986), which is largely based on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. BDSM certainly fits the definition of a world turned inside out and upside down, where people chose their roles from a variety of options. The old become young (ageplay and infantilism), men become women and women become men (genderplay), the weak become strong (femdom), rape becomes love (rape play), confinement becomes freedom and pain becomes pleasure.
