Peter Tupper

A Lover’s Pinch wins NLA non-fiction award

Aug 192019

I am proud to announce that A Lover’s Pinch is the co-winner for the Geoff Mains non-fiction book award for 2019, issued by the National Leather Association: International. My book shares this honour with The Sexually Dominant Woman: An Illustrated Guide for Nervous Beginners, written by Janet M. Hardy and published by Greenery Press.

This is the second Geoff Mains award I have won, the other being for the anthology I edited, Our Lives, Our History.

Venus in Furs (1995): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Aug 192019

Written, produced and directed by Victor Nieuwenhuijs. Starring Anne van de Ven as Wanda, and André Arend van de Noord as Severin. IMDB

(Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from English dub, not the English subtitles.)

Unlike the 1967 Venus in Furs or the 1969 Jesus Franco Venus in Furs, this is pretty close to the original story, though set in the present day. Severin, a young man, falls for a young woman named Wanda. They sign a contract to formalize their dominant-submissive relationship.

Severin/Gregor (van de Noord), Wanda (van de Ven) and “The Greek” (???) at the zoo.

Review: Gene Bilbrew Revealed, by Richard Perez Seves

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Aug 192019

GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer (African American Artists Series) is the latest in Richard Pérez Seves’ series of biographies of fetish artists and publishers.

Pérez Seves’ previous work on Eric Stanton gave an interesting picture of a man, his work and his time. However, the author has less to work with when it comes to Gene Bilbrew.

Venus in Furs (1967): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Aug 152019

Venus in Furs (1967) IMDB

As far as I know, this is the first feature film adaptation of Venus in Furs, or more accurately the first to bear that name. (According to IMDB, there was a short film released in 1965 titled Venus in Furs, though the description sounds nothing like the book.) It was also released the same year that the Velvet Underground released their debut album (having been formed in 1964), which featured the song “Venus in Furs.” I don’t know if there was any direct connection between the two.

Last day of the Metro Vancouver Kink auction

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Aug 102019

The auction to pay for the legal costs of Metro Vancouver Kink ends on Sunday, August 11th, at 12 noon (PST). I helped found MVK in 2007, and one of the things we thought the new organization should do is support the community as a whole, not just members. MVK and its elected board members have paid the price for warning about dangerous people in the community, and they need help to cover their legal costs.

This auction is a great way to get deals on books, in-person education, and more, as well as support a worthy cause.

Also, the GoFundMe for the same cause is still operating.

Link Roundup: July 2019

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Jul 162019

The Historical Blindness podcast has an episode on the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, an absurd porno-Gothic piece of anti-Catholic propaganda from the 1830s.
German industrial metal band Rammstein has a long history of sadomasochistic themes in their lyrics and music videos, along with other transgressions.
Earlier this year, Jack Thompson made history as the first trans person of colour to win the title of International Mister Leather. “I am all the things I am all the time.”
Bustle has a short history of the corset, though it skims over the more fetishistic aspects.
One of the more disturbing developments I’ve witnessed in the past few years is the rise of choking, and specifically non-consensual choking, in vanilla sex. Breath control is risky and frightening enough when done with proper consent and technique. But this is men incorporating it in sex with women with none of that, says the Atlantic.
Videogames are a relatively young medium, and only recently have people begun using them to explore issues of identity and sexuality. Bobbi Sands’ “visual novel”, Knife Sisters, covers kink and BDSM, but has a hard time buying advertisements or getting funding because of its sexual content, even in relatively liberal Sweden.
The blog The Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context has its own interesting study of the history and psychology of sadomasochism.
Leo Herrera, who made the gay alternate history film The Fathers Project, wrote an essay considering our present, possibly-post-HIV world, and its increasing cultural conservatism in the form of “community guidelines” on Tumblr and Facebook.

Venus in Furs (1969): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jul 152019

There were two films titled Venus in Furs released in 1969. This is the one also known as Paroxismus, directed by Jesus (aka Jess) Franco, and starring James Darren, Barbara McNair and Maria Rohm. It has little to do with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus im Pelz (aka Venus in Furs). (The other 1969 Venus was directed by Massimo Dallamano.)

Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jul 142019

Not every film I study in this project has a lot to say about sadomasochism. In some cases, these may be single scenes or even brief moments.

Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000) is a semi-improvised drama about the exotic dancers at a club and their various struggles in life.

Jo (Jennifer Tilly) has a smoke break outside the Blue Iguana

The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 252019

The Mask of Fu Manchu is a 1932 adventure thriller.

Many other people have written about the racial and gender politics of this film. Suffice it to say, they’re awful. This was at the peak of “yellow peril” racism in America, portraying a world on the brink of a cataclysmic war between West and East. Asians are portrayed as both vicious and weak, needing a leader like the Western-educated Fu Manchu to lead them.

This was also before the Hays code was put into effect in 1934, and it displays a degree of sex and violence that is still surprising today.

The two villains are both portrayed by white people in yellowface: Boris Karloff as Doctor Fu Manchu and Myrna Loy as his daughter Fa Lo See (“fallacy”?). Before Loy was the ideal American wife Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies, she played “exotic” or “ethnic” women in brown, yellow or black face.

Introduction of Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff)

Link Roundup, June 2019

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Jun 172019

It’s Pride month, at least in the United States. One of the ongoing controversies is whether kinky people belong in pride events (as recently asked on Twitter), and if so, whether that includes kinky people who are heterosexual.
- The Advocate says there’s no way kink should be banned at Pride.
- Gay Star News says “the kink community and the LGBTI community is inextricably linked“.
- Dazed says “The event should be as inclusive as possible, but raucousness, provocation, and fucking are important too; reconciling these things might be complicated but banishing kink isn’t the answer.“
Race Bannon, who has been involved in the kink world since 1973, talks in a column for RECON about the number of kinky men he knows who don’t seem to be involved in the public kink culture. He cites the research of clinical psychologist Russell J Stambaugh, PhD (blog), which suggests that the majority of kinky people aren’t involved in any kind of organized group, and perhaps as few as 10 per cent of kinky people are involved in organized culture. (Not clear if this is referring to kinky gay men or kinky people in general.) (This agrees with my own hypothesis about “dark matter”, the unknown number of kinky people who are not involved in groups.) If so, kinky organizations as we know them only reach a minority of their potential audience. The remaining 90 per cent are served by social networks like Grindr, RECON and Fetlife.
Black is the colour most often of fetish clothing, but it is also associated with mourning dress. Bellatory offers a quick history of black mourning dress, once required of the upper classes by law, and later imitated by the lower classes.
To paraphrase the British comedy team Smack the Pony, “Nuns… Haven’t a clue what they’re for, but aren’t they kinky?” (video) Nuns have been associated with deviant sex since at least Boccaccio’s Decameron in the 14th century. Vintage Fetish Photos has a collection of erotic nun images from the early 20th century.
Dr. Mark Griffith’s blog has a piece with citations on the fetishistic art of Allen Jones, which links to the BDSM-themed music and art of Adam Ant, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and forniphilia pioneer the House of Gord.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism