Link Digests – The History of BDSM

Link digest, April 2024

Link Digests No Responses »

Apr 152024

The Kinsey Institute, probably the foremost institute of sex research in the world, continues its work after state lawmakers block taxpayer funding.
Podcast It Could Happen Here interviews Dev Montanez from the Kinsey Institute about its history and struggles in the current neo-puritan era.
The Bureau of Lost Culture podcast explores the history of Soho bibles, mimeographed and hand-stapled adult booklets made and sold in London’s Soho district up to the ’60s. They included fetishes like “fladge”, i.e. flagellation, and rubber clothing.
The Bureau of Lost Culture podcast interviews Julie Peakman about her new book, The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex.
Gynecocracy is an 1893 anonymous erotic novel, featuring female domination, flagellation and “forced” feminization.
Fetish fashion had a blip of visibility in 2021, and Grailed, Shift London and Russh explores the influence of fetish on high fashion.
More finds from the Internet Archive:

Link Digest, March 2024

Link Digests No Responses »

Mar 152024

Researching The Sheik made me realize how much the contemporary criticism of the book and film echoed modern criticism of the books and films of the Twlight saga and Fifty Shades, mostly for reflecting the masochistic fantasies of women. ContraPoints, aka Natalie Wynn, has posted a video exploring the Twilight series and the issues of hetero female masochism.
Every so often, high fashion borrows from fetishism. For Fall/Winter 2024, it’s all about gimp masks/hoods, as shown in this Hypebae article.
Maxim Lupin has a video on the History of Trans Men in the Leather Community.
The Betwixt the Sheets podcast interviews the authors of the new book Kink in the Rennaissance, who have a lot to say about defining “kink” in history.
The Dirty Sexy History podcast has one episode on the myths attached to corsetry, and another on the history of adult toys.
The student news site of the Iowa’s Grinnell College covers the Kink Gardner event, which was previously run by SHIC (Student Health Information Center) and is now run by QPOC (Queer People of Color) to make it more race and gender inclusive.
DAZED profiles the UK Fetish Archive.
Archive.org has scans of:

Link Digest, February 2024

Link Digests No Responses »

Feb 152024

More finds from the Internet Archive:
- The anthology Against Sadomasochism (1982)
- Video from the 1989 Folsom Street Fair
- The biography of Mistress Antoinette (1988)
- Lesbian BDSM magazine Venus Infers Vol.1, No. 2 (1993)
- Multiple issues of UK spanking magazine Blushes (1986-1988)
- Penthouse August 1982, which included a black and white bondage/fetish pictorial by Andre Berg, and a feature article “S&M for beginners” by “V.K. McCarty”
The streaming service Kanopy (free access via public library memberships) has some documentaries about kink:

Link Digest, January 2024

Link Digests No Responses »

Jan 152024

KFS (Kinky Fetish Sex) TV has a couple of interesting videos.
- Tim Woodward talks about the history of UK fetish magazine Skin Two
- A documentary about the 1992 Skin Two Rubber Ball
The micro-controversy over the “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar” (showing conservative women in mild pinup poses or casual outfits) shows a fracture line in modern conservatism. The divide is between anti-porn neo-puritans on one side, and libertarian-hedonists on the other. The phrase “real women” in the title is the giveaway that both sides are anti-trans.
The Gay News Ephemera tumblr has a couple of scans from Christopher Street
- A 1979 pamphlet urging peaceful protests against the filming of William Friedkin’s film Crusing (1980).
- A 1979 editorial providing context about the filming of Cruising.
Just found there’s a film biography of Percy Grainger, an Australian composer who was also involved in BDSM in the early 20th century, called Passion (1999).

Link Digest, December 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Dec 182023

The Internet Archive has some interesting material including
- Scans of Kitan Club, a Japanese bondage magazine from the 1940s. (No translation, though.)
- Books like Jay Wiseman’s Erotic Bondage Handbook (on a library-style borrowing system)
- Vintage bondage clips
- A video demonstrating American Sign Language for “bondage”
Another Magazine profiles the 1930s French lingerie and fetish company Diana Slip, which was part of Léon Vidal’s network of companies that catered to fetishists.
Another also covers a collection of found photographs, known as “Rain Time”, of an anonymous rubber fetishist discovered in a house clearance in a London suburb.
The Ringer has the oral history of Chuck outing himself as a masochist from the TV series Billions, with quotes from the producers and actors.

Link Digest, November 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Nov 162023

The Mary Sue reviews the new book Superfreaks by Arielle Greenberg.
Honey & Hot Wax is an anthology of games about sex by a diverse group of nine designers. It includes games that challenge players to think about sexuality, gender and identity in new ways.
Nov 19, the Tom of Finland Foundation will host an oral history of Onyx SW and BIPOC in the Kink community. Link
Petition to protect the funding for the Kinsey Institute. Link
Kinky and Loving It is a 2023 documentary about Black people in kink, part of a series called Sex in Color. It screened at Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival.

Link Digest, October 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Oct 162023

Video tour of the Bishopsgate Institute, home to the UK’s largest queer archive and the UK’s only kink and fetish archive
Does the workplace romance of Secretary (2002) still hold up more than 20 years later, after #MeToo? Lithub
Women In Art explores the place of depictions of female slaves in Western art history.
While choking or other forms of breath play are seen as high-risk activities in the BDSM community, these activities have somehow been mainstreamed in what most people would be “vanilla” sex. Some of this is because of edgy TV shows like The Idol and so on. How has this happened, and what if anything should be done about it?
Also check out the history of latex fetishism video.

Link Digest, September 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Sep 172023

Rolling Stone profiles the latest iteration of the anti-porn movement, linking husbands’ porn consumption to “betrayal trauma” in wives. The illustrative anecdote is a woman who makes her husband promise to keep his eyes closed during the sex scene in Oppenheimer. “For the anti-porn movement, the use of the phrase betrayal trauma takes porn from a personal decision to one of active mistreatment.”
Cartoonist Kayfabe looks at the hardback edition of John Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline.
The Ohio Players were a funk/R&B group that originated in the 1970s. At a time, record album covers were becoming more than just a platform to display the artists’ faces. They were a frontier for graphic design, sexual explicitness and the aesthetics of the black body. The Ohio Players were notorious for putting sexy images in their album artwork, including bondage. Photographer Joel Brodsky shot model Pat Evans in a black leather bikini, posing with a bullwhip in a victorious pose, on their 1972 Pain album. The next albums, Pleasure (1972) and Ecstasy (1973), continued the theme, with the edgier stuff hidden below the fold of the album cover.
Notches Blog writes about the peculiarly sexual accounts of alleged demonic possession of women in England in 1645-7. It’s interesting to compare these accounts to the “transverberation” allegedly experienced by St Theresa of Avila about a century earlier; both described sensual, bodily visitations from supernatural beings. However, Theresa was canonized, while the women of the witch hunts were brutalized.

Link Digest, August 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Aug 162023

Puritanism is a sociopolitical stance that cuts across the usual political boundaries in the USA and can unite strange bedfellows. Most media attention has gone to right-wing puritanism (e.g. transphobia, no-fap incels, etc) over the last decade, but there’s also an active progressive/leftist strain of puritanism. Vox describes how online fandoms, which were once vibrant communities of sexual experimentation, succumbed to puritanical anti-fandoms. The generation that has been brought up with greater access to sexually explicit media than ever before is dusting off old feminist debates about pornography and sexuality.
The Sex and Psychology podcast explores the new frontier of sex doll brothels.
The Discourses of Suffering blog explores the story of Saint Jerome and how he was held captive and tormented by a woman with erotic strangulation. The original Latin of the text is much more sexually explicit.
In Poland, a conservative minister is using an academic study on transfemininity and sadomasochism as an excuse to change how the government distributes research grants. He calls it “nonsense and pseudoscience”. In other words, trans people and kinky people are being dragged into the culture war.
In the US, recent Supreme Court decisions allow businesses to discriminate on the basis on sexual orientation. NCSF has tells how a swinger company lost their event hotel without explanation.
Swingers can also get in trouble with jobs requiring security clearances, despite official claims that they don’t care about people’s sex lives.

Link digest, July 2023

Link Digests No Responses »

Jul 272023

After 14 years, San Francisco’s Wicked Grounds will have to close their kinky cafe, though they will continue with social and educational events. I’ve been there a few times and it was always a great experience.
Chicago’s Leather Archives & Museum will be screening classic BDSM-themed films, including In the Realm of the Senses, Cruising, and Hellraiser, for the rest of the year.
Cinekink in NYC announces its 20th anniversary film festival from August 2-6, 2023.
The Sex and Psychology podcast includes an interview with Esmé Louise James, who is best known for her series Kinky History, about fetishes through history, and includes interesting theories, such as how foot fetishes peak at times of anxiety about sexually transmitted infections.

Older Entries

A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism