Les Confidences de Chérubin: French vintage spanking

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Mar 082012
 

The Au carrefour étrange blog has several scans of vintage bondage and flagellation erotica from France. One of them is Les Confidences de Chérubin by G. Donville, originally published in 1939 and featuring beautiful spanking, lingerie and maid illustrations by Cheri Horouard, aka Herric.

Maid in uniform spanking young woman in bed

This is a great reissue the less fortunate will be able to buy, for lack of the original edition that not only is rare but does not approach within 100 euros you.
In addition to this text very pleasant, originally published by the great Jean Fort (Nettles White etc..), Whose narrator, Peter Thiverny tells, from initiation to sensual pleasure in voyeurism (parents) and the discovery of female buttocks (the young Monique and her swing) to various sexual practices including spanking with many companions of passage, and more so, this beautiful edition reproduces illustrations from the original edition (1939) Cheri Herouard (signed Herric).

[via Google Translate]

Man in turban and chains kissing foot of woman in quasi-Oriental headdress

While most of the illustrations are set in the present day, the one above indulges in Orientalist fantasy with the appropriate props.

Tennessee Williams’ “Desire and the Black Masseur”

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Mar 022012
 

Williams, Tennessee. “Desire and the Black Masseur” Tales of Desire New Directions, 2010. Originally published 1948

Dipping into the “literary figures who wrote kink” well, we find Tennessee Williams’ short story, “Desire and the Black Masseur.” A meek man wanders into a steambath, gets pounded and later killed and literally eaten by an African-American masseur. The end.

As a narrative of homoerotic interracial masochism, it works pretty well. The fact that the masseur is not named and only identified as “the Negro” means that is isn’t exactly racially progressive, but this is a story of fantasy, of a masochistic desire for regression and annihilation.

The narrative suggests that the drama of Burns’ masochism and the sadism of “the Negro” is a kind of cosmic drama of revenge and redemption for slavery and racism. I wonder if there’s a parallel between this story and, say, the race and gender subtext of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and other works: the white, Christian man submitting to the (possibly Jewish) woman.

You could say there’s two kinds of masochistic scenarios: one which goes against the dominant flow of power in society (e.g. this story, Venus in Furs) and the other which follows the dominant flow of power (e.g. Story of O), though the last case may subvert the dominant paradigm. E.M. Hull’s The Sheik does both: female submitting to male, white colonizer submitting to Oriental colonized (who turns out to be an Englishman anyway).

The subversive element may be secondary and optional to the experience of masochism, but it does render masochism more visible and legible.

Jack Fritscher’s commentary on the story, emphasizing the difference between Burns’ initial passivity and his later active surrender and submission.

Don’t confuse your Sams or your Gargoyles

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Mar 022012
 

Betty Page holding whip in magazine advertisment

Vintage Sleaze has a fun tidbit of kink history. Sam Menning, an actor who also worked as a photographer, took fetish pics, including the great Betty Page.

Menning eventually became the “house” photographer of sorts for Gargoyle, a distributor of 4 x 5 nude photos with a fetish bent. Mind you, they were 1950’s photos of a fetish bent…which meant play-acting with rather dim and confused models being asked to look tough…dramatic to this day, but little more than lingerie ads with the models in black. Not MY cup of tea, but someone’s.

Meanwhile, Senator Estes Kefauver was gunning for porn publisher Samuel Roth, particularly for the fetish/kink pictures Kefauver thought were published by Roth.

It turns out that Kefauver and his puritan goons had confused Sam Menning, photographer for Gargoyle Sales Corp, with Samuel Roth, publisher of Gargoyle Books. This mistake wasn’t revealed until Kefauver had Roth on the stand testifying.

The new wave of censorship

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Mar 022012
 

The history of obscenity and censorship is the history of drawing and redrawing very fine lines in the ever-shifting sand, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphors.

Consider the recent case of Michael Peacock in the UK, charged under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 for distributing allegedly obscene DVDs. (Peacock sold DVDS via Craig’s List and his own website and magazine ads, which seems like an oddly old-school way to do a porn business these days.) The Crown Prosecutor presented two lists, one of things that would probably be prosecuted (“sadomasochistic material which goes beyond trifling and transient infliction of injury”, “fisting”, “torture with instruments”) and those that usually would not (“mild bondage”, “fetishes which do not encourage physical abuse”)

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“The Velvet Underground” by Michael Leigh

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Feb 282012
 

Before the proto-punk/goth band the Velvet Underground formed, there was the book, The Velvet Underground by Micheal Leigh, published 1963.

According to Wikipedia:

The Velvet Underground by Michael Leigh was a contemporary pulp paperback about the secret sexual subculture of the early ’60s that [John] Cale’s friend Tony Conrad showed the group. [Angus] MacLise made a suggestion to adopt the title as the band’s name, and according to Reed and Morrison the group liked the name, considering it evocative of “underground cinema,” and fitting, as Reed had already written “Venus in Furs,” a song inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s book of the same name, dealing with masochism. The band immediately and unanimously adopted the Velvet Underground as its new name in November 1965.

If that was all, this book would have a spot in the history of BDSM, but there’s also the content of the book itself.

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Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Gothic melodrama

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Feb 242012
 

Special Victims Unit has always been the black sheep of the Law & Order franchise, with a tendency towards ratings grabs with has-been guest stars and clumsy discussions of issues. With last night’s episode, “Hunting Ground”, something has definitely changed in its treatment of violence towards women.

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Domina Irene Boss and the Other World Kingdom

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Feb 212012
 

One of my favourite podcasts, the Masocast, has an interview with Domina Irene Boss. Boss has been involved in both the pro Domme scene and the BDSM video scene for a long time, and has good historical insights on both fields. She was in both at the ground floor, and was able to vacation in Hawaii from the proceeds of her DVD sales. These days, particularly after the advent of Clips 4 Sale, the video market is so diversified that this isn’t possible anymore.

She also has some inside knowledge of the Other World Kingdom in the Czech Republic, which is about as close to “the Club” or “the Marketplace” or “the Network” as we’re ever going to get in real life.

Betty Dodson’s “Sex for One”

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Feb 202012
 

Salon.com has an interview with Betty Dodson (whom I once met at a TES meeting in NYC in 2005), author of Sex For One. She has interesting insights on the fall and rise of masturbation, and why we need gender parity in whacking off.

Obviously, the sexual climate was very different in 1974. How did people think about masturbation back then?

Who needed it? There was so much sexual freedom and there were so many groups and threesomes and couples getting together. It was very fluid in New York, L.A., San Francisco. I went to sex parties in the U.K., London, Amsterdam. I was one of the darlings of the jet set, so they’d invite me everywhere. I couldn’t have been happier. Then all of the sudden AIDS happened and the bottom crashed out of casual sex. That’s why the publisher in 1986 figured that they could finally deal with masturbation as the safest sex.

Do you think there’s less guilt associated with masturbation now?

I don’t think we’ve made any progress. If anything we’ve gone backwards.

What?! Really?

Well, you can at least say the word now. In certain circumstances you couldn’t say it at all, when I first started off. The response I got to using the word was people rolling on the floor laughing, and when I talked about teaching women how to masturbate, they was even funnier. What would you do to teach someone to masturbate? But it’s a physical activity that has an art to it. You don’t just grab it and whack it. It’s everyone’s favorite thing to do if you can’t get laid or you don’t have a delicious romantic relationship, but if we don’t incorporate masturbation into our relationships, we are going to lose sex anyway.

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