Reading the picture: Results of pornography survey

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 212011
 

Here’s an interesting paper on the results of a survey of people’s subjective experience to pornography. The researcher assembled about 70 porn images and asked people to comment on how they responded to the images and what they fantasized about in response to the images. (I participated.)

In an argument loosely based on Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, it has long been assumed that the subjective experience of pornography involved either the viewer’s sexual domination of the subject, or else the viewer adopting a like surrogate for the same end. In fact, these modes of encountering pornography appear to account for slightly less than one-third of responses to this survey. Even if we look only at responses in which the viewer is present in their narrative of the image, these simple modes account for only 63% of all responses. More surprisingly, from the traditional viewpoint, there is almost no difference in that rate by gender.

The takeaway is that, instead of a simple “male gaze”, people had a highly complicated and variable way of relating to images. Sometimes they are omniscient observers, sometimes they insert themselves into the image, sometimes they take the position of one of the people in the image. People spun elaborate scenarios about the action and experiences of the people in the image, based on the tiniest of cues in the image or the absence of details.

This suggests that people don’t take the pornographic image “straight”: they add a huge amount to the experience from their own imaginations and memories. When we read text, we complete the experience with our own minds, but it may be that we do when we see images, and that no two people see precisely the same image. People have active imaginations (not only sexual) and we cannot attribute the content of their fantasies solely to their media intake.

Anti-porn theorists generally posit that pornographic images encourage or foster imitative behaviour in the viewer, but this study suggests that it’s a lot more complicated. The viewer may select a woman who is injured or bound in order to fantasize about rescuing or healing her.

Another interesting point is the difference between putting a fantasy character in a “peril” situation, in which something bad is threatening but hasn’t happened yet and from which they could be saved, and outright violence or snuff scenarios.

This might have something to do with the hurt/comfort trope in slash fanfiction, in which one character in the story is physically or mentally injured and the other heals or tends to the first, creating an opportunity for physical/emotional intimacy. (Of course, this could also be read as an opportunity to indulge in latent sadism, displaced onto another character.) In the film of The Sheik, the Valentino character starts out masterfully masculine, but the emotional climax of the film comes when he is injured and prostrate before his female love interest.

This ties into Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten”, which talks about the mobility of the fantasizer’s point of view in flagellation fantasy, and Anna Freud’s essay on fantasies in which they are constantly re-edited by the fantasizer. (More on this later.)

The Stalag books and Holocaust porn

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 162011
 

Angela Caperton’s blog pointed me towards several Youtube clips from the documentary, Stalags (2008), about the Israeli stalag novels:

The Introduction

A discussion of the standard plot

A professor talks about his schooldays, when Stalag novels were circulated as porn, while the works of Ka Tzetnik 135633 treated the same subject matter but legitimately.

A publisher talks about the premise of the books, in which a “pinnacle of manhood”, American pilots, are dominated by women.

An interview with present-day Israeli who talks about his fantasies when having sex with a gentile German woman.

Interview with filmmaker Ari Libsker

I think this is an example of fantasy as a reparative/redemptive rewriting of an earlier experience, either first hand or indirect. Definitely gotta see this one.

More on Ka Tzetnik 135633 in a future post.

Maria Monk and “the pornography of the Puritan”

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 142011
 

Cover of 'Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk', showing nude woman praying and monk about to beat her with whip

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must “obey the priests in all things”; to her “utter astonishment and horror,” she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

Brian Busby also has some posts on Maria Monk, alleged author of the anti-Catholic classic Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, calling it “the best-selling work of fiction ever set in Montreal”. More likely it was written by American anti-Catholics who knew how to appeal to a nation steeped in Gothic/sentimental literature.

This book used common Gothic tropes: virtue in distress, murdered children, imprisonment, underground passages and chambers, arbitrary authority, cruelty and claustrophobia. It didn’t stint on describing and depicting the abuse of the nuns:

Most 19th century editions feature the same 38 engravings, all depicting characters and scenes in the book. There is, for example, the ‘inhuman priest’ Bonin in action pose. According to the book, it is he who, with an undisclosed number of nuns, trampled Sister St. Frances to death. Many of the images feature tormented nuns, women who have endured rape and torture, such as the ‘melancholy’ Sister St. Martin and ‘Mad Jane Ray’. In the illustration below we see Maria herself, recovering from ‘the cap’, an instrument of punishment described as ‘small, made of a reddish looking leather, fitted closely to the head, and fastened under the chin with a kind of buckle.’ The reader is told that it was ‘common practice to tie the nun’s hands behind, and gag her before the cap was put on, to prevent noise and resistance.’

…

Bondage, flogging, branding… it’s no wonder that the ‘awful disclosures’ found readers amongst those attracted to the works of Sacher-Masoch, Sade and Mirbeau. Indeed, the book has at times been packaged to attract just such an audience.

The book had a long life, with many legitimate and pirated editions. More than a century later, Monk’s book was still being used, turning up in leaflets opposing John F. Kennedy’s US presidential campaign. It still turns up cited on anti-Catholic kook websites.

Has this particularly anti-Catholic brand of pornography been rendered obsolete as fantasy material by the assimilation of Catholics in North American society, the diminishing power of the Catholic church and the general secularization of society? A cursory search of Imagefap revealed a fair number of “nun” galleries, and searching for “nun” on Literotica produced one page of stories, so perhaps this particular kink still has some life in it.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Awful Disclosures bear a lot of similarities: highly political works which used the language of Gothic sentiment to make their point and involved audiences who might not have been involved in other discourses. One was progressive and humanitarian, the other was xenophobic and bigoted. One was inspired by truth, the other by paranoid fantasy. It indicates just how powerful a discourse this is.

Still more Canadian pulp porn

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 142011
 

Brian Busby’s tour of the seamy side of Canlit brings us to the work of Danny Halperin, who wrote under the name of Neil Perrin.

This was Joanna (1949) begins like Twin Peaks: a beautiful woman, Joanna, is found murdered in water. One of her beaus delves into her life and turns up a sexually dysfunctional husband and a kinky lover:

On the walls of the room were hung all sorts of gadgets of torture; long needles, small, hairy whips, knouts, knives sharp as razors, silken threads of unbelievable length. Over the mantlepiece were afixed two large peacock feathers; the end of one was a rubber stopper, the end of the other a handgrip. I dared not ask the significance of these feathers for fear of being told.

Suspended from the ceiling were two long cords, obviously used to hold a person up from the floor by his (or her) thumbs. On the floor, as if alive, lay the stuffed corpse of a sinuous cobra. The most unspeakably evil paintings adorned the walls and, in one corner of the room under a blue light, sat the grinning statue of Priapus, the phallic symbol of the ages.

Another Perrin work was The Door Between (1950), about a damaged WWII vet who stalks the vamp who lives in the next room in his boarding house.

From another post:

Moving past the well-scrubbed, antiseptic couch romps shared by Bruce and Sheila we find relationships in which sex and violence are invariably entwined.

The first glimpse we’re given comes courtesy of Clara, Bruce’s downstairs neighbour, who gets off on being knocked around by her husband. The morning after Bruce’s arrival, the nightgown-wearing battered wife corners Bruce in the rooming house hallway, teasing: “Bet you’d like to beat the hell out of me, wouldn’t you?”

Jump to Vera, who shares a loveless sex life with Jake, one of the three men in her fawning entourage. “It is zee glandular love”, she sighs. “I suppose it will have to do until zee real love comes along. Some day he vill come to me, zee lover I need. He vill be strong and filty; he vill beat me and kiss me and feel everything – everything!” When one of her lapdogs dares describe her as a masochist, she responds: “I am not to be labelled. You can say I am zee masochist, I am zee sadist, I am zee pervert – anything that pleases you. But all I really am is zee voman. How do you explain zat?”

This novel ends with the hero beating the bad girl in a jealous rage, right in front of the good girl, who persuades him to stop so they can go get married. Charming.

As to viewing this a piece of BDSM history, there’s certainly a lot of sadism and masochism in The Door Between, but it appears to lack the formalism of the interaction that characterizes the dungeon in This Was Joanna. I’d categorized them more as “rough sex” stories than BDSM fiction.

More Canadian BDSM porn

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 132011
 

Brian Busby’s blog is proving to be a cornucopia of Canadian literary BDSM history.

His posts on Dianne Bataille’s The Whip Angels (1968), and the author herself, married to George Bataille.

Science fiction writer AE van Vogt wrote The House that Stood Still (1952):

Nine men and four women were standing in various tensed positions. One of the women, an amazingly good-looking blonde, had been stripped to the waist; her ankles and wrists were tied with thin ropes to the chair in which she sat sideways. There were bloody welts on her tanned back, and a whip lay on the floor.

John Glassco and “Harriet Marwood, Governess”

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Jul 122011
 

You could do an interesting anthology of major literary figures who wrote porn/erotica on the side: Voltaire, Diderot, Byron, Swinburne, Wilde, James, etc. (Sacher-Masoch is a different case, a writer who is remembered only for writing erotica, when he is remembered at all.)

Canada’s entry in this particular literary field is John Glassco, who was quite prolific under several pseudonyms.

From a review of a biography of Glassco, published in The Walrus:

Glassco was a prolific author of elegant, sadomasochistic pornography; his internationally bestselling whipping classic, Harriet Marwood, Governess, is stylistically superior to many revered creations of CanLit. Yet in contrast to the reception received by the work of Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, Glassco’s naughty books never attracted an underground following in his own country. Even Memoirs of Montparnasse, praised everywhere, fell into neglect after accusations that it caught the spirit rather than the letter of the lost generation.

The author’s blog also discusses Glassco’s pornographic offerings in detail:

In his seventy-one years, John Glassco produced five books of verse, eight volumes of translation, and the prose masterpiece Memoirs of Montparnasse, but not one approached the sales he enjoyed with The English Governess and its sister book Harriet Marwood, Governess. Both stories of flagellantine romance between a boy, Richard Lovel, and his beautiful governess, Harriet Marwood, they’re easily confused and are often described as being one and the same. Harriet Marwood, Governess, though published second, is actually the older of the two. In 1959, it was offered to Maurice Girodias, but the publisher thought it too tame. Glassco then rewrote the novel – apparently with the help of his wife – slashing it by more than half and ramping up the sex. Made to order, as The English Governess it was quickly accepted and appeared within ninety days under Olympia’s Ophelia Press imprint.

Publication by Olympia put Glassco (or “Miles Underwood”) in august company, including Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Nabokov, Burroughs and Reage/Aury/Desclos.

There are also discussions of Glassco’s flagellant poem and literary hoax Squire Hardman, another pornographic hoax called The Temple of Pederastry, completing Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill/Die Venusberg, and the rubber fetishist novel Fetish Girl (written as “Sylvia Bayer”)(Further discussion)

A discussion of different editions of The English Governess.

As a Canadian, it’s nice to know people of Canada are keeping the end up. More on that in another post.

Addendum: Busby as another blog dedicated to promoting his book and discussing Glassco.

Addendum: I think Glassco may have been the author of the mysterious excerpt from Beardsley’s Under the Hill printed in Gerald and Caroline Greene’s S-M: The Last Taboo.

Political bondage

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 032011
 

I found the above image on a Facebook page for Americans Against The Tea Party, a contemporary example of virtue in distress/naked (implicitly) bound woman as part of political discourse.

The gallery of images on the Americans Against the Tea Party provide an insight into the less rational side of political discourse. Some of the images make arguments, while other rely on negative associations, and specifically refer to faces and bodies. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are likened to apes. Two or three display morbidly obese women as typical “teabaggers”, linking body imagery and misogyny and classism. One pastes Beck’s face onto a slim man in a leatherboy outfit, linking political deviance and sexual deviance, plus likely the cliche of overcompensatory masculinity as a cover for homosexuality. There are also easy cheap shots of juxtaposing right wingers with Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan (two organizations who really knew how to use visual iconography).

These images were presumably created and distributed by left-wing individuals, and I have no doubt that there are comparable images being created and distributed by right-wing individuals. This is a particular level of political discourse, which is very much about the body, and particularly the female body. The image displayed above, separated from the contextualizing text, could be used in other political discourses. A right-winger could use the image of a nude, bound woman to suggest the idea of a woman’s body being confined and interfered with through abortion, decriminalization of prostitution, or other liberal ideas. The image is equally usable.

This image seems to come from a tumblr account, which has a series of lefty political mini-posters. Some of them simply urge the viewer to vote, and uses mild cheesecake (and some beefcake) images to get attention. Others use children-as-victims as motivating devices.

Another image shows a bound woman, though her expression indicates angry defiance, not victimization. The art style suggests the image was recycled from some earlier conflict, indicating the timelessness of this image.

One of the images explicitly shows a woman bound, with the caption, “There’s no safeword with the GOP”, which uses the idea of consensual BDSM as a contrast to what happens between women and the right wing social agenda. (It’s in an image display Flash app, so I can’t link to it.)

As we’ve discussed before, the sexual, and particularly female sexual victimization, has been used in all kinds of political discourse: for and against Atlantic slavery, the Greek rebellion, the German invasion of Belgium in WWII, the Stalag novels, PETA’s ad campaign, and on and on. What’s interesting is that these images linger on well after the conflict that inspired them becomes irrelevant, or at least less relevant. They become detached from political discourse and become solely sexual, part of pornographic discourse.

Addendum: by chance, I came across a book in the erotica section that had a variation of the same image on the cover, Playing by Melanie Abrams, Black Cat, 2008.

The function of queer pulp

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 012011
 

I twigged something when I read Cecilia Tan’s blog notes about the IASPR romance conference.

Which leads me to wonder if I did an analysis of BDSM-based and queer-focused romance if I would find a greater emphasis on the value of the sex (and its place in validating personal identity) than on the more “traditional” romance ideals of true love tied to a diamond ring and landed estate/portfolio? Of course, there are the same-sex romances, for example, which take place in an alternate universe where there is no homophobia, and where everything is entirely the same as possible to a traditional romance except for the one key point that the two main characters are man and man or woman and woman. These would have to be counted separately, I suppose… or I’d have to posit a separate axis on which to divide the genres. Hmmm.

Validation of personal identity for those who are marginalized is perhaps a bigger prize than financial security or the attention and love of a powerful/high status mate. Does that change the rules of romance for queer-identified authors/protagonists/readers? Or does it merely establish the rules more firmly, it’s merely that the prize is different?

So, the old gay and lesbian pulps had the additional function of validating personal desires and types of relationships that mainstream society didn’t recognize. Even if the story isn’t a variation of the marriage plot, i.e. ending in Happily Ever After, just saying it is okay to desire a person of the same sex or something other than heterosexual coitus is important. That undermines the erotica/romance distinction, and/or gives erotica a higher purpose of exploring and experimenting with desire, rather than endlessly renegotiating monogamous domesticity.

The myth of ancient houses

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 182011
 

“People don’t lie on the Internet!”
-Dept. Raineesha Williams, Reno 911!

I recntly read a Fetlife discussion of the old CastleRealm BDSM website and what was and wasn’t true about its operators, Lord Colm and slade jade (including whether jade actually existed). One of the posters linked to the preserved text of the CastleRealm site.

Thanks to the miracle that is the Wayback Machine, we can examine old websites, and trace the history of ideas and memes. This page (scraped from November 2000 but copyrighted 1998) presents the “ancient houses” idea with a completely straight face.

Houses: A common term for the families or small communities that have evolved from adhering to certain social activities, social values and morals associated with the Dominant/submissive lifestyle. Each “clan” developed their own special standards, style and customs and there are wide variations as to what is acceptable within a “house.” We find two distinctly different styles between the two main groups found within the term:

* The Oriental Society: The lifestyle developed in the Oriental countries, mainly Japan. This group of “houses” or “families” focuses mainly on the psychological and artistic aspects of Dominance and submission. Physical punishment and pain play little part in their world and great attention is given to the surrender and control of the mind and emotions. The beauty and artistic appeal of their method is easily seen in Japanese rope bondage.

* The European Council: Developed in Europe, mainly Germany, Belgium and France, this group is heavy into the more physical aspects of the lifestyle and incorporates the bulk of the BDSM practices we find today. The German houses gave birth to the PonyGirl/Boy and many of the other fetishes found in the power exchange. Within the European houses we find most of the Dominatrixes and male submissives, along with the practices associated with them, such as CBT.

…

Are these “houses” real or only a fantasy created by some fiction book?
These houses are very real as are the people who are involved in them. The history available dates their existence as far back as 2000 years and they most likely existed before then in a less structured manner. It is a common practice for people with similar ideals and interests to join together to share their experiences and needs, so the existence of these groups should not come as any great surprise to those who are aware of human behavioral sciences. You may not see a sign hanging over the doorway of the little white house on the corner of 3rd and Maple Street that says “Joe’s D/s House and Grill,” but they are there, hidden from view and doing very nicely in our everyday society.

One of the things that has undermined the existence of these houses is the current fad D/s is undergoing. It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has jumped on the band wagon and proclaimed themselves to be members of this or that house and boast of having their Masters degree in BDSM or D/s. The truth is that most of them are charlatans who have found a way to give credence to their misuse of power and pitiful knowledge. Their unfounded claims have planted more misunderstanding in this lifestyle than almost any other factor. Be wise and have doubts about anyone who solicits you for enrollment in a “house” especially on the Internet or at scene clubs. Most people who truly have roots in the old families are not about to proclaim it to the world.

…

Why are these houses so secretive?
Like any group that goes against the mainstream beliefs of the society within which it exits, there are carefully guarded standards about their establishment and being. Five hundred years ago, such things were only considered bizarre and extreme but not criminal. Today, with laws and concerns for human rights, such organizations fall into the jurisdiction of illegal activities or criminal acts. It doesn’t take an active imagination to consider the consequences for a group or individual discovered to be living a D/s lifestyle or to be practicing some of it’s activities. Remember that in many states it is still a crime to engage in oral or anal sex with your spouse. Just think of what a group who advocates the practices found in BDSM would be facing. Not a lovely thought, heh? Then is it any wonder that you don’t see billboards pointing out the way to “Joe’s D/s House and Grill?”

Laura Kipnis on the lack of female sex scandals

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 132011
 

Laura Kipnis opines on the DSK scandal and the apparent lack of female sex scandals, drawing on Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions:

In her influential 1991 book “Female Perversions” (later made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton), psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan writes that we tend to think of sexual perversions as a male province only because female perversions are more hidden. In fact, they’re hidden in plain sight. The point is applicable to sex scandals too, I believe. According to Kaplan, perversions aren’t primarily about illicit or deviant sexual behaviors, they’re actually pathologies of gender identity. “What makes a perversion a perversion is a mental strategy that uses one or another social stereotype of masculinity or femininity in a way that deceives the onlooker about the unconscious meanings of the behaviors she or he is observing.”

…

Women too, are capable of perverse behavior, and enlisting others in such stratagems, but this kind of thing generally doesn’t make the headlines. Very occasionally we see women getting themselves into scandals in ways we’d consider “masculine”—high school teachers sleeping with their students for instance—but it’s rare. More often, when we see a woman behaving in caricatured feminine ways, the response is, “Thanks for doing the laundry, baby.”

The stereotypical cliche of perverse sexuality, the CEO who pays a dominatrix thousands of dollars to dress in a French maid uniform and do her laundry, doesn’t seem to have a direct female analogue. When we look for female scandals with this perspective, things start to pop up, of female celebrities under tremendous pressure and acting out in bizarre ways. I think of Angelina Jolie’s (perhaps excessive) display of maternity in adopting African children, or Tammy Faye Bakker’s grotesque exaggeration of female makeup back in the days, or women who have multiple cosmetic surgeries. Still, these examples are something inward directed.

As women move into more positions of authority in the corporate and political realms, will they start to display more male-like sexual perversions, or will we have to create a new category of scandal for them? Tabloid journalism obsesses over the bodies of female celebrities (too fat? too thin? botched operation? pregnant? infertile?) but not their sexualities, not the objects of their desires.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries