The History of BDSM – Page 2 – Documenting my research in the history of consensual sadomasochism

Fifty Shades of Black (2016): The Celluloid Dungeon

Nov 112021

Fifty Shades of Black (2016) (IMDB) is a comedy/romance film directed by Michael Tiddes and written by Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez. Obviously, it’s a parody of the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey franchise.

Beyond just parodying Fifty Shades, Black derives comedy from juxtaposing sadomasochism, long seen as a “white thing”, with blackness.

Moon Charania’s essay “The Promise of Whiteness: Fifty Shades of Grey as White Racial Archive” in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media (Issue 8, January 2016) hypothesizes that the book and film’s story can only work because the two leads are extremely white and heterosexual. It presents a kind of hetero-white utopia in which all the cultural anxieties of the 2000s and 2010s are almost entirely absent. Almost no non-white people means no racial violence and inequality, and almost no queer and no trans people means no challenge to the primacy of heterosexuality.

The significance of Grey’s emotional torment, Ana’s romantic attachment to Grey, and the familiarity of white heterosexual domestic love render this (attempted) violent domination both palatable and melancholic. [Pg. 84]

To excite and placate the audience, Ana and Christian as lovers and antagonists could only be white. The sudden excitement found in a powerful white man beating an empowered white woman for sexual pleasure establishes an inextricable link between racial formation and sexual subjectification. [Pg. 85]

In Charania’s view, whiteness excuses everything: Christian’s domination and sadism, Ana’s infatuation and naivete. Remove Christian’s whiteness, his wealth and privilege, from the narrative, and he’s just an abuser. Remove Ana’s whiteness, and she’s just a helpless victim. It’s not a love story anymore.

So what happens if the analogs of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, “Christian Black” (Marlon Wayans) and “Hannah Steale” (Kali Hawk), are black?

Link Digest, October 2021

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Oct 152021

CBC’s Ideas podcast has a series called Body Language. One episode talks about the “the right to sex“, the thorny issue of sexual ethics and politics. In the BDSM world, we tend to treat consent as the be-all and end-all of sexual ethics, but that leaves issues of sexism, racism, transphobia, classism and so on, unaddressed.
The Official Bettie Page Podcast, episode 5, discusses the 2005 biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, and some other documentary and biopic film projects about the iconic pinup and bondage model.
The Rialto Report covers the 1977 launch of the Ultra Room at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell theatre in San Francisco, a lesbian bondage show surrounded by two-way mirrors. This includes an interview with the room’s first headliner, porn star C.J. Laing, and photos.
A Refinery29 post by Gina Tonic asks what it means to be a bottom. “…the labels ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ are often used interchangeably with the labels ‘dom’ and ‘sub’ – but is this always true?”
20 years ago, Fetish Diva Midori published The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, probably the first book published in English on Japanese bondage. Since then, kinbaku/shibari has grown immensely in popularity outside Japan, and some kinksters practice it exclusively. Spectrum Boutique interviews Midori about this pioneering project.

The Story of Joanna (1975): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Oct 152021

The Story of Joanna (IMDB) is a 1975 X-rated drama directed and written by Gerard Damiano and starring Terri Hall in the title role and Jamie Gillis as Jason.

Joanna comes from the “Golden Age of porn” in the 70s and early 80s when some hardcore adult films were made with higher production values for release with X-ratings in mainstream theatres, trying to reach a broader audience. This was also the heyday of mainstream softcore erotica films like Just Jaeckin’s Histoire D’O (1975) and the original Emmanuelle (1974), and edgier material like Nazisploitation classics The Night Porter (1974), Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1975) and Salon Kitty (1976). (I’ve heard that Damiano wanted to film Story of O but couldn’t get the rights, and made his own knock-off.)

Link roundup, September 2021

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Sep 202021

The History of the Dominatrix talks about male masochism as a complex of behavior that goes back far earlier than 19th century Europe.
On Them magazine, Danny Thanh Nguyen talks about being a gay BDSM top who does not fit the masculine stereotype.
The Conversation talks about Fifty Shades of Grey 10 years later, mainly from a publishing perspective.
OnlyFans said they would ban adult content, then reversed their decision, in August 2021. Bitch Media talks about the causes and implications of a new wave of censorship of adult content on platforms.
The American Sex Podcast interviews Kitty Stryker about the OnlyFans flip-flop and goes into the peculiar history of censorship and pornography in the USA.
Related to the above, auction site Ebay has also banned the sale of adult material, which has implications for academics studying the history of pornographic media, says the New York Times.
IN magazine explores the history of the archetypal gay male leather accessory, the chest harness.

Bitter Moon (1992): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Sep 182021

Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) meets Nigel (Hugh Grant) in the company of her husband Oscar (Peter Coyote)

Bitter Moon (IMDB) is a 1992 erotic/romance film, directed by the notorious Roman Polanski, based on the novel Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner

Nigel goes on an ocean cruise with his wife, Fiona, where he becomes fascinated by a beautiful, mysterious woman named Mimi. Her husband, a paraplegic would-be writer named Oscar, demands that Nigel listen to his story of his obsessive love with Mimi before Nigel has an affair with her. Like another tale of twisted love, Nabokov’s Lolita, we shouldn’t take the narrator at face value. Mimi privately tells Nigel: “You musn’t believe all he says. He’s a sick man. He imagines things.”

In Oscar’s story, he is a self-consciously literary archetype, an independently wealthy young American living in Paris to become a writer. On a bus trip, he becomes smitten with Mimi, a young French woman.

Mimi is a cipher, with almost nothing more to her than being a beautiful French dancer, at least in Oscar’s telling. The early stages of their romance go from sweetly romantic to an adolescent’s idea of eroticism.

Oscar: (to Nigel) “I’m only going into such detail to show you how completely enslaved I was, body and soul, by this creature whose dangerous charms have made such an impression on you.”

Link Roundup, August 2021

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Aug 152021

Kids comics of the 1940s and 1950s seemed rife with children being spanked, as revealed by the Teen Sleuth Haunted Library. Strangely, the Comics Code Authority, implemented in 1954, said nothing about the corporal punishment of children.
The Rialto Report explores the strange history behind the sadomasochistic film The Image (1975), including the first meeting between the film’s director Radley Metzger and the original 1956 novel’s author Jean de Berg, and the story of the film itself. Did you know that while there were exterior scenes shot in Paris, most of the interior scenes were shot in a building in New York City owned by the notorious Roy Cohn, former attorney of Donald Trump?
The FeatureBang podcast explores the 1975 art-porn movie The Story of Joanna, directed by Gerard Damiano.
The KinkyCast interviews Susan Wright of the NCSF, talking about how the new Model Penal Code decriminalizes consensual BDSM.
Actor Brendan Scannell, who played Pete on the Netflix dramedy Bonding, talks about his Emmy nomination and his experiences on the show.

S&M Judge, aka SM Rechter (2009): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Aug 132021

S&M Judge, originally titled SM Rechter, is a Belgian 2009 drama based on a true story. (IMDB)

“Miss Martindale” and the Female Disciplinary Manual

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Aug 102021

A few months ago, I perused the used books section at Vancouver’s venerable queer bookstore Little Sisters. In addition to a book on Kenneth Anger’s underground gay leather film Scorpio Rising, I happened across a book without a barcode or copyright date or even an author, titled The Female Disciplinary Manual. I had heard of this before and remembered something about it being connected with some kind of schoolgirl discipline fantasy operation. As it was only $9.00 Canadian and in excellent condition with dust jacket (copies on Amazon are priced at $148 or more), I snapped it up.

The book itself is a rather odd work, purporting to be from the 2030s when the school disciplinary regime of the early 20th century in England has been reinstated as the solution to a decadent culture. The prose is in an arch, deadpan tone that leaves the reader guessing how much of this is part of the school discipline fantasy and how much is sincere.

By happenstance, I also came across the strange story of the organization that wrote and published the book and apparently lived by its ethos. The fifty-year saga links into pagan cults, lesbian separatists, Victorian-Edwardian cosplay as a lifestyle, early text-only video games, the English schoolgirl-discipline fetish, and far-right politics.

eLust sex blogs digest #139

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Jul 162021

Welcome to Elust 139.

The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #140? Start with the rules, come back August 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

The Olga series: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 292021

Before there was Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, there was Audrey Campbell as Olga.

The Olga films were a series of exploitation “roughies” or “kinkies” released in the 1960s, all directed by Joseph P. Mawra, and starring Audrey Campbell as the sadistic mob boss, Olga. These films were released under several different titles and release dates.