The blog Au carrefour étrange has a set of images from a 1922 French book of flagellation erotica.
Jan 272012
Self-inflicted violence in religion: Jack David Eller’s Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence
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Jan 212012
Eller, Jack David. Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence Prometheus Books, 2010.
I’m going back into chapter one of the book (hopefully to get a draft done by the end of the month), and that means going back into religion and violence. Eller’s book is about the relationship between religion and violence, not only that humans incorporate violence into religion, but that we also invest violence with religious meaning.
Jan 202012
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Sadomasochism in Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” and “A Dangerous Method”
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Jan 192012
I tend to cringe at depictions of BDSM in mainstream media, as it is usually flubbed in one way or another. Sometimes, however, a good (not necessarily “positive”) depiction appears in unexpected spots. For example, look at two films by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
Roman sex tokens
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Jan 082012
UK newspaper the Guardian has a piece on the recent discovery of a bronze token specifically made for spending in Roman brothels in Britain.
While the Putney token has been hailed as a rare discovery from Roman Britain, such artefacts showing similar scenes were actually well known in Renaissance Italy. Scholars in the 16th century didn’t know what they were – maybe something to do with the reputed excesses of the emperor Tiberius? – but they did leap on evidence of ancient Roman erotic art. Anything from antiquity was considered noble in the Renaissance, so these “coins” (as they were misnamed) licensed saucy 16th-century art, including Giulio Romano’s famous series of pornographic illustrations I Modi.
Again, this ties into Howard Bloom’s “strong misreading” idea I talked about earlier, that this misunderstanding of a given text (the token) fertilizes more creativity.
Guest post on BDSM Book Reviews: The Archaeology of Erotica
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Jan 072012
My brief history of erotica has been posted on BDSM Book Reviews:
I would argue that the bulk of what is categorized as erotica today can be traced back to two highly influential books, one from the early twentieth century, the other from the middle, both by women, both with women protagonists being initiated into exotic realms of pleasure, both widely dismissed as sensational, pornographic, misogynistic trash.
Karen Halttunen’s “Murder Most Foul”
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Dec 212011
Halttunen, Karen. Murder most foul: the killer and the American Gothic imagination Harvard University Press, 1998 Google Books
Halttunen’s book is about the transformation of how American society handles social deviance (violent crime, particularly) from the pre-industrial to the post-industrial.
10 months to first draft
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Dec 182011
“Beware the man of one book.”
-attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas
My first post on this blog was back in July, 2005. That’s six and a half years of blog posts on this, with no actual book.
It’s been fun, certainly, but I’ve realized that I could keep doing this indefinitely, without ever actually writing my supposed book. Blogging is certainly more fun than the grind of delayed gratification and possible rejection of conventional publishing, but an actual book, if published, means more status and money. While I’ve maintained a fairly steady output on blog postings, I’ve gone for six months or even a year without working on the book directly.
I also have to ask when enough information is enough. Is this going to be the last word on the topic, or is it one of many books on the subject?
You can look at it like two different modes of creative production. JRR Tolkien, for example, basically wrote one big story, the saga of Middle-Earth, investing just about everything he knew into it. It’s hard to see the the connection between The Hobbit and the Silmarilion, but it’s there. Tolkien wrote other fiction, but he’s been known for his magnum opus.
Michael Moorcock, by comparison, wrote lots and lots of novels short novels, allegedly writing 15,000 words a day at his peak. A lot of his generation of writers just wrote a lot more.
So, do I want to invest all my time and energy and hope into one great work, or write many different works that can succeed and fail independently?
The history of BDSM isn’t the last non-fiction book I want to write. It isn’t even necessarily the last book on BDSM I want to write.
So, I hereby state that by my 40th birthday, October 27th, 2012, I will have completed a first draft of my book, and will have begun submitting it to publishers.
This will be a much scaled down work of about 60,000 words, and more tightly focused than the encyclopedic 100,000 words I originally planned. Call it 10 chapters of no more than 6,000 words each. By necessity, this will mean leaving out a lot of stuff, in favour of a tighter narrative.
My biggest fear, of course, in saying this is that in 10.5 months I will shamefully admit to all of you out there (crickets chirp… chirp… chirp) that I didn’t do this. My success in this task is up to me and nobody else.
Men’s adventure magazines gallery
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Dec 122011
Retrospace has a selection of scans, and not just the covers but the interiors, of old mens adventure magazines, variously known as pulps or sweats.
You can see earlier pornographic genres embedded in here: the same combination of xenophobia mixed with wish-fulfillment in The Lustful Turk, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and so forth.
Dec 032011
This is a joke, right?
Don’t you get the point of this? It’s to turn people on. I get the sexy little schoolgirl. I even get the helpless mental patient, right? That can be hot.
But what is this? Lobotomized vegetable?
How about something a little more commercial, for God’s sake?
Sweet Pea, Sucker Punch, 2011, w./d. Zack Snyder
Searching “‘sucker punch’ snyder misogyny” on Google returns about 225,000 hits. I don’t think any film has been judged so harshly by being misunderstood.
Sucker Punch does present a confusing and at times incoherent story, but I don’t think it is operating on fundamentally bad faith with the audience. (The previously discussed Goodbye Uncle Tom, which likewise mixes exploitation imagery with pro-social messages, is a counter-example of a film in bad faith.)
