The History of BDSM – Page 70 – Documenting my research in the history of consensual sadomasochism

Erastus Dow Palmer’s ‘The White Captive’

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Sep 272011

Erastus Dow Palmer's 'The White Captive', statue of nude woman standing

I’m still working up to reviewing Donna Dennis’ Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Harvard University Press, 2009), but I want to post something on a sculpture mentioned in the book called The White Captive by Erastus Dow Palmer.

It portrays a youthful female figure who has been abducted from her sleep and held captive by savage Indians. Hands bound, and stripped of a nightgown hanging from a tree trunk, she turns her head away from the terror, and clenches her left fist, in defiance of imminent harm. Palmer avoided the often cold appearance of Italianate Neoclassical sculpture, in part by using for his model a local girl. He was particularly commended for his use of a “thoroughly American” subject that makes a conscious allusion to the endless skirmishes between Native Americans and white pioneers. It is these naturalistic and individualizing qualities that have, down through the years, earned such praise for Palmer’s sculpture.

According to this article, it was based on Hiram Power’s Greek Slave (previously discussed). True or not, there are definitely similarities in composition and posture. The main difference is that in The White Captive, the woman has her left arm behind her body, fist clenched in defiance. Like Power’s work, this was publicly exhibited to men, women and children.

What’s interesting here is that two different artists used a very similar image, a nude woman in distress, to address two different conflicts, i.e. Greece’s rebellion against Turkey and the various battles between Americans and First Nations peoples in the West. The latter conflict was also reflected in the captivity narrative genre. These, in turn, are related to the “held captive by Catholics” stories: virtue in distress from a threatening Other population.

As discussed previously, this kind of imagery is used in a wide variety of contexts and to refer to a wide variety of real-world conflicts. It is thus hardly surprising that these images percolated through the collective subconscious, via the Anna Freud process described earlier.

Anna Freud, spanking fantasies and “nice stories”

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Sep 142011

While I’ve already read Sigmund Frued’s essays on sadomasochism, notably “A Child is Being Beaten”, I’ve been putting off reading his daughter, Anna Freud’s 1922 essay, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” (possibly based on her own life).

What’s interesting about this essay is its explanation of how sadomasochistic fantasy operates in relation to conscious daydreams and print media. Our subject, an adolescent girl, has both beating fantasies and what she called “nice stories”:

Nazi fashion in East Asia

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Sep 112011

For a while, I’ve been aware that Nazi imagery pops up in Japanese and Chinese culture every now and then, such as this set of pictures in the Daily Dot. I attribute this not to fascistic tendencies or even ignorance, but a historical and geographical distance so great that swastika armbands and black SS uniforms carry no real semiotic meaning, and signify nothing in particular. They’re just another fashion note, like the Chobits-style ear horns the “bride” wears in the above picture.

Contrary to what you might thing, people in Asia don’t just shrug this off. From the comments to the Chinasmack blog post:

To say you are mentally retarded doesn’t seem appropriate for your age . . . So, in the end I won’t be describing you both but instead wish for you: That the guy will forever remain a virgin, that the girl also forever remain a virgin, that you will be hit by a car when leaving your house, that you will be electrocuted when you bathe, and that for all of your offspring, the boys will from generation to generation forever be slaves, and the girls will from generation to generation forever be whores.

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What’s the difference between this and someone wearing a [Imperialist] Japanese military uniform to take photos?

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Asshole, your ancestors just rolled over in their graves.

I also wonder if there is some kind of “beautiful loser” thing going on here. We view these signifiers in the context of the defeat of fascism decades ago, so we can see them as signifying tragedy, of good people in bad situations. For example, here’s the Wikipedia plot summary of the “Slipstream” segment of The Cockpit anime:

A disgraced German fighter pilot is assigned to escort a captured American B-17 bomber carrying his childhood sweetheart, her scientist father and a fearsome secret cargo – a Nazi atom bomb. The night before the mission the pilot’s sweetheart begs him to let enemy planes destroy the bomber before the cargo can be used, even though she and her father will die with it. On the next day, After shooting down two of three RAF attackers by using the brand new Ta 152, the pilot allows the third Spitfire to destroy the bomber.

Here’s an inherently dramatic situation, a character torn between duty and humanitarian concerns, opening up the possibility of masochistic sacrifice and redemption in annihilation.

You could also see this as a way of Japanese people thinking about their nation’s legacy as a defeated, surrendered power by displacing the narrative onto another defeated military power, Nazi Germany.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin mantelpiece screen

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Sep 062011

Here’s an image cribbed from Reynold’s Mightier than the Sword (previously discussed), which shows a mantelpiece screen depicting a black man, brandishing a whip, standing over a black woman, who is half-naked. Another man observes from the background.

A lot of elements in this issue undercut its value as shock propaganda and add the erotic value. The woman is young and shapely, and positioned and dressed so that her breast just peeps from under her arm, and her upper body and arms are nearly uncovered. Her facial expression is hardly fearful or agonized, and seems to be one of ambivalent anticipation. Her dark skin depicted with subtle shading, giving a sense of the shape and texture of her body.

David S. Reynolds’ “Mightier than the Sword”

More on “Goodbye Uncle Tom”

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Aug 232011

The Mondo 70 film blog has an interesting series of posts (from 2009) on exploitation classic (?) Goodbye Uncle Tom (I previously discussed the Italian director’s cut), including one that directly addresses the depiction of sexuality in this film.

I’ve described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it’s compassionate to stare at someone’s absolute subjugation and humiliation — or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah’s drunken nakedness. [Filmmakers] Jacopetti & Prosperi’s reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.

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The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director’s Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.

Goodbye Uncle Tom seems to fall into the same pit as other, 19th century attempts to humanize slaves by showing them as capable of suffering, but neglects to show them as capable of any other response to their conditions. The flipside of suffering is rage (masochism to sadism) and the film suggests that those are the only two responses for blacks, and it is only a matter of time until 300 years of pent-up rage explodes in helter-skelter.

Kinkophobia and presumed knowledge

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Aug 202011

A newspaper in Vancouver, BC, ran a story yesterday on complaints, or rather a complaint, about noise from a swing party in the suburb of Delta.

The story itself is pretty thin, but what really interests me is the comments. Most of them are people saying “What’s the big deal?” or defending swinging, but many of which display a virulent hatred of the sexually deviant (swinging, in this case) combined with a presumed knowledge about the truth of swinging.

I worked for a swinger. He was a bit of a deviant. His second wife joined him for a while, then divorced him because she couldn’t stand the lifestyle. We got all sorts of pornographic mail at work. I quit my job when he said I should try it. Creepy.

PS: Most of the photos of the men were really ugly.

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Have fun with those festering , infected, bleeding sores…down there…hope you don’t get them on your face!

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If you have this kind of lifestyle, you have a 75% percent chance of having genital herpes. You may not have symptoms In fact most people don’t.But they are still randomly infectious.
And, your kids will find out about your lifestyle eventually.You are living in a dream world if you think this won’t effect them.You could keep this a secret which is really hard to do.But if you are successful, are you prepared for the day when your son shows up to one of your parties?
Condoms fail. How many women do you know who got pregnant because a condom broke? And, you can still get STDs with perfect condom use. Check it out yourself.
I would love to tell you that there is a sexual utopia. I would love to tell you that you can have sexual adventures galore without getting your heart or body broken. Who doesn’t want that? I would love to tell you that your kids won’t take huge sexual risks that endanger their health because they see you doing it.
But that, would be a lie.

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My wife and I wanted to try this lifestyle out, and now we too are divorced. I am trying to hold together the pieces of innocence for our children, while she is claiming to them her friendships with 20 somethings make them look cool. Its a sick sick World.

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I’ve been around the block more than a few times.These things were around in the 60s.And all the people I knew who did this stuff-all eventually divorced.Disbelieve me if you like & find out yourself.Respect and communication aside, when you do this stuff, your marriage is not an exclusive relationship. Someone almost always winds up getting hurt. Usually, it’s just a matter of time. As for being uneducated as you claim, seriously, educate yourself about STDs. Condoms fail 10 % of the time across the board. You can get herpes, HPV and syphilis with perfect condom use. You can also get these from oral sex.The risks are real and include serious long term consequences including head and neck cancer from HPV.The rates of which by the way are rising rapidly.Go to any government website on STD information and get the facts.
What people do is their own business. And honestly, nobody cares in this day and age. But the truth is, there are consequences which was my point.

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yawn…swingers are just immoral deviants that are not even worth discussing..let them rot from their various STD’s and continue running away from the truth of what they truly are, which is too ugly to even contemplate

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Anyone I’ve known, and I’ve known lots, who get into that lifestyle, almost always divorce.
In the end you don’t have a real marriage, you have an “arrangement” Once the guy hits midlife, he has absolutely no reason to be faithful to you, nor to honour your marriage vows. Think about it; they meant nothing. You talk about your kids being well behaved, but so what.They are learning things that will ultimately harm them.
Your talk about the facts of life with your daughter will, of course, now have to include how to deal with the constant herpes outbreaks and then there is the tender moment when your child realizes she has genital warts. She decides not to worry about HIV because you didn’t. Then there will be the heartbreak of seeing men just use your daughter and then dump her. Your lifestyle has a price. By the time most people figure this out, it’s too late. They are old, alone with their many lovers long gone and their kids seriously messed up and an

So, the attackers claim to know the dark side of swinging, though they don’t cite anything to support this. They even presume to know more about it than the swingers themselves. I think this supposed expertise is similar to the junk science that gets trotted out by homophobes.

I was a sex slave at Abu Ghraib!

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Aug 172011

Cinema Sewer 34, Danny Hellman, Cmm3C

Well, sooner or later, somebody had to make an image like the one above.

Danny Hellman created this for cover of the 24th issue of the Cinema Sewer zine, published out of Vancouver, BC by Robin Bougie.

It’s not the only Hellman that satirizes the Iraq and Afghanistan war, viewing those conflicts through the lenses of comic books and exploitation magazines (e.g. 1). This is an obvious take on the previously discussed Israeli stalag novels and the later men’s adventure magazines, referencing the notorious Abu Ghraib pictures. The brunette woman in the background represents Lynndie England, for instance.

The Abu Ghraib pictures put Americans in a quandary. The scenario was familiar, but the ones inflicting the suffering were “us”, not “them”. How could this be? This is what Other people do. It’s telling that England, a female soldier, became the most recognizable name and face associated with this scandal, linking political deviance with female sexual deviance.

I feel somewhat disappointed that this image is too knowing, too ironic to be a genuine expression of fantasy. Maybe we need to wait a few years before the psychosocial impact of the War on Terrorism percolates up from the collective subconscious. Or perhaps the torture porn film genre previously discussed is part of that response. Maybe in North America the feared Other is not the Muslim terrorist, but the out-of-control, paranoid police state. That at any second, for no apparent reason, we can find ourselves strapped to something in a windowless room where we are utterly helpless before an unknown person. Network television is already crawling with surveillance and confinement and competition. Somewhere out there, Room 101 is ready for you.

Another version of Room 101

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Aug 162011

Continuing my discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the function of violence, here’s the Room 101 scene from the American 1956 film version.

Note that the story pretty closely follows the book and the other two film versions: the electric shocks, the “How many fingers?” routine, Winston seeing his degraded self in the mirror. You can see how much of a perverse initiator O’Brien is (called O’Connor in this adaptation), guiding Winston room to room, preparing him for each stage of his descent into hell.

“Did the costumes make it good?”

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Aug 092011

Silk Spectre: Did the costumes make it good?

Silk Spectre: Dan…?

Night-Owl: Yeah.

Night-Owl: Yeah, I guess the costumes had something to do with it. It just feels strange, you know? To come out and admit that to somebody.

Night-Owl: To come out of the closet.

–Alan Moore and Frank Gibbons, Watchmen, Chapter 7, pg. 28

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism