Justice Weekly, Canada’s post-WWII fetish magazine

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Jun 262012
 

Being Canadian, I’m always interested in Canada’s contributions to the sexual edge of culture. I was delighted to stumble across the story of Justice Weekly, a true crime tabloid newspaper published in Canada that frequently included fetish letters. “…popular topics were discipline, punishment and humiliation of males (especially ‘errant husbands’ and spoiled post-adolescent children) by authoritarian/domineering females, transvestites and authority figures such as school principals, judges and law-enforcement officials.”

 

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Mad Men: “Mystery Date” and rewriting sexual violence

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Apr 092012
 

The theme of violence against women is front and centre in the Mad Men episode “Mystery Date”, and what leads into that phenomenon is a tangled web of fear, anger and desire.

The episode is haunted by the Richard Speck rape-murders in 1966, an incident which its own Gothic details: sexualized violence, women in danger, etc. The lone survivor of Speck’s massacre of student nurses escaped by hiding under a bed.

At the SCDP office, Joyce, a journalist friend of Peggy, brings in a sheet of photos of the Speck crime scene not fit for publication. Joyce describes the crime in melodramatic detail, as if imagining herself as the sole survivor and de facto hero of the narrative (Cf. the Final Girl of slasher filmes). Peggy and the other creatives are gruesomely fascinated and study the pictures. It’s new copywriter Michael Ginsburg who looks at the pictures but then denounces the others as “sickoes”, and says he wishes he hadn’t looked at them.

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Guerilla barbers of the French Resistance

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Mar 172012
 

From the Old Erotic Art Tumblr:

Half-naked women being threatened with head-shaving

This image, presumably the cover of an old men’s adventure magazine from the ’50s or ’60s, is puzzling initially. Why the shaving brush and scissors? Guerilla barbers? This is almost certainly a reference to les femmes tondues. In post-liberation France, women who allegedly collaborated with occupying fascists (especially “horizontal collaboration”) were publicly shaved bald. Like the “Nazi dominatrix” trope, this is the conflation of deviant politics (collaboration) with deviant female sexuality (“slut shaming”). Women are used as ritual scapegoats for a community’s problems (in this case, the legacy of occupation and collaboration in France) and symbolically “killed.” See Frost’s book Sex Drives

Interesting to see women-in-danger in the context of anti-fascist, “good guy” forces like the French resistance. This can be applied to just about any conflict, or to put it another way, any conflict or social anxiety can provide a framing narrative for the scene of woman-in-distress.

“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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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.

A curious film: I am Curious (Yellow)

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Jul 252011
 

I’m not sure if the original Swedish title, I am curious (yellow), has the same double meaning as it does in English. I.e. the protagonist, a young Swedish woman named Lena, is both inquisitive, and an enigma herself.

I have a strong suspicion that a lot of people attending this movie in the USA were hoping to see some skin and were probably disappointed and confused.

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The Stalag books and Holocaust porn

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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.

John Norman, author of Gor

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Mar 282011
 

io9.com has published a rare (and lengthy) email interview with John Norman (aka philosophy professor John Lange), creator of the Gor series.

Norman comes across largely as you would expect from his prose: long-winded, a bit pompous, and preferring monologue to dialogue. This is a guy who would interrupt one of the innumerable scenes of a woman being enslaved to spend a half-page discussing the etymology of her name and how to pronounce it.

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