book – The History of BDSM

The Right Wing and “social issues”

Dec 062024

Strub, Whitney. 2011. Perversion for Profit : The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Amazon

I’ve been reading Whitney Strub’s book, and despite its age, it is still very relevant in explaining the culture war over pornography in American politics. One of the things he details is though American history is littered with censorious firebrands like Anthony Comstock, those moral crusaders frequently stumbled over the problem that the majority of Americans don’t care very much about pornography as an issue. Men like Comstock and Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature could mobilize a small, but vocal minority.

As Strub tells it, when the neoconservatives and the New Right rose to cultural power in the 1970s, they had to reconcile their belief in small government, free markets, and libertarianism with more culturally conservative allies, particularly evangelical Christians.

Thought it sought a socially conservative, generally religious voting base, the New Right was heavily corporate-sponsored, and such groups as the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress recognized the value of neocon thought in legitimizing their project of deregulating American markets even as they reregulated American morality.[Pg.190]

We’ve seen this strange-bedfellows alliance ever since, creating people who believe the Invisible Hand should rule everywhere except areas like pornography, abortion, and queer issues.

In 1979 the New Right organizer Paul Weyrich had come dangerously close to admitting the movement’s emphasis on social issues was a shallow commitment designed to garner evangelical votes while obscuring the substantive procorporate agenda of New Right politicians: “Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” he said. Certainly the corporate benefactors of the New Right’s organizational superstructure valued profits over ideology; Coors, for instance, was headed by a reactionary zealot whose donations largely funded the important Heritage Foundation. But when the company recognized the consumer power of the gay market in 1979, it unhesitatingly ran ads in the gay paper the Advocate. [Pg.191-192]

More than 40 years later, we still see the same dynamic, even if the names have changed: trans people instead of gay people, puberty blockers instead of abortion, “cultural Marxism” instead of “the permissive society”. The 2023 brouhaha over trans streamer Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light suggests that the free-marketers sometimes back down when challenged by the cultural conservatives. Donald Trump himself embodies this contradictory political alliance: a man with multiple wives and a history of sexual indiscretions, who has been on the cover of Playboy magazine, can somehow be favored by the Christian right and even more reactionary forces. Grifters and quacks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson constantly stoke culture wars over issues of sexuality and gender, anything to drown out considerations of economic policy from the discourse.

I’ve said it before, and I hope I’m wrong, but I still think it’s only a matter of time before BDSM takes the place of trans in this particular social-political complex.

The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America, by Lisa Z. Sigel

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Oct 262024

Sigel, Lisa Z. 2020. The People’s Porn : A History of Handmade Pornography in America. London: Reaktion Books. Amazon

In the early 21st century, we think of pornography as a ubiquitous, mass-produced, and corporatized phenomenon. Sites like PornHub present the viewer with vast quantities, individually tagged according to theme and sexual act. Advances in video production and distribution technology means almost anybody can make and consume sexual content with a high degree of technical quality and specificity.

Sigel’s book explores an entire history of what might be called “craft” or “artisanal” erotica, produced in single items or small sets, and using a wide variety of media, from carved whalebone to modified mass-produced photos to handmade garments. Many of the items discussed in the book aren’t “erotica” in the usual sense, i.e. items intended to arouse the viewer, perhaps as an aid to masturbation. These artifacts, such as a carved wooden figure of Abraham Lincoln with an erection, might more accurately be described as “adult novelties”.

Latex & Lingerie: Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers Parties, by Merl Storr (2003)

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Sep 272024

Storr, Merl. 2003. Latex and Lingerie : Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers. Oxford: Berg. Amazon

Ann Summers is a UK brand of lingerie and sex toys, sold by brick-and-mortar stores, by online retailing and by a system of “Ann Summers parties”, in which saleswomen organize parties and directly market goods to the (all female) attendees. These goods include lingerie, sex toys, and related items. In particular, they sell bondage cuffs, light impact implements and other BDSM equipment. The Ann Summers parties are a point where “the rubber meets the road”, where people (i.e. hetero, vanilla women) have their first direct contact with BDSM toys, and the concept of BDSM play in general. Merl Storr’s book, based on interviews with party hosts and participant observation, presents valuable insights into how vanilla/hetero identities can change to accommodate the purchase of BDSM gear, if not the actual use of such.

Tom of Finland: This Life and Times, by F. Valentine Hooven III

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Dec 172021

Hooven, Valentine. 1997. Tom of Finland: his life and times. New York: St Martin’s Press.

One thing I’ve been curious about in the life of Touko Laaksonen, better known the world over as Tom of Finland, is did he participate in BDSM?

Hooven’s 1993 biography explores the deeply closeted, all-male, outdoors world that formed Laaksonen’s sexuality. There were a handful of bars and cafes in 1940s and 1950s Finland that catered to gay men, but they upheld a culture of effeminacy he didn’t care for. (Hooven makes the point that the “queen” stereotype was a way of asserting gay identity publicly in decades past.) His way to be gay was to partake in furtive, anonymous, nighttime encounters in parks, bus stations and the like.

“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.

Review: Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States, by Steven K. Stein

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Apr 182021

Stein, Stephen K. 2021. Sadomasochism and the BDSM community in the United States: kinky people unite. New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

Stein’s first chapter, which attempts to describe the proto-BDSM culture of the early and mid twentieth century, is a necessarily scattershot collection of data points. Research any historical field long enough and the gaps in the record become clear. We know so little about the sadomasochistic subculture prior to the 1970s. There’s some data about the gay subset, precious little about straights, and practically nothing about lesbians. Stein had access to the Kinsey Institute, the Carter Johnson Leather Library, the NLA Archives and more, and even then he couldn’t shed any new light on American BDSM before 1970.

Stein treats the BDSM culture as a whole, whereas I think it is more accurate to describe it as three parallel but separate streams (gay, lesbian, and straight), each with their own economy, and culture, that occasionally influence each other.

Deviant Desires by Katharine Gates

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Jun 152020

Gates, Katharine. 2000. Deviant desires: incredibly strange sex. New York: Juno Books.

Gates’s book is an exploration of a particular phase in Western sexual history. This is the pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-Fetlife Internet, when finding people who shared your kink was more a matter of luck and word-of-mouth than just typing something into a search bar. The people Gates interviews are an assortment of eccentrics who put their kinks out in early Internet forums, self-published newsletters, magazines and videos. Most of these media channels are hobbies and labours of love; a few attain the level of cottage industries that might break even some day. Some might even be seen as a kind of outsider art, fascinating precisely because of their lack of commercial slickness.

The why of fetishes has puzzled sexologists and psychologists since the concept was developed. Is there some deeper symbolic meaning to a fetish, or is it just a matter of a person randomly imprinting on a particular stimulus? Gates’ approach is primarily anthropological, not psychological, but she still tries to decode some fetishes.

People like to say that there are no new kinks under the sun, but the balloon fetish proves them wrong. Every era seems to have a fetish that is uniquely their own, and there’s something so post-modern/pop culture/McDonaldsTM/VH1 about balloons that the idea of eroticizing them feels particularly contemporary. […] It makes sense that the balloon fetish is such a new thing; after all, rubber latex toy balloons were not even invented until the 1920s, and have only been a routine part of the American suburban home since the 1950s. And although there exist looners as old as 70 years of age, most balloon fetishists are in their twenties and thirties. It’s really a baby-boomer and Gen-X phenomenon.
Pg.74-5

Many of the fetishists interviewed cite some childhood experience as the moment of recognition of their kink, such as seeing something in a seemingly innocuous film or TV show. E.g. the scene in the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in which a girl blows up into a sphere is well known to body inflation fetishists. However, most don’t see those moments as causing their kinks.

The first time Inflate 123 say the film at the age of five he cried inconsolably. […] By the third time that he saw it he just shut up, stared, and kept his fascination to himself. “It was the first external ‘proof’ of the concepts that were already swimming around in my head.”
Pg.99

A giantess fetishist has a similar belief, that such moments only catalyze or activate something that already existed in the person.

Ed [Lundt] doesn’t think that seeing growth stories in his childhood caused him to be a giantessophile, however. “I think that somewhere in the soup of one’s subconscious all these elements are floating around and the trigger just acts like a magnet drawing iron filings together. I starts to form a thing, and as you get older you see Village of the Giants, and it forms even more. When you hit puberty, you add on the sexual aspect and then it becomes the sex fantasy.” Ed feels that people become macros because of a combination of genetics and circumstances.
Pg.117

Twenty years later, it’s clear that Gates was definitely thinking ahead.

The sexual conversation is changing, and it’s changing rapidly. With the desktop publishing revolution and the advent of the internet, millions of people have suddenly gained access to previously unavailable information about non-conformist sex. New erotic communities are forming every day. Deviants with the most obscure and specific kinks — who always thought they were alone in the world — can now communicate with likeminded poeple.
Pg. 11

Today on Internet porn sites like Clips4Sale, you will find media catering to a mind-boggling variety of hyper-specific fetishes. Nonetheless, it is interesting to look back at this era, when the sexual frontier was charted and settled by people following their bliss, not bent on making money by exploiting a niche fetish.

Tales of Gor RPG

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May 042020

Tales of Gor (Postmortem Studios, 2017) is the licensed tabletop role-playing game adaptation of John Norman’s notorious Gor series of sword-and-sorcery novels, written by James “Grim” Desborough and illustrated by Michael Manning. Gor is notorious for heavy themes of slavery, sadomasochism, male dominance and female submission, and for long philosophical digressions justifying those themes. Since 1966, there have been more than 30 novels published in the series. The series has inspired a strong cult following, including a small branch of BDSM culture devoted to Gorean style slavery, both in real life and online in Second Life.

The Sensuous Woman on BDSM: 1969

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Dec 132019

Now that 2019 is ending and Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP is selling bondage gear and floggers, it’s important to remember that, not that long ago, BDSM was seen as a sign of mental illness. Case in point: The Sensuous Woman by “J”, published in 1969.

The Thing That Turns Him on You Think Is Sick
If he wants to resort to whips and chains or have you urinate on him or something of that nature, I agree with you, I think he’s sick — and he should let you alone and go find a simpatico sickie or, better yet, get professional help.
[Pg. 131]

Note that the author assumes that the reader will be turned off by such activities.

A Lover’s Pinch wins NLA non-fiction award

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Aug 192019

I am proud to announce that A Lover’s Pinch is the co-winner for the Geoff Mains non-fiction book award for 2019, issued by the National Leather Association: International. My book shares this honour with The Sexually Dominant Woman: An Illustrated Guide for Nervous Beginners, written by Janet M. Hardy and published by Greenery Press.

This is the second Geoff Mains award I have won, the other being for the anthology I edited, Our Lives, Our History.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism