In my research, I’ve observed patterns in the past that we still see today.
For instance, in the 1830s, a woman named Maria Monk turned up in New York City. She claimed that she had been held prisoner as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, where she had been subjected to bizarre tortures and told to sexually serve the priests who entered the convent via an underground tunnel. Any offspring of these unions would be baptized, strangled and disposed of in lime pits.
Continue reading »Because they didn’t live up to Clive Barker’s original novella:
He had anticipated this moment so keenly, planned with every wit he possessed this rending of the veil. In moments they would be here—the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure.
He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for them. The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals. Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them, decorated with the kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine—the product of seven days’ collection—stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of self-defilement. On the right, a plate of doves’ heads, which Kircher had also advised him to have on hand.
[…]
The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handful of humans had ever known existed, much less tasted—pleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that knowledge, wouldn’t he? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling and remain unchanged.
Evie Lupine hosted an extended discussion of A Lovers Pinch on her live video stream on March 22nd. Thanks, Evie!
Richard Pérez Seves has written a thorough and visually engrossing study of fetish artist Eric Stanton and the world he lived in. Stanton was one of the major artists to define the post-WWII American style of fetish and BDSM art, when this genre was very much underground. Seves managed to get access to impressive quantities of ephemera of the artist’s life and interviews with his friends and families.
Lindemann, Danielle J. 2012. Dominatrix: gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
“Professional dominatrix” is an archetype that attracts attention out of proportion to the number of people who actually fit that description. For many, they are the symbol of BDSM in general, a representation of the perversity of men, simultaneously attractive and absurd. Are they trickster courtesans manipulating men via their weaknesses, or just another type of sex worker?
The blog Of Love and Sex has reviewed A Lover’s Pinch.
A Lover’s Pinch is a deep dive that goes far beyond Leopold von Sacher-Masoch the Marquis de Sade. Admittedly, I wasn’t expected to read analyses of how religion, war, and slavery impacted our sexualities (and relevant imagery is included on some pages), but the author of this book is not afraid to broach those subjects.
I wouldn’t say that tricky subjects aren’t handled with care within these pages or that it’s un-PC, but the tone is sometimes decidedly frank. If you’re especially religious or still experience trauma from war or slavery, then A Lover’s Pinch might not be a book you wish to pick up (or you may wish to skip those specific chapters).
Cruz, Ariane. 2016. The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (Sexual Cultures)
In the (now missing) tumblr post above, raceplay is called a “gross kink”, equated with “fetishizing little girls”, and placed outside the realm of sex positivity. Why exactly is raceplay on the other side of the line marked “edgeplay”? And where do black women fit within the current kink culture?
Moore, Alison M. 2016 Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology.
Myths take on a life of their own, even if they don’t have any particular foundation. One of them is the idea that the violence of fascism and the Holocaust was the result of sadomasochism, or that the two phenomena have anything to do with each other. We’ve touched on the bit of glib folk-anthropology that Nazis were perverts before, but Moore analyzes more thoroughly than anybody else.
The sexual myths of modernity this book aims to unravel are those which concern masochism as a from of decadent gender subversion, sadism as a fascist return of the barbaric repressed, and current sadomasochism as a legacy of Nazism. They are myths in the sense that their proliferation has been built on poetic assertion, psychoanalytic speculation, and discursive repetition, rather than investigation, reflection or evidential grounding. [Pg.1]
Although no historians have ever attempted to produce creditable evidence that Nazi leaders were any more prone to what we might call sadomasochistic pleasures than any other political elite has been as wartime, this particular sexual myth has show surprising recurrence, persistence and capacity for re-articulation. Consequently, it has also proven to be fuel for a range of taboo sexual fantasies[….] [Pg.9-10]
Brownmiller’s statement probably had a lot to do with the anti-SM strain of feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In her view, masochism is merely a myth of patriarchy, an excuse for rape.
Ortmann, David M., and Richard A. Sprott. 2013. Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities
Sexual Outsiders is primarily a guide for people in the helping professions (psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and counsellors).
If you need to ask why this book is necessary, there is a problem of “therapy refugees”, people who have been unable to get therapy because they have been, or fear being, rejected for being kinky:
“After an off-hand comment made by the therapist about ‘those sick people who beat each other,’ I was put into a position of being unable to talk about any connections I had to BDSM. I also felt that it was unsafe to discuss that I was raped by a partner (which was something I needed to talk about) because we had been involved in a Dom/sub relationship.” [Pg.122-123]
