fashion – Page 4 – The History of BDSM

Goth: Undead Subculture review

Sep 192010

Goodlad, Lauren M.E. and Michael Bibby, ed. Goth: Undead Subculture Duke University Press, 2007 Gbooks

Emerging from the Romantics, emphasizing the truth of extreme experiences, and probably wearing too much black, the goth culture and the BDSM subculture are close cousins, if not actual siblings.

Goodlad and Bibby identify Goth as splitting off from punk, but with an emphasis on internal emotion and sensual expression instead of punk’s extroversion and asexuality. It borrowed from many other ancient and external influences, such as the occult, pagan religions, and the BDSM/fetish culture. Goth survives, while grunge, for example, has faded out. Like BDSM, goth prospered on the frontier of the World Wide Web, experiencing a flowering in the mid-90s. The authors also observe a later decoupling of goth style from goth culture (The Matrix being Goth style without Goth attitude, Donnie Darko and Buffy the Vampire Slayer being Goth attitude without goth style).

Goth style offers an ambivalent alternative to conventional standards of gender and beauty (the football jock and the perky cheerleader), but one that has it’s own strictures. Non-skinny goths of either sex are swimming upstream, and one essay observes that while goth give men greater license to perform femininity, it doesn’t give women license to perform masculinity, instead promoting a waif-like ideal. (As is often the case with those who defy gender, it’s about expanding options for men only. I’ve noticed that on the Second Life marketplace, you can get a “femboy” avatar, which is a male skin on a female body shape, but there doesn’t appear to be any avatars of female skins on male body shapes, or even a name for such a configuration.)

Trevor M Holmes, a former male exotic dancer, reported on an oral ultimatum from management, making tans and pumped up biceps and chests mandatory, and ordering “Act more masculine– no swishing, no frilly clothes– and act straight.” Why? “That’s what our customers want.” There’s a policing of desire here, that even (or especially) gay men must promote and prefer the ideal masculine sex object and subject of the straight-acting jock.

Skipping a lot of very interesting essays, what first caught my attention was Jason K Friedman’s “‘Ah am witness to its authenticity’: Goth style in Postmodern Southern Writing.” Thomas Jefferson, in the eighteenth query of Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote about masters in psychic bondage to their slaves. (Karl Marx also used the language of ghosts and vampires to describe the political and economic.) This ties into the South-as-Orient/sexual heterotopia idea I mentioned in previous posts.

Other essays touch on gothic fiction and the intersection of the BDSM subculture and goth subculture. These essays frequently touch on two fundamental questions about subcultures: if you join a subculture where everybody dresses the same, is it truly liberation? And can subcultures truly escape commodification by the mainstream?

So, is there anything truly revolutionary or transgressive in goth (and the same could be asked of BDSM, and many other subcultures)? Or is it just another marketing category? Somebody once said, there’s value and merit in being a punk in Orange County; but the moment the OC punk can articulate why being an OC punk is important, he or she can’t be that anymore. The same could be said of the kids in Saturday Night Live’s “Goth Talk” sketches, trying desperately to inject some magic and history and mystery and style into their suburban lives as they plug the Gloom Room, “right next to the Pizza Hut on Hibiscus Road.” Bless their monochromatic hearts.

Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro”: Somewhere, Jean Genet has an erection

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Jun 162010

“Alejandro” is the second time Lady Gaga has visually referenced The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974) in her videos.

The first time was in the “Love Game” video, in which she wore the dark pants, suspenders and officer’s cap look Lucia wore in that iconic scene. This seemed to be gesturing towards the early 70s, post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS downtown New York City scene as an image of sexual freedom and adventure. However, the video doesn’t engage with the implications of the source image. It’s just a bit of early 70s nostalgia, bereft of any particular meaning for Gaga’s primary audience who wasn’t even born when The Night Porter came out.

The video for “Alejandro” does address the themes of the source material: the militarism, the eroticism, etc. There’s a problematic connection drawn between fascism/militarism and homoeroticism. The nun imagery at the end seems to suggest that the only way Gaga’s character can be acceptable to a fascist man is to become an asexual image of virtue, nun-like.

There’s something a bit paint-by-numbers in this, particularly considering the similarities to Madonna’s videos. Homoeroticism? Check. Fascism? Check. Bra with gun barrels? Check. Swallowing rosary? Check. Latex nun uniform? Check. It’s pretty easy to generate 15-minutes of controversy with this kind of material, without sparking any particular debate or getting people to change their minds about anything. There’s certainly a long (if not always noble) history of anti-clerical agitprop, but whether that has actually made any difference is another question.

It put me in mind of MIA’s notorious “Born free” video. (Not currently on Youtube.com) Mia’s video employs the simple strategy of depicting pogroms and ethnic cleansing, but targeting red haired men. It’s a simple inversion strategy, one that generates shock, but doesn’t necessarily spark any deeper understanding or change attitudes. This is what the philosophers and poets in the late 1700s/early 1800s did when they tried to imagine themselves into slave bodies. I don’t know if this had any direct impact on the debate over slavery, but it did eventually contribute to the evolving form of BDSM porn.

The de-fetishization of harem pants

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May 262010

I don’t know if harem pants are still in in the spring of 2010, but a year ago Threadbared had an interesting post on the history and meaning of the harem pant, and by extension other pieces of “ethnic” attire.

In 1911, the same year that Morocco was named a protectorate of France, famed Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret “introduced” the harem pant to avant-garde aesthetes alongside caftans, headdresses, turbans and tunics in an Orientalist collection. Those items deemed “traditional” and “backward” when worn on a native body were thus transformed as “fashion forward” when worn on a Western one, in what amounted to the blatantly uneven, and undeniably geopolitical, distribution of aesthetic value and modern personhood.

…

The harem, as an Orientalist fantasy of sexual excess and perversity (bearing no relation to actual practices of seclusion), depended upon imperial tropes of Muslim women’s sexuality as alternately available and licentious, or naive and repressed. In either instance, the Muslim woman was understood as a patriarchal property and an “undeveloped” personality. But as numerous feminist scholars note, Orientalist fantasies about the sexual proclivities –and possibilities– assigned to the “loose” clothing of the harem’s imagined denizens were often received as liberating for the corseted Western woman. For her, donning the harem pant (or the beaded veil or the fringed “Chinese” shawl) powerfully enacted a series of resonant fantasies about the ostensible transgression of bourgeois domestic life for a more spectacular and sensuous one, defined by shocking indulgence and theatrical intensity.

But in her essay “On Vision, Veiling, and Voyage,” about “cross-cultural dressing” by different groups of women (in this instance, European and Turkish women) at the turn of the century, Reina Lewis argues that the “thrill” of such cross-dressing for Western women was “predicated on an implicit reinvestment in the very boundaries they cross. Clothes operate as visible gatekeepers of those divisions and, even when worn against the grain, serve always to re-emphasize the existence of the dividing line.” About the European woman who indulges in sartorial tourism, “she can enjoy the pleasures of cultural transgression without having to give up the racial privilege that underpins her authority to represent her version of Oriental reality.”

Paul Poiret and model, showing his "Oriental" influenced fashion

It also quotes a 2005 PopMatters post on Orientalism and Bohemianism in fashion:

In 1911, Paul Poiret, the famed French fashion designer, introduced a bold new line that marked one of the earliest and most famous appearances of “Oriental” fashion in the 20th century. Poiret’s cutting-edge “Oriental” designs included harem pants, caftans, tiered skirts, headdresses, turbans and tunics. In Raiding the Icebox, UCLA film professor Peter Wollen argues that Poiret’s designs embodied the rampant Orientalism dominating French culture at the time. Wollen describes the lavish “Thousand and Second Night” party Poiret threw to celebrate his new line. He says, “The whole party revolved around this pantomime of slavery and liberation set in a phantasmagoric fabled East.” According to Wollen, Parisian culture was in awe of the Orient, seduced by the Russian ballet’s performance of Shéhérazade and ecstatic over the publication of the new translation of The Thousand and One Nights; and Poiret’s fashions further whetted the public’s appetite for Orientalism. In addition, Poiret’s designs greatly impacted haute couture, and set the precedent for Orientalism in avant-garde fashion.

Lately, the term “harem pant” has come to mean any pant that is loose around the crotch, and in an ironic twist, the garment that was transgressively sexy in the early 20th century is now primarily seen as defiantly unsexy garment. It’s apparently popular with Muslim women who practice hijab.

Both article cited above speculate that it isn’t coincidental that the harem pant is back in fashion a century after its introduction, when the Western world is again engaged in wars in the Middle East and the status of Muslim women is much discussed. Perhaps the de-fetishization of the harem pants has to do with the deflation of the Orientalist fantasy of sexual adventure.

I don’t know if there was a specific fetish for harem pants, though likely as an aspect of a general Orientalist harem mise en scene in porn. I think there’s a difference between garments that are fetishized in and of themselves versus those that are part of a recognizable sexual trope or fantasy.

Perhaps some other garment is being appropriated for sexual fantasies in the developed world even as we speak.

Christina Aguilera and the possible decline of kink

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May 262010

The video for Christina Aguilera’s single “Not myself tonight” is aptly titled. It’s full of blatant visual quotes from Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (1989) and “Human Nature” (1995) videos, plus George Michael’s “Freedom.” The pop singer is channelling Madonna from 20 years ago, when Aguilera herself was in the Mouseketeers.

John Willie’s Bizarre, vintage magazine

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May 232010

I finally got through the 1400-or-so pages of the Taschen reprint of John Willie’s Bizarre.

Bizarre is definitely in the tradition of Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, London Life, Photo Bits, but unlike them it made almost no pretense of being a general interest magazine. It never completely gives up the pretense. Most issues include a photo or illustration of a woman tied up with the captions “Don’t let this happen to you!” and “Learn Jiu-Jitsu and the art of self-defense.” I believe it was sold through adult stores instead of general interest newsstands.

A brief rundown of the fetishes: bondage, corsetry, high heeled shoes and boots, gagging, cross-dressing, amputees, masks, spanking and humiliation.

The second volume is less interesting, as there’s little of Willie’s art, replaced by photo reprints from movies, and the letters get repetitive. There are also fewer editorials in Willie’s voice, a man-of-the-world who writes on fashion and style, in a kind of faux aristocrat tone.

As with all fetish correspondence magazines, there’s the question of how much, if any, of these letters were real, and how much, if any, were mailed in from readers instead of being written in house. My take is that the letters came from readers, for the most part, though probably edited a bit.

Some of them are more plausible than others. One guy wrote in with tips on how to smuggle cameras into movie theaters and take pictures of the film, and included a list of movies with bondage scenes in them. This is a distant ancestor of the video captures traded on the internet today.

At least one of them was for real. “Ibitoe”, later known as Fakir Musafar, wrote in Volume 21 in about his self-driven body modification efforts. It’s likely that this was the early form of the modern body modification/modern primitive culture, just isolated individuals pursuing their own muses, and no means of connection other than these obscure magazines.

The editorial material has a backwards-looking tendency common in fetish publications. Some of the stories refer to Victorian-era clothing and social relations, with “Memoirs of Paula Sanchez” purporting to be a 19th century memoir. Other features wax Orientalist. Volume 19 had “Saudi Arabian Nights”, supposedly based on “Flesh for Sale”, an article published in the New York Post in 1956, which claims that the slave trade continues in modern-day Saudi Arabia. Accurate or not, the author of the article instead switches to “the report of a British agent who was through the area in the early 30’s,” privileging this anonymous “agent’s” account over the more recent news article. The “agents” account goes into pornographic detail about the alleged slave markets, describing the slaves and how they were dressed and bound, and speculating about Russian female aristocrat ending up as slaves.

A letter in Volume 26, “Eastern Diplomacy”, is another classic Orientalist fantasy set in Turkey circa 1917, full of harems and flagellation.

Another letter by “Darlene” (Vol. 24) had a man forced, by blackmail, to dress as black woman and to pick cotton.

I had hoped that there would be some suggestion of what the hetero BDSM culture, if any, was like the USA in the 1940s and 1950s. Once you remove the letters that are just implausible, there doesn’t seem to be a culture, just isolated individuals writing letters to magazines and newspapers, and gleaning bits of fetish art and photography from mainstream culture.

Nonetheless, this is an ancestor of the modern BDSM/fetish culture.

More from Photo Bits

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May 132010

Petticoated.com has a few more images and excerpts from Photo Bits.

One of the letters, dated 1911:

I have been enclasped in the torture of corsets of the finest make and build, oh, my diary, and every day my waist has been slowly but surely diminished under the eye of the tyrant, whilst she has sat in semi-regal state and watched her servile maids do her bidding. I have been clad in the silkiest and most costly of underwear, laced, flounced and beribboned, and splendid frocks above all, of silk and satin. I have been mounted on boots and shoes, with heels ascending slowly day by day, and my hands and arms have been imprisoned in the longest and tightest of gloves: the adjustment of a single pair has sometimes taken as long as fifteen minutes. With my waist laced in so mercilessly that I cannot bend, with heels inches high, with fingers stiffened with the bondage of kid, with “hobble garters” worn in the house to educate and control my already stilted walk, the helplessness of my position breeds a spirit of resignation. My hair is growing under a long and exquisitely curled and coiffured flaxen wig, my complexion is a work of art, and my ears have been pierced to admit of the wearing of long and heavy diamond ear-rings. As a boy, I am fifteen; the mirror reflects an over-dressed “flapper” of thirteen who is being attired out of all proportion to her age.

I get the distinct impression that transvestite/fetish fashion has a way of looking backward. The illustration at the top of this post shows a woman with an S-curve side profile, which is a distinctly Victorian element, though the maids are dressed in early 20th century styles.

I’ve finally made my way through the two volume set of John Willie’s Bizarre fetish magazine, and one of the things I noticed is the backwards looking tendency in dress and style. Even though written in the 1950s, there’s a lot of reference to the Victorian era of corsets and the like. Puzzling, considering that most of Bizarre’s readership would have been born well after that period. Is this some kind of mother fixation, i.e. men fixating on the garments they would have glimpsed their mothers wearing, or a preference for a bygone era of extreme gender dimorphism and extravagance in dress, over pared down, relatively androgynous fashion?

People make a lot of the fashion in AMC’s drama Mad Men, set in an ad agency in the early 1960s. The strong division between the sexes is obvious in the clothing: suits with slim-leg trousers and hats for the men, dresses, girdles and bullet bras for the women. It certainly makes for striking visuals. Secrets in Lace sells an entire clothing line of 50s/60s retro fashion and particularly lingerie.

So, when does a particular garment become fetishized? In 30 years or so, will there be a pornographic trope of, say, yoga pants?

Photo Bits fetish magazine, 1911

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May 122010

I have a few 1930s-40s copies of London Life magazine, but I am still looking for Photo Bits, another pre-WWII fetishistic magazine. Debra Hyde has a few scans on Flickr.

But when I came across a copy of a 1911 Photo Bits, our consistency really hit home. Here was an early 20th-century British relic that featured — what else! — items on corsetry, female impersonation, and extreme shoes, even headlining the latter as “the cult of the heel.” That’s very similar to the tamer sections of Willie’s Bizarre, isn’t it?

Photo Bits was considered an early girlie mag, a publication that tried to straddle the mores of the Victorian era even as the world move onward. The playful bathing beauties on its cover were eye-catching and tantalizing for its day and its headline about kleptomania almost yells “women inside!” Still, if not for the fact that Photo Bits makes an appearance in Leopold Bloom’s thoughts in James Joyce’s Ulysses, I’d be hard pressed to think of the publication as edgy. But there you have it.