fetish – Page 6 – The History of BDSM

Victorian actresses as fetishized figure

Nov 242011

Davis, Tracy C. “The Actress in Victorian Pornography” in Garrigan, Kristine Ottesen. Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class Ohio University Press, 1992

It was a widespread assumption in the 19th century that actresses were whores. The actress was the most common female occupational type in pornography of the period, and some pornographic works explicitly referred to actual actresses. Actresses in turn danced on the edge of decency in see-through white dresses, body stockings and “breeches roles,” i.e. cross-dressing as men.

In the weekly serial magazines, available for as little as one penny and with circulations of hundreds of thousands, actresses were depicted in knee-length skirts, exotic Oriental harem trousers, men’s fencing costumes or breeches, intermixed with nude or semi-nude pictorials included spanking and lesbianism. The sexualization or fetishization of the costume itself is what’s at work here.

Is catfighting the fetish with no name?

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Nov 032011

1950's era advertisement showing illustration of two women in ripped clothing wrestling

Vintage Sleaze talks about 1950s era catfighting photosets and film loops. The author muses, “Seems to me if it were a real fetish, it would have a scientific name, and I can’t find one.”

I’m not sure what the author means by “a real fetish”. Even if there’s no fancy-pants Latin name for it, it’s a well-established porn market category, and is therefore “real”. (Gloria Brame used (and possibly created) the term “gender heroics” as an umbrella term for this kind of kink in Different Loving.)

Bram Djikstra talks about the catfighting/female wrestling kink in Idols of Perversity, arguing that this fetish is about confirming 19th centuries views of women as basically animalistic, but so physically weak that they have no real capacity for physical violence, so their fighting is strictly “play”.

The Irving Klaw-era catfighting may also have been a dodge to provide a more exciting visual experience than just women dancing or dressing and undressing, without going into hardcore and risking legal measures.

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.

“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

Bring on the dancing pagans

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Jul 282011

The Secret History of Rock has a post and clips on the influence of the sword-and-sorcery (known as peplum) films, both European and American, and their aesthetic, contrasted with the stodginess of the 50s and 60s.

The formula was simple- an American muscleman playing a mythic hero (usually Hercules or one of his equivalents), an evil king or queen, a scheming priesthood bent on human sacrifice, a virtuous maiden in need of rescue and lots and lots of exposed Mediterranean flesh for every possible taste. To an America stuck in the corporate monotony of the Cold War, these films were like an explosion of pure id, an atavistic knife to the heart of a denatured West.

I would add a lot of slavery-type imagery: women imprisoned and auctioned, virtue in distress. This of course went into the Frank Frazetta-Boris Vallejo school of paperback cover art and heavy metal album covers, etc, etc.

Laura Kipnis on the lack of female sex scandals

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Jun 132011

Laura Kipnis opines on the DSK scandal and the apparent lack of female sex scandals, drawing on Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions:

In her influential 1991 book “Female Perversions” (later made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton), psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan writes that we tend to think of sexual perversions as a male province only because female perversions are more hidden. In fact, they’re hidden in plain sight. The point is applicable to sex scandals too, I believe. According to Kaplan, perversions aren’t primarily about illicit or deviant sexual behaviors, they’re actually pathologies of gender identity. “What makes a perversion a perversion is a mental strategy that uses one or another social stereotype of masculinity or femininity in a way that deceives the onlooker about the unconscious meanings of the behaviors she or he is observing.”

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Women too, are capable of perverse behavior, and enlisting others in such stratagems, but this kind of thing generally doesn’t make the headlines. Very occasionally we see women getting themselves into scandals in ways we’d consider “masculine”—high school teachers sleeping with their students for instance—but it’s rare. More often, when we see a woman behaving in caricatured feminine ways, the response is, “Thanks for doing the laundry, baby.”

The stereotypical cliche of perverse sexuality, the CEO who pays a dominatrix thousands of dollars to dress in a French maid uniform and do her laundry, doesn’t seem to have a direct female analogue. When we look for female scandals with this perspective, things start to pop up, of female celebrities under tremendous pressure and acting out in bizarre ways. I think of Angelina Jolie’s (perhaps excessive) display of maternity in adopting African children, or Tammy Faye Bakker’s grotesque exaggeration of female makeup back in the days, or women who have multiple cosmetic surgeries. Still, these examples are something inward directed.

As women move into more positions of authority in the corporate and political realms, will they start to display more male-like sexual perversions, or will we have to create a new category of scandal for them? Tabloid journalism obsesses over the bodies of female celebrities (too fat? too thin? botched operation? pregnant? infertile?) but not their sexualities, not the objects of their desires.

Polygyny, veiling and why they matter to kinky people

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May 172011

Bountiful BC is a community of about 1000 people near Creston BC, home to a Mormon splinter group that practices polygyny, one man with multiple wives. The shortage of women has driven the age of marriage and child birth down to the early teens, and there’s been reports of young women being moved across the border to similar communities in the US. There are also problems stemming from a lack of places for younger men in this community.

The BC Attorney General hasn’t been able to prosecute the community’s leaders, because of claims of religious freedom and the difficulty of getting people in a tight-knit community to come forward and testify. The AG has turned to an old, rarely used law, Section 293 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes any form of polygamy or any kind of conjugal union with more than one person. It hasn’t been used in decades, when it was used against First Nations.

Right now, the BC Supreme Court is conducing a reference to determine the constitutionality of S.293. Critics say that the law is overly broad and vague, and intrudes on people’s personal lives, and could apply to people who practise polyamory or even live together as roommates. Supporters say the law can be “read down” to apply only to cases where exploitation is clear.

Apart from the many kinky people who are also poly, this case is relevant to kinky people in general.

“Gothic: Dark Glamour” & “Dressing for Pleasure”

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May 112011

Steele, Valerie and Jennifer Park. Gothic: Dark Glamour Yale University Press, 2008

Trunk, Jonny. Dressing for Pleasure: The Best of AtomAge 1972-1980 Murray & Sorrell FUEL, 2010.

S/M as fashion is not exactly the same thing as S/M as a sexual practice. There’s considerable overlap, but they have followed different paths into the mainstream.

As of 2010, we’re so used to seeing BDSM/fetish fashion in Hot Topic, in music videos, on fashion runways and in big budget movies that it is hard to believe that the look was ever countercultural.

Black people in fetish video porn

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Feb 042011

The Well Versed has a too-short interview with Alexander DeVoe, who talks about the history of black people in fetish video porn, on both sides of the camera:

AD: When I first started [directing], people didn’t understand it. When they watched it, they never would’ve guessed it was a black guy producing it; it was all this weird shit, tying people up, gagging them, crazy costumes and dungeons. I wanted to present something that was visually appealing.

TWV: So you’ve moved more towards fetish content?

AD: I look at it as another level to present people of color in.

TWV: Porn is still taboo in the black community, but we know a lot of black people are watching. When you got into the bondage stuff, was it difficult to introduce that?

AD: It was in the beginning. People thought, “This dude, DeVoe is crazy.” There’s a vocal minority that watches this. This is my style, once people got used to the brand, they were feeling it because I was giving them a different look. Everybody else was doing the booty shaking—and I do that because you’ve got to hit every niche. If you look at things in terms of business, everybody might not be feeling it, but there’s an audience. I never want to be compartmentalized or produced things that are stereotypical.

TWV: Was there a process of educating people on the fetish content?

AD: The owner of West Coast [Productions] gave me free reign to do what I wanted, so I was doing shit that was way out: Putting girls in wings and resurrecting dead folks. I was giving people a lot to look at. People were so used to popping in a VHS and watching people shake their booty and have sex. I tried to keep everything really complex, but I understand that you only had a certain amount of time before people hit fast forward.

I think people in any business, including porn, develop their own received wisdom about what their customers want. It does take a rare individual to go against the grain and take a risk, by having POCs in a fetish or BDSM scene, and to address POCs as an audience when the assumption is that the audience is white.

(via Violet Blue)

What price virginity in 2011?

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Jan 112011

From Xbiz, via Warren Ellis’ Twitter feed:

Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.

The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.

“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”

Whats surprises me about this is just how retrograde this seems. Virginity in 2011 just isn’t what it used to be. After the invention of condoms and antibiotics, it isn’t a magic talisman against sexually transmitted diseases. Virginity doesn’t have the social weight it used to either. Few people in North America expect a woman to be “virgo intacta” at the altar anymore, or to display a blood-stained bedsheet the morning after her wedding night. 18th century libertines fetishized virginity because its removal in a socially unapproved manner (e.g. rape or “seduction”) had such huge social ramifications for the woman. Apart from the direct violation of a person’s integrity, it would also result in social ostracism. (Assuming she wasn’t of low social standing, in which case society didn’t give a crap.)

In Clarissa, Lovelace spends most of the book trying by seduction and deception to get Clarissa to give up her virginity willingly, suggesting that he still puts a social value on it, despite his libertine views. Eventually, he just gives up, drugs her unconscious and rapes her, marking him as both a failed seducer and a coward. When she comes to, finally disillusioned about him, he offers to marry her to wipe away his crime and save her from social death, but she refuses.

Fast forward about 250 years, and watch the “Like a Virgin” number on the TV show Glee, in which three different people are moving towards their first full-on sexual encounter. They are not motivated by internal lust or passion for another so much as a desire to change their social status by removing the status of virgin, which they view as a stigma. In this case, they want and need others in their community to know that they have completed sex and are no longer virgins, completing their initiations into normative adulthood. Again, the social implications of virginity and non-virginity outweigh the physiological implications.

The existence of Girls Gone Wild and Barely Legal-type porn suggests there is still a fetishization of virginity, but I think this is more of a fascination with youth and freshness. It isn’t fascinated with the almost-magical instant of transition between two binary states, virgin and non-virgin, which seems to be driving this particular scenario.

The second thing that seems just odd is the definition of virginity implied in the press release. Kink.com seems to assume that virginity is not a social or psychological phenomenon, but an empirically verifiable physiological state. In other words, what they are really showing is the presence and then absence of a small scrap of human flesh, via heterosexual coitus. Big whoop. By that definition, a lesbian woman who has never had heterosexual intercourse would be a virgin her entire life, even if her first girlfriend got rid of that pesky hymen ages ago. In fact, a woman can have a non-intact hymen for any number of reasons, sexual or not. If we sign up for the pay per view, do we get a notarized affidavit of virginity after confirmation by the “trained expert”? (And who is this expert anyway? A gynecologist? Annie Sprinkle?)

I have no idea what Miss Blue’s sexual history is. It quite likely that she is hardly sexually inexperienced, and thus is a “technical virgin” only. This particular scenario may earn her a sentence or two in the history of porn, but it won’t significantly change her social status. The sign (the intact hymen) is de-coupled than the signifier (the woman’s sexual status). When the press release uses language like “sacrificing Nikki’s innocence”, it’s speaking in an obsolete language. We don’t believe in it anymore, in the same way we’re not impressed by a white woman with an Afro representing a lost tribe of beauties.

If I’m coming across as callous to Miss Blue, it isn’t intentional. I’m much less concerned about the state of her hymen, and whether it is breached in the right or wrong way, than whether it will be good for a rookie adult film performer to be dropped into the deep end. That this will be a live show, where they are discouraged from stopping and renegotiating if something goes wrong, is even more of a concern. As we saw in that excruciating scene in Graphic Sexual Horror, live shoots can create a situation in which everybody, including the models, wants to press on instead of stopping and making sure everybody’s okay with what’s happening. Nikki Blue’s first time (however you define that) doesn’t have to be hearts and flowers and soft music, but I would rather it didn’t go haywire for her.

That said, I don’t know how this can be anything beyond an ordinary video shoot. Linda Williams in her book Hard Core says that pornography evolved a complex visual language to represent what could not be represented: women’s subjective experience of sexual arousal and orgasm. What Kink.com is doing is attempting to visually represent what exists only as physiology, and has nothing to do with the social status or subjective experience of anyone involved. There’s nothing to see.

Addendum: Clarisse Thorn has a couple of good posts (1,2) on this.

Miss Maggie Mayhem has a good discussion of what “virginity” actually means.

Also, there are rumours going around that Nikki Blue is not actually a virgin. The deception!