fetish – Page 7 – The History of BDSM

Pedal to the metal, baby!

Dec 312010

io9 has a post on the 1960 case history of a man whose kink was to be run over by a woman driving a car.

Some perversions, while representing formidable psychopathology, are also tributes to the complexity of the human mind and unconscious ego mechanisms. The patient, a man in his late twenties, reported a periodic desire to be injured by a woman operating an automobile. This wish, present since adolescence, he had by dint of great ingenuity and effort, gratified hundreds of times without serious injury or detection.

…

Satisfaction could be obtained by inhaling exhaust fumes, having a limb run over on a yielding surface to avoid appreciable damage or by being pressed against the wall by a vehicle. Gratification was enhanced if the woman were attractive by conventional standards. Injuries inflicted by men operating automobiles or other types of injury inflicted by women had no meaning.

This is an interesting counterpart to the fetish of men observing women pumping car gas pedals, “powerful, violent woman with a car” versus “helpless, impotent woman with a car”. It could probably be connected to the foot/trample/giantess cluster of fetishes, i.e. of being physically overpowered by a large, feminine thing. I also think of the scene in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), in which Varla attempts to crush the Vegetable with her car, and I strongly suspect the patient knew of that movie later in life.

Sex pits of Tehran: “Passionate Uprisings”, by Pardis Mahdavi

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Nov 232010

Mahdavi, Pardis. Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution Standford University Press, 2009 Google books

This fascinating book is based on a series of Mahdavi’s visits from America to Iran between 2000 and 2007, which gave her an interesting longitudinal perspective of social change in Iran.

Mahdavi’s book explores a particular “thin slice” of Iranian society: young, urban, secular-minded, middle-class (or wishing to appear so), over-educated, under-employed, mobile (via cars and mobile phones), and exposed to the developed world via Internet and satellite TV. The men go clean-shaven and hair-gelled. The women wear tight-fighting mantos (coats) and headscarves that show their streaked hair, plus multiple layers of makeup. It’s a particular style of dress that has developed by dancing on the edge of Iran’s sartorial laws, under which a bare ankle, a three-quarter sleeve or a few centimetres of exposed hair could result in harassment, arrest or being whipped. Its also a statement against identifying with the ascetic look of morality police. They drive to house parties (no night clubs or other public venues), drink imported liquor, dance (completely forbidden) to Iranian-American hip-hop, and screw around, all the while looking over their shoulders.

John Harvey’s “Men in Black”

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Nov 092010

“Cool is conservative fear dressed in black.” Bruce Mau

On the last day of the Leather Leadership Conference 2010, I wore a red corduroy collared shirt in preparation for the flight home. It very quickly became apparent that how much I stood out in a sea of men and women in black t-shirts.

Sometime around 1820, black clothing for men came as a fad, but it never went. After the flash of men’s attire in the 18th century, the black or dark suit became the standard wear for all men in Europe, and even more so in the United States; Charles Dickens was considered something of a fop for his colorful attire when he crossed the Atlantic. There are several reasons for this: the new cult of masculinity as sober and rational, the Victorian cult of mourning, the rise of the Calvinist-capitalist bourgeoisie.

Thoughts on Hallowe’en costumes

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Oct 312010

Slate has a short piece on why Hallowe’en costumes are so sexed up, attributing it to a “rogue holiday” partially appropriated by gays, kind of Pride in the fall.

The Victorians enjoyed a good costume ball on Halloween, and some daring get-ups, like Gypsy outfits, were popular. But risqué costumes were not pervasive until right around Gerald Ford’s presidency, when homosexual communities in the United States adopted Halloween as an occasion for revealing, over-the-top attire.

The Halloween parade in New York City’s Greenwich Village began in 1973 as a family-and-friends promenade from house-to-house organized by a local puppeteer and mask-maker. It quickly became a neighborhoodwide party, however, and since the Village was New York’s de facto gay district, the gay community cottoned to it. The event, with its drag outfits and otherwise rebellious costuming, became famous in New York and across the country, as did similarly bawdy Halloween parties in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood and in West Hollywood.

Over on Change.org, an article points out that “One Woman’s Costume Is Another Woman’s Nightmare“, and asks about appropriations of native American dress as sexy costumes.

…the “sexy squaw” stereotype and subsequent appropriations are dangerous for non-fictional Native women, considering that “1 in 3 Native women will be raped in their lifetime,” and “70% of sexual violence against Native women is committed by non-Natives.” Compare that figure to the 1 in 6 overall American female population who is a victim of rape.

….

Consider the “Chiquita Banana” stereotypes of Latinas, oversexed black Jezebels, or the seemingly pliant and sexually subversive Japanese geisha. All of those stereotypical costumes correlate with a tame, sexually pure image of white women, like the European colonist with her full-length skirt, the Scarlett O’Hara on the plantation.

(The Scarlett O’Hara comparison is a bit off, as Scarlett was definitely not the Southern white feminine ideal, just as Rhett was a rogue and a scoundrel.)

A cursory examination of the costume section of the Wicked Temptations online catalog reveals a lot of less-than-progressive language and imagery. There are “Gypsy” costumes, “Native” costumes (“Our Natives set of costumes and accessories will prove why everyone decided to move to and settle on your land.”), “Nuns” (a classic), “Alpine Maidens” and “Schoolgirls.”

I think that when people talk about ethnic costumes as sexual fetishes and compare them to real-life sexual violence, there’s the implication that if you somehow got rid of the sexy costumes, the violence would stop, or at least be diminished. I’m not convinced it would. I’m not even convinced that if you somehow got rid of the underlying attitudes and fantasies that make a costume sexy, some of which goes back centuries, it would affect the violence. Don’t confuse a symptom for a cause.

Paul Fussel and Susan Sontag on men (and women) in black uniforms and black skins

Goth: Undead Subculture review

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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.

Rise and fall of a fetish: quicksand

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Aug 282010

In the big map of fetishes, quicksand lies somewhere between mud, bondage and breath control. On Slate.com, Daniel Engber’s Terra Infirma gives the cultural history of quicksand, including the quicksand fetish. It’s an interesting exploration of the varying values applied to a single phenomenon that is more myth than fact.

Quicksand in films peaked in the 1960s and declined considerably after that, until it is an unused, worn-out action gag, relegated to the same realm as tying people to railway tracks. The most recent non-fetishistic use of quicksand the article describes is the old Bruce Campbell show The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. in the early 90s. Since then, quicksand is largely used in a fetishistic context, not “straight”. Quicksand fetishists have been scrapbooking scenes from movies and TV for decades, helped by the Internet.

The article also suggests that there are other factors contributing to the prevalence of quicksand in the popular imagination, such as the rise and fall of sandboxes in children’s playgrounds. Once ubiquitous, sandboxes are now rare thanks to a carcinogen scare.

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 deeper meaning of nunsploitation

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Jun 132010

Inspired by Lady Gaga’s video for “Alejandro” (more on that later), Slate provides a run-down of nunsploitation books and films.

It includes a link to a Hermenaut article, “Convent Erotica“, that goes deeper into the nunsploitation genre, including its similarities to the “women in prison” genre.

The nun movie is the mirror of another disreputable genre, the women-in-prison movie. Both deal with women’s bodies in confined spaces, with innocence abused, with microsocieties, with the forms and channels of power. The women’s prison and the convent are sexual laboratories, the prisoners/nuns experimental subjects. Thus the emphasis on surveillance. If two people are having sex in one of these movies, chances are a third character is there to watch. Concealment and revelation, crucial issues in all pornography, take on special importance in nun movies because the convent, or more precisely the cloister, is designated as a space of invisibility. But it’s really the other way around: It’s this designation that makes the cloister so apt a set for eroticism. Just as it’s because the nun is supposed to deny her body and become invisible that she compels attention on the screen.

I wonder if nuns have fallen out of favor as fetish objects in the past few decades, as society becomes increasingly secular, and few women choose to renounce the world or are forced into convents.

I think the “torture porn” genre has stepped in to fill the gap of nunsploitation and women-in-prison films. This genre has a similarly ambivalent attitude towards women, unsteadily moving back and forth between victim, heroine and villain. There are similar elements of confinement, voyeurism, exploitation and the sense that this nastiness is happening in a hidden part of our own society.

From an interview with Thomas Fahy, editor of the essay collection The Philosophy of Horror:

I think we’ve been talking about torture in this culture a great deal recently and these films raise a very clear question: Is it ever permissible to torture someone? It’s a hell of a lot different thinking about that when you’re watching somebody torture somebody, in all of its ugliness, on-screen than when you’re watching the nightly news.

What I find interesting about them is that they’re not films about mutilating and torturing women — in the “Last House on the Left” remake, one of the torturers actually is a woman. And “Hostel” was raising a lot of really provocative questions. The protagonist who is able to escape the torture facility — in which rich people pay to torture European backpackers — had a different price charged for people from different countries and the most expensive people to torture are Americans. That speaks to anxieties that we have as a country.

However, with only a slight “shift in optic”, these stories are the basis for BDSM fantasies.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol.1

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Jun 022010

Sooner or later, I knew I had to deal with Michel Foucault. Not only is his name pretty much synonymous with the study of the history of sexuality, he was a practicing perv himself. So, with trepidation, I checked “The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1” and read it.

I’m a concrete thinker: I understand prefer examples to abstractions. Foucault writes at such high level of abstraction, it sounds impressive, almost poetic, but I have a hard time applying it to any real world example. It’s almost Hermetic, an intellectual model so seductively attractive that it may have little or nothing to do with the real world. This is precisely the kind of thing I want to avoid in this book, but if you study the history of sexuality you inevitably bump up against this kind of rarefied, critical theory language.

Not to say there aren’t interesting ideas here. Foucault says that we need to junk the repressive hypothesis of the late 20th century, that the 19th century was an era of censorship and sexual repression. Instead, the modern age (i.e. the last few centuries of the West) is a flourishing of sexual discourse. Foucault uses Diderot’s story of “The Indiscreet Jewels,” an Orientalist fable about a sultan’s magic ring that makes women’s genitals talk about their experiences. The starting point for all this was the Catholic pastoral, manuals for taking confession that advised going into great detail about the act. Sex had to be said. In this view, Walter, the author of My Secret Life, was not unusual, but just took the compulsion to speak of sex to an extreme.

Censorship and regulation of sexuality, for example, are both aspects of this compulsion to speak about sex and skirmishes in the struggle over how and by whom it was to be spoken. When we are confronted with people who express little or no sexual desires, we concoct a clumsy designation, “asexuality”, to fit them into our scheme.

I think Foucault is on shakier ground when he imagines some idyllic pre-discourse form of sex, when trading handjobs for pennies from the village idiot was part of every child’s life (or so Foucault seems to think.)

Another interesting idea is that the sexual repressions of the 19th century began with the bourgeoisie imposing sexual restrictions on itself, and then extending those restrictions to the aristocracy and the proletariat.

Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.

Pg. 103

If sex is not only or even primarily for reproduction (and everything else a perversion), that’s a good answer to what it is for.