It’s Easter weekend, and while over in the Philipines, they’re doing real life Crucifixions, in the US they’re doing their own version of the Passion.
Slate has an article on American stage productions of the Passion play, the last week of Christ’s life.
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France WW Norton & Co, 1996 Link
Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography as, “I know it when I see it.” The same could be said of genre in general. The genre of a given work is obvious, unmistakable, self-evident. A mystery story is a mystery because, well, there’s a mystery and it is solved.
However, genre is rarely pure, and there are many instances of works that defy categorization. Is James Cameron’s Aliens horror, science fiction or action? Also, genre becomes even less distinct when we backtrack, trying to find the first example of a given form. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited as the first science fiction novel, but is it actually that, or a Gothic novel?
This gets even harder when you try to excavate the history of pornography. Case in point: the anonymous novel Therese Philosophe, published in 1748 (the same year as Denis Diderot’s erotica/satire The Indiscrete Jewels, and John Cleland’s apolitical Fanny Hill). It is usually attributed to the Marquis d’Argens.
From Slate: Self-flagellation is a major part of the Muslim holiday, the Day of Ashura.
A subset of male Shiites injure themselves on Ashura to represent their grief over the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the prophet, at the hands of the Ummayad army in 680. These people engage in violent rituals such as pounding their chests with their fists, lacerating their scalps with a knife or machete, or self-flagellation with a zanjeer—five blades connected to a wooden handle by steel chain. But none of these forms of expression is sanctioned by mainstream religious authorities; most prominent Shiite clerics object to all forms of self-mutilation, since it has no basis in early religious history and appears barbaric to outsiders.
The parallels between self-inflicted ordeals in Islam and in Christianity are striking, as the practice persists in spite of what leaders say and the lack of any scriptural support. Prominent Muslim clerics have issues fatwas condemning the practices, that they reflect badly on the faith and harm the body.
Largier, Niklaus. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. Zone Books, 2007 Link
I finally got through Niklaus Largier’s In Praise of the Whip. It’s long and pretty heavy going at times, and being translated from German probably didn’t help. There’s also some Foucauldian theory in it, though not a huge amount. If I ever do this book, it will be a lot more accessible than this book.
Largier starts off by saying that flagellation is not only a tactile experience, but a visual and even performative one. “The voyeur, then, is already on the scene, even when he or she never openly appears.” (pg.23) This jibes with Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” and Anita Phillips’ assertion that the masochist always suffers for somebody.
Marcus, Sharon Between Women: Friendship, Desire, And Marriage In Victorian England Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Books Amazon
If “the homosexual”, as a legal and psychological identity, was invented in the late Victorian period via events like the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis and the trial of Oscar Wilde, there may have been forms of sexual identity that were un-invented at the same time. Marcus’ book suggests that, instead of looking at Virgina Woolf’s phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” and immediately assuming that the women in question were lesbians, or should have been lesbians if only their society allowed for it, “liked” may have referred to an emotionally passionate yet physically chaste form of female friendship. Far from being in opposition to heterosexuality, female homosociality was a complimentary adjunct to heterosexuality. Female friends were a standard feature of romantic novels; it was the unmarriageable types like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp who didn’t like other women.
Stone, Lawrence. “Libertine Sexuality in Post-Restoration England: Group Sex and Flagellation among the Middling Sort in Norwich in 1706-07” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1992, vol. 2, no.4, pp. 511-26
For a while, I’ve been saying that Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick were the world’s first consensual BDSM relationship, but they may have some competition.
…it is astonishing to discover a small coterie of middle- and lower-middle-class young professional people, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, in the ex-Puritan provincial town of Norwich, palying such exotic erotic games as voyeurism, group sex, wife-swapping, the trimming of pubic hair, and extensive bisexual flagellation. At the center of all this deviant activity was a young bookseller bookbinder, Samuel Self, who styled himself “Mr.” and was a member of that ambiguous new urban class, the pseudogentry.
Though Pico dela Mirandola’s text has the virtue of being early, the primary text of the history and science of sadomasochism is A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery by Johann Heinrich Meibom (aka John Henry Meibomius), 1590-1655. Meibom published his treatise in 1639, and it was still being referenced more than 200 years later when people tried to explain masochism.
I finally found an online copy of the complete text in English, an edition published in Paris in 1898. It’s a dense read, but interesting in several respects.
Meibom cites several examples that sexual masochism does exist, but then dismisses the arguments that this is a result of astrological influences (as Mirandola did) or local custom. He proceeds to establish a mechanistic, physiological explanation, that the loins or reins are related to the male reproductive capacity, and in certain men, especially older ones, arousal and ejaculation depends on excess mechanical stimulus to the loins.
Meibom has no psychological theory, and particularly no theological theory, for masochism. The sex act and its aberrations are purely physiological events, in keeping with the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment. God, sin, penance or mortification of the flesh has no part in it.
Three centuries after Christianity effectively banned mortification of the flesh from lay religious practice, voluntary flagellation still exists and is viewed in completely secular terms.
Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs. Beeton Fourth Estate, London, 2005
I’ve read about the fetishist correspondence in mid- and late-Victorian magazines in several sources. These were the 19th century precursors of Penthouse Forum letters, people apparently writing in about their personal experiences and/or fantasies. I take the position that most of these letters were genuine, in that they were not fabricated in-house, but came in from outside.
The question is, however, why were these letters published in such mainstream, middle-class publications?
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One of the key texts in the evolution of kink is the correspondence columns in Victorian popular magazines, the great-great-grandparents of Penthouse Forum. Even magazines as staid and middle class as The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, published by the Beetons, ran fetishistic letters about corporal punishment and corset tight lacing.
There’s three ways of looking at these letters.
Catholic World News has an interesting comment on modern-day mortification of the flesh.
Senator Paola Binetti, who is also a medical doctor, spoke out after another legislator, the homosexual activist Franco Grillini, made a reference to “sadomasochistic practices” of Opus Dei— specifically mentioning the cilice, a chain that is worn around the thigh, chafing and pricking the user’s skin.
Explaining why celibate members of Opus Dei wear the cilice for a few hours each day, Dr, Binetti told the Italian television audience that the practice is a small mortification, helping members to appreciate the value of sacrifice. “The cilice,” the lawmaker said, “causes us to reflect on the fatigue of daily life, such as the sacrifice of the mother who wakes during the night because her child is crying.”
I finally found a book with a thorough account of the flagellant movements of the 13th and 14th centuries, and the papal condemnation in 1349: Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (Pimlico, 2004).
The flagellants were a populist movement who, apart from flogging themselves around churches, also advocated attacking the clergy and nobility, and claimed to be able to perform miracles. Their leaders, lay worshipers called Master or Father, took confession and offered absolution. The people treated them like living saints.
This was too threatening for the powers that be. Pope Clement VI had once authorized mass public flagellations in Avignon, but a year later in 1349 he flip-flopped and issued a papal bull banning flagellation. Religious and secular authorities colluded and effectively stamped out the movement with excommunication and executions, though it flared up every now and then until the 1480s.
The irony is that the Church maintained flagellation as an ascetic and monastic practice (not a sacrament as the flagellants had it) after the papal bull. Some former flagellants repented by being flogged by priests in St. Peter’s in Rome.
Opeus Dei still practices corporal mortification to this day, though it’s generally mild stuff like taking a cold shower, fasting, remaining silent for certain periods. This is practiced by numeraries (celibate lay worshipers).
It looks to me like the issue was about control. Flagellants were a populist movement, mainly comprised of peasants and artisans, who experienced their self-inflicted pain as an imitation of Christ and a personal experience of contact with the divine. This was in contrast to the Church’s monopoly on religious experience. If you want to touch God, you couldn’t do it on your own, or see someone else do it. It had to be sanctioned by the Church.
Perhaps that this is what drove flagellation and mortification out of religious life for the laity, and made it reappear in the low culture of brothels and broadsheets. A few centuries later, we have the modern BDSM culture in Western civilization.
Incidentally, I can’t help drawing comparisons between the flagellants and the Space Monkeys of Project Mayhem in Fight Club: salvation through self-inflicted violence, growing into a paramilitary organization, plus a populist critique of elites and an apocalyptic mentality.
