maledom – Page 17 – The History of BDSM

Guerilla barbers of the French Resistance

Mar 172012

Half-naked women being threatened with head-shaving

This image, presumably the cover of an old men’s adventure magazine from the ’50s or ’60s, is puzzling initially. Why the shaving brush and scissors? Guerilla barbers? This is almost certainly a reference to les femmes tondues. In post-liberation France, women who allegedly collaborated with occupying fascists (especially “horizontal collaboration”) were publicly shaved bald. Like the “Nazi dominatrix” trope, this is the conflation of deviant politics (collaboration) with deviant female sexuality (“slut shaming”). Women are used as ritual scapegoats for a community’s problems (in this case, the legacy of occupation and collaboration in France) and symbolically “killed.” See Frost’s book Sex Drives

Interesting to see women-in-danger in the context of anti-fascist, “good guy” forces like the French resistance. This can be applied to just about any conflict, or to put it another way, any conflict or social anxiety can provide a framing narrative for the scene of woman-in-distress.

Nazi-exploitation: The Gestapo’s Last Orgy

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Mar 112012

House of Self-Indulgence has a summary of another Nazi-exploitation film, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, which by its description sounds like a take on The Night Porter. The framing story is two people walking around an abandoned concentration camp, years after the war.

Of course, I’m not saying it should be taken seriously as an accurate account of daily life at your average concentration camp during World War II. However, it’s way more honest and straightforward than the majority of the pro-war propaganda Hollywood has been warping minds with over the past seventy years. Your typical war film, especially the ones that are set during the post-war era, seem to glamourize armed combat, which I find tasteless and obscene. On the other hand, the films that make up the Naziploitation genre have a purity about them. The sole purpose of these films is to shock and offend all those who lack the common sense to stir clear of their wicked glow, and the good ones do so with no apologies.

The driving force of this film seems to be frustrated sadism.

Even though he was eyeballing her while she was being examined by the camp’s doctor and during the slideshow/rape orgy, it’s at the end of the cannibal dinner party that Conrad, and his trusty Luger P08 pistol, finally become acquainted with Lise Cohen and her dogged brand of spiritual fortitude. Frustrated by the fact Lise won’t flinch after repeated attempts to unnerve her (he does everything his drunken Nazi mind can think of to scare her), Conrad decides right then and there that his new mission in life is to make her scream for mercy.

This reminds of earlier discussions about the difference between genuine sadists and “bureaucrats of torture” in totalitarian societies. A bureaucrat just doesn’t care about the other person’s subjective experience. A sadist needs to know he or she is having an impact.

“Sucker Punch”, misogyny and Gothic archaeology

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Dec 032011

This is a joke, right?

Don’t you get the point of this? It’s to turn people on. I get the sexy little schoolgirl. I even get the helpless mental patient, right? That can be hot.

But what is this? Lobotomized vegetable?

How about something a little more commercial, for God’s sake?

Sweet Pea, Sucker Punch, 2011, w./d. Zack Snyder

Searching “‘sucker punch’ snyder misogyny” on Google returns about 225,000 hits. I don’t think any film has been judged so harshly by being misunderstood.

Sucker Punch does present a confusing and at times incoherent story, but I don’t think it is operating on fundamentally bad faith with the audience. (The previously discussed Goodbye Uncle Tom, which likewise mixes exploitation imagery with pro-social messages, is a counter-example of a film in bad faith.)

Guy Baldwin on the leather Old Guard

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Oct 272011

Leatherati has posted Guy Baldwin’s essay on the Old Guard. As per the site’s editorial request, I won’t post any excerpts here.

The most important thing Baldwin says about this misunderstood and much mythologized era (in large part because HIV killed most of the people who were actually involved) is that there were no universal protocols of leather. The idea that there was such a thing was a pernicious myth that other related subcultures have inherited to their detriment, and I’m glad to see an authoritative statement on the subject. The problem was that what local leaders of each community’s Scene handed down their own particular set of protocols as if they were universal.

Baldwin describes the primordial scene as three overlapping interests (motorcycles, “rough sex” and S/M fetish) and the people into the sex gradually segregated out over time, losing the bikes but retaining the military discipline culture.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin mantelpiece screen

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Sep 062011

Here’s an image cribbed from Reynold’s Mightier than the Sword (previously discussed), which shows a mantelpiece screen depicting a black man, brandishing a whip, standing over a black woman, who is half-naked. Another man observes from the background.

A lot of elements in this issue undercut its value as shock propaganda and add the erotic value. The woman is young and shapely, and positioned and dressed so that her breast just peeps from under her arm, and her upper body and arms are nearly uncovered. Her facial expression is hardly fearful or agonized, and seems to be one of ambivalent anticipation. Her dark skin depicted with subtle shading, giving a sense of the shape and texture of her body.

Softening the Steelhard Man: Captured by the SS

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Jul 272011

Book cover. Man wearing officer's cap embracing nude woman, in leather harness, from behind. Title is Captured by the SS

Sylvia Plath wrote that “Every woman loves a fascist” and the Nazi can function as the absolute extreme of the “bad boy”.

A book published by Ellora’s Cave under the Taboo line, Captured by the SS by Gail Starbright, goes deep into this fantasy. From the description:

By the twenty-first century, Germany has all but taken over the world. Only one nation remains untouched…America. Only spies slip in and out of enemy territory. Within this shadowy and dangerous world of cloak and dagger, Isabel Riley is an American spy deep in enemy territory.

Isabel is detained at a German checkpoint by a black-uniformed SS officer. She’s arrested, taken into custody and interrogated.

But she soon learns her enigmatic captor wants more than just her secrets. He enjoys tying her up or teasing her with the tails of his leather flogger. But floggers and video cameras are the least of her concerns. In the eyes of the Third Reich, ownership is real. And a lovely American spy is far too tempting of a war prize to pass up.

Although I haven’t read the book, my response to the description was “Um…”

The Sheik: book, film and history

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Jul 012011

“Historicizing The Sheik: Comparisons of the British Novel and the American Film,” by Hsu-Ming Teo

Cecilia Tan pointed me at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, which feature a fascinating article by Hsu-Ming Teo on the historical context of EM Hull’s novel The Sheik, which was turned into a famous hit film of the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino. If not the basis of the “woman ravished by noble savage” trope, The Sheik is certainly one of the better known examples of it.

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.

“Secretary” and two kinds of masochism

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Apr 262011

Gaitskill, Mary. “Secretary” in the Bad Behavior collection. Vintage books, 1988.

A friend and I were considering doing an unofficial commentary on the film Secretary. The project fell through before we did anything, but I did read the short story that was the basis for the movie.

The short story “Secretary” in this collection is the basis for the much-discussed film Secretary (2002), starring Maggie Gyllenhall and James Spader.

In the movie, the basic premise is worked into a fairly standard romantic-comedy “marriage plot” story. The protagonist’s masochism is equated with her compulsive self-cutting, and further folded into a standard heterosexual romance.

Unsurprisingly, the story is quite different from the film. Hollywood will do that.

John Norman, author of Gor

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Mar 282011

io9.com has published a rare (and lengthy) email interview with John Norman (aka philosophy professor John Lange), creator of the Gor series.

Norman comes across largely as you would expect from his prose: long-winded, a bit pompous, and preferring monologue to dialogue. This is a guy who would interrupt one of the innumerable scenes of a woman being enslaved to spend a half-page discussing the etymology of her name and how to pronounce it.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism