Dr. Johnson’s “mad thoughts about fetters and manacles”

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Mar 232009
 

The UK newspaper The Daily Mail provides a window into the private life of 18th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, specifically his masochistic relationship with another man’s wife, named Hester:

A sunny weekday afternoon in a well-appointed house in Streatham, South London. A generous lunch has been served, and the dining room has echoed with laughter and conversation.

A distinguished male house guest is left alone with his younger and much more attractive hostess. He murmurs something. She flushes and assents. They retire to a private room and lock the door behind them.

She sits on a chair and slips off her shoes. He kneels before her and takes her foot on his lap. He fondles it in his big hands, then stoops to kiss it.

Soon, at his urging, she has bound him hand and foot with padlock and chains, and he – suffused with shame and delight – is submitting to be whipped.

…

In one 1773 letter – written in elaborately formal French so that, if intercepted by servants, it could not be understood – he begged her [Hester]: ‘I wish, my protector, that your authority will always be clear to me, and that you will keep me in that form of slavery which you know so well how to make blissful.’

But there are signs that Hester – initially compliant – was an increasingly reluctant dominatrix. ‘I will detain you no longer,’ she wrote in reply, ‘so farewell and be good; and do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the rod enough.’

Even so, power play was an integral part of their relationship. In 1779 Johnson told Hester: ‘A woman has such power between the ages of 25 and 45 that she may tye a man to a post and whip him if she will.’

Hester later wrote: ‘This he knew of himself was literally and strictly true I am sure.’

And in a diary entry about her relationship with Johnson – whom she called ‘my slave’ – Hester wrote: ‘The fetters and padlocks will tell posterity the truth.’

This is an instance of the use of Master-slave terminology in an erotic sense, decades before the Munby-Cullwick relationship, which may not have been quite as unique as I thought.

The book is Samuel Johnson: The Struggle by Jeffrey Meyers Link

Sacher-Masoch’s The Black Czarina: “Blood spurted over the ermine.”

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Feb 282008
 

At long last, I finally found another translated work by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. “The Black Czarina” was a short story printed in the back of the 1965 Senate edition of Venus in Furs, translated by H.J. Henning. What Fernanda Savage translated as “Confessions of a Supersensual Man”, Henning calls “Confessions of an Ulta-Sentimentalist”, both of which suggest a connection to 18th century ideas of sensibility.

Unfortunately, the book says nothing about where or when “The Black Czarina” was published.

Unsurprisingly, the story reflects Sacher-Masoch’s preoccupation with cruel women (and fur), but it ties in his many other interests in a somewhat ungainly package. It starts off with a picturesque sketch of decaying Galician castles, but that doesn’t last long until: “The great Czar Vladimir is couched at the feet of his slave…. Bearskins are strewn profusely on the ground.”

Vladimir is obsessed with Narda, his slave, who was widowed after the war against Kiev, and delighted in seeing boyards fight to the death over her. The czar, passing by, claims her. However, he grows to love (?) her precisely because of her indomitableness. She says, “Kill me if you like, but you cannot force me. I mock you. You are as impotent as a child.”

To prove his love, Vladimir swaps places with Narda, sovereign and slave, then gives her absolute power for one day, sunrise to sunset.

Unlike Wanda von Dunajew, Narda requires no coaxing to take control on her special day. She wakes to have Vladimir kiss her foot, then dresses in ermine. Her first proclamation: “May my reign be a reign of peace an happiness. As long as it lasts, as far as my sceptre reacher, no man is to bear arms. In token of peace and gentleness, women will form my guard.” She orders treasury gold to be given to the people. She liberates the female slaves from the palace, who serve as her bodyguard.

Sacher-Masoch wasn’t exactly racially progressive, to wit:

“Where is the negress?” enquired Narda.

“In the dungeon.”

“Tigris? And why?”

“She killed her gaoler.”

Narda gave a sign and Tigris was brought to her. She was a superb woman who seemed carved out of ebony. A woman disquieting by the nocturnal splendour of her body of bacchante, by the cruel laugh of her feline face and the bloodthirsty sparkle of her voluptuous eyes.

“You killed a man?” said Narda in a severe tone.

The negress nodded.

“And why?”

“For the pleasure of it,” replied Tigris, grinding her teeth.

“For one day I have the power of life and death,” said the Czarina. “What shall I do with you?”

“Let me die. I cannot live here if I may not kill anybody. My heart thirsts for blood, as yours for kisses.”

“Good. Your thirst will be quenched,” said the Czarina with a shudder. “No man is allowed to bear arms in my domain. I pardon you Tigris. You will be my executioner.”

The negress let fly a savage yelp, the cry of a wild beast.

Narda is also described in animalistic terms.

The czarina and her female guards go on a morning bear hunt, and Narda calmly dispatches a bear. Then things take a turn for the odd. Narda comes across Iegor, the pragmatic and independent-minded peasant man, who is unimpressed by her.

“I hate all those who wear purple and fine linen, and harness men to their carts like beasts. We lived free…. We had no wars, and if anyone disturbed the peace of the commune, the people judged him.”

This is the kind of resourceful, independent peasant man Sacher-Masoch valorized in other writings, at least according to James Cleugh’s biography. Narda wins his loyalty until the end of the day.

When holding court, Narda hears the complaints of the people against the boyard nobles. In this case, loyalty to the czar is seen as a belief in justice and personal autonomy, compared to the corrupt and brutal boyards. Narda orders a boyard executed and quartered, with a portion given to each of four accusers. The others begged for mercy, but they are slaughtered by women archers. The dying men gaze adoringly at their executioners.

When Narda puts Iegor in charge of the army on the frontier, the czar says, “You have done what no sovereign dared to, broken the power of an arrogant nobility. For this, we thank you. But do not interfere with the rights of the Crown.” Narda pays no heed.

She holds an extravagant party at the end of the day. The boyards (presumably the ones who weren’t slaughtered) toast her. While there’s still an hour before sundown, she whips Vladimir.

Vladimir tries to cut this off, but Narda turns a temporary play into a coup. Vladimir and the boyards fall to their knees and surrender. Narda has Tigris execute Vladimir. “Blood spurted over the ermine.” It ends with a decapitation scene straight out of Salome and Judith and other stories of women destroying men, as described as Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity. Narda becomes Galicia’s benevolent dictator.

While Wanda is an agent (unwitting?) of Severin’s personal transformation (however incomplete and tentative), Narda is an agent of Galicia’s social transformation. She liberates the peasantry from the corrupt and vicious nobility and puts women, slaves and peasants in positions of authority, a classic “world upside down” scenario. Initially, this social upheaval is a liminoid ritual, a temporary period bounded by sunrise and sunset, but Narda takes the opportunity to make the ritual liminal, and permanent. Slave becomes sovereign, and sovereign becomes a corpse. Perhaps this suggests that the play of power in sexual desire, in which women have advantage, according to Sacher-Masoch, could result in real social revolution. We know that Sacher-Masoch grew up in a region wracked with recent peasant uprisings and massacres. For him, that was a very real possibility for the future, and he had a very ambivalent view of it. Perhaps his fascination with personal and social violence was a response to his wish for revolution, combined with his realization that, as an aristocrat and an intellectual, he’d probably be one of the first up against the wall. (Lord Byron had a similar conflict.)

Not a good story, as the dialogue is stilted and the characters are stereotypes, but at least I can speak with a little more authority on the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Rhetorics vs. confessions of masochism, and surrendered wives

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Jan 152008
 

EA Hanks’ column in the Huffington post sees masochism as the basis of the “surrendered wives” movement.

A lot of this hogwash so fantastically hogwashy (“Every girl inherits the princess gene which dictates her desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her,”)…

Ms. Epstein needs to come to terms with her S&M kink.

“Wha Whaaaaa?” you say. That’s right, I said it. Ms. Epstein is the “M” in the S&M. She doesn’t have a “princess gene” that dictates her “desire for a strong male role model to cosset and comfort her” – what she has is a “kink” that makes her “want” to have her “boo boo’s kissed.”

….

But rather than act out her own fantasies of waiting upon her bed of pink taffeta, her ball gag attached to her bonnet, her Bo Peep shepherd’s staff looming threateningly over cherubic skin, she feels the need to attribute her fetish for weakness, submission, and “innocent” coyness to all women.

One of the books I read recently (wish I could remember which one) said that we tend to take male masochism as rhetorical but female masochism as confessional. That is, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs is just his elaborate fantasy or symbolic of something else, with no relation to his real life, while Pauline Reage’s Histoire de O is her deepest, darkest secret, to be taken literally. Actually, it was just the opposite, that Sacher-Masoch acted out his fantasies throughout his life, while Reage apparently kept it all in the mind.

This is why I don’t get terribly worked up about the idea that romance novels are propaganda inculcating female submissiveness. If a man can finish his corporate executive job for the day, visit a pro-domme in the evening and get “forced” into a French maid’s outfit, and then go back to work the next day, why can’t a woman take a break from her job and family by imagining getting “kidnapped and raped” by a Gothic barbarian warrior and just go back to business when she’s finished? Pro-domme sessions cost a lot more than paperbacks, but both provide a temporary relief from social norms and an opportunity to expression forbidden ideas that need not have any expression outside the “magic circle”.

(BTW, the book mentioned in the link above goes to great lengths to make clear that the sexual encounters between the lead characters are 100% consensual, according to the reviews.)

I’m a bit troubled when I hear people in BDSM speaking about maledom or femdom as philosophy or politics instead of fantasy. Somebody like the above-mentioned Ms. Epstein makes the same mistake, projecting her desires onto all other women.

Once again, I’m reminded that masochism was originally defined as a male malady, though Krafft-Ebing did include four cases of female masochists. It was about men who didn’t follow the presumed drive for power and resources, in all aspects of life, even internal thoughts. There’s a similar concern being applied to women with masochistic imaginings, that discrepancies between their actual lives and their imaginings cannot be allowed.

The character assasination of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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Dec 272007
 

Finke, Michael C. and Carl Niekirk. One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts Rodopi, 2000

Noyes, John K. The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism Cornell University Press, 1997

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch needs better literary representation, even though he’s been dead for more than 100 years.

I still have yet to find any of his books that have been translated into English, other than Venus in Furs. There’s a whole shelf of books on Sade, both biographical and critical, but comparatively little on Sacher-Masoch. (Granted, Sade’s life was very well documented and also tied intimately to the history of the French revolution.) Here’s a guy who, in his life, was the next big thing in German literature, the successor to Goethe (who had his own penchant for self-orchestrated suffering, incidentally.)

And then Richard von Krafft-Ebing was rude enough to coin the term masochism, while Sacher-Masoch was still alive. Romanticism collided with science; science won. Whatever Sacher-Masoch’s literary accomplishments, all were forgotten, and he would be known to future generations as merely a lunatic and a sexual deviant. His ex-wife published her memoirs in 1907, further stamping him as a wife abuser.

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“Cruising” finally out on DVD

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Sep 122007
 

After 27 years, Cruising has finally been released on DVD. The film’s suggestion that sexual repression is more of a cause of violence than sexual expression is oddly timely, in the middle of a spate of conservative, homophobic leaders being caught with their pants down, figuratively speaking.

I’ve seen it once, years ago, possibly on TV and possibly cut. Regardless, it didn’t make a strong impression on me. I had seen the “cop/journalist enters the sexual underworld and undergoes an identity crisis” premise so many times in the direct-to-cable/video erotic thriller genre that it had become a cliche. I would like to see it again; it’s always important to see where the meme began.

I’d comment more on the film itself, if I had clearer memories of it. The only image that really stuck with me was the final shot of the cop’s fiance putting on the cop’s mirrored sunglasses and leather wheel cap, suggesting gender hybrdity and/or straight appropriation of gay imagery. How much of straight male sexual fantasy is the same as gay male fantasy, but with women instead of men?

Film Threat speaks highly of the film, saying that it’s much deeper than the imitation genre it spawned.

On one level, “Cruising” appears to be about Pavlovian conditioning. As Burns [played by Al Pacino] immerses himself deeper into the primal, extreme sensations of the bar scene, his lovemaking sessions with fiancée Nancy (Karen Allen) seem more physically aggressive. If a straight man is tossed into a sea of rough, sadomasochistic gay sex, will he begin craving this lifestyle? Will he stop appreciating the more tender, delicate advances of a woman? As it turns out, the film chickens out and never clarifies its stance on this issue of heredity versus environment (on the film’s DVD commentary track, the director admits that his movie “asks more questions than it answers”).

[William] Friedkin insists, however, that he never meant to correlate homosexuality and murder with “Cruising.” Even so, it’s easy to understand why gays would respond defensively to the film. Who wouldn’t balk after seeing their lifestyle coupled with both lurid, public orgies of rough ‘n tumble copulation and an epidemic of grisly murders?

Playing the devil’s advocate, however, perhaps Friedkin deserves to be cut some slack. The film’s terrain is clearly a limited, select subculture of the larger homosexual community, and one that did exist. Friedkin insists that most of the bar patrons featured in the film were true-to-life participants from The Day. We’re guided through heavy leather districts like Central Parks’ Rambles, and underground West Village clubs hiding between industrial meat packing plants (meat hooks dangle ominously in the foreground during several scenes).

During one hilarious sequence, customers pack a crowded bar donning patrol uniforms for a cop-theme costume night. Pacino’s character, unaware of the dress code and wearing more casual attire, is kicked out when managers accurately suspect that he’s a law enforcer. In a sea of blue police shirts, billy clubs, and dark slacks, Burns is the only real policeman in the joint – and he’s thrown out on his ear.

Gloria Brame has another take on the film, seeing it as a kind of Boys in the Band for kinky people.

You can also expect to glimpse a dangerous and unfamiliar world of leather. Sexual repression is an ugly thing and that ugliness is built into this film. These were the days before AIDS, before safe sex, and before SSC and safe words and all the other little protections that activists began to promote as a way of protecting leather people against predators. Clubs back then were raw and secretive and sleazy, filled with guilty people who led double lives and believed that antibiotics could cure every sexual disease.

Yet, despite all that, look at the men in the bar, many of whom were real players, not actors. They are a piece of leather history. They are the people who paved the way for the rest of us, who built the clubs, who opened the dialogues on SM, and who, ultimately, are responsible for taking SM out of the closet. For opening that world to public view, both the men who participated in the film and the director, William Friedkin, deserve kudos.

I have a theory that the mainstream interacts with minorities in three phases. The first is the “visibility at any price” phase, in which any kind of statement of existence is necessary, even if the minority is portrayed as clowns or monsters or victims. The second is the “really, we’re nice” phase, in which the minority is packaged as unthreatening and ready and willing to be assimilated into the dominant culture. The third is the “let’s cut the crap” phase, when internal issues and conflicts and rough edges that were suppressed in the previous stages come out. Cruising is an example of phase one. Something like the godawful film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden or the vastly superior Secretary are phase two. Kinky people still don’t have a phase three.

The Leatherman’s Handbook, by Larry Townsend

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Mar 082007
 

I bought a “stripped” copy of the 1972 edition of Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook off Ebay. It’s a strange read, considering it was published the year I was born, 1972; unironic use of the word “groovy” for one thing.

Even the terminology is different. Townsend uses S and M to refer to Sadist and Masochist respectively, not Slave and Master. It’s also a glimpse into a time when you couldn’t even mail-order whips and handcuffs.

Townsend’s attitude towards women or heterosexual S/M people is not positive.

While I cannot speak from personal experience, I have discussed this heterosexual bondage scene with several people who are deeply involved in it. I found that in most cases it was the man who desired to submit. Le Grand Marquis to the contrary, I saw the antithesis of the gay leatherman involved in this. Then I found some of the most qualified Ms [masochists] saying it really wouldn’t matter: “If I’m strapped down, maybe with a blindfold over my eyes how can I tell if it’s a man or a woman who shoves that dildo up my ass?”

Thus, I may have been wrong… at least as far as the very deeply involved bottomman is concerned. As to the rest of us- the S [sadist], the less experienced guy, or the casual leather tripper- I must adhere to my original premise. In the hetero scene we have a woman, whom our society usually casts in a submissive role- and who has been emphatically placed in this role by nature’s sexual physiognomy- assuming the master’s stance. The man, who may be a leader in the business world or an otherwise strongly dominant figure, assumes the posture of a crawling slave. Thus, the elements of bondage and humiliation are much the same as ours. But the fetish… the object of adoration is completely different. For most of us, if we’re going to play M, we want to know there’s a cock attached to the S! And we want to know it’s real!

Like Krafft-Ebing, Alfred Kinsey and even Nancy Friday, Townsend’s work is in large part a collection of people’s stories, and those stories rather freely mix fantasy and fact. A large part of the book are stories men have mailed to him, many of them set in a military or paramilitary institution.

Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved

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Aug 302006
 

First lesson in writing: the library is your friend.

I got a copy of Thomas Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved (incorrectly cited as “Venus Preserv’d” in Emily Apter’s Feminizing the Fetish) at the library today, and read it in the dull moments at my temping job.

Venice Preserved is a political allegory about England set in the republic of Venice. The kinky stuff comes in Act III, Scene i. Antonio, a lecherous and corrupt old senator, goes to the house of Aquilina, the Greek courtesan. Aquilina tries to turn him away, as she finds him repulsive, but he pushes his way in.

Antonio addresses Aquilina by childish nicknames (“Nacky, Nacky, Queen Nacky — come let’s to bed…”) and then as “Madonna.” He disregards her insults and brags about his “eloquence” which his actions equate with bribery. He overcomes her objects with money.

Aquil. No, sir, if you please I can know my distance and stand.

Anto. Stand: how? Nacky up and I down! Nay, then, let me exclaim with the poet,
Show me a case more pitiful who can,
A standing woman, and a falling man.
Hurry durry—not sit down—see this, ye gods—You won’t sit down?

Aquil. No, sir.

Anto. Then look you now, suppose me a bull, a basan-bull, the bull of bulls, or any bull. Thus up I get and with my brows thus bent—I broo, I say I broo, I broo, I broo. You won’t sit down, will you?—I broo—[Bellows like a bull, and drives her about.]

Aquil. Well, sir, I must endure this. Now your [she sits down] honour has been a bull, pray what beast will your worship please to be next?

Anto. Now I’ll be a Senator again, and thy lover, little Nicky Nacky! [He sits by her.] Ah toad, toad, toad, toad! spit in my face a little, Nacky—spit in my face prithee, spit in my face, never so little: spit but a little bit—spit, spit, spit, spit, when you are bid, I say; do prithee spit—now, now, now, spit: what, you won’t spit, will you? Then I’ll be a dog.

Aquil. A dog, my lord?

Anto. Ay, a dog—and I’ll give thee this t’other purse to let me be a dog—and to use me like a dog a little. Hurry durry— I will—here ’tis.

[Gives the purse.]

Aquil. Well, with all my heart. But let me beseech your dogship to play your tricks over as fast as you can, that you may come to stinking the sooner, and be turned out of doors as you deserve.

Anto. Ay, ay—no matter for that—that—[He gets under the table]—shan’t move me—Now, bow wow wow, bow wow …

[Barks like a dog.

Aquil. Hold, hold, hold, sir, I beseech you: what is’t you do? If curs bite, they must be kicked, sir. Do you see, kicked thus.

Anto. Ay, with all my heart: do kick. kick on, now I am under the table, kick again—kick harder—harder yet, bow wow wow, wow, bow—’od I’ll have a snap at thy shins—bow wow wow, wow, bow—’od she kicks bravely.—

Aquil. Nay, then I’ll go another way to work with you: and I think here’s an instrument fit for the purpose.

[Fetches a whip and bell.] What, bite your mistress, sirrah! out, out of doors, you dog, to kennel and be hanged—bite your mistress by the legs, you rogue—

[She whips him.]

Anto. Nay, prithee Nacky, now thou art too loving: Hurry durry, ’od I’ll be a dog no longer.

Aquil. Nay, none of your fawning and grinning: but be gone, or here’s the discipline: what, bite your mistress by the legs, you mongrel? out of doors—hout hout, to kennel, sirrah! go.

Anto. This is very barbarous usage, Nacky, very barbarous: look you, I will not go—I will not stir from the door, that I resolve—hurry durry, what, shut me out?

[She whips him out.]

Aquil. Ay, and if you come here any more to-night I’ll have my footmen lug you, you cur: what, bite your poor mistress Nacky, sirrah!

Enter Maid.

Maid. Heavens, madam! What’s the matter?

[He howls at the door like a dog.]

Aquil. Call my footmen hither presently.

Enter two Footmen.

Maid. They are here already, madam, the house is all alarmed with a strange noise, that nobody knows what to make of.

Aquil. Go all of you and turn that troublesome beast in the next room out of my house—If I ever see him within these walls again, without my leave for his admittance, you sneaking rogues, I’ll have you poisoned all, poisoned, like rats; every corner of the house shall stink of one of you; go, and learn hereafter to know my pleasure.

What’s interesting to me is the ambiguous relationship between client and dominatrix, in short, who exactly is on top here? Aquilina doesn’t like him or want him around, but he’s able to pay her to follow his script. She refuses part of the script, to spit on him, and then goes over his limit by whipping him and then kicking him out. There’s a constant push back and forth. It has a ring of truth to it, much as the flagellation scene in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, published in the middle of the next century.

Later in the play (Act V, scene ii), Aquilina threatens Antonio with a dagger as promised vengeance for the state execution of her beloved Pierre.

Aquil. Thou! think’st thou, thou art fit to meet my joys;
To bear the eager clasps of my embraces?
Give me my Pierre, or—

Anto. Why, he’s to be hang’d, little Nacky,
Trussed up for treason, and so forth, child.

Aquil. Thou liest: stop down thy throat that hellish sentence,
Or’ ’tis thy last: swear that my love shall live,
Or thou art dead.

Anto. Ah-h-h-h.

Aquil. Swear to recall his doom
Swear at my feet, and tremble at my fury.

Anto. I do. Now if she would but kick a little bit, one kick now.
Ah-h-h-h.

Aquil. Swear, or—

Anto. I do, by these dear fragrant foots
And little toes, sweet as, e-e-e-e my Nacky Nacky Nacky.

Aquil. How!

Anto. Nothing but untie thy shoe-string a little, faith and troth,
That’s all, that’s all, as I hope to live, Nacky, that’s all.

Aquil. Ney, then—

Anto. Hold, hold, thy love, thy lord, thy hero Shall be preserv’d and safe.

Aquil. Or may this poniard
Rust in thy heart.

Anto. With all my soul.

Aquil. Farewell—

Even with Aquilina’s dagger at his throat, Antonio seems to be getting off on the situation, angling for more kicks or views of her feet. It’s unclear whether he’s enough of a drunk, a fool or a fetishist that he can’t see he’s in real danger. After her depature, Antonio lies down and pretends to be dead, and Aquilina is not heard from again.

According to Apter’s Feminizing the Fetish, the first scene was the basis for the animal roleplay scene in Emile Zola’s Nana, but I suspect both can be connected to the story of Phyllis coaxing Aristotle into playing the role of a horse for her, which IIRC goes back to the middle ages, though not classical times.

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