Les Femmes Tondues: The Shaved Women

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Apr 072011
 

Gloria Brame has posted a startling image of a group of les femmes tondues, or shaved women. In post-WWII France, certain women, sometimes but not always prostitutes, were singled out for ritualized public humiliation for alleged “horizontal collaboration” with fascists. These women had their heads shaved, and this particular group seems to have been stripped naked and painted with a black substance (tar?), and are giving a fascist salute, more likely ironic than defiant.

I post this as an example of the kind of ritualized display of power that can evolve over time into sadomasochistic fantasy.

Pedal to the metal, baby!

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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.

Venus in Furs, live on stage

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Aug 132010
 

A friend in Rostock, Germany, is producing and directing a stage play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic (or it should be) novel of male submission and female domination, Venus in Furs, or Venus im Pelz.

The play stars Dino Gebauer as Severin and Meike Faust as Wanda, and directed by Florian Dedio. There are two shows, on September 11th and 15th.

Wish I was in Germany, and could understand German.

I’m glad to see this kind of project as I believe Sacher-Masoch is much neglected as a historical and literary figure, and his work deserves wider exposure and his life more academic study. For a man whose name was attached to an entire realm of human behavior and emotion, he is curiously forgotten. Freud’s two essays on masochism make no mention of Sacher-Masoch or his work

“A Man Called Horse” and stalled initiations

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Aug 062010
 

A Man Called Horse, 1970, dir. Elliot Silverstein IMDB

This movie probably did a lot to inspire the modern primitive movement, portraying a rather familiar story of a “civilized” person being initiated into a “primitive” culture. I’m not going to address the historical or cultural accuracy of this film, as I’m not really qualified and also it’s not terribly relevant to this discussion. (The film claims to be based on authentic sources, but so did Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.)

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Mad Men: The masochism of Don Draper

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Jul 282010
 

In the fourth season premiere of Mad Men, Don Draper should be on top of the world. Instead, he has a ratty Greenwich village apartment, a carefully maintained pretense that his new agency has a second floor, and a standing appointment with a prostitute whom he orders to slap his face while not taking off her bullet bra.

In art, everything means something, particularly in Mad Men, in which much information is conveyed in minor shifts in behavior rather than over speech or actions. That Don hires a prostitute and has her smack his face a few times during sex is indicative of his internal state of chaos, along with almost yelling at Peggy and throwing prospective clients out of the agency when they don’t like his pitch. In previous seasons, Don has masterfully handled jittery clients and a string of mistresses, one of whom had a masochistic streak herself. His masochistic behavior is meant to indicate his decline and his self-loathing, after his divorce and starting a new agency. He’s actually becoming a bit of a cliche, the high-powered executive in a suit who hires a pro domme to dress him as a French maid every Thursday at 7pm.

However, does masochism always indicate a disordered or self-loathing mind? I don’t think it does. BDSM can be integrated into a functional life. If Don owned up to a few things to himself, he might use his masochistic sessions as a way of getting some stress relief. However, Don seems to be using his scenes the way he uses cigarettes and booze: maintaining the impression of control without any moderation. Thus, he’s not an example of healthy BDSM, not that that idea had been developed yet in the show’s current year of 1964.

Phrased another way, will we ever reach a point in which a TV character has some form of non-normative sexuality without it being some exterior sign of some inner mental flaw? A parallel with homosexuality’s depiction in mainstream instruction is instructive. It used to be that homosexuality was a problem to be explained, and it could not be an incidental aspect of his or her character. I think we’ve reached a point where gayness is no longer an overriding element of a character. Sadomasochism is somewhere on that same trajectory.

Revenge of the Max Hardcore girl

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May 232010
 

Susannah Breslin’s column has a fascinating article on This ain’t Max Hardcore: a XXX parody. It’s a turn-the-tables scenario in which a baby-doll-style woman beats up and anally foot-fucks an actor playing the famed gonzo porn maker.

Paul “Max Hardcore” Little, currently serving a prison sentence in Florida, is known for his particular style of videos, which Breslin describes thusly:

In his movies, women are urinated upon, forcibly fellated until they vomit, their orifices cranked open with speculums. They are pile-driven, skull-fucked, and fish-hooked. Mostly, they are dressed and behave as if they are underage girls — somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, six or seven. These women-as-girls are accosted on playgrounds, where they suck provocatively on lollipops and respond to Hardcore’s come-ons with baby talk. In their sex scenes — if they can be called that, as they seem more like systematic attempts to break the human spirit recorded on videotape for posterity and profit — Hardcore, who wears a cowboy hat and whose prop of choice is a hideous canary yellow sofa, violates their holes while spewing forth a stream of degrading language.

Assuredly, Hardcore’s movies are not for the faint of heart. They are targeted at a demographic one would perhaps rather not dwell upon the existence of for any length of time. They are less “movies” and more political demonstrations: of power, of violence, of one man’s seeming frustration with the opposite sex: porn’s very own final girl, who, no matter how hard he tries, will not lay down and (pardon my language) fucking die, leaving poor Max with no choice but to return to the scene of the crime and do it all over again.

Breslin cites the “final girl” from Carol J Clover’s book Men, Women and Chainsaws. Clover argues that final girl, with the androgynous name and the ambiguous gender identity, is the one girl who ultimately survives and defeats the killer, who is also riddled with flawed sexuality and gender identity. This is part of the viewer working through his adolescent male sexual anxieties. Hardcore’s oeuvre bears a certain resemblance to the slasher film, an extremely prolific genre in the early and mid 80s, full of endless variation on the same basic formula. The story reminds me a little of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was about the standard horror victim into the hero(ine).

So, if Hardcore’s films are working through (however unsuccessfully) male issues with women, what is This is not Max Hardcore working through? Who is going to watch This is not… and who is going to cheer the female protagonist on? If we assume the default viewer of video porn is a young heterosexual white male, then he might make the identification shift (as Clover describes it) from the “monster” to the “final girl”, rooting for the girl to defeat the “dirty old man” archetype represented by Paul Little. Maybe This is not… is the other half of the dialectic, with the first half by the usual Hardcore video.

Arguably, Hardcore’s videos can be seen as an extreme form of “virtue in distress”, a distant descendant of Richardson’s Clarissa, but misread so that the power dynamic is only one way. This video could be seen as a “strong misreading” (as Harold Bloom would put it) of the Hardcore videos that unwittingly returns to the form’s ancestor.

Here’s a question: does the violence of a Max Hardcore video have the same impact when it is a young woman doing it to an older man? Or does femdom-malesub violence not have the same impact because it is not “real”, that we do not take women seriously as agents of violence? When Red Riding Hood fights back against the Big Bad Wolf, is it heroism or a joke?

Breslin’s piece also provides a great look into the porn culture of 2010, with biographical sketches of Debi Diamond, the producer and former porn performer, Rod Fontana (former US Army officer, porn performer and would-be preacher), and Kristina, the vengeful ersatz Max Hardcore girl who described Paul Little as a “sweet, little old man.”

(Note to Ms. Breslin: When are we going to see a non-fiction book from you?)

“Your power is getting your ass kicked”: Kick-Ass, superheroes and masochism

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Apr 162010
 

From Io9.com:

…the love of violence is really the main emotion that Kick-Ass expresses. Both inflicting violence, and receiving it. When Big Daddy points out that Kick-Ass’ superpower is getting his ass kicked, you can’t help accepting that it’s true. But the movie winks at us, through an eye that’s already swollen almost shut, and says, you know, that’s not a bad superpower at all. The broken, battered young body of Dave Lizewski is the most pornographic thing in the movie, and his contusions are badges of honor.

Superheroes don’t give us much in the way of lessons about morality, or science, or whatever — they give us a context in which violence makes sense. Much like gangsters, who are the other type of non-regular people we meet in this film. You could just as easily beat people up without wearing a funny costume or being a gangster, but then it would just be senseless assault. The superhero genre legitimizes our love of brutality. And our masochism, as I may have mentioned.

You can’t really love superheroes without being a painslut, Kick-Ass says. You can’t embrace all of the illogic and pointlessness and nastiness of men and women and children thwacking each other in shiny outfits, unless you’re addicted to hurt.

I think BDSM, like superhero stories, does depend on stepping into a sort of “magic circle”, a realm in which normal rules of society don’t apply, and the action is driven by less rational impulses. The problems come when the boundaries of the magic circle gets blurry.

Kick-Ass, incidentally, does have a power of a sort. Nerve damage from previous injuries reduces his ability to feel pain. This sets up an interesting question: wouldn’t a masochist NOT want to reduce the ability to feel pain? Or is just an excuse/reason to seek out even more extreme experiences?

The ancestors of Cindi the sex slave

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Mar 152010
 

From the introduction to Circlet Press’ new BDSM anthology, Kneel to Me:

Let’s call her Cindi.

She is a habitué of the slush pile, arriving in a story titled “Cindi’s Journey” or similar. She has a body with unlikely measurements, no history worth mentioning, and no special talents except the ability to walk in 5 inch heels while burdened by disproportionately large breasts. She lives in a future society indistinguishable from ours except that it supports some form of contract slavery that exists without political or economic rationale. For no particular reason she signs up for slavery and undergoes a lengthy period of what is called ‘training’ even though she doesn’t learn anything. Indeed, her trainers show no interest in developing her abilities beyond stretching her orifices. She has nothing to say beyond crying out prettily in response to the endless beatings or perhaps exclaiming over the size of her trainers’ penises (indeed, how would we know that their penises were fearsomely large if she didn’t dread accommodating them?) She may struggle in her restraints, but never in her soul. There is no twist to Cindi’s fate; at the end of the story she will be sold to one of her faceless masters.

Cindi sounds like a badly written descendant of Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy and Exit to Eden, probably the most accessible source material for this kind of writing. There are also traces of Reage’s The Story of O, which has antecedants going back to Diderot’s La Religieuse and Richardson’s Clarissa. It’s the female sexual initiation story.

The letters of Sacher-Masoch and Emilie Mataja

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Sep 052009
 

I’ve managed to locate another translated scrap of the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The Blast Books edition of Venus in Furs, translated from the German by Uwe Moeller and Laura Lindgren, includes a set of letters between Sacher-Masoch and a young Viennese wannabe writer named Emilie Mataja. Their correspondence lasted from late 1874 and 1875, when Sacher-Masoch was still married to Aurora Rumelin. A side issue is their various attempts to send letters anonymously to each other, without being intercepted by his wife and her father.

Mataja idolized Sacher-Masoch to a degree that would be embarrassing for a 13-year-old girl, let alone a 19-year-old young woman. “I worship you as a god, I idolize you through your works. Many a time I’ve revived my tired soul with your fiery words; I’ve shaken my feeble senses from their sleep with the feverish potion that streams from your work.”

He played the, “you are a special, talented person, far above the common horde,” card with her, and did give her advice on her writing career, both as a writer and on the publishing industry. (Whether this wagood advice is another matter.) However, this is when Sacher-Masoch started to sound a little crazy, or at least obsessive. His letters inevitably turned to persuading her to wear furs, going into great details on how to get an ermine jacket, and getting her to whip and dominate him. He sketches out plans for both of them to move to Italy and have an open marriage. He even referred to his wife as “Wanda von Dunajew” in one letter. He has sudden shifts of mood and mixed messages. On July 28, 1875, he called her, “My Charming Mistress!” By October 31, 1875, it was back to “Dear Miss Mataja”. By December 22, 1875, he went into great detail about how his own wife is now his ideal cruel woman, as if to say that he was the victor in their abortive affair and he didn’t need her anymore.

Mataja, much like Aurora Rumelin, was really after literary validation and connections from Sacher-Masoch, and was evasive about actually doing anything kinky with him.

Had they lived closer together, or Sacher-Masoch been a better seducer, this might have ended in tragedy, but instead it ended in comedy. They met for the first time a few years later in Vienna. He begged her to whip him, and in furs, of course. She said she would, so long as it was just the one time. Naturally, this wasn’t satisfactory for him. “I let the matter drop because I was beginning to tire of the joke (for me it was only a joke.” Then he inquired if she was still a virgin and passive-aggressively suggested that she was a lesbian.

“My impression was that he was highly peculiar, but I must say that apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was an affable, simple, and likeable man; and that there was something particularly moving about his tender adoration of his children.”

I don’t know why, but I have an urge to to salvage Sacher-Masoch’s personal and literary reputation, which grows in proportion to the evidence that he was something of a jackass. Then again, literary history is full of people who were acknowledged as geniuses but had sketchy personal lives.

The (fine?) line between torture and BDSM

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Apr 232009
 

The US policy on torture is much in the air today. Some of the defenders of the policy liken the kinds of “stress positions” and the like allowed to be used to fraternity hazings.

One interesting angle is comparing torture to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, used by the US military to prepare soldiers for being tortured. Slate compares SERE and real torture, making explicit comparisons between the former and BDSM.

Third, SERE offers interventions that relieve stress and reinforce the unreality of the exercise. Instructors and psychologists are available “to watch the students for indications that they are not coping well with training tasks, provide corrective interventions with them long before they become overwhelmed, and if need be, remotivate students who have become overwhelmed to enable them to succeed,” Ogrisseg noted.

Fourth, SERE has “defined starting and ending points. … [T]rainees arrive on a certain date and know that they will depart on a specified date.”

Fifth and most important, SERE is voluntary. “Students can withdraw from training,” Ogrisseg noted. In a report issued four months ago, the Armed Services Committee added that in SERE, “students are even given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop” any ordeal.

…

The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can’t tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can’t tell the difference between torture and training?

In this argument, the social context matters.

Over on Susie Bright’s blog, she talks about the impact SERE training had on her Airforce Academy boyfriend in the early 1970s:

In addition to the group beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sound/noise torture, starvation, dehydration, he was also forced to eat human feces and vomit, in accompaniment with the beatings. They had replicas of “tiger cages’ they kept him in. He wrote me that after awhile of knowing it was all a training, he couldn’t hold the frame anymore and it became nothing but his reality. His sense of time and self evaporated.

…

His father was Air Force— and I think even he was taken aback by the SERE training. Afterward, as far as I could tell, Robbie had a psychological breakdown. He wasn’t the same guy. I was afraid of him.

They’d given him some very peculiar advice about women— it creeped me out. I was, like, ‘HEY, it’s me, remember?” But he didn’t. He hurt me when we made love, my back bled. He acted like we were supposed to play this out until I got “tougher” and could take it. It didn’t have anything to do with “kink” or fun.

The Slate article says that the “frame” is very important, the subject’s awareness that there are rules and limits to this, that there is a safeword. However, Bright’s account suggests that it is not always possible to maintain that frame.

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