slavery – Page 3 – The History of BDSM

Roman Scandals (1933)

Sep 242012

Roman Scandals is a 1933, pre-Hays code musical starring Eddie Cantor and featuring elaborate set piece dance number choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Presumably a parody of Biblical and/or classical Hollywood pictures like The Sign of the Cross (1932), Scandals gives up any pretense of drama and goes straight to the sexual decadence. The means dance numbers on elaborate sets performed by dozens or even scores of women dressed identically (the “Goldwyn Girls”, including a young Lucille Ball). If you want to have large numbers of scantily clad women moving around in a situation of high drama, you can’t go wrong with a slave market or auction scene.

The Barbary Slaves, by Stephen Clissold

Featured Articles, Orientalism, Slavery No Responses »

Sep 182012

Clissold, Stephen. The Barbary Slaves. Elek Books, 1977 Gbooks

Up until now, I had focused most of my attention on Atlantic slavery as an source for BDSM fantasies, but there are other influences that go back centuries. The older some historical event is, the more it has decayed into myth. It underlies more recent events. Abolitionists used Orientalist and Gothic ideas to talk about American slavery and in doing so harkened back centuries to Barbary Coast slavery, when Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East. It was a roughly two-century period marked by Christian Europe’s relative rise as a world power and Muslim Northern Africa’s relative decline.

Master-slave Conference 2012 debriefing: Learning from Master-slave fiction

Uncategorized No Responses »

Sep 122012

The second panel I attended on Sunday morning was “Learning from Master-slave fiction”, with David Stein, Laura Antoniou, Anneke Jacob and Reid Spencer.

Most people encounter BDSM fiction before they encounter BDSM in real life, whether in the form of narratives or online encounters. This means that people tend to imprint on those fictions and receive ideas like: Masters are (or should be) wealthy, sadists, men, leather wearing, etc. Slaves are (or should be) without limits, make no decisions, etc. These assumptions cause problems later on. So what is the proper relationship between BDSM fiction, particularly Master-slave relationships, and actually living them?

Master-slave conference 2012 debriefing: thoughts on slavery

Featured Articles, Religion, Slavery No Responses »

Sep 092012

The word “slave” is an emotionally charged one.

I began my BDSM career in the early ’90s with an email slave relationship with a woman on the other side of the continent. It lasted over a year, with a contract, daily reports, exchanged gifts by mail, and so on. I had the notion that this is just what you did. (I eventually met her in person, and we still stay in touch. She currently lives with two men, her husband and her slave.)

When I signed on to Fetlife for the first time, I chose “bottom” as my role, not “submissive” or “slave”. I carefully chose a name, “Liegeman”, that connoted the feudal relationship of mutual obligation (or at least the idealized version of that), rather than the kind of terminology associated with the institution of slavery. I’m just not comfortable with that language, especially after I started researching American slavery.

For me, and I imagine a lot of people, the word “slave” denotes American antebellum slavery: an unskilled labourer in a hereditary state of chattel bondage, justified by the worst combination of Calvinism and Darwinism.

Obviously, lots of people in the greater BDSM scene use the terminology of master-slave, but the meaning they apply to it is quite different. The relationship is paramount, with aspects of marriage, apprenticeship, and military discipline. While Masters talk about “owning” slaves, it isn’t ownership in the sense of property, but more like noblesse oblige or feudal obligation.

As I asked in my presentation, how did we get from one definition to the other?

iHarem, for all your vintage slave girl needs

Uncategorized No Responses »

Aug 282012

iHarem is a blog with a vast collection of images and especially video clips of harem/slave girl/odalisque Orientalist fantasies, some going back to the early Silent Film era. Apparently, as long as there has been moving images, they have been used to deliver Orientalist fantasies of beautiful, available women, often in quantity.

More vintage slave paintings

Uncategorized No Responses »

Aug 272012

While trying to learn more about the Orientalist slave paintings I’ve been posting on Tumblr and Pinterest, I found there are a lot of these kinds of paintings. There’s the slave market set on Flickr, the entire Orientalism tag at Onok-Art, and a collection of slave market paintings on Tanos.org.uk.

Interview with Muslim slave Alia

Uncategorized No Responses »

Aug 242012

LN pointed me at this fascinating interview, courtesy of the Leatherati Youtube channel, with slave Alia who is a devout Muslim woman who is also the slave of Master Skip Chasey. She comes from a cultural background quite different from most people in the greater BDSM world, and there are interesting parallels between her life as a devout Mulsim woman and her life as a slave.

Victorian slave market paintings

Featured Articles, Orientalism, Slavery No Responses »

Aug 212012

A Fetlife post directed me to an entire page of Victorian paintings about slavery, or rather the Romanticized European view of slavery in “the Orient” or in ancient Rome, which was also a vehicle for female nudity. (Contrary to popular belief, Victorians had no problem with nudity if it was within the proper context.)

The page is in Turkish, but there’s little text anyway.

PETA, the politics of virtue in distress, and cannibalism porn

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jun 182012

A post on Vegan Times got me thinking about the use of the naked human body. “An Open Letter to PeTA” makes a feminist critique PETA’s use of sexualized imagery in its ads against animal cruelty:

Like animal exploitation, which turns non-human individuals into objects of consumption for humans, patriarchy as a cross-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon has always involved the ‘thingification’ of women’s bodies, manifested either through outright ownership (by husbands and fathers), or through widespread sexual objectification. Both non-human slavery and patriarchy are heavily steeped in the fetishization of violence. It would seem, then, that an organization ostensibly committed to the eradication of animal exploitation would also support the eradication of gender hierarchy. Yet judging from your track record, this has not been the case.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin mantelpiece screen

Uncategorized Comments Off

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.

Older Entries Newer Entries

A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism