Dr. Gloria Brame posted this video of vintage dominatrix photography, going back in the 19th century.

Ana wakes up in Christian’s hotel suite the next morning. Christian not only had her undressed, but sent his bodyguard off to buy her a complete set of new clothes.

Um, wasn’t Ana’s friend and roommate Kate nearby when Ana passed out, and wouldn’t she have been a more natural choice to look after an unconscious Ana than a relative stranger like Christian?

Let me call process for a moment. I started thinking about the previous chapter’s commentary while I was still reading the text, and I was going to talk about how this wasn’t supposed to be a snarky commentary. That is, no cheap shots, no snobbishness, etc. Accept it for what it is, and understand how it fits into the world.

However, as I read about Ana’s utter helplessness and passivity, and Christian’s controlling, remote ways, I became more and more annoyed. I just don’t like Fifty Shades of Grey on several levels. As a writer, I don’t think it’s very well written. As a kinky person, I don’t think it’s giving people a good idea of how to do good BDSM.

So, I keep veering into snark, and frankly the Internet has more than enough of that. I’m doing my best to avoid it.

Over breakfast, Christian continues his approach-avoid pattern, admitting that he is attracted to Ana while at the same time warning her to stay away. In the source-text of Twilight, this is because Edward is a vampire and he has to struggle with his urge to consume human blood. In this version, Christian says he won’t kiss her without her written consent, baffling her. This sets up another date between them in another city, where he teases that he will reveal all. “Once you’re enlightened, you probably won’t want to see me again,” he says. Ana agrees. (You’d think a woman whose thesis was on Tess of the D’Urbervilles would be a little more suspicious of a wealthy man who promises to whisk her away to new places.)

One of Dan Savage’s recurring pieces of advice is, “If you’re going to introduce your partner to your kink or fetish, don’t begin the conversation in the same tone as, ‘I have a contagious fatal disease.’ Be up front and direct and don’t pressure the other person with it.” Christian seems apologetic on the surface, but really he’s teasing Ana with his deep, Gothic secret, another example of his mixed messages. He’s already dominating her, long before any negotiation has taken place between them.

This conversation over breakfast, in relatively neutral territory, is actually a good time to bring it up, to have some transparency and straightforward communication. Instead, Christian micro-manages her eating.

When Christian says, “Oh, fuck the paperwork,” and has a session of rough sex in an elevator, it’s a relief. Finally something people do.

It’s no secret that rejection hurts, nor that it feels good to be know one is desired. Ana’s situation, of being adored just for existing while not having to take any risk herself, is an appealing fantasy (and not just for women). I think a lot of people have some kind of initiation fantasy: that some other person will take the responsibility of the sexual encounter. The hope is that somebody will recognize us as desirable: the dominant woman or man who will take us, the same-sex partner who will seduce us out of our closeted lives. It’s preferable to the slow, stumbling process of articulating one’s own sexual identity, of coming out as gay or kinky or even as a sexual person. Unfortunately, such initiators are rare in the real world, and most of us have to stumble along, making mistakes and dealing with rejections and breakups.

Not so Ana. She gets Christian Grey, handsome, wealthy, powerful, with the mind of a forty-year-old man in the body of a twenty-five-year-old model, to guide her from never-held-hands-in-public to BDSM. Compare that to the disappointment that colors real human relationships, and no wonder this is so popular. Submissives want to believe that their dominants are trustworthy and infallible, but they need to remember that they’re human beings too.

Again, I come back to the fear that this book is harmful. Fifty Shades bothers me more than, say, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, because the latter is clearly set in a completely fantastic world, and the former is supposedly set in our world. It even bothers me more than Story of O because the latter is raw masochism, completely divorced from any conventional idea of romance or marriage-plot. The problem with pink fun-fur lined handcuffs is believing that they can’t hurt you like the real thing if used improperly.

Maybe this is for the best. Maybe that our hypothetical newbie kinky woman who reads Fifty Shades will recognize the exaggerated fantasy for what it is, and if she ever goes to a munch or play party, she’ll know better than to model herself on Anastasia Steele. Maybe I’m underestimating people’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and general common sense.

Gloria Brame has posted a set of stereo-optic 3D images, likely made in 1920s France, of Ff BDSM scenes.

Shorter, Edward. Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire University of Toronto Press, 2005

Caveat: due to time restrictions, I’ve only read the “SM and Fetish” chapter of Shorter’s book.

This chapter presents a lot of fodder for further research, and I’m intrigued by Shorter’s idea of Western society moving towards an idea of “total body sex”, from an origin narrowly focused on heterosexual missionary coitus. Sexual behaviour in the early 21st century seems so varied that it’s hard to draw boundaries around “the sexual.”

What is germane for the larger story of total body sex is that SM exquisitely enacts sex over the entire body while fetish represents the entire body in a thematic way. [Pg.204]

I just can’t get behind a lot of his ideas and theories. For instance, he quotes Pico Della Mirandolla about early 16th century ideas of flagellation. He says that Mirandolla argued that flagellation was an inborn desire, but the passage Shorter quotes quite clearly describes an appetite for flagellation as acquired. Mirandolla’s friend describes his desires as “a taste I acquired as a child”, which Shorter insists “[means] that at no point was he not aware of it.” Unless there is some connotation to the verb in the original Renaissance Italian I don’t know about, Shorter is misinterpreting.  (pg.204-5) Most early modern scholars viewed sexual deviance as a something acquired from childhood experience, not something inborn.  The idea of sexuality as a fixed personal quality is only about 120 years old.

I also dispute his claim that the dominatrix archetype originated in the 20th century. Look at Matthew Lewis’ Gothic novel The Monk for Mathilda, a black-clad, seductive witch.

Shorter says the earliest dominatrix image his can find is a drawing by fashion designer Erté, published in the December 1916 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

However, the 19th century had plenty of women-as-equestrienne images, so there were plenty of antecedents.

Shorter continues to say that Erté ‘s design was a fluke, and there were no dominatrix-like images in high fashion until the fall 1960 collection of Saint-Laurent offered a mink-edged black alligator jacket for evening wear. After that, black leather has remained a fashion staple, notably in the mod fashions of the early Beatles, the Atomage catalogs and Mrs. Emma Peel in The Avengers. But what about Brando in The Wild One? What about the black leather jacket as the attire of soldiers and pilots, and as street fashion?

I also take issue with Shorter’s whitewashing of Sade, claiming that what the Marquis wrote were only allegories and he wasn’t a violent person. If Sade was something of a paper tiger, it’s only because he spent most of his adult life in prison, with nobody to hurt. His actions when out free in the world, well documented by the French authorities, show that he practised what he preached.

Le Cuir Triomphant by Alan Mac Clyde, illustrated by Carlo, c.1930

It is an intriguing point that while leather and rubber are usually thought of as the fetish materials, they seem to be 20th century fetishes, and 19th century fetishists were invested in softer (feminine?) materials like fur (a la Sacher-Masoch), silk and lace. Shorter says that the recognizable dominatrix archetype first crystallizes in the book Le Cuir Triomphant (“triumphant leather”), published in the early 1930, written by “Alan Mac Clyde” (a shared pseudonym of various French erotica authors) and illustrated by Carlo.

However, what about the black catsuit worn by “Irma Vep” in the French silent film serial Les Vampires, 1915-16?

For further research:

• Nicholas Choirier’s Dialogues on the Arcana of Love and Venus (1660)
• The life and writings of Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme
• Viennese schoolteacher and sadomasochist Edith Cadivec
• American actress Adah Isaacs Menken, and her performance of Byron’s poem “Mazeppa”

The Seduction of Venus has a post on French illustrator Chéri Hérouard, aka Herric.

Many of them feature lesbians (or tribades as they would have been known) who, in Paris at least, had very much come out of the closet following the Great War and indeed had almost become fashionable as a way to express women’s new post-war increasing independence.

Most lesbian erotica was, of course, aimed at men rather than women but that is not to say that the readers of tribade friendly magazines like Garconne would not have enjoed Herric’s pictures.

My steampunk erotica story “Upstairs, Downstairs” is now up on Every Night Erotica. It’s a short-short story about two characters from my steampunk erotica short story collection, The Innocent’s Progress & Other Stories.

Who says class consciousness and erotica can’t mix?

While we’re talking about Lenny Burtman, here’s a few clips from a film he produced, Satan in High Heels (1962).

A woman in leather with a riding crop sings “Female of the Species” in a nightclub.

Her preceding makeover and other scenes of retro leather dresses, pants and jodhpurs, not to mention a lot of smoking and drinking.

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?

David Stein said that the relationships depicted in fiction should be plausible. For example, discipline is not the same thing as punishment. Positive reinforcement is essential, and works better over the long run.

He wrote out of a desire to fix John Preston’s classic Mr. Benson, particularly how dumb, aimless and useless the slave character was. Stein’s novel Carried Away features two men with families and jobs who practice realistic BDSM. A romantic fantasy that is more grounded in realism.

Laura Antoniou admitted that what she masturbates to is 1970s gangbang porn, of which she says , “It’s terrible.” What interests her is a different thing entirely. Like Stein, her work is in large part a critical response (a strong misreading) to prior works, specifically John Preston‘s “Network” stories and the “Club” of Anne Rice’s novel Exit to Eden, but more realistic. Realism is, of course, a relative thing when you’re talking about secret international consensual slave trading organizations. She talks about psychological realism, covered with melodrama and fantasy, but refusing to conform to the conventions of romance.

Antoniou is in the awkward position of being extremely critical of the myths of BDSM, even though her own writings have contributed to those myths.

Some one in the audience suggested that fiction should be aspirational. Antoniou added that you can recognize things in real life that you admire from fiction.

By coincidence, this tied into the subject of the Overthinking It podcast that week, when they talked about the poet and philosopher Wallace Stevens and his ideas of the relationship between poetry (i.e. imagination and fancy) versus logical positivism (i.e. science). I.e. what’s the point in talking about unicorns when we know they don’t exist? Stevens proposed a “supreme fiction”, which is known to be fictional but is wilfully believe, to take the place of religion in modern consciousness. Fiction should be inspirational or aspirational.

Another topic was the business of writing erotica, and what does and doesn’t sell. Antoniou spoke highly of the work of TammyJo Eckhart (a friend of mine) before stating that femdom-malesub fiction doesn’t sell anywhere near as well as gay male or hetero-maledom-femsub. Even lesbians primarily buy gay male erotic fiction, not FF. This is in part due to market issues: publishers have their received wisdom/prejudices about what sells and what doesn’t, and that extends to market categories. E.g. Amazon just lumps everything under “erotica”, without finer gradations, though Barnes & Noble has a more developed sense of categories. The reviewer-sphere has a similar problem. Marketing feature like Amazon’s tags and the “other people who liked this bought these…” feature also help direct people to what they’re looking for.

Well, this had to happen sooner or later. I found this image on the Femdom Artists blog. This is the cover of a Mexican magazine, presumably published sometime in the late 2000s, based on the iconic images of Lynndie England and other American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “Arrogance and torture in Iraq!” shouts the headline.

Note the changes that appear on the painted cover: England is depicted as more shapely than in reality, and the male figures are depicted with more muscle definition. As for the woman in the foreground with the American flag pasties and the gun sticking out of her crotch…

It’s also interesting that this appears on a Mexican magazine, a nation not involved in the Iraq war, and therefore at a distance. A Mexican viewer can look upon this image and not feel any culpability at the actions depicted, just enjoying the spectacle and enjoying confirmation of prejudice that Americans are really violent and depraved brutes who allow their cruel, savage women to run wild on brown skinned people.  As we’ve seen before in the Ilsa films and other media, the sexual stands in for the political, and the sexually deviant woman personifies a politically deviant culture.

Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Directed by Don Edmonds, Written by Langston Stafford  IMDB

To secure America’s oil supply, a diplomat who is a caricature of Henry Kissinger and a hunky US Navy officer travel to the quasi-medieval Middle Eastern nation ruled by Al-Sharif, aided the notorious Ilsa, former she-wolf of the SS.

Ilsa, who hasn’t aged a day since the end of WWII,  is quite apolitical. She has adapted with the times and has no problem working for Arabs or employing Africans as henchwomen (two women named Velvet and Satin, who spend much of the movie near-naked and oiled). She’s into tyranny and sadism for their own sake, an auteur of torture and deviance.

We get a tour through Ilsa’s domain, an odd combination of medieval dungeon and modern clinic, where abducted European and American women are prepared for auction as slaves to various owners. There’s even something for the people into feederism, as women are fattened up for sale to African villages. This is definitely the realm of the disordered body. Furthermore, Ilsa’s pet scientists have perfected ways of concealing injuries and mutilations with medical techniques, juxtaposing the beautiful and the grotesque. This is fairly nasty stuff, though the amateurish makeup effects, fantastic setting and broad acting dilute the horror and shift the mood towards camp. One gag is that the diplomat politely refuses the sheik’s offer of a woman for the night, and the sheik amiably sends a boy to the room instead. The diplomat only objects a little.

There’s a note of political satire here: for black gold, Americans will go into the land of sexual deviance, a primitive world of slavery and Orientalist fantasy.

Uncontested mistress of the sheik’s “white slavery” operation, Ilsa coolly watches as her African henchwomen, near-naked and oiled, beat a rebellious man and rip his testicles off with their bare hands.  Yet somehow the American officer can penetrate the impenetrable Ilsa, suggesting all she needed was a good lay from a real (American) man.

As punishment for sex with the American officer, Al Sharif has Ilsa bound and brings in a leper to rape her. This film takes a strange turn as the viewer almost becomes sympathetic to Ilsa. As repellent as her actions are, it’s strangely painful to see her tormented and victimized. Of course, her vulnerability is equated with her conventional femininity, symbolized by a flowing blue dress instead of her usual paramilitary or dominatrix gear. As a “bad woman”, she is armored, impenetrable; transformed into a “good woman” by American dick, she is weak and rape-able. Either life’s a bitch, or you become one.

You can almost believe that when Ilsa unleashes the harem women and the eunuchs as part of the American-intigated revolution, she’s reformed. However, Ilsa is just too much of a sadist bent on revenge. Al Sharif is almost literally hoist on his own petard when Ilsa sends a woman unwittingly fitted with an explosive diaphragm to mount the sheik, who is so lustful he can’t stop fucking her. The result is… messy.

The Naval officer dumps Ilsa once she’s served her purpose. A child inherits the kingdom, moral/political/sexual order is restored, America gets its oil, and Ilsa is cast down into a filthy dungeon. However, you can’t keep an evil Aryan dominatrix down, and Ilsa will return for two sequels.

Ilsa functions as a free-floating signifier of sexual/political deviance that can be attached to European fascists, Middle Eastern oil sheiks, Latin American dictators, Russian communists or any other political villain. She is both a source of suffering and a recipient of it over the narrative of her films. The repetitive story lines and her cycle of symbolic death and resurrection suggest something ritual at work, trying to allay an anxiety that can never be completely dismissed.

In researching the history of consensual sadomasochism, there isn’t a comprehensive body of knowledge to draw upon, no established canon of reference works, no Journal of Sadomasochistic Studies.

Instead, I have data points: case studies, books (often anonymous), anecdotes, images, etc. I’ll admit that sometimes what is and isn’t a data point is decided on the “I know it when I see it” principle. Connecting those points requires a certain amount of guesswork and judgment calls.

For example: Dr. Samuel Johnson, English man of letters of the Enlightenment, and his relationship with his close friend Hester Thrale.  The latter’s posthumous effects, sold at auction in 1823, included a padlock and fetters. Thrale identified it as “Johnson’s padlock, committed to my care in the year 1768.” In 1767 or 1768, Thrale wrote that “our stern philosopher Johnson trusted me… with a secret far dearer to him than his life”. On other occasions , she wrote that “this great, this formidable Doctor Johnson kissed my hand, ay & my foot too upon his knees!” and quoted him saying, “a woman has such power between the ages of twenty five and forty five, that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will.” Finally, there is a reference in  Thrale’s journal to “the fetters & padlocks [that] will tell posterity the truth”, and Johnson’s own journal entry, dated 24 March 1771, about “Insane thoughts on fetters and hand-cuffs.” (in Latin) (Pg.387-388)

Johnson scholars have debated the exact meanings of these items and phrases. The more conservative, such as Peter Martin in his Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Belknap Press, 2008) say that the “suggestion that Johnson may have taken a perverse sexual pleasure in such confinement has been discredited” (pg.388) and dismisses “the wild theory that Johnson was a flagellant demanding to be scourged and manacled.” (pg.389)

Johnson was a troubled man, suffering from severe depression (he called it “the black dog”), the twitches and ticks that would today be diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome, and the habitual counting of obsessive compulsive disorder. (A trait he shared with the Marquis de Sade.)  He lived in fear of going mad, and much of the time he spent at Thrale’s house was as a patient of an informal retreat for therapy. Martin argues that the implements of confinement were more symbolic than literal, and that the confinement to his room at Thrale’s house was just a way of keeping Johnson calm in his worst moments, as he requested. (Pg. 388-390) In other words, it wasn’t a sex thing, and therefore should not be considered a sadomasochistic relationship.

I think that was an over-hasty assessment by Martin. Other scholars don’t dispute the facts but question the subjective quality of Thrale and Johnson’s relationship. Jeffrey Meyer’s Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
(Basic Books, 2008) reconsiders Katherine Balderston’s notes on Thrale’s letters from 1949. Says Meyer:

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s darkest secret, his modern biographers have not been able to reconcile his obsession with their exalted image of the great moralist and stern philosopher.  [...] Christopher Hibbert (1971) was cautious and indecisive. Though Hester [Thrale] had said “do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the Rod enough,” Hibbert wrote, in an awkward style that expresses his own uneasiness: “whether or not the rod was actually used, whether or not Johnson’s fantasies [sic] about manacles and fetters were erotic and masochistic in their nature, it is impossible now to say.”

[Pg.6-7]

Other scholars, if they acknowledged the data at all, squeamishly said it was too slender to draw conclusions. This makes me wonder how much evidence about various historical figures’ sexual peccadilloes have been lost by neglect or intent by prejudiced scholars.

Meyers writes:

Johnson submitted to chains and handcuffs, and had his door padlocked, when he felt the onset of madness. But it would have been quite impossible for the tiny Hester, even with the help of several manservants, to restrain and shackle a crazed, rampaging and uncommonly strong Johnson. He had bought these implements to restrain himself during period of madness, he was depressive, not manic, and never had to employ them. But he did actually use them in the closet drama of his ritualistic whippings.

[Pg.360]

Thrale annotated Johnson’s comment about a woman making a man her slave by saying “this he knew of him self was literally and strictly true I am sure.” (Pg. 361) Johnson also told his biographer Boswell: “madmen… are eager for gratifications to soothe their minds, and divert their attention from the mistery which they suffer; but when they grow very ill, pleasure is too weak for them, and they seek pain.” (Pg.361-362)

Much like Sacher-Masoch, Johnson was definitely a highly demanding and controlling masochist, and much like Aurora Rumelin,  Hester Thrale struggled to manage the boundaries between her own life and the demands of her ostensible “slave”. Even when Thrale was dealing with household renovations, sick children and a mother dying of breast cancer, Johnson sent her messages that alternated between grovelling and emotional blackmail, like:

It’s essential to remember our agreement. 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. [Pg.363]

It’s well established that whipping was nearly universal in homes and schools of this time: Thrale beat her own children frequently, and Johnson had been on both ends of the rod as a student and as a teacher. Why men like Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau became masochistic flagellants, and so many of their contemporaries didn’t, remains a mystery. Johnson was troubled by feelings of sing and guilt through his life, and it’s likely that bondage and flagellation, if only of a mild and largely symbolic nature, gave him at least momentary peace, both satisfying and punishing his sexual desires. Of course, a conservative could argue that Thrale’s reference to “using the Rod” was figurative, not literal.

Johnson’s use of “slavery” is also intriguing, as he was a staunch proponent of abolitionism. Perhaps he saw in slavery, as much as he despised it, a reflection of the abjectness he felt throughout his life, and a confinement that quieted him, and therefore used it as a metaphor.

There’s also the question of whether Johnson and Thrale’s relationship was sexual. There’s no indication that intercourse occurred between them, nor is it clear what Johnson felt when Thrale ministered to him: sensual pleasure or masochistic pleasure? Our modern definition of sex still privileges heterosexual coitus, and other bodily practices that do not fit it may not be considered sexual at all. In this relationship, you can see both a desire for a mother figure and for the physical sensations of confinement and flagellation, neither of which necessarily produce genital arousal.

I’ve completed the first draft of chapter 3, which covers the Enlightenment period, and I’m not sure how much, if anything, of Johnson’s story to include. This aspect of his life was only known long after his death, and does not turn up in the literature on flagellation as does the Madame Lambercier incident in Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps a paragraph or two, next to the Rousseau section.

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) dir. Don Edmonds IMDB Amazon

Arguably the best known Nazisploitation film (though Love Camp 7 (1969) is usually cited as the first), Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was a US-Canadian production (and shot on the exterior old sets for Hogan’s Heroes, according to one source). It starred Dyanne Thorne as the titular concentration camp commandant, impeccably crisp in a black, white and red SS uniform.

The women sent to Ils’a  camp are divided into two groups. One gets sent to “work details” of serving the men in the guard house. The other gets beaten, electrocuted, boiled, suffocated and more in “experiments” overseen by Ilsa and her female assistants. Ilsa’s ostensible reason for all of this is to demonstrate that women can withstand as much pain as men, and therefore prove that women can serve the Reich by fighting on the front line.

The male prisoners each get one night with Ilsa, after which they’re castrated.

This changes with the arrival of the prisoner Wolfe, a German-born American with blond hair, blue eyes and the ability to withhold ejaculation indefinitely. Ilsa is so taken with Wolfe’s indefatigable dong that he alone survives a night with her intact.

Whereas Wolfe represents ideal masculinity, the General who oversees Ilsa’s camp is a masochistic freak, who tops Ilsa from the bottom by demanding that she strip down to just her uniform tunic and stockings, then urinate on her while he lies on the floor beneath her. The camera focuses on Ilsa’s face grimacing in disgust and humiliation as she complies with his command. (This is the trope of the sexually-deviant fascist, about which more in other posts.)

Thus, instead of being an agent of Naziism, Ilsa is actually a feminist of sorts, exploited and confined by the male-dominated Nazi hierarchy she pledges allegiance to. She and her female subordinates function as a feminist insurgency within Naziism, usurping male prerogatives like authority, violence and sexual service. Admittedly, Ilsa’s brand of feminism involves having other women tortured, raped and killed.

At the climax of the film, Wolfe seduces Ilsa into letting him tie her to her bed. Wolfe then goes to lead the prisoners in revolt and escape. One of Ilsa’s bloody female victims crawls into the room and tries to stab Ilsa to death, but passes out or dies before she can finish the job. After the prisoners escape, German forces arrive, and an officer kills Ilsa, on orders from the general, and then burns the camp down so there is no evidence.

The last shot is of Wolfe and one of the female prisoners standing together, watching the fire; normal sexual and gender roles are restored by the death of Ilsa. The struggle of democracy versus fascism is displaced onto the struggle of patriarchal society against insurgent femininity. The scenario is “men saving good women from bad women, with (bad) men doing the dirty work.” It’s as if one deviant woman is somehow more evil than the entire Nazi hierarchy. Compare this to the legend of slave keeper Delphine LaLaurie in antebellum New Orleans; the deviant woman becomes the scapegoat for a deviant society.

Of course, Ilsa somehow rises again to star in Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (the only authorized sequel) and two others. You can’t keep an evil dominatrix down. Ilsa is kind of an auteur of sadism, and will attach herself to any political regime that will allow her to do her thing: Nazis, Middle Eastern oil states, Latin American dictatorships or Stalinist gulags.

The character of Ilsa is very loosely based on a real-life woman, the wife of a concentration camp commandant, Ilse Koch, who was tried by the Nazis for embezzlement and imprisoned, then tried by the Allies for war crimes, and escaped by the gallows by getting herself pregnant. Koch was regarded as a criminal by both sides of the conflict, and thus makes a perfect scapegoat, especially as nothing is quite as compelling as the monstrous woman.

I’ll admit, financial domination was a kink I didn’t really get, even intellectually. I just assumed it was something thought up by pro dommes for guys who were too anxious to meet them in person.

The interview with Mistress Harley on the People of Kink podcast opened my mind and showed me that financial domination and blackmail play is a kink with its own subtleties and intricacies. Money has its own fetishistic value, denoting power and potency, and to be deprived of it can affect some people as strongly as being deprived of the freedom of movement. A prodomme I know once told me about a man who wanted her to demolish his expensive car with a sledgehammer while he watched; she refused, not wanting to risk getting involved in an insurance investigation.

Even more interesting was when Mistress Harley talked about using applications like Teamviewer to remotely take control of her clients’ computers and phones. As technology increasingly becomes an extension of our selves, it makes sense that systems of remote surveillance and control would be fetishized as well. I am once again surprised at just how ingenious people are at coming up with new forms of sexuality.

Berlatsky, Noah. 2015. Wonder Woman: bondage and feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948. New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press

Wonder Woman spanking a man in Roman soldier uniform

Growing up, I had the notion that Wonder Woman had been created in the past as a perfect feminist icon, and only later was the character sexualized by other creators. In fact, Wonder Woman was “always, already” as much a figure of fetishistic fantasy as she was a feminist role model, patriotic symbol, or heroine for children. The original seven-year run of comics, written or co-written by William Moulton Marston and illustrated by William Peter displayed the kind of deep psychosexual weirdness usually only found in 19th century children’s books. (I say that as a fan of deep psychosexual weirdness.) Noah Berlatsky’s book explores just how queer and feminist those stories were; as the author puts it, “a flamboyantly gendered mess.”[Pg.169]

Berlatsky’s book almost exclusively focuses on the original run, written or co-written by Marston and illustrated by Harry G Peter, who had worked on “Gibson Girls”, early 20th century pinup art girls who were usually portrayed as strong, educated and independent. [Pg.9]

So, Berlatsky asks, how can the early Marston/Peter be both feminist and chock full of bondage and other fetishes? [Pg.13] The answer is that the stories drew upon specifically female experiences of disempowerment, depicted them in a highly fantastic way (i.e. the Gothic), and showed women escaping from these predicaments. He discusses Wonder Woman 16 in great detail, which is a fantastic retelling of the myth of the abduction (and implied rape) of Persephone by Hades. In this case, Pluto is represented as a trident-wielding patriarch who carries of women from Earth to the literal planet, where each is separated into a multi-colored light body and a dark hooded slave.

Berlatsky discusses this apparent paradox in great detail, going over the criticisms of feminist writers like John Stoltenberg and Susan Brownmiller. Brownmiller in particular sees the “master-slave relationship” as the foundation of male-controlled sexuality. Berlatsky quotes from her Against Our Will:

From the slave harems of the Oriental potentate, celebrated in poetry and dance, to the breathless description of light-skinned fancy women, de rigeur in a particular genre of pulp historical fiction, the glorification of forced sex under slavery, institutional rape, has been a part of our cultural heritage, feeding the egos of men while subverting the egos of women — and doing irreparable damage to healthy sexuality in the process. [Quoted from Pg.169-170 of Against Our Will]

Berlatsky points out that in condemning eroticized bondage, Brownmiller participates in it. “… there is no way to imagine liberating yourself from bondage without imagining bondage, with all its connotations.” [Pg. 21] The popularity of narratives of victimized women, like Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey and The Hunger Games, indicate that they have strongly connected with the lives of girls and women. [Pg.23] They are ways of talking about female experiences. (I question grouping The Hunger Games with the other two works.)

Gothic romances show women in sexual peril not to enjoy the sight of women in sexualized peril but rather because women often are in sexualized peril and want to read books that address their experiences. Similarly, Marston, [co-writer Joy] Murchison, and Peter do not show the rape of Persephone because the rape of Persephone is a stimulating thing to see. They show it because girls (and boys too) face incest and rape, and stories addressed to them must therefore face those things as well.

Or so I’ve been arguing. The truth though is perhaps a little less clear-cut. Marston, Murchison, and Peter in Wonder Woman #16 are writing about incest and rape, and they are doing so from a consciously feminist perspective. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t get off on fetishized bondage too. [Pg. 56]

Marston, Murchison, and Peter present incest as trauma and as tragedy. But they also present, and utilize, it as fetish. [Pg.57]

This is the familiar problem of authorial intent vs. audience reception.

Marston came to writing comic books with his own developed ideas on gender, sexuality and politics. His book Emotions of Normal People describe dominance and submission as fundamental human emotions, based on his studies of sorority initiation parties, in which the freshmen girls would dress up like babies, confess their misdemeanors and be mock-punished. [Pg.64-65] Marston described this as “captivation emotion”, which could exist in both between genders and within the same gender. Any gender could occupy any position in the dominant/submissive pairing.

That is to say, for Marston, Murchison, and Peter, there is no necessary contradiction between confronting the reality of rape and abuse (for women and also men) and indulging in a sexually charged BDSM romp (for everyone). For Freud, childhood rape and children’s fantasies of rape could not both be real. He could not imagine both at once. But Marston, Murchison, and Peter could. [Pg.67]

In Berlatsky’s view, people can both have dominant/submissive sexuality and be worthy of protection. [Pg.69]

Trauma recurs, and violence repeats, but that doesn’t mean the traumatized should only be allowed to be submissive victims — or that they should only be allowed to be empowered angels of vengeance. Rather, Marston seems to believe, once the power of rape is broken, the world will be safe for rape fantasies and for dominance and submission — the normal emotions. [Pg.72]

Marston’s philosophy is that women should lead because they do not have the same kind of ego as men, that they are capable of love and submission to a greater degree than men. Female masochism is the core of everything, the foundation of a new matriarchal social order.

We finally have a definitive answer, therefore, to the question first raised in chapter 1. The many, many, many, many images of Wonder Woman in bondage […] are not there (or are not there solely) so Marston’s audience– whether men or women– can get off on women disempowered. Rather, they’re there to teach men (and women too) the joys of restraint. [Pg. 117]

This is most directly displayed in Marston’s utopian vision of Paradise Island, which is pretty much kinky bondage games all day long. In Wonder Woman #3, Wonder Woman and her sidekick Etta travel to the princess’ homeland for Diana’s Day, in which women happily volunteer to to be dressed in deer costumes, captured, “skinned”, and trussed up for roasting, or tied and mock-baked into a giant pie. It’s all in good fun. [Pg. 142-144]

Lesbian D/s is the underlying dynamic of everything in Marston’s world. Even in his 1932 pseudohistorical pulp novel Venus with Us:A Tale of the Caesar, there are positive depictions of f/f relationships.[Pg.148-149] Remember, Marston lived a semi-closeted life as married to Elizabeth Holloway and living with a graduate student, Olive Byrne. This is fairly common knowledge among scholars and fans of American superhero comics, but it is frequently assumed, even by feminist and queer writers, that Marston was the alpha male of this menage. Berlatsky points out that not only did Holloway and Byrne name their children after each other, they continued to live together for forty years after Marston’s death. [Pg.149] It’s possible, indeed probable, that the affective and sexual bonds between the two women were as strong or stronger than the relationships between them and Marston. Thus, Marston was the “odd man out”, sort of an accessory to their lesbian relationship, welcome but not essential.

The polyamorous Marston, however, does not see female-female relationships as exclusionary at all. Rather, for Marston, lesbianism and female communities can take men in without violation or contradiction, because when it comes to sexuality, it is women who are determinative, not men. In this sense, Amazon society in Wonder Woman #23 was not kept pure [of men] and did not need to be kept pure. The Amazons simply took men in and by so doing made them women. […] But for Marston, a woman’s space that holds a man conquers him and turns him female. [Pg. 172]

Berlatsky only lightly touches on the rest of Wonder Woman’s history in comics and other media. It’s not just that no other writer and artist could quite achieve this level of mad genius. He says that other creators either aggressively refute Marston’s philosophy (e.g. a recent retcon which says that Diana was actually the illegitimate daughter of Zeus instead of being crafted out of clay by her mother and granted life by the intervention of a goddess) or merely pay lip service to Marston’s ideals (e.g. an ideologically incoherent story about the conflict of militarism and pacifism). Marston’s ideas were weird, but had their own internal consistency. Unfettered by considerations of realism or adult logic, he could create stories that broke out of the binary oppositions of gender. His most famous creation was a bundle of paradoxes that should not exist, but did.

Still from the film. Central is Bella Heathcote as Olive Byrne. In the background is JJ Field as Charles Guyette.

[The film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017, dir. Angela Robinson) is a “based on true events” story of William Moulton Marston, the two women he lived with, his interest in bondage, and how all of that influenced his superheroine creation, Wonder Woman. The film includes scenes in the 1930s in which Marston meets Charles Guyette, an early pioneer of fetish/BDSM media in the USA. While Marston definitely had an interest in bondage and fetishes, I was skeptical that meeting had actually occurred. I asked Richard Pérez Seves, a fellow kinky historian, and author of a biography and photo collection of Guyette, if this had happened.]

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Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman (2017). Director and writer Angela Robinson. IMDB

Who was Professor William Moulton Marston? A fantasist in the tradition of Frank Baum or Lewis Carrol? A guy who ruled a secret menage a trois with his wife and his younger student? A failed academic turned huckster and pornographer with a line in psychobabble? A loving father and husband with an unorthodox, closeted family?

And what was his best known creation, Wonder woman? A feminist ideal? A patriotic icon? A “strong woman” who is constantly in chains? A punishing dominatrix? A lesbian in a man’s world? Kinky cheesecake? A role model for girls? A sex object for men?

Like a Rorschach test, an individual’s answer to those questions reveal more about the answerer than the subject. It’s easy to take a pessimistic and cynical view of Marston, his life, and his work. One post on Tumblr wrote: ”

To me it feels like episode 9362528494 of Women Can’t Have Anything when, in the wake of the Wonder Woman movie that empowered so many, we have the attention being put back on this origin story that’s essentially a drawn out bdsm sex game controlled by a man.

The framing device of the entire film is an inquiry into Marston, an interview between Marston (not long before his death from cancer in 1947) and Josette Frank, about the content of his Wonder Women stories. In those pre-Comics Code Authority days (before 1954), Marston’s Wonder Woman stories were hardly the worst offenders when it came to sexuality or violence in a medium supposedly for children. Perhaps what attracted the judgmental eye of others were the subtle hints of free-flowing, polymorphous perversity in the stories, the (barely) subtextual queerness. The inquiry extends into Marston’s academic career and personal life, with Marston answering questions like a man on trail for his life.

For Marston in this film, it’s always about emotional truth, which is contrasted with what might be called material or external truth. Marston’s inventions and interests are all about ways to reveal and express emotional truth: his DISC theory of emotions, his lie detector, his interest in bondage and roleplay (there’s no spanking or any other sadomasochism in their scenes together), and his fiction.

BDSM, in this film, is about emotional revelation, unveiling the sexual-emotional dynamics at work in supposedly everyday life. Marston’s guide into their new realm is the “G-string king” himself, fetish publisher and designer Charles Guyette (which probably never happened). On this side of the fantasy-reality divide, it’s the younger, beautiful Olive who becomes the dominant, the prototype for Wonder Woman, who wields the golden lasso that ties Bill and Elizabeth together.

And it works. Though Bill, Elizabeth and Olive are forced out of Radcliffe College, they form an unofficial three-way marriage, including children from both Elizabeth and Olive. The film goes out of its way to present Marston as a loving husband to both of the women and father to all of their children. He’s not the sultan of the harem, he’s a guy who happens to love two women, and furthermore he knows that the bond between Elizabeth and Olive is as stronger or stronger than his bond with either of them. (In one respect, this is a love story between two women.) While this triad is necessarily in the closet, inside their little pocket reality, there is love and support. The bondage scenes between the three of them have the innocent pleasure of children at play.

It’s his wife Elizabeth who is concerned about external judgment, who sees her own life as a failure after her academic aspirations came to naught, and who sends Olive away after a nosy neighbor spies on one of their bondage sessions.

The film’s emotional climax is when, after Marston is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he invites back Olive to live with them. He gets Elizabeth to join him on their knees before Olive and plead with her to come back to them, and she agrees. It’s a kind of quasi-wedding ceremony, suggesting that Olive is the emotional foundation of their family, benevolently topping from the bottom. As the film makes clear, Elizabeth and Olive stayed together for decades after Bill’s death, and they named their children after each other.

This is not a documentary, let’s be clear. Apart from the scenes with Guyette, there’s also an improbable scene in which Olive lets Elizabeth and Bill spy on a sorority initiation, in which Olive paddles a pledge across her knees. I know that Marston wrote about this kind of thing, and strongly suspect he exaggerated or outright fabricated it. But the film asks us to accept an emotional truth that is different from a factual truth, to connect to the inner, emotional lives of the

Does the film work a little too hard to make Bill Marston a good guy, completely without sexism or ego or selfish motives? Perhaps. Are there some ethically dubious things in this relationship? Yes. We’re at a time when it’s still rare for mainstream media to take an unprejudiced, much less positive, view of BDSM or polyamory. This makes Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman a rare, strange film that somehow works.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

What are the sartorial origins of the black-clad dominatrix? I will skip the more familiar examples from recent years and try to find the earlier examples.

Certainly everyone will remember Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel (“Miss SM Appeal”) in the UK spy TV series The Avengers. Her most overtly kinky costumes were features in the episodes “A Touch of Brimstone” and “Death at Bargain Prices.”

Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers, wearing the leather jumpsuit costume from “Death at Bargain Prices”

A low-budget British take on The Day the Earth Stood Still, Devil Girl from Mars (1954) doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. The main appeal is Patricia Laffan as the title character in a striking costume, made of some black shiny material, possibly vinyl.

The “devil girl”, Nyah, is here to abduct men from Earth to repopulate her planet, an inversion of the usual themes from this type of film. Icy, superior, powerful, and sexually aggressive, Nyah certainly hit the dominatrix marks.

In the black and white era of film, color obviously could not be shown, but black could make a strong impression. A classic icon in American film is the black satin strapless dress worn by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946). In her song and dance number, the light shines sensually on her dress as she dances. Broadcasters have a saying that “radio is a visual medium”, and I’ve often thought that by extension, “film is a tactile medium”. The play of light on the black satin wrapping a woman’s body gives some impression of what it would be like to touch her.

Rita Hayworth in her iconic black satin dress in Gilda (1943)

The Gilda dress was, in turn, inspired by a notorious 1884 painting, Portrait of Madame X, by John Singer Sargent.

Portrait of Madame X, by John Singer Sargent, 1884.

One of Marlene Dietrich‘s earlier vehicles was Dishonored. Her character wore a black leather flying suit (and wore it well).

Marlene Dietrich (left) in Dishonored

For a while, I had assumed that the prototype of the dominatrix was French actress Musidora as “Irma Vep” in the French silent action serial Les Vampires. Her black full-body silk suit made her famous.

At a time when just seeing the shape of a woman’s calf in public was a novelty, Musidora’s nude-but-not-nude body must have been a sensation.

However, I learned that even before Musidora, there was another French actress famous for wearing skin-tight black on film. Josette Andriot, a sportswoman turned actress, was the star of the French silent serial Protea, beginning in 1913. Unlike Irma Vep, Protea was unambiguously a heroine, with a talent for slipping in and out of disguises. Her black body-suit was made of practical cotton, not sensuous silk. She may have been the prototype for the cinematic action heroine.

Unfortunately, the Protea series seems to be some of the many lost films of the silent era. I could only find a clip of part of the first one.

As others have noted, 1920 was around when the materials fetishized in pornography shifted from “soft media” like fur, silk and lace, to “hard media”, such as leather, rubber, and PVC.

In the 19th century, burlesque and music hall theatre were a place for fantasy and play, defying Victorian/Edwardian class and gender norms. Gender impersonators like Vesta Tilley and Malcolm Scott were popular stars. An Amazonian woman named Katie Sandwina (named after male bodybuilder and strongman Eugen Sandow) performed feats of strength. And in contrast to the ankle-length, wide dresses worn by most women, dancers and acrobats could wear tights and body stockings.

Dolly Adams with fringe at the bottom of a short costume, tights, short-heeled boots topped with fringe, cross at neck, cap. Source

The relatively unadorned female silhouette must have been a striking sight.

The other primary source of the dominatrix style was likely the riding habits of upper class women. Equestrianism was one of the few fields in which women could acceptably show athletic prowess. Women wore masculine-influenced, form-fitting costume in the darker colors usually only seen on men’s clothing.

By Constantine von Grimm – Published in Vanity Fair, 5 April 1884.
Downloaded from http://www.philaprintshop.com/images/vf4584.jpg, Public Domain, Link

Victorian women out for a day at the races

It would appear that the dominatrix per se didn’t crystallize until the 1920s or 1930s.

Lindemann, Danielle J. 2012. Dominatrix: gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

“Professional dominatrix” is an archetype that attracts attention out of proportion to the number of people who actually fit that description. For many, they are the symbol of BDSM in general, a representation of the perversity of men, simultaneously attractive and absurd. Are they trickster courtesans manipulating men via their weaknesses, or just another type of sex worker?

Lindemann’s book is a sociological study of professional dominatrixes, based on extensive interviews with pro dommes and their clients in New York City and San Francisco (probably the two largest concentrations of pro dommes in the USA). She spoke with both house of domination employees and independents. Her driving question is, what does professional domination, a small, highly stylized subculture, tell us about the rest of the world. She references Judith Butler’s studies of drag, an exaggeration that highlights an underlying truth. [Pg.10]

This book goes beyond some of the cliches about BDSM and pro domination, particularly the cliche that “the submissive has all the power”. Her interviews with pro dommes and client describe a delicate and nuanced struggle for control between the two parties. [Pg.33] Some pros say they are in control of the scenario, while others view it as more collaborative, even if their persona is the imperious queen. Lindemann describes several “cognitive strategies” pros use to manage this ambiguity, such as “the hustle” or the concept of “getting over” used by street vendors, the belief that despite all appearances, they are the ones who come out ahead of the transaction. [Pg.35] In the case of pros who work in houses of domination, there’s a third party with its own agenda in the equation.[Pg.38]

The “professional” part of professional dominatrix is how pro dommes construct their identity as an elite subset of sex workers, who might deny that they are sex workers at all, or at least exploit a legal loophole to work within the letter of the law. While apparent inexperience might enhance the appeal of a stripper or escort, a domme is supposed to be perfect, a mistress of her field.[Pg.72] Claims of training and experience create a mystique of authenticity. Ideally, a pro domme is supposed to do this as a calling, like an art form. To say “I’m just doing this to pay for dental school.” would spoil the experience[Pg.71, 85] One pro distinguished herself from other “hoochie dommes”: “They are contributing to the deterioration of the honor of what being a domme is.” (emphasis in original) [Pg.86] This is why, for instance, dommes who practice financial domination are viewed with suspicion and disdain by “purists”, who view findom as requiring no skill or artistry.

The other side of this equation is the client, who are trained by the BDSM culture of munches, Fetlife, online ads, etc.[Pg.60] Some clients willingly buy into the mystique of the all-powerful domme, which paradoxically desexualizes the women. By viewing these women as untouchable and asexual, the clients manage their emotional intimacy.[Pg. 113]

The space of the dungeon allows the exploration of alternate gender identities, but always in tension with the roles of the rest of the world. While pro dommes may cultivate the image of la belle dame sans merci, a taboo form of aggressive femininity, in interviews they often describe what they do as a kind of therapy, conforming to the role of woman-as-nurturer-of-men.[Pg.128, 144] This justification suggests that men’s masochistic and submissive desires are pathological, and pro dommes are doing the “work” of sustaining men in their normative sexuality and gender roles. [Pg. 147, 151] This folk belief gives the dommes a benefit too, allowing the expression of an uber-bitch role while being, underneath, a good, caring woman. They can move between different feminine archetypes. Certain subtypes of female domination strongly emphasize the quasi-maternal, nurturing roles of “mother”, “auntie”, “governess”, or “nurse”. (Lindemann suggest this is why the dynamic between dommes and their few female clients is very different; these client have no social power to reverse.[Pg.161]) BDSM may play with conventional gender roles, but it can’t completely escape them. [Pg.168]

The book ends with a woefully short, two-page historical background. Lindemann’s research says that “dominatrix”, in the BDSM sense, first appears in 1967, in The Bizarre Lovemakers, by Bruce Rogers. “Dungeon”, in the BDSM sense, goes back to 1974, in a classified ad in the Los Angeles Free Press. [Pg. 200] Though the terms “dominatrix” and “dungeon” are pretty new, there’s plenty of evidence that women provided professional domination services in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lindemann could have provided even a brief reference to Ian Gibson’s The English Vice. This is a personal quibble from a historian’s perspective on a fascinating and informative book.

The paradox of the “bitchy nurturer” put me in mind of Hannah Cullwick, and how Arthur Munby was fascinated by the strength and roughness of her body while emphasizing the sweetness and gentleness of her nature. We know that there were a lot of ageplay elements of their relationship, with him sitting on her lap or being carried. Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather talked a lot about the “two mothers” of the Victorian bourgeois home, the “wife” and the “maid”. In our own time, there are still divides between good women and bad women, and the narrative of the “bitchy nurturer” allows us to accept this apparent paradox. The dominatrix may appear to be the polar opposite of the housewife, but they both do emotional labor for men. This rationale turns up in many narratives of fictional dommes, such as Lady Heather in CSI: Las Vegas.