This image, presumably the cover of an old men’s adventure magazine from the ’50s or ’60s, is puzzling initially. Why the shaving brush and scissors? Guerilla barbers? This is almost certainly a reference to les femmes tondues. In post-liberation France, women who allegedly collaborated with occupying fascists (especially “horizontal collaboration”) were publicly shaved bald. Like the “Nazi dominatrix” trope, this is the conflation of deviant politics (collaboration) with deviant female sexuality (“slut shaming”). Women are used as ritual scapegoats for a community’s problems (in this case, the legacy of occupation and collaboration in France) and symbolically “killed.” See Frost’s book Sex Drives
Interesting to see women-in-danger in the context of anti-fascist, “good guy” forces like the French resistance. This can be applied to just about any conflict, or to put it another way, any conflict or social anxiety can provide a framing narrative for the scene of woman-in-distress.
The Venus Observations blog focuses on the history of American newstand porn magazines, particularly the competition between Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler and their various spin-offs and competitors. In the mid 1970s, the major magazines were in a one-step-forward, one-step-back dance between the softcore, soft-focus, lots of pubic hair, arty aesthetic and the harder, sharp-focus, exposed labia aesthetic of later decades. Fear of alienating advertisers and censors kept editors nervous, but fear of losing market share made them experiment. E.g. a nude pictorial with a 22-year-old, very young looking model wearing a tank top with “12″ on it.
In February 1976, Penthouse ran its first fetish-themed pictorial.
The real barrier breaking pictorial for February, however, was one called My Funny Valentine. Penthouse had had a (comparatively) few girl/girl pictorials before but this month they published their first fetish photographs. Dressed up in leather and vinyl the girls were depicted by photographer Stan Malinowski indulging in light bondage and whipping each other.
[...]
This pictorial, in the days when this sort of fetish was very underground and not displayed as a matter of course by female pop stars, caused some controversy in the press. Letters to the magazine, however, were universally appreciative (and Penthouse did, as we have seen, publish critical letters at this point) and asked for more.
At the time, mainstream magazines were nervous about showing a woman’s anus or labia in interior pictorials or their nipples on the cover, so this must have been a bold experiment for the publishers to show this kind of underground sexuality. Perhaps they discovered, as Irving Klaw and others had discovered in earlier decades, that fetish pictorials could tap a niche market without being sexually explicit.
My article on the strange case of Maria Monk and her connections to anti-Catholic propaganda and the nun as a fetish archetype has been published in Maisonneuve magazines 10th anniversary issue. (Print only, for the moment. And no, I don’t know what the monkeys are doing in the illustration.)
This was my first article in a national, glossy magazine for a while, and I hope this carries with it some prestige. It took several rewrites to get it done, but overall it looks pretty good. There’s only so much you can do in 1,500 words.
I had wanted to include a comparison between Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Story of O, since both are narratives of initiation. I wonder if there’s a more direct connection, if as a girl Anne Desclos (aka Pauline Reage) read some bit of Gothic pulp or anti-Catholic tract and it gestated in her mind the way Anna Freud remembered a snippet from a book about book on medieval knights and wove that into her fantasies.
An excerpt from an early draft:
While the content of Awful Disclosures and related works survive to this day mainly in anti-Catholic crank conspiracy literature, the format has been stripped of any overt political or religious message and used in a variety of pornographic works. The classic Story of O (1954), written by Anne Desclos (who once flirted with the idea of being a nun), follows a similar structure to Awful Disclosures. Like Maria Monk, O is initiated into a secret society where she is to serve her new masters sexually. The orders O receives echo the Mother Superior’s commandments to Maria Monk: “You are here to serve your masters… Your hands are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, most especially, any of your bodily orifices, which we may explore or penetrate at will… both this flogging and the chain… are intended less to make you suffer, scream, or shed tears than to feel through this suffering, that you are not free but fettered, and to teach you that you are totally dedicated to something outside yourself.”
If Disclosures uses transgressive sexuality to deliver a warning of the dangers of transgressive religion, O is a sexual fantasy built on nun-like selfless devotion. Maria Monk returns to the Protestant world to bear witness, but O throws herself deeper and deeper into the underworld, attaining a kind of martyrdom.
I also wanted to include PETA’s campaign of images of people (usually attractive women) as animals in cages or even as packed meat products, images that require only the slightest shift in optic to become pornographic.
Taking a very different approach to the likes of Jeff Dunas’ and Earl Miller’s location-based, soft-focus romanticism he [photographer Stan Malinowski] posed his unnamed models in a studio with just a standard studio backdrop and bright, even harsh, lighting.
[...]
The text, as it is, consists of a number of four line verses of poetry (you can see some examples further down) which are very much themed on the idea of one woman inflicting pain on the other. No lovey-dovey “friends who became lovers mush” or, indeed, any suggestion that really the ladies, of course, prefer men, as most of the other girl/girl sets suggested. So the text is as radical for Penthouse, as the pictures.
While it may be a bit of a stretch to associate Penthouse with progressive views of female sexuality, this pictorial and its accompanying text at least breaks with the idea of female-female sex as an adjunct to heterosexuality or associated with pastoralism and coy “friends become lovers” narratives. Despite apparent reader approval, Penthouse did not take a turn to the hardcore after this.
This is obviously a much more professional piece of work than was probably common in BDSM porn of the time, and also in a publication that had a much wider distribution and larger readership than your typical under-the-counter bondage magazine. It may have been the first-encounter for a lot of people.
Gloria Brame posted scans from “Legs and Attitudes“, a leg fetish magazine published in July 1930, Paris.
In 1930, women’s legs and lower bodies were a relatively recent discovery, having been hidden away in Western fashion for centuries. The photos posted seem based on the idea of glimpsing a stocking top or bare thigh in an unguarded moment (in a boudoir, after tripping on the street, a woman carelessly sitting to let her skirt slip), not a brazen display.
The Vintage Sleaze blog has the story behind the Fads and Fancies fetish magazine, published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and its signature artist known as Janine, actually a woman by the name of Reina Bull.
The astounding drawings by an anonymous artist known only as “Janine” who drew work for the sleazy Utopia magazine “Fads and Fancies” a British fetish magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The work is no longer anonymous. It was done by a woman all right, but Janine wasn’t her real name. Fads and Fancies was published by Utopia, who printed fetish material remarkably similar to Nutrix and Irving Klaw, and at roughly the same time.
[...]
Janine had an incredible, unique, eccentric and curious style likely developed to cater to the audience. Particular parts of the plump participants protrude depending on the proclivities she wished to portray. Which is an alliterated way of saying big boobs and big butts. Kinky and unreal, but then certainly enticing to the readers who must have been “big” fans (pun intended.) To the rest of us, they look hilarious…Dolly Parton on Steroids! The work takes an “all-purpose” approach to fetishists. The artist can not figure out if she is titillating a shoe fetish, a butt fetish, a fat fetish, a breast fetish, a stocking fetish…if the idea of a fetish is to focus on one particular object, there was something kinky for all in Janine’s curious drawings. At the time, the fetish underground was not yet defined, but the publishers knew if they appealed to a handful of eccentricities, they would reach a market.
Fads belongs in a tradition of English fetish magazines that includes Photo Bits and London Life, and goes back at least to the 1870s when the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine took a turn for the pervy. The business model seems to be, “give the punters what they want”.
Nowadays, Rule 34 is in full effect and every fetish has its own Tumblr.
Being Canadian, I’m always interested in Canada’s contributions to the sexual edge of culture. I was delighted to stumble across the story of Justice Weekly, a true crime tabloid newspaper published in Canada that frequently included fetish letters. “…popular topics were discipline, punishment and humiliation of males (especially ‘errant husbands’ and spoiled post-adolescent children) by authoritarian/domineering females, transvestites and authority figures such as school principals, judges and law-enforcement officials.”
The Justice Weekly was an 8 ½ by 11, 16 page newspaper published in Toronto Ontario Canada and distributed across the United States. It had a publication run from 1964 [sic] to about 1972. What made the Justice Weekly unique was its content. The paper covered news that was, by and large, considered far to risqué or just plain sexual for others to print. If a man was arrested and found to be wearing his wife’s underwear, it was written about in the Justice Weekly. If a “bawdy house” was raided by the police, all the details were to be found in the Justice Weekly. Cross dressing, fetishism, S&M all had a prominent place in this newspaper and its bigger brother The Justice Monthly.
[...]
Running for the next three or four pages was a “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Meets Girl. Boy Meets Boy” section. I read through the pages of ads laughing at much of the wording. “Sincere couple seeks others interested in topics written in this newspaper”.
Allison Jacques at McGill university has already written a paper(PDF) on the tabloid, viewing it as a window into Canada’s queer/kink subculture in the postwar period. From her grant application:
Chapter 2 focuses on the letters to the editor published in Justice Weekly in the 1940s and early 1950s, which were concerned almost exclusively with corporal punishment. Specifically, the tabloid regularly printed long narratives of spankings given and received. A combination of textual analysis and historical research reveals that these letters are rooted in centuries-old erotic narratives of flagellation and, in fact, bear a close resemblance in both style and substance to stories and letters published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the recurring themes and motifs in the letters of Justice Weekly are nearly identical to those found in historical pornography, they also make a great deal of cultural sense when viewed in terms of postwar concerns about the Canadian family and the perceived threat of juvenile delinquency. This chapter suggests that [publisher and editor Philip H.] Daniels was able to link the spanking letters in his paper to a real postwar panic over juvenile delinquency, enabling him not only to attract readers with titillating content but also to portray Justice Weekly as a relevant and legitimate newspaper.
[...]
Particularly from the late 1950s, the personals in Justice Weekly dealt almost entirely with unorthodox sexual desires, including sadomasochism, fetishes, and swinging. Significantly, Justice Weekly‘s column functioned as a rare site where certain sexual subcultures were made visible. The tabloid was not the only source of kinky personal ads in the 1960s, but it was a pioneer in the genre as one of the earliest and most enduring sources. The aim of this chapter is, first, to locate Justice Weekly within a history of personal advertising in Canada (a history that is almost entirely unexamined) and, second, to explore the editorial strategies used by Daniels that allowed him to publish and promote the ads while also distancing his paper from the sexual communities represented therein.
It would be interesting to see the interest in spanking/domestic discipline as an anxiety/arousal response to fears about the breakdown of the traditional family and the rise of youth culture.
As discussed previously, there have been a long series of different publications that host fetish letters, going back as far as the 1860s with The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, and continuing into the 20th century with London Life and Fads and Fancies and Photo Bits. Note that the magazines with fetish letters are from several different genres: EDM was aimed at middle-class women, London Life at a men’s style audience, and Justice Weekly was true crime.
I found another page on the Stalag novels, a sub-genre of porn/pulp novels published in Israel in the 1960s, and featuring sex-and-violence adventure tales set in concentration camps.
The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
What’s fascinating about the Stalag novels is their relationship to the real life violence and horror of WWII and the Holocaust.
The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch,” was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.
The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.
In keeping with pornographic tradition, these books had Israeli writers, editors and readers, but maintained the pretense of being real-life, first-person memoirs translated from English. Porn/pulp could say, in a distorted and altered fashion, what could not yet be said in polite, official discourse.
This ambiguity extends to Yehiel De-Nur, alias Ka-Tsetnik 135633 (“concentration camper” in Yiddish combined with his identification number), K. Tsetnik, Karl Zetinski, an author of
More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik “opened the door,” and “the Stalag writers learned a lot from him,” Mr. Narkis said.
[...]
One of K. Tzetnik’s biggest literary successes, “Doll’s House,” [or The House of Dolls] published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author’s sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.
Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.
The book tells the story of a girl captured and forced into sexual slavery in German “joy divisions”. (This, incidentally, was the origin of the name of the British post-punk band Joy Division.)
The House of Dolls (full text in English) is the site of multiple, divergent discourses: some see it as historical fact (and even teach it in high schools), some as literary fiction, some as exploitative porn, some as pure propaganda. Did De-Nur actually tell the story of his younger sister? Did he even have a sister? Was there a diary? Was there a real girl, or did De-Nur construct a composite of multiple real people in similar experiences? Or did he just make the whole thing up out of his imagination, a distortion of his own experiences in the camps, altered to be more commercial by playing on the tried and true “virtue in distress” theme?
This connects to De-Nur’s motivations as a writer: was he being factual about a reality that could only be comprehended as pornographic/horror? Was he building an identity as an author that was an amalgam of multiple real sources? As De-Nur’s multiple aliases and pseudonyms suggest, we’re in a complex, ambiguous area where fact and fantasy blur, and fantasy may point to a greater truth than the merely factual, but also where fantasy may obscure the literal truth.
After all, many pro-slavery writers criticized Harriet Beecher Stowe and her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, calling her a “peddler of smut” and debating the factual accuracy of her book. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind dismissed Stowe’s book as pernicious fabrication, for example.
De-Nur was scheduled to testify at the Eichman trial, but he fainted before his testimony properly began. It’s a frustrating detail, as if he is deliberately refusing to speak in terms of the literal truth, and preferring to speak in the poetic mode.
Even if De-Nur had no exploitative intent, his works like The House of Dolls and Piepel (about Nazi abuse of young boys) is said to be the inspiration of the later Stalag novels, a case of “vulgarization” (cf. novels of sentiment decaying into the Gothic novels).
Meanwhile in American, men’s adventure magazines of the 1940s through to the 1960s (known as “sweats” because they generally featured paintings of perspiring blue-collar men in peril on the covers) had their own Nazi-exploitation imagery.
Some were “virtue in distress” images, with women menaced by thugs in Nazi uniforms. Others showed men at the mercy of female SS officers, who had only the thinnest of historical justifications.
Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 were women.In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a guard shortage.
The German title for this position, Aufseherin (plural Aufseherinnen), means female overseer or attendant.
Female guards were generally low class to middle class and had no work experience; their professional background varied: one source mentions former matrons, hairdressers, street car ticket takers, opera singers, or retired teachers.
Volunteers were recruited by ads in German newspapers asking for women to show their love for the Reich and join the SS-Gefolge (“SS- Retinue” an SS support and service organisation for women). Additionally, some were conscripted based on data in their SS files. The League of German Girls acted as a vehicle of indoctrination for many of the women.
As discussed previously, the Nazi dominatrix is an attempt to link deviant sexuality with deviant politics, not to mention carrying unpleasant misogynist connotations (i.e. the belief that given the opportunity, women will be utterly depraved and cruel)
Amputee fetish site Overground.be has a collection of amputee fetish and letters published in London Life magazine, running from 1924 to 1941 and most signed “Wallace Stort”. Some of the letters also concerned prosthetic limbs, orthopedic boots, crutches and other devices. These were published alongside other types of fetish letters and stories.
The letters almost always involved testimonies from usualy young and nice looking women who are amputees, or otherwise “crippled”, in general quite happy with their condition of being “limbless”, or from men who have been involved with such women. Many letters are recommendations and advises from fellow amputee women, about the wear of prosthesis or fashion for the disabled woman. Whether those testimonies are real or fake is left to the appreciation of the reader, but are nevertheless always pleasantly old-fashioned to read.
Sampled over 50 years later, quite the most intriguing and now irrecoverable flavour of London Life was the regular reference to the attractions of limbless and lame women. At intervals over several years from 1927, a writer named Wallace Stort contributed lengthy, sometimes serialised stories whose heroines were always young beautiful spirited creatures who moved in an implausible theatrical world of limbless girls and their admirers.
A probably less than enthusiastic lady artist provided most of the the rather vapid illustrations of a demi-monde where young women rest contentedly on chaise-longues, their delicately chaste gowns revealing fewer limbs than even the heroine possesses. She is in every scene, in and out of the boudoir, resting or sweetly poised on her one dainty leg. Even when she is obliged to toy with an equally dainty crutch, it leaves her hand invitingly free for dalliance with a clean-cut (and unimpaired) hero.
Though there were definitely amuptee fetishists in the Edwardian and Victorian eras, I wonder if this had anything to do with living in England in the years after the first World War, when there were visibly injured people everywhere (obviously most of them would have been men). Also consider that this period would have been with first time in centuries when women’s legs were regular sights, thanks to rising hemlines and even the occasional trouser.
The rest of the Overground site has many interesting articles, essays and testimonials on amputee devotees and wannabees.
If you need more evidence that the Fifty Shades trilogy is actually an anti-kink book, look no further than the Fifty Shades one-off magazine, probably on a newsstand near you.
Apart from cocktail recipes, and an onion-skin deep introduction to kink history, there is an actual article by “Chloe”.
The article, “Sub? Domme? Neither!” has the subhed “Chloe took a journey of self-discovery that had her on both sides of a paddle before she decided that she just wanted to cuddle and make out”.
There are people who take a pass through the kink world before deciding that it isn’t for them. But if we take this magazine as a didactic instrument, i.e. one that teaches about kink, then this multi-page feature article seems pretty clear. The telos is vanilla sex, and implicitly heterosexual monogamy. The land of kink is where you visit for a week, and never leave the resort, before heading back to the mainland of cuddling and making out.
I’m sure people are arguing that Fifty Shades is normalizing BDSM (I’m more concerned about it normalizing abusive relationships), but this particular artifact shows just how deeply conservative a text it is. It creates a system of heterosexual vanilla monogamy that fences BDSM into a ghetto.
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.
Cover of Playboy August 1983, featuring Sybil Danning
Back in August 1983, Playboy magazine ran a feature on the New York City sexual underground, “A Walk On The Wild Side”, by John R. Petersen (Pg. 88).
Right from the start, Petersen sets up a “descent into the underworld”/”Heart of Darkness” scenario.
It begins with a taxi ride to the West Village in Manhattan, near the docks. Medieval map makers would have marked this space with fire-breathing dragons.
There’s even a guardian at the threshold, whose warnings are duly disregarded.
I have heard about this place from a friend who has been covering the New York sex scene for 20 years. “I thought I had seen everything, ” he told me, “but there are things happening at the Hellfire Club that made me nervous. There is one room… I couldn’t stay in there for more than a minute. You’re on your own. I won’t go back.”
Petersen’s descent into the underworld is in the “bad old” New York of the 1980s, when the city was expected to be an urban hellhole where anything was possible. It’s also long before the modern kink scene, when everybody operated on a first name basis. Some of the activities describe sound more swinger-y, perhaps a sign of a time when HIV had yet to sink into public consciousness. There’s no mention of safewords, Safe-Sane-and-Consensual, or organizations like the Til Eulenspiegel Society.
He quickly divides the people at the Hellfire into those who are seen and those who see, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
It is clear the crowd consists of two kinds of people: the spectators and the performers. There are those who come to present the pure form of their desire, without apology or pretense. For them, the presence of an audience contributes to their excitement. Their ability to respond to one another in front of a crowd of strangers seems to be a declaration. They can achieve that private space against all odds. The observers are something else. They cannot participate, they can only watch.
Petersen makes it sound a little like the cult adult film Cafe Flesh (1982), a future dystopia in which “negatives” get sick if they actually have sex, so they must come to the title venue and watch other people perform stylized sexual acts.
…my attention is drawn to a couple on my other side. A preppie tries to pick up a similarly straight lady. “Are you into S/M? Are you submissive? Most of the women who come here are into domination. It’s hard to find someone submissive. By any chance, do you like to be spanked? My name is Fred. I like to sky-dive and drive my Mercedes fast.” Scratch the surface and this is just another singles bar.
I’m baffled by the thought of a heterosexual kink scene in which submissive women are scarce. Perhaps claiming to be dominant was seen as safer in that environment.
Petersen emphasizes his colonial paradigm under which he operates:
Years ago, Richard Halliburton could swim the Dardanelles or spend the night in the Taj Mahal and write an article that took readers to a new world. Nowadays, the best adventure stories are sexual.
He writes with disappointment about Plato’s Retreat, “Couples lie on pillows watching porn movies. Times have changed: the scene is dead.” His frustration increases as he visit S/M clubs where a handful of men remain and talk about the good old days, or engage in consciousness raising sessions. Subcultures are built on dreams of a promised Utopia, and the flipside of that is nostalgia.
Petersen is a bit more moved by the performances at Mistress Belle’s theatre.
In the next act, a girl is forced to perform a pagan ritual, to hold a skull above her head. […] A man who is swathed in a tattoo of indecipherable design lights a candle and then, with a sweep of his arm, throws hot wax across her body. The act is exact, graceful, succinct. As the drops of wax meet her skin, she does not flinch. He takes the skull from her hands, binds her feet, then hoists her upside down until she spins free of the floor. He works his way through a ring of candles, splashing her body with wax, then extinguishes each one in turn. He removes a knife from his belt and slips it beneath her panties. Blood flows down her stomach in rivulets. He lowers her and they leave the stage. (Later, I hear him explain that the blood was calf’s blood from a butcher shop on Sixth Avenue.)
However, he betrays his lack of empathy when he is unable to process his reaction to a man who has his scrotum nailed to a board by Mistress Belle.
The nail freak appears twice a week, I am told. He is famous for his idiocy. I try to figure out what motivates him. Maybe he needs to prove he is an ironman, that his genitals are invincible. Maybe he is just nuts. It is beyond me.
Petersen doesn’t mention any attempt to interview any of these people, whether they are Mistress Belle’s slave girls or amateurs who want to perform at her shows. He does grasp the importance of trust in this situation, which may be lacking in both committed relationships and what would now be called hookup culture.
Back at the Hellfire Club, Petersen finally starts interviewing people. He starts with a leather crafter, Frank:
…you can’t really explain it. People are always trying to come up with reasons. So-and-so does it to relieve the tensions of being an executive–things like that. But that’s bullshit. We do it because it’s fascinating, because it requires our full attention. It is not casual sex. It is not the old in and out. Most people don’t think about sex; they just do it. We think about it.
One of Frank’s ladies, Deborah, says:
“My parents never showed affection, except when they gave me a beating,” she says. “I knew they loved me when I did something wrong and they cared enough to punish me. I was the only experience of love I had. I don’t know any other way to feel emotion. I was married. I had two children. My husband fucked me while I was asleep. I never came. Then I started hanging out with Frank.”
Unlike a lot of writing on BDSM in this period, Petersen at least partially gets it:
Who is the master and who is the slave? Most agree that the masochist sets the limits; he yields to the master but within clear bounds. Slave and master are equals. They know their parts. This is not a power play but a play.
[…]
… I still had to consider the possibility that those people [in the clubs] actually reach true ecstasy because they know exactly what it is they want. Normal heterosexuals may be blundering, ambiguous, noncommunicative by comparison. Without a doubt, the people I’d seen in the leather-and-chain lounges had tapped the primal power of a sexual script — a script that for most of us will always remain beneath the surface.
The word “normal” aside, this is pretty positive view of BDSM for a mainstream article of this period.
There are a couple of principles I keep in mind when studying history. The first is, “You have to work with the evidence you have.” We have no way of knowing how many people secretly had relationships like Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, but left no historical evidence. Likewise, I and other scholars of this particular field have to contend with the lack of historical material about lesbian SM before the 1970s. Maybe somewhere there’s an old journal or manuscript or audiotape sitting in somebody’s basement, and someday somebody will find it and open up a new field of study.
The second principle is, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It’s highly unlikely there were no lesbian women doing SM before 1974, but we can only make cautious, educated inferences based on what evidence we do have.
Thankfully, somebody scanned and posted old issues of Lesbian Tide, which contain what may be the earliest mentions of BDSM in lesbian media. As I mentioned before, lesbian SM emerged into visibility at the same time and in dialectic with more restrictive theorizations of lesbian-feminist sexuality, and it cannot be discussed without also discussing this conflict.
Perhaps visible lesbian sadomasochism began inOctober 1974 (PDF)i, when Lesbian Tide published “The Spirit is Feminist but the flesh is?,” by Karla Jay. In the opening paragraph, Jay claimed, “I’ve seen countless sisters rant against any sort of sexual inequality in a lesbian relationship only to hear later that their favorite sexual ‘sport’ is sado-masochism.”ii Jay’s off-hand mention and the apparent lack of response from readers suggests that lesbian SM was a known practice, if not common or widely accepted. However, “…social pressure has also forced some sado-masochists and lesbians living as prostitutes to live in this second closet.”iii The essay concerns the conflicts between people’s desires and fantasies and their ideologies. “What’s the poor lesbian to do who sincerely believes she should act out or somehow explore her sexual fantasies, only to discover her fantasies center, for example, on sadism, masochism, or some kind of fetishism?”iv
Jay explored the controversy among lesbians over sadomasochism along with other practices like dildo use and prostitution, and asked whether one could or should control one’s sexual fantasies. She favored individuals following their own consciousness, but acknowledged she had no resolution to those conflicts. Lesbian sexuality was a diverse and complex field.vFrom the beginning, lesbian sadomasochism had a complex and difficult relationship with lesbian-feminism.
The next year, Barbara Lipschutz (aka Barbara Ruth, aka Drivenwoman) published “Cathexis (on the nature of S&M)” in Hera, reprinted in Lesbian Tide May-June 1977 (PDF).vi Lipschutz idealized lesbian sadomasochism, proclaiming it was not only feminist but superior to heterosexual vanilla sex in providing women pleasure, because of women’s supposedly superior relational abilities.vii In her follow up article, “Coming Out on S&M” in 1976, Lipschutz linked SM and lesbianism as personal truths that were difficult to admit in public.viii
In 1976, Lesbian Tide printed a transcript (PDF) of a conscious-raising session in which women discussed sadomasochism in a variety of ways: as body work for expressing emotions (“being restrained has helped me with releasing energy in my pelvic area that has been blocked”), as intense expressions of devotion (“Taking or having complete control, or having another woman give me that much control, total control, to me is one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had.”), as uncertain territory (“Sometimes I wonder how far I would really go, either as a sadist or masochist? What are my limits? What are healthy limits? What are feminist limits? What are human limits?”), or part of a continuum of all sexuality (“Sexuality, any kind of sex, then bondage and dominance, and then sado-masochism is all on a continuum of control. Most sex in this society is based on control, on giving and taking. I think this can be real unhealthy or real wonderful and beautiful….”).ix
Later came Patrick (then known as Pat) Califia’s article “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality”, published in The Advocate in 1979. Califia recalled later:
I was terrified when I wrote it. I kept getting up in the middle of typing to lie down until my nausea subsided and my hands stopped shaking. When that issue of The Advocate hit the newsstands, it was days before I could actually look at my words in print. x
Califia described the lack of organizational infrastructure for S/M lesbians, even in the post-Stonewall years. While lesbian bars had existed for decades, lesbians had not yet developed more specialized sexual subcultures, or at least not to the same degree as gay men.
Lesbian S/M isn’t terribly well-organized yet. […] We don’t have bars. We don’t even have newspapers or magazines with sex ads. I sometimes think the gay subculture must have looked like this when gay life first became urbanized. Since our community depends on word-of-mouth and social networks, we have to work very hard to keep it going. It’s a survival issue.xi
When I came out as a lesbian sadomasochist, there was no place to go. A notice I put up in my local feminist bookstore was torn down. It took months of painstaking detective work to track down other women who were into S/M. There was no public lesbian S/M community to find, so I had to help build one.xii
S/M lesbians had to find allies in gay men and pro-dommes, for education and venues such as the Catacombs fisting club and other gay leather bars that allowed women.
***
iIn 1972, Echo of Sappho published a seven-page interview with Beverly, a member of the recently-founded Eulenspiegel Society. Beverly described herself as lesbian and often co-topped a male submissive with another lesbian. However, she also said she refused to dominate another woman on feminist grounds. Warner 2011, Pg. 54
iiWarner 2011, Pg. 27-29, quoting Karla Jay, “The Spirit is Feminist but the flesh is?” Lesbian Tide, (Oct 1974): p. 1
vThat Jay used a paraphrase of Matthew 26:41 in the Christian Bible (“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”) is almost prophetic, as much of the “lesbian sex wars” paralleled Judeo-Christian themes concerning the body and the soul.
In my research, I’ve observed patterns in the past that we still see today.
Cover of Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
For instance, in the 1830s, a woman named Maria Monk turned up in New York City. She claimed that she had been held prisoner as a sex slave in a convent in Montreal, where she had been subjected to bizarre tortures and told to sexually serve the priests who entered the convent via an underground tunnel. Any offspring of these unions would be baptized, strangled and disposed of in lime pits.
In a nation full of anti-Catholic and nativist ideologies, Monk’s (probably ghost-written) book, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, became a bestseller. Problem was, when people investigated the convent in Montreal, they could find no evidence Monk had ever been there, no tunnels, no lime pits, and none of the bizarre torture devices she described.
Awful Disclosures remained a staple of anti-Catholic propaganda, even during the presidential campaign of John F Kennedy. Anti-Catholicism frequently traded in sexual imagery, linking religious deviance (from sober Protestantism) with sexual deviance. This contributed to the rise of “sexy nun” erotica.
This eroticization wasn’t unique to anti-Catholicism.
In the decades leading up to the US Civil War, northerners and abolitionists painted the slaveholding South as a hotbed of sexual impropriety. This slid into eroticization, both before and after the war, leading to books like Memoirs of Dolly Morton, which purported to be a white woman’s story of being held effectively as a slave.
Portrait of Delphine Lalaurie
In antebellum New Orleans, the house of socialite Delphine Lalaurie was destroyed in a fire, which revealed the bodies of tortured slaves. Over time, this incident has grown into legend, depicting Lalaurie as a witch with insatiable and perverse sexual appetites. In the exploitation film, Goodbye Uncle Tom, Lalaurie was played by a beautiful woman slinking around her manor in a see-through nightie, standing over a pile of naked slaves drugged with opium.
DVD cover of Goodbye Uncle Tom, showing Lalaurie embracing a bound black man.
In an era that professed the idealization of women as pure and chaste and maternal, there was nothing more terrifying than a sexually aggressive woman. The existence of a woman like the mythologized Lalaurie was the symptom of the deviance and depravity of the South. It was also, for certain people, sexually arousing.
Even in the 19th century, militarism and authoritarian regimes were linked with sexual deviance. Starting in the 1930s, fascism was strongly associated with homosexuality, fetishism, sadism and masochism.
Cover of Men Today magazine, July 1963
After WWII, American men’s adventure magazines created an iconography of male and female sadists wearing swastikas, titillating with the promise of sadism and aggressive women.
Dyanne Thorne and Gregory Knoph in Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (1975)
Starting with Love Camp 7 in 1969, we had the beginnings of the Nazisploitation subgenre of film. This included highbrow dramas like Cabaret and The Night Porter, and grindhouse classics like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS in 1975. Dyanne Thorne played Ilsa (very loosely based on real world wife of a camp commandant, Ilse Koch), the icy blonde mistress of bizarre medical experiments, who takes male prisoners to her bed for one night, then has them castrated.
Dyanne Thorne with Tanya Boyd and Marilyn Joy in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976)
Despite dying at the end of the film, Ilsa returned in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, now working for petro-states and not having aged a day. Thorne also played a similar character in two more unofficial sequels, Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.
Even if she dies at the end of the film, Ilsa always comes back, off to serve some other regime: Stalinst gulag, North American mafia, or Latin American dictatorship. The “Nazi dominatrix” archetype, both terrifying and titillating, can be attached to any politically deviant regime. Only a truly corrupt society could produce such an unwomanly woman.
And this is still happening.
The “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, alleging ritualized sexualized abuse of children, deployed the same tropes of strange abuse, hidden realms of tunnels and secret rooms, etc.
During the 2016 US Presidential election, there was the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, alleging the Democratic Party leadership ran a secret child prostitution/pornography ring out of a hidden secret room underneath a pizza parlor in Washington DC. This would be ridiculous if not for the fact that at least one person believed it enough to enter the restaurant and fire off a gun.
Even more recently, there’s the “Frazzledrip” theory. This claims that there’s a snuff video circulating in the dark web which shows Hillary Clinton and her right hand woman, Huma Abedin, mutilating and killing children in a Satanic ritual. The alt-right types who have spread this story have picked up on the idea of portraying Clinton as the “evil woman” archetype, just like Ilsa, Delphine Laulaurie, and the other monster women. It never gets old.
The sexual dynamics of the American conservative resurgence have been fascinating over the last few years.
Evie Magazine is a conservative women’s magazine first published in 2019. Its aesthetics and content reflect the “trad life/trad wife” movement, creating a pastoral fantasy of rural, agrarian labour combined with an idealized hetero-nuclear family. At the fringier end of things, Evie’s content splices into ideologies like pronatalism, anti-vaccination, the benefits of “raw milk” and other health quackery, transphobia, anti-feminism, COVID denial, QAnon, etc.
It’s epitomized by the “tradwife” image, a (white) long-haired woman in a white or print dress, hair kerchief, and cowboy boots who has had borne and raised several children while running a country farm and baking her own bread daily, and yet somehow still looks like a fashion model. She does no paid labour outside the home, instead leaving that to her commuting (white) husband.
In December 2024, Evie released the “raw milk maid dress” for sale. According to the web site copy, this $190 USD cotton dress was “Designed in the French countryside and inspired by the hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe” and has “a flirty slit above the knee”.
It also says that the model depicted, Penny, “is wearing a size 4-6 and is 5′ 11” with a 32G cup”. No indication how this would look on a woman with a more statistically average body.
The response from Evie’s readers criticized the dress for being too impractical for working on a farm, too revealing for a movement that believes in female modesty, or both.
In my opinion, the dress inadvertently gives away the fantasy that drives the tradlife/tradwife movement. It bears as much resemblance to actual woman’s workwear as the cliche French maid outfit does to actual domestic servants’ attire. It’s costume, not clothing. Evie had to confront that, though billed as a magazine for conservative women, it’s committed to a male fantasy.
Evie’s lifestyle coverage includes sexuality of course. The sexual content is a new iteration of an attempt for sexual conservatives to take the sexual high ground, by expanding the realm of acceptable sexuality to include a wider range of behavior as long as it is within the bounds of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. To apply Gayle Rubin’s “magic circle” model, they are cautiously expanding the bounds of the circle along certain axes, but contracting them along others. That’s why Evie‘s Sex department publishes informational articles with titles like:
“The Feminine Art of Giving Your Husband A Breathtaking Lingam Massage”
“A Wife’s Steamy Secrets for Amazing Shower Sex”
“What to Expect the First Time You Have Sex”
“A Wife’s Secrets to Making Yourself Taste Delicious”
To be fair to Evie, it also includes pieces with titles like:
“How Do I Develop A Good Relationship With My Body When I Was Never Taught About Sex?”
“What You Should’ve Been Taught About Orgasms In Sex-Ed”
“The Destructive Lies We Tell Women About Sexual Pleasure”
I’m not qualified to say if this is good sexual advice, but at least there is some consideration of women’s sexual health and pleasure. Nonetheless, the repeated use of “husband” and “wife”, not “your man” or “a woman”, shows just how committed Evie is to heterosexual monogamous marriage.
Much like the concluding conversation of the ponyplay episode of Bones, what appears like an offensive maneuver is actually defensive. You can see it in the article’s opening, which sets up the straw-man of kinky people being sexual snobs. “If you’re a woman who enjoys vanilla sex, you’re a square. A dud. You’re super unsexy, and you’re just not cool enough if you don’t cater to modern men’s “near-universal” kinky proclivities.” Exaggerate or fabricate an aggression on yourself, and anything you do in response is justified as self-defense.
The article abruptly shifts topics to the alleged crisis of too many young virgin men.
Many speculate this downward trend into perpetual sexlessness is the result of widespread porn use among younger generations. And one could certainly ascertain that the kink crowd is modeling its behaviors towards what they see in porn.
Note the weasel words of “many speculate” and “one could certainly ascertain”, without any support. In Evie’s view, whether the problem is too much or too little sexual activity, the cause is always pornography.
Evie’s final rhetorical maneuver is to conflate BDSM with partner violence, and to completely elide the possibility of female dominant/male submissive sexuality (and anything other than heterosexual monogamy). In Evie’s view, femdom/malesub is like trying to divide by zero.
Some men can get off on sheer humiliation through performing degrading sexual acts. Just as easily as some men can compartmentalize women into being hoes vs. angels they take home to meet their mother, they can compartmentalize sex in the same manner – degrading, emotionless, humiliating sex with women they don’t care about vs. sweet, passionate, sensual lovemaking with women they actually do care about.
Strangely, this echoes the anti-BDSM writings in the feminist anthologies Against Sadomasochismand Unleashing Feminism, which try to convince their readers that vanilla lesbian sex is okay and just as exciting as kink.
People who are bad at sex are the first to glamorize (and lionize) being bad at sex by declaring it a “kink” while shaming others who have a healthy, functioning relationship with sex for not being kinky.
This same anti-kink discourse pops up in a tradwife magazine’s articles, lesbian feminist essays, and mainstream investigative procedural television. I think this indicates that BDSM presents a serious challenge to vanilla normativity (particularly with an emphasis on heterosexual reproduction), and to conventional gender roles (even for the feminists). Faced with visible violations of their self-imposed rules, they have to reinforce the border. Their insecurity that someone might cross that line makes them denigrate the other side.
The dress and the articles show that Evie is trying to have it both ways, to construct the image of an ideal woman who is sexually adventurous and passionate yet strictly monogamous and virginal until marriage, to perform agrarian and familial labor yet maintain her sex appeal and glamour, to work hard yet only within the domestic sphere. It’s a fantasy, and if that’s a fantasy that works for you, great. Just keep it separate from your politics.
Being Canadian, I’m always interested in Canada’s contributions to the sexual edge of culture. I was delighted to stumble across the story of 
