WIE/WHO: akim a.j. willems
W(H)AT: Sadomasochism and fetishism in popular and classic literature
WAAR & WANNEER/WHERE & WHEN: De tekst werd geschreven voor en gepubliceerd in “Et Alors? A Flamboyant Magazine” (n° 1 – december 2011); later werd de tekst op verschillende manieren bibliofiel uitgegeven (o.a. een ‘hair fetish edition’ met een leeslint van vrouwenhaar, een ‘japanese bondage edition’, een ‘latex edition’,…) op minimale oplages (meestal op 1, soms op 2 of 3 exemplaren) / This essay was written for and first published in “Et Alors? A Flamboyant Magazine” (n° 1 – December 2011); in later years several bibliophile editions (a hair fetisch edition, a japanee bondage edition, a latex edition,…) were printed in very limited editions (1 – 3 copies)
HELL IS HEAVEN
The Middle Ages are coming to an end when, in 1439, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (1398-1468) starts using movable type printing and a printing press. Modern book printing was born. And along came tougher censorship. Hardly one century after the printing of the first Gutenberg Bible a group of ‘wise men’ gathers at the Theology Faculty of the University of Paris to put together a first, hand written, Index Librorum Prohibitorum or list of forbidden books. The second edition (1542) contains sixty-five titles. By the time the first printed Index sees the light (1544) two hundred thirty writers and books have been banned by the church. Two years later that number has more than doubled. Most of these forbidden books were burned. In later times they were no longer burned but excommunicated to the ‘enfer’ of a (national) library; ‘enfer’ (French for ‘hell’) refers to the first European monastery libraries where books on topics that would send you straight to hell were kept in separate and restricted library rooms. Interesting is that a large percentage of the forbidden books are erotic books. Most of these collections have in the meanwhile been opened to the public. Only one remains closed: that of the Vatican.
In my Bibliotheca Studentica & Erotica I have created a private ‘hell’; a heaven on earth for a book fetishist like myself. As I am writing this article I am surrounded by books. I adore books. Old books in particular; although new books will not be discriminated. I like to run my finger tips over the pages and covers to feel all those other fingers that caressed the book in the past. I smell them and let the scent of old paper tell me secret stories about previous owners. Dirty stories! Oh, man, I love dirty stories. My own ‘enfer’, just like any other, is filled with erotic and pornographic books. A lot of them – not just sleazy or modern publications – are directly or indirectly referring to sadomasochism and all kinds of fetishes.
Contrary to the pope I am not a censorship fetishist. So let me guide you around and pull some books of the shelf to have a closer look!
THE 3 TENORS
Next time you are in a pub with friends, on the train to work with your colleagues or taking a shower with your team mates after sporting ask a random person the following: “If I say ‘sadomasochism’ and ‘literature’, which writers come to mind?” It is very likely that the answer – if you get one – is “de Sade”, “von Sacher-Masoch” or “Réage”. Even the pope has read one of their books. Or at least has heard about these ‘Three Tenors’ of sadomasochistic literature.
I first discovered the works of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) – his official title was ‘Comte’ (i.e. Grave), but he was nicknamed ‘Marquis’ – who lend his name to the term ‘sadism’ at the age of eighteen, during my first year at university. In a book shop around the corner of my faculty I bought a (translated) copy of Les 120 journées de Sodome, ou l’École du libertinage. It tells the story of four wealthy libertines that lock themselves and forty-six sex victims away in a castle for one hundred twenty days in search of all kinds of sexual and sadistic gratification. The Marquis finished writing this novel in 1785 while being imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris, but it was only published a first time almost one hundred twenty years later. I started reading eagerly the day I bought the book, but I must confess I never finished it. Come to think of it: I never finished any de Sade book. Not (only) because I needed to masturbate every time I had read twenty pages of his pornographic exposés, but because his books, despite their notorious reputation, are a bit boring.
Marquis de Sade wrote numerous essays, plays, short stories and – being a child of his pre-revolutionary times – even political pamphlets, but today he is best known for his erotic works: Justine. Les Infortunes de la vertu (1787), Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1788; second version of the previous novel), La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1797-1801; third version of the first novel mentioned), Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice (1797-1801; sequel to the previous title) and Les 120 journées. In a nut shell these novels all boil down to the same old story of power, of the powerful and the powerless. But de Sade has two tricks up his sleeve to turn this ancient theme into something new and unseen. The first trick is sadistic sex. The powerful like to torment the powerless and it turns them on! Sex is the essence of power in de Sade’s erotic writings. The second trick is foul language. The combination if this classic theme and the use of an explicit, pornographic vocabulary merge into a literary philosophy that defies the Christian morality and censorship of de Sade’s days. That combination makes de Sade exceptional. The Marquis not only wants to tell us that he gets a Boner with a capital B by being a cruel sadist, he also explains why. And he does so in extenso: the original combined publication of Justine and Juliette consisted of ten book bands. And that, like I said before, makes his original texts also extremely tedious. In recent editions of his works the philosophy was omitted. Only the pornographic cruelties were kept – sex sells! – in thin pocket editions like the one I bought ages ago.
Contrary to his French predecessor Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895) does not focus on (abuse of) power. His central theme is love. The love of a man for his woman. That woman is not a sex victim, but a strong independent woman, a shrew even, dressed in fur and boots. And her man becomes her adoring slave that kisses her feet and crawls like a dog for her. Although von Sacher-Masoch already wrote several historical books before, his literary fame first came with the publication of Don Juan von Kolomea (1866) in which he starts exploring his literary fantasies about suffering and submissive men. A dominating woman (Wanda) and her slave (Severin) are the protagonists in his best known work Venus im Pfelz (1870). The Austrian knight does not write in foul language about masturbation, homosexual escapades, incest, paedophilia, sadistic orgies and so on. Von Sacher-Masoch describes the relational phenomena of the desire to suffer and to be dominated, to submit to a woman and the mystical emotions linked to that.
Histoire d’O (1954) may be considered the sadomasochistic classic of the twentieth century. It combines the philosophies of de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch and links them to a female protagonist. The book was written in an era of female sexual exploration, a time in which women discover they can define their own destiny, be free and make their own choices. In the case of O: the choice of not being free at all. Histoire d’O is one of my favourite erotic books. Not only because of the story it tells, but also because of the ‘petit histoire’ that tells the birth of this publication. It is an example that you can (ab)use to be of the unpopular opinion that it is good to be a male chauvinist pig every now and then. It is very likely that this book never would have been written if French writer, essayist, journalist and publicist Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) had not told his female colleague and lover Dominique Aury (pseudonym for Anne Desclos; 1907-1998) that “women are not capable of writing erotic books”. To prove her lover wrong Desclos wrote Histoire d’O using the ‘nom de plumes’ Pauline Réage. For four decades people assumed the book had been written by a male writer using a female pseudonym. Paulhan was the prime suspect as he had written the introduction to this book. It was not until 1994 – after her mother had died; she wanted to spare her the scandal – that Desclos revealed to the world that she had written the book. But let’s go back to the year before the first publication of this remarkable love story. In 1953 Jean Paulhan, who is also a member of the Académie Française, offers Réage’s manuscript to his publisher and employer Gallimard. Gallimard refuses to publish it. Eventually Paulhan finds a brother-in-arms in Jean-Jacques Pauvert (°1926). Pauvert – only twenty-six years old at the time, but already notorious – had already published de Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice (a complete edition in ten volumes), Les 120 Journées de Sodom (a complete edition in four volumes) and La Philosophie dans la Boudoire by the time he printed the first edition of Histoire d’O in 1954. There is no clarity about the number of books printed of this very first edition. Some sources mention “480 items on vergé paper” (that were distributed to book shops to be sold) and “another 100 items” that were meant to be sent to literary critics writing for news papers and magazines. A majority of sources agrees upon “600 books”. A number of those – depending on the source: between twenty and sixty – have an etching by the French-German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) on the title page. Just so you know in case you would accidentally come across a first edition in your grandma’s attic: without the Bellmer etching it would nowadays cost about 1.500 EUR. A copy with the etching – ever since I started collecting erotica I only once saw a copy being offered at an auction; the opening bid was set at multiple times that price – will cost you an arm and a leg! Despite being a notorious publisher of erotic books Pauvert was very careful and modest when he decided to print only 600 copies at first. The Bibliotheca Studentica & Erotica has several editions of this book. The oldest was also printed in 1954. It is number 788 out of 1000 prints of the fourth edition. This means the book became so extremely popular in a very short timeframe that Pauvert needed to print multiple editions or a couple of thousand additional books in the same year. Uncountable copies have been sold since.
[Update to the above: anno 2021 the Bibliotheca Studentica & Erotica also has a first edition copy – with the Bellmer etching on the title page; similar copies were sold for 6.500 and 10.000 EUR at auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. I paid a fraction of that, but still enough for my partner at the time to call me crazy, for my copy]
HISTORY 101
It is no coincidence that the best known sadomasochistic novels were written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was the Golden Age of erotic fiction. But the theme was not new. As long as man has been writing he has been writing erotic stories; even with a touch of sadomasochism once in a while. Like in following ancient classics, for example.
Gaius Petronius Arbiter (27-66) was a Roman ‘judge’ in the court of Nero and, later in his political career, a consul. He is also the writer of Satyricon, a satirical story in verse and prose telling the story of Encolpius (a former gladiator) and Giton (a sixteen year old boy and Encolpius’ lover). Near the end of this story a maid named Chrysis flirts with Encolpius and introduces him to her beautiful mistress who asks him to have sex with her. Impotence however prevents Encolpius from doing his duty. In order to find a cure for his problem Encolpius goes to the temple of Priapus, the Greek god of fertility and protector of male genitalia, to pray. After accidentally killing one of the temple’s sacred geese he gets molested by the priestess Oenothea: she sticks a leather ‘dildo’ rubbed in irritating substances in his anus and tickles his penis with nettles. So, remember: when in Rome, do as the Romans do!
In the course of the fourth century the Hindu philosopher Vatsyayana writes one of the standard works on human sexual behaviour: the Kama Sutra. In his verses, in Sanskrit, he also speaks about four different ways of slapping or spanking during love making, about body parts that may or may not be spanked (in this perspective you could say the Kama Sutra is the first book ever to mention ‘safety rules’ for sadomasochistic play) and about the best way to moan when being spanked. He also warns his readers to be cautious: not all women like to be spanked, apparently.
“LOVE WELL, WHIP WELL”
Flagellation or whipping has always been very popular activity in erotic literature.
The English poet Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) fantasizes in one of his epigrams: “When Francus comes to solace with his whore / He sends for rods and strips himself stark naked; / For his lust sleeps, and will not rise before / By whipping of the wench it be awaked. / I envy him not, but wish I had the power / To make myself his wench but one half hour”.
In L’Academie des dames, ou les Sept entretiens galants d’Aloisia, one of the first French erotic classics, Nicolas Chorier (1612-1692) describes an encounter between an old priest and a young woman who, voluntarily, drops her pants to receive a good whipping. The original manuscript of this work was written in Latin and claimed to be a translation of a Spanish manuscript by Luisa Siega de Velasco (1522-1566), a well known poetess working and writing in the court of Maria of Portugal. The Latin translation was supposedly done by Johannes Meursius, a Dutch humanist. The attribution of the work to Siega de Velasco was a lie and Johannes Meursius was a fictive character Chorier invented to disguise his own identity as the writer of this explicit novel.
The English play The Virtuoso (1676) by Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) – playwright, musician & poet at the King’s court – depicts a scene in which the character Snarl (The virtuoso’s old uncle, a ‘closet libertine and masochist’) gets whipped by a young prostitute. The prostitute, Mrs. Figgup, is curious to know: “I wonder that should please you so much that pleases me so little”. Snarl, reminiscing about his younger days, tells her the reasons for his specific preference: “I was so us’d to ‘t at Westminster School I could never leave it off since.” And to make sure he gets what he is paying for he encourages Mrs. Figgup: “Very well, my dear rogue. But dost hear, thou art too gentle. Do not spare thy pains. I love castigation mightily.”
John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Memoires of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) is the first English pornographic novel and one of the most banned and prosecuted books in history. Due to that notorious reputation and thanks to the numerous recent film and even musical adaptations Fanny Hill – the shorter, more common title that is used to refer to this novel – is also the best known English erotic novel. In the novel an orphaned girl named Frances ‘Fanny’ Hill tells about her life in a London brothel in a series of letters she writes to an unknown woman. One of Fanny’s customers in the brothel is Mr. Barvil, a young masochist who requires whipping to enjoy sex. On a side note: another customer is a hair and gloves fetishist. Also interesting to know: just like de Sade while writing Les 120 Journées Cleland was in prison (for not being able to pay his debts) when he wrote Fanny Hill. Cleland, a free man again at the time of the first publication of the novel in November 1748, and his publisher get arrested in November 1749. The charge: corrupting the King’s subjects with their pornographic novel. Cleland – facing another imprisonment – renounced the novel in court and charges were withdrawn. Although the book was forbidden underground pirate editions were very popular in the nineteenth century. When the first edition was published in the USA in 1821 it was also immediately banned because of obscenity. Even as recent as 1963 another edition was banned in the US; the publisher however won that court appeal against the state of Massachusetts.
IF THE SHOE FITS
A high heeled shoe showing a fine woman’s ankle, that is all Nicolas-Edme Rétif (1734-1806), a French printer and writer better known as Rétif de la Bretonne, needed to get sexually aroused. According to Havelock’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Random House, New York, 1942) he was the first documented case of shoe and foot fetishism. ‘Retifism’ – the fancy word for a shoe fetish – was derived from his name. It is no coincidence that Rétif de la Bretonne’s first book – Le Pied de Fanchette (1796) celebrates the writer’s major erotic fantasy, but also documents numerous other ‘obsessions’ of an era that never stopped worshipping women’s feet as an erotic symbol in literature and other arts. From his massive autobiography Monsieur Nicolas (published in sixteen volumes between 1794 and 1797) we learn that his love for shoes and feet already existed at a very early age. When talking about his childhood years and his view on the girls in Sacy – the little village where he was born – that teased him by kissing him against his will when he was just seven years old he writes [translation by myself; AW]: “Soon my ideas about women became clear: I sensed how charming they were. But I wanted to kiss them myself instead of being kissed by them. That submissive role did not fit me. That is why my parents were convinced I was a good boy […] But I was attracted to them. And most of all their little shoes drew my attention. Agathe Tilhien, Reine Miné and especially Madeleine Champeaux were the most elegant girls at the time; their neat shoes were not tied with laces, but with blue and red lace knots. The very thought of these girls excited me […] In those days I noticed a young lady parading around Sacy. She was wearing fancy shoes like those ladies from the big cities. They were light coloured and had clasps with flickering gems on them. She had a gracious figure. I believed she was a fairy, as I did not know of the existence of goddesses yet. As of that day I only dreamed of her, Suzanne Colas. She only stayed in Sacy for a short while and I forgot about her soon after she left, but my interest in girls was bigger than ever before” And a little later Rétif de la Bretonne wonders: “This love for pretty feet, this love so strong it sexually arouses me, even if the girl is ugly, is it mere physical or psychological? Those that know this love know how fierce it can be. How is that possible?”
Rétif de la Bretonne was not the first to give sexual or erotic connotation to feet in his writings. The Epistolae, 33 love letters, by Lucius Flavius Philostratus (172-247), a Greek sophist from Athens who lived and wrote in Rome, may be considered the first example in Western erotic narrative of foot fetishism. The eighteenth love letter is addressed to a boy whose feet are sore because of his pinching new sandals. Philostratus tries to persuade him to go barefoot and he does not do so purely out of concern for the boy’s well-being. The letter is a eulogy on naked feet. The thirty-sixth letter is addressed to a woman and starts with following request: “Do not ever wear shoes or conceal your ankles…” And although Philostratus would like to see her completely naked, if she must wear clothes he wants her to uncover her feet at least: “I wish that all the rest of you were visible, exposing your whole body […] Be a bit economical of other features if you will, but leave your feet at least bare…”. The next letter, written for that same woman, ends with a hint of masochism in addition to the foot fetishism: “O feet unfettered! O unhampered beauty! Thrice happy me and blessed, if on me ye tread!”
In 1812 the first edition of the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen collected by Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grim (1786-1859) – better known as the brothers Grimm – is published. The twenty-first story in that volume was that of Aschenputtel. Aschenputtel, she is also often called Aschenbrödel, is an old fairy tale figure in European folklore that is mainly remembered because of that Grimm story. In case you started wondering what old fairy tales have to do with shoe fetishism: nowadays the old, European Aschenputtel is best known as her American Disney alter ego Cinderella. If the shoe fits…
LOVE IS IN THE HAIR
“Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair”; this quote from William Butler Yeats’ (1865-1939) poem For Anne Gregory is just one of many examples of the obsession with hair in literature. Hair is without a doubt the most spread fetish in the history literature. So many poets and writers have praised the beauty of a woman’s hair that university students can acquire a PhD by studying hair as a fetish in nineteenth century literature and writing a three hundred pages dissertation on the topic.
And in literature gentlemen prefer blondes as well. Ever since the Greek poet Homer (800-750 BC) described the goddess of love’s tresses as ‘xanthe’ (i.e. golden) long, blond hair remained a literary ideal. Like in this myth about Bernice II of Egypt (267-221 BC), wife of Ptolemy III, in which she cuts of a lock of her hair and offers it in Aphrodite’s temple for the save return of her husband who was on an expedition to Syria. For some reason the hair disappears from the temple. Conon of Samos (280-220 BC), a Greek astronomer and mathematician explained to his queen that it had been carried to the heavens and placed amongst the stars. The Greek poet Callimachus (310-240 BC) wrote a poem about this transformation of which only a few lines remain. Luckily we still have the complete Latin translation by Gaius Valerius Catullus (84-54 BC) that tells the whole story. The name Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair), an astronomical constellation discovered by Conon of Samos, refers to this myth as well.
But those are just ‘stories about hair’. The real birth of hair fetishism in literature goes back to Durante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) or as you might know him better: Dante. In his autobiographic prose work La Vita Nuova (1295) and in the highlight of Renaissance writing La Divina Comedia (1321) he portrays a blond haired, angelic female protagonist: Beatrice. Dante first met Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290) at the age of nine, fell in love with her and remained so for the rest of his life. Although she married another man and Dante married another woman. But he gave his first love eternity by writing about her and her blond hair. In both works Dante’s love for a woman is pure and non-sexual. In the Rime Petrose Dante shows another face. He gets rough – in a kind and playful way – with a woman named Petra. Petra is a cold woman with long braids like whips. And guess what: she is a blonde! In the fourth ‘canzone’ Dante fantasizes: “Oh, if I could but seize those lovely tresses / which have become both whip and lash for me, from very early matins / I’d make them ringing bells unto the night: / and I would not be pitying or kind, / but like a playful bear with her I’d play; / and, since Love whips me still, / I would avenge myself a thousandfold.”
In Francesco Petrarca’s (1304-1374) Il Canzoniere you will also find a lot of hair references with aesthetic and erotic connotations. The hair is a ‘pars pro toto’ for a woman; the hair fetish is the symbol for an ideal, metaphysical, but obsessive love for that woman. In Petrarca’s case: Laura; a long haired blonde he first notices in a church in Avignon at the age of twenty-three. Although little facts are know about this Laura from Petrarca’s poems it is not unlikely that he wrote about Laura De Noves (1310-1348) who was married to an ancestor of Marquis de Sade.
More recently the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) had a thing with hair as well. In his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857) it is said about Emma Bovary: “On eût dit qu’un artiste habile en corruption avait dispose sur sa nuque la torsade de ses cheveux: ils s’enroulaient en une masse lourde, négligemment, et selon les hazards de ‘ladultère, qui les dénouait tous les jours…Charles, comme aux premiers temps de son marriage, la trouvait délicieuse et irrésistible.” Emma’s hair becomes an indication of and symbol for her adultery ; every time she cheats on her husband she sticks her hair back up (too) loosely (which was not done for a decent married woman at the time). Her husband loves it when she wears it like that – because it reminds him of the days when they were newlyweds – which gives the story a hint of cuckoldry as well.
Flaubert’s contemporary fellow Frenchman Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) focuses on smells and scents; especially on the scent of a woman’s hair. And especially in the poems he wrote for his Haitian-French muse: the actress and dancer Jeanne Duval (1820-1862). La Chevelure – an undated poem, but likely written around 1859, was first published in the second edition of Fleur du mal in 1861 – for example is inspired by Duval who had left him in 1856. The poem starts: “O fleecy hair, falling in curls to the shoulders! / O black locks! O perfume laden with nonchalance! / Ecstasy! To people the dark alcove tonight / With memories sleeping in that thick head of hair. / I would like to shake it in the air like a scarf!” After that Baudelaire paints a detailed picture of the images the smell of her hair bring to mind: “Sweltering Africa and languorous Asia, / A whole far-away world, absent, almost defunct, / Dwells in your depths, aromatic forest…” And also: “Blue-black hair, pavilion hung with shadows, / You give back to me the blue of the vast round sky; / In the downy edges of your curling tresses / I ardently get drunk with the mingled odors / Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.” His muse’s – blue-black coloured for a change – hair is one big, olfactory trip down memory lane for the poet. In another poem – Les promesses d’un visage – he gives his poetic views on pubic hair: “You will find at the tips of two heavy breasts / Two slack bronze medallions, / And under a smooth belly, soft as velvet, / Swarthy as the skin of a Buddhist, / A rich fleece, which truly is the sister / Of this huge head of hair, / Compliant and curly, its thickness equals / Black night, night without stars!”
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), a protégé of that other hair fetishist Flaubert, wrote a short story with the title La Chevelure using the pseudonym Maufrigneuse. In this story we follow the diary of a mentally disturbed, thirty-two year old fetishist, with a passion for antiques, who is suffering from a very morbid erotic delusion. In the diary he writes that one day he buys an antique piece of furniture. After admiring and touching it for 8 days in a row he discovers a secret compartment. In this compartment: one single long and blond string of hair. For weeks he wonders and philosophizes why this hair was cut off and hidden there while touching the string over and over again. He falls in love with the string of hair. One night he takes the string of hair to bed, believing that it is the dead body of the woman it belonged to. When he starts taking the hair/the woman along while going out in public he is arrested and put away.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) – born as Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki – is one of my favourite erotic and pornographic writers. The fact the he wrote Les Onze Mille Verges (“eleven thousand rods”), one of the wittiest pornographic novels ever, is one good reason. Another one: Les Onze Mille Verges – the title is a vulgar parody of the catholic ‘onze mille vierges’ (“eleven thousand virgins”) – has it all; sadism, masochism, golden showers, scatophilia, vampirism, paedophilia, gerontophilia, masturbation, group sex, lesbian sex, gay sex and so on. It should not come as a surprise it was banned and forbidden in France, even until forty years ago. Apollinaire has always denied he was the author of this book that was published without a name, but just with the initials G.A. Another reason to love Apollinaire is his fetish poetry. Read his Fusée, La Jolie Rousse, Poême à Lou or Neuvième Poême Secret and you will find multiple references to hair. His best known hair fetish poem is without a doubt Le Deuxième Poème Secret. Apollinaire sent this ‘second secret poem’ to his fiancé Madeleine Pagès while he was at battle as a soldier during World War I. It is the only poem that just has one topic only: hair! Her head hair, eye brows, eye lashes, the hair in his fiancé’s arm pits and even the pubic hair on her vagina which he so gently calls a “toison triangle” (i.e. triangle of fur).
It is unbelievable how many writers and poets are obsessed with hair in their writings. Perhaps that is because hair is the ultimate (literary) synthesis of love, life and death; it embodies both Eros and Thanatos, both powers that determine our lives.
SCENT OF A WOMAN
I already mentioned Baudelaire had a strong focus on smells and scents in his work. But there are others. I will show you two.
The best known book about a man’s obsession for the way women smell is Das Parfum (1985) by Patrick Süskind (°1949). Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of the story, was born without a body odour of his own, but with an extremely good scent. One day he falls heavily in love with (the odour of) a young woman; he gets so obsessed by her smell he kills her. While he is working as an apprentice perfumer his obsession to have an own odour turns him into a serial killer: in order to create his own perfume, his own odour he needs to extract the smell of other people. In the end he creates a perfume that makes all people love him to death immediately.
The short story Bitch – first published in Playboy magazine in 1974 – also has an ‘olfactory chemist’ as a protagonist: Henri Biotte invented a ‘sex perfume’ he named Bitch. Biotte uses his girlfriend and assistant Simone and an old boxer as human guinea pigs. He sprinkles his girlfriend with the perfume, puts her in the same room as the boxer who can’t resist the perfume and fucks her brains out until the effects of the perfume wear out. Mission accomplished! The morning after the experiment Simone sprays the rest of the perfume over her body to seduce her lover Biotte. They have the wildest sex they ever had, but Biotte – having a weak heart – died in the act; without ever haven written down the formula for Bitch. End of that amazing erotic story by that popular author of children’s books: Roald Dahl (1916-1990). He wrote three other erotic stories for Playboy that year: The Visitor, The Great Switcheroo and The last act. All four stories were published, in the same year, in a book titled Switch Bitch.
SEEN THE MOVIE? READ THE BOOK!
So, you are not a book fetishist? Or not even into reading? Chances are that you have seen one of the following movies:
The first rule of Fight Club – and we all know that because we have all seen Brad Pitt in the 1999 movie – is not to talk about Fight Club. The scene that was cut out also said: unless it is for an article in Et Alors? . Chuck Palahniuk’s (°1962) debut novel from 1996 has numerous masochistic references that you will not find in the movie.
The Secretary (2OO2) tells the story of a young woman (released from a mental hospital) who starts working as a secretary for a lawyer. Their professional relationship soon turns into a sadomasochistic one. This classic movie was based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill (°1954) who writes about sadomasochism or fetishes in a lot of her stories. Also check A Romantic Weekend, The Blanket (that deals with role-playing and power exchange) or The Wrong Thing (lesbian sadomasochism).
9 ½ Weeks (1986) – although a semi-cult classic nowadays – never was a huge success with the big audience, most likely because of the sadomasochistic content. It was based on the book with the same title written by Elizabeth McNeil in 1978. It is supposedly based on Elizabeth McNeil’s (a pseudonym) own experiences.
Luis Bunuel’s movie Belle De Jour (1967) is a real classic. The screen play for this movie, written by Jean-Claude Carrière (°1931) was based on the book with the same title written by French journalist Joseph Kessel (1898-1979) in 1928 and tells the story of a woman who can’t fulfil her masochistic needs within her marriage and chooses to work as a prostitute (that goes by the name Belle de Jour) in a brothel while her husband is out working.
Now run to your library and do read the books! You will like them better than the movies!
FACTA, NON VERBA
A lot of writers and poets wrote about sadomasochism and fetishes. Some of them – being of the opinion the world needs deeds, not words (only) – were also living the lifestyle.
From Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) autobiographical Confessions it is evident that he was a masochist, even since childhood. In part one, book one he writes about how his teacher Miss Lambercier, a thirty year old woman, impressed him when he was eight years old. Her anxiousness when he could not answer a question and her treats to punish him if he did not learn well made a deep impression. When one day he had blows at her hand, with the feeling of pain, he also experienced a sensual and sexual pleasure that made him desire to be spanked by her again. Rousseau lived to crawl and obey; it was his most intense delight as he wrote in his autobiography: “Etre aux genoux d’une maîtresse impérieuse, obéir à ses ordres, avoir des pardons à lui demander, étaient pour moi de très douces jouissances.”
From de Sade it is known that he and his servant ordered three prostitutes to visit them in a house in Marseille on June 27, 1772. The women were whipped with birch branches and they, on their turn, whipped both gentlemen during that orgy. De Sade offered his guests anise flavoured chocolates that contained an unknown substance – rape drugs avant-la-lettre – making them very sick and even leading to the death of the eighteen year old prostitute Marianne Laverne. In September of that year both men are found guilty of murder by the court.
Von Sacher-Masoch, who married Angelika Aurora Rümelin (1845-1908) in 1873, tried to inject his fictional ideas into his everyday family life. At von Sacher-Masoch’s request Angelika Aurora changed her name to Wanda. He also urged her to infidelity, to make him a cuckold.
On February 2, 1882 Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) writes a letter to his girlfriend Nora Barnacle saying that he would be very pleased if he could feel his skin burn under her spanking hands, that he wished she would smack him, that she was strong with big breasts and that she would whip him. In 1909 he wrote a whole series of explicit and pornographic letters to Nora. Later in life when they were married Nora, asked about these letters, said: “I don’t know whether my husband is a genius or not, but he certainly has a dirty mind.” Joyce did not only enjoy being spanked, he also was an eproctophiliac. He loved to smell women’s farts.
American author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940), best known for his book The Great Gatsby (1925) was a known foot fetishist. Just like Charles Baudelaire, Giacomo Girolama Casanova (1725-1789) and many other authors. But F. Scott Fitzgerald was the only one that was also very neurotic about his own feet: he could not stand the idea that anybody else would see his naked feet.
Graham Greene (1904-1991) – writer of, amongst other things, the sadomasochistic stage play A House of Reputation (1950) – and his lover Catherine Walston had a sadomasochistic relationship. Greene loved to be burned with cigarettes by Catherine.
Japanese nihilist writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970; pseudonym for Kimitake Hiraoka) claims he had his first orgasm at the age of twelve while looking at a painting of Saint-Sebastian being pierced with arrows. His fetishes included: the hair in men’s armpits, sweat and white gloves. His biggest erotic, masochistic fantasy was to die in a bloody and painful way. In 1970 he killed himself with a Hara-kiri ritual. So be careful what you wish for.
TWO ENCORES
It was my pleasure to guide you around the Bibliotheca Studentica & Erotica, but before you have to go here are two ‘encores’, two books I did not show you, but you definitely should read:
In 1992 German journalist Sina-Aline Geissler (°1965) published Lust an der Unterwerfung; a very open book about her own masochist feelings, desires and experiences and that of other female masochists. The book created a little shockwave in the feminist movement because crawling for your husband or Master wasn’t a good sign of Girl Power. Little do they know, right?
At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century a strange phenomena takes place in (mostly German) scientific research. There is an increased interest for all things sexual and beyond the ordinary, an increased perversion of science. Scientists – psychiatrists mostly – start investigating the “contrary sexual instincts”. And although they are all perversions according to them it is funny to notice that all these perversion are studied in depth and described with much gusto in extensive and explicit case study descriptions. The best know result of that peculiar scientific field of interest is Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) – born as Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing – that was first published in 1886 as a clinical-forensic study. It is an unbelievable catalogue of sexual perversions and fetishes. I challenge you to read this book and if you have a fetish that is not listed there I will buy you a beer! Cheers!
bibliotheca studentica & erotica 