Sadomasochistic literature

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sadomasochistic literature deals with topics related to sadomasochistic sexuality and the partnership of people with a corresponding sexual disposition. This can be erotic , pornography , fictional stories, experience reports, scientific / pseudo-scientific treatises, guides and educational books.

Often, in partly fictional narratives, sexual practices and behavior such as submission, bondage , enslavement, discipline, humiliation, bondage , sexual violence, flagellation and similar sexual acts within a partnership are described. Due to rigid moral concepts, it was therefore repeatedly subject to ecclesiastical and state restrictions on dissemination and reception over the centuries .

History of sadomasochistic literature

Illustration of the Kama Sutra
Engraving around 1780

Early phase

One of the oldest accounts of flagellation is found in the sixth book of the Satires of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal ( Decimus Junius Juvenal ), another testimony is found in the Satyricon of Petronius where a delinquent is whipped for sexual arousal. Both works date from the 1st and 2nd century AD. Anecdotal stories about people who voluntarily let themselves be handcuffed or whipped as part of foreplay or as a substitute for sex date back to the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Already in the Indian Kamasutra ( Sanskrit : कामसूत्र, kāmasūtra, "verse of desire"), a work about erotic love , probably written by Vatsyayana Mallanaga in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, four types of blows are distinguished in love play. The areas of the body in which blows are not dangerous are also described, and it is stated that practices such as biting, hitting and scratching are only perceived as pleasurable with the consent of the other. From this point of view, the Kamasutra is likely to be the first written text on SM practices and safety rules.

The classics of the genre include the works of the Marquis de Sade , The 120 Days of Sodom or The School of Debauchery (1785), Justine or the Misfortune of Virtue (1791), Juliette or the Advantages of Vice (1796) and The Philosophy in Boudoir (1795) and Venus in Pelz (1870) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch .
From a position diametrically opposed to de Sade, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne, also known as "Anti-de Sade", wrote using similar stylistic devices . His works include, besides the famous Anti Justine (1793), the works, Paysan perverti ou les dangers de la ville (1775), La Paysanne Pervertie (1780), Mr. Nicolas (1784), Les Nuits de Paris (1786) and Paysan et la Paysanne pervertis (1787).

At the beginning of the 19th century, so-called "experience reports", which describe sadomasochistic practices, came into fashion. These include, for example, Mistress Berkley 's Venus School Mistress; or Birchen Sports (1810), Berkley is also said to have invented the so-called Berkley Horse , a device that prostitutes can use to beat customers. Modern Sports in the Westend of London (rod games and love adventures) by Ophelia Cox is about educational sadism and prostitution . Another alleged report of a so-called "whip society" is The Merry Order of St. Bridget: Personal Recollections of the Use of the Rod by Margaret Anson York. In 1866, St. George H. Stock published The Romance of Chatisement , which deals with the use of the rod in a girls' school. The same publisher Dougale made The New Ladies' Tickler; or the Adventures of Lady Lovesport and the Audacious Harry , it explains the domestic use of the rod. In 1893 the author published the three-volume work Gynecocracy and The Petticoat Dominant, or Woman's Revenge , under the pseudonym Julian Robinson in Liverpool , as "Die Weiberherrschaft", published in Germany in 1906. Both works deal with sadistic upbringing and punishment practices. In 1903 a similar book appeared, The Mistress and the Slave , 1931 Miss High Heels .

Around 1900 The Memoirs of Dolly Morton was published by the author Hugues Rebèl ( George Grassal ), a friend of the publisher Carrington. It deals with the flogging of women, especially slaves, and rape in the American Civil War. Another work that seems antiquated today is Letters from the Dungeon of Lenchen Reinhard and describes the punishment in a penitentiary in the form of a letter novel . A French example from this period is Despotisme Féminin by Jean de la Beucque .

The Victorian poet AC Swinburne caused a sensation with his early sadomasochistic lyric poetry and his (unfinished) novella Lesbia Brandon , whereby the author's autobiographical experiences may have flowed into the masochistic experiences of the boy in Lesbia Brandon .

After 1945

Boris Vian wrote a violent sex thriller in connection with the thematization of American racism in 1946 with J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (“I will spit on your graves”).

The increasing integration into the media of modern pop culture succeeded BDSM content at the latest with the comic series Sweet Gwendoline by bondage artist John Willie . The artist Guido Crepax , who was heavily influenced by him, is one of the most frequently indexed comic artists in the field of BDSM and had a decisive influence on European adult comics in the second half of the 20th century, especially with the character Valentina he created . The works of the British illustrator and comic artist Erich von Götha also had a style-forming effect in this area and most of his works were regularly subject to state censorship.

The depiction of sadomasochistic cruelty in connection with historical events of the Inquisition is provided in a novel by Roland Gageys entitled L'Inquisition et ses Tortures .

With the Histoire d'O (“ History of O ”) (1954) and “ Return to Roissy ” (1969), the French journalist and literary critic Anne Declos created two classics under the pseudonym Pauline Réage , which both the BDSM subculture and the still have a decisive influence on sadomasochistic literature today. The meaning of the author's work is generally placed on the same level as the texts of de Sades and von Sacher-Masoch.

1955 appeared The Whip Angels by Diane Bataille , the Canadian second wife of Georges Bataille , a née Kotchoubey de Beauharnais. Published in the Traveller's Companion series , Olympia Press, Paris as No. 9, 1955 under XXX and later with the somewhat clumsy pseudonym Selena Warfield. Translated as Die Peitschenengel , Darmstadt, 1968. Mavis Gallant is said to mention the book in her novel A Fairly Good Time (1970).

In 1956, the French writer Catherine Robbe-Grillet wrote and published the sadomasochistic novel L'Image under the pseudonym Jean de Berg in Les Éditions de Minuit . The novel describes the experiences of the writer Jean, who, after meeting his old friend Claire at a party with her slave Anne, is drawn ever deeper into her world of sadomasochism. The story was filmed in 1975 by Radley Metzger as The Image or The Punishment of Anne .

In 1966, the writer and philosopher founded John Norman with Tarnsman of Gor ( "Gor - The Counter-Earth") a sadomasochistic fantasy cycle , which includes today 30 volumes, reaching millions of copies worldwide and as the central motif male dominance / female submission on an Earth-like, medieval planet used.

In 1968 the novel Die Sklavin by Renato Ghiotto was published, the description of sadomasochistic daydreams in a lesbian slave relationship.

In 1978 the novel Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Ruins of Isis ("The Matriarchs of Isis") appeared. In her sadomasochistic fictions, the cult author of feminist fantasy depicts a matriarchal society on a distant planet. The novel criticizes the enslavement of one sex by the other. Reversing an extreme patriarchal social model, Isis / Cinderella is ruled by women, men are enslaved. But then a scientist appears from another planet in this world, whose husband, although formally submitting to the right to Isis, does not inwardly accept this matriarchal form of rule. At the end of the day, the moral message is equality : Isis is overthrown and men are turned from slaves to citizens. Bradley's novel can be interpreted as the answer to John Norman's cycle GOR . Zimmer Bradley reverses the basic idea of ​​this classic cycle in two respects, both in the relationship between the sexes ruling on the planet and in the gender relationship that is propagated in each case.

Edith Kadivec , who was convicted of sadistic violence against minors in the Vienna Sadist Trial in the 1920s, discusses a philosophy of sadomasochism in Confessions and Experiences (1977) and Eros, the meaning of my life (1979).

In 1978 the novel “ 9 1/2 weeks. Memories of a Love Affair ”by Elizabeth McNeill. In it, the author describes a BDSM relationship that also takes place extra-erotically between two actors who are not named. The portrayal is from the perspective of the woman involved, who years after the end of the relationship lets the relationship slip by again at a distance. The novel depicts the protagonist's ever-increasing bondage , who goes into each of the games that are offered to her, which become more and more unusual and extreme up to theft and robbery, until she finally breaks off contact completely after 9 1/2 weeks. The novel was initially published anonymously. According to the cover of the first American edition, it came from “a manager of a large New York company” and later formed the basis for the commercially very successful film 9½ weeks .

Sadistic confessions came in 1983 from the American forensic psychologist Terence Sellers . In The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern , the author describes the experiences of a dominant woman in the American BDSM scene.

The well-known American author Anne Rice published an extensive selection of sadomasochistic literature. Her three-volume German edition of the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy ( The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty's Punishment (1984) and Beauty's Release (1985)), published under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure , has been indexed since 1992. These extensive and detailed BDSM novels are reminiscent of the " Story of O " and set in a medieval fantasy world that is vaguely based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The stories contain detailed descriptions of bisexual acts in scenes of both male and female dominance . Originally under the pseudonym Anne Rampling , Anne Rice published the novel Exit to Eden ("Forbidden Desire") in 1985 . The novel is now distributed under her own name. The novel is about the fact that Kelly, the head of a remote exclusive BDSM holiday club, buys Slater as a "slave", whereupon the two of them fall in love. The novel was made into a film in 1994.

Pat Califia , founder of the important feminist- lesbian BDSM organization Samois , createda collection of erotic short storiesin 1988 under the title Macho Sluts , which was published by Alyson Publications. The actors of the BDSM fantasies can be assigned to gay , lesbian and sometimes no fixed gender roles at all.

Based on her own biography, Sina-Aline Geißler delivered masochistic confessions from the perspective of a woman in Lust for Submission in 1990 . She supplements her own experiences with interviews that she conducted with other submissive or masochistic women.

In 1993, Le lien was published in France , an autobiographical novel by the literature student Vanessa Duriès , who died in a car accident at the age of 21 that same year and thus achieved cult status in the local BDSM scene. Together with Dolorosa soror (1996), the first part of an erotic trilogy by Florence Dugas, the novel is part of a literary canon in France, as can be read in Entre ses mains (2003, “ In his hands ”) by Marthe Blau, where the inexperienced protagonist receives both works from her master to read.

In Laura Reese's 1995 novel Topping from Below (“Burning Fetters”) , the author has the leading actress investigate the murder of her younger sister. The resulting relationship with the extremely sadistic main suspect leads the protagonist deeper and deeper into inner doubts and very personal limits, and lets her relive the development of her sister's relationship with the suspect directly. The follow-up, Panic Snap , published in 2001, varied the theme of the first novel and was repeatedly referred to by critics as an uninspired infusion.

In 2007 the last part of the five-part Frost cycle written by Gregor Sakow ( Die Loge , Stahlruten , Das Walhall-Projekt , Die Zwerge von Arnheim , Götzendämmerung ) was published. The protagonist is the shitty cop Robert Frost, who at the beginning was still investigating the Hamburg police detective, but later literally continues to work on his own. The novels, written as a crossover , combine the sadomasochistic personality of Robert Frost with the elements of crime and thriller literature. Frost's role as an outsider in the fight against the rulers also gives the books a subtle amount of social criticism, especially since the good rarely wins and usually falls by the wayside as a victim of conspiracies.

Beardsley: The Flagellants Club, London, 1895

Censorship and indexing

In earlier epochs there were censorship authorities who also used the term censorship in their names. Later in the Federal Republic of Germany there was the “Federal Testing Office for Writings Harmful to Young People” (BPjS), which is now called BPjM . Officially, it does not prohibit books, but merely creates an index of media that are not allowed to be made accessible to young people. However, such media may not be publicly advertised or displayed on book shelves for viewing. Books indexed in this way are hardly marketable unless they are specifically distributed by SM publishers such as Marterpfahl-Verlag or Charon-Verlag and are specifically searched for by interested parties. Some SM classics are affected by indexing, however, for example, the " History of O " or " Nine and a half weeks " are freely available again after decades of indexing.

The GOR series by John Norman is particularly affected by the censorship . In the German editions of the volumes, Heyne Verlag has already shortened 45 percent of the original text, including all harder passages. An authentic representation of the Gorean understanding of dominance and submission in the German language does not exist to this day. In spite of this, most of these "defused" works were also indexed. Interested German readers therefore often switch to the English-language original editions.

List of contemporary sadomasochistic literature (selection)

List of non-fiction books (selection)

German-language editions

Practice-oriented editions

Theoretical texts

  • Norbert Elb: SM sexuality. Self-organization of a sexual subculture . Psychosozial-Verlag , Giessen 2006, ISBN 978-3-89806-470-5 .
  • Elke Heitmüller: On the genesis of sexual pleasure. From Sade to SM . Konkursbuchverlag, 1994, ISBN 3-88769-081-8 .
  • Andreas Hill, Peer Briken and Wolfgang Berner (eds.): Pleasure-full pain. Sadomasochistic Perspectives . Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89806-843-7 (congress volume, in which the current neosexual perspectives of sadomasochism are discussed).
  • Arne Hoffmann: Lexicon of Sadomasochism . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89602-290-3 (alphabetical reference work).
  • Lisa Kurth: Germany, united in a country of pain . Seitenblick Verlag, 2007, ISBN 3-9805399-5-4 (Development and differences of BDSM activities in the GDR and the FRG).
  • Olaf May: criminal law and sadomasochism . Shaker Verlag, Aachen 1997, ISBN 3-8265-5595-3 (also Diss. Univ. Kiel 1996).
  • Gini Graham Scott: Dominance and Humility . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1994, ISBN 978-3-426-77096-2 (sociological study of the American BDSM scene).
  • Andreas Spengler: Sadomasochists and their subcultures . Campus-Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-593-32374-5 .
  • Elisabeth Wagner: Borderline conscious sadomasochism. SM sexuality between breaking norms and confirming norms . Transcript Verlag , Bielefeld 2014, ISBN 978-3-8376-2870-8 (also Diss. Univ. Frankfurt 2013).
  • Thomas A. Wetzstein et al. : Sadomasochism. Scenes and rituals . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-499-19632-8 (based on a study by a sociological research group at Trier University).

Foreign language editions

Practice-oriented editions

  • Gloria G. Brame : Come Hither: A Commonsense Guide To Kinky Sex . Fireside Book, New York 2000, ISBN 978-0-684-85462-5 .
  • Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, and Jon Jacobs: Different Loving: An Exploration of the World of Sexual Dominance and Submission . Villard Books, New York 1993, ISBN 978-0-679-76956-9 .
  • Pat Califia : Sensuous Magic . Masquerade Books, New York 1993, ISBN 978-1-56333-131-2 .
  • Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy: The New Bottoming Book . Greenery Press, San Francisco 2001, ISBN 978-1-890159-35-1 .
  • Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy: The New Topping Book . Greenery Press, Oakland 2002, ISBN 978-1-890159-36-8 (practical and theoretical introduction for tops with an emphasis on psychological aspects, practical and technical questions, and detailed tips on finding a partner).
  • William A. Henkin, Sybil Holiday: Consensual Sadomasochism: How to Talk About It and How to Do It Safely . 2nd Edition. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles 2003, ISBN 978-1-881943-12-9 .
  • Phillip Miller, Molly Devon: Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns: The Romance and Sexual Sorcery of Sadomasochism . Mystic Rose Books, Fairfield 1995, ISBN 978-0-9645960-0-9 (illustrated and comprehensive manual focusing on practices and safety information).
  • Jack Rinella: The Compleat Slave: Creating and Living an Erotic Dominant / submissive Lifestyle . 2nd Edition. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles 2004, ISBN 978-1-881943-13-6 .
  • Sensuous Sadie: It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex, and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene . Trafford Publishing, Victoria, B. C. 2003, ISBN 978-1-4120-0183-0 .
  • Jay Wiseman : SM 101: A Realistic Introduction . 2. revised u. extended Edition. Greenery Press, San Francisco 1998, ISBN 978-0-9639763-8-3 (extensive reference work including some focal points such as “BDSM as a lifestyle” and “BDSM in pregnancy”).

Theoretical texts

  • Guy Baldwin: Ties That Bind: SM / Leather / Fetish Erotic Style - Issues, Communication, and Advice . 2nd Edition. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles 2003, ISBN 978-1-881943-09-9 .
  • Pat Califia: Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex . 2nd Edition. Cleis Press, San Francisco 2000, ISBN 978-1-57344-096-7 .
  • Pat Califia, Robin Sweeney (Eds.): The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader . Alyson Publications, Los Angeles 1996, ISBN 978-1-55583-281-0 (continuation of the lesbian feminist BDSM classic Coming to Power ).
  • Ivo Domínguez, Jr .: Beneath the Skins. The New Spirit and Politics of the Kink Community . Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles 1994, ISBN 978-1-881943-06-8 (collection of various essays by the author on the political side of sadomasochism).
  • Anita Phillips: A Defense of Masochism . Faber, London 1999, ISBN 978-0-571-19697-5 (philosophical and sociological arguments for masochism).
  • Samois (Ed.): Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S / M . 3. revised u. extended Edition. Alyson Publications, Boston 1982, ISBN 978-0-932870-28-5 .
  • Mark Thompson: Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice . 3. Edition. Daedalus Publishing, Los Angeles 2004, ISBN 978-1-881943-20-4 .
  • Thomas S. Weinberg (Ed.): S&M - Studies in Dominance and Submission . Prometheus Book, Amherst, N.Y. 1995, ISBN 978-0-87975-978-0 (overview of the state of research).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Juvenal, Satiren 6, lines 474-511 (lat.)
  2. ↑ Juvenal, Satiren 6, lines 474-511 (English)
  3. ↑ Petronius, Satyricon (lat.)
  4. ↑ Kamasutra by Mallanaga Vatsyayana, translated by Wendy Doniger , Oxford University Press 2003, ISBN 0-19-283982-9 2nd book: Chapters 4,5,7,8, pages 45-64 (English)
  5. ↑ Indexed by the Federal Inspectorate with decision No. I 31/87 of May 21, 1987
  6. ↑ After Norman had already participated in several World Science Fiction Conventions , he received an unfounded rejection for the 59th Convention, 2001 in Philadelphia. Norman responded with an open letter to the organizing committee accusing him of open discrimination against his work. See October 14, 2001 Open Letter
  7. ↑ Sleeping Beauty Awakening. Erotic adventures of a princess , Anne Roquelaure, indexed in Federal Gazette No. 184 of September 30, 1992. Sleeping Beauty punishment , Anne Roquelaure, paperback number 9846 Goldmann, Munich, indexed in Federal Gazette No. 224 of November 28, 1992

Web links