Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (5 page)

We handle these subjects in a medical [and] psychological context. We’re careful not to use slang language. It’s treated seriously. [We would] love to be all things to all people, but we are not there for salacious entertainment. We encourage the widest possible exchange of ideas, experiences, and emotions. We’re not an all-purpose sexual utility: We’re a support group.

We’re part of a global village. We have somebody in England who is leading conferences. We are developing a conference series with someone in Australia and [another person] in Singapore. The fellow in Singapore is 23 years old. He [says] that he really knew nothing about sex; nobody talks about it. Teenagers are kept ignorant. He’d found HSX educational and supportive. A lot of people have [said this]. For example, we started
Gay Young Adults
. Gays are born evenly distributed throughout the population, but when gays graduate from high school, classically they tend to cluster into regions. If a gay is in New York or San Francisco, [it’s] all right, because there’s a whole community. But if a gay remains in a small town, he or she is isolated—and the most isolated of the isolated are gay kids, who really have a lot of questions, not always about sex but about relationships and their own identity. We created a special, closed section restricted to people 21 or under. We’ve gotten two unsolicited letters from people who said, “You saved me from suicide.” There are people walking around this country who we have reason to believe are alive because of something we provided. That’s a nice feeling.

Two

T
he practices and desires we will examine are as old as eros. Yet we are so accustomed to accepting the idea that unusual or unfamiliar sexual practices are “perverse” that we rarely ask how these behaviors came to be so classified. What forces or individuals asserted what constitutes a sexual norm? How have these beliefs been assimilated into popular consciousness?

In this chapter we trace the rise of S/M as an observed phenomenon, beginning with the first attempts to scientifically unravel the mysteries of human sexuality until now. We also trace the roots of the organized S/M
communities, an expanding network of educational resources, support groups, and social organizations for sexual minorities.

At chapter’s end we feature three interviews:

In 1844 the first
Psychopathia Sexualis
was published in Leipzig by a Ukrainian physician, Heinrick Kaan. Forty-two years later Richard von Krafft-Ebing chose the same title for the first edition of his massive
Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study
. Between the first
Psychopathia
and the second lay the gropings toward the first scientific study of sex. Obviously influenced by Kaan’s work and publishing the more graphic details in Latin, to—as it has been suggested—“protect the imperfectly educated,”
²
Krafft-Ebing’s tome was at the pinnacle of Victorian scientific inquiry into human sexuality.

In other cultures—notably the Hindu culture of India—
ars erotica
, which treat sexuality as an art form or a discipline to be mastered, were long established.
The Kama Sutra
and its imitators are essentially how-to manuals for the upper classes, as much concerned with proper sex etiquette for the well-born as with the varieties of sexual play. Erotic arts were not only deemed worthy of respect but were thought to be divinely revealed. This may partly explain why the how-to of sex was explored while the how-come? was largely ignored: A gift of the gods is not open to scrutiny.

Between the
ars erotica
of the East and the
Studium
erotica
of the West lies a gulf that is still only beginning to be bridged. Although sexual repression was hardly invented in the 19th Century—Michael Foucault, for example, suggests that the 17th Century was a watershed in censure of sexual pleasure;
³
and taboos against masturbation and sodomy were recorded in the
Old and New Testaments—it is ironic that the first attempts to demystify sexuality were born of one of the most sexually repressive cultures in history.

The Victorian period is the point of departure for sexual research. A convergence of factors made it possible: Science, philosophy, and social sciences were growing emancipated from religion; an age of curiosity flowered within an age of hypocrisy.

Victorian society was prudish to an extent that seems unimaginable today. Piano legs were discreetly hidden beneath fabric skirts in the interest of modesty, and the Bible was capable of wounding refined sensibilities because it contains such words as
whore
and
fornication
. Victorians were so nervously and negatively obsessed with sex that almost anything held the danger of titillation.

Whereas earlier Christians may have perceived sex for pleasure as sinful, the Victorians viewed it as disgusting, animalistic, and depraved. It was even supposed that sex endangered the health; discharging semen was seriously believed to shorten one’s life. Parents went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their male children from masturbation or nocturnal emissions, in some cases fitting them with locked penis cages, spiked rings to render erections too painful to endure, and even alarm devices that caused a bell to ring in the parents’ room should the penis become erect.

In medieval times the evils of temptation and carnality were blamed upon women who, like Eve, led men to ruin. By the Victorian Age, it was believed that lust was a masculine phenomenon and that women were sexually lifeless.

While the surface of Victorian society was shrouded in respectability, contemporary novels such as
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
or
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
are allegories on the duality of Victorian life. In London as many as 40,000 prostitutes plied their trade. Brothels proliferated at a rate never seen before or since, catering to every imaginable taste. “Molly houses” (male brothels), child brothels, and flagellation brothels flourished.

Economic and religious influences are key elements in the spectacle of Victorian prudery. What we have come to call Victorianism was initially a phenomenon of the middle classes. As the economic power of the middle classes grew, their moralistic attitudes increasingly influenced the upper classes, and their effect on the lower classes was decisive. The experience of the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant stresses caused by the shift from an agrarian rural culture to a mechanized urban society were directly responsible for the development of sprawling slums whose squalor has never been rivaled. Victorian slums were the breeding ground of prostitution, crime, and violence; their misery was virtually inescapable. Only by adopting middle-class mores could the slum dweller aspire to that class.

The religious ideals of Methodism—the most powerful of the middle-class denominations—complemented Victorian social ideals. Modesty and restraint were unquestioned virtues. Proper gentlemen and ladies of the period eschewed strong emotion: Excessive laughter or grief were as objectionable as sexual excess. The appearance of respectability was paramount. To appear otherwise was to be common, and to be common was to be spiritually flawed, economically hopeless, and socially repugnant.

That anyone saw fit to study and publish work on sex—much less unusual sex—in this atmosphere may seem surprising. But the Victorian Age embraced paradoxes: Romantic extravagance in art and literature existed
beside the grim sobriety of daily life; fervent humanitarianism beside the institutionalized racism of colonialism; hyper-prudishness beside profligacy. Moreover, this was a golden age for science, which seemed to promise the salvation from human misery that only Christianity had previously offered.

Victorians appreciated science so long as it supported and confirmed their social ideals, which, by no coincidence, it generally did. The work of Charles Darwin, for example, had a profound impact on Victorian thought. While the possibility that man had evolved from a simian ancestor outraged many, Victorians nonetheless eagerly extended his theories of evolution to society. They saw themselves as occupying the uppermost rung of a tall ladder of social evolution. Just as Calvinism and its diluted form, Methodism, held that God demonstrated divine pleasure in the elect by rewarding their worthiness with wealth and comfort, so Social Darwinism held that Nature had rewarded the most worthy—i.e., the Victorians—with advanced civilization and technology. Social Darwinism was a direct transposition of religious belief into secular science. It provided a philosophical framework to account for such phenomena as urban slums and colonization. Those who did not prosper were unfit to prosper. Those who were colonized were unfit to rule themselves. That they be ruled by those whom evolution had blessed to be fit was only natural and right.

Darwinism also had a profound impact on contemporary psychiatry, itself a new discipline. The term
psychiatry
had first been employed in 1808; by the time of Darwin’s publication of
On the Origin of the Species
in 1859, psychiatry was primarily a system of classification braced by a body of unsupported theory. Only 50 years earlier insanity was commonly believed to result from the disposition of humors (bodily fluids) or sorcery. Psychiatry held that insanity was organic, the result of disease or injury, but this failed to account for a large number of remarkably physically fit lunatics. Natural selection and inherited traits provided plausible explanations: Insanity could be hereditary, and the insane biologically cursed with a weak nervous system. Further, if the etiology could be established, a cure ultimately might be discovered.
Science
could then fulfill its promise of delivering humanity from psychological woe.