[quote=“superking”]Isn’t BDSM a result of big government? I watched a documentary recently about the death of love hotels in Japan. They had some submissive guys and a dom called Rika. Two things struck me. First, there was no actual intercourse. Second, the guys said they wanted to be tied and whipped because this was their choice to be humiliated. They felt life was humiliating in a way they couldn’t control so this was their way of taking control of their humiliation. They were allowing themselves to explore and control how they felt about how restrictive and awful life felt to them. There was also some discourse about gaining control by having this terrible (what society perceives as legal but terrible) secret. They felt good about having this secret. It was something they could own for themselves. This all seemed to be tied in to big government making us nameless slaves.
This may be particular to the Japanese, but somehow I doubt it.[/quote]
This is just batscat crazy enough to be the actual motivation. Submissive types always did seem neurotic to me. Fifty shades of Nietzsche’s slave morality.
I wonder if it ties in with Stockholm Syndrome somehow?
De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is way more lewd and more than two centuries old. The old authentic SM of the French is way more erotic than 50 Shades of Boredom. Yawn.
Henry Miller and Anais Nin are also way more erotic.
Haha. I got into Anaïs Nin’s books when I was in sixth form. As a result I was fairly underwhelmed with my youthful experiences, although to be fair to those young men I was also probably more enthusiastic than skilful, in my youth.
[quote=“Ermintrude”]To explore emotions in a safe environment with few real-life consequences. It’s a kind of rehearsal for disaster. Or katharsis, after the event, you could argue. BSDM many not be your cup of tea but then some people don’t watch horror films or films with depictions of Nazi concentration camps. So many American films have dead children in them, or the lone wolf slasher who cuts up and tortures young women. The market for those films is completely mainstream. Or even ‘art’ for stuff like ‘The Boy With the Striped Pyjamas’, etc. We like to spend 90 minutes watching an ultimate figure of evil (theNazis) in our cultures brutalise us by murdering our children. Then off we pop for a burger or a drink. European culture and the rest of the west is one giant ‘safe word’.
I used to love Eminem. I listened to ‘Encore’ 24-7 when it came out. I never actually wanted to murder my ex. But listening to ‘You’re a fucking cokehead slut I hope you fucking die when you get to hell I hope Satan sticks a needle in your eye I hate your fucking guts you fucking slut I hope you die DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE.’ got me through some sad times.
So the FCC is an American government office? File that under ‘Who gives a shit?’[/quote]
Hadn’t really thought of art like that until now. Interesting. And thanks for the elucidation. I missed that because I don’t really connect with stuff in that way. I use art to pass the time or to allow other stimulus to enter my head just for the sake of other points of view or to kill my own internal discourse or just to give me something else to talk about when I’m with dull people. I don’t watch stuff for the thrill of it. When I start a book the first thing I do is see how many pages are left. I’ve practically stopped listening to all music now. When I watch tv I’m always clicking the info button to see how long there is left. It’s not a depressive thing, its just by 40 you know how pretty much everything is going to end when you engage in narrative art. Nature and documentary films are different though. Vic and Bob still continue to ignore conventional narratives so I like their stuff.
I forgot Eminem used to make good angry music. After I heard Toy Soldiers I shut his music out of my life.
The FCC are like a legitimised Mary Whitehouse.
I’d find BDSM boring probably.
Rowland, Stockholm Syndrome doesn’t really exist. Sorry.
Yeah, that was kind of wank, Toy Soldiers. There’s some dark stuff on that album. It goes beyond disappointment to a real questioning of stuff. I like it: there’s not really any resolution although he’ll fake-‘in it for my daughter’, occasionally.
The old Greek drama festivals, they’d watch 3 tragedies then two comedies. The Icelandic sagas, the English stuff like Biowulf, it’s all about confronting the ugly, in a group. You watch the filthiest things man could do to eachother, then there’d be some kind of victory against that evil. Or not. Even if it ends badly, people get to pre-think pain.
The cool stuff is when the artists play around with that and you get the tragicomedy. Like in the film ‘Oliver’, Fagin skips off into the sunset, with one of his little boys whereas in the novel, he rails against God, refuses to see a rabbi and is executed.
Horror films are a simple illustration. Dig around into horror films from different cultures and you’ll see a culture dealing with its collective fears. Japan and Korea: violence against women and children, technology (changing society, loss of the traditional). Thailand and Cambodia: krasue films and the like, haunted temple stuff: wronged women turning into vampires (social inequality, clash betwen past and present). UK: zombies, viruses (immigration? the fear of old ways of life, ‘Britishness’ disappearing). US: vampires, (sexuality), zombies, the lone crazy (terrorists/serial killers). Art can be a collective expression of anxiety.
Women in submissive roles in art: they are largely relatively powerful women, not people who actually face violence such as African women dealing with FGM or kidnapping by Boko Haram. It’s about women exploring their place in the world in an ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’ way, not about real sexual violence. I think that’s what winds people up because they see a pretty big overlap between choosing it for kink and getting off on it and not being able to say no and being horribly damaged by that. Women with that power and women without that power co-exist in the same cultures. Maybe. Just some thoughts.
Ermintrude, you are the best. Thanks for that great post. I remember when we went to BMAC I thought when listening to you speak that I have totally missed the point of art. I felt a bit ashamed of how dismissive I had been before. But then I remembered that most people I’ve ever spoken to about art have been idiots and I felt better.
What did I say? I was probably showing off for a boy.
Of course, it’s entertainment. But there’s more to it. Why do we create TV shows such as ‘Homeland’? I remember watching the end of Season 2 and asking myself why I enjoyed watching a young, pregnant mentally ill woman watch the father of her child and love of her life get executed in public in Tehran. Of course, I didn’t ‘enjoy’ it. But I was glued to that show. I 'identified with that character even though she’s a lot more extreme than me. Ultimately, she prevails, even though she goes through unspeakable things. She keeps her career going even though she lost her man and struggled with terrible unhappiness and professional self-doubt.
We are mapping emotions and filing our random experiences and thoughts onto these media moments, in the way we used to create religious experience. Compare the above scenario in ‘Homeland’ with the Crucifixion. Art is a kind of religious behaviour, basically. We externalise our pain through creation of mythologies (can I talk about semiotics yet? )
Why do you like ‘Blood on the Tracks’? It’s about having your heart smashed to pieces: that should be a negative experience. My favorite albums are ‘Unknown Pleasures’: the sad but coherent, clever, beautiful ramblings of a desperately sad, afraid 20 year old who hung himself a couple of years later. Why not listen to ‘Dancing Queen’, tunes-wise? For me ‘Unknown Pleasures’ is a ‘safe space’ for my own depression. It has this dark, oppressive feel to it. It’s from my hometown and it grounds me. I listen to it and I go through the journey of the album and when it finishes, I kind of stop. Katharsis.
Social norms, even now, tend to be quite misogynist, abusive, and downright rapey a lot of the time. BDSM culture (of which this book and movie are not a part) at least tries to dredge up all that dark stuff from the collective subconscious, bring it into the light, and have a conversation about it.
Marriage, n. A community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
–Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
I read a couple of Ted Mark’s “Man from O.R.G.Y.” novels, the dirty parts of the Dallas novelization, and my parents’ copy of The Sensuous Woman, by “J.”. These prepared me well.
Social norms, even now, tend to be quite misogynist, abusive, and downright rapey a lot of the time. BDSM culture (of which this book and movie are not a part) at least tries to dredge up all that dark stuff from the collective subconscious, bring it into the light, and have a conversation about it.[/quote]
I think it winds a lot of women up because as I said before, it’s not the wealthy white women who are generally (and I know that’s a huge generalisation) not at the receiving end of a lot of this stuff. We get called stupid and are belittled, but we, and people like the author are strong enough and have the resources to walk away from this kind of stuff. I think, though, there’s a certain responsibility that if you raise consciousness of something, in the hive mind, you raise things you don’t want to. My initial thoughts were quite dismissive along the lines of ‘silly women complaining about nothing’, ‘prudes’, etc, but I don’t live in that MRA culture that is full of weird guys that see ‘Aha! Sluts all secretly want to be tied up and sodomised! They fantasize about it!’ And neither does the author and she never has.
You could argue that all art does that and you get, say, copycat violence or whatever from people with issues will always happen. We shouldn’t censor because of that, but we should be aware of how we shape the hive culture, if we do.
50 shades doesn’t go into the idea of ‘consent’ or ‘mutual respect’, very much. Without foregrounding that in the conversation, it’s not particularly healthy, I don’t think.
But the fanfic community is really interesting. There’s a meadhall aspect to it that fascinates. Haven’t actually read it, though.
Depends on cultural context but even in some of the most liberated parts of the world you’ll find a preponderance of people who don’t understand simple matters of consent, among other things. Does a woman have the right to refuse her husband sex? If a man buys a woman dinner is she obligated to put out? Is it okay to touch someone unconscious if they were flirting with you before they passed out? Even in fairly forward-thinking and progressive places you’ll find lots of people who don’t really see what’s wrong about these scenarios. Anyway, I’m not the most informed or articulate person to discuss the issue of what people call “rape culture”… but it most certainly exists, and that’s what I was referring to.
I also worry that the widespread belief in something called ‘rape culture’ is actually damaging society.[/quote]
Right, and America is a post-racial society because they elected a half-black president
But really, even if you don’t buy into progressive views of things, surely you can admit that a culture that prioritizes the discussion of consent is not “sick” compared to one that doesn’t.
I also worry that the widespread belief in something called ‘rape culture’ is actually damaging society.[/quote]
Right, and America is a post-racial society because they elected a half-black president
But really, even if you don’t buy into progressive views of things, surely you can admit that a culture that prioritizes the discussion of consent is not “sick” compared to one that doesn’t.[/quote]
I’m not sure how the black president stuff is relevant, or that my views are not ‘progressive’ - whatever that means.
I have no issue with society discussing consent. Respect for others is basic empathy and deserves to be encouraged.
But when, just for example, rape hysteria becomes such that male students are required to take courses on ‘how not to rape’ (despite the incidence of rape apparently being lower on college campuses than elsewhere), it seems that society has taken a wrong turn.
Discussion of consent also needs to be sensible. Rape is unusual in that it can see ordinary actions turn criminal depending on the actors’ state of mind. People aren’t perfect mind readers, and an individual deciding at some point during/after a sexual encounter that they aren’t/weren’t that into it after all is a million miles away from a real crime scenario.
I propose a contest : rowland’s Three Degrees of Separation from Big Government.
The winner is whoever can find the shortest link between a totally unrelated case and rowland’s fetish.
