What Was I Thinking? (22 May)

Images used for the posts published on this date 

in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020

 

 

Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I'm busy working on an 8000-word essay, the structuring of which is giving me a real headache - it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by, rather than produce all-new material. 

 

It seems that I published a post on this date for five consecutive years: 2016 - 2020. And these posts were: 

 

 

On the Death of a Wellness Warrior (The Case of Jessica Ainscough)

In the first of the May 22nd posts (2016), I discussed the tragic case of a so-called Wellness Warrior from Down Under called Jessica Ainscough. She died, in 2015, from cancer, despite her fanatic adherence to a range of alternative treatments based on diet and lifestyle rather than medical science - including the ludicrous Gerson therapy. 

 

Her case perfectly illustrating the peculiar mix of denial, dishonesty and desperate self-delusion of those who reject chemo and surgery in favour of fruit juice and coffee enemas.  

 

Ainscough sadly placed her hopes in quackery and became a pin-up girl for those who believe there's a global conspiracy by the medical establishment (in cahoots with big business and governments) to cover up the beautiful truth about cancer; i.e. that it can be cured with positive thinking and a bizarre range of practices that are basically forms of faith healing and folk magic despite the pseudo-scientific language they are disguised with. 

 

Having said that - writing in a post-Covid era - I have to admit I'm a lot more reluctant to follow the science and allow untested experimental vaccines to be used on me at the behest of the authorities.

 

 

Towards a Queer Ethology: Who Fucked Bambi (The Case of the Deer-Loving Monkey) 

 

In the second of the May 22nd posts (2017), I discussed a short ethological study of something that those who like to idealise animal behaviour and use Nature as a metaphysical reference point for their own moral values, would probably prefer not to know about; a female sika deer contentedly having sex with a male Japanese macaque (or snow monkey) on the island of Yakushima. 

 

Apparently, although these two species enjoy a close and playful symbiotic relationship, it's extremely rare for them to engage in acts of coition. It seems wrong here to speak of consent or rape and the lead author of the study insisted that both animals seemed to enjoy their shared sexual experience (the female deer even licking the male monkey's ejaculate off her body).

 

 

On the Erotics and Etiquette of Wearing Gloves 

 

In the third of the May 22nd posts (2018), I reflected on a time when respectable women (including my mother) still wore gloves as a matter of course; not just as an elegant fashion accessory to be matched with hat and shoes - nor simply to protect the hands - but as a sign of culture, discipline and breeding.

 

Gloves encoded an entire set of values and were worn to display one's knowledge of - and conformity to - a complex series of social norms governing polite behaviour. In other words, the wearing of gloves was a question of etiquette, belonging to a wider politics of style.

 

But just as important as the wearing of gloves was their removal; a lady should always do so discreetly and not as if performing a striptease of the hand - a point that led us on to the erotics of the glove, as examined by Roland Barthes in his beautiful little book Le plaisir du texte (1973). 

 

According to Barthes, the erotics of the glove is often tied to the pleasure of glimpsing naked female flesh exposed between two edges. In other words, it's 'the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing' which the amorous subject finds arousing. 

 

But of course, there are fetishists who love gloves in and of themselves and couldn't care less about glimpsing the flesh or intermittence; their concern is with the length, style, colour and - often most crucially of all - the material of the glove (be it leather, silk, cotton, or latex).

 

 

The Man and the Dreaming Woman: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's The Witch à la Mode

 

In the fourth of the May 22nd posts (2019), I provided a reading of Lawrence's early short story 'The Witch à la Mode' - one that anticipates his often underrated second novel The Tresspasser (1912) and which is born of the author's sexual frustration and sardonic anger.

 

Interestingly, at the end of the tale, Lawrence seems to come down firmly on the side of sexual maturity and a conventional married life. For having saved his ex-girlfriend from the flames, the protagonist of the story, Coutts, abandons her in order to become the good husband and father, growing fat and amiable in domestic bliss, that he always wanted to be.

 

 

Clap Trap  

 

Finally, there's this post dated 22 May 2020 on the North Korean style communal clap-along in support of our NHS heroes and other key workers that became almost compulsory during the Covid pandemic when we were all in lockdown (a slightly sexier-sounding way of saying imprisoned in our own homes).

 

Doubtless, many clapped with sincerity and a sense of civic duty and were not just showing off or virtue signalling with their saucepans, but the entire performance was cynically orchestrated by politicians and the media and, as I said at the time, I would rather have had a dose of the clap than stand on my doorstep and join in with a depressing (and sinister) display of mock-solidarity. 

 

Freedom is often best expressed as refusal and not-doing, because, as Barthes powerfully reminds us, fascism is the power to compel activity. 

 

 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

The Ballard of Jazz the Knife 

(c. 1992)

 

 

I. Opening Remarks 

 

Piquerism - for those of you unfamiliar with the practice - is a perverse sexual interest in penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives. 

 

Most often, the targeted areas of the body are the breasts, buttocks, and genitals and whilst for many lovers it's a form of edge play or risk-aware consensual kink, for the true sadist - who laughs at the idea of obtaining permission or that libertinism should conform to a code of health and safety - piquerism only becomes interesting when it results in extreme suffering and death or is performed post-mortem.   

 

 

II. Biofictional Remarks

 

As a young child, I might be said to have had something of a piqueresque liking for sharp objects myself. I far preferred, for example, pricking balloons with a needle, than inflating them. And once, at school, I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she too would explode with a bang [1].  

 

And whilst I had an extensive range of toy guns, my favourite thing to play with was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade with which I could create the illusion of having stabbed myself through the heart (or knifed a friend in the back).    

 

 

III. Literary Remarks

 

I don't know how D. H. Lawrence felt about this subject, but the following scenes are worth noting:

 

(i) Women in Love (Ch. VI) [2]

 

Pussum has confessed that she's not afraid of anything except black-beetles. She's certainly not afraid of blood ... 

 

So when a man with a pale, jeering face laughs at her, she suddenly jabs a knife across his hand, causing him to leap up, cursing. He glares at her with sardonic contempt as the blood begins to flow from the wound inflicted by this feline young woman. 

 

Birkin looked on with obvious displeasure, but Gerald is aroused by the girl's action. Later, in the taxi home, she sits close to him and grasps his hand in hers; "rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain [...] and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity".     

 

(ii) The Plumed Serpent (Ch. XXIII) [3] 

Cipriano strips and publicly executes a group of prisoners with a bright, thin dagger ...

"'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he said in a loud, clear voice. 

      And swift as lightning he stabbed the blindfolded men to the heart, with three swift, heavy stabs. Then he lifted the red dagger and threw it down.

      'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he repeated." 

Later, Cipriano and his fellow revolutionaries indulge in a little fetishistic blood play, dipping their hands into blood collected from the bodies of the executed men in a stone bowl and raising wet, red fists. They then sprinkle some of the blood on a fire in a neo-pagan religious ritual.   

(iii) The Woman Who Rode Away [4]

 

A bored, middle-class white woman goes in search of adventure and to give her heart to the god of the Chilchui Indians ... 

 

Two men grip her arms whilst two others "with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her". 

 

They also remove the pins from her hair and touch her on the breasts and back. Then they drug her and groom her over the course of several weeks into the role of sacrificial victim. Her captors, the Indians, are superficially kind to her; gentle and considerate. Yet she sensed their cruelty underneath and when the time comes for her to die, they show no hesitation in killing her:

 

"When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs. Behind stood the aged man [...] holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife."

 

They are waiting for the right moment, when the red sun is about to sink: Then the old man will strike with his flint blade and accomplish the sacrifice ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] She didn't. And rather than encouraging my scientific curiosty, the teacher, Mrs. Horncastle, gave me a telling off in front of the class and made me apologise to poor, red-faced Mandy Howard.    

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 73. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 380.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Rode Away', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted are on pp. 55 and 70. 

 

For another post involving knife play (and with reference to the case of Sid and Nancy), click here.

In Praise of the Stiletto Heel

The Dioressence stiletto

Photo: Marton Perlaki for Dior

According to Camille Paglia, the stiletto heel is "modern woman's most lethal social weapon". Nevertheless, she concedes that wearing a pair incurs a cost - and we're not just talking money here. 

For no other form of footwear illustrates the fact so perfectly that culture, style and sexual elegance are refined forms of cruelty. Self-mutilation, it seems, is the price of high-heeled beauty. Still, no pain, no gain - as Jewish elders, sadomasochists, fashionistas and fitness coaches like to say. And wise women everywhere know the magic that an exquisite pair of stilettos can work on the body:

"The high heel creates the illusion of a lengthened leg by shortening the calf muscle, arching the foot, and crushing the toes, forcing breasts and buttocks out in a classic hominid posture of sexual invitation."

They don't call them fuck me shoes for nothing ...

And there's a good reason also why they are so loved by fetishsists; for a woman in stilettos is paradoxically vulnerable and threatening at one and the same time - she can't run, but she can grind her weaponised heel into your foot (or your face, or your genitals) à la Elizabeth Taylor as the most desirable woman in town, Gloria Wandrous, in BUtterfield 8 (dir. Daniel Mann, 1960).

As Paglia notes, the stiletto is thus far from simply a shoe; it's an iconic cultural artefact of disturbing complexity and the woman who wears it becomes both a seductress with an "aura of sadistic glamour" and  a pure object of male desire; she can be fucked, but she can also "lance and castrate".

Whilst true that women have worn high-heeled shoes for hundred of years, the uniquely tall and narrow stiletto - named after the thin Italian dagger much favoured by Renaissance assassins - is very much a piece of mid-twentieth design; born when post-war technology finally made it possible to create a convex heel using metal rather than traditional wood that narrowed to a dramatic, dangerous, and potentially deadly point.

Doctors warned against wearing them on medical grounds and many places banned the heels fearing they would damage the flooring or tear holes in their precious fucking carpets. And this is why one has to love them; their impracticality defies all utilitarian logic and their hazardous nature contravenes every bit of heath and safety legislation. As well as saying fuck me, stilettos scream fuck you and fuck off.   

Despite all the voices raised against them, the heels remained popular throughout the late-fifties and early-sixties with all the most stylish women of the time and they have continued to function as one of fashion's most powerful symbols of ultra-femininity, never quite disappearing from either the highstreet or the pornographic imagination.

Indeed, in his final collection as creative director at Dior (S/S 16), designer Raf Simons gave us his take on Roger Vivier's classic heel - the so-called Dioressence stiletto (pictured above). Offered in a lovely array of colours - including ochre, bronze, and Trafalgar red - as well as the traditional black, the shoes are available in lamb or calfskin and come with either a 7cm or 10cm heel - and a provocative price tag that dares you to buy them.

Whilst rather surprisingly (and disappointingly) deploring "their horrifying cost at a time of urgent social needs", Paglia nevertheless admits to wandering round the luxury shoe hall of her local department store and being ravished by their beauty:

"Despite my detestation of its decadence, this theatrical shoe array has for years provided me with far more intense aesthetic surprise and pleasure than any gallery of contemporary art, with its derivative gestures, rote ironies, and exhausted ideology."

She concludes:

"Designer shoes represent the slow but steady triumph of the crafts over the fine arts during the past century. They are streamlined works of modern sculpture, wasteful and frivolous yet elegantly expressive of pure form, a geometric reshaping of soft and yielding nature."         


See: Camille Paglia, 'The Stiletto Heel', in Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 187-90.

Entomophilia 2: Crush Fetish

Crush20 by Unknown 1886 (2017)

deviantart.com

Although some men (and, let's be honest, it is mostly men) enjoy watching women crush larger animals including live rodents, birds, fish, and even kittens beneath their feet (a practice that is illegal in many countries, including the UK and US), most devotees of crush porn are content with the so-called soft version that makes do with sexually sacrificing invertebrates; insects, arachnids, crustaceans, molluscs, etc. (a practice against which there are no laws and creatures about whom even many animal rights activists don't seem to care).

As Jeremy Biles notes in an essay on Georges Bataille and those he likes to term (after Jeff Vilencia) crush freaks, the latter are:

"sexually aroused by the sight of an insect exploded beneath the pressure of a human foot - usually, but not necessarily, a relatively large and beautiful female foot. Sometimes the insects meet their demise under the force exerted by a naked big toe. Other times, it is the impaling heel of a stiletto or the raised outsole of a platform shoe that accomplishes the extermination."

Crucially, as Biles goes on to say: "the crush freak typically fantasizes identification with the insect as he or she masturbates, and savors the sense of sudden, explosive mutilation attendant upon the sight of the pedal extrusions". This is why crush fetishism cuts across both podophilia and macrophilia, although Biles himself - rather unconvincingly - prefers to relate crush fetishism to technophilia, i.e. sexual arousal associated with machinery, rather than the feet of giant women.

I suppose the key is that lovers of crush porn feel shortchanged by the usual money shot of an ejaculating penis - they want to see (and need to imagine) a whole body exploding in every direction at once; the agony and the ecstasy of bursting bodies is the ultimate transgression of boundaries, making the values of society go splat via a perverse act of sexual violence. 

Diminutive former child star Mickey Rooney may have disapproved - although his concern was more for the children of America than the creatures being stepped on - but crush fetishism, like most other perverse forms of love - including philosophy - has something important to teach us; not least the absurdity of insisting upon an essential connection between Eros and morality.


See: Jeremy Biles, 'I, Insect, Or Bataille and the Crush Freaks', Janus Head, 7(1), pp. 115-31 (Trivium Publications, 2004). Click here to read online.

See also: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Sex', pp. 267-90. 

In the above, Raffles points out that most crush fetishists don't give a damn about insects, even though they may intensely identify with them during a moment of "wildly disorienting arousal". And neither do they attempt some kind of becoming-insect in order to escape the limits of their humanity. They just want to get off by pretending to be in the position of a bug underfoot; i.e., they just want to feel themselves worthless, disgusting, and vulnerable. For crush fetishists, the insect is merely a means to an end.       

Those interested in reading part one of this post on insect fetish should click here.  

In Praise of the Ballet Boot (and Other Kinky Forms of Footwear)

 Leather lace-up knee-length ballet boots 

The so-called ballet boot is a style of footwear given us by the pornographic imagination, that ingenuously integrates the box toe of the ballerina's pointe shoe with an ultra high heel, forcing the foot of the wearer to assume a near vertical position and miraculously transcend the ugly flatness of nature. Obviously, they're not designed as casual wear or for comfort; novices can experience painful lower leg cramps, for example. But for those who admire the art of shoe making, they're a perfect combination of culture, cruelty and contemporary calceology.      

Usually, the height of the heel is a minimum of seven inches; long enough to ensure that the foot is fully extended, but not so long as to prevent standing and tottering about. Knee-high and thigh-high versions will often incorporate zips, buckles, and padlocks as well as elaborate lacing; these things - in addition to the material that the boots are made of - being of crucial import to the devotee (the devil being in the detail, as every fetishist knows).   

Apart from the pointe shoe - which was originally conceived in response to the desire for dancers to appear ethereal, like the much loved Marie Taglioni, credited with being the first ballerina to genuinely dance en pointe in 1832 - another precursor of the ballet boot was the Viennese fetish boot (c. 1900), which came with an eleven inch spiked heel that made standing (let along walking) nigh impossible, but came in handy for anal penetration of the submissive male subject.     

Finally, mention must be made of Alexander McQueen's iconic Armadillo boot from the S/S 2010 collection entitled Plato's Atlantis - one of his most astonishing creations for the catwalk. Designed like the ballet boot with high heel and box toe, this outrageously beautiful ankle boot, hand-carved from wood and covered in snakeskin or iridescent paillettes, not only extends the foot and elongates the leg, but seems to organically fuse with the wearers flesh, transforming her into some kind of alien being.
     

Although somewhat challenging to wear - not only because of their height and shape, but also their weight - a bulge designed above the toes enables the boot to be lifted relatively more easily when walking; not that many women will ever be fortunate enough to experience wearing them, as only twenty-one pairs were ever made.

In 2015, Lady Gaga snapped up the three pairs shown above, auctioned by Christie's New York, for $295,000.

In Defence of Giant Lovers

The Meeting Place (detail) by Paul Day 

POV shot by Stephen Alexander

Whilst I wouldn't say I'm a fan, I certainly admire much of Antony Gormley's sculptural work and share many of his criticisms and concerns to do with public art. 

I think he's right, for example, to argue that many pieces unimaginatively plonked down in our airports, stations, and city centres lack ambition or challenge and fail to address the question of what role statues might play in the 21st century. 

However, I'm disappointed to discover that he seems to particularly despise Paul Day's giant brass figure of two lovers embracing at St Pancras International Station, as I quite like it. The Meeting Place might be crude and ill-proportioned - might, in a word used by Gormley, even be described as crap - but it can still excite fetishistically, even if it fails aesthetically.

For not only does the female figure have very lovely calves and ankles, given emphasis by her high-heeled shoes and tip-toe posture, but she also invites an upskirt peek (although, alas, there's nothing to see). 

And then there's the fact that she's thirty-feet tall, which surely brings out the macrophile in many a man. I don't know why it is that giant women - or, more precisely, the thought of being crushed beneath their feet - is so ingrained within the pornographic imagination, but so it is and Day's sculpture obscenely exploits this fact (whether or not he consciously intended to do so).

So, to conclude, we might say this: that whilst The Angel of the North artistically intrigues as an erection, it doesn't solicit an erection; it makes one wonder, but it doesn't make one want to perv.     

     

Venus in Furs

Are you visiting Woman? Don't forget your whip! 

The masochistic lover  will often fall on his knees and passionately kiss the feet of the woman he adores as his mistress: she whose eyes sparkle with cruelty and who by virtue of her greater power is able to place a spiked heel nonchalantly on the neck of all mankind.

Whatever the truth of her actual status is irrelevant: fur transforms any woman wearing it into a superior creature; be she rich and wrapped in mink, or a simple peasant girl in clothes trimmed with rabbit skin (something that is forgotten in this graceless and charmless age of rubber and plastic).

The figure of the dominatrix obsesses, seduces, and captivates the masochist because she corresponds to his own refined tendencies and mirrors his particular nature; in discovering her, he learns how to paradoxically find and abandon himself.

If, initially, many women are reluctant to accept the adoration of a slave - finding the thought of their lover's submission as well as their own placement on a pedestal like a marble statue distasteful and degrading - nevertheless they know in their hearts that there is no equality or justice in the false virtue of love. 

And, having picked up the whip and experienced the grandeur of their own pale power sweeping over them, they are often more than happy to demonstrate precisely what it means to be at the mercy of a young and frivolous woman ... 

  

Sandals

Young girls in strappy Greco-Roman style sandals: what excites the most; the bareness of the feet, or the tightness of the binding?

Or perhaps it's the fantasy of owning slaves. For desire can quickly negate liberalism and every erection makes despotic.  

Angela Carter and Lorenzo the Closet Queen

Portrait of Angela Carter by Tara Heinemann in which 

she brings out the almost spectral beauty of the subject

Used with permission

Since her death in 1992, there has, I think, been a marked falling off of interest in the work of Angela Carter amongst readers and critics - even those of a feminist persuasion. Tastes change and her writing now seems a bit too gothic and too queer; the language used is just too rich in an age of austerity (i.e. meanness and fear).

Of course, she still has her fans and loyal supporters and I might even be numbered amongst them, for her books meant a very great deal to me in my youth. But the fact remains that she's now a somewhat less mainstream and thus more marginal figure than she used to be and this is unfortunate, as she is not only a great novelist and teller of tales, but a brilliant journalist and critic.

Her study, The Sadeian Woman, for example, remains one of the best exercises in cultural history and sexual politics produced by an English author and her pieces collected in Nothing Sacred (Virago, 1992) also deserve to be read and re-read; not least of all the essay 'Lorenzo the Closet Queen', which combines two of her great loves and two of my own obsessions, namely, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the sociology of fashion. 

In the above, Carter offers an all-too-brief sartorial critique of Women in Love - a novel which, as she amusingly says, is "as full of clothes as Brown's". She also argues that if Lawrence catalogues the wardrobes of his heroines with such a loving eye for detail, he does so in order to convince his readers that he possesses a "hot line to a woman's heart by the extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and submission" [208].

This, she says, is a piece of literary fraudulence. And yet, as she goes on to add, Lawrence at the same time clearly enjoys being a girl and has a genuine and somewhat touching (if pathologically fetishistic) interest in female apparel. Lawrence, she writes, "is seduced and bemused by the narcissistic apparatus of femininity", even if he only wanted to be a woman "so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself" [209].

As I noted in an earlier post, Lawrence is particularly fascinated in Women in Love by the thought of brightly coloured stockings and they become a kind of leitmotiv running throughout the novel. Carter writes:

"Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones. Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.
      The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance. ... Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme erotic arousal in Gudrun; she touches them with 'trembling, excited hands'." [209-10]

The question is, what is Lawrence playing at in this scene of camp ecstasy and girliness? Carter is in no doubt:

"I think what Lawrence is doing is attempting to put down the women he has created in his own image for their excessive reaction to the stockings to which he himself has a very excessive reaction indeed, the deep-down queenly, monstrous old hypocrite that he is." [210]

This seems a bit harsh: but deadly accurate. Lawrence allows himself the "licence to mock the girls for parading about in the grotesque finery he has forced them to don" [211]. He is at once fascinated by female dandyism and the seductive allure of fashion and repulsed by it. If he depicts Gudrun as a kind of whore, then Hermione is turned into a terrifying witch figure by the exotic, aristocratic and self-conscious strangeness of her dress.

Whilst Baudelaire loved women for their unnaturalness, Lawrence hates them for it and many of his female characters end up like drag queens, defined and confined by their own clothing. Carter concludes that for most of the time in Women in Love, Lawrence is like a little boy dressing up in his mother's clothes and attempting to fool us into thinking he writes with the hand (and the eye) of a woman:

"The con trick, the brilliant, the wonderful con trick, the real miracle, is that his version of drag has been widely accepted as the real thing, even by young women who ought to know better. In fact, Lawrence probes as deeply into a woman's heart as the bottom of a hat-box." [214]