D. H. Lawrence and a Postcard from Paris

Erotic French postcard featuring a photo of 

Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) 

by Julian Mandel (c. 1920)

 

 

D. H. Lawrence opens his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity' with a liberal acknowledgement that "what is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another" [1]. It's a fine definition. 

 

However, it isn't long before he puts his reactionary hat back on and calls for the rigorous censorship of what he terms genuine pornography. Genuine pornography - which Lawrence distinguishes from the erotic aspect of art - is secretive in nature and almost always underworld. Secondly, it is an affront to sex and the human spirit:

 

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. Take the very lowest instances, the picture post-cards sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty." [2]         

 

Blimey! It makes you wonder what kind of cards Lawrence had been shown; as well as where, when, and by whom ...? As he'd been in Paris for a month shortly before writing his essay, it's possible that he was shown some saucy postcards by one of the bouquinistes plying their trade along the banks of the Seine. 

 

The amusing thing is that - just a few lines later - Lawrence feels obliged to acknowledge that "the human nudity of a great many modern people is just ugly and degraded, and the sexual act between modern people is too often the same, merely ugly and degrading". This would suggest that genuine pornography is actually a truthful representation of bodies and acts; a form of graphic realism that does away with the ideal fantasy of sex as something pure and pristine.   

 

There's a further irony in the fact that later in the same year - 1929 - thirteen of Lawrence's paintings would be seized by the police from the Warren Gallery in London and described by an octogenarian magistrate in pretty similar terms - gross, coarse, hideous, unlovely and obscene.

 

Now, if we think Frederick Mead's reaction unfair and slightly hysterical, then mayn't we also challenge Lawrence's view of French postcards ...?   

 

 

II.

The pornographic postcards with which Lawrence confesses at least a vague familiarity, have, for us, a kind of sepia-toned charm that makes one nostalgic for a time gone by. And, whether Lawrence wants to admit it or not, such images have a long, complex, and intimate relationship with the history of art and photography in which the human figure is so central. 

 

By the 1860s and '70s, nude photos were all the rage in Paris, though the authorities still had a degree of control over their production and circulation. However, thanks to a relaxation of censorship laws and new methods of photographic reproduction, the trade in (increasingly risqué) images in the form of carte postales grew dramatically during the following decades, both in the domestic market and internationally. 

 

Not only did street vendors offer such, but they were sold by wine merchants, café owners, tobacconists, barbers, and, of course, the second-hand booksellers who lined the Seine. As one commentator notes: "It is entirely possible that some two to four million nude photographs were in circulation by the end of the nineteenth century, many of them graphically pornographic ..." [3] 

 

Some cards featured anonymous prostitutes or working-class girls looking to make a little extra cash; others featured well-known models and performers, happy to pose au naturel or take part in a little faux lesbianism for the camera. Often sold in sets of up to a dozen, the cards were avidly collected (though, for obvious reasons, rarely posted in the mail). 

 

By the time of Lawrence's death in 1930, the heyday of the French postcard had pretty much come and gone and the 1940s and 50s saw the rise of the pin-up magazine, which, one suspects, Lawrence would not have approved of either.

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.   

[2] Ibid., p. 241. 

       

[3] Raisa Rexer, 'The Naked Truth About French Postcards', on the Wonders and Marvels website, click here.

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see Nigel Sadler's book Erotic Postcards of the Early Twentieth Century, (Amberley Publishing, 2015), in which he explores the changes in social attitudes, fashions, and technology through the medium of erotic postcards. 

Pornosurrealism: Autumn 1929

Ceci est une pipe

 

 

If there is one picture in which Surrealist art, nude photography, and porn all come together, it's a notorious image by Man Ray featuring his mistress and muse Kiki de Montparnasse displaying what Humbert Humbert would describe as the magic and might of her own soft mouth ... [1]

 

The picture - one of four sexually explicit images taken by Ray of himself and his lover - appeared in the avant-garde magazine Variétés, alongside equally explicit poetry written by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (two pioneers of literary Surrealism).

 

The story goes that when editor of the Brussels-based magazine, Edouard Mesens, complained he was having trouble paying the printers, Aragon suggested a special issue should be published in order to increase sales. Keen to contribute, Péret argued that nothing is more special - or sells better - than sex and he volunteered to provide some risqué verse (about little girls lifting up their skirts and masturbating in the bushes, for example).

 

Aragon explained the idea to Ray, who excitedly agreed to provide some photos - which, conveniently, he just happened to have hidden in a drawer of his desk. As one commentator notes:

             

"Even with the faces cropped, Aragon knew who'd posed for them. The male body, hairy and pale, was obviously Ray's. And everyone in Montparnasse would recognise as Kiki's the mouth, lipsticked in a Cupid's bow, clamped around his penis ..." [2]

 

André Breton edited the special special edition and called it 1929. He divided the poetry into four sections, named after the seasons, and each was illustrated with a tipped-in photograph by Ray. The initial print run of 215 copies were intended for private sale in Paris, but most were seized at the border by the authorities and destroyed. 

 

The few copies that escaped the clutches of the French customs offcials were sold (under the counter) at hugely inflated prices to art lovers, for whom the work embodied the freedom, dark humour, and daring eroticism that defined Surrealism. It has since become a collectors item; as has the first English edition published (somewhat belatedly) in 1996 [3].       

 

Notes

 

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr., (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 184. 

 

[2] John Baxter, 'Man Ray Laid Bare', Tate Magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2005): click here to read online.  

 

[3] 1929, by Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and Man Ray, (Alyscamps Press, 1996). Although the work is said to have been translated by Zoltan Lizot-Picon, it is actually a collaboration between the art scholar and critic Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno and André Breton's biographer Mark Polizzotti. 

      Whilst - predictably - HM Customs and Excise declared it pornographic and prohibited its importation into the UK, the book was, however, allowed to circulate freely within the United States as a work of art.         

 

 

On Eric Gill's Illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover

Eric Gill: Lady C. (1931) 

Early version of a wood engraving intended for 

D. H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover

 

  

I. 

 

A recent post on the D. H. Lawrence Society blog features an amusing exchange between Kate Foster and John Worthen on the merits (or otherwise) of a pair of drawings by Eric Gill originally intended as illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928): click here.

 

Having previously written on the Lawrence-Gill connection - click here and here, for example - and being a fully paid-up member of the DHL Society, I figured neither of the above would object if I added my tuppence ha'penny worth to the discussion ...     

 

II. 

 

The piece opens by declaring that Gill's sexual inclinations - which included incest, paedophilia, and bestiality - shouldn't affect our appreciation of his work. He may have been a monster of perversity, but hey, his drawings were rather lovely and, we are assured, they are "not in the least pornographic".

This last claim made me smile: such is the continued horror of smut amongst followers of Lawrence, that they can't bear the thought that works that they happen to find beautiful might be anything other than the innocent laughter of genius, free from any "intention to titilate". 

    

I also smiled when, having gone to the trouble to separate the work from the man, the post backtracks and decides that maybe we cannot exclude the figure of the artist from the drawings after all, as they belong to a single history and the latter are, in a sense, portraits of Gill. 

 

To be fair, I understand this ambivalence and it certainly doesn't trouble me in the same way as the earlier refusal to consider the possibility that art and pornography are not always mutually exclusive. However, push comes to shove and for the record, I think it perfectly reasonable to judge a work without any reference to (or interest in) the biography of the artist.        

 

Moving on, we arrive at the $64,000 question: Would Lawrence have liked the drawings? First to answer is John Worthen and he seems in little doubt that the pictures are un-Lawrentian:

 

"I suspect he would have found them pornographic, in the way he spelled out in his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', where he noted that 'In sexual intercourse, there is give and take.' In the drawings, it is all take (on the man's side), give on the woman's."

 

I have to confess, I have problems with this. For one thing, I cannot see how Worthen can possibly tell who is giving or taking what to or from whom in Gill's pictures. 

 

And, although Lawrence does indeed talk about give and take in the essay mentioned [1], he's not referring to some kind of conscious or consensual exchange between lovers. The reciprocity is, rather, inherent to the act of coition itself, be it between a man and a woman, two men, or one man and his dog; it's a flash of interchange between two blood streams and the question of who is active or passive, giving or receiving, is irrelevant (as well as a little tedious). 

 

We might also note that this is why Worthen's liberal concern that one party in an act of coition may serve in a purely functional and objectified manner as a machine à plaisir is also not really the issue here. For according to the logic of Lawrence's own position, any act of sexual intercourse is radically different from an act of masturbation (his real bête noire); even an act of violent rape results in a new stimulus entering as the old surcharge departs and only masturbation causes deadening. 

 

Just to be clear on this: Lawrence does object (vehemently) to pornography - and he may well have found Gill's drawings pornographic - but not on the grounds Worthen suggests above. 

 

Perhaps realising he needs an additional (more tenable) argument, Worthen now shifts ground slightly and implies that the pictures are the product of an obsessive (and presumably oppressive) male gaze and illustrate what is meant by the Lawrentian phrase sex in the head:        

 

"The drawings are, perhaps, examples of almost exactly what Lawrence was trying not to do in his novel: make the sex something to be looked at. He wanted it to be something felt. Gill is deeply, deeply fascinated by looking, I would say, and his gaze is obsessed; and that (oddly enough) is his limitation as an artist." 

 

This may or may not be true, but it's worth pointing out that Lawrence himself says the purpose of Lady C. was not to stimulate sexual feeling or incite illicit sexual activity, but, rather, help men and women think sex: "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly" [2]. Surely this conscious realisation requires us to keep our eyes open ...? 

 

Other criticisms of the drawings made by Worthen just seem a little strange. For example, the fact that the female bottom is made the focus of the pictures. As Kate Foster asks, "isn't Gill just trying to capture what Mellors wouldn't shut up about: 'Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is!'"    

 

I agree with Foster that one of the interesting things about the drawings is that the woman is positioned on top of the man and that "she appears strong and healthy, it's the male figure who looks thin and rather weak" and in need of support. Her body is not simply put on passive display for an appreciative male spectator and, again as Foster points out, there's a real tenderness about these images; the couple do appear to be cradling one another, despite Worthen's denials of this. 

 

Ultimately, there's a delicious irony here in a man explaining to a woman why the pictures are sexist and phallocentric (and trying to do so from a Lawrentian perspective).   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 233-253. The section relevant to our discussion here is on p. 245, lines 26-36. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 308. 

Should Sade be Saved?

Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l'école du libertinage (1785) 
Photo of the original manuscript: Benoit Tessier / Reuters

It was amusing to read that the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth century masterpiece, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been awarded official status as a trésor national and withdrawn from sale at auction in Paris - along with André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos - thereby ensuring that the novel doesn't fall into foreign hands.    

The work, which Sade famously composed in just 37 days on a roll of paper 39 feet in length made from bits of parchment glued together that he had smuggled into his cell whilst imprisoned in the Bastille, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification achieved via the rape, torture, and murder of mostly teenage victims.

When the prison was stormed and looted at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, Sade was freed but his manuscript was lost (and believed destroyed) - much to his distress. However, after his death (1814), the unfinished work turned up and was finally published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist, Iwan Bloch.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was banned in the UK until the 1950s. Indeed, even in post-War France the work remained highly controversial due to its pornographic nature and disturbing themes to do with power, violence and sexual abuse. Government authorities considered destroying it along with other major works by Sade, prompting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir to write an essay provocatively entitled Must We Burn Sade? (1951-52).

The essay protests the destruction of The 120 Days of Sodom and celebrates freedom and the flesh, whilst also calling for an authentic ethics of responsibility. Beauvoir not only argues that, ultimately, Sade must be thought of as a great moralist, but she also admits to being sympathetic to his utopian politics of rebellion and credits him with being one of the first writers to expose the despotic (and obscene) workings of patriarchy.

Where he falls short - apart from being a technically poor writer - is that he doesn't examine the manner in which cruelty destroys the intersubjective bonds of humanity and ultimately compromises the naked liberty that he most desires. In the end, Beauvoir concludes, Sade was misguided and his work misleads. But his failure still has much to teach us and it would be folly to consign his work to the flames.

Sadly, one suspects that today - in this new age of puritanism known as political correctness, with its safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all-round snowflakery - Beauvoir's philosophical arguments would fail to convince and there would be rather more voices prepared to answer Yes to the question she posed in relation to the Divine Marquis ...      

See:

Simone de Beauvoir, 'Must We Burn Sade?', Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, (University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (Arrow Books, 1990). Note that this edition also contains other writings by Sade, the above essay by Simone de Beauvoir, and an essay by Pierre Klossowski, 'Nature as Destructive Principle' (1965). 

This post was suggested by Simon Solomon, to whom I'm grateful. 

Monkey Business (On Human-Chimp Sexuality)

It's commonly assumed that human males are more easily aroused, more promiscuous and more prepared to fuck just about anything, than human females. But the available research data seems to suggest otherwise. Indeed, the evidence indicates that it's women - not men - who are more polymorphously perverse and erotically plastic in their pleasures, including interspecies shenanigans.

In a famous experiment performed by Canadian sexologist Meredith Chivers, for example, women were shown pornographic videos featuring men and women engaged in heterosexual, lesbian and male homosexual activity. They were also shown films, with added sound effects, of polyamorous bonobos vigorously having sex. Chivers wanted to find out if there was a difference between what women think excites them and what actually turns them on; so it was that the women were hooked up to a vaginal photoplethysmograph, to measure any changes in lubrication, blood flow, or vascongestion.

Asked to record their reactions, the predominantly heterosexual women unsurprisingly said that they mainly enjoyed watching the straight sex scenes. But the VPG told a very different story; they were aroused by all of the sex scenes - including the monkey porn. Indeed, whatever their professed sexual orientation, the women showed significant and rapid genital arousal almost no matter what they watched on screen - girl-on-girl action, masturbating men, or apes getting jiggy with it.

Repeating the same experiment with men, however, Chivers obtained very different results. There was not only a much closer correspondence between mind and body (gay and straight men both physically responding in a category specific manner with what they said they found sexually arousing), but, interestingly, none of the men registered even the first stirrings of an erection whilst watching the bonobos bonking. Any expectation that explicit animal sex would speak to the untamed beast within was - in the case of the men at least - sadly mistaken.

Now, Chivers is quick to point out that this doesn't automatically mean that all women are subconsciously lusting after non-human primates, or dreaming of animal lovers. If we were to believe this on the basis of the physiological evidence, then we would also have to believe that they secretly desire to be raped; because the fact is some women are physically excited by extremely violent fantasy and some display signs of genital response (including orgasm) during actual sexual assault.

Chivers argues - convincingly, I feel - that vaginal lubrication evolved as an automatic protective response, to reduce discomfort and protect from injury during penetration; that it was not essentially a sign of sexual arousal or indicative of desire. Thus, what her data reveals is that even the sight of a pygmy chimp with a hard on can stimulate a reaction, so closely do they resemble humans and so anxious are women to reduce the prospect of coital pain.    

But what of the male apes? I hear you ask. If human females can subconsciously find them a sexual possibility (or threat), do they find women at all attractive?

Apparently - and contrary to what the picture above or certain pornographic fantasies, usually involving large gorillas, might suggest - our simian cousins are not exactly lining up to date, rape, or perv on women. Show a male chimp images of a female chimp's genitalia or swollen anal rump and he's interested to the point that he'll even accept a loss of fruit juice in exchange; show him a pornographic picture of a woman and it's no deal - he'll stick with his juice.

Obviously, there are exceptions; that is to say, there are cases of apes in captivity who, when given the chance, like to watch porn on TV. But, for the most part, chimps seem to prefer their own kind. What's more, they tend to have a very strong MILF fixation and consistently prefer older females over younger, inexperienced females (suggesting that the human male preference for younger women is a relatively recent evolutionary development).   


See: Meredith L. Chivers, Michael C. Seto and Ray Blanchard, 'Gender and Sexual Orientation Differences in Sexual Response to Sexual Activities Versus Gender of Actors in Sexual Films', in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 93, No. 6, 1108-1121 (American Psychological Association, 2007). Click here to read online version of this essay. 

Love, Hate and Intercourse

Intercourse: The Life and Work of Andrea Dworkin, 
dir. Pratibha Parmar.
Presently being filmed in San Francisco and 
scheduled for release in January 2015

According to Rawdon Lilly, the Lawrentian persona in Aaron's Rod (1922), hate is a form of love on the recoil which invariably results in destructive violence, be it on a personal-individual or an impersonal-collective level: It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.

I've long accepted the logic of this and still think it's a crucial insight. But might we not turn it around and suggest that rather than hate being an extreme reversal of love, love is actually a sublimated and disguised form of hate? That, essentially, even the highest and most celebrated expressions of love are coercive forms of spiritual and/or sexual abuse based upon the threat of violence.

This rather more disconcerting and pessimistic view is perhaps where Andrea Dworkin was coming from in her radical feminist study Intercourse (1987).

Although Dworkin doesn't actually write that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (this oft-quoted line was invented by her critics in an attempt to disparage her sophisticated argument by reducing it to a crass slogan), she does suggest that the male lover is more often than not in a position of power over the female object of his desire and that penetrative sex therefore invariably involves some degree of violation and all the flowers or boxes of chocolates in the world don't alter this fact, even if they serve to mask it and somewhat sweeten the deal.

Extending her own analysis developed in earlier works, Dworkin argues in Intercourse that the eroticized subordination, exploitation, and abuse of women within a phallocratic society is central and determines the behaviour and beliefs of both sexes.

This is increasingly apparent within a pornified culture, although the hatred, contempt and revulsion for women is reinforced by and throughout the arts, media, law, politics, science and religion (i.e. all of those discursive practices which between them produce the truth of our engendered human condition). You can read many classic works of literature or watch almost all films to see this; pornography is by no means exclusively to blame and is ultimately just another symptom of a far more serious disease: misogyny.     

And this is why what we need is not more censorship or attempts to outlaw extreme pornography, but what Nietzsche terms a revaluation of all values.


Note: this post is dedicated to KM and all those like her sensitive to the issue of invasive male penetration and the internal occupation of their bodies; those women who, like Dworkin, realise that the question of intercourse is fundamental to feminism and women's freedom. 

On Cumshots and the Triumph of the Will to Orgasm

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe in the two-part film 

Nymphomaniac, dir. Lars von Trier (2013)

According to one sexologist, real men like to have narrative closure and some sense of satisfactory ending. Thus the importance and popularity within the pornographic imagination of the cumshot which provides an often premature but nonetheless definitive full stop to proceedings.

Only a few effeminate perverts enjoy the experience of delayed orgasm in which the purpose of pleasure and pleasure of purpose is constantly deferred and often ruined; perverts, a few philosophers, and those rare women who still value seduction over production and regard feminism in a Nietzschean sense as a loss of style, or an obscene staging of desire determined by purely phallic values.  

For such women - to whom the promise of so-called sexual liberation was always laughable - pleasure can very well exist without purpose. They don't mind exchanging amusing stories that lack a punchline (the female inability to tell jokes is rooted in an unconcern with climax, rather than the lack of a sense of humour), or receiving massages without the happy ending that most men anticipate and desire (consenting to a certain amount of back, neck and shoulder work so long as they are able to eventually flip over and have the oiled hands of their masseuse set to in the one area they want to have rubbed).

But today, as indicated, such women are few in number. The majority have been taught to demand equal rights and pleasures and to make sex visible and meaningful, i.e. the essential truth of themselves: I come therefore I am. The insistence on orgasm and the porn industry's obsession with showing such close up and in hi-definition has exorcised the ambivalence of her body and compromised the strange intensities that existed in erotic games of reticence and artifice.

I would like to think that Lars von Trier understands something of this and that his new film, Nymphomaniac - as well as the accompanying poster campaign which features many of the lead actors showing us their orgasm faces (including Charlotte Gainsbourg pictured above) - is a subversive attempt to mock the sexualized order we inhabit and to bring about some form of reversal.    

But, sadly, I suspect from what I have read of the work, that this is not the case; that he too remains a believer in sex as a form of truth to be ejaculated in all our faces in an orgy of realism. For that is precisely what it is to live in a pornified culture; one is subject to endless cumshots and an obsession with the real. 

Bukkake

 Illustration: en.wikipedi.org/wiki/Bukkake

When viewing a bukkake scene which, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the act, involves multiple male figures masturbating and ejaculating onto the face of a young woman, one is tempted to ask what the essential role of the latter might be; is she there as a necessary object of desire, or does she serve a symbolic function as sacrificial victim? 

Or is she not, in a still more fundamental sense, simply serving as an alibi? That is to say, is she not there merely to placate the heterosexual make conscience? 

For it seems to me that the real excitement of bukkake is generated by the fact that it's a homosocial and homoerotic event; a rare opportunity for straight men to be naked and in intimate physical proximity. It's not the sight of a woman on her knees that arouses, but of other men openly masturbating in a cock-and-cumfest which fetishises phallic masculinity and elevates semen to first place within a hierarchy of bodily fluids.

The viewer of such scenes which, as with the vast majority of porn, are shot from a male POV, is expected to identify with the anonymous (sometimes masked) male figures and encouraged to enjoy the feeling of vicarious pleasure.

They are not, of course, expected or encouraged to concern themselves with the young women at the centre of the action or think about the problematic sexual politics of bukkake, which, involving as it does, an undeniable element of violence and ritual humiliation, is uncomfortably close to a form of group rape and not merely a disguised form of gay circle jerk. 

Should We Lose the Lads' Mags?

When the defenders of so-called lads' mags argue that there is nothing wrong or shameful about the naked female form, you know they are either willfully misunderstanding the arguments made against pornography, or that they are morons. 

Personally, I tend to think that they are cynical and slimy rather than stupid. Thus they know perfectly well that the objection of feminists like Kat Banyard is not to female flesh per se, but to the sexual objectification and exploitation of female flesh.  

And they understand - as we all understand - how the young girls who model in such magazines are obliged to adopt a familiar series of poses and display their nakedness within a recognizable erotic environment. Reclining bodies on a bed, or bodies crawling around on all fours sticking out parts for penetration are not simply unclothed. They are, rather, naked for a purpose within a context of meaning and they don't so much expose the flesh as promote its desirability and advertise its availability as a commodity.

This doesn't mean I automatically lend support to the UK Feminista and Object campaign to "lose the lads' mags" from the shelves of supermarkets, but it does mean that there remains an important debate to be had on the intimate relationship between pornography, sexism and capital. 

Arguably, porn has always been the secretly privileged discourse of bourgeois society ...