They're in the Trees! (In Praise of Risky Play)

Two Blonde Beasts in a Tree 

 (SA/2019)

It's conker season - a time of the year that brings back fond memories of childhood, throwing bricks and sticks at the horse chestnut trees lining Chatteris Avenue and, if feeling particularly brave, attempting to clamber up them in order to better access their treasures.    

Today, children don't bother collecting conkers; nor do they seem to climb trees, or even go outdoors very much. We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture of health and safety in which unsupervised activity - or what used to simply be called play - is socially unacceptable.

And that, surely, can't be good ...?

In fact, the eradication of genuine play - understood as an inherently joyous but sometimes risky form of freedom - has had a profoundly crippling and depressing effect on children.

Modern parents, teachers, and other childminders may not like it, but children like to climb trees, swing on ropes, ride bikes, handle knives, jump in water, play with fire, throw stones, wrestle, explore abandoned buildings, and generally get up to mischief. And they like to do so without wearing crash helmets and other protective forms of clothing - for even cuts and bruises and grazed knees are an important part of having fun and growing up.          

In other words, forms of risky play have developmental and evolutionary value and can therefore be observed in other young mammals, not just human youngsters. Sometimes, rarely, it can result in serious injury and - very rarely - even have tragic consequences. But the benefits of allowing children to play outdoors and unsupervised far outweigh the dangers; as experiments with rats have clearly demonstrated.     

Children - like rodents - that are deprived of play during a critical phase of their development tend to grow up overly fearful and less adaptive when placed in an unfamiliar environment. Their ability to interact socially with strangers is also not what it might be; they can, for example, be sullen and withdrawn, or quick to anger (i.e., they have trouble regulating their emotions).

Again, that's not good - and surely it's not what anyone wants. Perhaps if children still played conkers and climbed trees, there wouldn't be so many teens stabbing one another, dealing drugs, committing suicide, etc. Such neurotic and psychopathological behaviour surely isn't unconnected to the dramatic decline in childhood play (and the equally dramatic rise of social media).   

The irony of the situation today isn't lost on one researcher in this area:

"We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun."*

* See: Peter Gray, 'Risky Play: Why Children Love It and Need It', Psychology Today (April 07 2014): click here.

Douglas Murray: The Madness of Crowds

Bloomsbury (2019)

Douglas Murray's new book is conveniently divided into four main sections headed by a single term (dramatically printed in bold even on the contents page): Gay - Women - Race - Trans

Each of these terms plays a foundational role within contemporary culture; they are the four pillars of postmodernity; the terms to which all paths lead and all other signifiers refer. Whilst they provide meaning and allow individuals to forge identities, they are also the true causes of the collective insanity that lies at the root of what is happening today.

That - in brief - is Murray's central argument; one with cultural and socio-political aspects, but which essentially remains a philosophical argument to do with the collapse of old values in an age after God, when even the secular narratives that initially promised to fill the void no longer retain our belief.     

The problem is, Murray is not a philosopher; he's a journalist and public intellectual. And so his analysis tends to be common sensical rather than conceptually challenging and when he does mention philosophers by name, it's only ever in passing and nearly always in a dismissive manner - never once does he engage with their ideas or even think it might be worthwhile to do so.

And that's a real problem for me - even if, broadly speaking, I agree with Murray on many points and share some of his concerns. Perhaps if he did read the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze with serious critical attention he might understand a little better why we are where we are and avoid the anglophonic arrogance that he and others of his ilk (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) are prone to.          


Gay

According to Murray, Foucault's views on homosexuality are deeply confused. I don't think that's true: I think, rather, that Murray dislikes any degree of ambiguity and, in the end, Foucault is a little too radical and a little too queer for his liking. For whereas gays, such as himself, want social acceptance and pride themselves on their respectability, "queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into" [37]. 

For Murray, irresponsible queers - along with radical feminists, black militants and trans activists - take things too far; instead of seeking liberal consensus and some form of historical resolution, they just keep banging on about power and politics, identity and intersectionality:

"Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing  how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other." [4]

Murray's fear is that this risks a backlash that would threaten some of the advances made in civil rights and sexual freedoms that he supports: "After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not." [232]

That's a very reasonable concern, but, ironically, some critics would argue that his moral conservatism is part of that reaction.    


Women

Murray's wish that we might all just get along is developed in his chapter on women and the relations between the sexes. But he seems to think that we'll never get along until everyone acknowledges the innate biological differences between men and women (including aptitude differences) and accepts these as a basis for ordering society, rather than the "political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences" [65]. 

The problem is, of course, that even biological facts are subject to cultural and socio-political interpretation. And even if we could identify biological facts concerning sexual difference in and of themselves, Murray doesn't provide any reason why they should be inscribed within society and its institutions as natural law; why biology should become not only a determining factor but a destiny.  

Murray also worries far too much about silly slogans, hashtags, and memes on social media that betray an apparent war on men being fought by man-hating fourth-wave feminists: things such as 'men are trash', 'kill all men', and references to 'toxic masculinity', etc.

I'm surprised Mr. Murray has the the time or patience to read the latest tweets from Laurie Penny et al and would suggest he spend less time on social media (which, in an interlude following this chapter, he describes as a massively disruptive force that dissolves the public/private distinction and ultimately leads to group think and mass hysteria).*     

Race

It's not only queers, feminists, and the tech giants of Silicon Valley who are foisting us off with "things [we] didn't ask for, in line with a project [we] didn't sign up for, in pursuit of a goal [we] may not want" [120], it's also those anti-racists who "turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else" [122], writes Murray.  

Just when black and white people were learning to live together in the same perfect harmony as the keys on Paul and Stevie's piano, along came critical race theory and black studies to fuck things up with "a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas" [122] that don't simply celebrate blackness, but problematise (and even demonise) whiteness.

Why, it's almost as if race were a political issue to do with power and privilege ... things which, as we have noted, Murray wishes to turn a blind eye to; just as he wants us all to be colour-blind: "the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963" [126]. To get beyond race is such a beautiful thought, says Murray. But, obviously, it's not going to happen: not least of all because race isn't simply a question of skin colour, as Murray acknowledges; it's a time bomb.  
 

Trans

Murray writes:

"Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans [...] trans has become something close to a dogma in record time." [186]

That, unfortunately, seems to be the case: and whilst I have no problem with trans individuals, dogma and/or doxa, should always be challenged - even genderqueer dogma.

Anyway, moving on ... I was fascinated to discover that:

"One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech." [196]

This surprised (and disappointed) me as someone who has written positively about autogynephilia and eonism in the past on Torpedo the Ark: click here, for example. Why must everything - even changing sex - be presented as a spiritual journey and an issue to do with human rights?**

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather think in terms of desire and seduction, perversion and pathology. And if I were a transwoman, the last thing I'd want to be is some kind of sexless figure like a nun whose newly constructed vagina is a sign of sacrifice and suffering rather than a site of potential pleasure.    

To conclude: The Madness of Crowds is an informative and interesting book, rather than an important and inspired one; a piece of intelligent journalism, rather than a work of philosophy. A book that ends with a call to love, as if it weren't precisely such idealism that got us into the mess we're in today.

Notes

* Murray will later go on to say: "The arrival of the age of social media has done things we still have barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that [...] is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy." [174]

One suggests Murray read (or re-read) Heidegger's classic 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, which might deepen his thinking on this point and also provide him with a wider perspective. I suspect, however, that Heidegger would be another of those philosophers that he'd dismiss for lacking clarity (though he could hardly accuse the latter of being a crypto-Marxist).  

** Murray provides the answer to this question:

"If people have a particular sexual kink then [...] it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.  [...]
      If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotc stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a softwear [i.e. non-biological] issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For - as with homosexuals - there is a drive to prove that trans people are 'born this way'." [198-99] 

Readers might be interested in a post on Douglas Murray's previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017): click here.        

Genki: Reflections on the Work of Daikichi Amano

Photo from Human Nature (2012) by Daikichi Amano

daikichiamano.com

Torpedophiles with a good memory might recall that I have previously written about a form of pornography known as tentacle erotica which originated with a famous design by Hokusai called The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814): click here. 

Two-centuries on and this dream has been obscenely realised in the work of the photographer and video artist Daikichi Amano - described wittily (if not entirely accurately) by Marilyn Manson as a combination of Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau. 

Other fans of Amano's imagery include the recently appointed chief creative officer at Burberry, Riccardo Tisci, who previously spent a dozen years at Givenchy, unfolding his sensual, romantic, sometimes rather gothic vision, and, perhaps less surprisingly, the filmmaker Gaspar Noé, whose work is often associated with the New French Extremity and analysed in terms of a particularly visceral and sexually violent cinéma du corps.

It might be noted that Michel Houellebecq also refers to Amano in his latest novel, Serotonin (2019). However, as the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, describes one video of a Japanese girl holding the tentacles of an octopus coming out of a toilet bowl with her teeth as the most disgusting thing he's ever seen, it's uncertain as to whether Houellebecq's a fan of naked girls covered in eels, worms, and insects, or fucking the denizens of the deep. 

Personally, I'm more than happy for Amano to explore his own dark fears and fantasies, fusing the human body with the natural world and finding new grotesque forms of beauty rooted in the mythology of traditional Japanese culture and the iconography of contemporary Japanese eroticism.

The problem is, thanks to I'm a Celebrity ... I find it difficult to take the work very seriously (the thought of Ant and Dec sniggering in the background is fatal to one's amorous interest).  

Michel Houellebecq: Serotonin

Front cover of the English hardback edition

William Heinemann (2019)

In the end, even your favourite writers let you down. And so Michel Houellebecq and his new novel Serotonin ...

Maybe he's tired of producing fiction; maybe success makes lazy. Or maybe his porno-nihilistic schtick is prone to some kind of law of diminishing returns. I don't know. But I do know this is a pretty feeble addition to what remains an impressive body of work and whilst the narrator-protagonist, Labrouste, needed his small, white anti-depressant pills to prevent him from dying of sadness, I felt in need of something to stop me from drifting off with boredom at times as a reader.

Ultimately, the problem with creating unsympathetic characters is that they're, well, unsympathetic - so they had better have something interesting to tell us and I'm really not sure that Labrouste does; unless, that is, one is interested in the commercial availability of hummus in French supermarkets (pretty good); the fate of French dairy farming in a globalised economy (pretty dire); the condition of his cock (mostly flaccid, which is unfortunate as this seems to be the core of his being).     

Having said that, there are plenty of things to enjoy in the novel. For example, I like the casual references to Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as if everyone will be familiar with these names dropped as easily as the names of high-end fashion brands and types of French cheese. 

I also like the fact that the Japanese photograper and video artist Daikichi Amano is given a mention and can imagine many readers quickly googling the name to see if he's real or just a fictional character made up by Houellebecq (in the context of the novel, of course, he's both). Considering Yuzu's fascination with Amano's work, it's surprising that her zoosexual adventures were confined to canines.

Fascinating too the central conceit of one day just walking away from one's old life; of severing all connections with family and friends and voluntarily going missing. A transgressive act - but not a criminal one (in either France or the UK) and Houellebecq / Labrouste is right to register his surprise:

"It was startling that, in a country where individual liberties had tended to shrink, legislation was preserving this one, which was fundamental - in my eyes even more fundamental, and philosopically more troubling, than suicide." [47]

If only for sentences like this, Serotonin is worth reading and it's always nice to be reminded that in less than a day one can erase or reconfigure one's entire life. Nice, too, to discover that two people can be buried in the same coffin.  
 

As for Labrouste's observations on love and sexual politics as played out between men and women, these didn't much interest - despite being placed within a Platonic-Kantian context to do with human perfection via the loving fusion of two into one and the attainment of mutual respect. That said, this passage is one that caught my attention as a xenophile:

"I had carnal knowledge of girls from different countries, and had come to the conclusion that love can only develop on the basis of a certain difference, that like never falls in love with like, and in practice many  differences may come into play: an extreme difference in age, as we know, can give rise to unimaginably violent passions; racial difference remains effective; and even mere national and linguistic difference should not be scorned." [81-2] 

This is true, I think, and is a truth long recognised and exploited within the pornographic imagination. I'm not sure that the lines that follow are also true, but they are certainly worthy of consideration:

"It is bad for those who love each other to speak the same language, it is bad for them to truly understand one another, to be able to communicate through words, because the vocation of the word is not to create love but to engender division and hatred, the word separates as it produces, while a semi-formless, semi-linguistic babble [...] creates the basis for unconditional and enduring love." [82]

When not reminiscing about lost loves and slowly coming to the realisation that it's the past and not the future that engulfs and eventually kills us, Labrouste likes to express his affection for cows and spy with binoculars on a German paedophile; "basically I think I would have liked to be a cop, insinuating myself into people's lives, penetrating their secrets" [184] ... A cop, or a novelist.  

He also tries (unsuccessfully) to counsel an old college friend, Aymeric, a farmer who, like many others, has fallen on hard times and is angry about it to the point of taking up arms. It's at this point in the novel that Houellebecq once again shows his uncanny ability to tap into the spirit of the times; anticipating the gilets jaunes movement and its rage against free trade, liberal elitism, and their own feelings of impotence and loss.

Suddenly, as James Lasdun notes in his review, "the book's seemingly haphazard elements begin working together" and Houellebecq no longer disappoints ...

He could (perhaps should) have ended the novel with Aymeric's violent suicide and the fatal confrontation between farmers and the security police (CRS). But Houellebecq writes on for another 75 pages or so, as Labrouste stalks an old girlfriend (Camille) in the hope that he and she might get back together and find the happiness they deserve.

First, however, he plans to murder her four-year-old son: "the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype" [265]. Of course, not being a stag or a Brazillian macaque - or even an early human - Labrouste can't go through with it; instead, he collapses into terminal sorrow and self-pity (though, to be fair, his cortisol levels are as high as his testosterone levels are low).           

In the end, there's nothing for him to do but get fat and watch TV: "I was now at the stage where the ageing animal, wounded and aware of being fatally injured, seeks a den in which to end its life." [291]

What worries me - after 1,285 days in Essex exile and already being ten years older than Labrouste - is the thought that I'm also at this stage; will I too suddenly have a desire to read The Magic Mountain and reach the Proustian conclusion that what matters most in this life is not social or cultural activity, nor intellectual stimulation, but young wet pussies?
 

Notes

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (William Heinemann, 2019).

James Lasdun, 'Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq review - a vision of degraded masculinity', The Guardian (20 Sept 2019): click here to read online.

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  

Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

brooklynmuseum.org

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'

- D. H. Lawrence

Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 

RoadKill

In the UK, there are over 38 million vehicles, mostly cars, driving along an extensive road network that stretches for about 246,700 miles (i.e., all the way to the moon and a bit beyond).

It's unsurprising, therefore, that each year an estimated one million wild mammals, including badgers, deer, foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits, and squirrels, are slaughtered on UK roads, with many millions more suffering fatal injuries, but managing to leave the scene of the accident and thus evade capture within the official statistics.

As well as the above, as many as ten million birds are also annually sacrificed on the roads; mostly pheasants, but also increasingly rare and endangered species, such as barn owls. Even domestic animals, including beloved pets, aren't safe; around 230,000 cats, for example are killed by cars each year. Sadly, I doubt that anyone even bothers to keep numbers for reptiles and amphibians, as if frogs, newts, and slow worms aren't even worth counting.  

As for human beings - and we too, of course, are not immune to becoming roadkill - there were 1,782 fatalities on UK roads last year and 25,484 serious injuries; numbers that admittedly pale into insignificance when compared to the previous figures given and it's hard to feel much sympathy for car owners who are complicit with the destruction not only of wildlife and the rural landscape, but who have also turned many urban areas into virtual no go zones for pedestrians and severely restricted the outdoor play of children. 

Hopefully, we'll one day reach the conclusion two legs good, four wheels bad and learn how to journey naked and light along the open road, exposed to full contact on two slow feet, as D. H. Lawrence would say.*  


Notes 

* I'm aware Lawrence is speaking figuratively here - about the condition of souls, etc. - but he was obviously no fan of the car, writing elsewhere of the mocking triumph of the motor engine and of traffic flowing through rigid grey city streets in terms of a sinister underworld.

Despite the name being in extremely poor taste, readers might be interested in Project Splatter, coordinated by researchers at Cardiff University, that attempts to quantify and map wildlife roadkill across the UK: click here for details.  

Reflections on a Crane Fly

Tipulidae

I.

There's a higher than usual number of crane flies coming into the house this autumn.

But that's ok with me, because, after dragonflies and butterflies, daddy longlegs are my favourite flies; even though, in reminding me of my childhood, these harmless creatures remind me also of the acts of wanton cruelty carried out against their number of which I'm now a little ashamed. 

Who knows, perhaps in some future hell, demons will pull my limbs off and throw me into a giant web for some enormous spider to devour.

II.

There are over 15,000 different species of crane flies, making them the largest family of all flies. Amazingly, the majority of these were identified by just one man - Charles P. Alexander (no relation).

Clearly, here was someone in love with these long-legged, slender-bodied insects which seem to have such trouble navigating when in flight and often just bump along as if a bit tipsy. 

To describe these alien beings - as one poet describes them - as tiny non-sentient biological automatons, is profoundly objectionable; one might have hoped that this anthropocentrically conceited notion of the bête machine (famously found in Descartes) was long discredited.  

French Knickers

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French knickers, for example ...

Until the end of the 18th century, women didn't usually wear knickers - which is why the young man hiding in the bushes and spying on an elegant young woman on a swing in Fragonard's famous painting of 1767, gets more of an eyeful as he peeps up her skirt than a modern audience might appreciate.

Now, of course, knickers - or panties as Americans and pornographers like to call them - are a universal item of female undergarment and come in a wide variety of styles, colours, and fabrics.

However, in my view, the loveliest of all are French knickers, preferably ivory-coloured silk and with buttons at the side, but sans lace trimming or any other decorative element; the sort of knickers that Lady Chatterley might have worn in the 1920s and which her lover, Mellors, is keen to remove so that he might penetrate her quiescent body:

"She quivered as she felt his hand groping softly, yet with queer thwarted clumsiness, among her clothing [...] He drew down the thin silk [knickers], slowly, carefully, right down and over her feet."       
Although French knickers have never quite disappeared - and enjoyed something of a fashion revival in the 1970s and '80s, thanks to the designs of Janet Reger - most women today seem to prefer wearing snug-fitting cotton briefs, or hideous thongs.

This is unfortunate, because less material means more explosed flesh and more exposed flesh means diminished sexual excitement. In other words, Bernard Shaw was right - clothes arouse desire and lack of clothes tends to be fatal to our ardour. Passion not only ends in fashion, it begins with it too, as any philosopher on the catwalk can tell you, or as any young woman who wears vintage lingerie will also vouch.   

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 116. Attentive readers might recall that in his introductory essay to the novel written some months later, Lawrence condemns "brilliant young people" to whom sex means "lady's underclothing, and the fumbling therewith" [314-15]. This, he says, is a perverse form of savagery. But it's clearly one that Mellors isn't unacquainted with and later in the novel he will ask to keep Connie's flimsy silk nightie as an object with which to masturbate: "'I can put it atween my legs at night, for company.'" [249].  

There are two sister posts to this one that readers might find of interest: one on French kissing [click here] and one on French maids [click here]. 

French Maid

F. H. Clough: The French Maid (1950s)

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French maid, for example ...

I.

Maids - including comely barmaids - have a long-established position within the pornographic imagination for complex reasons involving power and pleasure on the one hand, fantasy and fetish on the other. Indeed, I've written on the psychosexual aspects of this topic in an earlier post and readers who are interested can click here.

In this post, however, I'm specifically interested in the figure of the French maid as trope, stereotype, and soubrette; i.e., as an attractive young woman wearing a skimpy stylised outfit based on the typical uniforms worn in 19th century France. 

This costume - which is instantly recognisable - usually consists of a black dress with white trim and a full skirt cut well above the knee; a frilly white half-apron; a white lace headpiece; sheer black or fishnet stockings (preferably seamed); and high-heeled shoes. Optional accessories include a garter, a choker necklace, and a feather duster.   

Of course, maids - even in France - have never attempted to keep house dressed like this, but that's so beside the point that anyone who stops to raise this as an issue is an idiot. The pornographic imagination is not overly concerned with historical accuracy and the coquettish French maid ooh-la-la-ing her way through life belongs more to the world of burlesque and Benny Hill than domestic service. 

II.

Having said that, the French maid is not simply found in comedy and can sometimes move from sauciness to sadomasochism - as in Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947), loosely based on the shocking story of sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, in 1933.*

In the play, the two French maids - Solange et Claire - construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals when their mistress (Madame) is away. Their dark role-playing games always involve the murder of the latter. However, their concern with process rather than goal, means they always fail to ceremoniously kill Madame, thereby forever postponing the climax of their fantasy and delaying their own ultimate pleasure. 

The play was performed in London at the Greenwich Theatre in 1973, with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire. This production was filmed in 1974, directed by Christopher Miles, who implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the movie.**

Promo photo of Susannah York and 

Glenda Jackson in The Maids (1975)

Notes

* This murder exerted a strange fascination over French intellectuals - including Genet, Sartre and Lacan - many of whom sought to analyse it as a symbolic form of class struggle. The case has since inspired many artworks and further critical studies. 

** The film, made for the American Film Theatre, was released in the US in April 1975, and shown at Cannes the following month (although not entered in the main competition). To watch the trailer, click here.

For a sister post to this one on French kissing, click here. 

For a sister post on French knickers, click here. 

French Kiss

Grammatically speaking, I'm not sure if the word French, as used within English, is a modifier, qualifier, or both. Either way, it often also serves as an erotic intensifier, as illustrated by the term French kiss, for example ...

A kiss, as lovers of Casablanca will know, is just a kiss.

But a French kiss, of course, is something else entirely. And whilst some may protest that sticking your tongue into a young woman's mouth isn't the same as sticking your tongue into the holiest of holies, a French kiss is nevertheless in the same ballpark; i.e., it's an act of oral sex, albeit one that doesn't involve direct genital stimulation.

That's why Freud was right to identify amorous kissing as a form of perversion; one that is practiced by even those who would regard themselves as normal, healthy individuals. Put simply, there's nothing natural about oral erotogenic activity in which the the lips, tongue and teeth are diverted from their usual function and turned into secondary sex organs.

And although it may be pleasurable to exchange saliva and play tonsil tennis with a loved one, there's a good reason why the English term this French kissing and that's because they're secretly aware of just how queer it is to use your mouth in such an abberant fashion.       

Note: it's ironic that, until recently, the French didn't have a specific term for un baiser amoureux; they described it (rather unromantically) as un baiser avec la langue. It was only in 2014 that the slang term se galocher was accorded official dictionary status.

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

To read a sister post to this one on French maids, click here.

For a sister post on French knickers, click here.