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    Sadomasochism and Ardent Love: An Historical Perspective
    Sadomasochism and Ardent Love: An Historical Perspective
    Sadomasochism and Ardent Love: An Historical Perspective
    Ebook73 pages56 minutes

    Sadomasochism and Ardent Love: An Historical Perspective

    By Edward Shorter

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    About this ebook

    This short book by award-winning historian Edward Shorter explores the popular appeal of erotica and the allure of fetish sadomasochism. Shorter, a professor at the University of Toronto, is the author of 'Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire' which was short-listed for Canada’s major literary prize, the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Here, he focuses solely on fetish and sadomasochism, a side-bar in the history of desire. It was unknown in the ancient world and for some has been part of tool kit for sexual pleasure for only 100 to 200 years.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBev Editions
    Release dateMar 21, 2012
    ISBN9780987814647
    Sadomasochism and Ardent Love: An Historical Perspective
    Author

    Edward Shorter

    A social historian of medicine, Professor Shorter has published widely in the field of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. His recent publications include Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire (2005) nominated for the prestigious literary prize The Governor-General’s Award for Non-Fiction; A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry (2005); Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness (co-author David Healy, 2007); Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders. In 1995 Professor Shorter won the Jason A. Hannah Medal of the Royal Society of Canada for From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (1992), and in 2000 he was again honored with the Hannah Medal for A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (1997). He earned his Ph.D at Harvard and he has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine at University of Toronto since 1991.

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      Book preview

      Sadomasochism and Ardent Love - Edward Shorter

      Sadomasochism and Ardent Love:

      An Historical Perspective

      By Edward Shorter

      Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords

      ISBN: 978-0-9878146-4-7

      Copyright © 2012 Edward Shorter

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ****

      Contents

      Introduction

      A framework

      The story begins

      The sm-fetish package

      Men and women in traditional sm

      Turn-of-the-century sm

      Fetish

      SM and Fetish join the mainstream

      Fetish fashion

      About the Author

      Notes

      ****

      The remarkable success of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James has taken the literary world by surprise. Its quick and astounding ascent to the top of the New York Times bestseller list invites us to step back a pace and ask what is going on here? Why has this book, ostensibly about the theme of sadomasochism, one even more deeply tabooed than homosexuality, struck such a chord? How does the raising of sadomasochistic themes in 2012 fit into the larger evolution of sexuality and manners?

      In James’s novel, we meet Anastasia Steele, a young virgin working in a hardware store, and Christian, a fabulously wealthy young financier, an experienced player who has already had 15 sm relationships. Ana becomes totally captivated by him and is willing to go the whole nine yards for him even though her subconscious keeps screaming No!

      Sadomasochism tends to fill us with unease precisely because it seems such a repudiation of liberal western values. At its very core lies not the infliction of pain but the submission, complete and total, of one individual to another. The submissive, or bottom in the trade, surrenders all autonomy to the dominant figure, or top. The top becomes all-controlling in a way reminiscent of totalitarian dictatorship. How can we possibly reconcile this with western values? How can we explain the striking uptake of Fifty Shades among what is often described as the mommy set without assuming that the mommy set has somehow sold out to the North Korean Politburo?

      We have to re-jig a couple of assumptions here. One assumption that we as a society have conventionally made for the last thirty years — certainly since 1970s style feminism — is that sex is about power. The early feminist days were full of injunctions about the patriarchy and how male chauvinists used their power to control you in bed in order to control you in every other way as well.

      All of a sudden we find an entire generation of fast-track, autonomous young women celebrating not the acquisition of sexual power but its surrender. This is such a striking paradox.

      The problem here is that in the 1970s we were switched onto the wrong railway siding. There is such a thing as power relations in sexuality, and we see this played out in rape or in some form of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which the captives come to identify with their oppressors.

      But the sexual mainline does not run through power relations, a non-erotic subject. It runs through sensuality. Sex for most people is not about power but about luxuriating in the pleasures of the flesh, about a glass of champagne at ten a.m. Sunday morning and the exquisiteness of calf muscles tightened by high heels or the reach of a muscular male back. Only if we concentrate on sensuality and forget, just for a moment, about power, will we be able to come to terms with Fifty Shades of Grey.

      But Fifty Shades of Grey is about a very specific form of sensuality: sadomasochism, which means tying people up and, sometimes, whipping them, or at least administering a few symbolic strokes with a riding crop that redden the skin but do not cause tissue damage. Still, it can be painful. How can this be erotic?

      What is erotic here is not the infliction of pain but the exchange of control. This is not everybody’s cup of tea, but for many people the concept of surrendering total control, for a well defined period of time and in the particular context of the bedroom, can be exquisitely sensual. Similarly, assuming control over another person’s erotic experience — it’s you who determines exactly when and how and wearing what outfit she is penetrated — can be a delirious sensual experience. Or determining when and how he is penetrated, ditto. To the glass of champagne on Sunday morning we add a scarf that ties her hands, a pair of handcuffs that fasten his arms behind his back. Does William really accept you as the Mistress with absolute control over him? Let’s test by giving him ten of the best. Does Sally truly acknowledge that you are her Master? Let’s use this new dildo to find out.

      So it’s not that William and Sally set

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