Photo Credit: "Victorian Beauty" on Photobucket
The Victorians were not Puritans without the funny hats, which is how we think of them, if we think of them at all.
In the Victorian heyday, prostitution was legal; death was eroticized; lesbians could sleep together as “friends,” socially invisible lovers, because nobody thought women were that sexual; flagellation porn was the favorite flavor; and bosoms most certainly did heave above those restraining corsets. Yes, Oscar Wilde went to jail for being gay; women didn’t have the vote; and any little STD could kill you if the treatment, including institutional incarceration for prostitutes, didn’t get you first. No historical time period has it all, but this one was livelier, more intensely interesting and certainly more relatable to modern men and women than most people would ever guess.
By comparison, “contemporary pornography is kind of boring,” says Deborah Lutz, author of PLEASURE BOUND: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (WW Norton); and she should know because she has a Victorian porn collection.
An English professor at Long Island University, with a specialty in erotica, Deborah lives in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn which my car service driver told me last night is “very far away.” Pause. “Far. Very.” We had that discussion on the phone at 7:30 p.m. Thursday night, the exact time I was supposed to be at Greenlight Bookstore having a public discussion with Deborah about sex. (Have you ever been stuck on a train in a tunnel feeding into the Penn Station terminal while signals were down? Don’t plan on making your dinner reservations when it happens.) The driver said: “Ten minutes to get to you at Penn, maybe fifteen, at least thirty minutes, depending on traffic, to get you to Greenpoint. Ms. Bakos, I think you would be arriving too late to introduce the author.”
I hope everyone at Greenlight Bookstore realizes that it wasn’t fear of Brooklyn that kept me away.
When Deborah and I made plans to meet the week before for drinks to discuss her new book, she suggested a Brooklyn bar. Though I’ve surely been to that borough a dozen times in my 25 years in New York and will go back again when necessary, I held out for downtown Manhattan and managed to move her slightly up to the Village. Still, I was running late; and she text-ed me, “I am the glasses and plaid shirt at the bar.” She was, but also lovely, with long dark hair and smart/sexy eyes, like an Indy movie star, the visually perfect person to play the role of professor busting some myths about those stuffy Victorians.
The first question many of us who have seen Victorian porn must ask: Why all the spanking and flagellation?
Deborah acknowledges the theory that corporal punishment in public school inculcated masochism in some young men, but she seems more inclined toward viewing the dominant men who went to brothels to be spanked or whipped as predecessors of the powerful bankers and lawyers and CEOs who pay doms for a milder version of the same punishments today: They needed a break from being tightly in control; and they wanted to experience submission and “powerlessness” —exactly my conclusions when I researched Kink: The Hidden Sex Lives of Americans over a decade ago. In this and many other ways, you will discover in this delicious book that the Victorians and 21st Century people have common sexual ground.
I was as pleased as a good student to hear that Deborah and I shared some of the same insights into her material. Make no mistake, Pleasure Bound is the work of a learned author, an intellectual—but it is also a pleasurable, accessible reading experience even if the poets and painters are previously unknown to you. I can think of no other book that combines this level of expertise with approachability. Reading it is like eating French chocolates. Maybe your previous chocolate experience was Godiva or M&Ms (which I also love), but you won’t need a translator to fall in love with La Maison du Chocolat.
Deborah’s publicist sent me a copy of Pleasure Bound toward the end of last year, one of the highlights of the holiday season. I’d wanted a copy because one of my favorite historical characters, the explorer and author Sir Richard Burton, translator of Eastern sex books like The Perfumed Garden, was a character in her story. A group of 19th Century artists, writers and poets dedicated their lives to casting off religious fundamentalism, patriarchy and sexism. To some extent, they succeeded, laying the groundwork for women’s rights, gay rights, and government programs to help the poor and influencing art and literature even today. Burton, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the sensual painter, Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet and frequent customer of flagellant brothels, socialist William Morris and the girl in the group Christina Rosetti, Dante’s sister, were among the members of two Bohemian groups, the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes, challenging the world order through art, literature, intellectual discourse and outrageous behavior, including all manner of sex parties, often fueled by laudanum and opium.
As she details in the book, they raised a lot of interesting questions, like:
“To what extent does penetration (or the possibility thereof) determine social dominance, and what happens when the penetrator becomes the penetrated? How do gender roles hold up when the buttocks are eroticized instead of the genitals, and how does this demolition of the male-female binary influence women’s rights in society?”
She says, “To be frank, I’m not entirely sure. The buttocks have no genitals. Both men and women have the same equipment back there, so there is a sense of genderless-ness.”
Now what does that tell us about the national obsession with anal intercourse?
In one of my favorite anecdotes in Pleasure Bound, Dante Rosetti and other Aesthetes dig up the grave of his wife, Lizzie Siddal, dead for seven years and before that, dying slowly for years. She was his beautiful muse of sex and death. He’d been so distraught when her life at last expired that he buried a manuscript of unpublished poems with her. Seven years later, he was prying the lid off her putrid coffin. Had his undying love died? Was the loss of his art greater than that of his wife?
Deborah explains that the Aesthetes saw art as eternal, life as temporal. With afterlife an uncertainty, he had to rescue the poems, stained with decomposition, just as they all felt the need, even obligation, to celebrate the pleasures of the flesh while that flesh lived.
This philosophy reflected a growing skepticism among Victorian intellectuals about traditional Christianity and the notion of Heaven and Hell. With the afterlife an uncertainty, Rossetti and like-minded bohemians concentrated on the here and now, engaging in the pleasures of the flesh and elevating orgasm as spiritual fulfillment--as the spirtual sex believers do today.
But how did a nice girl from Boulder, Colorado, get involved with Victorian sex rebels?
“I was very influenced by a professor who specialized in Victoriana; and then I started collecting the porn. I really wanted to paint a picture of what it was like to be a sexual radical in Victorian London,” says Lutz. “I wanted to bring the time period alive.”
And she does. Don’t miss Pleasure Bound and give my love to Brooklyn. Hit the Greenlight Bookstore link above and buy from them.
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