Happily whipping Jesus 2: Mary Magdalene as submissive

This is a sequel to the post Happily whipping Jesus, which was about how some Medieval and later art presented the flagellation of Jesus as a sort of bdsm event, with sexually excited floggers and spectators. For the earlier post, go here.

Mary Magdalene, penitent

Anyway, I was in the Irish National Gallery in Dublin a while ago, staring at a piece of bdsm porn. It was painted towards the end of the of the 19th century. It showed a pretty blonde woman with her eyes turned up.

She’d ripped her own shift so she was bare above the waist, pointing a pair of very nice breasts at the painter, and the ladies and the gentlemen in the gallery where she hung. Unlike a lot of 19th century breasts, hers had nipples, lovingly detailed. She had a multi-thonged whip in her hand, and she’d paused after whipping herself. There were whip marks, red furrows against the plump, creamy white skin of her shoulders.  

She had the soulful expression of a submissive who’s just been soundly punished. She looked thoughtful, grateful and satisfied.

I wasn’t expecting her. She was sexy, and she’d been painted by someone who knew what whip-marks looked like, but more importantly, had seen the facial expressions of someone who’d been whipped, who thought they deserved it, but also found it brought them close to orgasm. She was porn, with the impact of a punch in the solar plexus.

She was Mary Magdalene, the frame said, the companion of Jesus. 

I couldn’t take a photo, and I can’t find a reproduction on the net. But there are plenty of similar images, though that’s the most overtly sexual one I’ve seen.

Christian art has always included a lot of bdsm imagery. If an artist wanted to paint a naked woman in bondage, for example, he or she used to paint Angelica from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, chained naked to a rock. It’s the same image, of course, as Andromeda chained naked to a rock, but by using the Ariosto story you make it a Christian rather than a pagan scenario.

But if you want to paint a naked woman in pain, or in sexual ecstasy, then you painted Mary Magdalene. That’s because Magdalene was imagined as a prostitute in a lot of Christian art. After the death of Jesus, she supposedly spend the rest of her life repenting, including by scourging herself. 

mariaSo if you want to paint a naked woman, especially one in submissive pose, then Magdalene was your subject. Your painting could be as sexy as you could make it, while apparently being a holy religious work. Here’s one by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1876), of her repenting, beautifully, outside a cave in France. 

But if you want to go a little further into bdsm, Magdalene will still oblige you.

Francisco Masnera y ManovensHere she is in a 19th century painting by Francisco Masnera y Manovens. She’s stretched out naked on the floor, looking up at someone who isn’t in the picture, seeking whatever will bring her forgiveness. The cross digs into her bare breast. 

siraniThis 18th century painting (I don’t know the artist) shows her with her whip pressed against her right breast. There aren’t any whip marks painted on Magdalena’s shoulders, but you can tell from the ecstatic, satisfied expression and her blissed-out eyes that the whipping is over.  

By the way, it’s common in paintings of the Penitent Magdalene to have the whip merge with her hair. In some paintings (eg Tintorreto’s) the whip isn’t actually painted, but she holds a swatch of her hair, touching her breast and going over her shoulder as a stand-in for the whip. 

My favourite, though, is the sculpture of Magdalene by Canova. She kneels submissively, with her eyes cast down, and she is holding out a cross (made of bronze, and detachable; many photos are taken without it). The cross is narrower and rounder than a real crucifix would be: it’s a rod. She has a rope round her waist, to hurt her skin, which was also used in auto-flagellation.

The front view, with the cross: 

canova

But it’s clearer, in some ways, if you detach the cross, and have her just holding out her hands. 

KLAS-Canova-Magdalene

The rear view: Back View of Penitent Magdalen by Antonio CanovaIt’s a sexual image, it’s an image of submission, and it’s very beautiful.

Happily whipping Jesus

scourging of ChristThis is a marble relief of the scourging of Jesus, made in the 17th century. It’s a photo I took in the Vienna Schatzkammer, or Imperial Treasury, in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. 

What’s interesting about it is the erotic depiction of Jesus, lying on his back, with his hands tied, and a slightly floaty, dreamy expression on his face while the man on the right whips him. 

The spectator on the left is clearly enjoying the show. That seems to be an erection poking his robes up, and his hand hovers near his cock.

All four men in this image have happy expressions. The face of the man with the whip shows slightly ludicrous glee. I guess I’ve looked a bit like that too, when the flogging is proceeding well and the girl is in sub-space and all’s right with the world.

It’s interesting because it shows awareness of bdsm on the part of the anonymous artist. I’d have thought it was an anti-bdsm image, showing that men who respond sexually to causing pain are wicked, if it wasn’t that the face of the Jesus suggests that he’s in a blissful state himself.

There are medieval images of the scourging of Jesus that show that the men doing the whipping have erections, but those are less ambiguous in their condemnation of the minority sexual taste. In those images the guys with whips are depicted as barely human, almost demonic, while the Jesus figure is depicted with flecks of blood on his body and his face contorted in agony. In this one, they all seem to be happy participants, like the guys in the Spanner Case.

It’s also interesting, like some of the descriptions of religious flagellation in classical Greek and Latin texts, for showing the ways in which religion and bdsm can, er, bleed into each other. Both approve of extreme states of consciousness, and valorise willing subjection to physical pain, but religion provides a non-sexual framework that people can use to explain what they, or their saintly martyrs, are experiencing. Without talking about sexual pleasure.

Finally, it’s interesting that this image is far more “blasphemous” than anything like Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, and yet it was accepted in its time as a sacred image. 

An note on Piss Christ

Piss_Christ_by_Serrano_Andres_(1987)I think Piss Christ is a beautiful image, which is different from it being a great work of art. A photo of Amanda Seyfried naked is likely to be beautiful too, but that doesn’t mean the photographer is a great artist.

However, it seems to me to be strongly pro-Christ in its message: that Christ, immersed in the human, is still radiant.

It isn’t blasphemous. As a non-believer with some active dislike for Christianity and Islam, in particular (also communism and fascism, for similar reasons), I like blasphemous art and wish there was more of it. And Piss Christ isn’t it.

But Christian art can be very moving as art even though the “message” doesn’t move me. I don’t let my dislike of Christianity as a worldview get in the way of admiring and responding to the St Matthew Passion, or the altarpieces of Tilman Riemanschneider. 

A night at the opera

I was at Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” at Holland Park last week.

It’s not my favourite opera at all. It’s probably not even going to trouble my top 100 favourite operas. It’s partly because I hate Figaro’s “Largo et factotum” patter-song, which is one of the models for the scenes in Disney animation films where a major character comes on and immediately sings a song announcing who they are. Anyway, most baritones make a huge meal of it. It hasn’t got much musical interest, and I can’t see how anyone can find it funny, so there you are.

Anyway, this performance made the best case for “Barber” that can be made. It helps comic operas a lot if you have singing actors who look the part at least slightly, and who have a vague idea of what might be funny.

Anyway, for once I fancied the female lead, Rosina. She was sung by Kitty Whately, and she managed to turn the boring virgin of most productions into a girl who’s up for it and well worth chasing. She doesn’t want to be chased, or chaste; she wants to be caught.

In fact, she sings this:

“I’m gentle, and respectful. I’m obedient, I’m soft and loving.

I let myself be ruled, I let myself be guided.

But touch me in the wrong way, and I’m a viper.

I’ll make them fall, before I submit.”

Which is a sort of Submissive’s Creed, isn’t it?

Tom of Finland stamps, and the mighty Fisto

You’ve probably heard that Finland has celebrated the work of the gay porn artist Tuoko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, by putting his images on a series of stamps.

Tom of Finland drawing. Indian chief, cop, cowboy and sailor not shown.

Tom of Finland drawing. Indian chief, cop, cowboy and sailor not shown.

As Tom of Finland he drew pictures of improbably fit men wearing clothes that were just a bit tighter than their skin. The look was modelled on Marlon Brando in The Wild One, if that had been a porn film. So the guys in his pictures had erections as big as police truncheons, and as hard, inside their denim jeans, and they had arses that were, well, the sort of thing you’d really like if you liked male arses. 

It’s nice that Finland is cool enough to give him his own series of commemorative stamps. And there’s a joke available about licking the rear of a Tom of Finland character that I’m not going to touch.

They get sticky when wet, too. 

Anyway, this reminded me that years ago there was a cartoon series on the tellie, He-Man. Like He-Man’s powers, the show was terrible beyond belief.

But it was interesting that while nearly all cartoon superheroes have a slightly obsessive urge to name themselves after their gender – Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Catwoman, and so on – He-Man took it to the extreme. Both components of He-Man’s name insist that he’s male, and they don’t say anything else. 

Fisto. Apparently there was another character in He-Man cartoons who was called Ram-Man. Maybe he was an Aries.

Fisto. Apparently there was another character in He-Man cartoons who was called Ram-Man. Maybe he was an Aries.

The other interesting thing about the He-Man universe is the most obvious and extreme of its homoerotic figures, someone whose special super-characteristic, and preferred practice, is way more perverse than anything Tom of Finland came up with. 

I refer, of course, to Fisto.

That’s one amazing brachio-proctic fist of luurve he’s got there. And, arguably, fist of justice, so long as he only uses its special powers for good. With great fist comes great responsibility. 

Oh, “brachio-proctic”? “Brachio” means the arm, and “proctic” means the general area up the bum. The term “brachio-proctic eroticism” was invented as a way of talking about fisting without bringing a blush to the cheeks of the innocent and naive. It was coined by Professor Basil Donovan, at the University of New South Wales. He was actually joking, but it seems to have taken on a straight-faced life of its own.

Bondage in the Ice Age: BSDM 20,000 BCE!

About twenty-two thousand years ago a tribe of humans crunched across white grass in a frozen landscape that’s now called Russia. Somewhere near the Don river valley they left behind two little sculptures. That’s how we know that these people, whoever they were, passed that way. It’s also how we know something surprising about their sexual imagination.

Kostenski Venus figurine, with her wrists bound

Kostenski Venus figurine, with her wrists bound: 20,000 BCE

These two sculptures, each one about the size of your hand, are of women. Like other Paleolithic “Venus figures”, the women are naked, or nearly naked, with exaggerated sexual features: their breasts hang hugely, like great sacks of grain, and their bellies swell, pregnant and vastly fat, like a ship’s sails.

What’s unusual about them is that one of the two women is shown with her wrists cuffed and tied, while the other woman is shown wearing a sort of harness that both restricts her movements and emphasises her breasts. That’s all they are depicted as wearing, although these images were created in the middle of an Ice Age. These two little sculptures seem to be the oldest known bondage erotica.

That tribe moved on, their destination and fate unknown. Since their day humans have done and built a lot of things, but some things don’t change. For one thing, it can’t be said that Russia’s improved much.

For another, it’s still true that whenever a new medium appears, from carving rocks to 3D imaging, one of the first things people will do is use it to make sexual images and tell sexual stories. And shortly after the first nudes are produced, someone else will come along and use the new medium for more specific sexual desires.

So the cultural history of what people now mostly call “bdsm” began about 21,000 years ago. 

Constanze Mozart: Mozart wrote to her, promising her a "thorough spanking on her dear little, kissable arse", when he got home. Di he deliver? The look in her eye says yes.

Constanze Mozart: Mozart wrote to her, promising her a “thorough spanking on your dear little, kissable arse”, when he got home. Did he deliver? The look in her eye says yes.

People who are interested in bdsm have built up a quite impressive pile of art-works and artefacts. There are bdsm references in Mozart’s operas, Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and Mapplethorpe’s photos, just to skim the Ms for a second.

As a Mortimer, I’m quite proud of my sculpture, “Caning Bench No 1, with Comfort Saddle and Hooks for attaching Cuffs”. If some archeologist finds it  21,000 years from now, I hope he or she puts it to good use. 

But it’s odd that we – we people who do bdsm – have failed to celebrate our novelists, and our poets and painters and composers, and so on.

I’ll be doing to some of that celebration over the coming months. 

Jean Harlow

I saw Red Dust last night. It stars Jean Harlow as the slut with a heart of gold, and a young, pre-moustache Clark Gable as an excessively pragmatic rubber boss.

Jean Harlow, chained and cuffed, naked, in a photo set taken before she was a star.

Jean Harlow, chained and cuffed, naked, in a photo set taken before she was a star.

It was made before the puritanical Hayes Code came along, so it was possible for Harlow to do a bath scene, with the lucky filmgoers seeing her sleek bare back and at least being able to imagine what the rest of a naked Harlow might look like. It also means the dialogue can make it clear that Gable fucks both of the two women in the film, and have the characters talk about that, when it matters, like adults. 

It’s a good film, mainly because of Gable and Harlow sparking off each other, and because of any other moment that Harlow spends on the screen. 

If I had a time machine, there are things I ought to do, like giving embarrassing and career-killing speech impediments to Hitler and Stalin, also Constantine before he marched back to Rome to force Christianity on its citizens. And teaching those stupid sods at Medina to shoot straighter, when Muhammad’s forces were coming. But those would be duties. 

What I’d really like to do right now is go back in time to 1932 to meet Jean Harlow with flowers, wine and chocolate to make my intentions clear. And if I am lucky and sufficiently charming, to fuck Jean Harlow. 

Orientalism #4

Of course, not all orientalist erotic painting is about race. Partly, it was about Victorian rules about nudity. You could show naked women in a “classical” setting, or you could paint naked women in some other culture, some far-away place.

angieThis painting, for example, is of Angelica chained to a rock, from a scene in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. So if you wanted to do an image of a bound, naked woman, you could do a painting of Angelica or of Andromeda (naked and bound in very similar circumstances), and present your bondage pic as high art. 

But if a Victorian painter made a picture of a naked woman with her hands tied behind her back, waiting for her lover, in a Victorian house, Victorian critics would have lost their shit on a scale that would make Nick Cage’s acting look minimalist.

The woman would have been called a whore, the subject would be damned as utterly indecent and perverted, the painting would certainly be banned from display, and the painter quite possibly prosecuted. So there is a reason apart from racism for Victorian painters to place their pictures of captive, naked women in Eastern, generally Mid-Eastern, settings. 

marketBut a lot seems to rest on the idea that slavery, or being naked and inspected by clothed men, is more intense when the woman is white and the men are not. It’s interesting that there aren’t more examples, in Victorian bondage painting, of naked black women being inspected by clothed white men. Maybe it was too close to home, in a century where the British had been supporting the slave-owning states in the US Civil War.

Maybe Victorian painters thought their audiences wouldn’t find naked black women as sexy as naked white women.  

I’m still working. The Probation Officer story will proceed shortly. 

Orientalism #3

exposeThere are a few things to notice here. For example, the slave woman (dark-haired but white-skinned; possibly meant to be Spanish?) has her hands above her head, with her wrists together. The painter could say, if challenged, that she was flamenco dancing. Maybe. But really she has her wrists together over her head to suggest bondage without actually showing it.

The black woman is also an attractive woman, but she is clothed. Because there’s a dichotomy in these paintings. The naked woman is helpless and enslaved, in the situation. But in the painting she has all the erotic power, and the viewer’s gaze is focussed on her. So the white woman takes the lead sexual role for the painting’s  audience. The black woman may have more power in the situation, knowing the rules better, and perhaps having a training role. But in the painting she  is secondary decoration for the plight of the white woman. That’s what’s important, to the painter and his imagined audience. 

Meanwhile, the non-white (Arab) man watches the slave girl, but he’s perhaps more interested in his opium dreams (note the hookah) than in the woman. Sometimes the woman is humbled in these paintings not by being “indecently” inspected, but by being naked but still ignored. Slave girls: men in the East have so many they can take ’em or leave ’em.

So there’s a dual message: slave girl humiliation, and the idea that the East is decadent and effete, due to fall to a stronger civilisation. Perhaps some muscular, cricket-playing Christian chaps should take their lands off them, says a lot of Orientalist art, and free their slavegirls. After all, those poor girls have been terribly treated: still, they’ll be properly trained and inventively grateful. 

Well, that’s the flip side of every rescuer fantasy.

I’m still working, but I’ve seen the on-coming train poking its refulgent nose into the tunnel. I’m doomed.

Orientalism #2

orientThere are a lot of images on the net, most of them painted in the 19th century, of naked white women slaves being examined by non-white, generally Arabic-looking owners. The images are painted by white men. 

The idea was that a white women is more humiliated by being owned, and seen naked, by non-white men than she would be if the slave-owners and traders were white. Increasing the humiliation of the white woman made the image more erotic for white men.

At least for those white men who liked those images. Clearly, these images were popular and a lot of them were painted, so it wasn’t the taste of a small minority. 

Orientalism


whip suck
Edward Said would have described the picture above as an example of Westerners projecting sexual stereotypes and “forbidden” sexual desires onto figures from “the East”. 

And he’d be right, for all that large chunks of his book Orientalism have been convincingly debunked, particularly by Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq. 

I just think that it’s not a very comfortable angle for oral sex. From the whipper’s point of view, that is. However, I like the way the woman has been attached to the frame so that her feet can’t touch the ground. It’s disorienting, as Mr Said would never have said. It’s a nice detail. 

Obviously, I don’t have time to do a proper post today. If anyone knows who the artist is, please let me know.