This is part of the excellent, steamy, funny and insightful novel “The Tale of the Tawse”
Because that novel’s about to be published, the early drafts have to come off the net. Publishers don’t like competition from free providers.
Once it’s published, the address for buying this will be uploaded here.
Probably the oddest thing about Jeremy Bentham is that he’s still around, and he attends meetings of the Board of University College, London.
Bentham. That's a wax head on his shoulders, and his real head in a jar at his feet. Don't ask.
When he died on 6 June 1832, he left his entire estate to the University College London. There was just one condition, that they had to enbalm his body, and his body would be brought to the table, to attend every college board meeting.
So his body sits in a wheelchair, most of the time, in a cabinet at the college. But he does attend the meetings. He’s listed on the minutes as “present but not voting.”
Bentham lived alone for a long time, so he managed to get fairly eccentric. I don’t think he believed in life after death, so I don’t think he thought that he’d personally be interested in the meetings. He may have thought that his physical presence would inspire the board members to remember his bequest and be sure to apply his philosophical principles in governing the college.
Or … maybe he just had one of those nineteenth century senses of humour, that seem a little robust by our standards. A friend of mine was at University College, though not on the board, and he says that Bentham’s seemed to be a benign and vaguely comforting presence.
The next post won’t be about Bentham, hey?
One of Jeremy Bentham’s interests was prison reform. He opposed arbitrary and unfair punishment. He believed that a system that was fair, matched to the crime, and impersonal would be respected by criminals and both be more humane and more effective in rehabilitating them.
So he didn’t have much understanding of actual human beings. The application of some his principles unintentionally made prisons even more nightmarish than they were before.
The treadmill avoided giving prisoners the satisfaction they might get if their hard labour actually achieved something useful. Similarly, the rule that prisoners had to be silent at all times was supposed to allow them to contemplate their faults and focus on improvement, and stop them encouraging each other in criminality. But people can’t function without social contact. It drove many prisoners mad.
Illustration by John Willie.But the authorities overlooked one of Bentham’s ideas, that’s since been taken up by bdsm dungeons and porn makers, enthusiastically enough to make up for all those years of neglect. That’s Jeremy Bentham’s Amazing Steam Powered Whipping Machine.
The offender is secured to the machine and the punishment can be set by setting the steam gauge on the whipping arm, to a certain number of strokes, at exactly the same strength each time.
Possibly this image seems sexier for people who read Popular Mechanics and hang around hardware stores. But it does lack the personal touch.The idea was that punishment could only be just if the same crime always got the same penalty. So whippings by prison officers were unfair, because some had stronger arms, or they might go easy on one offender and really whack away at the next one.
Bentham’s invention was fair, and dungeon mistresses (starting with Theresa Berkeley) and makers of fladge porn soon brought the great man’s dream into reality.
Detail from 1970s “Oh Wicked Wanda” strip. I think the girl under the table is called Candyfloss.Bentham argued that rights do exist, but that they have to be enforceable before they have real meaning. At the time he said this he was ridiculing the language about rights used by the French parliamentarians after the French Revolution, as if you could just make something a right just by declaring it was. For that reason, Bentham sometimes gets claimed by conservatives, but that’s only because they’ve only read the one sentence from the one essay, this one:
“Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.”
Nonsense on stilts.
That’s a cool phrase, “nonsense on stilts”, isn’t it? At the same time, Bentham actually did recognise that there are rights, in a political sense, that are not yet backed by any sort of law. So, he was one of the first people to write that men and women should have equal rights, and that animals have rights. You can argue about whether Bentham was contradicting himself, when he asserted rights that were not protected by the laws at the time he wrote.
But his approach is useful anyway. When we want to improve the rights of people who do bdsm, doing the gestural and rhetorical stuff may help, a bit, but it’s not the point.
They're probably safe from censors, so long as this doesn't get sexual.
A street march where people chant, “We’re here, the submissives’ arses are bare, get used to it”, might be fun, but it isn’t much use to a couple getting arrested because one of them gave the other a burn with a hot spoon, or at risk of losing custody of their children because they own a dvd showing a spanking and fucking scene between adults. (Both of those examples based on recent cases.)
So we come back to Bentham and his advocacy of women’s rights and animal rights. He did that because he knew that the law isn’t changeless. Push to introduce new rights into the legal system, and eventually, the law will change, and a new right will have been created, which was once just an idea. Like Bentham we have to be hard realists and idealists at the same time.
Rights are socially created, so if you persuade enough people then you change the social climate, then the political climate and finally the law. Discussion about tactics is likely to come up in this blog, from time to time.
But tomorrow I want to talk about Bentham’s weirdness, and then I can tell more stories about buying my first tawse and its first excursion.
“Jeremy Bentham was a man of leisure, took his pleasure in the evening sun, thought a lot about natural rights, finally decided that there were none.”
If the uncoolest band ever* says so, then it must be true. Anyway, yesterday I mentioned the Spanner case, in which a bunch of guys went to jail because they had bdsm sex with other consenting guys. Today a friend was telling me about the plan to censor the internet in Australia, to block things like this blog.
But before we can talk about censorship and our rights, we may need to try to define what we mean when we say we have a right to take part in bdsm. And what we mean if we say that authorities are violating our rights when they harass people for taking part in consenting bdsm, try to close clubs, block websites and so on.
Jeremy Bentham
Talking about rights, for me, means talking about the extremely unsexy philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who once said that the idea of natural rights was “nonsense on stilts”, which is brilliant. I mean the phrase “nonsense on stilts” is brilliant. But I’d also agree that rights aren’t a “natural” category, since nature hasn’t got a brain, or a conscience, or purposes; it’s just there. We interpret it and impose meanings on it.
Nor is there such a thing as a “god-given” right, even if you think gods exist.
Burn, baby burn: Christian inferno
A god can’t make something good by declaring it’s good, nor make something into a right just by declaration. When YHWH, the Christian god says you have a right to burn witches (Exodus 22:18) and force women into sexual slavery (Numbers 31:18), not many people think those really are rights.
But Bentham’s attack on the idea of natural rights (and implicitly on god-given rights) was part of his attack on “The Declaration of Rights” made by the French revolutionary parliament in 1791, and Bentham, as a patriotic Englishman, was slightly overstating his views to ridicule les Frogs. He was scoring debating points.
In general, Bentham thought that rights derived from society, and had to be enforced by law and sanction for them to be meaningful. That doesn’t mean he thought that rights don’t exist or are meaningless. “Rights”, in Bentham, are the autonomies (that is, the things the state won’t stop you from doing) and the expectations (like safety, and some opportunity to make a living, etc) that any society has to grant the individuals in that society, in order to allow individuals to live in the most happiness they can manage, while preserving common safety.
“Rights” are something that people create and defend. Sometimes they defend rights by argument and persuasion. The right of gay and lesbian people to marry if they want to is being won by debate and persuasion, with no riots or guns being necessary or useful. Sometimes people do have to defend rights by fighting, but mostly life isn’t that melodramatic.
Two facts: (1) This machine was invented by Jeremy Bentham. (2) That isn’t even the weirdest fact about Jeremy Bentham.
I mentioned that Bentham was weird. That’s why this picture of a “spanking machine” is actually relevant when you’re talking Bentham. But we’ll come to that shortly.
To be continued. I’ll be back to telling stories soon. Oh, there was an asterix [*].
I shouldn’t have to explain that “the uncoolest band ever” means Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Uncool, unsexy, and brilliant.
In the comments on the post about Kinky boots of the 1930s and Phegor illustrations, I mentioned the whipping scene in “Das Rheingold”. It’s very loud in the Georg Solti recording, where the recording supervisor, John Culshaw, commented that the whip they used to make the cracking sounds was “absolutely terrifying”. And he’d been to a British public school in the 1940s, so he can’t have been easily scared.
Anyway, I should say that the whipping scene in “Das Rheingold” is interestingly grotesque, but completely and utterly not sexy.
Nice hat. Astrid Varnay as Brünnhilde.
But if you were looking for a bdsm scene in a Wagner opera, I’d recommend the Daddy-daughter confrontation between Wotan and Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre. It begins with Wotan furious because his daughter disobeyed him, and determined to punish her.
She begs, reminding her father why she did what she did, and inadvertently reminding him of why he loves her: she’s the best of him. So he still punishes her, but he changes it to make it something positive, intended to benefit her. And they reconcile with one of the hugest and most overwhelming orgasms in all music.
If you were a Dom on the prowl (rrrowl!), you could do worse than hang about in the lobby after a performance of Die Walküre, There’ll be some very good looking women there, as well as the ones who look like James Thurber drawings. Find one who’s been weeping red-eyed buckets, buy her a drink and give her a handkerchief. So far you’re being a gentleman, but tell her to clean herself up in a very slightly command voice, and there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll take her home.
By three in the morning you should be smacking her ass and telling her she’s a good girl really. And she should be hitting the A above the treble stave.
Another Phegor drawing. German, 1930s. Anyone know anything about him?
I’ve been sent another Phegor drawing. It’s got some things in common with his other drawing, which I featured in the post “Radclyffe Hall with a whip”.
He (I’m assuming Phegor was a man) put boots on his dommes, and drew those boots in some detail. He liked stockings, too. And, obviously, he really liked drawing whip marks. The title, “Die Geisel der Freundin” (“The Girlfriend’s Whip”), suggests that he was German, but it may just be that this post card, or book illustration, was printed in Germany.
Thanks to the donor of this other Phegor drawing. Does anyone know any more about this artist? Actual name, other pseudonyms, anything?
I’m taking a short break from the Golden girl saga. There are probably only two more episodes left in it. It’s a true story, by the way, with the usual changes to de-identify people and to fill in gaps in my memory.
An image that haunted my twelve-year old imagination. How could the world have something this sexy in it?
I should say that Therese really did talk like that. Writing her dialogue, she sounds like a slightly kinky lesbian from a 1920’s or 1930’s novel. Like Radclyffe Hall, only with a whip. (There’s probably no such tumblr. Though I haven’t looked.)
I didn’t notice it when she was saying these things, because she carried it off so well. She was a professional, and therefore an actor. She’d chosen the style and she stuck to it.
I’m pretty sure that if I had a woman bent over a table and a whip in my hand, no matter how fraught that hanging moment might be, if I said something like “And not a peep out of you, dear”, that girl would laugh her fool head off and the tension would fly right out the window.
Sure, it’d be replaced by some new tension, because there’s plenty available in the moments before a flogging begins. Still, one moment of it would be gone forever.
But really, I just wanted to post this drawing by an artist who called himself “Phegor”. Phegor is a demon in the Old Testament (that is, someone else’s god), so it’s probably a pseudonym, shall we say. Anyway, I first found it in a book, “The Cruel and the Meek”, when I was about twelve and already well aware of my desires. I thought this was the sexiest, darkest, sweetest, sweatiest, hottest image I’d ever seen.
This is part of the excellent, steamy, funny and insightful novel “The Tale of the Tawse”
Because that novel’s about to be published, the early drafts have to come off the net. Publishers don’t like competition from free providers.
Once it’s published, the address for buying this will be uploaded here.
The answer us that it sounds exactly like an Arabian Night.
But really it’s a Parisian night, from the early twentieth century, put into English a little later by a London-based Welshman, Edward Powys Mathers.
Mathers’s version is probably still the most popular English-language version of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”. But he didn’t know a word of Arabic. He translated the French version by Joseph Charles Mardrus.
Chaste, though naked, athletics, as in the original Arabic versionMardrus knew Arabic, but he also wrote his own mildly erotic Oriental fantasies, like his “The Queen of Sheba”, which is all gold costumes (underwear that goes “clank” when you drop it), yearning glances and shuddering thighs. Then in the early 1920s, Mathers did an English version of Mardrus’s French. The original is two generations away from the English version.
I discovered all this when I went searching for other translations of the Princess Abrixa scene when I was researching my “Between the Lines”. “Between the Lines” among other things tries to sketch in a cultural history of bdsm. I wanted to show that there’s awareness of bdsm pleasures in pretty much all world literatures, not just the European ones. But when I checked the Burton translation, the bound and spanked girls weren’t there. There were only some chaste athletic competitions.
Disgruntled slavegirls demand to be in the sexier French/English version. (Painting: Giulio Rosati)So I checked other translations, and discovered that the bondage and spanking doesn’t appear in any other translation. Mardrus and Mathers had made it up. Well, the athletics was probably enough to keep Sharkhan happily watching, hiding in his tree, but it isn’t quite so saucy for the reader. Mardrus and Mathers knew what an Arabian night ought to be like, even if the original Arabic writer didn’t.
I fixed the immediate problem for my book by dropping the “Arabian Nights” reference, and substituting some early medieval Arabic medical texts that showed some awareness of bdsm, or at least of sexual responses to whipping. But it was a pity to have to lose that warm, all-girl spanking night by the pool.