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.
Come into the garden, Maude,
you faithless American faculty wife.
Strife? Christ, girl, there’ll be no strife.
Your husband, Linguistics Professor Claude,
saw your foot tease my cock to life
under the table, which he ignored.
No wonder you yank girls are bored:
I’d have gone for someone like me with a knife.
Ciggie? Well, you’re a sport. Our time just flew.
Now go back to the dinner, don’t get all soppy,
and send me out another wife or two.
Come on, love, no need to get stroppy,
you’ve got super tits and you’ll make great copy;
Sure I’ll put you in a book, or a girl just like you.
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.
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.
I’m about to go to a friend’s place, climb up a tree, and start cutting it down while I’m on it, with a chainsaw. The tree’s threatening to fall over and destroy the neighbour’s roof, so it needs to be taken down in small sections. It’s a very high tree, and this actually involves a certain amount of fear on my part. So I’m going to be extremely careful. Still, if there’s never another post on this blog, you’ll know roughly what happened.
Anyway, I occasionally read attacks on bdsm as something that’s inherently sexist, patriarchal, anti-women and so on. Most people who take part in bdsm know that this attack involves a total misinterpretation of what happens in bdsm.
Points we often make in reply are:
1. what about gay and lesbian bdsm, where either there are only women involved, or there are no women involved? So how can men be oppressing women if there are no men there? Or there are men but no women there?
2. what about men submitting and women dommes? (And if you say that that’s oppressing women because the dom serves the submissive, then why won’t you say that about male doms?)
3. what about choice? If a woman chooses to submit, then that’s an expression and an assertion of her desires and her sexual self? When did women making choices, and acting on them, become a bad thing, from a feminist point of view?
But there’s another issue, I think. Shortly after the Law Lords, in Britain, rejected the appeal of the Spanner group (a group of gay men who were arrested, tried, convicted, and slung into jail for engaging in consenting bdsm sex), they reaffirmed the right of parents and teachers to use corporal punishment on children.
By the way, the Law Lords, also called the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, which is a cool name, are a group in the British House of Lords who happen to have legal qualifications and judicial experience. Since they’re selected from among a relatively small pool, they’re probably less learned and competent than a panel of judges hearing an embezzlement case in Manchester, for example. But that’s what you get for taking hereditary privilege seriously.
Anyway, the height of the British establishment ruled that it’s not okay to cane someone, for example, if that person is an adult, is consenting and is going to enjoy it sexually. But it’s very much okay to cane a terrified child, since the child is not consenting and will be seriously hurt.
I think the Law Lords knew something that anti-bdsm feminists have missed. That is, bdsm mocks power. We take the clothes, the instruments and some of the language, of people in power, and we turn them into something arbitrary. That is, the person with the power isn’t necessarily heterosexual. If it’s a heterosexual couple, the power isn’t necessarily with the man. In bdsm , power isn’t necessarily with the person with the most money, or the most prestigious job.
Power goes to where the partners choose it to go, according to what will be sexiest.
Power has to serve the interests of pleasure.
Authoritarians don’t like that. Bdsm makes play out of something that they take very very seriously, and that feels like mockery.
Okay. It’s chainsaw time.
Update!
All electrical and telephone wires still up. Neighbour’s house still standing. I’m still standing. The tree is down.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a submissive partner, either in play or in a long term relationship, who wasn’t a feminist.
People mostly thought Andrea Dworkin was a joke, but she was a tragedy. She mostly harmed her own side.Not all of the submissive or surrendered women I’ve known would use the word, but that’s mainly because of the images it can conjure up.
That image combined obesity, sexless puritanism, righteousness, angry insanity, Berthold Brecht’s haircut (Tiny Tim’s, in Andrea Dworkin’s case), and general authoritarianism. It’s a dated image, but it does linger on. A lot of women would rather be in a club that has Rihanna in it than one that had Andrea Dworkin in it. Well, I support feminism, but me too, on that.
But one of my earliest submissive girlfriends was the Director of Women’s Issues for a trade union, so she wasn’t just feminist; she got paid for it. I remember her on her feet at a public rally, during a campaign to lift pay rates in industries that employ a lot of women. She made an absolutely brilliant speech, passionate, firebrand stuff. A lot of unionists, career feminists and politicians were looking at and noting the newcomer, wondering how they could get her into this alliance or that. I was sitting quietly in the background, incredibly proud that she was mine.
What no-one noticed was the little intake of breath when she sat down again. There were women on the panel who didn’t really approve of her having sex with men. So it’s lucky they didn’t know that she’d made that speech with her arse still burning, and one dozen fresh cane stripes across it. I’d cut the bamboo only that morning.
Rihanna bites the whip. Pink everywhere. Vaguely comic, but definitely not tragic.Of course, as well as my proper and very real pride in her I felt also proud for pathetic and unworthy reasons: I’d just canedandfucked this much admired feminist activist, so I must be no end of a mensch. I’ll admit that stupid thought here: no-one’s reading this blog anyway.
But that didn’t make me less supportive, or her politics one atom less feminist, or her speech less effective. It added a little energy, if anything. But if they’d known about it, those other women on that panel, they’d have turned on her and tried to get her thrown off.
[More to say, but tomorrow.]