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Notes on the "Founders" of S&M Posted on 11/12/2014

"Shiny, shiny
Shiny boots of leather
Whip lash girl-child in the dark
Severin, your servant, comes in bells
Please don't forsake him
Strike, dear mistress
And cure his heart"

from Venus in Furs (the Velvet Underground)

S&M. Sadomasochism. A combination of sadism and masochism, that is, deriving sexual pleasure from inflicting and/or receiving pain on/from another person, usually an object of love or attraction. While the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, the dynamics of domination vs. submission, and general erotic role-playing have been around since times immemorial, the term itself has only been used for a little more than 100 years. It originated in Victorian Europe.

Much of the typical S&M imagery, items, and style comes from the Victorian age aesthetic - corsetry, equestrian boots, leather riding crops, etc. Other tropes are borrowed from the Elizabethan period a couple centuries before that - the traditional English dungeon complete with cat o' nine tails, racks, elaborate bindings and such. English society, with its rigid moral structure overlaying many illicit and conventionally unacceptable 'doings', was particularly fertile ground for the modern idea of s&m to take root.

The individual terms sadism and masochism take their names from the two men described below, both of whom spent lots of time in lunatic asylums.

The word "sadism" derives from the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the infamous writer, aristocrat, and philosopher who led a truly dedicated life of perversion and debauchery. De Sade married into wealth, then embarked on a questionable pattern of behavior in which he subjected unsuspecting prostitutes, servants, and other unlucky victims to sessions of physical and sexual abuse in his castle, occasionally with the help of his wife. He was arrested and sentenced to death in 1772 (for homosexual offenses and attempted poisoning), but managed to escape several times, spent some time in Italy, then wound up recaptured and was imprisoned at the Bastille.

Here he began to write philosophical novels centered on his notions of sex and (a)morality, packed with all manner of bizarre, cruel, and otherwise perverse sexual acts. The most-read of these are Justine and Juliette, about a pair of sisters: the more virtuous of the two ends up being abused and miserable, while the selfish and amoral sister ends up with a life of comfort and wealth. One of De Sade's underlying themes could be summed up as "Vice is its own reward". After the French Revolution (during which he was nearly guillotined), de Sade spent his last years doing his second stint in the lunatic asylum at Charenton, where he got fellow mental patients to perform his plays at the encouragement of the asylum's director. Eventually he died of syphilis.

De Sade's value as a philosopher and writer is still a matter of debate today and probably always will be. Some consider him to simply be the deeply disturbed creator of particularly distasteful pornography without any redeeming qualities or lasting value. Others see him as an essential influence on later philosophical movements (existentialism and surrealism, to name a couple). He is also portrayed repeatedly in pop culture as the anti-authoritarian and subversive victim of persecution by the hypocritical powers-that-be. The truth is probably a combination of these. One thing is for sure: the Marquis de Sade did things his way.

From his official last will and testament: "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell.... Kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."

And now, "masochism". It's named after the Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895). Seems Leopold was obsessed with abuse inflicted upon his person by beautiful women. Physical torture at the hands of a pretty girl brought him to a melting orgasm; any form of lesser abuse was still a turn-on. As a child he was brought up on tales of cruelty and gore told to him by his wet nurse and police chief father. During his formative years he was particularly interested in the brutal ends of Christian martyrs and 'true crime' accounts of evil, domineering women torturing helpless men. As an adult, he engaged in numerous slave-master relationships and it showed in his writing.

Sacher-Masoch's most popular novel, Venus im Pelz ("Venus in Furs"), was liberally sprinkled with beatings, whippings, and forced anal penetration inflicted upon the protagonist Severin. The book is part of an intended six-volume cycle of fiction that was never completed due to Leopold's declining mental health. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum by his wife. Incidentally, the term "masochism" was officially adopted by the medical establishment as a psychosexual disorder years before his death; an honor to see such a thing named after oneself, but a dubious one perhaps.

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