[In 1984] we realized that support groups were needed: The same value served by the text service could be served by an interactive forum. We were familiar with heading support groups and encounter groups.
We started [with] one forum; now we have two. One is the HSX Open Forum [HSX100]; the other is the HSX Adult Forum, (or) HSX200. [HSX100] is open to everybody. [HSX]200 is closed, except to people who qualify for membership. Many of its sections deal with sensitive issues. We feel that people are more likely to acknowledge a variation of sexuality in this medium than they might in conversation with family and friends. Participation in [HSX]200 far exceeds the participation in [HSX]100. It’s logical, because these people are getting support from each other and acknowledgment and important information. HSX200 probably [has] about 15,000 active members.
We’ve gotten a glimpse into human sexuality that’s much broader than what people see in the movies or magazines or [in] a standard sex-education class. Our consultants tell us—and it is verifiable in our experience—that everybody’s wired differently. The narrow picture of what is sexually acceptable doesn’t describe the great range of human sexual expression. Somehow people have assumed a stance of morality connected with what they think is [sexually] normal.
We feel strongly that everyone is entitled to privacy: You don’t have to answer to anybody about your root personality. It’s who you are, and your sexual expressions—to the extent that they don’t hurt anybody else—fall within that. Everybody has different personas. You have a business persona, you have a friend persona, a family persona; you also have a sexual persona. If you look at any group of people in a business setting, you don’t have any idea what they are like in their bedrooms or in their bathrooms or anywhere else. It’s as irrelevant to their business persona as what they’re like in church or what they’re like with their parents. That’s important to realize. People feel guilty [when] they find themselves relating sexually in a way that they don’t relate in any other part of their life. But that’s true if they were to analyze any other personas they’ve adopted. The enlightened view of sexuality is that conventional heterosexuality is one of many expressions of sexuality.
[In HSX200] we have a section called Variations I [and] another called Variations II. Variations I is devoted to fetishes [and] things that people ordinarily consider nonmainstream. Conversations might deal with various forms of pleasure giving [and] sexual enhancement practices. Variations II is devoted to bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism, [and] power-exchange relationships. We also have Adult Babies for infantilists; GenderLine for transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenderists; Biways for bisexuals; Gay Adults; and Watersports for klismaphiliacs, urolagniacs, and people into douching. Variations I and Variations II have [the most] access requests. An area that seems to have taken off lately is GenderLine. It may have to do with outside publicity. There was a recent [CompuServe Magazine] essay contest. A transsexual was one of the winners and wrote about how his/her transition was made easier by the support gained on GenderLine. There were letters—some objecting strongly, some saying this was a great thing.
We handle these subjects in a medical [and] psychological context. We’re careful not to use slang language. It’s treated seriously. [We would] love to be all things to all people, but we are not there for salacious entertainment. We encourage the widest possible exchange of ideas, experiences, and emotions. We’re not an all-purpose sexual utility: We’re a support group.
We’re part of a global village. We have somebody in England who is leading conferences. We are developing a conference series with someone in Australia and [another person] in Singapore. The fellow in Singapore is 23 years old. He [says] that he really knew nothing about sex; nobody talks about it. Teenagers are kept ignorant. He’d found HSX educational and supportive. A lot of people have [said this]. For example, we started Gay Young Adults. Gays are born evenly distributed throughout the population, but when gays graduate from high school, classically they tend to cluster into regions. If a gay is in New York or San Francisco, [it’s] all right, because there’s a whole community. But if a gay remains in a small town, he or she is isolated—and the most isolated of the isolated are gay kids, who really have a lot of questions, not always about sex but about relationships and their own identity. We created a special, closed section restricted to people 21 or under. We’ve gotten two unsolicited letters from people who said, “You saved me from suicide.” There are people walking around this country who we have reason to believe are alive because of something we provided. That’s a nice feeling.
Two
VICTORIAN GENESIS
AND THE
MODERN SCENE
The prize offered by Helio-gabalus for a new and original deviation is still unclaimed after two millennia.
—ALEX COMFORT1
The practices and desires we will examine are as old as eros. Yet we are so accustomed to accepting the idea that unusual or unfamiliar sexual practices are “perverse” that we rarely ask how these behaviors came to be so classified. What forces or individuals asserted what constitutes a sexual norm? How have these beliefs been assimilated into popular consciousness?
In this chapter we trace the rise of S/M as an observed phenomenon, beginning with the first attempts to scientifically unravel the mysteries of human sexuality until now. We also trace the roots of the organized S/M communities, an expanding network of educational resources, support groups, and social organizations for sexual minorities.
At chapter’s end we feature three interviews:
• William A. Henkin is a certified sex therapist and licensed marriage, family, and child counselor. He is past president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, a member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and a Ph. D. candidate at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
• Hilton is 38 years old and was raised in Europe. He lives in New York, where he works in a high-technology industry. He is on the board of directors of the Eulenspiegel Society, America’s oldest S/M support group.
• Carter Stevens is 46 years old and lives in New Jersey. He owns and operates fetish video companies and publishes The S&M News.
IN THE BEGINNING …
In 1844 the first Psychopathia Sexualis was published in Leipzig by a Ukrainian physician, Heinrick Kaan. Forty-two years later Richard von Krafft-Ebing chose the same title for the first edition of his massive Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study. Between the first Psychopathia and the second lay the gropings toward the first scientific study of sex. Obviously influenced by Kaan’s work and publishing the more graphic details in Latin, to—as it has been suggested—“protect the imperfectly educated,”2 Krafft-Ebing’s tome was at the pinnacle of Victorian scientific inquiry into human sexuality.
In other cultures—notably the Hindu culture of India—ars erotica, which treat sexuality as an art form or a discipline to be mastered, were long established. The Kama Sutra and its imitators are essentially how-to manuals for the upper classes, as much concerned with proper sex etiquette for the well-born as with the varieties of sexual play. Erotic arts were not only deemed worthy of respect but were thought to be divinely revealed. This may partly explain why the how-to of sex was explored while the how-come? was largely ignored: A gift of the gods is not open to scrutiny.
Between the ars erotica of the East and the Studium erotica of the West lies a gulf that is still only beginning to be bridged. Although sexual repression was hardly invented in the 19th Century—Michael Foucault, for example, suggests that the 17th Century was a watershed in censure of sexual pleasure;3 and taboos against masturbation and sodomy were recorded in the Old and New Testaments—it is ironic that the first attempts to demystify sexuality were born of one of the most sexually repressive cultures in history.
THE VICTORIANS
The Victorian period is the point of departure for sexual research. A
convergence of factors made it possible: Science, philosophy, and social sciences were growing emancipated from religion; an age of curiosity flowered within an age of hypocrisy.
Perhaps the peculiar prudishness and sexual repression associated with the Victorian period helped escalate serious thinking on the subject: The discrepancy between the ideal and the real was too great to go unnoticed. But there was also the emergence of empirical science, the growth of medicine and psychology, a weakening of belief in traditional religions and moral codes in general.
—EDGAR GREGERSEN4
Victorian society was prudish to an extent that seems unimaginable today. Piano legs were discreetly hidden beneath fabric skirts in the interest of modesty, and the Bible was capable of wounding refined sensibilities because it contains such words as whore and fornication. Victorians were so nervously and negatively obsessed with sex that almost anything held the danger of titillation.
It became indelicate to offer a lady a leg of chicken—hence the still surviving tradition that she is offered the breast; but even this was called the “bosom” in the nineteenth century.
—G. RATTRAY TAYLOR5
Whereas earlier Christians may have perceived sex for pleasure as sinful, the Victorians viewed it as disgusting, animalistic, and depraved. It was even supposed that sex endangered the health; discharging semen was seriously believed to shorten one’s life. Parents went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their male children from masturbation or nocturnal emissions, in some cases fitting them with locked penis cages, spiked rings to render erections too painful to endure, and even alarm devices that caused a bell to ring in the parents’ room should the penis become erect.
In medieval times the evils of temptation and carnality were blamed upon women who, like Eve, led men to ruin. By the Victorian Age, it was believed that lust was a masculine phenomenon and that women were sexually lifeless.
A writer in The Westminster Review said that women’s sexual urges were dormant or nonexistent. “Nature has laid so many burdens on the delicate shoulders of the weaker sex: let us rejoice that this, at least, is spared them.” If they realized how great their sexual potential was, “sexual irregularities would reach a height of which, at present, we have happily no conception.” This was unlikely as long as a frail, unsensual constitution invalided them out of the bestial sexual fray. The distinguished writer on sex, Dr. William Acton, said that to claim women were capable of sexual impulses was a “vile aspersion.” William Hammond, U. S. Surgeon General, said that nine tenths of the time decent women had no pleasure from intercourse, and the famous Swiss gynecologist, Dr. Fehling, called sexual desire in young women pathological.
—ARNO KARLEN6
While the surface of Victorian society was shrouded in respectability, contemporary novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Portrait of Dorian Gray are allegories on the duality of Victorian life. In London as many as 40,000 prostitutes plied their trade. Brothels proliferated at a rate never seen before or since, catering to every imaginable taste. “Molly houses” (male brothels), child brothels, and flagellation brothels flourished.
Economic and religious influences are key elements in the spectacle of Victorian prudery. What we have come to call Victorianism was initially a phenomenon of the middle classes. As the economic power of the middle classes grew, their moralistic attitudes increasingly influenced the upper classes, and their effect on the lower classes was decisive. The experience of the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant stresses caused by the shift from an agrarian rural culture to a mechanized urban society were directly responsible for the development of sprawling slums whose squalor has never been rivaled. Victorian slums were the breeding ground of prostitution, crime, and violence; their misery was virtually inescapable. Only by adopting middle-class mores could the slum dweller aspire to that class.
The religious ideals of Methodism—the most powerful of the middle-class denominations—complemented Victorian social ideals. Modesty and restraint were unquestioned virtues. Proper gentlemen and ladies of the period eschewed strong emotion: Excessive laughter or grief were as objectionable as sexual excess. The appearance of respectability was paramount. To appear otherwise was to be common, and to be common was to be spiritually flawed, economically hopeless, and socially repugnant.
That anyone saw fit to study and publish work on sex—much less unusual sex—in this atmosphere may seem surprising. But the Victorian Age embraced paradoxes: Romantic extravagance in art and literature existed beside the grim sobriety of daily life; fervent humanitarianism beside the institutionalized racism of colonialism; hyper-prudishness beside profligacy. Moreover, this was a golden age for science, which seemed to promise the salvation from human misery that only Christianity had previously offered.
THE SCIENTISTS
Victorians appreciated science so long as it supported and confirmed their social ideals, which, by no coincidence, it generally did. The work of Charles Darwin, for example, had a profound impact on Victorian thought. While the possibility that man had evolved from a simian ancestor outraged many, Victorians nonetheless eagerly extended his theories of evolution to society. They saw themselves as occupying the uppermost rung of a tall ladder of social evolution. Just as Calvinism and its diluted form, Methodism, held that God demonstrated divine pleasure in the elect by rewarding their worthiness with wealth and comfort, so Social Darwinism held that Nature had rewarded the most worthy—i.e., the Victorians—with advanced civilization and technology. Social Darwinism was a direct transposition of religious belief into secular science. It provided a philosophical framework to account for such phenomena as urban slums and colonization. Those who did not prosper were unfit to prosper. Those who were colonized were unfit to rule themselves. That they be ruled by those whom evolution had blessed to be fit was only natural and right.
Darwinism also had a profound impact on contemporary psychiatry, itself a new discipline. The term psychiatry had first been employed in 1808; by the time of Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species in 1859, psychiatry was primarily a system of classification braced by a body of unsupported theory. Only 50 years earlier insanity was commonly believed to result from the disposition of humors (bodily fluids) or sorcery. Psychiatry held that insanity was organic, the result of disease or injury, but this failed to account for a large number of remarkably physically fit lunatics. Natural selection and inherited traits provided plausible explanations: Insanity could be hereditary, and the insane biologically cursed with a weak nervous system. Further, if the etiology could be established, a cure ultimately might be discovered. Science could then fulfill its promise of delivering humanity from psychological woe.
The latter half of the 19th Century saw doctors and theorists hunting busily for the hereditary factors of insanity and psychosexual deviance. Many believed that congenital conditions were manifest in anatomy and physiognomy. Physicians asserted they could diagnose, at a glance, a neuropath afflicted with “masturbatory insanity.” He would be, if not raving, at least identifiable by his pallid complexion, downcast eyes, and air of brooding melancholy. Similar fallacies (some of which will be familiar to contemporary readers) spread as gospel: Lesbians were all mannish; homosexual men couldn’t whistle.
Neuropaths aside, however, there was a larger question that nagged at Victorian scientists: If modesty, reserve, and sexual continence were the imperatives of human goodness, why were these qualities absent in so many Victorians?
PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
He was not the first to devote himself to the study of sexuality, but no one had a greater impact on the future course of sexology than Richard von Krafft-Ebing. He popularized the terms sadism and homosexual, invented the terms masochism and paranoia, and his classification system of sexual deviance remains the foundation of modern psychiatric diagnostics. But science and its theories do not develop in isolation: Krafft-Ebing’s assumptions mirror many of the prejudices of his age. His biases remain a matter of debat
e.
By drawing on over 200 cases collected from his own patients, other doctors, earlier medical literature, and defendants in criminal courts, Krafft-Ebing provides testimony for his view that unbridled sex can undermine the health and honor of individuals as well as the very foundations of society. By mixing extreme cases (e. g., murder and cannibalism) with seemingly innocuous deviations, he gives the overall impression that all sex is dangerous.
—SUZANNE G. FRAYSER7
Prior to Krafft-Ebing, S/M was neither a sickness nor a sin.
—CHARLES MOSER8
Like Freud after him, Krafft-Ebing considered reproductive relevance the benchmark of sexual normality. Psychiatry was the heir of moral theology: Sex was a biological mechanism devised by God or Nature to ensure the production of offspring. Sex for pleasure and intimacy which did not induce pregnancy was a perversion of biology as much as of God’s will. In this system “missionary,” man-on-top intercourse—a position believed to aid man’s seed in reaching its goal—was the only acceptable position; it also spared women from too active a role in their disagreeable but obligatory reproductive duties. Given this narrow definition of acceptable sexual activity, it is not surprising that Krafft-Ebing found an abundance of deviance.
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