The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  The implausibility inherent in this image is precisely what makes it so gloriously decadent. No one wanting to go for a spin would rely on a delicate former duchess to last the course. But it is both the glory and the agony of those who surrender to their own depravity that the imagination is never quite sufficient. So it is that human ponies are not confined to novels and fantastical illustrations; as with every decadent fantasy, there are those who seek to make it true. Dildoes with horsetails can certainly be found; so too boots in the form of hooves; so too farms with stables fitted for humans. Yet if anything illustrates the power of the erotic as opposed to the pornographic, it is to compare a photograph of a human pony, however handsome and muscular, however beautiful and slim, with a line illustration of a similar sight, or a paragraph describing such a scene. The appeal of equus eroticus exists not despite but because of it being a contradiction in terms. Sometimes the decadent becomes more powerful for being an exploration, not of the possible, but of what can never be.

  The Story of B

  Belle de Jour

  My decline into decadence started early, but by no means finished then. While at the age of sixteen I imagined that I had thought of all there was to do with sex, tried it all and found it all wanting, by seventeen I knew that there were entire planetary systems – if not universes – still to be explored.

  When I met W, I was no virgin. Sex in public, role-playing, costumes and BDSM. Cross-dressing boyfriends who liked the taste of the crop were a particular favourite. I knew that something was very different about him from the way he kissed me (biting my lower lip until I tasted blood). We drove round London and he told me about Ian Fleming’s bit on the side, an aristocratic lady who liked it rough. Very rough. As in bruises, and then some.

  ‘Bring it on,’ I said, and he smiled. After all, everyone has to have an ill-advised affair that they later regret.

  One night he came by my place. I’d requested that he bring whatever toys he thought suitable, but the only thing in his hands was a bottle of Bailey’s. No wicked spiked nipple clamps, no dildos, no blindfolds? No kinky kit? He said whatever he needed, I already had. Fair enough then. We sat at the kitchen table listening to the Smiths and drinking and laughing.

  Upstairs the mood changed. He walked into my bedroom like he knew it already. Opened the wardrobe and threw my things onto the floor. Kicked a black PVC vest and micromini in my direction. ‘Wear that,’ he said. He found my whips, including the rubber multi-tailed cat, which could deal blows that ranged from silkily teasing to vicious – depending on the user. At least I assumed it had vicious potential. I’d never known a lover who actively endorsed drawing blood.

  ‘Top on, bra off,’ he said. As I stood, arms behind my back, he whipped my breasts. Hard. The angled tips of the rubber tails felt like they were on fire. And this was with clothing on. ‘Strip,’ he said. I was surprised to see there were already weals across my breasts, raised double lines like tram tracks. He pulled himself out of his trousers and went, as they say, to town. His free hand alternated between squeezing his thick cock and smacking my face with a jaw-popping force. I’m not averse to pain. There is something about the shock of cold, of a sharp smack, that clears the head. In the instant the whip licks your body there literally is no room for anything else in your mind but that sensation. It’s too strong. And in a world where people spend the larger parts of their free time and salaries pursuing any experience that will take them out of themselves, I can say with certainty this does it. I didn’t notice the blood until he told me to go to the shower.

  And then the reason for the Bailey’s became apparent. We waited until his tumescence faded slightly and let his bladder go all over me. The salty streams felt like acid on my wounds. I opened my mouth and caught the spray. When I leaned over to chase the dregs to the drain, he took me in the arse. There was no need for foreplay. I was, in more ways than one, already wet.

  If you’re going to regret an affair, regret it for all the right reasons. Not because you grew tired of each other after several years of cohabitation until the day you found an empty condom wrapper in his briefcase. Not because you chose stability over excitement. Regret it because you may never feel that way again. Because when you tell it to others, they won’t understand. Me, I don’t regret a thing.

  Househusband

  Brock Norman Brock

  Step out from the woods and onto the heath. London below fills the valley, a sea of sparkling lights. A million lights, a million lives … a million…

  … Other Men’s Wives

  Rain.

  But the cold has gone. Suddenly everything’s muggy. And in the air, something’s sweet. The apple trees are in blossom. Or perhaps it’s cherry trees. Suddenly, as if by magic, flowers are everywhere – in the trees, on the ground, you can’t turn your head without seeing them waving their exotic little sexual organs at you, like a new crop of Thai table dancers just hitting puberty. ‘Hey, Mister, look-see, look-see …’ the tiny cherry blossoms tease.

  You’re standing in the rain outside of your child’s school, idly fingering a little downy pistil or stamen when you realise that you are hard. You look up to see if anyone has noticed. The white mothers sit in their red Volvo estates, double-parked, windows all steamed up from mugs of tea and gossiping. They’re talking about you. You can’t see their faces behind the fogged windscreens, but you can feel their eyes on you. The Bengali mothers, too, huddled around the school gates, under dark umbrellas, veiled, yashmacked. They’re looking at you, too. You shift your weight from one foot to the other to ease off some of the pressure on your erection and there’s a little ripple of reaction from the women, like a herd or a flock, as if they might panic and take flight if you were to make any sudden movements.

  Wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  Cock in the hen house.

  Househusband.

  The rain comes down harder. One of the red Volvo estates flashes its lights at you. Passenger door opens. ‘Get in, get out of the rain,’ she says. You do, and say, ‘Some Spring.’ She nods yes and smiles. You can’t remember her name but know that her little girl is called Lily or Rose or Buddleia and has bright red hair. You believe that she is a gardener, or possibly a florist.

  You’d taken yours round to hers once, a children’s tea party. The children disappear upstairs, leaving you to make small talk with the other mothers there, but it’s women’s small talk, all schools and gardens and childhood diseases, and you find your eye wandering over the domestic details of the house. You notice that she uses black rubber gloves to do the washing up, where your own wife prefers yellow.

  Later, there was a bump or a crash, then crying. The children had been bouncing on the marital bed. Someone had knocked over a lamp. The children are sent downstairs for their tea but you stay behind to help her to put the bedclothes back together. Under a pillow is her nightie, surprisingly feminine. It is flesh-coloured and silk. One shoulder strap is missing its hook, and has been tied back on with a make-shift loop.

  She sees that you are holding it. ‘Old thing…’ she is beginning to explain and then stops.

  From downstairs now you can hear the other mothers gathering their children to go. ‘It’ll take them at least ten minutes to get their coats and shoes back on,’ she says. ‘Don’t stop.’ She’s under you and your hips are grinding together in a slow, hard, bone-to-bone semi-circle. Above her head, her hands are splayed out like fruit trees with gnarly fingers. Her legs are unshaved and prickle like nettles.

  At the end of the party, her husband had arrived, pleased with himself for having been able to get away from the office early and not a little uncomfortable with the fact that another man had been in his house in the middle of the afternoon. He is annoyed that the other children and guests are leaving just as he’s got there. He corners you and makes aggressive, men’s small talk, all office politics and sport and public transport. He puts his hand on his daughter’s head, petting her hair proprietarily as if it were his wife’s r
ed cunt.

  Outside, the rain comes down now in sheets. You can’t see a thing through the steamed up windows except the dark shadows of the Bengali women around the school gates. Inside the car, the air is even heavier and more humid, like a greenhouse. The back is loaded full of cuttings and bulbs, bits of trellis and bags of potting soil, one of which has been ripped open, giving everything a dark and peaty smell.

  She reaches across and brushes your collar. ‘Pollen,’ she says. Her fingernails are dirty with soil. She laughs a little, awkwardly, when the pollen falls onto your lap but doesn’t break eye contact and continues brushing, then grabs onto your cock. ‘Like a root,’ you cannot help but think.

  The bell has gone. You can hear the engines of the other Volvos start around you. Sylheti voices pass nearby. Children’s laughter. As she goes down on you, her head accidentally hits the lever and turns on the windscreen wipers. For a moment you are exposed to the outside before you reach across her and switch them off and the rain obscures you once more.

  The car gently rocks.

  Spring has sprung.

  The Art of Roman Decadence

  William Napier

  To truly achieve Roman levels of decadence you will need a great deal of money and no scruples. You will also want a menagerie of wild animals, some obedient slaves with no appreciation of their human rights, and amorous inclinations towards at least one other member of your immediate family.

  The Romans had a number of ways of capturing their wild animals. Libyan lions, for instance, could be caught in the wilds of North Africa by having a scented and oiled-up slave get down on all fours and offer the animal his or her anus. When the lion was fully mounted and dreamily engaged, a gang of more pro-active slaves would leap out from the undergrowth, wrestle it to the ground, and sedate it with large draughts of Armenian brandy. The poor beast, having already suffered the indignity of involuntary coitus interruptus, would then be securely bound and shipped back to Rome for slaughter. Quite why they couldn’t have caught it with a goat and a net is a mystery. Presumably it was just more fun this way. Animals were more often to be found in the dining room than the bedroom, for all the Romans’ decadence, although there is one charming image of very mild bestiality from the life of the Empress Theodora. In her days as an actress, before she married Justinian, she used to perform a tableau of Leda and the Swan, covering her naked body with grains of barley and having a swan softly nibble them from her body whilst she squirmed and arched her back with every appearance of orgasmic delight. In her girlhood Theodora used to perform oral sex on passers-by in exchange for a copper or two (at that age too young to accommodate them any other way) and even after becoming Empress, when her husband’s back was turned, she liked to organise some quite spectacular orgies for herself – if her venomous biographer Procopius is to be believed. She would take on three men at once, only complaining that ‘nature had not given her a fourth or a fifth orifice’ so that she could take on more, and she frequently exhausted as many as thirty lusty young slaveboys in a single night. Procopius also tells us that she caused earthquakes by black magic, and during the course of her reign murdered, ‘I suggest, a million people.’ So perhaps his evidence, like that of so many Roman historians, is not always entirely reliable.

  The Emperor Tiberius enjoyed relaxing in the warm rock pools of that notorious sexual theme-park which was his villa on Capri, his penis covered in breadcrumbs so that mullet would come and nibble at it. He liked to have little boys swim along underwater and nibble at him as well, whom he called his minnows, while obliging groups of three or more beautiful boys and girls had sex in various positions in the nooks and grottoes of the surrounding gardens. The walls of his villa were covered in pornographic murals, and he set up an official government department ‘for the originating of unfamiliar carnal pleasures.’ Suetonius tells us that as a dirty old man Tiberius even went so far as to do unmentionable things involving milk, honey and unweaned babies.

  Nero isn’t known to have had sex with a swan or a mullet, but he did like to dress up in animal skins, however. He would then arrange for men and women who had particularly offended him to be tied naked to stakes, whilst he attacked their genitals as if he were a wild beast. He also managed the rare feat of raping one of the Vestal Virgins, Rubria by name, and murdering his aunt with a lethal dose of laxatives. But if he hated his aunt, at least he loved his mother. Rather too much. It was clear that his mother, Agrippina, had no problems with this attachment herself, however, even encouraging him by coming to his private quarters after lunch, when he was sleepy and half-sozzled, alluringly dressed to stimulate his attentions.

  But it was Caligula who really set the benchmark for incest, along with other decadent staples such as wanton gluttony, over-dressing, spending money that he didn’t have, and taking a passionate interest in theatricals. He also liked dressing up as a girl in a blonde wig and a long robe. The object of his incestuous affections was his sister Drusilla. It was their granny, Antonia, who first caught them in bed together, in the very act of defloration. But it didn’t stop the relationship flourishing, evidently. Caligula was so proud of his inamorata that he had a little amphitheatre built specially, where for a denarius or two, the unwashed multitude could come and gawp at their Divine Emperor buggering his sister on stage. He also liked to have another partner involved, ideally the North African gladiator Superbus, who would bugger him at the same time as he was violating his cherished sibling. Incest, homosexuality, exhibitionism, group sex and even a kind of prostitution all in one. Quite a feat of the decadent imagination.

  Caligula had his other sisters, Agrippina and Livia, gang-raped for twenty-four hours as a punishment for plotting against him, but Drusilla remained a firm favourite until her tragically early death at the age of 23 from, as the doctors said, ‘a surfeit of buggery.’ She had just finished a lengthy session with her brother and seven extra studs recently shipped in from Caesariensis, in modern-day Algeria. With much weeping and lamentation, Caligula affectionately sodomised her corpse one last time, by way of fond farewell, then had her declared a goddess. After her cremation he masturbated onto her ashes. Greater love hath no man. Caligula should also be remembered for having both created and choreographed the world’s first (and surely last) authentic ‘snuff’ ballet, Laureolus, which included ritual slaughter for real, the victims being played by criminals condemned to die anyway. By the end of the performance there were only three dancers left alive, on a stage strewn with dead dancers’ body parts and awash with blood.

  It is with some relief that one turns to the pretty boy Heliogabalus, who for all his faults was comparatively free of cruelty and sadism. Where Heliogabalus excelled was in hedonism and poor financial management. He was the first Roman to wear pure silk (strictly linen and wool up till then), and his preferred dishes at banquets included camels’ heels and the combs of living cockerels. If the essence of decadent cuisine is to eat the smallest, most superficial part of the largest or rarest animal and then throw the rest away, Heliogabalus had it down to a fine art. He ate flamingoes’ brains and the heads of parakeets, fed his dogs on foie gras and his lions on parrots and peacocks. He served dishes of mixed salads such as peas and gold coins, lentils and onyx, or rice with pearls. He kept a private brothel for himself and his friends, and never slept with the same woman or wore the same pair of shoes twice. (Some Freudian connection, surely.) The quintessential decadent moment came at a dinner party; he let down such a huge cascade of violet and rose petals from the ceiling onto the heads of his diners that several of them suffocated to death. Like his Imperial predecessors, he too loved sex in public and dressing up as a girl. He had himself carried around Rome in a litter drawn by naked women, whose buttocks he would whip as they processed. Before he stepped down into the street, gold dust would be sprinkled before his feet. The Romans’ taste for sex, violence and spectacle all came together at the games where whores proliferated to such an extent that, for a change, it wasn’t just the Emperor wh
o benefited. It was considered all part of a good afternoon’s entertainment to get some passing hooker to bring you off just at the climactic moment during the slaughter down in the sand; or failing that, you could pass the time by trying to ejaculate onto the people below. ‘The bald pates of senators were favoured targets,’ one authority tells us. The equivalent nowadays would be to take your seat in the public gallery of the House of Commons along with wife or girlfriend, mistress or whore, and get her to masturbate you while you aimed your erection straight at the burgeoning bald spot of Tony Blair or David Cameron. A delightful way for us to revive the noble values of Ancient Rome, but alas, probably not one that would be permitted in our dour and puritanical times.