Any lingering doubts about the protean authenticity of fetish artist John Willie’s genius are crushed under the weight of Taschen’s page-for-page reprint of all issues of Willie’s magazine, Bizarre, edited and introduced by contemporary fetish photographer Eric Kroll. Published intermittently from 1948 to 1954, Bizarre was a kind of Baedeker to the demimonde of fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism and other now fashionable paraphilias in an era when married couples couldn’t be shown sleeping in the same bed on a movie screen. More importantly, it was a showcase for his original illustrations of fetishistically costumed women in bondage, which remain the biblical authority for fetish-derived art and fashion today.
Willie (real name: John Alexander Scott Coutts) was the sort of raffish figure the U.K.’s better classes have exported for years, a flamboyantly eccentric remittance man, paid by his stolid British merchant banking family to stay away from home. Shipped off first to Australia, where he began his tempestuous relationship with his volatile muse, Holly, he worked in intelligence during WWII before moving to New York to pursue his “hobby” full time. That hobby, which is often generically described as bondage, encompassed a wide variety of interests—reflected in the pages of Bizarre—ranging from corsetry to amputee fetishism. He carried on a voluminous correspondence with fellow enthusiasts around the world, publishing their invariably literate and often touching accounts of their secret passions under pseudonyms like “Hobbledehoy” and “High French Heels.” Excavation even turns up a letter from the young Fakir Musafar, the most visible contemporary interlocutor of the body-modification culture. Thus, among his other accomplishments, Willie became the first historian of what has since become a vast and much-inspected sexual bohemia.
But it is as an arbiter of erotic taste that Willie enjoys immortality. His elegant renderings of idealized women in dominant and submissive poses created an idealized form evident today in everything from John-Paul Gaultier’s dresses to the surgically sculpted bodies of modern porn stars. Though these images are executed with a light hand and an evident affection for their subjects, they possess an undeniable bite that comes directly from the unconscious. Willie’s pinups with missing limbs seem no less radical at a distance of four decades.
Indeed, careful though he was to avoid the strangling obscenity laws of his own time, he was bedeviled by postal authorities and lived with constant economic and legal insecurity, undoubtedly contributing to his propensity for strong drink and his early death. The end of his final affair with 19-year-old Los Angeles model Judy Ann Dull, who died at the hands of bondage murderer Harvey Glatman, may have contributed as well. The artist whose subject matter is sex lives in a perilous world, in every sense, and that very tang of risk, what the late Dr. Robert Stoller called “the element of harm,” is what gives Willie’s work its steely edge beneath all the lace. If there is an indispensable omnibus work of fetish art, this must be it. IL

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback in slipcase: 1 pages
Illustrated

Devotees of corporal punishment form a sort of self-selected subculture within the already specialized world of sadomasochistic sexuality. Indeed, many “spankers” reject the application of sadomasochistic nomenclature (as opposed to the application of birches or nettles) to themselves and their tastes. There has always been a whiff of snobbery to the CP milieu, which partakes heavily of the symbolism of upper-class, single-sex education. Unashamedly Anglophile, CP culture reflects an appreciation of the erotic uses of hypocrisy.
The Female Disciplinary Manual, whose authorship is attributed collectively to The Standing Committee on Female Education, purports to be an official document from some future society in which corporal punishment is routinely employed in education, in the workplace and at home. It details, as only obsessional narratives can, all the different implements that may properly be employed for this purpose, ranging from slippers to straps, and all the ritualistic scoldings and expressions of penitence that should properly be expected from disciplinarians and their charges. Even the correct diameters of canes to be wielded for differing offenders and offenses are inventoried. In all these proceedings, the element of sexual arousal, while never fully denied, is regarded as an unintended and suspect consequence of punitive necessity.
Most American CP enthusiasts—and they are legion, both male and female—are products of co-ed public schools where physical punishment is foreplay to litigation. Perhaps the charm of these small volumes lies in their staunch refusal to analyze the desires they are meant to inflame. CP culture is built around shame, the most effective antidote to guilt. IL

Publisher: Wild Fire Club
Hardback: 112 pages

When he put this compendium of testimonials from SM practitioners together back in 1992, Thompson probably had no idea he was rounding up what would become the usual suspects whenever “constructive” representatives of the leather community were sought. Since this book was first published, contributors Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, Guy Baldwin, John Preston, Joseph Bean and, for that matter, Thompson himself, have become constituents of a thriving leather-community press that supports several imprints and a number of serious publications. In the process, they have come to represent that community in the wider debate over sexual politics in the culture overall.
For all the familiarity of the names, faces and opinions that predominate in this collection, the ideas expressed retain much of their freshness and bite. In an era when sexual desire has become confused and attenuated background noise to the clamor of the marketplace, it’s bracing to encounter such passion for the personal expressed in such direct emotional language. Particularly valuable are the recollections of such ur-leatherfolk as Thom Magister (describing his initiation into the very much underground bar scene of the ‘50s) and Jack Fritscher (on pioneering artist Chuck Arnett) in reconstructing the hidden history of the SM demimonde before Stonewall. That a subculture so savagely suppressed could give rise to the rigorous ideals of safe, sane, consensual SM play now generally acknowledged by practitioners of all orientations is nothing if not inspirational. Leatherfolk, in addition to its historical value, offers a refreshing tonic to the cynicism and ennui that prevail in the intellectual discourse of those who consider themselves “normal.” IL

Publisher: Alyson
Paperback: 328 pages

The first of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 63 pages

The second of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 71 pages

And talks… and talks. Fortunately, much of Shellogg’s exegesis is entertaining, if somewhat disingenuous. She frames her story in the breezy contemporary style of sex work memoirists dating back to Xaviera Hollander. Just another nice girl from a perfectly normal middle-class background who discovers hidden riches in her ability to amuse men with money. Happily, there is none of the self-serving vindictiveness toward her benefactors that has made such a hit of the ludicrous You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again. Shellogg’s particular specialty is dishing out carefully titrated abuse to male clients whose pleasure is pain and humiliation. She is, by her own description, “the eternal slut-mother. That’s what I do for a living. I embody the bitch.” These embodiments manifest the familiar forms: bondage, flagellation, latex fetishism, urolagnia, et al.
What sets this good-natured account apart from so much current SM lit, both serious and exploitational, is its welcome lack of moralizing and/or special pleading. A witty and engaging writer, Mistress Sonya (her nom de dom) loves to tell a good story more than she needs to make a point. Though her clients seem a somewhat pitiful lot for all their disposable income, mainly because their closeted status forces them to share their most intimate needs with a hired stranger, the author never seems to lose her zest for the game. And a game it is. Unlike her clients, and unlike lifestyle SM practitioners, Shellogg makes no bones about her own yearning for the conventional, for a husband, a house and a “normal” life. She is a bit of an outsider to the world in which she works, which makes her a pretty good guide to it after all. IL

Publisher: Barricade
Hardback: 304 pages

The unusual quality that sets this book apart from the current avalanche of sensational literature on the subject of child sex abuse is embodied in the subtitle. The author of this book invites us to consider, for a moment, why men commit abusive sexual acts against children, as we drag these men toward the chopping block. This quality is called compassion, and this book administers a sobering dose of it. In his ethnographic research, the author conducted lengthy interviews with a core group of 27 respondents, men drawn from treatment groups, prisons, probation programs and the private practices of therapists. Typically, the men were in their ‘30s, married and employed with no other criminal backgrounds. Most lived in the same households with their victims.
Some of Pryor’s research confirms what is already known. Nothing is a better indicator of a propensity toward sex abuse than a history of sex abuse. The lessons that an abused child learns about power, rationalization and self-worth (or its absence) shape the adult’s attitude toward other children. The idea that sexual abuse is somehow “normal” underpins the excuses abusing adults make to themselves to enable their own aggressions. However, Pryor finds that, contrary to the political construct of the abuser as an emotionless objectifier carrying the culture’s most unwholesome impulses to their logical conclusions, molesters are often as horrified by their own behavior as everybody else.
Though Pryor makes the explicit connection between cultural sexism and abusive behavior, he recognizes that not all men molest and that molesters themselves know this. Filled with shame and remorse not only by their own desires but, as a rule, by sexuality in general, they fall into the cycle of addiction, hoping to dam their impulses by force of will and, when will collapses, capitulating to them abjectly. Isolated in their self-hatred, molesters can only ventilate their rage through the victimization of others. What Pryor calls “the moral boundary” once crossed becomes illusive. His subjects have a way of identifying themselves as victims, of adults who molested them, of children who seduced them, of impulses they can’t understand or control.
Favoring what he calls “a peacemaking model” that will undoubtedly enrage many readers, Pryor opposes Megan’s Law and other public castigations of offenders, indeed questions the use of the criminal-justice system overall as a means of protecting children from abuse. Removing offenders from their isolation, compelling them to see the common humanity between themselves and their victims, offers the only hope for breaking the cycle of abuse from one generation to the next in the author’s view. “Until we find a way to encourage offenders to come forward with their stories rather than hide and continue with what they are doing, the situation is only bound to get worse.” IL

Publisher: NYU
Hardback: 351 pages

This hardbound installment in Taschen’s continuing series of fetish-oriented photographic offerings encyclopedically catalogues the work of Elmer Batters, certainly one of the most fanatically focused lensmen ever to shoot in the pin-up genre. Batters, whose work began in the 1940s and continued for some 40 years, was and is, as fellow photographer Eric Kroll (who edited this collection) describes him in the book’s introduction, “a regular guy with an obsession,” that being the legs and feet of women. Though he photographs their other parts as well—often with stark explicitness—legs and feet, most often clad in seamed, Cuban-heeled stockings, are generally in the foreground.
Technically competent, Batters’ images derive their power not so much from technique, or even subject matter, but rather from their artlessly frank juxtapositions of fetish imagery with more conventional expressions of sexuality. Unlike less ingenuous artists in the medium, who show the viewer a high heel as a way of suggesting something that is not shown, Batters poses his models with stockinged legs folded in against exposed genitalia, making the connection as direct as possible. It doesn’t require a decoder ring to figure out this work. This man is a born-again shrimper.
Indeed, the quotidian surroundings, the unadorned staging, the plain-to-routine-pretty models reflect a seeming unawareness of any audience outside the maker of the image. At their worst, Batters’ pictures might have come straight from Beaver Hunt. At their best, however, they have a stripped-down, telegraphic intensity, compressing all the libidinous fury of the photographer’s obsession in a single, power-packed frame. The lasting impression left by this exhaustive compilation is of an erotic artist more honest than slick, whose work succeeds by staying close to home. IL

Publisher: Taschen
Hardback: 215 pages
Illustrated

In his pioneering sexual ethnography, the late Robert Stoller was always careful to qualify his perceptions with the acknowledgment of his own limitations as a perceiver. Under the circumstances, this reviewer can do no less. I was a participant in Stoller’s investigation of the lives and souls of those who make porn and am quoted in this book at some length under the pseudonym “Ron.” I went on to co-author a second book on the subject with Stoller, Coming Attractions, which was published just after his tragic death in an automobile accident.
Like most of his later work, Porn consists mainly of interviews—interlaced with the author’s questions and comments of the performers, directors, writers and associated hangers-on who make their livings cranking out sexually explicit videos. While carefully avoiding political or moral judgments, Stoller nonetheless paints a picture from a definite perspective. By dedicating so many pages to voluble porn industry spokesperson and self-styled moral iconoclast Bill Margold, Stoller makes his case for porn as a refuge of talented misfits and sexual nonconformists. As the author puts it, “The motivating sentiment of porn is less ‘Let’s fuck’ than ‘Fuck you.’” Certainly, by encouraging his informants to share their often-troubled personal histories, elicited with a master psychoanalyst’s seeming effortlessness, he gives plenty of reasons why porn people might be angry and rebellious. Abandonment, abuse and molestation are recurring themes in the narratives of performers and off-camera industry personalities alike. Even interviewees like Nina Hartley, who profess to enjoy their work and disdain the sympathies of those who regard them as exploited, have their share of resentments to unload at anti-porn feminists and younger performers.
Though Stoller’s investigations don’t contribute additional ammo to porn-bashers, they give little comfort to those who prefer to imagine sex work as an endless toga party. Much of the evidence Stoller educes seems to corroborate his much-misunderstood and widely castigated theorem that “the erotic imagination is energized by the element of harm.” It is the angry edge of porn and the people who make it that gives it its vitality. Porn is a tribute to the memory of a scientist who shunned easy polemics in favor of uncomfortable paradoxes. IL

Publisher: Yale University
Hardback: 228 pages

Readers nurturing the illusion that Stalinism vanished from the world in the brick dust of the Berlin Wall owe themselves this package tour of the totalitarian mind, a veritable Baedeker to the P.C.-paranoid brain. To her credit, Barry (author of Female Sexual Slavery, of which this book is an update) does not pretend to be objective in her broad, shallow survey of sexual enslavement throughout the modern world. In her introduction, she identifies herself as an early supporter of what she calls “The Dworkin-Mackinnon Ordinance,” and lambastes her opponents in the “Feminist” Anti-Censorship Task Force (quotations hers) as “lesbian sadomasochists and heterosexual women hiding behind their own pornographic lives.”
A self-described “abolitionist” in regard to all forms of sex-for-hire, Barry no longer believes there to be any meaningful difference between “free” and “forced” prostitution. “Challenging that distinction,” she declares, “is central to my work today.” Lifting off from this position, the author takes the reader on a quick helicopter trip over the sad and sorry lives of female sex workers around the planet. Mail-order brides from the Philippines, child slaves in Bangkok brothels, police-registered prostitutes in the legal red-light districts of Germany, and American porn stars blur past as dark patches on Barry’s map of worldwide villainy, individual circumstances dismissed as mere distractions from the broad reality that unites them: “prostitution—the cornerstone of all female exploitation.”
In her view, prostitution exists neither to satisfy the sexual needs of men nor the financial needs of women, but rather to facilitate class enslavement by gender through the use of economic coercion and physical force. She dismisses the contrary opinions of women who consider themselves to be voluntary participants in the sex industry as “expressions of hopelessness.” That out of the way, Barry quickly moves on to join battle with her new classes of enemies: pro-prostitution “sex workers” and “sexual liberals who promote pornography as free speech and prostitution as consensual sex.” These individuals, she asserts without a blink, belong on the same list with “pimps… pornography purveyors, wife-beaters, child molesters, incest perpetrators, johns (tricks) and rapists.” Though the inductive leap from sexual liberals to rapists would seem breathtaking to many, it clearly doesn’t faze an author who finds much to admire in postwar Vietnam’s brutal anti-sex work campaign, which subjects recidivist female prostitutes to forcible “re-education.” And you thought I was joking about the Stalinism thing.
It’s easy enough to dismiss this book as additional mad rantings from a radical fringe of the feminist movement, more embarrassing to its friends than effective against its foes. Unfortunately, in her haste to indict intellectual heretics, Barry further obscures the very real evil she so vividly identified in her previous book. By falsely conflating the real experiences of San Fernando Valley porn stars and children abducted from Indian villages, she insults the dignity of the former while trivializing the desperation of the latter. Like the collectivist regimes for which she feels such nostalgia, Barry endangers her own cause by looking for enemies where none exist while overlooking the real ones nearby. IL

Publisher: NYU
Paperback: 381 pages