Of frogs and glue

I recently had cause to read the Wikipedia entry on sexual fetishism. As a definition, sexual fetishism is the condition of becoming aroused by particular physical objects or situations. I did note the article has warning labels all over it about being of disputed neutrality, and presumably there are judgements to be made there about what one might call the normal and conventional range of objects and situations that could cause arousal, and about the intensity of response and resultant behaviour. But I'll let that pass. Wikipedia notes that 'Many people embrace their fetish rather than attempting treatment to rid themselves of it' and on the whole I'd suggest that's probably a more positive outcome than anything a psychiatrist might attempt to 'treat' a fetish.

The terminology of fetish, of course, does throw one back to the older use of the term, which implies an object in which something sacred or supernatural resides, or perhaps which can be used to call up some sacred or supernatural part of oneself. But that's by the way.

There was one throwaway remark in the article that caught my attention:

The existential approach to mental disorders developed in the 1940s and influenced a view that fetishes had complex personal meanings beyond the general categories of psychoanalytical treatment. For instance, the Austrian neurologist and logotherapist Viktor Frankl once noted the case of a man with a sexual fetish involving, simultaneously, both frogs and glue.

Hmm... Well, real life can throw up situations wilder than any author might imagine, I guess. I'm not sure if I'd ever want to write a story that included such a fetish, though on past form even saying that is likely to mean some situation arises in which it becomes important that I do. I feel I want to know more, but also that I might not like what I find...

For the truly interested (or the truly perverse) the case is briefly mentioned in Frankl's book On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders (2004) - in footnote 9 on page xxiii, which refers you another footnote and that in turn to an audiotape of one of his lectures. I guess I might not get to find out more details anytime soon... unless anyone out there would care to enlighten me?

Customers who bought these items...

So I've been looking at stuff on Amazon. This is research for a story, actually, that started out with the question 'what Dewey decimal numbers would be used to classify books on BDSM'?

Various references on the Dewey system tell me the answer is 'it depends' - 155.3 for philosophy/moral/ethical books, 306.77 or, more specifically, 306.77/5 for sociology, psychology, discussion and how-to books, 364.242 for sexually-related criminology/offending and 616.85835 for medical and psychiatric studies. And some books seem to get listed under other numbers, for example if they're more specifically to do with personal memoirs or the history of sexual practices etc.

However, I then started looking at the current availability of some material on Amazon. As a result of this, I get:

Recently Viewed Items:
- S and M: Studies in Dominance and Submission by Thomas Weinberg
- Bound to be Free: SM Experience by Charles Moser
- Essential Papers on Masochism (Essential P... by Margaret Ann F...
- S-M: The Last Taboo by Gerald Greene

And to go with this, 'customers who bought these items also bought...' surprise surprise, the suggestions turn out to be a selection of photographic equipment.

Hmm.

I will say, though, that I came across half a dozen academic books on sexuality that do look more interesting than their often dry titles suggest, and I may well be buying them in the near future.

Dreaming again

I woke up this morning from a dream in which my publisher was insisting the 25K word file I'd sent her couldn't be considered as a 'novella' unless it had been written on a train.

However:
- I'm not currently writing a 'novella' though I am trying to finish off a collection of stories and various other projects.
- I have 'publishers', obviously, and except for one they are female. But they're not people I meet or have lengthy phone conversations with, just emails back and forth.
- I have been on a train recently, a couple of weeks ago, but it was a 20-minute journey not a long-distance marathon. Even I can't write a novella in 20 minutes. And normally, on train journeys, I read.
- I did, though, recently review Sharazade's Transported. The review is about three posts back.

So I'm not clear what symbolism is in play here or what my unconscious is trying to tell me. If I get any clues later int he day I'll share them... or you could have a go at interpreting this for me?

Sexual psychology visual test

Consider this a psychological test. Kind of a sexual Rorschach test?

You'll either see rude images in these pictures - or not.





They were taken in a stately home garden during a recent trip.

Apart from that - busy writing. Stuff moving along.

Personal influences - random stuff

I've been neglecting this blog for a few days while I've been sorting out real-life stuff, mine and other people's. Some of it involves sorting out medical advice and attention for other people (getting them to appointments and such). Some of it involves the kinds of work I get to be able to invoice people for. And some of it is just following my own nose and thinking about types of fiction writing that don't involve, or at least only indirectly involve, erotica.

Be that as it may, I thought I'd round off the introspective theme about 'where has my intellectual interest in erotica come from' by just making some lists. And here they are.

Psychoanalysis - Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' and Jung's book on symbols. Different themes here, but some are to do with the idea of narrative - making sense of the world, in some ways actually creating our world, through the stories we tell ourselves and the ways in which certain mental images seem to operate as ways of understanding meanings that underlie and influence the everyday.

Allied to this, the deliberate playing with language and image in dada and surrealism. What was it about lobsters?

Anais Nin's writing - her diaries and short short stories. I remember vivid and erotic descriptions of the train from Paris to Louveciennes, the description of a woman having her public hair shaved, her descriptions of her own house and garden and how they were invested with meanings for her, the line about a woman who always looked like a fire engine... strange collection of images I know. Writing it down some of it doesn't sound remotely like it should be erotic at all, but that was the reaction I had when I read her work.

Films – 'Cat People' (the bondage scene of course). 'Maitresse' and 'Loulou' (both with Gerard Depardieu who always seemed to exude a kind of sexiness I always wanted to emulate but never did, and Bulle Ogier in Maitresse and Isabelle Huppert in Loulou...). The very mannered 'Diva' - not because of the plot or characters but somehow just the way it was shot. The weird and darkly violent 'Themroc' and 'Bof' - early 70s films, the former still around on VHS and the latter now only a trace in French film databases, with no VHS or DVD release I can find. What is it with French cinema where even someone walking to shops looks charged with sexuality? Then 'WR mysteries of the organism', wonderfully anarchic. Some of Warhol's films - one involved a bdsm scene taking place in a cheap hotel somewhere between about four women- might have been 'Chelsea Girls' but I can't be certain... at any rate most of that film is shot in split-screen and I don't remember the scene that way.

Thinking about it, many of the influences I've found 'erotic' over the years, or made me delve more in the psycho-social aspects of eroticism, weren't in themselves about erotic subjects as such. They were - like the Warhol films - about people on the fringes of society just trying to get by, people who in some respects were seen as freaks by others and identified as freaks themselves, and for whom certain kinds of deviance weren't even exciting or exotic but just 'came with the territory'. Or they were odd, random images that seemed to make some kind of unconscious connection I can't even begin to define. What, exactly, about Dali's lobster telephone or Duchamp's large glass ('The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even' - which depicts components of a coffee grinder among other things) triggered an erotic response in me? Some influences are maybe more obvious - an old cover of an SF magazine, probably 'Analog', with a picture of an alien wild slave female in chains on the cover... but lobsters and coffee grinders?

Other stuff - Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson, the Illuminatus trilogy (which is every bit as random as Pynchon or some surrealist authors) had various scenes that were sexy in a strange way. Similarly, Michael Moorcock's Cornelius Quartet of novels, with their odd mix of 'Britishness' and offhand treatment of sexual themes, got to me.

And finally - Lenny Bruce. the comedian who worked strip joints for much of his career, used his words to battle for attention when all the punters really wanted to do was look at the strippers, and who wanted to know why it was ok to show people killing and maiming each other on film but not to show people enjoying sex.

As I said, it's a random list.

Have fun!

A personal history (first part of many)

This isn't going to be a very sexy post even though at some level it is about sex.
I've been thinking a lot lately about links between personal and sexual identity, and political and theoretical accounts of sex. I've been prompted to do this because as a writer, I'm trying to get a clearer view of where I'm coming from in my writing and the kinds of ideas that inform my writing. Many of these are not in and of themselves about sex or 'the erotic', but they inform the way I understand what sexuality and eroticism is.
We all, I guess, are influenced in our world view by a range of things we've read, seen or experienced over the course of our lives and I started trying to identify what, from my own biography, has been most influential in terms of my own perspective.
It turns out to be a real mix, and not the kinds of things I might have expected. There are academic books, human rights concerns, mainstream fiction, erotic fiction, some fairly edgy films, some experimental/arthouse films, some bits of paganism (which I came into contact with only in the last five years or so) and no doubt a bunch of other things I'll remember as I write this.
What follows isn't a complete list of influences. I haven't for example, included the comic book porn I discovered in a second-hand bookshop when I was about 14 – though I can still remember the cover, which involved a Nazi officer, Gestapo or SS or some such, whipping a woman tied and suspended spreadeagled with her clothes reduced to a few strategic rags. That was probably the first time I realised the stuff going on in my head went on in other people's heads too. Which I guess is also an admission that I'd probably had fantasies involving bsdm since the age of - well, I don't really know, but probably even earlier than primary school. While finding the comic (which I didn't buy and have never seen since) was an eye-opener and a bit of a head trip, it wasn't something that informed my values or principles and that's what this piece is about.
As a warning, this is going to end up being quite a long 'memoir' over a series of posts. And I've started with the dryer stuff, some of the academic influences.

Existentialism
Yes, I was a precocious teenager and yes, I had read Sartre's Being and Nothingness by the time I was 15. Existentialism asserts that there is no intrinsic or hidden meaning in the world around us, and we have to create this meaning for ourselves. As a baseline position that's fine, though of course all of us grow up in a world where things are 'explained' to us and we are inducted into sets of moral values, ways of defining situations and even the language and terms with which we understand the world. This comes to us from the weight of cultural history communicated by parents, school, etc. But it alerts us to the idea that things could be otherwise than we are currently being persuaded to see and define and value them. The most precious asset any of us has is the ability to think for ourselves. That might not be very sexy in itself but for me it meant my ideas about sex were as good as anyone else's, and I shouldn't accept anyone else's moral codes on trust.

Freud, Marx and psychoanalysis – the Frankfurt School and others
The Frankfurt School of philosophy was basically a bunch of social philosophers with interests in Marxism and Freudianism who worked out of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly, they reacted to the rise of Nazism by getting the hell out of Germany while they could, in the mid/late 1930s, because by background (some had Jewish associations) and political views they were pretty much sitting targets for the Nazis.
Principally I encountered Herbert Marcuse (indeed even went to one of his lectures in the UK many, many years ago – which dates me as well, Iguess). His Eros and Civilization (1955) is a vision of a non-repressive society. Marcuse sees capitalism (though in hindsight, one could make the same argument for almost all political systems) as seeking to repress our instincts.
At one level socialisation and taming of the Id is necessary – a society in which instinctual violence is a routine way of solving problems would not be a clever direction to follow. Yet to what extent is sexual regulation necessary?
Briefly, nonconsensual sex is problematic and does need some level of regulation. Yet respect for individual choices in terms of sexual freedom – by which we're largely talking about multiple relationships, polamory, bdsm and other fetishistic sexual practices, and full acceptance of gay/lesbian/bi sexual identities and practices – is a way to liberate creativity and authenticity in life experience.
There's a balancing act here. On the one hand, as Freud claimed, 'Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of instincts.' Sexual energy is channelled into creating political and economic systems. On the other hand, releasing sexual energy into sexual channels is one of the key ways individuals are able to develop their own identities.
I wouldn't propose this without a number of important qualifications. Many of the key artistic and literary works in our history were, actually, produced in periods of political repression and are to some extent the product of repression (and the need to find ways to critique repression). Many more were produced by individuals whose own sexuality was fucked up, and to some extent express their fucked-upness for our understanding, interpretation and education. I'm thinking, for example, of Richard Burton and TE Lawrence. But the general theme and questions seem to me to be as relevant as they were when I first read Marcuse's work.
There were others who were never part of the School but whose ideas nonetheless ran somewhat in the same channels. Wilhelm Reich was one. He was a strange bunny, initially a psychoanalyst who had worked with Freud. He moved to Denmark, then Sweden, then Norway to escape the Nazis (Jewish background again, and communist until he was thrown out for being too radical). He even had to leave Denmark for Sweden because he ran into trouble for 'corrupting' Danish youth his his 'German sexology'. He settled in the US in 1939 – where again he had occasional brushes with law enforcement and at the end of his life was imprisoned, sadly because one of his assistants had violated New York state laws relating to the alleged health benefits of his 'orgone accumulators'. He died in prison in 1957.
To be sure, he lived in difficult times and living inside his skull must have been a difficult and tortured existence. I'll start by dismissing all the orgone therapy and bion stuff out of hand. In his later life, let's say by the 1940s, he was very likely quite mentally ill. What principally interested me were his earlier publications, The Mass Psychology of Fascism for example. It seemed to me when I first read it, and seems to me still, that authoritarian rule survives on a fiction – that a 'strong' state and 'tough' laws (including on sexual relations) can create social stability, which many people are prepared to sacrifice personal freedom for.
Bottom line on all this: there's a message in here about understanding and appreciating the role of instability, and about how trying to follow any rules other than your own conscience is not only self-limiting but self-defeating. I guess in my mind this gells with the stuff I read on existentialism and to some extent forwards to ideas about paganism. There's also a recognition that there are links between our sexual life at an individual level and the mass structures of politics and economics - even if the precise nature of these may not always be clear. At one level. of course, they can be traced to very clear concerns about legitimacy and inheritance but I'll deal with this in a later post. For now, what I want to stress is the insight that mass social structures are often based on psychological and sexual repression, but it's unclear what benefits flow to individuals from the current 'balance' between repression and tolerance.
Incidentally, Reich's personal papers and unpublished manuscripts were, in accordance with his will, kept private for 50 years after his death and thus became publicly available in 2007 – so it may now be time to revisit his work.

Carl Jung
While we're on the subject of social psychology and psychoanalysis, at one point I was also interested in Carl Jung. No, I haven't read all 19 volumes of his collected works. But the bits I have read and understand seem to me to be sensible, in particular the general assertion that repressed/unconscious material is not necessarily sexual in orientation (which doesn't mean none of it is sexual, of course); that in order to understand the archetypes that are the stories we tell ourselves about our world and ourselves, and the complexes that motivate us, we need to maintain a creative dialogue with our unconscious through (among other things) interrogating our dreams, and questioning the assumptions of dominant norms and worldviews. Shutting ourselves off from these things results in a life that is also shut off from human meaning.
Jung's study of symbolism is something I'll come back to in later posts.

Mix'n'match academia!
I'm sure the idea of mix'n'match Sartre, Marx, Freud, Jung, Marcuse and Reich will be anathema to some, and it's hardly a basis for a clear and consistent theoretical perspective on life, the universe and everything. But all this stuff does point to a couple of broad principles. Firstly, meaning in life is never pre-given; we have to construct it and think for ourselves about what we're doing and why. And secondly, there is something about mass society that seeks to channel and constrain sexual energy and libido in very repressive ways. Some of this control is necessary for society to exist at all, and yet much of it is unhealthy at an individual level. It may not stultify creativity; in some instances it might even stimulate it, since creativity is that kind of creature – but often creative production under such circumstances comes at very great individual cost. And in general, a freer and more tolerant society, one in which wider forms of sexual expression are possible without repression, is going to be much more fulfilling and healthy for the individuals who make up society.
This blog is to some extent a 'work in progress' and I'll put up more stuff in the future covering, among other things, more academic material (postmodernism for example), plus literature, film, music, paganism and maybe even comedy.
As always, I'm interested to debate points I've made here and learn from what kinds of influences others can trace in their own lives. So comments are always welcome...