Mrs. Berkley's Salon

Mrs. Berkley’s Salon:

Pleasure, Perversion & the Technologies of Sexual Life in pre-Victorian London

David Rosen

The metaphysical meaning of sadism is the hope that the revolt of man will take on such intensity as to summon nature to change its laws.

Walter Benjamin1

The pleasure of pain well established by the eighteenth century, apparently by both sexes.”4 One of the most celebrated houses of ill repute in London during the pre- Besides Mrs. Berkley's salon, there Victorian era was the flagellation were quite a number of other parlor owned and operated by Mrs. “flagellant brothels” operating in Theresa Berkley at 28 Charlotte London during this tumultuous period Street. According to Mary Wilson, a of English history. Among them were fellow brothel owner and author of the ones run by Miss Wilson, who one 1860 memoir, Venus Schoolmistress, author has been described as "the Mrs. Berkley “possessed the first grand Gourdan* of the nineteenth century, requisite of a courtesan, viz., one of the 'queens' of prostitution' … lewdness.”* who made use of every modern device and The half-century between refinement."5 1780s and the start of the Victoria’s reign in Over the course of the fifteen 1837 is considered by years of her public service, some the "heyday" of from 1815 to 1830, she English flagellation.2 operated brothels on Old According to Iwan (Ivan) Bond Street, Tonbridge Block, the "dean" of Place, New Road, St. Pancras scholarly students of and Hall Place, St. John’s perversion, “it is possible Wood. Another to maintain that England contemporary was Mrs. was at one time the Sarah Potter (alias Stewart) classic of flagellation. ... who, when arrested, was in " Writing in Sexual Life possession of a little book in England, Past & Present, a singular that detailed her business practices. history of British mores and manners, According to one source, at Mrs. Bloch notes: "In no other country has Potter's establishment, the passion for the rod been so systematically practiced and * Madame Gourdan ran a series of developed."3 The historian Lawrence celebrated “first class” brothels on Stone confirms this assessment, Boulevard de Sebastopol and Rue des th reporting that “’Le vice Anglais’ was Deux Portes in Paris during the late 18 century, serving the heterosexual and homosexual inclinations of male and female socialities. [see Bassermann/204- * Image: FemDom Magazine 05; Benjamin and Masters/289] Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon

currycomb tough hides rendered callous by The girls were flogged in many different years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze ways. Often they were bound to the brushes; a prickly evergreen, called ladder, at other times whipped around the butchers brush; and during summer, glass room or laid on the bed. Any idea or and China vases filled with a constant innovation which the perverted fancy could supply of green nettles, with which she imagine was made use of to vary the often restored the dead to life.” orgies … 6 The full array of indulgences afforded a One of the other renowned visitor were considerable, as Ms. "governesses," as these women were Wilson notes: “Thus, at her shop, endearingly called, operating a whoever went with plenty of money, flagellant brothel during this period could be birched, whipped, fustigated, was Mrs. Collet at Travistock Court, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, Covent Garden. She was celebrated holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher- because the Price of Wales, the future brushed, stinging nettled, curry- George IV, is reported to have been a combed, phlebotomized, and tortured regular visitor to her very fashionable till he had a belly full.”9 establishment. Still others included Marie Aubrey, whose salon was on The first of London’s formal flagellant Seymour Place, Bryanston Square; clubs appears to have opened around Mrs. Mitchell, with operations at 22 the middle of the 18th century. Waterloo Road and at St. Mary's According to Lujo Bassermann, “In Square, Kennington; Mrs. James, at 7 London, the rod became standard Carlisle Street, Soho; Ms. Emma Lee equipment for whores between 1750 (Richardson) who ran a brothel at 50 and 1760.”10 Bloch reports that the Margaret Street (off Regent Street); earliest of these establishments was and Mrs. Phillips, with a facility at 11 operated by “a Mrs. Jenkins [who] won Upper Belgrave Street, Pimlico.7 Mrs. great renown as a flagellant.” Berkley, however, was the most notorious. Charlotte Hayes was perhaps the most innovative madam of this formative According to Bloch, Mrs. Berkley "could period. She operated a series of what be jovial and amusing; and used to were known as "new brothels" or find out every inclination, every whim, "nunneries" on, first, Great every mood, every wish of her clients, Marlborough Street, followed by and satisfy them, as soon as ever she another on King's Place off Pall Mall. was suitably paid.” Further, he Her modern approach was evident in stressed that “[h]er arsenal of such innovative practices as instruments were vastly more conducting medical examinations of complete than that of any other her "girls" and providing condoms to governess.”8 Ms. Wilson described the each couple. Her clientele consisted tools of Mrs. Berkley’s establishment mostly of elderly gentlemen of means with acute rigor: or rich widows. According to one historian, she paired “the gentlemen “Her supply of birch was extensive, and mainly with very young girls …, for kept in water so that it was always green whom they had to pay from five to and pliant: she had a shaft with a dozen twenty guineas, and the ladies with whip thongs on each of them; a dozen experienced young bachelors, who different sizes of cat-o-nine tails, some might cost anything up to fifty.” Mrs. with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; Hayes, like many of her sister leather straps like coach traces; entrepreneurs, quickly adapted new, battledores made of thick sole-leather, innovative technologies to fulfill with inch nails run through to docket, and perhaps the deepest human drive --

© 2016, David Rosen page 2 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon sexual passion. She had special Man in Company drinking of the Bumper, elastic beds constructed that gave “the as it stood on that tempting finest movements in the most ecstatic Protuberance…. They then went thro’ the moments without trouble or the least several Postures and Tricks made use to raise debilitated Lust … .14 fatigue to agent or passive.”11

During such a performance, young At Mrs. Hayes’ establishment, the women "stripped naked and mounted centerpiece of each evening’s a table to demonstrate their posterior entertainment was an artistically attractions."15 A performance by one staged sex show. The most celebrated such artist in 1766 has been described of these was the “South Sea Revels,” in some detail in London's Midnight highlighted by the “Dances from Spy: Otahiti,” which were so scandalous that, according to Bassermann, they A beautiful woman lies stretched on the “would not be permitted so openly, floor and offers to the view just those parts before a large group of eminent of her body that, were she not without all spectators, anywhere in Europe [in the shame, she would most zealously seek to 1960s].12 According to another conceal. As she is given to drink, she scholar, these performances featured arrives usually half drunk, and after two or “young men and woman [who] copied three glasses of Madeira exposes herself to the postures in Aretino prints.”13 men in this unseemly manner. Look, she is on all four now, like an animal. She is ridiculed, and men gloat over such The star of these – as well as many 16 th th prostitution of incomparable beauty. other -- 18 century and early-19 century sex shows was the "posture Mixing the art of performance with the girl" or, far less frequently, the posture perhaps more compelling attractions of boy. Forgotten today, the posture girl degradation and humiliation, the was a celebrated mid-18th century posture girl served as a powerful erotic performance artist. The appeal of stimulant to male (and occasionally such female performers was vividly female) patrons. Nevertheless, as an depicted in the 1749 publication, The historian reminds us, "Those who were History of the Human Heart: willing to display their sexual parts in

public show had probably gone the … a Bumper the Ladies was ordered to furthest into unconventionality."17 prepare. They immediately stripped stark naked, and mounted themselves on the middle of the Table. … They were clean Block states with emphatic certainty limbed, fresh complexioned, and had Skins that “[t]he most notorious female as white as the driven Snow, which was flagellant of the 18th century was heightened by jet-black Color of their Hair. Elizabeth Brownrigg, an obvious … The Throne of Love was thickly covered sadist, who was executed at Tyburn on with Jet-black hair, a least a Quarter of a 14th September 1767” for the Yard long, which she carefully spread savagery she is reported to have apart, to display the entrance into the inflicted on her children, servants and Magic Grotto. others. Her practices have been reported as follows: The performance involved more than passive display or posturing, … it was a common practice for her to lay demonstrating an eroticism that down upon the kitchen floor a couple of invokes religious sacrament: chairs so that one supported the other, and then, aided by her husband, she fastened They each filled a Glass of Wine, and laying her victim, previously stripped naked, upon themselves in an extended Posture placed the backs of these chairs, and whipped her their Glasses on the Mount of Venus, every from the shoulders to the buttocks until,

from sheer exhaustion, she [Mrs. chastisement herself, with any variations Brownrigg] was compelled to desist. On she likes, while the others watch. other occasions, Brownrigg fastened the [victim] girl’s hands together, attached a The report concludes, appealing to a rope to them which she slung over a higher literary standard, that strong hook in the ceiling, and then hoisted “Sometimes, by order of the president, her victim, naked as the day of her birth, the whipping starts on the calves and so that she swung at the end of the rope. goes up to the posterior, until the In this position, sometimes with a whole region, as Shakespeare says, horsewhip, sometimes with a cane, 20 sometimes with a broom, she lashed from milk-white ‘become one red’.” or beat at the naked body until the blood gushed from the wounds.18 Whether an accurate report or a mere pornographic fantasy, the story – as Her husband and accomplice, James, historian Emma Donoghue warns -- “should be taken with a large pinch of received only a jail sentence for his 21 19 salt.” Nevertheless, as she further part in the crimes. notes, it “is based on rumours of a real Still other more traditional flagellation club of the time.” The tale reflects th many male heterosexual conventions, clubs of the late 18 century included the “White House,” “Mother Cumins” the most obvious being the unstated and the “Elysium” in Brydges Street. assumption that sex between women is but a substitute for – not a true Nevertheless, the appeal to flagellation appears to have been not limited to alternative to -- the desire for the men, nor to activities conducted male partner. Nevertheless, it does exclusively in commercial sex clubs. suggest the existence of not only One example may help illustrate both female flagellants, but of clubs – not to mention pubs frequented by elements. A report in the December 1792 issue of London’s Bon Ton lesbians as well as lesbian brothels -- Magazine describes a female dedicated to fulfilling exclusive female sexual pleasures.*22 flagellant’s club. It is reported to have met every Thursday night at a private facility on Jermyn Street. The sexual The making of modern sexuality practices engaged in by these – mostly married -- women was described in The "modern" character of Anglo- the following detail: American male and female sexuality began to develop its current shape th These female members are mainly married during the 18 century. According to women, who, tired of marriage in its usual Lawrence Stone, during the two-and- form, and the cold indifference which is one-half centuries between 1570 to wont to accompany it; determined by a 1810, England underwent repeated novel method to reawaken the ecstasy which they knew at the beginning of their married life. … The honourable society or * Bloch notes a 1711 report in the club to which we refer never has fewer “Spectator,” a London magazine, of a “club than twelve members. At each meeting six of female wrestlers” and adds: “Once a are chastised by the other six. They draw week the club assembled at quarters which lots for the order of procedure: then, either they hired for the year. Once there they a written speech is read or an extempore threw off the restraint and decency and one delivered, on the effects of flagellation flew at each other in a free for all scramble as it has been practiced from the earliest and tussle. From ten in the evening until age to the present day; … after which the four the next morning they tumbled about six patients take their places, and the six wildly, pummeling and scratching each flagellants begin the practical other and destroying both the property and demonstration. The president of the club clothes of each other.” [Bloch, Sex hands to each a stout rod, and begins the Extreme-214-15]

© 2016, David Rosen page 4 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon waves of evolving sexual life, which – Heterosexuality and the Third Gender collectively – form the bedrock of what in Enlightenment London: is now accepted as heterosexuality. "Seventeenth-century society had … “English society thus passed through presumed that although there were several phases,” notes Stone, three kinds of bodies (men, women, providing the following useful schema and hermaphrodites), there were only from the end of the 16th century to the two kinds of gender (male and early 19th century: female)." Going further, he adds:

A phase of moderate toleration lasting until After 1700 this system was replaced by the end of the 16th century; a phase of another for men but not for women. For repression that ran from 1570 to males, there were now two kinds of bodies 1670; and a phase of permissiveness, (male and female) but three genders even license, that ran over a century from (man, woman, and sodomite) -- since the 1670 to 1810. This was followed by a new sodomite was supposed to experience his wave of repression that began in 1770, desires and play his role as a result of a was spreading fast by 1810, and reached corrupted education and not because of his its apogee in the mid-Victorian period.23 bodily condition. For women, the old system of three bodies [i.e., male, female Accepting Stone’s four-phased model and hermaphrodite] and two genders could still be presumed.*24 suggests not only a wave-like ebb and flow of permissiveness followed by It is now almost forgotten that during repression (with much overlap or the preceding centuries people lived a undertow within each phase), but one different social model of sexuality, in which the boundary between particularly male sexuality. As permissible and illicit or perverse Trumbach reminds us, "In European sexual behavior keeps being redefined society before 1700 probably most as a component or feature of the males felt desire for both males and larger social forces transforming females. … the actual sexual behavior society. of men had changed little from what it

has been in ancient pagan During the pre-Victorian era, the Mediterranean world."25 Such a sexual dominant Western or “modern” forms culture did not presume that every of heterosexual pleasure and male man was pan- or bi-sexual, nor self-identification were institutionalized actively pursuing sexual relations with – becoming, in tern, defining features every female and/or male he met. As of romantic love and the nuclear family B. R. Burg points out, system. In particular, the first half of the 18th century saw the establishment The preponderant majority of [young of the formal structure of male and, to males] -- apprentices, servants, or a lesser extent, female agricultural laborers -- lived and worked in heterosexuality. During the latter half a heterosexual milieu. Relations between of the century, this structure took on persons of opposite sexes dominated their the unique particularities of expression observations on every hand and served as -- especially in their excesses -- that the basis for the development of their 26 came to define much of the popular social and sexual orientation. sexual culture of North America and * part of Western Europe up until the A distinct homo-eroticism among women, traumatic decades of “sexual often referred to as "sapphists" (for Sappho), “tribades” (a 16th century term revolution” of the 1960s-1970s. for a woman who rubbed herself or for having an extended clitoris or “female Randolph Trumbach notes in his member”) or “Tommy” did not emerge in definitive history of the period, Sex England until the 1770s. [Trumback, p. and the Gender Revolution: 65; see also Donoghue, p. 4-5, 27.]

detestation.” Nevertheless, as Burg This was a social culture that warns, “This is not to imply that sometimes did not consider consensual sodomy was an acceptable style of male-only sexual engagement (let conduct.”27 Even when there were alone desire) among the apparent violations of the dominant minority of men* so involved as conventions, such actions for the most "abnormal". Homoerotic attraction, part seem to be perceived as while formally despised by church and inappropriate rather than abnormal. state alike, seems to have been For males, the changes in self-hood socially tolerated as long as it did not that accommodated the imposition of violate the particular conventions of an exclusive heterosexual self-identity age and gender roles. Sexual brought with it the establishment of a attraction between men, between men social category that would formally and male youths and among “lads” become known as homosexuality.** had for centuries been formally subject to church and civil punishment The sexual polarities of the "sodomite" (sometimes even resulting in death*). and the "libertine" represented the As a new urban culture emerged, a extremes of not only sexual identity moment of social tolerance also for males, but of heterosexuality itself. emerged, transforming sexuality. In their own way, each represented a challenge to the dominant paradigm of Homoerotic attraction in the 17th self-restrained, monogamous century -- and to a lesser extent in the heterosexual culture. Each served as 18th century -- Britain was not a form of contestation with the rising understood as an unacceptable social demand to control passion and dimension of masculinity. As Burg to express this focused passion advises, “Whether wealthy or poor, through the prescribed psycho- confirming Anglican or religious physical-sexual practices of a new type dissenter, royalist or parliament man, of marriage – one limited to genital- sodomy was simply another crime, vaginal intercourse that served the another work of the devil with little needs of both procreation and inherent capacity to evoke passionate pleasure. Trumbach’s research found that

* Two exceptions during the 17th and 18th The sodomites … inverted the rituals of centuries where homosexuality may have marriage, spoke of intercourse as marriage been a predominant practice was among and the room with the beds as the chapel, British seafarers and the “vagabond and gave birth to wooden dolls. But these brotherhoods,” the all-male gangs that rituals were only incidentally religious: wandered the countryside; see Burg/43- they were primarily in protest against the 68. exclusion of sodomites from marriage and * Homosexual offenses, and their from all legitimate sexuality. The respective punishment, differed for men libertines, however, seemed to have aimed and women. For men, the crime involved at a more elaborate reconstruction of their genital-anal penetration and the culture.28 transmission of seminal emissions, with punishments ranging from a fine, standing in a public pillory, imprisonment, flogging While the sodomite sought acceptance to being hanged. [Burg/25, 35; within terms of the dominant values of Spencer/186-93; Trumbach/7-8; see the conventional Christianity of the especially Block/SexExtr-132-34] For women, prosecution involved sodomy in which a dildo or other instrument was used ** Homosexuality as a formal psycho- as a substitute penis; punishment for such sexual social category would not be offenses ranged as widely as that for men. formally established until the 1890s. [Donoghue/59] [Spencer/10]

© 2016, David Rosen page 6 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon day; the libertine activity sought to by the contradictions of “modern,” subvert these values. According to middle-class Victorian and post- Colin Spencer, “The libertine [was] Victorian society. Nevertheless, the bisexual and makes no value judgment impulse or desire for a more on his sexual partner, he appears passionate, hedonistic and, indifferent to the idea of a preference sometimes, perverse experience of to either.”29 Adding more confusion pleasure, has persisted, serving as a to this classification schema, male powerful (if marginal) force of effeminacy – often expressed in the subversion during the subsequent two extravagant dress of the libertine centuries. This subversive passion “fops, rakes and beaus” – was would be shared -- as an extreme considerate a sign of the sodomite.30 expression of desire -- by some Ironically, as Stone astutely observes, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. “Protestant theology began the slow separation of sexual pleasure from Trumbach distinguishes three procreation that ended in the last 17th- unintended consequences of this new century spread of both contraception sexuality -- consequences that and libertinism.”31 continue to significantly effect social sexuality to this day. First, male The libertine challenged the dominant sexual passion became heterosexual -- model that equated personal virtue exclusive, mandatory and absolute; with sexual commitment to a single female passion was altogether denied spouse and that linked pleasure with -- due to the then-current "blindness" procreation. As Trumbach notes, of the dominant patriarchy. Ironically, libertines "used their sexual this resulted in significantly less state experience to construct a moral and church condemnation of relations alternative to Christianity's view of between women. As Donoghue sexual pleasure."*32 While the observes, “the legal silence on sex sodomite would -- after much political between women seems to have been struggle -- be reconstituted into uniquely British.”33 today's homosexual, the libertine has all but died out as the landed gentry Second, self-identified heterosexual and early bourgeoisie were superceded men were required to maintain and demonstrate a fierce anti- * * The libertine is distinct from the "dandy" homosexuality. This homophobia was of the late-18th and early-19th century. directed both outwardly (against Dandies like George Bryan (Beau) individual attraction to other men or Brummell and Lord Alvanley symbolized a youths) and inwardly (against auto- peculiar type of self-expression of the eroticism – this being most explicitly Regency period. They were noted for their expressed as the oft-repeated dress, the "Macaroni uniform, " that prohibitions against masturbation.)*34 "entailed squeezing the figure into a very Such phobia toward self and other’s tight, very long-tailed coat with pastel- maleness – physicality -- were coloured breeches, a suffocating stock, wigs a yard high and high-heeled shoes, symptoms of the greater battle preferably studded with jewels." capitalist industrialization was waging [Murray/45] Nevertheless, as Venetia to control nature – this time targeted Murray has noted, "Regency London at disciplining sexual passion. Male, if dandyism was a revolt against … tradition, not human, “second nature” was being an expression of distaste for the extravagance and ostentation of the previous generation, and of sympathy with * Masturbation by males was then called the new mood of democracy." [Murray/35; “onenism” or self-pollution and see also Bloch/SexExtreme-92, 96.] “nymphomania” for women. [Trumbach, 63, 65]

© 2016, David Rosen page 7 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon transformed into a socially-prescribed “release” if not pleasure, the new desire – one that responded only to requirements of enforced exclusive heterosexual object choices heterosexuality added greater while forcefully repressing a set of demands to this encounter. very different types of physical, erotic passions having to do with auto- and The prostitute played many roles for homo-erotic pleasure. her male customer. These included:

Finally, men sought new physical She was seductress and boon companion. outlets for their disciplined But she was also a trickster and a thief. heterosexual desires -- and did so She was the monogamous wife of her good within a context increasingly defined husband, and she was also one among many of her harem. She was dominated by an expanding market economy, an and abused, spat at and anally penetrated. economy that saw sexual relations as Her private parts were the delight to a a form of commodity exchange. This man’s eye – a great unknown darkness disciplining was but one dimension of through which he moved with a candle; but the larger social processes that, he was also contemptuous of her making collectively, would create the “modern” them public. He beat her to make her West. Other dimensions of this vast good and then submitted to her as his society-wide process included: the stern but loving mother.35 rapid destruction of traditional rural society through the enclosure of the And she was a lot more. As Trumbach commons; the concomitant notes, “[t]he most practical way urbanization, with its tumultuous therefore for a man to prove his population increases; expansion of the heterosexuality was to go to a factory system of industrialization; the prostitute.”36 She served as a social rise of the bourgeois state; and the safety value used to lessen the hegemony of capitalist social relations, personal-social tension that developed i.e., monetary exchange as the as the interval between the age of principle determinate of social and sexual maturity and the mean age of personal values. marriage steadily expanded. By the 18th century, the interval had reached On a personal level, outlets for the ten years or more, thus – and this expression of this new male became an acute issue within the less heterosexuality were often found formally supervised urban context of outside the confines of monogamous industrializing London, Manchester and marriage, sometimes at the extremes other cities – introducing new where genuine libidinous desire and pressures for sexual fulfillment.37 repressed rage crossed. In Finally, married men used prostitutes themselves, these outlets were both to set limits to the intimacy they were the personally painful and the socially now expected to share with their disruptive consequences of the wives.38 imposition of this new sexual order. The remaking of prostitution occurred The wages of sin on both a quantitative and qualitative level*. The women engaged in it were The foremost physical outlet for this called many things, “buttered bun,” new form of male heterosexual “buttock,” “squirrel” “mackerel,” “cat,” passion was female prostitution. This age-old institution of male-female * social relationship was fully remade For a thorough discussion of prostitution in England between the late-17th through during this era. While men continued the early-19th centuries (see Trumbach, to go to prostitutes for sexual pp. 69-195).

“moll,” “froe” and “vrow” as well as classes engaged in the learning of among the poorer classes “bunter,” menial trades, sex for hire was not “smut,” “trumpery,” “crack” and easily obtained.”43 The question “mawkes.”39 First, there was an remains as to how they got their enormous increase in the number of sexual needs met. women engaged in this, the oldest profession. According to an unofficial Two features of this unique form of estimate, in London alone at the turn economic exchange can help illuminate of the 18th century there were upward the new condition – first, the venues in of 50,000 “harlots” serving all classes which the sexual exchange occurred and all sexual appetites.*40 So and, second, the sexual practices widespread was prostitution that “[i]t engaged in by the female sex-workers is likely that most men who lived in servicing their male customers. The London at some point went to a formal structure of prostitution prostitute.”41 The formal integration of appears to have mirrored the prostitution into “respectable” society dominant hierarchical order of the achieved its clearest expression in the English society of the day. The series of “court brothels” reportedly greatest number of female prostitutes sanctioned by George III to serve the tended to be streetwalkers, plying sexual needs of his favored gentry.42 their trade on some of most crowded thoroughfares and back-alleys of the Second, this occupation -- if not growing metropolises of England. profession -- of female wage labor was However, moving up the social order, transformed from a marginal business prostitution took place in taverns and into a truly significant enterprise. private rooms, innumerable bawdy Quantitative expansion gave way to houses, more pleasurable bagnios and qualitative reformation as prostitution bordellos, and culminated in an grew from a relatively isolated activity assortment of fashionable upper-class into one assuming an historically brothels and specialized sex salons. unprecedented scale. It was marked by the particular cultural Streetwalking -- or “nightwalking,” as characteristics of an increasingly class- this pursuit has been called44 -- defined society. As Burg notes, appears to have emerged in the last- quarter of the 17th century. This was … although the city of London contained the same time that the first public oil- sufficient number of prostitutes to service burning street lamps were introduced a substantial number of apprentices and a in London.45 Streetwalkers either large segment of the [male] population as operated as independents or were well, those women were professionals, attached to a tavern or lodging vendors of sexual favors to those who 46 could pay. house. For the poor, illiterate and often violently debauched young However, as he pointedly adds, ”For women who took up the trade, the apprentices [and others] in lower sexual encounter with the male customer appears to have often involved a publicly-consummated deed * E. P. Thompson, citing a contemporary hurriedly executed either standing source, adds with his ever-perceptive class upright against a wall or doorway or consciousness that these “prostitutes turn lying on the ground. These encounters out to be ‘lewd and immoral women,’ appear to have involved little foreplay including ‘the prodigious number among or aesthetic eroticism, but did produce the lower classes who cohabit together a certain type of release if not without marriage’ (and this was a time pleasure or fulfillment on the part of when divorce for the poor was an absolute impossibility.)” the customer – what it provided the

© 2016, David Rosen page 9 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon woman, except money if she was lucky public cabarets, sex clubs, high-class or syphilis if not, can only be brothels and flagellation salons that imagined. catered to the needs of middle- and upper-class men (and some women). A second tier of prostitution appears to Some establishments employed only have taken place in the numerous black women while others, like those bawdy houses that spread throughout operated by Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. London during the 17th century, Berkley, provided for the specific especially within the districts sexual indulgences of their clientele.50 populated by the poor. According to Trumbach, The courtesan or fashionable prostitute represented not simply the highest Women who worked out of houses level of the new class of female wage experienced more favorable conditions labor, but the inherent contractions of than those who solicited on the streets. … capitalist social development. These They provided apparel. They might women could work in a fashionable provide some restraint upon the practices brothel or serve as a kept mistress. of defloration, sado-masochism and sexual assaults on young girls. They provided Among the former, service at contraceptive information and means of establishments run by Mrs. Hayes and abortion. Mrs. Berkley represented the pinnacle of success. Still other well-known Often referred to as “cavaulting madams who ran fashionable brothels schools,” “academies,” “nanny that employed such women were ones houses,” “nunneries” or “public houses run by Elizabeth Wisebourn (from of assignation,” like the Three Tuns on 1690-1720), by Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Russell Street, they were often raided Burton (1710s-1720s) and Mrs. by the Society for the Reformation of Goadby (1770s).51 Among the most Manners and other such groups.*47 well-known mistresses were Ann The bagnio was even more Sheldon (later Mrs. Archer) and Emily fashionable. As Trumbach observes, Lyon (later Lady Hamilton).52 “It actually did have a hot bath and a However, as a social class, these cold one. But it also had rooms where women reflected a unique aspect of for an additional fee one could spend capitalist development. As Stone the night with a woman one had notes, brought in or sent out for.”48 Over the century, an increasing number of The economic uncertainties of professional these establishments were owned or and mercantile life, the improvement in the managed by women or married education of bourgeois daughters, and the lack of career opportunities for girls couples like Mrs. Harris and Ann suddenly reduced from genteel affluence to Sarsfield, Elizabeth and James poverty meant that there was a reasonable Robinson, and Ann and William Dyas, supply of attractive and well-bred girls to 49 among many others. form suitable companions and mistresses for men of means.53 Placed above the bawdy houses and taverns near the top of the “perverse” More popular venues were pleasure sex pyramid, were the assortment of gardens, popular private parks devoted to “flirtation and seduction.” The oldest of these appears to be * This group is reported to have been Spring Gardens which one Tom Brown responsible for prosecution of no less than reports, in 1700, to be a place “where 101,683 persons in the London area for both sexes meet and mutually serve such offenses as sabbath-breaking, swearing, drunkenness, lewdness, brothel- one another as guides to lose their keeping and sodomy. [Fryer/103] way.” Still another popular garden of

© 2016, David Rosen page 10 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon the period was the Bartholomew Fair. Paying customers (mostly male) could Not surprising, after these be witness to a new type of sexual impoverished girls and women had female performance described as their child, they couldn't easily return follows in the London Spy in 1704: to their rural or small-town families because of the social stigma and a couple of Plump-Buttock-Lasses, who, to personal shame they suffered. Many show their Affection to the Breeches, wore were forced to sell all their possessions ‘em under their Petticoats; which, for (often including their clothes) to raise decency sake, they first Danc’d in: But to money to support themselves and show the Spectator how forward a Woman their children; others turned to once warm’d is to lay aside Modesty, they doft their Petticoats after a gentle prostitution or "streetwalking" to earn Breathing, and fell to Capering and Firking an income; still others were forced to as if Old Nick has been in ‘em.54 turn over their infants to the local church parish in order to seek survival However, the pleasure garden found wages. But perhaps the women who its fullest articulation during the latter- suffered the greatest degradation were half of the century at Vauxhall. It was those who, out of desperation, 56 celebrated for its “Dark Walks” which committed infanticide. And the were, according to one author, surviving children, many were in turn “haunted by ardent youths and forced into involuntary servitude, reckless virgins.” 55 some as chimney sweeps, while others served as “virgins” in heterosexual Other outlets of sexual experience brothels or in homosexual pederast expressed the new male clubs.*57 Many have paid dearly for heterosexuality still more cruelly. the establishment of modern romantic Among the most consequential were heterosexuality. the wide scale increase in reported rapes, the increase of sexually A nation in crisis transmitted diseases and the rise in the number of children borne by Henry Spenser Ashbee was the unmarried woman. These unintended notorious 19th century author, Pisanus consequences were but some of the Fraxi, who compiled Index Librorum prices paid by women to realize the Prohibitorum. First published in 1877, radical restriction of the male’s sexual this three-volume work has been object choice of desire and the identified by literary historian Steven sanctioned forms of expression. Marcus as “the first bibliography in the English language devoted to writings Perhaps the greatest price for the new of a pornographic character.”58 sexual order was paid by the poor, Ashbee described Mrs. Berkley as “the unwed mothers and the flood of queen of her profession.”59 She "bastard" children that spread through practiced her craft during one of London and other growing English England’s most critical periods of social cities. For many peasant and working- transformation, a period that not only class women, the very conditions of remade English society, but employment, whether as a domestic or established the foundation of what is wage-laborer, demanded that they be now widely considered the modern free of infant dependents. Whether age. from passion or rape, widowhood or abandonment, unmarried women * According to Bassermann, the either pregnant or of recent “deflowering” of virgins was an even more motherhood found it very difficult to popular indulgence among heterosexual secure legitimate employment. men than flagellation. [Bassermann/149]

urban petty thievery; unacceptable This period, between the 1750s-1830s, public conduct like alcoholism, was a tumultuous era. The American urination, “free Mondays” and other and French revolutions signaled the traditional anti-work holidays; and the beginning of the end of British world sexual activities conducted on public hegemony. While the American streets between a working-class colonial war lasted only seven/? years, prostitute and her customer.62 So the war with France dragged on for disruptive were these perceived more than two decades. For the challenges to social conventions that, British (and not unlike the U.S. in between 1760 and 1810, Parliament Vietnam), it an enormously expensive enacted more than sixty laws making effort to maintain imperial hegemony. individual crimes capitol or hanging In particular, the war was devastating offenses.63 for the propertyless poor who had to pay not only heavy taxes, but often This anarchy, however, was expressed with their bodies as forcefully with its greatest severity on the rural conscripted soldiers and sailors. It poor. The fate of the agrarian was also an era that witnessed the proletariat – those who resided on the industrialization of traditional lands owned by the class of men who handicraft work practices -- with the may well have been regular visitors to uprooting of long-held social relations the brothels run by Mrs. Berkley and and customs – leading to the slow and other governesses -- is pointedly bitter dissolution of rural life. These described by E.J. Hobsbawm and developments dragged on for more George Rudy: than a half-century of social strife (if not open revolt) and included the It is difficult to find words for the Wilkes agitation (1760s and 1770s), degradation which the coming industrial the Gordon riots (1780s), attacks on society brought to the English country the King in London (1795 and 1820), labourer .... They lost what little traditional right and security they had, and gained Luddite uprisings (1811-17), the East instead not even the theoretical hope Anglian riots (1816) and the “Captain which capitalism held out to the urban Swing” riots of 1830 that so wracked labourer. ... Instead, another, less human, 60 England. more unequal hierarchy closed in upon them -- the farmer who talked to them like Laurence Stone has characterized a squire, the squire who drove them out England during the 18th and into the for partridge and hares, the collective early-19th centuries as an “anarchy conspiracy of the village rich who took [that] lay only just below the their commons, and gave them instead their charity in return for their servility, surface.”61 Social anarchy took many and on whose whim depended their forms. Perhaps most disturbing to the livelihood. They did not even sell the propertied classes was the growing birthright for a mess of pottage. They incidences of what they considered simply lost it.64 “crimes” – Luddite attacks on factories or spontaneous food and other riots; As they further note: “The threshing practiced robberies by highwaymen machine thus became the symbol of and “vagabond brotherhoods”* or their misery.”65 It would not be a surprise to find that some of the same type of devices found in Mrs. Berkley’s * According to Burg, “The vagabond salon were used to put down these brotherhoods … provided refuge for large futile uprisings. More interestingly numbers of runaway boys… . [T]he life of yet, the threshing machine found its the wandering youth was passed in a predominantly male and predominantly sexual corollary in the thrashing homosexual milieu.” [Burg/48] machine, described in one account as

“a machine which lashed forty addicts love, of mutual sharing of pleasure [of flagellation] at a time.” [See without a price.* below.] And nowhere does the market Perhaps the most telling word in this exchange of sex become absolutely remarkably poignant and eloquent transparent, sheared of all vestiges of passage is the reference to romantic love, than with the prostitute "degradation" -- the absolute engaged in the commerce of subjugation and decimation of both a perversion. A perverse act -- at least class and its individual members. as defined by then-contemporary Clearly, this degradation transformed conventional social, moral, medical the rural poor, reducing them -- and religious authority – is the “gray symbolically if not literally -- into market” of sexual life. It was an act at industrial "slavery". But, in a process once subject to two contesting forces: recalling Hegel's great dialectical saga the apparent freedom of unlimited in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, exchange and the enforced restrictions this severe social process of of unacceptable pleasure. This is the degradation also, inversely, great social legacy of pre-Victorian transformed the symbolic "master." perversion – where the most Degradation made the master equally exaggerated forms of the market less human and, on both physical and crossed with the rejection of psychological levels, pursue a new acceptable conduct or morality, giving desire -- the pleasure of pain, of rise to the radical pleasures of Mrs. flagellation and other perversions. Berkley’s salon.

One of the most insidious aspects of The pleasures of perverse passion the rise of the market-mediated society is the process by which ever The passion associated with sexual more intimate aspects of personal, perversion – especially flagellation -- private life are reduced to a took on a new character during the commodity existence. E.P. Thompson period between the 1750s-1820s. This has pointed out that as commodity unique sexual "aphrodisiac" has a long manufacturing became the acceptable history in the West.67 However, it model of social exchange, “need” or appears to have undergone a desire itself became a commodity … an fundamental expansion -- measured in object, a psycho-physical property terms of the range of what was bought and sold, manufactured and considered "permissible" pleasure and manipulated like all other goods and by a greater number of people services. As Thompson discovered, engaged in the practice -- during this “the remodelling of ‘need,’” during this socially disruptive period. period was “the greatest transformation in history.” This Like all social conventions, this one served, as another commentator has has a pre-history. As early as 1677 observed, as the “effective dividing there are reports in Britain of a new line between the traditional world and sexual performance art, the strip the modern.”66 Thus, whether tangible tease. Whereas today the “art” form or imaginary, whether precious or is renown for the disrobing by women, ordinary, whether expensive or cheap, in its earliest manifestation a male whether social or private, commodity character – a country gentlemen in the desire – the pleasures offered through the marketplace – is but the inversion * For an alternative concept of exchange, of gift giving, of mutual sexual see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and pleasure expressed as a genuine act of the Erotic Life of Property.

© 2016, David Rosen page 13 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon play, They Rover, by Mrs. Alpha Behn Perverse pleasurable indulgence – was the sexual tease. By the middle probably found its most celebrated of the 18th century, female exposure expression in Sir Francis Dashwood’s became the principle form of Hell Fire Club. This establishment was presentation. And by this period, the an outgrowth of the “Devil Clubs” of strip tease had been transformed into the 1720s at which, as Trumbach the performances of the posture girl. reports, “the mysteries of the Christian religion were mocked, the Devil was “Lewd” performance was but one of worshipped, and whoring was the sexual practices that transgressed promoted.” In the 1730s, Dashwood, the moral conventions of the day. a libertine and a deist opposed to Lewd or explicit conversation was also conventional Christianity, was one of common. As Trumbach notes, “lewd the founding members of the Dilettanti conversations in the public streets Society, an organization dedicated to were both a means of creating erotic furthering knowledge of classical excitement and of showing the degree civilization. to which [women] had left behind conventional female behavior.”68 Dashwood’s later literary efforts, most Among sex practices, the menage a notably his revision and publication of trios, involving two female prostitutes the Book of Common Prayer, were and a male customer, was “[p]robably supported Benjamin Franklin, who the least offensive transgression.”69 Trumbach says was “as committed as Anal intercourse seemed less popular, Dashwood to the principals of a although according to some it was a virtuoso’s libertinism.”73 practice favored by Continental men. Fellatio “was less controversial but still The Hell Fire Club operated in the not common,” whereas flagellation 1750s. While few first-hand accounts was far more commonly practiced and of the actual practices carried out at openly discussed.70 the club seem to have survived, it developed a reputation as a venue in Another feature of this period was the which the fictional writings of the apparently popular practice of nude Marquis de Sade were put into erotic dancing. As Peter Fryer notes, as practice. Dashwood organized the club early as the end of the 17th century at the gothic abbey of the Monks of there were reports that “[a]t private Medmenham and inscribed over the gathering … naked dancing by men door the group’s motto, taken from and women together seem to have Rabelais: Fay ce que voundras, or Do been fairly popular among people who as you wish.74 Block reports that “the earned their living by prostitution, Bona Dea (the ancient goddess of robbery and begging.”71 But perhaps fertility) was worshipped with parodies the most provocative element was the of Christian ritual and acts of sexual naked balls that often involved sexual intercourse.” Others report that encounter as part of the popular members of the club engaged in revelry. Called “buff-balls” and flagellation and that other “satanic” “buttock-balls,” these events were practices took place. Charles Spencer popular among the poorest social notes that, up until recently, the club’s classes and have been described as “orgies were always considered to follows: they were “… [dances] in have been strictly heterosexual,” but which both sexes – innocent of may have been witness to a wide clothing – madly join, stimulated with variety of perverse libertine raw whisky and the music of fiddle and indulgences, including bisexual and tin whistle.”72 homosexual encounters.75

During this period, according to Stone, the male, middle-class literary public. “The production of sexual hardware The pictorial arts also helped expand was partly the result of improved the vocabulary of sexual technology and greater specialization representation through the artistic in manufacturing.”76 Dildoes first renderings of female (and to a lesser appeared in London in the 1660s. extent male) nudes. Such evolving Originally called “del-doe,” they were forms of reproduction as the imported from Italy and continued to peepshow, prints, cards, lithographs be imported until the early-19th and, by the 1830s, photographs [see century.77 During the late-17th Appendix] extended perverse images century, it is reported that dildoes to a wider, non-literate audience. were sold at the Sign of the Cross in Finally, plays, poetry, songs and other St. James Street, bought and used by popular forms of expression added to aristocratic ladies of the court. In the the popular sexual discourse.81 1720s, they are reported being sold openly by women in St. James’s Park. Many of the devices of this period were However, the saleswomen carried implements of a receding agrarian age baskets of dolls that had, instead of – and the further removed agrarian life legs, a “cloth-covered cylinder of about slipped, the more elaborate became six inches long and one inch wide.”78 the hand-wrought devices of flagellation and other perversions. Condoms first appeared in London in Equally important, the “gentlemen” the 1660s and, like dildoes, were who regularly visited Mrs. Berkley's imported from Italy. According to and such establishments were not Stone, they were used for prophylactic unfamiliar with the collection of cat-o- rather contraceptive purposes -- and nine tails, bending canes, leather were openly manufactured, advertised, straps, battledores, holly brushes and sold and used. “They were clumsy other devices. Mrs. Berkley’s clientele affairs made of sheep gut,” he notes, -- identified by Ms. Wilson as “and were secured to the wearer at “innumerable old generals, admirals, the base with a red ribbon, which was colonels, and captains, as well as tied around the scrotum.”79 By the bishops, judges, barristers, lords, 1740s, they were sold by a Mrs. Lewis commoners and physicians”82 -- were in a shop in St. Martin’s Lane; later in likely drawn from British nobility, the century they were sold by a Mrs. landed aristocracy and the emerging Phillips in a shop at the Green Canister bourgeoisie, for they were the only in Half Moon Street, and still later at 5 men who could afford such an Orange Court, Leicester Fields.80 indulgence. In addition, many may well have been raised on farms or in Equally important to the spread of the countryside and some still likely perverse pleasure was the increased controlled large manorial estates. availability of a wide assortment of “pornographic” media. These included In their familiarity, these devices a diverse assortment of published provide the tools of expression for a materials that ranged from scandalous new sexuality -- a sexuality of novels like John Cleland’s Fanny Hill or pleasure derived from the measured the memoirs of a woman of pleasure physical experience of pain … sado- to the writing of Defoe, Swift, Fielding masochistic flagellation. More than a and, most critically, John Wilkes, the century before the practice was most influential libertine of the period. formally named by Richard Kraft- In addition, the availability of a wide Ebing83, sado-masochism appears to assortment of call-girl directories have achieved a level of if not social helped legitimize prostitution among acceptance than at least tolerance,

© 2016, David Rosen page 15 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon especially among more well-to-do delinquents. As another historian has men. Inherited technologies of the noted, “So easy was a whipping to period, especially hand-wrought administer, so obvious the deterrent it agrarian tools, contributed a critical was thought to be, that it became the element to the experiencing of a new judicial panacea for most minor socio-economic relationship of crimes.”85 The first public whipping pleasure, one tied – no pun intended - post was introduced in 1597. Those - to physical pain and emotional subject to such punishment ranged humiliation … to degradation. from vagabonds and drunkards, to thieves and rioters, to heretics and Discipline and punishment dissenters and to mothers of “illegitimate” children and Other factors were needed for this homosexuals. It was even inflicted on form of sexual experience to become Mary Hamilton – alias William not only relatively widespread, but Hamilton, among other male names – sustained as an accepted sexual for masquerading as a man and practice -- even if only enjoyed by a marrying numerous reportedly relatively small minority of devotees. unsuspecting women.86 Most critical for this development was the widespread presence (and In no other area of English social life acceptance) of whipping, flogging, did flogging achieve greater beating and other forms of corporal articulation than within the military. punishment throughout British society. The Army formally adopted it as a One finds the use of the proverbial method of punishment in 1689 with "rod" in the prison, the poor-house the passage of the Mutiny Act. and the parish, in the army and navy, According to Geoffrey Abbott, the in schools, factories and at home, range of offenses and respective where the husband had the right -- punishments included: “Deserting and often exercised it -- to beat his during action brought 900 lashes, wife and children, as they were deserting when on guard duty, 1,500 classified as property. The social lashes. Deserting a second time disruption precipitated by the resulted in 900 lashes and emerging new capitalist social order of transportation as a felon for life … .”87 the 17th and 18th centuries -- with its Within a Navy made up of “pressed” accompanying crises on the farm and sailors, “brutal discipline was throughout rural society as well as considered essential, and was urban centers -- demanded new forms administered almost daily.” Flogging of punishment to discipline the rapidly methods included “Kissing the growing unstable population. No area Gunner’s Daughter” (being placed over of social life in which hierarchy had to a ship’s gun and whipped), “Flogging be maintained was free from the terror at the Grating” (being placed between of corporal discipline and punishment. iron grates which stood at right angels) and “Flogging round the Fleet” According to George Riley Scott, “there (in which the hapless victim was is no form of punishment older than moved from ship to ship and flogged flagellation.”84 The first official law on each one).88 permitting flogging, the Whipping Act, was passed in England in 1530* and English military genius perfected was directed at the punishment of flogging into an art form with the invention of the cat-o’nine-tails. Its elegance has been described as * Whipping of women was formally follows: suspended in England in 1820. [Abbott/127]

It consisted of a wooden handle nearly men. As Mrs. Wilson reports about the twenty inches long, with nine tails of extensive collection of armaments of whipcord, each about an eighth of an inch perverse pleasure at Mrs. Berkley’s think, thirty-three inches long, but free establishment, it “restored the dead to from knots. The ends of the cords were 89 life.” Many doctors, medical writers bound with silk thread to prevent fraying. th th and others of the 17 and 18 A soldier in 1832 has left the following centuries identified flagellation as an aphrodisiac. They drew inspiration vivid memoir of his experience bearing witness to military justice: from the ancient and classical traditions. From the Talmud, they I felt an astounding sensation between the were aware that being beaten over the shoulders under my neck, which went to back may be a cause for seminal my toe-nails in one direction, and my ejaculation. From the Greeks, they finger-nails in another, and stung me to learned that the Spartans engaged in the heart, as if a knife had gone through public whippings of boys by my body. … I felt my flesh quiver in every priestesses to improve virility and nerve, from the scalp of my head to my bravery. And from the Romans, they toe-nails. The time between each stroke were aware that at the festival of seemed so long as to be agonizing, and yet Lupercalia infertile women whipped the next came too soon. The pain in my lungs was more severe, I thought, than on their buttocks with goat-hide straps to my back. I felt as if I would burst in the increase their chances for 92 internal parts of my body. …90 procreation.

Flagellation at British public schools is The appeal of the "rod," however, was also legendary. Whether for not limited solely to discipline and punishment, sport or pleasure, few punishment. Flagellation has long been middle- or upper-class youth attending a part of a subversive strand of such a school escaped this perverse Western Christianity, the ecstatic practice. Students were flogged for religious experience. In his famous ignorance, inattention and idleness as study of radical religious movements, well as disobedience and lying. They In Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman were beaten by school masters as well Cohn provides invaluable insight into as by fellow students, often most religious or ecstatic flagellation. Often viciously by older classmates. A forgotten within the revisionist history student of the late 18th-century recalls of the Catholic Church is the mass the terror of such an experience: self-flagellation movements that swept Europe between the 13th and 17th [the teacher] tyrant did but seldom use the centuries. They arose against a rod; his favourite instrument was a long background of famine, plague and the rattan cane, big enough to correct a culprit widespread belief in what Cohn calls in Bridewell [prison] … The shrieks of the “the world-shattering, world- boys who were writhing beneath his blows transforming drama of the Last Days were music to his soul … I declare to God I which was now unfolding in all its have seen wales on the sides, ribs and 93 arms of boys of the bigness of my finger.91 terror and exaltation.” Lasting for more than four centuries, flagellants Flagellation was also long accepted by moved like a great wave through Italy, some as a valid medical practice – if then through Germany, the Low seen as quackery by many others. It Countries, France, Spain and other was seen as a mysterious power that parts of Europe. Its social power is could rejuvenate the flesh and suggested by the following description stimulate sexual potency. It was of but one representative episode that took place in Italy during the early perceived as helping overcome th impotence, especially among elderly years of the 15 century:

Protestants facilitated its spread to so Led usually by priests, masses of men, many other aspects of social life, be it youths and boys marched day and night, prisons, the military or schools. It with banners and burning candles, from should, therefore, not be a surprise town to town. And each time they came to that flagellation -- which was both so a town they would arrange themselves in widespread and took such diverse groups before the church and flog themselves for hours on end. The impact forms of expression (be it for torture which this public penance made upon the and punishment, as ecstatic passion or general population was great. Criminals as a medical practice) -- became confessed, robbers restored their loot, actively integrated into sexual life. At usurers the interest on their loans, Mrs. Berkley's and many of the other enemies were reconciled and feuds sex clubs of the late-18th through the 94 forgotten. early-19th centuries, flagellation became integrated into quasi-ritualized It was, however, as a ritualized practice and, in doing so, made explicit procedure of punishment and pain that what had long been latent, however self-flagellation made a lasting disguised, hidden or denied. contribution to the history of perversion. Cohn describes the Technologies of pleasure remarkably standardized rites of flagellation as follows: The devices found at Mrs. Berkley’s salon were drawn from a receding When they came to a town the flagellants agrarian era and did not represent the would make their way to a church, form a advancing industrial revolution. These circle in front of it, take off their clothes and shoes and put on a sort of skirt newer technologies, symbolized by the reaching from the waist to the feet.... steam engine, locomotive, threshing machine and, most critically, ... The men beat themselves rhythmically electricity, represented new forms of with leather scourges armed with iron social power and, in turn, new spikes, singing hymns meanwhile in relationships between humanity and celebration of Christ’s Passion and the nature, artificial life and the living glories of the Virgin. ... The flagellants did body. The traditional agrarian their work with such thoroughness that implements found at Mrs. Berkley's often the spikes of the scourge stuck in the flesh and had to be wrenched out. Their and other flagellation parlors were blood spurted on to the walls and their hand-wrought devices often bodies turned to swollen masses of blue distinguished by remarkably innovative flesh. design features -- features intended to elicit different physical/sexual feelings. These flagellants were considered “men of God” and held in the highest Within the setting of late-18th and regard by the town's people they met early-19th century urban sex clubs, along the way. For they were “not these former tools took on new simply ... penitents who were atoning identities as devices for the infliction of for their own sins but martyrs averting eroticized pain. These clubs were the plague and, indeed, the highly specialized, ritualized settings … annihilation of mankind.”95 environments far removed from the pastoral setting that gave birth to Religious or ecstatic flagellation does many of these devices. In this not appear to have been as process, as rural tools become extensively practiced in England as eroticized urban fetishes, their identity compared to the Continent. Block both incorporated and went beyond suggests that the absence of that of the older era, an era flagellation rituals among English characterized by non-urban, non-

© 2016, David Rosen page 18 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon industrial and often non-capitalist life. the 20th century. Chace Price, These devices, anointed in their new described by one commentator as “an identities, became not simple 18th century English bon vivant,” is eroticized objects, but mythical reported to have attempted to build “a symbols championing a materialist, machine which lashed forty addicts [of anti-Puritanical and subversive flagellation] at a time.”100 In 1830, sexuality … hedonism. according to Bloch, a Mr. Talbot "saw such a machine for flagellation at work The industrial revolution produced not in a London brothel.” He adds most only the enclosure movement, modern curiously: “Lately, Americans have factory system and machine culture, take up the idea again.”101 but the modern forms of sexual expression and perversion. Ironically, By the end of the 18th century, the perversion also contributed to the then-new "high technology" of development of industrialization itself. electricity was being applied to devices While the devices identified in Mrs. designed to treat sexual dysfunction Berkley’s brothel are for the most part among women and men. Perhaps the drawn from an agrarian past, probably most innovative of these sexual her greatest contribution to sexual technologies was the electrically- history was the invention of the powered mating swing. It was “Berkley Horse” or Chevalet. This reportedly discovered by a German ladder-like device with protective pornographer in 1790 and, as “an padding [image #1] -- what Marcus English invention,” die stimulations has described as “a large football maschiene, produced much sexual blocking-dummy” -- functioned with an pleasure. The historian Margaret C. elegant simplicity: Jacob describes this mating swing as one “which was powered electrically The client was tied to it so that his face and swung the man and woman in and projected through one space and his out of each other, thus stimulating genitals through another. The “governess” their new effortless flight to ecstasy.” stood behind and administered the whip to [image #2] She adds: “The back or buttocks, according to taste, while [pornographer’s] text assured the a scantily dressed girl sat in front and massaged his cock and bollocks.96 reader that the power of machines could compensate even for 102 Ms. Wilson, the governess, describes a impotence.” fairly representative scene in the following way: a naked man is placed This swing appears to be one of the in the Horse and “a woman is sitting in first electrical devices used to help a chair exactly under it, with her address the sexual problems bosom belly and bush exposed: she is associated with impotence and ‘manualizing’ his ‘embolon,’ while Ms. infertility. The search for a cure to this Berkley is birching his posteriors. ...”97 set of very complex psycho-physical Marcus calls this invention conditions has driven much of the “perversity’s contribution to the development of new forms of sexual Industrial Revolution”.98 Adding to the technology introduced in the West lore of Mrs. Berkley’s technological over the last two centuries. ingenuity, her salon also featured “a Sometimes one could not tell whether compound pulley on the first floor, to an invention was a prosthetic device or which a man could be attached by his a fetish, whether it served a medical hands and flogged in this position.”99 purpose or simply provided perverse pleasure -- or both. However, still earlier technologies of perversion point more directly toward

The "electrically driven whipping treatment plan that had his patients contrivance" is a case in point. Block sleep with their bedroom window identifies this truly unique American shutters open so as to better gain contribution to the history of sexual access to the moonlight's beneficial technology as having been invented by rays. He was also a proponent of an industrial school in Denver during having couples sing romantic songs to the late-19th century. According to one another. More radical still, as one contemporary author, De Villiot, Peter Fryer reports, “Graham would sit writing in Paris, the device functioned naked in an earth-bath together with as follows: an equally naked young woman; their protruding heads, ‘beautifully dressed The contrivance in question has the form of and powdered,’ appeared ‘not unlike a chair which lacks the seat or cane two fine, fully-grown cauliflowers.’”105 bottom. The patient seats himself on this after having uncovered what is But the "divine bed" was his greatest disrespectfully termed his posterior. This accomplishment. The electrically- up-to-date chair is sufficiently raised to allow four beaters fixed beneath it to powered device was designed to operate freely in a rotatory movement provide both sexual and medical more or less rapid according to the wish of satisfaction to those who were the operator, who has only to switch on an selected to use it. It is reported to electric battery fixed on the chair with have been built by a tinsmith named metal wires. … The operator has only to Denton and cost £12,000 – an press a button and the whipping chair does astounding price for the day. Graham the rest. required prospective patients to submit a written statement as to the Bearing more than a trace of sarcasm, cures they sought -- as well pre- De Villiot notes: "As to the feeling of payment of £50 -- before being the principal party -- that is to say, the selected for treatment. pupil -- who is held in the chair by a vice gripping ankles and wrists, 103 It must have been a stunning piece of American papers say nothing." aesthetic and technical innovation. However, a century earlier, the According to Paul Tabori, “It was "Celestial Bed" represented an beautifully carved and gilded, covered innovative use of the-then new power with silk damask, supported by of electricity. The bed was the twenty-eight glass pillars, and centerpiece of the notorious "Temple surmounted by a richly carved and of Health" -- often referred to as the gilded canopy, from which crimson silk "Temple of Aeschlapius" -- run by Dr. curtains with fringe and tassels were James Graham. It operated in London suspended.” As Block notes, "… the between 1779 and 1784 and wonderful divine bed -- the 'Magneto- specialized in the treatment of sterility electric,' unique and incomparable, for among men and incapacity among nothing like it had ever been produced women. before." Going further, he adds:

Graham’s formal training as a It was located on the second story in a physician is in doubt and he has been large and magnificent chamber to the right referred by some as “Emperor of of the orchestra and in the front part of his Quacks.” Nevertheless, he was attractive hermitage. In Graham's office, fascinated by the new technology of next door to the divine bed, there was a electricity and he is reported to have cylinder through which the emanations of traveled to Pennsylvania to study the 'divine and all-animating fire' Benjamin Franklin’s methods.104 Over (electricity) were conducted into the bedchambers. Moreover, vapors of strong time, he devised an innovative

© 2016, David Rosen page 20 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon medicaments and oriental incense were "body poetry," "plastic poses" and conveyed into the room by the glass pipes. "living statues."* No less an authority of beauty than J. W. Goethe was In addition, the room in which the witness to one of her performances: Celestial Bed was located was saturated with "the melodic sounds of An Englishwomen of about twenty years -- the harmonica, celestine, soft flutes, very beautiful and shapely. She had a lovely voices and a great organ."106 Greek costume made for her which suited Pleasure -- sexual and of all the her admirably. Then she loosened her senses -- was provided on an hair, took a few shawls and arranged a unprecedented scale. As another series of attitudes, poses, gestures, so that one finally thought that one was dreaming. commentator has noted, Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying,

earnestenticing, sad, droll, debauched, Sex, overt or indirect, was the keynote of repentant,, threatening, terrifying, etc. … the Temple, how to retain or regain youth, She knew well how to choose and change beauty, fertility. Dr. Graham spared no the folds of her veil for each expression. … expense; all the rooms in which people waited for a consultation, or a session in the Celestial Bed, or a sermon, were Speaking with the voice of lost youth, lavishly furnished, provided with soft lights Goethe adds: "The old knight found in and sweet music.107 her all antiquity, all the beautiful peoples of the Sicilian coins and even While the bed was the centerpiece of Apollo Belevdere himself."108 the Temple, the real star and principal attraction was the sixteen- or How the future Lady Hamilton came to seventeen-year-old Emily Lyon, later be associated with Dr. Graham to become renown throughout Europe remains unclear, but Hamilton as Lady Emma Hamilton, the most performed at his Temple of Hymen as famous British courtesan of the late- Hebe Vestina, goddess of health and 18th century. Born in 1761 and of beauty. She is reported to have posed humble means, she gave birth to a for an hour at a time on a dais, child out of wedlock at age sixteen. pretending to feed a serpent out of a Leaving the child with her mother, cup. In her role of "Vestina the Emily went on to remake her life – and Gigantic," as Block admits, "her divine that of many men as well. A woman throne exposed her charms to the of remarkable beauty, talent and lascivious eyes of the multitude."109 intelligence, she became the mistress to such notables as the sea captain, It is not known whether Lady Hamilton John Willet Payne, Sir Henry ever met Mrs. Berkley or visited her Featherston, Sir Charles Greville and flagellation salon. However, in the Lord William Hamilton, the British four decades that span the public lives ambassador to the Court of Naples. of these two extraordinary women, She also served as the principal model radical aspects of a very different for a number of leading British artists, sexual culture were taking shape. the most notable being John While the dominant culture was being Rowlandson. While married to defined by the illusions of "romantic Hamilton (and following his death) she love," a deeper sexuality was gaining had a scandalous liaison with Lord expression through the reported Admiral Nelson and bore him a increases in the number of prostitutes daughter. and rapes, the presence of homosexual "deviants" and the Renown for her striking beauty, she was one of the foremost performance * Lady Hamilton may have gotten her start artists of her day, celebrated for her as a "posture girl." [Lofts/15-16.]

© 2016, David Rosen page 21 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon popularity of private sex clubs catering ways new technologies have been to all manner of perverse pleasures. actively incorporated into both The relative tolerance of perversion evolving sexual practice (particularly during the reign of George III (who interpersonal performance) and its sanctioned court brothels) and George public presentation through each new IV (who was a regular visitor to the generation of mass media. bordello operated by Mrs. Collet) ended with the latter’s death in 1830. Technology & sexual practice After the brief reign of William IV, Victoria assumed the thrown in 1837 The technologies of sexual pleasure and remained in power for the next can be distinguished between those of sixty-five years. Under her forceful performance and those of stewardship, as Block admits, "the representation. This chapter has whole character of society changed …. analyzed critical elements of both [A]n abrupt end was put to the technologies during the formative previous period of dissipation."110 period of capitalism and the birth of modern sexuality. These technologies A host of complementary means were not only created the foundation of deployed to accomplish this, including contemporary sexual culture, but the establishment of a permanent established the patterns by which each police force, the passing of tough subsequent generation of sexual censorship laws and anti-homosexual devices and communications media legislation, the official end of flogging has been incorporated into Western in public schools and the military, and society. the closing of bawdy houses, taverns, brothels and flagellation clubs. This The technologies of performance repression would lead to the famed include devices intended to assist a double-standard morality to which person to better perform or physically Victoria's name is now intimately experience his/her sexuality. This linked. It was a sexual culture that chapter has described an assortment would take more than a century, until of hand-wrought, mechanical and the sexual and counter-culture electrical fetishes and marital aids as "revolutions" of the 1960s, to be well as a number of prophylactic finally overturned. Today, we are contraceptives and prosthetic devices. amidst a new era of sexual These technologies were invented to transformation, an era marked enhance sexual pleasure and/or to perhaps more than any other recent increase the likelihood of procreation – one by what Engels called the or at least promised such fulfillment. “progressive-regressive dialectic” of Equally important, they have capitalist social life. significantly influenced the experience of what has long been distinguished as Perversion has persisted over the last perverse sexual practices. The fetish, two centuries, immune to the repeated in particular, holds out the promise of threats from religious zealots, police allowing the practitioner a direct raids and political repression. experience of a sexualized other. It Perversion has adhered to the does this by simultaneously distorting traditional models formulated during and intensifying the illusion of the 17th century, yet remained transparency, of the subject’s direct sufficiently flexible to adapt to the access to the object of desire through most innovative of contemporary a symbolic representation. A artifact of each subsequent era. And technology of performance promises a in no area is this flexibility more momentary ecstasy through the clearly represented than in the novel merger of the desiring subject and the

© 2016, David Rosen page 22 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon object of desire: the promise of sexuality. First, they were being driven abandonment, orgasm, union with to achieve complete exposure (both otherness. literally and figuratively) through the absolute explicitness of the public The technologies of representation are display of sexuality – a phenomenon instruments intended to capture, that each generation of convey and -- in doing so -- make communications media has sought to more immediate, if not real, a realize. Second, they were being representation of the experience of equally driven by the ceaseless effort sexuality. They serve as vehicles for to reduce all human, and therefore the sensual presentation of the body, sexual, practices to a commodity form, most notably that of women, as a thus making one of the most intimate physical terrain of adoration and of human relations – something that conquest. These technologies consist makes people human -- of the evolving forms of indistinguishable from all other objects communications: from peepshows, of exchange. lithographs, books, magazines, newspapers and other printed media During the century-and-one-half like playing or post cards, photographs between the late-17th and early 19th and stereoscopes to nickelodeons, centuries, the foundation was laid for films, records, telephones, radio, the modern Western form of sexuality. television, homevideo, cable television This process involved the remaking of and videogames and culminating in heterosexuality (and the concomitant today’s latest innovations, the formalization of homosexuality) by the Internet/Web and virtual reality refocusing of desire onto a specialized “teledildonics”. Collectively, the media set of object choices – choices that help fashion and disseminate the were expected to satisfy personal language of sexuality, thus fostering a pleasure. This process also involved vocabulary of sexual practice and the furthering of a wide array of illicit consciousness. These media both or perverse sexual practices that came constitute a socially shared imagery to constitute critical features of the and articulate the private fantasies sexual vocabulary of experiences still that do much to shape an individual’s practiced today. Foremost among experience of her/his sexuality. The these was the apparent popularity – technologies of sexual representation among men and some women, create both the material as well as the heterosexual and homosexual, as well imaginative context in which sexual as those men who visited both life is practiced. “common” prostitutes and upper-class sex clubs -- of what had long been This chapter introduced some of the considered to be a perverse practice, earliest modern forms of sexual flagellation. representation – daguerreotype and stereoscope, cheep paper books as Practitioners of sexual perversion well as the posture girl, female have, over the last two centuries, prostitutes and female flagellation demonstrated a remarkable resilience. salon proprietors. In particular, as This is most critically expressed in women were exploited by the rapidly their ability to resist the countless evolving sex market economy they, in efforts at suppression waged by civil, tern, exploited the most traditional religious, political or medical form of representation, performance authorities. Clearly, what is defined as as a personal spectacle. In doing so, perverted behavior can change over these women invoked two of the time – as evident in the evolving underlying forces recasting modern standards associated with flagellation,

© 2016, David Rosen page 23 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon homosexuality or pedophilia. But recast into sex toys – and sold in adult perversion persists as a social bookstores and neighborhood category of deviance, abnormality or pharmacies or through catalogs and socio-moral transgression. Internet sites. One consequence of this development is that the very Part of this resilience is demonstrated nature of what was long considered in how, ever since the 18th century, “perverse” or “illicit” has been recast. perverse practices have embraced Today, they seem to have lost much of technological innovations as part of what for so long was considered their the effort to enhance the psycho- “obscene character”. This is most physical experience of personal sexual evident in the whole new class of pleasure. This “embracing” of sexual devices, often called “material innovation has two distinct aspects. aids,” which have emerged to bridge First, it was applied with equal vigor to the gap between a prosthetic device all new forms of consumer-oriented and a fetish. technology – be it hand-wrought, mechanical or electrical devices (e.g., Practitioners of perverse sexuality whips, dildos) as well as sensual have responded to technological materials or fabrics (e.g., leather, innovation very differently than, say, rubber). Second, this process the Luddites and others who are (involving a tactile object with a identified as social radicals “resisting” distinct physical materiality) did not change. At particular times, both abandon or reject the past –- but sexual perverts and proletarian rather occurred as part of a quasi- workers have challenged the religious or ritualized practices that conventions – be they moral or often actively incorporated older economic -- of the dominant social devices, techniques and procedures. order. For workers – especially those Finally, the technologies of pleasure hand-craftsmen of the 17th and 18th have become commodities fully century England – resistance integrated into an ever-more dominant represented a fight to retain more class-structured market society. While than long-held traditions and social perverse behavior crosses all class, relations. They also claimed a right to race and gender boundaries, its a socio-personal value system -- i.e., articulation often follows strict social craftsmanship – as a meaningful way lines of demarcation. For example, of life as well as a livelihood. the dominant media often accepts “perverted” practices among the rich For these workers and their families -- and famous, popularizing them as and not unlike many people living in “luxuries,” indulgences steeped in the “undeveloped” countries today -- highly fantasized yet deeply technological innovation represented emotionally-disturbing aura of the by the new factory system was being illicit. However, for all too many, and imposed, literally and figuratively, especially the poor, acting out upon them. This new system was perverse practices in an unsanctioned characterized by machine culture and manner (e.g., with a streetwalker, at a capitalist social relations, and was truck stop) is often cause for jail, the being imposed by the combined insane asylum or worse. authority of an expanding state and a rising bourgeoisie, and a weakening Over the last century-and-a-half, crown and church. And imposition it sexual life has undergone a process by was -- a bloody, merciless one at that. which many once-labeled perversions For these traditional tradesmen, have been transformed into lifestyles. innovation did not promise new or It is a process that has seen fetishes better opportunities, but signaled the

© 2016, David Rosen page 24 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon destruction of their way of life, if not society in which sexual practice would their personal existence. Thus, be a gift among equals. Pleasure so technology was not really the constituted, like all forms of acquisition determining issue but merely a or consumption within capitalist tangible symbol of a new, more society, can never satisfy, truly fulfill. degrading social system. For many of those considered For those who employee them, the perverts, and there were and are a technologies of pleasure, whether as very wide assortment of people device or image, represent a means by labeled as such, appropriate innovative which the separation between flesh technologies signified a new and consciousness, self and other, opportunity to achieve pleasure. If, subject and object is momentarily like the Luddite, the pervert is seen an overcome – and, for some, for this being loyal to an older, unacceptable brief moment of fantasy, alienation is tradition, then his/her “calling” might overcome. And overcoming alienation, well be to a different order of sexual the revaluation of values outside experience, one more hedonistic, more commodity exchange, is the hidden polymorphic and, perhaps, even more goal of not only many perversions, but sacred than is possible under most subversive acts that challenge conditions of commodity sexual the structure of social power and exchange. proclaim a new, truly more humane, way of life. But unlike the Luddites, perverts have repeatedly over the last two centuries A new way of seeing been willing to experiment with each new generation of innovation. Perhaps As historical coincidence would have it, reflecting the privilege of their class, during the period when Mrs. Berkley among those for whom a record was operating her unique salon in survives, very little seems to have London, photography was being been beyond consideration in the invented across the Channel. search for sexual satisfaction. Some According to Steven Lubar, curator of traditional devices, like the dildo and Engineering and Industry at the whip, have become staple elements of Smithsonian Institution, "the first sexual fantasy – adapting to new person to take a photography was technological conditions where Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, in 1824." In appropriate, as with the battery- 1832, Louis Daguerre announced his powered electric device. Others, like process to the French Academy of the Celestial Bed and Wilhelm Reich’s Science and, in 1837 (after forming a orgone box, have succumb to the partnership with Niepce), he whims of historical evolution and introduced an improved process using disappeared from sexual practice. a copper plate coated with silver iodide.111 Marcus has noted that In the face of the market’s inexorable "shortly thereafter [1832] a lively pull, the technologies of pleasure hold business in photographs of a sexual out what can only be called a distorted nature got under way."112 “utopian” promise of sexual satisfaction and personal fulfillment. "The daguerreotype process flourished This pleasure is distorted because its in the period between 1840 and realization is achieved on only a 1851," notes historian Gareth S. private, personal (and often isolated) Jowett, "but it has several severe level, outside of the full reconstitution limitations." The daguerreotype of the individual practitioner’s life process was, to put it kindly, a difficult within a non-alienated society – a procedure by which to make a

© 2016, David Rosen page 25 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon photograph. Jowett describes this grisette [working-class part-time early procedure as follows: prostitute], lorette [courtesan working near a church], lionne [lioness], biche The apparatus was bulky, a lengthy [“bitch”], cocotte [prostitute], grande exposure time was required, and the cocotte, grande horizontale [royal resulting prints were extremely fragile and court prostitute] -- were initially had to be kept under glass. The pictures imagined in the lithographic could be difficult to look at because of the productions of the 1830s and metallic glare, and the cost was quite high 115 for quality prints. But the major 1840s...." Such imagery served to disadvantage was the picture could not be help forge the basic iconography of duplicated.113 female (and, to a lesser extent, male) representation articulated as Nevertheless, as Abigail Solomon- pornography. Godeau has observed, "almost as soon as there were easily produced Photography, during the first few daguerreotypes, there were decades of its introduction, established pornographic ones." She notes the a pattern for media representation of unique beauty of this new medium of sexual imagery that would be followed sexual representation: by nearly all-subsequent "new media." First and foremost, and as both an art Daguerreotypes are, of course, unique and commerce, photography appealed images; ... Daguerreotype pornography is to the self-interest of the upper often exquisitely hand-colored, the models classes and served a variety of are carefully posed and lighted, and the purposes. Such purposes included trappings are often luxurious ... . [These economic (e.g., Muybridge studies images were sometimes] concealed inside watch covers, opened by hidden springs, or measuring the labor process), political lining the interior covers of snuff boxes or (e.g., police mug shots, corpses after made into jewelry. By the early years of Paris Commune), personal (e.g., self- the [French] Second Empire, much and family-portraits) or pleasurable daguerreotype pornography was (e.g., pornographic) -- and often more stereoscopic. Possessing a compelling than one at a time. Second, part of illusion of three-dimensionality and the personal enjoyment that came preternatural detail, painstakingly tinted, from photography was anchored in entirely grainless, the visual effect of the sexuality, especially in terms of its hand-colored daguerreotype stereo is the acme of verisimilitude.114 appeal to the perverse. Images of women (and, to a lesser extent, men) She reminds her readers that before in a variety of “provocative” positions its industrialization in the 1850s, "... and costumes was established. photographic pornography appears to Together, the object of representation have been a luxury item." And, with within a context intended to illicit very rare exception (apparently only in excitement, the image expressed a France), an indulgence available only unique iconography of unacceptable to a certain well-to-do class of men. pleasure, be it labeled immoral, obscene or perverse. Many of the early photographers borrowed from still earlier painterly As with all "new" media, a certain and lithographic visual styles when degree of inventiveness defines early they approached the portraiture of the pornographic photography. According nude, especially the female nude. In to Solomon-Godeau, the creative France, as Solomon-Godeau points breakthrough that distinguishes the out, they borrowed from "a broad medium is the invention of the "beaver spectrum of sexualized and more or shot," the complete exposure of the less venal feminine identities -- the female genitalia. [S-G/297] This

© 2016, David Rosen page 26 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon captivating, if not humiliating the two-dimensional photography. representation, often presented female Crary identifies this appeal as follows: subject with her face covered, be it by petticoats or veils. [see Images/xx] The stereoscope ... provided a form in This shot remains not only a principal which "vividness" of effect increased with technique of photography to this day, the apparent proximity of the object to the viewer, and the impression of three- but appears to have been adopted by dimensional solidity became greater as the all subsequent "new media" as a optic axes of each diverged. Thus the defining technique of female (and, to a desired effect of the stereoscope was not lesser extent, male homoerotic) simply likeness, but immediate tangibility. representation. He strongly cautions his readers to During the first quarter of the 19th bear in mind a very simple but all- century, when human vision was a important fact: "We will never really major subject of scientific know what the stereoscope looked like investigation, a number of optical to a nineteenth-century viewer or research instruments were converted recover a stance from which it could to devices for popular entertainment. seem an equivalent for a 'natural Among these "scientific toys," as they vision'."117 Such a warning can be were referred to, where the applied to all communications media. thaumatrope (i.e., a "wonder turner") and the phenakistoscope (i.e., The tension between "likeness" and "deceptive view"). They do not, "tangibility" has come to define the however, appear to have been made historical development of modern use for sexual imagery as part of their media technology. It has repeatedly innovative techniques of manifest itself in the battles between representation. On the other hand, the requirements of rendering ever- photography and the stereoscope more exact reproductions and the rapidly became media for the demands for intensifying the feeling of dissemination of "pornographic" a media experience. In other words, images. achieving the goals of each dictate leads to a fundamentally different Following photography, the outcome: for the former, it culminates stereoscope was the second principal in achieving an indistinguishable medium of visual representation correspondence between the original during the 19th century. As Jonathan and a copy; for the later, it culminates Crary reminds us: "It is easily in the merging of the subject and the forgotten now how pervasive was the object. Within terms of today's new experience of the stereoscope and how digital media, this disparity is evident for decades it defined a major mode of in the face-off beginning to take shape experiencing photographically between the new standard for High produced images."116 This technology Definition Television (HDTV) and the was developed by two pioneering appeal of "virtual reality" [VR] or optical-media innovators, Charles immersive simulation programs Wheatstone and Sir David Brewster. popular among video-game players. It exploited a particular physiological dis-functionality of human sight, This tension was articulated as part of "binocular disparity" (by which each new social sexuality that was eyes sees slightly differently), in order beginning to take shape during these to suggest a fundamentally different, early days of the "modern" or and in many ways more powerful, industrial phase of capitalist experience than that offered through development in the West. Linda Williams has noted that "... mid- to

© 2016, David Rosen page 27 Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon late-nineteenth century was a period capture and, in 1840, pioneered the in which a new porno-erotics of use of silver nitrate and gallic acid for corporealized observation began."118 development of the latent image (i.e., During these early decades of the calotype). According to Jowett, emerging new medium of "Talbot's process was the direct photography, a host of different ancestor of all modern photographic techniques competed with one another techniques."121 for popular acceptance and many (if not all) were used to depict sexual By the early-1850s, new techniques imagery of female nudes. Besides the were introduced that speed up the daguerreotype process and the photographic reproduction process stereoscopic photos, other techniques from the then-current several minutes included stereoscope glass prints, to 2 to 20 seconds. This helped to stereoscope cards (on salt paper or significantly expand the market for viewed by transparency), large-scale photographic images. In the U.S. prints, "carte de viste" prints (i.e., during this period, the costs for a very small prints mounted on commercially-produced daguerreotype cardboard supports) and ambrotypes photograph dropped from 50 cents to (i.e., prints rendered through the wet 25 cents to 12-1/2 cents. So popular glass collidion process and sealed onto had they become that it was estimated a cardboard shield).119 that, in 1853, three million prints were produced and that over one hundred This "new porno-erotics" contributed commercial studios operated in New to an historically new sensibility, as York City alone.122 It is not known much an visual or imagic experience how many of these images were as a tactile one. Williams (drawing "pornographic" or how many studios upon the work of Crary) proposes that produced such representations. the photography engendered not simply psychic stimulation, but actual George Eastman's introduction of the physical stimulation as well. She sees relatively inexpensive Kodak camera, this to be similar in development to which took advantage of the then- other late-19th and early-20th century breakthrough nitro-cellulose roll film, media technologies, including flip in the 1880s-1890s, propelled books, picture puzzles, Muybridge's photography into the second phase of zoopraxiscope, Edison's mutoscope. market expansion. This effort involved These media helped to heighten the not only again significantly lowering erotic experience of pornographic the cost of the medium, but also images.120 providing the user with greater control over the photographic and the Photography underwent the first phase reproduction/duplication process. of becoming a mass-market art form This effort would culminate in the as refinements in the photographic medium's third phase of development procedure were introduced (e.g., with the introduction of the self- shorter exposure time, more accurate printing Polaroid instant camera in lenses, faster development processes) 1946 and culminate in the late-90s and the costs of cameras and other with the introduction of digital equipment decreased significantly. photography.123 As Williams notes: Perhaps no single person was more essential to this process than Fox ... as the technologies producing these Talbot, an Englishman sometimes images became cheaper later in the [19th] credited with the invention of century and erotic and pornographic photography. In 1835, he developed a images circulated widely though most often illicitly, it seems quite likely that a wider method of sensitizing paper for image

© 2016, David Rosen page 28 range of classes of both sexes had an - the police report -- were "so obscene 124 opportunity to observe such images. that even to pronounce the titles ... would be to commit an indecency." He One result, which could have been was sentenced to a fine and a year in expected, was that "pornographic" prison; "the widow Rene, photography became a major public manufacturer of the daguerreotype," morals issue. was sentenced to a fine and two months in prison; and the artist, Numerous early photographs were Moulin, was also sentenced to a fine arrested and even jailed for their "art". and a month in jail.125 For example, Felix Jacques-Antoine Muolin has been described "the first But perhaps the most celebrated 19th [French] photographer in the history of century case of censorship of this new photography whose work exudes medium involved one Henry Hayler, an seductiveness." He was part of a English photographer who enjoyed a unofficial group of early photographic European-wide reputation. Hayler was "artists" who specialized in depicting the subject of a major raid in the female nudes. Besides Muolin, this spring of 1874 during which the police group included August Belloc, Bruno descended on two houses in London in Braquehais, Philippe Derussy, Louis which he conducted his operations. Jules Duboscq-Soleil and Alex Gouin. While Hayler escaped to Germany, According to Serge Nazarieff, Muolin according to Ashbee, "no less than ran a studio in Paris during the late- 130,248 obscene photographs, and 1840s and produced a series of "plate 5,000 slides were seized and daguerreotype nudes using non- destroyed...."126 These two incidents professional models from fourteen to suggest the scale of the flourishing sixteen years of age. ..." photographic pornography business in France and England and, one suspects, Going further, Nazarieff notes: "In in other parts of Europe and North 1851 he had a little trouble with the America during the latter-half of the law: a number of licentious images century. done by Moulin had been seized by the police at Malacrida's place." Malacrida was an optician and sold images that -

Sex Matters Mrs. Barkley’s Salon

Notes

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 493. 2 J. K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Invention of Masochism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 85. 3 Iwan Block, Sexual Life in England: Past and Present (Herfordshire, England: Oracle Publishing, Ltd., 1996), p.320; see also Sexual Extremities 4 Stone/279 5 Block/SexEngland-134 6 Block/SexEngland-356 7 Henry Spenser Ashbee, (Pisanus Fraxi). The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature: Catena Librorum Tacendorum. Prohibitorum (New York: Documentary Books, 1962), /I, xlii-xliii; Bloch/Sex England -134-37, 352, 355-56; Bloch/Sex Extreme- 217-23; Braun/170-71 8 Bloch/353 9 Ashbee/vol I, xliii-xliv 10 Noyes-Bassermann/137 11 Trumbach/179 12 Bassermanm/136 13 [xxx] 14 de Vries-Fryer/141 15 Block/SexExtrem-200 16 Block/SexEngland-327; see also Trumbach/107, 157-59 17 Trumbach/136 18 Scott/205-6 19 Bloch/SexEngland-350-51; Bloch/SexExtreme-216-17 20 q/Partridge/141-42; see also Bloch/SexExtreme-215-16 21 Donoghue/215 22 Donoghue/293, n. 3 23 Stone/339 24 Trumbach/9 25 Trumbach/5 26 Burg/65 27 Burg/40 28 Trumbach/84 29 Spencer/179 30 Spencer/188 31 Stone/396 32 Trumbach/169 33 Donoghue/18 34 Stone/308, 319-20 35 Trumbach/161 36 Trumbach/69 37 Stone/308 38 Trumback/194-95 39 Trumbach/145-46 40 Thompson/55-56 41 Trumbach/69 42 Brassermann/133

43 Berg/66 44 Trumbach/70 45 Schivelbusch/89 46 Trumbach/147, 153 47 Fryer/103; Trumbach/146-47; Burg/36 48 Trumbach/139 49 Trumbach/120-29 50 Stone/380 51 Trumbach/175-77 52 Trumbach/179-81 53 Stone/330 54 xxxx 55 xxx 56 Trumbach/147-49 57 Bloch/SexExtreme-128 58 Marcus/35 59 Marcus/67q 60 Thompson/62; Thomis/177-86 61 Stone/151 62 Burg/49-50 63 Thompson/60 64 H&R, 32 65 H&R, 51 66 Sale/38 67 Anthony/xxx 68 Trumbach/155 69 Trumbach/156 70 Trumbach/157-59 71 Fryer/240 72 Flyer/241 73 Trumbach/86 74 Trumbach/87 75 Stone/332; Spenser/227; Trumbach/83-86 76 Stone/333 77 Block/SexExt-175-76 78 Spenser/221 79 Stone/334 80 Stone/380; Block/SexExt-175-76 81 Block/289, 294, 301-2, 310-20; Marcus/xx; Stone/310, 334-36, 394-96 82 Ashbee/xx 83 Kraft-Ebing/xx 84 Scott/188 85 Abbott/123 86 Abbott/124-25 87 Abbott/128 88 Abbott/131-32 89 Abbott/131-32 90 Innes/97q 91 Stone/281-82q 92 Block/SexExtre-193-98 93 Cohn/136 94 Cohn/128

95 Cohn/133-34 96 Tannahill/386 97 Ashbee/xx or Bloch/SexEngland-xxx 98 Marcus/67 99 Bloch/xxx-354 100 Braun/170 101 Bloch/xxx-338-39 102 Jacob/175 103 Block/EngSex-339 104 Stone/332 105 Fryer/242 106 Block/SexExtrem-59, 108-11 107 Lofts/15-16 108 Block/SexExtrem-63q 109 Block/SexExtrem-113; see also Block/SexEngland-292-98; Fryer/242 110 Block/SexEngland-289 111 Luber/51* 112 [Marcus/66-67] 113 Jowett/188-89 114 S-G/296]. 115 S-G/301] 116 Crary/117-18] 117 Crary/123-24] 118 Williams/34] 119 Nazarieff/10-11] 120 Williams/17] 121 Jowett/188] 122 Jowett/190] 123 Lubar/63] 124 Williams/25] 125 Nazarieff/110-11] 126 Ashbee/q-Marcus/67n]