It took me forever and a day to accomplish this, but I retooled a video I made awhile back and finally uploaded it to YouTube. It will, I hope, be the first of several such book-based presentations and, yes, this video constitutes the first of the new links I plan to activate.
The video presents illustrations and accompanying text from an old flagellation novel,Happy Tears, A Family Idyll, clandestinely produced in the 1930s. It’s chock full of whippings among family members, with everyone from parents to wicked aunties and naughty brothers getting into the act.
But bare bottom exposure is about as far as the sexual humiliation goes — well, bare bottoms and ritualized admissions and apologies, that is. There’s no other nudity and no sex whatsoever. It’s all about the discipline.
Today, we’d consider this type of novel taboo, but I long wondered if its “family setting” was less threatening to the readers of its time. The taboo of non-marital sex was so much greater during that era that, perhaps, the familial format was a safer parameter for people’s fantasies.
Incest became an all-together different animal in late 20th-century porn novel. The sexual revolution had made non-marital sex commonplace and perhaps it helped push the theme away from the comparatively tame familial setting of Happy Tears and into a more clearly more pornographic. Incest porn became far more explicit and subversive — nasty, in fact. And it flourished, clearly meeting some kind of consumer demand — in diametric opposition to the taboo itself. Today, pornographic incest novels are wildly collected, often provoking bidding wars on everyone’s favorite auction site. The taste for them has yet to abate.
Which makes Happy Tears pretty quaint by comparison.
Special thanks to Lisa V of Cinekink fame. Her early encouragement kept my interest in bringing vintage illustration to the masses alive, despite procrastination’s ongoing interference.
