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As a collector of erotica and “curiosa,” an old bibliophile’s codeword for the pornographic, I come across a lot of unusual publications. Some are historical interesting — like a rare pre-Civil War erotic novel — and some are downright silly. I figure one way out of my blogging inertia might be to start a Tawdry Tuesday where I share tidbits from and about books I’ve collected. And to start things off, let me share four flagellation images from the 1934 Falstaff Press edition of Iwan Bloch’s Sex Life in England.

Falstaff Press was one of several clandestine publishers that produced books out of depression-era New York City. Run by Ben and Anne Rebhuh, Falstaff specialized in the risque and “anthrolopgia” and traipsed that fine line between scholarly and prurient. A arts-and-culture website’s wiki entry provides a sound run-down of what’s known about Falstaff Press.

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Although by today’s standards, Sex Life in England would appear tame, it was one of those titles that flirted with the prurient, largely because of its cabinet of illustrations as end contents. The flagellation illustrations I’ve posted here range from the seriously rendered to caricature. Hard to imagine that this is the kind of stuff that would stop the U.S. Post Office in its tracks and arrest someone for distributing such stuff, but such were the times when the Comstock law was in effect.

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Iwan Bloch was a noted author and sexologist from pre-Nazi Germany. He was a contemporary of fellow sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Sigmund Freud considered his contributions on homosexuality key to looking at sexual orientation from a non-pathological stance. I suspect it gave some level of legitimacy to Falstaff Press in the eyes of government suppression, but not much, given the fervor of the law. Although he was responsible for discovering the presumed-lost manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade and he was an early biographer of the notorious figure, so who knows.

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I happen to like Bloch’s Sex Life in England because it’s a what’s what and who’s who of English erotic literature — although I chuckle at chapter titles like Highly Spiced Titles of Erotic Books, Secret Pornologic Clubs in England, and The Greatest Erotobibliomaniacs in England [and] Their Fabulous Erotic Treasures Described. Sure, it lacks the bibliographic depth and details of highly scholarly work, but it’s still informative. So much so that I have two copies of Sex Life in England in my library — one in collectible condition, the other clearly beat-up but perfect for reading and research.

I’ve posted jpegs of the table of contents from Bloch’s book at my my Flickr account. Stop by and view the breadth of Bloch’s research yourself!

From the Times description of Bergner, I half expected the book to be something of an Average Joe’s look at sex, but what I got was sound reportage instead. Bergner profiled four different paraphilias — foot fetishism, female sadism, pedophilia, and amputee attraction, delving into each and their psychology with a fair amount of courage and curiosity.

Yet I came away with mixed feelings and a good deal of respect for what Bergner accomplished in Other Side. I found myself torn over the foot fetishist’s dilemma in his book. Here, a man was chose chemical castration to end his tormented arousal for feet, a fetish so strong that the mere mention of the word foot made the fellow hard. Regardless of context. My sex-positive side ached to see the guy cognitively talk himself into self-acceptance, but his shame was so strong and his arousal so inconvenient that he chose otherwise.

When Bergner moved on to female sadism, my first reaction was “The Baroness? Not again!” She’s a personage that pops up time and again in books when the author wants to explore sadism. Plus, she reminds me of actress Molly Shannon. A lot.

But I quickly saw what Bergner was doing: He was focusing on the rarest of creatures in the BDSM realm of things, the female sadist. And The Baroness is apologetically that.

To my surprise, Begner’s exploration at The Baroness’ side gave me a few unexpected finds. First, and perhaps most thought-provoking, when he quoted psychological schools of thought, he fell back on 19th-century KrafFt-Ebing and Hirschfeld, which stopped me in my tracks. You mean there isn’t anything more current? Really.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It might mean that the sexual expression of recreational BDSM is so acceptable to the psychiatric profession that it isn’t worth exploring. That maybe it no longer rises to the level of paraphilia. If so, I find that refreshing.

Nonetheless, I suspect The Baroness will come across to the uninitiated as unduly extreme and S/M as the frightening whips-and-chains of old. Her tales of extreme play — especially the roasting of a human pig-on-a-spit — will cloud the minds of the uninitiated. They won’t see her sober compassion for the street outsiders of her neighborhood, her capacity for soulful lust and love.

Be forewarned: The Baroness is not for beginners.

Bergner really challenges his readers when he explores the nature of pedophilia. When we hear the word, we don’t think fetish, we think crime. Bergner himself struggles with the subject, walking a tightrope between objective reporting and the knee jerk of his own parental protectiveness. However, he uncovers some fascinating findings in the process. Unlike the BDSM section where the psychiatric literature is old and dated, much of the literature about pedophilia is current and ground-breaking, suggesting that the mystery of pedophilia could be unraveled by continued hard work. Some findings suggest the disturbing possibility that pedophilia, for repeat offenders, might be an inborn trait, but it’s clear that sex crimes aren’t a one-size-fits-all. For every hardcore, inborn pedophilia, God only knows how many are one-timers acting on impulse after having lost all sense of boundaries. All deserve prosecution. But we must at least consider that what leads a person down this path is a varied as any other sexual motivation.

Is pedophilia an uncomfortable topic to explore? Without a doubt. Is it so distasteful that it compels us to remain ignorant? I think not. Let’s be more courageous than that.

Bergner waxes most compelling when he examines amputeeism. At face value, an amputee attraction appears extreme, like a fetish twisted into the strangest of perversions. For the reader, it’s like a car-wreck — you can’t help but watch. However, Bergner pushes beyond the rubber-necking to show us that the oddest of fetishes isn’t necessarily superficial. Out of tragedy, a woman amputee finds identity and acceptance when she poses for fetishists. And when she meets a photographer who has longed loved amputees, couplehood forms. Out of the depth of human existence, mutual fulfillment arose and a happy ending was had.

Which left me to ask myself, “Who am I to judge?”

Perhaps that’s the best message of Bergner’s book. Sexual attraction is a complex and varied beast, and perhaps we should be less quick to slap an quick-and-easy label on every little variation. Yes, let’s keep a strong sense of criminal victimization for such acts as pedophilia. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Let’s be a touch more discerning and knowledgeable.

The Other Side of Desire is a good place to start.

You can, however, find entertainment at the Ravenous Romance website where a new story “Hot Fling” is yours for the taking. I’ve downloaded it but because I want to read it on my Sony Reader, I need to set aside some time and convert it from PDF to .rtf. Maybe later today. (Even I need a break from my own delightful havoc.)

Because I’m either writing or editing all the day long, I’ve spent my evening unwinding with the new television season. I’m enjoying House M.D and trying out Fringe. Have Heroes taped and will watch it tonight, although all the men in my life claim it’s gotten too weird for them and don’t want to watch it. Bleh to them.

But what I’m really, really enjoying is the new season of Torchwood via Netflix. Especially since Jack Harkness’ sexuality is on the snoggin’ upswing. I just hope it doesn’t come too obligatory; I’d hate to see his bisexual lust reduced to one man-on-man snog per episode. That said, the reunion kiss between Jack and a fellow time agent was HOT. Do yourself a favor and watch this video starting at roughly the 45-second mark.

Now, you see, if Marvel superheroes had done this in the comics when I was a kid (and, later, as a much younger woman than I am now), they would’ve made a lot more sense to me. I always rolled my eyes when two superheroes met up for the first time. They also went off on a testosterone-sparked fist-fighting frenzy (oh true believer), bashing the brawn out of each other before discovery they were on the same side.

Had they fought and then snogged? Now that would’ve made some kind of sense to me — if for no other reason than its erotic heat.

And with snoggin’ on my brain, it’s back to sloggin’.

Which reminds me: I need to set up a blog listing mechanism where I can drop people’s press releases and announcements. I get a number of them, many from friends and colleagues, and I need to set up a vehicle for quick and easy display.

Oh and the NY Observer article was entitled “Smacking Foreheads in the Night” A Sexual Narcissist Remembers”? A passing nod to the new John Waters movie? It got me wondering.

* And I can’t find their archives. Can you?

I know I’ve been diverted with my short film (Or would that be video? What’s the difference, film folks?), a spate of family birthdays, writing my novel, etc., but I’m still surprised that I almost missed this sex flap. Leave it to the NYT to point it out, eh? At first, I thought it was one of those “west of the river” incidents which don’t always make the east-of-the-river editions, but a little investigating showed that it was indeed in the entertainment section of my paper. What started as a high profile exhibit became a copyright vs. public domain via appropriation battle, complete with our local outre art machine weighing in on the matter. It’s one hell of a coincidence — art meets familial privilege and power. At least it wasn’t over the sexual content, just over the inclusion of real, identifiable people.

Oh, and this little ditty? Can you say sex scare? Sure, some kids are hooking up and, just like a lot of their curriculum, certain sexual behaviors have been “pushed down” to younger ages. So teens aren’t waiting for college or the local working class bar to engage in casual sex. Maybe our abstinence programs have scared them off relationships rather than sex. You think? Really, it’s little more than a flap, given the numbers cited.

It started whenKinsey published his two volumes of sex research, a effort that resonated with the public conscious, perhaps even being a “right thing at the right time.” After all, sexology manuals were available to the American public since the 19th-century days of American free thinkers.

Maybe Kinsey’s books resonated because they weren’t simply “here’s your body parts, get to know them” manuals. Instead, they documented enmass what kind of sexual activities Americans had engaged in. And most mometously, he dared to document and publish volumnous material about women’s sexual experiences, behaviors, and preferences.

Hey, when a book like Sexual Behavior in the Human Female got coverage in Redbook*, you knew something big was happening. (Note the other cover topics for a glimpse into 1950s American mores.) One wonders how much further taboos and prudery might’ve weakened had Kinsey lived to publish a volumn on same-sex practices. The data was there, the possibility of a book was talked about, but Kinsey’s heart and the Rockfeller Foundation’s and the National Research Council’s courage gave out too soon.

Well, as long as we have John Waters doin’ his stuff, I guess we’re OK.

And while I’m sliding into a light note:Jeb Bush, you ol’ rascal you! Now if you’d just get rid of minority voter suppression in Florida, you might be alright in my book.

*Note the subtitle of the magazine. Back then, we treated young adults as if they were mature enough to handle information. Today, conservative forces don’t allow us much differentiation between children and adults. You’re either one or the other, determined more by your marital state than your chronological age. And, yes, I might scan and post the Redbookarticle in the near future. Today’s a tad too busy for it.

Until then, I’ll content myself with T.C Boyle’s new book, a fictional account of Kinsey’s life. Funny, but I keep reading how unflattering James H. Jones’s “Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life” was to the man. Frankly, I thought it did a good job outlining how Kinsey drew his research methodology from zoological school of thought, a technique that had its shortcomings but was never clearly or definitively dismissed by later schools of thought. (And, hey, just open the butterfly drawers of any natural history museum and you’ll see that research approach perserved every bit as much as the samples within.) Obsessive? Perhaps and likely it combined with his analytical nature, resulting in his drive for knowledge. And, to put it another way: I doubt what obsessiveness he did have didn’t rise to the level of needing an SSR. I doubt his detractors would decry the man if, instead of sex, he had poured his behaviors into economics or conservative policy. But because he poured it into sexology and made a substantial impact on our culture, he’s almost the pariah that Planned Parenthood is.

I didn’t find Kinsey’s little masochisms detracting either. If anything, it ran parallel to his notion that no sexual practice is truly deviant. And his own sexual experimentation versus the pristine, detached image he tended to project? Hey, you’re looking at “the closet” in action. We tend not to see it that way because it held married straight swingers, but it was the closet of its time. Which makes me think that the closet for queers and other sexual minorities must have been in the moth-ridden rafters of a crawl space.

One significant reason I never found Jones’ book unflattering is because I know plenty of people who engage in the same practices that Kinsey did and, well, I see it as “normalized” already. Seeing any one of my friends and loved ones on the street and you wouldn’t know who sticks something up his pee hole or which couple does full swaps on a Saturday night. It was, frankly, impossible for me to see Jones’ description as purile.

Of course, if you’ve rarely deviated from the missionary position and go to church three times a week, I’m sure you’d feel differently. (Too bad nobody’s collecting the sexual histories of the conservative religious segment of our population.

Psst. I have a secret: My new favorite bisexual cartoon hero is Brock Samson of Venture Brothers’ fame. At first I thought he was strictly a womanizer, what with the famous tented erection in his boxers, but when he engineered a bondage and fisting scene with the pirates of the Sargasso Sea?* Well, that just changed everything. And that’s some bone-breaking sphincter he’s got!

Yum. * See episode guide.

FYI: I’m sick with a yucky headcold and although I’ve made it passed the sore throat phase, I’m now in the cough-and-chills phase. Blogging will be light to nonexistent for the rest of this week — just like the first half of this week. Sorry ’bout that.

But I’m having trouble reading this Jenna Jameson review. Because a long time ago, in a newspaper near to me, the Sterns were the Sunday magazine food writers. I know they’ve moved on, tackling popular culture topics left and right, but I’m having a hard time reading this review without hearing their old “food review voice” coming into play. It makes some of their statements read facecious; I can’t tell whether their making the old subtle digs within the facade of a compliment as in days of old. Weird.

Some time ago, I caught wind of today’s youthful swinging scene via Naked Loft Party. I said then that, forget that it makes me feel old to be beyond their demographic, I was pleased to see them making their own way in the sexual world. And when I caught VH1’s The Secret World of Swingers a couple of weeks ago, it only reinforced my sense of it all. For the first time, I saw a scene that didn’t look highly predatory; it looked pretty egalitarian. The predatory nature of some individuals in the scene of my age group is the single most turn-off for me when it comes to swinging. That and I need more personal intimacy than sport fucking appears to allow. Of course, it’s possible that the documentary ignored any predatory overtones and maybe it’s still there, but what can I say? I enjoyed the portrayal it did present.

Question: Do we really want to get rid of 527s? Do we?

Then it tracks the trials and tribulations of getting backers for a movie that’ll be rife with real life sex. Note to Hollywood backers: I go to see as many unrated or NC-17 movies as possible. Last seen: Young Adam. And the movie theater was packed. There’s a market out there but you, dear backer, need to get some balls.

And then Zane comes out. Well, sort of. She’s finally doing a book tour now that she’s published well over a half-dozen novels. I understand her need for domestic privacy — it can be tricky, navigating the waters between the big ocean of being totally out and protecting the shore of family when you write sexually explicit stuff — but I’m glad to see her profile. Or head shot. Or whatever. But honestly? I haven’t bought or read a Zane novel. I don’t need to to admire her. She knew where the publishing industry wasn’t serving the African American woman and she single-handedly created what was lacking.

Finally — and saving the best for last — sex is finally getting noticed as all the publishing rage. It’s been building for some time, what with Zane, chic lit, general erotica of the post-feminist kind, but it took Jenna Jameson and the impending release of Melissa P’s autobiographical work to blow the lid off the steaming pot. Good. Maybe now more agents will move erotica from their “not interested in handling” list to their “hot for” list. Me, I just hope Melissa P’s work doesn’t read like every other European smut work I’ve tackled in the last few years.

Bugmenot for the NYTimes: iwethey.

Tomorrow: A few words about Dick Cheney’s few words.

To read of Legman’s legacy while listening to the very man who has renewed a government assault on pornography is, if not ironic, certainly a strange synchronicity.

When I was a young teenager, I had a couple of horses, and my friends and I would spent long summer afternoons riding through the meadows along the Connecticut River. One of our favorite forbidden stops was at a certain outhouse. It was an old, decrepit thing that tilted to the right, but it still did the trick of providing the necessity respite to the farmers and their field hands. Early in the summer, we’d stop by and peer into this decrepit building to establish our baseline awareness of what dirty jokes and poems it held so that late in the summer, before the potato harvest commenced, we would know what new little dirties had accumulated on its walls during the labor-intensive tobacco harvest. Rarely were we disappointed.

Oh, for such simple summer traditions!

I’m not at all sure where or when I first learned about latrine scrawls, but I remember it was as much as hobby for my girlfriends as it was for me. I remember them telling me about sneaking into men’s rooms or overhearing their older brothers or simply remembering those rare gems they’d find in a women’s room, but what I keenly remember was their subversive glee and, me being younger than them, their willingness to clue me on this esoteric knowledge. Later, as we grew a touch older, we’d occasionally find ourselves in separate stalls in a working class restroom rife with scrawlings. We’d shout out the dirtiest of them to each other while peeing in an subtle competition to see who had lucked out in getting the best stall. Back then, “best” had nothing to do with cleanliness or whether the toilet flushed.

Today, my kids would be absolutely embarrassed to find such clandestine goodies, what with so many of today’s public loos scrubbed to a pristine gleam.

Now I’m not going to suggest that everything I learned about sex, I learned from dirty jokes. But they did satisfy my curiosity about sex as they became part of a larger repertoire and awareness. And, of course, fond memories of giggling with my girlfriends can’t be discounted.

Mine was a curiosity that endured. In later teen years, I’d routinely ask a boyfriend, upon his return from a restroom, if he saw anything clever in the stalls that he could share with me. The most enduring and endearing of boyfriends, knowing my tastes and appetites, would indulge me, but more conventional boys would likely dump me after the next date. (Begging off, no less, with the “price of gas” excuse. How little things have changed.)

My teen years brought me another discovery: that of what my father’s family did after the little kids went off to bed at family gatherings. To my surprise, they sat around and told dirty Polish jokes. If, as this article claims, dirty jokes can be ascribed to our neuroses and compulsions, then my father’s siblings may have found a healthy way to excise the pain of being outsiders, the result of their father’s radical decision to marry outside of the Catholic faith. It got him excommunicated and consequently made him dead to his family and my father and his siblings never knew their paternal relatives. The jokes gave shape (however twisted it might’ve been) to the ethnic identity they’d been robbed of and at the same time allowed them to mock their fate while also validating their ability to survive the pain of exclusion. Group therapy of the best kind, if you ask me. Today, though their ranks have greatly diminished, they remain the most jovial of folk.

But for me, the kid who grew up with only sporadic contact with these long-distant jokesters, the dirty joke gave me avenue into their circle of adulthood. The punchline became the icebreaker and knew no generational boundaries. When I greeted them at my wedding reception some twenty years ago, it went along the line of, “What’s long and hard on a Pollack?” “Third grade.” Later, other more reserved attendees commented to us about “that rowdy table that laughed a lot,” only to blush to they learned it was the bride’s family.

Far more recently, I’ve had the odd fortune to run across Legman-like devotees of the dirty joke collecting via ebay. Bid on the manuscript collection that pops up on rare occasion and they’ll email you, whether you win or lose the bid. Why? To see what jokes you might have in your possession that you might care to trade for like items. Invariably, I don’t have anything for them, what with my fleeting interest in the topic, and I’m certain I’ve come across like a newbie when I typify my response with a mention of the 1927 Humphrey Adams edition of Anecdota Americana. Invariably, they come back with how common that book is, which editions they already own, etcetera, etcetera.

At first, I thought these devotees were a tad creepy, sort of like those socially-deficited fetishists I occasionally run across, and maybe they are. But after reading this appreciation and better understanding the bibliographic nature of this collecting, next time I’ll be a kinder, gentler newbie.

Because, who knows, maybe these are the kind of guys who wouldn’t have freaked when I asked them about the bathroom walls on a first date.**

* See also Michael R. Goss’s treasure trove of a website.

**And they would know, unlike the author of this article, about the circa-1928 George Routledge edition of Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae and the 1968 Awards Books mass market paperback edition and the 1879 Isidore Liseux edition. But hey, libraries are cheaper than antiquarian booksellers.

I suppose, though, the bigger question is: What’s wrong with my Queerdar and why isn’t it working better? For now, I’m blaming the cold and flu medicine I’m taking.

One reason I like to run into sexual renegades whenever possible is that, as a writer, I get pretty isolated. I wish I could organize more contact and makes friends or at least enjoy a casual run-in. (“Hey, cool t-shirt. Did you go to the recent roundevous?” That would’ve been my line, had I acted on my suspicions at the bookstore.) Still, every so often I get a much needed pat on the back. The latest came when I opened up my Venus Book Club monthly brochure and saw it highlighted my contribution to Maxim Jakubowski’s Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 with “[a]nd in ‘On Hallowed Ground,’ a carnally charged couple tours a cemetery, giving the epitaphs on the grave stones their own naughty spin…”

Yeah, that feels good. Needed that.

I was also surprised to see that the new Master/slave anthology edited by N.T. Morley is a flip book! Yeah, it’s gimmicky but gimmick even now and then is fun. Besides, can you imagine the number of Masters who are going to read the book right side up while their kneeling submissives have to read their pages upside down? (I scanned the catalogue graphic because it shows the flipbook format; the online entry doesn’t.)

But damn! Next time I have to say something to the guy in the bookstore. Woof, at the very least!