Long before the acronym BDSM was in use, long before people recognized that many of their fantasies and fascinations qualified them for a clinical diagnosis as a sadomasochist, pulp fiction offered all the erotic thrills of today's BDSM fiction.
One could factually argue that the biggest difference between pulp readers of yore and BDSMers of today is that we abide by "safe, sane and consensual" while such concepts were unknown in pulp fiction, which often included violent, terminal (fatal) fantasies.
But, to my mind, the most fundamental difference between the BDSMers of the middle decades of the 20th century (from the '30s to the '80s, primarily) and contemporary BDSMers is that we have a word (acronym, actually) to describe ourselves, a word that doesn't carry the connotation of evil or wrong.
Yet we really are the same people. We thrill to the same dark and wondrous spectacles of black leather and smoky rooms, fetish boots and lustrous garments, thick ropes and unbreakable chains, sinewy whips and wooden crosses that thrilled them. We want to see the blood and sweat of sex, to hear the screams and see the tears, just as they did. Only we know who we are and what we are doing and that knowledge gives us a power over our own sexuality that previous generations did not possess.
While in 2009, we can find consensual representations of BDSM on the Internet, in 1959 we collected books and magazines about violence and atrocities. Pulp fiction traded on the near-universal fascination with SM but it was part of a culture whose knees were still locked by Victorian sex phobias. BDSMers of the 1930s and 40s, and really up into the early 1980s, hid their pulp magazines, creeping off to secretly masturbate in attics and locked bathrooms, believing that sadomasochism was a sin and unsure of the difference between SM for pleasure and violent rape.
I think that by knowing who we are, and by having a name for ourselves, BDSMers have made an enormous and unprecedented psychological transition in the past 80 years. Self-awareness allows us to take responsibility for what we do. It allows us to distinguish between pleasure and harm. We know the difference between Abu Ghraib and a BDSM dungeon party.We can make BDSM fit with our moral codes. We no longer believe that kinky sex is the opposite of love: we see that kinky sex can be a form of love. We don't have to be ashamed of ourselves anymore because our models are not violent criminals: our models are happy people who enjoy sexual intensity for the sake of pleasure. We know how to take the nearly universal impulse of sadomasochism and transform it into something joyous, passionate,and loving.
Today, I'll be sharing some vintage images of SM, pulp-style. In style and content, many of them are remarkably similar to the fantasies overflowing on UseNet and other smut repositories. I'm really curious (and would appreciate hearing from as many of you as are willing): If this was all the stuff you could ever get to satisfy your BDSM fantasy needs, how do you think it would affect your attitudes about BDSM?
(I'm going to repeat the question in each of today's posts, so you can respond to any group of images I'll be showing.)
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