A Brief History of the Scene

BDSM has been a thing for longer than you think it has. In fact there’s evidence of people deriving pleasure from pain, pursuing fetishes, ritualising sexual behaviours, and engaging in dominance and submission for pleasure thousands of years ago.

The activities we engage in now, then, are part of a long and rich tradition. You don’t need to know any history to enjoy doing kinky stuff, of course, but I’d argue it’s worth having an overview simply because:

1. It’s interesting
2. History is rife with fun ideas for play sessions
3. Knowing the roots of the scene will help you understand why it is the way it is
4. Knowing how ancient BDSM is can help you feel more comfy with your kinks

There is a lot of history to cover, by the way – and they’re making more of it every day. By necessity this overview will be extremely brief. Check the sources if you want to do some further reading.

This overview will also be heavily weighted towards recent history (the 20^th Century onwards) simply because there are more sources available covering this time period. Enjoy!

Contents

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One little clarification

A really, really long time ago

Not quite so long ago

Relatively recently

The modern day

One little clarification

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For the whole of human existence people have been whipped and tied up and sold into bondage against their will. That stuff doesn’t count. That stuff is just part of the grimness of history.

What we’re examining here, specifically, is evidence of similar behaviours (whipping, bondage, flagellation, dominance and submission) but where the goal was clearly pleasure, or where it was a desired and revered part of culture.

A really, really long time ago

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Looking back thousands of years in history, it’s difficult to be certain of anything… but a decent argument can be made that kink was an important part of the very first human civilisations.

The Goddess Inanna (also called Isthar) of Ancient Mesopotamia is often cited as an example of this. In many ways she evokes a modern dominatrix: she was a powerful woman who may have wielded a whip. Rituals devised to honour her may have involved ritualised pain and performative public sex, and she was known as (among other things) a goddess of the power of kissing the phallus.

Ancient Greek and Etruscan art is also rife with filth. Culturally, sex was a very different thing back then – it might have been engaged in not just for romance, but also as a way of firming up bonds between wiser older people and their protégés.

One lauded example of Etruscan filth is a temple in Italy, where a fresco on the wall of a tomb depicts a woman being spitroasted while her lovers spank her with a rod and a bare hand. The depiction of this act in a fresco suggests that it was considered not just fun and games, but spiritually important.

Later on in ancient India (sometime roughly around 400 BCE), the Kama Sutra was compiled. This ancient text is today thought of as more or less just a sex manual… but there’s actually a lot more to it. It provides guidance on living well, finding a suitable partner, and maintaining a relationship once it’s started.

(I say “guidance”, but a lot of it is, by modern standards, bananas. Mixed in with some relatively sensible advice on living well you’ll find injunctions to sprinkle your loved one with powdered monkey faeces, reject any woman who sweats too much, and educate yourself on the intricacies of cock fights if you want to win yourself a man.)

In addition to all this… advice, the Kama Sutra also points to elements of kink being in existence at the time. It advises that biting, pinching and scratching can be pleasurable… but that you should ask before diving right in as only some women enjoy these things. Not bad for its time.

Not quite so long ago

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The Victorians (circa the 1800s) are famously both extremely kinky and extremely repressed. It was a time when sexual matters were considered too taboo to discuss in polite society, and yet also a time when pornography, prostitution and queerness were flourishing.

During this period, in fact, many of the basic ideas about sexuality which persist to this day were first formed and formalised. Despite their reputation for being stuffy and repressed, the Victorians actually invented the concept of homo- and heterosexuality.

Porn involving whipping, birching, caning and flagellation was extremely popular during this time. Some people theorise that this is because actual no-fooling beatings tended to happen a lot at this point in history. Many people experienced being caned or birched during their schooling… and so it was only natural that it was eroticised.

Whatever the reason, flagellation was big. It had been present in pornographic material for hundreds of years, but during the Victorian era it became possible to visit brothels dedicated to whipping and birching where you could both give and receive a beating.

In Austria in 1870, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published Venus in Furs – a novel which has gone on to be widely translated and republished and adapted. Based loosely on real experiences, it tells the tale of a man who wishes to submit to a woman and have her treat him cruelly. It’s directly from Sacher-Masoch that we get the word masochism.

Venus in Furs is just one of many famous works of erotic literature that were being published at the time (despite heavy censorship). As the world entered the 20^th century, filth was rife.

Relatively recently

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Up until now, people engaging in kinky shenanigans had generally dressed themselves in whatever attire was fashionable at the time. It was only at the beginning of the 20^th Century that dedicated fetish clothing started being a thing – pioneered by companies like Yva Richard and Diana Slip. Both of these companies were famous for the elegant, strappy, decidedly kinky lingerie they produced.

The advent of World War I did somewhat put a damper on things… but once it was over everyone who had survived was definitively ready to party. And that included those in Germany. Faced with…

• Infrastructure devastated by a war
• No money
• Huge economic sanctions from literally everyone
• A complete lack of trust in government

… Germans all over the country responded the only way they could: by taking a bunch of cocaine and partying for 14 years. Welcome to the Weimar Republic.

From 1919 to 1933, Germany became a surprisingly liberal democracy. Suddenly citizens were permitted all kinds of freedoms that they never had access to before: prostitution was legalised, as was cross-dressing and the use of some drugs. At the same time, economic sanctions meant that many old forms of entertainment and indulgence (like cigars and alcohol) were off the table.

The result was a veritable explosion of sexual liberation – a period of heady self-expression that has gone down in history as a particularly wild time to be alive.

In Weimar Germany (and particularly in Berlin) you could visit wild cabarets where you’d meet androgynous performers and watch obscene sex acts carried out live on stage. For the right price you could have any kind of sexual experience you desired (man, woman, hermaphrodite, decapitated goose) delivered to your door in a limousine.

The Weimar Republic had a lot of problems, hyperinflation being just one of them, but it did a lot to advance kink culture. Alas, in the 1930s it would collapse and be replaced by a much less liberal, less fun and less (to most) sexy heir: Nazism. Sigh.

Post World War Two, we start to see things that look at least a little bit like the modern kink scene, aesthetically at least. The leather-heavy look that still persists to this day arose from the gay leather community, which itself came to prominence in the late 1940s. Many gay men had gone to war during the preceding years – and this might have played a part in the culture that arose among them when they returned to civilian life.

The war allowed gay men to meet gay men from many other countries and walks of life – leaving them keen to seek community once the war was over. The conditions under which they met might also have led to a certain preference for uniforms, strict rules and regulations, and a hierarchical structure.

Whether the war had anything to do with it or not, gay motorcycle clubs started forming in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These gave rise to the leather subculture – a subculture which revolved around the wearing of leather, relatively strict protocol, hierarchical relationships, dominance and submission, and sometimes (but not always) motorcycles too.

This was at a time when being gay could be dangerous to your health. Getting outed often meant losing your job, losing your freedom, and putting yourself at risk of physical assault. For these reasons, strict protocol and mentorship was a big part of the leather community. It was necessary to help keep people safe.

As we entered the 1960s, things became yet more liberal and open-minded… helped along the way by a scandal involving Dutch-born ex-nurse Monique Von Cleef. Von Cleef was what we would today call a dominatrix, and had been discretely providing pleasure and pain to thousands of clients (many of them rich, powerful and influential) for years. She was charged with lewd conduct and the possession of obscene materials, and in the run-up to her trial the media went wild, accusing her of being everything from a communist to a kidnapper.

Thankfully, reason prevailed, and Von Cleef escaped imprisonment. Unthankfully, she was deported from the US for more-or-less made up reasons. Perhaps America just wasn’t ready to openly accept kinky stuff going on in the suburbs of their wholesome little country. But, nonetheless, the case did a great deal to raise the profile of sado-masochism in the public consciousness.

The modern day

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Until the advent of the internet, the kink scene had always been somewhat underground. Kink-friendly spaces were limited and exclusive. Clubs and dungeons were difficult to find… and if you didn’t live in a big population centre your experience of kink was likely to be extremely limited.

The internet changed all of this. It allowed kinky people to find one another, to talk as a group, and to organise.

Much of this dialogue, in the early days, took place on the Usenet group alt.sex.bondage. This group is still around today, although it’s not very easy to access and anyone who does go to the trouble of visiting will find it overwhelmed with auto-generated spam. Boo.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, though, this forum was very much alive and well. Kinky people (mostly on the west coast of the US) started using the groups to arrange meetings – sometimes for play, but just as often simply to get to know one another. These were the very first munches. The name was coined because they often took place in burger joints, where attendees would munch on burgers.

Time passed. The internet developed and the community grew at an unprecedented pace.

In 2008 software engineer John Baku started work on the website that would become FetLife (it was initially called FriendsWithFetishes, perhaps inspired by Friends Reunited). It was a hit, and now it’s one of the biggest social networking sites for kinky people. Of course, as FetLife grew, the Usenet groups where it had all begun fell into disuse.

In 2011 Fifty Shades of Grey was published, and rapidly became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Though many people were, by this time, aware that a kink subculture existed, this was the first time something involving BDSM (or, at least, a weird delusional version of BDSM) had become massively, virally popular). This popularity resulted in a huge influx of new people to the scene.

Now, the kink scene is more or less an open secret. In many countries in the world the vast majority of barriers to being involved have lifted. People can learn about kink culture and kinky practises freely online, and there is some form of organised kink scene in many parts of the world.

What happens next is anybody’s guess… but hopefully it’ll be filthy and disgusting and uncomfortable and great.

Sources

The History and Arts of the Dominatrix by Anne O Nomis, published by Anna Nomis LTD, November 2013.

“’Pleasure Bound’: The Victorian Era’s Kinky Side” by Tracy Clark-Flory, published by Salon, February 2011. Link: https://www.salon.com/2011/02/20/victorians_2/.

“The Forgotten Fetishwear Company of 1920s Paris” by Olivia Singer, published by Another Magazine, June 2016. Link: https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/8761/the-forgotten-fetishwear-company-of-twenties-paris.

“Cracking the Whip” published by Pulp International, April 2012. Link: https://www.pulpinternational.com/pulp/keyword/Monique+Von+Cleef.html.

“The Extended History of BDSM” by Skyeler Huntsman, published by High Altitude History, April 2017. Link: https://historymsu.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/the-extended-history-of-bdsm/.