Susan Winemaker describes herself as a “nice Jewish girl from Toronto”. She majored in philosophy and the culinary arts, and presumably because the former would not pay, went to study the latter in London. But as everyone knows, learning to be a chef and being a chef-for-hire is not as lucrative as being a dominatrix, and this is where she turned her talents. In Concertina: An Erotic Memoir of Extravagant Tastes and Extreme Desires(St. Martin’s Press), Winemaker gives an account of her work in a trade of administering discipline and pain to men who think it worth, say, 150 an hour to be treated in such a way. It’s an odd career, although it is one long associated with sexuality, especially in England. It has plenty of peculiar moments and fun which Winemaker enjoys and writes about with amusement; the first sentence of the book is, “It’s 11:25 a.m. and I’m sitting on and suffocating Bernie”. The work is delivering a service for a fee, and is full of day-to-day, practical tasks just to get the job done, as in “At 2:13 I was on my hands and knees, wiping semen off the dungeon floor. At 2:17 I was eating a hummus sandwich in the garden, and answering the telephone to a man who was interested in catheters and other medical procedures. At 2:30 I answered the door to a stranger named Robert …” She was good at her trade, and had plenty of repeat clients handled with just the right degree of pain and remove. When she “blurred the boundaries” between mistress and client and took one on as a lover, the results are more disturbing than anything that happened in her dungeon.

There is plenty of food in the book, and many comparisons made between serving up a meal and serving up domination. When she was in training as a chef, she says, “I was shocked by the belligerence, the bellicosity, and the sheer violence” of the ranting of the head chef. “Hurry up!” he yells, “Sauce on the side! you’ve got the memory of a bloody goldfish.” She is amazed by the abusiveness, and commiserates with one of its targets, but gets the reply, “You kidding? I deserved every bit of it and more. We all did! I couldn’t respect a chef that didn’t whip my ass. He’s one of the best around, and don’t you forget it.” It is just the sort of attitude she would later prize in her clients. A friend advises her, “Treat the kitchen as a psychological study in power and discipline.” There are tools in the kitchen, ramekins and salamanders, and tools of her subsequent trade as well. When she sets up in her dungeon, the owner of the cottage that contains it points out and names all the gear: blindfolds, gags, belts, paddles, whips of horsehair, whips of rubber, crops, birches, and tawses. There was a cast iron chamber like a standing coffin, a leather bench, stocks, and a metal headcage that looked like a birdcage. On a trolley were nipple clamps, thumb traps, weights to be hung on the genitals, and clothes pins. And of course, there are latex gloves, wet wipes, and tissues. Serving up something delicious for the client is part of both trades, and she writes that “pain, violence, discipline and a good grasp of the trade’s tools could produce something succulent and beautiful”.

The woman who introduces her to the new profession says that the money will be good, but money must never be the only motive. “You need to enjoy what you’re doing,” she says, “it makes all the difference. Despite how it appears, you need to like men if you want to do the job and do it well… you need to care for them. You’re there to facilitate their fantasy… You’re playing a role. Don’t let it go to your head. Don’t take it too seriously. It’s a game. It’s a job. Make sure to have fun with it and you’ll be fine.” It is all good advice. She does like the game she plays as Mistress Anna and she likes the men. She had a session with “Enema Larry” who liked her to be in rubber nurse uniform, and afterwards he went to kiss her goodbye on the cheek. “I backed away just in time,” she writes. “I don’t want you to catch my cold, Larry.” The response: “Oh, but, Anna, I want your cold,” he instantly volleyed. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in the cottage. A beautiful thing to say. I loved my job for moments like that, for unexpected intimacies born of strange circumstances.” From Bernie, she enjoyed witty repartee and the sense of play. He liked being suffocated by her rubber dress, and although he seldom asked for anything, at one session, he said, “You can go really far with the suffocation this time,” and she knew how to handle the request: “Bernie, you said it, you took the words right out of my mouth because today is the day I’m going to push you like you’ve never been pushed before.” But it was a game; she knew she would thereafter “just carry on as usual.” It is illuminating that when she was preparing for her career, she not only read fetish magazines and rope-tying manuals, but also Stanislavski’s Building a Character and An Actor Prepares. She writes of the accord between her and clients, “There will be no ‘sex’ as it’s understood. It will be my job to administer pain erotically and expertly… a symphony in the background, a range of sensations assailing me, the brief connection, the spice of anonymous intimacy, the distilled concentrated moment. I respond to detail and subtlety, rules, roles, and melody. This is theater, finitude, and utterly otherly experience.” Upon enquiry from her parents, she reports that she is working within an exclusive independent theater in London, and this is a stretched truth rather than a lie; she does not mention if she prepared them for the franker descriptions in her book.

Though she is objective in describing her work, the most open and candid part of Concertina is the troubling account of her relationship with a client with whom she fell in love. In many ways, her job was no different from any other; it was demanding work with a good paycheck, but she realized that she was lonely: “I’m giving and I’m going home to no one.” But Adam was gorgeous and responsive, liking especially the genital application of two score clothespins. Outside the dungeon, they developed an intense, sadomasochistic give and take. There is even (gasp) romantic and passionate normal sex. They aren’t able to abandon domination / submission, however, and the convolutions mount. “The thought of ordering my lover to pleasure me was vulgar. I want him to pleasure me because he wants to, not because he has to, and not because it’s the role he’s playing.” The last straw is that Adam, who says he loves her cooking, admits he accidentally ate a raw chicken cutlet and didn’t notice. Winemaker eventually sees the humor in such a denouement, but the resolution of their relationship is sad and cruel. Never mind; she wants to start up a luxury porridge bar in London, and that is not a euphemism for anything erotic but rather a culinary niche that she thinks is unexplored. It would be a simpler life, and I would trust her to write about it colorfully, recipes included, but I suspect it would not result in a memoir as strange or funny as this one.

Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix
(St. Martin’s Press; January 8, 2008; ISBN-10: 0312366728)
Available at: Amazon.com / Amazon UK

© 2007 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

A billboard in Baltimore used to read, “Virgin: teach your kids it’s not a dirty word.” That it could be thought of as a dirty word, and that social forces might pay good money to change this concept, illustrate part of the ambivalent feelings our society has toward virgins and virginity. The ambivalence, at many levels, is exhaustively examined in Virgin: The Untouched History(Bloomsbury) by Hanne Blank. An independent historian (with some books of erotica to her credit), Blank says that she was working as a sex educator and wanted to find authoritative sources on virginity. Despite the medical, historic, religious, and social implications of the subject, she found few. “Even though my interests were limited to virginity and virgins in the Western world, it was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if I wanted to read a comprehensive survey of virginity, I was going to have to write it.” Her book is indeed comprehensive, and it is scholarly but far from dry, as she examines the surprisingly complicated topic of what a virgin is, and tries to make sense of why the subject has been on our collective minds for so many centuries.

Just defining what a virgin is is a tough exercise. And it isn’t just a philosophical or verbal one: “It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.” The lowest common denominator, she finds, is that a virgin is someone who has never had a penis in her vagina. There are plenty of other insertables, but the penis-in-vagina act is the one that counts (and, significantly, men, while they might be “continent” or “celibate” are seldom labeled as being virginal). The Greeks talked about the subject metaphorically and with imprecise terms. When the Christian Doctors of the Church weighed in, they did not exactly make all things clear, with Aquinas stating that virginity was part of the behavior of “chastity” and a particular quality of the virtue of temperance. Augustine said that if a virgin resisted rape, then she was still a virgin after rape. We are still confused on the issue, especially if we regard the always fascinating topic of how adolescents comport themselves sexually. A “technical virgin” may see some sort of virtue in keeping her vagina penis-free while allowing insertion elsewhere or enjoying other sexual athletics, but some would see this as against the spirit of the true definition (whatever that is). The emphasis on a potentially procreative act, rather than any other canoodling, isn’t because of any inherent biological cause, but seems to be due to social factors, like a father’s valuing his daughter’s virginity as a bargaining chip in matrimonial negotiations. Virginity renders paternity knowable; there is no doubt about who the mother of a child is, so fussing about male virginity isn’t part of our cultural history. And as fathers went, so went the society; Deuteronomy makes plain that a woman who can’t show the tokens of virginity (whatever those might be) upon marriage should be stoned by the community, and a new husband who wrongly accuses a father of offering a daughter who is “damaged goods” is fit for a flogging.

Those tokens are folkloric and not scientific. No other animal besides ourselves seems to recognize or value a condition of virginity. Sometimes the explanation given is that humans are the only animals with hymens, but this is not true; lots of mammals have them, and they have hymens that are useful in, say, sealing out water, or only opening up when the female is in estrus. No animal besides ourselves pays the hymen any attention, and this is despite that the human hymen serves no function. Probably our excessive interest in this vestigial membrane comes from our intense interest in virginity and the possibility of being able to search a woman’s body for physical proof of it. Hymens come in all sorts of shapes, and five of them even have names (annular, crescentic, redundant, fimbriated, and septate); one female may go through different shapes at different ages. Hymens can be fragile or resilient, and can be transected if penetrated, but there are no natural laws on the matter: “Not all hymens with complete transections have been penetrated, not all vaginal penetration is sexual, and not all sexual penetration causes a complete transection of the hymen — or indeed any at all.” There is no accurate test for virginity, although many have been proposed, from the supposedly physiological to the downright superstitious. “The simple fact is that short of catching someone in the act of sex, virginity can be neither proven nor disproven. We cannot prove it today, nor have we ever been able to.” Just to show how patriarchal is the interest in such tests, there is always one form of evidence that is universally considered inadmissible in the matter: the woman’s own verbal testimony.

Blank learned early in her research that conversations on virginity were always yanked to the topic of “losing it” and all the jokes and folklore that are connected with (the title of her chapter on the subject) “Opening Night”. The church was interested in promoting chastity, as were the nobles who wanted a smoothly operating society on their lands. But Blank has found nothing to verify the famous “right of the first night” or “right of the lord” that allowed a nobleman to deflower a bride before she went in to her husband. Of course there were sexual abuses of power, but no one anywhere recorded a practice of the lord of the manor taking every virgin on her wedding night. A virgin may bleed on her first night, or she may not, and no one really knows how frequently or why; this topic has been treated with such interest and has caused drollery as well as heartbreak, but we are shockingly ignorant about it. Similarly, no one really knows why sometimes first sex is painful and sometimes not, but pain isn’t all physiological: “It’s not glamorous, it’s not titillating, and in fact it’s downright mundane: studies show that women who have a comprehensive, nonjudgmental sexual education and who develop affirming, self-empowered attitudes about their own sexuality are more likely to report positive experiences when they lose their virginity.”

Comprehensive and nonjudgmental sexual education, however, eludes us in the US. “Of all the countries of the developed world, the United States is the only one that has to date created a federal agenda having specifically to do with the virginity of its citizens.” Our federal government is attempting to establish virginity as the only proper sexual status for its never-married citizens. That young people should abstain from sex is the basis of millions of dollars of federal programs; that they do not abstain, and never have, is obvious but makes no difference to those with a pro-virginity agenda. Usually such agendas come from religious groups. Funding, for instance, goes to a program called Free Teens USA, which is run by people with strong ties to the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The church maintains that any sexual activity outside of marriage is an abomination, and Reverend Moon has advocated that a woman who is threatened with rape ought to kill herself rather than undergo extramarital coitus. Less extreme religious groups may advocate virginity, but the results are poor. Abstinence programs do not reliably lower risky sexual behavior. When the Centers for Disease Control did research into programs that were supposed to reduce such behavior, none of the programs that were successful were centered on abstinence. (Since then, the CDC has discontinued such research and removed the results from its website, and its recommendations for contraception have been replaced by statements of official support for abstinence and abstinence only.) Blank’s book is not a polemic, but her enlightening historical review of western attitudes to virginity would be good reading for anyone making governmental policy about our virgins. It is also a call to remember the long confusion of historical definitions and attitudes, and that “losing one’s virginity” is probably not one physical, emotional, or psychological event, but a process of sexual development that is different for everyone and ought not be oversimplified as one coital act.

Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank
(Bloomsbury USA; March 20, 2007; ISBN-10: 1596910100)
Available at: Amazon.com / Amazon UK

© 2007 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.