“Attractive young woman wanted for nurse role-play and domination. No experience necessary. Good $$. No sex.” It was an ad at the back of The Village Voice in 2002, and it caught the eye of Melissa Febos, a college student at The New School in New York. She had done her share of jobs other students were doing, like working in bookstores or coffeeshops. She was interested in better money and was also inherently interested in breaking rules and taboos. The ad represented her start of four years as a dominatrix, years that she chronicles in a thoughtful, funny book, Whip Smart: A Memoir(Thomas Dunne Books). For those of us who won’t ever be answering such an ad, or hiring the services of such a one as Mistress Justine (Febos’s work name), this is an introduction into a strange world that only exists because it fills a need. Febos has insights into the men who make such a business possible, and into her own capacity for dishing out pain and humiliation, but suffice it to say that she doesn’t explain everything away; there is enough strangeness here for anyone’s curiosity, and it makes Febos’s book a page-turner.

Febos learned that another resident of her apartment in Brooklyn was a dominatrix. “Aside from a few tame experiments with handcuffs, I had no concept of what this meant. What was the job description for a dominatrix?” Ever the student, she started doing research into magazines that “consisted of erotic stories and advertisements for ‘dungeons.'” She could tell from the pictures of the glamorous models that they didn’t really work in dingy cellars. Eventually, she worked up the nerve to ask her neighbor about the job. The neighbor was going to law school (“She looked so normal“) and her ability to negotiate two such different worlds immediately appealed to Febos. The neighbor explained that there was not actual sex, though the work was sexual, and the money was good, and it was easy to get hired, but it was hard to keep the job. “Domming isn’t for everybody,” she warned, and that was yet another goad for Febos.

Answering the ad, she showed up at the sprawling Dungeon of Mistress X, though she admits she was “at a loss for how to dress for such an interview.” It was, indeed, no dank and dusty cellar, but “a high-styled big-budget dream,” the lush stuff of fantasies. “Excitement folded through me in waves. I had to work here.” Her introduction into the Red, Black, and Blue Rooms is very funny. Shown a table with leather upholstery and metal rings, her guide explained that the top of the table is a lid that opens. “For storage?” Febos asked. No: “For slaves. It doubles as a coffin… If you’re lucky, you get to tie them up – gag, blindfold, the works – and stick ’em in there for most of the session.” So much hardware: “Mounted on the walls were hooks from which hung leather floggers, whips, ropes, riding crops, paddles, cuffs, blindfolds, and even a couple of gas masks.” There were a dizzying array of stocks, a riding saddle, cages with locks, mirrors, a giant wooden cross, strap-ons, stilettos, nurses’ costumes, and more. “Reeling, I wondered how I’d ever remember the names of all this equipment, let alone learn how to use it.” There were plenty of monitors to keep track of traffic in the hallways, elevator, and entryway. There were managers on shifts who took the phone calls for bookings, on an hourly wage with commissions for booking clients. Mistress Justine (Febos enjoys the irony of having the name of one of De Sade’s decidedly non-domme heroines) could expect $75 wages for an hour’s session, plus tips that might be $5, might be $500.

The men were not the social outcasts she had expected. “They were seemingly normal. The majority of them were married fathers, and they were nearly all professionally successful. My client base consisted of stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, rabbis, grandpas, bus drivers, restaurateurs, and retirees.” Their diverse needs she saw as compulsive, but routine, just an itch that had to be scratched. One good tipper merely wanted to arm wrestle for a half hour. More than one client wanted to play a kid who needed a spanking because of a call from a teacher for schoolroom naughtiness. Another common fantasy was to have Mistress Justine play “the high school bitch,” a role she enjoyed, one of the “most requested bullies, along with mom, stepmom, teacher, babysitter, and nurse.” One client, “filthy rich and dumb as wood,” had plenty of sessions “and never tired of the same scene, the same lines. Sometimes I would blindfold him just so I didn’t have to make all the facial expressions.” One had a sweater fetish, wanting to be swathed in sweater pants, underpants, booties, and all, and then tied up. The men would want verbal humiliation, or enemas, or spankings, or other abuse. They must have been having fun at some level, fun that is hard for the rest of us to understand. One client, in stirrups and nipple clamps while getting a catheter installed, “did not look like a man indulging in lascivious pleasure. He looked like a man suffering from painful constipation.”

She says of her high school bitch role, “Don’t mistake my enthusiasm for identification; I was not this type of girl in high school.” It’s all an act. When people asked about her work, the first question was always, “Do you have sex with them?” (No.) The second question was always, “Do you do it because you’re into it?” (No.) “It’s an acting job,” she explains to a date. “Probably one of the most reliably playing acting gigs in New York,” an explanation that always got a chuckle. Like any job, some of it was fun. “Pretending to admire a 250-pound man in a ratty wig and pink muumuu with lipstick smeared on his teeth and pretending enough to play his lesbian seductress often required rigorous effort. When I had another mistress to share the burden, that effort was paid mostly to prevent hysterical laughter.” But sometimes it was just work: “Relentlessly spanking someone for an hour is grueling.” And it wasn’t any fun cleaning up messes. But the job brought in money, and intangible results: “Being a dominatrix so quickly became a part of my identity.” She liked being wanted. She became comfortable in her body and she enjoyed having female friends at work. She did homework at the dungeon during down times, and her grades were good.

Her personal life, though, was a mess. She was using some of the nice money she made to buy heroin and cocaine, and Febos describes the effects of the drugs with detail but not drama. She is also matter-of-fact about getting to AA meetings, increasing her honesty within the abstinence program, and staying clean. She might not have been “into it” at the superficial level of getting off sexually on the scenes she played, but there was a deeper level to the power games. “I torture people for money and I can’t stop,” she says as a shock introduction to a new therapist, and eventually she does stop. She had the feeling that she had completed her anthropological investigation, and she had gotten the benefits of conquering her shyness. She won’t be going back to that scene, because now she is herself teaching writing in college. Her students who exhibit curiosity about their teacher’s past will find plenty of models of colorful descriptions in this volume, along with sometimes lacerating introspection, as well as astonishing depictions of peculiar behavior handled with tolerance and sometimes even affection.

Whip Smart: A Memoir
(Thomas Dunne Books, March 2010; ISBN-10: 0312561024)
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

© 2010 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

If you are like me, you take off all your clothes in order to change into other clothes, to bathe, to sleep, or to make love. You do not get naked to advance your religion, nor promote a good harvest, nor to support a political or social cause, nor gain money, nor participate in artistic display. There are, however, plenty of people who have done such things and continue to do so. In fact, throughout history people have taken their clothes off for reasons more than quotidian, and in fact, a history could be written about such stripping, and in fact, such a history has been written. A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion Books) by Philip Carr-Gomm is full of surprising reasons people get naked, and funny ones, and practical ones, and sensual ones, and many more. What might have seemed a topic that was too simple to repay extended thought turns out to have many subtle (and not-so-subtle) facets. The author, who has written many serious and academic tomes, says that when his friends learned the subject of his newest book, they wanted to know what could possibly be said about it. He has found plenty to say, and for the most part avoids any academic stuffiness; this book is as fun as history gets.

One reason that Carr-Gomm can exploit the subject in so many ways is that it is universal; all of us get naked from time to time. Another reason is that the subject is full of contradictions. Without your clothes, you might well be embarrassed in some situations, or you might feel confident and powerful in others. Religion has emphasized the shamefulness and lust associated with a naked body, and yet some highly religious people have abandoned clothes in a show of innocence, lack of shame, or denial of materialism. Nakedness can mean abjection, with nothing left to lose, but it may also be a show of power, which makes it good for political protest. Being naked is often quite the antithesis of titillation, as visitors to nudist camps will tell you, and yet in most places in the world, if you take off your clothes in public you will be arrested. (Notable exception: Public nudity is a recognized right in Barcelona.)

It is famously known that witches practiced their wicked rituals naked; there are plenty of pictures from the time of the Witch Craze to show us how they did so. There is scant evidence, however, that there was any sort of an actual witch religion. Far more likely is that any depravity of witchery was found in the minds of the witch-hunters, who were happy to imagine their prey committing all wickedness, and naked to boot. The belief of naked witches did give such artists as Dürer an acceptable reason to portray female nudes. Nakedness has been used as part of an initiation rite, as can be seen in the puzzling frescoes of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries, and in Mithraic cults, and even in Freemasonry. Carr-Gomm himself is a participant in modern Druidism, which sometimes fosters naked ceremonies, but the modern Wiccan movement is more famous for ceremonies performed “skyclad.” It is a surprise that this term, which Carr-Gomm rightly says “is so much more romantic and poetic than the starker terms naked or nude,” is actually borrowed from Indian religion, some of whose followers are known by a word denoting “clothed with the quarters of the sky.” It is more of a surprise to recognize the role of nakedness in more familiar religions that are not known to promote the shunning of clothes. There must be sects nowadays that baptize only naked candidates, but the early church drew on Jewish immersion rituals that required nakedness; St. Hippolytus of Rome, for instance, wrote around 200 CE that those to be baptized had to be without clothes, and also the women without jewelry. St. Cyril a century or so afterwards said that such nakedness for baptism was an imitation of Christ’s nakedness on the cross. Isaiah underwent three years of nakedness as “a sign and wonder,” and in the seventeenth century, other Christians were shocked when some Quakers explicitly followed his example.

Such nakedness partakes in the contraries of humility and power, a two-fold punch that protesters have used effectively. One of the most famous examples of this probably never happened. Lady Godiva sympathized with tax protesters, but her husband said he’d only change the tax laws after she rode through the streets of Coventry naked. Naked people, especially naked women, have ever since used the power of being in public to get their points across without even the defense of clothes. An antiwar protest group Breasts not Bombs happily displays the former, with the sensible idea that anyone offended by seeing a breast but not by seeing young men killed in warfare needs an adjustment of opinion. In India in 2004, forty women marched naked to protest murders and rapes by soldiers. The protest was reported, but few Indian papers carried photos of the women, with one commentator noting that the press could not abide showing naked women protesting, but delighted in showing cheesecake of naked women deliberately posing. There are many protests of this type, of varying degrees of importance and indignation, but most of them seem to have been initiated by women, not men. It is a Godiva syndrome: “… the act of a woman deliberately baring herself in order to make a statement is more powerful than if a man were to do the same, and indicates a deep level of commitment to a cause, on behalf of which she is willing to override her instinct to maintain the protection of clothing.”

It is more fun to consider nakedness for fun’s sake. There isn’t much here about private nakedness, but plenty about the more-or-less organized nudist (renamed by many “naturist”) movements, which consider sunshine and fresh air far more healthful than purported propriety. Those who attend such groups have little interest in shocking anyone, and kept in their own confines, they do not; it is hard to imagine a more harmless enthusiasm. Nonetheless, it seems threatening to some people. “The Welsh Harp Incident” occurred near the Welsh Harp Reservoir in outer London in 1930. A mob of clothed people attacked the nudists who were bathing at the reservoir, shouting, “Not even cannibals would lie about in that condition! Hottentots would behave with more decency: you are a rotten lot of dogs!” (One assumes they did not shout in unison.) Even more fun is nakedness for the sake of a prank, streaking, which Carr-Gomm has traced to 1804 when college student George Crump ran naked through Lexington, Virginia. He became a Congressman. Students have continued to follow his lead, but the phenomenon seems to have peaked in the 1970s; after all, hundreds of naked students all running at the same time has far less shock value than one naked person running onto a football field. There is a nude rugby game held annually in New Zealand, and sometimes a naughty clothed person streaks across the field, only to be tacked and subdued by the players.

You can find out here about the disadvantages of nude air travel (no hot drinks were served by the attendants). You can see the famous picture of Michael O’Brien who streaked a rugby match and was arrested, with a thoughtful bobby doffing his helmet to place over the streaker at just the right location to allow a photograph that could be printed in the newspapers (in a pose which looks very much like Roman soldiers leading the naked Christ to Golgotha). Erotic films are barely mentioned, but the influences of The Calendar Girls and The Full Monty are examined, wholesome films that showed that taking off one’s clothes publicly can be heroic and generous. There is an explanation of the work of Spencer Tunick, who gets huge numbers of volunteers to disrobe so he can take pictures of the mass, often within well-known settings. John and Yoko’s famous pictures are here, along with one of the performers of “Puppetry of the Penis.” And here you can learn Lyndon Johnson’s nickname for his penis, which he displayed in a Zen response to a reporter’s question of why he continued to bomb Vietnam. Thoughtful and funny, here is a history book taking a unveiled look at varieties of a human universal. Not only that, but the beautifully-produced book seldom goes three pages without an illustration, and the illustrations are consistently of naked people, not always handsome (although plenty are) but always using a lack of clothes to provoke, amuse, or enlighten. So does Carr-Gomm’s book itself.

A Brief History of Nakedness
(Reaktion Books, May 2010; ISBN-10: 1861896476)
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

© 2010 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.

Marriage seems so much a given in our society that it is peculiar to question how essential it might be. And yet, if it were completely natural, would we have to have calls for laws to defend it? If it were everyone’s basic nature happily to conduct a monogamous marriage, would we need such legislation as tax breaks to support it? Why would we need to threaten to stone adulteresses? Why would marriage need sacramentalization by churches? Even with such social support, why can we expect half of marriages to end in divorce? If the family unit of husband, wife, and children was so essential, why is it present in less than a quarter of households? The answers may be that monogamy wasn’t part of our ancient ancestors’ culture and that we strain to instill it into our own. This is among the lessons in the provocative and entertaining Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality(Harper) by psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá, themselves a married couple. If we look at such evidence of how our chimp and bonobo cousins conduct themselves or how our anatomy (male and female) is designed, we can get ideas of how humans comported sexually as foragers, in the thousands of years before just a biological blink of an eye ago we settled down to farm. The authors have given a guided tour of current research into these topics, and although the 300 pages of text deal with some weighty biological and social ideas, the summary here is engaging and presented with good sense and good humor. Even if you are determined that yours and everybody else’s marriage ought to prosper and continue, and that marriage must be politically defended at all costs, you are bound to gain insight on why this is so difficult for many of us to accomplish.

The very first quotation in the book is from The African Queen, where Katherine Hepburn in the role of Miss Rose Sayer proclaims, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Hardly. Oh, humans are special, and spectacular at times, but we have trouble accepting that we are merely one particular kind of ape. “Like bonobos and chimps,” say the authors, “we are the randy descendants of hypersexual ancestors.” The resistance to accept nature has played a role even in modern evolutionary psychology, and the authors critique what they call the “standard narrative of human sexual evolution” which goes like this: boy meets girl, the boy measures her for youth and fertility and the girl measures him for wealth and status, and they form a long-term pair bond during which she is alert for any sign he might abandon her and he watches to make sure any children she bears are his. Researchers say they have seen this pattern in one culture after another, but the authors show that it can be seen as a response to social conditions, modern social conditions. By modern, they mean in the past 10,000 years since the development of agriculture; but humans have been existence twenty times longer than that, and before farming, we lived in small groups on a large and fruitful Earth.

It’s not the picture of the benefits civilization has bestowed upon us. The authors repeatedly turn to Thomas Hobbes’s famous definition of the primitive state being poor, nasty, brutish, and short. They do so only to show that the hunter-gatherers probably experienced none of that. The groups lived communally, and members didn’t need to own things, and they didn’t need to own spouses. They would have engaged in multiple ongoing sexual relations; this is what chimps and bonobos do, as do the few remaining hunter-gathering communities left. There used to be more such foraging communities until western ideas of property and propriety were forced onto them, but it is pretty easy to find missionary priests writing about how shockingly little the newly-discovered natives cared about marriage or fidelity. There are species whose males beat each other up and the winner gets to mate, but our ape branch competes another way, at the level of sperm itself. (This is bound to be a lot less bloody and a lot more fun.) The large size of human testicles and the large volume of ejaculate produced are dissimilar to the monogamous gibbons or gorillas. A human male produces hugely exaggerated amounts of sperm and semen because he wants to wash out semen deposited by any predecessor. In fact (and there are labs where artificial penises and artificial vaginas are employed to demonstrate this), the glans of the human penis is designed to help displace the semen it finds in a vagina before depositing its own. Not only that, but there are researchers who analyze the different spurts of ejaculate, beginning, midstream, and ending. The spurts are of different chemical content, with the first ones having white blood cells and antigens that can cancel out the final spurts sitting there from a predecessor. Monogamous animals just aren’t that interested in sex, mating rarely because there is no competition. Humans think of sex frequently and act upon the thoughts frequently, not the monogamous pattern. Did you ever wonder why with men supposedly on the prowl and keyed up for sex that it is the female who tends to make the most noise during the act? “Female copulatory vocalization” of many species is a topic researched by biologists with microphones, and humans fit nicely into the category of those who advertise coitus in this way, an activity many of us take pains to practice in private. Why advertise in such a fashion? To welcome all comers. The men, glad to let their sperm fight it out, got off on the general sex party, and that might be a reason that among the most popular forms of video pornography you can find are of multiple men and one woman. It is all a process of natural selection, but in a way that Darwin would not have expected. Darwin (and the authors reassure us that they are not Darwin bashers by any means) was a product of his times and saw pair-bonding in a monogamous light, but even he allowed that some sort of communal marriage was the original way of doing things.

So why did we ever give up our promiscuous paradise? (The authors remind us that “promiscuous” need not be pejorative; it comes from a root word meaning simply “to mix.”) It does not take an evolutionary biologist to know that sometimes people do things for short term gain that fail to benefit them in the long term. Settling down on a farm meant stability, and a relatively constant food source. Surprisingly, it might not have meant better health or nutrition, for the farmers didn’t forage for that wide range of foods available in the wild. It may have been that before farming, they didn’t have an idea about how sex made babies; some current foraging tribes, for instance, think that the developing fetus is helped by different men planting their contributions during the pregnancy. With possession of domestic animals, however, the lightbulb may have gone on, and possessiveness for offspring may have started. Cue the politicians. Cue the armies.

It is unclear where we go from here. The authors themselves say, “We’re not advocating any particular response to the information we’ve put together. Frankly, we’re not sure what to do with it ourselves.” It might be that our impermanent or unsatisfying marriages are the simple result of a societal distortion of a previous pattern of communal families and child-rearing, and some groups, of course are trying polyamory and group living. There is surely something wrong with a marriage in which, for instance, a spouse has an affair and the immediate response of the partner is to assume all is irremediably over and to pack up and leave, but that’s a frequent pattern. There are marriage therapists who themselves propose the dire dichotomy of “love it or leave it.” It’s not what our ancient forebears would have done, and in some societies (think of France) having relationships on the side is an accepted pattern. With tolerance, perhaps wedlock can be more pliant and not break with stress. Perhaps accepting how we are equipped with hunter-gatherer morals will make such tolerance easier to get.

Sex at Dawn
(Harper, June 2010; ISBN-10: 0061707805)
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

© 2010 Rob Hardy. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.