The desire
to explore the limits of power and submission is not a male compulsion but a
human one.
—Erica Jong
[This electronic
document was produced with optical-character-recognition software. As
indicated, it consists of portions of Chapter 7 of Princess at the Window--FC ]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Our
The man,
whose name is Warrick, is six-foot-three with broad shoulders and rippling
muscles, He is naked except for a towel draped over his hips, and he is flat on
his back on a bed. Iron cuffs attached to lengths of chain encircle his wrists
and ankles.
Rowena, the woman, is young and slender, with waist- length
blond hair. She stands over him and shakes her head when his eyes implore her
to remove his gag. She strips the towel from him and tries to climb astride his
body, but he struggles violently and she falls back. She tries again, and this
time his resistance is so strenuous that the entire bed moves along the floor,
and his wrists and ankles become smeared with blood. “You stupid man,” she says
to him. “Why cause yourself pain over something you cannot prevent?”
She removes her clothing and tells him that, while he may
fight her, it will do him no good. She begins to caress
240
Our Secret Garden 241
him and
sweat breaks out on his brow as, despite the outrage he feels, his body begins
to respond to her. The sight of her breasts swaying above him, the sound of her
panting, and the feel of her hair on his skin all arouse him. He wages a bitter
internal battle as she slides his erect penis into her vagina. He continues to
struggle and strain. But all his willpower, all his conscious effort, is not
enough. Finally, she brings him to orgasm.
A. servant is sent to minister to Warrick’s injuries, to
bathe him, feed him and help him with his bodily functions while he remains
chained. The next night, his struggles start his wounds bleeding again as
Rowena visits him three times, coaxing an ejaculation from him on each
occasion. The following evening, she returns another three times. She examines
him closely, remarks on his body, uses him. Despite the fury that burns in his
eyes, he is powerless to stop her. Not once is he permitted to speak to hen
Later, Rowena will recall how exhilarating it was to have him completely at her
mercy.
On the fourth day, he is released, given a set of clothes and
threatened with death should he ever show his face in the vicinity again. But
the year is 1152, and Warrick, kidnapped from an inn by bumblers unaware of his
identity, is an English lord who does return—with his army. He orders Rowena
transported to his castle and locked in the dungeon. Before he leaves, he sets
fire to the bed on which he had been confined and gathers up the chains.
After spending three weeks in the dungeon, Rowena is taken to
Warrick’s room. He threatens to beat her if she faints and informs her he
intends to repay her in kind. After warning her never to interrupt when he’s
speaking to her, he orders her to strip. He assures her that, should he not
find her sufficiently arousing, there’s nothing stopping him from having as
many as ten of his men rape her while he looks on. As she undresses, she
watches him positioning
242 THE
PRINCESS AT THE WINDOW
the chains
and pleads with him, promising not to resist. But to no avail. She lies down in
the centre of the bed and he orders her to spread her legs. She’s told to
spread them wider, and he then chains each to a post. He secures her wrists and
pushes a gag into her mouth.
Gradually her trepidation subsides as he begins to coax a
sexual response from her. He caresses her gently, persistently. She begins to
arch against him. His touch becomes rougher. When he enters her, her eyes fly
open to see the triumph in his. “Now you know how it feels to have no control
of a traitorous body,” Warrick says to her. “You made me want this, despite my
fury, so I have made you want it, despite your fear.”2 Soon she is screaming in
orgasm. Afterward, she thinks it inconceivable that she found anything
pleasurable in such an experience.
Hours later, Warrick returns to the room where Rowena has
remained bound and gagged. When she closes her eyes to block him out, he orders
her to look at him. “Whenever you are in my presence, wench,” he says, “you
will look at me unless I tell you otherwise. Do not make me repeat it.”3 She is
forced to do so as a servant feeds her and attends to her other needs, but she
manages to look through him rather than at him. He punishes her by having
intercourse with her again.
The next morning, he takes her before she is fully awake.
Twice more he returns. The following day, its the same. On the fourth; she is
released from the chains, but Warrick has a reputation for exacting revenge in
excess of the crimes committed against him. Rowena, who belongs to. the upper
class, is now dressed in the clothing of a servant. She is told that she is to
refer to him as “my lord” and will be whipped if she fails to comply. She is
now his personal attendant, required to wait on him during meals in the dining
hall, clean his room and launder his clothes.
She is ordered to prepare Warrick’s bath and told to
Our Secret Garden 243
undress him. When she recoils against removing his lower
garments, he threatens to chain her to the bed again, and so she sinks to her
knees as commanded. “‘Tis quite satisfying, seeing you in that tumbled
position,” he says. “Mayhap I will have you serve me at table just so.”4
She is forced to wash and then dry
him. “On your knees again,” he says. “And take care, wench, that you do not
miss a single drop of moisture. Do I catch a chill because of your negligence,
I will beat you for it.” While she is
performing these tasks, however, it becomes clear they are both sexually
aroused. When she balks, he tells her it’s his right to have sex with his
servants “at any time, in any place.”5
He
drags her to the bed and uses his superior strength to keep her there. Then he
kisses and caresses her ‘relentlessly until, overcome with sexual hunger, she
shames herself by obeying his command to beg him to take her.
Afterward, Warrick taunts her by reminding
her of her capitulation and she thinks, “All the power was his. He had control
over her body, control over her emotions, control over everything she did. She
could not even get angry without his leave, for he knew well enough how to
frighten the anger out of her,”6 He pulls her onto his lap in the dining hail
and, in front of everyone, touches her intimately and then orders her to wait
for him in his bed. He humiliates, her by giving his daughters the fine gowns
that had once belonged to her. He tells her she is stupid. Even when she comes
to him willingly, he restrains her hands during love-making.
The above narrative isn’t found in
a pornographic video produced by chauvinists and then rented from seedy
triple-X outlets by male sex offenders. Nor has it been stopped at the border
and examined by customs agents before being allowed into Canada, despite its
blatant domination and’ submission theme. Rather, all of the above takes place
in a romance novel written by a woman for other women.
*********
As we’ve seen earlier, feminism has been heavily influenced
by people such as Catharine MacKinnon, who insists that “pornography, in the
feminist view, is a form of forced sex.”27 According to the Violence Panel,
pornography is one of a number of under-acknowledged “forms of violence”
against women. This report says that while
252 THE PRINCESS AT THE WINDOW
“Canadian
feminists have been working toward recognition of this strong link between
pornography and violence, harm and degradation of women and children,” “civil
libertarians and some arts groups” equate anti-porn measures with censorship
(the implication being that no feminists have concerns about censorship, and
that one cannot be both a feminist and a civil libertarian).28
The feminist anti-pornography lobby has been so adamant in this respect that
many people now believe it’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that
there’s a direct connection between porn and rape. It hasn’t, and there isn’t.
If you put a group of young men in a room and show them videos containing violent sexual material, their adrenaline levels will
increase and they will demonstrate a propensity to behave more aggressively
than usual. But anything that causes
higher adrenaline levels will produce the same result—including twenty minutes
on an exercise bicycle, or watching violent material with no sexual content
whatsoever. Unless we’re prepared to ban exercise bicycles, jogging and large
numbers of mainstream films, there's no reason to scapegoat porn.29
Other people consider
the fact that sexually explicit material has been found in the home of serial
rapists—or that a few of these criminals have declared, in a new twist on
"the devil made me do it" defence, that porn caused their horrific
behaviour—to be evidence of a link between crime and porn. But that overlooks the millions
of people who use pornography and don’t turn into rapists. It also ignores the
fact that some criminals blame the Bible for inspiring their crimes. If we’re
going to hold porn responsible, there can he no reason not to indict the Holy
Book as well.30 [The e-mails from Ms. Malenfant contain various condemnations
of pornography and sexual liberalism in general--but never a word against Ms.
Laframboise's views on any such. That fact is just one of many revealing how
selective and self-serving is the righteous indignation of these two people.] [Back]
According to feminist anti-porn activists there’s only one
way to interpret a photograph depicting a woman restrained and gagged. The
notion that it might be harmless
Our Secret
Garden 253
sexual
entertainment, produced and consumed by consenting adults who understand the
difference between fantasy and coercion, doesn’t even make it into the
discussion. Rather; such an image is viewed as part of a training manual for
misogynists who, according the Violence Report, force their wives or
girlfriends into similar poses once such ideas have been implanted in their
heads.31 (In Only Words, a collection
of anti-porn lectures, MacKinnon says that permitting men to view porn is like
telling a trained guard dog to “kill.”32)
Such thinking extends beyond feminist circles, In what
is known as the Butler decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1992 that
pornographic materials that place Women “in positions of subordination, servile
submission or humiliation” violate “the principles of equality and dignity of
all human beings.” It further proclaimed that “[c]onsent cannot save materials
that otherwise contain degrading or dehumanizing scenes” since, in its opinion,
“[s]ometimes the very appearance of consent makes the depicted acts even more
degrading or dehumanizing.”33
Referring to the findings of the controversial
American Meese Commission investigation into pornography, among others, the
court said that since “a substantial body of opinion” considers such material
to be harmful to women, it isn’t necessary to actually prove this. In the
court’s view, not just feminists but the Canadian public in general considers
this sort of porn dangerous.34 As a
result, such material (when it appears in gay publications, men’s magazines or
explicit videos-but not elsewhere, apparently) is illegal in this country.
In order to come to such a decision, though, Canada’s
highest judicial body first had to arrive at a moralistic judgment. There’s no
law against tying up another consenting adult and having sex with them. There’s
no law against role-playing sexual fantasies in which one partner kisses the
254 THE PRINCESS
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other’s
feet. Therefore, when the court called depictions of these perfectly lawful
activities “degrading” and “dehumanizing,” it was making a statement about what
kinds of sex it thinks are healthy and what kinds it thinks are pathological-in
the same way that some people still declare gay sex to be “abnormal.”
Next, the court accepted the argument put forward by
the feminist Legal Education Action Fund (whose brief was co-authored by
MacKinnon) that this is an issue of male freedom of speech versus female safety.35 In the name of
promoting female equality, then, the court chose to believe that men and women
are fundamentally different with respect to what turns us on-a profoundly
sexist doctrine.
Such ideas should give any thinking woman pause,
because underlying them is the notion that no self-respecting female would have
the slightest interest in sexual fantasies that involve power struggles. The
court seems convinced that no healthy woman would fantasize about chaining a
gorgeous man to the bed and having her way with him for seventy-two hours. It
clearly cannot conceive of any woman in her right mind day-dreaming about being
kidnapped by a tall, dark and handsome stranger who finds her so alluring he
can’t keep his hands off her, who is so overcome by desire that he rips the
clothes from her body, pins her down and drives her wild with sexual pleasure.
Not long ago, “pure” women - the sort that men brought
home to their mothers - were expected to view sex as nothing more than an
unpleasant duty. Those who acknowledged their own
libidos were considered aberrant. In 1858, for example, a British surgeon named Isaac Baker
Brown introduced clitoridectomies as a “cure” for female masturbation. While
nineteenth-century medical and religious authorities also condemned male
masturbation, girls weren’t simply warned that such activity would cause them
to go insane; there was concern they’d end up in brothels. 36 [Not only fear that they'd "end up in brothels",
but horror at the general prospect of female "unchastity", was the
reason for desperately wanting to stop them from masturbating. (The reporter's
word 'girls' above is unclear, but the discussion in her source for this
information, Alex Comfort's The Anxiety
Makers, contains many details of these efforts as directed at very young
females far from puberty.)] [Back]
Our Secret
Garden 255
Today, women are being told - by mainstream feminism
and the Supreme Court of Canada - that “good” girls aren’t interested in sexual
fantasies that involve domination, submission or bondage. We’re told that only
men (violent, nasty ones) get turned on by such things. We’re told that we
shouldn’t look at these sorts of images, think these sorts of thoughts or
participate in these sorts of activities, since they lead to a wide range of
social evils. We’re told that, if our sexuality isn’t as strait-laced as the
court assumes it to be, we should feel ashamed, dirty, perverted, abnormal.
But the
truth is that women do find porn -
kinky or otherwise - arousing. In 1987, Time
magazine estimated that women were renting as much as 40 percent of X-rated
videos.37 A British women’s magazine readership poll published in 1993 found
that 83 percent of women acknowledged being aroused by porn, while a joint Details and Mademoiselle readership survey that same year determined that 21
percent of female respondents enjoyed explicit videotapes and that one in four
had been tied up during sex.38 More to the point, no one remotely familiar with
the sort of contemporary women’s romance fiction I’ve described above can
possibly deny that plenty of women are interested in sexual fantasy material
that involves overt or implied bondage. Despite what anti-porn feminists would
like to believe, many women are also turned on by scenarios in which females
are kidnapped and threatened with rape.
Let’s be clear about this: female consumers are the reason the $855-million (U.S.) per year
romance industry exists.39 While men purchase most of the material we normally
think of when we talk about pornography (such as Playboy, Penthouse and explicit videos), and while we may quibble
over who reads other types of erotic literature, there’s no question that women
buy the vast majority of romance novels. If domination and submission held no
256 THE PRINCESS
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allure
whatsoever for women, if every last one of us was interested only in
unmistakably consensual sexual fantasies, the kinds of novels I’ve described
wouldn’t be readily available in every general interest bookstore.
********
Elizabeth McNeill’s
9 1/2 Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair appeared in 1978. We’re told that
McNeill is a pseudonym for the “New York career woman” who experienced these
events. The book begins, “The first time we were in bed together he held my
hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him.” The intense,
obsessive, extreme relationship that follows includes blindfolding, bondage,
spectacular sex, beatings, and public humiliation-all of which end when she
suffers a mental breakdown. The book remains popular and has engendered a
movie, suggesting that large numbers of people find such ideas arousing.
But it is
perhaps the Beauty trilogy, by American author Anne Rice, first published under
the pseudonym AN Roquelaure between 1983 and 1985, that demonstrates most
clearly that the female erotic imagination is as varied as the male one. The
first book, The Claiming of Sleeping
Beauty, based roughly on the fairy tale in which the entire castle falls
asleep for a hundred years, begins with the prince taking fifteen-year-old
Beauty’s virginity prior to kissing her awake. What follows is a novel of “tenderness
and cruelty,” in which Beauty is one of a number of young men and women
required to complete a term of sexual servitude in the kingdom of a powerful
queen. Tormented
THE
PRINCESS AT THE WINDOW 268
by female
as well as male masters, the slaves are routinely slapped, spanked, paddled and
lashed in these novels, which feature both heterosexual and homosexual sex.
They are required to perform demeaning tasks and are subjected to ritual
humiliations.
Women have been dealt a full share of all those qualities
that make us human-the ones we are proudest of as well as those that most
disturb us. Each individual possesses these qualities, although they may differ
in strength from person to person and ate affected by the way other tendencies
combine and interact within our psyches. That there are people-both male and
female-who are left stone cold by the above sorts of explicit material is
beyond dispute. - Noting the enormous variety of sexual responses among
individuals, anti-censorship feminist Carole Vance has formulated what she
calls her “One-Third Rule.” She says:
“show any
personally favored erotic image to a group of women, and one-third will find it
disgusting, one-third will find it ridiculous, and one-third will find it
hot.”51.
Among those who are turned on by such material, there
is infinite variety as well. Many people are titillated by specific elements
and repulsed by others. Some individuals are so discomfited by their positive
response that they’re barely able to admit to it. Others happily imagine, read
about or look at drawings, photos and videos of dominance and submission
scenes, but stop there. Some enjoy play-acting these sorts of scenarios with
consenting adult partners, while others push things even further by
participating in activities that approximate the real thing-as the author of 9
1/2 Weeks did. As
well, there are a minority
of individuals
who step over the line from legal to illegal activity, who force unwilling
sexual partners, or children, into taking part in this sort of activity. It is
at this point that such behaviour becomes morally objectionable, that the term “violence” becomes
appropriate. [Sadly, the fact that it is
so easy to misstate oneself, and even easier to be misread by others, does not
deter a person who is determined to accuse someone.] [Back]
Our Secret
Garden 269
Although raised as a Roman Catholic, I abandoned the
Church during my teen years because I wasn’t prepared to accept its view that I
should feel guilty shout impure thoughts as well as actual deeds, While murder
is a terrible crime, I don’t view murder mystery writers--who think about these
matters a great deal--as having sinned. Nor do I believe that an actor who goes
through the motions of killing someone is guilty of any transgression. There is
a difference between thinking about something and actually doing it. There is a
difference between fantasy, play or pretence and the real thing. In the words
of one of the men interviewed by Wendy Dennis for Hot and Bothered: Sex and Love in the Nineties:
...I find the idea
of overpowering a woman sexually and taking her against her will extremely
erotic. That’s rape, and I would never dream of acting on that desire in
reality because rape is vicious and horrible. There’s a difference, though,
between having an erotic desire and acting on it. A fantasy is a pretend
story...52
Dennis
begins the first chapter of her book with the following: “I won’t divulge all
the dirty details of my sexual fantasies here, just a few choice tidbits. I
will confess up front, however, that they’re not even marginally politically
correct [original italics].” She goes on to explain that, over the years, she’s
had difficulty reconciling the content of her submissive fantasies with the
modern, assertive woman she knows herself to be. “In the juiciest variations, I
willingly submit while Mongol hordes of broad-shouldered, masterful, slavering
men do unspeakable things to my body,” she writes. After interviewing hundreds
of people in cities across the United States and Canada, Dennis reports that
what we humans find sexually arousing runs the gamut:
THE PRINCESS AT THE WINDOW 270
.what’s “interesting” to some is
conventional - beyond words to others. If I tell you, for instance, that some
couples revitalize their sex lives by lighting candles in the bedroom and
taking baths together, some of you are going to think that’s baby stuff. If I
tell you that some couples watch porn regularly, or make their own dirty
movies, or make dirty movies with other couples and watch them together, some
of you are going to say that’s disgusting while others will say, “Yeah, tried
that...what else have you got?”53
When Dennis
asked people specifically about their sexual fantasies, she found no less variety:
I heard female fantasies that involved a woman
masturbating in a roomful of guys, being tenderly caressed by two adoring men,
being the only woman on a plane hijacked by Iranian terrorists and being
savagely “taken” by them in the cockpit, having her pussy licked by a German
shepherd, seducing an uninitiated teenage boy who was hired to clean out the
garage, servicing a hundred guys in a hotel room, all of them eating beer and
pretzels and waiting for their turn. “I assure you,” she hastens to add, that
the people “having these fantasies are solid citizens and contributing,
productive members of society.”
As a rebellious teen, I was also disinclined to feel guilty about being sexually active before I was married
just because the Catholic Church said I should. There are a great many
things in this world that are unjust or otherwise unacceptable, that are worth
getting upset about, but
(assuming
that people take precautions against disease and ---->
Our Secret Garden 271
are
responsible about birth control) in my view sex isn’t one of them. We all do enough things in our
lives that we should rightly feel ashamed of, there’s no need to add con-
sensual sex that harms no one to the
list--regardless of how bizarre it might be.
[Back]
Some of us like spicy food and exotic flavours, while
others prefer simpler fare. Similarly, people who abhor horseradish no doubt
find the slogan on the label of one brand that talks about enjoying “tears of
happiness” incomprehensible. Why would anyone want to eat food that practically
curls your hair, they might ask? How could it possibly be a pleasurable
experience? I suspect the answers to such questions have much in common with
why some people enjoy being spanked or fantasize about having another person at
their mercy in a sexual context.
*******