Venus in Furs (1870)

"You interest me. Most men are very commonplace, without verve or poetry. In you there is a certain depth and capacity for enthusiasm and a deep seriousness, which delight me. I might learn to love you." (20)

This line really jumped out at me, because it's just what I imagine a lot of nerds imagine some lady will say to them some day. And they'll be like yeah! I have a depth and capacity for enthusiasm! I was just waiting for someone to notice! I bet nerds really like this book, which was written by a nerd and then translated to English by a different nerd.

You know that old defunct Tumblr, "Nice Guys Of OK Cupid"? It was a collection of dating profiles from guys who were all "I'm so nice, why don't any women love me? I would treat a woman like a goddess but I guess they don't want to be treated like goddesses, they all want some asshole instead! Women are such bitches, because they don't love me!"

Masoch can't stop quoting this one line from Goethe, "You must be hammer or anvil." He thinks that "Woman demands that she can look up to a man, but one like [our dorktagonist Severin] who voluntarily places his neck under foot, she uses as a welcome plaything, only to toss it aside when she is tired of it." (105)

The problem here isn't with Severin's (or Masoch's) particular fetish, which is to have ladies whip them. That's fine, man, have your fun. The problem is that he extends it to some kind of conclusion about human nature that's not at all true. Women do not by nature demand either to look up to a man or toy with them. (Men aren't like that either.) That's a dumb idea. Here's another thing that's not true: "Man even when he is selfish or evil always follows principles, woman never follows anything but impulses." (43)

And it's boring! God, for a book about whipping there is none too much whipping. Instead there's a whole lot of him begging to be her slave, and then her treating him vaguely slave-y, and then him getting all indignant, and then her all "Well see, you're being a dick about it," and then him being all "Oh, you're mad at me, treat me like a slave," and then we circle back around to the beginning like fifty times. Wahhhhh.

If you flip the characters' genders in your head while you're reading, the book goes an awful lot like that 50 Shades thing does. (I know more or less how it goes from hearing a million readers and feminists get all pissy about it. It's hard to tell who's more offended about that book - readers or feminists.) But there's a funny twist at the end (spoilers follow for this and I think 50 Shades too): you'd expect a female protagonist to win over the guy and be with him (one way or another). But here, she just dumps him. She's all "I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his innate strength" (23) and then she runs off with a dude who's just like that. So Masoch's kink assumes that one who has it isn't enough to satisfy a woman. That's weird, and probably kindof a bummer for him.

So this is a book about a self-defeating fetish for being controlled, born out of a weird hatred and fear for women. It's unpleasant, and boring, and all too familiar because I still hear that shit today, from miserable nerds.

Lame, dudes. Lame. ( )

Note this book is free and in the public domain.

What an oddity! In short, this is a story of beauty and the beast with whips. The plot is simple. Boy meets girl, boy begs girl to be slave, girl makes boy slave, the book ends. Many reviewers state this was tastefully done and doesn't include explicit sex scenes. Then there is the strange title. Venus is easy to figure out - but fur? I'm not sure how the author arrived at this conclusion, but fur is a symbol of tyranny and cruelty in the book. This is why Venus/Wanda only whips her male slave when wearing furs. Weird! I should also mention this was published in 1870.

The beginning and ending of the book is set in the present, while the majority of the book is a flashback to the Venus story. There is a little twist at the end, but the strength of the book is its characterization and emotion. Although it can be melodramatic at times, readers get to passively experience the mind of a masochist. Things become more interesting, when considering the author was a masochist himself. We actually get the word masochist from the author’s name; an Austrian psychiatrist coined the term based on the author perverse behavior he was known for. Even stranger, the author asked his wife to act out the contents of the book in real life. Not surprisingly, the author eventually died in a mental institution.
( )

Venus in Furs is a bad book.

Like seemingly all of the underwhelming literature before 1900, it is a pointlessly nested story about a “supersensual” man throwing himself in the arms and the hands of a briefly reluctant mistress. Beginning with a sinister attempt at levity, it ends as a rather self-unaware farce including a lover hiding behind furniture. That awkward drollery is detrimental to the subject, and the inherent ridicule of the 19th century does not help ; I much prefer incidentally an other short story by the same author about a tragic voivod and his merciless queen in the Middle Ages, but I cannot remember the title and possibly it was not even by Sacher-Masoch ; anyway Venus in Furs's characters themselves express their longing for more primitive times, where lust and passion had more stark, unironic overtone.

So if even the author could see that why did he put them in the 19th century ? It's like setting an action movie in the 21st one ! Is it a stupid satire or what ?

Fornication, of course, is very much a laughing matter ! or at the very least a smirking matter. But Sacher-Masoch cannot manage a smirk, or even the deadpan which lends a goofy gravitas to most preposterous stories of throbbing flesh. No, he is too pygmalionically enamoured with his own subject, telling his story with love-struck eyes and dropping jaw, and both extremities of the tale suffer from it.

There is room for moments of grace in a story with a bad beginning and a sloppy end ; but an eighty-page story that does not make much room, unfortunately. Such moments are there, though.
Magically magnificent purple prose oozes from the page on occasion, such as the most magnificent sentence of all “ she even gave me a kiss, and her cold lips had the fresh frosty fragrance of a young autumnal rose, which blossoms alone amid bare stalks and yellow leaves and upon whose calyx the first frost has hung tiny diamonds of ice ” (by the way, the word of the week is whithersoever). Outrageous situations and the narrator's violent torments did echo somewhat in my jaded soul. And at least we are spared the triviality of explicit copulation, Gott sei dank ; it's all heaving bosom and such.

Venus in Furs is a bad book. But for a while, it manages to be a good bad book.

Also a funny thing is that Sacher Masoch fills his story to the brim with never-mentioned again Jews, without even portraying them negatively, which would have been more understandable given the context, or positively for that matter. He just sees them everywhere. Go figure. ( )

Due to the study « Psychopathia sexualis » of the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, « Venus im Pelz » came into an unwarranted imbalance. More than a hundred years after this novel was written, there is a broad knowledge regarding the different types of sexual experiences. Deviations of the so called « Normal » are of low social acceptance. But persons, who like to play sexual games, will have no scruples trying out the harmless proposals given by Ritter Leopold.

Much more relevant than I expected.

As a Domme who deals with all kinds of sexual masochist I found this 137 year old novel a much more useful insight into the mind of male masochists then Stephen Elliott's "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats me Up."

Leopold is more aware of his own inner emotional state.

I'm am amused to see how many reviewers think this book is not "erotic" because it does not contain graphic descriptions of sex. I think what those reviews fail to realize is that, for some people, descriptions of humiliation and abuse *are* sexual.

For some people this is a very hot scene: "To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship."
"And who on that account maltreats you," interrupted Wanda, laughing.
"Yes, who fetters me and whips me, treads me underfoot, the while she gives herself to another."
"And who in her wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why not? This final tableau doesn't please you so well?"
I looked at Wanda frightened. "You surpass my dreams."
"Yes, we women are inventive," she said, "take heed, when you find your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you more cruelly than you anticipate."
"I am afraid that I have already found my ideal!" I exclaimed, burying my burning face in her lap. ( )