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Loading... Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticismby Deborah Lutz
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) mahallett | May 29, 2021 |  I don’t believe she succeeded here. Yes, the Victorians were profoundly different to some extent. But the mores of the era reverberate today, in art, literature, religion and public attitude. This isn’t a 101 book. The author jumps into a description of the life of Gabrielle Rossetti, casting it in a fictional tone. The first part of the book devolved (for me, ymmv) into an alphabet soup of Important Victorian Characters, most of whom I was only glancingly familiar with and some I’d never heard of. It took a while to sort them all out. The author’s contention that the collaboration of these people – Rossetti, William Morris, and explorer Richard Burton, among others – created an atmosphere that eventually became the underpinnings of the gay rights movement is marginally persuasive. Sexual behavior that we think of as “liberated” were, as Lutz tells us, all there in Victorian London. They were just an open secret. And sometimes prosecutable at law, depending upon your politics and patrons. Overall, the writing was not as smooth as I would hope, and Ms. Lutz handles the conflict between thematic narrative and temporal narrative by ignoring it, to the detriment of her work. But there is much to take away from this exploration of Victorian sexuality and the arts. (  ) KarenIrelandPhillips | Jul 10, 2011 | "Something like 50 percent of the pornography of the time was flagellation pornography. There are lots of different theories about that. One is that these gentlemen who went to private schools like Eton were whipped for punishment as kids. If they did something wrong they would be publicly birched -- a collection of birch branches tied together would be used. The boy's pants would be taken down and he'd be bent over this special block and it would be public. Any schoolboys who wanted to could come and watch. For many of these boys, of course, it was traumatic, but for other boys it's an erotic experience. It developed into this masochistic eroticism. Another aspect is that middle-class and upper-class men were expected to be very controlled -- to control their emotions, their servants and their women -- and women were expected to be submissive. So I think a lot of men found themselves wanting to lose control, wanting to be the one who was controlled." Interesting, right? Not that there's a shortage of bondage porn nowadays (or that's what I've heard from, y'know, other people), but it's not 50%. Weird-ass old Brits.  AlCracka | Apr 2, 2013 | no reviews | add a review
At the height of the Victorian era, a daring group of artists and thinkers defied the reigning obsession with propriety, testing the boundaries of sexual decorum in their lives and in their work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhumed his dead wife to pry his only copy of a manuscript of his poems from her coffin. Legendary explorer Richard Burton wrote how-to manuals on sex positions and livened up the drawing room with stories of eroticism in the Middle East. Algernon Charles Swinburne visited flagellation brothels and wrote pornography amid his poetry. By embracing and exploring the taboo, these iconoclasts produced some of the most captivating art, literature, and ideas of their day.As thought-provoking as it is electric, Pleasure Bound unearths the desires of the men and women who challenged buttoned-up Victorian mores to promote erotic freedom. These bohemians formed two loosely overlapping societies--the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes--to explore their fascinations with sexual taboo, from homosexuality to the eroticization of death. Known as much for their flamboyant personal lives as for their controversial masterpieces, they created a scandal-provoking counterculture that paved the way for such later figures as Gustav Klimt, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Genet.In this stunning exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, revealing how they uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women's emancipation, the dissolution of formal religions, and the pressing need for new forms of sexual expression. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.77094209034Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love Practices Biography & History EuropeLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.92)
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