The English Vice

Minutes before he’d started throwing up over the fabulous Persian carpet in his Manhattan penthouse, my banker-friend K. had promised to take to exercise and clean living in 2009. I’d marvelled at his low cunning—the ability, even when blind drunk, find the words needed to contain his khoti’s righteous morning-after wrath.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that I heard the Bitch-in-Chief, as he fondly calls her, bragging that she’d got him to deliver on his word. B-in-C had the smug air of a woman who has finally beaten a good man into submission. I knew better. Based on the certain knowledge that K. wouldn’t work up sweat on account of anything other than a platoon of naked Uzbek Houris, I asked the B-in-C for his the address of his “gym”—and off I went.

Miss Victoria wasn’t Uzbek—but the minute I laid eyes on her, it was clear just why K. was there. Beautiful, blonde and blessed with a body built for Oriental Contortions no Uzbek Houri could ever have imagined, Miss Victoria cooed in delight at the prospect of having a fine gentleman as myself “exercise” at her establishment. Having relieved me of my credit cards, she signed me in—and swung open the doors to Paradise.

What I saw froze my blood, and shrank my killi to the size of a pea. K., trussed up in a black leather gimp suit, was performing push ups. Each time he failed to drag himself off the floor, one of Miss Victoria’s stunning assistants would, with a languid flick of her arm, horse whip him within an inch of his life. All around, there were men screaming with pain—or was it pleasure? “I ache for the brush of her lips”, K. said, with the helpless air of a man who has crossed the frontiers of all reason, “but I ache for the crack of her whip”.

For the first time, I looked at the name on the registration form Miss Victoria had handed me: Slavercise.

Now, it isn’t as the idea of tying up people and whipping them is alien to my watan. My dear friend, the Maharani of B., took no small small pleasure from flogging the peasants at last year’s mango-harvest time, when the uppity so-and-sos demanded money, will you believe it, to pluck the fruit.

And there’s Muharram, of course. Back in the Pind, they take the whipping stuff seriously. The flagellants would march down the street to the Masjid, each determined to demonstrate their neighbourhood’s abiding grief about the unfortunate events of 680, A.D.

Ya Ali! Ya Husain!, they would rhythmically cry.
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
Jor Sey Kutto Behan Dey Lodon [Hit harder, you sister-fuckers], the flogger-in-chief would shout out periodically, to the shirkers
Ya Ali, Ya Husain
etc. you get the idea.

At first, I thought the existence of Slavercise was a symptom of the Protestant distaste for sloth which runs through Jesustan—a distaste which manifests itself in a veneration of exercise, cold showers and outdoor discomfort that is just as unhealthy as the fat-fetishism I have earlier written on. But on closer inquiry, it turned out that this was a facile analysis.

In my watan, the infliction of pain is what god intended it to be: an instrument of punishment; a means of control. Its experience, be it in the mango orchards or at Muharram, is merely a dress-rehearsal for the larger agony we call life. In Jesustan, though, pain is a choice—an aesthetic of profound spiritual significance.

From Piety to Pornography
We desis have long known that White Master enjoys a strange relationship with the whip: its not for naught, after all, that the urchins on Janpath run after goras with enormous leather hunters in their hands.

Like all good stories, the story of White Master’s and the whip begins a long, long time ago. During the tenth century, historians tell us, flagellation was as core a part of monastic practice as prayer. Indeed, psalms and prayers were often recited as monks and nuns were flogged.

Processions of flagellants also travelled Europe for periods of thirty-three days, enacting the years of Christ’s life. Prophecies of the coming apocalypse were in vogue then, as they are now; the flagellants hoped to reduce their time in Purgatory and to ward off ailments like the plague.

Through whipping the body, one attacked the home of the devil, and thus drove out Lucificer—to the delight of god, the angels, and any deviants who happened to be watching. From various thirteenth century accounts, we learn that the flagellant was often naked, in a ritual remembrance of Adam and Eve in the state of nature. As such, flagellation was a means atoning for Original Sin, and of seeking the intercession of the Virgin through sharing in the pain of Christ’s Passion.

From around the fifteenth century, though, flagellation began into fall out of fashion—in no small part because the Spanish Inquisition deemed the practice heretical and began executing its practitioners. Flagellation was thus driven underground. But this pious act was kept alive by underground orders of gynopygian clerics, mainly Jesuit, who saw it as an essential tool for exorcisms.

Two hundred years later, whipping would have a magnificent revival in that glorious media for society’s most secret secrets—pornography. Much of this revival was inspired by the famous scandal of Catherine Cadiére. In September, 1731, Cadiére was sentenced to death for witchcraft—and then released, to public applause, a month later. Cadiére’s health had been ruined by the plague of 1728, and she began to suffer from what she believed to be possession by the devil. The Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste Girard, whom she met in 1728, undertook to deliver her from evil—using a whip and his penis. He was later investigated for abuse. In an effort to protect the church in general and the Jesuits in particular, though, Cadiére was tried as a witch.

Divine ecstasy and profane ecstasy—the spiritual experience and the orgasm—were shown to be intimately entwined in the course of this revival. Pornographers of the eighteenth century added the whip to the iconography of the nymphomaniac nun and the debauched Priest—all well known, the English-medium types among you will know, from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer onwards—thus tying together pleasure and desire with pain and punishment. It was, it takes little to see, a uniquely Christian pornography. In popular imagination, the Marquis de Sade is seen as a libertine; his sexuality was, in fact, that of a Christian ascetic.

The English Vice
It was among the Angrez, though, that the tender art of flagellation reached its finest flowering.

In his 2007 work, In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier notes that the widespread upper class embrace of whipping made England the “homeland of flagellant tendencies”. He notes that brothels in continental Europe labelled their flagellation services an “English education”. Flagellation was, the historian Ian Gibson noted in his 1978 classic on sex, shame and beatings in Victorian England, “The English Vice”.

Unique to British flagellation was its very public practice: this was not practice secreted away in the brothel. The author Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote at great length of his fond memories of being whipped at Eton. Eighteenth century English doctors recommended whipping as a therapeutic instrument to treat melancholy, epilepsy, mania, and increase blood flow—which it indisputably does. Whipping, Largier reminds us, was also recommended in nineteenth-century martial guides as an instrument of conjugal intimacy: six of the best, it was widely held, was just what was needed to get the Khoti all hot and sweaty.

Gibson, in the noble cause of seeking to end corporal punishment in British schools, railed against flagellation, arguing in White Master’s whip fetish “as with all sexual perversions, we are dealing with a form of arrested development, with a prephallic fixation that puberty and subsequent experience have been unable to dislodge”.

But is it? Its entirely possible, for example, to argue that many normal heterosexual marriages far exceeded in their pain that so far inflicted by the most hard-wielded whip. Yet, no one characterises marriage as a prephallic fixation.

Khair, we often see whips-and-leather masochism as a furtive activity, hidden away in sordid brothels. In Jesustan, though, it is increasingly occupying its rightful place, sanctioned by history and culture. Slavercise isn’t the only service offering the sweet touch of the whip to enhance your workout; establishments like Stiletto Heel Workout offer competing services. There are clubs and associations like flagellants; one site even offers them the opportunity to put up happy photographs of their holiday flogging experiences.

In Jesustan, it is clear, the pursuit of pain is taken as seriously as the pursuit of happiness (or what passes for it). We have much to learn from White Master in this, as in other things.

All about child sex

“He laughed uproariously when his nanny wagged his cock with her fingers”, wrote the physician Jean Hérouard in his chronicle of the Emperor Louis XIII’s childhood. It was an amusing trick the child seemed to enjoy. Later, Hérouard—physician to Louis’s parents, Henry IV and Marie de Medici—noted that the Emperor-to-be “in high spirits made everybody kiss his cock”.

It is near impossible to be blasé while encountering Louis’ highly sexualised childhood—so ably documented by the social historian Philippe Ariès in 1965. In our world, the conduct of Louis’ caregivers would constitute child abuse, plain and simple. Even someone like me, who can think of few more pleasant ways to pass the time than having a French nanny in a nikki-nikki skirt kissing my killi, has to admit that the thought of her doing so to a three year old is profoundly disturbing.

Part of this has, of course, come about because of a recognition of the scale—and damage—inflicted by child abuse across the world. But part of our loathing for the conflation of the words ‘sex’ and ‘children’ is also historically conditioned. Ever since the nineteenth century, childhood has been reinvented as a space segregated from the adult world by a wall of innocence. In the centuries that have passed since 1604, when Louis was three years old, we have built a culture that sundered childhood from sexuality, Sigmund Freud’s best efforts notwithstanding.

But now, the young of Jesustan are fighting back. With the grim determination of a generation determined to set right a great historical wrong, they are shagging on the beaches, in the mountains, in school toilets, and on their parents brand-new leather sofa-sets. Late last year, Louisiana teenager Brittany Phillips even stabbed her 35 year old boyfriend because he just wouldn't give it to her. Fortunately for middle-aged men, about half of Jesustan’s children will have managed to get laid before they receive a high-school diploma.

To my mind, all is well and as it should be—after all, Dada-ji and Dadi-ji were rolling about in their parent-funded, Pandit-sanctioned manji at the age of fourteen (not always sanctioned; there was the time Nani-ji had a fling with a Pathan dry-fruit seller, which I'm told left idli-dough all over the kitchen walls, but khair, I digress).

Most people in Jesustan, though, don’t agree. Back in April, the situation alarmed President-elect Barack Obama—who will replace Beloved Leader later this year—enough to talk about addressing the problem through a “focus on abstinence, where we are teaching the sacredness of sexuality to our children”.

I’m not sure what he meant by the sacredness of sexuality—personally, I like it as profane as possible, although I must try to do it to plainsong or Vedic chants one of these days—but I suspect the phrase suggests Beloved Leader’s long shadow will be upon us for some time yet.

Back in 1996, Jesustan’s national panchayat authorised an abstinence-only programme to combat teenage pregnancies—a programme that, instead of handing out birth-control pills or just splaying the brats, put up $ 50 million a year for promoting Virginity Pledges (last year, it was up to $ 204 million).

It all began in 1993, when the Southern Baptist Church—beloved of Beloved Leader, and beloved, evidently, of Barack—set up an organisation called True Love Waits. “True Love Waits”, its website states, “encourages moral purity by adhering to biblical principles. This youth-based international campaign utilizes positive peer pressure by encouraging those who make a commitment to refrain from pre-marital sex to challenge their peers to do the same”. By signing its Virginity Pledge, adherents promise to live “with sails raised for revival”—as opposed, presumably, with their penises rampant.

Variants on the Virginity Pledge flourished, all subsidised by public money. For example, an organisation called the Silver Ring Thing issues—no, you dirty-minded bastards, not that—silver rings with Biblical exhortations urging teenagers not to dip their wick in the first available chick. Silver Ring Thing also holds classes explaining “how God can help young people overcome temptation in their daily lives, how to support one another and what to do when tempted to give into sexual pressure”. Sic., I should add, it is pressure: not pleasure.

Last year, though, a study by the Johns Hopkins University demonstrated what any idiot could have told Congress: that you just can’t trump teenage lust. Teenagers who pledged to avoid sex until marriage were as likely to have intercourse as other U.S. adolescents, the survey found. In fact, kids who took the pledge also were less likely to use birth control pills or condoms than those making no promise. Fifty-three percent of the teens in the pledge group said they had engaged in premarital sex compared with 57 percent of those who hadn’t taken the pledge. Eighty two percent percent of those who had taken the oath simply denied five years later that they had ever done so. “The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, just in case anyone had missed the point.

But what is in fact driving teenage sex in the United States? Here, the tale takes a twist

Not long ago, Time broke news of a “pregnancy pact” made by teenage girls at a school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which led to seventeen students—most aged younger than sixteen—ending up expecting babies. Investigators found that the girls had decided to have children together, both in an effort to deflect adult opprobrium—and, evidently, to give their unbearably boring lives some meaning. “Some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were”, Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told the magazine.

Teenage pregnancies have been rising across Jesustan after having declined from 1991 to 2005. It isn’t just the young and careless who are ending up getting pregnant. Pop star Britney Spears’ sister, Jamie Lynn—star of Nicklodeon’s popular show, Zoey 101—gave birth to a child when she was just seventeen. The hit movie Juno, vested teenage pregnancies with a certain social cachet, as did Knocked Up, a comedy about one-night stands.

What is remarkable, of course, is the Protestant seriousness of purpose with which Jesustan’s children engage in sex: cocks are for procreation, not for play (like for their great-grandmothers but not for Louis’ nurse). Part of this protestant ethic, of course, is deep rooted in Jesustan’s culture: it is not for naught, after all that, that penises are referred to as ‘tools’, women are ‘nailed’, or that this land’s pornography revolves around sex on office tables, doctors’ clinics and farmyards. Even this rebellion, thus, is suffused by the neurosis of the culture which it opposes.

Now, its not my case that having your killi kissed at a tender age liberates you of the sexual neurosis which Mom—or Mummy-ji—inflicted upon you. Louis, notably, grew up ill at ease with women. His married a Spanish princess—who, oddly enough, was known as Anne of Austria—in November, 1715. But their wedding night was a disaster; Louis’ killi thereafter didn’t get anywhere near Anne of Austria until 1619. “He thereafter occasionally managed to sleep with the Queen”, one historian has recorded, “but only from a sense of duty”. (of course, this is true of all married people; the one percent who claim otherwise lie).

My point is only that taboos transform through time—and that what we are seeing compels us to examine the robustness of the rules we have grown up with. The English-medium tabka amongst you will, doubtless, recall the story of the rape of Ganymede, where Zeus abducted the so-named young boy and carried him up to Mount Olympus to be his eternal lover. In the original Greek myth, it needs to be noted, the term “rape” is used in a clinical, value-neutral sense. Everyone concerned was happy at the turn of events—Zeus, of course; Ganymede, too (and even Ganymede’s father, who was for some reason delighted at the thought of his first-born being buggered senseless on them yonder mountains).

For centuries, the myth of Ganymede was a centrepiece of ancient Greece’s well-documented culture of pederasty. On the island of Crete, the historian Ephorus tells us, men would ritually kidnap young men, and take them into the countryside for two months of feasting and fucking. The boys’ families would pretend to resist the abduction but the few that actually did so were scorned. A family that protected its sons was “extremely shameful”, Ephorus explains, “since in effect they are publicly admitting that the boy is unworthy to get such a lover”.

Unless you live in Kandahar or Peshawar, though, it is no longer cool to shag little boys. And unless you live in Jesustan, you will likely get expelled from school if you are caught at it in Class IX B. Since I do not shag little boys, and—alack!— Class IX B is just a frayed memory, I have no issues with either rule. But I do remember wishing Mrs. S., the Sanskrit teacher, would play with my penis. Perhaps it would be pleasant to have a world where that was at least possible.