11. Reynardine: Cowgirls and Indians
Dear Lucinda,
I am still trying to explore the bondage issue in my mind, trying to analyze the source of its appeal. My husband, in that brief discussion I referred to in a previous letter, wondered if my cowboy and Indians experiences were the source of the attraction. This was his theory based on the fact that I preferred the hands-behind-back, legs tied together, bondage over the spread-eagled bondage I think he thinks I would more naturally prefer (the grinning ten-year old Indians who used to tie me in the golden days of childhood innocence, always used to tie me, thank God, in the former manner).
I think the cowboys and Indians experiences stimulated it, but I don't think they're the source. I do think there's a connection with my attraction to girdles and corsets, having to do with excitement over being closed up and compressed (which you are when tied the way I like it, but wouldn't be if tied spread-eagled). And there is this hand-behinds-back issue which is clearly related in my mind to the whole apron-spanking-handcuff nexus discussed earlier.
The turn-on is the feeling of helplessness, enclosure, another's control, delicious passivity, deference to male force. All related to that psychological state we've discussed earlier of being girdled even when you don't have a girdle on. Anyway, I can't help but feel that if we could get to the bottom of this, we would get somewhere interesting (intellectually). If I go on too much about bondage, however, please let me know. This is a personal thing for me, and the first time I'm really thinking about and acknowledging it, but I don't want to be self-indulgent about it, if it's not a major source of interest to you.
I find I'm stimulated by good writing about fashion, I've always been turned on by books about femininity like those of my mother's that I mentioned to you, I love poetic copy in girdle ads, and a bell has always rung softly for me when I read about a woman being bound or constrained in a work of literature, or even, at times, in journalism. I'm not turned on by men being tied. With women, I put myself immediately in her place and feel her constraint. It is possible that the reason why there is so much bondage in literature is that it was acceptable to write about it and not acceptable to write about intercourse. So it became a metaphor. And it is, to some degree, a metaphor, just as the girdles and corsets are.
Of course everything is always purely in the realm of fantasy. Reality is an entirely different story. I have no real desire to experience anything like what a woman being kidnapped or bound by a burglar is going through, but the fantasy image is very safe, harmless, and free. Which is why, essentially, any real experience of bondage has to be in a kind of theatrical form to be titillating, so that it retains the fantasy quality.
This is, after all, what the story was with my experience on the railroad tracks. I remember that when I first arrived, I didn't like the situation at all. Not only was I the only female in sight, but I was dressed in a way that emphasized my femininity to a great degree and I had an uncomfortable sense that the men present were responding to it. That tacky, inauthentic costume was classic frilly, pink sash feminine, and in my disappointment at not having to wear a corset (I didn't have any at the time, but I had had a few theatrical corseting experiences), I had worn my tightest long-line, with the hooks fastened as tightly as possible. I think they noticed, and were responding.
So there I was with my tiny waist and hair ribbon in the middle of a group of men with their macho photo equipment. I felt very vulnerable, conspicuous, and uncomfortable, and when I saw the length of the rope, and thought that the villain was going to tie me, I was not titillated in the least. But then, when everyone wisely made it a matter between my husband and myself, and gave us privacy, it became very arousing. And we didn't need to feel ashamed about that, because , after all, we were simply following a script, staying outside the margins of reality.
Everything was safe and trusting, even though I was being tied even more securely than a burglar would take the time to. I didn't feel guilty about letting my heart flutter with excitement, because I was being a "good sport" and felt licensed to enjoy an often-dreamed about situation. Please feel free to feel whatever vicarious titillation you wish about my damsel-in-distress experience. It was, after all, as I'm saying, a vicarious, even literary experience for me.
Thinking about your friend who admitted that she liked to be spanked, I'm sure that one aspect behind the configuration of everyone's sexuality is childhood experience. Look at what playing with our mothers' girdles did to us. So that even though many women may respond to the metaphoric attraction of submitting to bondage, I do think the fact that it was part of my childhood play experience with boys has something to do with it.
One of the crazy things about the '50's was that everything was so innocent on the surface and so deeply sexual underneath. What could be more respectable and innocent than going to church on Sundays and look at the role it played in so many of our erotic imaginings of womanhood? Well, cowboys and Indians were the same thing. I remember my mother once coming to get me to go somewhere and her finding me at the Indian's campground, all tied up expertly by boy scouts, and her not batting an eyelash, just asking one of my playmates to please untie me because we had to go to my grandmothers.
Thinking back, I always enjoyed this, in ways that I didn't even know were sexual at the time. I always volunteered to be the captive lady and I always preferred it when there was real rope and I didn't have to fake it and be bored. I've never admitted that to anyone, even my husband. That did come back to me when I was tied on those tracks. Well, I've gone on long enough about what I still insist is a minor part of my sexual makeup, confined to a little island of my imagination where heroines like Nancy Drew, Emma Peel, Andromeda, Angelica, the prettily-dressed ladies of countless melodramas and cowboy movies, and now Lucinda in handcuffs, discuss techniques of eyelash fluttering in situations in which you can't move anything but your eyelids.
I'll get back to girdles and corsets. But now, I'll just send this off and give my fluttering little heart a break.
Reynardine
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With the mention of Andromeda, the ever-erudite Reynardine opens a fascinating
side issue. For centuries, it seems, artists have gleefully used the Greek
myth of the chained princess as a pretext to put a little nude bondage
into their work. Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyck come to mind, as well as
later artists such as Gustav Dore'. (Right.)
Such was the power of classical allusion to license erotic imagery that even reference to modern Greece provided a degree of dispensation. At left is Hiram Power's The Greek Slave, arguably the most celebrated work of sculpture in prudish nineteenth-century America. Ostensibly a protest against contemporary Turkish oppression of Greece, one suspects it owed its popularity to factors beside international concern.
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