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| For some masochists, Coca-Cola is the real thing. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Pain & Pleasure = Sado/Masochism." Originally published in Fantastic (Gallery Press), vol. 2, no. 1, February/March 1973.
Excerpt: "What is very often difficult for the layman to understand is just how close love and hurt can be. Most of us are familiar with the expression, it's easy to hurt the one you love. Consequently one might wonder whether or not it is possible to turn that saying around and come up with the concept that it's easy to love the ones you hurt. This becomes a very interesting thought to both the sadist and the masochist . . . either way the coin turns."
Reflections: This article is Ed Wood's treatise on sadomasochism, i.e. "sexual pleasures associated with either giving or receiving pain." Although the topic is a bit salacious, especially by 1973 standards, Eddie attempts to maintain a serious, even scholarly tone throughout this article. "Pain & Pleasure" definitely finds Ed in his professorial mode. (No giggling, class.) Were it not for some of the wilder details—like the story of an unfortunate masturbator with a Coca-Cola bottle stuck in his rectum, necessitating a trip to the emergency room—this article might even seem a little dull or dry.
Really getting into the spirit of things, Eddie tortures his readers with this extremely painful metaphor right at the beginning:
Many marital sex standards, for years, has revolved around the expression, it doesn't matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home! However, speaking sexually, this rule puts a man and a woman at the mercy of whatever happened to be in the kitchen instead of seeing to it that the husband and wife's appetites, individually, were appeased by thoughtful shopping at a sexual supermarket of singular desires.
Sexual supermarket? Ouch! I'd have to imagine that food was scarce in the Wood household circa 1973, so perhaps Eddie was just hungry when he wrote that passage.
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| Freud had some thoughts on sadism. |
Ed does his best to explain where sadism and masochism come from. You see, we humans have a great deal of pent-up anger within us, but modern man has "no symbolic forms of release for those urges." Hence, some of us take out our hostility on our partners in the bedroom. It's all very natural. Isn't sex already a little primitive and violent, Ed argues? Well, the sadists and masochists just take it a step further. "Pain & Pleasure" stops short of fully endorsing the S&M lifestyle, but the article almost reads like a plea for tolerance for a maligned and misunderstood subculture—a Glen or Glenda (1953) for the whips-and-chains crowd, if you will. As he explains:
Sado/masochistic behavior is an activity which had an extremely black name in the past; certainly more so than today. It is mentioned in conjunction with masturbation but only to a point that both are a rather unique sexual practice . . . neither are uncommon however.
Just as he did with cross-dressers in Glenda, Ed stresses that sadists and masochists are otherwise-normal members of society who just happen to have one little sexual quirk. Perhaps even your friendly neighborhood milkman enjoys being tied up and beaten with a hairbrush occasionally.
To give this article some scholarly credibility, Ed Wood includes a rather lengthy quote from Sigmund Freud, who apparently said that sadists were "incomprehensible." I could not correlate this passage with any of Freud's texts available online, but the famed neurologist originally wrote in German, so perhaps Eddie and I were consulting different translations. Many or most of Ed Wood's citations in When the Topic is Sex have proven to be genuine.
Throughout this article, Ed Wood uses the term "saturnalia" interchangeably with "orgy." I'd heard of the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, but I didn't know the term (when used in its lowercase form) could be applied to any generic gang-bang. Actually, Ed informs us, sadomasochism is generally frowned upon at orgies, unless the event is exclusively devoted to that particular fetish. An all-S&M orgy sounds like it could get messy quickly. I'd hate to be the one to clean up afterwards.
Next: "The Sado-Masochistic Saturnalia" (1972)