Victorian erotica is replete with
all manner of discipline. Indeed, it would be hard to find an erotic
act as
connected with a historical era
as
discipline is with the reign of Queen
discipline, with its sir’s and
madam’s, its
stilted syntax and its ritualized roles, sounds Victorian even when
it’s used in contemporary
pop culture.
Is it any wonder that the film The Secretary was set in a most
outdated
office, where the typewriter
and
hand-corrected manuscripts were more reminiscent of Victorian clerical
practices than of an era of
email and
spell-check?
Erotic discipline
requires that a
mannered propriety be intact so that its dignity can be deprived as an
element of the punishment.
True
discipline requires that innocence and naughtiness be poles along an
unbroken continuum. What can
innocence
really mean in an era as contaminated as ours, when grown
women wear t-shirts with
“Brat”
emblazoned on them and thongs extend above the waistline of the average
teenager? The essence of
Victorian
discipline is the shock of the naughty, the righteous indignation of the
punisher and the shame of the
punished.
Today’s literature of erotic discipline can only play at Victorian
dynamics, and all subsequent
writings will
only be pretenders to a crown of the era whose reign will never
end.
Lest there be any
doubt, this
collection is submitted as exhibit A in the case for the legitimacy of
the
Victorian
era’s
dominion over all discipline erotica. In this collection,
all manner of discipline is
represented.
Men and women are both
dominant
and submissive. There are school punishments, judicial punishments,
punishments between lovers,
well-deserved
punishments, punishments for a fee, and cross-cultural punishments.
These stories are set
around the
world and at all levels of society. The authority figures in these
stories
include
schoolmasters, gamekeepers, colonial
administrators, captains of ships, third-world potentates, tutors,
governesses,
priests,
nuns, judges and policemen.