Ms Astrid
Supermoderndomme
/Sexual Abstracts
A History of the Female Sadist
By Astrid Strega
I went to a kinky event recently where a family of people spoke about their sexuality as a group. They spoke of fluidity, an absence of a distinct and fixed self, an identity formed in fluctuation and flow; they seemed to consider this characteristic unique, but it sounded very familiar to me. It seemed as though they were speaking of a larger experience, a collective story. And I wondered to myself why this discussion felt so familiar, so like a discussion I’d been having internally with myself as well as a discussion I had heard spoken of. I wondered if history, our history, wasn’t built in our stories of the world: the expressions of ourselves in language, a thread that tied us all together in our creations of ourselves and our societies.
The history of BDSM is often framed as murky. When we speak of the history of BDSM, we speak in stories, both real and imaginary. BDSM itself is somewhat imaginary: The B, D, S&M all mixed up together in the minds of those who live “the lifestyle” and the stories that are told by them as well as about them. These are the fantasies and fictions that happen in the dark cracks of the sexual world. And BDSM’s connection to real sadism, the actual desire to torture and kill, throughout our written history, is often difficult to frame without negating all the efforts that “safe, sane and consensual” players in the modern scene have fought to create. But still, in the minds of those who fantasize about the obscene and deranged, the only real difference is that BDSM players respect the limits of our social world, whereas killers and villains do not. The impulse might, as dangerous as it is politically to say, be quite the same.
One of the earliest accounts of female sadism is from the 17th century: a woman named Elizabeth Bathory, also known as “the Blood Countess,” for her legendary and oft mythologized love of bathing in her victims’ blood, supposedly to maintain her youth and beauty. Though she was never tried or convicted for her crimes, her killing of purportedly 600 noblewomen and servants resulted in her being locked inside a castle, until her death 4 years later. A great many stories and artistic pieces have been dedicated to her story, many of which attribute her sadistic impulses to female vanity. And so, be it real or fictive, our first understandings of how sadism functions, through the eyes of a woman, gets ascribed to the most nominal of personal beliefs: unrelenting self-idolatry.
In this way, the sexualized desire for the pain of others is removed from the story of the Blood Countess. But a passion for blood and death seems surely to play some part in motivating a woman of noble birth to kill hundreds; it seems strange that a relentless need for youthful beauty could drive a non-sadistic person to bathe in the blood of others or encase them in iron maidens, another rumored pleasure of the Countess. The tension between what we’d like to think happened and what might have happened within the heart and mind of an individual seems quite different.
In this regard, we can only imagine what someone might have lived based on what their legend has become. For instance, in the biblical story of Judith, the beautiful widow chosen by God to behead the villainous Assyrian ruler, Holofernes, Judith is often framed as a pious
She describes romantic engagements with sissy sluts, macho military men, and luscious ladies, whom she describes as being 'a treat, like truffles.'
One of the earliest accounts of female sadism is from the 17th century: a woman named Elizabeth Bathory, also known as “the Blood Countess,” for her legendary and oft mythologized love of bathing in her victims’ blood, supposedly to maintain her youth and beauty. Though she was never tried or convicted for her crimes, her killing of purportedly 600 noblewomen and servants resulted in her being locked inside a castle, until her death 4 years later. A great many stories and artistic pieces have been dedicated to her story, many of which attribute her sadistic impulses to female vanity. And so, be it real or fictive, our first understandings of how sadism functions, through the eyes of a woman, gets ascribed to the most nominal of personal beliefs: unrelenting self-idolatry.
In this way, the sexualized desire for the pain of others is removed from the story of the Blood Countess. But a passion for blood and death seems surely to play some part in motivating a woman of noble birth to kill hundreds; it seems strange that a relentless need for youthful beauty could drive a non-sadistic person to bathe in the blood of others or encase them in iron maidens, another rumored pleasure of the Countess. The tension between what we’d like to think happened and what might have happened within the heart and mind of an individual seems quite different.
In this regard, we can only imagine what someone might have lived based on what their legend has become. For instance, in the biblical story of Judith, the beautiful widow chosen by God to behead the villainous Assyrian ruler, Holofernes, Judith is often framed as a pious
Bathory (film, 2008)
woman, protective of her people. Yet not everyone has seen the story in that Christian of a way. In his 19th-century drama, Friedrich Hebbel wrote his own version of her story, in which the seduction of Holofernes prior to his killing produces a sadistic fervor in Judith, which causes her to feel some form of loss subsequent to his death, as though the murder mourned her victim. In a fit of confessional fury, she declares aloud: “Beware of this mouth, this nape, these ears - beware of all that can bite, tear, and suck until your foreign blood is exhausted - delicious!” Her devouring of Holofernes, body and soul, is a sexual sadist’s dream story. But then, as I said before, we can interpret our stories as we wish to. I suppose, in this way, this interpretation and re-interpretation of our world’s stories demonstrates how truly abstract the sexualities of peoples really are, as well as their own understandings of them.
And thus we come to the modern female sadist, a figure still shrouded in her own social invisibility and the network of patriarchal structures that define women’s motivations as petty or small, a la the Countess’ vanity. Mistress Nona, renowned Mistress and caning specialist, is one such woman. I recently began interviewing sadistic women of the scene in New York City, where many of the original scene players of the 80s and 90s still live and play. Mistress Nona was the first of them. Her sexuality, at a glance, seems almost pansexual; she describes romantic engagements with sissy sluts, macho military men, and luscious ladies, whom she describes as being “a treat, like truffles.”
When she describes a scene with her sissy submissive in which she fists him and her hand transforms into a cock, making her able to orgasm from the thrusting, the cracks in the reality of the event begin to form. As she defines her sexuality for me, I begin to see where the transformational, the impossible and the insane creep through the story. As she tells it: “I’ve experienced the ultimate in abstract sexuality. The only way I can describe this is: before Picasso came out with cubism, which is a reduction of realism to its natural planes, the geometric shapes, he could draw photographic images. But cubism is the advanced version of realism, the more sophisticated version. What happened to me within the scene is that BDSM is a more sophisticated version of sexuality. It’s the abstract.” And if a peek into the lives of these women, fictional or real, tells us something, it can be to inform us of what the abstract can bring: a landscape as rich in reality as any fantasy can become.
And thus we come to the modern female sadist, a figure still shrouded in her own social invisibility and the network of patriarchal structures that define women’s motivations as petty or small, a la the Countess’ vanity. Mistress Nona, renowned Mistress and caning specialist, is one such woman. I recently began interviewing sadistic women of the scene in New York City, where many of the original scene players of the 80s and 90s still live and play. Mistress Nona was the first of them. Her sexuality, at a glance, seems almost pansexual; she describes romantic engagements with sissy sluts, macho military men, and luscious ladies, whom she describes as being “a treat, like truffles.”
When she describes a scene with her sissy submissive in which she fists him and her hand transforms into a cock, making her able to orgasm from the thrusting, the cracks in the reality of the event begin to form. As she defines her sexuality for me, I begin to see where the transformational, the impossible and the insane creep through the story. As she tells it: “I’ve experienced the ultimate in abstract sexuality. The only way I can describe this is: before Picasso came out with cubism, which is a reduction of realism to its natural planes, the geometric shapes, he could draw photographic images. But cubism is the advanced version of realism, the more sophisticated version. What happened to me within the scene is that BDSM is a more sophisticated version of sexuality. It’s the abstract.” And if a peek into the lives of these women, fictional or real, tells us something, it can be to inform us of what the abstract can bring: a landscape as rich in reality as any fantasy can become.
- 09/06/2010
