Who Are Those Masked Fuckers?
One thing I’ve noticed in almost two decades of kinky blogging: people vary a lot in how much shame, reserve, or caution they have about their sexual life in general and about their BDSM proclivities in specific. Some people want to be seen, to be watched, to have their sexuality be understood as a performance. Perhaps that’s why there’s a whole category of sex camming where cam-to-cam interaction is a premium part of the offering. On the other hand, for good reasons or bad ones, a lot of us don’t want our face “out there” for strangers to see. From the first masked balls of antiquity to the earliest days of photographic porn, it has been thus: a bit of cloth over the face creates a startlingly liberatory erotic effect!
I am not convinced that wearing masks in a porn photo, or to the fancy dress ball that is half an orgy, is genuinely supposed to hide one’s identity. No, rather, it creates a structure of permission in which everybody involved can later claim “I didn’t recognize those two beautiful creatures who dragged me off into the spare bedroom and ravaged me so severely. It’s a complete mystery!”
Likewise, in the early days of pornography especially, there was some risk. Porn was illegal and performers might be arrested, tried, and punished, or at the very least, exposed to public social censure. Would a three inch oval of black felt truly protect this kinky-underwear model at the Parisian studios of the 1920s Yva Richard mail-order fetish fashion house? Of course not! But it gives her some deniability, plausible or otherwise. “Please, monsieur, that blasphemous harlot has the hips of a farmer’s cow! You could not possibly think that is me, for I am a most respectable actress and singer!”
Of course it is impossible to separate the functions of fashion, fetish, and anonymity played by the masks of early porn production. At a masked ball, elaborate masks are perhaps for fashion first, and only secondarily for facilitating disinhibition through extremely weak anonymity. In an illegal porn production for the camera’s lens, the anonymity function might have been more important. But almost anything seen in sexual contexts, especially forbidden ones, quickly becomes fetishized. Thus when Celine, a famous dominatrix of 1920s Paris, is seen to pose in this mask, we may assume she wears it as a marketing device, appealing to fetish and deliberately invoking the frisson of the forbidden:
By the time we get to the 1950s era of Irving Klaw, with pornographers selling bondage and spanking porn by the mailsack out of dank New York City basements, I think it’s safe to say that the mask had become just another common word in the visual vocabulary of BDSM fetish:
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Interesting history, thank you.