Reviewed by William Dean
(03/07/01)
Does your erotic video collection include the whipping scenes from Billy Budd, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Lawrence of Arabia? Do you salivate at the thought of soft leather strands caressing bare skin with that echoing slap that drives its aficionados over the edge to orgasm? Then you simply must have Joseph Bean's book on your shelf, coffee table, or bedside table. Why? Because long-time leatherman, Curator of the National Leather Archive and Museum in Chicago,
former editor of Drummer magazine, author of Leathersex, and internationally recognized expert on S/M practices, Joseph Bean is the man when it comes to flogging.
You have to respect the experience and savvy of a man who has been flogging and been flogged for over thirty years and, frankly, there is no other book that even comes close to this one. This softcover 140-page tome lays it all out for everyone, from beginner to experienced whiphand. It explains concisely how to choose floggers, how to negotiate scenes, how to read your partner's mental, emotional, and physical states, and even how to artistically create a palette of sensation with patterns and strokes of floggers to send you and your floggee into ecstasies of pleasure.
Dennis moves up very close behind his lover, close enough to extend a hand and actually feel the heat radiating from the boy's body. Then closer still, until that heat can be registered on the hot, sweaty skin of his chest. He draws a line or two on Mark's back with the cane, pressing its length into the flogged and swollen flesh and drawing it away until its tip draws a wet, white track in the back. The pink-white lines disappear quickly in the canvas of bruises and
redness. Then letting his fingertips just touch Mark's waist, Dennis raises the cane over his head and slashes into the waiting back.
This is sensuous writing. Readers familiar with Bean's thoroughness and easily-read style from Drummer magazine will prize Flogging for the consummate, comprehensive book it is. The book is laid out in a series of descriptive narrations of scenes set at S/M parties, at home, and other locations, each followed by a careful examination of behind-the-scenes information including the basics of flogging, inner and outer techniques, making a flogging scene work for participants and viewers, and the cleaning and maintenance of flogging instruments.
A flogging is a whole thing in and of itself, it is not just X many of this stroke followed by this many minutes of that stroke using flogger A to stimulate body part C. It might be that the way to understand a flogging scene in a holistic way is to think of it as a story being either told by the Top or made up together by the Top and the bottom. Already you have two different -- both very workable -- concepts of how a scene is built just there.
The chapters are illustrated with pen and ink drawings that are simple and instructive, drawn by Chris M, an artist, writer and S/M educator, very active with The Black Rose in Washington D. C. for a decade.
In addition, Flogging includes a section on where to buy floggers, which ones to buy, and a great essay on "Milestones in Modern Whipmaking," by Gayle Rubin, Ph.D., updated from her previous same-titled article in DungeonMaster.
There are now many distinguished artisans making whips in many parts of the US, and there are numerous opportunities for them to show their wares. This is a dramatic shift from the way things were in the late 1970s. Even the most mediocre of the whip now available are far better than most of what could be obtained then. The best ones would have been unimaginable. We have new kinds of whips which are now widely obtainable, such as the redesigned floggers made popular by western whipmakers and now customarily called 'California' or 'West Coast' floggers. An even more recent development is a resurgent production and popularity of finely crafted singletailed whips.
Like any style of making love and having good sex, flogging is far more than simple technique. It is an art form in itself that is mutually creative between partners, that elevates both to a higher, deeper place within their own pleasure-self. As Bean writes:
[Flogging] can be as beautiful as a ballet or as precipitous and violent in appearance as a blizzard, and remain precisely the experience that the 'players' want for their sexual or even psycho-sexual satisfaction.... Keeping the lion alive and hungry to provide intensity, keeping your heart open and generous to ensure mutuality --- you become a Master Flogger --- except for the technical practice. So, now, get out there and practice.
