Dissecting Marilyn Manson by Gavin Baddeley

Author:Gavin Baddeley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780859658768
Publisher: Plexus Publishing Ltd.

Hirschfeld later notes that the Marquis de Sade had witnessed women surreptitiously masturbating at public executions, which were noted as good pick-up locations by young men. Classical literature also records that the Roman empresses Messalina and Theodora masturbated while watching gladiatorial combat.

While Freud used sex to map out the human mind, and Crowley employed it to chart the mystical world, LaVey regarded sex as an allegorical guide to human society. In his biography, The Secret Life of a Satanist, the chapter dedicated to ‘Masochistic America’ suggests that the Black Pope’s experiments in sadomasochistic ritual and psychodrama in the 1960s could profitably be applied wholesale to the present-day USA.

LaVey diagnoses the major problem of Western society as an epidemic of unrecognised masochism. Overt masochism is harmless, admirable even, as an honest expression of an individual’s identity. But the repressed masochism brought about by the confused messages broadcast from TV set or church pulpit – which simultaneously tell the masses they’re all worthy individuals while reminding them of their inadequacies – just create self-important zombies with a subconscious desire to be punished. And all too often, such covert masochism manifests itself as attempts to provoke better-developed or more powerful individuals into punishing them. By this typically perverse line of argument, LaVey presents the thugs and hooligans used to justify repressive laws of Church and State as malfunctioning masochists created by those very same institutions. ‘Most people don’t want to pick a leader,’ says LaVey, ‘they want to pick an executioner. So when they “elect a leader” they’re really saying “I want you to pull the switch, not the other one.”

In 1998, the year following his death, a requiem was held for Anton LaVey at London’s Torture Garden in recognition of his role in promoting an understanding of fetishism. The club’s name is derived from a 1899 book by Octave Mirbeau. One of the most macabre Decadent novels, The Torture Garden describes an elegantly depraved Englishwoman introducing a cynical Frenchman to the immoral delights of a Chinese garden where torture is practised as an art form. Brutal sadism and unspeakable beauty become inextricably intertwined like two poisonous vines, in this novel which Oscar Wilde referred to as ‘a green adder of a book’.

The Torture Garden is just one of dozens of popular fetish clubs operating in most Western cities today, high-profile concerns open to anyone willing to pay the entrance fee and wear the appropriate fetishistic costume. Such clubs would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, at the time of the foundation of the Church of Satan. By 1990 the unimaginable had started to happen, and S/M nightclubs – once a secretive domain confined to the red light districts of Europe’s most liberal cities – started to surface above ground. So where did these popular fetishist night-spots emerge from, and why do so many fashionable young people attend?

It isn’t that such clubs didn’t use to exist – but they were private, discreet affairs, part of an erotic underworld where wealthy deviants rubbed shoulders with petty criminals, prostitutes and maverick artists.

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