The Undergrowth of Literature

a book reviewing pornographic publications. To study pornographic literature in sufficient depth to write a serious treatise on the subject is brave. Cogniscenti are likely to wonder to each other why one needed to do it. To write a foreword to the book, or even a review, is pretty brave too. Hardly a mess dinner passes without some colleague (usually a surgeon) springing to his feet to tell the antique joke about a psychiatrist being a sex pervert who failed in the practical. Let us assume that the motives of all of us are clean, respectable, wholesome, of which no one need feel ashamed?like money. The book is in fact entirely respectable and written in no way with an eye to the porno market although it might have been even more transparently virtuous without the 16 half-plate glossy photographs varying from Penthouse's Pet of the Month to leather-suited females in chains and 'Dammed Nudes in the Fiends Pit'. But then, it's got to be authentic, and the pictures certainly do help to make the point. Few would dare deny that Miss Freeman has read her subject well, though the academic side is thin. Freud, Havelock Ellis, Fenechel, to name but three, have escaped her. This is a description, often witty, of the subject rather than an analysis of its origins. One especially valuable thing is the constant reminder of how much mass advertising relies now on increasingly 'kinky', i.e. sexually-deviated, motifs. Bondage devotees The description starts with non-porno women's magazines, romantic slush with erotica only hinted at. Men's magazines on free sale become more obviously deviant and Miss Freeman offers her views on the 'best buy'. And then on to covert but freely available magazines for homosexuals like Physique Pictorial and the hidden mass of small-circulation publications for the sado-masochists, transvestites, bondage devotees and so forth. Entrancing, but logical, to read that the hero of a shoe-fetish story is a blond Germanic cobbler. Rubber News seems to be the most adequate of specialist periodicals, but died, apparently, with the prosecution of its Editor last June. There is much of interest here to those who study their fellow-men albeit of the 'Good God, do they really?' type. For example, the married couples who have 'bondage evenings', drawing lots for who is going to handcuff whom. Erotic Lesbian literature, Miss Freeman concludes, is for men, and there is a sad concluding chapter …