Erotic Lashings

From a review of Niklaus Largier's "In Praise of the Whip. A Cultural History of Arousal" Zone Books 2007 by Bettina Bildhauer

Hurting oneself goes against all basic common sense. It is hard to understand, and easy to mock or deride. Images of madmen, masochists, or monks beating themselves are stock figures of human stupidity, decadence, or aberration. This is because common sense, as social consensus, has a vested interest in human integrity and intactness, and self-harm offends its most central value. If we want to understand why humans hurt themselves, we have to use something other than common sense. In his book In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier uses the case study of whipping to do so from a historical perspective.
As the title and subtitle already indicate, whipping for Largier is an example of a technique of hurting oneself to induce a state of intense excitement or ecstasy that transcends language and the body... Moreover, the flagellated people aim for their bodies to become texts in various ways, to be seen and read, either as a realization of Scripture or as pornography.
...he sees a clear shift around 1700, when the interpretation of the ecstasy of whipping changed from a predominantly ascetic to a predominantly erotic and medical one. Eighth century hermits might have been the first to practise self-whipping, although the evidence is unreliable. Voluntary self-flagellation first became common in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the monastic orders, where whipping had previously been used only as a punishment. The eleventh-century Benedictine writer St Peter Damian played a crucial role in popularizing this practice. It was incorporated into rituals of penitence and confession, of praying or singing the Psalter, but also into private devotion. The late Middle Ages, Largier's specialist area, get the most expansive and most sensitive treatment -and perhaps here, whipping came closest to being part of mainstream culture.
In 1260/61, flagellation became a mass movement. The city of Perugia, perceiving itself to be in crisis, officially suspended work for a month in order to allow the citizens to repent and whip themselves. A procession went to Bologna, and flagellant processions soon started up throughout Europe, as people everywhere took out a month or longer to repent in this extreme manner.
A 1703 treatise by Jacques Boileau first expressed the fear that flagellation might have erotic undertones, and from then on, whipping was always suspected of inducing sexual arousal. Openly pornographic texts, like those of the Marquis de Sade and other French eighteenth-century writers, continued the tradition of allowing images and performances -and Largier here counts Sade's evocatively described tableaux vivants among them -to do what linear narratives cannot, and feed into critique of the Enlightenment's overemphasis on reason....

Read the complete text of the review here