a Cultural History of Arousal
Niklaus Largier
In a suburban Dublin school in the late 1970s, I caught the tail end, so to speak, of corporal punishment. Not that the good brothers made us bend over for our punishment, by then: we went home instead with hot, welted hands. But we had our suspicions about the more fervid among the floggers, not least the sweaty charmer who liked to warm the cane with a brisk rub of his crotch before he let fly. Something, we surmised, was up with this lot. Such at least, as Niklaus Largier’s gripping history of flagellation confirms, is the easy modern assumption with regard to the switch, the rod and the birch. Flagellation is surely a sign of misdirected or repressed desire: its adherents (givers or receivers) must be, at best, just a little bit sad. But In Praise of the Whip tells another story: of ascetic and perverse imaginations that were liberated by a taste for the whip.