For, just as a gun has no other purpose than to kill (or threaten to kill), a whip has no function but to cause searing pain, or coerce through the memory or promise of pain. We are a species that universally recognizes and accepts the need, and right, of one person to terrorize, through torture, another. And the voice of sanctioned terror is the hiss of the whip, its sonic crack on bared flesh.
When I question my terrible delight in the image of the whimpering, lashed slave girl, I am oddly comforted by the universality of the whip. I would be a monster to have invented it, to have been the first and only sadist to wield it. But the whiplash curls its sinuous way through human history: it is not my creation, my obsession, but humanity's.
Of course, the eroticism of the whip is inescapable. Flesh itself, it seeks to caress naked flesh -- and even strips a clothed victim with its fiece desire, its tearing force.
It is a tool of the strong, employed on the weak: not only master against slave, but (inevitably) male against female. The whip magnifies, amplifies the perhaps marginal power differential between the particular man and woman, husband and wife, master and slave girl. It is integral to the relationship between the sexes. One might even say, it symbolizes and oddly settles the tension inherent in sexuality. Woman's weapons traditionally were her sharp tongue, her stinging words. But one lash, well laid on, is worth a thousand words; the whip always wins (however foully, however unfairly) the argument. The whip is an unanswerable fallacy. A phallic fallacy.
I fairly swoon at the dramas played out at public whipping posts in prim New England, Scotland, London. The overt and latent sexuality of the flogging of a female slave or convict, or disobedient wife. Her breasts, her belly, buttocks were protected by a code of modesty, for no one else's eyes but other women, or perhaps a husband. The to-be-whipped female was stripped, stretched and tied in full view of men, women, children: which is to say, even in a deeply inhibited society like Salem, she became the humiliated, helpless object of lust, vulnerable and open. Her nakedness, tears, frantic pleading, the climax of screams and contortions all are reflections in a distorted mirror of the sex act.
Yes, the whip is the tool of the domina. If she is large and powerful, she is a surrogate man, which is to say, a surrogate brute. But in the hands of the diminutive dominatrix -- a fine image, I admit -- it is an equalizer -- but only in a species of farce. The tiny hand plies the whip on the willing man only.
We created not only the whip, but its language, its accoutrements, its appurtenances, its variations, its rituals. Whipping post, the whipping stool, whipping horse, whipping pillory. The seeming mathematical precision of the sentence: three dozen lashes, forty stripes less one, twenty strokes of the rod. The victim, led to the place of punishment. Does she walk, is she dragged, or does she sit backwards on a horse? Does she undress herself, or is she stripped before being tied, or after? The loops for her wrists, the crossbeams or X-frames. All the retainers and accomplices of the lord whip.
The variety of whips does credit to humans' boundless ingenuity, as well as our inexhaustible cruelty. The cat, tawse, dragonard, bull- horse- or dogwhip. The rod, the cane, the bastinado. The strap soaked in brine. The metal tipped scourge. The blacksnake. The blacksnake for you, my dear...
And you, my reader: do you hold the whip? Do you run it through your fingers, or flick it in the air, or slap it against your leathern thigh? Perhaps nervously, lovingly, angrily impatient or coolly savoring the anticipation? Are you aroused?
Or, reader, it is you whio is led to that post, are you already tied there? Did you disrobe, or did strange, strong hands strip you? Do you hear the taunts, the gasps of suppressed lust, the jibes of the crowd? Have you made your mind up to endure in silence? Dare yoou look over your shoulder at the brute who will reduce you to agony, at the sinuous coil in his gloved hand?
Is it my hand?
