I was reading a biography of the writer Naomi Mitchison,* not expecting much in the way of kinky doings. She was, after all, an early feminist writer – that was, before she became pals with Tolkien, or started writing science fiction. One doesn’t expect pervery from early feminist writers.
I was wrong, and was happy to be proved so.
When Naomi was in her early teens, her controlling mother took her out of school so that she could learn womanly things with a governess:
She and three other girls who shared her governess would fantasise that they were captives. […] They tied one another up; they were in bondage and they were sacrificial. Naomi, innocently enough, played bondage with her friend Frances Parkinson until they were 16 years old, suggesting, perhaps, a connection to the larger social, psychological and sexual realities of their lives. [p. 20]
I don’t know how tying up one’s little friends relates to social realities of one’s life, but I won’t dispute it. Naomi certainly felt confined within her social circle. Her mother didn’t even let her have her own bedroom: instead, through her entire adolescence, Naomi’s bed was in her mother’s bedroom.
When Naomi got married to Dick, who was a friend of her brother’s, she was 18 years old, and had no idea about how things worked between men and women. Amazingly, nether did Dick. They kind of fell into a marriage before they knew what love, or desire, or sex really was. Lots of people were in this situation at the time, of course, but unlike most people, Naomi and Dick didn’t just write off their sexual lives altogether. When they found out that there was a lot of fun to be had out of sex, they decided to have an open marriage.
It was, apparently, a very warm relationship with many guest stars in it. Naomi probably enjoyed more sexual adventures than most women at the time. Unfortunately, when she tried to write books about it (which is what early feminists apparently did: write erotica), the publishers were far too cautious to publish them uncensored.
For example, at one point a publisher thought that it was far too risqué to print a mention of a woman unbuttoning a guy’s trousers. In the end, he told Naomi she could leave the word “button” in, if she left out the word “trousers”. (Honestly, using words like that in fiction… scandalous. Trousers, indeed.)
Anyway, Naomi had a rather more exciting life than her mother had probably intended for her:
In Naomi’s memoirs as well as the diary that she kept during the Second World War, it is clear that she particularly admired Rudi Messel. Naomi describes that playful and rather trusting relationship: “…he asked me to tie and beat him, which I did, making fierce faces and quite enjoying it myself but not, I expect, hurting him as much as he might have preferred. Why should we insist on certain patterns of conduct?” [p.88]
She wasn’t into it, then. That’s a pity. Nice of her to out this Rudi guy, whoever he was, but he might have been dead by the time the memoirs came out.
Unfortunately, after WWII either Naomi had had enough of sexual experimentation, or, more likely, the biographer grew tired of describing it, so the rest of the century – and the book – was rather uneventful in this regard. Ah, well.
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*“Naomi Mitchison. A biography” – by Jill Benton; Pandora Press, 1992.