On the late-Victorian fetishization of india rubber dildos

[breathedout]

The munificent dildo of india rubber [...] does appear as staple fare in Victorian pornography, either carefully highlighted as in the case of The Story of a Dildoe or casually inserted in random scenarios of sexual pleasure, as in several episodes in the Pearl: "The godemiches [dildos] were brought forth, and proved to be of monstrous size, to our ideas; they were made of the finest vulcanised india rubber, beautifully molded and finished with all appendages complete." In most of these instances, the material of the dildo is always remarked on and cited as a guarantee of the dildo's superiority and efficiency. In one case, it is a "big india-rubber instrument" tucked away in a drawer on the dressing table; on another occasion the dildo disappears, but the qualities of the india rubber are still extolled: "What do you think of my sweetheart? Isn't she a beauty? There's an elastic belly to spend on, and I can assure you it has a moist engaging entrance to it—feels like velvet, and clutches like India rubber."

I describe these appearances of the india-rubber dildo for two reasons: first, the reification of india rubber in these pornographic texts as efficient, modern, lifelike, and beautiful resonates strongly with the history of the [cultivation and] manufacture of india rubber, a history powerfully linked to the management of colonial India.[...] The raw material for the manufacture of india rubber, Woodruff tells us, originally came from the "moist clayey lands of the Amazon basin, and extending over a large district of Central and South America." He points out, however, that this dependency on raw materials from the Amazon was carefully altered by English entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, who wanted to ensure that the raw materials came from areas over which they had colonial control: "Sir Clements R. Markham had already transplanted the quinine-yielding chichona tree from South America to India and in 1870... he turned to the cultivation of rubber. The plants and seeds which he brought back with him... were soon distributed through the Botanical Gardens at Kew to the tropical colonies. The story of the distribution of these supplies in the nineteenth century is... in part the story of Britain's role as the leading mercantile nation."

As Woodruff demonstrates, the manufacture of india rubber announced in many ways the ingenuity of British rule: plunder the raw materials from one part of the New World (South America), take them to a centralized space in the metropole (the Botanical Gardens at Kew), then redistribute them along the shores of a British colony (India), and you have the makings of a booming rubber industry. Woodruff's history thus provides the india-rubber dildo with a complicated and insistently colonial referent of its own. Technologies of sexuality fuse with technologies of colonial industry [...]

[Furthermore, t]he technologies of manufacturing india rubber in the late nineteenth century much resembled the technologies of colonial rule in India. The first stage in the manufacture of india rubber in the metropole was purification: the raw rubber had to be rid of any "foreign matter. The rubber was cut up by hand and the more obvious forms of adulteration... introduced by the native as good measure removed." The rubber was then fed into a filtering machine, where it was cleaned further, and added into a plasticizing machine that moulded and "kneaded the rubber effectively." Once through that process, it was passed into a "softening machine," where critical artificial chemicals were incorporated into the rubber to ensure its appropriate malleability. It was only "when the material had been cleansed, ground, softened and compounded" that it was ready for the process of vulcanization. [...]

Such a manufacture was echoed in the process of creating the perfect native subject. Gauri Vishwanathan delineates how the business of empire building was facilitated through the intellectual purification of the native Indians, which supposedly obtained from the introduction of English-language literature and the careful filtering out of native literary and intellectual traditions. The emphasis, as in the india-rubber manufacturing process, was on slowly curing the natives of their "adulterating" instincts, on somehow incorporating alongside those instincts a respect and need for English rule.

—Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

(Apologies to Arondekar for rearranging her prose a little bit; I wanted to shorten and combine passages from two sections, as they inform each other. All elisions are marked, & hopefully it's not too choppy. Apparently it's just all imperialism all the time around here today...)

Edit: Thanks to oulfis for linking to a source where you can read the text mentioned, including, as he says, an amazing advertisement for the dildos on Page 14.

Comments

[oulfis]

For the edification and delight of others: here is a place where one might read one of these bits of Victorian porn featuring india rubber dildos, with an extensive, fascinating, and hilarious advertisement for them on page 14.

[breathedout]

WONDERFUL; thank you! I've edited the post to reflect this important addition. :-D

[sylvaine]

Oh my god, amazing :D

[breathedout]

LOL glad you enjoyed.

[bigblackdog]

this is so interesting! i have to laugh a little that the author chose to use the phrase "casually inserted." and i'm wondering... ok so, you have this sexual technology all wrapped up with colonial industry and this colonial purification ideology (methodology? i'm not very practiced with academic terms); how are the dildos being used? like, what's then happening in a sexual dynamic where that dildo with all its cultural baggage and implications is being (casually) inserted?

thanks for sharing! here's to imperialism sunday.

[oulfis]

I think this is a really interesting question! Like, so much of colonialism-as-consumerism does get gendered in this really fraught way (or so I vaguely recall, this isn't my area of expertise) -- at least in the 18thC it's one of the tasks of the 'woman of the house' to regulate the purchase and consumption of colonial products (in the 18thC, china, mahogany furniture, muslin, and tea), to make sure they are brought into the home in appropriate ways. So what the heck is going on when she uses these colonial goods to fuck herself and/or her friends???

ETA: is Victorian medicalization part of the answer here???? the india rubber dildo says it "will cure the virgin of the green sickness without the risk of impregnation": is it latching onto, like, the rhetoric of exotic medicines???????

[bigblackdog]

ok! yes! i'm reading the story of the dildo and its virtues seem to include being a satisfying substitution for a man, that it can be used for "mutual enjoyment" with another lady, and that there's no "danger"/risk of pregnancy. and there's something really interesting there with this substituted maleness that's risk-free.

edit: maybe that like, that purification process is so modern, so efficient and effective that this native sourced tool is rendered completely harmless. but-- and i don't feel at all qualified to talk about this-- if the dildo is serving as this stand in for the emasculated native wouldn't they still think it's pretty taboo for a brown man to penetrate a white woman ?

[bigblackdog]

is that the appeal? that it's really taboo to act this out but mediated in such a way that it's still "safe"?

[breathedout]

Arondekar does link native Indian men with India rubber dildos in the popular pornographic imagination, but at least in her argument it's much more complicated than a 1:1 correspondence; the emphasis in the dildo scenes themselves tends to be on the purified perfection of the empirically-made product, to the elision of the sources of its material. (Though, as I said in a previous comment, there were anxieties about whether English manhood, either compared to or unaided by dildos and/or Indian men, would prove unsatisfying.)

But yeah, brown men penetrating white women continued to be a super taboo thing, even in porn (which featured, it goes without saying, featured p l e n t y of white men with brown women).

[breathedout]

Oh this medicalization angle is a fascinating one! Not the direction Arondekar goes in her chapter, but vibrators and other sex toys were certainly being marketed as hysteria aids, etc., during this period.

Arondekar (and I'm going from memory here; I'll try to dig up specific passages later today) focuses on a pair of dual and somewhat contradictory anxieties in the dildo porn sources she looks at. The authors seem simultaneously anxious to assert the male-centrism even of sex involving dildos (in other words, the emphasis is on what the dildos are a substitute FOR, which is a man, and hence the supposedly "lifelike" quality of india rubber is a plus, and the fake ejaculate is a plus, because what we're supposedly trying to replicate in a less disease- and pregnancy-risking behavior, is a man); and also both aroused by and anxious about the possibility that the dildos might be BETTER than a man; that since they can be bigger, and last longer, and since women can wear them themselves, they might have an intoxicating and disrupting effect, and become preferable to the thing they were supposed to replace. Arondekar ties this to the role of the (specifically Indian) male in facilitating white male fantasies of virility. She cites a bunch of examples in which Indian men serve as sexual helpers or repositories of Eastern sexual secrets, but not active participants in the sex they're facilitating. (In one particularly disturbing example, the white hero finds a native Indian man "ravaging" two English white women. He kills the man and then finds, to his delight, that the ravaging was unsuccessful: the girls' hymens are still intact [because definitely the respectful thing to do in this situation is to CHECK THAT!]. The white man then ravages the women himself (!!!), and feels at his peak manhood while doing so, but afterward is tormented by the feeling that, ever since he killed that native, he hasn't felt as much a man.) Without the sexual aid of the colonial subject, be it dildo, native servant, or native adversary, the Englishman left alone is found wanting.

[teaforlupin]

*insert John Mulaney gif* Now we don't have time to unpack ALL of that

[breathedout]

L O L

In all seriousness I do actually want that in gif form now

[breathedout]

I totally laughed at "casually inserted," too, ahahaha. Arondekar has a wry sense of humor that sometimes peeks out delightfully from behind her academic prose.

And she definitely does go at quite some depth (LOL) into how the colonially-manufactured and touted dildos are used in Victorian porn! I didn't expect so much interest but a couple of other people have also asked, so I'll see if I can isolate some excerpt-able passages tonight after work.

[teaforlupin]

I'm losing my mind over the fact that in the linked text, the dildo in question can be filled with a mixture of 'cream and gelatine' to simulate ejaculate? W H A T

How... how widespread (heh) was this kind of literature? I am completely ignorant of this aspect of Victorian history...

[digsdigsdigs]

I do not have any particular expertise in Victorian porn but I know some Victorianists and my impression is that there was a LOT of it and it was REAL DIRTY

I made a little :o face at the quote you pulled ... think of the spoilage ...

[teaforlupin]

I hadn't even got to considering that aspect of the whole disaster but I am joining you in the :O face making

[breathedout]

YES I KNOW, isn't that intense?? I mean I guess we have dildos that can ejaculate these days, but one would hope for fake-come with easier cleanup...

The Victorian porn industry was huge and extremely widespread. (The classic on this topic is Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians.) Arondekar writes that "Between 1834 and 1880, the Society for the Suppression of Vice confiscated more than 385,000 obscene prints and photos, 80,000 books and pamphlets, five tons of other printed matter, 28,000 sheets of obscene songs and circulars, and various other ephemera." What's harder to ascertain is the extent to which all the porn featuring india-rubber dildos actually produced (or grew) a market for what one economic magazine called "questionable rubber goods" among the general populace. It's kind of hard to imagine someone reading the linked advertisement and thinking "hot damn, I gotta get me one of those!" but you know! Different times, different appetites.

[teaforlupin]

I really just... never considered ejaculate to be one of the key selling points of dildo potential, you know?

[breathedout]

NOR HAVE I, MY FRIEND

Nor

have I.

[oursin]

Came via a link from conuly

Liza Z Sigel is a more recent (and less Freud-influenced) scholar of Victorian porn and its circulation, whose work I strongly recommend.

'Questionable rubber goods' would pretty certainly have meant, in context, contraceptives. The catalogues I have seen purveying these, along with other products consumers presumably found somewhat embarassing, like trusses, did not include dildos, although they might include abortifacients and impotence remedies.

Occasionally dildos have turned up in the saleroom but the instances I recollect seeing news items about were ivory or ?wood and C18th. India rubber, unless carefully curated, probably would not survive so well. This is also why there are probably more animal-gut condoms than rubber johnnies preserved for posterity in museum collections.

[breathedout]

Oh excellent, thanks so much for the rec and for the additional context! And yes, the paucity of actual real-life examples of india rubber dildos (as contrasted with how common they are in porn) was one of the things that interests Arondekar—though as you say, it could be a function of them degrading over time.

[digsdigsdigs]

WOW fascinating!! Thanks for sharing this. I did a research project in college on the history of apothecaries in England that ended up blowing my mind with all the ways the development of botanical science went hand in hand with colonialist exploration and expansion -- but! it was sadly lacking in sex toys!

Coincidentally tying the fantasy thread back in here, I've been procrastinating by reading Terry Pratchett this weekend, and I'm in the middle of The Fifth Elephant which has a whole plotline in which the death of a rubber condom entrepreneur is a key clue. Pratchett seems to have gotten rid of the colonial history of rubber as a commodity, so far, although the rest of the plot does center around the main character, the chief of police, having to do some delicate diplomatic negotiations in order to maintain the city's access to another region's resources during political flux.

I haven't really read enough Pratchett to know how that fits into his larger political worldview, although my read so far is it's a kind of UK-liberal-satire that allows for a pretty good chunk of cynicism about authority and government maintained simultaneously alongside a disinclination to write about imperialism. So you have Vimes pursuing a policy of diversity (of human, nonhuman, and undead beings) within his department, allowing Pratchett to send up various aspects of working life, while building in a political history to the world that has lots of chaos and various kinds of injustice but, notably, not colonialism or slavery.

I did a quick look and haven't found anyone writing much about the ecology of Discworld, which I think would be a fun project! The crucial resource in this book is the fat reserves under Uberwald (the purest and highest-quality fat for soap and candles to be had!) -- in another book there are mentions of the old treacle mines that used to supply the city with raw sugar. Which means that producing these commodities is the work of miners, as opposed to, historically, whalers or slaves on sugar cane plantations -- I gotta stop before I get really carried away with this but, anyway, great quote!

[breathedout]

Oh wow, I bet that project was fascinating!! Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy features a pair of botanists working in the service of empire, and although that thread of the story isn't followed through very far, it did pique my interest about the functions of Kew and places like it in the 18th & 19th centuries.

I haven't read Pratchett but your ecology project sounds like a fun distraction from a fun distraction, ahahahaha. You're leveling up in your distraction game!

[conuly]

I haven't really read enough Pratchett to know how that fits into his larger political worldview, although my read so far is it's a kind of UK-liberal-satire that allows for a pretty good chunk of cynicism about authority and government maintained simultaneously alongside a disinclination to write about imperialism.

Yeah, that's a good read. Even where it comes up it's Ankh-Morpork: Trying and Failing to be the World's Policeman and Journalist or spoofing "explorers" who only found places the natives guided them to rather than Ankh-Morpork: The Boot Across the Face of the Disc.

[chestnut_pod]

Ah, makes one almost regret one's own thesis topic is not more salacious!

This is fascinating, and I would love to know if Adondekar goes into the actual use/figuration of these dildos later on.

[breathedout]

She does indeed! I'm going to try to excerpt some more exact passages later today, but basically (going from memory and pasted from a previous comment), Arondekar focuses on a pair of dual and somewhat contradictory anxieties in the dildo porn sources she looks at. The authors seem simultaneously anxious to assert the male-centrism even of sex involving dildos (in other words, the emphasis is on what the dildos are a substitute FOR, which is a man, and hence the supposedly "lifelike" quality of india rubber is a plus, and the fake ejaculate is a plus, because what we're supposedly trying to replicate in a less disease- and pregnancy-risking behavior, is a man); and also both aroused by and anxious about the possibility that the dildos might be BETTER than a man; that since they can be bigger, and last longer, and since women can wear them themselves, they might have an intoxicating and disrupting effect, and become preferable to the thing they were supposed to replace. Arondekar ties this to the role of the (specifically Indian) male in facilitating white male fantasies of virility. She cites a bunch of examples in which Indian men serve as sexual helpers or repositories of Eastern sexual secrets, but not active participants in the sex they're facilitating. (In one particularly disturbing example, the white hero finds a native Indian man "ravaging" two English white women. He kills the man and then finds, to his delight, that the ravaging was unsuccessful: the girls' hymens are still intact [because definitely the respectful thing to do in this situation is to CHECK THAT!]. The white man then ravages the women himself (!!!), and feels at his peak manhood while doing so, but afterward is tormented by the feeling that, ever since he killed that native, he hasn't felt as much a man.) Without the sexual aid of the colonial subject, be it dildo, native servant, or native adversary, the Englishman left alone is found wanting.

[chestnut_pod]

Just boggling, good lord.

[clarasteam]

thank you for this amazing post - I have read some Victorian porn but this is new to me! I'll just be over here boggling.

[breathedout]

It is pretty boggling-worthy, I agree!

[doctornerdington]

THANKS for this! I've read a ton of Victorian pornography (for which I mostly blame redscudery), but I've never read about colonial contexts. This is fantastic stuff.

[breathedout]

Oh good, I'm glad you enjoyed it! I'm finding the whole chapter (and indeed book) super fascinating.

[starshipfox]

The only time I've really thought about Victorian dildoes is in the context of Tipping the Velvet, but, iirc, they use a leather dildo rather than a rubber one. Perhaps less comfortable, but probably more ethical (as the production thereof would not involve so much exploitation)? Although I'm sure that wasn't what Waters was thinking about when she wrote that scene.

It's interesting how keen they are to remind you how great the India rubber is within the porn. It's like if now you were reading a fic, and it was like "Buffy used the strap-on from Lovehoney, because they make the best and most comfortable products..."

[teaforlupin]

"It's like if now you were reading a fic, and it was like "Buffy used the strap-on from Lovehoney, because they make the best and most comfortable products..." "

LOL

[breathedout]

I KNOW, ahahahaha I found that totally hilarious as well. It reads like the porn was sponsored by a rubber manufacturer!

"Oh Tara," Willow moaned. "I can't get enough of this dual-density body-safe silicon from Vixskin!"

"And," Tara panted, thrusting into her, "the Jaguar harness, made of faux leather for easy cleanup, is fully adjustable for maximum comfort and accuracy!"

[starshipfox]

LMAO, this is a great story, you should probably write more.

[conuly]

Would you mind if I linked to this?

[breathedout]

By all means! When it comes to india rubber dildos in Victorian porn, the more the merrier.

[beehammer]

Oh man. Was it Anais Nin who wrote about shipboard sailors having an india rubber sex doll and one of them mounted it so hard he bounced right off?

[breathedout]

L O L O L oh my god

I don't remember this from my tour of Nin, but whoever wrote about it, that's amazing.

[beehammer]

The upshot was that they didn't wind up cleaning it well enough in between users and it gave. them. all. VD.

[breathedout]

Comments on this entry are the gift that keeps on giving Is2g