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.