Pulp Sadomasochism and Sensational Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Postwar United States

Abstract

“B a r o n e s s V e n u s H e i n r i c H V o n K r a m m knew every sinkhole of vice and bizarre experience sought by the jaded jet-set as they roamed the sin cities of the world, seeking to plumb ever further into the shame swamps of human depravity. And Jimmy Bergner, an American on the bum through Europe played right into her hands,” teases the 1966 pulp Shame Chateau. Confronted with “torture and terror,” the unassuming American Jimmy stumbles upon “a whole subculture based on violence” as a “sin guest” outside his own country.1 Leftover Lust’s Magda, “an exciting girl who thought she had left all the horrors of her European past far behind her and was happily married to American, Frank Dane,” likewise soon finds herself thrust into the horrors of sadomasochism when “Anton Lupescu, the evil, heartless beast-master tracks her down for more of his depraved delights.” The text, published in 1965, titillated readers with promises of “sadistic love-hunger” and “degradation smothered behind a gag.”2 Shame Chateau and Leftover Lust are two of the thousands of pornographic pulp novels that circulated in the post–World War II United States. Many of these texts depicted scenes of “sadism” and “masochism” for the titillating pleasure of readers, situating the practices as delightfully horrifying. Officially categorized by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a form of mental disorder in 1952, sadism and its flip side, masochism, were subjects of intense interest for medical and scientific institutions in the postwar years. Alfred Kinsey’s landmark studies, psychiatric authority, and popular culture all turned toward sadomasochism, querying why one would desire pain, violence, and degradation as part of one’s sexuality. Situated within a national milieu dedicated to defining the boundaries of