BDSM RTV MEDIA NEWS!!!!


22 june 2009


Gloria Vanderbilt's Brooklyn sex mansion: anything but vanilla,  


Source: www.sfbg.com San Francisco Bay Guardian - San Francisco,CA,USA


Gloria Vanderbilt may be 85-years-old, but she will have you know that she is having none of your boring, vanilla bedroom fantasies. Famous for that whole 80s denim thing, and for being Anderson Cooper's begetter, Vanderbilt's erotic novel Obsession (about BDSM no less!) is due out on June 23, and, according to the New York Times, it comes with a healthy dose of flora, though not, apparently, of fauna:


Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

Charles McGrath cautiously sidesteps Ms. Vanderbilt's own involvement in BDSM (and stiffly acknowledges that her novel "uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from"), but I doubt the author is any stranger to her subject.

For one, the Brooklyn sex mansion that just so happens to be the setting of the majority of the book's orgy scenes is aptly called the "Janus Club". What the New York Times doesn't mention is that Janus, the Roman god of doorways who had two faces peering in opposite directions, has always been an important symbol to those involved in BDSM. San Francisco's own not-for-profit organization promoting safe consensual BDSM is called the Society of Janus, and chose the name because "Janus has two faces, which we interpreted as the duality of SM (one's dominant and submissive sides)." Janus Magazine, an old British magazine devoted to softcore spanking, also takes on the name. There is, in Vanderbilt's novel, a special usage for a "smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods," that has little to do with brushing actual hair.

Ms. Vanderbilt also acknowledges that her work is inherently autobiographical, and states, "I think that all the very graphic sex is true of self-exploration and true of fantasy. I think it’s poetic.” I started reading excerpts of her novel on the Harper Collin's website, and an arbitrary scroll to page 16 revealed this:
I will be carrying only a single match, but that match will find its way to your body's middle, where even as you sleep you are thinking of me while I make my honey. It is as if that match were a bee that needs to suck your cock so much it could find it, hidden though it is, in the world's largest city. And, having lighted the way, the bee will fly away, the match extinguished, and I will begin, softly at first so that you can sleep a few more minutes, the long, slow, delicious process of licking your cock, and since I must have your honey milk even more than the bee, I will struggle to stay quiet though my pussy will be throbbing drumlike: I will eat you at first around the rim of your cock in undulating circular patterns. I take it in my mouth and give it a special kiss. Master, I whisper as you surrender to our ecstasy.

I have nothing to say about that other than, may we all be so connected with our sexualities at the age of 85.

Obsession may be one of the classiest books about BDSM ever published. Ms. Vanderbilt is, after all, an heiress. In this novel, you won't encounter any vinyl clad jezebels in lucite heels. According to the NYT, in lieu of the usual BDSM fare, the author presents us with "young ladies in Fortuny tea gowns, without underwear" who are blind-folded with "masks of dove and marabou feathers". These girls don't bother with the old Hitachi magic wand. Not when they have "gilt and lacquered sex toys" which are personally looked after of by an "an elegant madame who keeps up standards around the place". Having enough money to actually own a legitimate Fortuny gown? Her writing definitely is autobiographical, it seems.