Historical cases of masochism: Domestic servitude
Reports of submissive kinks in men from the early literature on human sexuality. In this entry, a case of a man with the domestic servitude kink reported by Iwan Bloch.
If you are an attractive woman with some public presence on social media today, it will not take long before you come across some curious requests from strangers you have never met. Indeed, if you have a public profile on a platform where anyone can send you a private message, you might be fancied by a particular group of men: those who have submissive sexual fantasies.
Some of these men might venture to formulate strange requests in your private messages. For example, they might ask to worship you like a goddess, to send you money, or to be your personal slave, asking for nothing in exchange. For the average woman who is not privy to the content of men’s submissive fantasies, these messages might seem bizarre, creepy, or even disgusting. The average woman might even disbelieve the genuine character of the requests and she might suspect a joke is being played on her.
The age of the internet and the ubiquity of social media have rendered this practice commonplace due to the ease with which it can be done. If you are a man with the aforementioned inclinations and you tend to disregard the consequences of risky decisions, you might easily be tempted to write lengthy messages to the women you admire on social media platforms, asking if they could grant you the honor of fulfilling your fantasies of submission, servitude, and humiliation.
Most of your requests will go unanswered, undoubtedly, but perhaps if you try enough times, by sheer luck you might intrigue a woman. If all fails, you would at least derive some satisfaction from the exercise of formulating such requests and sending them to the women you admire. Perhaps even the mere confirmation that your messages were read by their recipients would be enough to start your imagination on a sustained erotic scenario.
This practice, however, is not new. Even before the internet, some men acted in much the same way, just by a different medium. Instead of sending direct messages on the internet, they wrote letters and posted them to unsuspecting women.
The German physician Iwan Bloch, in his Sexual Life of Our Time, reproduced one such letter written in Berlin on June 7, 1902. In this letter, a man writes to a woman who mesmerized him after he briefly saw her enter her house. That brief moment appears to have been sufficiently potent for him to cast her in the role of mistress in his sexual fantasies of servitude.
He addresses her in the letter as “gracious lady” (translated from the old German form of address Gnädigste Dame) and makes sure to apologize first for daring to write to her. The man makes no effort to conceal what attracted him to the gracious lady: “a glorious figure and magnificent hips”.
He then goes on to inquire whether the lady would like to make use of “a servant and a slave” who blindly obeys her every command. He asks her if she would grant him the honor of making him such a slave. He calls her “mistress” and “commander”, and vests her with the powers to punish him should he fail in his duties as her slave.
The unknown author of the letter appears to include a return envelope in case the lady wishes to write a response. He also attempts to work out some logistics of how he might meet his future mistress should she grant his request. He hopes to find her on a specific city intersection at a certain time on Friday evening, holding a rose in her hand.
Here is the full letter from the English translation of Bloch’s volume:
BERLIN, June 7, 1902.
GRACIOUS LADY,—
First of all I must sincerely ask your pardon for daring, most honoured lady, to write to you. I saw recently a lady with a glorious figure and magnificent hips enter your house, and I suspect that you are this lady. If you, gracious lady, desire a servant and a slave, who will blindly obey all your commands, and upon your order, as a slave, without any will but your own, will perform the basest and dirtiest services, I should be happy if you would be so gracious as to make me that slave, if I might visit you from time to time in order to serve you, my strict mistress and commander. If at any time I should fail to obey you absolutely, you can treat me most cruelly and chastise me most severely.
Will you, gracious lady, deign to answer me, your basest servant, and to make use of the enclosed envelope to tell me if you, this evening, will go for a walk, and how, and where, in what cafe you may chance to spend the evening, and if you will be my strict mistress, and if I may venture to be your slave. Perhaps, most honoured lady, you could be at the Oranienburger Tor1 at eight o'clock precisely on Friday evening, with a rose in your hand. Full of subjection and abasement, obedient to your strict commands, and slavishly kissing your feet and hands, I am your most abject servant and your basest slave.2
Iwan Bloch fails to inform us how such a letter came into his possession. If it was posted to its recipient, the lady most likely sent it to Bloch because she thought he might find it of interest to his studies of sexual deviations. Indeed, it was common for the pioneer researchers of sexual psychology to receive such correspondence as it aided them in their scientific inquiry. In any case, if the lady did receive the letter, we do not know if she acceded to the requests of the would-be slave.
Alternatively, the letter could have stayed in its author’s possession. In this case, it was most likely written purely for the purpose of fleshing out a sexual fantasy on paper, as such a literary exercise can produce delightful erotic sensations. Indeed, it is very common today for men who have submissive sexual fantasies to publish fictional accounts online that they present as true. They do this to excite themselves and to bring their fantasies to life through writing.
It is possible, then, that the author of this 1902 letter wrote it for the same purposes without any intention of posting it to the recipient, even if the gracious lady existed and the episode that purportedly inspired the letter’s writing was real.
No matter who sent the letter to Bloch, the fact stands that it reflects a submissive sexual fantasy in the erotic imagination of a man from more than a century ago. That man, like many today, was animated in his erotic imagination by the burning desire to be a domestic slave to a sexually attractive woman. He wished to serve her unconditionally and to suffer any punishments she chose to inflict on him for his failings.
Technology has changed the medium through which men with these kinks imagine themselves approaching the women they long to serve as slaves, but the core element driving these desires appears to be unchanged.
This refers to the intersection of Friedrichstraße, Chausseestraße, and Torstraße in Berlin where a historical gate once stood (Tor means gate in German). The gate was demolished in the late 19th century but the name persists to this day in referring to the intersection.
Bloch, Iwan. (1909). The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization. Translated by M. Eden Paul from the sixth German edition. Rebman Limited. (Originally published in 1907.) p. 582.
Oh how I wish I were born back then. I would have wrecked havoc among these proto-European subs. 😈
Given the time period, this woman would probably have made good use of a servant to free herself up from housework lmao