But who or what is this word “serverin” referring to? Maybe some descriptor from the fetish lexicon with a meaning derived from an explicit passion?

Perhaps an initiate’s term for a type of masochistic bondage?

intones Siouxsie in a hoarse whisper.

her voice now redolent with kinky authority. Back to a near whisper for

to wicked irony...

ascending into a spine chilling howl with

Fetish songs and events are nothing new. A casual reading of “The Satyricon” of Petronius reveals the very lubricious side of ancient Rome, complete with songs and poetry. The French Libertines must have had music and entertainment. Victorian English publications such as “The Pearl” show more of the same in that era. The pre-war German cabaret scene was infamous for catering to fetishists with its shows... and this culture also spread to the rest of Europe and America in a lesser degree.

The first punk-rock wave had its share of outre Cytherean material, with songs like the tongue-in-cheek “Black Leather Monster” or the savage “Mistress of Taboo”, both by The Plasmatics, or the more facetious “Love Comes In Spurts” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. The Glam scene has always been more than a little kinky, and certain segments of the so called “hair-metal” world were rampant with highly suggestive lyrics and delivery (Lita Ford’s “Stiletto” or Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr Tinker Train” for example). “Welcome To The Dark Side”, by Becky Woo, Duchess DeSade’s “Oh My Gash”, and Athamay with “Eternal Torture” or “The Pleasure of Sin/Caged” are good examples of fetish songs from bands dedicated to beyond-the-pale sexuality.

More recently we might hear London After Midnight performing material such as “Where Good Girls Go To Die” or “The Bondage Song” and it seems an increasing number of goth/darkwave groups are displaying their kinks. But where does the archtype of the whip wielding, leather-booted mistress wrapped in exotic trappings derive from? Relative to ancient Rome and the Libertines, this is a fairly modern incarnation... and recent developments in the fetish universe have amplified the thrust of this aesthetic to exotic extremes.

Which brings us back to Serverin. Shame on you, you nasty thing, if you already knew this! Serverin is the “hero” of the best known novel of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom we get the term “masochism”) “Venus In Furs”. In this tale, based on actual events from the author’s life, Serverin von Kusiemski becomes the love-slave of an exotic widow.

Sacher-Masoch is arguably the wellspring of modern fetish imagery. His extremely sensitive disposition, brilliant mind, and overactive sexual imagination just bursts with wildly erotic and evocative visions; his pen translating them into literary feasts for the world to dine upon.

Sacher-Masoch, of Spanish, German, and Slavonic bloodlines, was born in the 1830’s to a Galacian police superintendant and a “Little Russian” noblewoman. When he was twelve they moved to Prague, where he mastered the German language in which he was later to do his notorious writing. He had been a very frail youth who wasn’t expected to survive until his mother gave his nursing over to a zaftig Russian peasant woman. He not only regained his health, he also had an indelible image of the strength and fertility of powerful women impressed upon his psyche.

This image, a certain countess from his father’s side of the family as well as scenes from the bloody revolution of 1848, served to fire the sexual imagination of the young boy. By puberty, he was having erotically arousing dreams of being bound and tortured by cruel women. He also loved pictures of executions and torture, and avidly read of the lives of the martyrs. The countess, Xenobia, had a particularly strong influence on Masoch. She was tempestuous and beautiful, an uninhibited sexual adventuress who was continually cuckolding her husband with other lovers. She was also as tempermental as a Siamese cat, often resorting to cruelty when irritated.

Leopold absolutely adored her, and she responded to his affection with an amused acceptance. She sometimes even allowed him to help her dress, which led to one of his earliest associations of pain with pleasure and sexual attraction. He was attending to her as she donned her wardrobe, which almost always included furs. As he was kneeling to put on her ermine slippers he had a sudden impulse and kissed her feet. She laughed with delight – then kicked him and sent him sprawling, which curiously filled him with bliss.

When Leopold was ten years old, he had what was probably the most profound incident involving the Countess. He had been playing hide-and-seek with his sisters and was hidden away in a clothes rack in Xenobia’s room. Before he had a chance to leave, she entered with a lover, fell onto a divan with him, and they began to caress and kiss one another. Almost immediately her husband arrived with two friends. Astonishingly, and quick as a cat, she leapt from her lover and smashed her husband in the face with a powerful blow which sent him reeling, blood streaming down his face. She then grabbed a riding crop and drove all three men from her chambers with a rain of whipping. The lover escaped in the melee, which also caused the clothes rack to fall, exposing Masoch. When Xenobia saw him she was furious. She threw him to the floor, dug a knee into his body, and pummeled him with punches. The pain of the beating was infused with a sort of delirious sense of her sexual power and closeness, and he was again flooded with bliss. The obsequious husband soon returned begging forgiveness, so Leo was sent out of the room. Outside, he put his ear to the door and listened to the hiss of the crop, the sting as it struck flesh, and the moans of the husband.

Another image of powerful femininity entered his mind in the revolution of 1848. Masoch, at the tender age of thirteen, helped defend the barricades along with a young female relative who wore a pistol in her girdle and was a ferocious fighter. But it was the Countess with her exotic garb which influenced him the most. She shows up continually in his later work, and the wearing of fur became a sexual obsession that stayed with him his whole life. He would even comment on attractive women by saying “I would love to see her in furs”, and said of unattractive ones “I could never imagine her in furs”. He kept articles of ermine around when he was writing as well, stopping to stroke them fondly from time to time.

When Leopold was only sixteen, his favorite sister died suddenly. This heart-breaking event took the edge off his joy in life; he became notably quieter and his general demeanor became that of a serious intellectual. An astoundingly gifted student, he took his doctorate in law at only nineteen years old, and was already teaching German history at the the University of Graz. He soon abandoned teaching in favor of writing as his career as an author began to gather readership. By the age of thirty, he was becoming well known; he had also been in the military, garnering a field decoration for bravery during a battle in Italy. He had also had a number of love affairs (including one in which he ran off to Italy with a Russian princess), most of which had ended in disappointment. Of course his reaction to these romantic sufferings soon found its way into his writings, assuming the persona of his willful heroine, Wanda von Dunajew. The assumption of this name as a nom de plume by a woman writing to Masoch was his introduction to perhaps his most bizarre relationship, the one with his first wife, Laura Rümelin.

Ms. Rümelin was a woman of humble origins, a glovemaker who lived with her mother. She began to write to Masoch, cleverly using the name of his heroine, in an attempt to retrieve some rather risqué letters a girlfriend had written to him as a joke. Leopold began to fantasize about the writer of the letters, imagining her to be like his heroine. He insisted that they meet before he would return the scandalous material. There was an immediate attraction between them. Laura cleverly perceived the aura of mystery her disguise had caused in the novelist and milked it for all it was worth. They eventually became intimate and a child was the result, after which they married. Imagine the disillusionment of both parties when Sacher-Masoch realized that, not only was she not a Russian countess or even any kind of royalty, but that she was nowhere near the dominating, cruel being he had longed for. On the other hand, she being of moderate tastes and desirous of a “normal” marriage, soon discovered what a truly bizarre human being she had married.

One woman acquaintance had described Leopold as “simple as a child and naughty as a monkey” with regard to the dichotomy between his public and private activities. Leopold was soon attempting to draw out a dominatrix from this basically gentle woman. He tried to get her to whip him, but when she refused, he had a chambermaid do it in front of her. He finally succeded in having her whip him daily with instruments he had devised himself with little barbed tendrils. He averred that it was good for his work, since he no longer needed a character in his fiction which he was able to enjoy in real life.

He was forever attempting to get Laura to be unfaithful with other men, so that he might taste the delicious pleasures of being a cuckold. When she resisted these attempts out of basic moral decency, Masoch took out ads in her name posing as a married woman seeking a casual sex affair. When Laura was forced to attend a meeting with a man who had answered one of the ads, she confessed the true nature of her situation to him in tears. Being a gentleman, he conducted her straight home to Leo. Leopold often delighted in placing Laura in awkward, humiliating, and embarassing situations, something he enjoyed immensely when it happened to him. She, however, was far too sane to get any pleasure from it and it became a continual torment. When he eventually succeeded in getting her into a sex affair with another man, she was so humiliated by the experience that she began to hate Masoch. She eventually left him for a journalist and Leo took up with a woman he had hired as a secretary. He later married her and had children, once he finally got a divorce from Laura, who had refused this wish just as she did his many kinky sexual requests.

Leopold and his new mistress, Hulda Meister, who doted upon him like his Little Russian nurse of childhood, eventually settled on a piece of land he admired for its ruined medieval tower. This tower was ostensibly haunted by the spectre of an ancient tragedy. He died at a young 59 after becoming fairly legendary among the locals for the theatrical events he put on. What a legacy he left for the legions of “masochists” who were yet to be born.

We’ll let Siouxsie and the Creatures take us out with the chorus of “Venus In Furs”. There is a simple change Siouxsie makes from the original Lou Reed lyric, “forsake” instead of “awake” It is a telling change, and much more attuned to the depths of our subject: