Joyce Carol Oates' FIRST LOVE: Pre-Teen BDSM

Here's part of the plot summary from the dust jacket of the hardback of Joyce Carol Oates' First Love [French: Premier amour]:

Josie S- has come with her mother Delia to live in her great-aunt Esther Burkhardt's house in upstate New York. Also living there is Josie's cousin, Jared, Jr., on leave from the Presbyterian seminary. Preoccupied with his studies, impeccably dressed in his starched white shirts, distant and mysterious, Jared, Jr. is an intriguing figure to Josie's curious and impressionable young mind. One summer afternoon, when Josie encounters Jared, Jr. at the riverbank behind the Burkhardt house, dark secrets are shared between them as an unnatural love blooms.

Amazon elaborates with: [First Love is] a dark tale of adolescent love, divided family loyalties, psychological manipulation, and betrayal in the story of eleven-year-old Josie and her relationship with an intriguing, twenty-five-year-old cousin, Jared. 

And Publishers Weekly adds some details:

Oates's compelling Gothic tale [...] is an intense, perfervid study of child sexual abuse, religious hypocrisy and family breakdown. Eleven-year-old Josie and her ruthlessly self-centered mother, Delia, spend a summer at the weather-worn house of Josie's angry, forbidding great-aunt Esther Burkhardt [...] Esther's gaunt, solitary, compulsively clean grandson, Jared Jr., a bookish 25-year-old seminary student, repeatedly preys on Josie, sexually violating her, taunting her in a low, hypnotic voice. He cuts her stomach with a broken clamshell, forces her to lick her own blood to seal their bond as cousins, shows her porno photos of tortured, naked girls and terrifies her into silence with his threats.

Here's an excerpt from Oates' First Love:

"Don't hurt me! Oh please...." You hear yourself begging, but Jared pays no heed. Slowly and ceremoniously [...] he undresses you --- pulling your sleeveless t-shirt off over your head, tugging down your cotton shorts, nylon panties [...] He lifts it [a broken clam shell] its sharp edge against your breastbone and you wince [...] between your little breasts, and again pressing, pressing --- and this time you cry, "Oh!" as the blood springs out and runs down your chest. And Jared holds you tight murmuring good girl, good girl touching the seeping blood, licking his fingertips then forcing them into your mouth, too. You almost gag, but you don't."

John Pistelli shared that First Love: [...] ends when she refuses to participate in Jared’s desire to make her his accomplice in preying on the poor children of their town for the purposes of child pornography, rape, and murder. 

Lastly, Kirkus Reviews opined of First Love: Oates at her best--and a happy reminder that she remains one of our foremost chroniclers of childhood's awakening and woman's fate.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: "Uncle Roy" Candid Polaroids of [Pre] Teen Nieces

Saturday Night Live: Uncle Roy Sketch

I learned about Buck Henry's Saturday Night Live (SNL) Uncle Roy sketch from a footnote in Rosen's Beaver Street: A Modern History of Pornography. On season 4 episodes 5 (November 11, 1978) and 20 (May 26, 1979) of SNL, Uncle Roy bamboozles his nymphet nieces, Tracy (Gilda Radner) and Terry (Laraine Newman), into searching his pockets for "candy", exposing their panties for candid Polaroids, and participating in a bit of BDSM e.g., spanking and bondage.

In a 2009 episode of Archive of American Television, Henry reflected on the sketches by saying that Tracy and Terry were between the ages of 8 and 11 and that:

"The great thing about the sketch [...] the best thing about the sketch [...] they really liked, they really loved each other [...] So, when I asked them to throw down their little panties and let me take pictures of them standing on top of the coffee table [...] the giggling and the show of affection would just increase."

Henry further rationalized the sketches by sharing that they were written by not one but two women - Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts. 

And he hoped that the sketches would start "interesting conversations in families across America about who was the Uncle Roy in their family."

SPRING AWAKENING: Teen Masturbation, BDSM, Sex and Rape\Incest

Broadway's Spring Awakening musical is based on Frank Wedekind's bawdy play, but the musical is more raunchy. The musical made what the play implied more explicit, which is revealing when one realizes that the main characters, Wendla Bergman and Melchior Gabor, were fourteen-years-old.

For example, in the play Hans Rilow masturbated to a picture of Venus of Palma Vecchio which he described as having “plump, youthful breasts”. And asked, “Maiden, maiden, why dost thou press they knees together?” But his autoeroticism was implied.

Venus of Palma Vecchio

In the musical, Hanschen masturbated to Antonio da Correggio's Io. The stage directions read “[...] Slowly and steadily, Hanschen begins to masturbate – building steam as the scene continues.” And on Broadway, Jonathan B. Wright, playing an early-teen, energetically simulated masturbating first with his right then lift hand.

Antonio da Correggio's Io

In the play, fourteen-year-old Wendla asked Melchior, “Would you like to beat me with it once? […] Please---please.” But when she didn't feel Melchior's switch she said, “Oh, Lord, I don't notice it in the least! […] Then strike me on my legs!” Finally, feeling the pleasure of the pain she exclaimed, “You're stroking me! You're stroking me!”

In the musical, additional stage directions were added. “She offers him her backside. He considers, then strikes her lightly.” But Wendla said, “I don't feel it.” Melchior replied, “Maybe not, with your dress on.” Consequently, the stage direction read “Wendla hikes her skirt, offering Melchior the prospect of her somewhat more exposed backside." And that's exactly what Wendla (Lea Michele) did at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 49th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

In the play, it was implied that Melchior raped Wendla when she pleaded, “Don't---don't, Melchior! […] Oh, Melchior!---Don't, don't---” But in the musical Wendla says, “”No […] Don't it...[...] Wait...[...] Now, there---now, that's...[..] Yes […]” After which the stage direction read “Melchior penetrates Wendla” to which she responds, “Melchior---oh...” On the stage, Melchior (Jonathan Groff) exposed Wendla's (Lea Michele) left fountain before he lowered his trousers, mooned the Broadway theater goers and simulated breaking Wendla's maidenhood up to climax.

Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in Spring Awakening.
(Photo by Joan Marcus)

In the script's preface, Steven Sater admitted that shifts were made when he wrote the book “As others have noted, the two biggest shifts we made to the tale occur at the ends of Act One and Act Two---in the hayloft and then in the graveyard. In Wedenkind's script, Melchior “date-rapes” Wendla. We wanted to see him make love to her. More: we wanted to show how this [fourteen-year-old] young man […] first uncovers ineluctable sexual feelings; how he begins to own his sexual identity; how he helps [fourteen-year-old] Wendla awaken to hers.”

And just in case you're thinking that Sater updated the ages from Wedenkind's play, Sater shared that the characters were “adolescent”, Wendla was “a nineteenth-century [fourteen-year-old]” and Bronx native Lea Michele (Wendla) joined the company when she was fourteen.

While watching the Youtube clips of Spring Awakening, I normally skipped through the songs, but Melchior stopped me hot as he rubbed Wendla's fountains through “The Word of Your Body” and thankfully my frozen Samsung tablet forced me to listen to “The Dark I Know Well” where Martha and Ilse shared their stories of sexual abuse by their fathers.

[Martha]

You say all you want is just a kiss goodnight,
And then you hold me and you whisper,
"Child the Lord won't mind.
It's just you and me.
Child you're a beauty. "

[Ilse]

I don't scream. Though I know it's wrong.

I just play along.

I lie there and breathe.

Lie there and breathe...

I wanna be strong-

I want the world to find out

That you're dreamin' on me,

Me and my "beauty"

Martha and Ilse sing “The Dark I Know Well”

The bawdy teen musical won a number of awards including the Tony for Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical.

Spring Awakening 2007 Tony Awards and Nominations