(Let me lead you through the sepia-toned, historic setting for this tale - colonial India - where you will experience some of the most delicious Clothed Female Naked Male fun you have ever come across. On the banks of the Ganges the senior boys' college was filled with aristocratic 18 year olds, thrillingly subject to the discipline of female English teachers mature age and young.)
The views of school disciplinarian Sarah Maitland are coming back into focus and not before time.
Born in 1881 in Surrey, England, she was a true child of the Empire. A Governess, then a teacher at second-tier public schools she was to develop a theory on the disciplining of boys that made her sought-after on three continents. But her 1939 privately-printed Raising Boys to be Gentle Men was overtaken by the advent of war and was little heard of until recently.
She was certainly an interesting woman of her times. At Nottingham University College she struck up a friendship with young D H Lawrence and lent the future novelist her diaries recording one of her disappointing love affairs. In London she apparently met and impressed George Bernard Shaw and attended the opening night of his play Misalliance in his company. She may have had an affair with H G Wells and been hurt when he moved onto his next liaison. After her experience in India she engaged in correspondence with Sigmund Freud.
Yet she had a very practical focus on discipline, wielding the cane, slipper, tawse, paddle and hairbrush as vigorously as any schoolmistress of her era. She became a cult figure among English ruling class males with a masochistic attachment to the punishments they received at female hands during their schooling. One of her former students, a member of the House of Lords, commented anonymously to The Times on her death, "Sarah had more finesse at delivering exquisite humiliation than any schoolmistress or governess ever known."
Just before World War One she left for Bombay and taught at a school for the sons of well-off Indian families. When the army summoned every available male teacher for the trenches in Europe or militia duty on India's frontiers she found herself promoted to Principal. Asserting discipline over 18 year old boys with no male staff to help proved a crucible in the development of her ideas. She was to be further tested running a school for black boys from professional families in Jamaica in the 1920s. Later she gave advice to detention facilities and prisons in the south of the US. She died in 1961.
Her answer was refined around 1914 in the college for 18 year old boys where she found herself Principal. Not spanking, not caning - at least not on their own - but a technique she called Total Clothing Deprivation was the means for bringing about a proper attitude to women. During the years of adolescent development, she concluded, there was an opportunity to "traumatize" males by exposing them totally nude to females, women older than them or their own age. From this point attitudes to women undergo a decisive change. She wrote:
"No more is it possible for them to maintain attitudes of smug superiority to the 'inferior' gender. Certainly not after they have been shamed and humiliated by being stripped of all clothing in front of a female in a disciplinary setting, perhaps where there are other female onlookers to witness his disgrace. I would add, however, that such a setting not be without tenderness and love. My experience is that boys who experience Total Clothing Deprivation at the hands of a female carer become sensitive and thoughtful men, true gentlemen."
In her book she offered abundant examples and case studies of the working of these principles, especially drawn from her times in India and Jamaica with Indian and black youth. It was brutally frank and scientific: she was candid, for example, in discussing the role of involuntary erections in shaming males. She wrote, "Absolutely unable to control the functioning of his own body the adolescent is distressed beyond measure when exposed to a female teacher, doctor or nurse in this condition; even more so an aunt, sister, mother or grandmother. Out of this trauma a more sensitive and submissive adult male will emerge. Put it this way, he will feel as if he has been left with no secrets. He will feel that females have seen the very essence of his being, his secret essence."
In fact in the book she provided a whole chapter on the treatment of involuntary erections, full of examples drawn from India and Jamaica. (That is why, in the climate of 1939 Britain, it needed to be privately printed.) She recommended the used of feigned indignation and anger when the embarrassment occurred, leaving the "offending" boy speechless and helpless. An alternative approach was to direct what she called "a scornful glance or a withering look" at the problem, making the boy feel extremely ashamed and apprehensive about what might happen next."
Eloquently she argued that men come into the world naked and in the care of women and there is nothing unnatural in this condition. In words that would send tremors of fear up the backbones of just about all males, she was to assert that this male nudity in front of dressed women be revived. She made a fetish of "total" clothing deprivation. Her philosophy went way beyond the traditional bared bottom: comprehensive shaming was essential to trigger mental change. And that meant youths with everything bared, and preferably before a group of women. And - to repeat a favorite point - the horror of involuntary erections being glimpsed or, better still, examined - by a nurse, teacher or governess or curious mother or sister - was a big part of the ritual humiliation.
Her personal memoir was recently located, unread, in The British Museum. It will shortly be published. In it she provides a no-holds-barred account of the things she saw and did. It is certain to feed into various strands of feminism and to galvanize the burgeoning CFNM community. It will point psychologists and educators to different ways of raising boys.
The first part of the manuscript deals with India. The war meant all her school staff were female and unmarried. They included older women, long established in India but living in all cases without male companions. They were likely to be stimulated by male nudity enforced on 18 year old boys and to support the strategy. Others were English girls, barely qualified as teachers, sent out to fill the posts vacated by the men and barely older than the boys they were to teach. For them, witnessing Total Clothing Deprivation was going to be challenging. Some would be excited by it, others afraid. All boys at the college were 18 and from upper caste backgrounds, inclined to reject female authority at first blush. As 1914 started Sarah faced real disciplinary challenges and was on the search for new approaches.
According to this unearthed memoir she then had the experience that was to shape her peculiar theory about the disciplining of young men, indeed her whole career. She was visiting the home of one of the lively Hindu families which had a senior boy at her school. Other guests were officials of the administration and Indian professionals. It was a happy celebration that began with drinks in the lounge attended by bare-footed male servants while sari-clad maids could be glimpsed in the corridors.
But not only maids. Down one corridor she saw in profile the son of the household, her 18 year old student, standing back to the wall absolutely stark naked. He was standing rigid as a sentry, hands clasped behind his back. Totally nude.
The sight astonished and, she admitted in her memoir, it also excited her. He was a tall boy with darkly burnished skin, slender and athletic. She had to look several times, incredulously, to confirm that his flanks were indeed totally uncovered - his well-shaped upper thighs seemed to swell into a muscular bottom. Her gaze confirmed too that the bundle hanging from his groin was not underwear of any kind but his exposed genitals. She had had to struggle not to stare longer and to carry on conversation with other guests.
The surreal atmosphere was confirmed by servants coming and going, by maids walking past the youth and glancing and giggling as they looked him over brazenly. But his eyes remained ahead at all times. Finally as the party rose to go to the dining room an elderly and worldly Englishman with a silver mustache lent close to Sarah and said, "Miss Maitland, as a gifted pedagogue you would understand more than most. But Indian families punish males by making them present themselves, as in that scene there, completely in the nuddy. Seen it numerous times. Up to the age of 25, would you believe? Bit disconcerting to us English folk but apparently works a treat."
He went on: "Yes, they call it 'Murgha', nudity as punishment. Runs deep in their culture. For example, there's a religious group committed to poverty. Their men go naked to make the point, but their women are allowed to wear white robes. And apparently temple caves with carvings show men naked except for pendant jewelry, the women as priestesses fully dressed looking scornfully at their buck-naked menfolk. Whole thing gives me the shivers. But I imagine if you're a woman..."
