Gynecocracy

Gynecrocacy Definition

1. Government by women.
2. A society ruled by women.

Female Domination

In 1893 a clandestine publisher brought out a flagellation novel with an entirely new twist: the hero/victim is dressed as a girl. This was Gynecocracy:

An ill-disciplined youth, having failed to settle down at school and having recently behaved indecently to one of the maids, is sent away to be educated with his three girl cousins under the control of their governess. Shortly after his arrival he is compelled to wear girls’ clothes as his normal attire. After much flagellation of all parties except the governess, and sexual interaction with all the women of the household, Julian marries one of the cousins, but continues to wear corsets and to remain under her dominion. A similar work, entitled The Petticoat Dominant, or Woman’s Revenge, appeared in 1898, possibly by the same author. --Peter Farrer

http://www.petticoated.com/petpunessay.htm

Peter Mendes quotes from a prospectus of 1896 about the book, which confirms that it was appreciated as new at the time:

“Gynecocracy” is not a common smutty little pamphlet devoted to the vulgar description, in coarse ungrammatical language, of common give-and-take love, but it is entirely based on a new idea, a fresh conception relating to a state of society that we may have heard about, talked about and whispered about; but we have never yet had this peculiar, pleasing, tantalising, salacious system of trained lubricity exposed before in print.

For many it will be a relaxation. The. famous Marquis de Sade found pleasure in humiliating female victims. Can it be possible that there are dainty, high-bred ladies who, gaily turning Nature's laws upside down, find sweet solace in the sufferings of a sweet youth, who becomes their victim, and is forced to be their toy, sometimes an unwilling one, subjected to their most extraordinary lewd desires and inventions? Is petticoat-government a desirable form of education for a raw youth of tender birth, and can he become a man, if brought up among girls, dressed in female attire with corset, high-heeled shoes and sixteen-button gloves, so as to destroy all outward signs of his sex?

What influence will this life of slavery have upon his sexual longings and future career? Can a man be of both sexes at once and change his nature, as he dresses either in masculine or feminine attire? All these questions relating to the sway of womanly government are here fully solved, among a series of adventures which for delicate handling, albeit full of real erotic and novel surprises, surpasses anything that has ever been published up to this day in any language.

 

AVANT PROPOS

Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not inapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they, to a discreet and judicious reader, serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate....

Good and Evil, we know in the field of this world, grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil- that is to say, of knowing Good by Evil. As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose -what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider Vice, with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true war-faring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race when that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness: which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare to be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas) describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his Palmer through the Cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?
Liberty of the Press
JOHN MILTON.