Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage

by Malcolm McKesson, Wesley Gibson (Editor), Katharine Gates (Editor)

Matriarchy: Freedom in Bondage is the life's work of 86 year old reclusive artist Malcolm McKesson, who has been secretly writing and illustrating this semi-autobiographical erotic novel for the past thirty years. Matriarchy follows the extraordinary transformation of a young man abducted into willing submission as a servant to a stern mistress who teaches him to "curb his manly nature." The protagonist learns to take on the roles of daughter, pageboy and husband, each with appropriate costume. With its intense and atmospheric line drawings and evocative descriptions of exotic costumes, rituals and bondage devices, Matriarchy reveals an inner mythology created in ecstatic seclusion, a subersive world of courtly eroticism. This novel promises to become a classic in the tradition of The Story of O and Venus in Furs.

1997 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you a Sub? Do you delight in bondage and cross dressing? Malcolm McKesson certainly did, and this bizarre but beautiful book is the proof of it. After a life of working in obscurity, he published this roman a clef and became the darling of the Outsider Art world.
Malcolm was a neighbor. He came from a wealthy New Jersey family, went to Harvard, and then failed at everything until he settled on being an artist. He was our local eccentric, the guy who spent one winter living in an igloo he constructed on his lawn. His poor wife Madeleine roughed it up in the big house with no electricity or running water. Several summers running, he constructed a scale model reproduction of a British warship. It was an oddly beautiful thing, tied up at the dock he built for it, but it sank on its initial voyage. A friend remembers as a child seeing Malcolm in full female rig (he was a big guy, bald, with lots of ear and nose hair) walking down to town. When she exclaimed, "There's Malcolm!" her parents shushed her. Somehow he managed to negotiate his place in a conservative, well-off summer community and yet live an art life devoted to his dream of serving The Feminine and suppressing The Masculine. Good on ya, Malcolm!

[Michael Allen Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting. Fascinating even, as a piece of biological ephemera. Really this is the fictionalized coming of age story of a submissive, who now has the chance to rewrite his own history through a fictional version of himself. The story itself is nothing remarkable, but the book is a really interesting study of outsider art and fetish just by its existence alone.

[Yureka Eric Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

here sissy sissy sissy... it's time for agp story hour. get on your knee highs and your bad dragon and try not too wet yourself.