The latest Dominatrix “memoir” to be released is denounced at its own launch party. This could either be a publicity stunt or a promotional disaster. I suppose we’ll never know…

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

‘The story behind Madame Lash’s no-show at her book launch varies wildly depending upon who you talk to. On Monday night the Sydney dominatrix left the author of her biography Madam Lash: Gretel Pinniger’s scandalous life of sex, art and bondage ”standing at the altar” when, at the last minute, she deputed her chauffeur to read a statement denouncing the book as lies. ”The chauffeur read out a statement saying it was character assassination,” says the jilted author Sam Everingham, who, though sympathetic to his subject, is having none of it. ”[But] I gave her a copy of the manuscript in October, and she read it in January, and we workshopped it together, and she did an edit with me.” Everingham says that Ms Lash was ”excited and happy” with the advance copy he sent her. He says the real reason she has backed away from the book, and all subsequent publicity, is because her financial security has become imperilled. Everingham said the only income she has received is $1000 to $3000 a month through the estate of a deceased patron (named by Private Sydney’s Andrew Hornery as the billionaire Lord Paul Hamlyn), and that Ms Lash’s brother told him she feared financial ruin if she backed a book in which that relationship was mentioned. To put it mildly, Ms Lash disputes his account. She would not be drawn about her finances, but told the Diary she was neither happy nor excited about an advance copy. ”I can’t begin to tell you the outrage it is. I cannot read the book without total nausea. I’ve got to page 84. It’s like identity fraud. I thought I was getting an art biography.”’

Terrifying advice on masturbation from “What a Young Boy Ought to Know”, published in 1909:

‘No boy can toy with the exposed portions of his reproductive system without finally suffering very serious consequences. In the beginning it may seem to a boy a trifling matter, and yet from the very first his conscience will tell him that he is doing something that is very wrong. It is on this account that a boy who yields to such an evil temptation will seek a secluded, solitary place, and it is because of this fact that it is called the “solitary vice.” Because the entire being of the one who indulges in this practice is debased and polluted by his own personal act it is also called “self-pollution.” It is also called “Onanism,” because for a similar offence, nearly four thousand years ago, God punished Onan with death (Genesis xxxviii, 3-10). This sin is also known by another name, and it is called “masturbation,” a word which is made from two Latin words which mean “To pollute by the hand.”‘

Courtesy of Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice.