Butt Combing: Before Their Birchings
Sometimes in the Victorian flagellation literature you’ll see references to various pre-punishments before a birching, such as a spanking, or the application of various caustic unguents to redden and soften the area to be birched. I’ve even seen references to touching up a bare bottom with a curry comb. This looks like a hair comb being carefully applied to bent-over bare bottoms, but my best guess is that the goal is similar:
The image looks like it may be from the from the Biederer (Ostra) studio in Paris. (Today I learned that the Biederer brothers were Jewish, and both of them died at Birkenau in 1942.)
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