Energy Independence

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Tsk, tsk...

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may trust me on this: when it comes to remembering scenes accurately and completely, bottoms have it all over tops.

My dear byrdafyre reminded me (however inadvertently, or perhaps very, very subtly) of a scene we did several years ago during which she orchestrated some serious overcoming in a Barca Lounger thus enabling her 2+ hour endurance of the various depredations upon her person. Once summoned again from memory I recalled that I was challenged too, and not unpleasantly: rigging to a soft, somewhat amorphous block of yield-y upholstery takes a little extra doing.

So, I bow to and thank the formidable woman reclining to your left for keeping the record straight. Clearly higher selves are somewhat more ecumenical in their choice of landing place than I would credit them, even in my own (somewhat faulty) memories.

Who Are You, Really?

The following may or may not have happened not too long ago. If it did, you know who you are.

Me, I didn't recognize myself.

It was not unlike how you often describe the shape of the room when I'm playing with your breath, how the world goes slightly plastic, soft. You flexed like you were being tumbled in the rogue wave I would later describe to you I had become. You levitated out of bed with, it seemed, the aid of but a couple of my fingers and suffered your exhausted body being bound yet again, not slowly, not erotically, but as though engraved by the single piece of still sweat-dampened jute. Your elbows veritably slapped together, your forearms jumped to their usual indigo hue, you gurgled a half-hearted protestation. You were soft, yielding... we both and everything wanted this moment, and gave way to it.

Once your wrists were unlovingly pinioned, you managed a "no..." as your soft world hardened to black. And then it began.

I wrote to you the following words a couple of days later:

"How often does one hear that on the heels of some momentous event or incredible behavior? 'Yes, it was me, but it's like I couldn't even recognize myself...' Unfortunately such words are likely as not to be uttered in a court of law during some sort of criminal proceeding, but the same words are also an acknowledgment of a tectonic shift in perception, for they imply that it's possible to see oneself from without, to see ourselves doing a self we don't recognize, which can only mean that we're having at that moment an experience of pure being."

You already know me a bit this way, this way better than nearly anyone else, really. You've felt that friction in your cheeks before, that heat. This was something else, this was shocking and hurtful and blinding in a way that no blindfold ever blinded. There was a learned force behind that first strike. You gasped four times, you seldom gasp at all unless I'm just giving you breath after a long withholding of it. I'm used to the cane coming down on you - your breath leaves in whimpers and cries, but it doesn't make noise going back in. You staggered under the blow before I grabbed your hair and rounded to the other cheek with concussive energy easily equal to the first. Was that what is called reeling? I wondered if it was the force or the surprise. Probably both.

After a sufficiency of mayhem committed on this face I adore you dropped to one knee, hard. I steadied you from the crown of your head and proceeded to rape your mouth, boring of that shortly and releasing you to fall. Your head missed the trunk by inches - your hair brushed over the corner. That's how quickly everything can go to pieces, but the room flexed for us, wanted this, just as we wanted it.

By one beautifully shod foot I dragged your limp form, squeaking across the parquet, back toward the bed, noting to you how good you were being about keeping your stilettos on. I would not call what I was enacting on you sadism, for I took no pleasure in it. I take no pleasure in beating you, on concentrating my upper body's weight on the business end of some tool or through the palms of my hands.

It's what we do; it's your apotheosis and my abasement.

As I noted to you years ago I am now, with you, a hitter, and uneasy rest the hands from which the gloves have been removed. Would that I were truly sadistic... that I could get off on hurting you.

Leashing you by your hair I lifted you and flipped you back on the bed, crushing your arms. You wormed backward weakly before I grabbed your throat and pressed it to the mattress. Your lips opened and closed silently, maybe you croaked something like a word, I don't know. I held you to the bed with one hand, choking off your resistance, while the other hand found you drenched with want. My still tumescent sex found you quickly and I caused myself some slight discomfort in the violence of my thrusting. When I let up on you you sucked breath and cried out, prompting the insertion of two fingers deep in your throat... and with it the retching. Out and back again, each spasm registering on my disinterested member. Once again to your throat, then in it, then once again a mighty swing and a resonant slap.

I was blind to myself, blind with sweat, berserk with power. I failed to check in, I failed to show up at all. I wondered where I'd gone. It was all so uncalled-for, this savagery. You're never anything but sweet as sugar. There was a long moment when it seemed you might sob, but no. You kept your composure, your dignity, your wits about you... you did not meet me where the ground was slick and unsure. One of us always has to stay present, rooted. You volunteered this time.

Then all the colors changed and it was past.

When I lifted the cloth from your eyes they were brimming with tears and wonder. Though I have beaten you bloody in the past, never have I done anything like this, been anyone like this. I have been on the offensive at times where I get what's going on - a rage propelling an attack properly comported to its object. The fighting me, a me I recognize. No rage this time, not even a mild pique. A calm and deliberate execution of raw blazing will, that's what it was. But whose? Who led this?

I'll be curious to learn if it really did happen, but I'll have to wait until I appear again. If I do you'll let me know and I'll make sure to get a good look next time.

Dem Damn Doms 2

Dear J.,

Following our most recent exchange I am very thoughtful about the whole matter of man qua dom and its characterization (both from within and from without) verses man qua man, and what we think of him. The entire idea of a "dom" I find problematic for a whole host of reasons, some already touched upon, but not least of which for what a man must believe true of himself in order to buy into the concept, however it ends up showing up on him.

My historical knowledge is sketchy here, but the idea of the dom (as a kind of freighted shorthand for dominant male) is I think a fairly recent phenomenon, one that has evolved coincident with the advance of women's equality, which is a sneaky way of noting that manhood in its poetical and even biological dimensions has taken something like a walk in the wilderness over the past generation (and possibly longer). As a result I think both genders have for at least half of that time recognized that something is not quite right in the relations between them, but something different than what was not quite right leading into the feminist and now post-feminist revolutions. The animal nature of both men and women has been bound by a new set of rules that in their effect have corrected a great many social ills, but also fomented some interesting existential issues for people's expression of their essential biological selves.

I don't mean to suggest that such issues arise for everyone; maybe only very few are sensitive to it. Where they do, however, they can be crippling. Of all the women with whom I've played, everyone over, say, 35, has wrestled with her a priori identification of herself as a feminist and her apparently conflicting desire to be tied up, or more generally overcome and dominated (younger women seem less, but still a little, conflicted). It is a proverbial cognitive disjunct and is so common in my experience that I feel as if I have begun parroting myself whenever the subject is broached (which often issues in some form of "What does this say about me as a person?"). There is at once a thrilling sense that rules are being transgressed combined with an equally gravitational sense that there lurks some sort of moral failure, a duty to oneself that is not being observed. In no case is anything like a natural flow of feeling the first and most ready instinct.

Which is, regrettably to my mind, not so dissimilar from general attitudes toward sex characteristic of even earlier generations.

Men, as is our wont, react hostilely toward any limitations placed on the biological imperative of spreading ourselves thinly and using lots of resources (such as women). What has been good for social functionality has been damaging to instinctual masculinity, for there are simply too many of us men walking the earth for any of us to be free-ranging anymore. Of course pointing out the debasing of masculine gender identity is not only politically incorrect (since somehow men are still believed to hold most if not all of the cards), such an allowance by any man reflexively and further debases its claimant among those of his own gender, since it admits to a weakness which is not part of masculinity as gender construct or as biological agent. The only "men" who effect classic masculine stereotypes with no fear of interdiction are those in either gender transition or those of a lower order of class. In both cases overt masculinism is tolerated because such men are politically ennobled by their socially marginalization or economic oppression. But the gender indeterminate and gender-fucked people with whom I have played have a uniquely canny take on the fluidity of assignments and identity - to float at the flexible edges of correct anything is the only place anything important ever happens.

Thus do heterosexual men find not much with which to align themselves, and with even less by which to position themselves as exceptional (which, to certain people with a puritanically punitive sensibility, is as it should be, and is especially agreeable to the sort of men in public office and with public profiles whose testosterone so frequently crosses up their fragile egos (paging Elliot Spitzer)). This plays out in relationships as it does in the larger corpus of society. A pro-domme once noted to me that men cannot be submissive for fear of what either women or other men might think of them, nor can they be full-on dominant without being ridiculed in the popular consciousness. The rational choice is to keep up a neurotic straddling act and essentially cease to register anywhere with anyone.

It could be that we all come to the BDSM table "broken" in some conventional sense of that word, but so what? What we don't appear to be doing in large measure is coming as we really are - perhaps beaten down and eager for a refreshed self-image, believing in a vitality we once knew we had and in our own ability to have it again... in our own worthiness of feeling alive.

Men especially do not feel particularly worthy of the drives that give no other species pause. The idea that it is right and in the nature of people to inflame their senses, leave their heads, to swoop down and be swept up, to have struggle and suffering included as tonics to the all-too-quickly digested repast... all this is not well endorsed, not outside the precincts of fiction at least. So, most doms are just scared that any instinct they act upon might be construed as a factual self-affirmation, a statement of principle, as a look into who they really are, and thus an alert to God, mom and the psycho-industrial complex to swing into action.

In practice I think what we get to see these days are largely half-measures of men, dom or otherwise.

A bit of a ramble, but that's how it is sometimes.

Mac, the Biological Essentialist

Help, Help! I'm Being Oppressed!

The engendering of humiliation characterizes the practice of hojojutsu and other inchoate forms of what would become shibari, and is implicit in what was the seed of shibari's own transformation from a martial into an erotic practice, and perhaps into something even more profoundly useful.

On the face of it, being bound is humbling since the unbound party is assigned the manifest power in the equation. The way in which we perverts temper the politically awkward fact of a power gradient obtaining between two parties is to call it a "power exchange", but there's no getting around it: one person humbles, and hence humiliates, another. What I would like to counterintuitively assert here is that a humbled state is about as close to the possession of pure power as any person can hope to achieve in life.

It has always been possible to subvert the will of a presumptive controlling party by creatively appropriating the presumed (sometimes ceded) mechanism of control. Thus, for example, has the word "queer" lost all of it's force as invective. Consciously surrendering to humiliation and degradation, to being apparently reduced and controlled by another, is the difference between being empowered and being oppressed. This idea is both the fulcrum and the lever of consent, and like those two basic machines there is practically nothing that consent cannot move.

All mystical traditions recognize that oppression is an optional state. Christ did nothing to resist the cross; in fact he actively sought the harshest of judgments from Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees. He was not oppressed in the slightest - rather, he was impassioned, humble and went down willingly to the grossest of abasements. He loved his enemies (and I have to doubt he thought of them as enemies). Had Christ indeed permitted himself to be oppressed by his oppressors he would then have likely have been forgotten along with every other Jewish carpenter named Jesus from the Galilee of his era. That he (as the tale is told) gave himself, that Christ surrendered, is what is remarkable about the man. A few hundred years before Jesus became the Christ, Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince, surrendered to humility and became the Buddha. Among the liberated community of our own era, the stories of Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi and countless others bear out the maxim that oppression is optional.

It's a bit more difficult for me to come up with an argument for oppressive practices other than bondage (say, whipping) being transformative in the direction of liberation (maybe I'll have a go at that sometime - the flogging scene in the movie Glory springs to mind), but I don't doubt that the same principle applies. Tying someone up looks to a tyrant like a ready means of reducing what it means to be a fully realized human, so the tyrannical community reliably adopts physical restraint as one of its tools. The liberated community knows in its bones that such behaviors are gestural, impotent and ultimately futile.

Given, however, that consciousness first blinks on in a monadic cosmos where all data points to our being all and one with Everything, that is, in a flawless state of union with the principle of creation, the perversion of physical restraint into eroticism is a small leap. Between the bottom of our hearts and the backs of our minds we already know what our deepest nature is and that it is continuous with the whole of existence. We come to consciousness both enlightened and tightly constrained, our fledgling senses accommodating only the toroidal nature of the womb. It is a comfort, a state of knowing without thinking, from which Freud observes we part only reluctantly. An atavistic impulse to return to the perfect state of satiety and unity is associated in earliest consciousness with being in a tight spot, understood as such only a posteriori, and certainly distinguishable from the open and vulnerable physical and psychic space we come to view as our world.

A commonplace about enlightenment is that separation and individuation are finally understood to be falsehoods, and so the inevitability of death is cast in a wholly different light, one unpacked of fearsome meaning (or any meaning at all, actually). To really live then becomes what Kant, in his consideration of the Sublime, liked to call Zweckmaßigkeit ohne Zweck, (purposeiveness without purpose). Alfred North Whitehead noted in his Function of Reason that the precise purpose of authentic inquiry is to be purposeless. At the edge of experience purpose is understood by scientist and mystic alike to be a mental, egoic construct, one which I suggest endows the entire notion of oppression with its noxious cast.

Indeed, to be enlightened is to fear no evil.

All ecstatic experience (or, again, passion) points to ultimate principles, and orgasm is the one form of ecstasy with which most people will have at least some experience in their lives. We partner-up intending to bridge the divide between at least two individuals, and fucking is largely (and merrily) how we prosecute that intention. So, as a species on at least one thing we're all in agreement: deep relations with at least one other person = good. Extrapolating only slightly from there it's easy enough to infer that deep relations with the whole of creation = even better. Getting sexed-up leads to ecstasy leads to reconnecting for a moment with the Godhead we know from earliest consciousness. Communion with ultimate principles is bred in our bones. Christ, Ghandi, Lao Tzu and nearly everyone else with their eye on the ball tell us more or less the same thing: We are God, we are All, what we think separates us from our true selves is an illusion. Gestation and birth are just metaphor for the state of grace and the fall from it.

(If we already have grace and know the ultimate truth, why bother with getting born and having duality, individuated self-hood, identity and all the other head-fakes of waking life in the first place? What's the advantage? Is the Universe in the business of squandering perfectly good creative energy?

The appearances of life have their own grade of cosmic import and are yet another topic to be considered another time.)

The physical constriction of bondage is a ready return to the antecedent state of grace. In getting tied up under a consensual, surrendered framework it's relatively easy to transform the intention of someone interested in controlling your freedom into a free ride to satori. Doing that allows the power gradient to shift immediately in the direction opposite to what is normally assumed, and tyrants need not apply.

Advantage: Bottom.

Dem Damn Doms

A little while back I had a very fruitful exchange with a woman relatively new to BDSM and interested in bondage. She is fiercely intelligent and fearless in her quest for straight dope, which resulted in epistles I found myself pleasantly surprised to be writing - not merely in response to her entreaties but about my character; both the one I possess and the one I play. Here's a meaty chunk:

When you get the time and inclination, (and if you are still interested) would you speak more on the issue of Doms and emotions? I am trying to get a handle on why particular Doms will attempt to 'train' women (or 'girls') yet withhold all sense of love, affection, being the lover, etc. They will 'collect' women ...or will select women they say are 'promising girls' yet what is the woman left with? Isn't love and affection part of what one would want to develop within the confines of a D/s relationship, in or out of marriage, or with both?

Dear J.,

Feh.

The phenomenon you note is chief among the reasons I do not frequent the organized scene. Like so many other things that can obtain between two people, problems of intimacy are rampant in BDSM, but like so many things obtaining to BDSM, it's amplified.

You might have described any of dozens of doms I've encountered through the years, many of whom profess towering abilities (which some of whom can actually deliver) which they deploy sparingly and at arm's-length from their partners. If pressed, they will allow that this aloofness is not only part of their prerogative, but that a certain, almost clinical, detachment advances the purity and precision of their control, as though the mingling of other energies might corrupt some predetermined end (in the case of rope geeks (i.e., my tribe) this can emerge as a tiresome fastidiousness with regard to knots, physics, etc.). This somewhat specious objectivity is probably helpful in side-stepping any moral qualms about the propriety of torturing an otherwise perfectly lovely person who (gulp) loves us.

Getting caught up in the particulars of "training" (toward what end we are left to wonder), rules, and so forth, while generally advancing a reductivist paradigm (e.g., from woman to girl, restraint, etc.) serves the purpose of distracting the bottom from what's going on in her emotional life as she deals with rules, the breaking of them, and consequentially the many and sometimes exquisite taxations of her body. This, it must be said, is one of the oft cited seductions of bottoming or subbing - gauzing over some emotional pain is a key inducement to willingly suffering the privations of submission.

It also conveniently gets the top off the hook for having to deal too deeply with his partner. Getting a bit too close to some essential truth? Throw out another red herring! Perhaps more importantly, constant redirection of the bottom's attention allows the top to stay comfortably buttoned up himself; if she's busy fulfilling her mandate she's less likely to notice her mate's foibles, much less his all-too-human vulnerability. When's the last time anyone pointed out a vulnerable top?

I see both dom and sub being very well served by the pomp and bombast of BDSM. As a practice it allows for sex and what looks like very intimate interaction, but mostly I think it's a lot of psychic smoke and mirrors.

But, what armchair analysis would be complete without some generous self-incrimination? I don't doubt for a moment that my interest in tying up comely lasses is rooted in a deep, almost atavistic fear of capital W Woman. I have no trouble loving women, however. I'm a great exponent of everyone grabbing as much love as time and fate allows, and I'm fortunate to have in Fin a woman who not only endorses such a view for her husband, but for herself. We both have a great deal of love in our lives and together. After 25 years Fin sees me very clearly, shares my affliction of maximum affection, and wants for me as I want for her, and that is as much as we can pack in. Love is of course critically important in the scheme of things but it is just love after all; it comes naturally and in great profusion, it's non-toxic and low in calories. It's the pound of flesh closest to the heart that we can keep.

The morality of love has, I think, gotten terribly muddled in the past couple thousand years. It's compelling to read Plato's Phaedrus or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to see how love unfurled prior to our age. We seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy coming up with reasons for not loving, or stories about what we're feeling being something other than love, or cases for having not committed love against another, or worst perhaps of all; masks for misbehavior we call love. We point ourselves toward love today largely wary of passion and not just a little weighted toward the tragic. Not at all like the Greeks, or for that matter the Romans (although I think it was segue from Republic to Empire that inaugurated the ascendancy of the bureaucratization of all things raw, robust and lively... like love).

The world we can touch these days is much more orderly and granular (certain appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), and BDSM as a relational ideal, again, amplifies the conventional world by even more rigorously atomizing and organizing exchanges between partners, compartmentalizing on the basis of its peculiar morality and logic, legislating with appeals to the putative authority of objectivity, acting with thoughtfully blunted intent and plausible deniability; fearful, really, of the messiness of real human relations.

That messiness is, to my thinking, an absolute good. Were it not for love and relationships opening us up to the pain and humiliation of devastating loss, there'd be no intimation of what it's like to die, and thereby what it is to live.

I kind of cherish my fear of Woman for all the reasons I believe I've described previously - Woman's curvy circularity, her ripeness, her lunacy, her bottomless love, the expression of which I am born like any other. As a genetic male I must at some point create the man I would become by declaring myself not Woman. Not the bottomless love from which I come. That, I think, puts me pretty much in a perpetual state of awe about the principle from which I've had to wrest myself in order to fill in the blank that was my gender identification and my physiology.

According to women I've known that mission has been pretty much accomplished, but still, how do I deal with something I am in awe of? Well, I could hate it, I suppose, I could hate Woman. Fortunately, I don't - Ah luvs 'em. I would have to guess that, dysfunctions aside, I had much more love around me than not as I made the differentiation move in adolescence (and by love I mean my parents made their hearts fully vulnerable to my drama) , but that's the armchair squeaking again. Certainly I never got from any of the women in my young life any excuse for hating.

The last squeak of the armchair is Freudian: the fear going along with awe that I will be subsumed by that which awes me. The gambit I choose is to control awe-inspiring Woman with my ropes. Maybe it's less Freudian and more Apollonian - regulating chaotic Dionysus with his linear architectonic, etc. Aeschylus would have loved it.

Now I'm straying into mytho-analysis, so it must be time to pause. If I've not exhausted you by this point then you shall have to tell me your secret for enduring people who think they know something.

Good night.

Mac

Of Rôles and Other Chimaeras

• What role do you identify as having?
  
  

I find the entire question of rôles and identity somewhat notional, to be honest, for everyone I've ever known in BDSM culture has very permeable containment of whatever they claim as their identity or rôle, and few hesitate to say so.

For example, several professional dominants (prodommes) with whom I've played are quite happy submissives and/or bottoms off the clock, and more than a few hardened masochists of whom I'm aware turn out to have well-formed sadistic streaks. I myself have tested everything I've ever contemplated doing on another person on myself first, and found all of it gratifying to various degrees. None the less, our categorizing instincts being what they are, most people in the "scene" (even those most polymorphously perverse) adopt one designation to supervene over others.

In my case, I'm what would be understood as a straight rope top, that being the active party in a hetero exchange featuring bondage. I do not expect or require submission, in fact I rather like when a bottom works passionately at escape. I am, however, hugely gratified by the final yielding borne of either exhaustion or the capitulation of resistance, and I do what it occurs to me to do to attain that yielding. I envisage the net effect as analogous to the performance of a priestly function of sorts: I am excited by the aspirant's quest and the deft administration of a small part of their journey is my principal gratification. I have not heard many tops allow this, but I find topping in BDSM to be effectively a service rôle (further subverting the congruity of the labels with the truths of BDSM).

• How did you come to your role identity?

My sexually controlling nature emerges from an especially awkward and powerless youth. At age 12 I reached 6 feet in height, and I weighed at the time only 125 pounds. For the next several years, I could not organize one foot in front of the other, much less participate profitably in athletics or appeal to the opposite sex. I was also an easy mark for the more alpha/successful boys my age, as it did not take much to knock me over.

The first feeling I recall that this ungainliness might not last forever was when I subdued an assailant by ensnaring him in my long arms and just pressing him to my body. He could not break out of my grasp to hit me and became suddenly very quiet, even docile. A teacher broke up the altercation (wherein I was implicated as the instigator, which, owing to my opponents becalmed state, must have been easy enough to assume), and I was quite pleased with myself to be marched to the principal's office and treated to detention.

Thus did physically controlling another person take on the coloration of personal overcoming. With otherwise a perfectly average young man's view of the world, girls were of course intimidating to me in my teens. When I hit upon simply holding them tightly or pinning their arms while otherwise engaged, I not only got more enjoyment from the act (however chaste or innocent), but my partner would often enough become noticeably more enthusiastic. Strong physical control of my partners (even absent bondage) has been a hallmark of my sex style since.