In BDSM We Trust

Silly me.

I have always thought in my anthropologically Pollyannaish way that the possibility of such a cunning and competitive creature as homo sapiens making it this far without exterminating itself speaks to some deeply rooted cooperative impulse. Imagine my surprise in finding out that the received wisdom among evolutionary anthropologists is that social skills and cooperative behaviors developed to better compete with other humans.

Huh? So, the ability to wage war and ultimately to obliterate all life on our home planet is an adaptive improvement on the behaviors of Paleolithic hominidae? Who knew? And how about a species that can completely encode such a trait in but a few thousand years (i.e., a blink of the evolutionary eye)? Despite the credit due our species under this view for collectively mutating faster than A-Rod, the grimness of the entailments I can scarcely imagine (how about this one - North Korea wins).

Who can blame AIG for trying to reverse-hedge the insurance business?

While I would not question the position that competitive pressures within the BDSM social milieu exist and are indeed intense, the success of BDSM as practice once a partner relationship has been established is predicated on something rather less zero-sum, a trait that is apparently being looked upon as theoretically radical, possibly even heretical, among anthropologists.

In a recent New York Times article there is reported a recent shift toward a new direction among careful thinkers in such matters. In a recent monograph, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes that human babies are uniquely expert in eliciting from their adults deeply suborned evolutionary adaptations, the net effect of which evince to us our own capacity to trust.

The great apes get their progeny up and running on their own much faster than humans; among mammals human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time. This extended span of rearing is, understandably, rather a lot for any human mother to bear. Thus among the many ways humans cooperate in rearing children is, according to Hrdy, chief among beneficial adaptations. By their wily ways of keeping adults not merely entertained, but largely empathetic to their helplessness, infants provoke and reinforce the expression of the trust trait. This is true for apes, but apes will not generally ask for or offer assistance in the rearing of their young. Humans do, and we generally get a positive (read: non-infanticidal) response from our fellow adults because, well, we all find the little blobs of gristle pretty adorable.

Perhaps we are able on a sub-conscious level to recall our own helplessness as infants, and thereby file our responses to little ones under "empathetic", but according to Hdry we were "nice before we were smart." Even so, we were smarter than other cooperative animals (such as certain birds, wolves, etc. - it's how we managed not to become dinner) before we became fully homo sapiens spaiens some 12,000 years ago. But that's what makes the problem interesting. We had brains that were already cunning, territorial and selfish, and there is much about our behavior even today that augers against evolutionary success, but we seem to have evolved more profitably in the area of trust. Babies express it reflexively, parents recognize the trust their babies show toward (certain, not all necessarily) other adults, and trust the other adults to aid in the rearing of the children.

Of course, as soon as we entered the neolithic era, developed agriculture and settlements, we came up with the idea of territory and, concomitantly, war to enforce its boundaries. The selfish genes entered their ascendancy, but the extant traits for trusting were able to keep pace, and the time spent rearing our offspring has not gotten any briefer in the intervening millennia. As an adaptive trait trust and the sharing of pooled resources is still pretty novel.

In light of all this it's a bit startling to learn that the assumption of anthropologists, sociologists and political theorists has been for generations that humans are primarily competitive, and social adaptations are largely in service of that dominant impulse. Perhaps my rosey colored views can be attributed to my long experience at play in the fields of trust. Loving just one person takes a great deal of trust, and also faith that their love is genuine. The pains of loving fully and well are profound, and faith is required because the pain can so easily be taken personally. Loving many takes an expansion of faith, and the vectors of trust become much more densely interwoven. My wife trusts and loves my partners proceeding purely on the love and trust she sees in me for them (much as I believe Professor Hdry suggests obtains in other loving contexts), and I do likewise with her partners. Trust does much to ameliorate competitive impulses (which have their place in the evolutionary scheme of things once trust has been violated, I suspect).

I think most would agree that it's difficult to trust in just one relationship, much less many. With more than one or in several relationships conscious trust becomes something to which one has to surrender since there is no such thing as stage-managing it. What exactly is it were asking to trust anyway? That we not get hurt? If we're unwilling to hurt then we're unwilling to love. If we submit to trust (to quote the great Peter Gabriel line) we get love, and we get the inevitable pain of love too, but we take it, gladly.

I don't need to spell out the value in metaphor of BDSM play to the case supporting Professor Hdry's theory - I think many readers of this column understand the virtues of trust, of cooperation, of loving profligately and wastefully, and of electing to suffer in love. The demands on, and challenges to, trust in BDSM play are always formidable, and within that sphere I've elaborated on an infantile impulse my conscious mind surrendered over 40 years ago, but which may also be a key trait in shoring-up mankind's evolutionary prospects against its own prodigious inclination for self-immolation.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love, Part 4

We spend out lives forgetting perhaps because the apparent truth that the self that gets pumped out into this dimension is somehow inauthentic bumps up almost immediately against biological nature. Nature’s uncaring and fascistic intent for us is to make copies – authenticity be damned. Nature gives us the little incentive called sexual pleasure to make those copies, but, the deeper truth being what it is, just as nature would confound our reaching in the direction of authenticity it also gives us one of the best avenues back to unity that we have, sex, which religion fears because sex trumps orthodoxy (and, hence, power) as a means of ecstatic, transformative experience. Not that devotion doesn’t work at all – millions of mystics have renounced the world to commit their lives to attaining a view of the godhead. But that’s a slow, laborious process. Similar, if not identical, results can be achieved with sex in a fraction of the time. Mysticism is to sex as the abacus is to a Quad-core processor.

So, there you go, nature itself offers up to humanity the sine qua non of spiritual actualization, sexual ecstasy, by marking it specifically as difficult, by making it appear inauthentic, by prompting a forgetting of unity. Thus does the fast track of sex become boggy with cultural and religious ideas of separation and thought-based self-identity, crystallized in the emotion of… shame. In shame sex looses its efficacy, and we can all think of some manner in which we’re thoughtfully disabling our sex with some blockage or other – an entire industry and billions of dollars in chemicals have rallied to meet our shameful thoughts about our sex. We become useful idiots in nature’s plan for our chromosomal proliferation.

That is, unless we don’t.

In a grander sense nature provides the friction we need to get traction, to make our way back to what lies in front of all of us and use that truth now and, instead of hovering just above life, falling fully and intimately into it.

She’s still there, by the way. Still just as tightly tied, somehow managing all this while to have avoided being gagged. And look at that – she is a good girl after all! In all this time I’ve been talking nothing has changed about our Besu and her predicament, except maybe her thoughts. With time and patience, hers and mine, she begins to let thought go and allows her body to be – in pain, dislocated, displaced. She has allowed herself to become unknown to herself, her self has mysteriously abated and left in its stead an opening, a widening which will meet all possibility now, especially that of divine immediacy, of the immanence of love and the enfolding of time and space, the time and the space in which we firmly believed until we shook ourselves loose from it.

For my part, as the top, I stay on the path I started down with her, the one on which she consented to volunteer her freedom, her voice and her self to my designs, my intentions, which, as anyone knows, were always in some sense her own. Among those intentions would be to for me to remove from her senses the veil of familiarity and the known, and challenging bondage is the manner in which I apply myself to my intention, a manner in which she can at every moment of our engagement feel that intention and the collapse of space/time that, if we are able to press forward into true intimacy where things are fuzzy, scary and strange, reveals the authentic nature of self in its obliteration and merging into the other, and by extension, into all things, into unity. With bondage it is to this strong possibility I continually pledge myself and then my self’s subjugation, that I might feel her in and about me and in so doing forget about either one of us.

It’s very similar to exactly what is going on right this very moment between all of you and me. Right now you, this audience, is not an assembly of individuals to me – to me you’re all fused, you’re an audience. With any luck you’ve been having an experience roughly in common of me, the element at the front of the room, the one holding forth hopefully with more authority than pedantry, but hopefully… full of hope and, therefore, vulnerable, open and exposed, with many of my deeply felt and personal truths revealed to others, the audience, my partners, as it were, in this little talk, without whom nothing here would have taken place.

Well, perhaps Besu and I would found our way into a lovely little scene, but you get my meaning.

And that’s how it happens – you show up, you present yourself and you stay present and before you know it you’re in the throes of an intimate experience. Surprise!

In my experience of it, it’s in this way that BDSM can deliver the goods sought after for millennia by adepts, mystics, alchemists… aspirationalists of all kinds and colorations; that being to surrender self, and to gain power and strength in the surrender. Regardless of what two people may actually be doing, when energy is fearlessly offered and intense both top and bottom surrender to the present moment and die to their respective pasts. To relate is to be fully conscious without necessarily being happy. Let the first happen and the latter will follow, get the inside right and the outside falls into place. The B of BDSM, bondage, as fact and as agent, may be no more efficacious than any other sadomasochistic mode, but if it may be said to do nothing else it does stress interiority - the daunting pleasures of going within, for, after all, and perhaps paradoxically, bondage is all about containment. I don’t want to overstate my position here on bondage, for I have a great many other kinks, but I believe that to be in it and to look at it is to have ready and unique access to the primal and essential impulse of being human, to step lightly back into the deeper currents of being, and through the gateway of intimacy as partners welcome a pure intimacy with all things, in every dimension, and in no time.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love, Part 3

But what has an ontology of duality brought to human relations? I see an ever deepening, almost therapeutic search for self as distinct from all else that is believed to exist as the final measure of earthly attainment, the ultimate good.

And I’m referring now to the quest itself, for as you’ve noticed the notion of concretely individuated self is (kind of) slippery, and that’s good. What would it mean to actually “tie down” who I really am? Well, if I tie anything down so it stops moving, stops becoming, is, in other words, static, then I can tell myself I know something for knowledge can only be of the immutable and unchanging.

But I would not appear to be those things. I’m always changing. I am, for example, aging. I’m compressing the gap between this very moment and my ultimate non-existence even as I simultaneously open up time and space between having become conscious and this very moment. I understand that I live constantly in relation to my end, my death, what Martin Heidegger called his “proximity theory” of being. Eckhardt Tolle would have me understand my relationship to my end as a brand of intimacy which most people are conditioned to avoid, as it is unmanifested and cannot, therefore, be weighed in thought.

Being, to Heidegger, is a misapprehension of authentic self (as opposed to individuated self); as I noted before we tend to settle for a concept of who we are relative to what we think we know about the world around us. Heidegger, while saying that the ultimate knowable truth is death, elaborates by observing that we do this prejudicially, meaning we construct a self from what we think we know best, what is most familiar, even comfortable, and this leads to a misbegotten notion of self. Our most authentic selves come not from what we know best, but from what is
most mysterious to us, what is darkest, strangest and most inscrutable. We know our authentic selves when we’re on the trickiest ground. Our highest and best selves are unlikely to show up in a Barca Lounger; we do, however, recall proudly the last time we pulled through when the chips were really down.

I would like to extend Heidegger and propose that in life we are processing toward unity, which is the truest course of being, and unimpeachable because we all face the same end, which, despite the most thoughtful efforts of organized religion, is a vast, aching mystery. Thus do we come into the world with an inborn ability to process back to a unified state, for all that is born dies. Being born itself gives us a strong impetus to aim for unity, for the world of the womb is expressive to earliest consciousness of a principle of unity and birth is all about separation, so in a sense the Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian problem of struggling for reunification with God is apt, but only as metaphor. As a way of understanding one’s humanity and of actually getting to God it’s historically of somewhat dubious utility.

So, how to go from unity to separation and back to unity? Well, we all get to unify in the ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust episode, the curtain call, as it were, and maybe even then we get to understand the nature of God and being without time, but what about before then, in life? Is it possible?

Through intimacy. Through breaking down what we think we know about self and its separation from other, from our partner. Through abrogation of self and merging, fusing and even joyously confusing the frontier where you end and your partner begins. It is what the Buddhists call compassion... compassion – feeling with. In Heidegger’s native language, mitgefühl. It is in the realization of authentic self, the self that is the other and acknowledges no distinction, no separation. It is being as one, unmediated, undifferentiated, which is available to us in this life, before it ends. No where is it written that we have to wait to know, in fact we’re born knowing and we spend our lives forgetting. That, to me, is what intimacy is all about, forgetting to forget.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love: Part 2

Say I have somewhat ruthlessly tied my partner in a position for which she was unprepared. Unprepared? Some might say that’s bad form for a top, and I would beg their momentary indulgence. So, my partner is working hard with this position and is possibly breaking down a little before long... sooner than she’d like... and in recognition of this I add a bit more challenge to the picture, something subtle that shifts the focus of discomfort just enough to take her out of the mind that’s saying “I… can’t… do this…” and put her back into the body that’s feeling more and more with each passing moment.

While I can afford to appear aloof about all this shifty energy, she’s anything but: it’s really uncomfortable now and ere long she might want out, might even get a little irate, but she’s not using her safe signal. In a little while she might get vocally angry, which is easily frustrated with a gag, about which she’d be humiliated on top of her aching for release. But in the meantime we’ll all keep aware for a safe signal, or panic, or, hopefully, fuller and fuller consciousness and presence as her options fall by the wayside.

I may give her a moment’s respite in the form of a glancing, gentle touch, brokering the continuation with a moment’s kindness, as it were, but I'm in close to her suffering, which is now acute and which she's resisting - I sense that she wants to be still in her bondage but it’s hard... she wants to be good but she’s unprepared to be good, to perform as she thinks I want her to perform, as she thinks I want her to be. Thinking about doing something “right” or “well”, or how she can manage the pain or the humiliation. Thinking… thinking… and thereby making the Cartesian blunder of being – cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. But what? What am I? What’s assumed here? Well, first of all a self, a substantial, individuated entity apart from other selves and things. “I” is not only assumed, it's separate, and separate is, of course, anything but intimate. Separate is alienated.

So, now the suffering is more than physical; it’s existential. She’s in her head, figuring how to do what she’s being challenged by to avoid being with the challenge and thereby risking who she thinks she is. She’s the solidly proverbial human doing as opposed to the shifty, ephemeral and maybe chaotic human being. The primary question is now before her, brought by her dangerous lover, someone with whom she would be intimate if she could figure out how. If she could figure her way out of alienation. Always figuring. How to answer? Figuring out what the original question was in the first place… perhaps finally figuring not to figure.

The head, the mind, the brain, the center of ratiocination is the back office of intimacy, it’s where your claims get processed by unfeeling functionaries who insist on procedure and logic ahead of inconvenient and disorderly emotions. As any process-driven bureaucratic organization would do, thinking insists on not only its primacy but on the expansion of its control. Not surprisingly, many of the people I’ve met in the BDSM community are very bright, one might even say brainy. Good with their heads, and, maybe, in the community specifically looking to get out of those same heads a little more often.

So, perhaps rather than militate against intimacy, we simply fall back on familiar and culturally endorsed patterns of dealing with new information – we sort, we categorize, we try to figure it out, we think about things. Think about that; when’s the last time you had an ecstatic experience by thinking about anything?

Maybe some of you are familiar with Eckhardt Tolle’s Power of Now and his concept of the “unmanifested”. The manifested is the reality we think we know and the one we rely on to explain our existence. It’s a relative existence, one in which context is all important. It’s the heir to a long tradition of what I call separationist belief structures, starting with Plato’s ontological division of the world into extensional and ideal realms in the “Cave Analogy” to an interpretation of grace that includes a fall from it - Lucifer’s fall from heaven, man’s fall in the book of Genesis, and with the fall the eternal struggle to return to God’s good side.

Coming into the Enlightenment, this basic principles of separation and alienation are present and operant in Descartes and the worldview he organized so neatly and imparted to, for example, Issac Newton, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics and the calculus and their divvying up of reality into smaller and smaller quanta, ad infinitum.

Already pickled in a guiding existential principle of separation and duality, these leaps forward in human thought to this day look to most folks like unvarnished benefits. Notwithstanding important confirmations in high-energy physics (e.g., Heisenberg and the "Uncertainty Principle") of long-standing theories enunciated in metaphysics (e.g., Liebniz and his "Monadology"), both of which concern themselves with primary substance, and which together are beginning to point to resolution in a non-granular universe, the doctrine of duality continues to advance a world view where parsing thought, method and calculation is practically a religion, one where quality is least of all judged on refinement of feeling and mostly based on reproducibility of results. Not altogether a bad thing, I would say, for it made writing this essay using a word processor a great deal more fluid a project than it might otherwise have been.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love: Part 1

This is the text of a lecture I delivered for TES in NYC recently. It is only slightly modified to suit this forum. First the teaser:

Join Mac for a riff on Leonard Cohen of which the poet himself would approve. The ends of love have known many means: chocolate, diamonds, war... bondage? Well, maybe not so much. Until now. From ancient myth to modern neuroses Mac explores what love might have in store for us and how rope helps pin it down. Carve into your desire to bind or be bound and what it means to your ideas of yourself, your partner, your intimacy and the ends of your being. Go straight to the top to get to the bottom of some pretty big issues, expect the usual big words, a little Q&A, maybe a few gratuitous visual aids, and maybe to leave with some new ideas.

***

Thank you all for having me again, and especially to Lolita for her raw determination in getting a date together. I can well imagine that she often gets her partners to stretch and do the sorts of things they might not otherwise, and about which, afterward, they’re grateful.

I’d like to open tonight with a quote from the blog of someone who appreciates many of the same things I do about art, culture, daring, polemic and especially Japanese aesthetics. His name is Tatsuya Ishida, and he’s the author of Sinfest. Here you go:

“Whenever I peel an orange, I save the stem end for last. There's something about pulling out the spine that is very satisfying. Texture-wise, visually, the little plucky squirty sensation, it's a fun little operation to cap the peeling process. That's sort of my modus operandi when it comes to food. I try to leave the best for last. When I have a chicken pot pie, for example, I eat all the carrots and peas first, and leave a stash of chicken for the big finish. When I have a sandwich I work my way around the crust to the middle. I have this shit down to a science. Sometimes, though, it's not so smooth. Things can get complicated. Like, when I'm eating a pancake breakfast with hash browns, bacon, and eggs, I can't decide what my favorite thing is. I panic a little in my heart because I don't know how it's going to end. But that's what life is all about. Thrills, man. Thrills. I start out all confident that I'll end with a bite of bacon but then, the sweet syrupy pancakes start to win me over. Then the hash browns, that unassuming dark horse, make a comeback. And then the eggs are like, "Hey, we're the pure unblemished souls of chickens! Recognize!" At that point, all bets are off. It's anybody's game. I might go with bacon. I might not. Nothing's set in stone. Anything can happen. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, ‘Tat, you crazy fool! You HAVE to have the last bite planned out AT ALL TIMES!’ But I like to live on the edge, Jack. I take chances. I flirt with danger. That's how I roll.”

Flirting with danger, that’s certainly one way to roll, and, I’m going to submit here that it’s not only a great way to roll but a great way to come to the timeless moment when danger, uncertainty, and the strangeness they engender roll into fusion between oneself and what, until that timeless moment, was another person. This is what I call intimacy.

A big part of success in anything has to do with allowing yourself to be surprised, indeed, being grateful for the leavening and spice of life's surprises, big and small. This is never more true than in relationships, but in principle yielding to surprise solves for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating very few new problems of its own. Often events are just surprising and nothing else - not really problems at all if one can accommodate having not expected them.

I’ve been chatting about this idea with friends for a while to see what views I could glean that are different from my own. Rather than definite answers to the question of “what is intimacy?” or “how do you arrive at intimacy?” I have, for the obvious reasons, been interested in the question of whether suffering and displacement are legitimate access points to the realm of intimacy, and, concomitantly, what is that militates against immediate immersion into intimacy if suffering and displacement are indeed effective?

In the BDSM community we’re all familiar with the terms “intimacy averse” or “intimacy challenged”, and if I may presume to narrow these concepts down to something we can work with in the short time we have, let me suggest that they mean something like the inclination to run away, to withhold, or to give the impression of withholding, and, perhaps most importantly, to react with trepidation to a partner’s fullness of feeling in love, be it ecstatic or despairing.

To go into what I mean by “love” is a subject for another day – I’ll allow, however, that love in any universalizable sense of the word, must include an opening of self to the other, a revelation, if you will, where at least in some measure we expose the better, and the worse, angels of our natures to another person. I know that I will develop an intense and poignantly suasive feeling when I am coming unfurled before a companion, and never more so than when I am freely, profligately and perhaps even recklessly reducing their physical representation to me – who they look like, feel like, who they like to think they are. Rope is pretty good for this.

But, coming unfurled in this instance refers to the way in which I become completely honest about who I am in the moment, which is often neither pleasant nor attractive. But it’s authentic and it’s there, and it is fully expressive, and it fronts for me if it is welcome. If it’s unwelcome, it’s still there but there are other aspects of my character that may step to the fore at such times, no less honest, and which may be called upon to broker a continuation of the opening and the revelation.

Let me give you an example... (Besu and I teamed here to provide a visual aid similar to what we did a while back for photographer Jack Montgomery, a riff on Nobuyoshi Araki, right...)

Ins and (Mostly) Outs of Public Displays of Kink

When time is short I'll occasionally dip into the pool of interesting ideas I've addressed with one correspondent or another over the years and dress it up a bit for posting on RSE. Here's one concerning my antipathy toward public play.

• What happens when the norms/rules are violated in a club? Do others provide sanctions or do some just look away? What if people consistently violate and are sanctioned…will they eventually stop coming because they realize that they aren’t wanted there? Have you ever seen someone who others ignored or sanctioned because they weren't respecting the rules? If so, what happened and what happened to them?

In my checkered experience of the public scene, the answer to this question seems to me highly contingent on the nature, structure and/or conditions of entry into the club. At one of the few surviving public BDSM clubs in NYC there is no vetting for fitness to the club's motif and putative purpose, so culture tourists and "wankers" (men who intrude on scenes while masturbating) are not only common but form the base upon which this club continues to do business.

Crowding by such persons reliably breaks scenes, mine and others. My standard line to unwanted participants (at first politely delivered) is "If you need to know where to position yourself, it's where I'm not hitting you," referring putatively to my reach inside the scene, but offered with a dusting of menace. More than once I've been brought to the point of physical confrontation with a wanker who simply would not keep his distance from my bound partner. In one instance an inebriant ended up being physically removed by myself and three other men (none of whom represented the club), but it is my impression that as a matter of policy no one who pays the cover is ejected unless the disruption has practically evolved into one for the police. I understand the club's position as a business proposition, however, and my choice to attend or not is, like any wanker, mine to make. It's impossible, however, not to conclude that under such conditions I am providing an attraction, and act, as it were, and indeed paying for the privilege of doing so, solely for the club's benefit.

In the interest of gender equality let me also observe that it is not only sexually repressed men who confound public play. Under different public circumstances and on more than one occasion women have approached me in public and endeavored to insinuate themselves by exaggerating their interest and experience, or by just lying. The latter behavior, if not pathological, one can usually chalk up to loneliness or an interest in something other than bondage (such as in one case the mistaken assumption that I was both substantially well-off and of a certain faith). More than a few women I've met have "always been intrigued by bondage" once, it seems, they've calculated my value on some other scale. Finding out I'm married usually puts an opportunistic intrigue down pretty quickly.

A counterpoint to this kind of tedious public dynamic are clubs such as one I used to frequent in Seattle, which fields 7 - 10 dungeon monitors on any given night. These experienced volunteers manage scenes in which perhaps a large number of people have taken an interest, or will assist with complex suspensions or other dangerous situations, and generally make their presence known and felt for the sake of those who can use them to, or, at the very least, to establish a perimeter.

(As an aside, gay bears and leather daddies make, I think, especially excellent DMs; robustly masculine and intimidating on the outside, politic, diplomatic and empathetic on the inside. The queer clubbing community also seems to have an intuitive feel for SM scene energy, irrespective of individual appetite. This reflexive and deferential civility toward concentrated human experience (in this case intimacy) is what I think endows a community with culture. Perhaps we don't use the word "culture" to qualify the straight or vanilla communities precisely because they lack the requisite erotic cultivation and civility to qualify as such. As I am often wont to observe here, BDSM just amplifies who one (or an entire community) really is.)

It helps that the Seattle outfit is a membership club, so all members are thoroughly briefed on the rules, and outsiders such as myself are obliged to either be accompanied by a member upon entry, or to be meeting one there. Even so, outsiders are obliged to sign off on the rule sheet. I'm given to understand anything untoward is very unusual, and that was indeed my experience. Likewise, in a private party setting all of the attendees have probably demonstrated their bona-fides to the host directly or by relation to a trusted source, so rules are largely unnecessary and comity is far more likely.

But, still, there are no guarantees. Once, some time ago, at a private party outside Austin I performed a semi-suspension that gathered a large audience. As the scene played out to the satisfaction of myself and my bottom (a friend's girlfriend), the respectful (and wanker-free) crowd dispersed to reveal two attractive young women, one of whom I had taken note of earlier in the evening, the other giggling cutely and asking if she could be next. I foolishly (and youthfully) said "of course," both flattered and feeling very full of myself on the heels of my moment in the spotlight.

Well, pride goeth before the fall.

Their excitement ended up centering around getting pictures of each other in situ at a BDSM affair, to which they had been invited as decoration (which I would find out presently). I had unwittingly volunteered to be their sideshow cut-out. With very little rope on her my initiate posed and mugged for a few snapshots before she realized she was in fact in the early stages of helplessness, at which point she began complaining loudly that she was uncomfortable, and went from giggly to apoplectic in a matter of a few seconds. Fortunately my creds were good with the organizers and, more importantly, the bouncers, who bounced promptly when the one I had initially found cute started shouting (most uncivilly) "Hey! This asshole's assaulting her!" There were several minutes thereafter of feather smoothing and drink ticket distribution, the effect of which apparently prevented the dialing of 911.

Turns out culture tourists can show up in grubby trenchcoats and shear back-seamed stockings.

The above constitutes the majority of my misfortune in the public scene taken over 20 odd years, so I consider myself actually pretty fortunate. Apart, however, from the occasional class or private tutorial (and, of course the fine art stuff), I've pretty much forsaken public play for these and other reasons, but mostly because I finally got wise to the happy fact that in all areas of life the right sorts of folks seem to show up right in my midst when I'm least expecting it, and with a lot less work and stress. To quote Bertold Brecht:

"What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough"

Ring Around the Collar

The cards and letters keep coming...

I am having trouble figuring out BDSM culture... I'm very interested in collaring and wonder if you've ever collared a partner or participated in the ceremony, or can tell me more about the symbolism and so forth. I don't even know what I would wear with a collar! How for example did collaring become special in BDSM? Also, do you have anything you can say about wearing a collar in mainstream society? Obviously I know you don't wear one, but maybe you know people who do.

This from someone who stumbled into kink through association with an artist friend we have in common. I've not heard of what progress she's made in her experiments, but elaborating on my reply to her for posting here has been interesting.

I understand that as a novice the norms and mores of the "culture" should be of exceptional interest, but what I think I know on this front is likely of very small value to someone for whom the interest is keen. Many years of exposure to and participation in (to varying degrees) the club, porn, house, Internet, fine art and political BDSM scene has lead me to surmise the following with respect to norms in BDSM and that which, within the framework of an interpretive apparatus, would identify it as a distinct culture: they are the very norms that identify the larger culture from which they emerge, merely amplified.

Let's consider the example of collaring. When two people avow to one another that between them a commitment to one another obtains, it is customary in the West for this oath to be materially symbolized somehow. In my business I use contracts - legally defensible though they may be, they are in fact merely betokenings of a common understanding. In trade, value is expressed via money, which, like a spoken word, has no intrinsic value other than that ascribed to it by the receiving party; even gold fluctuates daily with respect to the perception of its worth.

In marriage, we use rings, a convention which, as I understand it, emerged from Egypt and is symbolically derivative of the Uroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail and symbolizing the pelastrational nature of integration and assimilation (see Mysterium Coniunctionis by C.G. Jung). Moving forward a couple of millennia, the Romans had culturally calibrated the ring symbol as representative of value, and employed expensively tooled rings of precious metals as trade goods in marriage - the wedding band was regarded as a legal agreement expressing ownership of its wearer, i.e., the woman. Arguably, we preserve more of our current cultural, civic, intellectual and social cues from the Greco-Roman tradition than have persisted from the high era of the Pharaohs.

Even in our modern age we speak of "taking" a mate, and wedding bands are looked to as symbols of "goods" that are "spoken for". I never remove my band, and it is frequently a topic of conversation with partners who are eager to plumb the meaning of the ring as I've perverted it. Even among long-time kinky people there is often the residuum of cultural conditioning regarding possession and its symbols. One learns about one's kink on the tricky terrain of intimacy - through vulnerability, openness and the making of mistakes, false assumptions, or sometimes going 'round in circles (or, if you're lucky, in the making of circles, such as dear A. below - ed.).

In that accelerated world, the lessons come more quickly, more clearly and often more extensibly. This is how it is, I think, that kinky folk tend toward the somewhat more polite and decorous end of the spectrum in the broader cross-section of society. Again, not different so much as simply amplified.


A collar is, to my thinking, merely a variation on the same theme, albeit amplified to an unambiguous degree, whereas the ancient meaning of the wedding band has been diluted by years and the general principle of democratization. Collaring is something we do with our pets, a factor in our lives our laws tell us we "own" and for which we are responsible. I expect the pervy world to keep pace with whatever most clearly and most subversively represents unambiguous commitments (which, of course, are every bit as fragile over the long haul as any commitment expressed elsewhere in society), be it collars or something else. That it be openly defiant or contrary to convention is definitionally its perversity.

Personally, I find collaring symbolically facile. In far more recent times metal collars and chains were expressive of ownership and were also punitive instruments, as they are still. Yet, today, the wearing of metal chains about the neck is not merely fashionable, it's practically uniform. The more bombastic and aware of the Gangsta community here in Brooklyn openly declare the wearing of heavy metal chains about their necks as the subversion and appropriation of a potent symbol from the habit of their historic white oppressors. It is apt, therefore, that proper white society should look upon black "bling" with distaste and discomfort, for it is emblematic of pain white visited upon the body of black on these shores. In much the same spirit the word "nigga" is now exclusively the dominion of black-on-black communication. There is no white person still standing who does not appear a knuckle-dragging cracker should the word escape his lips with any sense of conviction.

Given that most kinky folk come from solidly middle class circumstances and would not be thought "oppressed" in any conventional sense of the term, one wonders about the subversive value of the collar, or what exactly is being defused through reappropriation. This is true for all symbolic expression in kink. The psycho-historical aspect to kinky expression may not be as labyrinthine as Gangsta culture, but then again, perhaps it is. Another way of looking at the issue may be to follow the path backward to what the dominant culture identifies and endorses as normal, and see how behaviors someone such as myself (a scion of middle class comfort if ever there was one) practice (and even call sacred) emerge from that so-called normalcy. In the end, all subcultures end up being commentaries on that of which they are derivative.

Notes from the Hermitage

This is picking up on the thread with which I started this blog of a lengthy email interview I did with a sociologist a while back. As I am just returned from travels (during which the last two posts went up automatically) it’s convenient to have something, in effect, already written, as it may be from time to time in the future. There’s still plenty left to this interview, so I’ll be posting the preserved hanks of it at times when there’s nothing fresh in the larder.

I know I will be receiving some energized mail for this post, and I would be indebted to those of you moved to write if you would post your rejoinders in the comments area where they may spur further discussion. Thanks.

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I am very interested in further information regarding the politics of BDSM organizations. Specifically, I'm interested in the hierarchies of which I have some vague understanding. I'm talking about the individuals (or maybe the areas of interest in BDSM) that appear to reign king/queen and those who would be considered "lesser than". For example, who are the elites of the groups and what kind of people are criticized. I know there is one guy in Dallas who a few others said (in a derogatory tone) that he will let anyone spank him. He walked around just asking any and everyone to do so. So, I saw this hierarchy operating even before I began the interviews. What can you explain to me about the hierarchies that you observe? It isn't at all clear to me, but surely there are groups or individuals who reap greater status than some others.

With some consideration, I'm afraid I'll be of little help to you in this matter of the social hierarchies in BDSM. As you know, I (along with nearly all of my partners) participate outside the established scene. I do rarely link up with a woman who is on the board of one of our local organizations, and have from her some insight about the formally structured hierarchies, but I gather that is not quite your interest.

With said friend I did recently deliver a demonstration for the organization she helps direct, with her as my bottom. It was offered through the bondage special interest group, which is one of many SIGs organized by the membership. Our outing was very well attended, which I assumed originally had to do with the tricky inverted suspension we had advertised, and discussion following went on well past the alloted time. My friend corrected my perception later in noting that the outsized interest was engendered chiefly by my outsider status.

That I do not circulate in the club or organizational scene could add something, I think, to my currency in the NY kinky milieu. The partners whom I've introduced to the scene apparently enjoy greater cache owing, perhaps, to a subtle prejudice in favor of sexually independent and self-actualized women that both women and men in the scene deploy happily (for different reasons, of course). The woman who does not need because she already has is the stuff of which many Hollywood legends are built (think Dietrich, Monroe, & co.). Of course, the attraction is often quickly overlaid with envy or jealousy ere long, but the root fascination remains.

The self-actualization of peripheral pervs is communicated in terms of scarcity, which prompts me to speculate that another prejudice that lurks in the organized scene has to do with joining the organized scene itself, which is ipso facto expressive of a need for partners, and that need conveys weakness. It is, again, a way of wearing who one is on one's sleeve and sacrificing thereby certain tactical advantages. A woman I play with who lives in Oakland, CA used to work for Midori (The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, Grove, 2001), arguably the most active BDSM educator and presenter in the world. Observing that San Francisco has a lively leather scene, I asked which venues Midori prefers in her home town, to which my friend replied "Mac, be serious. You know the club scene. If she started showing up in clubs, that'd be the end of her speaking career."

In the BDSM scene, first among sacrificed advantages when one shows up publicly is mystery (a compelling quality, kinky or otherwise). BDSM refracts all manner of power expressed and exchanged between participants; minor defects of confidence or character that might be politely indulged in vanilla social settings (or even celebrated in certain therapeutic contexts) are often amplified in BDSM to the status of pathology when grafted to a particularly bizarre kink (which is, of course, any kink that is not my kink). Thus, as doubtless you've noticed, kinky folks are by and large a very well-mannered lot.

My egalitarian instinct recognizes the unfairness of this, the double standard, as it were, but the biological essentialist in me recognizes the pattern as natural. There is an incentive and opportunity, however, for people who labor with deficiencies in the confidence area to get a grip on their inhibitions and/or awkwardness, for once they have joined they find themselves in a setting where their peculiar fancies might finally find succor. While shyness inside an actual scene may be just the thing the script calls for, shyness in public, non-scene space is looked upon as a form of withholding as it might be in any social setting. There are many incentives to get out of one's own way in the organized scene; like in so many other areas of life, those who give of themselves fully (whatever it is that they have to give) enjoy generally greater status for being happier and freer people, and the same folks tend to attract attention more suited to their liking. In the scene, as elsewhere, givers gain.

That said, and at the risk of generalizing, I recognize the fellow in Dallas of whom you wrote, or I should say I recognize his type. Often, humiliation and rejection is a part of scene energy, and many are the players who will haunt the ranks affirming themselves accordingly. If this fellow's entire MO is to prostrate himself before any and all plaintively seeking intimacy, that may very well be exactly what he needs to get off. He may in fact rue the actual spankings he receives; the contempt and scorn of his peers seems as likely to me to be the instrumentality of his kink as you describe it.

Of course I'm speculating in respect to this case, but if I'm failing to describe a particular Dallas spankee, I'm describing any number of other kinky people. I am acquainted with a fellow who happens to work in my profession, but in a much more public capacity with a large investment bank. He is responsible for some 100+ analysts and makes pronouncements that affect the stock price of companies and the livelihoods of thousands. Last year, he announced that his firm would drop coverage of a large employer that had fallen on hard times, and that same company (upon having seen it's stock price drop by half) sold off a division shortly thereafter. The new European owners promptly laid off all employees (500+) and moved operations to India. My acquaintance is single, straight, handsome, 50ish, and spends the occasional weekend evening as a sissy maid crawling about the floor at private parties having his entreaties to lick women's boots rebuked. He is, of course, invited to these gatherings and a welcome feature of the proceedings. His role, however, could not be much more debased. As cliché as it might sound, his is not an unusual phenomenon; he suggests that this activity brings balance to his life (although his kink did cost him his marriage). For his part, he does not get what I do at all, finding bondage tedious and complicated (not an uncommon sentiment for those who are impatient for intensity). We agree, however, on the pleasures of keeping largely to ourselves.

As usual, you have a windy answer to a fairly straightforward question. In a nutshell, I would have to say that the elites in the formal scene are often not what they appear to be, and that they are often considered elite for not appearing at all.

Risk Everything All the Time, Part 1

So, it's late on Monday evening and I’m shuffling through Jersey City to the Grove Street PATH station. Following a bit of work I’ve stopped for dinner and vigorous dialogue with a long-absent and dear friend with whom I can unself-consciously bring up kink and Kafka in the same breath. By this hour my constitution is propped up with a surfeit of bizarre boutique-y Malbec and rangy thoughts. It’s a clear night, a good one for surprise visits, which, despite my slight impairment, I still have in mind once I’m back across the river.

Descending into the station I note that the cops minding the station that night are all of the body type good for short bursts of activity on flat ground. One pauses coming up the stair to catch her breath, the other feigns impatience and shifts a plastic bag she has slung over her shoulder from one side to the other. I wonder if the perps they’d likely encounter in the subway are the kind who thoughtfully use elevators while fleeing. The crackle of the panting cop’s radio reminds me that they’re more like smart-cams with a reporting function – they don’t generally chase anyone down, they dial up an insertion team for that.

The hair of the very few Manhattan-bound passengers waiting on the platform begins to rustle as the inbound train pushes air out of the opposite tunnel. The train rumbles into the station shrouded in a thin fog which lifts and dissipates as the train slows, a phenomenon I happen to be facing and find strangely beautiful. The last several cars are dark, which is not that uncommon for NYC transit rolling stock, but this is a milky darkness. In the time it takes for the word “odd” to register in my thoughts, the doors open and people spill out onto the platform gasping and spitting, and gray smoke unfurls toward the vaulted ceiling.

New Yorkers (and their Jersey counterparts) don’t pay any attention to things that happen all the time; obvious attention-giving is how we tell tourists from locals. No one else on the platform was watching the inbound train arrive, and the station was well-filled with smoke and disgorged passengers stampeding toward the stairs by the time heads were turning. In either my Malbec-conditioned momentum or local-centric obliviousness I kept walking toward the evolving mayhem, which I thought later of myself exceptionally dull-witted. It wasn’t until the acrid smoke obscured my feet that it even occurred to me to change my direction and use my handkerchief to cover my mouth. There were a couple of passengers on their knees on the platform whom I gave a moment’s pause to consider helping before they were scooped up by one of their standing number to be merged into the panic that was heading my way. I stepped aside and made for the further (and less choked) exits. Coming my way were several New Jersey Transit workers carrying fire extinguishers, one yelling somewhat needlessly “Please evacuate the station!” I looked back to see their progress halted by dozens of bodies crowded at the bottom of the stairs. As I was not looking where I was going I bounced off a very soft chest; it was the stopped cop I’d seen on the stairs. As I turned I was met by kind eyes and a big bluesy voice asking me if I was all right - did I need help getting up the stairs? I nodded, and then shook my head and she somehow got my meaning, switching promptly to a more brusque “Then keep moving upstairs.” As I climbed the stairs now coughing a bit I thought I’d certainly caviled her.

On the concourse level the air was only slightly tainted by the fire. Passengers milled about looking progressively less traumatized, rallying to the point of laughing in many cases, beginning to shrug it all off. In the midst there were obvious signs of chaos – a couple of discarded coats on the floor, some vomit, a makeup compact, a pair of high heels left neatly on a utility box on the wall, everyone trying to get a cell signal. The transit workers who had made for the distressed end of the platform had wisely abandoned their mission and were bringing up the rear of the passenger herd coming up the staircase, calling out for everyone to evacuate the station, and largely ignored.

I waited at the exit stairs to see if anyone needed assistance or to await the inevitable stroller mom, but when a younger man asked me if I’d like help getting out I realized my presence was not only superfluous but maybe even a little fatuous.

When I came above ground the first bits of a glittering flotilla of fire equipment was assembling loudly on the square while others screamed in from every direction. Manhole covers were opened and plumes of smoke wafted up, fouling the air with the stink I’d just escaped. Hoses were extruded from trucks like fresh pasta. As colorful as it all was, I started back whence I’d come to see if my dear friend might not be completely exhausted of friendliness. There would be no going to Manhattan tonight.

One of the shibboleths of kinkdom is the idea that risk can be controlled. This is soft-peddled in the two maxims “Safe, sane and consensual,” and “Risk Aware Consensual Kink.” No thoughtful person who has practiced BDSM for anymore than a few minutes defends the notion that it’s safe – that one would even care to be safe en scene is itself counterintuitive, for it’s precisely where the certainty of outcomes departs that things get interesting. Safe is the precisely the opposite of exciting.

Relating Through (Not Despite) BDSM

One hears ad nauseum that kink deranges the finding and building of solid relationships and abiding love. I disagree. Certainly there are many interests vested in the maintenance of that idea, not least of which would be the common culture and its perpetually reinvigorated puritanism. Love and a satisfying relationship are the peanut butter and jelly of erotic maturity - pretty easy for me to piece together (even with the handicap of a learned palate) if I just own up to my fondness for the simplest of tastes. My need for love (and expressing love) is as basic and atavistic as anyone's; my need for peanut butter nearly as much so.

It may yet take generations but these United States will eventually exhaust the world's importable supply of sexually backward mores (our foundational religious tolerance being since the dawn of the Republic a magnet for intolerance) and have to make peace with biology and its uncalibrated expressions. In the meantime curiosity about erotically flamboyant behavior will invariably come subtly freighted with pietistic (and peanut butter-less) scruple. Consider the suppositions below:

• How do you find others with similar BDSM interests?

I traffic in artistic circles, model for artists, rig for hire, write on aesthetics, mysticism and altered states, and consort with other writers. I’m open about my inspirations, and much of that flows from my pervy experience. I make a point of studying the work of those by whom I’m inspired, and endeavor to meet with these people and join their projects. That has led me to participation on various bondage websites and as model/rigger for various photographers who have an eye for the spirit of BDSM. Since I either show up in the work or contribute to it, I am introduced to others in the community as effective and participating in my capacity, and inevitably the right people find their way to me (and I to them).

• Do you feel your BDSM interests make it difficult to find a partner?

Quite the contrary; I feel that my BDSM interests enhance and deepen my social profile, even among those who have no interest in bondage as such. A counterintuitive example: I myself find petroleum chemists who are deeply passionate about subtle variations in carbon chain branching very interesting indeed, and will spend an entire party listening in rapt fascination to the latest advances in refinery by-product reclamation processes if the speaker accepts my ignorance and believes in my interest. I met one such person recently, had a most enjoyable evening owing to that person’s candor, and enhanced in the process my understanding of our fossil fuel-based economy.

Most people do not believe that who they are and what they spend their lives on could ever be interesting outside their domain. Whatever it is that someone does, however arcane, can read from them as an object of others’ fascination if they are willing to speak their truth with passion and alacrity. Preachiness may be a fault, but it works because consciousness seeks expansion more often than not.

• What type of impact has your BDSM interests had on your relationships?

My BDSM interests have given me more and better relationships, and also given me a modality and even a narrative structure in which to render the happy accident of my existence comprehensible to myself. Furthermore, BDSM transforms what might be considered in a conventional view to be a character quirk (some would say a flaw) into an elegant and erotic competency that distills my rangy sympathies for the benefit of another person while accelerating insight into my partner’s humanity.

• How has BDSM affected your sexual life?

The question appears to presuppose a distinction between BDSM as affective, and my sexual life as affected. There is no such distinction, much the same way that a top is not a top without a bottom in the picture (and vice versa). While I have and enjoy conventional, gentle intercourse as an extension of my affections, it is precisely that; affectionate in the way that walking hand in hand or a delicate peck on the cheek speaks my feelings for another person. The fugue of my high sexual arousal is inseparable from BDSM.

Porn: Use Only as Directed

The establishment cant about porn usually has something to do with its subversion of the otherwise wholesome attitudes, appetites and sensibilities of young men. The pure version of me, as it turns out, is and always was purely perverted, and my earliest exposure to porn promptly subverted that purity. The cinematically seedy trappings in which I discovered my proclivities to be unexceptionally alloyed, indeed commodifiable, struck a reactionary chord in me; how could I identify myself with something so, well... tasteless? The puritanical version of me resisted the idea of my own commonness.

Nearly 30 years on it’s all so much water under the bridge, and I am in the end grateful for my ammonia-scented revelation. While it was my own lofty estimation of myself at the time that forbade such squalid associations I would fortunately get better (with the help of some patient-but-eager young ladies).

I found in addressing myself to academicians that making what is academically interesting actually interesting is its own challenge, one I had a shot at with the following…

• At what age did you self-identify as being in the BDSM culture?

My awareness of the fact that there were other BDSM oriented people predates my understanding of it as what is popularly understood as a culture. In the hormone addled years in which I discovered bondage porn, I did not realize that what I was seeing was in fact a means of transmitting a pattern of belief, a system, or a prior art. I understood something else entirely about it, as you might imagine.

Although I knew of bondage as an erotic practice by the age of 15, I came to associate it with the desolation of Time Square adult bookstores (of which I entered several as early as 16 on dares; my size and general bearing allowed my indulgence in most adult activities well ahead of attaining majority) and therefore did not make my interest known to girl friends through my teen years. Whatever sense I had for any "community" that might devote itself to bondage (or related activities), I was pretty sure for many years that I wanted little to do with it.

I did, however, have several partners during my sexually formative years who very much liked being held down during erotic activity (from the earliest kissing and petting, to during intercourse by age 16). I enjoyed this too for its aggressive cast. I met the woman to whom I'd be wed at age 20, and she was very receptive to aggressive sex (being "taken" as she puts it), but I did not begin to associate our mutual erotic pleasure as anything other than just our "way" for several years still.

It was my first lover outside my primary relationship who introduced me to a kinky milieu to which I felt some affinity. These people were all artists of various sorts - my lover an accomplished ceramist and dancer. She quite casually asked to be tied up during sex, and I quite falteringly obliged at first, then shortly thereafter with complete abandon. I liken it to having emerged onto an open plain from a life spent in dark woods; at first frightening, then amazing. I finally welcomed kink (and in my case specifically bondage) into my psyche under the broader rubric of creativity and art-making, fields in which I had already spent some time and was cultivating further passion. Looking back on it all, I realize that I might have adopted the view of myself as member of a distinct subculture at many points before I finally did (especially since the sorts of women I was attracting were consistently excited by what-I-didn't-quite-understand-at-the-time was my dominance), but I was apparently waiting for the opening to come as an engraved invitation at age 23.