Amer-al Qaeda

With apologies for my absence, I offer this forthright observation by Paul Krugman from this morning's NYTimes on the culture wars. As is abundantly clear to anyone in our United States, when cultural conservatives are out of power, the culture war becomes a shooting war. This has, quite naturally, got me thinking about my own little sub-corner of the larger culture.

At its most expressive, SM is a peak experience of self-responsibility, something grievance-minded individuals abhor, notwithstanding their contradictory rhetorical posturing. The having of grievances or the blaming of others for unhappiness is definitionally a repudiation of responsibility. The taking of action, the assumption of risks that attend such actions, and the constitutional strength to abide the outcomes of having taken the risk, without deflecting any part of it, is the operant principle of SM, morally and practically. It is also the definition of responsibility. SM is a context within which grievance does not function, for causality is unmediated and apparent to its participants. Thus the top who does not check and test the reliability of a club's suspension points cannot blame the club if they fail. Anyone for whom a scene fails is implicate in its failure for having freely consented to it; both top and bottom share responsibility.

When we feel upset and assign blame outside ourselves this I call personal irresponsibility. That right-wing fanatics should emerge now to terrorize their fellow citizens is indicative of not only their lack of common cause with the basic tenets of democracy which brought progressive voices to the executive and legislative branches of government and legitimized them, but it also betrays an understanding of the nature of action that begins and ends somewhere other than within. The "terrorist" is not a self-responsible actor; he or she nominates some conveniently external factor (political view, lifestyle, race, God-name, etc.) to inform their grievance, and then appeals to external authorities to legitimize prejudicial action, with the actions thereafter generally focused against an objectified form of the grievance, i.e., the target to be terrorized and/or purged. The pointedly amoral version of such terrorism calculatedly appropriates the mantle of free speech (or "common sense" or "spin-free") as the Trojan Horse by which it breeches the wall of personal responsibility.

The traditional fulminate to such action is religion, which advances its claims and power on the supposition of exteriority, individuation and otherness. Its value system is essentially negative in that some seminal lapse is its ontological starting point, and often the capricious enmity of non-immanent forces require appeasement (if it's God) or defeat (if it's the heathen infidel). Lapsarianism is a principle of resistance and victimization; cowardice articulated as salvation to a fevered, often homicidal, degree. In this regard, the supposition of exteriority in the context of religious belief may be viewed as a conventionalized form of insanity.

What little harm the principle of SM may be said to visit upon the world is mostly self-contained, meaning practitioners and believers hurt themselves (but take responsibility for doing it). As extreme as their proclivities might be they do not show up in public places and indiscriminately seek to harm others. Anyone who does is something other than a sado-masochist, and is doing something other than SM. Sado-masochists are, in other words, functional members of society, making their lives, enjoying their liberty, providing for their happiness.

People who do show up at churches to kill doctors, invade museums to slaughter Jews, erase hundreds by detonating truck bombs near government installations, or who use torture to gain an advantage over their presumed enemies, are not unlike an infection for which our body politic has yet to evolve antibodies, a social pathogen, with about as much regard for their fellow man as swine flu.

Religion pimps righteousness, while taking life, trampling liberty, and indulging grievance. Faith believes in one's fellow as one believes in oneself, and responsibly abides the entailments of so doing.

Obsessed

Or maybe just loyal.

I light of the many and disturbing revelations being made these days under the general rubric of "torture," I feel increasingly compelled to point where I can to clear-headed accounts of what has been the neo-American position and tradition on torture in recent years, and its high distinction as a mode of interaction between people.

Consider this digest of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody in last week's New York Review of Books (with thanks to John Wirenius for pointing it out). Also

One of the most obvious distinguishing characteristics of American-style torture is the ambivalence of its enablers. Seldom has so edifying and concrete a term been so cavalierly double-spoken by its practitioners. "Enhanced interrogation techniques", indeed. Nothing so sullies any act as shame, and nothing is quite so neo-American as absolving ourselves of our bad behavior by professing our self-loathing. In principle, however, this is less neo-American than a first-world updating of the old passive-aggressive Puritan two-step, known better to historically liberal sensibilities as moral cowardice.

What makes it moral is that it is an act of will; the will to purity. What makes it cowardice is that, while Puritans of all stripes love purity, Puritans generally dare not speak the name by which such love would be reified, namely the destruction of the impure ("Death to the infidel!" notwithstanding). Nietzsche ennobled the will to power ("Machtgelüst") in several of his works, and noted that it was as characteristic of enfeebled ascetic types as it was of robust, pro-creative types. Only one of the two could, however, be said to be an honest broker of their intentions.

In the present case our elected leaders have been too ashamed to call what they were directing what everyone already knew it was; as though it's not torture when we do it (and heaven forfend it should be looked upon as simple sadism). To give a moment's benefit of a teeny, tiny doubt, perhaps torture is such a definitionally gray area among those at the levers of power that other world leaders and international bodies were understandably cautious in their observations and condemnations of neo-American behavior. Is the nature of leadership power a contingent property of the threat of torture (the so-called "deterent effect" so beloved of penal-industrialists, gun nuts, drug warriors and sabbath gasbags)? Maybe, and maybe if you're a leader you have to deal with the possibility you'll have to use that threat someday. Maybe we've all been reminded lately that it's not just a threat, and that we should be careful about what we sign up for when pulling our own little levers, like on voting machines.

It's certainly no mistake nor should it be a surprise that clear reportage on torture is just now emerging - directly on the heels of the departed regime (the ICRC Report is dated early 2007, but was just released within the last month). Although it clearly advantages them to discredit the previous regime, I have been impressed by the new Obama administration's forthright use of the word "torture" to describe what has been going on, to permit open and transparent debate on the matter within its ranks, and to allow that it's going to take some time to clear it up. It's the antithesis of the earlier view, free of moral absolutism and capable of working the ground between the polarities of purity on both sides; the pro-"enhanced interrogationists" and the Human Rights Watch-ers. It's smart and utterly impure stuff, the first we've seen of its kind in a long while.

In the BDSM world view, what we do and our experience of it we call sadism, plainly. It's focused, directed energy between two people for an instant or an hour, it's intended to register as an unconventional sensation (conventionally called "pain") and to shift the recipient's frame of reference - psychic, emotional, corporeal. The rope bondage I love so much I consider to be especially capable in levering all of the above, through the surfeit of time required to do it, through the symbolic and actual connections, and through the symbolic and actual suffering of physical restraint. What happens in that space is unconditioned, and it's not always good, but the disposition toward its potentials has to be non-normative or what you've got is failure before the fact. In positive terms, one has to have a bit of a liberal world view to get what BDSM has to offer; to be honest of intent and to gladly suffer uncertainty of outcomes.

For all of a top's activity inside a scene, the benefits of the frame shift accrue equally (if not in greater measure) to the receiving party, and this, apropos my last post on the subject, is another characteristic marker of BDSM. It ain't BDSM if the lever you're using extracts power from the exchange.

That would be torture.

Is It Torture Yet?

Consider the ethical dilemma of meat-eating on page 310 of Michael Pollen's brilliant Omnivore's Dilemma :

"To (Benjamin Franklin's ) argument 'other animals eat meat', the animal rightist has a simple, devastating reply; Do you really want your moral code based on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, we can choose: Humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; carnivorous animals do."

To this I reply that a moral code based on the natural order is apt if for no other reason than our ability to conceive of rights is also natural. If we endorse the natural ability to choose as being in the order of things, but exclude choices based on selective observation of the natural order, then we have only deepened our dilemma.

Coming obliquely yet again to my point, I wish to observe that empathy is the determining ground of torture.

Think about it. Other animals kill outright, and if they don't kill outright they linger a bit over their prey's demise, perhaps to sustain the rush of the hunt, perhaps naively. As agonizing as that may make the death of the poor creature in a predator's clutches, ethically it does little more than make sport of the act, but not torture. I think it's safe to say that in as much as a motive may be imputed to any predator (other than humans) it has to do with getting the kill.

Humans do stalk, hunt and kill for sport, but we also do these things for utterly bureaucratic purposes as well, and then often with no intent to kill. Torture, the blandly procedural visiting of engineered suffering upon another person, serves an end but is seldom the end itself, various religious and political manias notwithstanding. Even in the case of an event such as the famous Inquisition during which the infliction of lethal suffering putatively served some ennobling end (say, salvation), it's fulfillment was contingent on the recipient's confession, renunciation, or what have you - the externalized criterion. I have to doubt that it's ever been recorded that any prelate who committed or suffered to be committed the laying of a lash on the hapless back of an innocent owned up to a simple will to be an agent of suffering; the mission of the priestly class (always a dangerous and uniquely religious confection) was, and still is, the legitimizing pretext.

When the visiting of pain is the end itself then what is happening is sadism, and the distinguishing mark of its humanity is empathy. Want of empathy mixed with externalized criteria (e.g., renouncing Satan / al Qaeda / le diable du jour) to which the engineered suffering is suborned is torture. While in the popular consciousness the space between sadist and torturer is ethically gray, and doubtless there is plenty of room for crossover, the unfriendly, oafish, often pathological, and as often statist, mode of hurting others favors the term "torture".

Sadism is an intimate act. To be sadistic is to stay close to the authentic feelings of one's partner in the act, and in an sado-masochistic context a sadist's partner would nominally be a masochist, but not always. Many are the partners with whom I've shared an intense experience who would never identify as masochistic. They have no fondness for the pain they experience as a product of my depredations, but they take it in and work out their ultimate triumph over it, often by absenting themselves from it, but, again, not always. Sometimes it ends up just being a long effort of endurance. It is often more difficult for me to be cruel to someone I know derives nothing of value from pain qua pain. Their psychic, emotional and physical machinations within our exchange are more complex, less scrutable to me, and thereby in a sense more demanding of my empathy, with which I often feel myself responding profligately, if not always evenly.

Throughout, the ends served are uniquely contained within the exchange between partners, whether pain is intended, or at all the object of the proceedings. As often as not, a partner will tell me that their objective was to witness how much I pack into my love, and how unconventional I can make its expression. To quote a recent email from a lover of many years past, speaking to her perceptions of my approach:

"One thing it's definitely not is ordinary - you're like an anti-Valentine. Your affection was always tailor-made to me, however fucked-up it looked to anyone else (and it did and still does), and it sucked sometimes, it hurt so much, but it was pure and I always thought it was my own. It's unforgettable because it's unimaginable."

That was long enough ago for me to blush at what she was referring to and my own ineptitude at that time. Then I was not clear that what I was doing was not torture in the most venal meaning of the word, and this lover would not turn out to be masochistic in the end, although she was working on figuring that out through our play, much as I was figuring my way through my conflicts about being mean with someone I love. What I like to believe she is pointing out above is less so the depravity of our erotic interest in each other and more the closeness and intimacy borne of the difficulty of what we were doing - me naively throwing (nylon!) rope, her asking for it, both of us aroused by our respective uncertainties. I hurt her not quite knowing what I was doing (incompetence plus nylon equals rope burns every time). She got off not on the pain, but on the intensity of my approach and that I would risk any of it on her.

What I understand with the passing of time and the patient teaching of my partners is that what I do with rope, my hands, my cock or any other part of me is far less important than what and how much I'm willing to offer to the space we would fill between us, which in the natural order of things may be the essential import of human eroticism. It's a choice as to how we do who we are, and the choices are pretty much unlimited in the erotic realm, but what they all have in common in order to preserve them as erotic is empathy, no matter the mode of their expression. My expression happens to induce an eruption in the range of human feeling usually given a wide path under most circumstances. Absent empathy what I chronicle in these pages would be torture. With empathy, the adhesive media of human expression that can transform a victim into a participant, there is the possibility of transcendence.

With thanks to Spain, for doing the right thing, and to A. for keeping her old emails.

Angelic Bitchslap

I write a lot here about the spiritual and practical effects of embracing uncertainty, doubt, displacement and, ultimately, change. I like to think that often enough I remember to link my ruminations through the ungentle art of bondage and its related practices. This one is going to be a stretch.

I look out my living room window as I write this entry and see a decrepit oil tanker loudly blurting diesel fumes into the air as it delivers another 40,000 gallons of soon-to-be greenhouse gases into the bunker beneath my building in Brooklyn. It will lumber around the corner onto the main commercial drag in my neighborhood and crumble a few more centimeters of salt-crusted tarmac from the hundreds of potholes it hits as it coughs its way back to the oil terminal along Gowanus Canal.

However it arrives, the day is coming when this little transaction will cease. Even so, with the snow on the ground and the wind chill approaching zero, I'm glad for a warm apartment and that the toddler running around over my head can at least do so in stocking feet. As I watch the delivery conclude, the hose is coiled back to its ready position and a few obsidian drops mark the snow and the event... and the need. The truck lurches away in crescendo of ground gears and a cloud of blue smoke.

Made of fungible stuff, these carbon traces - the oil on the snow, the blue fumes - may come from Saudi Arabia, from the North Sea, from Texas, from Venezuela or from any several of the thousands of corners of earth being ruined by the habit of consumption, war and resistance to change.

Today, around noon, we will watch as our last, desperate, generations-long bitchiness about progress sings its nunc dimittis, having delivered fully on the pestilential promise of its creed. The revelation of our folly was so sudden and catastrophic, in our freshly home-made straits we have already begun to sigh with relief at the mere promise of remedy, of a shift. The long captivity to which we consented began in a spasm of self-loathing following the banishing of institutional prejudice with the triumph of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and was tempered by the schism of Vietnam. We have been having something like Robert Frost's "lover's quarrel" ever since.

No one ever tells you that the "better angels" of which Lincoln and now Barack Obama have spoken so eloquently can reveal to a culture and a people just how hateful and venal they have been. In the venal acts of 9/11/01 we had an opportunity to heed the angels' call - the manner of our better angels is not necessarily kind, but it encourages us to be more so, and their point is that we not make war upon ourselves. That devastatingly obvious opportunity was squandered and the acid bath of the last eight years was, in a way, just the last swing of the pendulum before it finally lost its moorings. We totally ran the clock down, broke it, maybe because it needed breaking, but also maybe because our collective soul needed just this much uncoiling, just this much and nothing less.

The utter loss of institutional and personal certainty, of anything like "homeland security," and the certainty of the change that will ensue is the same opportunity, only more obvious, less dispensable. It still boggles my mind that we dispensed the call of 9/11 with comic bromides like shopping is patriotic, but if, in the the end, we were engineering a shovel-ready shit-storm such as we're now experiencing, all for the sake of a fresh appreciation of the excellence of our Constitutional principles, then leveraging pliant national moods during national tragedies is just one abuse among a multitude we consented to.

Today we close the old book, the book of reaction and victimization, right to left and left to right, and we step up upon its terrible lessons to our prosperity and our posterity, to look homeward to where we grew up before, and to where we are to grow up yet again. It's the way we do it here.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and to our United States.

Energy Independence

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Red is the New Black

I read a scathing indictment of stalking-horse Sarah Palin by Naomi Wolf, whom I respect but whose writing I often find perversely reactionary within the feminist canon. In this recent essay, Wolf makes a good case for the Rove/Cheney Axis having picked pliable Palin (chummy in that hillbilly Bush way and, based on her flirtatious body language, an equally adept liar) as the perfect tool and the solution to an overly principled John McCain. While I agree with and find interesting Wolf's central thesis concerning affable, weak figureheads and creeping fascism (although she goes a little histrionic toward the end of her essay) her blundering use of "S and M" as a kind of reactionary adjective for the embrace of threatening (capital B) Black accoutrement by modern police forces demonizes not only SM but fails (since no one has ever been stomped to death under an SMer's jack-booted heel) to draw a sufficiently grave image in the reader's mind of the potential threat of a full fascistic bloom.

As agents of the state go the great historical exponents of aggressive black paraphernalia are, of course, the Gestapo (Geheimestaatspolitzi or Secret State Police) and their superiors in the Schutzstaffel, the SS, who did indeed fetishize their costume. "Costume" is a fair characterization of high-ranking Nazi regalia owing to its operatic presentments, fussy personalization and lack of uniformity, but the black ensemble of the SS was originally designed as a uniform by SS officer Lars Bonne Rasmußen, introduced by Heinrich Himmler and manufactured by Hugo Boss. Although the Waffen SS (the "armed" combat corps, frontline ideological police and, later in the war, the field extermination squads for the "Final Solution") persisted in black colors throughout the Nazi era, domestic SS enforcers began moving toward Herr (army) feldgrau (gray-green) as the black uniform became increasingly identified among the German Volk with capricious, even gratuitous, bullying and corruption (see the excellent BBC documentary series War of the Century for the Nazi view of art as political legitimizer, and also Peter Cohen's brilliant Architektur des Untergangs ("Architecture of Doom") for a penetrating overview of the totality of the Nazi aesthetic, blackened and otherwise. Finally, Albert Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich, illuminates the dark power of perception management and the depth of public docility martial bombast can engender).

Ignoring Nazism, Wolf's one nod in the direction of meaningful Fascism/black associations is toward Mussolini's "Blackshirts", but even that's wide of the mark as the Blackshirts were the voluntary militia arm of the inchoate Italian Fascist movement - not state-sponsored, certainly not when they were founded, and then only tenuously once Mussolini came to power. Before the Nazis claimed legitimacy in '33 the SS were Hitler's personal bodyguard - the Brownshirts, however, did most of the stomping. With respect to state-sponsored thuggery Wolf has missed the SS/Gestapo connection utterly in favor of prosecuting a parochial antipathy against SM - a stateless social group, a culture if you like, and at best (giving Wolf the benefit of the doubt) an NGO - that advocates consent as among its first principles and has never had any material effect on anyone not in its own ranks.

Naturally I'm sensitive to such misappropriations, especially from the political camp to which I claim some allegiance, but it's I think instructive to note Wolf's use of the the stalking horse metaphor ("FrankenBarbie") for Palin, a device Wolf (like Rove) seems quite content to use when it advances her own demagoguery against "the other", in this case SM. It's no less mendacious, in my opinion, than the kind of rabble-rousing currently deployed by the Republicans desperately flogging a insubstantial connection between Barack Obama and one William Ayers, neighbor and one time party host to Obama, and a former member of the Weather Underground (known as "subversive" when they were active, but now conveniently called terrorists (in the present tense) by McCain, Palin and their acolytes).

Of the independently verified vacuity of a Obama / Ayers cabal McCain says "We need to know that's not true." Sure they do. For a generation, arguably since Nixon (who birthed the culture wars), conservatives in this country have needed to know that the truth is whatever the pathocracy tells them is required to control and banish "the other". What a pity that Wolf should stoop to the same ponerological tactic in her Palin/Black/"S and M" conflations.

Wolf could have set her "FrankenBarbie" arguments to right by simply stating that Palin and McCain have a lot to gain by steering attention away from Palin's hardwired associations with the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates violent secession of Alaska from the Union and at whose conventions Palin has spoken more than once, as recently as this year. Better still, such red herrings distract from Palin's active membership in certain radical congregations of the Assembly of God church, which makes no secret of its lust for Armageddon and its aim in the meantime to install a theocracy in the US. Then there's McCain's memorable turn with as Number 1 of the cast of The Keating 5 at the outset of the last major bank failure, forgotten only to those now voting for the first time.

Regrettably, Naomi Wolf sees intellectual honesty in likely the same way Karl Rove and Dick Cheney understand it, as a trap that confounds the efficacy of spurious associations made to fan righteous fear among true believers, such as the Obama / Ayers canard, or, as in Wolf's case, the fusion of "S and M" and Fascism.

Marriage Failure a Natural Success

In a hilarious example of editorial resistance to the way things actually are, the Washington Post published this feature on the findings of researchers at the esteemed Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the genetic basis for marital dysfunction.

The writer and editors of the Post article blandly accept the social idealism of the study's authors, not bothering to trouble themselves with a critical (i.e., journalistic) perspective on the biological ramifications of what, essentially, now seems to be a demonstrable biological truth (albeit as yet scientifically uncorroborated); that some 40% of men are genetically outfitted to "cheat".

The use of the word cheat in the article is very telling, as are words such as "risk", "dysfunction" and "threat":

"Men with two copies of (a particular) allele had twice the risk of experiencing marital dysfunction, with a threat of divorce during the last year, compared to men carrying one or no copies," said Hasse Walum, a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who led the study. "Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no copies."

If we consider more than one copy of the allele in question (an allele is a member of a pair or series of genes that occupy a specific chromosomal position) predictive of a man's success or failure in marriage and long-term relationships in light of the much more rigorously predictive models of Gregor Mendel and later Charles Darwin, then a fair alternate conclusion could be that men possessed of more than one of these rover alleles are more likely to wander and therefore reproduce - precisely nature's intent for all its creation - and that failure, if any is to be assigned here, accrues entirely to the institution of marriage as it is conceived in the popular consciousness.

Do we blame fish for dying off when we dam a river?

The report is all very nuanced, and not made any less so by the inclusion of weasel words such as "satisfied", with the concomitant couching of the entire study's relevance in terms of that vague and variable criterion - stacked, let it not go unobserved, on but one side of the matrimonial partnership (which, I suppose, if one considers the Latin root mater in matrimony is placing the emphasis where it wants to go anyway). It's quite likely that nearly 100% of men with this naturally-occurring genetic variant would have equally valid (i.e., weak) complaints about their matrimonial "satisfaction", thus is the criterion spurious and the point of the study moot.

But, since we're on the subject, let me apply Occam's Razor and offer a simpler thesis: Naturally-occurring human genetic encoding trumps socially-engineered monogamy.

Big surprise.

Despite its laughable faults, this study does support an explanation for women-kind's reliable attraction to renegades and outcasts, the proverbial "bad boys", the "alphas", of whom it is always known at the outset never stick around. The basis of the attraction to the James Dean type is by now well-understood: women sense good-quality genetic information much as men do - the kind that begets more of the species most efficiently (and therefore gets passed on), the kind they want expressed in their offspring. If 40% of males pack the tomcat allele, then there's no denying that variant's success in getting itself passed on.

If a woman thinks about it (i.e., does the risk-analysis math) she may indeed go directly for the beta male, or upon hooking up with an alpha seek to modulate his risk profile down the scale to beta levels (thus possibly jeopardizing her marital satisfaction in an entirely different way). On the level of woman's feeling, however, the recently popular beta types, e.g., the "emo-boy" and homo-manque, have apparently had their moment in the sun and have been largely discarded (as they characteristically fretted they would be) by sexually astute and self-aware (read: trend-leading) women.

From the perspective of a long-time married man who, given my history, likely has two or more of the offending allele, marital survival is in no way predicated on the luck of the double-helix draw. Fin and my marriage is completely legit in all the conventional senses of the word (licensed, blessed, taxed, etc.), but it is also something else utterly outside conventional legitimacy: we can't "cheat" because we tell the truth.

Or, pulling in Occam again, cheating ≠ truth telling. Fin knows all about my partners, they know all about her, I know about hers and they about me. Everyone is clued in and gets complete disclosure upon request from me, and I from them. I think the marriage succeeds not because it's open but because we are open with each other, fully exposed and vulnerable... and therefore, paradoxically safe.

Think about it - the "cheating" is just the lying (cheating = lying); we fear what we don't know, and if our partner lies to us about his or her desire for other partners, about the nature and extent of their lust, about their kinks, about whatever, we don't get to know them, who they really are, who we're spending our lives with, who sleeps next to us (when we're really most vulnerable), who's helping to raise our kids. Now, that's fearsome, not knowing who you're married to. That could be reason enough to get out of the relationship.

Make no mistake, I'm not arguing here for having a lock on everything your partner is or will ever be in order to stay in your relationship. Quite the contrary - mystery promotes attraction (see "bad boys" above). I'm talking about proceeding from truthful premises and being content with the unvarnished truth of what you find out about your partner, which is often what they're finding out about themselves in the same moment. Their own picture of themselves is likely incomplete, so the truth is we don't get to know anything our partners don't know - although we pretend it's possible and often demand answers along these lines. In effect, we ask to be lied to.

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 (in the sense of Wendell Berry's concept of "solving for pattern") for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating 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.

Blaming unhappiness on hardwired (and therefore unsurprising) biology is lazy, even shabby, thinking. Lying is a social act, related in this case to a social institution, marriage. Given that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that cheating plays a big part in a sizable percentage of those divorces, it may be fair to say that lying (by cheating) is a property of conventional marriage; i.e., dishonesty comes with the package, if not in the bridal registry.

That after 25 years Fin and I are still married is already statistically unconventional, but in the conventional sense our marriage is a failure in that it utterly fails to force biology to heel, and has failed, thereby, to fail. With respect to this failure to fail we have also been told occasionally through the years that our marriage is basically a sham, that our relationship is nothing more than that of roommates with privileges (ironically, this often comes from folks whose marriages are somewhat brittle, if not in outright distress).

And you know what? Those folks get to be right. That's all 25 years of cohabiting companionship, mutual support, commitment, pooled resources, sexual experimentation (within and without), crisis management and the gathering to our relationship of a cherished and loyal coterie of friends, lovers and fellow travelers comes to: a sham marriage. Nothing like a real marriage, with the lying and the cheating and the stacked odds on ending and the counselors and the lawyers... the real institutional trappings of the institution of marriage.

So, there you go: lots of alleles = marital failure. QED.

What bearing, then, does the bit of embossed paper with the endorsement of several potentates with powers granted them by The State of New York have on my relationship with my wife? Nothing with any real meaning, really.

Other than perhaps economic. The last lines of the article cited above confirm as much:

"Fisher (quoted previously in the article), who described herself as a romantic, said she would not reject a potential mate who has two copies of the risky allele (Surprise!). She paused, (no doubt doing the risk analysis) then added: 'But I might not start a joint bank account with them for the first few years,'" (italics mine).

What's left? Well, Fin and I don't lie, cheat or resist our genetic makeup, and we stay together despite the odds. Clearly it's something other than the kind of failed marriage that gets looked at in studies.

I wonder if anyone still believes in the idea of a sacrament.

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.

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.

Outrageous.

About an hour ago a judge in Queens County, City of New York, issued findings of not guilty of all charges against the three NYPD officers indicted in the shooting of Sean Bell in November 2006, during which the officers emptied nearly 50 rounds into the unarmed man and two of his unarmed friends. Bell died, the two friends survived and testified at the bench trial. Neither Bell nor his friends were suspected of any crime other than, incorrectly as it turns out, to be in possession of a weapon. Sean Bell was not the target of any investigation, nor was he of any prior interest to the police. He merely was in the right place at the right time for the incompetence that periodically manifests among New York’s “Finest” to end up played out on his person.

The particulars of the case are available elsewhere. Judge Arthur Cooperman’s verdict acquits Detectives Oliver and Isnora of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment. Detective Cooper was acquitted of reckless endangerment. The judge tellingly wrote that “incompetence is not the same thing as criminality”. The take-away here is manifold, but most saliently I understand the verdict to mean that NYPD officers are no more competent to deal with life-and-death situations than any citizen - life-and-death situations which often they, by dint of carrying death-dealing weapons, engender. As a point of law, at least in New York State, police officers are held to no higher standard than any other citizen in matters of lethal force.

Here’s an NYPD-approved competency test. Take your preferred index finger and rest it on the edge of a table. Flex your finger, say, 16 times and rest, taking a moment to use either hand to reach into any pocket quickly and remove it. Now put your finger on the table edge again and flex another 15 times. Take note of how long that took. That’s about how long it took Detective Oliver to determine he was firing on an unarmed man, despite his sufficiency of competence in reloading his semi-automatic weapon in the middle of the fray and finally loosening 31 of the 46 fatal shots, despite his sufficiency of instinct to preserve his own life and step aside from the car piloted by mortally injured Bell which Oliver testified went from a parked position to somehow bearing down on him and his colleagues at speed in the same span of time, such that, according to their testimony, the detectives were in fear for their lives.

Detective Oliver and his codefendants are able to offer as an affirmative defense to the charges that they were not heard when they identified themselves, that they were in fear for their lives, that they misjudged the presence of a weapon (although they testified that they could not see very well into the car). Their defense, in other words, amounts to a proclamation of gross lethal incompetence, endorsed by police department procedure (which permits the use of lethal force in indeterminate situations). Judge Cooperman affirmed this as a legitimate defense and acquitted, doing damage in my estimation to both the ideas of justice and the social contract.

Let’s not overlook in all of this that the prosecution, agents of the state just like police officers, presented their case ineptly, perhaps even incompetently. In no part of this fracas has any officer or agent of the state delegated with the responsibility and paid by the citizenry to do so protected from, or taken responsibility for, the danger they themselves present to lives of the citizenry.

And justice? While it’s clear who effected Sean Bell’s slaughter and the suffering of his compatriots, in Bush’s America persons sworn to uphold the law consider themselves neither responsible to it, nor subject to its adjudication. Makes sense, doesn’t it, in a trickle-down kind of way…

At this point you’ve doubtless wondered what all my high dudgeon has to do with BDSM, rope, etc. As horrified as I am by the facts and the entailments of this verdict, I’m reflecting on the matter of competence as it pertains to non-state actors such as myself, and I’m recalling a case in Seattle where an appellate court ruled that a defendant is not allowed to plead the competence of a partner to consent to a “forcible” rape scenario, the evidence for force having been rope and duct tape found at the scene. The State of Washington, in other words, says that you are not competent to consent to whatever you’re forced to do, and being tied up is enough to constitute force.

I’m obviously not all that familiar with case law on these issues, and I frankly don’t know how case rulings in New York State generally go (I suspect the constitutional scholar John Wirenius will have something to say about the Bell verdict, and it will be worth reading when he blogs it). I am familiar with a friend who suffered for years in court over what was essentially his incompetence at recognizing the forged ID of a 17-year-and-9-month-old model with whom he made nude pictures; the state in this case was tacitly requiring my friend to act as its agent in the interpretation and processing of state papers, the disposition of which being solely of interest to the state itself. My friend had made a good faith effort to indemnify himself, as he always does. The charges were reduced repeatedly from felonies to misdemeanors to a single misdemeanor, on which he accepted the bench ruling of guilty in order to have it removed from his record once the verdict had been entered (purely so the prosecution could get the conviction). In this instance there was competence demanded of someone who professed none and of whom no reasonable competence could be expected.

So, consider the fact that citizens who are ipso facto incompetent to take responsibility in loco parentis for big brother can, should it suit the state, be forced to have done so after the fact. Meanwhile, competence for determining one's own consent to certain behaviors can be conveniently excluded from admission in a court of law. In either instance no actual harm or coercion need be demonstrated by the state.

On the other hand, in an instance of actual and irreversible harm, namely a completely blameless man was wrongly killed by agents of the state, incompetence is conveniently claimed as an affirmative defense, goes unassailed by the prosecution, and is affirmed by the presiding magistrate as legitimate. Police officers can irresponsibly gun down citizens, and this is not a crime because legally the police are as free as you or me to be incompetent, i.e., at the pleasure of the state.

What, apparently, we are not free to be is competent in any intelligible sense of that idea. A competent citizenry would not consent to legitimized police incompetence.

Leading Question

Starting not from the beginning, but rather where I think my answers start to take on some interest, here is where my scholarly interlocutor's little bit of knowledge became a dangerous thing:

• How do you negotiate the consent and boundaries of 'safe, sane, and consensual' with your partner?

Like an increasing number of my fellow travelers, I do not believe in safe kink. I would go so far as to say that the mere idea of safety partially compromises the allure, efficacy and possibilities for discovery in kink. One of the fundamental notions that is therefore understood from the very beginning of any interaction is that what another person and I are proposing to participate in with one another is inherently unsafe; let us not labor under any delusions to the contrary. If we're having this type of conversation in the first place, plain-spoken acknowledgments of danger lurking among our intentions usually ups the excitement level that much more.

The word "sane" I consider a bromide and a palliative, and as an truthful assertion pertaining to anything to do with BDSM ascertainable only a posteriori. In fact, if someone feels compelled to assert to me their sanity, said sanity is thereby immediately suspect in my book.

Consent is perhaps the only term I consider meaningful of the three above. Consent emerges not from anything like a call-and-response-type exchange ("It is my intention to tie you up now." "That would be agreeable."), but from the feeling of trust, faith and mutual advantage discovered endogenously in the consideration of something possibly unsafe and, in a conventional sense, of questionable sanity. With time and the understanding that the person I am with will do me no harm, consent abides whatever it is that we determine we would like to do.

An example: a current partner and I are very fond of breath control play. We have never negotiated it, and it has evolved over many months to a fairly pitched and risky degree. It's beginnings were humble enough - I had gagged her very thoroughly and she had experienced trouble breathing. I rearranged things a little more to my liking (and comfort level), but none the less effectively, and we had a very nice scene. It was not until I mentioned the severity of the gag that she was prompted to tell me that she had found her gasping for breath very exciting, much to her surprise. We are now somewhat expert in a variety of ways of controlling her air supply, and she finds them all very much to her liking. Not safe, questionably sane, adventitiously consensual, and, as it turns out, one of our favorite things.