Undignified Debate

I repost the following from Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, published originally in the op-ed section of the Washington Post, October 28, 2006, and recently quoted by Robert Creamer in the Huffington Post as a part of the ongoing non-debate between "because we can" rationalizationists for government torture and the morally less-challenged. Dorfman, as it turns out, authored the play Death and the Maiden, the theme of which is very much aligned with this thread. My recent posting by the same title is probably one of the last pieces I've written not on this thread.

It still haunts me, the first time - it was in Chile, in October 1973 - that I met someone who'd been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.

That is what stays with me - that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell and the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.

It was his image, in fact, that swirled up from the past as I pondered the current political debate in the United States about the practicality of torture. Something in me must have needed to resurrect the victim, force my fellow citizens here to spend a few minutes with the eternal iciness that had settled into the man's heart and flesh, and demand that they take a good hard look at him before anyone dare maintain that, to save lives, it might be necessary to inflict unbearable pain on a fellow human being. Perhaps the optimist in me hoped that this damaged Argentine man could, all these decades later, help shatter the perverse innocence of contemporary Americans, just as he had burst the bubble of ignorance protecting the young Chilean I used to be, someone who back then had encountered torture mainly through books and movies and newspaper reports.

That is not, however, the only lesson that today's ruthless world can teach from the distant man condemned to shiver forever.

All those years ago, that torture victim kept moving his lips, trying to articulate an explanation, muttering the same words over and over. "It was a mistake," he repeated, and in the next few days I pieced together his sad and foolish tale. He was an Argentine revolutionary who fled his homeland and, as soon as he crossed the mountains into Chile, had begun to boast about what he would do to the military there if it staged a coup, about his expertise with arms of every sort, about his colossal stash of weapons. Bluster and braggadocio - and every word of it false.

But how could he convince those men who were beating him, hooking his penis to electric wires and waterboarding him? How could he prove to them that he had been lying, prancing in front of his Chilean comrades, just trying to impress the ladies with his fraudulent insurgent persona?

Of course, he couldn't. He confessed to anything and everything they wanted to drag from his hoarse, howling throat; he invented accomplices and addresses and culprits; and then, when it became apparent that all this was imaginary, he said he was subjected to further ordeals.

There was no escape.

That is the hideous predicament of the torture victim. It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations; my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives - Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? - all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, it has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question - does torture work? - when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress - such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 - are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments - and there are many more - to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago's sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering ?

Energy Independence

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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.

No Hesitation

I'm into this idea that all one's drives in life converge to produce the bizarre amalgam that ends up being the unique contribution we leave in our wake, whether we know of it in life or not. The phenomenon is something of a longhand version of how an identity gets formed - and formed in this instance is to be firmly understood in the past tense, since identity must necessarily remain incomplete until we die. The shorthand version of identity formation is largely, maybe entirely, a fantasy - one that has the ready potential to expedite the final accounting of death.

Some readers will see my enthusiasm as a extension of my developing position on the philosophical and practical futility of identity-making, individuation, selfhood and such other notional work-arounds to the empyrean pleasures of unity. Still, in the same way that we use the grant of a life to work falteringly back to the wisdom with which it was originally endowed, that being a merging out of and back into unity, the stuff of life flows like water in the direction of convergence.

The stuff of my father's life was many sided and resistant to convergence. He was educated as a musician, spent a short time in radio, was a waterman and ultimately surrendered all of his art to the making of his family and a solidly remunerative profession. His profession offered nearly no space for his art, so it emerged from him at home, usually when things were most difficult for him personally, and only in small snippets. In summer he would take every opportunity to putter about the harbor rooting for little necks and cherrystones, drop hand lines for flounder or cast for bass. He also spent 20-odd years perfecting a short nocturne a few notes at a time, going through two pianos in three decades before he died in his early fifties of nothing in particular (and everything generally). One of his last delights was to meet Fin and have her translate the Marlene Dietrich songs he'd listened to since the 50s.

I have wondered over these past two decades since his death how much the fencing-out of his art contributed to the shortening of his time on earth, for his line was and is still pretty long-lived. As great, present and dutiful a dad as he was, and as much as he indulged all his children's artistic dalliances, he didn't permit himself the same life-giving tonic. I recall a pervasive air of frustrated self-regard marking his death most clearly, and if I preserve a sense of my father's identity at all, meaning the one that he left at the end, however inadvertently it would be that of a frustrated artist.

One of the signal happinesses of my life has been the convergence of so many of my drives and passions. Even those that don't clearly flow into others at least do not dam the general progress and merging. Not so long ago I might never have guessed that bringing what one does together with who one is could be so important. Until I stirred my pathological fondness for aesthetics with the latent artistic impulses of my life's partner, seasoned that generously with the unstinting visions of countless other creatives and wrapped the entire fecund lot in the old news of my kink, I might as well have been half alive. I don't doubt that I would have been a great candidate for that vague ennui so characteristic of our age and culture, and so characteristic of my father's last years.

The unexpected result of all this fiddling was a new and deeper channel being carved, one in which my remunerative work modulated to accomodate itself to a broader vagueness, a more refined uncertainty, permitting chance opportunity and movement while at once, apropos this journal, finding its locus around a single thread.

Of the chance opportunities there have been many in the fine arts. In the coming weeks I will be posting some betokenings of my collaborations with a artists here in NYC and elsewhere whose work I esteem well beyond my association with them.

The Tolerance Fallacy

I was talking with a Dutch acquaintance, Sabine, the other night and she summoned to our conversation several of the topics to which I've paid disproportionately much attention in this journal. She is in NYC looking into the BDSM and burlesque subcultures to develop material for a series she hopes to do over the next year on these and related topics for Het Parool, a daily in her native Amsterdam. She also produces for several television news/cultural outlets and will perhaps be returning next spring for a longer stay and some filming. She would like to do a segment on shibari rigging, so I gave her particulars for friends Bob and Chantal at Ropemarks, an Amsterdam-based site of very high quality. I spent a lazy, hot afternoon shortly thereafter perusing some of the Dutch sites and articles she'd rooted out regarding BDSM, seeing how much Dutch I could make out with my German and leaving the rest to Google.

In chatting with Sabine I was once again taken with the extraordinary tolerance of Europeans, and of the Dutch in particular, although much of our conversation went in the direction of assimilation problems among the Muslim population in Holland, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, and how much tolerance counts as enough ("Genoeg is genoeg" to quote Sabine). The very notion of tolerance itself provoked some insightful dialogue, as we determined that it is predicated on objection, and thus implies stratification or a moral hierarchy. Tolerance is very precisely not acceptance (which assumes a equality and perhaps even incorporation), and certainly there is something unacceptable (in the West, at least) about religious vendettas and homicidal rampages, such as the events prompting our consideration of the subject.

Apparently the Dutch (like the rest of the EU) are talking a great deal about the requirement (nearly codified by the scuttled EU Constitution and most recently in the ill-fated Lisbon Treaty) that the European polis practice tolerance while their immigrant populations suffer no obligation to accept the communities and structures that welcome them. It is an interesting historical moment for the founding members of the EU, especially the political classes, who are suddenly beset by their own double standards, and it is a difficult time for the left (my tribe), having discovered their presumed standard bearers to be more than a little interested in conserving the segregated status quo.

Happy-faced shibboleths, much less legislation about tolerance never settled any issue (e.g., kink, homosexuality, religion, race, etc.) that high minds (e.g., governments, political organs, social movements, etc.) would have them do in a high-minded way. Tolerance is a very dangerous thing to teach, for embedded in its curriculum is the concentration of a moral objection to the tolerated, one that in the granting of the tolerance serves merely to dignify antipathy and open the divide that much wider. As a pervert I can much more readily abide open enmity than sniffing tolerance, meaning: accept me or don't, but be clear. As Europe is learning, tolerance only exacerbates existing frictions.

Living as I do in the priciest third-world country on the planet (Brooklyn) I have a somewhat refracted view of cultures mingling, and tolerance here is in short supply. What happens in Flatbush does not stay in Flatbush, it moves out onto the land and is finally and fully assimilated (flattened) into the level playing field that is still (at least in some measure more than most of the rest of the world) America. Remember when no one in Dubuque had yet heard of hip-hop? Disco? Bay Ridge? And that's just cultcha (such as it is). New Yorkers are anything but tolerant; we're impatient, dismissive, entitled and self-important, but no more so than we think you are.

This city is an arcade of freaks (of which your correspondent is happily one), oddities, revolutionaries, capital concentration and preposterous creative energy because New York does not condescend to tolerate, it does not care about your identity or the terms under which you insist upon your segregation. Quite predictably it gets attacked a lot by moralists; some with bibles, others with laws, still others with the occasional spectacular slaughter. As this lively pool of seething intolerance continues to accept and incorporate humankind's best creative energy alongside the worst body blows the high-minded can heave at it, all without skipping a beat, the high-minded will uselessly persist in legislating and imposing its agenda for my behavior. I personally don't have a lot of tolerance for that.

Dem Damn Doms 2

Dear J.,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mac, the Biological Essentialist

Dem Damn Doms

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

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

Dear J.,

Feh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good night.

Mac

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.

***

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.

Of Rôles and Other Chimaeras

• What role do you identify as having?
  
  

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

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

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

• How did you come to your role identity?

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

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

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