Separated at Birth? (Pt. 3)

The eastern tradition, being steeped in its own myth systems and of a more contemplative orientation generally (as opposed to idealized (in the Platonic sense) or rule-driven, like in the west of at least the last several millennia), does not deviate, I think, from the general outline I’ve given thus far. In the east submission is essentially a feminine, Dionysian narrative, but the tradition in bondage in the east proceeds less from an intuition of sex as a biological imperative and more as a means of transcendence. We may look to the Kama Sutra for a conspectus of the eastern belief in the mystical virtue of the erotic, but erotic bondage gives us a unique kind of on-demand system for inducing transcendent states. The Japanese in particular have developed an architectonic for bondage that is observant of several eastern modes of mystical attainment - notably yoga, the hatha variation of which imparts several asanas to the standard kinbaku kamae. I won’t go so far as to insist that Japanese bondage is single-mindedly about seeking communion with the godhead, but I do believe that impulse to be one of the foundational stimuli for its emergence from the contemplatively derived martial disciplines preceding it, and one of its principle distinctions from western bondage.

One observes in stock kinbaku imagery a manner of submission, a going into the experience, as it were, that is far less characteristic of the western idiom, which itself traditionally emphasizes the resistance of the person being tied. The western “damsel’s” situation is being imposed from without; the agency of her helplessness is external and she usually goes along only reluctantly. She is, in a broader narrative sense, not responsible for her tribulations - she is a victim. One need not go far into either ancient or modern myth systems in the west to see the subjugation of the mortal individual to willful cosmic forces, often personified, which act pointedly on mortal posterity. The problem of predestination versus free will comes up so reliably in the west because we insist upon thinking of our existence as individuated selves, free agents in other words. There is very little impetus to endorse willing submission in western thought systems; it defies a long and acculturated tradition of separation - from God and from each other. Submission in the west is, I would suggest, a radical and even subversive act. If you’re going to give in, best not to be too obvious about it.

The idea of the monad, or the unbroken continuity between apparently individuated phenomena is axiomatic to Buddhist thought since at least the time of Bodhidharma (about 500AD), and well developed in other eastern traditions. Consider the Hindu idea of the veil of Maya, before which we labor with the problem of duality. Behind the veil, there is no separation and duality is revealed to be an illusion. Whereas the separation from ultimate principles (the “fall from grace”) is believed to be a fact in western ontologies, eastern disciplines stress only the illusion of separation overlaying the fact of unity. To the eastern mind, the same energy flows through all apparently individuated things, as, for example, revealed in the meridian systems of oriental medicine. Open, boxy, and irregular kinbaku architecture intentionally plays with these meridians, with the crossing and rearrangement of energies and the possibility thereby of a look into ultimate principles. That it becomes in the making highly erotic only compounds its force and potentials. The classic M-jo in the Japanese tradition thus goes quite willingly into her restraint and, while not necessarily embracing her suffering, accepts it as consistent with the pain of illusion such as we know on this side of the veil. Although the Shinto tradition wedded to Zen does not say much about the antecedent Hindu concept of Maya, it does predicate satori as the endpoint of suffering wherein the truth of unity is made manifest to the spirit.

Of course, all of this is available to the western bondage practitioner too, and it could easily be said that the rope top is performing a kind of priestly function in any case. The overwhelming emphasis on resistance to being restrained in the popular conception of bondage in the west, as opposed to ready yielding characterizing the eastern conception, is, I think, consistent with much larger mytho-poetic, and hence social, constructs inhering in both. It may be difficult to describe what the salient differences are between eastern and western traditions in bondage (I mean, hands get tied behind the back in both cases), but it becomes easier when we couch our interest more broadly in the two world views.

Separated at Birth? (Pt. 2)

I mimicked the Klaw style (there being no real technique) for a little while before stumbling upon John “Willie” Coutts and his Gwendolyn drawings. In Willie I think western bondage finds its first true prophet. Willie’s style was not only founded on the same sort of artfully sculpted 40s - 50s Monroe curves as Klaw, but he laced those curves impossibly tightly, drawing in the waist, pulling back the elbows, pushing out the breast, lifting and separating, as it were, and elongating with stiff, angular posing and sky-high heels. In addition, Willie was shameless in his use of overwhelming and distorting gags, which displace visual and aural cues to the wearer’s personality revealed in facial and verbal gesture. I see this as enhancing the quality of mystery associated with woman, the mystery of creation, of begetting, and the messy business of generating life (a thesis elaborated here). Willie’s work was all about the reduction of the individual, particular woman, and the elevation of capital W Woman. In the pages of his Bizarre magazine, he was wont to allow occasionally that the imposition of vigorous, calculated bondage was the only cure for that hopeless intimidation felt by modern man confronted with the withering power of Woman. If he were read in philosophy (and I doubt he was – he was first an intuitive and second a drunk), Willie would probably have agreed with Nietzsche’s association of woman with the chaotic, fecund and creative Greek god Dionysus, who was balanced by the tempering, masculine-associated regulatory and managerial Apollo.

There are many theories on how and why bondage, and in particular its identifiable stylings, both eastern and western, gains formal status in the 20th century. Some posit that while photography played a large role in the break out into popular consciousness, binding for erotic effect has a far older history. The consensus view among aficionados seems to be that the Japanese vernacular, emerging from 15th century martial hojojitsu into what we in the west call shibari or kinbaku today, dates in its erotic manifestation to the early 19th century, but there evidence to this effect is largely apocryphal. Following Itoh Seiyu's drawings from SM-inflected kabuki dramas, the form seems fairly well-evolved when erotic kinbaku images start showing up in Japan around the late 1920s and early 1930s, right about the same time the delicate SM drawings of Carlo, Herric and Rene Giffey that influenced Willie came out in the Parisian pulps of the era. Willie may also have stumbled upon Japanese bondage imagery while exiled in Australia, but his letters tell us that in 1937 it was Carlo’s work that first came to his attention while living in Sydney†.

I’d like to speculate here that the emergence of bondage as erotic on a wider scale in both east and west inheres in the culturally parallel rush to modernity. Europe and America were already deeply involved in the shrinking of distance and the building of metropolises by the turn of the 20th c., and the Japanese had mounted their own juggernaut into modernity upon Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 appearance in Edo (now Tokyo) Bay and the concomitant demise of the Shogunate. With the primary evils of death, pestilence and even discomfort in retreat, humans are no less biological despite the Apollonian lever being applied to capricious Dionysian nature; taming her, predicting her behaviors, defending against her unceasing demand that humans reproduce themselves - one of the greatest practical and metaphorical examples of this overcoming of nature is the birth control pill. Besieged, our essential biology adopts a guerrilla strategy (perversity) since the civilized, sanitary and organized world legislates only a meager freedom to the biological idea of nature. My western mind sees bondage as I think Willie got it, as a splendid and artful presentation to the several senses of Woman, capital W woman, the principle of creation, available and vulnerable, but also revealed in utterly unambiguous mythic form, and emphasizing mythic tensions. That’s the power of myth to my thinking: it gets us to perform on our biological imperatives.

To be continued.

† The Art of John Willie; Sophisticated Bondage. Monograph, edited by Stefano Piselli, Eric Stanton, et al. Glittering Images, 1989.

Separated at Birth?

(Excerpted from a 2002 public lecture / demonstration)

Thank you all for coming, and thanks also to A. for the invitation to speak tonight, and for the request months ago to get her up off the ground.

A. and I have been playing on and off with rope for several years, and have only recently made the move into suspension. We hope to show you a little trick we’ve practiced later on - a single leg inverted suspension - among the more difficult suspended poses to both rig safely and to hold for even a small length of time. I’ll make a few points in so doing about safely managing the technical aspects of such a scene, but frankly, suspended bondage, like rock climbing, is a high risk activity under the best of circumstances, so I’m obliged to apply a disclaimer here and say that I don’t intend to teach you a thing about tying somebody and hanging them up. Not a thing. Suspension bondage is best learned slowly and steadily over time with a tough, understanding partner and competent instruction; not, in my opinion, by means of public demonstrations such as you are to see here tonight.

My intent is to show you what’s possible and perhaps what you can do with what’s possible, rather than impart specific information on how it’s possible. The technique and dynamic between A. and myself are, as you might imagine, unique to us, and in any case, we may not pull off what we intend tonight, so anything you see here is very likely completely useless to the success of your own rope scenes. That said, please don’t hesitate to ask questions afterward about what you will have seen me do (or not do) tonight. Also, I’d be happy to talk later about the little précis I’d like to present now.

This presentation is about to take a philosophical turn, perhaps for the worse, and I’ll be interested to see how many are standing at the end of it. At the very least you’re about to learn that I’m kinky for more than just rope. Suspension, while not unique to eastern bondage and its aesthetic, is highly identified with it. The working properties of hemp and jute rope, which are common in eastern practice, facilitate picking partners up in order to enhance their helplessness. None of those considerations preclude enacting the delicate airborne forms common to Japanese-style bondage in the western style, but such crossover is seldom seen, a factor in leading observers to speak of wide differences between east and west. I’d like to take the first part of this presentation to put across a few ideas I have about that difference.

There is quite a lot of discussion of how or if east meets west on various online groups where rope geeks like myself hang out, and I’ll be drawing a bit here from other’s ruminations on the subject, but the upshot of what I’m about to say is pretty much my own and I’m by no means done thinking about it. If you disagree, and I hope you’ll be critical, I would appreciate hearing about it.

Foregoing even a cursory consideration of gender identity and its attendant politics, I make the following observations from the standpoint of the one identity about which I can speak with any authority, that being my own. All of the assertions that I’m about to make proceed from that basic prejudice, and I hope you’ll all forgive where I run afoul of any other prejudices in the room.

Having played with gender queer, classic queer and straight partners of both genders, my central orientation has consistently sought out an essential straight feminine trait; that which is hormonally responsive to me as a straight male and unconditioned by orientation or gender. Of course, on many occasions that hormonal energy has been absent, but such vacancies do not necessarily result in disappointing scenes, and often only further affirm my own proclivity. I like to recall that even among those people I’ve tied who were not necessarily kinky, who were perhaps just doing a modeling job, or in a transitional phase into which rope fit or helped, that expressions of that “eternal feminine” which captivates me could (and often did) come out.

I began my formal explorations in bondage well over twenty years ago with the person who is still my primary partner and my wife. I recall quite clearly the early compulsion to envelop and overwhelm her, and to have the result of that be the emphasizing of her sexual availability. Although I backed away from the impulse initially, it was not too long after those inchoate stirrings that rope entered our lives. Even in my first crude and ineffectual efforts to get her restrained, I saw her in a wholly new light, wherein her curves revealed themselves ever more fully and her yielding was ever more apparent. That I was at times somewhat oblivious to the yielding part may have helped me concentrate on pure technique with greater alacrity, but suffice it say that the actual application of rope was all about visually dramatizing the soft, giving, ovoid and fleshly charms that make her to me woman with a capital W.

Although I was aware of bondage porn by that time, I prissily steered a wide path around it for years despite its ready availability close to home. Thus, the only information I had to go on at that time (or, really, wished to go on), this being the early 1980s, were Irving Klaw’s extraordinary pictures of Bettie Page and her cohort often ineptly tied for his Movie Star News. My wife will remember the pilgrimage she and I took to the tatty storefront, meeting Irving’s sister Paula, who ran the shop at that time, and our coming away with a catalog of the tiny images which MSN would sell to customers as prints. Having turned my nose up at Bondage Life, Lyden, HOM and the other image peddlers, those vague, tiny Klaw images were my first tutorial in tying up comely lasses.

Riffing on Brent Scott Riffing on Socrates (was Meeting with BS)

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Meeting with BS 3

Returning now to matters more pleasantly esoteric...

***

Since a live feed had happened just the previous night the space was given over largely to sets and the scattered paraphernalia of what appeared to several womens' torture. The chair (the one desk chair that has ever appeared in Insex media) was positioned prominently, a mop leaned upon it and several coils of hemp rope stacked in its seat. Beneath the chair was a bundle of plastic wrap or bags shot through with black PVC tape, several latex gloves and other matted, damp-looking bits of detritus. Before the chair stood two Sony cams, partially disassembled with open cases between them. Emptied light stands and a boom were arrayed to one side and behind these a long table held piles of leather goods, rope, tape in various colors and widths, wooden and metal devices and copies of what I would come to learn were scripts. In a tall stock pot at least one insertable item presumably awaited boiling.

Shelves positioned back and away from the set overflowed with raw materials of all descriptions – wooden planks, wire, medical supplies and entire sides of latigo leather spilled off the upper reaches, while the lower slots held tubs of Neats Foot Oil, isopropyl alcohol and racks of hand tools. These later were clearly intended to be used in the darkest corner of the room where a lathe, a small band saw and a couple of other machine tools had been pushed together temporarily. On the lathe was the beginnings of a wooden pear gag which, when he showed it to me, PD allowed he was considering having manufactured in volume, likely as a plastic casting. The part on the lathe was an element of a prototype; the other bits stood carefully arranged on a nearby work stand, the hand-carved leaves impressing me greatly in their uniformity and excellent finish.

We talked throughout, PD throwing off references to authors and artists whose work he admired and from whom he took his inspiration. I observed that the pear reminded me of something I’d seen on Jeff Gord’s site and my host steered me immediately to another shelf containing dozens of volumes of the Gor series, a score of cheap Japanese trade shibari books (the first I’d ever seen), obscure Italian and French editions (Glittering Images?) on John Willie Coutts, Bettie Page, a army field surgical manual from the 1950s, a copy of Research (#49) featuring Fakir Musafar, and, most relevantly, a number of graphic books featuring the works of Simon Benson, Eneg, Jim and others. He flipped one open to a bookmark and pointed out a Benson image by which he and Jeff had likely been similarly inspired. PD heaped praise on House of Gord, the evil genius of its master and what he assumed must be Jeff’s minion, given the profligacy of mannered abominations issuing forth from that site, especially in the area of fornophilia. (editing note: I would later visit the Gord compound outside Seattle on a similar mission and learn that Jeff Gord does engineers and machines all the designs appearing on HoG almost entirely on his own).

Inspired upon learning of my interest in fornophilia, PD dropped the Benson book and made for a terminal. He opened a browser and typed in the URL www.b****s****.com and loaded the very first ShockWaved website I’d ever seen. A grid map of a gallery with an insect icon crawling around in it came first to the screen, and links opened into a crude virtual tour. It was very impressive.

“That’s you? You're BS?”

“That’s me, formally, maybe formerly.”

Meeting with BS, 2

“Mac! You’re early, fucker.” That much I remember verbatim. (The next bit I don’t think I’m making up, but I scribbled down something to the effect of) “Too bad about last night. You would have been a good distraction for the girls.”

In any case, for openers he didn’t do half badly.

PD stepped back, took my hand in a surprisingly weak but perhaps just early-morning grip and ushered me into his vaulted atelier of dangerous ecstasies. Directly in front of me was an impressive video editing suite, the screens of which were variably papered with images of (enslaved.com’s) Paige White’s extremities sunken in the sands of Muir Beach with driftwood occupying both her ends of her alimentary canal, and a terminal set-up with less obviously interesting data scrolling lazily upward. I would learn two things shortly; first, how to make an anal hook and a bit gag from found objects (and how the two relate), and second, Insex’s rate of customer acquisition.

Before becoming educated, however, PD and I exchanged pleasantries, starting with the disarming mutual admission that the matter of how to handle my interest in investing in Insex was a mystery to us. I allowed that I’d never done anything like what I was proposing, and PD allowed that neither he nor his partners had ever imagined taking in outside capital. We were both immediately more at ease since there were no longer any expectations of a right way to go about our business, should it happen we would end up having any to do together. His suggestion for the time being was to “fuck that’ and show me around the space, which was more compact than seeing it on screen had led me to expect. For a New York studio it was still substantial, but PD’s inventiveness and the place’s own rustic qualities had impressed me remotely as endless. Just another trompe-l'œil of which I’d learn there were legion.

(As the critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Marlene Dietrich, the art is in the seeming)

Meeting with BS

I was reminded recently by a correspondent and fellow blogging top of an episode from a few years back by which I shifted from being solely a supporter and patron of other people's creative aspirations to my current evolutionary phase - that of responsible agent.

It's very much in vogue to refer to erotic rope bondage as an art these days, and to pin the sobriquet "artist" on those who do the tying. I was reluctant for years to assume that mantle, other than as an expedient for what ever else I might have called my ropework, and in order to escape acknowledging myself as an artist. I was (and am) very caught up in complex ideas about art, art making and aesthetics, and am arrogantly wont to discount received wisdom about such subjects or to distance my ideas and works from inclusion under their rubrics, up to and including reflexive references to my creative output as art or myself-as-maker an artist. Not that I have anything like a fully formed rubric under which to cast my own creative impulses, but I thought I did at least know that no one else's were any good.

In 1999 I met someone who in his own accomplishments and disposition toward rope evinced to me that my self-righteousnessness was not only self defeating, but utterly contrary to the spirit of erotic bondage. The spirit... that was a new idea to me. My fellow top made no grandiose pronouncements nor observations regarding his or my own attitude; I inferred the possibility of a spirit of bondage from what he conveyed to me through his works, which were by that time not inconsiderable and had taken many forms in many venues. The latest of these venues was a wildly successful website. Others had included gallery shows and academic installations, both of which had, in the public reaction to them, apparently driven him out of a respectable middle-class existence and onto the web.

Of course I resisted what I was learning and it was some time after that meeting that I began to see the convergence of my own passions into something like a unified field of endeavoring, which I had learned from the example of this man was possible. 1999 was when I started to get over my own preciousness and out of my own artistic way. It would still be many years before I would be able to completely swallow that I was doing art.

I'm not much for keeping diaries or journals, but I did spend the entirety of a train trip from New York to Albany penning notes about my meeting with this fellow, which I have transcribed and augmented in the following posting and some several to come. I'll take a break from the interview transcripts for the time being and log the content of these near-decade old notes, if for no other reason than to get them on the record. My initial purpose, in fact, in writing this blog was to provide myself a linear structure in which to organize and refine these stray inspirations concerning the experience of beauty and its intersection with my erotic will.

***

The trip up from Princeton was mercifully fast and in my fatigue I was still able to distinguish between Penn Station in Newark and Penn Station in Manhattan, detraining at the former. Having been out of NYC for all these years had only enhanced the anxiety even a long experienced traveler might feel when embarking with the city’s mass transit from an unknown corner. Finding the PATH train in Newark to the WTC in New York to then switch for a quick uptown jot on the A or C was as good as navigating in a foreign language to me.

It was 11p when I came up in the World Trade Center’s soaring atrium and asked a guard for the nearest public phone. I dialed the number PD had given me via email and got him after a couple of rings. There was clearly audible activity in the background (of the sort I recognized from watching Insex Livefeeds) and I suddenly felt very privileged. Where others had to upload their interaction using kludgey dial-up connections, I was on the Batphone. PD was enthused for my call and suggested that I come immediately to the studio. It was, he said, just across the river. With a feeling of regret (that has only grown over the years) I begged off. Finding my friends’ apartment in the mid-night abandoned lower reaches of Manhattan would be about as much as I thought I could handle – more subways, more rivers, Brooklyn, of all places… when I had left New York in the mid 80s, nice people did not venture into Brooklyn in broad daylight, much less in the middle of the night.

I got directions on the F line out to York Street for the following day. PD and I determined to meet at the highly unreasonable hour of 9a, for he would have a shoot to prepare for in the afternoon. We would have breakfast, talk money, look at figures.

When finally I bedded down on my friend’s creaky vinyl couch at midnight my last thoughts were of my due diligence and whether I’d be able to write the check the next day if I were sufficiently convinced. Did I have enough ready capital for the percentage I needed in order to make it worth getting involved? I knew from my own participation in Livefeeds that Insex had a big, rabidly active following, and that what they were doing was revolutionary (pornographically, erotically and even sociologically). I imagined membership in the hundreds, monthly cash flow to be in the tens of thousands and margins to be pretty healthy. What sort of financials was it reasonable to request of a porn operator if you’re thinking of investing in their operation?

I came above ground at York Street and marveled at the weight of the Manhattan Bridge over my head, turned right and followed the span down into the then still disreputable district called Dumbo. I was just a bit early and so I walked around the giant, sagging warehouse where I was to seek out the Big Worm Productions buzzer, once, that is, I had found the main entrance. There were innumerable decrepit steel doors girded round the building, none of them marked or particularly distinguishable as a main entrance. As I passed by one with more than its fair share of band stickers a woman emerged from behind the battered metal and I ducked in behind her. I clambered my way first over bags of garbage and then up several flights of a decaying stairwell to where a small paper sign with “BWP-Intersec” scrawled on it marked the landing I wanted and pointed me around the peripheral hall to a corner door. I buzzed, waited, buzzed again, heard some shuffling and was presently greeted by a bespectacled, berobed and bed-faced visage I took a moment to recognize.

“Mac! You’re early, fucker.”

Porn: Use Only as Directed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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