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.

Who Are You, Really?

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

Me, I didn't recognize myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then all the colors changed and it was past.

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

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

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.”

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.