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“The idea is not to make me feel small,” one submissive
told me a couple of days ago. When I was taking the GMSMA novices
class one of the teachers remarked, “You should both come out
of the scene feeling better than you felt before getting into it.” This
is the essence of what we do. We make each other feel better. Understanding
this, is the difference between those who don’t quite understand
and the ones who do. They only see the mockery, cruelty and the pain,
not the joy of BDSM.
What they miss is the earthiness of sexuality. Because of the dominance
of monotheistic severity in Western society, huge parts of our world
have lost the capacity to partake of the sweaty, stinky animal that
lies deep inside our bodies, in favor of the ethereal pleasures of
the mind. We see this lack of understanding of the body in those
Neo-puritans who want to control the world and turn the culture back
to the totalitarian past after World War II. They preach rationality
and spirituality because they don’t understand that humankind
is made up of equal parts rationality and barbarity, spirituality
and earthiness. This is why evolution is such a mystery to them.
They can’t understand how nature, in all its extravagance and
wildness, could have created this spiritual creature, Man. “...noble
in reason,...infinite in faculty!”— Hamlet II, ii, 17.
They can’t understand how nature and history could have grown
something so wonderful as them because they have spent so much time
trying to please their God of a book. They don’t see the God
of their body. They are so inside their heads that they can’t
see nature without the filter of human intelligence. This even distorts
their view of human history.
They wish to stand athwart history, like W. F. Buckley’s Conservative,
crying, “Stop!”, but are unable to stop the stream of
history as it erodes and changes everything. Their opponents on the
left are not much better; trying to channel history in the direction
they want it to go. Both are lost in dry abstractions and miss the
reality of the water, which softly erodes even the hardest stone.
A Dominant in a dungeon, smelling of sex, sweating over the flogging
of a glistening submissive, smelling even sexier, can’t miss
the sweet moisture of history, as history oozes out of their body.
All this couple is concerned with is the stimulations of their bodies
and the connection they are developing together, not the history
they are making, that will come when they are older, feeding off
of their memories. At this moment there are no ideas, no bookish
gods and no rational thoughts, just raw nature, sex and power. They
remind us that history, when it was admittedly about power and sex,
was much less cruel than when it became about ideas.
I have been accused of giving seducers and sadists ideas that they
can use in their nefarious seductions of innocents. I can’t
help the kinds of people who use my words without understanding my
ideas. The fact that I have described the effects of subspace as “touching
heaven” is seen as a false promise, too good to be true. The
fact that many Christian saints reached their ecstasy under torture,
which, as opposed to BDSM, was not intended to create ecstasy, is
forgotten. That many modern masochists have described the same sensation
is irrelevant to those who find what I say horrible, or who have
had a bad experience with what we do. To them the transcendental
experience cannot be reached through sex or the body, but only through
the contemplation of the abstraction of religion. What they forget
is that one cannot get to heaven by trying to get to heaven.
This is always the great conundrum when dealing with the transcendental
effects of extreme behavior, you can’t go into it with the
idea that you are going to touch heaven, and end up touching heaven.
You cannot find God. He can only find you.
But, most people are not sexual because they want to gain any kind
of enlightenment. Sex is done for fun because it is fun to get rid
of the stresses of the work of survival, because it is fun to be
free with one’s body, to exercise it for what it can be and
to just get silly, to shed our serious human brain for the brain
of an animal intent upon having his or her will with another animal.
This is the greatest cruelty of those who want to make sex the serious
business of procreation, taking away that fun. Even in the animal
world sex is not just about perpetuation one’s DNA, it is also
about power, and that is the fun of BDSM, to play with power. The
Romans knew this.
When archeologist uncovered a building in Pompeii which had a room
covered with pornographic paintings, they thought it must have been
a whore house where one could choose what kind of sex you wanted
to have, until a scholar pointed out that the paintings were of sexual
activities which the Romans found objectionable because the pictures
were about dominant males giving up their power sexually.
Why were these paintings where they were? The scholars finally came
up with the solution; it was to protect naked bathers from the “evil
eye”. This was not the later idea that someone with some kind
of horrible looking eye could look at you and take away your potency,
rather it was about the way a rival could look at you and take away
your power. A Roman felt vulnerable when he or she was naked, so
the way they protected themselves from this evil eye was with laughter.
If you laugh at something it will take back the power. It was the
laughter of the fishermen of Falmouth in Massachusetts that destroyed
the power of the witch hunters in Salem back in 1693.
These paintings on the wall were supposed to be funny. The hanging
lamps based on the erect penis and hung with bells were funny, so
they protected the house from the evil, envious eye. Indeed, as more
and more houses were excavated they found that quite a few houses
had erotic paintings in them, often in places of prominence. Indeed,
in one house there was a statue of the god Priapus, replete with
gigantic erect penis, standing guard over the owner’s power.
Because the Romans considered sex fun, they were comfortable with
it.
Contrast that with an ad running for Kaiser Permanente. The whole
point of the ad is that Kaiser has an expert for everything; someone
to keep an eye on your heart, on your diet. When time comes for the
couple to go to bed, who is it that ushers them into the bedroom,
a Pediatrician, not even an OB-Gyn. The point of sex in our puritan
society is children, not reconnecting with your partner or having
fun with your body. I doubt that the advertising agency thought of
things this way and if the people writing the ads are like most copywriters
I’ve known, they were most certainly not having sex to make
babies, at least not just yet, but the idea is so engrained in our
consciousness that it just has to bubble up. In the end it is important
to be serious, to see the world as a serious place.
Don’t fall for this temptation. We are about sex, about ways
of using our bodies to celebrate the feeling of being alive, not
about something as serious as Heaven or even worse Hell (best described
as a place without laughter). It is about making the world what we
want it to be, if only for a moment. It is about fun. That fun is
the most subversive thing in the world. Look at how the political
comedians have shown the current crop of serious buffoons for what
they are. When the witch hunters come, don’t fight, don’t
make nice, just look at them like the fishermen of Falmouth, and
laugh. In the end their evil eye always disappears. They are trying
to damn the stream of history.
That submissive body sweating under the flogging and the dominant
body who is doing the flogging are making a connection more powerful
than the draw of religious theater from which so many get their connections
and that is what those who find it incredible that we can touch heaven
with our play, don’t understand. You cannot touch heaven without
another person because heaven is the connection between people. |
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