Peggy Kleinplatz is a sex therapist and professor at the University of Ottawa. Her paper is in the book is called “Learning from Extraordinary Lovers: Lessons from the Edge”. It is all about how what people can learn from those of us who practice what Easton and Hardy call “graduate school sex”. After all, people learn from others with advanced training, why shouldn’t those who have practiced sexuality as a difficult and technical art be able to show the world to a better sex life.

I gave a brief review of how Kleinplatz begins the paper in the last column, so I will simply skip to the meat of the paper, the 10 lessons. These are things that sadomasochists have learned over years of playing dangerous games with their sex lives. It comes from our extensive communications with our lovers and our understanding that we don’t know what makes our lover hot, that we have to find out, both those of us on the top and those of us on the bottom. The first lesson is an old one. “The power of intense eroticism lies within” or as Master Jack (and a lot of other people) have said, the most important sex organ is the brain. John Norman in his Imaginative Sex put it another way.

You do not know another person until you know their fantasies. We add and subtract pretty much the same way, but our fantasies are branded with our own histories and personalities. They are precious and, in certain particulars, unique to us. A person who does not wish to know our fantasies does not really wish to know us; he may wish to deal with us, or to use us, but he does not totally wish to know us. (my italics) (p. 48)

We each of us have sexual fantasies that get us going but most people are reticent to tell people what they are, even their partners. Indeed, I would think that for those who came to SM back in the repressive days of the 1970s and 1980s, will remember the difficulty and the trust needed to show these very private parts of ourselves to someone else. This certainly was my experience as I was coming up in the scene. But slowly, as we began to understand that we could trust our partners and that bringing most fantasies to life was not just liberating but down right erotic, we let go of our inhibitions in this area.

One of the things that Kleinplatz understands is that when we understand and play out these fantasies it heightens the empathy between the partners. “Sex goes awry when people touch without feeling; clients report how dismal it feels to be touched as if they were pieces of wood, rather than embodied beings, alive in their flesh” (p. 335). The human being is more than the sum of his or her nerve endings and erotic zones. The Human being is a consciousness, with an active and imaginative mind that fantasizes and bringing those fantasies to life makes that consciousness come alive.

Lesson #2 is that “The devil is in the details” of sexuality. We are not our labels. A lot of my problems with so much of the taxonomic arguing over who is a Dominant or a Sadist or a Top and what is the difference between one and the other, is just that. We are each individuals. Each of us is our own label.

This label business is even more pernicious when it is used by professionals in the mental health field. Kleinplatz speaks about how if a man came to a mental health professional and told her that he wanted to be bound and beaten, she would diagnose him with the paraphilia Sexual Masochism and try to cure him, whereas a ProDom would spend time trying to find out exactly what it was he wanted, every tiny detail. One has to wonder who the sadist is.

Actually, that is somewhat unfair to the therapist because the entirety of her professional knowledge about sexuality, and particularly kinky sexuality, is about disorder, not about order. I did a brief literature search in the databases that catalogue the peer-reviewed literature. I found less than 100 articles for Sexual Behavior or Sexual Development, but a research project I’m working on for one of my professors came up with 4800+ articles on Religion and Medicine or Psychology. Sex research which is not about pathology or disease is virtually non-existent and for the last half decade or so a career killer although that seems to be changing.

The other thing that Kleinplatz doesn’t really mention in this section is that it is really all about communication. One of the things that seems to upset those who think sex belongs hidden is when people talk about their sexuality. I had a conversation with a person that I take the bus with in the morning about this column and when I talked to her about sexual fantasies she got all frightened. Now this woman knows me and what I am, and I did not ask her about her sexual fantasies but still the idea of bringing her fantasies to life with someone seemed very upsetting to her. If a partner doesn’t know what turns you on, he or she can’t turn you on.

Lesson #3 is that one should not have sex only partially aroused but only in a state of the highest arousal. Like much of what Kleinplatz says, this seems obvious. BDSM is partially about rituals to enhance our sex lives, sometimes going on 24/7. We wear pieces of clothing, we immobilize our partners, so they can get charged up fighting their bonds, or feeling the bondage on their bodies. We stimulate them with whips and paddles. We play roles to act out fantasies; we prolong the agony of arousal. We do this because we have learned over the years how much more powerful our orgasms are when we slowly build the excitement stimulating and then backing off.

But what if you are one of the many who learned their sexual behavior from inhibited adults and in the back seat of your father’s car? We all remember that the basics of our sex ed class was all about not doing it, not how to enjoy it, even before the abstinence only fallacy. We learn about sex as adolescents, when our sex drive is raging, so we become used to the idea that we become aroused, and then we satisfy our lust. The problem is, of course, that this golden age of physicality doesn’t last. What is even worse is that we learn our sexual practices before we learn the pleasures of deferred satisfaction. Then we pass from adolescent passion to the cares and woes of being an adult without adjusting our sexual practices. Perhaps this is why so many of us come to BDSM at the end of our excitable 20s, because we are looking for a way to prolong the excitement and lustiness of newborn sexuality.

Lesson #4: More communications skills, more negotiation skills and much more trust needed to sustain extraordinary sexuality than ordinary sexual relationships. It requires more trust to allow a partner to render you helpless in bondage than to simply allow him or her to penetrate you. For many people simply getting nude is a leap of trust, not to mention getting naked at a club where you will have sex in front of a crowd (who will appreciate it). This trust brings people closer together; it is the cement of all relationships.

The scene is not known for successful relationships, although if one looks more closely at it we find that this is more complex than it seems. We seem to hunt until we find the right one, then drop away from the scene. The skills necessary to conduct a successful BDSM relationship should translate into the skill necessary to conduct a successful relationship period. Perhaps the perception that we change partners a lot comes from the fact that people in the scene tend to conduct their relationships more publicly than people outside the scene. I do know this, however, that the break-up of a scene relationship is much louder than the break-up of a more conventional relationship and that is a sure sign that the bonds are stronger.

Lesson #5: Sex has many purposes other than sex. This would seem on the surface of things to be rather pathological. It is said of rape that it is about power, not sex, and many contemporary sex manuals tell us not to mix sex and the rest of our lives, that it should be a respite from the rest of our lives, but that is silly because we would not say, as Kleinplatz points out, that a walk in the woods is just exercise.

This all comes from the fact that sex was first researched by late Victorian Europeans, more specifically Austrians and Germans, with the odd Englishman thrown in. Here is Freud’s take on the matter from his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,

The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals know as copulation, which leads to a release of sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct— a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger. But even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they are developed, would lead to the deviations described as “perversions”... Here, then, are factors which provide a point of contact between the perversion and normal sexual life and which can also serve as a basis for their classification. Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger beyond the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be transversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim. (p. 15-16)

We can only be surprised, then, to note the interesting, if sad, observations concerning so-called boundary violations that when women patients who have been sexually exploited by their male analysts are interviewed, it is quite common for the patient to report that the sexual connection was quite important to her because it gave her a sense of importance within the relationship, and that it was when the analyst tried to withdraw from the sexual connection that she initiated the complaint. In other words, the patient experienced being physically involved with her analyst, who made the desires of both parties fully evident, as a corrective to what was otherwise an abusive power relationship involving an apparent imbalance of apparent desire! Obviously, in these unfortunate cases the remedy is at least as damaging as the problem which prompted it. But that irony should make clear to us how badly sexual desire and power are often managed in clinical analysis when the analyst participates in a traditionally "appropriate" manner. (Renik, 2006, p. 163)

There it is, sex used for the purpose of wielding power, coming from a very different place, and being understood, not just condemned. But then we in the scene know all about that.

I’ve gone on way too long and perhaps quoted much too much. Next time, the last 5 lessons, from understanding sex as a transformative act to simply encouraging people to look for better and better sex.