Image by . Ward via Flickr~ Bind my flesh in cotton and leather... nylon and chain ~
Tighter... The bite of the rope into my ankles assuring my inability to escape.
Tie my wrists so I am unable to push you away.
Unable to deny you access.
Strip from me free will, choice.
Place me on a surface, a bench, a bed, a St. Andrew's cross, a pommel; spread and exposed for your scrutiny. Strip away all artifice and expose me for your pleasure.
Wrap the bindings tighter around my skin so it grips my flesh in it's unrelenting embrace.
 |
YES, It's ME. |
See the relaxation in my body even as I tune into your presence, all senses alert.
Release nowhere in sight, tension building as the bindings pull my tender skin.
Let me know that my will is null and void.
Soon it will be to exist to serve you but for now it has disappeared.
Resistance is futile. I am open and defenseless to your whims.
I must accept whatever you choose.
I am here of my own desire.
I must accept whatever you choose to inflict on my body ~ my mind.
The word "NO" is not understood.
It is forbidden.
~ Submission ~
What does it mean?
Total acceptance of your mouth, your tongue, your teeth, your hands, your words, weaving sensations and unlocking doors in my mind, my body. Stripping back layers of defenses, control. I exist only to please you, in whatever way you can conceive. I am completely in your power, exposed and vulnerable.
Of every 10 people who reads these words, one or more has experimented with sadomasochism (S&M), which is most popular among educated, middle- and upper-middle-class men and women, according to psychologists and ethnographers who have studied the phenomenon. Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D., of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, has researched S & M to learn the motivation behind it--to understand why in the world people would ask to be bound, whipped and flogged. The reasons are as surprising as they are varied.
Personally speaking, I found the Dominance and Submission experience and my own sexual "awakening" at the ripe age of 16 in the darkness of Chicago's Underground S&M scene. I always give thanks that it was ~M~ who found me, recognized the edginess lurking there and chose to refine it. I was primed and ready, for what, exactly, I wasn't sure, but I was willing to go the distance to find out. To fill the void. I had always had dark and sometimes violent sexual fantasies that began in EARLY childhood. In truth, I was a psychiatrist's wet dream as I fit every Freudian supposition.
Was there sexual abuse as a child? Absolutely.
No paternal encounters or brothers, but a family member and more importantly, several of his friends. The dissociation of that experience brought on the aspect of my personality that is largely in control of my sexuality now. But I digress, we will cover that later in depth.
Back to the what and the why:
For over a century, people who engaged in bondage, beatings and humiliation for sexual pleasure were considered mentally ill.
I know I have had more than one person suggest that to me.
But in the 1980s, the American Psychiatric
Association removed S & M as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This decision--like the decision to remove homosexuality as a category in 1973--was a big step toward the societal acceptance of people whose sexual desires aren't traditional, or Vanilla, as it's called in S & M circles.
What's new is that such desires are increasingly being considered normal, even healthy, as experts begin to recognize their potential psychological value.
S & M, they are beginning to understand, offers a release of sexual and emotional energy that some people cannot get from traditional sex. "The satisfaction gained from S & M is something far more than sex," explains Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., a social psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. "It can be a total emotional release."
Although people report that they have better-than-usual sex immediately after a scene, the goal of S & M itself is not intercourse: "A good scene doesn't end in orgasm, it ends in catharsis."
Although people report that they have better-than-usual sex immediately after a scene, the goal of S & M itself is not intercourse: "A good scene doesn't end in orgasm, it ends in catharsis."
Why does psychiatry even concern itself with sexual behavior that is consensual and adult? Why label any such behavior "sick"?
Urban anthropologist and founding LSM member Dr. Gayle Rubin has described the way society views sex by classifying sexual behavior as part of the "Charmed Circle of Sex" versus the "Outer Limits".
Basically, society likes sex to be straight, married, monogamous, private, not-for-hire, procreative, and vanilla.
Some BDSMers manage to violate each and every one of those descriptions - sometimes all at once!
According to Rubin, society does its best to eradicate or suppress behavior on the "outer limits". We do this in several ways, including social and religious disapproval, legislation around sexuality, and classifying behavior as psychologically "sick" versus "healthy".
Enter the role of psychiatry.
Mental health theories have changed. Masturbation is okay; women can be sexual; even homosexuality is no longer a mental illness.
But psychiatry still pathologizes BDSM, and I maintain that this contributes to shame, secrecy, isolation, and self-loathing within the BDSM community.
More concretely, it justifies laws criminalizing S/M behavior, legal decisions to deny child custody to kinky people, and discrimination in job and housing areas.
It’s more important than you think to fight the psychiatric classification of kinky behavior.
"If children at [an] early age witness sexual intercourse between adults... they inevitably regard the sexual act as a sort of ill-treatment or act of subjugation: they view it, that is, in a sadistic sense."
--Sigmund Freud, 1905
Freud was one of the first to discuss S & M on a psychological level. During the 20 cocaine fueled years he obsessed over the topic, his theories crossed each other to create a maze of contradictions. But he maintained one constant: S & M was pathological.
--Sigmund Freud, 1905
Freud was one of the first to discuss S & M on a psychological level. During the 20 cocaine fueled years he obsessed over the topic, his theories crossed each other to create a maze of contradictions. But he maintained one constant: S & M was pathological.
People become masochistic, Freud said, as a way of regulating their desire to sexually dominate others. The desire to submit, on the other hand, he said, arises from guilt feelings over the desire to dominate. Where would this man be without GUILT?
In my opinion, both views are skewed.
The view that S & M is pathological has been dismissed by the psychological community.
Sexual sadism is a real problem, but it is a different phenomenon from S & M.
S & M is the regulated exchange of power among consensual participants, sexual sadism is the derivation of pleasure from either inflicting pain or completely controlling an unwilling person.
Despite research indicating that S & M does no real harm and is not associated with pathology, Freud's successors in psychoanalysis continue to use mental illness overtones when discussing
S & M. Personally, I think it might just be a fetish, maybe they were just into deviancy?
Sheldon Bach, Ph.D., clinical professor of psychology at New York University and supervising analyst at the New York Freudian Society, maintains that people are addicted to
S & M.
They feel compelled to be "anally abused or crawl on their knees and lick a boot or a penis or who knows what else. The problem," he continues, "is that they can't love. They are searching for love, and S & M is the only way they can try to find it because they are locked into sadomasochistic interactions they had with a parent."
He's way off the mark in my case, but then again we are all unique and for dear Sheldon, his perception may well have been his reality. As far as the off the cuff comment of "who knows what else?" perhaps Professor Bach should complete his studies before giving his uneducated opinion?
I, myself am a "Switch", ( I give as good as I get and I totally "get" both ends of the whip...) and believe me, a few hours with me would clear up Dr. Bach's confusion about the inability in our world to love. It may very well clear up a lot more than that for him once the "compulsion" to obey ME overtook him.
And I GUARANTEE you ~ it would.
Maybe his sexual hangups come from parental influences, or lack of love in that area...Freud seems to share the same misfortune, but mine certainly DO NOT, and I detest being a foregone conclusion in the minds of academics.
Unique experiences and the ability to process those experiences are key to the shaping of an individual.
Control and having been repressed or sheltered certainly figures into a lot of the scenes and journeys I have been privy to. Exhibitionism, sexual excess, humiliation, physical pain, emotional pain, seems they all follow that same path back into the mists of memory for some.
Meredith Reynolds, Ph.D., the Sexuality Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, confirms that childhood experiences may shape a person's sexual outlook.
"Sexuality doesn't just arise at puberty" she says. "Like other parts of someone's personality, sexuality develops at birth and takes a developmental course through a person's life span."
In her work on sexual exploration among children, Reynolds has shown that while childhood experiences can indeed influence adult sexuality, the effects usually "wash out" as a person gains more sexual experience. But they can linger in some people, causing a connection between childhood memories and adult sexual play.
(In my case, I have refined and compartmentalized my needs and desires.)
In that case, Reynolds says, "the childhood experiences have affected something in the personality, and that in turn affects adult experiences."
Reynolds' theory helps us develop a greater understanding of the desire to be a whip-bearing mistress or a bootlicking slave.
For example, if a child has been taught to feel shame about her body and desires, one may learn to disconnect themselves from them. Even as one gets older and gains more experience with sex, their personality may retain some part of that need for separation.
S & M play may act as a bridge: Lying naked on a bed bound to the bedposts with leather restraints, one is forced to be completely sexual.
The restraint, the futility of struggle, the pain, the master's words telling her she is such a lovely slave--these cues enable her body to fully connect with her sexual self in a way that has been difficult during traditional sex.
For someone who was unable to come to terms with their sexuality in the normal time frame of puberty, experiencing pleasure and pain at the same time while put into situations that one was taught were shameful or wrong would incapacitate most minds. Compartmentalizing these experiences allows one to examine them in a safer environment.
Allowing a Dom/ Domme into these scenarios ~ by allowing them into that holy of holies, the mind, they are able to take the scene and recreate it, allowing the sub to escape into that subspace and give in to the sensations and feelings that scene elicits from them, the ability to release that energy in a controlled manner, while being absolved of responsibility and guilt over the reactions is cathartic.
It's a purge. It's Pure and unadulterated, heavy and mind bending. It redistributes that trust and control that Dr. Bach thinks your parents stole from you...I know from personal experience on both sides of the whip ~
It beats the hell out of Xanax and Psychotherapy.
Pardon the pun...really.
Escape theory is further supported by an idea called "frame analysis," developed by the late Irving Goffman, Ph.D. According to Goffman, despite its popular conception as darkly wild and orgiastic, S & M play has complex rules, rituals, roles and dynamics that create a "frame" around the experience.
"Frames suspend reality, They create expectations, norms and values that set this situation apart from other parts of life," confirms Thomas Weinberg, Ph.D., a sociologist at Buffalo State College in New York and the editor of S & M: Studies in Dominance & Submission (Prometheus Books, 1995).
Once inside the frame, people are free to act and feel in ways they couldn't at other times.
After all, the ingredients in good S & M play--communication, respect and trust--are the same ingredients in good traditional sex. The outcome is the same, too--a feeling of connection to the body and the self.
Laura Antoniou, a writer whose work on S & M has been published by Masquerade Books in New York City, puts it another way:
"When I was a child, I had nothing but
Once inside the frame, people are free to act and feel in ways they couldn't at other times.
After all, the ingredients in good S & M play--communication, respect and trust--are the same ingredients in good traditional sex. The outcome is the same, too--a feeling of connection to the body and the self.
Laura Antoniou, a writer whose work on S & M has been published by Masquerade Books in New York City, puts it another way:
"When I was a child, I had nothing but
S & M fantasies...I punished Barbie for being dirty. I did Bondage Barbie, Dominance with GI Joe.
S & M is simply what turns me on."
OMG! I couldn't have said it better myself.
OMG! I couldn't have said it better myself.
