Different Loving

by William Brame

  Increasing numbers of individuals began to form D&S alliances. Leather had begun as a uniquely gay, subterranean culture centered around motorcycle clubs and bars; in the 1970s heterosexuals—influenced by the early and exhilarating victories of gay liberation as well as the formation of consciousness-raising groups by feminists—seized on the idea of forming S/M support groups. The Eulenspiegel Society, the first such group in the United States, was founded in 1971. Two decades later the National Leather Association—an umbrella organization for S/M support groups and social clubs—reported “an international network of well over 400 Leather/SM/Fetish organizations.”18

  A backlash in the gay and lesbian communities against S/M, however, temporarily inhibited the burgeoning subculture. Three events—all occurring in 1980—helped excite anti-S/M sentiment. The film Cruising portrayed the leather scene as inherently sordid and violent. That same year CBS Television aired Gay Power, Gay Politics, a documentary that erroneously stated that S/M is a mostly gay male practice and that 10 percent of all gay deaths in San Francisco were S/M-related. Neither claim could be substantiated, and the producers were later censured by the National News Council, but the documentary had already conveyed its message about leather sexuality. That same year the National Organization for Women (NOW) passed a resolution advocating homosexual rights and condemning S/M. These events and the 1982 publication of Against Sadomasochism, a collection of feminist essays that harshly condemn S/M, have cast an enduring pall over relations between non-leather and leather gays and lesbians. The same year also saw the publication of Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, a collection of essays and fiction by lesbian feminist sadomasochists, which provides an intellectual framework for reconciling sadomasochism, lesbianism, and feminism.

  Krafft-Ebing’s legacy lives on in popular opinion. Although contemporary Americans are certainly more likely to perceive sex for pleasure as an acceptable activity than did the Victorians, deliberately nonreproductive sex—and particularly any form of sex which does not have heterosexual intercourse as its main ingredient—is generally regarded as perverse.

  The last two decades have witnessed a social phenomenon. The diverse leather communities—prolific in their writing and sophisticated in their organization—have attracted thousands of D&Sers in search of community, support, and the opportunity to socialize and meet like-minded partners.

  Unification, however, remains problematic. Many organizations limit membership according to same-sex or opposite-sex preferences. Many heterosexuals are uncomfortable socializing with gays, and homosexuals perceive straight sadomasochists as swinging thrill seekers, uniquely interested in D&S as an episodic erotic event rather than as a committed lifestyle.

  The heterosexuals into radical sexuality have never felt the need to build specialized communities in the same way as their homosexual counterparts. In the Gay/Lesbian sub-cultures, garments and even toys become symbols carried well beyond the area of play into the open light of public spaces. They speak of a tribal affiliation that is as strongly social as it is sexual.… For most straights, radical sexual practice begins and ends in the bedroom or the playroom.

  —GEOFF MAINS19

  As the organizational network expands, however, leather traditions—particularly the adoption of leather dress codes, respect for seniority, and a tribal spirit—are more widely emulated. Heterosexuals who once largely looked to pornographic novels for role models—and who typically discovered that the fiction provided no advice on the daily problems of real people—are turning to the D&S communities for advice and support.

  This evolution has led to “pansexualism”: Gays, straights, bisexuals, and transgenderists fraternize and attend parties together. The National Leather Association has taken a leadership role in unifying all D&Sers, regardless of partner preference, into a cohesive political and social force.

  There is a lot of separation between the straight, gay, and lesbian S/M communities. But there is also pan-S/M consciousness. As one wise woman who has been doing this for many years has said, “Leather is thicker than blood.”

  —GAYLE RUBIN20

  Finally, one of the most significant developments in heterosexual D&S has been the rise of the electronic samizdat. Hundreds of D&S-oriented electronic bulletin boards have formed since the late 1980s. For many people still laboring under the Victorian ideas of acceptable sexual behaviors and living in sexually and politically conservative regions, the anonymity and accessibility of these on-line networks has permitted a free interchange of ideas on topics formerly too distressing to discuss even with relatives or friends.

  As of this writing, international electronic networks have become a primary medium of communication and socialization for millions of people interested in D&S-related sex. The on-line environments offer everything from peer support and discussion groups to sites dedicated to personal ads, erotica, and graphic images. On the Internet, news groups prefixed by “alt.sex” treat individual topic areas (female dominants, water sports, fetishism, spanking, inter alia). The most heavily-trafficked area is “alt.sex.bondage,” which features lively, sometimes acrimonious, debates on D&S issues and technical “how-to” discussions. On the World Wide Web, new D&S sites are constantly emerging, hosted by enthusiasts and vendors from Hoboken to Hong Kong. On Compuserve, the Human Sexuality Forum’s Variations II (founded in 1987 by Gloria Glickstein Brame), is the nation’s oldest on-line D&S support and education group.

  The observer effect has held powerful sway in cyberspace, where large numbers of newcomers emulate the behavior of loquacious veterans and eagerly adopt the prevailing mores, etiquette, and slang. The net effect seems to be a growing emphasis on the technical elements of D&S and on its enormous potential as casual, safe-sex play. One of the more intriguing phenomena has been the proliferation of “play parties” and “munches,” regional social events organized by and for D&S cybernauts who meet for “3-D” interfacing.

  INTERVIEWS

  WILLIAM A. HENKIN

  Every society has taboos. Most of them have sexual taboos. Those societies that do not have sexual taboos have mouth taboos, either on eating or on talking. What the connection is between the beginning of the alimentary canal and the end of it, or between the tongue and the genitals, I will only leave for speculation.

  There are two reasons, as far as I can tell, why S/M is taboo in our culture. The first has to do with control. As a society, we are as frightened of control issues as we are of anger issues. They are related. To express anger seems like losing control. So it’s taboo to look at those things that frighten us. Second, if you control people’s sexuality, you control their lives. If you tell them what they may or may not do sexually, you have in a very real and a very deep way told them who they may be, who they may not be, what they may be, what they may not be. The organization of any society needs—or feels that it needs—to control its citizens.

  As far as I can see, there is no engagement between two mammals that does not include a power relationship, a jockeying to determine who is the alpha animal. In my observation, most relationships between two people do not include any awareness of this need to resolve the power dynamic. People attempt to determine their power relationships implicitly, not explicitly, and consequently human interactions are generally fraught with arguing and bickering to see who gets to control things. This complex process may result in a lot of manipulative behavior, with people who are physically or psychologically weaker trying to gain control from underneath, covertly, and people who are clearly stronger physically or psychologically feeling that they’re being manipulated, but not quite knowing how, getting frustrated, and hitting their partners. I’m speaking hypothetically, but it’s been my observation that that’s part of what goes on in a lot of spousal abuse, partner abuse, battering relationships.

  I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about this, but I don’t know of a battering situation, for instance, where [either] the batterer, the batteree, or both have not come fr
om situations where power was dealt with unconsciously. I have worked in situations where I had to deal with many people who had been battered, either as adults—spouses or partners—or children. I don’t recall a single one of those situations where consensual S/M or D&S was a component. I’m not sure that such erotic games would have been acceptable to most of those people.

  If one is being unconsciously and nonconsensually domineering, one will behave brutally [physically or psychologically]. If you’re unconsciously submissive, then I think there’s potential for a great deal of self-deprecation. If you don’t really want to give in to your partner’s demands, but you do it continually, and feel resentful, I think it’s very psychologically self-destructive. It leads to considerable anxiety and suppressed rage. Similarly, you can be brutal [by] demanding things that could be asked for. When you start to make the dynamics of these interactions conscious, you begin to have some choice in the matter. Some people may become conscious of being domineering or brutal—or submissive or self-demeaning—and may decide that they don’t like these configurations in themselves and want to stop. Then they encounter a new process: learning how not to behave in their old patterns and to behave in new ways. Others [may] find something valuable in dominant or submissive behaviors under certain circumstances. For some people, not only do D&S and S/M provide a safe and consensual arena for these activities, but, because they eroticize them, they make pleasurable experiences that are less pleasurable in nonerotic contexts. So if you’re accustomed to being domineering and you find that you can get into a sexual situation where you can be dominant and have what you want, you may find that when you go back to the office, you don’t have to bully everybody.

  There are theorists who will say the cause is genetic; there are theorists who will say the cause is psychodynamic: Something happens in childhood that plays itself out later on in life. The theory I am most comfortable with is a combination of nature and nurture, some kind of biological or genetic or psychological predisposition which gets activated somewhere along the line. I am happiest so far with John Money’s theory of lovemaps. He posits that whether or not there is some kind of biochemical predisposition, each person has a kind of mental map delineating what he or she will find erotic.

  For example, a child listens to his or her parents in an ongoing, though unconscious, dominant-submissive relationship. Dad is very aggressive, very loud, very forceful about how he wants things to be done. Mom, though she may be as intelligent [and] competent, is meeker. Hearing his parents argue or fight or debate, the little child feels some fear. The fear sets up nervous reactions and, because there are a lot of nerve endings in the genital region, the child [is] stimulated. Children are all sexual. There are videos of children just a few months old masturbating. There are photographs of little boys in utero with erections. So there’s some connection for the little child. If this happens traumatically, or if it happens repeatedly over a period of many years, a lovemap is activated so that when the child later encounters situations in which control—expressed as D&S—are prominent, he or she may [be] erotically stimulated. If the child begins to masturbate around fantasies connected with this, or starts to engage in other sexual activities, the lovemap already established is set firmly in place.

  People don’t get involved with sexuality that is concerned with control, power, and intense sensation without having control, power, and intense sensation as issues in their personal lives. I can’t say whether there’s a higher percentage of people involved in D&S and S/M activities who were abused as children than otherwise, partly because the people I see as a therapist are coming to me because they have problems. They’re not coming to me because they feel great. I’m seeing a skewed population. This is the problem with interviewing psychotherapists under any circumstances: We see people who are in trouble, so we cannot extrapolate from our clientele to the real world. Also, we are in a period right now when the notion of child abuse is extremely prominent. It’s part of the popular culture to talk about abuse and it’s easy to see childhood itself as a nonconsensual situation. We are all socialized and we need to be socialized. But to be socialized means that we are dominated, without our consent, by people who have power over us. If we then are unhappy as adults, it’s easy to look back and say, “I was abused.” We were all abused. But we need to start talking about degrees of abuse and what constitutes the differences between trauma and abuse.

  We can call anything arrested sexuality or arrested development. When I’m driving in rush-hour traffic and I see intelligent, successful adults screaming at each other, cutting off other cars, risking their lives and dozens of other lives in order to grab 20 feet of space, I see infants functioning in adult bodies. The same can be true in some people’s sexuality, whatever the nature of their sexual behavior might be. It may be that some people in [S/M–D&S] communities had unusually difficult childhoods, but then so did a lot of people outside them. You probably could find a similar profile among professional politicians or policemen or the military or physicians or lawyers—anybody who finds satisfaction in controlling other people or the circumstances of their lives. One of the things I find conspicuous about the people I have seen in these [S/M or D&S] communities is the relatively high level of consciousness they exhibit about what they’re doing and their willingness to investigate it farther.

  It is plausible that the usual notion of normative heterosexuality is what people are mostly supposed to become, but we’ll never know as long as we make sex so dirty for children. John Money suggested that if we really wanted children to grow up to be sexually healthy adults, we would treat them the same way we treat young athletes. We’d say, “Go out and practice as much as you can, and when you do well, we’ll reward you.” Instead, we hide sexuality. It should come as no surprise to those of us who think there’s a model of sexuality that people are supposed to follow that lots of people don’t. I know that there are some people who are involved with S/M or D&S activities who really cannot get off in any other way, but the same thing is true of missionary position, male-female heterosexuality. I look to maximize options. If people can get off with ordinary missionary-position sex and also with D&S and also with this, that, and the other, then they have many more opportunities for pleasure.

  Certainly there are people who engage in D&S and S/M activities for whom it is a problem or the expression of a problem—but so also there are people who cannot engage in anything but ordinary penis-vagina intercourse for whom sex is a problem or the expression of a problem. If someone is really the sort of person who is likely to become a serial killer, he probably won’t be talking about it and he probably won’t be in so relatively conscious a relationship as S/M. He’ll much more likely be repressed or out there doing mayhem.

  The fight for sexual freedom that we see waged in the streets and in the courts in our country—and which is not even allowed as a fight in many other countries—is not an irrelevant fight. It is essential to our freedoms and our identities as individuals and as a society. If you control people’s sexuality, you control people. The people I have worked with who were involved in conscious S/M or D&S relationships have not seemed to me to have been destroyed, damaged, or abused by those relationships. If people are not damaging themselves or others, it really is nobody’s business what they are doing.

  HILTON

  I’m heterosexual [and] switchable. I consider myself to be not so much dominant as sadistic and masochistic. I need S/M to have a good sex life—something I found out when I was about 22. I was never shy with women. I remember my friends, after sex, would always say how wonderful it was. I’d have sex and it was okay, but it was nothing special. I could take it or leave it. I knew that whenever I saw a woman dressed in leather, rubber, latex, anything tight and shiny, I would get turned on, but I never related it sexually. But at 22 I was traveling in Denmark [and met] a woman who was about 35—an “older woman”—and I complimented her on her beautiful clothing. She invited me to her apartment and, lo and be
hold, she happened to have a dungeon. I didn’t know anything about S/M: All I knew is that she was beautiful and an older woman, which turned me on at the time. She began tying me up, playing with me, spanking me, and to make a long story short, I had an orgasm. [That’s when] I realized that my sexuality was tied into a lot of the fantasy things. That basically started me on my career of S/M.

  I was fortunate that at an early age I found people and places to go to. I didn’t have damaging emotional relationships. Once I knew that I was really into it, I wouldn’t have a lover unless she was interested in S/M, because it’s very frustrating to be in a relationship where you’re not sexually satisfied. I think it’s deceitful to be with someone and have to go secretly outside of the relationship to get satisfied. I see a lot of people coming to the group who are married: Their spouses are either not into it or know nothing about it. I think it’s very sad that people do things like that, because the whole purpose is to share and explore our sexuality together.

  Many people don’t like the word sadomasochism [because of its connotations]. I know people who would never give or receive pain but think of themselves as into S/M—transvestites, foot fetishists, clothing fetishists. What’s D&S to one person is S/M to another. You can spend days, weeks, and months trying to define things. [Some] people are into the Scene and hate to use the word S/M; some get hung up on the terminology. I’m not worried about it. Whatever makes someone feel comfortable is really what’s important.

  For me, S/M is a very important part of a relationship. I enjoy dominating or submitting to someone that I really like. It doesn’t have to end in intercourse. However, for me, when I’m in a relationship, and I currently am, the S/M is foreplay and it ends up in what I call S/M intercourse.