Different Loving

by William Brame

  Being told how to stand, sit, kneel, lie, where to look, how to address me, how to serve me food or drink, how to be there just for me, can be very freeing. To put someone else’s desires ahead of one’s own, to receive pleasure solely from pleasing someone else can be very good for the soul. I’ve heard slaves say that they feel most free inside when they’re enslaved. When you affect the body—whether with ropes, diapers, clothes, sensation, or other control—you affect the mind.

  There are many games and many different styles. What’s a turn-on for me may be a turn-off for another dominant and vice versa. One of the most exciting experiences for me, both professionally and in my private life, is to be with someone who wants to please, serve, and submit. Resistance games are fun, but I don’t find it erotic to have my power repeatedly challenged. My friend does; she works perfectly with this dynamic and so I refer those clients to her. I like to lead someone down an intense road of submission, service, and S/M. I’m strict and sadistic, yet gentle and compassionate. I want a person to get outside himself. Pain and bondage are means to this end. I love to look at complicated bondage, but it seems to me that the person usually goes on an inner journey. This is a profound journey, but I’m not this type of guide.

  I’m a neopagan, goddess worshiper. I believe that in every human being there is a spiritual source. Some people call it a higher power; for me it’s the higher power within and without. I like to be worshiped and adored, but I’m clear that it’s not the ego-inflated human but a greater power within that’s being adored.

  JAMES W.

  I think of every day as an adventure in my life, and every day as an adventure in my relationship. I love to find out where my limits are and go beyond them. For me, what goes on in all of these experiences is the exchange of what I call “psychic energy.” When Freud used the term libido, he meant sexual energy. When Jung used the term, he meant life-force energy, which is much closer to what the Hindus mean by kundalini, the energy that’s supposed to lie coiled at the base of the spine until experience wakes it. In my experience, when S&M does not work, the result is simply two egos or bodies getting together. When it does work, it involves a different level of interaction and being. For some people, this level is activated by intense sensation. For others—and this is more true for me than not—that level is reached through mind games. It’s not that somebody else controls my mind but that I voluntarily give up the power to make certain kinds of choices. What I give up is negotiated in a specific situation at a specific time. This to me [is] the universe of D&S.

  Although I have been in a specifically S&M or D&S relationship for only several years, it looks to me as if the exchange of erotic power has been present throughout my life, in all my relationships. And as I look at the way most people interact, it seems to me that it is present in most people’s relationships most of the time. There is a little dance in which one person becomes the seeker and one person becomes the sought; one person becomes the dominant and one person the submissive. It’s not necessarily erotic. But there’s an organization of energy, so that we can continue with our lives. The problem in most relationships is that this process is unconscious.

  If you’re an ordinary person having ordinary intercourse, there are a lot of questions you never have to address about who you are, who your partner is, what issues of control [exist]. When you leave the world of vanilla sex—particularly the heterosexual vanilla world—you have to start asking [such] questions of yourself. Doing so opens up the opportunity, or presents the problem, of consciousness, of growing in self-knowledge. I’m not saying that just because you get conscious [about D&S], there aren’t other unconscious things going on. But this consciousness seems to me one of the greatest values, though not necessarily one of the greatest pleasures, in this mini-universe. Actually this is a great pleasure for me. I’m a process junkie; I like to work things to death. But I know some extremely intelligent, experienced players who want no truck with that attitude. They do S&M for fun. Period.

  [As for the] physical reality, well, in the sexually vanilla world, people are forever fucking each other while the person on top is pinning the wrists of the person on the bottom, or lightly slapping or tickling him or her. Since I’m a boy in this culture, and since more of my partners have been girls than boys, mostly those were situations in which I was on top, holding her wrists or slapping her butt, and sometimes the results were very gratifying. I [once] grabbed one girlfriend when she walked past me, threw her over my lap, hiked up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and spanked her, and she turned and gasped at me over her shoulder, “Oh, James, how did you know?” That was nice, but knowing what I do now, I see it was also nonconsensual. She could have taken what I did as abuse instead of as a sexual delight.

  In 1987 I was divorced. Ours looked for all the world like a straight-on vanilla relationship, and in some regards I guess it was. But she had run through a string of abusive partners—guys who threw her down the stairs, broke her nose, broke her ribs, blackened her eyes—a real horror show. I have a white-knight complex, so I was going to save her. We had a great sexual relationship and a little vanilla slap and tickle, and that was fine. But we also had a lot of manipulative disagreements, and somewhere in the midst of this marriage, I discovered one night that I really wanted to deck her. Even though I never did anything of the sort, I felt like an abuser. I didn’t like this about me at all. I had never felt that way; I had never been in an abusive relationship. Nobody was hitting anybody, but it felt lousy, and with whatever discussion we were able to have, it didn’t look as if there was any way we were going to resolve it. It [was] untenable for me. This was not where I was going to spend the rest of my life. So I ended the relationship.

  [My D&S sexuality] was very difficult for me to acknowledge. Cybele has never been in the closet about anything; I’ve been in the closet about everything: Awareness is a constant process of coming out for me. Like many vanilla folks, I had a certain number of S&M experiences that I did not call S&M. And though my fantasies were elaborate, one thing that was clear to me was that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t quite know how to find out.

  Since I didn’t know anybody who knew anything about the subject—it turns out I [did] know people who were involved, but they weren’t talking, and I wasn’t asking—I started visiting professionals. Some of my fantasies were submissive, but they were vague, because I didn’t know what submissive meant or what a submissive did. Most of my fantasies involved substantial dominance, with me as top, just as they had when I was younger. I wanted to top helpless women who would swoon and love me. I searched for a submissive who was very experienced, to teach me to top. She was not easy to find, so I visited a number of professional dominants, trying to figure out what to do. None of those dominatrices was very good. Now that I am in this community, where there are several excellent professionals, I see none of those others around, so I conclude that they are people who simply do S&M professionally. Unlike the professionals in the community, the activity is not meaningful to them; it’s just a way to earn a living.

  [But then] I spent several hours one evening with a man who advertises as a professional dominant. He was intelligent, educated, informed, and articulate and able to explain to me what was going on in a language I could grasp. He was also a very adept leather top. On the one hand, I learned something about how to top; on the other, I discovered that I had a genuine submissive side that I had not seen before.

  [With his approach in mind], I answered an ad that turned out to be Cybele’s. I got her answering machine, and her message was grammatically correct. I’m a writer with a graduate degree in English and experience teaching college English, so it was important to me to have a grammatically correct partner. We traded messages and talked a number of times before we met. She was anticipating somebody much straighter than I, as she tells the story; a voice went off in the back of her head when I opened her door, saying, “Oh, it’s you.” But since she’s a good professional, she ig
nored the voice, and we had our little introduction and the session. However, this session, which was supposed to last an hour, went several hours. A woman who works with her listened at the door at one point, afraid that some harm had come to Cybele.

  One of the things that is most engaging right now—I mean that in all senses—is that Cybele has a persona who really wants to bottom to me. [And] her baby persona—Baby Pixie—is very happy to have a submissive daddy. However, the context of our erotic relationship has been very different from that, and it is hard for me to come out as a top with her. Mistress and slave really undergird our relationship.

  SRI SHIVAYNANDA

  SMC is a church dealing with goddess worship—the dark-side goddess. It got its origin about 10 or 11 years ago when a group of people were fantasy playing with S&M energy and female-domination energy. At the same time, goddess worship was being discussed at an academic forum on the other side of town [among] sociologists at U.C. Berkeley. To make a long story short, there was a convergence of people acting out some old mythologies of dominant goddesses and sacrifices to them. It was merely speculative at first, but a few people decided to organize this energy under a religious corporation. This group ultimately became the Service of Mankind Church, which is a funny, yuppie name, but they wanted to come up with a nonthreatening name [so] the church could function without attracting attention. People didn’t want it connected with [the] other strange things coming out of Berkeley.

  The articles of incorporation define the church as based around worship of a dominant goddess. SMC’s religious practices are varied. One of the things that we would like to get people into doing—especially since so many people are attracted to us because of an erotic interest—is a search within. We have a woman who leads a group in basic guided visualization. She talks for several minutes and then asks people to sit quietly and imagine themselves in [a] particular scene. We’ll also chant the names of goddesses, because that helps center the mind and gets individuals out of individualism and into the group. The religious part is merely the acknowledgment of that goddess [and] surrendering, making an offering to that goddess.

  We’ve done a lot of rituals. We find some interesting little mythology [about] some goddess, and [a] woman will play the role of that particular goddess. We’re not worshiping that particular goddess or that particular woman: It’s an acknowledgment of the feminine aspect of divinity. [For example], there is a ritual practiced principally in Nepal. A young virgin girl is seated on a throne; she incorporates the spirit of a goddess. The village people will come in and lay down fruit and gifts and flowers. They’re not worshiping that little girl; they’re worshiping the feminine aspect of divinity. It’s symbolic. We’re not Kali worshipers; we invoke different goddesses [symbolically].

  Perhaps [it was] my Catholic school background and dealing with the Blessed Virgin that influenced me. Through grade school and high school I saw the Blessed Virgin as a surviving form of goddess worship. I think that drew me to [goddess worship] as a young person. [But] the Judeo-Christian point of view is that good and evil are located in two different deities: All good is in God and Jesus, and all evil is in another god, called Satan. In the Hindu pantheon and in other [Eastern religions], good and bad are combined in one deity. In monotheism we separate these [aspects]. The dark-side goddess—[from] the Eastern point of view—is not evil; it implies that we have to recognize within ourselves the potential for the maximum of good as well as the maximum of evil. To believe in the dark-side goddess is to acknowledge within ourselves just this potential. We worship the dark-side goddess because she is the one who can take these energies and do mass destruction. If we’re aware of what she is [and] give her acknowledgment, she could be quite benign. Keeping her benign [is] why you worship the dark-side goddess.

  From a Jungian point of view, there is not evil but a dark or hidden side of our psyche [containing] various taboos [and] things we try to hide from ourselves. And if, from the Jungian point of view, you have a support situation in which to open these doors and face these things directly, it is like looking at the dark or hidden side. Certain alternative sexual persuasions run parallel to what we call Shakti. Shakti’s a form of goddess worship, goddess power.

  Going through Tantric books, books on other Indian practices, there was this recurring theme of a male figure on the ground [and a] goddess figure standing on his prone body. There’s one particular rite where one male is selected who becomes the human-assailant symbol of the god Siva. He is usually put down flat on the ground, and he’s usually bound. He crawls forward toward a female sitting on a chair, who is emanating the focus of this goddess energy. [She is] the Kali figure. He makes a long slow crawl—because he’s bound, it’s very laborious. When he finally gets there, he becomes the basis upon which she stands: A triumphant standing on the male god. Such images go back quite some time. And [then] you go through pictures of beautiful women you find in S&M magazines. There are men down on the floor with a woman’s feet on their heads. I found out that this is a sex picture; [it’s] there to turn some guys on.

  Tantra recognizes that the way to thinking about the oneness of the universe can be achieved by traveling an erotic path. When an erotic path is established, it’s not sexuality. [In] Tantra you hold that energy, and as long as it’s being held rather than released, there is an altered state of consciousness. When a man [has] an erection, he’ll do anything that the woman wants, because he wants some realization of that. During that time he’s in an altered state of consciousness. The same goes for the female. We try to get that kind of a state going so that during that period one can have this inner trip. For example, the priestess playing the part of the spirit who sits on the throne [is] usually dressed erotically [to] get that male energy going. We use the iconography of this dominant goddess. That’s when the ritual [and] the chanting occur. We have icons of Kali standing barefoot on the chest of Siva. The mythology is that Siva lies dormant as dead until Kali steps on him, and at that point her power, her sexuality, her Shakti is so strong that she’s able to raise an erection in this corpse. From the Western viewpoint, this is a bit crude and weird, but this is the Hindu point of view: First comes the erection, and then comes life. She brings him back to life. As the legend goes on, they eventually copulate, and when they do, that sustains life in the universe. In other words, this union makes life go on.

  We never [have] an orgy or anything like that. In order to give up all of his symbols of power and ego, a man may strip himself naked and lie prostrate at the feet of the goddess. Only certain individuals are selected to perform that symbolic surrender of the male to the feminine aspect. In some cases he’s bound, in some he’s scourged—to show that he’s making his ultimate surrender. To straight people, that’s not sexuality; that’s just plain weirdness. But to others, like dominant women who’re watching, that’s very hot, very erotic, and they’re sure it’s explicit sexuality.

  The Service of Mankind Church is our official name, but our subname is Sanctuary of the Goddess. And in the Sanctuary of the Goddess we wanted to establish a sacred place. [Our] mission is to make a reaffirmation of [our] theology, [to] define a group of people—men and women—who can learn more about the spiritual trip and actually become a part of it. We want priestesses and monks to carry on the ritual as well as to teach others. We call it the Inner Circle. We are doing this as a means of separating ourselves from the army of hedonistic men and a few women who see the Church as a place to expand their sexual and social lives, a place where they can meet a woman who is into S&M and female dominance. We’re being drowned by these people.

  MORGAN LEWIS

  I became a dominant because, since I was three years old in the playground, [I was] a take-charge person. I don’t like to follow directions; I usually pick people’s directions apart. If I could have worked in camouflage for the military, I would have. I always see how things could be made better. I’m an innovator. I like dealing my own deal. I’m used to leading groups of people
. I’ve been the head of organizations, on the national board of [the massage] organization I belong to. This is me: I walk in, and I take over. I do what needs to be done.

  I got into S&M because I had a sexual partner, and we had been together for eight years. We were trying to find something new to do, and I played with cross-dressing and he became completely submissive. And that’s how I got into it. I didn’t know what to do at that point. So I went to the Eulenspiegel Society and learned what S&M was. I [would] go every Monday night, come home, and tell him what I saw. We played the games at home. Then it became a part of my life.

  I’ll tell you what S&M has done for me: It’s made me a better businessperson, a better mother. I get along better with people. I’ve been able to be more real with myself. I was an entertainer all my life: I’m even better [now], because I’m not afraid of people anymore. It’s made a complete person of me, because I have this power and this control.

  People who dig black women will come to me. There’s no doubt that’s what they want. One thing about people in the Scene: They won’t come to you if that’s not what they want. If I advertise anywhere, I always say I’m a big, black, buxom woman; a lot of men have been attracted to me because I am big and black, and prominent. I don’t think of myself in any ethnic form. The mere fact of being a woman never affected me until I realized I could flaunt it. But I’ve always used my body to get what I want; I’ve always conned men into doing what I want. Being a woman, being black—these things aren’t deterrents for me. They’ve been very advantageous for me. I don’t think that black people really know where they’re coming from, so I’m not coming from anywhere but my consciousness as a woman; and it so happens that I am black.