Janet looks at boundaries and unboundedness:
Skin as a Meditation on Morality
Here’s a moment I like to remember. I was kneeling on the floor, bent over the edge of a bed. There was a clothespin on my clit. It had been there for quite a while. My lover was fucking me up the ass. Just as he came, he reached around, opened the clothespin, lifted it away from my sticky flesh.
The inside of my head went white. The next thing I can remember is that somehow I seemed to be holding all the bedclothes in my hands, and there seemed to be a very loud shriek echoing off all the walls.
What I love about that moment is its purity. I had no volition, no ego, no self. I was a tiny scrap of burning white energy floating in an infinitely huge universe, contained only by the intent of my lover.
It seems to me that the experience I’m trying so hard to describe in this book, whether you want to call it ecstasy or bliss or spirituality or transcendence or whatever, is always at some level about loss of self – about having the precious opportunity to forget, for just a little while, where I end and everything else begins.
Which brings me back again to the question of skin – the membrane that defines the boundary between what’s me and what’s everything else. Working on this book has brought me back again and again to the question of skin, and I’ve realized that at least for me, it’s a powerful metaphor.
For me right now, all of SM seems like an exploration of the nature of skin. When I beat you, I light up the nerves in your skin. When I put clamps on your skin, I compress its nerves and drive away the blood that feeds it, and when I take them off the blood comes back to heat up your skin and make you gasp. When I put you in bondage I have turned your skin to a rigid armor that holds you in place, and drawn your attention to the pressure of the ropes and cuffs against your skin, holding you in place when my hands can’t be there. (Is this, I wonder, why leather has become so important to SM – are we at some level recognizing the importance of skin to what we do?)
But here’s the real thing about skin, the important thing, the thing that’s about morality. Without our skin, we’d be part of everything, and everything would be part of us – so we’d never know what was ours to take care of, and what wasn’t. That’s what my skin does: it reminds me what’s mine to control, and what isn’t. Skin is my karmic job description.
Now, I have a friend right now who is receiving proof every hour that even inside his skin he doesn’t get to control things all that much - millions of cells are dancing an arrogant square-dance inside his skin, propagating and multiplying, sticking their little cellular tongues out at radiation and chemotherapy. But at least, I think, he gets to try to control what’s going on inside the pink membrane, the bag that we’re given for carrying our groceries.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book, I have a tendency to try to control a lot of things. I think of myself as good at controlling things, and I’m pretty sure that the world would be a much better place if they just let me run it. I make myself pretty crazy trying to control more than I really can or should. So it’s probably a very good thing that I have this soft chamois bubble around me to remind me exactly where my control stops.
Sure, there are lots of things outside my skin I get to influence— but anytime I get to thinking I’m in control of anything outside my epidermis, it’s time for me to take a deep breath and start letting go. Letting go, letting go, letting go. Remember, goddammit, Hardy, letting go.
And then, when policing that boundary begins to feel like too much effort, I can free up my heart, open my throat to scream, may be ask a good friend to pull a clothespin off my clit at just the right moment, and float skinless, a burning scrap of energy, boundless through the universe, for just a little while once again.
What it all adds up to
Now that we’ve finished explaining to you all the beliefs we don’t have, all the knowledge we refuse to know, all the causes we refuse to ascribe and all the control we’re struggling to let go of, it may surprise you to hear that all this non-ownership does add up to something resembling philosophies of life. Although Dossie’s and Janet’s philosophies sound very different; we manage to fit together very well: different metaphors, same cosmos.
Here’s Dossie’s description of how she sees the world.
The universe is bigger than all of us. Divinity, if that’s what we can call the energy of the cosmos, is infinite, eternal, or at least so much more vast than our consciousness can comprehend that it might as well be. Longer than we will ever know, bigger than we can see or imagine. When I need a reminder, I like to hang out with redwood trees: they are also way bigger than I can really get. We operate on finite brains, and there is no way we know what God looks like.
Understanding that the universe is bigger than me offers me infinite opportunities for becoming a bigger person, possibilities for growth beyond what I can imagine today. It unbounds me. Acceptance of the ultimate unknowability of everything frees me: it releases me from feeling responsible for controlling what I can’t.
I feel from my experiences that the divine energy of the cosmos, God if you will, or the tao, or kundalini, or eros, or the force – whatever you like to call it – flows through each of us all the time. That’s why I like names like “life force” or “the Way” to describe that mysterious energy that makes us living beings rather than hunks of meat. So if this animating energy flows through all of us all the time, and if that is what divinity is, then the only question becomes, why are we so seldom aware of this?
For most of us, everyday consciousness is focused on the tasks of life: working, walking, eating, communicating. Divinity is flowing through us, yes, but we aren’t paying attention. Spiritual practice and religious participation are among the huge number of ways that we set ourselves up to pay attention to the divine.
In 1 962, when I was first living on my own at the age of eighteen, I heard something that changed my life, from a guy I met in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Listening to my struggles to find a spiritual belief I could live with, he said: “Everything changes if you see God as a woman.” Here I was struggling with a god of wrath when I could relate to a goddess of compassion, of flowering and fruitful earth, of unconditional love. Something like a huge array of dominos went down, and everything, indeed, changed.
Because I got to choose. God, like the redwood tree, like the universe, obviously must be way much more than some grandfatherly guy with superpowers. So I don’t really know at all what God looks like. If you like to anthropomorphize the divine, if it works for you to focus on the ineffable by personifying it, then remember that you get to choose the form. I get to envision God or Goddess however it works for me at any given moment in time. Mother, crone, warrior, dancer, healer: the pantheons supply us with imagery, mental pictures we can imagine when we want to connect to any aspect of the divine, something we can talk with, ask questions of, pray to. Many of the world’s religions have a concept of an unknowable god, eternal, infinite, too big for us to grasp, and then a pantheon of lesser deities, envisioned as more or less human: saints, angels, elves, fairies, orishas, ancestor spirits, nature sprites, divinity on a human scale.
So to my mind, all religions are valid insofar as they supply ways for their members to experience and realize the divinity that flows through all of us. And it doesn’t matter if you imagine divine force flooding up from inside you, or pouring into you from above or below. It’s really all the same thing. Spiritual practice, religious ritual, high-consciousness sex: all ways of paying attention.
I have always been drawn to embodied spiritual practices, and indeed, that’s what this book is about. Embodied means occurring in the body, felt in the body, enacted with the body. Practices that move our attention through our bodies on a path to open our awareness to the divine.
Examples of embodied spiritual practice include gospel churches, where the devout sing and dance quite vigorously to raise the spirit. Hatha yoga stretches the body to open a clear
relaxed channel. Sufi dancers spin and twirl, using the disorientation of turning and the focus required to remain upright, as the path they follow to wake up to the life force within. Prana, following the breath that flows in and out of each of us in turn, chanting and devotional singing, are yet more ways of moving energy in the body. Medieval flagellants, Hindu saddhus, modern flagellants in the Philippines, Native American piercing rites, ancient and modern practices of scarification: yet more embodied spiritual practices, these last involving sensations of pain designed to alter our states of consciousness and wake us up to the glorious flow of the life force inside us.
We perverts are not without precedents.
And Janet’s:
Yesterday I spent the day having astonishing sex. It’s only been hours, but the memory of sex is ephemeral, so all I remember now is flashes: clamping my hand across a mouth so I could feel the scream against my palm; pushing my left fist up against a perineum and my right hand flat against a belly, and feeling the bolt of electricity that threw my head back and rattled my teeth like an old-time preacher baptizing a child; the trembling of my knees as I fought to keep my legs open for whatever might happen between them next.
Today I am in an airplane, somewhere over Nebraska, I think. I have spent the day showing my passport to strangers, buying expensive snacks in airport gift shops, wrestling my overweight suitcase onto conveyor belts, reading glossy magazines with far more attention than they deserve.
Ever since Dossie and I started this book, I’ve been arm-wrestling with the question of spirituality, and the back of my hand seems to be nearing the table. The things that other people describe as spiritual experiences are things that I’ve experienced too: the still majesty of nature, the heart-stopping love that is parenthood, the miracle of seeing my own muscles and tendons rise and fall under my skin as I wiggle my fingers – my god, all I have to do is think about moving my body and it moves, just like that.
So I guess it was spirituality – the magic that vibrated my palm, that threw my head back, that shook my waiting knees. It was something, anyway. It felt to me like any other kind of energy – like electricity, or light, or heat: physical, concrete, measurable. It’s hard to talk about it much because everything I say sounds so vague and woo-woo – even the word “energy” sounds ridiculously inadequate, a groovy holdover from a less left-brained era. But if I’d been around in the 14th century, and I’d been able to perceive radio waves with my own body and had tried to describe what I was feeling, I’m sure it would have sounded equally ridiculous. Given a choice between sounding stupid and denying my own perceptions, I guess I have to choose the former.
But what I don’t get, can’t get, is what’s so especially spiritual about that particular energy. It’s certainly one of the great mysteries that holds the universe together, that connects me with friends and strangers and animals and plants and rocks. But so is the $5 I handed across the counter for a copy of Premiere a couple of hours ago. So is the bag of pretzels I ate, and so are the crystals of salt at the bottom I moisten my finger to pick up and lick off. I can’t understand why my hands dancing across this keyboard can be a spiritual experience and the silicon and plastic and metal they’re tapping can’t.
The phrase “sacred sex” makes a certain amount of sense to me, and heaven knows we need it after a couple of millennia of being told that sex is a dirty hellbound sin. But I just can’t work out a schema in which sex is sacred and choosing new tires for my car isn’t.
What is sacred, I think, is attention. If I’d had my mind totally focused on my clit yesterday, I’d have missed the moment when the power ripped up from my friend’s asshole into my right arm, across my chest, back down my left arm, into her belly, and round and round like a dazzling pinwheel of light. If all I can think about is how much money there is in my checking account and whether the $200 tire will last twice as long as the $100 one, I miss the astonishing realization that the tread under my hand passed through the rain forest and the steel mill and the conference room of a Madison Avenue ad agency and the shipping department of Costco; and that handing my credit card to the clerk has connected me with hundreds of people I’ll never meet, with trees I can’t climb and a factory whose workings I don’t begin to understand; and that I breathed in molecules from those people’s skin and oxygen exhaled by those trees and pollution floating in the air from that factory before I ever considered buying the tires.
It is with some reluctance – well, kicking and screaming, honestly – that I’ve come to conclude that the energy, or kundalini, or life force, or whatever it is we are writing about in this book, is absolutely real: when something lifts me off the floor and slams me against a wall, that’s evidence enough for me. But nothing about it strikes me as particularly “spiritual.” To me, it’s a physical energy, just like electricity: a form of energy that we don’t have the right instruments to measure yet.
Now if that’s spiritual, then everything is spiritual. And, yeah, of course everything is spiritual, but used that way the word has no meaning – when I look up a word in the dictionary, I like to find a more precise definition than “See also: all the other words in the dictionary” – so we’re back to the beginning.
Sex, because it feels so very good, is easier to pay attention to than hooking the back of my bra every morning: may be that’s why we call it sacred. But I think sacred sex is simply practice – a way of practicing to notice sacred everything.
1 Adapted from Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, Ed. Jess Stein, Random House, New York, 1971, and from Ehe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Wm. Morris, Ed., Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston, 1981.)
Morality Play
Stolen pleasures
What happens when we look at pleasure as our birthright? And when we give ourselves permission to enjoy pleasure fully and easily?
Most of us grew up with values that didn’t really allow us to deserve much in the way of pleasure, particularly sexual delights. Everything was either forbidden or you hadn’t worked hard enough for it. And there were enormous proscriptions against enjoying sex, which was seen as somehow anti-spiritual or overly devoted to the flesh.
So we wonder if we are acculturated to believe that stolen pleasure is the only kind we are allowed. Some folks have a lot of fun being naughty and don’t mind, indeed delight in, the sense of the forbidden they get from dirty, raunchy, definitely transgressive SM and sex – an act of rebellion against the established order. Others, like us, find guilt distinctly un-sexy, and want to feel radiant and powerful and free. However, those who enjoy transgressing in play but don’t want the crushing burden of real-world guilt, as well those who dislike and distrust guilt inside or outside the bedroom, have one thing in common: we’re still stuck with the values that pervade our culture, the values that love to steal our pleasure by making us feel that we don’t deserve it. Why do we call it “Devil’s Food Cake”?
We are never good enough. A supreme example of this insidious belief is our national obsession with body image – with size, weight and an increasingly unrealistic standard of physical beauty. A perfect work ethic issue – we can work and work and work, and work out, have surgery, diet till we drop, and still not feel good enough. So we strive and struggle to work harder, spend more money, look better, to earn love and pleasure.
And we can never work hard enough to deserve love and sex and pleasure... because that’s not how we get them. The basic pleasures of human existence are free for the taking.
Ask yourself a few questions. What would it be like to take the day off to go to the beach without fretting that you should be using the time to get started on your taxes? What would life be like without that constant nagging voice of authority at the back of your brain?
What would pleasure be like if we valued it properly?
What would any form of delight feel like without that background drone of shame?
What would sex be like with no guilty thrill?
Do we even know?
About ethics
We, your authors, make no claim to be perfect, but we are ethical people who care a lot about the well-being of those around us, and of those we may never meet as well. In all the books we have written about sexual practices, it has been very important to us to teach and value ethics.
We are constantly learning and teaching about ethical intimacy: how to find our own boundaries, how to respect the boundaries of others. How to say no and to hear no, how to demonstrate caring for the well-being of each of us. Playspace, in the bedroom or the temple, where we make a special commitment to be our very best selves, needs to be a safe container for us to open our hearts and explore the unbounded love that ecstasy opens up. In sex and SM, the play party or scene space is often the special bounded space that we hold sacred, where we show our most vulnerable insides in order to travel together into ecstasy, where we make and keep a special commitment to mutual safety and respect for everybody.
Especially when we’re exploring our darker and more challenging fantasies, as Janet has found:
Sadist
Today I beat someone as hard as I could.
I broke one toy over his ass and bloodied several more. I beat him until his cries were high as a child’s — if you heard an animal making a sound like that, you’d put it out of its misery.
Radical Ecstasy Page 4
