In keeping with that struggle, she notes that the following essay was the most difficult piece she wrote for this book – her brain got so scared and so stubborn about it that she had to write it in several small chunks, taking breaks for walks, snacks and breathing in between:
Memory: My therapist’s office. I’ve just finished telling her a dream: I was cutting my lover’s skin off with a knife as part of a scene, and she came from it. The therapist asks, Do you realize how often your dreams are about skin?
Memory: Maybe six years later, a play party. My partner has me tied, standing, in a trapeze-like sling. He is piercing my breasts and chest with needles. I have a vision: My skin is not solid; it is made of molecules, spaced broadly apart. The needle is a tool for pushing the molecules farther away from one another. With the molecules so far apart, there is nothing keeping me here in my body. I leave.
Memory: My wrists are tied together. I look at them curiously. The rope is holding my wrists immobile, but my wrists seem to have very little to do with me. I cannot understand why, just because my wrists are here, I have to be here, why I can’t just float away like a wraith in a cartoon, and leave my body behind in the bondage.
It’s true: My dreams are very often about skin. There is a part of me that simply doesn’t believe that I am stuck here in this thin saggy sack. And really, as I move through my life, I’m the kind of person that people identify as not being in her body a lot of the time: if you come up behind me and say my name, you’ll usually startle me; I often bump into doorframes and miss freeway off-ramps; nobody who’s known me for more than a week ever tries to throw me anything without warning me first. Fact is, I don’t like it much in here, and I wish I didn’t have to stay here.
Last week, I had my first cutting. I asked a friend to open my skin very shallowly with a scalpel, not to make me healthier or prettier, but as an intentional exploration of the nature of this thin pink layer that makes the difference between me and not-me.
I am not very good at telling the difference between me and not-me.
Ever since the cutting, I have been in a state of terrible turbulence, alternating between pathetic neediness and hermitlike hypersensitivity. Something got opened up, something much more than a layer or two of epidermis, something that really didn’t like getting touched and that apparently really needed to get touched.
I have always been terrified of being too much for people (probably because a lot of people have told me that I’m too much for them). As a result, I’ve always picked people who are needy enough that I’ve felt sure they can use up all of me — what, after all, would a self-contained person be able to do with someone like me?
And even when I get such people in my life, I’m still so terrified of being too much that I pretend to be less than I am. Yesterday I wrote a hard letter, long overdue, setting a boundary I should have set quite a while ago. As I sit here right now, I don’t know whether my relationship with its recipient will recover. I have had so little practice establishing the difference between me and not-me that I have no idea what the aftermath of such a letter is likely to be.
My one true phobia (true, I’m not wild about cockroaches and other bugs, but I mean the real racked-with-uncontrollable-shudders-for-no-logical-reason-type phobia) is hard even to explain. What triggers it is a certain sort of something that looks like its getting stuffed fuller than it can hold. I read a scientific article once about a bird that had an injury to the part of its brain that told it when a task was completed. It kept on building its nest until the hole in front of the birdhouse was stuffed full of twigs like a broom, and it was still trying to put more twigs in there; and I shuddered for days. A blocked street grate full of dead leaves creeped me out; I couldn’t think of anything else for hours. And what that phobia is really about, I realize now, is me: the me that is too much, that is too full of emotion, of me-ness, for anybody to take, for the world to contain.
And I wonder why allowing someone to open my skin, on purpose, for fun, has me just the teeniest bit verklempt. It’s a wonder I’m not exploding all over the landscape like an overstuffed sausage casing.
There’s exactly one place in my life where I get to stop worrying about being too much: you guessed it, in scene. When I top, I’m allowed to know as much as I can and use my knowledge any way I want to. I’m allowed to hit as hard as I can and be as loving as I want to afterwards. I don’t worry that I’m too much for my partner - that’s what they’re there for; I’m supposed to be too much for them.
When I bottom, I can scream as loud as I can. I can let go all the anger I can bring up. I can struggle and be violent. I can cry as though my heart will break. I can let my heart break. Nobody will tell me that my anger is inappropriate, or that my sadness is too much for them, or that they’ll give me something to cry about — as though a person had to have something to cry about.
The entire world is too small to contain me. And one small dungeon, with the right person in it, is plenty big enough.
There’s exactly one place in my life where I get to stop worrying about being too muctoo small to contain me. And one small dungeon, with the right person in it, is plenty big enough.
So here we have an apparent paradox: Janet has gotten to do something that feels a lot like leaving her body – at least that’s the way generations of journeyers, traveling on spiritual techniques and psychedelics and BDSM, have described it. But she’s done it precisely by getting deeper into her body, through experiences of intense sensation or intense focus on someone else’s sensation.
We suggest that perhaps what is called an “out-of-body experience” might be instead a transcendent moment during which one recognizes the illusory nature of the division between oneself and the rest of the universe: you haven’t left your body, you’ve just let the boundaries between it and everything else dissolve for a little while. Feels nice, perhaps even a little miraculous – doesn’t it?
When the shell doesn’t match the spirit
Many of us have had the experience of waking up in the morning, feeling seventeen years old and full of hell – then looking in the mirror to see the face of a sleep-raddled, slightly saggy and wrinkled forty-year-old peering back with a startled expression. Whose face is that?
For some of us, the outside not matching up with the inside is more than an occasional moment of startlement. Gender represents a serious problem in self-expression for a great many people: very little is as tightly prescribed, and proscribed, as how we are supposed to express gender. In our culture, gender is supposed to mean that we can always tell the girls from the boys; to do that, we are supposed to polarize maleness and femaleness, separate them as far as we can. Anything in between the poles is obviously wrong. In 2002, more than two dozen people were murdered in the United States because they were transgendered.
So how can we express what’s in us when it’s constantly being held up to somebody else’s yardstick? And how do you find yourself in this sea of other people’s meaning? We think that we are only starting to even explore what gender is. Exploration has been forbidden for so long that we have only a little glimpse of what gender might be like in the world if we were really free to express however it came to each of us, at each part of our lives. One thing we can observe is that gender is not necessarily fixed. We ourselves, and others we know, have lived in a number of gender expressions during our lifetimes.
We resent being asked to choose. No one should be closing doors for us: each of us can choose our own doors, thank you very much. We don’t want to be forced to conform to somebody else’s standards of male and female, masculine and feminine, butch and femme.
When Dossie was first a feminist, she made two very visible changes in her life. One was that she learned to repair her car and use power tools – with much delight, since she wasn’t allowed to take shop at school when she was a little tomboy. The other was that she collected a whole lot of vintage evening gowns from the thrift stores, and set about being visually flamboyant for
the first time in her life. To Dossie, there was no contradiction in this – she was setting out to be the person she wanted to be, which is sort of a cross between Jane Russell and Rosie the Riveter.
Yet another advantage of transcendent play is that while you’re doing it, your “body” sometimes magically adapts to fit your sense of yourself, as Janet writes here:
My Cock
Quite a few years ago, I had one of my good male friends face down on a bed. I’d been whaling on his butt with my favorite cane, and had just come in close to touch him and connect with him. He looked back at me over his shoulder, his face smoothed out with endorphin-y bliss, and said in a small voice, “Oh, Sir, that was just wonderful.”
At that moment, I sprouted the biggest, hardest boner you ever saw in your life. Thing is, I don’t have a cock — not a flesh-and-blood one, anyway.
My cock is made of energy. When I picture it, I picture a cock as clear and shimmering as crystal, but as warm and pulsating as any man’s. It’s only there when it’s erect; the rest of the time, it goes away, and I’m no more aware of it than I am of my toes inside my shoes.
My cock shows up at odd times. The first time I ever took a tantra class, I was shown how to do undulations — those rolling pelvic thrusts that travel up and down the body like waves — and on the very first undulation, my cock was sticking up, as obvious (and slightly embarrassing) to me as a 14-year-old boy’s unwanted erection. The fact that nobody else could see it didn’t matter — it was there, and I had a strong feeling that the other people in the class knew it was there even if they didn’t know exactly what it was.
I can come from sensations to my cock. I once had a man tied spreadeagled to a bed, and I lay on top of him and pumped between his legs, and my cock ejaculated into his cunt, and we both felt it, and I came. My orgasms from my cock aren’t as intense as the ones from my clit, but they’re deeply satisfying, like scratching a long-unscratched itch.
The one time in my life I’ve ever given what I think was a really good blowjob, it was because my own cock was erect too, and all I had to do was think of what would feel good to my cock and then do that to his cock. Afterwards, he looked wonderingly at me and said, “Wow, what got into you?” It wasn’t so much what had gotten into me as what had come out of me.
Sometimes, I like to give my cock a body of its own — so I strap on a cock of silicone or rubber. But when someone sucks the toy or I fuck them with it, it’s my energy cock that’s feeling it.
I’ve wondered sometimes if my cock would be happier on a man’s body, if it would like to be surrounded by a man’s muscles and hair and smell. And while it’s a nice fantasy, I don’t think I’d be any better at being a man than I am at being a woman. Why go through all that work and trouble to be unsuccessful as a different gender, when I already have a perfectly good gender to be unsuccessful at?
So my cock and I stumble through our odd life together, surprising each other occasionally, surprising others from time to time. While it lacks some of the benefits of a flesh-and-blood one — I’d sure like to be able to pee out of it — at least I don’t have to put condoms on it.
Willing but weak
If you, dear reader, are eighteen years old and in perfect physical condition, and intend to play only with other physically perfect eighteen-year-olds for the rest of your life, you have our permission to skip this section now.
But for the rest of us, one of the areas in which the whole body/ mind/spirit issue is most frustrating is when our minds or spirits are hot for play or sex but our bodies just can’t keep up – either because what we want is physically impossible for anybody – sex with deities, death during sex that you get to have over and over again, those wonderful SM fantasies that in real life would land you in the intensive care ward – or because our individual body is, by virtue of age or injury or illness, simply not able to do what we wish it could.
In our previous books, we’ve written about one way to let your brain carry you beyond the limitations imposed by your body using role-playing, fantasy and imagination. With those tools, you can be people you aren’t and do things you can’t. Now, we will propose that your entire body/mind/spirit can contain far more hot juicy sexy energy than your body alone can sustain, and that even fragile bodies can attain unbelievably intense transcendent states by opening themselves to the forces of joy, power and sex that surround them.
Dossie suffers from chronic breathing problems, serious environmental sensitivities, asthma that sends her running for four different inhalers several times every day. Yet she writes:
Breath Comes Up Flying
The breath comes flying up fast these days. A mere focus at the root, opening the spine to let in the Queen of Snakes. Fat and golden, She drives up my spine. At each nexus, an image: the asshole, the crucible, the power spiral, the green sprouting ivy at the heart, gasping blue sky at the throat, midnight between the eyes, and the top of my head blows open, crown rising, sucking in the opal cosmos, filling me with light.
And somehow, in that state, I forget to worry about my aging body, how I look, how I need to lose weight, what about a face lift... With decaying disks and arthritis in my feet I can fly in the dance for hours, while my asthmatic lungs pump up so much life that sometimes people have to tell me the drummers are exhausted and need to stop.
When I need further confirmation of the miraculous nature of trance, others tell me they can see it. In me. They tell me they see rainbows flowing down my sides, colors sparking from my fingers. I wonder about that till I realize I can look around the class while I’m leading an exercise, see the flow of the breath, the easing of the face, the little jerks and stretches of kundalini working her way through a tight place. The light glowing through the skin. Stretching you. And me.
It never fails to amaze me how fast this can happen, how easily my spirit opens. And the confirmation that the magic really works. This energy is learned by being felt.
Even those of us who hunger for more intense forms of SM, for bondage or whips or clamps, can often find in our breathing and our connection a way to sate our hunger when our bodies, or those of our partners, can’t keep up the pace that our fantasies would set for us. Here, Janet writes of her first time topping her lover, who suffers from the aftermath of a serious spinal injury:
I want this so much, and I’m so scared — how do I top someone whose kinks are so different from mine, and who, moreover, lives in a damaged body whose fragilities I’m just starting to understand?
But we’ve been planning this for a week or more, we’re both faintly dizzy with lust. I know public play is a near-limit for him and that he’s pushing himself to do this, and I want it to work for him. Fortunately, it’s a small party, attended mostly by people he knows well and feels comfortable with, and the space is a small one, dark and warm, with lots of intimate private nooks. I can find a way to make this work, I know I can. I can ride both of our fear and use the emotion to build the scene from. Can’t I?
The party starts with a small ritual. Damn, he’s already having trouble: we’re standing in a circle, and standing on concrete for so long is challenging for him. The circle is swaying, and that’s even harder. I try to use my body to block the swaying so he’s somewhat protected from it. Hang in there, hang on.... whew, he’s made it, but not by much. We collapse onto a nearby mattress and he rests until he’s stronger. Then we get away to a quieter place where he can get some medication, and we can regroup and figure out whether play is still an option.
We wait. The meds kick in. What the hell. We decide to give it a shot. What the fuck have I gotten myself into? Am I insane?
Ah, the perfect playstation: a small prison cell, a mattress on the floor, bars for bondage, plenty of privacy, nice and warm. Not knowing exactly what we’re going to do, I’ve dragged along the Monster Toybag, loaded with everything I can think of — flagellation toys, sex toys, bondage gear, safety equipment. I don’t think I actually put any construction equipment in there, but that�
��s probably only because I didn’t think of it. I wheel it in, open it up, start unloading. And then there’s his bag too: a weight belt to protect his back, a posture collar (cool, I’ve always wanted to put one of those on someone — this isn’t just about the protection for his neck, I like this thing), some rather fey little drag items that are quite sweet, more bondage stuff... well, you could probably supply the entire party with the stuff we’ve brought. Not that we were, well, nervous or anything.
Ha ha, me pretty, I have ye just where I want ye. To put it more bluntly, he looks beautiful. Tied on his back, with his hands down by his sides in bondage mitts, his booted feet tied to the bars at the end of the cell, blindfolded, gagged, and — a last-minute refinement that sent a beautiful wave of resigned, erotic helplessness across his face — loops of cord running from each side of the posture collar to secure his head to the bars at the top of the cell. In other words, quite, quite immobilized. And while I’m not usually all that turned on to bondage in and of itself, I’m quivering like a Jell-O mold and running a high fever.
Hmm... what now? Seems to me he’d mentioned something about having rather responsive nipples. I take one gently between a thumb and forefinger and pinch it.
Wow. I’ve given blowjobs that haven’t gotten that emphatic a response. Wonderful, whole-body tremor and a gasp with a little bit of a moan behind it. Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun. I settle in for some experimentation: pinching, flicking, rubbing... they all work, and the effect doesn’t seem to diminish — in fact, it seems to strengthen. I lower my mouth and try out a little tongue and teeth, and the response triples and I can feel my cunt begin to throb. I smile to myself: I can keep this up for a long, long time...
...and in fact, I do. There’s a brief interruption: “Sir?” he asks faintly. (I grin: he’s already pretty short of breath.) “Yes?” I respond. “The blindfold? It’s itching like mad, I think I’m allergic to something in it.” “No problem,” I reassure him. I grab the spandex shirt I’ve already taken off and position it to tie over his head, hood-style, as soon as the blindfold comes off — no interruption in the scene at all to speak of — and I’m back to tormenting his nipples again...
Radical Ecstasy Page 13
