by John Warren
All The Colors of Kinkiness
People often talk about BDSM as if it were some sort of monolithic activity, like accounting or poker. (My apologies to accountants or poker players. I know better, but the line was too good to pass up.) In fact, the umbrella of consensual transfer of power covers an astonishing variety of acts, attitudes, degrees of commitment and extremes of kinkiness. BDSM or “The Scene” is like a very liberal Chinese restaurant. You can take as many, or as few, items as you want from Column A, B, and so on.
Each couple can decide which activities bring them the most pleasure. Some couples savor a highly intellectual BDSM that can be so subtle that even someone observing their scenes would be unaware that anything kinky is going on. Others enjoy a level of stimulation sufficient to horrify many observers. Still others appreciate elaborate psychodrama that may or may not include stimulation. The only people who can determine what is right for you and your partner are the two of you. There is no right or wrong way to do BDSM. It is also important to recognize that “intense” is not the same as “good.” The two spectrums are unrelated. Two people sitting together and whispering can be having just as satisfying a scene as two others amid slashing whips and full-throated screams. It is what that particular couple wants and needs that determines the appropriateness of a scene.
Individual styles can also vary widely. Some dominants like to project a harsh, stern demeanor and keep the caring sensitivity carefully hidden. Others cherish the role of loving guide and protector. A scene can be as serious as a religious ritual, or it can be a laughing, giggling frolic.
Submissives, too, project a broad range of images to the world. Some, particularly men, like to maintain a passive, stoic image that can be frustrating to a dominant or a top looking for guidance. One female dominant complained in frustration, “How in the hell can I have any fun if I can’t tell if he is?” Of course, others value and encourage that sort of a show of unruffled endurance.
Some submissives say they can only really let go when they have intentionally adopted a role. In effect, they create an internal psychodrama in which they are a captured secret agent, molested peasant maid or blackmailed debutante.
Ann, an Atlanta submissive, makes a point of distinguishing her “uppity submissive” from what people in the scene call a SAM (Smart Assed Masochist). While the SAM tries to “top from the bottom,” that is, to control all aspects of the scene, Ann’s uppity submissive is more likely to signal her eagerness for stimulation by pinching the dominant’s bottom in passing or looking up with innocent eyes and asking, “Is that as hard as you can hit?”
Of course, bottoms don’t have to make any such distinction. The essence of a top/bottom scene is giving and receiving “pain” and no pretense of unwillingness or reluctance is necessary.
There have been numerous attempts to examine the various approaches to BDSM. One of the most successful of these was detailed by Diana Vera, writing in The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. Based on her experience and observations she described nine levels of submission. These range from a kinky sensualism in which everything revolves around the submissive’s needs, through play submission where the submissive gives up control but the stimulation is erotic and pleasing to both. All the way at the other end of the spectrum is consensual slavery where the slave exists solely for the dominant’s pleasure. This short piece is intriguing reading for anyone who is interested in thinking about submission as well as actively submitting. However, I caution that while it may look like a hierarchy, it is simply a description of various play styles. One may try several, but one should not think that there is any progression involved. A better way of looking at it would be as little boxes arranged on a tabletop. One can fit in one box or another, but none of the boxes are better than any other.
Another way of looking at conceptualizing the scene comes from my own dear Libby. Instead of considering the severity of the activities or the portion of the day they take up, her approach examines the emotional intensity of the submission and the degree of trust put forward by the submissive. In her section, “A Submissive Looks At Submission,” later in this book, she goes into detail about her three levels of submission: fantasy, clarity and transparency.
Inspired by Libby’s format, another submissive woman offered her three categories. Unlike Libby’s, these are not in a hierarchical structure but, instead, are based on the needs of the submissive. The first is “stimulus driven.” Here, the submissive is taking part because he or she is seeking out a specific stimulus, like the pain of whipping or the confinement of bondage.
The second category is “relationship driven.” In this, the main desire is for a relationship, often with a particular person. Individuals in this kind of relationship take glory in the multichannel communication between the submissive and the dominant and enjoy the richness of the information flow.
The final category is “fantasy driven” where the submissive seeks to make a fantasy or fantasies real. Sometimes, this is accomplished by living through the fantasy; however, others find satisfaction in finding an individual who shares his or her fantasy and no specific action needs to take place.
However you choose to play, welcome to a land of fantasy in the midst of reality. Here, perhaps more than in any other aspect of your life, you are free to choose your own route to ecstasy.
Are You a Loving Dominant?
Well, are you? It may seem like an easy question to answer, but it can be more difficult than you realize. Sadly, in our society, domination, sadism, cruelty and brutality have become confused and intertwined.
Crude, unrealistic fiction has made the situation worse. Publishers have found that to reach the broadest possible audience, they must include themes that are repugnant to many. Because consensual, loving BDSM in fiction is so rare, those who are interested in these themes must pick through thousands of pages, like looking for jewels in a dungheap, to find sections they find provocative, while other readers wallow in the nonconsensual brutality.
The following is a series of questions that you need only to answer in your own soul. Be honest with yourself and look deeply into those answers to see if this scene is really for you.
Do you get as much pleasure or more from erotically exciting your partner as from your own enjoyment of the sexual act?
If this is true, you are likely to be a good dominant. The essence of this kind of play is to take another’s power and then use it for mutual pleasure. If you already seek to maximize your partner’s gratification, you have a mindset that will adapt well to BDSM.
Do you want an easy relationship with you as the unquestioned boss?
If yes, then BDSM is unlikely to be for you. A BDSM relationship is more, not less, complex than one that is purely vanilla. This is because BDSM relationships generally have all the components of a vanilla relationship, plus those that are unique to BDSM.
It is common to hear dominants talk about how hard they have to work. This is because in exchange for the power that is given us, we must find ways of using that power for the benefit and pleasure of both participants. At the same time, because of the trust given us, we must be very sure that nothing we do is harmful to anyone in the relationship. This kind of careful balancing act certainly isn’t attractive to someone looking for an easy ride.
Have you been in an abusive relationship and would like to “turn the tables” on someone like the person who abused you?
This is another rough start. A significant number of people in BDSM have been in abusive relationships, and some of them consciously use BDSM psychodramas to help them work through the negative feelings that resulted from these experiences.
However, revenge is a poor motivation for such an intimate relationship, and it is likely to result in further damage to your self-esteem.
Why do you want to control another person?
This is a sticky one. Film star Vanessa del Rio once told me one of her earliest fantasies was of having a group of tiny people in the palm of her hand. She
loved to imagine that she had complete control of them, but, to me, the key was that she imagined that she would use this power to make them happy.
The desire to help, to enhance or to make others happy is common among dominants. This may be why so many dominants are in the teaching and helping professions: medicine, social work, religion. Other-centered people make good dominants. Self-centered people often find that the strain of the responsibilities inherent in a BDSM relationship is overwhelming.
In a consensual relationship, control applied purely to self-gratification is a self-limiting proposition. Submissives who do not get what they are looking for are unlikely to remain in a relationship for very long.
Do you have fantasies involving nonconsensual activities or harm to another?
This isn’t as serious as you may believe. The trick is being able to keep the fantasies inside your head and separate from the scene you are playing with another person. Most of us have large, hairy monsters in the dark corners of our mind. What separates the civilized from the uncivilized is how tight a leash we keep on them.
Having fantasies is all right; acting on them isn’t. Aside from being totally against the ethical principles of the scene, such “play” can get you locked up with other people who believe in nonconsensual play, and they may be bigger than you are.
Dig All Those Crazy People
Why? Why do people do this? Why do people love this? Some of us are fascinated with the genesis of these feelings and enjoy searching for the root cause of our desires. Others, myself included, hold with Alexander Pope that, “Like following life though creatures you dissect, you lose it in the moment you detect it.”
Sometimes, I suspect that too close an examination can actually destroy the feelings being studied, and I recognize that an understanding of causes is not necessary for enjoyment. I have only the vaguest idea of why chocolate ice cream tastes good, but that ignorance decreases neither my enjoyment nor my consumption.
I’ll admit my sexual tastes are more unusual than love for chocolate ice cream. Still, no one has done deep analyses of why some people like chocolate sauce on their pizza. People who love it pack the Hershey’s syrup on trips to Pizza Hut, and the rest of us avert our eyes and shudder a bit or maybe borrow a dollop and see how it tastes on the pepperoni. They are simply classified as weird or, if they are rich enough, eccentric.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, social science theorists, theologians and feminists haven’t lined up to find answers for this chocolate “perversion,” for people carrying handkerchiefs they never use in their coat pockets or for voting Republican. These are simply “trite eccentricities” unworthy of study.
To make the question even more complex, the language of experience is not the same as the language of classification. Race car drivers don’t study physics, although they may pick up a good bit of it in passing. They drive. They experience. They don’t think about the underlying mechanics but about the feel of the car and the track.
People have studied poems since before Aristotle wrote Poetics. Their reactions still come down to “This poem speaks to me.”
However, some enjoy sharpening their Aristotelian knives and having at “the search for why.” If you tend toward this approach, I dedicate this search for causes to you.
Some give a simple answer to “Why?” “It is fun, enjoyable.” “We like to do it.” Unfortunately, this kind of simplicity isn’t looked upon kindly by the members of the Ivory-Tower Brigade, who glory in philosophical head- knocking and counting dancing-angels.
Unfortunately, all too many of these deep thinkers have largely fixated on sadistic monsters and masochistic victims. Like Shakespeare’s Horatio, they have failed to realize that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Neither loving domination or sensual submission is part of the paradigms they develop. To admit that these exist might knock their carefully constructed houses of cards askew. To make matters worse, the competing theories are all different, and most of them, are mutually exclusive.
I was strongly tempted to exclude much of the psychological theory on the grounds that it is inconsequential to the people most actively involved. Unfortunately, I have been repeatedly and forcefully reminded that anyone attempting to discuss BDSM with a learned audience or with doctors is going get presented with these spurious explanations.
I suppose that it is better you encounter them here, amid interpretation and exegesis, than to have them flung into your face with an implication that they are, somehow, revealed truth. Just take a firm grip on your temper and read on.
Theories of sadism and masochism
In the labeling craze of the 19th century, when scientists still clung to the mystical concept that to label something was to control it, D.R. von Krafft-Ebing came up the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. This learned tome was a sort of Sears and Roebuck catalog of perversion, listing just about everything that two or more people could do together to get their individual or collective rocks off. Krafft-Ebing must have had a good laugh on thrill-seekers perusing his volume; he put the boring stuff in English and the good parts in Latin.
As most people in the scene know, the term “sadism” came from the writings of the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade and masochism from those of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Both de Sade’s writings (including Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, Juliet, Twenty Days at Sodom) and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs are still hot-selling items today. A quick glance at any of de Sade’s work will show you why many dominants are infuriated when they are accused of being sadists. Nonconsensuality was the order of the day for the Marquis.
Krafft-Ebing got it almost right with submission when he defined masochism as:
“A peculiar perversion of the psychical sexual life in which the person affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master…”
Aside from the near miss of failing to recognize that submission is independent of hetero- or homo-erotic orientation and throwing in the term perversion, he came fairly close to how many submissives would describe themselves. However, after that good start, he ruined it by adding three words, “humiliated and abused,” at the end. With just three words, he narrowed the definition to include only the small percentage of submissives who do enjoy humiliation, and convicted the master, a person who is doing what the submissive wants done, of being abusive.
Krafft-Ebing was even less kind to dominants and tops, who he implicitly lumps with sadists.
“Sadism is the experience of sexually pleasurable sensations (including orgasm) produced by acts of cruelty, bodily punishment inflicted by one’s own person or when witnessed in others, be they animals or human beings. It may consist of an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound or even destroy the others in order thereby to create sexual pleasure in one’s self.”
Unfortunately, aside from some amusing — or horrifying — examples (depending on your point of view), Krafft-Ebing is almost useless to anyone looking for insights. Sadism is simply seen as “a pathological intensification of the male sexual character,” and females are seen as anxious, irritable and weak. (I wonder how Mistress Mir, Goddess Sia or any of the other myriad dominant women feel about that?)
Freud, the father of modern psychology, took the ball and ran with it. Not one to do things by halves, he came up with three separate and sometimes contradictory theories. In “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” he claimed that sadism is a component part of the sexual instinct, an “instinct for mastery” that is inherently masculine, and masochism is “nothing but inverted sadism.” Freud declared that sadism and masochism are interchangeable. Masochism is only sadism that has turned inward upon the self.
Sadists behave as they do, according to this theory, because, during childhood, they were trapped in the anal stage of development
, attempting to control the parent figure by releasing and withholding feces. (Does the term “crock of shit” come to mind?)
In his later essay, “A Child Being Beaten,” Freud shifted the birth of sadomasochism to the child’s first oedipal conflict and linked it with parental punishment and punishment fantasies. His argument was that the child links forbidden, sexual feelings with the fear of punishment. In effect, pain is the payment for pleasure.
With better footwork than a running back, Freud next feinted toward his first theory but then went wide and, in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” hypothesized that masochism, not sadism, is the primary component and linked it with the death instinct. For one thing, masochism, in his eyes, was necessary so that women could endure childbirth.
Eric Fromm, a leading light of the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who desperately tried to explain the rise of Nazism, moved the discussion of sadism and masochism from the individual, where Freud had staked his claim, to society, or at least to the individual’s reaction to society. In The Fear of Freedom, Fromm postulated that freedom itself was frightening in that it caused intolerable loneliness and that individuals adopt various strategies to escape from it. He maintained that sadomasochists use control as such an escape hatch.
For example, masochists were described as consciously complaining about being weak, inferior and powerless, while at the same time seeking circumstances where these feelings were intensified.
