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?
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.
And afterwards, he hugged me, and thanked me, and made me a cup of tea, and helped me put away all my toys.
When I try to think about the “me” that was breathing hard and getting wet as I whipped the cane down again and again, the first thing I think of is a Victorian schoolmaster, a figure out of Dickens: solid in my sense of righteousness, implacably, impossibly cruel, letting a lifetime of repression and anger pour its strength into my clenched jaw and my descending arm. How am I going to sleep tonight, thinking of that?
Yeah, yeah, I know the standard line: it was all consensual, we both wanted it, consenting adults in private, blah blah blah. But the hell with that: it was a vicious, savage beating. And I’m still shocked and a bit scared. And I wish I could do it all again right this very minute.
Because somehow, as the blood rose up under his skin and his ass got redder and harder and darker, it was as if he, his essential self, was what was rising up to the surface, pushing up to greet the cane, reaching for my cruelty like a delicious treat.
All his layers disappearing, melting into the rising tide: the clever writer, the respected academician, the family man, the athlete, each melting into the surging heated blood so that nothing remained between him and me but a thin layer of skin...
... and when the first spot of blood appeared, I felt an exultation, a triumph: the last layer dissolving, perfect connection. His wails transported me like music. I was nothing but the arm that beat him and the ear that heard him and the cunt that oozed and the heart that pounded with exertion and bliss and love and, yes, cruelty.
A kind of perfection, really: a being that gives hurt, and a being that gets hurt, and nobody and nothing else. Where else could I ever find that kind of purity, that clear untainted sweetness?
Tonight I am surfeited with that sweetness, a child on Halloween night, and I will sleep badly, dreaming of schoolmasters. But soon I’ll crave more; I always do. Because, you know, I’ve always had a terrible sweet tooth.
When we’re playing with such dark fantasies, how can we know that we’re ethical people? The ethics of SM are often expressed as “Safe, Sane and Consensual.” What that means is respect for physical safety, respect for emotional safety, and tremendous honoring and respect for each person’s autonomy, for every person’s right to choose their experience.
Our ethics are internal, subjective, based on how we feel, because we want to feel good about who we are and what we do. We want to live in a world where people treat each other well. We want to like who we see when we look in the mirror every morning.
Honoring vulnerability becomes even more important as we explore our differences. Sacred space in conventional temples has often been a problem for leather perverts and other sex radicals. Most places where we go to learn spiritual practices that don’t involve sex pretty much expect that our sexual differences will be left outside. Leatherpeople have too often had to attend their spiritual practice in the closet.
Sacred space is intimate space: our temples, our playrooms, our dungeons, everywhere we gather together to practice. So we must put serious attention into how our playspaces are going to be safe spaces for everyone who comes to play.
We are all perverts, and we all arrive in the dungeon fearful of judgment as we contemplate baring our most intimate kinks and our juicy (and often wounded) selves to all who are present. It is a gross violation to be anything short of totally respectful to anyone who opens themselves up in our rituals.
The wide-ranging sexual diversity of our community can create tensions. Gay men, transmen, transwomen, drag queens, hyper-femmes, straights, gays, bis, genderqueers, people covered with tattoos and piercings and inhuman colored hair in dreads, people who look like the folks who live next door to your mom and dad. We come from a huge diversity of backgrounds: class difference, racial difference, cultural difference. Tops and bottoms and switches, doms and subs, those who follow protocols and those who are extremely loose – we have a lot of difference. Our entire society deals very poorly with difference. Our differences rub together when we gather in a playspace, and we get to discover the fears that we still carry around, and the myths and stereotypes about “those other people” that still infest our thinking and our feeling.
We maintain that we are enriched by all this difference. We have a whole lot to gain from connecting with people who are different from us – who look different, whose experience is different, whose expertise is different, who have different wisdom. Wisdom that might make us wiser, if we listen carefully.
The difficulty is that difference has so often been persecuted. Many of us have serious reasons to fear assault, battery, bashing, rape, even murder. Those who come from cultural or sexual minorities have generations of history of oppression and enslavement, lynching and genocide, entire societies attacking them not for their individual differences, but because they are a member of a group that the culture in power hates or fears. people of color, people of ambiguous gender, women, people from other countries, people from other cultures…
At a panel at a recent Leather Leadership Conference presented by people of color within the leather community, each panelist responded to the question, “How would a person be polite to me?” This can be the first step in understanding another person’s experience – asking, respectfully, how they wish to be addressed, asking what works for them, what they need to feel safe.
Think of how you have felt anywhere where your kind was the minority. (If you are heterosexual and of European ancestry, and have never been anywhere where you constituted a minority, let us recommend the experience to you.) Did you feel awkward? Self-conscious? Was it hard to be understood? How did you fit yourself into somebody else’s milieu? What were the culture gaps, the unfamiliar forms of communication? They say a fish can’t see the water, and we can’t see the air, but maybe, when we try an excursion out of our own familiar atmosphere and struggle to understand communications from elsewhere, we can start to see beyond the paradigms of our own culture that constitute our assumptions. Maybe we’ll learn something new. Maybe we’ll take a few steps outside our box. Maybe we’ll feel freer.
If you are a member of a group that has been oppressed, for whatever reasons, how do you feel among people who look and act like the people who oppressed your ancestors? Are they stereotyping you, assuming they know who you are and where you come from by how you look? Do you feel on edge? Poised to defend yourself? Angry? Fearful of being treated as anything other than the beautiful wise proud sexy individual that you are? What do you need to feel safe here?
As we contemplate sharing intimate space with people who are very different from us, let us also remember that those of us who explore the world’s religions to extract practices that fit into our SM spirituality are borrowing from cultures that we probably don’t understand very well. Reading about a culture is not the same as growing up in it.
We perverts borrow ritual technologies from a lot of cultures and redesign them to our own purposes. Who do we borrow from? Native American sun dance, African polyrhythms and possession, Hindu kavadi, Malaysian tai pu san, Maori tribal tattoos, piercings from Irian Jaya. We don’t think of this as stealing, since nothing is lost from the original; on the other hand, we don’t really have any way to return what we have borrowed. Many of the people who have preserved traditions from old roots – shamanic practices, initiation rituals – are native peoples who are mightily oppressed by the mainstream culture.
We need to be thoughtful about other cultures’ rites. Members of these cultures are not always happy about our borrowing, and they justifiably feel disrespected if we lightly and casually colonize their sacred traditions. Europeans have, after all, colonized just about everybody else (not to mention frequently each other). So back again to learning how to be polite. we need to value the sources of our traditions, and to respect the truth that the people who grow up in a particular tradition and have years of study and practice know more about that tradition then we do.
We have a vision of cultural pluralism. If we only play in groups restricted to people who are exactly like us, then the people we are truly restricting are ourselves. We would like to continue our explorations in communities populated by a huge diversity of people. Where there is conflict, we like to remember that friction makes heat, and heat is energy that can blast us out of our boxes and into a wider understanding of everybody else, and ultimately ourselves.