Whee — a whole day with Daddy! This was an unprecedentedly rare opportunity, since he had a full-time job and I had a primary relationship; usually we only got to squeeze in an hour or two in an evening. So we’d set up a lengthy and elaborate role-play with plenty of our favorite nasty sexy punishment games. I didn’t know exactly what he had in mind, but he’d asked me to bring along “something to be punished for.” Knowing the kinds of things he liked, I’d borrowed a handful of extremely smutty magazines from my roommate, and showed up as my nine-year-old alterego “Jessie,” in pigtails, an indecently short schoolgirl outfit, and a hangdog expression.
All had gone quite satisfactorily so far: Jessie had been a very naughty girl indeed. Daddy and I had been doing some magnificent improv based on the magazines, and it had evolved that Jessie had not only showed up at school with the smut, but she’d been showing it to her little friends, and she’d been selling peeks for 25 cents a look, and she’d stolen the magazines from the corner store, and her purse was full of against-the-rules candy she’d swiped while she was in there, and she’d told the principal that she’d taken the magazines out of Daddy’s nightstand! — all this, of course, extracted from her after many threats and many more spankings. What could possibly be a nicer way to while away a pleasant Tuesday?
But then Daddy decided that I had to apologize for my terrible behavior. He sat me down at the dining table with a lined pad and a ball-point pen to write a formal letter to the principal, Mr. Fisher, detailing my many transgressions and offering my apologies.
I was instantly catapulted nearly forty years back in time. At eight years old, I was promoted to do reading and writing with kids a grade ahead of me. The reading, and the content part of the writing, were no problem — I could easily have kept up with children a lot older than that. But I was a poorly coordinated child even for my age, and kids a grade ahead of mine were learning the flowing Palmer cursive that was being taught to schoolchildren in the early ‘60s — hand motions far beyond my physical abilities. I spent hours that year struggling, frustrated and tearful, over smudged pieces of lined yellow paper, trying to get my letters to look like the perfect ones on the strips that hung over the blackboard in every classroom, and failing every time... not understanding why I was the only one having to do this special, impossible work, and bringing home report cards with A in every square except for the mocking Cs in Handwriting.
Daddy would never have known the difference had I decided to print my letter to Mr. Fisher, but it never occurred to me to do that: I was nine years old, and I wrote in cursive. Laboriously, I wrote in the best Palmer cursive I could manage: “Dear Mr. Fisher: I am sorry for being a bad girl. Love, Jessie Hardy.” I tore off the paper, and handed it to him hopefully.
He looked at it and tore it up. “You have to write everything you did wrong and apologize for each thing separately,” he said. “And you don’t sign ‘Love’ to a letter to the principal, you sign ‘Sincerely yours’.”
Mutely, I began again: “Dear Mr. Fisher...”
He found fault with that letter, too, and made me write it over. And the next one, and the next one — I’d left out one of my naughtinesses, or I’d spelled a word wrong (OK, so I did that one on purpose), or it was too short, or too messy. I sank deeper and deeper into my old space of shame, anger and frustration, closer and closer to tears.
Finally, abruptly, he accepted my latest letter — to my surprise, since I didn’t think it was as good as its predecessor — and we moved on to more spankings and sex and fun. (He told me later that he’d seen me getting more upset than he felt that he wanted to handle, and so had decided to move on.)
So my special day with Daddy had turned out to have a special gift in it — a visit to my own past, and a reawakening of a buried memory, a chance to re-experience feelings of injustice and frustration — and to see where, perhaps, similar feelings today might have their origins. Not bad for a day of playing hooky and a couple of pieces of borrowed smut.
We have spoken so far mostly of journeys into altered states in which the vehicle that carts us down the road to somewhere else is the body: sensations in the body, stresses to the body, the breath, the skin, physical connection to another, intense SM stimulations, sex, or any other way the body can lead us into ecstasy.
But within the enormous repertoire of BDSM, there are also many journeys in which the vehicle is the mind... where what is sexy, what raises the life force, what wakes up kundalini, is mind games.
We have a theory, perhaps better described as a metaphor, for how SM works in the psyche. This theory explains, for us, a lot of our drive to travel in dark dirty places, and why playing these games often results in our feeling more whole, more ourselves and perhaps healed in some way.
Carl Jung’s “map” of the mind (please remember that the map is not the territory – this is a metaphor!) can look something like the ocean. If you think of it like this, the air is our everyday consciousness: things like grocery lists, things we do for work and so on. The water is the unconscious mind, which we usually perceive in nonverbal or nonintellectual forms like feelings and dreams — the oceanic depths of the psyche, where are found sunken pirate ships, fabulous stories, archetypal creatures like mermaids and dragons. At the very bottom of this metaphorical ocean Jung places the Collective Unconscious, which he saw as the divine energy that animates and connects us all, the gate to spiritual awareness.
Jung talks about a gray area between conscious and unconscious which he calls the preconscious mind. It’s sort of like tide pools: sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can’t, sometimes it’s under the water, sometimes it’s in the air. Here we find dreams and fantasies, fleeting desires, experiences we only occasionally remember. Like the creatures we see in tidepools, certain parts of ourselves thrive better in this alternating environment than anywhere else.
Now imagine a big iceberg floating on this ocean, a small part visible above the surface, much more of it hidden beneath the water. Jung called it the Shadow, and thought of it as the repository of everything we have forbidden ourselves to be aware of: painful feelings, shame, trauma, family secrets, the things Aunt Edith did when she had too much to drink, cultural taboos, incest and sin, doubts we have about what we are told we are supposed to believe. We have all been brainwashing icky stuff from our awareness since birth. A lot of our deposits into this scary account were made when we were small children and afraid of things we no longer fear. Everything in the Shadow carries a huge emotional charge: Forbidden!
We suspect that many of the dark fantasies we love to explore in SM are paths to the Shadow – paths to parts of ourselves that we wish to bring back into consciousness, split-off parts that we want to welcome back so that we can be whole. Seen in this way, the theater of SM is a sort of psychodrama, tracing a scary painful path to some dark cave in our iceberg, but with someone else to share in the journey and act as mirror to validate our experience. What if we can walk that path and write a script that gives the story a new ending – a denouement that resolves conflicts, leaves us feeling more sane and more powerful? What if our companion on this journey, our top or our bottom, then sees us as lovable or desirable? What if when we shoot that story full of eroticism we are injecting it with the healing power of the life force? What if bringing our dark fears into the light of awareness can heal us, make us more whole?
This is what we and the players we know have done, time after time, in the mind journeys of deep BDSM play. For many of us, ecstasy and traveling in the Shadow are one and the same thing: from the messy bottom of our fears, from the roots in the dirt, up through us and out to the cosmos. Many, many people find healing in the Shadow.
We believe that shadowplay often entails a different sort of journey than the embodied practices we’ve described so far in this book – a sort of emotional or spiritual deconstruction, a breaking down of the component parts so that they can be reassembled into a structure that feels stronger and better afterwards. Janet writes here about her discovery of such a possibility:
I bottomed for the first time this weekend to someone new, someone who I think will become very important in my life. And I already know that he’s used to playing very differently than me — not with the simple straightforward give-me-pain-and-let-me-fly scenes that I’ve always excelled at, but with twisty little games of give-and-take, mindfuck and control, confusion and misdirection: a whole new roadmap for me, as different from my skydiving ecstasy as the jungle is from the Antarctic.
Partway through the scene, I felt myself teetering on an unknown edge, and wasn’t sure I liked it. I couldn’t find the words then, but what I figured out later was this: there’s a kind of SM that’s about getting to win, and a kind of SM that’s about getting to lose. And I’m used to playing the kind that’s about getting to win. About both people getting to win.
I once watched a workshop/demonstration on interrogation play come close to a fistfight, when the demo bottom realized that being interrogated meant that you didn’t get to win. You could see it cross his face — this was going to hurt more that he could take, and all these people were watching, and there was an awful moment when it was clear that he was about to take a swing at the instructor (who was about half his size and twice his age), and then he safeworded. I felt awful for the instructor, and I knew just how the bottom felt. Winning feels awfully good, and if you’re not turned on to it, losing feels lousy.
Last year, when I was recovering from a painful breakup, I started wanting scenes where I didn’t win. In fact, even when people tried to give me scenes where I won, it didn’t work — I broke down anyway. I didn’t have it in me to be big: I needed to be small, to fall apart into all my little component parts so that they could reassemble in new ways. I sought out some of the strongest, meanest sadists I knew, people who were willing to push me further that I’d ever gone before — frankly, further than I’d have been willing to push me under the same circumstances, right up to the edges of consent, into full cathartic shrieking begging meltdown. It was then that I began to learn something of the reward of smallness, of being reduced to my irreducible minimum, of finding out what I was made of.
It takes trust to go this far. When I bottom like this, I trust that my top will respect the bare quivering pink self that’s all that’s left when I let myself lose: a hint of the wrong kind of mockery, the slightest indication the next day that anyone’s opinion of me has been lowered, and I may never, ever be able to go there again. And I could never top anyone this way whom I didn’t trust absolutely — it takes the strongest person in the world to let themselves be this weak, and if I can’t trust their strength I certainly don’t feel safe playing with their weekness.
So now, when I look back on my experience of this weekend, I think I may have discovered a new limit for myself. Once upon a time, I might have said, “No losing.” Now, I think my limit is, “No losing on the first date.” The second date?... well, that’s an essay for another night, I guess.
Before we get too deeply into the subject of roles, we want to clarify one issue. We’ve talked to a lot of people who are turned off to the idea of role-playing, imagining something very theatrical like Robin Hood and Maid Marian, because they think it would feel artificial and awkward to them. Our belief is that everything we do in life is to some degree role-playing, and most especially that everything we do during sex or BDSM has to do with playing roles. We suspect that the way you behave with a lover or play-partner isn’t the same as the way you behave with your boss or your mother-in-law. So in this section, when we discuss roles and games, we’re not necessarily talking about very theatrical scripts with props and costumes, but simply about the intensified roles that we adopt in order to find our turn-on and our ecstasy.
Roles we play in mind games tend toward archteypal extremes: we polarize the power between dominant and submissive to turn up the voltage.
In Janet’s scene at the beginning of this chapter, the roles were polarized by age, by making one player the child and the other the adult in power. In other scenes, the top might have the flavor of the teacher, the guru, the empress, the slave trainer, etc. The heat of the scene often comes from the extreme polarization of roles, with the dominant taking on enormous power and with it enormous responsibility, and the submissive giving over that power for the delight of feeling free in a myriad different ways.
BDSM primarily focused on the mind journey is often called DS, or dominance and submission, to distinguish it from sadomasochism, which gets defined as playing with intense stimulations like pain and sex. Actually, in our experience, much of DS involves physical connection, and much of SM involves mental domination, so there’s probably more gray area than pure anything. Your authors aren’t known for valuing purity of any sort.
The roles we play in SM, and the power exchanges we practice, offer us infinite ways to connect, and present many confusions of which we need to stay aware. Especially the difficult truth that who we are in our fantasies is part of us – an important part, but not the only part.
Many submissives’ fantasies are of the big bad wolf, the Klingon, the ice queen, the arrogant unyielding bitch or son-of-a-. They dream of complete subjugation by an ever-dominant and ever-certain Someone. And the same submissive may also want a romantic hero or heroine who will gaze into their innermost soul and wholeheartedly accept whatever is to be found there. They want to be cherished, respected, recognized for the valuable beings they are.
Therein lies the paradox of dominance. Love and domination seem, at least on the surface, to be mutually exclusive. How can we love unconditionally while demanding subjugation of will? If we love someone just the way they are, how can we require them to be another way? If we want them to be happy, how can we make them do things that they don’t want to? Yet if we don’t provide adequate subjugation, if we don’t enforce our will on theirs, they feel uncared for, abandoned. It’s enough to make a boy or girl go vanilla.
The problem arises, we think, when people get “stuck” — stuck in the source material for their fantasies of control, ownership, force. We all want our play to seem “real” — some go so far as to disdain the word “play, “ insisting that what they do is real ownership, real control. And the harder we push to make it real, the more we may lose track of an essential truism of kink:
Everyone involved in a scene is in service to that scene.
This truism applies whether the “scene” is a friendly smack on the tush or a lifelong 24/7 relationship. Everyone involved needs to have a roughly similar picture of what the scene is or will be: the more similar the picture, the greater likelihood of a successful outcome. Some aspects of that picture may be externals, things like what outfits we wear or who gets hit on what body part, but that’s usually not the whole picture. What do we want to feel? Are we stern but caring, lovingly parental, terrifyingly sadistic, serenely shamanistic? Are we terrified or adoring, child or warrior, pathetic or ecstatic? A rebellious captive, an adoring pet, a hardworking servant, a precious jewel? What kinds of words or sensations or behaviors or environments make each of us feel that way?
When we know the answers to these questions, or at least have discussed them and begun to recognize where our fantasies meet and where they might stray, we know what the scene is. And from here on out, whether we’re King or Queen of the Universe or the lowliest of the low, we are now in service to the scene we’ve mutually chosen and entered into. We are playing the same game.
The amazing thing is, once we recognize and truly accept that control is illusory and that we’re in service to something greater than ourselves, we often find that issues of control and ego, which may once have seemed important, have melted away. We neither give nor take away power. Rather, as we raise eros, everybody’s power gets amplified, and together we become enormously powerful. We enter that magical realm of consciousness that athletes call “the flow” and we call “scene space,” where we and our partners and the environment and the activity all become one, working together to create a mutual reality in which time and space float away. Each moment follows inevitably upon the one before, and the communion and the sensations and the emotions all feel so perfectly right that ego and control seem as distant and irrelevant as the temperature in Bangkok. We are in a reality no less real than our morning commute.
Let’s look at a variety of ways people journey in the life force by the scripts they choose to play. For our purposes, roles define scripts, and the scripts become the rituals through which we transit into the divine state of consciousness.
If you’re wondering where these scripts come from, you need look no further than the sweet or not-so-sweet stories you soothe yourself to sleep with every night. Fantasies are a wonderful window into the Shadow, reflections in the tide pools of consciousness of beasts from the deeps. They are a great way to see your archetypes, your story, what’s important to you. Look in your daydreams at what you want to do, how you see yourself in scene. Then look at who you have imagined as your ideal Other: who are they, what do they do? Think about what your fantasy says about how you want to be received, what about you you imagine your partner responding to and how the partner responds.
Dossie, the abuse survivor, has a lot of fantasies that involve a parent figure, simultaneously vicious and nurturing, who sees her pain and gets turned on by it, and thus is moved to love her and treat her (eventually) with sweetness and lust. Perhaps this is curative to the horrible feelings of the battered child – the beliefs that her parent can’t see her pain, is refusing to help her with her pain, hates her when she is in pain (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”); and that when she is in pain, or in want of nurturance or support or love, she is ugly and unlovable. Only we clever schemers of sadomasochism can script a scene to go from pain and victimization to lust and love and orgasm and cuddling.
Janet’s root fantasy is more likely to make her the parent figure, with her sense of power and righteousness channeled into loving punishments that transform her bottoms into the beautiful people they indeed can be after she chisels a little on them.
You can see why your authors love to play together. And had we met when we were first starting out in the scene, we might have wanted to explore one fantasy over and over again together, seeking out all its permutations. But we’ve been at this a long time, and we’ve both expanded our repertoires quite a bit. Today, these are not the only roles we play – we explore lots of scripts, and often Dossie is the top and Janet is the bottom.
We’ve learned that when we set out down the path of a fantasy, we must allow the fantasy to take us where it will – overscripting doesn’t work in this realm. And we’ve also learned not to get hung up on whether or not our partners would have chosen that fantasy themselves, or whether they’re helping us with a fantasy of our own choosing; energy and turn-on get raised no matter where the fantasy had its origin. The important part of a journey isn’t where it starts, but where it takes you.
We call our original fantasies our “root” or “core” fantasies — they are the dreams we started into SM with, and they’re still the ones we return to when we want to soothe ourselves or turn ourselves on. And they’re still a source of self-knowledge and healing for both of us. Enriched by many people over the last few decades, your authors now have lots of dreams and scripts and games, a constantly expanding repertoire for traveling in Shadowland. Because, you see, when you decide to play with somebody, and it turns out that their fantasy is different from yours, then you are blessed with the opportunity to explore a whole new and fertile territory in which you may discover new delights and new visions of who you can be.
In our time in the scene, we’ve met thousands of people, and their root fantasies have been inexpressibly multiple and beautiful, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination and lust. Here are just a few of them.
For some players, the essence of eros in DS is the issuing and obeying of orders, commands, the giving and receiving of service. The rush of being in control or out of it, the creative delight in making the script evolve while the submissive, following orders without knowing the plan, watches the sequence unfold like stunningly potent theater. Dominant as director: it helps to remember that theater as we know it today actually evolved from religious ritual; and that ritual was invented as a way of speaking with the gods.
Submission and dominance takes thousands of forms – perhaps as many different forms as there are submissives and dominants. We tried breaking this section up into subsections labeled “owners and slaves,” “masters/mistresses and servants,” “pleasure slaves,” and so on, but found that such divisions didn’t really work all that well – each individual identifies with some terms and not with others, and is often turned off or even angered by terms that aren’t a good fit for their individual identity and experience. So instead, we’ll talk about what we see as some of the ecstatic rewards of the different kinds of experiences, and let the labels take care of themselves.
One friend of ours tells us that service is her spiritual practice. In putting another’s needs and wants always ahead of her own, she can escape from ego into a state of selflessness, with her dominant providing any boundaries she needs. For her, DS service as a spiritual path is very similar to bhakti yoga, the Hindu devotional practice, or altar-tending, or any practice based on caring for things or people. The slave, who has devoted himself or herself entirely to the needs of an owner, travels even further into selflessness, buoyed up by the support of the owner, and by the script of responding to the owner’s desires.
Both slave and servant are often required to do a lot of functioning on their own initiative. The altered state is maintained by the need to stay closely attuned to the owner’s desires, often striving to anticipate needs and wants, to proudly show up with the right cup of tea at just the right moment without being asked. This practice promotes selflessness, emotional (maybe even psychic) attunement and competence. One slave told us he lives for the appreciation he gets when he does something well.
Pleasure slaves are focused on being superb sex objects or sexual performers, to delight the recipient of their attentions, and are valued enormously for their skill and art. In the land of BDSM, sexuality is seen as an arena for art and creativity and skill and mastery of technique. We understand that some people have wonderful talents at various aspects of sex and SM, and we admire the work of the great artists in our field.
And what does the dominant get out of all this? A good master or mistress travels with the sub, and treads a path of enormous responsibility which sharply focuses attention, similar to contemplative meditative practice. The dominant is responsible for balance, which requires that he or she be centered. Janet reports that at moments of peak connection as a dominant, she feels herself to be moving at superhuman slowness – although to an outside observer, of course, she is moving at normal speed. She feels as though she is channeling light, energy and knowledge from an outside source, sometimes feeling as though she is glowing with light or standing at the center of a pool of light. We have read of athletes reporting similar sensations when they are performing at peak competence during their sport, and who is to say that they aren’t channeling the same energies that we are?
Some of us like to leave our humanness behind entirely, becoming furniture, or objects, or animals, shutting down our busy brains as completely as possible for the duration of the scene. One friend of ours coped with a disabling injury that had him bedridden for several years by eroticizing the idea of becoming a human “toy,” completely immobile except as his dominant desired; he collected medical devices that made him even more helpless than his injuries dictated, and turned his damage into a source of erotic opportunity.
Human pets leave the ranks of humanity entirely to frolic in the realms of dogs and cats and ponies. Dossie recalls a puppy scene she once played with a gay male friend:
The first thing I wanted to know is, was I a good dog or a bad dog? Was this a brat scene? My master told me I was a good puppy, albeit a little untrained. I inquired about housebreaking, and he reassured me that this wasn’t going to be a housebreaking scene. He put me on a leash and had me crawl around behind him, teaching me to heel and sit and stay and the like, all very gently, in a loving voice, with lots of petting and stroking and “Good puppy!” encouragement. It was like falling under a spell. With nothing to do but follow simple directions, my chattering monkey mind soon shut up, and I felt empty and at peace. Free of all that human sound and fury and drama, free of worrying about the future or fixating on the past — puppies don’t have much in the way of memories, do they? Although we continued on to do a flogging and caning scene, the part that sticks out in my mind was the simplicity of being a puppy. Pure and simple.
There is a special joy in being able to fight back like you mean it, genuinely exerting all your physical and intellectual will, knowing that when you lose, it will be to someone who will take care to ensure that you’re given exactly what you came there to get – just the kind of pain or sex or humiliation you want and need – so that the pain of losing is magically transformed into an extraordinary kind of winning.
Some people like to enter into these scenes with a closely matched partner, fighting for supremacy and not knowing until the outcome who will be the top. Others decide going in who will lose, and arrange for multiple tops or a bit of creative bondage as a handicap, to ensure that the bottom can fight back with everything they’ve got and still get taken down as hard as they want. We have one friend whose fantasy is to be kidnapped, tortured and raped, and who has a trusted acquaintance who assembles groups of kidnappers, unknown to the “victim,” who will grab her at an opportune moment, spend several hours performing chillingly realistic scenes of torture and gang rape (all within the limits she has negotiated with the acquaintance who is stage-managing the production), and release her when she is bruised, exhausted and fully satiated.
The payoff for the top in these scenes can vary. The power and control can make you feel enormous. A lot of resistance play is based on the rush of the roller-coaster ride of playing with the bottom’s most vulnerable places, and riding the razor’s edge of keeping the bottom from falling out of the scene entirely while you seduce them further and further out of ordinary reality.
A subset of resistance play is the interrogation scene. Here the roles are prisoner and interrogator, and there are a bunch of ways to write the script. Do we imagine that the prisoner actually has the information being sought? Or is this an ordeal where the prisoner is pretending to withhold information? Is the prisoner in the completely hopeless position of being tortured to discover information that she doesn’t even have? Here the top is conducting the bottom on a very tricky journey, playing with power and double binds to unhinge the mind and generate a state of willlessness – which can be a profoundly peaceful condition for the bottom.
Dossie remembers:
We did one scene recently where I was a streetwalker and Janet was my abusive pimp. I put on my sluttiest clothes, including a long leather coat I had found at a thrift store, and walked into my bedroom. “Where did you get that coat?” “At the thrift store, it only cost forty-three dollars, honey.” “You’re lying, bitch. You could never get a coat like that for forty-three dollars. You’re holding out on me.”
I knew I was supposed to be afraid, but she was so brilliant, all I could do was admire the gambit. And then we hung in with it a little longer, and we did this very sexy punishment scene, and Janet had orgasms with her metaphysical cock, and I felt all helpless, and all I could do was take it in and ride it. And it all worked very well.
Or perhaps the scene is designed to be an ordeal, in which the prisoner confronts various difficulties and triumphs over them; or maybe the interrogator triumphs and rewards the prisoner with love and positive regard for speaking the truth. Some interrogation scenes go deeply into mindfuck: we have seen interrogators ask, “What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in high school?”
None of us likes to answer that question. And yet, speaking about our adolescent humiliations in the context of an erotic connection, to a listener who (maybe) won’t put us down for being human, can have remarkably redemptive qualities.
Daddies and mommies and babies and kids and brats – what a field day for the player! And what a huge choice of highly charged scripts, forbidden connections, punishments and rewards, love and nurturance, abandonment and despair – the entire range of human experience to choose from. Age play gives bottoms the opportunity to bring our inner children into relationship with another person, to enact the dramas that the kids think are important and to see what comes out of that.
Going into our child roles can be scary, and we often feel ridiculous, especially at the beginning of a scene. We don’t suggest deep inner child play with strangers. We want someone we trust at the other end of the equation, someone who will welcome us back into our adult selves when the play is over, somebody reliable to whom to expose our old wounds.
For tops, the opportunity to be both Bad Daddy and Good Daddy, the powerful Good Mother and the Betrayer, can be a healing journey – an opportunity to journey in the psychological Shadow and reclaim forbidden parts of ourselves, to inject our old traumas with eros and write a new ending to all our old scripts. Janet’s scene at the opening of this chapter is a good example of how age play can be a journey into the light and a healing revelation.
There are aspects of humiliation in a lot of SM play, but most often the scripts are negotiated to limit the extent of humiliation. Because in all our ambition to break ourselves and each other into our component mental and spiritual parts for fun and healing, we are not really out to degrade each other. Nevertheless, some genius players find ecstasy and enormous eros in gross humiliation. To play with humiliation is tremendously powerful – we are playing directly with shame, a profound human emotion that we all carry from our childhoods. We all have memories that make us cringe.
Humiliation players get right in there and revel in it. One woman we know tells us that humiliation makes her happy, That’s the experience she starts from – it feels really good. Her play often looks like triumph over degradation, just because it makes her so happy. She reports that she goes into serenity when she is being degraded, and describes her state of consciousness as spiritually awake.
Years ago, Dossie used to be a professional blackjack player, counting cards in the casinos in Vegas. She was amazed to watch all the people who actually enjoyed gambling – what she was doing was business. And she realized how much of our lives we spend working with money, struggling with money, budgeting money, saving money, worrying about money, balancing the checkbook – what a relief to go to a casino and actually play with money.
Similarly, we think the humiliation players are onto something amazing. If we only had the courage, we could all play with our shame, and for that bit of time it wouldn’t be serious at all. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
It may interest you to know that the words human, humble and humiliation come from the same root, humus, the word for earth or dirt. To be human means to be close to the earth – good and dirty.
Deep emotional play. Going deep, deep down into profound emotions, digging down into old wounds. These are some of the scariest and most rewarding forms of ecstatic SM mind play.
We’ve talked about playing with breakdown, with taking our scenes to the levels of intensity that crack walls, blast open doors, fracture thick cement foundations – tearing us apart so that we can see ourselves and each other in the lovely bright light of eroticized consciousness, and building ourselves up again with more choices, freer, more aware, more whole.
Old wounds might be about child abuse, losses, deaths, the terrors of the playground at grade school, the more recent lousy breakup, the horrendous job hunt, the performance that the audience (silly fools) was bored with. Dossie, the therapist, points out that recent wounds are almost always connected to old wounds – that’s the most likely difference between the disasters of the present that bother us and those we can weather with relative ease.
Old wounds might also be about cultural trauma, and we might enter them by deliberately invoking the stereotypes, and the judgments about those stereotypes, that represent our oppression. A friend of ours once set up a scene to deal with her rage at men for all of the assaults and belittling and insults and assumptions and presumptions she had suffered throughout her life. She asked four gay men to tie her down and beat her up while calling her “chickie, ” “bitch” and “cunt” and berating her as dumb and stupid and incompetent and little and basically less-than. Actually, the sight of four gay men pretending that they believed that a women’s place was in the kitchen and in the bedroom was pretty comical from the outside; but as the scene got going, and the struggle got real, it was impossible to trivialize the journey. She had arranged to be tied down so she could go fully into rage, and thrash and fight and scream – without falling off the table or hurting anybody. And she did. And it was loud. And it was a terrific catharsis. She felt afterwards that she could accept men in her life much more wholeheartedly, now that her rage was no longer a secret. And the men who topped the scene had a sense of healing about it – bringing that guilt about being male out in the open and playing with it moved their stuff down the road a little further too.
Our experience is that playing with sexism is a button-pusher, and that playing with cultural traumas like racism, enslavement and genocide is even scarier. To travel with SM and ecstasy through the gates of old wounds, a respect for safety is utterly mandatory. These journeys are reckless enough without being devil-may-care.
We are used to negotiating physical limits to our play... here we must figure out and communicate about our emotional limits. This is always to some degree a guessing game, even if you’ve done it a few times – because the oceans of the unconscious are truly bottomless, and you never know for sure what you’re going to find down there in the deep. Dossie likes to play with sexism – after she has done a whole lot of negotiation to make sure the people she is playing with are just pretending, and that true respect and care are the foundation for this reckless journey. A genuinely sexist creep pushing her around and calling her a bitch raises serious questions about how far a girl ought to go on the first date.
Limits, and the risks that make thinking about limits important, belong to tops and bottoms both. Would you think twice before playing the role of raping and murderous father to your bottom’s victimized child? We hope you will. Because we are playing with fire here, and tops are as vulnerable as bottoms to getting burned.
A commitment to aftercare is important too: the scene is not over until everybody in it is back on the planet in their everyday state of consciousness. Janet recalls connecting for the first time with her very angry precious inner bully during a scene in which she was topping Dossie. Both of them could feel the intense dark energy fueling that scene. Afterwards, after kidnapping and beating and insulting and raping Dossie, it was Janet who needed to be held and cuddled and comforted.
Some players live their roles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are families of players, with masters and slaves and puppies and children, all adults, all written into the same piece of theater. Like all aspects of BDSM, players who do well at 24/7 have a high sense of integrity and tremendous respect for boundaries. You have to have respect for boundaries if you’re going to spend that much of your life in boundarylessness.
24/7 relationships are the monasteries of kink: people who maintain a high degree of ritual and protocol on a daily basis, and thrive in that circumstance. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice, please remember that slavery is indeed still illegal, and that anyone who wants to leave is free to do so. So 24/7 works as long as the various members of that relationship feel that it works. The reality requires more cooperation than our fantasies might suspect.
And the roles aren’t prescribed. The bottoms are often male, and frequently earn more money than their tops. The tops might have less power in the culture at large and still be adepts at administering power in BDSM and spiritual space.
The wisdom that 24/7 practitioners develop is what happens when you go as deep as you possibly can into your roles and archetypes, when you live the part, as it were. Balance and healing can be found here, and a profound sense of rightness when people find the place in a relationship or an SM family that works for them. For many, living full-time in their roles is living full-time in spiritual connection.
Some of us combine spiritual practice and SM by channeling entities, deities, archetypes or creatures that we feel connection to as the motivating or inspirational force to a scene. Channeling is allowing a spirit, angel, saint, deity, diva or any other entity you identify with to enter you or rise within you or become you, temporarily: there are a variety of beliefs that people explore to explain the phenomenon. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that something from the outside comes into you, or that something within you comes to the forefront. What matters is that we dig deeply into a role or an archetype and bring its particular power and vision and wisdom up (or down) to power a scene or a ritual.
Channeling deities is another way to move from role into ritual, and can be done from both the top and the bottom. A bottom might choose to invoke Persephone, say, or Hercules in drag. (Thirteenth labor of Hercules: he sold himself into slavery to Queen Omphale of Lydia, and spent three years as her body slave in female clothing — it’s true, look it up.) This kind of deep role-playing is sex magic; so is everything else in this book.
Dossie channeled the goddess Kali during a flogging ritual with her dear friend Coyote, whose roommate had just died of AIDS. Kali is the fiery Hindu goddess of creation and destruction who blasts open doors, tears down old structures, throws out our old treasured garbage we keep hanging onto and makes room for something new. Sort of like spring closet cleaning, only a lot scarier. And more profound. Every religion ought to have a goddess like Kali.
Tied down so she could fight if she needed to, Coyote chanted to Kali, who was flying down Dossie’s arm and into her body through the whip until they both erupted in a hot flow of grief. After this directly physical manifestation of pain and suffering, she felt cleansed and ready to go on with her life.
Dossie once attended a class called “Practical Shapeshifting,” in which the participants were taught to imagine the animal who had the skill and wisdom for a particular task, and then imagine being that animal and having those skills. A woman in the class who was looking for work produced a fine fantasy of being a seal safe in her silky fur, who could slip through the waves, rise and fall easily with the tides, and swim so powerfully that she need never fear crashing on a rock or any other hard sharp obstacle.
Here is an example of an SM shapeshifting healing in which Dossie participated:
Playing with the Goddess
Durga tells me I’m the only item on her dance card. My cunt contracts. A small adrenaline rush of fear accompanies the swelling of labia. Just how intense will this game be? She says she has been having hard times, a bitter breakup. She needs the purging and reunion with herself that only our play can accomplish. I am at once honored and vulnerable: this will be intimate.
Durga wants me in the leather corset, it will protect my physical vulnerabilities so she can unleash the storm inside without worrying about hurting me. She doesn’t want to hold back. Her slave puts me in the corset, and Durga tightens me down to breathlessness. As she straps in my waist, I feel both small and strong in black stockings and heels. Rivets on the wrist cuffs catch the light as she secures me to the cross. “Do you want the ankle cuffs?” I inquire. “No.” She laughs. “I want you free to buck.”
Durga is tall and wide and immensely powerful in her flowing skirts. She is corseted like armor, Athena’s breastplate. Her hair is pulled back, Cretan curls falling down her back, jewels on her forehead. Her dark skin sucks in the light and reflects it back warm and somehow more alive. Her smile reveals teeth bright like stars in the night, her tongue red like life, her eyes flash fire in the darkness. Brightness flows from her face as her incandescent grin kindles everything in her path, only to return everything to itself, cleansed and beautified in her loving gaze.
Her nails are lacquered purple, burning claws as she takes my face in her hands, turns my head to take my mouth in hers. Hot like the jungle, she pours herself into me.
And when her breath is mine and mine is hers, she trails her talons down my arms, my sides, my legs. Stockings split in her path, running down my leg like blood from ripped skin. The sharpness of the sensation is hard to take in without tensing; I writhe and jump. She gets a good grip with one arm and lifts me off my feet while she continues with her extremely free hand — I hang helpless, she is my only ground.
Every pinch, every scratch, every ripping sensation is all too much — as Durga has told me her miserable breakup with her last lover has been too much, too much pain, too much intensity, all the hurts in exactly the places that hurt her the most. She traces this history on my body, all the pain that is too hard to take. I struggle to take it in, to keep up with her. She is shapeshifting, snarling and predatory, a huge panther clawing and biting, finding her strength through her impact on me.
And I become prey, a leaping impala, a dancing gazelle, the object and leader of the chase. I dodge and dart, crying out in purrs and growls, sharp cries of distress, and Durga keeps catching me, over and over. We are speaking in tongues now, mysterious words in a language neither of us understands, emotions voiced with no particular meaning but intense force. I hear her pain, her betrayal, her questioning herself: How could I have let this lover so close as to bring me to grief? What other choice is there if we are to love?.
I turn into a snake and hiss and writhe — “Go for it, snake girl!” chants my Durga, and I bare my fangs and grin in her face, “Come and get me!” And we are traveling, heart to heart at the end of a whip, her life and her pain flowing out down the lashes into my ass. I take her into me and up into my heart, all green and soothing like aloe, like the cool fresh jungle on a hot day, like shade and understanding and relief. I take her in.
It is wondrous and amazing to be able to be at once healer and bottom, giving while receiving, emptying out a beloved’s stored-up rage and grief, offering catharsis to my top while leaping like a gazelle over streams and rocks, pursued by a fierce gleaming panther.
There’s no particular climax to this play. We just carry on till we are done, and Durga takes me down and carries over to a chair, nestles me in her lap, and we are wrapped in one skin, warm and loving, for a while — until gravity asserts herself and we return, each to her individuality, intact and full of love.
We’ve said all along that all SM is ritual and that scene space is sacred space – indeed, that everything is sacred. Which is utterly true. And some players gather together to do formal ritual, using intense physical sensations from the SM realm as the vehicle that carts our consciousness into the present, the pain that forces us into acceptance, the boat that carries us on a tidal wave of ecstasy. Janet described her experience of a flesh-hook ritual with Fakir Musafar earlier in this book.
All generalizations are untrue. It would take an entire book to describe the full range of SM ritual practice, so here we will include a few common guidelines. In SM ritual people gather together, usually do some form of symbolic cleansing to wash off the junk of everyday life, and connect to each other in a circle. Each participant might state her or his intention, what they would like to get out of this journey. The intention might be as simple as communion with the divine, or more complex according to each person’s needs in the moment. Dossie once got pierced with sixty spears, with the intention of making spiritual contact with her ancestors. It worked.
Here the roles of top and bottom shift. The journeyer is going to be pierced or whipped or otherwise done to, but for their own purposes, essentially to prepare for a more or less solo journey. So the ritual is about the bottom, for the bottom’s use and purposes. The top, the person who does the piercing or tying up or whatever, is not so much dominant as guide, priest, support person. Large rituals require a lot of support people: piercers, drummers, volunteers who organize the physical environment and volunteers who stay present with the ritual, but not journeying, ready to offer support to any traveler who needs it. A shoulder to cry on, water, somebody to dance with. At the kavadi, the ritual with spears that Dossie journeyed in, priests would drum on the frames that held the spears in place, driving rhythm into the body through the holes in the skin. At the flesh-hooks ritual, two bodyworkers had set up tables and were available to help anybody who wanted their services.
Piercing the skin has a particular place in SM ritual – we say that opening the hide is a spiritual as well as a physical opening, an intense way to drop our boundaries and flow or fly with the divine. All the journeys are mind journeys. Clearly there is no way to leave the mind behind, and luckily there are thousands of ways to change our minds, alter how we are seeing and feeling, and a thousand purposes for traveling down these paths. Some qualify as healings, others as deep emotional explorations, and still more as ritual dramas that we do because they delight and fulfill us by allowing us to open to energy that is bigger than us.
A lot of these scripts are designed to let us escape from ego, from rigid patterns, from our own blind spots – to escape from our ego masks, top and bottom alike. Remember, everyone in a scene is in service to the scene. The priest/ess serves, the god/ dess serves, the slave serves, the child serves. We all serve.
So we end this chapter with a mind journey enacted by the two of us, told first in janet’s voice, then in Dossie’s:
Villain
Well, I thought it was going to be a simple straightforward little flogging scene.
It was Friday night, at the end of an agonizingly long week. Dossie had come over for dinner (getting delayed in traffic for nearly an hour on the way), and we’d gone out to a movie. We were both pretty tired and frazzled, but we don’t get to play that often, so we decided to go ahead and at least do something.
I started to tie her to the bed, face-down. I noticed that she was being very quiet, her limbs responding passively as I moved them into position; I assumed she was just trancing out as she so often does.
But then I picked out my softest suede flogger and just drew it across her ass, like painting her skin with a soft brush, not even a stroke, really. And she shuddered all over and whimpered.
A part of me thought that she was just doing it to turn me on, knowing how I respond to helplessness and vulnerability. A bigger part of me didn’t care. I brushed her butt again with the flogger, a bit harder; she whimpered louder and tried to roll off to one side to shield herself. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was acting, but I was getting turned on.
I took the intensity up as slowly as I ordinarily would on anyone, slower than I usually do on Dossie. It didn’t seem to matter — she’d clearly gone into a space that was about feeling punished, brutalized, abused. We’d done such scenes before, but always with intent and a lot of negotiation. I was a bit concerned, but not concerned enough to stop.
I was hitting her pretty hard by now, and she was sobbing, her face contorted. Her ass looked incredibly vulnerable and helpless. I was suddenly seized by the idea of fucking her up that ass and was more aroused than ever — I wanted to beat her raw and then fuck her so it hurt with every thrust. I gloved up, lubed a finger or two, and began to explore her asshole, but it was tight and unyielding. She came out of whatever place she was in long enough to tell me that she’d had some intestinal upset that morning and was too sore for anal activity. Speaking as sanely as if we were planning a grocery expedition, we agreed that we’d enjoy a butt-fucking scene some other time, but this wasn’t the night. And then we were back to where we’d been before, victim and villain, as though the conversation had never happened.
I was using my meanest toy, a heavy leather two-fingered tawse that I know from experience is almost impossible to enjoy: vicious bite with a lot of weight behind it. I was using it as hard as I could. She — who could ordinarily soar above such a sensation laughing — was shrieking and sobbing and struggling to get away from the blows. I was dripping wet.
I ordered her up on her hands and knees and pushed a fat bolster under her hips to raise her butt up to where I could get at her cunt. I slipped into my harness, added my favorite double-ended dick, lubed up and knelt behind her. Finding my way with my fingers, I jammed my cock up her and began to fuck her hard. She sobbed and moaned; there was no question that I was raping her.
I grabbed her by the back of her hair — an interesting moment for me, as the brute in my hips kept pounding away at her, but the loving friend in my head said quietly, give her plenty of slack, you don’t want to hurt her neck. I snarled, “Tell me you like it.” She cried harder. The idea of making her tell me she liked it, knowing that she didn’t, became terribly important to me. I pounded and pounded and repeated my demand. “I can’t,” she cried. I threatened her with more tawse if she didn’t say it, and she still couldn’t, so I pulled out and struck her a dozen or so times, as hard as I could. She screamed.
I began fucking her again and repeated my command. Coming slightly out of headspace, she gasped something about feeling painted into a corner, and I began to realize that she really couldn’t say it — something of a disappointment, but if she couldn’t she couldn’t. So I just let that one go, and cast around for another strategy. And then I had it...
“Mmmm, you make Daddy feel good,” I growled. Her head came up, and in a tiny little voice she said, “Daddy?” And in that moment the scene refocused — I was no longer the violent rapist, instead I was the daddy who must violate what he loves best, and she was my beautiful little girl.
The resolution of the scene became clear to me. I went on fucking her, but now my incoherent growls were promises that if my little girl made me feel good, I’d make her feel very, very good. I brought myself to a crescendo — I didn’t actually come, but I didn’t care all that much; I’d had a top-gasm if not an orgasm. Now, I told her, Daddy was going to make her feel good. I got another dick, bigger than the one I’d been wearing, and eased it into her. Then I began to use a vibrator on her clit. She came explosively within moments — she, who usually has to be cajoled slowly and expertly toward orgasm — I could hardly believe it was over so fast. I lay on top of her back and held her close until her breathing slowed. A few minutes later, when I was pretty sure we were both back in relatively normal headspace, I untied her.
Later, in the kitchen, dishing up ice cream, I found myself humming an unfamiliar tune. I cast around in my head and recognized it: “My Name,” the song that the murderous brute Bill Sykes sings in the musical Oliver. I realized that I had just liberated my inner Bill Sykes, and grinned like the sadist I am.
Victim
We decided to play something easy, it being a little late to start, expecting to do a simple flog and fuck, some SM version of a quickie.
Janet tied me to the bed with soft restraints, very comfortable, spread-eagled on my stomach. Lying with my face on the pillow while she secured my ankles, feeling relaxed and taken care of, I felt myself beginning to sink down into some deeper part of myself. Not my more ordinary defiant powerful I-can-take-anything-you-can-dish-out mode. I felt small.
When Janet started the scene with a light and sensuous flogger, even though this was a gentle stimulus that had nothing to do with pain, the very fact of being tied down and done-to precipitated me into a warm bath of helplessness. I felt confused and lost: why would she tie me down and do these strange things to me? I felt surrounded. I felt, not surrendered, but taken.
As Janet increased the intensity of the striking, I started whimpering. Whimpering and thrashing. Usually, I use my knowledge of my body to channel intense stimulation, breathing it through me, tensing muscles in a happy response that welcomes the incoming fire. When I do this, I feel a sense of joyful control, and sensations that may be difficult to take in become the occasion for delight in feeling and transcending them. At these times, my top feels like a guide, a nurturing parent, a generous person who is working very hard so I can experience this literally sensational journey: in short, Santa Claus.
But not this time. This time I fell into my victim space. As Janet struck me with the usual fiendish array of instruments, I felt lost and helpless, and the sting of the strike made me want to cry. A terrible sadness awoke in me. And serious confusion: why was I being subjected to this? I felt no sense of guilt or justice. I just felt abused.
Somewhere in here, a more rational consciousness suggested that to play this kind of a deep scene, which can be scary to a top, I really should negotiate some consent. Tops like to feel like Santa Claus. They less often enjoy feeling like heartless criminals. Even though Janet and I have been here before, I felt a need to check in and make sure she was all right with this. I looked up, and saw in her face what I needed to reassure me: a cold, hard stare. Janet’s precious inner bully was awake and enjoying himself.
So we set off down the path of victim and villain, in search of whatever truth might be found there, which might include why we wanted to go there in the first place. Janet attacked me with increasingly unforgiving implements of punishment: the tawse, the cat, the paddle, the cane. And I sank deeper and deeper into my own fathomlessness, whimpering and feeling helpless, with a curious sense of luxury in all this. It surprised me that, having abjured my customary methods of surfing pain, I still was able to take a huge beating. I could have safe-worded at any time; I could have asked her to go a little lighter. When Janet and I play, what we do is always collaborative, and we would be appalled at the idea that either one of us should actually suffer for the pleasure of the other. Besides which, last week I beat her up.
And Janet, indeed, was making the unstated accommodations to the limitations of reality that actual abuse seldom regards. She was striking only well-padded parts of the body, and allowing time between intense strokes for me to process the sensation. So my body never went completely out of control, or maybe only for a second or two.
Although Janet was certainly allowing me the time to process sensations, I was not doing the processing. I was choosing (choice is an important concept here) to be the victim, to be frightened and hurt and betrayed and tortured for who knows what reason, and to respond with whimpering and misery. Luckily Janet has within herself the top who can enjoy this.
We went on for a while. There wasn’t any scripted end to this in sight. No climax, no culmination — I suppose I could have safeworded, but we were both looking for a denouement, some conclusion that answered the state we were traveling in. We were beyond the question of what could I take — I was beyond deciding much of anything, and the game we were playing did not include the villain taking consideration of the victim’s misery.
Janet decided to take it out in sex, giving me the reward of feeling good for taking my punishment. This made little sense, since in the crazy logic of my state of mind the beating itself seemed to be the purpose, the why of why we were there doing this in the first place. So Janet rewrote the orgasm at the end, from “Daddy’s going to make you feel so good,” which she tried first, and which obviously didn’t make a lot of sense to my precious inner victim. So she raped me, with the stated rationale that I would be a good girl by making Daddy feel good. Somehow this made a certain amount of sense to both of us.
We leapt together into the Daddy/girl script. I felt a kind of internal jerk, as I translated my sense of helplessness into childishness, and my victimhood into betrayal.
And Janet was right — translating the scene into the language of child abuse gave us a way to find a closing. She fucked me until she got off, telling me constantly about how I was a good girl to make Daddy feel so good (and isn’t that the ultimate betrayal?), and then got out the vibrator. That was a revelation. After a couple of hours of victimhood, where my own pleasure was (apparently) not being regarded as at all important, when we got to the clitoral stimulation, there was a huge orgasm right in there, as if it had built up and was just waiting for an opportunity to express itself. Loudly.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the scene we had played had a lot to do with sex. Deep psychological exploration, maybe. Living mythos, maybe. Deep emotional play, for sure. Shadowplay, absolutely.
But sex? There it was.
Without my being aware of it, I had become terrifically turned on. And when the vibrator started up, my body woke up instantly to a flood of exquisite pleasure, as if the vibrator was pouring delicious light into me. As though my body filled up as Janet pumped me full of ecstasy. And that exploding ecstasy was the resolution of the scene. Not exactly an answer to the dilemma of why I like this. But the answer to the deep need inside me: to make that profound sexual connection to my lover from my precious inner sadness. For Janet to come and love me in my misery, this is the healing. This drives the pain away and fills me with light. This works.
When we talked about this a couple of days later, we discussed the possible purposes, rewards, outcomes of such a scene: healing? catharsis? opportunity to playact what would be unacceptable in the real world? And what does this have to do with spirit?
My inner truth became clear: there was no purpose, no goal. What I desire is to go on the journey, to be, for a while and with the mirror of another, that part of myself that I fall into in these scenes. Just to be that victim, which indeed I have been in real life, both as a child and as an adult. Playing like this gives me a way to remember, to relive it, for a little while, with the ever-so-important proviso that this is psychodrama, not real abuse. When I try to seek out meaning in this, the answer I get is: I don’t know. I only know that sometimes I want to go there.