Two
The prize offered by Helio-gabalus for a new and original deviation is still unclaimed after two millennia.
—ALEX COMFORT1
The practices and desires we will examine are as old as eros. Yet we are so accustomed to accepting the idea that unusual or unfamiliar sexual practices are “perverse” that we rarely ask how these behaviors came to be so classified. What forces or individuals asserted what constitutes a sexual norm? How have these beliefs been assimilated into popular consciousness?
In this chapter we trace the rise of S/M as an observed phenomenon, beginning with the first attempts to scientifically unravel the mysteries of human sexuality until now. We also trace the roots of the organized S/M communities, an expanding network of educational resources, support groups, and social organizations for sexual minorities.
At chapter’s end we feature three interviews:
• William A. Henkin is a certified sex therapist and licensed marriage, family, and child counselor. He is past president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, a member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and a Ph. D. candidate at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
• Hilton is 38 years old and was raised in Europe. He lives in New York, where he works in a high-technology industry. He is on the board of directors of the Eulenspiegel Society, America’s oldest S/M support group.
• Carter Stevens is 46 years old and lives in New Jersey. He owns and operates fetish video companies and publishes The S&M News.
In 1844 the first Psychopathia Sexualis was published in Leipzig by a Ukrainian physician, Heinrick Kaan. Forty-two years later Richard von Krafft-Ebing chose the same title for the first edition of his massive Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study. Between the first Psychopathia and the second lay the gropings toward the first scientific study of sex. Obviously influenced by Kaan’s work and publishing the more graphic details in Latin, to—as it has been suggested—“protect the imperfectly educated,”2 Krafft-Ebing’s tome was at the pinnacle of Victorian scientific inquiry into human sexuality.
In other cultures—notably the Hindu culture of India—ars erotica, which treat sexuality as an art form or a discipline to be mastered, were long established. The Kama Sutra and its imitators are essentially how-to manuals for the upper classes, as much concerned with proper sex etiquette for the well-born as with the varieties of sexual play. Erotic arts were not only deemed worthy of respect but were thought to be divinely revealed. This may partly explain why the how-to of sex was explored while the how-come? was largely ignored: A gift of the gods is not open to scrutiny.
Between the ars erotica of the East and the Studium erotica of the West lies a gulf that is still only beginning to be bridged. Although sexual repression was hardly invented in the 19th Century—Michael Foucault, for example, suggests that the 17th Century was a watershed in censure of sexual pleasure;3 and taboos against masturbation and sodomy were recorded in the Old and New Testaments—it is ironic that the first attempts to demystify sexuality were born of one of the most sexually repressive cultures in history.
The Victorian period is the point of departure for sexual research. A convergence of factors made it possible: Science, philosophy, and social sciences were growing emancipated from religion; an age of curiosity flowered within an age of hypocrisy.
Perhaps the peculiar prudishness and sexual repression associated with the Victorian period helped escalate serious thinking on the subject: The discrepancy between the ideal and the real was too great to go unnoticed. But there was also the emergence of empirical science, the growth of medicine and psychology, a weakening of belief in traditional religions and moral codes in general.
—EDGAR GREGERSEN4
Victorian society was prudish to an extent that seems unimaginable today. Piano legs were discreetly hidden beneath fabric skirts in the interest of modesty, and the Bible was capable of wounding refined sensibilities because it contains such words as whore and fornication. Victorians were so nervously and negatively obsessed with sex that almost anything held the danger of titillation.
It became indelicate to offer a lady a leg of chicken—hence the still surviving tradition that she is offered the breast; but even this was called the “bosom” in the nineteenth century.
—G. RATTRAY TAYLOR5
Whereas earlier Christians may have perceived sex for pleasure as sinful, the Victorians viewed it as disgusting, animalistic, and depraved. It was even supposed that sex endangered the health; discharging semen was seriously believed to shorten one’s life. Parents went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their male children from masturbation or nocturnal emissions, in some cases fitting them with locked penis cages, spiked rings to render erections too painful to endure, and even alarm devices that caused a bell to ring in the parents’ room should the penis become erect.
In medieval times the evils of temptation and carnality were blamed upon women who, like Eve, led men to ruin. By the Victorian Age, it was believed that lust was a masculine phenomenon and that women were sexually lifeless.
A writer in The Westminster Review said that women’s sexual urges were dormant or nonexistent. “Nature has laid so many burdens on the delicate shoulders of the weaker sex: let us rejoice that this, at least, is spared them.” If they realized how great their sexual potential was, “sexual irregularities would reach a height of which, at present, we have happily no conception.” This was unlikely as long as a frail, unsensual constitution invalided them out of the bestial sexual fray. The distinguished writer on sex, Dr. William Acton, said that to claim women were capable of sexual impulses was a “vile aspersion.” William Hammond, U. S. Surgeon General, said that nine tenths of the time decent women had no pleasure from intercourse, and the famous Swiss gynecologist, Dr. Fehling, called sexual desire in young women pathological.
—ARNO KARLEN6
While the surface of Victorian society was shrouded in respectability, contemporary novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Portrait of Dorian Gray are allegories on the duality of Victorian life. In London as many as 40,000 prostitutes plied their trade. Brothels proliferated at a rate never seen before or since, catering to every imaginable taste. “Molly houses” (male brothels), child brothels, and flagellation brothels flourished.
Economic and religious influences are key elements in the spectacle of Victorian prudery. What we have come to call Victorianism was initially a phenomenon of the middle classes. As the economic power of the middle classes grew, their moralistic attitudes increasingly influenced the upper classes, and their effect on the lower classes was decisive. The experience of the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant stresses caused by the shift from an agrarian rural culture to a mechanized urban society were directly responsible for the development of sprawling slums whose squalor has never been rivaled. Victorian slums were the breeding ground of prostitution, crime, and violence; their misery was virtually inescapable. Only by adopting middle-class mores could the slum dweller aspire to that class.
The religious ideals of Methodism—the most powerful of the middle-class denominations—complemented Victorian social ideals. Modesty and restraint were unquestioned virtues. Proper gentlemen and ladies of the period eschewed strong emotion: Excessive laughter or grief were as objectionable as sexual excess. The appearance of respectability was paramount. To appear otherwise was to be common, and to be common was to be spiritually flawed, economically hopeless, and socially repugnant.
That anyone saw fit to study and publish work on sex—much less unusual sex—in this atmosphere may seem surprising. But the Victorian Age embraced paradoxes: Romantic extravagance in art and literature existed beside the grim sobriety of daily life; fervent humanitarianism beside the institutionalized racism of colonialism; hyper-prudishness beside profligacy. Moreover, this was a golden age for science, which seemed to promise the salvation from human misery that only Christianity had previously offered.
Victorians appreciated science so long as it supported and confirmed their social ideals, which, by no coincidence, it generally did. The work of Charles Darwin, for example, had a profound impact on Victorian thought. While the possibility that man had evolved from a simian ancestor outraged many, Victorians nonetheless eagerly extended his theories of evolution to society. They saw themselves as occupying the uppermost rung of a tall ladder of social evolution. Just as Calvinism and its diluted form, Methodism, held that God demonstrated divine pleasure in the elect by rewarding their worthiness with wealth and comfort, so Social Darwinism held that Nature had rewarded the most worthy—i.e., the Victorians—with advanced civilization and technology. Social Darwinism was a direct transposition of religious belief into secular science. It provided a philosophical framework to account for such phenomena as urban slums and colonization. Those who did not prosper were unfit to prosper. Those who were colonized were unfit to rule themselves. That they be ruled by those whom evolution had blessed to be fit was only natural and right.
Darwinism also had a profound impact on contemporary psychiatry, itself a new discipline. The term psychiatry had first been employed in 1808; by the time of Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species in 1859, psychiatry was primarily a system of classification braced by a body of unsupported theory. Only 50 years earlier insanity was commonly believed to result from the disposition of humors (bodily fluids) or sorcery. Psychiatry held that insanity was organic, the result of disease or injury, but this failed to account for a large number of remarkably physically fit lunatics. Natural selection and inherited traits provided plausible explanations: Insanity could be hereditary, and the insane biologically cursed with a weak nervous system. Further, if the etiology could be established, a cure ultimately might be discovered. Science could then fulfill its promise of delivering humanity from psychological woe.
The latter half of the 19th Century saw doctors and theorists hunting busily for the hereditary factors of insanity and psychosexual deviance. Many believed that congenital conditions were manifest in anatomy and physiognomy. Physicians asserted they could diagnose, at a glance, a neuropath afflicted with “masturbatory insanity.” He would be, if not raving, at least identifiable by his pallid complexion, downcast eyes, and air of brooding melancholy. Similar fallacies (some of which will be familiar to contemporary readers) spread as gospel: Lesbians were all mannish; homosexual men couldn’t whistle.
Neuropaths aside, however, there was a larger question that nagged at Victorian scientists: If modesty, reserve, and sexual continence were the imperatives of human goodness, why were these qualities absent in so many Victorians?
He was not the first to devote himself to the study of sexuality, but no one had a greater impact on the future course of sexology than Richard von Krafft-Ebing. He popularized the terms sadism and homosexual, invented the terms masochism and paranoia, and his classification system of sexual deviance remains the foundation of modern psychiatric diagnostics. But science and its theories do not develop in isolation: Krafft-Ebing’s assumptions mirror many of the prejudices of his age. His biases remain a matter of debate.
By drawing on over 200 cases collected from his own patients, other doctors, earlier medical literature, and defendants in criminal courts, Krafft-Ebing provides testimony for his view that unbridled sex can undermine the health and honor of individuals as well as the very foundations of society. By mixing extreme cases (e. g., murder and cannibalism) with seemingly innocuous deviations, he gives the overall impression that all sex is dangerous.
—SUZANNE G. FRAYSER7
Prior to Krafft-Ebing, S/M was neither a sickness nor a sin.
—CHARLES MOSER8
Like Freud after him, Krafft-Ebing considered reproductive relevance the benchmark of sexual normality. Psychiatry was the heir of moral theology: Sex was a biological mechanism devised by God or Nature to ensure the production of offspring. Sex for pleasure and intimacy which did not induce pregnancy was a perversion of biology as much as of God’s will. In this system “missionary,” man-on-top intercourse—a position believed to aid man’s seed in reaching its goal—was the only acceptable position; it also spared women from too active a role in their disagreeable but obligatory reproductive duties. Given this narrow definition of acceptable sexual activity, it is not surprising that Krafft-Ebing found an abundance of deviance.
We are still living with the Victorian notion that sex itself is bad. Western society has not always believed that, but it believed it with a kind of a vengeance after Krafft-Ebing—a man who as far as anybody can tell had intercourse with his wife enough times to produce a couple of children and may not have done anything else sexually thereafter—wrote Psychopathia Sexualis. He held as the worst possible sexual practices homosexuality, transgenderism (he was particularly addressing transvestism), sadomasochism, and masturbation.
—WILLIAM A. HENKIN
Three things are remarkable about Psychopathia Sexualis. The first is its breadth of inquiry; then and now, psychological theory often rests on an extremely limited statistical base. Second is his compassion toward those who practiced acts that personally disgusted him; he advocated leniency, tolerance, and legal reform, arguing that one should not be punished for a condition for which there was little hope of a cure, as in the case of homosexuals. But most remarkable of all was the enormous distribution of his book: Krafft-Ebing, a medico-forensics expert who was specifically interested in the legal ramifications of sexual deviance, never intended Psychopathia Sexualis to be popular.
He did not want the public to read his book, so he gave it a scientific title, employed technical terms, and inscribed the most exciting parts in Latin. Despite these handicaps, the author proved to be a magnificent reporter: the public swooped down on his book.
—VICTOR ROBINSON9
It was sensational, shocking, and irresistible. As a medical book it escaped the taint of deliberate salaciousness; its stringent moral tone reinforced social ideals. Genteel readers entered a dizzying vortex of vampires, ghouls, lust murderers, shoe fetishists, groveling masochists, heartless sadists, pederasts, and bestialists—many of whom apparently drank tea in the cozy drawing rooms of bourgeois Europe.
Actually, Krafft-Ebing’s behavioral “discoveries” had been known for centuries, if not millennia. Yet some readers found in Psychopathia Sexualis the first inklings that their sexual desires were not unique.
For the first time there was an exhaustive, accessible work that dealt not only with sex but with the types of sex that people seldom discussed. But even as Psychopathia Sexualis was going to press in Stuttgart, in England Havelock Ellis had begun the research that would culminate in his massive—and virtually unmatched—Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
Contemporaries in time and discipline, these two scholars had dissimilar motivations. Ellis had a vested interest in demystifying sexuality: He had a lifelong titillation with urination that he credited to his mother having urinated openly in front of him when he was 12. His vocation as sexuality educator resulted from a religious experience he had as a young man. While reading a work by Dr. James Hinton that attempted to reconcile Christianity with science, Ellis was struck by a sense of utter harmony and euphoria. He decided then to become a doctor and to devote himself to the study of sexual behavior so that future generations might be spared the shame that ignorance and repression had caused him.
Ellis ultimately produced the seven volumes of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897 to 1928), but his greatest goal was never achieved. His works had limited success in combatting condemnation of unusual sexual behaviors. Freudianism was already growing apace, and its emphasis on psychoanalysis and intuitive theory was at odds with Ellis’s cross-cultural studies and scholarship. Still, Ellis’s sympathetic point of view helped popularize his work among members of the sexual minorities he wrote about, some of whom seemed to receive his conclusions as gospel. After reading in Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) that turn-of-the-century American gay male prostitutes wore red ties, for example, countless gays began wearing them as a recognition device.
Bullough notes that the Chicago Vice Commission in 1909 found that the numerous male homosexuals there (estimated at 10,000 or more) also made use of the red tie convention to identify each other. Bullough comments: “This leads to a question of whether homosexuals had adopted red as a color in Chicago or whether they wore red because Havelock Ellis told them it was the thing to do.”
—EDGAR GREGERSEN10
The possibility that gay men, after reading Ellis, wore red ties illustrates the observer effect. Simply stated, the observer effect involves learning of a behavior (whether by direct observation, reading, or word of mouth), finding the behavior personally appealing, and then emulating that behavior. This is not an unthinking imitation of the “monkey-see, monkey-do” variety. The observation elicits feelings of identification in the observer. By emulating the behavior, one gains an affiliation with one’s fellows which leads to increased self-esteem and social power. The gay men who learned that red ties could discreetly communicate their orientation to other gay men adopted the code as a standard, much like the contemporary gay man who wears a colored hankie in a rear pocket to “flag” his sexual interests.
This process of observation-identification-emulation-affiliation must be distinguished from fallacious assertions (such as those made by the Meese Commission in its study of pornography in the 1980s) that exposure to unusual sexuality (paraphilia) contaminates individuals who are otherwise uninterested.
Paraphilias are not socially contagious. They are not caught by association with paraphiles or reading about them, or by looking at movies or videos of them engaged in paraphilic activity. The myth of social contagion, especially from exposure to visual depiction of paraphilias, underlies officialdom’s current panicky fascination with pornography and with driving it underground. The truth is that paraphilic pornography does not defile normophilic lovemaps. It simply does not appeal to anyone except those whose lovemap already mirrors it.
—JOHN MONEY11
A heterosexual cannot be transformed by reading Ellis—or anyone else—into a homosexual, any more than this book will transform a sexually conventional reader into a sadomasochist. The person whose sadomasochistic desires were previously limited to fantasy or occasional furtive encounters is the one whose behavior may be affected by discovering that a community of shared interest and sympathetic understanding exists.
The life sciences still battle for the ground that was scorched and denuded before the 19th Century’s end. Science has failed to adequately explain the origins of sexual proclivities. Instead, today’s popular media, bolstered by rafts of self-appointed experts, seize on idiosyncratic theories, such as sexual addiction, as if they represent progress in thought and knowledge. But the “diagnosis” (that too much sex is always bad) is warmed-over Victorianism, and the “treatment” is unchanged: strive to overcome, sublimate, repress.
Indeed, the scientific study of sexuality languishes. Scientific methodology demands, among other things, that when an experiment is repeated under all the same conditions, the results must be identical. A truly scientific study of sexuality is perhaps an impossible task, since we do not have the ability to replicate genetic structure or behavioral conditions in different human beings. Further, scientific study requires long and painstaking research and, most important, funding.
Sexual research has invariably incited storms of hostility and outrage. In Britain Havelock Ellis’s publisher faced criminal prosecution for issuing Sexual Inversion. The Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality (1919–1933), founded by eminent German scholar Magnus Hirschfeld, was sacked and its priceless documents and library burned by the Nazis, who shipped some of its staff members to concentration camps.
In the United States Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) was a pioneering work that gained Alfred Kinsey the title “The Columbus of Sex” from Time magazine. Kinsey examined sexual behavior as practiced, not as idealized. Among many other findings, he reported that 20 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women who participated in his original surveys expressed some degree of arousal in response to sadomasochistic stories. By 1954 Kinsey was under attack from the American Medical Association and Congress for the depravity his works allegedly engendered. The House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw financial support from Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. The U.S. Customs Service seized materials addressed to the Institute. Kinsey died of a heart attack in 1956, his research incomplete, and colleagues allege that the “scrutiny, criticism, and harassment took an emotional and physical toll.”12
A decade later William E. Masters and Virginia Johnson published Human Sexual Response, based on 12 years of direct laboratory observation of sexual activity. Laymen and clergy attacked their work for, among other things, the use of sexual surrogates in studying orgasm and for their conclusion that almost all sexual dysfunction originates in religious orthodoxy. Conservative psychoanalysts ignored or dismissed some of Masters and Johnson’s more controversial findings.
Between 1988 and 1991 three federally funded studies of potentially invaluable worth (particularly at a time when transmission of the HIV virus that causes AIDS is epidemic) were proposed to examine patterns of sexual behavior. The two that were approved were ultimately canceled under pressure from Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman William Dannemeyer. The third was dismissed as political suicide despite the high regard with which it was received in peer review.13
Although over 100 years have passed since Krafft-Ebing first identified sadomasochism and classified it as a pathology, his theories remain the foundation for current perceptions and clinical diagnoses. Official changes in the classification of unusual sexuality—when they occur—seem to be driven by changing social attitudes rather than new data.
If you look at the first edition (1952) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, fellatio, cunnilingus, and masturbation are all mental illnesses. By 1980, with the third edition of the DSM, you find as mental illnesses reduced desire, incapacity, and so forth. And that’s changing again. Psychology, in this sense, is very much a sociological creature. We follow the scripts of the society. When the society says it’s good to have sex then it’s psychologically sick not to, and when the society says it’s bad to have sex then it’s psychologically sick to [have sex].
—WILLIAM A. HENKIN
In discussing the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to reclassify homosexuality in 1973, Dr. John Money points out that politics and pocketbooks inform scientific bias.
A major political struggle of gay activists to have homosexuality upgraded from an illness to a social status required having it declassified from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the APA.… Inevitably, the old guard fought back. They were loath to relinquish their conviction that homosexuality is always a disease for the cure of which they provided a treatment (and earned an income).
—JOHN MONEY14
Although attitudes are changing about what constitutes acceptable sexuality, the view that paraphilia is an illness requiring treatment prevails.
Most of the psychological literature is bent on demonstrating that alternate (which I prefer to “deviant”) sexual practices or lifestyles are in some ways sick. This is a consequence of the medicalization of psychology. I’m not very happy that psychology is seen as a medical process. It seems to be far more a philosophical inquiry, if you will. Nobody knows why people become anything.
—WILLIAM A. HENKIN
In the last few decades knowledge about D&S behaviors and customs in the D&S subculture has largely been disseminated not by scientists, but by sexual practitioners themselves. Increasingly sophisticated modes of communication (beginning with the explosion in the publishing industry, and extending to television talk shows and, especially significant, to computer bulletin boards) have provided individuals with a wealth of information about sexuality. And the observer effect has played a significant role in the growth of minority sexuality communities. Open communication about D&S has attracted thousands of fetishists and sadomasochists to D&S support networks. There is no more instructive example of the observer effect than the transformation of the Old Guard of sadomasochistic homosexuals into contemporary D&S culture.
I think S/M is changing now because the opportunity for communication exists in a fashion that it has not had ever before. Kinky sexuality is talked about more on television and radio talk shows. The purpose of the people producing all of this media [may be] to sensationalize in many cases, but the effect is that people are not living in dark, separate corners, as I was when I was young, believing that no one does any of this stuff. They are [informed] by general media that [such] fantasies are acted upon.
—JOSEPH BEAN
The gay leather scene traces its ancestry to two sources: the barracks of World War II and the motorcycle outlaws of the 1950s and 1960s. As the origin mythology describes it, leathermen derived their complex authoritarianism from the first source while from the second they acquired an abiding fascination with black leather and bike clubs.
The massive American military mobilization of World War II uprooted millions of men who might otherwise have found scant opportunity even to travel from their hometowns and placed them within a huge, exclusively male society under pressure of a cataclysmic drama. Men whose homosexuality might have remained repressed or hidden were given an extraordinary opportunity to explore and gratify their desires. For gay men of a sadomasochistic bent the military offered a further thrill: power and discipline within an authoritarian framework. Gay leather sex then and now is a celebration of Greco-Roman ideals of masculinity—a hypermale society that embraces classical male values and rituals such as honor, service, initiation, mentoring, and paying one’s dues.
Upon their return to the States about 1946, many of the gay vets wanted to retain the most satisfying elements of their military experience and, at the same time, hang out socially and sexually with other masculine gay men. They found that only in the swashbuckling motorcycle culture did such opportunities exist and so the gay bike clubs were born.
—GUY BALDWIN15
By the early 1960s the existence of this subculture had reached the attention of the avant-garde. The film Scorpio Rising (1963)—described by author Hunter S. Thompson as “a bizarre little comment on twentieth-century America, using motorcycles, swastikas and aggressive homosexuality as a new culture trilogy”16—depicts men slowly and sensuously dressing in leather jackets and Levis, and contains a few sadomasochistic vignettes.
Leathermen did not generally welcome public attention. Entering their society was intentionally made difficult. Each newcomer had to prove his worth in a controlled social environment where experienced people guided him through a lengthy training period. Failure to abide by the complex unwritten rules governing dress and demeanor meant at least a lessening of social status and at worst ostracization. This social milieu has since come to be known as the Old Guard, and networking was among its key social regulators.
One of the mechanisms that keeps the S/M community relatively safe is networking: People know people within the community who know new people within the community, and so on. I’m talking specifically about the male subculture, which is what I know best.
—JOSEPH BEAN
Although Old Guard conventions continue to influence gay and straight leather and D&S communities, its rigorous etiquette has been considerably diluted. This is largely attributable to a sizable influx of men (and women) who seek sexual acceptance among peers. The very things that made the Old Guard strong—a highly evolved social structure and a sense of community—attracted new members and, ultimately, contributed to its demise.
[When] Tom of Finland became widely known—his art primarily dealt with gay male leather imagery—suddenly there were a couple of years when leathermen were the living icons of gay sexuality. The result is that the network breaks down. There is an influx of endless numbers of curious people; there are more people showing up at play parties and the bars than could possibly be assimilated. In my view, for the S/M community to remain somewhat underground and somewhat unaccepted, so that people have to approach warily and have to prove themselves as trustworthy individuals, is in fact a very high value for the community.
—JOSEPH BEAN
The leather community met a previously unfulfilled social need. And as novices flooded in, activists became keenly aware of the vital importance of educating those who would not have the opportunity for individual mentorship.
In the second edition of The Leatherman’s Handbook, author Larry Townsend writes:
A little over ten years ago I signed a contract to write The Leatherman’s Handbook.… It was a virgin field, wide open, and, except for my disagreements with a few shrinks here and there, the ideas I was suggesting were fresh and new. This time, however, I am faced with a mountain of written material expressing the opinions of a great many people.… Making the present task far more difficult … is the enormous increase of people participating in a very wide area of activities.17
The blank slate upon which Larry Townsend wrote in the early 1970s had rapidly filled by the 1980s. Until the 1960s the main sources for information on D&S were clinical studies; by the mid-1980s a wide array of nonfiction and fiction about D&S (much of it produced by gays and lesbians) became available. For a time it seemed that the 1960s’ relaxation of sexual mores had opened the door to free discussion—and exploration—of unconventional sex.
Increasing numbers of individuals began to form D&S alliances. Leather had begun as a uniquely gay, subterranean culture centered around motorcycle clubs and bars; in the 1970s heterosexuals—influenced by the early and exhilarating victories of gay liberation as well as the formation of consciousness-raising groups by feminists—seized on the idea of forming S/M support groups. The Eulenspiegel Society, the first such group in the United States, was founded in 1971. Two decades later the National Leather Association—an umbrella organization for S/M support groups and social clubs—reported “an international network of well over 400 Leather/SM/Fetish organizations.”18
A backlash in the gay and lesbian communities against S/M, however, temporarily inhibited the burgeoning subculture. Three events—all occurring in 1980—helped excite anti-S/M sentiment. The film Cruising portrayed the leather scene as inherently sordid and violent. That same year CBS Television aired Gay Power, Gay Politics, a documentary that erroneously stated that S/M is a mostly gay male practice and that 10 percent of all gay deaths in San Francisco were S/M-related. Neither claim could be substantiated, and the producers were later censured by the National News Council, but the documentary had already conveyed its message about leather sexuality. That same year the National Organization for Women (NOW) passed a resolution advocating homosexual rights and condemning S/M. These events and the 1982 publication of Against Sadomasochism, a collection of feminist essays that harshly condemn S/M, have cast an enduring pall over relations between non-leather and leather gays and lesbians. The same year also saw the publication of Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, a collection of essays and fiction by lesbian feminist sadomasochists, which provides an intellectual framework for reconciling sadomasochism, lesbianism, and feminism.
Krafft-Ebing’s legacy lives on in popular opinion. Although contemporary Americans are certainly more likely to perceive sex for pleasure as an acceptable activity than did the Victorians, deliberately nonreproductive sex—and particularly any form of sex which does not have heterosexual intercourse as its main ingredient—is generally regarded as perverse.
The last two decades have witnessed a social phenomenon. The diverse leather communities—prolific in their writing and sophisticated in their organization—have attracted thousands of D&Sers in search of community, support, and the opportunity to socialize and meet like-minded partners.
Unification, however, remains problematic. Many organizations limit membership according to same-sex or opposite-sex preferences. Many heterosexuals are uncomfortable socializing with gays, and homosexuals perceive straight sadomasochists as swinging thrill seekers, uniquely interested in D&S as an episodic erotic event rather than as a committed lifestyle.
The heterosexuals into radical sexuality have never felt the need to build specialized communities in the same way as their homosexual counterparts. In the Gay/Lesbian sub-cultures, garments and even toys become symbols carried well beyond the area of play into the open light of public spaces. They speak of a tribal affiliation that is as strongly social as it is sexual.… For most straights, radical sexual practice begins and ends in the bedroom or the playroom.
—GEOFF MAINS19
As the organizational network expands, however, leather traditions—particularly the adoption of leather dress codes, respect for seniority, and a tribal spirit—are more widely emulated. Heterosexuals who once largely looked to pornographic novels for role models—and who typically discovered that the fiction provided no advice on the daily problems of real people—are turning to the D&S communities for advice and support.
This evolution has led to “pansexualism”: Gays, straights, bisexuals, and transgenderists fraternize and attend parties together. The National Leather Association has taken a leadership role in unifying all D&Sers, regardless of partner preference, into a cohesive political and social force.
There is a lot of separation between the straight, gay, and lesbian S/M communities. But there is also pan-S/M consciousness. As one wise woman who has been doing this for many years has said, “Leather is thicker than blood.”
—GAYLE RUBIN20
Finally, one of the most significant developments in heterosexual D&S has been the rise of the electronic samizdat. Hundreds of D&S-oriented electronic bulletin boards have formed since the late 1980s. For many people still laboring under the Victorian ideas of acceptable sexual behaviors and living in sexually and politically conservative regions, the anonymity and accessibility of these on-line networks has permitted a free interchange of ideas on topics formerly too distressing to discuss even with relatives or friends.
As of this writing, international electronic networks have become a primary medium of communication and socialization for millions of people interested in D&S-related sex. The on-line environments offer everything from peer support and discussion groups to sites dedicated to personal ads, erotica, and graphic images. On the Internet, news groups prefixed by “alt.sex” treat individual topic areas (female dominants, water sports, fetishism, spanking, inter alia). The most heavily-trafficked area is “alt.sex.bondage,” which features lively, sometimes acrimonious, debates on D&S issues and technical “how-to” discussions. On the World Wide Web, new D&S sites are constantly emerging, hosted by enthusiasts and vendors from Hoboken to Hong Kong. On Compuserve, the Human Sexuality Forum’s Variations II (founded in 1987 by Gloria Glickstein Brame), is the nation’s oldest on-line D&S support and education group.
The observer effect has held powerful sway in cyberspace, where large numbers of newcomers emulate the behavior of loquacious veterans and eagerly adopt the prevailing mores, etiquette, and slang. The net effect seems to be a growing emphasis on the technical elements of D&S and on its enormous potential as casual, safe-sex play. One of the more intriguing phenomena has been the proliferation of “play parties” and “munches,” regional social events organized by and for D&S cybernauts who meet for “3-D” interfacing.
Every society has taboos. Most of them have sexual taboos. Those societies that do not have sexual taboos have mouth taboos, either on eating or on talking. What the connection is between the beginning of the alimentary canal and the end of it, or between the tongue and the genitals, I will only leave for speculation.
There are two reasons, as far as I can tell, why S/M is taboo in our culture. The first has to do with control. As a society, we are as frightened of control issues as we are of anger issues. They are related. To express anger seems like losing control. So it’s taboo to look at those things that frighten us. Second, if you control people’s sexuality, you control their lives. If you tell them what they may or may not do sexually, you have in a very real and a very deep way told them who they may be, who they may not be, what they may be, what they may not be. The organization of any society needs—or feels that it needs—to control its citizens.
As far as I can see, there is no engagement between two mammals that does not include a power relationship, a jockeying to determine who is the alpha animal. In my observation, most relationships between two people do not include any awareness of this need to resolve the power dynamic. People attempt to determine their power relationships implicitly, not explicitly, and consequently human interactions are generally fraught with arguing and bickering to see who gets to control things. This complex process may result in a lot of manipulative behavior, with people who are physically or psychologically weaker trying to gain control from underneath, covertly, and people who are clearly stronger physically or psychologically feeling that they’re being manipulated, but not quite knowing how, getting frustrated, and hitting their partners. I’m speaking hypothetically, but it’s been my observation that that’s part of what goes on in a lot of spousal abuse, partner abuse, battering relationships.
I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about this, but I don’t know of a battering situation, for instance, where [either] the batterer, the batteree, or both have not come from situations where power was dealt with unconsciously. I have worked in situations where I had to deal with many people who had been battered, either as adults—spouses or partners—or children. I don’t recall a single one of those situations where consensual S/M or D&S was a component. I’m not sure that such erotic games would have been acceptable to most of those people.
If one is being unconsciously and nonconsensually domineering, one will behave brutally [physically or psychologically]. If you’re unconsciously submissive, then I think there’s potential for a great deal of self-deprecation. If you don’t really want to give in to your partner’s demands, but you do it continually, and feel resentful, I think it’s very psychologically self-destructive. It leads to considerable anxiety and suppressed rage. Similarly, you can be brutal [by] demanding things that could be asked for. When you start to make the dynamics of these interactions conscious, you begin to have some choice in the matter. Some people may become conscious of being domineering or brutal—or submissive or self-demeaning—and may decide that they don’t like these configurations in themselves and want to stop. Then they encounter a new process: learning how not to behave in their old patterns and to behave in new ways. Others [may] find something valuable in dominant or submissive behaviors under certain circumstances. For some people, not only do D&S and S/M provide a safe and consensual arena for these activities, but, because they eroticize them, they make pleasurable experiences that are less pleasurable in nonerotic contexts. So if you’re accustomed to being domineering and you find that you can get into a sexual situation where you can be dominant and have what you want, you may find that when you go back to the office, you don’t have to bully everybody.
There are theorists who will say the cause is genetic; there are theorists who will say the cause is psychodynamic: Something happens in childhood that plays itself out later on in life. The theory I am most comfortable with is a combination of nature and nurture, some kind of biological or genetic or psychological predisposition which gets activated somewhere along the line. I am happiest so far with John Money’s theory of lovemaps. He posits that whether or not there is some kind of biochemical predisposition, each person has a kind of mental map delineating what he or she will find erotic.
For example, a child listens to his or her parents in an ongoing, though unconscious, dominant-submissive relationship. Dad is very aggressive, very loud, very forceful about how he wants things to be done. Mom, though she may be as intelligent [and] competent, is meeker. Hearing his parents argue or fight or debate, the little child feels some fear. The fear sets up nervous reactions and, because there are a lot of nerve endings in the genital region, the child [is] stimulated. Children are all sexual. There are videos of children just a few months old masturbating. There are photographs of little boys in utero with erections. So there’s some connection for the little child. If this happens traumatically, or if it happens repeatedly over a period of many years, a lovemap is activated so that when the child later encounters situations in which control—expressed as D&S—are prominent, he or she may [be] erotically stimulated. If the child begins to masturbate around fantasies connected with this, or starts to engage in other sexual activities, the lovemap already established is set firmly in place.
People don’t get involved with sexuality that is concerned with control, power, and intense sensation without having control, power, and intense sensation as issues in their personal lives. I can’t say whether there’s a higher percentage of people involved in D&S and S/M activities who were abused as children than otherwise, partly because the people I see as a therapist are coming to me because they have problems. They’re not coming to me because they feel great. I’m seeing a skewed population. This is the problem with interviewing psychotherapists under any circumstances: We see people who are in trouble, so we cannot extrapolate from our clientele to the real world. Also, we are in a period right now when the notion of child abuse is extremely prominent. It’s part of the popular culture to talk about abuse and it’s easy to see childhood itself as a nonconsensual situation. We are all socialized and we need to be socialized. But to be socialized means that we are dominated, without our consent, by people who have power over us. If we then are unhappy as adults, it’s easy to look back and say, “I was abused.” We were all abused. But we need to start talking about degrees of abuse and what constitutes the differences between trauma and abuse.
We can call anything arrested sexuality or arrested development. When I’m driving in rush-hour traffic and I see intelligent, successful adults screaming at each other, cutting off other cars, risking their lives and dozens of other lives in order to grab 20 feet of space, I see infants functioning in adult bodies. The same can be true in some people’s sexuality, whatever the nature of their sexual behavior might be. It may be that some people in [S/M–D&S] communities had unusually difficult childhoods, but then so did a lot of people outside them. You probably could find a similar profile among professional politicians or policemen or the military or physicians or lawyers—anybody who finds satisfaction in controlling other people or the circumstances of their lives. One of the things I find conspicuous about the people I have seen in these [S/M or D&S] communities is the relatively high level of consciousness they exhibit about what they’re doing and their willingness to investigate it farther.
It is plausible that the usual notion of normative heterosexuality is what people are mostly supposed to become, but we’ll never know as long as we make sex so dirty for children. John Money suggested that if we really wanted children to grow up to be sexually healthy adults, we would treat them the same way we treat young athletes. We’d say, “Go out and practice as much as you can, and when you do well, we’ll reward you.” Instead, we hide sexuality. It should come as no surprise to those of us who think there’s a model of sexuality that people are supposed to follow that lots of people don’t. I know that there are some people who are involved with S/M or D&S activities who really cannot get off in any other way, but the same thing is true of missionary position, male-female heterosexuality. I look to maximize options. If people can get off with ordinary missionary-position sex and also with D&S and also with this, that, and the other, then they have many more opportunities for pleasure.
Certainly there are people who engage in D&S and S/M activities for whom it is a problem or the expression of a problem—but so also there are people who cannot engage in anything but ordinary penis-vagina intercourse for whom sex is a problem or the expression of a problem. If someone is really the sort of person who is likely to become a serial killer, he probably won’t be talking about it and he probably won’t be in so relatively conscious a relationship as S/M. He’ll much more likely be repressed or out there doing mayhem.
The fight for sexual freedom that we see waged in the streets and in the courts in our country—and which is not even allowed as a fight in many other countries—is not an irrelevant fight. It is essential to our freedoms and our identities as individuals and as a society. If you control people’s sexuality, you control people. The people I have worked with who were involved in conscious S/M or D&S relationships have not seemed to me to have been destroyed, damaged, or abused by those relationships. If people are not damaging themselves or others, it really is nobody’s business what they are doing.
I’m heterosexual [and] switchable. I consider myself to be not so much dominant as sadistic and masochistic. I need S/M to have a good sex life—something I found out when I was about 22. I was never shy with women. I remember my friends, after sex, would always say how wonderful it was. I’d have sex and it was okay, but it was nothing special. I could take it or leave it. I knew that whenever I saw a woman dressed in leather, rubber, latex, anything tight and shiny, I would get turned on, but I never related it sexually. But at 22 I was traveling in Denmark [and met] a woman who was about 35—an “older woman”—and I complimented her on her beautiful clothing. She invited me to her apartment and, lo and behold, she happened to have a dungeon. I didn’t know anything about S/M: All I knew is that she was beautiful and an older woman, which turned me on at the time. She began tying me up, playing with me, spanking me, and to make a long story short, I had an orgasm. [That’s when] I realized that my sexuality was tied into a lot of the fantasy things. That basically started me on my career of S/M.
I was fortunate that at an early age I found people and places to go to. I didn’t have damaging emotional relationships. Once I knew that I was really into it, I wouldn’t have a lover unless she was interested in S/M, because it’s very frustrating to be in a relationship where you’re not sexually satisfied. I think it’s deceitful to be with someone and have to go secretly outside of the relationship to get satisfied. I see a lot of people coming to the group who are married: Their spouses are either not into it or know nothing about it. I think it’s very sad that people do things like that, because the whole purpose is to share and explore our sexuality together.
Many people don’t like the word sadomasochism [because of its connotations]. I know people who would never give or receive pain but think of themselves as into S/M—transvestites, foot fetishists, clothing fetishists. What’s D&S to one person is S/M to another. You can spend days, weeks, and months trying to define things. [Some] people are into the Scene and hate to use the word S/M; some get hung up on the terminology. I’m not worried about it. Whatever makes someone feel comfortable is really what’s important.
For me, S/M is a very important part of a relationship. I enjoy dominating or submitting to someone that I really like. It doesn’t have to end in intercourse. However, for me, when I’m in a relationship, and I currently am, the S/M is foreplay and it ends up in what I call S/M intercourse.
I went out with a woman for five years; we were madly in love. I met her at an S/M club. We had everything in common—the same music, same eating habits, same everything—except our sexuality. At first we would play a lot with each other, [but] she stopped playing and grew to resent the Scene. It’s amazing, because everything was together except our sexuality. I started suppressing my S/M fantasies. I found that it’s like a bubble in water: You suppress it, the bubble pops up; you push the bubble down, it stays down a little longer, [then] comes up about twice as fast. I suppressed for six months, and then I had to have S/M. Even today we’re still the best of friends. However, sexually, we’re just not compatible.
I’m an optimist. I’ve never been depressed or thought I’m the only one in the world. I’ve always been comfortable with what I’m into because it’s always been consensual and something I’ve enjoyed. I’ve never felt guilty. I don’t feel I can or even want to change. It’s like going to someone who’s gay and saying, “You’re going to be straight tomorrow.” It doesn’t happen.
I like fetish clothing. I love wearing it and want my lover or friends to wear it. I have a lot of clothing which probably could be construed as feminine—latex panties and things like that—but I’ve never thought of myself as a cross-dresser. Secondly, I like converting pain into pleasure. I really get into spanking [and] a lot of caning. I went to an English school: We used to get caned and spanked [there]. I used to hate that until I was about 14. Then we had female teachers who were in their 30s and they used to spank us. When I was spanked by them, it never really hurt and I suddenly started enjoying it. But I never saw a sexual connection, although from age 14 I started having spanking fantasies. As regards wearing tight clothing, that goes back to when I was seven or eight years old.
[My S/M fantasies really] grew once I started understanding them in a positive manner. I have certain fantasies which I really enjoy playing out, [such as] worshiping a goddess. I [also] like wrestling with a woman. My girlfriend’s really into that—that’s a lot of fun and very physical. You can do it in a very sensual and erotic way.
I like groups that have workshops. [One can] learn about the dangers of doing bondage, which a lot of people are unaware of. There are do’s and don’ts for everything. We have a few doctors in the Scene who are very good, and once in a while they’ll give a talk on the health and safety aspects.
I have been a member of Eulenspiegel since 1980 and on their board since 1982. The Eulenspiegel Society [TES] was founded in 1971 in New York by Pat Bond for masochists only. They met in his apartment. After a few months [they] decided to open it up to everyone in S/M. TES is a nonprofit group. It’s purely voluntary, and [its] main purpose is educational. Eulenspiegel comes from German mythology. When the group was formed, a woman attended who loved the name Till Eulenspiegel, based on a mythological German masochist. He used to run up and down a mountain carrying a pail of water. He hated running down the mountain, because then he thought of carrying the pail up; but he enjoyed carrying the pail up, because he then thought about carrying it down.
We have two meetings a week. The first is open to everybody. We have a talk [or] demo [which] lasts an hour. The second [hour], we have a circle where people listen or talk. Everyone introduces himself by name or pseudonym. You’re free to sit and listen. People talk about their interests or S/M-related topics and issues. People find it very therapeutic and informative. The second night of the week we have special-interest groups. We have a dominant-men–submissive-women’s group and a dominant-women submissive-men’s group. Occasionally we have a switchables groups. We have a transvestites group. Another important group is [our] novices group. New people are usually very shy. Often they want to know where you can find toys and how to use them. We may talk about how we got into the Scene, how we play. How to meet people who have similar interests is a very common question. We tell people it can be at a local movie house, a local art gallery—anywhere you meet the person of your dreams. You’re not always going to find someone at an S/M club.
We open the meeting with 10 minutes of announcements about membership or our quarterly newsletter. We tell people about major events in the future—like parties or fund-raisers or the Gay Pride Parade. Then the guest speaker talks. They end the lecture with a question-and-answer period. Then we put all the chairs in a big circle. The rules for the circle are that you [must] raise your hand, because cross-conversation [is] disruptive. Every week different people run the circle to keep it interesting. Afterwards, we usually go to a restaurant [with] a big room in the back and socialize and get to know people on a different level.
The Eulenspiegel Society has a mailing list of about 500 ex-members, so between past and present members our membership is close to 1000. We average between 30 to 70 people at a meeting. There are many more who’ve [visited but] who never [joined]. We also get between five and 10 human sexuality classes from the local universities every year. We’ve had a few students who’ve been hostile about S/M, but usually when they find out that we’re regular folk, they don’t have too much to say. The bottom line is [that] it’s consenting, caring adults. We’re not blatant at the meetings; we don’t play. It’s a forum to talk. However, we do play at parties.
We look at [our goals] as sexual liberation for all. We don’t discriminate against any segment of the population. We feel everyone should have the same protection. We’ve always been politically active with the gay leather community, and we’ve always helped and participated in local fund-raisers. We’re probably going to get more politically active. The leather community has to be strong and stick together if we’re going to withstand harassment. Personally I think we have to get involved if we’re going to survive. Otherwise people will walk all over our civil liberties. I would like to see more networking and shared resources within our community. There [are] a lot of lawyers, doctors, and professional people [in the Scene]. If we were all aware of each other, and our strengths, we could have a strong business bloc. I think there are a lot of very good political activists out there, especially in the National Leather Association [who] are doing outreach programs [to] the “straight” community to spread the word in a positive way.
I’ve always felt this from the bottom of my heart, and it’s a very simple thing: Everyone is different. If you can learn to live and love and accept each other’s differences, the world would be a better place.
My mother, God rest her soul, was a phenomenal woman whose basic attitude toward sex is that when sex is good, it’s great, and when it’s lousy, it’s not too bad. She and my father brought me up without the guilt so often associated with sex, so I have been able to enjoy my sex life. I do [have] a lot of recreational sex, but I realize and appreciate the difference between that and a warm, loving relationship. I’ve been married twice; at one point in my life I was living with five women at a time; at other points in my life I’ve had single, monogamous relationships. I’ve run the gamut. The relationships are what stick out in my mind more than the scenes.
I’m very much a hedonist. Any kind of D&S scenes that I get into are strictly a form of fantasy foreplay. The point of the entire scene is still sex [not] as a substitute for sex. I have many nonfetish-oriented relationships which I enjoy entirely. I’m strictly dominant, but I’ve had long-lasting relationships with dominant women [in which we] hung our whips on the door outside the bedroom.
D&S is a part of my life, but I can walk away from it tomorrow … at least for a week. It’s the old saw: Nobody wants to eat steak every night of the week. I tend to be attracted to women who are independent outside of the bedroom, so sometimes that can cause a lot of sparks; but I’ve had relationships that [were] totally slave-master 100 percent in every detail.
When I was young, there was only one thing on my mind: getting laid. I can’t [say] exactly when my D&S interest began. It would have to be after I got into the sex business. [As] a professional photographer and cinematographer specializing in the adult field, I started getting hired to shoot this stuff. It interested me, and [if] something interests me, I will experiment with it. I found that I enjoyed it. I’m much more into B&D or D&S rather than S&M. It is part of my personality—the same part that makes me want to be a film director. I like to control emotions. When I make a film, I am, by definition, controlling an entire audience’s emotions, and I carry that same feeling into the bedroom. Controlling a woman’s emotions gives me the same kind of thrill, and pushes the same buttons in my psyche. I’m [also] very pushy, and tend to be opinionated, loud, and forceful outside of the bedroom, so it tends to carry over.
I enjoy bondage, leather, spanking, straight sex. I can get into a lot of different things, depending on the partner I’m with. I’m not into pain, but I have gone into heavy scenes with partners who, because they were so turned on by it, brought me past the point I would normally stop.
The real nature of S&M was driven home to me about 15 years ago. I was doing a movie called House of Sin. There was an S&M scene [with] a mistress and her slave, who were, in real life, living together. She had him on the floor, with his hands tied behind him. She had a dog chain wrapped around his cock and balls and was lifting him off the floor by his cock and balls and smacking him across the nuts, hard enough so that every guy in the room had his legs crossed. Two things stuck in my mind: First, that while this was happening, this guy had an incredible erection, and two, as soon as I yelled, “Cut!” he immediately started to bitch and moan about the fact that he was lying on a hardwood floor and didn’t have a pillow behind his head. At that moment I realized that what she was doing to his genitals was not painful; the little bit of pressure on the back of his head, that’s what his brain was interpreting as pain. But the hard pressure of her hand coming in contact with his nuts was erotically stimulating. I realized that in S&M, if it’s painful, you’re doing it wrong.
The body feels stimulation; the mind interprets [it]. The way that the mind interprets it determines whether it’s pleasure or pain. Who knows what determines that—probably a combination of what determines everything in this life: heredity, education, and environment. Someone much brighter than me once said that there is only one erogenous zone in the human body, and that’s the space between the ears. If your brain interprets [something] as erotic, you will not feel it as pain. What makes someone aroused by the smell of three-day-old sweat socks? Damned if I know. But I know it happens, and more power to them. They’re not harming anybody. If that’s what gets them through the night, God bless them.
There is a misconception about the people involved in the Scene—what we term “Ted Bundy-itis.” When you discuss S&M, the first thing people think about is a Ted Bundy type preying on unsuspecting women and getting sexual kicks by maiming and killing. It’s as far away from the Scene as it is from mainstream society.
The people in this Scene are, by and large, older, more intelligent, and probably better off economically than the average person. Maybe they need more mental stimulation to be erotically aroused. Maybe as you get older, you need more to keep your interest. I’ve been involved in the Scene in Europe, and I find that the people who are seriously involved can buy and sell me three times over, whereas, I guess, the poor garage mechanic is willing to hump whatever he can grab on a Friday night. I don’t know if that’s an elitist attitude; it’s certainly self-serving, since I’m into the Scene. But it’s a personal observation. That’s one of the reasons I started The S&M News. It is a newspaper aimed strictly at adults. We’re trying to cover every aspect of the fetish scene. [It’s] strictly informational, not erotic. I am gratified to say that the response has been nothing short of phenomenal.
My personal beliefs are basically [that] whatever people want to do without causing permanent harm to another is [okay]. Personally, I do not like any kind of a scene that causes injury. I would never draw blood. I believe that the skin of the body is there to protect what’s in your body from outside forces, be it germs, or whatever. Scatological play, to me, once again, is on the edge of being unhealthy. [It] turns me off. I have gone as far as I want to go. I would not go any further. I do not get off sexually [from] inflicting pain.
My [college] degree is in photographic science. After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, I went to work for a large motion picture processing laboratory, and ran that for a while, then worked for an English corporation building an emulsion coating plant in the United States. I’m a former class-A photographer with the film union and shot original footage for the film Taxi Driver. That’s basically how I got into this business.
I have three different companies. One is Carter Stevens Presents, where I produce and direct adult videos. I specialize in fetish-oriented material because the market for “straight” adult material is glutted. Most of my stuff is released by Chain of Command here in the States, and under Amsterdam in Europe. I also shoot and provide production services for many other fetish companies. About a year ago I started The S&M News. Our press run at the moment is about 10,000. I [also] have a partner in Europe, and the two of us sell American product to Europe and try to sell European product to America, although that’s not as easy. Americans have this thing about foreign films: They don’t like them. [Also], the adult material in Europe is much more adult. The stuff that they’re making, especially in the fetish field, is too hard for current American standards.
[Generally], you have people who want to turn out a decent product, you have people who are turning product just for the bucks, you have people who are exploiting a market, and there are people who are trying to cater to a market. Everybody’s taste is different, too. There are people who don’t want the real stuff. They want pretty girls who look like they tied themselves up and could just as easily untie themselves. There’s another market that wants to know that this girl is truly well bound and helpless. And by the same token, there are people who get turned on if [the actress] looks like she is not enjoying it, and there are other people who will get turned on if she looks like she’s enjoying it tremendously. But it’s Sturgeon’s Law: 99 percent of everything is crap.
The first, probably the most important [problem] in this day and age is legal constraints. It’s not that the laws have changed; it’s the way personal freedoms are interpreted. [For example], I could never film a golden shower in one of my videos today. It is not more illegal, but it is economically unfeasible. The average prosecutor wants to go after pornography. Say it’s getting close to an election: The prosecutor will pick an easy target. Pornography is one of the easiest targets. But to the average audience, straight, good old-fashioned humping is no longer as taboo as it used to be. He knows that if he goes after run-of-the-mill porno, he is going to have a harder time getting a conviction. Golden showers, fist fucking, enemas, things that the average person is going to interpret as perverse: Since I’m very allergic to jail cells, I leave [these things] out of my films because [then] I am less likely to get picked off the shelf in Podunk, Iowa, and face a court battle which would make it economically unfeasible for me to do business.
I do not have any sex in my fetish films. I do a lot of shooting in Europe [and] I make two versions because the Europeans are strange: They like sex in their sex films. So I shoot two versions of everything that I do in Europe. Hard core [is] for release in Europe only. Every time I go to Europe, I’m less excited about coming back here. There have been increased prosecutions all over the country. [But] I’m here and I’m in the fight. I don’t like to be, but my only other choice is getting out of the business I’ve been in for 22 years. I’m [definitely] not a champion of pornography. I don’t think we’re doing any great social work. These are fuck films. They’re entertainment, not brain surgery. On the other hand, I don’t think we’re doing any harm. We make these for adults with adults, and what adults want to do in their own damn home is their own damn business, as long as nobody is harmed. I am a champion of personal freedom. The right to have fun is not in the Constitution [and] not protected. So I vote Liberal and pray for the Supreme Court justices to see the light.