Eristic Virtue

I have had a pathetically easy life.

A Marxist might retort, privileged. A bourgeois, fortunate.

In any case, it is true: there has been no more fortunate time, no more fortunate nation, and no more fortunate class than the ones I was born into. My birth coincied nearly exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and for all of my childhood, with that brief blip on 9/11 and the following months as an exception, my country was reaping one of the greatest peace dividends in world history. I was born into an age of unparalelled technological progress and economic prosperity, in a nation so flush that it could afford to make charity compulsory and guarantee every man, woman, and child 3 meals a day and a roof over their heads. I was born into a prosperous enough family to not have a dollar of debt coming out of college, and was far enough up Maslow's heirarchy that I could spend it on an enormously personally fulfilling but ultimately comercially dubious degree focusing on philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, I had a stable family who softened the sharp edges of the world and never showed me anything but love.

This is not the kind of life one writes songs about.

Of course, there is little more inimical to the values of my homeland, or that of my Dutch ancestors, nations of shopkeepers both, than that lust for glory and eternity that most often lodges itself in hope of military success. I have no desire to be written about in a modern-day Iliad.

Yet even this burgher can admire their struggle. Not their courage, not their prowess in battle, certainly not their vainglorious attitude and posturing for position that seems at once simian, puerile, and a sad parody of masculinity. Their struggle. The fact that they were thrown into the fire and, at least some of them, emerged unscathed, or at least not broken.

I've been thinking about this in light of Orlando's posts about slumming and BDSM. We're coming at the same issue from two very different traditions, I think, and that produces some notable differences. Most importantly, I don't conceive of their life of struggle as any more real than the "sheltered" one that I've led. This isn't so much a quest for truth as it is a quest for virtue. It isn't knowledge I seek, but the ability to look myself in the mirror at the end of the day.

Of course, this competitive, eristic virtue can manifest itself even in completely safe settings. I imagine the philosophy Phd who triumphs over his interlocutors when defending his dissertation feels something of the triumph that Achilles did when dragging the body of Hector around Troy. So too does the loving parent who braves everything for the good of his or her child, or the service submissive devoting all to the care of their dom, if in very different ways.

The fact that such diverse manifestations of virtue are lumped together in my mind is illuminating. What unites them is not triumphing over a rival or the nobility of service, it's the fact that they had an obstacle to overcome, and they succeeded. This is somewhat troubling, since seeking obstacles for the sake of obstacles is self-destructive, masochistic in the legitimately negative sense. Moreover, struggle for its own sake, with no aim to speak of- is simply nihilism. And perhaps owing to my easy life, I haven't found something worth fighting for yet.

I should probably find it.

Seeking a third option

I have often heard it said that the asshole-doormat dichotomy is the male equivalent of the virgin-whore dichotomy. Condescending or altogether unattractive nice guys are fond of spouting the wisdom that women go for jerks; the few aggressive men who find that their strategy works are fond of mocking those who fall into the former ctegory. Both sides, in any case, seem to deny that there might be a middle ground between treating their partners poorly and refusing to stand up for themselves.

In ethics, too, this divide persists. All too often it seems that Christian love is at odds with Aristotelian virtue. Eristic Aristotelian virtue demands a purpose to life, one that it is capable to succeed or fail at. It gives one something to strive for, but it opens the possibility of failure- and since, whether it be in military ventures, commercial conquests, or something similar, that goal is most often satisfied in a competitive mileu, there are winners and losers.

And of course, it is impossible to love a loser. If one so buys the philosophy that one is unable to look onself in the mirror should one fail to live up to its tenets, one would be incapable of loving someone that also fails to live out that philosophy. Even in non-zero sum competition, where it is possible in theory for everyone to succeed, not everyone will.

Love, on the other hand, seems to urge esteem for everyone, no matter what their accomplishments or virtues. But if dignity is something that is given gratis, a reward for mere existence or the preciousness of human life, there does not seem to be much to strive for.

So I suppose my question is, is it impossible to hold myself to a high standard while still refusing to accept the lack of the divine spark in every person I meet?

Rant time

I'm tired of being an existential threat.

I'm tired of my life being used as a political football by people with privilege coming out of their ears.

I'm tired of having to read every work of political philosophy with a view to justifying my existence.

I'm tired of every halfway decent of political philosophy shouting from the mountaintops that my life is a subject unworthy of their attention.

I'm tired of constantly being on the defensive.

I'm tired of not being able to cross post this on facebook for fear of losing my anonymity.

Normally, it's water off a duck's back. Haters gonna hate. Aquinas had ideological blinders, Aristotle was a douche. None of them were cool enough to understand me. None could destroy my insistence that my life is my own, or shake my faith in the liberationist consensus of personal autonomy uber alles. My life was my own, firmly ensconced within the realm of self-regarding behavior. The haters could fuck off.

This year the curriculum presented a unique challenge, and a steadily growing discontent waiting to burst a dam with self doubt. Hobbes was a fascist prick, no bones about it, but Spinoza, Rousseau, hell, even Locke afforded a far too broad scope for social coercion. More than social coercion: a social unity that [i]must[/i] be preserved at all costs, whose malcontents pissed on the gift they were given in being delivered from the chaos of a state of nature, whose malefactors, selfishly asserting their right to defy the collective, committed the cardinal sin of undermining our incredibly fragile peace.

I, of course, instinctively knew that there was no place in such a world for me, doomed by my nature to forever exist on the fringe until some benefactor to the public weal ended my threat for good. Which is why my normally aloof inquiry began to be quite introspective, and my political became my personal.

So of course, when my vague apprehensions about the role of those who approach the world on a slant crystallized into something definite, when it ceased being an academic question and these defenders of the status quo made their prescriptions specific and personal, when, in short, Tocqueville decided to unmask his bigotry toward nonbelievers, I snapped.

My sophistry didn't skip a beat, of course, and I avoided the cardinal sins of bringing personal baggage into the discussion and excoriating ancient authors for retrograde mores. Yet I am sure my building rage and increasing skepticism was apparent every time I endeavored to defend de Tocqueville, that really, since for him it is necessary for religious consensus to exist in order to protect a commonwealth, it's not actually the tyranny of the majority he spent 5 chapters railing against, really, it's no more intrusive and tyrannical than prohibitions against theft, also necessary for stability, as I prostituted my identity and dignity within it in the interests of fairness and honest inquiry.

So I sprinted for 30 minutes to blow off some steam, unsuccessfully attempted to procure alcohol, spent two hours in bed seething and composing this post, and now that I've gotten this off my chest I'm gonna see if sleep is at all possible tonight.

The English language sucks- meditations on love

You'd think a substantially Christian nation would have taken better care with the language used to express its fundamental truth. Alas, it ain't so.

The notion of an all-encompassing love has been dragged through the dialectic, sullied so many times by a false dichotomy between hard-nosed realists and starry-eyed romantics, used as a plot device in sappy romance novels and hackneyed children's fare so many times that I can't but evoke a million cliches when speaking of one of my fundamental spiritual truths.

The foremost culprit: the very word love. While its linguistic history is a fascinating look into how we view these concepts as related, the Greeks had it right when they subdivided the concept in their language. Our word can be used for Eros, erotic love, Philia, the love of friendship, Agape, romantic love, and finally, from the Latin, Caritas, the root word of charity, denoting that all-encompassing love for mankind.

It is the last one I'm concerned with here.

I'm not abandoning my materialist bona fides (at least, not yet). I'm not positing a metaphysical conception of love that has the power to affect the world and change things apart from the self-moved actions of individuals who feel this love. My outlook is still fundamentally secular, at least for now.

Mind over matter, it really don't matter
If the street's idle chatter turns your heart strings to tatters
Flatter hopes don't flatter and soul batter won't congeal to mend
a life that is shattered into shards
Was it in the cards?

--Bad Religion, Materialist

This is a sentiment I still largely believe, at least as far as practical matters go. Love does not exist independently of humanity, and if we wish to create a loving world, we must turn to our own devices, not a phantasmal spirit.


For me, philosophy has always been an expression of love. Love requires understanding; its foremost expression in the thinker has always been the interest in understanding another's point of view. The love of ideas is the love of people, for people are nothing more than the ideas through which they experience the world. By far the most satisfying part of my education has been, when studying an author for months at a time, the subjunctive tense is dropped. When the thought becomes not, This is how Plato would view it, but when your understanding of an author becomes so complete that your natural affections cannot but be influenced by what you have read, when you have internalized that person's philosophy into your own.

This is love. This is sex, for exactly the same reason that eros and caritas can be encompassed under the same word. This is sex, because it is a meeting of two souls, separated perhaps by centuries and millenia but no less profound for the separation.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

--Galatians, 3:28

This is the love that the Christians used to smash Aristotelian aristocracy. This is the love that refused to buy the dichotomy between virtue and caring for our fellow man, the love that found virtue in the weak. This is the love that refused to accept that dignity belonged perforce only to the great, that virtue is a competition, that only the refined and powerful deserved the title of good.

For someone living after the transformation, this fact seems unremarkable, and it is difficult for us moderns to know just how different it was before Christ. It was in fact the greatest shift in thought Western Civilization ever underwent. One need only see what contempt Aristotle held the merely good-natured man in, and the contempt with which most pagans greeted humility, to see that it is so.

Finally, and most to the point, this is the love of feminism and queer theory, of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, of this blog and my companion blogs. Progressiveness is nothing more than applying that all-encompassing caritas to ever widening swathes of the population, who had heretofore been denied the dignity that is the birthright of everyone with a human soul.

Here I will do my damnedest to express myself and make myself understood, and will seek to understand others. For it is only in this way that me and my fellow BDSMers can be loved, and be welcomed back into the fold of that caritas that ought to be all-encompassing.

Don't call me a sissy

I've written about crossdressing here and here before this. Relevant quote:

Ultimately, crossdressing in a BDSM context says that feminine traits in a male are shameful, and should be mocked, and that the only natural order is a dominant male and submissive female.

So I've changed my mind from those earlier posts, right? For the most part

It's clear to me now that those posts were based on faulty premises, but their logic is sound. Most egregiously, I assumed anything being taken on as a submissive to enhance the practice of BDSM necessarily degraded both the submissive and the trait taken on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and were it so, there would be nothing redeeming about the lifestyle.

There is certainly a spirit in which feminine traits could be degrading within the context of BDSM, where one could play upon a man's insecurities and the contempt with which our society views the feminine. For my part, to the extent that I buy into this narrative I find it unfortunate, and do my best not to bring it up in my sex life.

Yet this is not the only way to incorporate transgender or crossdressing themes into a BDSM scenario. In the first place, it seems absurd on its face to claim that any transgender person participating in BDSM necessarily degrades whatever sex they've transitioned into, especially since presumably many of them are perfectly happy and secure about their transitioned gender. Nor ought I be concerned that this reflects society's larger mores that may be destructive, if I am confident that this results from an authentic expression of the self rather than internalized misogyny or pressure to conform, as this would indicate a wholly unhealthy level of attention to the dialectic. Housewives who have thought through their options and ultimately decided that a life of child rearing and domestic duties are the best way for them to be fulfilled ought not be worried that their authentic choice coincides with a choice many are forced into, and likewise I shouldn't be concerned that, the way my sexuality works out, I end up mimicking male dominant female submission tropes.

In the end, it doesn't need much more justification than this: I look fantastic in a corset, and I'll be damned if I prevent myself from looking my best for my Master.

Huh

Will Wilkinson, one of my favorite libertarian bloggers, on masculinity in America.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with.

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/

Intriguing. I've certainly found the process of constructing an identity greatly aided by not buying into heterosexist culture (when reading the article linked in Wilkinson's post, I thought more than once- "I'm so glad I'm not normal), but I've never heard it expressed in quite this way. Fascinating stuff.

Intellectual Ammunition

Try bringing up this study to anyone who buys into the hackeneyed pop psychology explanations of BDSM: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24238131-2,00.html

AN unusual sex survey has found that Australians who enjoy bondage and discipline are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise "normal" sex.

The research showed 2 per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role play.

And contrary to commonly-held stereotypes, they are not doing so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are "sexually deficient" in some way, according the study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales.

"Our findings support the idea that bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a minority," Associate Professor Juliet Richters and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The findings showed that it was more common among gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and that participants were more likely to have been more sexually adventurous in other ways.

"However, they were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious," said Prof Richters, author of the book Doing It Down Under.

In fact, men who take part may be happier, with results showing they score significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men.

The researchers did not study why this was, but suspect it might simply be that they're more in harmony with themselves because they're into something unusual and are comfortable with that.

Prof Richters says the findings go against professional views of BDSM.

"People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation," she said.

There was also an assumption, mostly among the general public, that people involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, "and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused".

She said she hoped the results would help change these stereotypes.

Apparently Tim Tebow is a virgin

There are many possible angles to attack this story from, but I'm not interested here in the hero worship of athletes, the appropriateness of asking such a prying question, or our fascination with the sex lives of athletes. I do want to talk about how this fits into the mythic Tebow: thanking Jesus for winning the Heisman trophy, his ministry in prisons, his overseas proselyting, helping with circumcision, and generally his status as percieved upstanding guy, the sort of guy who is faithful and immune to the pleasures of the flesh, the sort of guy that chose to stay in his room playing a party game isntead of hitting the town when he had a night in Atlantic City.

I will be honest: when I heard the news, I felt a little threatened and defensive in a completely irrational way. Here's me, a philosopher instead of an athlete, a heathen, queer, perverted, a dire existential threat to traditional values- and someone whose prowess on the field I admired greatly, who seems to have the respect of everyone but opposing SEC teams- showing yet again that he is not me, or anywhere close to me in conceptual space. I could not help but hear, in the effusive praise of the media (when they weren't excoriating the reporter who asked the question), that he is a virgin and I should be too.

But why should I feel that way? Tebow never condemned people who make different choices than he does, and he doesn't seem the sort to judge. I have to own that the response consistent with my values would be admiration, not because chastity is inherently valuable, but because undergoing such privations for the sake of your values is admirable; much like vegetarians, I can respect his dedication even as I disagree with his values.

I hate to leave it on a hackeneyed note, but I suppose we've all got to learn, myself included, that everyone has different forms of flourishing, and we ought not interpret respect for someone else's lifestyle as derision for our own. Certainly there are those who wish to remain celibate before marriage, or whose natural instincts incline them toward intimacy only in certain contexts; if Tebow gives these people a better way to live up to their values, or makes them feel more comfortably acting in the way that feels most in tune with their selves, he's doing good for the world.

Dear BDSM organizers who make their events aged 21+

Fuck you with a rusty shovel.

Sincerely,
A hot 20-year old

BDSM and Christianity

Found this picture of a tattoo of St. Teresa of Avila from Trinity the other day, and it reminded me that medieval Christianity produced a whole lot of writers and thinkers that, looking at it from my perspective, articulated and understood the masochistic experience in ways far more eloquent than anywhere else I've seen it. St. Theresa. John Donne. It's no accident that the BDSM community has glommed on to a lot of the symbolism and implements of the period, most notably from the flagellants.

And while the masochistic and submissive experiences may be different, I don't think Christianity's kinship to kink is accidental. There's a lot of places you can take Far from it: I don't believe that I would be submissive if I had not been raised Catholic. Fundamentally, Christ made submission noble, and made the submissive a hero.

My supreme role model bore his love in tribulation and his purity in agony, his suffering was virtue and the ultimate expression of his all encompassing love was to die on the cross. If the height of my romantic ideal became one who was willing to suffer for the good of their beloved, it has much to do with this narrative. If we English speakers correctly group together so many different concepts under "love," it should not surprise us that caritas can morph into philia can morph into eros.

My savior preached the nobility of service and the excellence of humility. Despite being the stainless man, who embodied all the virtues and having the essence of the divine within him, despite being the perfect human being, Christ was not too proud to get on his knees and wash his disciples' feet.

More importantly than that, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The world is turned upside down by the divine revelation; the wisdom of the mighty is the folly of God. The downtrodden can take the mantle of righteousness.

ἔχεις μοι εἰπεῖν, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἆρα διδακτὸν ἡ ἀρετή

Can unchosen character traits be considered unvirtuous or blameworthy?

The inimitable Bitchy Jones on forced fem once again:

"The best of these is probably ‘Women wear trousers!’ Because when you’re trying to deconstruct and evaluate what the position in femdom of forced feminisation as a way of diminishing men and what kind of ideas about men and women it reflects and endorses there really is nothing like an irrelevant non-sequitur to stop you in your misguided tracks."

It's got Nine Deuce's acrid tang. The "there's some sort of thing wrong with you. It's not your fault (ND'd blame it on patriarchy, god knows what Bitchy would blame it on, but in any case, it's clearly not an aspect of the will), and it may not even be immoral because it's not hurting anyone. But it's not noble. It demonstrates a character flaw, something corrupted within you. Maybe for souls such as yourself, giving in to such desires is the best decision in a bad situation, but don't pretend like it's a good thing."

I've always felt that such an attitude was decidedly unhelpful. Beating yourself up over desires never seemed to do anyone any good. Much better to accept yourself for who you are, right? Much better to find something liberating in being different from the norm, rather than be paralyzed by it.

Yet I have to own that all of those are utilitarian defenses. If one were to consciously adopt beliefs based on expected return, they might work. Perhaps the subconscious does so, but now that they're arrayed in this fashion, it seems an insult to the truth to leave it at where I'd rather the truth be.

Yet it also seems horridly unfair to condemn a fundamentally unchosen trait. The only coherent morality has always seemed to me to only be concerned with acts of the will. Morality consists of correct action, not correct thought.

The difficulty here may be professing a morality based only on the harm principle while still harboring attachments to other commonly accepted principles of morality (the framework I've been exposed to divides traditional morality into the categories of Harm, Purity, Loyalty, Fairness, and Respect for Authority). Such an attachment to the will makes sense in a heavily consequentialist, utilitarian morality based only on the harm principle, but if you're going to accept purity as any basis of morality, purity of thought seems just as important as purity of actions. In that sense, the difficulty may only be an insufficiently rigorous application of my moral principles to my moral intuitions. I, for example, am repulsed by eating dogs, but I'm also able to overcome my revulsion long enough to realize that my moral intuition in this case is invalid. Perhaps then I need only return to my first principles: clearly no one is being directly harmed by people doing what Bitchy describes, so there's no problem. Describing something as bad but not immoral seems like a cop out: you're trying to have your cake and eat it too by indulging a bad moral intuition while trying to soothe your intellect that knows such condemnation is not justified.

Maybe the force of such a case indicates that I ought to examine my principles. If that's the case, well, it's not something I'll get done in the scope of one post!

Rape culture and the anti-gay movement

From the ever awesome Dw3t-Hthr over at safe spaces:

"The primary contributor to "rape culture" is the idea that people -- particularly women -- are not competent definers of their own sexuality. That they 'really want it' even when they don't, or that they only need to be instructed to become fully sexual in the manner their instructor desires, or that their decisions about sexuality in one set of circumstances mandate that they make the same decision in different circumstances."

Amen.

But I'd like to use this as a springboard for another conversation that's likely to piss a few people off.

The truth of the matter is, I see a lot of this same mentality in the excoriation of the ex-gay movement. I stand by my position that reparative therapy for homosexuality is in all cases unnecessary, and in most cases traumatic and a poor idea for all involved. But whenever I hear people claiming that the ex-gays can't truly have become heterosexual, I see the same old colonization of other people's sexualities. We queers have a theory, and damnit if we're not going to make every person fit into it in some way or another. I may disagree with their decision, but claiming that deep down they're actually homosexual, that they can't have become heterosexual- well, it strikes me as saying that they're not competent enough to define their own sexuality.

I understand the concerns many people have. Obviously there's considerable pressure to become an ex-gay. Obviously the proponents of the ex-gay movement are doing the same colonization of other's experiences that I'm decrying here. But I think that neither coercion nor oppression invalidates free will. And that neither of those things compromises the individual's perogative to name their own experiences.

Yes.

HarperJean on the latest BDSM and feminism kerfuffle:

"I've been thinking lately that any "examining" relative to sexual desires is better focused on their effects rather than their causes.

We could stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that someone's desires for dominance and/or submission are the result of bad relationships, bad role models and sexist culture. So what? I don't think feminism is about abstract notion or morality or purity. The relevant question is not where desires come from but where they take you. Do your submissive fantasies and/or experiences leave you feeling good about yourself and your relationships? Do they contribute to safe and satisfying relationships? Do your dominant fantasies and/or experiences lead you to actually denigrate or abuse your partner, or others around you, or have other harmful effects? The Feministing commenter who said it would be better for people's communities if they didn't do BDSM seemed to hint at such an effects-based analysis, but didn't offer anything to support it.

Surely, some people do experience kinky fantasies or play in ways that are harmful to self-esteem, intimacy, personal autonomy or mutual respect. We might say that they're "in it for the wrong reasons," but whatever the reason what's important is that, at least in the ways they're currently doing it, being in it is not good for them or for others.

So, I think it is not helpful and can be hurtful to ask someone to examine and justify where their desires come from. By contrast, at least as a piece of advice, examining how you're going about it and what it is doing for you seems just fine. And in fact that's something how-to writes, presenters and other community figures often do advise.

Of course, either way it could still be used as a bludgeon, because it can still carry the assumption that the examining can only have one result and if you reach a different one you're just wrong."

http://trinityva.livejournal.com/1000547.html

Yes, exactly. I was planning a post along these lines, but she nailed it so well I don't think I have to. Suffice it to say that I've always found "where did this come from?" (which is inevitably the kind of answer feminists are looking for when they ask us to "examine" our desires) to be a singularly unproductive question. A thing's origin has nothing to do with its value, or its morality.

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

I will not run away.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, how much more the one without intensity! I've lived a waking sleep, a conscious death, moments cascading before the consciousness without appreciation or purpose. A dull listlessness, the rut of routine, robbing me of the little time I have here.

I will not live that way.

And the way out of that ennui is masochism. The harmonies and dissonances, the pains and the pleasures, the joys and the sorrows: it is the celebration of life, the absolute opposite of the death drive the psychologists have so erroneously imputed to us! What saccharine things are a song full of tonics and fifths, a life spent free from struggle and sorrow! The harmonies and dissonances of pain and pleasure make a sweet symphony for my soul to gorge upon, its intensity screaming with a pressing insistency: I am LIFE, I am wonderful and terrible, and all the better for having the two mixed into one!

I will no longer run away from what gives life its spice and its color, its meaning.

What would one want with heaven, anyway?

Live and learn

Owing to our long distance relationship, my Master and I have an open relationship; we can date other people. One of the people I was considering dating was a good fit for me in many ways, but there was a deal breaker. See, I like doing nice things for friends; I like using my car to drive them places, I like kicking in a bit more than my share of the booze money. I can take charge when it's necessary, but I'm more comfortable following another's lead. for her, all of these things were a sign of weakness, and every encounter was an adversarial one to get the better of the other. Not only did this make interpersonal relations with her troublesome, but it attacked my very sense of identity. I mean, all of these things that I had been taught from birth that made me a good person- my willingness to share, my lack of pushiness, my (at least self percieved) tendency to desire the good of others, sometimes at the expense of my own was to her a sign of weakness. I was pretty emotionally wrecked for awhile trying to win her approval before I realized I should just be comfortable with who I am.

So it will be quite a relief to return to my relationship with my Master, where such traits are celebrated and not denigrated. A space where I can be myself without it being because I'm too weak, but because we have mutually complementary roles that are equal in diginity. A space, in short, where acting what comes most naturally to me is understood as an examined choice and not a sign of weakness, that I would surely act differently if I had the power to be more assertive or assholish.

John Donne rocks my socks

"BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me,'and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy:
Divorce me,'untie, or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

Challenge: write a paper on this without referencing my masochism =)

The stressed businessman

It's a trope I'm sure we're all familiar with: the high powered CEO of a Fortune 500 company is sick of being in charge all the time, so he pays a woman to beat up on him and take the burden of control away from him for a few hours.

I always thought this particular reason didn't apply to me. After all, I don't work at a high stress job; I'm a student, not a CEO. The fate of hundreds don't rest upon my decisions. I don't have stockholders to be responsible to. Though my life does involve some stress, it's no less than what most people have to deal with. And though I can take a leadership position if no one else is competent or willing to do it, I find myself more often following orders than giving them wherever such things are necessary.

And yet, the trope may be hitting at something deeper. A few weeks ago I read an article, now unfortunately lost to the mists of my continually clearing internet history, that claimed that masochism was a result of the modern burden of selfhood, a way to release the stress of keeping up a constant persona. Objectification, being treated poorly, and the trance states evoked by pain are all means to this end. This dovetailed a bit into a recent post over at Trin's:

"To make a man suffer -- to make him feel, to force his walls down and reduce him to quivering sensation, whether pleasure or pain, is an achievement, and more intensely pleasant for being so."

I had never linked this particular part of my personality with masculinity, but what she says about most men certainly applies to me. I'm a reserved kind of guy. I use my emotions; I don't let my emotions use me. For me, they have to be constantly monitored to ensure that I don't hurt myself or others when I give them license to escape my head and affect the outside world. I suppose some would call me repressed, but I think self-control is one of the cardinal virtues, and I think that my tight control of my emotions makes me a better person. Nonetheless, to maintain such control all the time is difficult, perhaps not healthy, and makes it all the more fun and exhilarating when I do finally let go.

And when I finally do let go is very often in a BDSM space. It's there that my dom can force me out of my habitual stoicism and make me feel. It's there that, bound, gagged, and beaten, my emotions can be given voice impotently. I can let them loose and not worry about hurting anyone else or myself, because in that situation I'm powerless.

Super Bowl Commercial

We fade in on a twenty-something somewhat attractive white girl. She's sitting on a stool slightly off-center with a stark white background. Subsequent actors are the standard rainbow array of politically correct races and ages.

"...you spend your whole life being told that you're sick, that you're a deviant, so the first time I met someone that didn't treat me that way, but promised to explore it with me, well, that was a revelation."

Towards the end of her statement she begins to fade away on camera, with our next actor's face superimposed over her until he is all that remains.

"...friends found my porn stash when I was fifteen. Needless to say, my social life wasn't a whole lot of fun till I could escape to college..."

next actor, this one is a bit older than the others

"My employer found out about a meeting I was attending, and fired me for it. Said it was 'bad for workplace morale.' How am I supposed to make my mortgage?"

next actor, again a bit older

"I had always been a good parent. Why did CPS feel the need to remove my child from its loving home just because of what we did in the bedroom?

next actor, this one the youngest of them all

"It's something that's so integral to your identity, but how are you supposed to tell the people you care about about it, like your parents? I mean, they would already pitch a fit if I was gay: no way they're ready to hear that I like pain and am most fulfilled in a subservient role!"

Fade to black, with the following words superimposed in the center of the screen in white

"24% of lypiphiles have lost their jobs because of intolerance. 3%, their children."

these words fade, and new ones replace them.

"Let's fix that."

new words

"www.lypiphilia.org"