The politics of BDSM

Whenever I bring up the specter of discrimination against kinky people to my liberal and sex-positive friends or even family, I get typically get the same response.

"You don't know what the social landscape will look like by the time you enter the workforce! Look at what the gay community has done in just the past decade!"

If there's one strain in liberal thought that's absolutely anathema to me, it's the naive insistence on the inevitability of progress, exhibited most strongly in the communists ("Like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." --Nikita Khrushchev). There was nothing inexorable about our victories in civil rights, social safety nets, and social permissiveness. Society does not tend to more progressive mores over time (progressive itself being a misnomer that reinforces this myth), at least not inexorably.

The best hope for improvements on this front, and it's slim enough, is riding on the coattails of the gay movement. If we can succeed in enacting very broadly-worded anti-discrimination against sexual orientation statutes into law, then convince a sufficiently sex-positive court that it does or should apply to us, that would be a huge victory. The general sexual permissiveness that the gay movement engenders also offers hope for the future.

Nevertheless, I am not very hopeful that such things will come to pass. Foremost among the reasons for pessimism is the lack of our community's will to political power. There is little consciousness of community among us; while appellations for individuals like dominant and submissive are common, the best we can come up with when referring to the collective are "kinky" or "the S&M community." Frankly, I think that the conservatives' railings against the "gay agenda" were well founded; the gay movement was breathtakingly well-organized and tenacious. We've certainly not got that. Frankly, there's a part of me that wants to get my law degree, join the national coalition for sexual freedom, and start trying to change that.

But that's far from our only concern. For one thing, language isn't doing us any favors, even beyond the complete inability it has to evoke a common consciousness in our community. Much as the gay community managed to turn its psychological designation "homosexual" into a relatively positive sounding, though by now dragged through the common culture as an insult of sorts, "gay," (and a shame that "homophile" never caught on) so too do we need find something better than "sadist" and "masochist." Might I suggest "lypiphile" - "pain lover" in Greek -as a catch all for both masochists and sadists, submissives and dominants?

More importantly, however, we've also got a vanishingly small bloc of support that cuts across the traditional political binary. Libertarians obviously have our back, as little good as the Ron Paul fanatics will do us. Conservatives hate us for obvious reasons. But most importantly, we've not got the entirety of support from the liberal bloc that carried the gay movement to a by now nearly consummated success.

The truth of the matter is, there's much in our sexuality for a certain type of liberal to dislike. Hierarchy, dominance, and control are anathema to liberals, and not all of them will see their evils mitigated by the fact that it's chosen - especially with the liberal tendency to discredit autonomy for environmental factors. If a criminal can be exonerated because of a bad home life, the masochist can be pitied for having been taught by their environment to glorify cruelty and suffering, to the point where the liberal in question ignores the entirely positive subjective experience and instead focuses upon those unhappy antecedent causes. (I've come out against the pop psychology explanation of masochists reliving their abuse in the past, and this shouldn't be construed as supporting that assertion. Nevertheless, it's the sort of explanation most people are likely to believe.) After having fought so hard for egalitarian relationships, many liberals will find it distasteful to return to what is perceived as an outmoded and barbaric form of relationship dynamics, again, even if it is freely chosen, and particularly when the genders of the participants evoke the bad old days of unchecked patriarchy. Feminists in particular will hate us, both because maledom femsub is the rule in the community (mostly because dominant women are like freaking unicorns. I am so incredibly glad that I'm bi, not only because of the ease of finding a partner, but also because the demographic problem has warped almost every aspect of femdom. But that's a subject for a different blog post), and because many see any instance of power and hierarchy during sex, even when freely chosen, even when the genders of the participants are subversive of traditional gender roles, as reinforcing the idea that sex must be predicated on a power relationship, and thus injurious to both sexes but particularly to women. Third-wave "sex positive" feminism will have our backs, but not everyone's on that bandwagon.

Of course, there are certain elements in the liberal camp that will support us. Many exalt autonomy above any of the previous concerns, and feel that a person's will to do what they wish is the highest good. In fact, I'd be tempted to say that, with the authoritarian section of the left in rapid decline ever since the demise of communism, that these types are what predominates in the American left today. If they can get over their initial revulsion to our odd sexuality, we'll have their support. And with the gay rights movement teaching them to do just that, there's a good chance we'll succeed.

As a self-identified liberal, though slowly sliding into libertarianism, I must answer these concerns if I am to reconcile my sexuality and my politics.

In the first place, I'm no anarchist. I do not see hierarchy qua hierarchy or authority qua authority as an evil. The institution of parenthood is one of many instances of benign authority. There is nothing in my philosophy to preclude benign authority, and that is precisely how I would define my relationship with Socrates, and any BDSM relationship at its best. Nor indeed should the comparison with parenthood imply irresponsibility. Rather than the abrogation of responsiblity that an adult child would desire, submission to me represents, in its best light, honor, duty, and devotion.

Moreover, if I understood the word correctly from my readings as a junior in high school, I am strictly a pheonomenologist. (Undoubtedly, my real life friends who have actually read Hegel are going to laugh at my crude approximations of the philosophy. To which I say, "hush.") I consider the highest truth to be the subjective experience of an individual, and as I have stated before, I emphatically reject the intrinsic theory of value. On this view, the fact that what I do in the bedroom has the outer trappings of the typically negative heirarchy and control is irrelevant. Indeed, because the subjective experience that it provokes in a submissive individual is so radically different than what it would provoke in anyone else, any sort of equviocation between the two is absurd, the most rank sophistry.

As to the feminist assertion that my activities reinforce a conception of sexuality as an act of power, I must disagree strongly. In the first place, I emphatically reject the second-wave feminist adage, "the personal is political." It's difficult to see how what I do in my bedroom, with at least a modicrum of secrecy, affects the broader culture. But even if it did, it would not send a message that control and hierarchy in sexual relationships were okay, but that autonomy and individual choice were paramount to having a rewarding sex life.

Moreover, my personal philosophy considers autonomy of the utmost importance. And while, on the face of it, this would present a problem with my desire to surrender autonomy, at least in part, there is actually no conflict. If I don't have enough autonomy to be able to surrender it when I feel that it will lead to a more rewarding life, I consider that autonomy meaningless.

Even with all of this, though, there are times when I can't shake the feeling that conventional wisdom is right. No, I don't have any guilt about the supposed perversion of it; that ship sailed a long time ago, when I was coming to grips with my bisexuality. Nor indeed can it be fairly characterized, in my opinion, as guilt.

But there is a fear that I've somehow been corrupted. That my soul has been taught to revel in the basest of actions. This may be an exultant expression of my deepest self, but if I feel that the ultimate expression of my self is when I'm being used as a human toilet, what's that say about my self?

Those times are rare enough, however. Ultimately I know them to be baseless anxieties imposed upon me by an intolerant society. I rest easy on my conviction that the inherent theory of value is ultimately a bankrupt philosophy.

Work-safe porn

Sure, between the 24% chance to lose a job and 3% chance to lose a kid, there are a lot of reasons to wish I hadn't been afflicted with this kind of sexuality, but there are benefits too. Chief among them is that our sexuality is so weird that we can get away with looking at pornography that no one but ourselves would characterize as such. I mean, how many men can get turned on by reading radical feminist discourse?

"To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo."

Oh yeah, talk dirty to me, man-hating foes of the patriarchy! I wonder what her response would be if she learned that that's the epitome of a turn-on for the female supremacists, nearly all of whom are male.

Like most heterosexual or bisexual submissive men, I have indulged in fantasies about the dominant women utopia, even if they are almost strictly a campy, guilty pleasure. For all of the triviality they represent, however, I think their pervasiveness reveals something deeper. One of the better BDSM bloggers on the net called it categorical degradation, a desire to have something fundamental to ourselves found as inferior. And much as I sympathize with the gender benders out there, and loathe the gender binary, there's not much that's more fundamental to our identity, or as innate to ourselves, as gender.

Socrates and I have been discussing adding insults to our sexual repertoire. The odd thing is, it's not really a desire to be insulted, much as the desire for pain isn't really a desire to be hurt. If he honestly insulted me on something I was actually insecure about- on my inability to bring him to orgasm more than once in our meetings a few weeks ago, say - it would definitely be hurtful, and probably not even arousing. But call me slut or whore - despite the fact that the insults are almost completely inapplicable to me; I was a virgin before Socrates, after all - and I turn into a submissive puddle of mush. And there's a really odd space where "bitch" evokes all the positive, safe places of submission and control without anything that makes me insecure. Much of BDSM activity, especially in the more cerebral parts of it, consists in evoking all of the positive emotions concerned with these usually negative phenomena without straying into negativity. Which brings us back to dominant female utopia and categorical degredation.

I think the reason why categorical degredation is so appealing to the submissive crowd is because its so good at evoking all the positive emotions without the negative. Because it's categorical, something that you don't have control over, something that is fundamentally not your fault, you can't be guilty because of it, it can't be something you're truly insecure about. As such, it evokes everything positive without the negative.

And while gynosupreamacy may be both intellectually bankrupt and not applicable to my current homosexual relationship, there's always Aristotle's natural slave. Which brings me back to my first point: who else can find pornography in philosophy class?

The history of BDSM?

For something that feels as inborn to me as my bisexuality, I find it odd that BDSM is a relatively new invention. There doesn't seem to be any record of an organized community before the 19th century. Well, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me too much; after all, though homosexuality has been observed in many other places, its manifestation has differed. Perhaps ours has as well; maybe I would have been a Christian flagellant if I had been born in the 13th century.

While on one of my usual wikipedia rampages (which included subjects as diverse as penis panic, alien abductions, Christian flagellants, and Roman festivals), I came across the first pairing, so far as I can tell, of pain and sexuality.

"Lupercalia’s stress on fertility made it very significant for females. Infertility was then considered a disease, so women desiring children and easy childbirth implored the gods at Lupercalia. Ancient medicine was little removed from soothsaying, so when illness was beyond cure, people asked the gods to "purify" them of the disease, hex, or curse causing it. In Roman belief (as in several modern religions) purification resulted from a light, ritual scourging. Thus women seeking pregnancy and easy childbirth sought a "lustration" - a cleansing thrashing - from a Priest of Lupercus."

http://lupercalia-edmonton.com/history.htm

Okay, so it's fertility instead of sexual pleasure, and probably not directly related to my sexuality, but an interesting tidbit nonetheless.

Have any of my readers come across any more ancient accounts than this one?

Emotional masochism?

For a few days after meeting with Socrates, I was finally at peace, no longer plagued by anxiety about the morality or nobility of my desires, no longer fearful that I would never find a partner to share them with, no longer fearful that some measure of reserve in my psyche would make opening myself up to someone in that manner impossible, no longer anxious at having fallen so far behind my peers in dating and romance. I had finally grown into my own skin, made a tremendous leap. Truly, I had found happiness.

Except I hadn't.

All throughout that period of contentment, something felt...off. Maybe I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I don't think that's the entire story. I kept asking myself, over and over, "what did I do to deserve such fortune, such happiness, especially when so many across the world are so miserable?" And while there may have been a nearly survivor's complex guilt there, I don't think that that was the cause. Nor indeed could it be explained by a feeling of unworthiness at my excellent fortune.

The truth of the matter is, when I'm at peace, I'm not at peace, and when I'm content, I'm not content. There's something in me that relishes the challenge of a worry, the goad of anxiety to make me strive to be better than I am. When I felt I had finally found it, there was almost a sense of loss: that I had ended the struggle, and could discover no more.

Such is the imperiousness of youth.

So when the worries returned, though in a different guise- and how could they not? The goad to introspection strikes me just as surely as the longing for submission, and any happiness of mine could not stand unexamined for long- I welcomed their return.

Back to work, I thought.

It's funny; before now, I always thought that "it's about the journey, not the destination," was only a trite platitude. As goal-focused as a utilitarian must needs be, it rung hollow to me. I'm gaining more respect for this bit of common wisdom, though.

I make my title nearly facetiously, for I do not truly believe that this part of me is linked to my masochism. I'm far more inclined to believe that it's more widespread than my odd sexuality, and that if its genesis is anywhere it lies in my introspective and striving nature.

Marriage, BDSM, and meaning

Two of my friends are getting married in just a few days (no, he won't be on a leash. Unfortunately.) While I'm happy for them,undoubtedly some of my more nihilistic comrades in the freethinking movement will see no meaning in their commitment. "A mere vacuous twitch of the brain cells," they might say, "brought about only because the survival shells of their selfish replicators, the genes (if I may appropriate Dawkins' term in a way contrary to his actual sentiments on the subject) required a successor." While anyone who believes in the theory of evolution, without divine intervention, must concede that this is the material, efficient cause of my friend's actions, anyone who has been in love themselves knows that this is far from a satisfactory account of the actual sentiments of the blissful couple. Even more thoughtful people rightly conclude that, however base or meaningless the material cause of it is, that nevertheless, meaning may be found in the love, joy, honor, duty, and commitment that is the right of everyone in love. And that, indeed, reducing their emotions and subjective experience to merely that- to the vacuous twitch of the brain cells- is not only egregiously erroneous, but also the most deplorable insult to the nobility of marriage. In short, anyone who has not succumbed to nihilism in our age must concede that an efficient cause is not a teleology, that a cause is not a destiny, nor a purpose, nor a meaning; that whatever the cause of a thing may be, meaning may be found in the experiences it provokes in us and our loved ones.

So why, then, do so many people balk at applying the same principle to my sexuality?

In my blissfully happy state, they will say, "he is merely reliving the abuse of his past," "he has been cultured in this way, no matter how, from his birth." That may or may not be true- for the record, I grew up in a stable middle class family, and have no memory of abuse save for a particularly outrageous middle school social situation, by which time my sexuality was abundantly clear anyway- but it matters naught to me. The meaning of my experiences, whatever they may be, will not reside in their material cause.

And even if it were? So much the better. If there is one solace my philosophical side can find in my sexuality, it's the rejection of the inherent theory of value and meaning. Not necesarily do pain, degredation, control, and heirarchy result in evil- but that their meaning and significance rests solely with the person who experiences them. And can you think of any more poetic, any more noble, any more constructive way of dealing with that abuse than defiantly turning those experiences on their ear, transforming the very things that hurt you into a relationship-strengthening, identity-affirming ecstatic experience? The black community has in some degree reclaimed the word "nigger" in much the same spirit, the gay community is attempting a similar feat with their slurs- and all three represent a defiant effort to turn that which hurts us into beautiful things.

The most confusing night of my life

This is an excerpt from my journal after my third day with Socrates:

He pushed me just a little farther than I was willing to go. Odd that it was from something almost completely vanilla in nature; but he fucked me harder- well, a lot harder- than I was capable of handling. I don't doubt that his intentions were benign; he merely thought I could take it. In retrospect, I should have done a better job of communicating my discomfort- maybe invoked my safeword. He's no mind-reader; mistakes are going to be made; both of us will miscommunicate and push not enough or too hard. Then again, I hear here "It's partially my fault," and, "these sorts of things happen in an S&M relationship" - the calling cards of an abused sub. Then again, to his credit, as soon as I made it known that I was in rough shape and that things had strayed into the unenjoyable for me, he stopped, without me using my safeword- he didn't even come tonight.

Then, later that night, as I was tossing and turning in bed, it hit me, and I felt fairly guilty. In my reticence to do so, I had deprived him of his property- and what right had I to do so? It was his, not mine, and a revolt against all that was....natural? that he had not got to come that night.

That I had no right to my own body.

Needless to say, this scared the shit of me. I'm coming perilously close to enjoying the sort of abuse- unintentional as it may have been- last night, at losing my ability to say no, and becoming less and less likely that I will communicate my state to him, feeling that he ought to take whatever he can.

But it feels so good. At the same time, I'm in a pretty dark place right now.

I'm only fortunate that I have a partner who I can trust here, and I know that he will never harm me in that way willingly.

The best night of my life

This is an excerpt from my journal of my second night with Socrates:

If the passionate life is the good life, I've been blessed beyond belief. Never did I imagine that I'd reach the height of such ecstasy, not even in my wildest and most optimistic dreams about this. Maybe it was the position, a sure way to destroy my pride and turn my into a submissive puddle of mush. Maybe it was his willingness to push me just a bit further than I had gone last time. Maybe I was just finally trusting him. Whatever it was, I finally and truly felt his. It was probably not true, but in those moments, slick with the sweat of exertion trying to accomodate that buttplug, I felt that there was no limit I couldn't cross for him.

"torrid" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Even now, five hours after we parted and 20 miles between us, he has the power to torment. Undoubtedlty his potency will reach me once I return to college as well. Not that I'm complaining; this is the sweetest agony. As it turns out, I am actually a masochist. Still, it's probably a good thing we can only do this for a week. I'd probably die of sleep deprivation if we kept this up any longer.

Pathology? Absurd; I refuse to believe that something so wonderful is fundamentally sick. If it is the result of abuse, then surely this is the requital of the gods for the injustice done to us; nay, if that be the case, surely we abused ought to pity the normal. I don't have any memory of abuse myself, making me skeptical of such claims, but they do claim that they can be repressed.

Everything just worked once that blindfold went on. Unable to even see what was happening, I truly and finally surrendered. And, ah! The depth of emotion! The oh-my-god-is-he-actually going-to-is-that-smell-what-I-think-it-is-christ-please-no-but-please-yes-I'm-his-whatever-he-wants fear mixed with adoration mixed with the sweet high of submission mixed with the most intense pleasure.

I have never been so happy to be alive.

I'm operating on an average of 4 hours a sleep a night the last few days, but it's been oh so worth it. In my insomina, the gentle and sweet numbness of the immediate what-the-hell just happened gradually gave way to a torrent of desire, tossing and turning in my bed replaying the night's events in my head and adding more, which gradually gave way to the most profound sense of tranquility and contentment I have ever experienced. As I took a constitutional in a nearby park, its usually muted beauty becoming vibrant in the afterglow of the night's experience, every tree, chirping bird, and whirring insect adding inexorably to the beauty of the scene, as rosy-fingered dawn rose to greet me, dispelling the twilight of 5 AM for the beauty of the sunrise, I contemplated my life, and I think rightly considered myself one of the most fortunate people on the planet.

An awesome cap to the most wonderful year of my life.