Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (17 page)

fused during play—they are in an altered state. So speak slowly and use simple words if you feel you are not getting through.

Consensual Nonconsent

For some bottoms, the object of painful techniques is to be out of control. They do not want a cooperative, mutually negotiated scenario, but rather a nonconsensual fantasy and a fair amount of force. Restraints will have to be strong and escape-proof. They need to struggle and suffer until they reach a phase of liberation or release. They may want to be “broken.” I urge newer players especially to proceed carefully. The emotional consequences of a session can last long after the toys have been put away. So be cautious of a scene this heavy—do you want to take care of a bottom who has lost their will to you? And if you are a bottom seeking a scene of this nature, please take responsibility for your own feelings and needs. It is unethical to expect a top to take on a larger role in your life than they wish to take. Do not engage in harassment or stalking! If you know you will be vulnerable after a heavy scene, arrange care for yourself before you play, so you don’t crash when you are all alone and have no resources to keep you connected to the human race. As sweet as those endorphins are, losing them is a wicked crash.

Many of us associate pain with punishment, and fantasy punishment scenarios abound in BDSM play. There are lots of teachers who paddle unruly students, daddies who have to put little girls (age thirty-two) in the corner, guards who flog con- victs who tried to escape, et cetera. Punishment can put the top and bottom in an adversarial dynamic. If this disturbs you, you may want to require the bottom to admit that they deserve the punishment, and aim the scene toward getting them to feel more attached to you. By beating them, you are driving them toward

the safe cage of your possessiveness. Or you may find, as a top, that when you are in a certain wicked mood, you don’t want to make nice, you just want to kick the shit out of somebody who knows they belong on the floor.

In most scenes that include significant levels of discomfort, the bottom will reach a plateau. There are a number of ways to deal with a bottom who says they can’t take any more. One pos- sibility is to take them at their word and praise them for what they were able to do. If you feel that they are capable of more and may be disappointed later if they give up, you may want to simply take a break and see if some comfort and protein can screw up their courage once more. If the bottom told you there were certain things they wanted to experience, and the two of you haven’t made that happen yet, they may be motivated to dig a little deeper if you remind them of what their masochistic ambi- tions were prior to play.

Sometimes people cannot willingly go where they need to go—they have to be taken there. This is a controversial observa- tion, and most people will want to steer clear of it. For most of us, it is safest to stick with the zone of play where we have clear, uncomplicated consent. It’s a dicey proposition for a top to ignore a bottom’s pleas and continue to hurt them until they yield. You wind up manifesting a great deal of the Shadow, and you’ll feel quite a backlash from that.

Once upon a time, play without limits or safewords was very common in the gay men’s leather community. A bottom was ex- pected to do some research on a master before approaching him. Did you really want it, or not? If you made a bid for his atten- tion and he took you home, you were supposed to make yourself available for whatever he liked to do. He was God, and you were dirt. Whining later was seen as sissy bullshit. If you whined, no

top would touch you—you were an unreliable coward who might make secret and sacred things public to the authorities.

I appreciate the modern, pansexual kinky community’s desire to keep BDSM safe, sane and consensual (as the old slogan goes). But I sometimes think we have allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the direction of predictable scenes in which the top functions as an extra pair of hands for the bottom. While it can be a great deal of fun to help your bottom masturbate to their fa- vorite things, is there not some way to make equal space for what the top wants? It is a double bind, being expected to exercise a dark and wonderful power while obsessing with the intricacies of the bottom’s sensitivities, perpetually second-guessing them. A lot of the bottoms I meet nowadays seem terribly spoiled to me, and very unhappy, because they don’t really want to be running things. More than a few good bottoms in our little world seem lost under the current mores. They long for the thrill of encoun- tering the harsh will of an Other who is severe and powerful. Here’s a story about this impasse.

I once participated in a whipping booth at a fund-raiser for the Operation Spanner defendants. (We were raising money for a small, private club of British leathermen who had been arrested and charged with assault for doing consensual SM with each other.) Prospective bottoms were allowed to pick any of several implements and specify the number of strokes and the level of intensity they desired. I was surprised how many eager novices lined up to see what it was all about. This seemed to be a safe way to try new toys and be just a bit of a masochist.

Toward the end of the event, after almost everyone had left, I was ready to pack it in. But one woman was very persistent. When I told her she would not be able to use the tickets she had purchased and offered her a refund, she was quite upset. She told

me she had never been caned, she was terrified of it, but she felt so compelled to be caned that she was going out of her mind. She literally begged me to show her what it would be like to be out of control from pain.

So I bent her over the leather whipping bench, held her down with one hand on her lower back, and caned the bejesus out of her. She had asked for a dozen strokes and began to protest when we reached eight. “I have to insist on giving you what you asked for when you first talked to me,” I told her, “because I think that is what you really want and need.” So I hit her quite hard for the last four strokes, then added an additional one—“So you know that everything is not up to you. Sometimes the top will decide what you get.”

She was dizzy when she straightened up, and beaming. So proud of herself and grateful. She fell on my neck and hugged and kissed me. I even got a thank-you card from her years later. Sadly, in all that time, she had encountered no one who would help her over the hump by ignoring her pleas for mercy. What a waste of talent and thrills! Now, there was a potential masochist worth her salt.

But you can see how easily this scenario could have gone all pear-shaped, as our British colleagues would say. If I had been wrong in my assessment of her, she could very easily have come up from the table fighting mad, and justifiably so. She could have accused me of assaulting her. It certainly would have harmed my reputation (such as it is, poor sooty thing) and upset everyone who heard about it. We talk very little, regrettably, about how much the top needs to be able to trust the bottom. Buyer’s re- morse can ruin another player’s life.

If it makes your crotch tingle to squeeze someone’s balls until he protests, or take a sharp little blade to her inner thigh, or if you

can’t wait to get a blow job after you see the first bruises appear on a healthy pair of buns—well, you are by definition a sadist. The psychiatric experts pity masochists as self-harming fools. But they think sadists are dangerous. The
DSM-IV-TR
has some very silly things to say about sadists becoming rapists and killers.

The vulnerability of the masochist is plain. There they are, perhaps bound, heart pounding, dreading what is going to happen next, promising themselves that if they can just get through this one session they will never ask to be whipped/branded/clipped/ pierced/squeezed/frozen/tattooed again. But what about the leather-clad bastard who is going to put this poor, naked person through hell? Never mind that the masochist begged and pleaded for it yesterday. The expense of the equipment, the time it took to locate a soundproof space and good bondage equipment, all this effort is seen as self-serving rather than an honest attempt to make the bottom’s dreams come true.

No-Fault Play

It’s so easy to make a mistake once play begins. People shut down and quit communicating. In semidarkness, a whip may land where it shouldn’t. A game that was great fun two weeks ago is causing flashbacks tonight. The suspension equipment breaks, resulting in a painful fall, or a cane cracks in half and cuts someone. And yet everyone involved in these scenes had the best of intentions, and did everything within reason to be a good play partner.

This is why I recommend a no-fault attitude for BDSM players. As long as both partners respect each other, make a good-faith ef- fort to abide by each other’s limits and are open to feedback, I think that missteps ought to be understood as part of the price you pay for being on the edge. Indifferent or bad experiences are there to teach us how to avoid them. A couple or group who have

an accident ought to give and receive comfort, make up and keep learning. It takes a lot of experience, and a certain amount of in- nate talent, to correctly assess and challenge the central nervous system. Luck is a factor as well!

If you take any of the above paragraphs as an excuse for being lazy, negligent, or callous, well, you just ought to go to hell, that’s all I have to say. And I’ll probably be there to shovel some coal on the blaze.

Enough, Already!

In closing, let me bring up one more controversial fact. The heavier the scene, the more both partners experience weariness, anxiety, and aches and pains. It takes a lot of strength, grace and stamina to work on someone’s body for a prolonged period of time. If you are a switch or a top, what is your attitude toward your own pain tolerance? Do you disapprove of it or ignore it? Do you pretend it doesn’t exist? Or do you work with it to build your own excitement? More than one dominatrix is wearing a pair of nipple clamps under her bustier to keep herself focused on her sniveling client. A famous domme author once referred to her extra-high heels as giving her a useful reservoir of irritability. I find it fascinating that in consensual BDSM, tops and bottoms and switches can all have a relationship with pain as a beloved friend and reward.

Some of my favorite play partners are tops who need a break. I am more than happy to anonymously provide a vacation for them at the other end of the whip. Every partner of mine is entitled to confidentiality. But because our community can be so stupid and judgmental about tops who get tired of always being the one to bark out the orders, I never even note the identities of these people in my journal. (As if anybody could ever read my handwriting.)

When a bottom whimpers and tells me they can’t take any more, I have been known to whip out a pair of needles and pierce my own nipples. While they watch. If I can take it, I ask, why can’t they?

And that’s the perfect place to stop. Because there’s only so much you can learn from reading a book. Go outside and play.

Submissive: A Personal Manifesto

Madison Y oung

I’m a mom. I’m a submissive. I’m a feminist. I struggle to write these words, finding myself in the greatest power-play dynamic of my life with a three-month-old infant who lies sleeping in my lap while I hunch over my laptop. She is a demanding dominant and I’m happy to serve her, to focus my energies around meeting her needs. I let the rest of the world slip away while she nurses from my breast. There is a sense of freedom in the experience, and I feel whole and complete in this energy exchange.

This feeling is not foreign to me. For the past six years, I’ve served her father as his submissive, lover, partner, and now the mother of his child. Ironically, my dedication to my child and my partner is what has made sitting down to write this essay the most challenging. My identity is complex—an interweaving of queer, masochist, rope slut, sex worker, control freak, loving partner and mother. Within these carefully constructed labels, in order to find

my true self, I must give in. I must allow myself to be taken over, not just to fall deep down the rabbit hole but to jump, to fly, to dive in with knowledge.

To be the truest form of myself, I leap into a world of submis- sion.

I am a multifaceted woman with dominant and submissive tendencies, a wide range of desires for sensation play and a need to play out different societal and animalistic roles in a safe environ- ment with my partner. Sex is primal and has a magical, energetic rhythm to it—a pulse that you find in yourself or that passes be- tween two or more persons. There are many ways to play with that pulse, that energy, both physically and psychologically. That pulse can be exchanged with great precision and control or it can knock you off your feet like a tidal wave.

Submission caters to my Virgo love of control and precision. Submission fulfills me, in the eroticism of lists and charts, in the satisfaction of completing a task. Submission penetrates me deeply with the pleasure of rules to obey and jobs well done. Submission is falling into a Zen space of control: constructing my being as an instrument of use and pleasure, allowing energy to flow through me, reprogramming the fibers of my being to reflect the desires of my Dominant. Submission is instinctively serving my Dominant, without effort, without being noticed or drawing attention. It’s all about the details and serving another, not indulging in one’s own sexual impulses. It’s a delicious mix of cerebral and visceral sexuality, of control and instinct, of pleasure and selflessness.

To submit to my Dominant is to serve my Dominant, to plea- sure him, to obey protocol, and to serve as a useful tool in the completion of tasks. Submitting is making his life and household run more smoothly as well as providing entertainment and plea- sure. When I submit to my Dominant, I serve his erotic desires

and fulfill mine; in practice, it might be as simple as walking behind my Dominant and to his right side, fetching tea and pre- paring it the way he likes it and never allowing his water glass to become less than half full at dinner. Or it could manifest as standing or kneeling rather than using a chair at dinner, a party or on the subway. These small acts of submission enveloped in our day-to-day activities can fill my being with erotic energy and a sense of connectedness and commitment to each other.