Sometimes people cannot willingly go where they need to go—they have to be taken there. This is a controversial observation, and most people will want to steer clear of it.
Sometimes people cannot willingly go where they need to go—they have to be taken there. This is a controversial observation, 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 expected to do some research on a master before approaching him. Did you really want it, or not? If you made a bid for his attention 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 favorite 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 encountering 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 their 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 remorse 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 effort 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 innate 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.