SIREN'S SOAPBOX
June 1 - 25, 2000
all material copyright © 1998-2000
dr. gloria g. brame
SIREN'S SOAPBOX
June 1 - 25, 2000
all material copyright © 1998-2000
dr. gloria g. brame
When my parents were teenagers, living in what would later become infamous as the Warsaw Ghetto, they both belonged to the local branch of the Young Communists. It was, I suspect, the most radical rebellion at that time and in that place where Orthodoxy reigned over Warsaw's mega-shtetl of cosmopolitan Jews. My grandparents were Orthodox Jews and, of course, strictly kosher. Marching with Commies and sneaking into Christian restaurants to eat kielbasa were to my parents what piercing and tattooing are to today's young adults.
What cured my parents forever of their taste for Communism (they never did lose their taste for kielbasa) was spending some time under Communist rule. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they fled to Russia and stayed there until the bitter end of World War II. My parents' Communist sympathies died violently in Stalin's Russia. By the time they arrived in the United States, in 1949, their souls hungered for democracy the way their bellies had, in Russia, craved food. Unlike Russia, America delivered. They have been fierce patriots since, and settled on a middle-of-the-road political philosophy, part left, part right, and all American.
I was thinking about political evolutions today while watching Ralph Nader being grilled by Tim Russert. Nader, the self-appointed defender of the little man, is now running for President on the Green Party ticket. Nader always struck me as a sour, depressed, arrogant, self-obsessed individual, the kind of person one wants to like because he seems to have his heart in the right place yet who is so personally unlikeable that one just can't help suspecting that he secretly kicks his dog.
But as he rattled on, his responses not quite as polished or articulate as they could be, his demeanor as unpleasant as I remembered it, some of his rationalizations fuzzy, I suddenly found myself preferring Ralph to Al and George. He hadn't come equipped with a list of facile phrases and buzz-words and mottoes that had been laboriously scripted by a crew of high-priced publicists. He wasn't that smooth, and he didn't look that great on camera; Naomi Wolf hadn't selected that boring suit, nor was his father busy collecting on political debts in the background.
The more I listened to Citizen Ralph, the more appealing it seemed to have a real person as a candidate for President, as opposed to the smiling cardboard puppets raised by politicians to be politicians, otherwise known as our Republican and Democratic party candidates.
For someone who has assiduously rejected Earth Shoes and their mutant spawn, Birkenstocks, throughout her life, this sudden sympathy for Green party politics was a revelation. Not that I don't love animals, trees, and our great planet Earth, but I love leather too. Green always seemed so...so...pansy. So sentimental. So darned earnest.
Perhaps because my parents were raised amid massive political upheavals, and their lives so shaped by the devastations and dictators of mid-20th Century Europe, politics took a center seat in family conversations. My father liked to discuss politics at the dinner table and when I was a child, anything my father liked to discuss was fascinating to me. I became politically aware at an early age and like my parents have evolved through different political phases.
My earliest and strongest political feelings began with the Civil Rights movement and, for the most part, ended towards the end of the Vietnam War demonstrations. Included in that long period were also the Black Power Movement, the Women's Lib Movement and the Gay Lib Movement of the early 70s. I supported them all, in principle, and attended more than a few marches. In my teens, you were much more likely to find me at a rally than at a bowling alley or a movie theater.
In New York, it was easy to find all the revolutionaries any teenager could want. I heard Angela Davis speak and waved to her jail cell at the old women's detention center (long since torn down, the land now a garden adjoining the Jefferson Market Library). I was a marshall at the first Women's Lib March in 1970. I smoked a joint with Abby Hoffman at the first Earth Day celebration in Central Park. WBAI-radio (a part of the Pacifica Network) in New York was my source of all political commentary and the Village Voice the source of my political news.
I wanted to like the revolutionaries because I admired their passion, but even at 13 and 14, the rhetoric of SDS, the Weathermen, the Panthers, and other extremists disgusted me.
My intrigue with revolutionary politics came to an abrupt end in the mid-70s, when--for reasons I can't recall--I found myself in the basement of a church in Greenwich Village, attending a meeting of a group called Radical Vegetarians. I remember only two things about this meeting: first, that one of the actions being seriously debated was a plan to bomb city sidewalks so that the soil beneath could be liberated, allowing seedlings to rule the earth. Second, that one of the men there was completely and utterly hairless: no hair on his head, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no hair on his arms or hands. He seemed perversely pleased with his hairlessness because at some point during the discussions he managed to reveal that there was no hair anywhere else on his body either.
Their plan to trade human lives for vegetable ones appalled me. In that moment I knew the Left had collectively lost its mind. To add moral insult to political injury, for a couple of years after this meeting (we'd been asked to provide our names and phone numbers and, naive child that I was, I did just that), I regularly received obscene phonecalls from someone who sounded suspiciously like the hairless vegetarian.
As my parents had learned, nothing discourages one from leftist politics so much as hanging around leftists. Or, as Clemenceau once noted: "A man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart. A man who is still a socialist at 40 has no head. "
In my 20s, still newly depoliticized, I was thrust by circumstance into a job on Wall Street which, over the course of the next seven years, became a career on Wall Street. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people with money, status, prestige, and--not surprisingly--conservative politics.
I confess: I was not a political tabula rasa: more like a disenchanted hippie in a tailored suit. When my job duties included attending private Wall Street fund-raisers for Ronald Reagan in elegant, all-male clubs on New York's Upper East Side, I felt lost. These people--the men in Brooks Brothers suits and Hermes ties, with nicknames like Biff and Skip, who belonged to country clubs in Connecticut and whose fathers had secured them spots at Ivy League schools through generous donations--were more exotic to me than the dinosaur fossils at the Museum of Natural History.
So I can't say that I was eager to pick up Republican politics. I was, however, willing to listen. And there were some ideas which appealed--among them the elimination of big government and a fierce dedication to freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights: ideas which have now been nudged to the side of Republican politics and into the mainstream of Libertarian politics.
Then there were the wierd little images of the lions at the gate of Republican politics. There was the time I saw George Will, pissing drunk, give a nearly incoherent speech and then nearly fall face-first into his soup; the time Ed Meese fell asleep on a dais--slowly melting and morphing into Jabba the Hut with every soft snore; a private dinner with military honchos at a hotel near the Pentagon where a former CIA operative, seated at my elbow, kept up a steady stream of disjointed and paranoid ramblings involving frogmen from Cuba.
It wasn't just the Republicans, though. Heavens no. During one business trip to the Hill, an elevator door swung open to reveal the most corrupt, sodden, bloated, evil face I'd ever seen. It took several seconds before I realized I was staring at Ted Kennedy up close. Even if you'd never heard of Chappaquiddick, one look in that man's eyes told you everything you needed to know about Sen. Kennedy.
Ultimately, I realized a sad, brutal fact. I really don't like politicians at all. Given my druthers, I'd rather have tea with a serial killer than a senator. I think the conversation would be more meaningful.
By now you may be wondering just where my political sentiments lie. I wonder about it all the time myself. My sub, who is a staunch Republican, believes I'm a wild-eyed liberal. My husband, who is apolitical, senses nascent fascism in some of my views. My leftie friends still find common ground with me; but so do my conservative ones.
When it comes to voting, I usually vote Democratic, but will gladly vote outside the party for a better candidate. I've voted in every presidential election since I reached voting age 27 years ago. Almost without exception, voting for a President has meant voting for the lesser of two evils. I can't recall ever supporting a candidate with my whole heart. From my perspective, by the time someone rises to the top of the heap of one of the two big political parties, he has compromised himself so many times that he can't be trusted. It comes down to voting for the guy you think will do the least damage.
Indeed, that seems to be the theme of the 2000 elections: "vote for me as the guy who will do the least damage to our thriving economy." The question is whether you believe Clinton can be credited with the strong economy, or whether you think it's the road hewn by Reagan that has made this prosperity possible. If you think it's Clinton, you'll probably vote for Al; if you think it's Reagan, George will likely be your man.
I think both parties have outlived their purpose. The Republicans, once the enlightened, progressive force that swept Abraham Lincoln into office, are now largely perceived as a bunch of mean, Bible-thumping prudes who hate poor people. Meanwhile the Democrats, viewed as a voice for positive social change for decades, now come across as fat-cat pols who cynically manipulate poor people by promising them things they can't deliver. Either way, the voters lose.
Which brings me back to Al and George. I can't decide which one is less awful. Both have dubious records on issues ranging from capital punishment to abortion. Neither has distinguished himself, personally or politically. They didn't raise themselves up from poverty and obscurity (like Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon); they don't have significant achievements in other fields (like George Bush, Sr., Ronald Reagan and General Eisenhower); they aren't war heroes (like JFK) or athletes (like Gerald Ford); heck, they don't even seem sincere (like Jimmy Carter).
More importantly, they aren't politically DEFINITE, the way an LBJ or a Nixon, a Kennedy or a Reagan was definite. Indeed, LBJ and Nixon not only possessed convictions, they schemed, manipulated, and bullied others into advancing their convictions. Love them or hate them, those presidents took stands on issues and stuck with them. Depending on your own politics, you knew right away whether you opposed or supported them: either way, you had something to sink your teeth into--something to work for or to fight against.
What does Al Gore stand for? What does George W. stand for? I have no fucking idea. They don't have convictions; they have opinions. And those opinions change with every poll. Today's bad publicity means they'll do a turn-about tomorrow and send cadres of spin-doctors out to pound some new fiction into our heads. Listening to the candidates is like listening to windshield- wipers. They keep moving but they ain't goin' nowhere.
Both Al and George are the mediocre sons of ambitious politicians. Neither has demonstrated he can do more than scamper down the path his father paved. Both come across as weaklings and cowards, with a taint of corruption about them: George's role in the Savings & Loan scandals of the 1980s and Al's fund-raising techniques are equally suspect. Both relied on their influential daddies to bail them out of combat duty in Vietnam. Bush led hazings in college and then chased women and used drugs before realizing he wasn't going to get to the White House that way. Al is so reality-challenged he's claimed that Love Story was based on his life and that he invented the Internet. And while I don't know about Mrs. Bush, I have not forgotten that Mrs. Gore spearheaded a movement to censor rap music, and can pound the sanctimonious Family Value hammer with the best of the Christian Right.
No one can accuse Nader of pandering to the masses, of taking up popular causes, or of being anything less than heroic in his commitment to his social beliefs these past 40 years. He has leadership qualities. He has convictions. He is an iconoclast in the American tradition, a rugged individualist, a self-made millionaire. He's the stuff of which Presidents once were made. Gritty, unpleasant, determined, passionate stuff. Hard, serious stuff. True, I've already heard a few ideas from his camp that made my hair stand on end. And, let's face it--his chances of winning are right up there with Pat Paulson, Dick Gregory and "Pigasus." Still, compared to a couple of yellow- bellied daddies' boys, Green may be the only way to go.
Leafing through the new issue of Elle magazine, I was immediately drawn to a story ("Something's Afoot," July, p. 90) which led off with this spunky statement: "Pretty feet are highly coveted." Amen, sister! About time the mainstream media noticed. Indeed, some of the finest people I know covet feet--and not just pretty ones, either. Dirty, sweaty ones sometimes smell just as sweet. To some of us anyway.
But what really attracted my attention was the simply yet eloquently titled side-bar: "Tortured Soles." In this curious adjunct to the beauty secrets of the rich and shallow, a nameless "fashion editor and self-professed stiletto addict" describes the tortures she endures for the sake of high heels. The writer then recounts the time she wore a pair of shoes so tight and high that by the time she limped home, half of a toenail came off when she removed one. Undaunted, she merely had a new false toenail glued on. She quotes her dumbfounded boyfriend: "I don't understand how you can wear shoes that hurt. Isn't comfort the whole point of shoes?" Her response? "I laughed to myself. As if."
Now, speaking one pervert to another, tell me: what species of madness would possess someone to walk around in a torture device without getting a sexual thrill out of it? What kind of weirdo gives up her toenails without even the possibility of a post-torture orgasm? That's just sick!
Which brings me to a subject on which my slave and I have occasionally experienced some cognitive dissonance. See, among his many other depraved charms, he is a foot-fetishist. Just the sight of a sexy shoe can get him hard, and footwear figures prominently in our lives, both in the dungeon and out in the world. My closet overflows with the dozens of boots and shoes he's bought me over the years; and the space under my bed overflows with the dozens of boots and shoes we've either bought for him or which he brought into this relationship (in big cardboard boxes, no less). Where once my doggie hid at bath-time now resides a dusty altar to the Mary Jane, the Pump, the Ballet Boot and (our most recent obsession) the Tap Shoe.
Put another way: until I met my slave, I thought I had a foot and shoe fetish. Now I must hand the scepter to him as the Person Most Likely to Turn Into Imelda Marcos If The Money Was Ever There.
This is just fine with me. I do love shoes, and since I have so many different fetishes myself, his obsession with footwear suits my antic temperament and amuses me no end. There is only one place where we disagree: among the stacks of boxes of shoes he's bought me are a good dozen or more with heels the size of the average American male's penis. (Come to think of it, if they designed the heels to look just like dick, that would actually make the shoe more attractive to me. Kind of gets one's Mistressly point across.)
Before I start a new fashion trend, let me make my point. You knew I'd reach it eventually, yes? Here it is: My slave loves nothing more than fantasizing about and seeing me in spiked "fuck me, I'm utterly helpless" heels: the kind even the most sophisticated woman is doomed to totter on at some totally inappropriate moment. It fits the image of the Domina formed in his (and millions of other mens') imagination. The stiffly clad, brittle, porcelain icon of a Mistress, the grist of SM porn mills: she usually looks as if she took a step forward she'd fall flat on her face. How do they stand up? Is there some kind of a metal brace behind them?
In all fairness, such heels can be menacing, even terrorizing, when used in SM play. Slipped into a submissive mouth, ground into a squirming groin, forced into a wriggling ass--hey, what's not to like? Wearing them in bed is quite the full-body thrill. But walking in them? Oh puh-leeeze. They hurt! Your back feels lousy, your legs are constantly cramping, and sometimes you stand at the bottom of a staircase and want to cry or turn back rather than further stress your tormented tootsies.
Which is why I don't think high heels really are the ess muss sein of Mistressdom. Maybe if the Mistress is a masochist. But as a creature driven by a hunger for pleasure (mine, that is), wearing uncomfortable garments of any type is simply outside my limits. ORANGE! PINEAPPLE! (or safe word of your choice).
A prodomme has few options. Her livelihood depends on fulfilling submissives' fantasies. Spiked heels, starched lace and corsets are all part of the uniform. But it isn't a non-pro Mistress's job to dress up to please HER submissive. Beating naughty boys and girls is not a job; it's a vocation! When we dress up to look hot, it's because it pleases US to look that way. Some of us adore high heels and that means a lot of subs luck out. But as far as I'm concerned, the dominatrix who focuses on "pleasing" rather than granting a privilege, who dresses uncomfortably because it's what someone else expects or demands, who tries to fit into someone else's mold, has essentially admitted that she has no real power.
To be powerful is to be yourself. That is the greatest power there is. Personally, I am the pragmatic, headstrong, self- sufficient, earthy type, not the delicate China doll type. I keep my feet planted firmly on the ground. I'll be damned if I "suffer to be beautiful," as Yeats once wrote. Fuck suffering: that's what we have slaves for.
You don't need the high heels, or the corsets. They're lovely decorations, the frou-frou of female dominance. But they aren't important. What is important is knowing who you are and taking joy and pleasure from who you are. The only dress a dominatrix really needs is her attitude. The only jewels, her honor and dignity. As for shoes--I recommend Frye boots. You can really kick ass in those.
It's happened again. The media event that all Smers dread: an SM-related murder. If you haven't already heard the news currently unfolding in Kansas City, a man who used the handle slavemaster on the Net was just discovered to have several barrels of dead bodies in his backyard and more hidden elsewhere. It is alleged that in recent years, he trolled BDSM areas on the Net, seduced some unsuspecting submissive women, then tortured and murdered them.
Horrible? Unspeakably. A grisly lesson for all reckless subs? Certainly. The women showed up at a hotel to meet and serve this man, based uniquely on their cyber-relationship. How many of us haven't done such crazy things? Is it time, perhaps, that we STOP doing such crazy things? Obviously. (If you haven't already read Playing Safe and Staying Safe, please do.)
It goes without saying that their families have my greatest sympathy and that I grieve the passing of the young victims--not only the two submissives, but the numerous others who met similar fates.
But for me, the real story is how the media is covering this and, equally importantly, how we, as a Community, are responding. As usual, media have seized on the SM aspect of this case, taking the opportunity to cast aspersions on our sexual identities. This despite the fact that most of the victims were not SMers, but were lured by promises of money and other non-kinky things.
Journalists are making noxious implications that SM can lead to murder; psychologists are being cited as saying that bondage is fine, but anything involving pain is "sick." And the BDSM Community is responding defensively, hurrying to assure everyone that we are not really like that, that we are people who only have consensual, loving sex. One SMer even issued a loud, showy wail of anguish, as if to say that when bad SM things happen to good people, it's the Scene's cross to bear.
What a load of poop. If you know more than 3 people in SM, then you know that we are, at times, perfect idiots when it comes to choices in partners. Most of us place an emphasis on moral issues, but others of us place the emphasis on our genitals. Beyond that, some of us apparently don't entirely grasp the concept of consent, as evidenced by the letters I get from het femsubs terrified by their Masters' insistence that they fuck dogs or other women.
Loving, consensual SM between spiritually and politically enlightened individuals is the Scene's social ideal, and a high ideal it is. But to suggest that we've achieved it is absurd. Most of us are just doing the best we can, and trying to establish sustained relationships. We aim to be loving and to respect limits. But even the best of us aren't perfect. And, then, there are some of us who are rats and don't care who we hurt, emotionally or physically.
And you know what? This makes us just like the rest of the world. Some of us are so dumb we go along with anything; and some of us are so mean, we take advantage of that. In what realm of humanity do you not meet people who fit this description?
There is no evidence of a higher rate of violence or abuse in our Community. If anything, we are less likely to continue cycles of violence or abuse (see the BDSM/fetish survey for details). The SM Community stands in contrast to the vanilla world, where violence begets violence, and abuse (of children, spouses, lovers, and others) is so rampant that family courts can't keep up with their caseloads. People who fuck up bad in the SM Scene get disgraced and banished. Where do they go? Back into vanilla-land, of course, where prey is plenty, punishments nil and invisibility easy.
Had slavemaster been caught a few years ago, before he'd logged onto the Net, he'd be assailed as a serial killer who preyed on naive women. Editors wouldn't assign feature stories which speculated on whether vanilla sex leads to murder. They wouldn't run out to interview spokespeople for the vanilla world to explain how rape and sex are different, and to claim that REAL vanilla people engage only in consensual, loving encounters.
To consign cruelty, violence, murderous impulses, and, yes, even sadomasochistic sex uniquely to the realm of BDSMers is ludicrous and dishonest. What we have here is not a sadomasochist who is a serial killer, but a serial killer who preyed upon our Community. Perhaps he thought, as so many "clueless chudwahs" do, that a submissive is someone who will obey anyone, go anywhere, do anything for anyone who uses the handle "Master" or "Mistress." The perception is wide-spread because some submissives act exactly that way. But they don't act that way because they're sadomasochists; they act that way because they are naive, or foolish, or immature, or self- destructive--in other words, because they are exactly like most people.
Humanity's capacity for evil angers me to the core. I'm angry that two submissives were gulled and then murdered. It chills me to imagine their sweet expectations of pleasure changed to abject terror when they realized their mistake. But what makes me even angrier is that this story has given the enemies of sexual freedom an opportunity to revile us, to prod their long noses into our culture, to re-enforce bizarre and demeaning stereotypes about us and--worst of all--to make some people feel like they have to justify our sexual identities to others.
This whole thing reminds of me of the Ted Bundy case. If you recall, Bundy was a convicted serial killer who claimed, shortly before his execution, that he had been corrupted by SM pornography. His "sadomasochism made me do it" argument was about as persuasive as David Berkowitz's "the dog made me do it" one. Yet media pundits eagerly embraced Bundy's theory. Here was a death-row inmate, a pathological liar who not only deceived every single human he ever came in contact with but who was making a full-court press to save his own ass, and they believed him! Talking heads bobbed up in every media cauldron to argue the evils of That Which We Do. For years after, Bundy's name was linked with SM. What a sham. What a lie. What a fucking shame.
Folks, let's try something new. Let's put an end to apologizing for being who we are and doing what we do. Let's stop feeling responsible when someone who likes SM sex turns out to be a murderer; or when a murderer turns out to like SM sex. Let's quit thinking that being an SMer means you always have to say you're sorry.
About ten years ago, my friend Bruce, who writes frequently on gay issues, proposed a theory about closets. He said that when gay men and lesbians come out of the closet they often go right into another one. This other closet is a place where all your friends are gay, most everything you do is based on being gay, all your causes are gay causes, and you conform to all the latest and greatest trends in gay culture.
This closet is nothing like the one you occupied before. It's bigger; it's full of interesting and sexually adventurous people; and, at first, it feels like you've been invited to join a wonderful private club. Still it is a closet: a refuge from the world and a fortress against it.
The world can be an ugly place for sexual minorities. People hate us not for who we are but because of what we represent to them. Some hate us purely because we enjoy a level of sexual freedom they are afraid even to contemplate. Others hate us because they were taught to hate us. Any way you explain it, most of us know how it feels to be treated as a pariah. So it's not surprising that we are eager to find a safe haven with those who share our sexual orientation.
An email I recently received reminded me of my talk with Bruce a decade ago. The correspondent gave thanks for the advice, quizzes, and communications tools in Come Hither. He had despaired of ever convincing his wife that kink was acceptable. By using the book as a guide, they were able--after years of miscommunication--to have a positive dialogue about kink. More than that, his wife was now willing to experiment with his BDSM fantasies.
The email made me feel wonderful. But when I replied I asked my correspondent please to take one final piece of advice from me: not to rush into the Scene too quickly. It needed saying because Bruce's theory about gay closets now applies to BDSMers as well. From small, secret pockets of community the Scene has flourished into a vast subculture, so absorbing that many people find themselves increasingly detached from the world outside.
How many of us are there now who know they like some form of kinky sex? In the US alone, it is in the tens of millions. In 1986, when I first came out, there were a handful of SM clubs in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In 2000, I could attend a BDSM event of some kind--munches, parties, contests, demos, seminars--nearly every day of the week in Atlanta, Georgia; on weekends, there are usually several parties to choose from here. The same is true in all major U.S. cities and lots of minor ones as well.
The SM economy has exploded too. Add up all the leather- crafters and toy-makers, visual and performing artists, fetish boutiques, toy shops, videos, book publishers, magazines, commercial websites, prodoms, sex-workers, bars, B&B's, and clubs that you've heard about. You'll see that thousands of people now depend solely on BDSM for their livelihood. It has become not just possible but easy for people to work in BDSM jobs, attend BDSM parties, and be surrounded by BDMSers 24/7--without ever having much contact with the straight world, except when paying bills or shopping at the mall. In Atlanta, my doctor, lawyer and accountant are all SM-friendly.
And, really, that's great, just as it's great that the gay and lesbian communities have flowered into rich subcultures with genuine economic clout. It's fantastic for someone like me--who came out in the highly closeted mid-80s--to find kink everywhere I turn and to be able to support BDSM causes and businesses. I love it. It's a feast after famine.
BUT. For all the support and solidarity that the Scene may provide, it also poses real dangers.
One danger is the smug belief that Scene people are morally or intellectually superior to our vanilla brethren. Scene people often congratulate themselves on being smarter, kinder, more generous, and more compassionate than those poor unenlightened people who are still having in-and-out sex. Maybe I just don't get out enough but, in my experience, the Scene doesn't self- select for saints. A person may call himself Master or slave, or Mistress or submissive today; but if that person was schlemiel every day of his or her life until yesterday, what kind of Mistress or slave do you imagine that person will be?
A superiority complex is usually just the flip-side of a crushing inferiority complex. The people who bray the loudest about how great we all are are usually the ones whose old baggage is piled so high it's blocked all the exits. In reality, the Scene includes geniuses and idiots, sincere people and pathological liars, people you despise and people you worship at first glance. But no magic fairy dust falls upon us when we become SMers: we are the same people we always were, just (one hopes) more sexually and emotionally satisfied, and thus more capable of experiencing joy.
Another danger is believing that once you find your way into the Scene the great mysteries of life will all be explained to you--preferably during a one-hour training session with someone you may never have met before but whose guidance you accept unquestioningly. If I had a dollar for every person who has written me requesting (and sometimes demanding) the golden key to SM which will unlock the secret of complete happiness, well, let's just say I wouldn't be living in a rental.
Yet another danger is peer pressure. Newcomers, particularly, but all of us, really, are consistently bombarded by rhetoric and rules, and are pressured to do as others do. The first and biggest problem with this, of course, is that there is no uniform thing that others do: under our leathers exists an infinite range of choices, preferences, and personalities. Indeed conformity and peer pressure are the enemies of sexual freedom. Their agents are the BDSMers who try to convince you to do as they say (which, by the way, is not always as they themselves do). Nothing could go more against the grain of sadomasochism than being forced to conform to a group standard.
In Come Hither I warn about "Faux Mentors" and "Dogmatists" who take it upon themselves to make you play by rules they make up. These are people who are dead-set on converting you to their point of view on what is "real" BDSM and what isn't. Even worse, they encourage people to forget everything they knew, to suspend all critical judgment, to leave their common sense at the door, and to follow their lead into the magical kingdom of SM.
When I read that lovely email, I had an immediate image of my correspondent innocently traipsing down to some SM club on a quiet Friday night and being cornered by a Faux Mentor who convinces him that the best way for the couple to "learn" about kink is by the Faux Mentor giving the wife an "instructional" spanking. After that, the husband would be told he could only address his wife as Mistress and she would be told she must always wear latex--sans panties--and high heels. And, naturally, they would have to start attending a particular BDSM club which, naturally, hosts group play-parties where, naturally, they would soon discover they are expected to do BDSM with strangers because that is what everyone does.
Which brings me to the final danger of living in a BDSM closet. Hidden within the cozy comforts of our private world, all too many people are still struggling with guilt and shame about being kinky. The multitude of crank theories out there to explain kinkiness is amazing: from people who believe they were SMers in former lives, to those who believe totem animals dictate their sexual preferences, to those who float pseudo-scientific theories that women are submissive by nature, to those who refuse to concede that SM has anything to do with sex. Presumably, these theories lift the taint--and responsibility--of our being people who like to give and receive pain, humiliation, and other experiences which stand apart from conventional wisdom on what people are supposed to enjoy in bed.
Just as gay culture is filled with homophobia, our Scene is filled with sadomasophobia. How else to explain the hostility people express at fetishes and practices they don't personally enjoy and the bitter debates over whether to call ourselves D&Sers, BDSMers or SMers? Why else do people come up with long- winded, dubious theories to explain primal sexual urges, visible in every species? Why is there so much segregation and partitioning and divisiveness within our Community? No amount of cheerleading, rhetoric or posturing can disguise the feuding, disrespect, and hostility that results when SMers disagree about SM.
Why do some people say SM has nothing to do with sex? I believe it's because they feel that sex makes SM too dirty, too gritty, too close to who they really are and what they really want in bed. Sexless SM is more of a psychological and intellectual enterprise, unsullied by dripping genitals. Why do they develop those baroque theories to explain submission and dominance? I guess it's because they are so unresolved about SM that they are constantly attempting to rationalize it. And why all the segregation according to fetish, and preference, and lifestyle? I think it's because people bring all their old prejudices with them into the Scene. Perhaps they have finally reached a place of peace with their own interests: but YOUR interests remain suspect.
So before you rush into the Scene ask yourself: what do YOU want to get out of BDSM? Are you looking for personal happiness or a magic bullet? Are you willing to take your time learning about what it all means, or do you want advice from people who pull dead rabbits out of hats and tell you they're roaring lions? Are you so fed up with your old life that you want to forget it ever existed? If you're shopping for a new life without resolving any of the conflicts of the old one, then step right in, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the closet. Don't be surprised when you discover it's just as dangerous in there as it is in the outside world.
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