Feel Me Breathe
Clarifying a few matters related to BD/SM, which is otherwise called power play.
SEX IS BACK IN THE “NEWS,” as usual, in the only way it gets there: scandal. In his landmark 1964 book Eros Denied, Wayland Young explains that sexual repression comes in four forms: accident, absence, suicide — and scandal.
For most this is like a Zen koan (and it excludes important ideas offered by Wilhelm Reich — for another article). What we today call abuse (when it breaks the surface of the news) is an attribute of scandal, and society is obsessed with it. It “sells papers” as the expression goes, and as Stephen King once wrote, we all want to see the car crash in slow motion.
Before I go further: in my experience interviewing hundreds of survivors, most sex abuse happens in the home, by a person in the family or trusted by the family, often with a guardian at home (such as the mother). The book Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso documents an extreme case of what I have heard about countless times.
Ignoring the Most Common Forms of Harm
To obsess over the industrial or political manifestations of sexual abuse, or to say it’s those rich people up in the ivory tower running the world, is to ignore a simple fact that both survivors and their therapists know well.
To perseverate over “child sex trafficking” is to ignore the common forms of abuse that a large portion of the population seems to have experienced and is still dragging around with them, truly suffering.
What is also not said in polite company is that the sexual injury is one thing, but the betrayal of trust (often by the guardian who should have done something) is another.
And it’s not easy to talk about. I have a close male friend who is a survivor and he said to me once that he’s never revealed this to a partner and not had it used against him. So he keeps quiet.
While we are here, there are very few people who have not been in some way injured by some of their sexual experiences. This is often avoidable, but since there are exceedingly few places to talk about sex without risking arrest, or being defrocked, deplatformed or called a perv, we rarely get to the part about healing.
When was the last time you had a conversation with anyone about your sexual journey, including your favorite attributes of erotic intimacy? That is a real question.
Scandal Shames and Contaminates All Sexuality
What tends to happen is that sexual scandal in any form reflects negatively on all forms of sexuality, especially what nobody seems to talk about: what we want, and what we feel is wholesome and nourishing, and is not about consent or obligation, but is rather about affection, desire, sharing, curiosity and fun.
That unicorn is out there somewhere! We’ve met quite a few times.
The topic now on the hob is this thing incorrectly known as BD/SM, and which is being associated with child sex trafficking, rape, and the perverse hobbies of the extremely rich. Yet this general subject area is a favorite pastime of the plebes, the commoners and the upper crust alike. It is porno on page one, or as happens today, coming into my inbox from Substackers.
Every time I read something about BD/SM, which is the wrong term for the activity (standing for bondage/domination, sadism/masochism), I get the feeling the writer has never been near the stuff, or personally known anyone who has, much less had a personal experience. But maybe he Googled it.
The Felonious “Lifestyle”?
Ray Horvath, once a communications professor, writes in a recent Substack:
I used to allow my students to pick their topics for their presentations and their papers. One of them chose BDSM, so I had to look it up and found what I expected to find: people selling themselves, but the majority of them being kidnapped victims, drugged and forced into the lifestyle.
The lifestyle? He’s not describing a style of life. Being drugged, kidnapped and forced to do something pertain to felonies. The term lifestyle usually refers to swingers — married couples who meet up with other married couples for social sex, pretzels, apple cider and who sometimes watch the game when that gets boring.
Felonies have nothing to do with BD/SM, which is wholly voluntary, consensual preference for sexual play. That play includes events that are off the menu of what is called vanilla sex — sex which by some miracle transgresses no boundaries whatsoever and offends nobody whosoever, as long as they don’t know the any of the squishy details, which of course most people want to know, if only to be disgusted by what is perfectly ordinary.
Being offended by sex is a form of sex play. I am tempted to use the word fetish. That would be accurate.
The ex-professor, who allowed his students to choose their own topic, continues:
BDSM might be a choice for people who have been oppressed all their lives and think there is no way they can get out; they need company in their misery. Their pain needs more and more compensation and external assistance until it hurts more than their feelings... For a small fragment of what used to be humans, overstimulation is the way to go, so BDSM is a logical next step. Those, who start having sex at the age of 15, have no feelings left by the time they turn 30, so the most intimate experience in life is degraded to the feelings of a beaten or a predatory animal for them. Are they still human? The uber-rich are used to overstimulation from a young age, and they cannot live without their “soma,” even if it involves occasional visits to an Epstein’s island.
This paragraph sets an unofficial world record for the number of judgments about sexuality condensed into 142 words: Oppressed, misery, pain, overstimulation, former humans, start at age 15 and devoid of feelings by 30, degraded, beaten, predatory, animal, soma (anesthesia) and visiting an Epstein island.
Wow. What is this person into?
A Mutual Desire Field
What is called BD/SM in popular writing (“the press” and many books) is the pathologized interpretation of psychologists pathologizing their notions of consensual sexual experiences. These experiences are removed from their wholly voluntary context and examined like a bug under a microscope.
That context is a mutual desire field. For every dominant who wants to put a sub in ropes and chains, there is a sub who wants more than anything in the whole world to be put in ropes and chains. And here’s the funny part: in my experience, the subs (or bottoms) abound; the doms (or tops) are rarer to find.
Many men and women love the submissive aspect of play. They long for it, in many forms. You might be surprised who has rape fantasies, which is different from rape.
And as for tops, their end of the arrangement requires considerable training, practice, discipline and expense. All those custom leather objects are handmade and cost quite a lot of money, along with the fixtures in the “dungeon” or studio. If they don’t find a suitable bottom, it’s not much fun. Usually, they do.
Mental and Emotional Exploration
While I have seen some intense actual BD/SM play (especially a male/male session I witnessed one night at The Wet Spot sex co-op in Seattle, where I wanted to leave a big bottle of arnica), what most people find appealing about this branch of eroticism is the psychological angle.
It is, more than anything, a form of mental and emotional play, often conducted as roleplay, where power exchange is explored, and where sexual dynamics and non-ordinary states of consciousness can be exaggerated and experienced.
This can include playing with shame, humiliation, control, cuckold fantasies or experiences, denial of gratification, exaggerated self-consciousness, and other aspects of “powerlessness” — as a game, and not as cruelty acted out in a relationship.
People can come up with “scenes” and then dramatize them (teacher/student, stewardess/passenger, doctor/patient, interviewer/interviewee). Some of these can involve “punishment” for “bad behavior.”
If you want to know something about the whole slave business, South Park’s character Mr. Slave (an elementary school teacher’s boyfriend) is a fabulous satire.
The thing about power exchange is that it’s exposatory. It turns sexual dynamics inside out, where they can be seen. Usually, they are concealed.
Femdom and CFNM Play
Most of the tops I’ve met have been women — who shall we say have a lot of sexual options open to them.
The most popular form of power play is called femdom: female dominant, often with the women dressed to the nines and the men roaming around naked, hoping one of the stunning dommes will so much as notice them. (This is also called CFNM play — clothed female, nude male, usually conducted in a party environment.) If this is not every girl’s dream, it is for quite a few.
Years ago, Erica Jong (the woman who wanted to be a whole person and not half of a relationship) wrote an article for Penthouse called “Is Sex Sexy Without Power?” In it, she considers why an all-powerful millionaire stock trader would want to go to a dominatrix, pay her a thousand dollars to be blindfolded and handcuffed, and have a thundering orgasm (without being touched) when she dangles her panties in his face.
In the same article, she notes that this is an extension of the power dynamics present in nearly all sexual relationships, to some degree, including many marriages. Why do some women choose to have sexual relationships with their bosses? Why do people choose unavailable people? Why wealthy or are influential people seen as attractive?
Do All Relationships Have a Top and a Bottom?
Jong suggests that part of what (to some greater or lesser degree) nearly everyone gets off to — men and women alike — is the power aspect of sexuality. (And when this goes missing, sex can become boring.)
Tina Woodbury, the madame at a club I visited a few times, and presented at, was fond of saying that all relationships have a top and a bottom. Especially the successful ones, where people know and agree to their role, which is based on their personality constitution. Someone wears the pants in every family, which sometimes means fishnets. Every functional relationship has a way to distribute power.
Dramatizing this, and playing with it, is the essence of what is called BD/SM.
In case you were wondering. And by the way, if you want to infuse some energy into a sexual relationship without top/bottom play, try masturbating together. That is the most egalitarian form of sex.
Epstein Island in all its forms is somewhere else, and something else.
Larry Allen is an uncredited co-author of the article above, particularly one paragraph. Here is his response to the full piece, written to me and to Ray Horvath.
Hello Gentlemen,
I woke up this morning to this in my Inbox. Wow Eric, what a can of worms you’ve opened with that one little substack Article! You provocateur you!
I think that in the threads of these emails, I want to mention just a couple of points, especially since this subject is absolutely fraught with opinion from ‘professionals and researchers’, who clearly have no actual worldly, experiential wisdom about the subject upon which they pontificate.
But sex sells, whether its good or bad, so there’s money in opinion. Further to that though, I have found that the actual reality of some subjects in life, is often 180 degrees from the perceived reality of professional opinion makers. The food pyramid is an example of this, it’s actually completely upside down and wrong, but nevertheless, ‘Expert Opinion’ and agendered lobbyism perpetuates the myth, and most people, most of the time, go along with what is promoted.
Let’s get an example in the sexual field. “What do women want sexually?” All sorts of things will immediately run through your mind, from learned material and from experience. But WHAT exactly, do women want sexually? You can’t ask them , they will modify their answers according to their perception of the professional questioning them, at the lest. This veiling is normal human behaviour, and it has bamboozled professionals on such subjects from Freud to Masters and Johnston and on and on and so forth, which has led to an industry of professional opinion about female sexuality, but very little actual truth.
Enter metadata! Jordan Peterson gave us something HUGE on this subject. He accessed metadata from google searches, to see what women were actually looking for in terms of pornography, rather than what we think women want sexually. Google can do that, and it can identify the gender of the search users, so the data is trustworthy as its completely blind of opinion and veiling. What women searched for, is what the data showed, nothing more, nothing less.
Okay, given that most female ‘porn’ is consumed in written form (Mills and Boon or Harlequin Romance ‘Bodice Rippers’), google determined that the top five characters of ‘The Protagonist’ in female pornography were: Surgeon, Billionaire, Pirate, Werewolf and Vampire. The theme of such pornography that was most desired, was the story of the vaunting power of the female sexuality which ‘tamed’ the monster of the protagonist, and after that they lived happily ever after, etc etc.
You won’t hear such from ANY professional opinionster about female sexuality, and what men should and shouldn’t be ‘for their women’. You will hear that men should be loving, men should be gentle, men should be good providers etc etc. But women WANT monsters! So the real truth, is 180 degrees from the opinion.
To extend this 180 thought model, or testing protocol, as means of truth seeking, Freud and Co (and Co and Co and Co) all labelled gay men as deviants. They INVENTED the division between Heterosexual and Homosexual, and since then we’ve had a cascade of everything ‘different’ being labelled a perversion. Never mind that ‘gays’ have always been in the human species and many other species, suddenly some expert decides that they are failed men, and they are therefore deviants. The principal reasoning behind this is that they do not take women as partners and do not, as a rule, father children. So they are ‘failed men’ and they ‘fail’ women. The same women who say that they want a good man (who, of course, doesn’t actually exist), but who actually want a monster (who might exist, if you just look hard enough).
What is lost in that dualistic conundrum is that ‘gay’ men aren’t actually interested in being a ‘nice boy’ or a ‘monster’, for a woman AT ALL. They are not interested in being one half of a union of opposites, they are interested in a bond with a human of the same type as themselves. Essentially, they are brothers, not brother and sister. There is no substitution here, no ‘failure’ involved, only desire, and seeking for a truth.
With BDSM, you have a similar problem with observation and analysis as ‘truth’ by expert observation and deduction, versus actual reality, the two are 180 degrees apart. NO ONE who actually practices BDSM would say that it’s a substitute for intimacy. It’s exactly the opposite, 180 degrees, it’s an extraordinary, metaphorical and literal pursuit of intimacy on all levels, emotional, spiritual, sexual, physical. That’s the reality. It’s a total 3 dimensional experience, in the extreme.
Unfortunately, the ‘Pornography’ version (which is barely 2 dimensional) is not taken from the reality of BDSM, it’s taken from the down-streamed ‘deviant’ version of the reality from Freud and Co (and Co and Co and Co), which people think is the true reality because ‘Experts’. So it’s a literalisation of a pseudo reality, masquerading as a ‘Truth’, which I would suggest is a phenonema which is created by the absorption of the reality proposed by Freud and Co (and Co and Co and Co). 180 degrees!
So, women and monsters and good men again… Have Freud and Co (and Co and Co and Co) actually CREATED this split through their religion of the mind? I think that is the actual truth. I also think that these experts have so split us all off from our own 3 Dimensional desires, and our spirit, that we’re all either becoming monsters, or desire to make union with a monster, or we’re casting around looking for monsters to kill. So you want an answer to that – go where the experts have already labelled everyone as monsters… I mean actual sexuality, if you can still find it somewhere, somehow.
Larry
Excellent article! 👍