Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (17 page)

Then my roommate joined the Society of Janus. After only two meetings she said, “I’m sorry for being nonconsensually dominant. I only want to do power games in the bedroom, and then with people who want to do them with me. S/M is not what you think it is.” I was amazed by the change in her and became intrigued because if something was happening sexually that was good that I didn’t know about, well … where do I sign up? I went to a Janus orientation and was astonished: People were committed to talking about the forbidden and about safety. They were working on communicating, on negotiating. I’m an est graduate, and I’ve been in a lot of groups, [but] I had never seen
this
level of conversation. Most people don’t even talk about straight sex!

The people at Janus were talking about what worked and what didn’t and
why
, and how to negotiate what you want and don’t want when you do S/M. I was fascinated by the level of honesty. Janus has a rule, which is that if you don’t have an interest in S/M, you’re not allowed to join. This keeps out the people who are just curious, journalists, and therapists who want to study us like bugs under a microscope. I wanted to join so I was very frank. I said, “This is all new to me, and my erotic interests are mainly costume, sexual theater, and masturbation. I enjoy sex with people, and I’m very multiorgasmic when I masturbate. I don’t know if I qualify, but I’m seriously interested in joining.” They decided that my interest in costume and sexual theater could be considered a fetish, and they felt I would be a good addition. I appreciated that. I attended almost every program they had because I quickly realized that I didn’t know
anything
. I went to programs on piercing, bondage, sensory deprivation, gender, fetishes, whipping, you name it. I
didn’t know where I fit in, but it was erotic, informative, and fun. I don’t fantasize when I have sex [or] when I masturbate. I never have. I’m very much in what I see and hear and smell and feel and taste. So when a young man approached me at a Janus meeting and said, “I’d like to be at your service, anything you want,” I wasn’t able to tell him a thing. I didn’t know how to get the dynamic [started]. But I kept going to meetings, I kept talking to people, and I kept listening and asking questions.

I couldn’t seem to find my niche, yet I knew that there was a higher drama than what I was experiencing. One reason I was into masturbation is that no matter how much I loved somebody, after a while the sex was predictable. My mind would wander. I thought, Why can’t I stay focused? Am I afraid of intimacy? The truth is that I need high drama, or intensity. After the first flush of infatuation wears off, the drama’s gone. In S/M this drama can be very intimate and very personal; it’s not phony drama. It’s also difficult to let the mind wander if you’re truly involved in a D&S or S/M scene. More than just the genitals are involved. When the purpose of the interaction is not just orgasm but another kind of release as well, one moves to a deeper level of relationship that is more sophisticated and requires more thought and communication.

In 1983 I went to work for a phone sex company. Within two weeks my dominant persona emerged. Boom! I think I had been afraid to take power. I [remember] that when I was nine—my parents were separated when I was four—my mother and I [had] a big argument. I won and she was reduced to a helpless, hysterical quivering pile of tears. I had this
enormous
rush of power like, “TADA!! I’m in charge!” followed by hysteria, because, if at nine years old I was in charge, we were in big trouble! Later in life it was hard for me to start scenes because I was scared about what was going to happen next. But on the phone, it’s so distant; and most of the people I was dealing with didn’t really want to submit. They wanted somebody to play out [a] fantasy. The fantasy [aspect] made it safe for me to act the role and ease my way into true dominance. Eventually
pretending
to be dominant became boring and a little frustrating. I began to ask the client if he would be willing to try genuinely being dominated over the phone. Some agreed and I started to explore the actual world of D&S. This has
never
been boring, professionally or personally. I’ve found it to be challenging, rewarding and a true path of self-awareness. Once I started playing with power in an erotic context I became aware of its uses and abuses in the rest of the world. I became a better communicator and negotiator—not only did I know about power games, I had played them out in a safe, fun, erotic way.

I went to work as a mistress-in-training for a professional mistress in late
1983. I was submissive to her and—under her instruction—dominant over the clients. I learned how to start a scene, what to do in the middle, and how to wrap it up. I found a framework upon which to hang my own interests. After about a month or two, I put an ad in the paper. In 1985 my roommate moved out so that we could turn her bedroom into a dungeon, and we began working together. I opened my own place and I did it mostly by slave labor. I got a phone call from a young man who was a painter and plasterer interested in D&S. We had a satisfying relationship on both sides, and he replastered and repainted my entire apartment.

I’m very involved in the S/M community in San Francisco now. I teach in it, I play in it, most of my friends are S/M people: not all, but most. I can be all of who I am in that world. When I go into a community that is not S/M-positive, sometimes I tell them that I’m a sex educator. I can be who I am, but not completely, because there’s a part of me that may not [be] fully respected and accepted in that world. In my community I feel loved and accepted. When I got sick and was hospitalized with a herniated disc, all [my] money went towards paying bills. But the community raised money for me, did my shopping, cleaned my house; people came and bathed me at the hospital. Six months later people still called, asking, “What can I do?” I have an experience of being part of a tribe that appreciates its elders—I mean, I’m not that old, but I’m appreciated for what I know, what I give, and how I learn and teach.

[Professionally] I specialize in gender play, infantilism, and slave training with a pleasure-pain dynamic. Each [situation] has different emotional, physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual intents. My erotic interests are extensive and varied both privately and professionally. This is important professionally because unless you’re remarkably skilled it’s difficult to make a living with only one interest, such as bondage or S/M. So I do a wide range of activities, including fetishism, such as shoe/boot/foot worship, or various psychodrama scenarios.

I don’t do anything illegal. I don’t do degradation scenes. That’s a limit I have. I have a hard time both privately and professionally doing something that I believe could encourage or reinforce low self-esteem. For me humiliation and degradation are two very different activities on a large continuum, starting with mild embarrassment and ending with extreme self-abasement and degradation. In the middle could fall teasing, mockery, humiliation, and the stripping away of
false
pride. I believe it’s possible to do degradation scenes safely but that it’s very tricky and requires follow-up aftercare by the top. I don’t do anything unsafe in terms of S/M or health. There’s no oral sex, anal sex, intercourse, or masturbation by me for legal reasons. The
second reason I don’t do anything directly sexual is that I like keeping something for my life partner. As a sex worker, I feel it’s very important to have activities that are only for my personal relationships.

One group of clients I see are people who are interested in giving up power in a manner that is not competitive or rebellious. I do a lot of slave training and mental control. Usually such a person is someone who is in control a great deal in his life. He is looking for a place to relax and safely put all his power. Mental control alone is not always sufficient. Pain can be an aphrodisiac, but it also can be a very powerful reminder to someone that he is right here right now and not in charge. It’s difficult to let your mind wander when your body is experiencing a very intense [physical] sensation. I use some bondage so that people have the experience of being unable to get away, or so that their bodies are altered in some manner. It’s an experience that is separate from the rest of their lives. It’s an experiential process, not an analytical one.

Being told how to stand, sit, kneel, lie, where to look, how to address me, how to serve me food or drink, how to be there just for me, can be very freeing. To put someone else’s desires ahead of one’s own, to receive pleasure solely from pleasing someone else can be very good for the soul. I’ve heard slaves say that they feel most free inside when they’re enslaved. When you affect the body—whether with ropes, diapers, clothes, sensation, or other control—you affect the mind.

There are many games and many different styles. What’s a turn-on for me may be a turn-off for another dominant and vice versa. One of the most exciting experiences for me, both professionally and in my private life, is to be with someone who wants to please, serve, and submit. Resistance games are fun, but I don’t find it erotic to have my power repeatedly challenged. My friend does; she works perfectly with this dynamic and so I refer those clients to her. I like to lead someone down an intense road of submission, service, and S/M. I’m strict and sadistic, yet gentle and compassionate. I want a person to get outside himself. Pain and bondage are means to this end. I love to look at complicated bondage, but it seems to me that the person usually goes on an inner journey. This is a profound journey, but I’m not this type of guide.

I’m a neopagan, goddess worshiper. I believe that in every human being there is a spiritual source. Some people call it a higher power; for me it’s the higher power within
and
without. I like to be worshiped and adored, but I’m clear that it’s not the ego-inflated human but a greater power within that’s being adored.

I think of every day as an adventure in my life, and every day as an adventure in my relationship. I love to find out where my limits are and go beyond them. For me, what goes on in all of these experiences is the exchange of what I call “psychic energy.” When Freud used the term
libido
, he meant sexual energy. When Jung used the term, he meant life-force energy, which is much closer to what the Hindus mean by kundalini, the energy that’s supposed to lie coiled at the base of the spine until experience wakes it. In my experience, when S&M does not work, the result is simply two egos or bodies getting together. When it does work, it involves a different level of interaction and being. For some people, this level is activated by intense sensation. For others—and this is more true for me than not—that level is reached through mind games. It’s not that somebody else controls my mind but that I voluntarily give up the power to make certain kinds of choices. What I give up is negotiated in a specific situation at a specific time. This to me [is] the universe of D&S.

Although I have been in a specifically S&M or D&S relationship for only several years, it looks to me as if the exchange of erotic power has been present throughout my life, in all my relationships. And as I look at the way most people interact, it seems to me that it is present in most people’s relationships most of the time. There is a little dance in which one person becomes the seeker and one person becomes the sought; one person becomes the dominant and one person the submissive. It’s not necessarily erotic. But there’s an organization of energy, so that we can continue with our lives. The problem in most relationships is that this process is unconscious.

If you’re an ordinary person having ordinary intercourse, there are a lot of questions you never have to address about who you are, who your partner is, what issues of control [exist]. When you leave the world of vanilla sex—particularly the heterosexual vanilla world—you have to start asking [such] questions of yourself. Doing so opens up the opportunity, or presents the problem, of consciousness, of growing in self-knowledge. I’m not saying that just because you get conscious [about D&S], there aren’t other unconscious things going on. But this consciousness seems to me one of the greatest values, though not necessarily one of the greatest pleasures, in this mini-universe. Actually this is a great pleasure for
me
. I’m a process junkie; I like to work things to death. But I know some extremely intelligent, experienced players who want no truck with that attitude. They do S&M for fun. Period.

[As for the] physical reality, well, in the sexually vanilla world, people are forever fucking each other while the person on top is pinning the wrists
of the person on the bottom, or lightly slapping or tickling him or her. Since I’m a boy in this culture, and since more of my partners have been girls than boys, mostly those were situations in which I was on top, holding her wrists or slapping her butt, and sometimes the results were very gratifying. I [once] grabbed one girlfriend when she walked past me, threw her over my lap, hiked up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and spanked her, and she turned and gasped at me over her shoulder, “Oh, James, how did you know?” That was nice, but knowing what I do now, I see it was also nonconsensual. She could have taken what I did as abuse instead of as a sexual delight.

In 1987 I was divorced. Ours looked for all the world like a straight-on vanilla relationship, and in some regards I guess it was. But she had run through a string of abusive partners—guys who threw her down the stairs, broke her nose, broke her ribs, blackened her eyes—a real horror show. I have a white-knight complex, so I was going to save her. We had a great sexual relationship and a little vanilla slap and tickle, and that was fine. But we also had a lot of manipulative disagreements, and somewhere in the midst of this marriage, I discovered one night that I really wanted to deck her. Even though I never did anything of the sort,
I felt
like an abuser. I didn’t like this about me at all. I had never felt that way; I had never been in an abusive relationship. Nobody was hitting anybody, but it felt lousy, and with whatever discussion we were able to have, it didn’t look as if there was any way we were going to resolve it. It [was] untenable for me. This was not where I was going to spend the rest of my life. So I ended the relationship.