Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (54 page)

I haven’t acted on my sexuality very much. What’s caused me to change is [Sara], with whom I have had a friendship relationship for about 15 years. It took time, but eventually I got where I could open up to her about my problems and my hang-ups, my strange desires. It was a real healing force. I regret that I have wasted so many years … but better late than never.

1992: A number of things have happened this year. One of them is that my relationship with my wife has gotten to the point where there’s very little now that she isn’t willing to do to me. I think it was just a matter of getting comfortable with it, beginning to understand that sometimes pain is not pain—it’s something else, too. And to trust that when I said I wanted her to whip me, that’s really what I meant. I wanted it to hurt. It’s a hard thing to believe sometimes.

At first, Sara was uncomfortable and uncertain, [but] I think it was always her intent to be supportive. [Now] we can do some fairly heavy scenes. I think she has come to see this process as one which she has an interest in and a stake in, also.

Since we talked [last], I have developed an immensely higher comfort level with this sexuality. I’ve come out to my brother and sister. [My daughter] expressed not a great deal of surprise and not a great deal of interest when I warned her and her boyfriend about some videotapes of porn that they might find in the back of the cabinet. She thought it was okay:
“Whatever turns you on.” She and I have a fairly deep relationship. We’ve always been pretty open talking about sex.

All of this had really given me a whole lot of confidence. I’m not ready to hang up a whip on my wall at work—not quite!—but I do wear a leather armband virtually everywhere now.

[My wife] can tie me up quite thoroughly and whip me till I’m screaming. I also like sharp-pointed things in certain sensitive spots. She’s willing to make me jump and squeal with needles, and she has a very sharp pair of tweezers that she has fun with.

More and more since we’ve been able to really get into stuff, we’ve gotten into cock-and-ball torture of various sorts. That includes putting on clothespins and pliers and even alligator clips to pinch. Cock-and-ball torture and genital torture generally have been part of my fantasy life since I was a kid. When I was growing up, there were some little kind of thorny things—we called them sandspurs or bulldogs. I used to thread them on a string and wrap them around my penis. I remember one time I got a pair of underwear and put a bunch of these inside. That turned out to be a little too much, but I then took an old pair [of shorts] and cut a flap where the crotch was so that it wouldn’t be tight—it’d just rub and bounce. That worked out real well.

I think we have a ways to go before we really have a good D&S dynamic in our play. What lacks [now] is me feeling submissive. I feel that very rarely with my wife. [She] knows it. That’s one of the real strengths of the relationship: We talk very candidly about all this stuff. I’m hoping that it will come simply with increasing comfort. I’m hoping that we will begin to spend some more time on the head-trip aspect and not just on what you can do with the body.

I think the secret of our success is simply that we have a very open relationship; we are as honest with each other as we know how to be in all areas. We talk about sexual matters very easily and openly, and very often when we have had some D&S play, we’ll go over it later on [and] talk about it. It’s really helped us.

[Before meeting John], I was aware that this sort of stuff went on. In fact, I had a relationship with someone who probably would have liked this sort of thing, though we did not do very much. I’m not quite sure how this information was conveyed to me, but I knew that he would like to be whipped. I was very reluctant to do that sort of thing. My own sense of myself is of a person with needs for power, and I find this scary. So seeing myself as someone who would like very much to dominate other people [is something] I try and step back from.

At a certain point John was willing to share with me that he had fantasies which involved mainly submission. I had a mixed response. At times some of the things that he might fantasize about people doing, or even himself doing, were repellent. Some other things were just interesting.

I was initially willing to try bondage and had interest in both directions—not only in binding but in being bound. When I was a preteenager a male cousin and I had a game of tying each other up. The idea was to see who could tie someone up so that they could not get loose. I recall enjoying that game and being good at it and able to tie [him] up [so] that he could not get loose, whereas he could never do that to me. So the idea of bondage as such probably was not as strange as it might have [otherwise] been.

In fact, I remember somebody actually doing that years ago and my finding it scary. What was scary about it was being helpless, because there have to be levels of trust in these things. If you are not trusting, then it is another kind of experience. I am mistrustful of people and the possibility that they might misuse the situation. With my husband, what happened was that he talked about it, [and] I said, “Okay.” I brought out some ropes; I think he was surprised. I’m sort of amused by a lot of this. I can’t say that there’s a big sexual charge, but there is certainly some amusement.

I’m interested in dominance, but I’m not interested in sadism. The idea of hurting somebody is not appealing, even when they want to be hurt. The idea of causing welts and stripes and blood really is not especially appealing. These are things that my husband has liked to have happen to him. I think he still has trouble asking for something of that sort. He knows that I am uncomfortable with it. I’m more willing to experiment with different accoutrements, more willing to keep going—instead of five slaps, 15. So both in terms of variety and intensity, I’m willing to do more … and in the process I am probably causing more pain than I might once have, having realized that it’s not terribly dangerous.

Our whole culture tells women that you don’t cause pain, that you’re nice. So there does seem something wrong about standing in front of someone who can’t protect himself, with crops or paddles or whips, and causing hurt and seeing the physical evidence of that. [I still feel that way] at times. One of the things that I try to do is get a reaction without [inflicting] a lot of pain. You can wallop the hell out of somebody, or you can strike them in a sensitive place, not especially hard, but in ways that get a reaction. I try to do the latter. [My husband] would like both. He was delighted [once] when I was annoyed and hit a little too hard. He wandered around for a week with welts and bruises. I was not happy about that. I thought that was a loss of control on my part. He thought it was wonderful.

While I might be the dominant, my husband is the leader. He’s the one
who has taken us to this, and [he] knows far more about it than I do. I appreciate that, because if it were left up to me, we wouldn’t do it. And I would like to go on exploring. His interest in these things has been aided and abetted by outsiders who have, I think, given him permission to do things that he originally might not have thought he could. He was then able to come to me with this and say, “This might be okay. Is it really okay?” I’ve been very supportive. I might not always want to participate in something, but I feel that it’s important that he tries to explore what he can, and I’ll do what I can.

SECTION FOUR

I
NDIVIDUALIZING THE
B
ODY

Fourteen

W
hat do the popular entertainer who flaunts colorful tattoos, the woman who gets breast implants, and the man who has several rings pierced through his penis have in common? They are all practicing body modification.

The practice of modifying the human body has endured since before recorded history. The forms and methods of alteration are countless; fashion, cultural, and religious practices have dictated variations in placement, style, degree, and type. The alterations have ranged from the mundane to the extraordinary.

The eroticization of tattooing, scarification, branding, or piercing is called
stigmatophilia
, from the Latin for “love of a mark or brand.” Although body modifications aren’t necessarily adjuncts to erotic stimulation, they cannot escape identification with the erotic. Among D&Sers body modification is often a unique means of combining the aesthetic with the sensual. In this chapter, we profile Fakir Musafar, perhaps the most audacious body-modification advocate today. A shaman and master piercer, Fakir was born Roland Loomis in 1930 in South Dakota. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in creative writing; he has spent much of his life as an advertising executive. He has developed his expertise through research and over 40 years of personal practice of primitivistic body ritual. Fakir publishes
Body Play
magazine. He is married.

The archaeological record amply demonstrates the ubiquity and antiquity of body modification. Representational art reveals that various South American Indians pierced their septums with a number of rings or elongated their earlobes with ear spools, as shown in effigy vessels and figurines made prior to European contact. Neolithic cave paintings in southern Europe depict hands with missing fingers, offering a tantalizing clue as to the antiquity of ritual amputation, which historically has occurred over much of the world. Human burials have yielded plentiful proof of body modification, from jewelry fashioned expressly for modification—earrings being among the most common—to the visible alteration of the human form, such as cephalic deformation, or changing the shape of the skull during infancy. There are far too many examples to enumerate here.