Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (56 page)

I had a hard time for a long time finding anyone who followed what I was trying to do or say. I kept looking. The only place I found people free enough, exploratory enough, who had broken down a lot of programming—who could understand this or who had been exploring it—was in the world of S&M. They had discarded body taboos and a lot of cultural garbage to do S&M. I found my niche. I found that, in a sense, everything I had been doing since age six always had S&M overtones. [Now] I’ve been a practitioner of S&M with other people for many years. Oddly, most people think of Fakir as a bottom because he hangs in trees with fleshhooks. That isn’t necessarily so! For the most part, Fakir is a top.

Playing with intense sensation is what people do in S&M for the most part. That is what we do in rituals and in piercing and in tattooing. Many people have found that this
is
a way of opening up their body-spirit connection. When one goes about this consensually and takes intense physical sensation in an expected way, they find that they can separate the body—which is feeling sensation—from the spirit in[side] the body. They’re expanding their consciousness, their understanding of life. I have found that I can get into an altered state that can be used for many things, including healing.

Let’s say we’re going to inflict intense physical sensation—we’re going to pierce 100 steel rods into my chest and back. At first this will be very unpleasant, but soon, if I’m in the right state and I’ve made the right preparations, my body’s endorphins—natural opiates—kick in, just like a lot of people in S&M find when they’re being whipped. It builds and builds until finally you achieve a euphoric state. This is not pain: Euphoria and pain are opposites. Intense physical sensation can be either.

If a shaman and magic are present, ecstasy can be led into an altered state of consciousness in which physiology is subject to change; it is malleable. Native American cultures have used this in healing for a long time. It’s been used all over Southeast Asia, Tibet. Deliberate, ritualized infliction of what we would call pain—or what I call strong physical sensation—can change the relationship of the body and that which lives in the body so that some kind of physical transformation is possible.

Intense physical sensation creates body focus. [Normally] your attention is scattered, diffused. There are different ways to focus it: There’s headfirst focusing. An example of that might be Zazen meditation. You sit very quietly and deal only with what’s going on in the mind. When you finally achieve some state of clear consciousness, your attention is focused in one direction. [A second way] is by devotion, as in Western religions: You get all
your attention focused into the love of Jesus. You’re then able to do things in life that you couldn’t do with unfocused attention.

The third way is the body-first way. This is the way of the shaman and the fakir. By using some kind of intense sensation in the physical body, you focus all concentration on one particular space in the physical body. After that, you can take the attention and make it go inward to explore your inner space. Your attention cannot wander when you’re doing something intense. [And] when your attention is this focused, it’s possible for something to happen. You may direct the attention into another sphere of consciousness. Shamanic activity for the most part is intent on body focus.

One of the neat things about the body-first approach is [that] the important element you have in the body system is sexual energy. This is the problem I’ve had [doing] Zen meditation. I always kept getting to a point where I was spacing out. I was getting the desired result, but always behind me was other baggage, and I didn’t know what to do with it. What happens if I got turned on? They give you no provision for this. The same thing is partly true for devotional systems of controlling your psyche and body. The missing ingredient in most of those systems is sexual energy. In body-first [focus], that’s the first thing you deal with. If you create a body focus and it isn’t erotic, this isn’t going to work very well.

Tattooing, piercing, branding, sculpting the body by putting ligatures on arms and legs, corsets and belts around the midsection, [all] cause a change of body state. This is a deliberate and usually ritualized change. One result is that you [may] get familiar with your body. You have control over the body. The body is responsive and plastic; it essentially conforms to the aesthetic ideal of the spirit that lives in the body. The body-spirit connection becomes clear and sharp through any form of body modification. All forms of body modification require commitment and some acceptance of physical restrictions and limitations. These may not last forever, but one must accept those to get to the other side.

Fifteen

W
ho can forget the image of Scarlett O’Hara being tightly laced into her corset, nearly fainting, and yet gladly suffering for the sake of reducing her waist another inch? While some people today may consider corsets a quaint fashion anachronism, growing numbers of both men and women happily are enduring the rigors of corsetting. While their reasons vary, most agree: They find the corsetted figure sexy. And, as a method and infliction of control over the body and shape, corsetting lends itself very well to D&S. Corset training has been a staple of D&S erotica and practice for a century or more.

In this chapter we hear from a number of tight-lacing enthusiasts and feature profiles of:

We also include some thoughts on corsetting from Fakir Musafar, whose corsetting innovations have literally transformed the bodies of hundreds of men and women nationwide.

Corsets have played a central role in the public history of fashion and the private history of the boudoir. They have also been the inspiration for contemporary ladies’ undergarments. The first brassieres were invented to support breasts when corsets in the early 20th Century were cut low. When corsets were cut higher at the waist, girdles were introduced. The corset is both an expression of extreme femininity and a repression (through restriction) of the body. This garment, which boldly exaggerates stereotypical feminine curves, does so by rigorously confining the torso.

In the past, psychiatrists perceived the erotic interest in corsets as uniquely a fetish activity, often entailing extreme masochism. Stekel detailed several cases of corset fetishism, including that of a “well-educated and respectable man, the father of four healthy children, happily married”:

The corset holds a unique place in the erotic aesthetic of many body-modifiers.

The first documentation of a prototypical corset dates back to circa 2000
B.C
. Pictorial depictions of the people of Minoa, Crete, show both genders wearing tight, wide belts which compressed the wearer’s midsection, giving men and women alike a wasp-waisted look. The belts also lifted and enhanced the female bust line.

Other ancient cultures that have practiced similar forms of waist modification include the Dinka people of Africa, whose males still wear beaded corsets to designate age status.
²
Waist reduction was also practiced among the Ibitoe of Papua, New Guinea: Young men wore a cinching belt of rigid material as part of a rite of manhood. Men with dainty waists were objects of beauty.

The rigid modern corset traces its origins to a significant innovation in European corset styles sometime in the middle 16th Century: the introduction of busks, rigid supports sewn into the front of the corset. The busks were first made of wood and were presumably arduous to endure.

In the late 17th Century, corsets—traditionally long—were cropped above the thighs, and small waists became the rage among fashion plates of both genders. Women’s corsets were structured so as to force the breasts upward. Even officers in the French and British armies engaged in tight-lacing. Military uniforms were tailored to emphasize attenuated masculine waistlines.

Corsets fell out of favor in the late 18th Century only to regain popularity in the early part of the 19th Century, when wooden busks were replaced by supports made of whalebone and metal. The corset was an essential component of women’s dress throughout the 19th Century, despite warnings from physicians and many women against tight-lacing, which continued for over 100 years. Tight-lacing was blamed for damage to internal organs and for inducing miscarriages. The severe 19th Century corset often interfered with respiration, and corsets were a frequent cause of the “vapors,” which dispatched Victorian women to fainting couches. Yet the appeal of a slender female waistline was firmly established in the Western cultural aesthetic, and so the corset remained a fashion fixture well into the 20th Century.

In the early 20th Century a Parisian couturier invented the “slim line,” which emphasized a natural shape. Whalebone was soon replaced by insulated metal stays.
³
By this time, a broad variety of styles and materials were used in corset designs. During World War I women allegedly donated enough metal from corsets to the military cause to construct two warships.

The corset seemed to be threatened during the 1920s, when flappers popularized boyish figures and a minimum of restrictive wear. Perhaps one
could take womanhood out of corsets, but apparently one couldn’t take corsets out of womanhood. In order to achieve the slim, no-bulge ideal of the 1920s, well-endowed women tight-laced to fit the fashionably boyish silhouette.

The 1930s brought a renewed interest in corsets. Plump hips and ample breasts were once again au courant, especially in counterpoint to slender waists, and the hourglass figure came into its heyday. In this decade the Dunlop Rubber Company first began experiments which led to the development of Lastex, a latex end product. With the vastly increased comfort of an elastic garment, the corset’s popularity once again mushroomed. Another company, Warner Brothers, introduced the “roll on,” an elastic corset with lighter control and two-way stretch, which could be pulled on; boning was replaced by heavy stitching or doubled material. Hooks and eyes lost favor when the zipper was invented in 1931.
⁴

Today’s lingerie catalogues and music videos are full of frilled facsimiles designed to accentuate bosoms, flatten abdomens, and flatter other assets without actually causing changes to the body’s shape. For the purist the traditional styles of Victorian and Edwardian corsets, employing tight laces and boning to create a long-lasting change in body shape, are deemed most desirable. Contemporary versions, however, are more adjustable and comfortable.

The best-known American retailer catering to today’s serious corset enthusiast is B.R. Creations, which specializes in fanciful designs in sensual fabrics. B.R. obtained corset patterns from Fakir Musafar, who began to take an interest in corsets in the 1940s. By the 1960s he had turned his personal interest into a business. He launched an intensive study of contemporary body types and created patterns designed for the modern figure.