I come from a household where corporal punishment was not part of the regime. I do remember that with my first girlfriend we were quite sexually active but didn’t want to mess around with birth control. We were very creative with forms of sexual activity that did not involve intercourse, and the things I found most interesting were bondage and spanking. The thing that’s really fun about being a submissive is [that] it’s like rock climbing or skydiving. You’re faced with something where your intellect will say, “You’re utterly safe. The rip cord is right here, and you can pull it, and the parachute will open, and you’ll float to safety.” But all your visceral senses [are screaming].
There are several things that I have fantasized about that are more fun to fantasize about than to do. One is taking a really hard spanking, but my tolerance for pain is not horribly high. The times that I’ve gone over what I will tentatively call my limits have not been pleasant experiences. I imagine that different approaches, starting slow and working up to more intense things, might prove different. One of the things I’d like to try doing more of is roleplaying. I’d love to play out [a scenario of] being called into a teacher’s office and reprimanded and told I won’t graduate unless I submit to a spanking. But fantasies aren’t always good realities.
Twelve
WHIPPING
She plucked some twigs from the broom, and whipped the girl so that she raised welts on her.… Matryosha did not scream under the strokes, obviously because I was present, but she gasped strangely at each blow. And afterward she continued to sob gaspingly for a whole hour.… Immediately I felt that I had done something vile. At the same time I experienced a pleasurable sensation because suddenly a certain desire pierced me like a blade …
—DOSTOYEVSKY, The Possessed1
WHAT IS IT?
When the rock band Devo sarcastically intoned, “Whip it, whip it good” in the early 1980s, it joined a tradition historically populated by monks, not punks. Flagellation—the striking of flesh, usually but not exclusively on the back, with a whip, flail, or other stinging device—has the distinction of being perhaps the single most widely practiced form of punishment in history. It is impossible to determine the degree to which flogging pain was intermingled with sheer sensual pleasure.
This chapter focuses on:
• Mitch Kessler, who is 47 years old and a native New Yorker. He crafts whips and “implements of affection” under the name Adam Selene. He is an elected officer of the Metropolitan New York chapter of the National Leather Association (NLA). Gerrie Blum is his life- and business partner.
• Gerrie Blum (also known as Gillian Boardman and Lady Gillian) is 54 years old. She and Mr. Kessler own Adam’s Sensual Whips and Gillian’s Toys. Ms. Blum is an officer of the Metropolitan New York chapter of the NLA and is a delegate to the NLA National Advisory Council.
• Laura Antonio is 27 years old and lives in New York, where she works in the design and production of magazines. She produced the 1992 Miss Northeast Leather Contest.
WHEN DID IT BEGIN?
Whipping has had a long and subtle history. In pagan Sparta young men were whipped by female priestesses before a wooden image of Artemis as a rite of passage. Flagellation also occurred in the mystery cults of Mediterranean civilizations—such as Greece, Persia, Rome, and Egypt—as one method of inducing altered consciousness. Other methods included fasting, music, the inhalation of fumes to produce intoxication, whirling dance, contemplation and meditation, and hypnosis.2 Such rituals and metaphysical voyages are emulated by contemporary whipping enthusiasts who combine sexuality and spirituality.
At least two major religions, Islam and Christianity, have embraced self-flagellation as a means of self-purification. The Shiite Muslims still engage in public self-flagellation. Adherents of Roman Catholicism escalated self-flagellation in the 13th and 14th centuries to what has been termed “flagellomania.” The practice was ultimately banned when devotees became a little too devoted to self-mortification and less devoted to the Church.
The western world has had a long tradition of flagellation and similar acts associated with Christian penance. The West today has seen the secularization of sadomasochism, once looked upon as an exemplary religious experience.
—EDGAR GREGERSEN3
In Christianity self-flagellation was inherited from the “desert fathers,” monastics who first established small communities in the Egyptian desert in A.D. 381. The desert fathers regarded sensual pleasure as inherently sinful and believed that discomfort blunted cravings for pleasure and proved the unimportance of the body. Their philosophy became the religious ideal of Christian Europe for well over a thousand years and persists in many quarters, such as in the Penitente sects in the American Southwest.
How profoundly the Christian antipathy to sexual pleasure has affected human sexuality is impossible to overestimate. But it is obvious that self-mortification and religiously inspired punishment often replaced forbidden sexual gratification.
Celibates often indulged in prodigies of masochism, and especially in flagellation, and we find cases of confessors making use of their power of absolution to force their female parishioners to beat them.
—G. RATTRAY TAYLOR4
During the 11th Century flagellation was promoted as a form of penitence and was doled out by confessors as frequently as is the modern-day “Hail Mary.”
At first the priests used to do the whipping themselves, the penitents usually being entirely nude, and the penance being inflicted in a place attached to the church.… In the twelfth century St. Dominic made the practice widely known, and established a scale of equivalents, 1,000 lashes being considered equivalent to the reciting often penitential psalms.
—G. RATTRAY TAYLOR5
In 1259 groups began forming in northern Italy for the express purpose of self-flagellation. Entire communities—even five-year-olds—participated, despite the censure of both secular and religious authorities. The movement eventually waned, but resurgences occurred in 1262 and 1296. In 1334 repeated earthquakes were interpreted as God’s displeasure and spawned another mass movement of self-whipping, and in 1348–49, when the Black Plague devastated Western Europe, frightened crowds again fell into frenzies of self-flagellation. Processions of thousands from all classes spread through present-day Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and England.
The Church was alarmed when the Brethren of the Cross formed around 1349. This iconoclastic sect held that one could attain eternal salvation by undergoing 33½ days of self-scourging without intercession of priests or the Church. A papal bull promptly denounced the Brethren as heretics, and the movement was disbanded, reemerging briefly in 1351 and again in 1354, before being crushed by the Inquisition. Their demise did not, however, end self-flagellation: The practice simply was once more brought under Church control.
The enormous historical popularity of flagellation at least suggests that participants derived some pleasure, albeit unconsciously, from acts of extreme masochism. Because the persons who performed these acts did not identify their activities as erotic and although the context of religious faith cannot be ignored, the many records of nuns begging to be bound and flogged and partly clad priests beseeching women to beat them—and their ensuing spiritual ecstasy—suggest that self-flagellants experienced, at the least, an endorphin rush. Contemporary enthusiasts all report an inextricable link between eros and whipping.
The first unambiguous linking of flagellation and erotic pleasure in the West occurred in the 15th Century, when an Italian named Pico della Mirandola wrote the first known account of sexual sadomasochism. He described a man who could not enjoy sex unless he had been beaten to the point of bleeding with a whip soaked in vinegar.
Over time the power of the Church waned and so too did documentation of flagellation. But sexual sadomasochism “soon had a place in pornography and in life”6 as flagellation traveled from the processions of the penitents to the bedchambers and brothels of Europe. Whipping was designa
ted “the English vice” not long after A Treatise on the Use of Flogging was published in 1718.
It was suggested at the time that whipping was the last resort of rakes whose senses were dulled by sexual excess, but this certainly does not conform to contemporary understandings of psychosexuality. Whatever the reason, English brothels dedicated to flagellation enjoyed a huge success. A Mrs. Colet’s establishment was so popular that King George IV made a well-known royal visit. A Mr. Chace Pine invented a machine capable of whipping forty persons simultaneously. Another madam, Mrs. Theresa Berkley (inventor of a spanking bench known as the Berkley Horse), was able to retire in comfort after eight years of turning others’ pain into personal gain. Despite—or perhaps as a result of—the Puritanism (later known as Victorianism) that overtook England by the end of the 18th Century, flagellation brothels increased in popularity.
Although whipping has been condemned as an erotic practice since the end of the 19th Century, it long remained a favorite means of enforcing discipline among schoolchildren. Even today children in some parts of America are subjected to corporal punishment. From the 16th to the 20th centuries in Europe, whippings with canes and birches were accepted pedagogy.7 It has been suggested that these unsavory acts of violence against children have helped perpetuate the adult interest in whipping that continues in contemporary English pornography. Many psychologists have observed that the sum effect of such arduous punishment, instead of inspiring distaste, may instead excite erotic pleasure.8 Certainly the historical record indicates that there is something about the intense stimulation of stinging blows to flesh—even the most innocent flesh—and its asserted expiation of sins that may compel recipients to crave repetition. In any situation, whipping carries a high risk of physical injury and emotional trauma.
HOW IS IT DONE?
Since all of the acts described in this book are assumed to be mutually consensual, we will not discuss the many cruel and vicious methods of whipping used over the millennia to degrade and abuse people. A whipping that takes place in a D&S context is specifically intended to serve both partners’ erotic and psychological pleasure.
[One should] never use the word brutality. [D&S] is done with caring and love. I’m extremely maternal. I want the person I am topping to have a wonderfully good experience. And it’s sexual. I want them to really get off on it.
—JEAN L.
D&Sers, as a rule, love ritual. In some cases, a flogging may be a ritualized part of a larger ceremony of submission, such as the “one year and one day” contract of submission one interviewee entered into with a dominant.
He had a series of ritualized questions, designed to make sure that I was willing to go through with this. I took a flogging from the whip that he had made—a birch, a bundle of rods with a long handle—and I took 13 strokes with that, one for each month plus one for the day. Afterwards, I vowed to come and to go, do and leave undone, and to speak and be silent according to his will and whim. In return, he promised to respect and protect my honor and integrity and to judge and guide me with all of his wisdom.
—LAURA ANTONIO
A whipping may begin with a careful selection of the appropriate implement; the submissive may be required to kneel and to kiss the whip’s handle before the activity begins. Such head trips are a kind of foreplay to the main erotic event.
Submissives are sometimes ordered to count the strokes of the whip aloud or to say, “Thank you, may I have another?” after each stroke. There are numerous variations on this theme. A dominant may announce in advance the number of strokes to be given so that the submissive knows what to expect. Partners frequently introduce other control elements, such as providing the submissive with a safe word or having the submissive beg.
With [my lover], I usually make it a condition that I’ll flog him until he begs me to stop, which takes a lot of doing. I think maybe he’s topping from the bottom, but it’s fun to do, so I let him get away with it.
—ADIDA
A consensual whipping usually entails a lengthy physical building-up to prepare for more intense sensation.
When you whip somebody, you start off lightly, so that it is a body massage. You keep doing that and very, very gradually increase the intensity. That’s how you bring someone up. As you increase the intensity, if you have a person who is a sexual masochist like myself, there will come a point where their body says to them, “You’re experiencing pain! Time to get the endorphins going.” The endorphins will kick in, and you will get an endorphin rush.
—JEAN L.
Some prepare for a whipping by gently stroking the area to be struck with a lightweight implement, or with fingers, or even with a feather or fur. Commonly soft sensations—such as tickles or caresses—are intermingled with moderate blows, especially during the early stages. A number of very mild implements are available, such as a whip with silk or deerskin strands. As the whipping progresses, some dominants continue to alternate gentle sensations with intense ones, by rubbing a bit of fur or silk over the sensitized skin between strokes, for example.
Tops will often consciously develop as much proficiency as possible with a variety of implements. As a rule tops also pride themselves on their ability to prolong the submissive’s anticipation by raising the level of stimulation notch by notch, until the submissive enters an ecstatic state.
I like being adept enough at reading body movement and at wielding a cane or a whip to get the person into the zone [of ecstasy], because I know that, once there, [she] will have a very good time. If I push too hard, it’ll hurt too much all at once, and the person will want to fight the intensity. If I go too slowly, she may not get there.
—MR. HAPPY
WHY THEY LIKE IT
The reasons why people like whipping are as diverse as the reasons why they enjoy any other D&S play; many people, however, settle on whipping as an activity of choice. This is probably because whipping is associated with rigorous adult punishment (in contrast to a spanking, which is usually considered a more childish punishment) and also because whipping is an activity so associated with sadomasochism as to be a cliché. D&Sers, and particularly those in the Scene (as opposed to strictly private practitioners), display a strong tendency to observe and to revere tradition. Many people who would not otherwise have experimented with whipping have become adept because it is a fixture of D&S erotica. Few, however, continue unless they find the experience to be erotic.
A whipping, like any other form of corporal punishment, is a physical manifestation of the same power exchange which others may experience uniquely through psychological control. The pain and disgrace of punishment may elicit powerful feelings of submission. With each blow, the reality of the dominant’s power is impressed upon the submissive, who may in response grow more sexually excited.
Typically, submissives accept whippings as a demonstration of devotion. Both partners take pride in each other’s performances: Dominants are often emotionally gratified that the submissive will go the extra mile.
One of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done was a caning with Adida. I gave her 100 strokes with a very thin, whippy cane in that little area where the butt joins the thighs. She was in this perfect submissive posture, her butt up in the air, her face way down on the bed, and her toes pointed just the way she’d been told. I instructed her not to count any strokes that weren’t hard. She never cheated. On the last 10, I told her that if she moved at all, I’d start over. I kept increasing the intensity. Adida did not move. The control that she had to do that, and the head space that she was in in order to do that, made me so hard. It was really beautiful.
—MR. HAPPY
ECSTASY
Among the whipping enthusiasts we interviewed there was virtual consensus that, in its highest form, whipping leads to ecstasy. This ecstasy is usually described as profoundly spiritual, even as an out-of-body experience.
When Cybele and I are well merged in this sort of spiritual space, and she does this kind of flagellation, I transce
nd. I don’t escape myself; I go beyond myself. I’m there. Cybele’s term [for it] is flying; my arms start to move as if I’m flying. My mental imagery is of being above the clouds, and then flying down and investigating. It’s really more like an out-of-body experience than anything I have ever had, and I’ve done a lot of psychic work, including out-of-body experience.
—JAMES W.
Depending on the couple, whipping may be a punishment or a reward. Some people will whip the partner only to enact a punishment scenario; masochists who enjoy being whipped, however, may receive whippings as a reward.
I really like to be flogged. There’s a state I get into which I call “the zone.” When I’m in this state, it’s as if, no matter what is being done, it doesn’t really hurt; all it does is put me into this alternate state. Tear can block it, or being too tired can block it, or trying to make it happen can block it, but when everything’s working right and I have my breathing down properly, each new strike, each new blow, seems to add to the euphoric and ecstatic state.
—MR. HAPPY
Others may perceive the experience as a physical trial which, once endured, allows them to transcend normal limits and to feel empowered.
The first time I was seriously whipped, I started chanting to myself, “I am powerful; I am strong; pain cannot harm me.” And that became a little mantra. Every time I would receive a blow, it would just energize me and make me feel stronger and more powerful.
Different Loving Page 33