Radical Ecstasy

by Dossie Easton

  Everyone involved in a scene is in service to that scene.

  This truism applies whether the “scene” is a friendly smack on the tush or a lifelong 24/7 relationship. Everyone involved needs to have a roughly similar picture of what the scene is or will be: the more similar the picture, the greater likelihood of a successful outcome. Some aspects of that picture may be externals, things like what outfits we wear or who gets hit on what body part, but that’s usually not the whole picture. What do we want to feel? Are we stern but caring, lovingly parental, terrifyingly sadistic, serenely shamanistic? Are we terrified or adoring, child or warrior, pathetic or ecstatic? A rebellious captive, an adoring pet, a hardworking servant, a precious jewel? What kinds of words or sensations or behaviors or environments make each of us feel that way?

  When we know the answers to these questions, or at least have discussed them and begun to recognize where our fantasies meet and where they might stray, we know what the scene is. And from here on out, whether we’re King or Queen of the Universe or the lowliest of the low, we are now in service to the scene we’ve mutually chosen and entered into. We are playing the same game.

  The amazing thing is, once we recognize and truly accept that control is illusory and that we’re in service to something greater than ourselves, we often find that issues of control and ego, which may once have seemed important, have melted away. We neither give nor take away power. Rather, as we raise eros, everybody’s power gets amplified, and together we become enormously powerful. We enter that magical realm of consciousness that athletes call “the flow” and we call “scene space,” where we and our partners and the environment and the activity all become one, working together to create a mutual reality in which time and space float away. Each moment follows inevitably upon the one before, and the communion and the sensations and the emotions all feel so perfectly right that ego and control seem as distant and irrelevant as the temperature in Bangkok. We are in a reality no less real than our morning commute.

  So many choices...

  Let’s look at a variety of ways people journey in the life force by the scripts they choose to play. For our purposes, roles define scripts, and the scripts become the rituals through which we transit into the divine state of consciousness.

  If you’re wondering where these scripts come from, you need look no further than the sweet or not-so-sweet stories you soothe yourself to sleep with every night. Fantasies are a wonderful window into the Shadow, reflections in the tide pools of consciousness of beasts from the deeps. They are a great way to see your archetypes, your story, what’s important to you. Look in your daydreams at what you want to do, how you see yourself in scene. Then look at who you have imagined as your ideal Other: who are they, what do they do? Think about what your fantasy says about how you want to be received, what about you you imagine your partner responding to and how the partner responds.

  Dossie, the abuse survivor, has a lot of fantasies that involve a parent figure, simultaneously vicious and nurturing, who sees her pain and gets turned on by it, and thus is moved to love her and treat her (eventually) with sweetness and lust. Perhaps this is curative to the horrible feelings of the battered child – the beliefs that her parent can’t see her pain, is refusing to help her with her pain, hates her when she is in pain (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”); and that when she is in pain, or in want of nurturance or support or love, she is ugly and unlovable. Only we clever schemers of sadomasochism can script a scene to go from pain and victimization to lust and love and orgasm and cuddling.

  Janet’s root fantasy is more likely to make her the parent figure, with her sense of power and righteousness channeled into loving punishments that transform her bottoms into the beautiful people they indeed can be after she chisels a little on them.

  You can see why your authors love to play together. And had we met when we were first starting out in the scene, we might have wanted to explore one fantasy over and over again together, seeking out all its permutations. But we’ve been at this a long time, and we’ve both expanded our repertoires quite a bit. Today, these are not the only roles we play – we explore lots of scripts, and often Dossie is the top and Janet is the bottom.

  We’ve learned that when we set out down the path of a fantasy, we must allow the fantasy to take us where it will – overscripting doesn’t work in this realm. And we’ve also learned not to get hung up on whether or not our partners would have chosen that fantasy themselves, or whether they’re helping us with a fantasy of our own choosing; energy and turn-on get raised no matter where the fantasy had its origin. The important part of a journey isn’t where it starts, but where it takes you.

  We call our original fantasies our “root” or “core” fantasies — they are the dreams we started into SM with, and they’re still the ones we return to when we want to soothe ourselves or turn ourselves on. And they’re still a source of self-knowledge and healing for both of us. Enriched by many people over the last few decades, your authors now have lots of dreams and scripts and games, a constantly expanding repertoire for traveling in Shadowland. Because, you see, when you decide to play with somebody, and it turns out that their fantasy is different from yours, then you are blessed with the opportunity to explore a whole new and fertile territory in which you may discover new delights and new visions of who you can be.

  In our time in the scene, we’ve met thousands of people, and their root fantasies have been inexpressibly multiple and beautiful, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination and lust. Here are just a few of them.

  Submission and dominance

  For some players, the essence of eros in DS is the issuing and obeying of orders, commands, the giving and receiving of service. The rush of being in control or out of it, the creative delight in making the script evolve while the submissive, following orders without knowing the plan, watches the sequence unfold like stunningly potent theater. Dominant as director: it helps to remember that theater as we know it today actually evolved from religious ritual; and that ritual was invented as a way of speaking with the gods.

  Submission and dominance takes thousands of forms – perhaps as many different forms as there are submissives and dominants. We tried breaking this section up into subsections labeled “owners and slaves,” “masters/mistresses and servants,” “pleasure slaves,” and so on, but found that such divisions didn’t really work all that well – each individual identifies with some terms and not with others, and is often turned off or even angered by terms that aren’t a good fit for their individual identity and experience. So instead, we’ll talk about what we see as some of the ecstatic rewards of the different kinds of experiences, and let the labels take care of themselves.

  One friend of ours tells us that service is her spiritual practice. In putting another’s needs and wants always ahead of her own, she can escape from ego into a state of selflessness, with her dominant providing any boundaries she needs. For her, DS service as a spiritual path is very similar to bhakti yoga, the Hindu devotional practice, or altar-tending, or any practice based on caring for things or people. The slave, who has devoted himself or herself entirely to the needs of an owner, travels even further into selflessness, buoyed up by the support of the owner, and by the script of responding to the owner’s desires.

  Both slave and servant are often required to do a lot of functioning on their own initiative. The altered state is maintained by the need to stay closely attuned to the owner’s desires, often striving to anticipate needs and wants, to proudly show up with the right cup of tea at just the right moment without being asked. This practice promotes selflessness, emotional (maybe even psychic) attunement and competence. One slave told us he lives for the appreciation he gets when he does something well.

  Pleasure slaves are focused on being superb sex objects or sexual performers, to delight the recipient of their attentions, and are valued enormously for their skill and art. In the land of BDSM, sexuality is seen as an arena for art and creat
ivity and skill and mastery of technique. We understand that some people have wonderful talents at various aspects of sex and SM, and we admire the work of the great artists in our field.

  And what does the dominant get out of all this? A good master or mistress travels with the sub, and treads a path of enormous responsibility which sharply focuses attention, similar to contemplative meditative practice. The dominant is responsible for balance, which requires that he or she be centered. Janet reports that at moments of peak connection as a dominant, she feels herself to be moving at superhuman slowness – although to an outside observer, of course, she is moving at normal speed. She feels as though she is channeling light, energy and knowledge from an outside source, sometimes feeling as though she is glowing with light or standing at the center of a pool of light. We have read of athletes reporting similar sensations when they are performing at peak competence during their sport, and who is to say that they aren’t channeling the same energies that we are?

  ‘Less than” human

  Some of us like to leave our humanness behind entirely, becoming furniture, or objects, or animals, shutting down our busy brains as completely as possible for the duration of the scene. One friend of ours coped with a disabling injury that had him bedridden for several years by eroticizing the idea of becoming a human “toy,” completely immobile except as his dominant desired; he collected medical devices that made him even more helpless than his injuries dictated, and turned his damage into a source of erotic opportunity.

  Human pets leave the ranks of humanity entirely to frolic in the realms of dogs and cats and ponies. Dossie recalls a puppy scene she once played with a gay male friend:

  The first thing I wanted to know is, was I a good dog or a bad dog? Was this a brat scene? My master told me I was a good puppy, albeit a little untrained. I inquired about housebreaking, and he reassured me that this wasn’t going to be a housebreaking scene. He put me on a leash and had me crawl around behind him, teaching me to heel and sit and stay and the like, all very gently, in a loving voice, with lots of petting and stroking and “Good puppy!” encouragement. It was like falling under a spell. With nothing to do but follow simple directions, my chattering monkey mind soon shut up, and I felt empty and at peace. Free of all that human sound and fury and drama, free of worrying about the future or fixating on the past — puppies don’t have much in the way of memories, do they? Although we continued on to do a flogging and caning scene, the part that sticks out in my mind was the simplicity of being a puppy. Pure and simple.

  Resistance and takedown

  There is a special joy in being able to fight back like you mean it, genuinely exerting all your physical and intellectual will, knowing that when you lose, it will be to someone who will take care to ensure that you’re given exactly what you came there to get – just the kind of pain or sex or humiliation you want and need – so that the pain of losing is magically transformed into an extraordinary kind of winning.

  Some people like to enter into these scenes with a closely matched partner, fighting for supremacy and not knowing until the outcome who will be the top. Others decide going in who will lose, and arrange for multiple tops or a bit of creative bondage as a handicap, to ensure that the bottom can fight back with everything they’ve got and still get taken down as hard as they want. We have one friend whose fantasy is to be kidnapped, tortured and raped, and who has a trusted acquaintance who assembles groups of kidnappers, unknown to the “victim,” who will grab her at an opportune moment, spend several hours performing chillingly realistic scenes of torture and gang rape (all within the limits she has negotiated with the acquaintance who is stage-managing the production), and release her when she is bruised, exhausted and fully satiated.

  The payoff for the top in these scenes can vary. The power and control can make you feel enormous. A lot of resistance play is based on the rush of the roller-coaster ride of playing with the bottom’s most vulnerable places, and riding the razor’s edge of keeping the bottom from falling out of the scene entirely while you seduce them further and further out of ordinary reality.

  A subset of resistance play is the interrogation scene. Here the roles are prisoner and interrogator, and there are a bunch of ways to write the script. Do we imagine that the prisoner actually has the information being sought? Or is this an ordeal where the prisoner is pretending to withhold information? Is the prisoner in the completely hopeless position of being tortured to discover information that she doesn’t even have? Here the top is conducting the bottom on a very tricky journey, playing with power and double binds to unhinge the mind and generate a state of willlessness – which can be a profoundly peaceful condition for the bottom.

  Dossie remembers:

  We did one scene recently where I was a streetwalker and Janet was my abusive pimp. I put on my sluttiest clothes, including a long leather coat I had found at a thrift store, and walked into my bedroom. “Where did you get that coat?” “At the thrift store, it only cost forty-three dollars, honey.” “You’re lying, bitch. You could never get a coat like that for forty-three dollars. You’re holding out on me.”

  I knew I was supposed to be afraid, but she was so brilliant, all I could do was admire the gambit. And then we hung in with it a little longer, and we did this very sexy punishment scene, and Janet had orgasms with her metaphysical cock, and I felt all helpless, and all I could do was take it in and ride it. And it all worked very well.

  Or perhaps the scene is designed to be an ordeal, in which the prisoner confronts various difficulties and triumphs over them; or maybe the interrogator triumphs and rewards the prisoner with love and positive regard for speaking the truth. Some interrogation scenes go deeply into mindfuck: we have seen interrogators ask, “What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in high school?”

  None of us likes to answer that question. And yet, speaking about our adolescent humiliations in the context of an erotic connection, to a listener who (maybe) won’t put us down for being human, can have remarkably redemptive qualities.

  Age play

  Daddies and mommies and babies and kids and brats – what a field day for the player! And what a huge choice of highly charged scripts, forbidden connections, punishments and rewards, love and nurturance, abandonment and despair – the entire range of human experience to choose from. Age play gives bottoms the opportunity to bring our inner children into relationship with another person, to enact the dramas that the kids think are important and to see what comes out of that.

  Going into our child roles can be scary, and we often feel ridiculous, especially at the beginning of a scene. We don’t suggest deep inner child play with strangers. We want someone we trust at the other end of the equation, someone who will welcome us back into our adult selves when the play is over, somebody reliable to whom to expose our old wounds.

  For tops, the opportunity to be both Bad Daddy and Good Daddy, the powerful Good Mother and the Betrayer, can be a healing journey – an opportunity to journey in the psychological Shadow and reclaim forbidden parts of ourselves, to inject our old traumas with eros and write a new ending to all our old scripts. Janet’s scene at the opening of this chapter is a good example of how age play can be a journey into the light and a healing revelation.

  Humiliation

  There are aspects of humiliation in a lot of SM play, but most often the scripts are negotiated to limit the extent of humiliation. Because in all our ambition to break ourselves and each other into our component mental and spiritual parts for fun and healing, we are not really out to degrade each other. Nevertheless, some genius players find ecstasy and enormous eros in gross humiliation. To play with humiliation is tremendously powerful – we are playing directly with shame, a profound human emotion that we all carry from our childhoods. We all have memories that make us cringe.

  Humiliation players get right in there and revel in it. One woman we know tells us that humiliation makes her happy, That’s the experience she starts from –
it feels really good. Her play often looks like triumph over degradation, just because it makes her so happy. She reports that she goes into serenity when she is being degraded, and describes her state of consciousness as spiritually awake.

  Years ago, Dossie used to be a professional blackjack player, counting cards in the casinos in Vegas. She was amazed to watch all the people who actually enjoyed gambling – what she was doing was business. And she realized how much of our lives we spend working with money, struggling with money, budgeting money, saving money, worrying about money, balancing the checkbook – what a relief to go to a casino and actually play with money.

  Similarly, we think the humiliation players are onto something amazing. If we only had the courage, we could all play with our shame, and for that bit of time it wouldn’t be serious at all. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

  It may interest you to know that the words human, humble and humiliation come from the same root, humus, the word for earth or dirt. To be human means to be close to the earth – good and dirty.

  Old wounds

  Deep emotional play. Going deep, deep down into profound emotions, digging down into old wounds. These are some of the scariest and most rewarding forms of ecstatic SM mind play.

  We’ve talked about playing with breakdown, with taking our scenes to the levels of intensity that crack walls, blast open doors, fracture thick cement foundations – tearing us apart so that we can see ourselves and each other in the lovely bright light of eroticized consciousness, and building ourselves up again with more choices, freer, more aware, more whole.