Old wounds might be about child abuse, losses, deaths, the terrors of the playground at grade school, the more recent lousy breakup, the horrendous job hunt, the performance that the audience (silly fools) was bored with. Dossie, the therapist, points out that recent wounds are almost always connected to old wounds – that’s the most likely difference between the disasters of the present that bother us and those we can weather with relative ease.
Old wounds might also be about cultural trauma, and we might enter them by deliberately invoking the stereotypes, and the judgments about those stereotypes, that represent our oppression. A friend of ours once set up a scene to deal with her rage at men for all of the assaults and belittling and insults and assumptions and presumptions she had suffered throughout her life. She asked four gay men to tie her down and beat her up while calling her “chickie, ” “bitch” and “cunt” and berating her as dumb and stupid and incompetent and little and basically less-than. Actually, the sight of four gay men pretending that they believed that a women’s place was in the kitchen and in the bedroom was pretty comical from the outside; but as the scene got going, and the struggle got real, it was impossible to trivialize the journey. She had arranged to be tied down so she could go fully into rage, and thrash and fight and scream – without falling off the table or hurting anybody. And she did. And it was loud. And it was a terrific catharsis. She felt afterwards that she could accept men in her life much more wholeheartedly, now that her rage was no longer a secret. And the men who topped the scene had a sense of healing about it – bringing that guilt about being male out in the open and playing with it moved their stuff down the road a little further too.
Our experience is that playing with sexism is a button-pusher, and that playing with cultural traumas like racism, enslavement and genocide is even scarier. To travel with SM and ecstasy through the gates of old wounds, a respect for safety is utterly mandatory. These journeys are reckless enough without being devil-may-care.
We are used to negotiating physical limits to our play... here we must figure out and communicate about our emotional limits. This is always to some degree a guessing game, even if you’ve done it a few times – because the oceans of the unconscious are truly bottomless, and you never know for sure what you’re going to find down there in the deep. Dossie likes to play with sexism – after she has done a whole lot of negotiation to make sure the people she is playing with are just pretending, and that true respect and care are the foundation for this reckless journey. A genuinely sexist creep pushing her around and calling her a bitch raises serious questions about how far a girl ought to go on the first date.
Limits, and the risks that make thinking about limits important, belong to tops and bottoms both. Would you think twice before playing the role of raping and murderous father to your bottom’s victimized child? We hope you will. Because we are playing with fire here, and tops are as vulnerable as bottoms to getting burned.
A commitment to aftercare is important too: the scene is not over until everybody in it is back on the planet in their everyday state of consciousness. Janet recalls connecting for the first time with her very angry precious inner bully during a scene in which she was topping Dossie. Both of them could feel the intense dark energy fueling that scene. Afterwards, after kidnapping and beating and insulting and raping Dossie, it was Janet who needed to be held and cuddled and comforted.
24/7
Some players live their roles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are families of players, with masters and slaves and puppies and children, all adults, all written into the same piece of theater. Like all aspects of BDSM, players who do well at 24/7 have a high sense of integrity and tremendous respect for boundaries. You have to have respect for boundaries if you’re going to spend that much of your life in boundarylessness.
24/7 relationships are the monasteries of kink: people who maintain a high degree of ritual and protocol on a daily basis, and thrive in that circumstance. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice, please remember that slavery is indeed still illegal, and that anyone who wants to leave is free to do so. So 24/7 works as long as the various members of that relationship feel that it works. The reality requires more cooperation than our fantasies might suspect.
And the roles aren’t prescribed. The bottoms are often male, and frequently earn more money than their tops. The tops might have less power in the culture at large and still be adepts at administering power in BDSM and spiritual space.
The wisdom that 24/7 practitioners develop is what happens when you go as deep as you possibly can into your roles and archetypes, when you live the part, as it were. Balance and healing can be found here, and a profound sense of rightness when people find the place in a relationship or an SM family that works for them. For many, living full-time in their roles is living full-time in spiritual connection.
Shapeshifting
Some of us combine spiritual practice and SM by channeling entities, deities, archetypes or creatures that we feel connection to as the motivating or inspirational force to a scene. Channeling is allowing a spirit, angel, saint, deity, diva or any other entity you identify with to enter you or rise within you or become you, temporarily: there are a variety of beliefs that people explore to explain the phenomenon. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that something from the outside comes into you, or that something within you comes to the forefront. What matters is that we dig deeply into a role or an archetype and bring its particular power and vision and wisdom up (or down) to power a scene or a ritual.
Channeling deities is another way to move from role into ritual, and can be done from both the top and the bottom. A bottom might choose to invoke Persephone, say, or Hercules in drag. (Thirteenth labor of Hercules: he sold himself into slavery to Queen Omphale of Lydia, and spent three years as her body slave in female clothing — it’s true, look it up.) This kind of deep role-playing is sex magic; so is everything else in this book.
Dossie channeled the goddess Kali during a flogging ritual with her dear friend Coyote, whose roommate had just died of AIDS. Kali is the fiery Hindu goddess of creation and destruction who blasts open doors, tears down old structures, throws out our old treasured garbage we keep hanging onto and makes room for something new. Sort of like spring closet cleaning, only a lot scarier. And more profound. Every religion ought to have a goddess like Kali.
Tied down so she could fight if she needed to, Coyote chanted to Kali, who was flying down Dossie’s arm and into her body through the whip until they both erupted in a hot flow of grief. After this directly physical manifestation of pain and suffering, she felt cleansed and ready to go on with her life.
Dossie once attended a class called “Practical Shapeshifting,” in which the participants were taught to imagine the animal who had the skill and wisdom for a particular task, and then imagine being that animal and having those skills. A woman in the class who was looking for work produced a fine fantasy of being a seal safe in her silky fur, who could slip through the waves, rise and fall easily with the tides, and swim so powerfully that she need never fear crashing on a rock or any other hard sharp obstacle.
Here is an example of an SM shapeshifting healing in which Dossie participated:
Playing with the Goddess
Durga tells me I’m the only item on her dance card. My cunt contracts. A small adrenaline rush of fear accompanies the swelling of labia. Just how intense will this game be? She says she has been having hard times, a bitter breakup. She needs the purging and reunion with herself that only our play can accomplish. I am at once honored and vulnerable: this will be intimate.
Durga wants me in the leather corset, it will protect my physical vulnerabilities so she can unleash the storm inside without worrying about hurting me. She doesn’t want to hold back. Her slave puts me in the corset, and Durga tightens me down to breathlessness. As she straps in my waist, I feel both small and strong in black stockings and heels. Rivets on the wrist cuffs catch the light as she s
ecures me to the cross. “Do you want the ankle cuffs?” I inquire. “No.” She laughs. “I want you free to buck.”
Durga is tall and wide and immensely powerful in her flowing skirts. She is corseted like armor, Athena’s breastplate. Her hair is pulled back, Cretan curls falling down her back, jewels on her forehead. Her dark skin sucks in the light and reflects it back warm and somehow more alive. Her smile reveals teeth bright like stars in the night, her tongue red like life, her eyes flash fire in the darkness. Brightness flows from her face as her incandescent grin kindles everything in her path, only to return everything to itself, cleansed and beautified in her loving gaze.
Her nails are lacquered purple, burning claws as she takes my face in her hands, turns my head to take my mouth in hers. Hot like the jungle, she pours herself into me.
And when her breath is mine and mine is hers, she trails her talons down my arms, my sides, my legs. Stockings split in her path, running down my leg like blood from ripped skin. The sharpness of the sensation is hard to take in without tensing; I writhe and jump. She gets a good grip with one arm and lifts me off my feet while she continues with her extremely free hand — I hang helpless, she is my only ground.
Every pinch, every scratch, every ripping sensation is all too much — as Durga has told me her miserable breakup with her last lover has been too much, too much pain, too much intensity, all the hurts in exactly the places that hurt her the most. She traces this history on my body, all the pain that is too hard to take. I struggle to take it in, to keep up with her. She is shapeshifting, snarling and predatory, a huge panther clawing and biting, finding her strength through her impact on me.
And I become prey, a leaping impala, a dancing gazelle, the object and leader of the chase. I dodge and dart, crying out in purrs and growls, sharp cries of distress, and Durga keeps catching me, over and over. We are speaking in tongues now, mysterious words in a language neither of us understands, emotions voiced with no particular meaning but intense force. I hear her pain, her betrayal, her questioning herself: How could I have let this lover so close as to bring me to grief? What other choice is there if we are to love?.
I turn into a snake and hiss and writhe — “Go for it, snake girl!” chants my Durga, and I bare my fangs and grin in her face, “Come and get me!” And we are traveling, heart to heart at the end of a whip, her life and her pain flowing out down the lashes into my ass. I take her into me and up into my heart, all green and soothing like aloe, like the cool fresh jungle on a hot day, like shade and understanding and relief. I take her in.
It is wondrous and amazing to be able to be at once healer and bottom, giving while receiving, emptying out a beloved’s stored-up rage and grief, offering catharsis to my top while leaping like a gazelle over streams and rocks, pursued by a fierce gleaming panther.
There’s no particular climax to this play. We just carry on till we are done, and Durga takes me down and carries over to a chair, nestles me in her lap, and we are wrapped in one skin, warm and loving, for a while — until gravity asserts herself and we return, each to her individuality, intact and full of love.
SM ritual
We’ve said all along that all SM is ritual and that scene space is sacred space – indeed, that everything is sacred. Which is utterly true. And some players gather together to do formal ritual, using intense physical sensations from the SM realm as the vehicle that carts our consciousness into the present, the pain that forces us into acceptance, the boat that carries us on a tidal wave of ecstasy. Janet described her experience of a flesh-hook ritual with Fakir Musafar earlier in this book.
All generalizations are untrue. It would take an entire book to describe the full range of SM ritual practice, so here we will include a few common guidelines. In SM ritual people gather together, usually do some form of symbolic cleansing to wash off the junk of everyday life, and connect to each other in a circle. Each participant might state her or his intention, what they would like to get out of this journey. The intention might be as simple as communion with the divine, or more complex according to each person’s needs in the moment. Dossie once got pierced with sixty spears, with the intention of making spiritual contact with her ancestors. It worked.
Here the roles of top and bottom shift. The journeyer is going to be pierced or whipped or otherwise done to, but for their own purposes, essentially to prepare for a more or less solo journey. So the ritual is about the bottom, for the bottom’s use and purposes. The top, the person who does the piercing or tying up or whatever, is not so much dominant as guide, priest, support person. Large rituals require a lot of support people: piercers, drummers, volunteers who organize the physical environment and volunteers who stay present with the ritual, but not journeying, ready to offer support to any traveler who needs it. A shoulder to cry on, water, somebody to dance with. At the kavadi, the ritual with spears that Dossie journeyed in, priests would drum on the frames that held the spears in place, driving rhythm into the body through the holes in the skin. At the flesh-hooks ritual, two bodyworkers had set up tables and were available to help anybody who wanted their services.
Piercing the skin has a particular place in SM ritual – we say that opening the hide is a spiritual as well as a physical opening, an intense way to drop our boundaries and flow or fly with the divine. All the journeys are mind journeys. Clearly there is no way to leave the mind behind, and luckily there are thousands of ways to change our minds, alter how we are seeing and feeling, and a thousand purposes for traveling down these paths. Some qualify as healings, others as deep emotional explorations, and still more as ritual dramas that we do because they delight and fulfill us by allowing us to open to energy that is bigger than us.
A lot of these scripts are designed to let us escape from ego, from rigid patterns, from our own blind spots – to escape from our ego masks, top and bottom alike. Remember, everyone in a scene is in service to the scene. The priest/ess serves, the god/ dess serves, the slave serves, the child serves. We all serve.
So we end this chapter with a mind journey enacted by the two of us, told first in janet’s voice, then in Dossie’s:
Villain
Well, I thought it was going to be a simple straightforward little flogging scene.
It was Friday night, at the end of an agonizingly long week. Dossie had come over for dinner (getting delayed in traffic for nearly an hour on the way), and we’d gone out to a movie. We were both pretty tired and frazzled, but we don’t get to play that often, so we decided to go ahead and at least do something.
I started to tie her to the bed, face-down. I noticed that she was being very quiet, her limbs responding passively as I moved them into position; I assumed she was just trancing out as she so often does.
But then I picked out my softest suede flogger and just drew it across her ass, like painting her skin with a soft brush, not even a stroke, really. And she shuddered all over and whimpered.
A part of me thought that she was just doing it to turn me on, knowing how I respond to helplessness and vulnerability. A bigger part of me didn’t care. I brushed her butt again with the flogger, a bit harder; she whimpered louder and tried to roll off to one side to shield herself. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was acting, but I was getting turned on.
I took the intensity up as slowly as I ordinarily would on anyone, slower than I usually do on Dossie. It didn’t seem to matter — she’d clearly gone into a space that was about feeling punished, brutalized, abused. We’d done such scenes before, but always with intent and a lot of negotiation. I was a bit concerned, but not concerned enough to stop.
I was hitting her pretty hard by now, and she was sobbing, her face contorted. Her ass looked incredibly vulnerable and helpless. I was suddenly seized by the idea of fucking her up that ass and was more aroused than ever — I wanted to beat her raw and then fuck her so it hurt with every thrust. I gloved up, lubed a finger or two, and began to explore her asshole, but it was tight and unyielding. She came out of whatever place
she was in long enough to tell me that she’d had some intestinal upset that morning and was too sore for anal activity. Speaking as sanely as if we were planning a grocery expedition, we agreed that we’d enjoy a butt-fucking scene some other time, but this wasn’t the night. And then we were back to where we’d been before, victim and villain, as though the conversation had never happened.
I was using my meanest toy, a heavy leather two-fingered tawse that I know from experience is almost impossible to enjoy: vicious bite with a lot of weight behind it. I was using it as hard as I could. She — who could ordinarily soar above such a sensation laughing — was shrieking and sobbing and struggling to get away from the blows. I was dripping wet.
I ordered her up on her hands and knees and pushed a fat bolster under her hips to raise her butt up to where I could get at her cunt. I slipped into my harness, added my favorite double-ended dick, lubed up and knelt behind her. Finding my way with my fingers, I jammed my cock up her and began to fuck her hard. She sobbed and moaned; there was no question that I was raping her.
I grabbed her by the back of her hair — an interesting moment for me, as the brute in my hips kept pounding away at her, but the loving friend in my head said quietly, give her plenty of slack, you don’t want to hurt her neck. I snarled, “Tell me you like it.” She cried harder. The idea of making her tell me she liked it, knowing that she didn’t, became terribly important to me. I pounded and pounded and repeated my demand. “I can’t,” she cried. I threatened her with more tawse if she didn’t say it, and she still couldn’t, so I pulled out and struck her a dozen or so times, as hard as I could. She screamed.
I began fucking her again and repeated my command. Coming slightly out of headspace, she gasped something about feeling painted into a corner, and I began to realize that she really couldn’t say it — something of a disappointment, but if she couldn’t she couldn’t. So I just let that one go, and cast around for another strategy. And then I had it...
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