“Mmmm, you make Daddy feel good,” I growled. Her head came up, and in a tiny little voice she said, “Daddy?” And in that moment the scene refocused — I was no longer the violent rapist, instead I was the daddy who must violate what he loves best, and she was my beautiful little girl.
The resolution of the scene became clear to me. I went on fucking her, but now my incoherent growls were promises that if my little girl made me feel good, I’d make her feel very, very good. I brought myself to a crescendo — I didn’t actually come, but I didn’t care all that much; I’d had a top-gasm if not an orgasm. Now, I told her, Daddy was going to make her feel good. I got another dick, bigger than the one I’d been wearing, and eased it into her. Then I began to use a vibrator on her clit. She came explosively within moments — she, who usually has to be cajoled slowly and expertly toward orgasm — I could hardly believe it was over so fast. I lay on top of her back and held her close until her breathing slowed. A few minutes later, when I was pretty sure we were both back in relatively normal headspace, I untied her.
Later, in the kitchen, dishing up ice cream, I found myself humming an unfamiliar tune. I cast around in my head and recognized it: “My Name,” the song that the murderous brute Bill Sykes sings in the musical Oliver. I realized that I had just liberated my inner Bill Sykes, and grinned like the sadist I am.
Victim
We decided to play something easy, it being a little late to start, expecting to do a simple flog and fuck, some SM version of a quickie.
Janet tied me to the bed with soft restraints, very comfortable, spread-eagled on my stomach. Lying with my face on the pillow while she secured my ankles, feeling relaxed and taken care of, I felt myself beginning to sink down into some deeper part of myself. Not my more ordinary defiant powerful I-can-take-anything-you-can-dish-out mode. I felt small.
When Janet started the scene with a light and sensuous flogger, even though this was a gentle stimulus that had nothing to do with pain, the very fact of being tied down and done-to precipitated me into a warm bath of helplessness. I felt confused and lost: why would she tie me down and do these strange things to me? I felt surrounded. I felt, not surrendered, but taken.
As Janet increased the intensity of the striking, I started whimpering. Whimpering and thrashing. Usually, I use my knowledge of my body to channel intense stimulation, breathing it through me, tensing muscles in a happy response that welcomes the incoming fire. When I do this, I feel a sense of joyful control, and sensations that may be difficult to take in become the occasion for delight in feeling and transcending them. At these times, my top feels like a guide, a nurturing parent, a generous person who is working very hard so I can experience this literally sensational journey: in short, Santa Claus.
But not this time. This time I fell into my victim space. As Janet struck me with the usual fiendish array of instruments, I felt lost and helpless, and the sting of the strike made me want to cry. A terrible sadness awoke in me. And serious confusion: why was I being subjected to this? I felt no sense of guilt or justice. I just felt abused.
Somewhere in here, a more rational consciousness suggested that to play this kind of a deep scene, which can be scary to a top, I really should negotiate some consent. Tops like to feel like Santa Claus. They less often enjoy feeling like heartless criminals. Even though Janet and I have been here before, I felt a need to check in and make sure she was all right with this. I looked up, and saw in her face what I needed to reassure me: a cold, hard stare. Janet’s precious inner bully was awake and enjoying himself.
So we set off down the path of victim and villain, in search of whatever truth might be found there, which might include why we wanted to go there in the first place. Janet attacked me with increasingly unforgiving implements of punishment: the tawse, the cat, the paddle, the cane. And I sank deeper and deeper into my own fathomlessness, whimpering and feeling helpless, with a curious sense of luxury in all this. It surprised me that, having abjured my customary methods of surfing pain, I still was able to take a huge beating. I could have safe-worded at any time; I could have asked her to go a little lighter. When Janet and I play, what we do is always collaborative, and we would be appalled at the idea that either one of us should actually suffer for the pleasure of the other. Besides which, last week I beat her up.
And Janet, indeed, was making the unstated accommodations to the limitations of reality that actual abuse seldom regards. She was striking only well-padded parts of the body, and allowing time between intense strokes for me to process the sensation. So my body never went completely out of control, or maybe only for a second or two.
Although Janet was certainly allowing me the time to process sensations, I was not doing the processing. I was choosing (choice is an important concept here) to be the victim, to be frightened and hurt and betrayed and tortured for who knows what reason, and to respond with whimpering and misery. Luckily Janet has within herself the top who can enjoy this.
We went on for a while. There wasn’t any scripted end to this in sight. No climax, no culmination — I suppose I could have safeworded, but we were both looking for a denouement, some conclusion that answered the state we were traveling in. We were beyond the question of what could I take — I was beyond deciding much of anything, and the game we were playing did not include the villain taking consideration of the victim’s misery.
Janet decided to take it out in sex, giving me the reward of feeling good for taking my punishment. This made little sense, since in the crazy logic of my state of mind the beating itself seemed to be the purpose, the why of why we were there doing this in the first place. So Janet rewrote the orgasm at the end, from “Daddy’s going to make you feel so good,” which she tried first, and which obviously didn’t make a lot of sense to my precious inner victim. So she raped me, with the stated rationale that I would be a good girl by making Daddy feel good. Somehow this made a certain amount of sense to both of us.
We leapt together into the Daddy/girl script. I felt a kind of internal jerk, as I translated my sense of helplessness into childishness, and my victimhood into betrayal.
And Janet was right — translating the scene into the language of child abuse gave us a way to find a closing. She fucked me until she got off, telling me constantly about how I was a good girl to make Daddy feel so good (and isn’t that the ultimate betrayal?), and then got out the vibrator. That was a revelation. After a couple of hours of victimhood, where my own pleasure was (apparently) not being regarded as at all important, when we got to the clitoral stimulation, there was a huge orgasm right in there, as if it had built up and was just waiting for an opportunity to express itself. Loudly.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the scene we had played had a lot to do with sex. Deep psychological exploration, maybe. Living mythos, maybe. Deep emotional play, for sure. Shadowplay, absolutely.
But sex? There it was.
Without my being aware of it, I had become terrifically turned on. And when the vibrator started up, my body woke up instantly to a flood of exquisite pleasure, as if the vibrator was pouring delicious light into me. As though my body filled up as Janet pumped me full of ecstasy. And that exploding ecstasy was the resolution of the scene. Not exactly an answer to the dilemma of why I like this. But the answer to the deep need inside me: to make that profound sexual connection to my lover from my precious inner sadness. For Janet to come and love me in my misery, this is the healing. This drives the pain away and fills me with light. This works.
When we talked about this a couple of days later, we discussed the possible purposes, rewards, outcomes of such a scene: healing? catharsis? opportunity to playact what would be unacceptable in the real world? And what does this have to do with spirit?
My inner truth became clear: there was no purpose, no goal. What I desire is to go on the journey, to be, for a while and with the mirror of another, that part of myself that I fall into in these scenes. Just to be that victim, which indeed I have been in real life, both as a
child and as an adult. Playing like this gives me a way to remember, to relive it, for a little while, with the ever-so-important proviso that this is psychodrama, not real abuse. When I try to seek out meaning in this, the answer I get is: I don’t know. I only know that sometimes I want to go there.
Open Heart, Open Skin,
Open Everything
So here we are, almost finished with the book, and we’ve got a piece of news for you that may or may not be welcome: you don’t get to open yourself up to ecstasy and then slam yourself closed again right afterwards. It’s pretty much impossible, we think, to be one with your partner and the universe at 10 p.m. Monday, and then go to work Tuesday morning kicking widows and orphans out of their slum apartments; we suppose it technically can be done, but in our experience, opening yourself to bliss also means opening yourself to a whole bunch of other stuff, among which are capacities like empathy, generosity and compassion.
That doesn’t mean that every great player you meet is also a great person. We’ve both played with phenomenally great players, connected and transcendent and spectacular, who are, to put it frankly, kind of shitty people. About the best thing we can say about them is that we suspect they’d be even shittier people if they were less connected and transcendent and all that. Radical ecstasy isn’t a panacea for all life’s ills; it won’t turn Ebenezer Scrooge into Lady Bountiful.
And of course, this doesn’t mean that reading this book, or having experiences like the ones we describe, is going to turn you into a saint – we’re writing the damn thing, and it certainly hasn’t turned us into shining exemplars of perfection. We have our moments of judgmentalism and selfishness and harshness and small-mindedness, just like everybody else. But we also feel that every time we travel in ecstasy, the experience peels away a tiny bit more of the fear and un-happiness that hold us apart from our fellow beings, makes it just a tiny bit harder to stuff ourselves back into our armor.
The experience of living in the world with an open heart is, we believe, genuinely different from most people’s everyday experience — more vulnerable, more trusting, more empathetic, with greater emotional extremes. And of course, living in the world with an open heart and expressing that openness through the paths of sexuality and SM has even greater differences – the joys of extreme physical and emotional intensity, the freedom of seeing the world through a multiplicity of lenses.
Therefore, we decided that this book wouldn’t be complete unless we wrote a bit about our experience of living in the world with the results of that slow peeling-away that we have both experienced – about what we think it means to try to live with emotional and sexual and spiritual openness, its joys and its tribulations and the responsibilities it carries.
Janet writes:
High-Wire Acts
Today is Day Three of Dossie’s and my big retreat to whip a huge, unwieldy pile of pages into something resembling a manuscript. I am fighting a troubling set of physical symptoms, of which by far the most disturbing is vertigo.
Last night, I dreamed all night of having climbed into high places from which I could not get down. In the last of these dreams, I am attending a celebration of some kind. As part of the festivities, I am putting on a show. Surrounded by a group of women, I am masturbating exuberantly as they cheer me on, laughing, applauding, singing. I am shouting my fantasies aloud as I bring myself to a loud and lusty orgasm. The fantasies are boundaryless and frightening, utterly socially unacceptable, and the crowd is loving them. Dossie is there among the group of women, holding my head and shoulders from behind, quietly reassuring me amid the laughter and applause that she is holding the emotional truth of my fantasies and will be there afterward to clean up any messes I’ve left behind.
After my orgasm I fall immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep. Still in the dream, I awaken the next morning to find everybody moving sluggishly, hung over, preparing breakfast; there is a thunderstorm outside. I want to fix Dossie something nice to thank her for the previous night; I make her lovely buttered toast and set off in the storm to give it to her. I climb a cliff looking for her — she is not there; I cannot get down; I am stranded, with the toast, in the storm. Mournfully, I eat it myself, and settle alone at the top of the cliff to wait out the rain until I can find another pathway.
I have joked for many years about being an “emotional exhibitionist.” I see it as integral to the work I do as a writer and educator to put my own emotional processes on display; when I heard about Annie Sprinkle’s work in opening her cunt with a speculum and allowing audiences to step up one by one to view her cervix, I felt an immediate shock of sisterly recognition. But this book has tested as never before my ability to go on doing my high-wire act over and over again, without letup.
For the last two years, we have both written about all of our SM play as part of the process of writing this book. That means, for the last two years, I have done no scene that has not been about pushing my own edges, and after which I have not then required myself to examine those edges under a microscope and note my findings in a lab notebook for the perusal of others.
Part of my job is, like any good performer, to make it look easy; and I think I do. In fact, while I’m doing it, it is easy, and fun, and sexy, and thrilling. It’s only by stepping back and looking at what’s going on in my life that I can see that things are getting a little haywire.
I think the task Dossie and I took on when we decided to write this book was more than just the decision to write a book — it was really a commitment to extreme, exaggerated spiritual openness over a period of approximately two years, an experiment in living without skin over an unnatural period of time. I don’t think we knew this when we decided to do the project, and I’m not sure it was a conscious decision, and I’m sure glad we decided to do it together, because I know neither of us would have survived it sanely without the other.
Well, the experiment is nearing its end — the book leaves for the editor in a couple of weeks — and I think we’re both nearing our breaking points.
For Dossie, this is manifesting as fear of the book itself: she wakes up in the night having anxiety attacks. I work with books every day and have a pretty good sense of what they can and can’t do to me, so this one doesn’t scare me all that much (usually).
For me, it seems as though everything inessential in my life is closing down, bit by bit, as I focus all I’ve got on this single task. I haven’t been able to read a book for pleasure in many months. I am doing no casual play and very little masturbation. I have rearranged my life so that I spend most of my time in solitude — my only employee now works elsewhere, my son sleeps different hours than I do and my lover comes over only on weekends. My skinlessness makes it difficult for me to talk about anything but trivial matters with anyone but Dossie, and my conversations with Dossie are almost always tearful because I cannot talk about anything that is not deep. And then, of course, there’s the vertigo.
So when we write about the joys and terrors of living as an open person, you have before you the evidence. In this book, we have written tale after tale of having our hearts torn open with ecstasy, of soaring higher than we ever believed possible. But here in this little cabin out in the country sunshine, I have dreamed of huddling alone on a cliff in a rainstorm — and I can’t write this book without telling you about that part too.
What does openness mean? If there were such a thing as a tribe of perfectly open-hearted people, here’s what we think they would be like. They wouldn’t withhold emotion; they’d express joy or sadness, anger or fear, without reservation, but without dumping on others. They’d trust easily and give easily, relaxed in the assurance that whatever they gave would somehow be given back to them. They wouldn’t try to control things that weren’t theirs to control. They wouldn’t judge others — they’d understand that most people are simply doing the best they can with the tools they have at the time. They’d be generous with their time, their energy, their possessions, their affection. And most of all,
they’d love freely, without worrying about whether they were getting as much love back as they were giving (as though love were some sort of karmic checking account that had to be kept balanced!).
In order to do all this, of course, our mythical perfectly open-hearted people would also understand that they had to love themselves and take care of themselves in order to love and take care of others – they’d be as empathetic with themselves as they were with everyone else. Each heart would be as open to itself as it was to each other heart; each individual would take care of himself or herself with the same kindness with which they take care of their lovers and friends.
Are we that open, that balanced, that perfect? Hell, no, not even close. But we’re a bit closer than we used to be, and we’re pretty sure that the experiences we’ve recounted in this book are the reason.
Open your heart – easy to say. Open up to you, to how you feel, to me, to how I feel, to everything and everyone around me ... sure. But nobody can live full-time with no personal boundaries and no psychological defenses. So openhearted always means as open as you can be right now, while still maintaining awareness of your own boundaries and taking care of your own needs.
All of us at times fear opening our hearts. It’s scary to open up to our own feelings – the intensity of joy of grief, pride and regret. What if we open our hearts and we’re not keeping our most intense emotions on a tight leash and somebody sees them? Would we feel embarrassed? How can we love ourselves with all our fear and shame and childish delight right out in the open? To be this open, we need to practice a very high level of emotional self-acceptance. We need to be kind and accepting and loving toward ourselves – as kind as we are towards our friends and loved ones. Really scary.
Radical Ecstasy Page 18