I knew that, for the most part, nothing bad had ever happened to me. I had almost everything a person could want, and so much more.
But maybe love and family are like eyebrows: you notice when they’re not there.
OF COURSE, THERE was one more reason that Shakespeare’s manifesto on power and powerlessness was so attractive to me: my nascent sexuality also revolved around power exchange.
I’ve always been kinky. My fetish appeared early, long before I knew anything about kink or the diversity of sexual lifestyles. As a child, I pored over any book that mentioned spanking, paddling, or thrashing. Tom Sawyer and The Whipping Boy went through many early reads, as did, believe it or not, key entries of the Oxford English Dictionary. (“Spank: To strike, especially on the buttocks with the open hand.”) In one mortifying childhood memory, I told a friend that I wanted to rewatch the paddling scene in Dead Poets Society three or four times because I was “curious about the sound editing” of that moment.
I did lots of “book reports” and elementary school projects on corporal punishment.
Many, many “book reports” on corporal punishment.
Even as a toddler, my sexuality existed. By the time I was five, I was already prototyping my sexual identity (and no doubt ruining the otherwise pristine childhood memories of a few friends) with twisted games of House. From the outside, it looked like the standard childhood game: we climbed into a playhouse and pretended to be a family.
On the inside, things got weird. With the fevered specificity of a tiny Orson Welles, I manipulated our scenarios so that whoever was pretending to be the mom or dad that day ended up chasing us around the playhouse with a belt, yelling that we needed to be “punished.” This style of play thrilled and, on a deeper level, profoundly satisfied me. I was a glutton for these play punishments.
But even at that age, we all sensed that there was something shameful about our game. We never played House with adults nearby.
Most fetishists have funny stories about the strange ways our sexuality leaked out in childhood. When my friend Tom was eight or nine, his parents took him to Home Depot. While they looked at merchandise, Tom wandered over to a computer terminal—the kind that employees could use to search for inventory—and, for reasons he still can’t quite explain, and despite the fact that he had never been spanked himself, impulsively typed “I want to spank 528,984,777,000 girls!!!!!” onto the screen. (He doesn’t remember the exact number he wrote; he just mashed his hands against the keyboard until the number reached a height that was sufficiently impressive to an eight-year-old.) Tom stood at the terminal for a minute, transfixed, just as I have always been, by the mere sight of that word. But when the euphoric fog of self-disclosure cleared, Tom realized he wasn’t alone—a middle-aged man was standing right behind him, wearing an expression that confirmed he’d read Tom’s confession.
Tom didn’t even bother to delete his words. He just fled the scene of his crime.
As I got older, I stayed weird. My copy of Roald Dahl’s Boy (which details his childhood canings in the British school system) went through so many rereads that its cover fell off. The dictionary was my first erotica: I looked up the definitions for spank, paddle, thrash, and whip so often that, after a few years, my dictionary automatically fell open to those pages. I could say that I was haunted by sexual fantasies about domination, submission, and pain, but that would be a euphemism. I wasn’t haunted by fantasies about “domination” or “submission.” At that point, I wasn’t even familiar with those terms. I was haunted by specific fantasies about being bent over for a severe punishment, as I cried and begged for forgiveness. Alone in my room, I sometimes rolled up a pillow, put it under my hips to force my bottom into the air, as if I were draped over someone’s knee, and lay on my stomach to drink the confusing cocktail of satisfaction and self-loathing that came of that position.
I realize that all this raises the obvious question of whether I was spanked as a kid—that is, hit repeatedly on my butt in the specified and deliberate way I fetishize—and how that played into my emerging sexuality. But that question is a pinch more stinging than bees, and it will take me this whole book to answer it. For now, feel free to make assumptions. But be forewarned: those assumptions will probably be wrong.
WHEN I WAS ten years old, I changed schools (and, for the first time, stayed put for a few years) and met a misanthropic ballerina named Peng (rhymes with “lung”). Before long, she was my best friend. I admired Peng’s languid, graceful body and her enviable straight hair, which looked so perfect compared to my frizzy blond mess. But Peng’s outward elegance was tempered with enough inner deviance to make our friendship possible. It was Peng’s idea the first time we covered a rival’s house with toilet paper; the secret language we invented to insult classmates was her idea, too.
But Peng’s best idea, by far, was the Green Notebook.
It was 1999. That year, Peng and I (like everyone else in our generation) played a video game called The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The green notebook was our way to keep the story going during class.
Link is the hero of the game. He begins his quest to save the world of Hyrule as a child, but when the battles become too challenging for his age, he goes into hibernation at the Temple of Time under the care of Rauru, the game’s so-called “Sage of Light.” Seven years later, Link wakes up as an adult and continues his quest.
Link’s hibernation period was our window of opportunity. What if Link wasn’t asleep during those seven years? What if, instead, he was training for the battles to come? Wouldn’t that be a good story? Peng and I relished the chance to flesh out this part of Link’s narrative without contradicting the game we loved.
We filled a green three-ring binder with paper and a bag of multicolored pens, assigned colors to each character, and passed the notebook back and forth during classes. Peng wrote as Rauru. He spoke in gray ink. I wrote as Link, who spoke in green ink.
In our story, Rauru was a strict—very strict—teacher and mentor figure to Link. (Both Rauru and Link are male, and have no biological relationship; to this day, most of my favorite erotica emphasizes that dynamic: male, platonic, educational.) I didn’t control both characters, but just as I had done years earlier when my friends and I played House, I manipulated our scenarios so that Rauru ended up giving Link severe, detailed beatings, with all kinds of implements: straps, sticks, and more. At night, I taught myself to masturbate to the thought of those stories.
More than a decade later, when the green notebook came up in conversation, I asked Peng if she remembered the experimentally masochistic scenes that, in hindsight, seemed so obvious and embarrassing to me. She didn’t. It was my first experience of the kind of love that Shakespeare described as “painted blind”—every time I had let my freak flag fly and done something twisted, Peng didn’t even notice. I loved her for that.
“LET’S RENT A MOVIE,” Peng suggested at a sleepover one night in 2001, when we were fifteen. At Blockbuster, I stumbled onto a French film called The Piano Teacher. The back of the tape said that it was about a piano student who gets involved with his masochistic music teacher. Intrigued and titillated, I grabbed Peng and insisted that we rent this movie. She shrugged and, as usual, tolerated me.
The Piano Teacher is about a middle-aged piano teacher named Erika, who has a domineering mother and a father who is institutionalized in a psychiatric asylum. Erika and one of her piano students, Walter, become attracted to each other, and he tries to kiss her. Erika tells Walter that she’ll have a relationship with him only if he is willing to satisfy her masochistic fantasies, which she describes in a letter. Walter is repulsed. Their relationship climaxes when Walter attacks Erika in her apartment, in exactly the way she requested, and beats and rapes her. Erika seems shaken and unsatisfied by this encounter. The next day, when she sees Walter at a concert, he ignores her.
At the end of the film, Erika removes a knife from her purse and casually inserts it into her own chest.
Peng was bored. I sat frozen on the couch, wearing a mask of stricken, sunken-eyed horror. (When beginning to explore a divergent sexual identity, do not turn to French cinema.) Did Erika’s character speak for me? Was she my sexual destiny? Were my only choices to follow my superego into the light of normative (if frustrating and unsatisfying) vanilla sex, or to follow my id into the suicidal hellscape of a French psychosexual drama?
American pop culture wasn’t any better. In Six Feet Under, an otherwise sexually open-minded and nonjudgmental character who cheats on her submissive boyfriend complains, “If only he enjoyed nice, normal, perfectly average sex.” Friends and Frasier are speckled with occasional jokes about the perversity of kink, only some of which felt lighthearted and benign. Even Sex and the City, which I hoped might be a refuge of sexual positivity, devoted an episode to Miranda’s shock and disgust when she finds spanking pornography in a date’s apartment. None of those references are problems by themselves—most people don’t share my fetish, so it makes sense for pop culture to portray it as something unusual. And kink often is funny! But the problem was how relentless those messages were. I never got to see my burgeoning sexuality in a healthy or happy light. According to my culture, I was one of two things: a punch line for a prerecorded laugh track, or a freak.
In 2002, I went to a local movie theater with a few high school friends. We didn’t have a specific movie in mind; instead, we had planned to show up at the theater, check out our options, and pick something. We asked the ticket taker what was playing that hour. He listed a few options—including a new movie, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, called Secretary.
“What’s Secretary about?” my friend Karen asked the ticket taker.
“It’s about a woman who gets into a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss,” said the guy behind the glass, with a chuckle.
I launched myself at the ticket booth, elbowing strangers out of my way. People leapt to the sides as I plowed through the group like a linebacker. A baby flew out of his mother’s arms and landed in a tree.
“We’ll see that one!” I yelled, pounding on the counter. “Four tickets, please!”
No, that’s not what happened. But that’s how it felt. Here’s what really happened.
“That one sounds okay,” I said, shrugging casually. “What do you guys think? Want to see that?”
“Okay,” my friends agreed.
Oh, the ticket taker had undersold this movie. It’s not just about a woman who has a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss; the two characters seem to have a specific interest in spanking. Other kinks do show up, such as pony play—at one point, the main character wears a saddle—but Secretary was close to right up my alley. Every time the secretary makes a typo on an office document, her boss calls her into the office, bends her over his desk, and spanks her. I was overwhelmed to see a version of my fantasies onscreen. It was the first time I realized I wasn’t the only one who had them.
But even Secretary was hard to swallow. (Years later, I would learn that the film was based on a far more complex short story by Mary Gaitskill.) In the movie, the masochistic lead character, Lee, has a sad backstory, with a history of psychiatric institutionalization and self-mutilation. (At one point early in the film, she presses a boiling hot teakettle against her naked thigh, exhaling with relief as her skin burns.) In her bedroom, Lee keeps a hidden box, decorated with colorful rainbow stickers, full of razors, spikes, and other implements that she can use to hurt herself. Secretary seemed to suggest that sadomasochistic relationships are merely an alternative form of self-mutilation.
In the absence of James Spader, was I supposed to start cutting myself?
I longed for Caliban because I longed to uncage myself, and the ravenous sexual terrors in me, from the antiseptic place where I was starving us to death. I longed for Caliban’s ugly honesty and the unselfconsciousness of his impulses. Pop culture, hygienic and un-nuanced as it was, gave me nothing to hold on to. Only Caliban could speak to me about what it is like to feel infested.
“Peace and happiness can only come from God,” someone told me once. “Our Heavenly Father is an awesome force that brings us to our knees. His will controls everything. Can you imagine that?”
Could I imagine an awesome force that would bring me to my knees? Could I imagine submitting to a higher authority and giving up control under threat of severe punishment? Could I imagine obedience, bondage, pleasure, pain, sacrifice, and suffering blended together in a holy mélange?
Yes. I could imagine that.
AS A KID, I had imagined that if I learned my mother’s triggers, I could navigate her land mines and she would settle into a consistent place as the generous, loving half of herself who I adored. Failing that, I reacted to my mom’s unpredictable moods with a terrible fantasy: I longed for illness. When I was eight, I read a novel about a little girl with leukemia. I envied that girl so much. In the book, the little girl’s parents brought her flowers and sat by her bed. They cried and brushed the hair away from her face. I wanted someone to brush the hair away from my face. I wanted my mother to be as gentle and maternal as the mother of the little girl in the book. And I assumed that if I got sick, she would be.
I could picture it.
“Go on without me,” I would whisper in a hoarse voice, as my loved ones gathered around the bed in a frozen tableau of grief. “Live. Dance. Sing. Love. I will always be with—” And then my head would fall against the pillow, my hair scattered around my face like a halo. Outside, a gentle rain would begin to fall.
“She’s gone,” my mom would say, her voice cracking.
“A great light has gone out,” the nurse would whisper, as a single tear ran down her face.
Yeah, that sounded good.
Karma obliged. When I was fifteen, only a few months after my mother introduced me to Caliban for the first time, my hand went numb. It didn’t get better for weeks. My mom worried it was a brain tumor, but after almost a year of tests, a neurologist had another idea.
“It looks like this is multiple sclerosis,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a relief!” my mom said, brightly. “After all, nobody wants to hear ‘brain tumor.’” She laughed. I pursed my lips.
“Nobody wants to hear MS, either,” the neurologist replied. “But we’ll do what we can. I’m swamped with appointments this afternoon, but here’s a coloring book. It can answer some of your questions.” He handed the coloring book to me. It was my sophomore year of high school.
My mother took me back to school, and I went to math class. I hated math. I had dropped out of the honors track, which meant that Peng and I weren’t in the same classes anymore.
I sat alone in the back row and pulled the coloring book out of my backpack. It flopped open onto my desk. It was designed for a younger child, most likely one who had a parent with MS. The pages of questions and answers were illustrated with black cartoon outlines of happy figures. I flipped through the thin book and learned that multiple sclerosis is one of the more baffling degenerative neurological diseases. It has no known cure. It can cause paralysis, blindness, and other problems with the potential to screw up my social life.
I understood why they put this information in a coloring book. I suddenly wanted something to do with my hands.
One page caught my eye. On it, the black-and-white outline of a little boy asked the question: “Do people who can’t walk still have fun?”
“Yes!” cheered the empty outline of his mother, from her wheelchair.
I shoved the coloring book into my backpack and left the classroom.
When I got home that evening, I walked into the living room and put Zoolander, the Ben Stiller comedy about male models, into the VHS player. I sat on the couch and stayed there for four days, watching Zoolander over and over, dozens of times. Once again, my body had let me down. It was too fragile, too carnal, too vulnerable to pain. I wanted to be Ariel, who is light, airy, ethereal, and unburdened with physicality. (Even Ariel’s n
ame likely comes from its similarity to aerial.) Instead, I felt like Caliban, Ariel’s antonym—dark, heavy, sad, scared, and tied to the earth. Every time Zoolander ended, I rewound to the beginning and started again. The lines of the movie became a meditative refrain. I felt myself drift away.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good-looking,” said Derek Zoolander from inside the TV.
There was a soft tap on the living room window. I glanced over and gasped with surprise.
Caliban was there.
I ran up to the window and pressed my hands against the pane.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered, amazed. It was the first time a Shakespeare character had stepped off the page and into my life. I opened the door and gestured for Caliban to step inside. But he refused. He didn’t want to come in.
Caliban is always on the outside.
Prospero never learns how to love. Indeed, his emotional detachment isn’t specific to love—Prospero seems to misunderstand the language of all human emotions. Ariel, a nonhuman, has to explain it to him:
ARIEL
Your charm so strongly works ’em
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
PROSPERO
Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL
Mine would, sir, were I human.
Prospero’s books are not enough for love. The raw depths of human emotion can only be accessed through the wild, unclean underworld of our bodies. Love demands us to reject the cerebral and physically surrender to nature. In The Tempest, Shakespeare proves it.
Sex with Shakespeare Page 4