The S-M community had its own standards, its own principles. “Safe, sane, consensual” were the hallowed words. Neither the Baroness nor Master R had much use for them. “Safe is limiting,” Master R said disdainfully. “And what is sanity?” Consent was just a beginning. He preferred to adhere to a different code, “the code of love.” He loved his slaves, he said, and expounded on the meaning of the word, paraphrasing the philosopher George Santayana: “Love is a physical drive with an ideal intent.”
AT dawn, after my night at Master R’s, I walked outside to the spit, which remained, two years later, next to an untended vegetable garden, tomato and zucchini stalks from seasons ago softening to mulch beneath a riot of blackberry bushes. The sky was clearing fast, clouds skating toward oblivion. The gray steel immensity looked like one of Richard Serra’s outdoor sculptures: hulking, incomprehensible. “That day had that wonderful incongruity,” the Baroness had said. “The gorgeous autumn weather, the sun, the blue sky, and the next thing you know you’re at the heart of darkness.”
We drove back to the city. As we came close to Manhattan, the Baroness phoned her husband to say she was almost home. “Hello, handsome,” she began adoringly, and the affection stayed in her voice throughout the conversation. She called again a half hour later to say she was very near. When we reached her building he was waiting there to kiss her and welcome her back.
THE Girl in her horse blinkers, Greg with his spiral notebook, Elvis on his spit—all were in important company. Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent his life yearning to replicate the whippings of his childhood governess but never, he wrote, “daring to declare my tastes.” And in ancient Athens, in the marketplace, the philosopher Peregrinus Proteus masturbated while Athenians lashed him at his request. He later cremated himself at the Olympic Games of 165.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist, coined the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in the late nineteenth century. Sadism he drew from the Marquis de Sade, the French aristocrat and author who, a century earlier, lived in an ecstasy of assaulting women—slicing, poisoning, whipping—and lived often, too, in prison or a lunatic asylum. “Sex without pain,” he said, “is like food without taste.” Krafft-Ebing derived masochism from Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the nineteenth-century author of Venus in Furs, an autobiographical novel of submission that some of the Baroness’s acolytes treated as a bible.
“A differentiation of original and acquired cases of sadism is scarcely possible,” Krafft-Ebing wrote. “Many individuals, tainted from birth, for a long time do everything to conquer the perverse instinct…. Later, when the opposing motives of an ethical and aesthetic kind have been gradually overcome, and when oft-repeated experience has proved the natural act to give but incomplete satisfaction, the abnormal instinct suddenly bursts forth. Owing to this late expression, in acts, of an originally perverse disposition, the appearances are those of an acquired perversion. As a rule, it may be safely assumed that this psychopathic state exists from birth.” He believed the same about masochism and most other erotic deviance: the conditions were inborn. And in Psychopathia Sexualis he recounted hundreds of case histories of the afflicted.
“Case 21. Vincenz Verzeni, born 1849: ‘I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure…. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating.’”
“Case 28. In the 60s the inhabitants of Leipzig were frightened by a man who was accustomed to attack young girls on the street, stabbing them in the upper arm with a dagger. Finally arrested, he was recognized as a sadist, who at the instant of stabbing had an ejaculation, and with whom the wounding of the girls was an equivalent for coitus.”
“Case 57. ‘I am thirty-five years old, mentally and physically normal…. Even in my early childhood I loved to revel in ideas about the absolute mastery of one man over others…. In reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which I read about the beginning of puberty), I had erections. Particularly exciting for me was the thought of a man being hitched to a wagon in which another man sat with a whip, driving and whipping him.’”
Krafft-Ebing’s heir, Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician whose library on sexuality was burned by the Nazis, collected cases of deviance in a similar way. But with the desire to give or absorb pain and degradation, Hirschfeld saw an impulse so widespread that the word “deviance” couldn’t fairly be applied. Soon after his death, his students put together a book of his teaching, Sexual Anomalies: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the flagellomania of Englishwomen became a sort of epidemic. One of the most remarkable manifestations of this tendency was the formation of female flagellation clubs, whose members were recruited exclusively from the upper classes.” The women would meet one evening each week, much as a book club might, to whip each other, and brothels specializing in whippings were a popular and even accepted part of London life.
To read Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld between spending time with the Baroness was to see her within a long history but also to understand her rarity. Both scientists suggested that female masochism was common enough. But true female sadism was so hard to find that Krafft-Ebing, for all his avid assembling, related only two cases in Psychopathia Sexualis, both of women whose erotic charge came in sucking their husbands’ blood. Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld included any number of prostitutes adept with whips and wives implored to enact scenes of punishment, but there was no woman to match Sacher-Masoch’s ideal lover, the fictionalized master of Venus in Furs, who was compelled by her own desire.
The Baroness would have stood out in Krafft-Ebing’s and Hirschfeld’s research, as she did now in the night world of New York. There was no shortage of professionals. To type in “dominatrix Manhattan” on Google’s search engine was to find Mistress Troy and Mistress Elizabeth and Mistress Rebecca. It was to read about a mistress who specialized in “kidnapping and abduction” and “full toilet training,” and another, Mz. Black Mistress, who declared, “I will confiscate your worthless nuts when you bow down to me baby.” There were hundreds and maybe thousands of others who made or supplemented their living by supplying customers with subjection at an hourly rate, but, except possibly in a broad psychological sense, there was no sign of their taking pleasure. Some of them attended the monthly parties the Baroness threw at a bar near her shop: a tall, knife-bodied black woman; a pygmy-sized white woman whose makeup was pale as plaster; an art student with multicolored hair who hoped to find customers to help pay her tuition. They laughed as they gave out their floggings. They spat derision and condemnation as they flailed away with studded paddles, causing not only flesh but spines to shudder. They smiled as they ground their spiked heels into the testicles of men who lay beneath them. And perhaps they took satisfaction in having such power over the gender that, as a rule, had more. But they didn’t speak of pleasure the way the Baroness did. They didn’t speak of lips swelling. They didn’t talk of protracted orgasms. They didn’t talk, as the Baroness did when she remembered Genevieve or another slave, a man she’d named Luminous, about a transcendent connection, about a mutual desire so strong that sadist and masochist couldn’t keep themselves away from each other; they didn’t talk about being desperate and destined for each other; they didn’t talk in terms of each other. They didn’t speak—didn’t come close to speaking—about being in the thrall of love.
The Baroness was a true female paraphiliac. There weren’t many, except in the realm of masochism. In all the other categories, from acrotomophilia to zoophilia, women were, according to every sexologist I talked with, drastically underrepresented. Some estimated the imbalance at ten to one. Most refused to estimate; the statistics just weren’t there. But no one doubted the disproportion.
One theory, at least with the paraphilias that centered on body parts rather than sexual acts—on feet, say, as opposed to floggings—was that male desire arose much more from the visual, and so it was more vulnerable to
misdirection. The theory was frequently linked to the idea of imprinting. In 1935, the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz had performed an experiment. As a brood of goslings hatched, he made sure that he, and not the mother goose, was the first being the hatchlings saw. The goslings, who would normally have followed their mother everywhere, instead followed Lorenz. He had successfully become their mother by presenting himself during the brief window when the goslings’ brains were innately programmed to take in and store their mother’s identity, to be imprinted with this information. Some sexologists believed that similar factors might be at work with the particulars of male desire, that during boyhood periods when certain hormonal surges occur, surges that may be momentary or protracted and that come most likely before puberty, the brain is open to imprinting that then defines erotic attraction. A boy’s endocrine and neurological systems are intertwined so that, at these susceptible times, his erotic ideals become fixed in the brain. The times for imprinting may not be as limited as the goslings’—a few seconds or minutes don’t necessarily determine the direction of eros. No proponent of the theory was sure about the windows of susceptibility, or about all the hormones involved, or about the mechanism of imprinting. When it came to desire, few sexologists were sure about anything.
And such theorizing didn’t fully address the question of why women are so rarely paraphilic—or address the problem of how female desire finds its direction. Meredith Chivers, a psychologist in Toronto, had chosen to devote her young career to these unknowns.
In her lab, in a faceless concrete building belonging to one of Canada’s most important psychiatric teaching hospitals, on a floor of sexuality researchers where she was the only woman, she wore narrow, stylish rectangular glasses and graceful black boots that laced up almost to her knees. Her blond hair fell over a low-necked black top.
She joked that she’d been studying sex since the age of five, when she first contemplated the reasons for kissing: “I was sitting next to my mom in our family’s giant Chevrolet Impala station wagon, and feeling very small—cars have always made me feel small—and my five-year-old brain was chugging away. Why would they do this, why would people kiss? My parents weren’t kissing at that moment, but I’d seen them, and I’d seen other people, and I wanted to know why this would occur. We were pulling out from our compound of townhouses onto Three Valleys Drive. It’s bizarre to me that I remember this one event in such detail. As we were going over the curb, right at that instant, the thought suddenly went through my head: That’s why they do it; men and women kiss because they’re going to have babies.”
Twenty-eight years later she was not only alone as a woman among her colleagues but alone in studying female eros. When she’d first arrived on the floor of sexologists, Kurt Freund was still alive and doing research there. She asked why he never studied women.
Half a century earlier, in Czechoslovakia, Freund had been employed by the Czech military to help catch conscripts who were trying to evade service by pretending to be homosexual. He developed a mechanism, called a plethysmograph, to quantify male arousal to various stimuli. A glass tube was placed over the penis, with an airtight seal around the base of the shaft. Images were shown. A gauge detecting increases in air pressure measured the swelling of the organ. If the air pressure didn’t rise when Freund showed erotic slides of young men, the conscript was headed into the army.
Freund was, meanwhile, among the first modern-era psychiatrists to argue that homosexuality arose from prenatal biology rather than childhood experience, and that it could not be treated. At the start of his career, he had tried to cure gays through psychoanalysis; eventually he called in his patients and gave back their money. He worked to repeal Czech laws that criminalized gay sex, and later, after he’d fled Communist rule and settled in Toronto, his understanding of homosexuality as permanent and harmless helped to convince the American Psychiatric Association, in 1973, to remove the orientation from its list of psychiatric disorders.
Bald, with big ears and a nose like a scythe, Freund answered Chivers’s question with his own: “How am I to understand what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women when I’m a man?” And in his words she heard an affirmation of what she suspected, that when it came to the workings of erotic attraction men and women might be entirely different.
She knew of an unpublished study showing that the degree of genital arousal in heterosexual women watching videos of heterosexual and lesbian sex was “undifferentiated.” The women, Chivers said, “were responding to everything.” In a series of studies of her own, she replicated this result and added other stimuli, including a video featuring the copulation of bonobos, a species of ape closely related to the chimpanzee. She made the bonobo movie herself, finding footage of bonobo sex. Because the soundtrack was insufficient (“bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex, though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds”), she dubbed in some animated screeching. She led both women and men, heterosexual and homosexual, into her lab to watch and listen.
The lab consisted of two small rooms. One held a brown vinyl chair, a small TV sitting on a table, and, depending on the subject, a penile plethysmograph or the bulb and wires of the vaginal model. The bulb was long and slender, about a quarter-inch in diameter, with a broad stopper at the base to prevent it from slipping in too far. The light from the bulb was reflected off the vaginal walls; a photocell measured the reflection. The greater the flow of blood to the genitals, the more light bounced back. On a computer in the adjoining room, Chivers controlled the videos and monitored the subject’s level of physiological arousal.
As the bonobos humped, blood ran to the women’s vaginas. It didn’t take long; physiological excitement was immediate, just as it was—no matter what the female subject’s sexual orientation—when the screen showed women going down on women, men going down on men, men screwing men, and men copulating with women. The male subjects, though, grew physically aroused mostly in categorical ways: straight males responded to images of lesbian or heterosexual sex, gay males to scenes involving men. And the male subjects were unexcited by the apes.
Every thirty seconds, a question popped up on the subject’s screen: “How sexually aroused do you feel right now?” The subject punched in a number on a keypad. The males answered in ways that corresponded to the measures of the plethysmograph. Their minds and penises, their subjective and objective scores, were in agreement. The females replied in ways that were much less related to the responses of their vaginas. They reported no immediate arousal to bonobo sex. To lesbian scenes, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their genitals indicated, to scenes of gay men they reported a great deal less, and to heterosexual scenes they reported much more. For women, all seemed confusion. Adding to the muddle, Chivers pondered a study demonstrating women’s arousal to sexual assault, and a report showing that some women reach orgasm during rape. Her own experience as a clinician confirmed this.
The muddle, she believed, might be due to thinking about female sexuality in male terms. Men’s genitals responded to specific categories of stimuli, and these responses matched their psychological desires: if this was the standard, then women were a mess. But what if it was only a standard? What if, for women, physical readiness for sex was distinct from the lust for it? What if there was another legitimate system of desire?
“I feel like a pioneer on the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said. Between stints in Toronto, she’d done another version of her obsessive research, while working under Michael Bailey, a renowned sexologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. Looking at Chivers’s data showing swift vaginal engorgement to images of all sorts of human sexual activity, Bailey had suggested that women are inherently bisexual, but Chivers had balked at this idea. It seemed to apply a male paradigm—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual—to something deeply unknown. “I do think that for women preferences exist,” she told me. “Women do choose to have sex with men or with women or with both. But I don’t know if
it happens for the same reasons men seek out partners. I don’t know that it’s driven by a sexually motivated system, by sexual desire in and of itself. Is there a basic sexual rudder for women?” she asked, and said that she suspected there might not be, that “emotional kindling” might prove to be far more important in the erotic directions women took.
There was an “interesting relationship,” she wrote to me later, describing the work of another researcher, “between sex drive and attraction to same-sex or opposite-sex people. As sex drive becomes stronger in men, their attractions to men and women are more polarized. Women, however, show greater sexual attraction to both women and men as sex drive gets stronger. This suggests that sex drive is working in concert with a mechanism in men to direct sexuality toward one gender or another, whereas in women this mechanism may not exist and therefore greater sex drive is expressed with both genders.”
“There’s this gravity,” she said, “in the academic world, to look at male and female sexuality from the perspective of equality, of sameness. Any indicators of difference are seen as socially constructed—or else the methodology of the research is seen as flawed. I feel like I’m going to fight an uphill battle in saying, ‘No, male and female sexuality are really different, and you’re going to have to look at them differently.’”
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing Page 7