Mona Carter, a plump 26 year old blonde with innocent blue eyes and a ready smile, is an excellent example of the former type of bondage fan. Mona grew up regarding sex itself as basically evil and any variation from the most common form of sex as vile and perverted. Although she later learned otherwise, at least in an intellectual sense, it is almost impossible for most people wholly to unlearn the sexual attitudes acquired early in life.
Thus Mona has always had considerable difficulty in enjoying sex, and has never shown an experimental attitude toward marital relations; even slight departures from the norm upset her. In bondage situations, however, she is able to gratify her strong desires for several forms of sexual activity which would otherwise be beyond the pale for her. Oral sexual relations with both men and women particularly appeal to her in a bondage situation, just as such relations are particularly taboo in any other setting. It is the combination of desire and inhibition which has this ultimate effect, as we shall see.
Her husband Arnold, on the other hand, typifies the opposite sort of moderate sadomasochist. Arnold, a skilled toolmaker of 29, first experienced sexual excitement as a child while being punished. The associations of childhood, affecting the personality at a time when the whole concept of sex is developing, are almost impossible to displace. They are demonstrably responsible for an inordinate quantity of sexual deviations, and are almost invariably at the root of fetish behavior, in which such objects or materials as shoes, leather, fur, and the like are endowed with almost mystic sexual importance.
The Pavlovian concept of the conditioned reflex helps explain this phenomenon. Pavlov, of course, was the Russian psychologist who rang a bell every time he fed a group of dogs. The dogs quickly learned to associate the ringing of the bell with the experience of being fed, to the point where they reacted to this sound as to the stimulus of food itself—i.e., they began salivating when the bell was rung whether or not food was offered.
To understand the way a conditioned reflex could establish a sexual fetish, one might conceive of an experiment in which, through the proper placement of electrodes in the brain, subjects were induced to reach orgasm immediately after being presented with a normally non-sexual stimulus. For example, they might be shown pictures of hummingbirds. Once the pattern of hummingbird-picture-plus-orgasm was established, one could disconnect the electrodes and expect that the sight of a hummingbird would continue to elicit a strong sexual response from the subject.
It is thus that fetishes develop, and it is thus that sex for Arnold was strongly associated with guilt, punishment, and physical pain. He witnessed an act of coitus between his parents—an act which, out of childish ignorance, he even interpreted as one in which his father and his mother were hurting each other. He was then scolded, was told he was a dirty child for sneaking in on his parents, and was soundly spanked by his mother, who stripped off his pants and held him across her naked lap while spanking him with the palm of her hand.
All of the excitement of the scene, combined with the indisputable fact that slaps upon the buttocks stimulate sexual nerve-endings, engendered extreme sexual excitement followed by orgasm. And, since one can no more easily train a person to desist responding to a given stimuli, than one can train a child to dislike a food he has grown to enjoy, so the connection between sex and pain and punishment remained with Arnold, reinforced over the years by sundry additional incidents.
While the manner in which both Mona and Arnold acquired their present sexual orientation is of more than a little interest, it is by no means unusual and parallels cases documented time and time again in psychoanalytical literature. The reader who wishes to pursue the matter further might consult other works dealing with such subjects. Dr. Benjamin Morse’s The Sexual Deviate covers this and other subjects comprehensively and gives a good picture of the way these mechanisms operate; Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, while largely dismissed by present-day authorities as superficial in certain respects, does present an exhaustive survey of the various forms which fetishism may assume and is most valuable in that regard. The reader with an incomplete acquaintance with Latin should take care, though, to avoid buying an older edition of this work; earlier publishers seemed to feel that candid material was obscene unless presented in a dead language!
While Arnold and Mona are both interesting as cases of sexual development, we are here concerned less with how they acquired their particular sexual feelings as we are with the way swinging, via their bondage club, has come to provide them with a means of satisfying these feelings. For this reason we will omit a discussion of their early years and will instead concentrate on their sexual life since marriage.
• • •
ARNOLD: I suppose it’s unusual in this day and age, but when Mona and I were married we didn’t have enough sexual experience between us to amount to much. I had actually had intercourse just once, and it was pretty much of a disaster. I had been dating this girl, and she actually seduced me. She wanted to sleep with me and I told her that I didn’t want to do this because I respected her. I suppose this is a pretty obvious cop-out, but I really did believe it at the time.
We had been petting, and when I said this she got absolutely furious. She got her hand on my scrotum and started to squeeze, and she told me if I didn’t make love to her she would crush my testicles. I don’t know if she meant it or not, but either the pain or the threat or something got to me, and I became excited enough to go through with it and had coitus with her. It wasn’t much good for either of us. I tried to date her again but she didn’t want to have anything to do with me.
And Mona, believe it or not, was a virgin on her wedding night
MONA: I guess it is hard to believe, isn’t it? You know the story they tell about unicorns, that they use that horn to violate virgins—well, they also say that the reason there aren’t any unicorns any more is that there aren’t any virgins, either. But I was one. I had plenty of opportunities for sex, but I always managed to stop myself before I went too far. I used to think that sometime sooner or later I would lead a boy on too far and I wouldn’t be able to stop him, that I would wind up getting raped. Maybe it would have happened eventually, I don’t know, but it hadn’t happened by the time I was 18, and then I met Arnold and we were married.
ARNOLD: One good thing was that from the beginning we were able to discuss sex together. We both admitted that maybe we were undersexed and that it didn’t mean too much to us. We were wrong, but that was what we both honestly believed at the time. And although our honeymoon wasn’t the kind of wild orgy people talk about, it worked out well as far as we were concerned. The first night we didn’t even attempt to have intercourse, We just held each other and petted. Then the second night we managed it, and we had intercourse on a fairly regular basis from then on.
MONA: Our sex life was low-keyed, but it was normal.
ARNOLD: That’s about the best way to describe it. Sex was just no big deal for us. A certain percentage of the time I wouldn’t be able to get an erection, or Mona would tense up and wouldn’t get excited at all, and I suppose either of us would have been a damned unsatisfactory partner for anyone else, but we were fine for each other.
MONA: Partly because we happen to love each other very much, for one thing. When you have a real love for each other, it’s more than sex. It’s the tenderness you feel for each other, and that’s more important than having sex so many times a week or whatever.
JWW: Then I take it you were satisfied with your sexual relationship?
ARNOLD: Well—
MONA: You could say that we thought it was as good as it could be. For us, I mean. We realized that other people got more intense pleasure out of sex than we did, but we didn’t know that we could do any better than we were doing.
JWW: What made you change your minds?
ARNOLD: It was a fight we had. I don’t even know what we argued about but that’s really beside the point, isn’t it? Whatever it was, it was a real rip-snorter. We’d been married abou
t three or four years at the time and we had just recently begun having some very bad arguments. They always worked themselves out and at the end we kissed and made up, and usually made love.
MONA: Sometimes I think we had those fights for the fun of making up again. And our lovemaking was at its best afterward.
ARNOLD: This one time, we were really screaming at each other. Mona said something that got to me, I forget what, and I told her that I felt like taking her over my knee and walloping her. She told me I wouldn’t dare, and I was just mad enough to take the dare.
MONA: I didn’t really believe he’d do it. But I suppose I must have secretly hoped he would, because as soon as he started spanking me I got a very funny feeling. It wasn’t just sexy, it was different from anything I could remember feeling before. I thought how strong he was and how he could do anything he wanted with me and I was powerless to resist him. And this was a very stimulating line of thought to me.
ARNOLD: You made it pretty obvious. I was paddling her pretty hard—I got carried away, see—and the next thing I knew she was on her back with her knees up screaming “Fuck me, fuck me” at the top of her lungs. Excuse the expression, but the thing is that that’s what she said, and Mona was not the kind of person to say a word like that. There’s a saying that a person wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful, and that’s a perfect description of Mona. I don’t think I ever heard her say damn before, and here she was saying this, and it was crazy. I got this sudden spontaneous erection like never before and the next thing you knew we were going at it like a couple of dogs in the mating season. She kept on using obscene language and calling me dirty names and telling me to do it to her as hard as I could, and for my part I was just completely carried away, terribly excited in a way that was different from anything that had ever happened in the past.
MONA: It was almost too much for us. I had a really unbelievable orgasm. I hardly ever had reached orgasm before, and when I did it wasn’t that powerful, but this was fantastic. And afterward we didn’t know what to make of it. We couldn’t exactly talk about it. We were both embarrassed and ashamed, but at the same time we had enjoyed ourselves tremendously. It was . . . odd.
• • •
Experiences similar to the one described above will often lead a couple to incorporate some sort of sadomasochistic ritual into their foreplay in order to enhance their sexual relationship. One might have expected that this would be the case with Mona and Arnold, but things did not turn out this way. Although they could hardly deny what had happened, they found it difficult to accept the implications of their discovery. Each felt that their love for each other was clean and tender, and that the new sides of themselves which they had uncovered were evil and generally undesirable.
• • •
MONA: It was a very frustrating time for both of us, and I often found myself wishing that the whole thing had never taken place, however good it had been at the time. I found myself having these thoughts of being raped or spanked all the time. I imagined Arnold forcing me to do certain things, such as fellatio. When I had these thoughts it made me passionate, but it also made me feel very uncomfortable, and very guilty and dirty.
ARNOLD: Mona used to try to pick fights just so that they would end with a spanking. If we had been a little denser than we were this might have worked out fine, but we were able to see what we were both doing and it disturbed us. It was a vicious circle. Like Mona, I was having fantasies of bondage and domination, and on the one hand I wanted that sort of sex and at the same time I felt it would have a bad effect on our marriage.
MONA: So we reacted in different ways. I kept acting very bitchy, and lover boy went out and found himself a whore.
ARNOLD: It was really an experiment. I felt I could do anything with a prostitute and it wouldn’t matter. Things that would be degrading with Mona I could do with a prostitute. I got a girl’s phone number from a fellow at work. I went to her place and explained what I wanted her to do. I thought she would get angry or disgusted, which would actually have pleased me. Or else she might have laughed at me. But she didn’t react at all. I guess girls in the business get every kind of odd request, and this at least was something she could do with no trouble.
I had her tie my hands together behind my back. Then I knelt on the bed and she spanked me on the buttocks. At first nothing happened, and I was ready to call it off and go home when all of a sudden something just plain connected, and I was suddenly very excited. I had her go on spanking me while I performed cunnilingus on her. I had never done this with Mona, I had thought about it but never mentioned it, and now I found it terribly exciting. I had a powerful orgasm from doing that, and from the spanking she was giving me. Then afterward I felt terribly guilty about it. I spent three sleepless nights brooding about it before I finally gave up and confessed everything to Mona.
JWW: What was her reaction?
MONA: I was furious, and we had a terrible fight. I slapped Arnold and called him a fairy and a pervert and a cheat and everything else in the book, and he hit me back, and we wound up making love, and once again it was this wild thing like before. After that it was time for both of us to face up to some facts. We talked about seeing a marriage counselor but both of us decided it probably wouldn’t do any good and that it was sure to be embarrassing. So we talked it out and did some reading on the subject, and it seemed as though the best thing to do was act out our fantasies in sex play.
JWW: Did this work?
MONA: Yes and no. It was exciting that way, but we felt badly about it afterward. As though we were soiling our marriage and giving in to desires that weren’t worthy of us.
ARNOLD: Then I picked up a magazine on the newsstand with an article about bondage clubs. That got us on the right track, although it was a long time before we did anything about it. But we began buying books and reading them and we actually knew a great deal about the entire swinging scene before we actually got involved in it.
MONA: We finally decided that it was something we had to try. I was very nervous at the thought of our having sex with other people. I didn’t know how we would react to it. We felt, though, that it wouldn’t kill us to try it, and that it might work out well.
JWW: How did you first make contact?
MONA: We used one of the clubs and answered a few ads. We had done enough reading so that we knew how to pick the right ads. Some of them came right out and used key words like bondage or discipline, and others were a little more subtle. Couples and singles would describe themselves as being in need of training or fit to be tied or students of the history of punishment. If you knew what you were looking for, it wasn’t hard to find out what couples were tuned in on our frequency.
We were really very cautious about the whole thing, too. We used false names and a Post Office box in another city, and we exchanged several letters with a few couples until we found one we felt we could trust. We knew to do this from what we had read.
JWW: Were you afraid of postal authorities?
ARNOLD: That was part of it, but not the whole thing. What we were most anxious about was getting involved with some kooks and weirdoes.
MONA: Maybe that sounds funny coming from us—
ARNOLD: I guess we should be broadminded about everything, since our own kicks are off the beaten track. It just goes to show that everybody’s pretty much prejudiced against anything that isn’t his own kick. Still, what we had to avoid was getting mixed up with the extreme Sadie Maes. There’s a big difference between our kind of bondage and the wild stuff that some people go for. As far as I’m concerned, they can play their games all they want and more power to them, as long as they leave us out of it.
MONA: Amen to that.
ARNOLD: But the trouble is that they don’t leave you out of it, not if you have the bad luck to get mixed up with them. In our crowd, if somebody really draws the line at a particular sex practice, he or she is excused automatically from it. We aren’t really cruel, although we’ll act out cruelty in order
to enhance things at a club meeting. But some of these people get their kicks from out-and-out sadism, up to and including true torture. Get involved with them and there’s no way out. The fact that you really don’t go for that scene only makes it more exciting for them.
MONA: This really can happen, and when it does it’s enough of a nightmare to turn a person off swinging entirely. Tell them about the Fosters, honey.
ARNOLD: That’s a perfect example of what happened to two members of our group. They answered an ad and went to join this group, and from the ad and the correspondence it seemed to be just an ordinary bondage group. The wife was selected and tied up, and then instead of a little harmless paddling they really went to work on her. This one woman came out wearing high-heeled boots and a tight leather corset and began lashing her on her bare breasts with a cat-o-nine-tails. The husband tried to break this up, and he was explaining that this wasn’t the way they got their kicks. It wasn’t that these jokers didn’t believe him. They were delighted—the less our friends enjoyed it, the more of a kick it was to these disgusting animals. They tied him up, too, and then they really went to work on both of them. I don’t want to go into much detail because to be frank it makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. They burned their genitals with lit cigarettes, they forced objects into their rectums—it was a nightmare, that’s all, like something you’d read in a book by the Marquis de Sade.
MONA: When I heard about it I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t gone to the police afterward. Some of those people did things that would have gotten them twenty years in prison. Or a lifetime sentence to a hospital for the criminally insane. Why, it was just luck that no permanent damage was done, and as it happens Peg Foster has a few scars that still haven’t faded. She may carry them for life.
But she said that they couldn’t very well go to the police without exposing themselves in the process. After all, they had gone to that meeting expecting to participate in illegal sex activity, and those sadists could even have claimed that the Fosters went along with everything and then decided to go to the police after it was all over.
The Taboo Breakers: Shock Troops of the Sexual Revolution (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 15