OPINION
that the sexual elite have known for years. Dominance and submission, sadism and masochism, they’re simply ways of processing life and death. The poles. The extremes. The light. The dark. These practices are perverse by definition, but so is knowing, as we all do (although we all suppress it out of necessity), that you and everyone you love will one day die and your life will have meant nothing. Think of your sexuality as an impression of your life; a painting, a poem, a piece of music inspired by your unique experience and vision of the world and the visions and experiences of your ancestors which will have integrated with your own. Think of your sexuality as an expression of all the beauty, horror, profound feeling, poignant tragedy and pathos that death brings to life. Now imagine that there were a way you could communicate these illusive truths, the essence of your fundamental pain and pleasure, to another human being, without saying a word. Engaging in BDSM is nothing more than a communication of two poles of life: horror and peace. By acting out, just as we did as children (though with fewer ropes and bit-gags), we reach to understand the inescapable truth – that we are already gone. The little death
Submission Revisited ESSAY / Vanessa IL LU ST R AT ION /
Austin Locke Jessica May Underwood
A Matter of Life and Death The landscape is changing. The women who burnt bras and walked the streets bare-breasted under loose white t-shirts are recoiling into their semis and reaching for Spanx.Their daughters pile one set of false lashes on top of another and worship a silicone goddess. Men are troubled. Trampled. They keep building their phallic buildings up and up but somehow they’ve become a benign joke, as floppy as that flaccid comedian’s hair. Their sons surf the internet confused, looking for their sexual identity – their masculinity – in a florescent 2D supermarket of abandoned pleasure. Sex has been slowly crushed; exposed and interrogated in the name of gender studies and ad campaigns, then abandoned. Hijacked by chains and bestsellers, sex has been sold like a whore by a pimp until she’s chosen to recant her freedom and return to the underground in chains. And down there, in a grimy subterranean cocoon, something is happening. Sex is happy down there. She loves the shadows and the dimly-lit shame. It absolves her. Above her head, the arid post-apocalyptic landscape of the sexual revolution stretches out before us as far as the eye can see. Our sickening sexualities are in collective pathology. A pathology of waxed, bleached, enhanced sex, packaged to the masses. But on the south side of women’s bodies in 2012 we’ve seen a wet summer. It rained. The wave broke. The women came out as kinks. These lifeless things The pendulum which propelled our mothers through the frontiers of domination is in the process of swinging back into a déjà vu, a revisiting, a return to a land of painful suppression. But this time we’ve not been snared in the wild and led stamping and steaming into the oikos to serve as the broken horse by some ancient kyrios. This time we’re returning with something they call ‘informed consent’, which allows us to allow these things to be done to
us. Grappling between our feminism, our femininism and the imprint of countless generations of masculine suppression, a shell-shocked army of Stockholm syndromed girl-children read acceptably marketed (anti-)erotica and want to know why thoughts of being raped and beaten turn them on. Pelletier and Herold's '88 study found that over half of its female respondents admitted to fantasies involving forced sex. The question of why has been bandied around by various psycho-types for years, but no strong conclusion has been widely accepted, mainly because you can’t really nail a subjective entity down. It’s a truly tender subject, where shame outweighs intrigue, which means there are few willing to ask the question, or provide enough information to begin a search for the answer. That was until this summer, when a multi-shaded book made the super-taboo mainstream. And so women have begun to pick their way through the psychological, social and economic debris of thousands of years of sexual slavery, and as they explore, they’re beginning to understand where their widespread sexual guilt and grotesque perversions have been built and indeed normalised. Hold on… if a perversion is ‘normal’– for example, if over half of female respondents admit to it – then it can’t, by definition, be a perversion. And indeed, the DSM-IV suggests that BDSM is not a paraphilia in and of itself, that to be so it must first cause clinically significant harm, distress or impairment. So what are the women? They are Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias and they are also his traveller, revisiting their own ruins. That colossal wreck But these things are not lifeless at all. Beneath the dry desert, a spring is rising. The mirage is a real oasis. What we are discovering is something 125 MAGAZINE
Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said:Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” – Percy Shelley
This is sex as a tool to transcend. It’s sex as an emotion…the emotion. It’s the mirror of our fear, love, pain, joy, pleasure and sorrow. It’s fleeting, like the orgasm itself, and we measure it out, stretch it out, act it out again and again in our strange human rituals that are all designed to preserve life in any way possible. Post-coital tristesse (PCT) is the condition of depression experienced after sex. It’s more common in men than women, although women could just experience it in delay. The phenomenon was noted as far back as the 16th century, when philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote about it thus: "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind." It’s no coincidence that the French call the orgasm ‘la petite mort’ – the little death. Of course, what the poets and philosophers have known for thousands of years, science is only just confirming. The leading sex hormone that they’re concerned with here is dopamine, although various others come into play such as oxytocin, affectionately known as ‘the cuddle hormone’ because continued close contact after orgasm is thought to sustain its levels and relieve the depressive effects of dropping dopamine levels. But it’s the dopamine that causes the high and the low, and if you’re kinky the highs are higher and the lows are lower because pain and fear pump everything harderbetterfasterstronger. Dopamine isn’t just reserved for sex though, and there’s an argument to suggest that kinks are just another kind of addict. If we look down into that quagmire it’s possible to see a common thread running through junkies, kinks, religious zealots, and those with any number of mental ‘disorders’ on various points of the spectrum. That thread is ritual, and ritual is nothing more than a search. An attempt to bring some light, order, understanding and transcendence to a chaotic and ultimately senseless existence. These seekers may have more than their search in common though. Is there a mind predisposed to kink? And if so, what causes it?
revulsion at their own sympathy and often disapproval of Lolita for leading him on and manipulating him. The skill in Nabakov’s crafting of this character is exceptional but his insight into Humbert’s psychological and sociological history, both before and after his birth is, in this author’s opinion, what makes us invest in the character. Humbert Humbert’s childhood love Annabel Leigh (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee) is the girl with whom he shared a first interrupted sexual encounter. She dies suddenly of typhus before he’s able to consummate his passion. I’m going to suggest that the psychological pathways to fetishism and those to PTSD are staggeringly similar. Fetishism doesn’t have to stem from a trauma or indeed produce a trauma reaction, but it has the same effect of trapping the mind and causing it to re-live an event that it’s latched on to. “The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal.” Lolita – Vladimir Nabakov The man is 48. His Dominatrix calls him Snorkel. He sits on a cheap plastic chair in an expensive suit with his head hanging down. I’ve been told that he won’t look me in the eye unless I tell him that he can, which I do. “When I was a boy in the West Country, my father used to take us to the beach to dig for lug worms. I hated the worms, so while my brothers were digging I would go snorkeling. One day I was behind some rocks when I saw a beautiful young woman undressing on a secluded patch of sand on the other side of the rocks. I kept the lower half of my face in the water and watched her. I was only seven, but I was so hard, even in the cold water. She had long dark hair that looked like those greenish-black ropes of seaweed. I was mesmerised and not concentrating on the water around me. I’d let my snorkel sink so that it was just an inch out of the water. A wave came. It wasn’t even a big wave, but it flooded my snorkel and I inhaled a lungful of seawater. The girl saw me and covered herself up.” Snorkel comes to his Dominatrix once a week for one hour. She submerges him in a bathtub of water, in mask and snorkel. She puts handfuls of seaweed in the water. She leaves the snorkel one inch above the water, he closes his eyes, and then she fills the bath until Snorkel’s snorkel is flooded, at which point he spontaneously ejaculates, without so much as a touch of the hand. “There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).” Lolita – Vladimir Nabakov Femininism The girl is 21. She is the daughter of a wealthy man in a position of power. She has the figure and face of a child and smokes slim cigarettes. Her boyfriend is a sadist. When she menstruates he confiscates her knickers and sanitary items. She must stay on all fours until she stops bleeding.
Optical replica Humbert Humbert is Lolita’s anti-hero and charismatic captor. A child abuser, kidnapper, rapist and ultimately a murderer. The reader feels huge sympathy for him (despite his crimes),
“It’s something about being free of responsibility I think. If I have nothing… am nothing… if I’m worth nothing then, I dunno, I can’t feel anything. That’s nice, you know? I’m an object. It’s peaceful. I didn’t bleed ‘til I was 19. I was too 37
thin. I liked it like that. I was flat. I could just be a kid. More peace. I dunno. It’s fucked up, right? I know. I got stuck somewhere.” Ok, let’s talk about feminism. Do we have to? Yes, we do. While the above example might be a little extreme, from my crow’s nest perch above the world of female eroticism I can report (which will be no surprise) a flood of exploration and interest in the general direction of BDSM, the rumblings of which were certainly audible before we knew how many shades of grey there were. However, since its publication and the illumination of the mass market nobody ever dreamed of, that growl has swelled to a low, vibrating roar. So where is feminism while all the women are bending over? Are we all misogynists deep down? Well, yes. There’s a good chance we are, not because we want to be but just because that’s what’s been bred into our minds, and even our chemistry, and now it’s coming out sideways, through our sexualities. We’ve been fighting it; of course we have. Quite rightly so. And what about men? Are they misogynists, or has their pendulum swung so far in the other direction while they were desperately trying to be new men so as to make them misandrists? Who hates who again and why? Most men I’ve interviewed on the subject don’t entirely know what to do with their new kinky women. There’s a confusion… is it a trap? If I dominate her, am I going to get smacked down and called a chauvinist? But she wants me to, and something about that feels good; there’s an ancient echo running through my blood when she submits. Yet they’re frightened. Damaged even, and shamed, like Snorkel in his bathtub of seaweed. Do men need re-masculating? Could it be that masculinity also needs healing? This is what feminism was surely all about – leveling the playing field. But now it’s level, nobody’s quite sure where they stand. We’re balancing our primal urges with our heightened intellect and moral obligations on top of grappling with our individual idiosyncrasies and collective experiences. Women have found themselves in a post-feminist twilight zone that I’ve christened ‘femininism’; they are beginning to own and understand their suppression and the effects it’s had on them and they are making it work for them. We can actually see it happening right now. Women are beginning to understand and use the power of submission on their terms. The fact that their current paperback role model is a puny shadow of and weak insult to the feminine power of submission is irrelevant; the essence has been released. The questions have been raised. The re-birth of sex The rape of sex began so very long ago that it’s impossible to untangle the thorns. But now she’s being re-born, older and damaged and wiser and more beautiful, like Shakespeare’s heroine; “One Hero died defiled. But I do live, and as surely as I live, I am a maid.” Is she dark? Yes. She can be. Is she light? Yes. She can be. Is she a living, breathing, fucking paradox? Of course. But then, that’s life all over. Women have always been the impenetrable, ever-penetrable guardians of paradox. It’s women that have traditionally acted as the midwives at our births and deaths, and it’s women that carry the pleasure of conception and the pain of labour. So it’s no surprise that it’s women who are heralding a new age of sexuality. Call it fetishism, call it ritual, call it PTSD, call it ancestral impressioning, or transcendence or Stockholm syndrome, or just call it The Search; The Search for life beyond death, before death, in death, around it, over and under it. It doesn’t matter; it’s still The Little Death. The Big Death. And the very essence of life.