Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (4 page)

Over 200 people volunteered to speak with us; an edited selection of hundreds of hours of interviews appears on these pages. Our interviewees are exceptional in their frankness, but perhaps even more significant, they are productive, private citizens who are contented with their choices. They do not commit sensational crimes. They are not the malcontents who appear in clinical studies.

We provide a record. So impoverished is the world’s present knowledge of and education in human sexuality that most of us can only stand by helplessly as political activists fight to become the self-appointed moral guardians of our sexual freedoms, assigning values that predate our grandparents to acts of love which predate recorded history.

With this book we hope to demystify a topic which has long suffered under a vast and oppressive cloud of antiquated mores and pseudo-scientific rhetoric. Until now honest information on alternative sexuality rarely has been available outside of scholarly magazines and partisan publications.

We also hope to add to the greater body of knowledge about what people
really
do behind closed doors with the people they most love and trust. Perhaps
Different Loving
will help open the door for further research into the mystery, beauty, and complexity of human life and its diverse expressions.

I
NTERVIEWS

I am director of the Human Sexuality graduate program in the Department of Health Education [at] New York University. We look at sadomasochism from many perspectives: clinically, socially, legally, personally, and culturally. My students are going to be professionals in the sexuality field. They’re looking at everything with a scientific eye.

We have everybody from medical doctors to undergraduates and social workers and psychologists coming through the program we run for a graduate degree specifically in human sexuality. Part of it is studying groups of people who have nontraditional lifestyles. People who practice S/M and B&D are [in] that group of people, and we try to look at how society labels these behaviors. We [also try to see] how the individual in the behavior labels and understands the behaviors. Of course, there’s often very great conflict.

It’s the classic kind of anthropological dilemma: An American goes to Sri Lanka, studies the sexual behaviors of the culture, writes it up, and sends back a report. That’s different than talking to a Sri Lankan and saying, “Tell me why these behaviors exist.” One of the things that we do in the study of S/M and B&D is [that] we look [at them] from outside. That is okay, but you also have to combine it with the experience and knowledge and the definitions of the person inside. [We do this] by having people who live that lifestyle come and talk to us [and] by going to organizational meetings like [the] Eulenspiegel [Society] [Author’s note: a New York City S/M support group] and having cross-cultural experiences. We’ve been going to Scandinavia every other year now for the last five years and comparing Eulenspiegel [members] with people who belong to an S/M organization in Denmark. It’s phenomenally different. Eulenspiegel has to be subdued and quiet, whereas the [Danish group is] considered a social organization and gets funding from the government, as does every other social organization. It’s got to create a difference [in] self-esteem [for its members].

One of the problems with these types of behaviors—and I don’t mean purely S/M [but] all kinds of behaviors that are not perceived as standard behaviors among the general population—is that we tend to look at them and try to categorize them. In reality, if you look at heterosexual intercourse, you don’t ask, “Is heterosexual intercourse an appropriate manner of behavior?” Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. When it’s done by consenting adults, who
are over 21, using safe sex practices, in a committed, monogamous relationship, it certainly is healthy. When it’s used by the rapist to rape an individual, it’s not healthy. [Yet] they’re both heterosexual intercourse.

There is a range of behaviors [in S/M]. There are people who are using it in an adult manner, between consenting adults, within the parameters of our legal society, and they’re living a healthy life and contributing to society. There are people who may not even be in the S/M–B&D social structure but [who] are using those kinds of behaviors and are unhealthy. You certainly wouldn’t [include] a rapist in what you’d call the mainstream, heterosexual-intercourse population. [Similarly], there are people using B&D behaviors that are not the mainstream of the healthy S/M society. [Jeffrey Dahmer is] a classic example of somebody who’s at the one end of the spectrum. For general society to group him with people who belong to the Eulenspiegel Society is ignorance. I would say tying and spanking behavior between consenting adults is no more intrinsically unhealthy than wanting to have coital sex or engaging in any kind of precoital behavior that occurs between consenting adults. [But as a society] we don’t recognize fringe behaviors that are done in an acceptable, healthy way.

From my limited knowledge [from] field experiences, [sadomasochists] seem to have healthy relationships—if we know what that means. In the old days—[meaning] my parents’ and your parents’—a healthy relationship was one that didn’t end in divorce. [Nowadays] I don’t know what a healthy relationship is. I guess it’s when two people are satisfied with the relationship, [and] certainly I’ve met a number of people [in S/M] who feel that way.

I don’t use the theoretical approach [that sadomasochism represents arrested sexual development]. I think it’s an unknown, and I certainly think social learning is a great influence. There’s so much we don’t know about how our sexual ideas are formed. People often perceive sexual behaviors in a political manner. A lot of our behaviors are as a result of our social-cultural learning and influences, and certainly, in women, that’s a great force. But to then take that and apply it to people who behave in a masochistic way—or in any other particular kind of way—makes me question how scientific the observations are, how politically biased the observations are, and what [such people] would say about the sadistic female that’s appropriate and the masochistic female that’s inappropriate.

Such theories are political and have no realm in trying to understand the phenomenon. That’s another question: Do we need to understand S/M and B&D, or do we need just to accept it? When you look at the history of fetishes, three or four fetishistic behaviors were discovered between 1870 and 1900—they weren’t [actually] discovered; they were just named by a medical
source. All of a sudden we are compelled to understand and interpret them. Perhaps what social scientists should be doing is trying to understand the people who can’t accept the behaviors.

I want to tell one story about Sri Lanka. When I was there, we had to take a ride; it was only [about] 30 or 40 miles, but it was across country. In Sri Lanka that takes about seven hours by car. We didn’t know that, so we kept asking the driver, “What time will we get there?” He kept saying, “Oh, soon, fine, pretty soon, just a little while now.” The next day I told a medical colleague who’s Sri Lankan, “I’m amazed at how people don’t care about time here,” and I related the story. He started to laugh and said, “You don’t understand. Time is in God’s hands. If that driver said, ‘We’ll be there in six hours,’ he’s taking God’s right to determine how long it’s going to take to make that trip. ”

How stupid of me, to take my values and my cultural learnings and throw it on this person’s shoulders. I think that’s what we tend to do all the time with behaviors like S/M and B&D. We take our learnings and our understandings, being outside of that subculture, and try [to] understand and explain it … or [we] just reject it.

We have written [many] books about medicine, health, psychology, and human sexuality. When CompuServe [Aus.: a million-member, international electronic network] opened their service to a variety of subjects, we proposed to do a human sexuality information service [HSX]. In 1983 we began the HSX Information Advisory Service [as] an electronic magazine with a hotline. There were special features, interviews with experts, letters to the editor, and questions and answers. That turned out to be the most important part of the service: People could read thousands of questions and answers stored there. [CompuServe] is a perfect match of medium and message. A lot of people are concerned about their sexuality. They have large areas of ignorance. Here they can anonymously ask questions of a very intimate nature. Over our hotline we get hundreds of messages a week, questions that people can’t ask anywhere else. We’ve established a direct line between [them] and the foremost authorities in the country from various areas of sexual medicine.

[In 1984] we realized that support groups were needed: The same value served by the text service could be served by an interactive forum. We were familiar with heading support groups and encounter groups.

We started [with] one forum; now we have two. One is the HSX Open Forum [HSX100]; the other is the HSX Adult Forum, (or) HSX200. [HSX100] is open to everybody. [HSX]200 is closed, except to people who qualify for membership. Many of its sections deal with sensitive issues. We
feel that people are more likely to acknowledge a variation of sexuality in this medium than they might in conversation with family and friends. Participation in [HSX]200 far exceeds the participation in [HSX]100. It’s logical, because these people are getting support from each other and acknowledgment and important information. HSX200 probably [has] about 15,000 active members.

We’ve gotten a glimpse into human sexuality that’s much broader than what people see in the movies or magazines or [in] a standard sex-education class. Our consultants tell us—and it is verifiable in our experience—that everybody’s wired differently. The narrow picture of what is sexually acceptable doesn’t describe the great range of human sexual expression. Somehow people have assumed a stance of morality connected with what they think is [sexually] normal.

We feel strongly that everyone is entitled to privacy: You don’t have to answer to anybody about your root personality. It’s who you are, and your sexual expressions—to the extent that they don’t hurt anybody else—fall within that. Everybody has different personas. You have a business persona, you have a friend persona, a family persona; you also have a sexual persona. If you look at any group of people in a business setting, you don’t have any idea what they are like in their bedrooms or in their bathrooms or anywhere else. It’s as irrelevant to their business persona as what they’re like in church or what they’re like with their parents. That’s important to realize. People feel guilty [when] they find themselves relating sexually in a way that they don’t relate in any other part of their life. But that’s true if they were to analyze any other personas they’ve adopted. The enlightened view of sexuality is that conventional heterosexuality is one of many expressions of sexuality.

[In HSX200] we have a section called
Variations I
[and] another called
Variations II. Variations I
is devoted to fetishes [and] things that people ordinarily consider nonmainstream. Conversations might deal with various forms of pleasure giving [and] sexual enhancement practices.
Variations II
is devoted to bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism, [and] power-exchange relationships. We also have
Adult Babies
for infantilists;
GenderLine
for transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenderists;
Biways
for bisexuals;
Gay Adults;
and
Watersports
for klismaphiliacs, urolagniacs, and people into douching.
Variations I
and
Variations II
have [the most] access requests. An area that seems to have taken off lately is
GenderLine
. It may have to do with outside publicity. There was a recent [
CompuServe Magazine
] essay contest. A transsexual was one of the winners and wrote about how his/her transition was made easier by the support gained on
GenderLine
. There were letters—some objecting strongly, some saying this was a great thing.