Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (47 page)

I’ve been in over 80 videos [and] over 68 magazines. My picture’s been all over the world. It’s been associated with some of the more well known magazines and videos. Harmony Communications put out a two-part magazine called
The Perils of Topanga Canyon
. It sold out almost immediately and they consider it a classic. I’m very proud of it, myself. The
Bondage Is My Pleasure
series [from] Cal-Star is very popular. And the spanking scene in
Hitchhiker Spanked II
was very popular. Shadow Lane’s
Older Men with Younger Wives
is also very popular. There are so many!

D
AVID
C.

It would probably be a lot easier for me if straight screwing or oral sex really turned me on. [It] would be easier to deal with and to find partners I could
share it with. But unfortunately that’s not the case. For a while I thought, I’m the master of my own destiny. I will simply reshape my psyche and decide that straight screwing is what really turns me on. But it isn’t. I’ve accepted that. That seems to put spanking in a terrible light—like a disability that I’ve come to accept and deal with—but I don’t feel that’s true, because through those fantasies, both enacting them and using them strictly for fantasies, they’ve very much enriched my sex life.

I think the sense of risk that one cultivates through D&S and [which one] relishes in these sorts of games is very pertinent to everyday life. This sounds like a testimonial of what Tupperware has done for my kitchen, but I feel that if you approach D&S as a trust issue—of learning to trust and learning to give up control—one can look at it almost as an exercise applicable to daily life: taking risks and letting go, allowing things to happen rather than trying to always be in control, learning to accept control instead of being passive. I think sexual play is one of the few ways that we have left as a self to play, to pretend, to explore, to reach out to people on truly profound levels. And to have fun and burn off calories at the same time.

I’d call myself a switch. Unfortunately, my current partner is not of the same mind. I think it’s easier for someone who isn’t to assume a dominant role rather than to assume a submissive role, or at least it’s safer for them. The only real play I can get in my current relationship is pretty much on the submissive side. One of the problems I’ve had in communicating my desires and preferences is [that] it’s important to me to get the feeling that my partner is enjoying what [she’s] doing. That feeling is very important to me, perhaps because of my problem in reconciling the violence [of spanking] with an act of love.

I come from a household where corporal punishment was not part of the regime. I do remember that with my first girlfriend we were quite sexually active but didn’t want to mess around with birth control. We were very creative with forms of sexual activity that did not involve intercourse, and the things I found most interesting were bondage and spanking. The thing that’s really fun about being a submissive is [that] it’s like rock climbing or skydiving. You’re faced with something where your intellect will say, “You’re utterly safe. The rip cord is right here, and you can pull it, and the parachute will open, and you’ll float to safety.” But all your visceral senses [are screaming].

There are several things that I have fantasized about that are more fun to fantasize about than to do. One is taking a really hard spanking, but my tolerance for pain is not horribly high. The times that I’ve gone over what I will tentatively call my limits have not been pleasant experiences. I imagine
that different approaches, starting slow and working up to more intense things, might prove different. One of the things I’d like to try doing more of is roleplaying. I’d love to play out [a scenario of] being called into a teacher’s office and reprimanded and told I won’t graduate unless I submit to a spanking. But fantasies aren’t always good realities.

Twelve

When the rock band Devo sarcastically intoned, “Whip it, whip it good” in the early 1980s, it joined a tradition historically populated by monks, not punks. Flagellation—the striking of flesh, usually but not exclusively on the back, with a whip, flail, or other stinging device—has the distinction of being perhaps the single most widely practiced form of punishment in history. It
is impossible to determine the degree to which flogging pain was intermingled with sheer sensual pleasure.

This chapter focuses on:

Whipping has had a long and subtle history. In pagan Sparta young men were whipped by female priestesses before a wooden image of Artemis as a rite of passage. Flagellation also occurred in the mystery cults of Mediterranean civilizations—such as Greece, Persia, Rome, and Egypt—as one method of inducing altered consciousness. Other methods included fasting, music, the inhalation of fumes to produce intoxication, whirling dance, contemplation and meditation, and hypnosis.
²
Such rituals and metaphysical voyages are emulated by contemporary whipping enthusiasts who combine sexuality and spirituality.

At least two major religions, Islam and Christianity, have embraced self-flagellation as a means of self-purification. The Shiite Muslims still engage in public self-flagellation. Adherents of Roman Catholicism escalated self-flagellation in the 13th and 14th centuries to what has been termed “flagellomania.” The practice was ultimately banned when devotees became a little too devoted to self-mortification and less devoted to the Church.

In Christianity self-flagellation was inherited from the “desert fathers,” monastics who first established small communities in the Egyptian desert in
A.D
. 381. The desert fathers regarded sensual pleasure as inherently sinful and believed that discomfort blunted cravings for pleasure and proved the unimportance of the body. Their philosophy became the religious ideal of Christian Europe for well over a thousand years and persists in many quarters, such as in the Penitente sects in the American Southwest.

How profoundly the Christian antipathy to sexual pleasure has affected human sexuality is impossible to overestimate. But it is obvious that self-mortification and religiously inspired punishment often replaced forbidden sexual gratification.

During the 11th Century flagellation was promoted as a form of penitence and was doled out by confessors as frequently as is the modern-day “Hail Mary.”

In 1259 groups began forming in northern Italy for the express purpose of self-flagellation. Entire communities—even five-year-olds—participated, despite the censure of both secular and religious authorities. The movement eventually waned, but resurgences occurred in 1262 and 1296. In 1334 repeated earthquakes were interpreted as God’s displeasure and spawned another mass movement of self-whipping, and in 1348–49, when the Black Plague devastated Western Europe, frightened crowds again fell into frenzies of self-flagellation. Processions of thousands from all classes spread through present-day Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and England.

The Church was alarmed when the Brethren of the Cross formed around 1349. This iconoclastic sect held that one could attain eternal salvation by undergoing 33½ days of self-scourging without intercession of priests or the Church. A papal bull promptly denounced the Brethren as heretics, and the movement was disbanded, reemerging briefly in 1351 and again in
1354, before being crushed by the Inquisition. Their demise did not, however, end self-flagellation: The practice simply was once more brought under Church control.

The enormous historical popularity of flagellation at least suggests that participants derived some pleasure, albeit unconsciously, from acts of extreme masochism. Because the persons who performed these acts did not identify their activities as erotic and although the context of religious faith cannot be ignored, the many records of nuns begging to be bound and flogged and partly clad priests beseeching women to beat them—and their ensuing spiritual ecstasy—suggest that self-flagellants experienced, at the least, an endorphin rush. Contemporary enthusiasts all report an inextricable link between eros and whipping.

The first unambiguous linking of flagellation and erotic pleasure in the West occurred in the 15th Century, when an Italian named Pico della Mirandola wrote the first known account of sexual sadomasochism. He described a man who could not enjoy sex unless he had been beaten to the point of bleeding with a whip soaked in vinegar.

Over time the power of the Church waned and so too did documentation of flagellation. But sexual sadomasochism “soon had a place in pornography and in life”
⁶
as flagellation traveled from the processions of the penitents to the bedchambers and brothels of Europe. Whipping was designated “the English vice” not long after
A Treatise on the Use of Flogging
was published in 1718.

It was suggested at the time that whipping was the last resort of rakes whose senses were dulled by sexual excess, but this certainly does not conform to contemporary understandings of psychosexuality. Whatever the reason, English brothels dedicated to flagellation enjoyed a huge success. A Mrs. Colet’s establishment was so popular that King George IV made a well-known royal visit. A Mr. Chace Pine invented a machine capable of whipping forty persons simultaneously. Another madam, Mrs. Theresa Berkley (inventor of a spanking bench known as the Berkley Horse), was able to retire in comfort after eight years of turning others’ pain into personal gain. Despite—or perhaps as a result of—the Puritanism (later known as Victorianism) that overtook England by the end of the 18th Century, flagellation brothels increased in popularity.