Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (64 page)

The reason [I ask] is that sometimes the area has been under torture, like the nipples, and if so, the skin tends to be a little [tougher], I need to know how much force I’m going to be using [and] how to handle it: to be ready for problems if the needle doesn’t go through right away.

If the person is ready, I prepare him. I clean him up. I mark the area to be pierced. I always talk to him. [The] feedback that I have gotten is that people feel comfortable when they’re here. They come in the door, and they’re nervous as hell. But by the time they walk up the stairs to the room where I’m going to do the piercing, they are comfortable. That is more important to me than anything. I’m in a position of a family doctor who is going to violate a part of their body. If a woman is going to lie down on a bed and open her legs, she has to feel that it’s okay, and so do I.

[Washington, D.C. has] a leather weekend, usually in January, where a thousand or more people come to a leather contest. In that weekend I do anywhere from 20 to 25 piercings. I have someone registering everybody, and I bring them upstairs. I have an autoclave going all the time, so sterility never changes, precautions never change. I have someone with me to always make sure that I am being cautious. That’s usually my other half. He is usually here, watching me—he’s like my nurse—to make sure that I don’t do anything stupid. If I pick up an instrument before my hands are sterile, that instrument gets sterilized immediately.

There are many styles [of piercing]. I find that piercing a woman’s nipple is a lot easier than piercing a man’s. A man’s nipples are smaller and a bit on the tougher side. I find it a little harder to get the needle through [on a man]. On a woman, it will just go right through, and half of them don’t even feel it. Yet they’re terrified that it’s going to hurt. I pierced my nipple and had no pain and no blood, but I was on a natural high. This is what I wanted: My heart said do it, and it felt good.

Of all the piercings on a man, the one that I think is the nicest is a Prince Albert. It’s also the fastest to heal, in my opinion, because the urine is sterile and the salt tends to help healing. A frenum [piercing] is one of the simplest to do. It hurts the least, but it still hurts a little. There’s a foreskin piercing, where you pull [up] the foreskin and pierce right through [it]. Sometimes a person wants a small ring on it, so he cannot pull the foreskin over the head. Then the piercing can be used as a chastity [device]. Or it can be a large ring, where the foreskin will go totally around the head when it’s enlarged. An ampallang, I have been told, is a wonderful sensation, especially for women. Both the ampallang and the apadravya are a little on the dangerous side. If done wrong, the person could bleed a great deal, because when you’re hard, you have vessels that fill up with blood, and if you penetrate those vessels during any one of these piercings, you open that little tube, and it will drip until it’s healed.

If you love someone, you should be able to give him what he wants. If he wants to be spanked, then I should spank him. The emotional part [of S&M] for me is that I know he enjoys it. Not that I don’t do other things for him that he enjoys, but this is something that not everyone could or would be willing to give him. It’s something that I can. Many people make it a spiritual thing. For me it’s playful. Sometimes I have trouble keeping a straight face in a scene, because we’re having so much fun.

Before I met Mr. Happy I had never done or thought about any of this stuff. The most I had thought about it was that what’s normally considered pain could be considered pleasure.

I’ve always been into physical things like ballet and martial arts. I enjoy physically letting go and going all out. My family is very loving; they encouraged independence. At the same time, they were always there, giving support, help, and encouragement to do what I wanted to do. It was great. I love my parents!

When I met Mr. Happy, he told me he was into this. I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a try. I can’t promise that I’ll enjoy it or be good at it, but I’m willing to give it a try.” I found that it was really a lot of fun! I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d say, “You miserable worm! Did I get that right?” Or, “Oh, yeah, of course, uh, let me, um, spank you for being so presumptuous! What are you being presumptuous about? There must be something! Anyway, let me spank you; you don’t need to know why!” I’ve gotten better at it now.

People perceive that S&M is like kidnapping or pedophilia. But you can’t do this stuff without really caring for the person you’re with. If you don’t like them, don’t do it! Caring and love is a big part of it: It’s not two
people who hate each other. [We’re] people who care for each other very much.

I have two nipple piercings and six outer-labia piercings. I’m still not sure which was braver: getting the first one when I didn’t know what I was in for, or getting the subsequent ones where I did! That kind of pain I don’t deal with well. I know people who do. I have a friend who got her nipples pierced and she just blinked and said, “Oh, is that all?” For me, it was very intense. When I got my nipples pierced the first time, it was like a shot straight to the heart. It’s a big rush and a bit scary, because I’m not real comfortable with needles. But it was also exhilarating. I did something I didn’t think I could do. I pushed my limits.

I had the two nipples done in one session, and then I had all six outer-labia [piercings] done in another session. Apart from other feelings, you get a big rise in endorphins. I felt like I was floating about six feet off the ground after that. And it was just a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time jumping around and being very happy that night!

I have curved barbells through the nipples. And I have rings through the labia, which is a good idea, because curved barbells tend to hook onto things. I remember one night when Mr. Happy and I were making love—good old vanilla sex. We didn’t notice that one of my barbells had hooked onto his nipple rings. He arched his back when he was coming and managed to rip his ring about halfway through his nipple! It hurt me a little bit, too, but my nipples are stronger than his, so he lost the tug of war.

The labia rings rub against Mr. Happy’s cock. I think he feels it more than I do, but I feel his piercings more than he does, so it’s an interesting enhancement. Actually, the most fun I have is that sometimes the six labia rings jingle when I walk. Music wherever I go!

I’m in a stronger relationship with Mr. Happy than I’ve ever had, because there is all that extra stuff in there that [demands] your attention and makes you think about what you’re doing. When you’re in an S&M relationship, you have to really care about this person, to feel [completely] connected. I’ve gone skydiving; I’ve faced things that are kind of scary and felt exhilarated. S&M is somewhat like that. You think, Gee, this could be scary! But when you do it, you feel so exhilarated and empowered. Not only have you exerted yourself—you’ve actually
enjoyed
it. It gives you a little bit of that empowering I feel when I do martial arts.

I have always viewed [S&M] as a form of play and a form of release more than a lifestyle. It’s not that it’s not important to me: I’d certainly miss it if I never could do it again! It’s just not something that shapes the rest of my life.
Conversely, it’s not that it’s partitioned off into this special area. It just doesn’t spill over into work, and it doesn’t spill over into taking out the garbage. It doesn’t have any bearing on who does the checks or who does the driving. It doesn’t enter into my interactions with people who aren’t into this.

[As a child] I would do things with my genitals, pinch them. By puberty I would put clamps on or wrap my penis in Scotch tape when it was flaccid. When it would start to become erect, there was this odd biting of the tape. It felt a lot better than just having a regular erection. Those were the first inklings I got that not everything that theoretically hurt, actually hurt in a way that the culture says it ought to. I did these things by myself, and it never even occurred to me to do them with a partner. I didn’t feel a sense of guilt or oddity about this stuff. I was raised in a family of atheists who believed in individual responsibility, so I didn’t have some of the obstacles that get thrown in other people’s paths about accepting the way they are. It’s not that I’m out to my parents, but they did raise me to be independent, so I took them up on their offer. I don’t know if this is something that my parents really need to hear. I am out to my brother and sister. I’m also fairly out to coworkers.

I’ve never been particularly good at pretending I’m
not
strange. People who were straight-laced and not happy about their sexuality would be driven away, and I got the women who were into this. My first girlfriend let me tie her to the bed and spank her. It was fun for both of us. She did things with me, too! She bit my cock when she was sucking on it. Then I ran into a woman who was desirable in many ways. She was beautiful and intelligent, and we had good vanilla sex. I would try to bring these things up; I was used to having it work out well. She said, “That’s perverted, but we can fix that.” I thought, Oh geez, golly; maybe she’s right! and I started to have doubts.

I wanted to do scenes of much more intense domination and much more intense pain, both as a top and a bottom. I was also starting to explore my attraction with men. So right when I wanted to get more into this, there was this person telling me that all of it was sick. I hadn’t yet bumped into any support groups. [But] other than that one period, S&M has never been a problem for me. I just lucked out.

I’ve got five piercings: nipples, frenum, Prince Albert, and a guiche. The guiche and the Prince Albert are interesting. When I met the woman who actually rescued me from my year of self-doubt, we were looking at a way to keep me from playing with myself without her permission. You can lock a Prince Albert to a guiche. She did that to me once. She made me wait two weeks,
teasing
me the whole time. Oh, that was not fun! Well, it was, but it was hard to last that long!

I’m planning one more piercing, an ampallang. The ampallang runs laterally through the head of the penis. [It] takes about six months to heal, but it’s supposed to be quite pleasurable for the partner, too. Some people, I think, take it too far and wind up with so many piercings, it’s baroque.

I’ve jumped out of airplanes and ridden motorcycles, and I’ve got several piercings. Yet every time I get a piercing, it’s almost like the first time. I don’t know how much it’s going to hurt. I know it’s going to take time to heal. So I get nervous and fluttery every time I get one, even though I’ve already got several. It’s a way of challenging myself.

[Piercings] are convenient for S&M play. I can be led around by my penis, or it can be locked up. [Piercings] enhance sexual pleasure for me. They make my nipples more sensitive. I really feel the ones on the end of my penis when I’m having sucks. My orgasms are more intense than before because there is this little hot-electrical-wire sort of feeling.

I discovered fairly early on in my sexual development that I was multiorgasmic and also that I could have orgasms without ejaculating, and, for that matter, I could ejaculate without having an orgasm. Orgasm [is] possible in many ways which don’t have anything to do with the classical interpretation of how it all works. I’ve [even] come from having my earlobes sucked! I got that idea from a guy in a wheelchair. I asked him about sex, and he said, “I’ve just relocated my erogenous zone.” He said he wouldn’t let just
anybody
touch his ear! It had to be somebody special. For him that was like his penis!

There is one very loving little story about how I knew that Adida was a keeper. I hadn’t been with a woman since my ex. I already had my Prince Albert. Adida and I came back to her house, and she basically got me drunk. I didn’t have any idea what her reaction was likely to be to the piercing. I had intended to sneak off to the bathroom and remove it, but things acquired a momentum of their own. I was thinking, Oh, my God! Worst case, she’ll call the cops; best case, she’ll require lengthy explanation.

She reached down and put me inside her, and we did the thing, and she never broke stride. So, finally, we’re cuddling and I said, “Did you notice anything?” “Oh! It was very nice.” “The
ring
?” I asked. And she said, “Oh, that!” She didn’t even give me the satisfaction of saying, “Oh, my God! What’s
that
?” She’d never seen one; she’d never even heard of it before! I figured, There’s something special about somebody like that!

SECTION FIVE

T
RANSLOCATIONS OF
D
ESIRE