Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (88 page)

Of all the types of water sports, golden showers and enemas are the more widely practiced variations. They also present the least-significant health risk.

All water sports entail some degree of risk. Improper administration of an enema, for example, can have fatal consequences. Urine, although an environment hostile to viruses and bacteria, is not infection-proof. Extreme caution is observed among water sports enthusiasts. Still, under optimum conditions, the erotic use of urine can be low-risk, while judicious use of enemas precludes unsafe contact with fecal matter (which teems with harmful bacteria). It is, perhaps, not surprising that the relative safety of golden showers and enemas makes them considerably less taboo than coprophilia, which can be exceptionally hazardous to a partner’s health (none of our interviewees described an interest). Most instances of coprophilia seem to occur outside a specifically D&S context. (One of the earliest literary references, however, is found in de Sade, which may lead some erroneously to infer that there is an inherent link between sadomasochism and coprophilia.)

Nonetheless, one does not need to mention coprophilia to encounter repugnance. The taboos against any contact with body wastes are adequately profound. While urine and feces may be as much a part of ourselves as our hair and our fingernails, most Westerners are taught to feel shame or disgust about contact with body wastes. These taboos persist among even the most sexually adventurous and are instilled as an aspect of one of the fundamental and most necessary social skills we learn: controlling the urges to eliminate. Socializing small children—and instructing them that cleanliness is vital to the health of the human organism—is a requirement in any society that wishes to produce healthy adults. But that children, even after toilet training, naturally take a keen, playful interest in elimination is no secret.

As a group, children are typically enchanted by the body’s intimate functions, but by adulthood, most individuals have successfully learned to suppress or to erase this natural delight. Often early curiosity is replaced by hostility or horror. Many adults completely forget a time when the body’s products were as innocently intriguing as the products of the mind may now be. But eliminatory processes have remained a source of private fascination for the water-sports enthusiast. For this reason some researchers believe that an interest in water sports implies arrested sexual development, as if true adult sexuality severs all links with childhood sexuality. If nothing else, the overwhelming
evidence of sexuality research argues that those things which were erotic to us as children continue to hold erotic sway over most adults.

There is little documentation of the erotic interest in urine prior to the 19th Century, when Havelock Ellis—a self-proclaimed urolagniac—and others began intensive clinical investigations and quickly discovered scores of practitioners. Folklore from many continents is rife with stories in which urine plays an important, often magical, role. Urine’s significance in ritual and medicine dates to antiquity.

Urine is still used as a sterilizing agent in non-Western medicine (it is, for example, used as an effective antidote to jellyfish stings among some residents of the Caribbean), and in some cultures, drinking of urine remains an act symbolic of spiritual devotion (as among devout Hindus, who ritually imbibe cattle urine).

The enema has a long and well-documented history as a purgative and a curative, and enemas were popular aphrodisiacs in centuries past. The belief that enemas possess restorative and curative powers persists.

Despite age-old taboos (and more likely because of them), fascination with urine and the urethra, defecation and the anus is extremely widespread.

Even without eroticization elimination may be pleasant, not only because one is literally relieving the organism of waste, but also because the anus is sensitive to pleasurable sensation. Further, because the urinary tract and the anus lie in intimate conjunction with the genitals, stimulation to one region may create some degree of pleasurable sensation in the other. The proximity of these zones creates numerous anxieties for humanity. Children are not alone in grouping together—and confusing—eliminatory and reproductive functions. The association between elimination and eros may be further ingrained when taboos against free contact with one’s own sexual organs merge with the taboos against the anus and urethra.

The water-sports enthusiast is not necessarily immune from ordinary taboos. On the contrary, he understands the taboo quite clearly but is gratified when he defies it, as long as this is done in a way which he finds personally acceptable. For example, it is typical for a klismaphile to develop fairly complex psychosexual scenarios. He or she may place enormous importance on the particular enema equipment used and on the rituals performed. Such complexities create an atmosphere of permissibility, and any significant departure from the scenario may make the participant deeply uncomfortable. The tension between the desire and taboo can be profoundly challenging.

When the experience is successful, it may represent a magical return to an idyllic, primal state of abandon.

Sensual pleasure is the single most important motivation cited both by our interviewees and sexuality researchers. Still, many individuals who regularly take enemas do not perceive an erotic connection. For example, New Age “colonic irrigation” clinics proliferate nationwide, and their patrons and staff often claim that an enema serves a uniquely health-restoring purpose.

Not only do water sports fall into very distinct categories, but within their own area of interest, participants often have strictly defined limits. Many, and probably the majority, of individuals who may find it acceptable to experiment with golden showers on their skin are uninterested in golden showers in their mouths, and the percentage of enema enthusiasts who wish to have contact with feces seems to be vanishingly small.

A nominal, and probably only a coincidental, overlap exists between people who are aroused by urine and those who enjoy enemas. Those who are interested in both may simply be demonstrating that, having breached
one taboo, they may be willing to experiment with other unusual or taboo activities.

Some clinicians link infantilism and water sports; rubber fetishism, too, has been associated with urophilia. In both cases, the link is probably environmental. For infantilists, to be out of control of one’s natural functions is part of the simulation of infancy—the wastes themselves are of less interest. And if the adult water-sport enthusiast’s interest was shaped by childhood experience, as seems usually to be the case, rubber goods (such as sheets and training pants to prevent soiling, or enema hoses and nozzles attached to enema bags) may become associated with elimination and may merge with the erotic interest in water sports. It has also been suggested that rubber fetishists who like shiny clothing are urophiles.

While such speculations are interesting, these links are neither inevitable nor universal.

Water-sports enthusiasts are frequently interested in D&S. Some degree of power exchange is evident in most aspects of their erotic play, and a significant percentage of D&Sers express at least passing interest in some aspect of water sports. Water sports are particularly appealing to a submissive who perceives contact with the dominant’s urine as an exquisite humiliation. Urinating upon someone is an assertion of great power, while allowing oneself or seeking to be urinated upon is a dramatic abandonment of power.

Enemas are often described as supremely relaxing. Our interviewees say that they feel calmer, more at peace after being purged. Enemas also seem to enhance some D&Sers’ feelings of submission.

The power aspects of water sports are especially powerful when coercion scenarios—somewhat more typical in klismaphilia than in urophilia—are introduced.

If the submissive is erotically coerced into engaging in some aspect of water sports, he forfeits responsibility for the act. The submissive with a penchant for anal eroticism, then, can accept a kind of pleasurable stimulation he might not ordinarily permit himself. Force scenarios may also elicit feelings of erotic humiliation. Many individuals, however, neither enjoy coercion scenarios nor find their activities to be humiliating.

I
NTERVIEW

I never had a problem [with] coming out about my gay life or S/M. Maybe I’ve been out all my life because I’m too lazy to be in the closet. As for my [S/M] activism, I write for a living. One of the primary rules of writing is to write what you know. One of the things I know is S/M. I generally feel that if I am allowed to be the way I am—which is way outside most people’s definition of acceptable—then I have to let other people be the way they are, even when they are way outside my definition of acceptable, which includes being bigoted, close-minded idiots. If that’s the way they’ve made their lives, then I say let them be like that.