Explaining bdsm, in 1629

Posted on October 4, 2014 by jaime

Johann “It’s a wig” Meibom

Nearly four hundred years ago, a German doctor, Johann Meibom, noticed that some of his patients were reporting something that struck him as odd: they got sexually excited by being whipped across the buttocks and upper thighs.

Whipping happened a lot back then, but very little of it was intended to turn people on. Meibom did some thinking about why people could take sexual pleasure from pain. Eventiually, in 1629, he published a treatise about it: On the Sexual Uses of Whipping (Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria).

Meibom’s explanation was that whipping brings blood rushing to the assaulted area, and if the whipping is close to the genitals the increased blood supply will make it easier to achieve arousal.

“Blows on the buttocks and loins (that is, the groin, hips and lower abdomen), the area of the body most involved in producing sexual fluids and carrying them to the genitals,” he wrote, “warm and inflame those parts and contribute strongly to the arousal of sexual desire.”*

“The irritation of Lechery”, as they used to say, around 1629.

Meibom’s was one of the first attempts to explain the causes of bdsm sexuality and, by suggesting that a sexual response might have a sexual cause, he made a promisingly sensible start.

The question of what causes bdsm desire, where it comes from, is one of the first questions asked by people who discover bdsm desires in themselves or in someone they love. (Yes, it should be a joyous discovery, but it isn’t always that way at first.)

When people raise questions of cause and origin – of aetiology – it’s only partly out of curiosity. They also want to know how the aetiology of bdsm affects the answers to some other questions.

Those questions include whether bdsm is part of the natural range of ways of being human and sexual, or whether it’s a sign that the person drawn to bdsm is pathological or damaged; and whether or not a person can simply decide to have, to to get rid of, bdsm desires.

If they turn to more recent medical or psychiatric theorists for answers, they may find that medicine and psychology have taken some giant backward steps since 1629.

Take Karl Abraham, for example, the twentieth century psychoanalyst who argued that “sadomasochism” was caused by … teeth.

Nah, let’s bring him on tomorrow.

* I was going to use the contemporary translation by Edmund Curll, because he’s a hero of mine (all underground publishers are), and because he used the phrase, “the irritation of Lechery“, which I love. But for clarity’s sake I’ve provided a modern translation.

Why isn’t everybody into bdsm (a lot)?

Posted on October 3, 2014 by jaime

I’m going to be writing, off and on, about what we know about why some people like bdsm, and respond sexually to bdsm-like situations, while others don’t.

I’ve been putting this off for a while because it’s a huge task, and I’m revising the Probation Officer novel into (I hope) publishable form at the same time.

But I promised I’d write something about why corporal punishment of children is a bad idea, and that topic fits into the bigger topic: where does bdsm come from, anyway?

Since the nineteenth century, most people trying to come up with explanations have come at this issue the wrong way. Bdsm is thought of as pathological, “sick” and evil, and yet there are people who are drawn to it and enjoy it, so psychologists and theorists asked “what is it about those people? What went wrong with them?”

But bdsm is intensely pleasurable. It seems to work by taking some sexual things that everybody shares (surrender, for example, and the desire to make your partner respond to what you do), and making those things even stronger.

So what mystifies me is: why isn’t everybody into bdsm?

That oceanic metaphor…

Another way of looking at this is to agree that pretty much everybody actually is into bdsm to some extent, which is why so much love poetry is about conquest and submission, why some lovers scratch and bite each other, and so on. It’s just that some people only explore the shallowest edge of bdsm, getting their feet wet paddling at the shore, while others dive into the ocean and have a whale of a time.

Some of us like bdsm a lot, and some only a little bit. So … why isn’t everybody enthusiastically into bdsm?

Watch this space.

Up on the roof (a confession of cowardice)

Posted on October 2, 2014 by jaime

It’s a very retro look, the skinhead thing. These are 1960s skins, but the guys who crashed the party dressed exactly the same. But they didn’t listen to ska anymore; it was white power music.

I was at a party once, that got gatecrashed by skinheads. Shaven heads, Doc Martin steel-capped boots, yellow laces, admiration for Hitler, weird views about Jews and Asians, and so on. Neo-Nazi skinheads, not the fashion trend following kind.

Quite a lot of the guys at the party got beaten up, and … I couldn’t see anything I could do. I could get beaten up too, but I couldn’t save anyone else. I hadn’t punched anyone at high school or since. I was shit at fighting. So I wasn’t much use to any of the non-skinhead guys present.

The skins didn’t attack the women. They made themselves unpleasant, but they didn’t do any punching or raping.

They’d planned it. Someone in the house must have annoyed them, because they’d guarded the doors and windows so there was no way out.

So, because my girlfriend and I were less drunk or drugged than most people there, we climbed to the end of the fire escape, and then pulled ourselves up onto the roof. It was quite cold up there under the stars, with this house of horror scenario going on underneath us. She was shivering, so I held her tight for body warmth.

We finished up fucking. On a sloping corrugated iron roof, with a two and a half story drop below us, and nothing to break your fall except the concrete at ground level.

We must have made enough skeleton sex noise that the skins realised there were people hiding on the roof, because one of them poked his head over, but before I’d even moved he fell while he was trying to pull himself up.

He must have hit the concrete walkway at some speed, but I never heard the impact, or what happened to him. Drunks are often lucky. I don’t like skins, but I hope he was lucky.

Eventually, it was the women at the party who saved the guys. They realised that the skinheads weren’t just ideologically weird about women: they were afraid of them. So some of the bigger women simply beat up a couple of the leaders.

The skins leaders didn’t know what to do. Getting punched by big punkette and goth women hurt, and it was humiliating; it didn’t fit the things they believed. Then the guys from the party started punching back, and someone grabbed a poker from the fire and was angry with it. This time the skinheads lost.

Me and girlfriend, we were on the roof. Unscathed. Useless.

The top of the stairs

Posted on October 1, 2014 by jaime

I always feel privileged when I get a dream in which I can fly. I’d love to fly. It’s why I prefer Superman to Batman, probably.

Also, I want stories to be serious, but I get sick of the idea that darkness is the same thing as seriousness. I think the Superman idea, of having a being of near-infinite power, essentially a god, who is a fairly good person trying to be better, is more interesting than the Batman idea, which is about being driven and twisted by childhood trauma, and so forth.

I think the effort to be good is more interesting, and more like most people, than being shaped by some endlessly romanticised “terrible event”.

Anyway, I like dreams of flying. I also like dreams about huge, old labyrinthine wooden houses, that have a ricketty third floor that waves a little in a strong wind, and then I discover there’s a fourth floor, and a tower above that. I can’t stop climbing.

I guess I like heights. Top of a tree. Top of the stairs. Up in the air. Up on the roof. It’s safe up there.

More stairs: 12-step programs

Posted on September 30, 2014 by jaime

Stairs again, because I’m working. It’s interesting that in horror movies, the monster is waiting at the top of the stairs. But in bdsm erotica, women get spanked or caned downstairs, while upstairs is a safe-ish sanctuary for the comfort of masturbation or post-punishment consolation sex.

The walk of shame after punishment, up the stairs to (probably) sanctuary. So many iterations of this idea.

The damage is done. Now there's just the climb up to her bedroom, with lotions and cool sheets.

The damage is done. Now there’s just the climb up to her bedroom, longing for lotions and cool sheets.

See? Trouble happens at the bottom of stairs. It’s all business, headmaster’s offices, dungeons, studies with leather-topped desks, and kitchen tables down there.

No wonder these two girls ran into trouble…

I don’t know the photo-set this comes from, but it presumably involves a humiliating naked wait, then the caning or paddling, and finally being sent up to bed.

Once they’re up those steps, everything will be fine.

Finally, it’s a well-known fact that the shortest walk to the top of this building involves 1,665 steps. Gustave Eiffel really liked watching people climbing stairs.

A less well-known fact is that at the very top of the tower there’s a secret entrance that leads into a lavishly appointed bedroom for very fit perverts.

It’s called the Donjon Célestes (Aerial Dungeon). Instruments of pleasure and discomfort are supplied by an elderly lady who once hunted heretics for her Order, but now prefers more pleasant and temporary mortifications of the flesh.

Stairs

Posted on September 29, 2014 by jaime

Not a deep day, today. I’m revising Chapter 5 of the Probation Officer novel, and any thoughts I have will go into that, probably.

So here are two photos of a spanko cliche: the punished girl walking up the stairs afterwards.

That Maureen story: the WTF moment

Posted on September 28, 2014 by jaime

I wrote a series of posts, “The shame of being a dom”, which included the story of Maureen. That story includes one completely WTF moment. We were discussing English literature because I was helping her with her assignment. Though it’s unwise to do this on a bed, naked, if you want to get any work done.

I’d never made any bdsm approaches with her, not even something safe and mild like smacking her ass when she was about to come. She’d never had any bdsm experience of any kind, and, as far as she knew, any bdsm desires, dreams or fantasies.

But still, this dialogue happened:

Me: Well, you can say Milton’s Areopagitica is an ambivalent defence of free speech, and hey! you could link it to the Romantics’ idea that Satan was a sort of spirit of freedom. Must be at least 400 words in that.

Maureen: Mmmm. I guess. So would you like to spank me?

So, I thought at the time and afterwards, where the fuck did that come from? Why did she say that? I was glad she did say it, and the consequence was a relationship that turned out incredibly hot for both of us. But … why?

I asked her then and later, and she claimed she had no idea. She’d just thought it’d be something I liked. She never expected that she’d turn out to like it so much as well.

I have one theory. I already had a library, a collection of books that followed me round from house to house, that was more than you could fit into a single car. (You’d need a couple of trucks, now. I know this, because when I left the city and moved up to the mountains, the books did take a couple of large trucks.)

Why are these girls doing what they are doing, in this photograph? Charming, yes, but it is sexy?

Anyway, one of my books was Les Jeux de Dames Cruelles, or The Games of cruel Women. This was a book of vintage erotic photographs, lithographs and postcards, which, despite the title, mainly featured cruel things being done to happy girls, not done by them. Though often it worked both ways: Fifi tied up Nanette, and took the cane to the poor girl’s helpless bottom. Maureen had really liked that book.

Vintage erotic photography has an odd effect. At one level its sexual charge is gone, because of all the differences of technology, and style – even when the models are naked, their hairstyles, the shape of their bodies, the way they pose their bodies – now seem awkward, and charming rather than sexy. “Look at her,” we might say, “quite a pretty girl, but does she really think that’s sexy?”

Anyway, Maureen noticed that the book fell open at certain places. She was right. There were some images I really liked, not because they were charming but because they were hot. She knew young men, and she knew that I’d held that book in one hand, and my cock in the other, and that explained the book’s tendency to open itself at the images that still held their sexual charge.

And so that’s how she knew that if she offered me her body, in submission, I would be most willing and overjoyed to take it. In my stylish and articulate way:

Me: What? Uh, hrrrrrrm. Um-hrrrrrrm. Oh. Uh, yes. Yes, please. Absolutely. Yes.

Jerusalem Mortimer on Pinterest

Posted on September 27, 2014 by jaime

I’ve got a Pinterest page. I pin selected mildly erotic pictures on it, which are mostly taken from this blog.

I get the impression that Pinterest is a pretty chaste affair, so even though I’ve been selecting photos that don’t show genitals or fucking, I’m probably pushing the boundaries even by showing nipples. So my page may not be there forever.

But what struck me as interesting is this: it’s been going a few days, and it has five followers. But it’s just photos taken from the internet with my wordy words removed.

My blog, on the other hand, shows off maybe a million words, most of them organised and put into the right order by me, and it’s been going for nearly three years. Do you know how many followers this blog has?

I’m sorry, but it’s none.

I know I have readers, so I’m happy: “fit audience find, though few”, and all that. You’re discerning people, all of you.

Still, my motley and random collection of light bdsm images is going to eat this blog alive. (Bangs head on desk.) Anyway, word fans, the real business is and will always be here. I’m about the words.

If you want to look at the inoffensive Pinterest set, it’s here:

Five Graves to Cairo

Posted on September 26, 2014 by jaime

I’ve got a thing for movies written by Billy Wilder. They tend to be brilliantly witty, and to pack in as much sexually subversive material as he could get away with. His films include age play, homosexuality, lesbian hints, cross-dressing, just off the top of my head. And it seems that almost every film he made included a spanking threat, which would be received with purring pleasure by the intended victim.

Here’s the dialogue from one of his few non-comedy films, the World War II drama Five Graves to Cairo, featuring German supply dumps, Erich von Stroheim doing his arrogant Nazi schtick, heroic resistance fighters and a stranded British corporal.

Anne Baxter is the heroic resister of all things German, who puts up relatively little resistance to the charms of the British chap played by Franchot Tone.

Franchot Tone: If the circumstances we find ourselves in were not so extraordinary, I might turn you over my knee and spank you with abandon.

Anne Baxter: Thank you for your interest.

Franchot Tone: Not at all.

So polite. Since I saw this film I’ve been looking for an excuse to say Franchot Tone’s line to someone, but I haven’t found the right extraordinary circumstances, yet.

The pride of being a dom

Posted on September 25, 2014 by jaime

My mom would have insisted this was no way to treat a woman.

When I first started finding willing partners and doing bdsm I was worried about the apparent contradictions between being a dom, and having convictions about gender equality and strict rules against hitting women.

So I felt some shame about being a dom, and about my desires.

But these days I’m absolutely shameless, even proud. Here are some key reasons why.

1 Respecting “yes”.

There’s still a duty of care even when someone says “yes”. Consent isn’t the only consideration you take into account. But if a submissive says, “hurt me, rule me, and fuck me when I’m crushed,” and that’s something you both want, then you have to respect the submissive’s right to consent and get what she wants.

(“She” wants? I thought about using inclusive pronouns, but that makes it sound as though I’m laying down universal rules. These are only my personal conclusions.)

You can and should look out for your lovers, a duty that applies to submissives as much as to doms. Sometimes a submissive might beg for harder pain or tighter bonds because the moment is so good, and it may not always be safe and sensible to give her that. Still, unless you have a good safety concern, or it’s something that you personally don’t want to do (I won’t do scat or cut someone, for example, no matter how nicely the submissive might ask for it), you shouldn’t protect people from having their desires met.

Respecting the “yes” as well as respecting no, and hard limits, is respecting the submissive.

2 Respecting the power of sex

Hotness is good.

In my early bdsm career I was always troubled when I hurt a woman, even though she was a consenting submissive woman who loved the pain and wanted to be made to serve.

But I had the reassurance that came from the look on her face and the sounds she made when she came. I’d feel incredible pride in that.

And I knew the sexual joy (getting all William Blake-y here) that I’d just experienced.

It’s a good idea to trust sexual pleasure when it’s mutual and strong. You can work out the intellectual issues later.

3 Knowing yourself, and trusting yourself where you know you can

A lot of people think that bdsm must escalate, over time, as people supposedly get jaded and push out to further limits, so that one day, eventually, a spanker will be wanting to tear flesh with pincers, a la Sade.

Research has shown that this just isn’t true. People work up to the level of intensity that they’re comfortable with, and they stay there. That’s certainly been my experience.

Seconds before the grenades go off

Like everyone, I have a dark side.

For example, I’ve fantasised about throwing hand grenades into a Ku Klux Klan rally, leaving meat-spattered white sheets and groaning neo-Nazis crawling, blind with their own blood, on shattered, exposed bones across the dried-mud ground. Is that dark?

But my dark side doesn’t seem to have much to do with my dom side.

Submissives have requested me to do things that are beyond my own usual limits, like drawing blood with a birch. I’ve told that story on this blog: look for the Vampire Girl tags. Another woman wanted me to use a wooden rod on her buttocks and thighs with all my strength, not judging or pulling the strokes, just going as hard as I could.

Both times I found that my pleasure diminishes as I go further than I’m comfortable with. I can stretch a limit, but not far or for long.

So the monster in me isn’t hiding behind the dom. The dom loves giving pleasure through giving surrender. The monster seems to be hiding behind my politics, not my sexual desires.

Boo!

4 Know the submissive, and watch her

Watching submissives closely is important to keeping them safe, and keeping them happy in that bdsm way that is mostly but not entirely sexual. Luckily, I’m turned on by submission, when a woman I desire submits to me, so I can watch a submissive being submissive, all day.

Close communion comes from close observation. Close observation also tells me, as a dom, whether I’m doing good and not harm. And when I know I’m doing well and doing good, I can feel proud of it.

5 Respecting dominance

I know that I put a lot of work into domming. Regardless of how people interpret the dynamics of what happens between dominant and submissive, I know that I do more, I make more judgment calls, and the chances are that she will come quite a lot more often than me.

(On a particular occasion I might, for example, come in her mouth and refuse her permission to come. But it tends to work out in her favour on average, over a period of time.)

She gets to go into subspace when she finds the way, and though I know there’s a dom equivalent, I can’t allow myself to go there in a session. I need to stay alert, observant and active. There’s a degree of illusion-making, of legerdemain, in domming, where we give the submissive the pleasure of feeling that she is powerless and she serves, and she is not served. Providing that illusion involves skill and work and art. I am, submissive madam, your most arrogant servant.

I still think submission is a gift given to a dom. There are people who making barfing noises whenever someone says this, but it seems to me to be true.

I find the level of trust and generosity involved in giving someone submission is, ahem, moving and beautiful.

At the same time, while a submissive gives a dominant one vast gift, a dominant gives a submissive many smaller gifts, which come down to forcing on her the things she most desires.

So dominants have our own form of generosity. It took me a while to learn that and respect it, but that’s because I’m slow.

Sing if you’re proud to be a dom, sing if you think it’s da bomb

So it took me a while to work it all through, but these days I’m rather proud to be a dom. I enjoy it, and I can make a girl cry (another absolute taboo when I started) with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips.