"Nothing matters except you, me and the sound of my voice," Lily
Fine tells the tied-up and exposed businessman who begged to be spanked
before breakfast. She says it slowly, making her slave wait for every
sound, forcing him to focus only on her, to float in anticipation of the
sensations she will create inside him. Anxieties about mortgages and
taxes, stresses about business partners and job deadlines are vanquished
each time the flogger hits the flesh. The businessman is reduced to a
physical creature existing only in the here and now, feeling the pain and
pleasure.
"I'm interested in manipulating what's in the mind," Lily says.
"The brain is the greatest erogenous zone."
In another S & M scene, Lily tells a woman to take off her
clothes, then dresses her only with a blindfold. She commands the woman
not to move. Lily then takes a tissue and begins moving it over the
woman's body in different patterns and at varying speeds and angles.
Sometimes she lets the edge of the tissue just barely brush the woman's
stomach and breasts; sometimes she bunches the tissue and creates swirls
on her back and all the way down. "The woman was quivering. She didn't
know what I was doing to her, but she was liking it," Lily remembers with
a smile.
Escape theory is further supported by an idea called "frame
analysis," developed by the late Irving Goffman, Ph.D. According to
Goffman, despite its popular conception as darkly wild and orgiastic, S
& M play has complex rules, rituals, roles and dynamics that create a
"frame" around the experience.
"Frames suspend reality, They create expectations, norms and values
that set this situation apart from other parts of life," confirms Thomas
Weinberg, Ph.D., a sociologist at Buffalo State College in New York and
the editor of S & M: Studies in Dominance & Submission
(Prometheus Books, 1995).
Once inside the frame, people are free to act and feel in ways they
couldn't at other times.
S & M: Part of the Sexual Continuum
S & M has inspired the creation of many psychological theories
in addition to the ones discussed here. Do we need so many? Perhaps not.
According to Stephanie Saunders, Ph.D., associate director of the Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana
University, "a lot of behaviors that are scrutinized because they are
seen to be marginal are really a part of the continuum of sexuality and
sexual behavior."
After all, the ingredients in good S & M play--communication,
respect and trust--are the same ingredients in good traditional sex. The
outcome is the same, too--a feeling of connection to the body and the
self.
Laura Antoniou, a writer whose work on S & M has been published
by Masquerade Books in New York City, puts it another way: "When I was a
child, I had nothing but S & M fantasies. I punished Barbie for being
dirty. I did Bondage Barbie, dominance with GI Joe. S & M is simply
what turns me on."
Whip Smart: Beyond the Boundaries of Safe Play
While S & M can be a psychologically healthy activity--its
motto is "safe, sane and consensual"--sometimes things do get out of
hand:
Abuse
It is rare, but some "Tops" get too involved in power and forget to
monitor their treatment of the "Bottom." "I call them 'Natural Born
Tops,'" says dominatrix Lily Fine, "and I don't have time for them."
Also, some bottoms want to be beaten because they have low self-esteem
and think they deserve it. They are forlorn, absent and unresponsive
during and after a scene, in this case, S & M ceases to be play and
becomes pathological.
Boundaries
A small percentage of people inappropriately bring S & M power
play into other facets of their life. "Most people in S & M circles
are dominant or submissive in very specific situations, while in their
everyday life they can play a whole range of roles," says psychology
Professor Luc Granger. But, he continues, if the only way a person can
relate to someone else is through a kind of sadomasochistic game, then
there is probably a deeper psychological problem.
The Use of S & M as Therapy
People often confuse the fact that they feel good after S & M
with the idea that S & M is therapy, says psychology Professor Roy
Baumeister. "But to prove that something is therapeutic, you have to
prove that it has lasting beneficial effects on mental health...and it's
hard to prove even that therapy is therapeutic." In mental health terms,
S & M doesn't make you better and it doesn't make you worse.
Excerpts from an S & M Glossary
Sadomasoonism (S & M): An activity involving the temporary
creation of highly unbalanced power dynamics between two or more people
for erotic or semi-erotic purposes.
Bondage and Discipline (B & D): A subset of S & M not
involving physical pain.
Top: The dominant person in a scene; synonyms: dominant, dom,
master/mistress.
Bottom: The submissive person in a scene; synonyms: submissive,
sub, slave.
Switch: A person who enjoys being a Top in some scenes and a Bottom
in others.
Sadist: A person who derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain
on others.
Masochist: A person who derives sexual pleasure from being abused
by others. Sadist and masochist are sometimes used playfully in the S
& M community, but are generally avoided because of psychiatric
denotation.
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