Toward a Historical Theory

Certainly the interests and appetites of this thing we do, Cosa Nostra, as it were, have been around for some time. Shakespeare's Sonnet 57 speaks to the essence of these feelings:

Being your slave what should I do but tend
Upon the hours, and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend;
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world without end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

The longing stems in this case from desire and vulnerability brought about by feelings of love and adoration. It was not generally thought a good thing in Shakespeare's time that love should be requited. The most violent affections were considered suspect - they tended to distract one from the practice of religion and one's social obligations. Making a socially acceptable match and being married according to law and custom was the only credible option. If the match happened to also bring affection and desire, one counted oneself as fortunate.

Indeed the institution of marriage was just one of many social constructions which had the effect of repressing sexual urges and channeling them into proper behaviors. In the Christian dogma of the late medieval and early modern eras, the body was perceived as evil, particularly the female body, and any pleasure irredeemably perverse. However, under the Catholic and Lutheran strains of Christianity we are all sinners, required to repent and beg mercy from our Lord. It was the scamp Calvin who championed perfection through self-denial, including denial of any pleasure whatsoever in the act of conceiving the children we are obligated to produce.

Still, unusual pleasures were considered worse than typical ones. Sodomy was socially unacceptable in the extreme, even though many married folks probably practiced it in secret. It was useful as a political tool for targeting one's enemies, so the Catholic church labeled it a heresy which gave them a justification for executing those found guilty.

But back to the topic of sexual repression. Scourging and other forms of penitence were used to repress sexual urges. Foucault writes eloquently about the practice of confession and how it transforms deeds into words which are then categorized and neutralized, thus producing a very effective form of social control.

At the same time, social hierarchy was the order of the day and virtually everyone was engaged in some form of Master/slave dynamic. Men dominated women, Lords dominated lesser nobility and commoners, Landlords dominated tenants, Lords, ladies and anyone who owned property dominated servants, Royalty dominated everyone and the Church dominated the parishioners, not to mention Masters who actually owned slaves. Anyone seeking to learn a trade entered into an apprenticeship with a Master, an arrangement that seems to have been borrowed heavily by the "Old Guard" leathermen of the 20th century. There is no doubt in my mind that Masters and Mistresses of all stripes in this social hierarchy elicited sexual services from underlings.

My theory, then, is that those practices that either in intent or effect repressed sexuality became fetishized. The French Libertines, with our namesake De Sade in the forefront, seized on this and developed it into an art form. Rather than finding pleasure in the thing itself they transferred no small portion of that pleasure to the act of transgression. De Sade's writings do not closely resemble kink as it is practiced today, but instead focus on the most transgressive acts possible, such as rape, bestiality and necrophilia.

The Victorian era, again with a debt to Foucault, brought an orgy of social control. Institutions sprang up like weeds and all of them carried the mandate of observing, cataloging, categorizing and disciplining the body politic. Hospitals, Prisons, Schools, Orphanages, and Poorhouses were established to contain social ills against the rising tide of personal liberty engendered by industrialization and capitalist wage labor. Schools used corporal punishment to keep students manageable, and their moral behavior was considered just as important as their studies. Children caught masturbating were severely punished. People who exhibited sexual license could be treated in hospitals and asylums for their "disorder".

Ultimately, both the methods of control and the control itself were entwined with our sexual makeup. While only a small fraction of us practice kink openly or secretly (let's say for the sake of argument that there are 3 million kinksters nationwide - that's still only 1 percent) the cultural tropes we trade in are incorporated into the vanilla sex industry, e.g., the naughty nurse, french maid, schoolgirl, farmer's daughter, cop, bunny, cat, barmaid and pirate wench are all featured in vanilla porn and stripper acts, and can be purchased as sexy lingerie.

All of this transformation from mode of repression to mode of sexual expression was facilitated by a much larger transition from scarcity to abundance. Some time around the introduction of mass production, we acquired the ability to produce far more goods than we need, and so the emphasis in society shifted from producing a disciplined workforce to consuming. Consumption is encouraged by license - go ahead, treat yourself, you deserve it. And sex is not left out of the equation. While much marketing sneaks the product in as a replacement for actual sex, the desire for sex is presumed to be constant, intense and unstoppable. This age of expression was drafted in part by Freud whose most influential idea was that the repression of healthy sexual urges results in strange behaviors and physical illnesses, the cure for which is to find the root cause of the urges and direct them into healthy, mature behavior. (According to Freud vaginal intercourse was of course healthy and mature).

Hence, we are a nation of repressed people who have been told to want sex all the time. Rather than being surprised that a few people might be kinky, I'm more surprised that our numbers are still relatively small. D/s lifestyles trace their roots back to real-life power relations. The interrogation scene draws on a fetishization of police and military force but also goes back to the Catholic sacrament of confession. Caning, flogging and whipping were all used as real forms of corporal punishment in numerous social institutions. Bondage was used for various purposes going back to ancient times, while the "damsel in distress" trope became prominent as women's sexuality was repressed to the point that it was considered not to exist at all. Women who were told that they did not possess a sexuality channeled their desires into fantasies about being abducted, tied to the tracks, raped, ravished and seduced, as these all removed the woman's volition from the equation.

There are a lot of people running around the kink community who say that it is unnatural for us to attempt to have egalitarian societies and that Dominance and submission will eventually resurface. I don't know exactly what to make of this idea, as I tend to believe in the democratic ideal of political equality - that it is the responsibility of a just government to ensure that all citizens are equal under the law and have equal opportunity to participate in their political system. That is to say, even though I submit to Dr. Faust, in theory he has no greater privilege under the law and can be held to exactly the same code of conduct as I am. Indeed, I would not want to be unequal in the eyes of the law. I enjoy voting, owning property and engaging in productive, fairly compensated labor on a voluntary basis. All of which contributes to my ability to take care of myself and enter and leave social relationships at my own discretion, hence the traditional D/s relationship engaged in by men and women is disrupted and men are no longer presumed to own their wives. The fact that I and my kinky brethren desire dominance and submission does not negate the political desirability of justice under the law, no matter how persistent the human urge to conquer, control and exploit seems to be. Indeed, it is precisely the seemingly unstoppable ferocity of this urge that necessitates justice.

Real Slavery

Stripping and Sexual Liberation

I knew someone who worked as an "exotic dancer" years ago. She was in college, taking 17 credits, active in the drama department and working on plays, working as a dancer, and also in ROTC. She was also a dominant and was a part of the club we briefly ran on campus. I'm not sure when she slept, and I have to wonder if she was on meth or something.

She invited me, along with my friend from the club, to her birthday party, at which a male stripper friend of hers performed for us, as her birthday present. We all brought singles to tip him. He put on a very nice show for us.

But one thing I remember is that her apartment was very bare. She made dinner, which consisted of a few sad slices of zucchini and some hastily thrown together spaghetti. She seemed to lack any kind of private or interior life. Everything she did revolved around her excessive commitments. She was also enthusiastically naive about her ability to extract favors from people on the basis that they shared an activity. She was sure that the theater department would happily throw together a banner for the club and even met me and my friend on campus to show us their set decorating workshops. It all came to nothing, which was pretty much what I expected. She never spoke a word about it again, and dropped out of the club shortly after, never to be heard from again.

Mistress Matisse writes very eloquently about her experiences working as a stripper, a prostitute and a professional dominatrix. She seems to have come through it unscathed, and knows women who have done the same. On the other end of the spectrum are the women in the documentary "Stripped", most of whom did not come out unscathed. Dr. Faust and I suspect that Matisse is an exception, and that she has maintained her sanity and dignity mostly through moving into pro dom work, which is so specialized and highly paid that one really can call all the shots. Further, she has a level of intelligence and creative talent that most women do not possess.

The women in the film express very similar litanies of problems. They have Daddy issues, low self-esteem, body-image issues and a seemingly endless supply of unexpressed creativity. They long to make a living doing something truly interesting and creative and find ordinary jobs to be stifling, underpaid and unsatisfying. Some of them, when given a chance to express themselves, really do have talent, and some, sadly, do not.

Several of the women in the film had plastic surgery. One of them went into a coma after complications with hers. One of the women in the film wrote about her experiences and subsequently went missing. All of them, after working as a stripper for a period of time, were psychologically damaged. Their attitudes about men became more harsh and their self-esteem only got worse. They described stripping as an "addiction."

The reality, in my estimation, is that strippers provide for their clients much more than a performance or a glimpse at something nice to look at. Strippers confirm the customers' most base beliefs about women; they confirm that women are whores and will provide for men's sexual needs as long as the money is good; they confirm that it is men's privilege to demand that women conform to their expectations and desires, and that men are entitled to judge women on that basis and express that judgment monetarily; they confirm that women are more highly prized for providing a sexual outlet than they are for doing legitimate, productive work; they confirm that women's livelihood is connected to their sexuality and that it is more proper for that livelihood to come directly from the men who benefit from it, rather than belonging to a woman in her own right.

Men who patronize strip clubs, according to the film, are very demanding of the performers. They hold the performers in contempt even as they patronize them. I see this reflected in the double standard held by many men that women who have casual sex are not respectable, and that the woman who doesn't put out is suitable for dating and marriage. In the long run, this is bound to turn out badly, since they will likely marry a woman whose interest in sex does not match his and will then turn to affairs, prostitutes and strip clubs to meet his needs. This is a behavior pattern based on deep-seated misogyny and male insecurity. Women who buy into it are likewise contemptuous of other women and treat their friends poorly.

Some people argue that men require these "extra" forms of sexual release. I don't begrudge them the opportunity to enjoy themselves, and as Dan Savage says, all men look at porn. Dan's assertion has been confirmed by the men I know. But I don't know men who regularly use strip clubs or other live sex workers. If they do, it's pretty much as a novelty, but to a man they assert that they don't enjoy the dynamic in those places, and find the other patrons objectionable. And being a lustful woman, if they're with me they're not likely to be undersexed. I'm not saying that to brag - I just happen to have a high sex drive, and few inhibitions. It seems to make sense to me that a man who is comfortable with a highly sexed girlfriend would also find these public displays of misogyny distasteful. I just wish more men felt that way.

I'm very bad

So, I was watching a documentary about sexual abuse by priests.

I know this is already sounding bad, but please, bear with me.

There were some shots taken in a classroom in a rectory, and there were these things hanging from the ceiling. Not being Catholic, I'm not sure what they are, but to me they only looked like chains.

So now I have these very bad thoughts. I'm kind of picturing my Dom wearing a priest collar and punishing me... and maybe I could try to get out of my punishment by doing something really nice for him. Also, I'm imagining it with an old-fashioned school desk.

This is so wrong. But it feels so right. I actually mentioned it to him and asked him if he found it blasphemous. He didn't really say either way. He just asked if I wanted a nun costume. I definitely don't want a nun costume. I think the plaid skirt would work just fine.

Sigh. Just when I think I know how bad I am...

The Vampire Thing

Of all the mythic creatures that have been around for centuries, if not eons, vampires seem to reappear in our consciousness a great deal. The ancient myth, it's been argued, was created to explain the existence of human killers. It does seem reasonable to assume that the psychological type inclined to kill for fun has been around longer than we've been able to solve their crimes. In fact, there are some documented cases of people in history who killed repeatedly, for no particular reason. So, in the days before police procedures, when townspeople went missing or bodies turned up bloodied and mangled, monsters were invented to explain these events.

The Victorians really took to the vampire story. Bram Stoker's Dracula was written in 1897, and draws on the true horror for its time: sex. Vampires, particularly in the early industrial period, are sexual creatures. They stalk and seduce their victims. Their attack is a sensuous experience. And those who are attacked are often turned to vampires themselves, a metaphor for being corrupted by sexual license. Anne Rice's vampires play up this aspect, as anyone who's read her other works would find unsurprising.

Vampires can also be pretty gay, and represent that other threatening form of sexual license - homosexuality. The Victorians were pretty terrified of that, too. The vampire in Dark Shadows gave off some gay vibes, and indeed, the show was campy as all hell. The secretive nature of the vampire comes in to play here, as gays can be among us and yet not known. The coffin in which the vampire sleeps comes to symbolize the closet in which the horror of the unknown other is hidden.

But, with the 20th century came a shift in priorities. Mass production brought consumerism, and as a result, the straight-laced mores of the Victorians gave way to permissiveness. Now we are presumed to want sex all the time, and practically shunned if we fail to live up to that image. Vampires and sex both came out of the closet, and latter-day monsters tend to be a lot more like regular people. The "vampires as people, too" motif came front and center with Buffy, in which the appetites of the vampire are not all that different from the appetites of the humans with which they co-exist. They are still evil, though - unless they have souls.

So I'm not entirely sure what to make of the Twilight thing. I find it interesting that the vampire has now been so normalized that the vampire who romances the human starts to look more like West Side Story than Dracula. These vampires seem to actually have souls, and choose abstinence - a parallel I find somewhat disturbing. It does seem to echo the cultural backlash against permissiveness in which abstaining from pleasure is seen as a virtue in its own right.

Still, these chaste, shiny vampires seem custom-made to appeal to very young women, and feeds their beliefs in non-threatening-yet-dangerous men who have no life outside of obsessing over their girlfriends. I don't find this a healthy dynamic at all, and the assertion that Bella "chooses" to be with Edward as a manifestation of her liberated self is kind of ludicrous. It's exactly the easiest and most dangerous road for a teenage woman to take, and hence not really that much of a choice. Choosing to live her own life, now that would take some guts.

On the other hand, one can cast it in more of the West Side Story mold, in which loving Edward is tantamount to interracial love. In that case, I guess it does take courage to choose the relationship. But I still don't agree with the abstinence part. If being with Bella means constantly fighting his most fundamental longings, then Edward is basically a kinky guy trying to be with a vanilla girl, and promotes the lie that people can actually repress their desires and still be happy.

If any twilight fans are actually reading this, let me know what you think. I'm going to stick with the vampires that actually have sex for the time being. Besides, that guy who plays Edward in the movie is not my type. He has the Frankenstein forehead, which always turns me off.

If you were a slave...

I confess, I don't like the term "slave" applied to BDSM or D/s relationships. I feel that it is inevitably inaccurate, since slavery is, by definition, non-consensual. People who keep slaves in real life are doing so for economic gain, not for anyone's personal satisfaction, least of all the slaves'. They are operating outside of the law and do not have any abiding interest in their captives' well-being. Slavery is conducted in many parts of the world - women are sometimes abducted but more often lured with false promises of legitimate work, only to find that they are dependent on criminals for their livelihood and expected to earn money for them through prostitution, drug smuggling, or other illegal labor. For instance, if you were a slave...

...you would be prevented from leaving through coercion, brainwashing, and violence
...you would not be fed adequate, nutritious food
...your captors would compel you to use harmful, addictive drugs through which they could control you by controlling the drug supply
...you would be raped by your captors
...you would not receive adequate medical care
...you would most likely be murdered by your captor as soon as you became too much trouble or were no longer profitable
...if you became pregnant, your captors would most likely take the baby away and sell it, or murder it

I think what most people refer to as a "slave" role in BDSM is actually closer to that of a servant in the service of an English or American household in the 18th - 19th centuries. The servant in this situation was kept in place by the constant threat of being dismissed and losing both their livelihood and shelter, and was expected to follow an elablorate set of rules in order to keep that position. It is still more coercive than consensual, but servants were not killed or brutalized nearly as much as slaves are. They were sometimes physically punished, and probably molested and/or raped by their employers more often than people of that era would be inclined to admit.

Now, playing at being a slave or a servant is different from claiming to actually be one. I can actually see myself really enjoying slave play in small doses and under controlled circumstances.

She doesn't take this argument to the degree that I do, but Mistress Matisse did say in one of her Control Tower articles that no matter how much you may want it not to be so, you do have the right to leave the relationship, even if you call yourself a slave, and that believing otherwise is a nice fantasy, but not reality. So I'm not the only one.

I've come to accept that people in this community use the term slave to refer to something that is not actually slavery, and I accept that this is what they want to do. I just think it would be more accurately called something else.

Gender Matters Less

It doesn’t take a very detailed observation to notice that non-threatening, conventionally femme girl-on-girl sexiness is heartily approved of among straight men. Indeed, it’s a staple of the adult entertainment industry, from strip clubs to the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise. It even shows up in the weirdly incestuous “twins” theme – apparently two women making out is even sexier if they look exactly the same, never mind the fact that they have identical DNA. (I could go on at length about the challenge same-sex, intragenerational relations pose to that most ancient of social customs, the incest taboo, but not here.)

Still, it’s assumed that the ladies in these scenarios are not actually lesbians. If they were, they would, by definition, have no interest in men as sex partners. No, the assumption is that these young, attractive women would enthusiastically welcome a man into the mix. In fact, they may even be presumed to feel that the girl-on-girl fun is good for a laugh, and gets the guys turned on, but falls more under the category of drunken rowdiness or “being wild”, whatever that means. Do those girls really get off on it themselves? That seems to be beside the point.

The taboo for women, then, is not making it with other women. The taboo is not making it with men. At all. Ever. The heterosexual male world seems not to take the rejection very well, and treats actual lesbians with a fair amount of contempt, not to mention outright hostility and violence. Not only do real lesbians decline to have relations with men, they also tend to neglect the work that goes into being femme. Not having a reason to live up to the standards of attractiveness straight men go for, lesbians may very easily forego shaving, makeup, femme clothes, long, tousled hair, and so on. A certain subset of men seem to take this as a personal affront, and will enthusiastically call such women out with slurs such as “dyke” or worse.

For men, on the other hand, making it with another guy is the taboo, the big one, from which one cannot come back. While bisexual women get a big thumbs-up from most men (but not, sadly enough, most gay women), bisexual men are treated as dangerous. Women tend to shy away, out of fear that they will be a disease vector, that they are really gay and only want a woman for social approval, or just because they can’t stomach the idea of man-on-man sex. Thus, the straight/gay dichotomy holds up more solidly with men than with women. When a man comes out as gay, the assumption is he’s strictly for the fellas and no gray area at all. Bisexual men, and it’s certain that they exist, are more likely to repress and avoid bringing it up or ever experimenting with it. If they can get off with ladies, it’s just as well to stick with that and not open up such a big can of worms. Until you find him trolling Craigslist or airport bathrooms.

Perhaps the dichotomy has some connection to biology, though. I have heard of research which finds that men really are more either/or in their sexuality – either it gets them up or it doesn’t. Women, lacking such a distinctive and obvious meter for their arousal level, are more apt to try something to find out if it has any potential. Guys pretty much already know.

When it comes to BDSM, the whole situation gets even more complicated. Some of the foregoing holds true – bisexual women are quite common in the scene and ladies are quite apt to get intimate with each other to varying degrees. Many female subs are quite content to bottom for another woman, even though they are more likely to settle down with a male Dom. The poly kinky family frequently sports a male Dom and more than one female sub, an arrangement facilitated by flexibility with regards to women, sex, and gender. Men, on the other hand, tend to want either ladies or men, and not a lot of in between, at least when it comes to sex.

Still, BDSM is not always sexual, and many people are really quite firmly hetero when it comes to sex but much more flexible when it comes to straight-up BDSM play. Some go as far as to label themselves bi-kinky, because it is hard to take the sex out of it completely. Women often play together like school friends at a slumber party, and some men are perfectly content to play with other men or even have male submissives who are not their sex partners.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, except that BDSM is, at the same time, sexual and not sexual. Yes, one can conduct all manner of perverted fun without even exposing anyone’s genitals, much less connecting them. But at the same time, the vast majority of us do those things because it gets our motors running. It’s a very compelling reason to get into something, and many of us really need a compelling reason to do something so socially unaccepted. When these ideas start creeping into one’s head around the same time that they start getting tingly feelings down there, it doesn’t go away easily, if at all, and the connection can never truly be severed. While there are a few strange-even-for-us people who are really very asexual about it, I suspect that a lot of the “It’s not sexual” crowd are really just trying to bowdlerize it to make it seem more acceptable.

In the end, all I can really say is that clearly gender matters less to us than it does to the vanilla. It’s not a huge stretch – transgression in one area tends to bleed into others. Gender queerness is part and parcel of the scene. This is one reason why hardcore female supremacists and Gorean types turn me off; they want to codify the gender structure more strictly than even vanilla folks do. But then, a lot of us actually get off on codifying things. So perhaps I can forgive them that. D/s as the fetishization of OCD, in a sense. Still, as much as I like things organized, and rules can be very sexy, I like my gender fluidity and flexibility, too, and I think that’s because, deep down, I’m really in love with humans. I enjoy studying them and puzzling over their complicated natures, and as much as they sometimes annoy me, they are endlessly fascinating. And if both halves are fascinating, then I can’t limit sexiness to just one half.

Why Women Like Jerks

When I was teaching classes on gender, the subject of women’s sexual objectification came up. I pointed to the inherent contradiction between the law, which stipulates that women under a certain age are off limits (unless their parents give them permission to marry – ew) and popular culture, which puts girls as young as 14 in revealing clothing, pushes them down catwalks, and generally promotes the ideal of the sexually available female.

One of my students very angrily insisted via her research paper that, as she had learned from a professor of evolutionary biology, the sexualization of teenaged women was perfectly natural, because it is when women become fertile, and that NOBODY was going to change her mind! Not having the time or energy to spend on one overly opinionated young lady in a class of 135, I mostly ignored her vehement argument. I could have informed her that being totally intractable and unwilling to consider alternate explanations is nothing to be proud of, no matter what the (soon to be former) president says. But I doubt it would have had an impact.

But then, in the spirit of responsible scholarship, I can’t completely reject her professor’s theory either. Although I suspect that any middle-aged man who so enthusiastically defends the idea that underage women are suitable sex objects is being at least a little self-serving (again, ew), I don’t doubt that being attracted to fertile women has its evolutionary advantages. And yet, people have all sorts of sexual urges that don’t seem to have any logical explanation. Where is the evolutionary advantage to homosexuality? And it clearly has something to do with biology, because chimps, dolphins and penguins all do it, too. And I can’t even begin to imagine what Darwin would think of foot fetishists or furries, or why being fetishized and sexualized also makes young women such prime targets for rape and murder. Some evolutionary biologists think the rape part is perfectly logical, but I’m not so sure they can explain the murder part. It doesn’t seem advantageous to me to remove a healthy, fertile young woman from the gene pool.

It all leads me to examine my own sexual proclivities. Among other things, I like mean men. Not the boorish or the bloodthirsty, but highly intelligent, sarcastic, abrasive, arrogant men. I know from talking to other women that I’m not the only one. Rock stars don’t have a reputation for being particularly sensitive or kind, and as we all know, they attract chicks like flies to dog shit. Some of them are reputed to have eaten the heads of animals and engage publicly in pyromania. Add bed-wetting, and you’ve got the serial killer triad.

I’m not so much of a masochist that I’ll let a man treat me poorly in order to get my mean-guy fix. I have actually turned away men who were interested because they were too mean, or at least not smart enough to realize that sometimes you have to be civil or people don’t want to be around you. I’m not sure if that actually makes me attracted to psychopaths or not. Regardless, a little attitude goes a long way – learning this is an important part of having social skills.

One of the hallmarks of the arrogant man is competition. Professional athletes, lawyers, politicians, CEO’s and generals all tend to enjoy competition, and wouldn’t much enjoy their work if they didn’t. Dr. House is an interesting character partly because he’s motivated by the desire to lord his superior abilities over others, rather than the altruism we expect from physicians. He’s probably closer to real doctors than we’d like to admit. I’m sure most doctors are perfectly decent people, but they can’t all be Mark Green or Jack Shepherd. Talk to a nurse for five minutes, and I’m sure you’ll hear more than enough about the arrogance of the average doctor.

To take a somewhat tired, structural-functionalist and socially Darwinist approach, competitive men are Alpha males and as such, women seek them for the protection they offer from the likewise-competitive Alpha males of their enemies. The competitive, Alpha-type man also has the hunting instinct to acquire better shelter and more goods, thus providing more comfort for his mate and children. It makes perfect sense from that perspective, and seems to be a popular approach among women. But is it really what motivates my taste in men?

At the other end of the psychological spectrum is the Freudian perspective, which states that we are all born in a state of polymorphous perversity and learn to fixate on either appropriate or inappropriate sex objects depending on our experiences. I believe Freud would consider the Alpha-type male a highly appropriate object for a woman, but he’d probably think I ought to be more afraid of them and overwhelmed with shock and awe at what they want to do with me. I’m sure a Freudian would think that my lack of a father growing up has something to do with my attraction to Alpha males. It seems to make sense, but I’m not sure that’s the case. My primary caregiver during much of my childhood, especially my earliest years, was my mother, and she has a tendency to worry and doesn’t handle crises well. Alphas, on the other hand, are calm under pressure and very useful people to have around. Still, the lack of a strong male figure in my childhood can’t really be discounted.

From a more contemporary perspective, however, adulation of the Alpha male in society is not limited to women and is a product of the institutionalized bias that maintains male privilege, as well as class and race privileges. A white male like Dr. House gets away with far more misbehavior than any woman or minority ever could. Likewise, his status as a doctor grants him extra privileges above and beyond ordinary people. In the context of his show, his misbehavior often results in the noble, but sometimes unintended, consequence of saving lives, which redeems it and provides justification for his increased privilege.

It’s always a matter of some debate whether men need to engage in some form of aggression or if they do so because they are allowed to get away with it. Indeed, men are encouraged to be aggressive through the rituals of organized sports, the prevalence of armed conflict around the globe (both state-sanctioned and otherwise), and the fetishization of the military. One sociological theory, something of a gender spin on strain theory, holds that it is the disconnect between the levels of power and permission men are raised to expect and what most men can realistically achieve that makes men aggressive.

And yet, not all men are aggressive, and there is a wide variety in the type and intensity of aggression. Many men satisfy their need by participating in ritualized violence, often vicariously. Organized sports are clearly the most common of these rituals, including the theatrics of “pro” wrestling as well as those that require actual skill. Violence is integrated into the culture through a variety of rituals, all of which involve uniforms. Military institutions, law enforcement, sports, and sadomasochism all fit the bill.

When the violence occurs without a uniform, outside of a culturally sanctioned ritual, then it carries social disapprobation, the severity of which depends on the manner and degree of the violence. Mob hits and gang warfare tend to rate as not especially problematic, since the victims are widely assumed to be fellow criminals, and this is used to explain away the undertones of racism inherent in the argument. Bar fights, jealous lovers and insurance vultures don’t frighten us too much because they seem pretty easy to avoid, by staying out of seedy bars, being faithful to one’s mate or avoiding entanglements with the greedy and unscrupulous, respectively. But in all cases, we disapprove, and reserve our strongest objections for those who prey on the helpless – children, animals, the sick and elderly.

In offender studies, it turns out that men who commit violence against women, especially their intimate partners, come in very distinct varieties. There is the “hot-blooded” offender, who has intense feelings of anger and resentment and poor impulse control. This type of person, when provoked, becomes very agitated and literally increases in body temperature. The other type, the “cold-blooded,” is not easily provoked, and offends mostly because they get enjoyment from it (and interestingly, actually displayed a lack of body heat in laboratory experiments.) This is a commonly cited feature of a set of psychological disorders, ranging from narcissistic personality disorder and malignant narcissism to antisocial personality disorder. The person suffering from antisocial personality disorder is frequently labeled a psychopath or sociopath.

The anti-social personality type, or sociopath, does not feel empathy for other people or creatures and views others largely as objects to be manipulated for personal gain or pleasure. Not all people with this condition commit violence, but it does seem to come in handy in that instance. Serial murder seems to occur when this condition is combined with a sexual interest in controlling others, which can be carried to the degree that one is sexually excited and sated by violence and murder. Curiously, a large number of serial killers also have a history of head trauma.

Could it be that some of these traits – cold, calculating, manipulative – have persisted because, sometimes, they provide some social benefit? Maybe it’s like sickle-cell anemia. The gene that causes sickle-cell provides protection against malaria when only one allele is present, but with both alleles, the person develops the disease. Maybe in some situations, a lack of extreme emotions comes in handy. Maybe it enables some people to remain calm under distress and provide leadership during a crisis. Perhaps the lack of empathy is just an unfortunate variant of this otherwise useful personality type.

Or maybe it’s just because cold, narcissistic, manipulative and sometimes aggressive behavior tends to allow the individual to survive in situations where others wouldn’t. Survival of the fittest does not always translate into a benefit for the social unit. Society has long attempted to rid itself of these traits. In earlier eras they would be called “unfeeling” or “unchristian”. Today, we recognize the danger inherent in some of these behaviors and attempt to protect our more vulnerable citizens from being harmed by them. But we never seem to make any progress.

Do we need men to be aggressive, or to believe that they are entitled to an upper level in the hierarchy, in order for our society to function? Or does this merely reproduce patterns of oppression and injustice that went unchallenged for centuries? Is it a vestigial trait left over from less civilized eras of humanity in which real, deadly violence was necessary on a daily basis? And if it’s no longer necessary, does it attract women because they retain a genetic stamp from that earlier era, or because they have likewise been trained to want it by the same institutions that create men’s behavior?

A long break

For the two or so people who follow my blog, I've obviously been away for a while. I was without a computer for a time, and also switched jobs, so it was tough for me to find time to blog.

Dr. Faust and I are still very much together, and still D/s. These days we are more concerned about balancing our kinky life together with work, school and domestic chores. I don't do everything around the house, because that's not really part of our kink, and also because I work full-time. So we share, and he's really much better at it than most guys I've been with. Some people might interpret that as a sign of potential gayness, but really I think it's more of an "in control" thing.

Anyway, I plan to start up again as much as I can. I find it a useful outlet for my thoughts and feelings and to work through issues that come up in D/s.

Coming up in the next few weeks, I'm going to be doing some fun stuff, too. I'm probably going to do the safety talk for the local Submissive Discussion Group, and then I'll be doing a wax play demo for the local Next Generation group. Should be fun!

The Ecstacy of the Agony

For the summer, Dr. Faust has been living and working at his ancestral home, which is about 2.5 hours away. He's driven up to spend the weekend together several times. Three weeks ago, he had a BIG family event to go to and couldn't make it. Two weeks ago, I went to his ancestral home and met his family. I won't talk about his family here except to say that they are very nice people, much nicer than the families of any of my previous long-term partners.

Obviously, kinky fun was not something we would be doing at his ancestral home. And last weekend, Dr. Faust had to stay there to fix his car. Therefore it has been FOUR WEEKS since we were able to actually play.

FOUR WEEKS.

Though he gave me permission to gratify myself once before I went to visit, the urges have become truly intense. He'll be here tomorrow.

Tomorrow. HUGE SIGH.

I'm not sure anticipation can even cover it. I am filled with a powerful, urgent need and can barely concentrate on anything else.

When he arrives tomorrow, I will be waiting on my knees by the door. I'll be dressed to please him and wearing my cuffs. I will have my playtime collar, with the tag that labels me as his "play slut" at hand in case he wants to put it on me right away. My second bedroom is currently empty and so I'll have it ready to use as a play room. Nothing too elaborate, as we don't own anything at that level. I'll have a chair and a table. Like an interrogation room. He can tie me to the chair if he wants and use me.

Waiting for it is so deliciously painful. Not unlike actually playing itself. And being his, all the time, makes it even worse/better. The harder it is to wait, the more delicious it becomes, and the more exciting the eventual release will surely be.

I love to feel his dominance over me. Even when it's difficult to obey, even when I feel uppity and bratty and I'm doubting my ability to submit, it turns me on. The more he requires, the more he clearly wants my obedience and submission, the hotter it is. This is something I have come to understand about myself. I realized it, not surprisingly, while watching my television boyfriend, Dr. Greg House. I've always been into dominant men. Wolverine, The Goblin King, that guy in college. Having crushes on professors, as I've done a few times, stems mostly from their authority over me. I used to joke, even, that I went into grad school mainly because I have a professor fetish. Drum majors. Mr. Rochester, for you Bronte readers. Heck, I was always way more into Scully than Mulder, because she's clearly more badass. Women don't excite this need as much as men do, but she's an exception. It's the red hair.

So, for all my hand-wringing and obsessing over the limits of this lifestyle and how we, as a social group unto ourselves, negotiate them (see previous post), it is an immutable fact. I need to be taken, and owned, and used by a Dominant partner. It can be tough sometimes for me to see myself as a submissive. I fret over the characteristics of other subs and don't much want to share some of them. Still, I gladly and willingly submit, because it meets this need. And it turns me on. And I enjoy it. But the fact that it fulfills me in this way ensures that even in those rare instances where it's not so enjoyable, I will gladly make the effort.

Oh yeah, and I want to please him. Of course I want to please him. That part barely even feels kinky to me. It just comes naturally. Sometimes there's so much I want to do for him that I'm not sure I'm able to do it all. But it doesn't worry me. He's not tough to please. He is truly a very loving Dominant, just as committed to treating me kindly and sweetly as he is to making me his obedient, horny, nasty play slut. Is it any wonder I'm crazy for this guy?