by Jayed MeadeThe best, most deviant, and therefore most potent forms of Sado-Masochistic practice are always explorations of the nature of the self. Beyond responding to the need for pleasure gained from suffering pain, the truly deviant impulse moves towards transcendence of the everyday limitations of life, allowing a deeper insight - if it is sought - into who and what we are.
This is apparent in the kind of interactions that take place between skilful players. A serious bottom wants more than to feel the cut of the cane across their buttocks, or the sting of a whip on their back. A good Top is never content to simply administer a beating. Although skilfully applied pain in itself can be satisfactorily stimulating, it is the extra-physical communication between partners that elevates the exchange beyond the mundane and allow us a glimpse into a wider reality. Because, let’s face it, we can receive or give mundane pain in all manner of circumstances if that’s all we want, from getting ourselves beat up in an argument or picking a fight on the street.
In good S-M practice the pain exchange takes place in a context that incorporates the surrender of what can be called normal social identities, swapping them for roles that allow us to inhabit others. These other identities act in relation to yet others (Top or bottom) that accentuate the subjective identities adopted. So, a bottom needs a Top in order to be a bottom, and a Top needs their bottom to be a Top. And I’m not just talking about role-play.
For example, I often play with Tops who want nothing more than to visit me and cane me. But their pleasure is gained from administering the strokes in an environment where they are able to enter into this experience and savour it, confident that I am able to take what they want to give. They are then free to concentrate on the sight, sound and feel of the activity. My own enjoyment comes from their skilful application of rattan to flesh made more satisfying through my confidence in them and their ability. This allows me to endure the pain and undergo the slow release of endorphins it brings. It enables me to enter that elevated mental space beyond physical discomfort that I ultimately want.
This is dependent on us adopting roles in relation to one another that allow both of us to step outside of what would be our normal social experience. We enter a theatre of play that enacts a relationship that otherwise exists on a level of fantasy, in our imaginations, where secret urges play out in our minds. Even without role-play, we are playing roles. And those roles only work in relation to one another. So together we make the whole. And this whole is entirely conjured from our individual imaginations.
In more elaborate role-play, where we play out scenes of domination and submission to contextualise what is always the pay-off of the pain exchange, this is more obvious. We are always only ever acting according to our own fantasies. For a bottom, our Top is always the Top of our imagination, or as close as we can expect to get it. And for a Top it is the same (as a transvestite submissive I understand that I am playing a mostly approximate fantasy role for many of my male, heterosexual Tops. But I am always dressed and made-up to make it as real for him as possible).
When our fantasies are brought into physical reality like this we inhabit a transformed mental space, with all the sensual heightening that accompanies such a shift. This creation of an alternative reality is beyond the usual, socially defined constant reality we spend most of our waking time in. But it is one we are drawn to even as we occupy our socially defined identity in our day-to-day life. It is a crucial part of what we are, existing at a deeper level of consciousness than that required to exercise our duties at work or college or in the family.
Having entered into this other reality, we can begin to recognise the roles we play in normal life in relation to others, and how much we only see others in terms of the roles they play in relation to us. Such an insight allows us to understand not only the deeper currents of desire we, and others, feel. But also how much the identities we take on in life are framed by our adopting roles in relation to others that are conditioned by a limited understanding of what we are. And that ultimately these roles avoid a fuller realisation.
We can go further, and understand how much social roles are adopted in order to avoid what might be considered costly alternatives, where we anticipate what might be our fate if we were more fully conscious. Mostly this is a fear of loss of stability and security. The occupying of more fully realised identities threatens the regularity of what we have, even if what we have is unsatisfying. At the bottom of this is a fear of loss of normative social status among other things. And at the bottom of that is the fear of loss of physical protection. Deep down we fear at the level of the body.
Sado-Masochistic play enables us to overcome a fundamental fear that otherwise inhibits us - that of physical pain. It allows us to enter into pain's truer, more complex workings, and to realise how the body processes it, with a correspondence in the mind. In fact, we learn that the mind and body are all of a piece, a singular whole, intricately bound in its reactions to stimulus. And that what we fear in the mundane, everyday mind, can become its opposite in the more fully realised mind, as pain turns to pleasure and beyond those opposites. And when we realise that, we can begin to imagine the transformations that might take place in a more fully realised life. S-M play, in that respect, can be much more than a simple playing out of secret desires; it becomes a part of much greater exploration of the self.
Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
