What does it mean to use the problematic aspects of BDSM as a way to explore real power and real pain? Can images be recontextualized through words? What does self-exposure really entail? How are sex positive and sex negative feminists allied against certain kinds of sex and certain kinds of work?
[Trigger warning: see tags]
PART ONE: Fists
[A nude black and white photo of Lori taken from behind. She is seated on a stool, and her arms are pulled straight behind her by a leather bondage device. It has multiple straps and runs up her back and around her neck. Her face isn’t visible and her hands are clenched into fists. She is tilted at a noticeable angle.]
This device sent chills down my arms. I’ve owned a pair of leather restraints for years. I use them on a regular basis at work and occasionally for play. Usually I find restraints unremarkable. There was something about this particular device, though, something about its shape: halfway between the full arm binding of a straitjacket and the piecemeal straps of modern medical restraints, what the girls on my first psych ward called ‘the four points.’
You will only see straitjackets in museums and BDSM parlors these days. It’s not that straitjackets weren’t effective; on the contrary, hardly anything is more effective. It’s that they are horribly painful to wear for long periods of time. Wikipedia explains the physiological reasons with the standard detachment: “Blood tends to pool in the elbows, where swelling may then occur. The hands may become numb from lack of proper circulation, and due to bone and muscle stiffness the upper arms and shoulders may experience excruciating pain.” We’re more civilized than inflicting that sort of pain now.
We’re so civilized we speak in code. When the call came down the hallway for a Code… Code Orange, I think (or Yellow? Not Blue, that was death), we all knew to scatter. Calling codes is one of the many amusing ways psych wards are like commercial BDSM parlors, where the scatter-and-hide code is always ‘Clear’ If one didn’t hide, if one stayed and peeked around the corner, she’d see a man in a business suit being led into a room with a black bondage bed and black leather cuffs. Or, she would see a girl being held down on a white cot, straining against white canvas cuffs.
I made it a point to be as disobedient as I could without incurring consequences. I needed to prove to myself that I was still in control even though I was not able to leave. This tendency faded quickly enough in the BDSM parlor, where we were forbidden to come and go as we pleased to avoid drawing the attention of police to the fact that we fucked men in the ass with dildos and fists. In other words, our restriction was for the safety of the management, and for our safety, too. At ten days, my stay in the psych ward was too brief for my obstinance disappear. When the code was yelled, the orderlies shooed us down the hallway, but I ambled so slowly I fell behind the other girls, stopping right next to the doorway from which the yelling was emanating. I peered in, largely to see if I could, but also because I thought that someone should.
Source: The first instance of this image seems to have been posted by Chelsea Lee. Another image from the same shoot, suggests it’s Ms. Lee with her wrists bound to her ankles here.
Right off, the murky exposure in concert with the positioning of the five women standing around Ms. Lee’s prone body vignette the frame in a way more than a little reminiscent of the Polaroids hidden away in a burnt out abandoned house littered with pornography a showed me back in back in junior high.
I could reiterate points made previously; however, looking at this I am realizing something about my relationship with BDSM imagery: when such imagery is divorced–as this is–from perform the expected heteronormative gender roles (male=dominant; female=submissive), I am rather fond of it.
In my experience, there is a vitality to being completely at the mercy of another. Yes, I prefer such experiences sans restraints. Yet, there is something about rope as a symbol enabling something of trust and surrender to be brought to bear on exchanges that might otherwise remain ambiguous.
“They look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do." –Literal translation of a seven syllable Fuegian sentence-word mentioned by Martin Buber’s in I and Thou.
This GIF reminds me of Johanna, the daughter of one of my mother’s church friends who, in hindsight, was almost certainly sexually abused throughout her childhood.
At six, Johanna was a pretty and knew it. Around adults she adopted an affected shyness. One-on-one she was not unfriendly as long as you did exactly what she said. If you didn’t, she could be viciously mean..
I was a year older and not especially friendly with her. But kids make all kinds of alliances against boredom and it didn’t hurt that Johanna wanted to undertake something illicit.
She explained to me that although her mother had forbidden it, she wanted to rebuild her Fort.
The Fort, it turned out, was a sort of tent. It had a house shaped frame formed from interconnecting black plastic rods. Said rods needed to be smuggled from her upstairs bedroom through the living room crowded with adults and downstairs into the sun drenched rec room.
It took an hour or so to erect the frame and fit the nylon skin tattooed to resemble an idyllic suburban house over it.
Johanna told me that we were going to play house. She was the dad and had to go to work; I was the mom and she expected me to clean the house and have dinner ready when she got home.
She marched off upstairs; I opened the zippered front door and went into the house– inside it was too small for me to stand up all the way.
Johanna came in behind me and asked why dinner wasn’t ready. I said I hadn’t expected her so early.
She demanded that I come outside with her. Standing beside the Fort she told me she was going to punish me and pulled down my underwear. I tried to pull them up with both hands but she seemed to have expected this and fondled me. Her touch was clumsy; it made my insides feel strange.
She shimmied the waist of her own underwear down and told me to touch her between her legs
She guided my hand and fingers, pressing her body roughly into mine as she explored me with increasing insistence.
I started to feel like I was melting before I remembered how to move, pushed her away and ran upstairs.
…
Five years later, I was waiting for my mom to finish with a church elder’s meeting when Johanna shoved me into the men’s room. Inside, she quickly checked the shower area and stalls before menacing me with the chrome blade of a Swiss army knife. She pushed me back against the wall and pushed metal edge against my throat.
I will kill you unless you stick your tongue in my ass.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t scared or worried for my safety. What upset me was having no notion whatsoever of what she really wanted.
Before anything more could happen, my brother walked in on us. Johanna brandishing the knife and charged at him. He sidestepped and she spun, pointing the tip of the blade at each of us, threatening grievous bodily harm if we told anyone then disappearing into the hallway.
…
What happened between us failed to traumatize me. And I bear her no ill will. All she did was tell me to do something when asking would have worked– Johanna was not unattractive and in spite of my deep reservations with regard to anilingus, it’s likely I would have complied.)
I haven’t thought of her in more than a decade. And seeing this GIF my first thought was not to immediate flashback to the aforementioned incidents. I started off thinking about how there are two types of BDSM imagery: those pathologically preoccupied with power dynamics and those focused on the role trust plays in transgressing bodily boundaries. I categorically dislike the former; the latter tend to really get under my skin because I cannot help attributing metaphorical significance to them.
I know I am not normal but when I trust someone it’s not that I expect them to want to tie me up and do whatever they want with my body as much as I just would have no qualms whatsoever if they did. I sincerely feel my trust entitles them to places just as much of a claim on my body as I do. It is as if through friendship I am already completely naked, restrained and at the mercy of another–much like this boy.
It occurs to me that Johanna probably shared this feeling of base nakedness, The difference lay in her willingness to strip others to level the field.
I do not accept such wonton disregard for consent. At the same time, I don’t comprehend why it would ever not be okay to ask for something as long as it is okay to decline.
You’d think most people’s curiosity about the bodied-ness of others would thrill at such openness. Most leave you restrained and walk away. A few will willingly touch you, even fewer will admit they want you to touch them the way you want to be touched and maybe once in a lifetime someone will summon from you a certain degree of the grace which transcends mercy.
You know that saying about how a friend will bail you out of jail at 2am while a true friend will be sitting next to you in the cell saying: damn, that was fun.
I think it’s a wise aphorism but I guess I reckon friendship differently than most people.
To me a friend is someone who would ask to tie me up in this fashion and I would without a second thought consent
A true friend would just tie me up and proceed to push me outside my comfort zone and so thorough transgress the bullshit notion of boundaries that I would only be able to whisper Meister Eckhart’s prayer: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Acetylene Eyes 