SHAME, AROUSAL & DESIRE
In my own case, sexual desire came "attached" to shame -- almost as if they were "hard wired" together from the start. When my dad would spank me, for example, I was so scared and humiliated that I would get an erection
-- and this was years before I could actually come. Other times, as a boy when I was afraid (also unrelated to sexual stimulation) -- I would sometimes get a hardon. I didn't know what it meant when my dick swelled and got stiff, but I felt really ashamed of it happening and tried to cover it up. So shame, sexual arousal and the fear of punishment began to form a masochistic amalgamation in both my mind and in my body, just after the onset of puberty.
I first started masturbating in the bathroom when I was eleven and I had my first orgasm there. After that, I started to masturbate at least daily, often two or even three times a day for a while. These were real quick, purely physical jerk-offs. I didn't really have any fantasies at that time -- just got off on the how my dick would look and feel when it got hard -- it made me feel like a real Big Man.
But every time I went to the bathroom for another session, I was afraid that my dad would burst in and punish me for jerking off. I even imagined him taking his belt off right there and strapping me, bare-assed in the bathroom hollering and crying so loud that the whole neighborhood could hear my whipping -- and I would be so ashamed of myself!
The tension I had worked up, the fear of being caught and punished as well as the shame about doing it in the first place, made the release of the resulting orgasm particularly intense. It is this thrill of sexual intensity that is the basis of all sadomasochist desire, I believe. I became addicted to this level of heightened stimulation in my orgasms before I was twelve.
Later on, when I engaged in masturbation, it was in my own bedroom, so my fears about being caught and punished were minimized (he never actually caught me masturbating). But I missed the sense of danger that I had when masturbating in the bathroom, the fear added to the excitement. I found that sometimes I masturbated fantasizing that he had caught me and punished me. These fantasies were based on real fears of the recent past that were now called upon in memory and were indulged in because the element of danger and the thrilling fear of reprisal, added an exciting dimension to the sexual fantasy.
The fear and shame associated with the acts made the masturbatory experience more tension-filled, thereby intensifying the orgasm. Years later, when I was no longer ashamed of having sex and certainly not afraid of being punished for it, I still was attracted to the simulation of these emotions of shame and fear in the sex act, giving an unmistakable quality of masochism to my sexual fantasy life. __
HEARING THE NEIGHBOR BOYS "GETTING IT"
Becoming aroused by thoughts of getting a whipping go way back for me -- way before puberty, even. I was curious and excited hearing about how other boys "got it" from their dads as a kid -- we used to swap stories. In the 1950s and 1960s, most working-class fathers still disciplined their sons with spankings and whippings. My dad spanked us a few times, but it was just a few swats on the seat of our pants -- more humiliating and shame-inducing than really painful. Most boys in my neighborhood got whipped with a belt on their bare ass. It was not uncommon to overhear someone getting a belting when I was a kid (houses were very close to each other) especially during the summer months, when everyone's windows were open (nobody had air conditioning).
Across the alley from us, there was a "minister" of some fundamentalist church, and he disciplined his boys out in his garage, so if you happened to be outside playing in the back yard when one of his his boys were "getting it" you could hear the whole thing. First there would be a lot of yelling inside their house, then he would drag the kid by the scruff of his shirt out to the garage, slamming the door shut behind them. The poor kid was usually crying and begging for mercy -- sometimes loudly -- he know that his father's strappings were serious and painful. Once they were inside the garage, he'd yell at the kid some more, tell him to drop his pants, and then you could hear him belting the errant son at least a good dozen times before he was finished. The non-stop crying was punctuated by little squeals every time the strap hit the boy's ass. I would get a hard on listening to it -- even though I was only five to ten years old back then -- like I said, well before puberty.
Nobody considered this child abuse -- it was just the way it was for working class boys back then. Maybe if I had actually been whipped by my own dad, I wouldn't have eroticized it so much. The shame the kid must have felt, knowing that not only his brothers, but the whole neighborhood could hear. ___
A RECKLESS ADOLESCENT ESCAPADE
When I was eighteen and had already had sex with girls, I still felt unsatisfied in terms of the excitement aroused by my unfulfilled sadomasochistic homosexual fantasies. This desperate level of dissatisfaction was the driving force behind a reckless encounter I pursued on a whim during the summer after my senior year in high school, while I was still living at home with my parents.
I copied down a number that a guy left scrawled in a park toilet stall. He said he wanted to whip a young guy's bare ass, the name he left was "Butch." Reading his message gave me a hard-on. Memories of being punished by my father had already entered into my masturbatory life but I had never acted any of these fantasies out with anyone yet – this encounter might create a situation for the realization of this dark fantasy and promised a dangerous thrill.
I didn't want to have sex, however – just wanted (needed?) to be whipped. I needed it BAD. Besides, I had been smoking marijuana (that's what I was doing in the park), and my judgment was off; so, instead of considering it carefully, I just rashly went to the pay phone near the toilet and called the number, before I lost my nerve.
He realized from the moment I asked for "Butch" what the call was about. Seizing the moment, he arranged to pick me up in his small Volkswagen near that particular park toilet. Five minutes later he arrived and brought me, not to his house, but to this light manufacturing company in an industrial sector of town, which was nearby. Since it was Sunday, and it wasn't a residential area, the whole neighborhood appeared to be empty. I was afraid maybe he'd try to molest me, and I wasn't ready for my first homosexual encounter at the same time as my first whipping.
So I told him that I wasn't interested in sex – that I just want to be whipped. "You will be" he promised ominously. We turned in and parked at the empty parking lot next to a large shed-type structure made of cinder blocks and corrugated tin in this forsaken neighborhood.
He unlocked the door to this building and then pushed me roughly past the main area to the small inside office, where he locked the door behind him. and then ordered me to strip. He never removed any of his clothing, but just sat there, watching me clumsily, self consciously undress. Then I just stood there, naked, shivering, embarrassed.
After circling around me, looking me over hungrily while I just stood there -- he easily talked me into letting him tie me up to a small cot in the corner. After he had tied me hand and foot to the cot, he balled up one of my dirty socks and stuck it in my mouth. From that moment on, he was a different man.
All of a sudden, he violently dragged the cot to the center of the room and then took off his belt and, going into the role, started pacing around the cot, telling me what a fuck up I had been, how I was a poor excuse for a man. By now I was terrified, because I didn't understand the role playing he had slipped into.
He gave me six strokes across my ass cheeks and thighs real hard and fast, right off the bat. I howled, but my cries were muted by the sock – he had already turned up the radio to cover the crying, and no one was around in this part of town on a Sunday afternoon anyway. He said he'd let me go after two dozen (and he did).
But he did each stroke very slowly, pausing between each hit, really savoring each reaction to the pain, each little squeal he was eliciting. By the time he got to a dozen I was crying nonstop like a little boy and begging him to stop. Looking back at it now, the whipping was actually quite skillful in that he knew how to lay on hard, even strokes in new places each time, making the welts evenly distributed all over my whole backside from my shoulders to the back of my thighs without any overlapping welts. Judging from his performance, he must have had lots of practice. I wondered how many other young men he had lured here to this dirty little office.
Afterward he untied me, let me dress and then brought me back to the park toilet and dropped me off there. Nothing was said during the ride back. He gave me his number on an old supermarket receipt before I got out of the car.
I never told anyone about it until I was in my thirties. I just felt afterward that I was lucky he didn't kill me. I was deeply ashamed of being so stupid in allowing myself to be tied up and abused this way and the whole humiliating experience kept me from approaching another masochistic scene for quite a while (and I've never let anyone tie me up since).
Yet, I must admit that I used the degrading memories of the whipping – his power and my helplessness for example – as the basis of jerkoff fantasies later. I kept his number for a long time, thinking about calling him back, from time to time, but I never did. ___
A FEW OBSERVATIONS
We have two basic, instinctual drives: sex and aggression; sadomasochism combines them—that's what gives it such extraordinary power. By means of very gross, primitive expressions of aggression (pulling by the hair, hitting, spitting at, urinating upon, etc.) a greatly heightened tension is created in the unfolding of the sex scene—through elaborate acting out of the dominant and subordinate roles in extended foreplay resembling theater—all in order to increase the magnitude of the eventual climax and release in orgasm—the combination is explosive.
But our drives are different from animal instincts in that we have non-specific objects of desire, they are labile—so we can displace our aggression onto other objects; besides S&M sex, sublimated aggression could assume the form of working out with a punching bag, rough sports (esp. contact sports), vigorously playing the piano, expressive dance, etc. Only S&M, however, combines the strong instinctive aggressive power lust and will to domination with the excitement of sexual stimulation.
In these kinds of scenes or enactments, aggression is the primary thing—sex is secondary; sex is merely the vehicle, the means, for the expression of aggression. Sex is like the shot glass, aggression is the whiskey that fills the glass; as liquid is poured into the glass it assumes the form of the glass, so the aggression is "poured" into and takes the shape of sexual "acting out" (the scenario); sometimes referred to as sex "games." (Despite its superficial resemblance to coercion and abuse, it is, in actuality, a form of play, freely indulged in.)
In other words, raw aggression is funneled into and assumes the form of sexual play through a process of the sublimation of aggressive desire from its original object (i.e. your unreasonable boss, a family member with whom you are irritated, etc.) to the subordinate sexual partner in the S&M scenario. It is all very straightforward.
The subordinate partner has a different but related "economy" of relief from stress, he is the recipient of the aggression; by willful submission to the other guy's more powerful, dominant ego, by "emptying" himself out, by accepting shame, ridiculed cruelly for being such a "fag,"--for not being more of a "man"-- he subversively "pirates" the "Real Man's" hypermasculinity, along with his domineering sense of mastery. In this way, the subordinate partner "imports" his manhood from a superior male. This element of stealth and transgression relates to the "outlaw" status of a masochistic male in our society, where willful submission to another man is anathema, and may even seem to be sick, criminal or depraved. (There is nothing immoral in any of this, as long as everything remains mutually consensual).
We move into highly immoral ground, however, when, angry at the boss, we go home and look for an excuse to slap around our spouse or abuse our kids, or we get drunk and beat up a fag or a Jew or a "nigger," etc. We get in trouble when we try to rationalize our aggression (i.e. they deserve it), then we have convinced ourselves that we have moral justification for immoral acts of violence perpetrated upon unwilling victims.
We are deeply instinctual creatures, and modern life is extremely stressful and frustrating, but if we can sublimate some of our pent-up anger and aggression harmlessly into the enactment of a prearranged, mutually-consensual, no-holds-barred, role-playing scenario, it can act as a periodic, healthy, therapeutic displacement of forbidden, aggressive desire into a powerful and mutually-satisfying, cathartic experience.