Scene Role Play Vs. 24/7 Lifestyle

By Patrick Califia

patcalifia@aol.com 

http://www.patcalifia.com/ 

SCENEprofiles Interview with Patrick Califia

Note: This article is based on a presentation I gave at "Thunder in the Mountains: A Pain Odyssey," a leather conference held in Denver, Colorado, July 27-29, 2001. This presentation was part of a panel with the same title, and this article has benefited from the perspective of other panelists, including Midori (moderator), Mark Frazier, Frank Strona, SlaveMaster, Max, and Tom Wood. I've made every attempt to focus on my own thoughts about this controversial topic. If I've inadvertently filched anyone else's insights, my apologies. My thanks to Rich Dockter, director, and the dedicated crew of volunteers who made this hot and well-organized event such a pleasure to attend. For more information about Thunder in the Mountains, you can check www.thunderinthemountains.com 

This sensitive subject has generated a lot of heat in personal discussions among friends of mine and on the Internet. A 24/7 BDSM or D/S relationship is, for many of us, our most treasured fantasy. It is what a lot of us hope for each time we do a scene with a new partner. Many of us believe that we will only be happy when it is possible to have a full-time position as a slave or property, or as a lifestyle master, mistress or owner. Perhaps that's why there's so much fear and even rage when anyone questions whether this "ideal" is actually attainable or practical in real life.

What I bring to this topic is 25 years of involvement in power exchange sex and relationships, although I sometimes wonder if that does not add up to 25 years of marinating my cynicism in a cold bath of skepticism. My longest-running S/M relationship lasted only five years. I have had many shorter love affairs, contracts, collarings, scenes, etc. with people who inspired feelings in me that ranged from intense romantic love to a sadistic but fascinated disgust. I like to think that I am a safe, competent, and imaginative top. But I can't ignore the drawer full of discarded collars, dog tags, chains, and tit rings that I periodically mourn over, as if each one was a bead on a rosary of self-reproach. The skills that it takes to maintain a lifelong, committed, 24/7 S/M relationship have eluded me. In this article, I can only speak for myself; it may very well be that others have abilities -- or needs -- that I lack.

I believe that most, if not all, full-time S/M relationships are doomed to failure. Most of the attempts at 24/7 role-based intimacy that I've seen result in more alienation and betrayal than in fantasy fulfillment, hot sex, or closeness. As a therapist, an activist, and a player, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this is so (or why I perceive this to be so). What I say here is not intended to mean that S/M relationships are sick or inherently flawed. I have seen many partnerships and polyamorous arrangements that included BDSM, D/S, or leather sex, which were fun, loving, and nurturing. But the people in those relationships tend to move in and out of their S/M personas, switch around and mix things up, and separate their behavior and expectations during scene time from their rules about what's appropriate conduct during mundane time.

Why is it that being owned or possessing another is such a compelling theme for S/M relationships? As a community, we sometimes shy away from asking questions like this because we are afraid of the answer. We have often been shamed by explanations of our sexual style that pathologize the ways we bond with one another and release our sexual tension. But all desires and actions have antecedents; there's a reason why we do what we do or want what we want. As long as we pursue this mode of inquiry without being prejudiced against S/M or stereotyping it, I think we can gain some useful insight from analysis and introspection.

When I realized that there was a name for my sexual fantasies about bondage and spanking, that there was this sexual perversion called sadomasochism or bondage and discipline, I went straight to the library. There I found what has often been called the prototypical S/M novel, The Story of O. For the purposes of this article, it's interesting to note that O is strictly trained so that she can be brought into 24/7 erotic slavery, and that she does so within the context of Roissy, a secret society and chateau where such relationships are the norm. Pauline Reage has described an S/M utopia, a closed social universe where no one questions the prerogatives of a top, and all bottoms are expected to live their roles all day, every day, making themselves available for sodomy or the lash on command.

As I got older and my collection of S/M porn grew, I was fascinated by the extent to which these stories are situated in S/M utopias. There are de Sade's corrupt convents and murderous monasteries, the stories of English boarding schools (The Merry Order of St. Bridget), salacious tales of secret societies like the Hellfire Club and the association of top men fictionalized by John Preston in Mister Benson, F. E. Campbell's slave rings that whisk middle-class American girls into dire peril in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, the military (as in Mason Powell's dark and compelling novel The Brig), motorcycle gangs (see the thoughtful and perverse coming-of-age story, Property Of), shipwrecked male sailors taken as slaves on countless Islands of the Amazons, the very different tropical islands where John Willy drew and described the training of pony girls, John Norman's male dominant counter-earth, Gor, A. N. Rocquelare's Eden, and of course, Tony deBlase's series in the early Dungeonmaster newsletters, which he called plainly, S&MUtopia.

We are members of a sexual minority. We usually do not see the things that we value, our erotic cues and aesthetics, reflected in the larger culture. I'm not talking about the occasional kinky image on the cover of a CD (sorry, Janet) or the haute couture leather and studs that occasionally scandalize a Paris runway. That's just capitalism, raiding our subculture the way it raids all other specialized groups, looking for new ideas to commodify. The way that we relate to one another is for the most part invisible in the media, religion, government, art, public policy, the social sciences, etc. We surface only as case histories or criminals.

This is a lonely experience. It is also frightening. While some of us are able to strut with the bravado of an outlaw, underneath that rejection of society's mores is the consciousness that we are not particularly valued members of the body politic. We are definitely second-class citizens. It takes an incredible amount of effort for us to find each other, to find places where we can socialize or have the kind of sex that we like, and to locate any cultural representations that are accurate or empathic. Our lives as S/M players are conducted in the interstices between the institutions that really matter. We survive by being overlooked. We may feel very special, but that is a defense against the full consciousness of how despised we are, and how limited and constricted our imaginations, our relationships, our creativity, our politics, our ambitions, our very souls and spirits are.

We all want a place where we can be ourselves without fear of repercussions. We resent the loss of our freedom so deeply that often we are not even aware that we experience such a loss. Under the grim terms of our oppression, we have no way of discovering who or what we could be if we were allowed to live out-of-the-closet, as socially recognized and valued individuals. Our collective grief about this destruction of our human potential, this check-rein upon our happiness, runs deep and seems to have no cure other than sweeping social change. Yet even the most whole-hearted activism is no cure, because any intelligent sex radical knows that we will not be free in our own lifetimes. We have to sublimate, become altruistic, warm our hands before the imaginary bonfire of the next generation's self-confidence and liberty.

And so we turn inward. If we cannot occupy the town square, we will try to create a world where it is safe to express ourselves privately. I think the fantasy of the 24/7 S/M relationship is an attempt to escape from the suffocation of dealing with the vanilla mainstream and its bland tyranny, into a place of authenticity and safety where we will be free to live out our fantasies and take them as far as we can, past the limits of a play party or a leather bar. Erotic slavery is a form of S/M utopia, written on the walls and floors of our own homes instead of on the pages of a book. It's the perverse version of the American virtue of rugged individualism -- DIY (Do-It-Yourself) liberation. We Are Everywhere, but mostly at Home Depot.

Splitting is a primary defense against experiencing a painful reality. The unpleasant fact or emotion is put in another place, a compartment that the conscious self refuses to enter. One then proceeds to live as if the contents of that compartment did not exist. This distortion can lead to some odd and even self-destructive behavior, since protecting the split becomes more important than dealing with the bad-tasting medicine of truth. Oppressed people are given no choice but to utilize this defense, on a community-wide basis. We have good reason to believe we will not be allowed to achieve our goals in the real world if our sadomasochism becomes public knowledge. For many of us, this means we try to live entirely within the leather community, and set aside all of the things that we might otherwise have wanted for ourselves in the mundane realm -- children, a graduate degree, a professional career. Or, if we have those things, we try to protect them by shutting our leather and latex firmly in the closet.

But you cannot heal a split by choosing to live in only one aspect of the forced dichotomy. A 24/7 S/M relationship may offer the mirage of an oasis where one will be able to elude the ridicule and ignorance that greets exposure of sadomasochistic activity in the tabloids. I will probably make myself very unpopular for saying so, but I think immersing yourself in such a fantasy, like an ostrich with its head in the sand, is as delusional and impoverishing as trying to ignore your perverse sexuality by drowning yourself in overwork, alcoholism, vanilla monogamy, or fundamentalist Christianity. It is not easy to be a well-integrated sadomasochist. But if we do not try, Eros cannot manifest itself in our lives in a healthy way. By saying this, I do not mean to underestimate the difficulty of trying to be an authentic human being when the deck is stacked against you. In our case, simply trying is a victory; but it is pretty damned hard to not feel like a failure when one's dreams don't come true, even if lack of success has nothing to do with one's individual shortcomings and everything to do with how the system of sexual privilege works.

Problematic as the modern family might be, in its idealized form it promises us unconditional love, comfort and safety, rootedness and a feeling of belonging. Most of us are, officially or unofficially, the black [leather] sheep of our families. We have been written out of the will, sometimes literally. Either our families have rejected us for the content of our sexual expression, or we live in fear that they will discover the awful truth and disinherit us. Whether most people actually receive that unconditional love, comfort, etc., from their blood kin is irrelevant; it is a promise we have all been made, something that we feel entitled to, something that every good person ought to have experienced. To be cast out of the circle of kinship is a terrible thing. It leaves us alone in the world, without allies.

The full-time role-based relationship becomes a competing ideal, an alternative font of replenishment, resources, and group membership. I believe the need to seek a form of affiliation to replace the biological family of origin also explains the popularity of daddy/boy, daddy/girl, mommy/boy, and mommy/girl play. Like the imaginary families of female prison inmates, these voluntary networks probably work as well, if not sometimes better, than the more traditional institution based on heterosexual marriage and reproduction. At least in the S/M "family," one does not have to hide a significant portion of one's nature, and the members are free to come and go as their needs evolve. Roles are based on the individual's sense of his or her own capacities and desires, not dictated by genes or hormones. The old style of family promises its members that they can always come home, where they will be loved, no matter what. Given how often this promise has been honored in the breach, perhaps it's just as well that most leather daddies and mommies do not have such delusions of grandeur.

There are, however, a couple of problems with trying to create a family based on erotic dominance and submission. The biologically-based family already has enough trouble containing the sexual tension that seems to be an inherent part of any group of primates living together in close quarters. The roles of parent and lover are incompatible; one cannot simultaneously support the growth and individuation of a child while trying to keep him or her forever at the fetishized level of development. Dependent children are a lot of work, but they have the excuse of being genuinely dependent by virtue of their physical and emotional immaturity. It is less clear what developmental needs the leather family might serve, and little discussion of the possibility that sexual involvement might preclude being able to minister to some members' needs.

The level of rage that people in S/M relationships display when those relationships end has always amazed me. It seems that we are capable not only of a greater intensity in terms of the physical sensations that we crave, but we are also capable of more dire antipathy toward those we once adored. This is for the most part due to the unconscious nature of such an arrangement. Both top and bottom may have a deep need to be taken care of and give up adult responsibility. The "play" that we often speak of is a code for returning to childhood and its polymorphous perversity, re-experiencing a time when we could ignore the consequences of our pleasure-seeking behavior because there was a wise and loving grownup to contain and protect us. The infant's horrified discovery that mother is a separate entity, with her own agenda, bound to sometimes frustrate and disappoint, plunges the helpless child into bottomless terror and rage. A 24/7 S/M relationship is much, much more likely to tap into these primeval experiences than one that is taken on a scene-by-scene basis. How many masters and mistresses have the training that it takes to manage this sort of projection without damaging the bottom's psyche, or being mauled themselves?

I sometimes think that the melodramatic quality of all interactions in our community is an attempt to distract ourselves from feeling cramped by the extremely tiny stage on which we are allowed to enact these emotions. We seem incapable of politely acknowledging public service; any putative community leader is instead lionized, and panted after as an object of sexual lust and politicized objectification. We cannot agree to disagree, or compromise for the sake of moving forward to other items on an agenda. Perhaps because we both need one another and feel trapped with one another, we are prone to turning on each other as viciously as we once turned up our rumps and wailed to have our heat acknowledged. We have been forced into these shoddy demonstrations of temper, pettiness, and malice by the same social forces that keep us in the DSM-IV and out of respectable society. I guess it beats watching television.

It's no accident that 24/7 S/M relationships have become more popular with the advent of the Internet. While going online makes it possible to connect with information and support to an extent that was unthinkable 10 years ago, it also means that there are more and more people who think of themselves as experienced sadomasochists who are in fact simply pornographic typists. I don't wish to belittle the enormous value of telecommunications in bringing minority communities of all sorts together. I know many couples who met each other via the Internet. Lives have been saved by timely and compassionate intervention via e-mail. But when your only S/M experience consists of jacking off as little words march across a glowing screen, you have to conjure up more and more intense fantasies to compensate for the lack of real physical sensation and the risk of being face-to-face (or cock-to-butt) with an unpredictable Other.

Experience is the only antidote to this romanticization of real-life, consensual slavery. Unfortunately, because older players tend to leave the public S/M scene, content with the relationships they have developed in their youth, and perhaps feeling unwelcome in support groups that cater mostly to novices, our community does a lot of reinventing the wheel. We need to do outreach to our kinky ancestors and elders, and we need to listen to what they've learned. A friend of mine who recently ended a contract of a year's duration was reproached by several people for destroying their model for the perfect S/M relationship. We are that desperate for role models, for people who have already been to the destinations we are trying to reach who can warn us of the pitfalls we might find along the way.

It's no secret that having kinky sex gets you high. In a good scene, both top and bottom achieve a kind of high that can't be duplicated elsewhere. It's a feeling of profound connection to one another, joy in one's physical being, hope, bliss, optimism, and love. Combine all that with an earthshaking orgasm, and you've got a powerful positive reinforcer. The desire to enter into a permanent state of erotic slavery or ownership is, in part, an attempt to get high and never come down. As a clean and sober person, this makes me suspicious. I have learned (and learned and learned) that hanging on to transcendental moments rapidly converts them into a nightmare. When you try to stay high all the time, you very quickly enter a state in which it is impossible to get high at all. You continue to do all the things that worked before, but now you are doing them just to maintain a normal state and avoid getting deathly ill.

S/M is not heroin, but it isn't a garden salad with low-fat dressing either. It's not a main course, yet it's too necessary to be compared to dessert. Too much of it will, I believe, make you as sick as swearing off it permanently. Just as I try to take my recovery one day at a time, because the prospect of promising to be abstinent forever is too daunting, I have a new resolution to take my S/M one scene at a time. My hope is that if I do my best to keep each scene clean, hot, and affectionate, I will be able to create a foundation for a lasting relationship that will be based on reality, where no one is taken for granted or resented.

Being in top space 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is impossible. I think it is fascinating that so many of us continue to expect this when even the most casual observation of our realm would indicate that very few people can successfully stay in top space long enough to run a two-hour scene. Instead of rewarding tops for what they can reasonably do, and do well, we set them up for failure by holding up the goal of the-scene-as-relationship, power exchange unbounded by Chronos.

I am not speaking here of any relationship between a top and a bottom. If you are a top, aspects of that role will color your personality and the relationship, whether you are in scene space or not. But there is a difference between resting quietly in a gray zone between erotic dominance and civilian equality, and having to sleep with your leather, boots, and spurs on lest you tarnish the bottom's image of you as a sort of perpetually raging Bluebeard the Pirate in the drawing room. Perhaps the only way a 24/7 relationship can be maintained is if you do not live together. I am as deadly in my sweatpants as I am in my fetish gear, but very few bottoms have enough common sense to quake at the sight of me trying to keep a bath towel turban on my head while I trim my toenails.

The fact is, most tops want to switch at least some of the time. And most tops want to switch a lot more often than they get to. Any really workable relationship between a top and a bottom has to find a way to accommodate this reality. The bottom who can tie up, torture, and fuck their top senseless without harboring a grudge is a rare find. In the past I used to be quite angry about this, but now I wonder if it is not something I'd be better off accepting, like pigeons in the park or people who get on the bus without deodorant. Perhaps it's too much to ask that someone move from a condition of hapless surrender to predatory control. For many bottoms, the desire to submit is an offshoot of the top's mystique. Seeing the monarch of one's libido in chains may be a break in the bottom's frame of reference that is too great to be tolerated.

Full-time slavery puts an equally onerous burden on even the most dedicated and sincere bottom. Most people who are attracted to S/M rely on certain limits to make them feel safe enough to go under. Another reassuring fact is the injunction that a top must perform within the parameters of the bottom's fantasies. I have yet to meet a bottom who is really capable of being my full-time slave. Obedience vanishes once most "slaves" are ordered to do something that they genuinely do not want to do. Yet, in my book, this is exactly the difference between an S/M relationship based on scene-by-scene play and a 24/7 one: the authority of the top is more global, the bottom has few if any rights, and there's no shop steward ready to take down complaints against management. If a slave is property, they are a thing, and I do not ask permission from my couch to sit upon it or beat the dust out of its cushions.

Since I've already committed blasphemy by casting aspersions on 24/7 role-based S/M relationships, I might as well walk all the way to the iron stake and the firewood and question whether any ongoing relationship between a top and a bottom is a workable plan. My most gratifying and intense S/M relationships have been with other tops. From time to time, it was nice to have access to a bottom, if only so that we had someone to come over for dinner and flog in public. Perhaps this is because I cannot see a bottom who never switches as my equal, although it's politically incorrect to say so. In my heart of hearts, I do not believe that such people are grownups. I think they are lazy, self-centered, and incomplete -- and untrustworthy, to boot. The pleasure that I get from binding and beating someone I relate to only as a bottom is very intense. I would not like to live without it. But it is also not enough. And I think it is interesting that such interest, on my part, rarely includes a desire to fuck the bottom or get them off by other means.

When I fall in love, I want to encounter the same intelligence, independence, imagination, deviousness, and power in the other person that I find in myself. I want someone who will pay as much attention to my body and my fantasies as I am prepared to devote to theirs. And I'm not talking about body worship here, dear reader. There's not much sensual gratification, for me, in taking the role of a human-sized lollipop. There's nothing more boring than a blowjob performed by a self-absorbed bottom who is so wrapped up in his or her fantasies about being degraded and needed to be used that they have no idea how the things they are doing actually feel to me. Lions spend a good deal of their time running after antelope, but they do not mate with them. They consume them -- with relish and great appreciation, mind you -- and then they turn to one another for companionship.

(This is how I talk just after yet another collar goes into the drawer of misbegotten affairs. Before you quote me, come back in six months with that microphone. Catch me just after a comely masochist has caught my eye, and I'll sing you the praises of the clear-headed bottom who knows what they want and keeps to their place, with no bullshit, no ambivalence, no false pride, and no troublesome concern about their goddamned reputation. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, we want the world and we want it... till we want something else.)

I could go on and on about the co-dependence among tops that keeps them in bondage to the unreasonable expectations of their putative property; the whining passive-aggressiveness of bottoms that lays waste to many a scene; the problems with fusing, enmeshment, and accumulated resentments that let the sexual heat leak out of vanilla relationships as well as our more operatic ones. But this deconstruction makes me feel too sad. I remember being a young person in my twenties, exploring leather bars for the first time. The men I met did not often form couples. Most of the so-called leathermen who cruised South of Market in the '70s were just clones in butch drag looking to get their faces fucked while somebody with a big dick stood over them, pretending to be straight, and told them they were cocksuckers. But there were men in black leather who had collared boys on leashes following them about, hands kept in the small of their backs, eyes down. There were slaves who slept at the foot of a master's bed, who kept his house and minded his fist, and prayed to be taken down the stairs into the dungeon on one day, and prayed to be spared from that fate on the next. Men who took their work seriously, who did not speak of play or toys or sanity.

Now, as then, I have so much yearning for that purity and fell power. When I open myself up to that feeling, it is as if it will crack my chest open and make me weep. Stupid psychologists and antiporn feminists may prate about fetishes being the result of objectification, but I know better. It is about perfection. Perfection and grace. As I read William Carney's The Real Thing, I loathed the sneering narrator on every page, but I also burned to be recognized by him, to pass the stringent tests he ordained and be recognized as a member of an elite brotherhood, a man fit to compel the obedience of and receive the suffering of another man. Full-time, with no compromise, no breaks, and no mistakes. This may be the central tragedy of sadomasochistic romance, our hunger to simplify and exemplify slave and master, in perfect harmony and tension with one another, when most of us are much more mutable and complex than these beautiful ideas.

So here we are, by the waters of Babylon, caught between angels and the Old Adam, darkly lit archetypes and the cracked souvenirs of disillusionment. Let me finish raining on this parade by saying, to hurt myself as much as you, that it probably doesn't matter how we try to organize or express our yearning for one another. Relationships based on adult desire don't last, unless they are held together by the vice grips of religion, property, kinship, and law. We are a promiscuous species. Most other mammals have enough sense to simply go into heat a few times a year. We have to color our lust with courtship, romance, and the chimera of eternal happiness. But nature doesn't care about our happiness, and so our biology drives us from one partner to another, whether we are fertile or not. The gene pool is diversified, enough children are born (too many) for another generation of homo sapiens, and we go back to our clubs and parties, looking for someone who will heal our wounds and open the door to heaven.

The only "monogamy" that is natural is not between lovers or spouses, but between mother and child. That is the primary relationship that takes priority over every other game of emotional tug-of-war. It is the touchstone, the template, the only irreducible form of love that we cannot do without. We refer to come as cream because we know that it's milk that seals the first pair of lovers together. Given how little we revere, understand, protect, or cherish this connection, we have scant hope of making one heart-shaped picture out of the two separate jigsaw puzzles of I and Thou.

~~~~~

Copyright 2003

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