Review of Sensuous Sadie’s book:
Spiritual Transformation through BDSM
Stories and Submissions from Fellow Travellers

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Review by Rick Umbaugh
Nayat326@cs.com 

Rick Umbaugh is a former actor who is now a Graduate Student in Psychology at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. His bachelor’s degree is in playwriting and is currently working, in conjunction with the Society for Comparative Philosophy on a play about Alan Watts, the counterculture philosopher and theologian. He has a column in the E-Zine, The Dominant’s View, and has been published in the newsletters of several BDSM organizations. Rick is from the Midwest but has spent most of his life in New York City and Washington, DC. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his slave and her daughter.

There is a movie that came out in 1999 called "Romance". In it a woman, Marie, is living with a man who has no interest in sex. He tells her at one point that if she wants to have a baby she should just ask him to "do his chores" and he will have sex with her, but that is the only way. Her boss, the principle at her Catholic school, is something of a libertine. He seduces her to come to his place by hinting he is getting ready to fire her because she can’t spell. She comes to his house and he brags that he has had 10,000 women. He talks endlessly about his conquests and his prowess, and she is just bored. But it is also obvious that he really wants her, and she is in need of being wanted.

He asks her if she wants to be dominated and she agrees. He takes her into another room, ties and gags her, not very artfully. In the French version of the movie (it’s the director’s cut on NetFlix) the camera lingers on her face as she stands tied. She begins to tear up and her boss checks in on her. He ungags her and she asks to be let down, "Take me out of this." He does so and carries her to the bed where he lays her down. He asks what is wrong, if the bondage was not what she wanted or if she really wants vanilla sex (which he calls "normal sex"). She begins to cry and tells him it was okay, that she enjoyed herself. You can see that she has just had the transformative moment that most of those who are into alternative sexual practices have experienced at some point. Sensuous Sadie has edited a book for Marie.

The book is structured like a scholarly text book, with an opening essay by the author illustrating what she has found, then a series of chapters from others in the field which inspired the essay. What is different about this book from a scholarly is that it is not about research or theories but about the personal lives of the writers. Sadie has a huge pool of correspondents and is not afraid to promote people whose writings have impressed her.

The book is too large summarize completely here, so I will confine myself to Sadie’s essay. Because Sadie has gotten her information from such a diverse group of writers her essay at the beginning of the book is very much the heart of the book. She structures it around two ideas, Joseph Bean’s concepts around how one approaches spirituality, "head first as the yogis do, body first as fakirs do, heart first as monks do, or he may attempt the perilous task of going sexuality first as in certain Tantric paths." She uses this structure because of its flexibility. She also uses Huxley’s concepts of the "Doors of Perception" which posits that one can reach a godlike state through certain drugs. She quotes Huxley’s definition,

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended by, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

After making the connection between the doors of perception and BDSM she shows how people approach this experience. She begins with what will be for more traditional readers the hardest connection, the sexuality-first way.

What she means by this is spiritual transformation which comes out of one’s sexuality. She begins in what she calls "vanillaland" This is the sexuality of Tantric yoga or Buddhism, Kundalini Yoga, which is also related to the Tantric writings and the Kama Sutra. These approaches originated as a part of the Hindu tradition, which emphasized sexuality as a way of life. These practices emphasized raw sexuality as the way towards spiritual liberation. She also talks about Christianity in the same context. I find the connection between the Christian debasement of the flesh and BDSM, connecting them as a way of liberation the same as the Tantric practices, a bit of a stretch. Christianity is about the withering of the flesh, not the blossoming of the sexual experience. Still, many of the authors in this book do and I cannot argue with their experiences.

Sadie makes the connection between BDSM sexuality and spirituality by showing how some of the experiences of BDSM are connected to other more traditional religious experiences. She notes this:

One of the main ones is an interconnectedness between self, partner, and god or the universe. This is often experienced through an intense focus and awareness of the present while simultaneously and paradoxically a disconnect with time and space. There can be a feeling of freedom, and a breakdown of boundaries which can feel which can feel to both the Submissive and the Dominant like a great vulnerability.

For me that is a pretty good description of what Zen practitioners call a "satori moment", a bit of spiritual liberation. Sadie hedges her bets here, there is, after all, some controversy about this idea, but it is also the experience of many of the writers in this book.

The next section is the "body-first" way. By this she is talking about the way of pain, the ecstasy of pain and the art of body modification. Practices which produce a lot of endorphins, including fisting, vaginal and anal. It is a way of stimulating and modifying the flesh to be able to glimpse an eternity. The connection with BDSM is pretty obvious. Endorphins are a god drug and pain, even to the Christian Martyr pain is a pathway to ecstasy.

In the following section Sadie talks about the mind-first way. It is the intellectual’s way. In the BDSM sense it refers to dominance and submission. It is the way of service and surrender, where the Submissive does things to please his or her Dominant. She also puts prolonged bondage in this category and the Dominant’s experience of walking meditation. BDSM as the martial art of sexuality. Lastly, it is the way of ritual. Many couples who use Dominance and Submission to express their relationship reinforce it with ritual.

Sadie next describes the heart-first way, the way of love. At first this would seem to be not related to BDSM, but one of the things one learns from Dominants in particular is that there is a huge relationship between the love and trust that one needs to be a dominant. Sadie quotes Joe Bean on how he loves anyone he plays with, even if they are only acquaintances.

My experience is that this is not something that is coincidental. BDSM play can create emotions which, if they are not love, mimic it. There are some, of course, who deny that what they do has anything to do with love, it is not my experience.

The next section describes the Dominant as shaman. This is a pretty short leap in that many shamanistic societies use physical pain or confinement to elicit the peeling away of layers of illusion that shaman’s use to enter the spirit world. I have known many Dominant’s who do this. Sadie talks to several of them about the effects of particularly intense scenes. She talks about how someone who sends a Submissive traveling is responsible to take the trip with him or her and to have a pretty good idea of how it will effect them. Personally, I have only done this coincidentally, but it is fascinating reading to find out how others do it intentionally.

Lastly, she speaks of using BDSM to heal. This is a complex topic. What the mortification of the flesh can do is make one more aware of the flesh. It can help one reclaim one’s flesh, as a story that Fakir Mustafa tells of a woman who had been abused against her will so was having her genitals pierced so they could become hers again. It can be a tool of grieving as Mistress Angelique Serpent did by wearing a particularly uncomfortable corset to mourn her slave symbol, because

I needed to give my insides a physical reason for hurting so much…The endorphins and the breathing restriction, as well as the meditative mindfulness of posture that a corset necessitates, transported me to an altered state where grief was easier to bear."

Sadie ends the essay with two parts, one is about bringing God out of the dungeon, talking about who when one does BDSM with all of these way in mind one can balance one’s heart, body, mind and sexuality to achieve a kind of spiritual liberation. The last section, Where We Go from Here is a call to take what we learn from BDSM and take it out into the world. Submissive with service, Dominants with leadership.

The rest of the book is a series of articles and interviews with various authors. It is divided into traditions which roughly fit the practices of the various authors anthologized in the book, e.g. Eastern traditions or Earth Centered traditions. I was rather pleasantly surprised to find that even the Judeo-Christian tradition was represented by enough authors, particularly well by Chris M., to be included.

I am one of the authors represented in the book so I can give a description of how she approached and structure our sections. Around the turn of the millennium I wrote an essay. It connected BDSM with Zen meditation and the ecstatic practices of other mystical spiritual practices. These are the first two sentences of the book, "A few years ago I came across an article by Rick Umbaugh called "The Art of S/M". I was the first article on BDSM and spirituality I’d ever read, and I e-mailed him immediately and struck up a friendship." After that she asked me to be interviewed for her newsletter, the "Leatherpage". She included that interview, along with three questions that she asked every other author who is included in the book. What is interesting, particularly about the three questions is the eclectic nature of the responses. The only thing that I find in common about them is the thoughtfulness with which these questions are approached. I suppose this is normal for authors who are going to be anthologized, but you can tell that these people have thought a great deal about their sexual experiences and what they meant to them.

This has been a great year for books on BDSM. This book and Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures edited by Drs. Charles Moser and Peggy Kleinplatz has made great leaps into helping move BDSM from simply a diagnosis of mental distress to something that should be taken seriously by the scholarly and psychological communities.


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Copyright 2008
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