FOREWORD (63 page)

“Don’t do this,” mother says to her little boy. “You must do that.” Sit, stand, eat, sleep – the commands batter his self

– esteem all day long. Eventually, the child digs in his heels and says NO. “Do you want to go to the park?” “No.” “Do you want to stay home?” “No.” It is the child’s effort to recapture infantile omnipotence, to assert his independence in the face of life’s overwhelming pressure to conform. The boy’s rage against mother’s rules is evidence of his struggle to preserve an emerging sense of himself as his own man.

Tired of the battle, he removes himself from mom’s control by spending more time out of the house, in the anarchic freedom of boys his own age. Dad and society encourage him to be a man, to be adventurous and assert himself – to be as unlike mother as possible. The young man’s sport of “mooning” – dropping one’s trousers to flash a naked rear end in the face of an astonished public – is a playfully defiant gesture; it asserts the mooner’s right to masculine behavior “no matter what anyone thinks.” Can anyone imagine a girl mooning? When women are involved in the young man’s assertion of sexuality and daring, the matter becomes less playful. “You filthy, terrible person!” the girl cries when he gathers up nerve to put his hand between her legs. “I never want to see you again!” He feels the beast for having tried to be a man.

In our society, saying no to sex is usually the feminine role. The girl’s outrage at the boy’s sexual advances comes Men In Love

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from trying to be as much like her mother as possible; those are her rules for gender identity. “If anything bad happens,” mothers warn their daughters, “I don’t care why or how, it is the girl’s fault.” Controlling men, denying men, offering sex only with strings attached, confusing it with love, romance and marriage – that becomes second nature, the very mark of a lady.

The damage done to the feminine psyche is considerable, but not the subject of this book. The result to men is that while biology drives them to seek sexual satisfaction, they feel they must “attack” women to get it. Fortunately for the survival of the human race, the sexual imperative will not be denied. The girl who at fifteen made him feel like a beast capitulates when she is twenty. But there is a price. “No,” she says, “only if you love (and/or marry) me.” “No,” she says as a wife, “I don’t feel like it tonight because you were mean to me yesterday.” “No,” she says, “I will never try that because it is disgusting.”

The husband feels a familiar loss of power, a frustration of desire, a damming up of his most central self. He is regressed back to those angers first felt when he was so little he had to do as women ordered. Some men may put the resulting frustration and rage into their work or into extramarital affairs. Others may run away or just have a philosophical drink with the boys and forget it.

Some men cannot Their angers are too heated to be forgotten or released through ordinary channels. S&M

fantasies provide a safe outlet, reversing old positions of dominance. “They assert your right to be yourself no matter what others say.” (Eliot, below.)

The man is taking revenge for hurts he has felt ever since he was a boy.

Nancy Friday

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ELIOT

I act out my fantasies with submissive females. They’re still fantasies nonetheless; but, for example, this actually happened:

A matron of fifty-five or so answered an ad I had placed in a swinger’s newspaper. All her life, she had had fantasies of masochistic submission but had never dared act them out. She is married with two children. Finally, she got up the courage and made an appointment. She came to my studio in town, and soon I had her on her knees, her hands tied behind her, naked but for a garter belt and stockings I made her wear (to make her feel more self-conscious, more naked than naked), and a dog collar and leash around the neck. I sat on the bed as she knelt before me, the other end of the leash in one hand, a cat-o’-nine-tails in the other, and told her what I was going to do with her. At first, of course, she was terrified, not only with fear of pain but with a sort of residual common sense, and more: the fear of the unthinkable. But as I tell my girls, it is because you don’t dare do it that you must do it. This is the ultimate fascination.

Well, I calmed her fears so that she could enjoy herself, tied her down spread-eagle on the bed and whipped her, insinuating the rhythm of the whip gently into her body rhythms and building from there. As soon as she realized it wasn’t really going to hurt, and that nothing terrible was going to happen to her, she became more sexually excited; and the experience blew her mind.

Now, this was a fairly typical S&M experience. They are not all that numerous, I admit; not nearly as numerous as those of dominant women, though it occurs to me that a great many men who go to “dominant damsels” may not really be all that masochistic; if they could easily find submissive females they would do so. It isn’t easy; but I am patient and persistent, and now have several female slaves. Those who talk women’s lib, crying “male chauvinist pig,” often make the best slaves.

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But you asked for a fantasy; well, I often fantasize punishing Barbara Walters, Luciana Avedon (of the Camay commercials), Anne Francis, Elizabeth Montgomery, Bernadette Peters – and Nancy Friday.... Though I must admit Baba Wawa is my favorite, let me state the complete fantasy in this way: Nancy Friday reads this letter and feels a pang of impulse she never felt before; it becomes an obsession; her husband can’t satisfy it; he’s just the old husby, not the Demon Lover. (Most of my women are married, and not unhappily.) The impulse haunts her. At last she writes and makes an appointment.

At my studio, she is sent into the bathroom to change; then she walks into the studio wearing only a garter belt, stockings, and shoes, tingling all over with self-consciousness; she is required to parade up and down before a fully clothed man this way. Now totally aroused, she is tied over a bar; her stomach rests on the bar, her wrists and ankles are tied together; she is in a callisthenic exercise position of one bending over and touching her toes without bending her knees; and she cannot move. I then attach a pair of moderate-strength nipple clamps to her nipples; they hurt just enough to give pleasure.

Going around to the other side, I anoint her vulva, from anus to clitoris, with “orgy butter” (no kidding, there is such stuff in the sex boutiques). This is very soothing, and our Nancy is now aflame with desire, all caution and inhibition gone, she is now totally spontaneous; which of course is the whole idea, not only of my exercise, but of lust, even of sex itself.... While she watches, I take a cat out of the drawer; now the big moment is coming! She attains a new level of apprehension. She is required to say, “I’ve been a bad girl, so please whip me.” I caress her back with the whip; it is an indescribably sensuous sensation. Then, as described above, I whip poor Nancy mercilessly (well, not really), and soon she begins to cry out not with pain but a series of soul-wracking orgasms ... After this, she must kiss the hand that whipped her and say “Thank you for punishing me,” and she promises Nancy Friday

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to forward to me all letters from masochistic females; she makes an appointment to return next week…

All I will add about myself is that I was happily – and normally – married for some years; my wife died of cancer.

After several depressing years on the “singles scene,” I find this both more fulfilling and more rewarding than trying to marry again in a fragmented world; these experiences really are liberating and cathartic, they assert your right to be yourself no matter what others say; it is the most intense experience a human being can have – which is no doubt why many shy from it. And it expiates guilt. I do not proselytize; I do not justify. I only say this is the way it is, and it is a good way. And that is why my several ladies, in search of a supreme catharsis, find it when they visit The Master Rod

(AKA Eliot).

Fantasies like Eliot’s (above) illustrate men’s ultimate love/ rage polarization. The inner logic has been pushed so far, become so exaggerated, that it has entered the absurd.

While S&M may be the most terrifying aspect of the erotic imagination, it allows us to examine the masculine conflict on the largest possible scale.

Here men are, pursuing both ends of their ambivalence at the same time: lusting after women, but also angry at them.

Wanting their love, but wanting to hurt and humiliate, too.

Men trained by our culture to think of women as pure, asexual creatures, but dreaming of turning them into sexual animals as “dirty” as themselves. Men forcing women to love them, whipping them into sexual happiness. Heart on the sleeve, the torturer’s mask on the face.

A cartoon-simple notion of the sadist would start with the idea that he has no concern for how his victims feels. In fact, wouldn’t the ultimate refinement be, not that the victim grows to love her pain and finds orgiastic relief in it, but that she hates it so much it finally breaks her? After reading a few Men In Love

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of these fantasies, however, a surprising picture begins to come through. Again and again, we find that underneath the sadistic facade the fantasy has a contradictory story to tell: The man seems to be saying that he inflicts his will on the victim not to be cruel, but to force the inhibited woman into pleasure she could not accept in any other way. Eliot hurts his sexual partner “just enough to give pleasure.... Soon she begins to cry out – not with pain but a series of soul-wracking orgasms.” He selflessly mentions no orgasm of his own, only the satisfaction of helping the woman “expiate [her] guilt.” Eliot signs himself with an aggressively masculine
nom de
guerre,
but doesn’t the picture he gives us have elements of a mother giving a child. a dose of bitter medicine “for her own good”? Is it possible that one element of the sadistic character is based on identification with a female model – mother herself, the Ogress of the Nursery?

Eliot gives us another insight into the inversions of power so characteristic of S&M. We need not expect fantasies to follow the unities of Greek drama, but out of what motivation does the woman in his story suddenly say, “I am a bad girl”?

There has been no preparation, she has done nothing wrong.

Then we realize these four words are a stage direction from her to him.
She is telling him she needs to be punished.
He has her
permission
to proceed. If Eliot is the actor, she is the playwright.

Instead of Eliot feeling he is a bad boy because he wants to express anger and get sex, the woman takes all the blame and initiative. Women have always denied him sex; this woman now begs for it. Eliot whips women in revenge for the suffering they have caused him, but his cruelty arouses no fear of retaliatory anger. He has constructed his fantasy to emphasize that the woman is a volunteer. He is not forcing her to do anything; he is merely carrying out her orders.

This is very curious. Since fantasies from men like Eliot take as given that men are imperious, powerful, and superior to women, why do notions of guilt, of needing to appease the victim with pleasure – even a suspicion of fear of the woman Nancy Friday

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– so inexorably enter? Why do these fantasies tell us again and again that only superficially is the man the “master,” that underneath he is the woman’s servant? Is it his will he is serving here – or hers?

TOD

I’m a very very happily married male, aged thirty-three, educated, in business for myself, and I never let a fantasy pass me by. I share it with my wife. We hold nothing back from one another.

I was a battered child and a fantasy was a normal thing. It was a necessity. But out of this constant came the realization that my mind was totally capable of producing any ideal I wished. With this realization came yet another, the detail.

Given quiet time I realized that I could build any amount of detail into any fantasy. Instead of spending five minutes inside my mind I could spend ten times the time and really make the fantasy come alive. Out of this thought came an obsession with detail.

An example: She pulled her panties down. Not enough, leaves too much to chance. What color are the panties? How did it sound? What room was she in? Exactly how did she pull them down, fingers, thumbs, one hand, two hands, were there lights on, what did her face look like, how did her hair hang, did she have other clothing on?

The point of all of my fantasies is to make the woman feel touched by a gentleness and sensitivity not always associated with the male animal. I have a need to please the woman but I need to be pleased too. For myself I need to know the intimate secrets this marvelous creature, woman, keeps for herself. The following fantasy is a favorite: There is a room somewhere where there can be total privacy. It is white with a padded table that can be moved and adjusted into numerous positions. On the table is a woman about forty-two who owns a local bookstore. Her Men In Love

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hands and feet are tied with soft padded straps, her eyes are blindfolded and a soft white cloth covers her mouth. She is awakening from the influence of a mild drug ... apparently induced to get her to this place. She suddenly begins to struggle as she becomes aware of being tied down. I speak to her slowly and softly, telling her she will not be harmed and will be set free some hours later. I tell her she is beautiful and I want to know her but that she would never let a relationship develop normally. I tell her to calm down and relax. I tell her over and over again she will not be harmed. She finally realizes it is useless to struggle. I tell her I will remove the covering over her mouth if she’ll not scream. She shakes her head and I remove it. She’s nervous, crying, fearful. She asks many questions and begs me to let her go. I tell her I am going to love her and that I want her to be calm and relaxed and to just let it happen. She calls me a perverted rapist. I tell her I am nothing of the kind. That such a person would do his thing only for himself and not consider her. She acts like someone being violated and it hurts me not being able to convince her otherwise. She will not calm down and so I cover her mouth again. She is dressed in a white blouse and tan vest buttoned over her small breasts. She has a full medium-length dark brown skirt with brown high boots and black stockings. Her hair is long and dark brown with a touch of gray. Her frame is small but not stubby looking. I move to her side and touch her breasts softly telling her how beautiful they are. I unbutton her vest and blouse, pull them both apart and kiss her chest and neck. I tell her she shouldn’t wear a bra, that she really doesn’t need one, that her tits are small enough to support themselves. I put my hands under her, slowly, and somehow unfasten her bra. She fights me as much as she can. I am gentle and slow-moving and I talk to her, telling her she will not be harmed in any way. I lift her bra up and reveal her little tits. Her nipples are quite large for the size of her tits and are brown. I kiss each gently and play with the nipples with my tongue. I tell her I’ve wondered what her tits looked like and who has felt them before me and Nancy Friday