FOREWORD (70 page)

This happens to her when she isn’t even here.

You see, I have this little soundproof room that contains a hospital delivery table and a little hand-cranked electric generator (the generator being of the type I’ve read about some of our neighboring countries to the south using for torture). I also have these neat little attachments for the generator, custom made, naturally, for an exact fit in or on any portion of her body. (I really don’t know where this room is in our house; but believe me, it’s here.) Sometimes when I take her in there, she doesn’t know what is going to happen and goes right along with the whole bit. Other times, she has been there before, and I have to force her into it. Either way, she is put onto the delivery table and strapped down fore and aft so that she is spread out wide and vulnerable. I have this little suction device that I put on her clitoris, attached to one wire, and a large bulbous dildo that completely fills her Nancy Friday

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vaginal cavity attached to the other wire; and as I put the one on her clitoris and force the other up her cunt, she notices the wires and starts to get an inkling of what is coming. I, in my sadistic excitement, enjoy tremendously the sight of her naked body so helplessly spread out before me; and her pleading voice only adds to my pleasure. I watch her closely as I give the crank a few slow, experimental turns to judge how much pain or discomfort the electric shock will cause.

She twitches and cries out in surprise; and as I slowly increase the speed of the generator, she strains against the straps; and her cries get louder, her whole body convulses and then relaxes as I slow down the crank, then convulses again as I speed it up. Her voice becomes a scream as I keep up the speed; her body is one big tight muscle; and as the electric current keeps flowing between her clitoris and the whole wall of her cunt, she screams, “Oh, my God, I’m coming, I’m coming!” I just keep cranking until her long sustained wail starts dying down. I stop the crank and watch her as she twitches involuntarily and slowly relaxes. Her relief is so, great that she so completely relaxes that she no longer has any muscle control; and her anus opens up and voids, just as the piss quirts from her little peehole. Little does she realize, as I clean up the mess, that her ordeal is far from over. I unstrap arms and upper body, and tell her she must lick her holes clean. She refuses (of course she thinks she can’t bend over this far, but this is my fantasy and she can do anything I want her to do) to so degrade herself, so I quickly put my little nipple suction cups on the wires and attach them to her nipples. Only a few cranks and she gladly bends down and licks her holes clean and ends up sucking her own clitoris, as the idea of what she is being made to do excites her. I now strap her back down to the table and remove the nipple attachments. Her fears start anew as I put on two different attachments, one a long, slim one that I slide into her peehole, and one a dildo that I push into her asshole.

By now, whatever masochistic tendencies she has have been multiplied many times; and she starts to get excited by these Men In Love

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actions. As I start turning the crank and the electricity flows through that part of her body, she once again starts convulsing over and over. I slowly turn the crank and watch her and listen to her moan as she comes again and again, almost continuously, until she is completely satiated and passes out. Conveniently for me, she always passes out at exactly the moment I need all my concentration for my own mind-blowing climax.

For me, it is a very useful type of fantasy. In addition to being a big sexual turn-on when I don’t feel very loving toward females in general, it also has the very useful effect of ridding me of any feelings of hostility toward my wife.

Really, it works wonders. She will never know how I can stay so calm and accepting of her bad moods. Little does she know how I’ve used her. Anger just doesn’t last long at our house.

There is another side of the coin. Sometimes the fantasy goes just the other way, and I am the one strapped to the table. She has a ball with me, forcing me to drink my own come as she aims my cock so that it hits my mouth (huge, unreal squirts of come that almost choke me), then the same with my piss, all the while rubbing her clitoris and coming continously until she has to let go of the crank and grab a huge dildo and fuck herself as she keeps rubbing her clit through a big, final climax. Again she passes out completely following this, as always just at the very moment I no longer need her. Isn’t she considerate? I also think it’s cool that the one being tortured ends up getting excited and coming, and not really being hurt at all.

When I began this book, I was so naive and confused about S&M that I tried to break it down into neat, separate chapters. My contributors even gave me the titles, complete with capital letters: “I am into Bondage . . .” and so I would open a file marked Bondage. “What turns me on is Spanking

. . .” and that’s where he went. But then I would hear, “My Nancy Friday

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scene is Flagellation with Transvestite overtones, and I also go in for Golden Showers and Enemas while wearing a policeman’s uniform. Sometimes I do them ... sometimes they are done to me.” My contributors knew what I had to learn: These highly specialized notions easily change from one to the other because they have one central idea at heart –

the delivery of all forms of sexualized pain, physical or not, in the service of expressing dominance or submission. If this chapter is longer than others, it is not only because I received more S&M fantasies; it is because the complexity and power of S&M would be lost in any effort to see any one aspect as unrelated to the rest.

Before I began this book, I thought sadomasochism was about whippings and red-hot irons; now I know that even in fantasies in which there is little or no physical violence, psychic humiliations are all any of us need know to understand hell. Clifford and Roy (above) have fantasies in which they are feminized. This does not mean that either of these men is necessarily homosexual. They mention being married; their sex scenes are mostly with women. Of course, gay men also marry sometimes, but my feeling is that if the men above could be easier about accepting the more

“feminine” components in their characters, which society has denied them as “real” men, they would not choose loss of gender identity as the most shameful torture they could imagine.

It is also fascinating to see how subjectivity carries all before it, even in S&M. Heaven and hell are both in the mind. To a transvestite, Clifford’s fantasy (above) might be a kick. Clifford is not a transvestite; for him, cross-dressing is the most abject humiliation.

The notion of bondage runs throughout this chapter. It, too, does not have absolute meaning; ropes, manacles, handcuffs, mean different things to different people. The whole fantasy can be about the pain of the ropes; sometimes being tied up can be mentioned while passing on to descriptions of an entire host of other things that are done. To Men In Love

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one man, bondage expresses power – “You are my prisoner.” To another, it says, “You are so precious to me, I cannot bear to let you go.” To the masochist, chains can be a symbol that the jailer cares.

When we were little, we may have resented mother’s rules; but unless she limited our freedom, we felt she didn’t care if we lived or died. Who wants to be free to play in traffic? Rebellious and difficult as adolescents may seem, they also want parental boundaries – if only to cross them when they are ready. “Why not?” the seventeen-year-old boy asks the fifteen-year old girl. “My parents won’t let me.” To the grown-up ear, that sounds feeble. To children, it carries power.

I think that chains and ropes carry another significance in these fantasies, one difficult to explain because it operates on a level of body consciousness words can only approximate.

How can anyone prepare a young boy or girl for the intense eruptions of emotional and sexual energies in adolescence?

Something is going on in their bodies they don’t understand.

The overload of sensation in the nerve endings is frightening.

Many young people report that their first orgasm made them think they were going to die.

The total loss of control that is the sexual high can also bring a fear of loss of personality, of going beyond familiar limits, exploding, being annihilated. Defenses are set up – not always the easiest to live with. Some people keep a tight grip on themselves because they feel no one else will. They cannot let go even for orgasm. For these people, outer symbols of containment are reassuring. Held tightly together by the ropes and safeguards provided by someone else, the fantasist isn’t fearful he will lose his freedom. He has lost only his anxiety. He is safe to let go, to explode in sexual release. Ecstasy means the state of being outside the body.

The chained dreamer need not fear he will go outside too far.

He is held in by the chains of love.

Open any page in the Brothers Grimm and you will find blood, dungeons, ogres, evil witches. S&M fantasies begin in Nancy Friday

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horror; but like the fairy tales beloved of children, they, too, journey to the desired goal: “Believe it or not,” says Vincent (below) in discussing a fantasy in which he is slapped by his wife, “this is a tale of love.” It is a commonplace that parents tell children their discipline shows how much they care.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is an expression of the parent’s anger. In the end, with the child’s instinctive radar for what people important to him are feeling, he figures out the truth.

More often than not, parents wish their children well, but no child grows up without an occasional hurt during the necessary processes of socialization. In our culture, the job of inculcating those disciplines which will make the child acceptable to society is handed to mother. The child may think she is arbitrary and motivated by personal malice; the truth is, of course, that mother is merely passing on the rules by which she was taught herself. If her ideas of conduct are bewildering, they merely mirror conflicts of the society for whom she is acting as acculturizing agent.

If at times I have referred to mother as the Ogress of the Nursery, if – especially in this chapter – I have seemed always and inevitably to be blaming mother, it is because I am giving the child’s point of view; I have tried to describe, analyze, and explain, not make judgments.

A more reasonable society would have reacted to the unenviable position mothers are put in, and found a way to have fathers share the burden, both of love and of anger. Ours has not. Nor has our culture resolved its double messages and conflicts about sex so that mother is not left in the ambiguous position of saying sex is lovely, but acting in such a manner that the child perceives she really feels it is dirty.

And so while mother may act with all the love in the world for her children, it’s often a lonely, thankless task. She is not raising her children to live in some ideal freedom of the future, but to live in the world as she perceives it today. Her problem is how to civilize her son without crushing his spirit.

In this dilemma she gets little help from our culture, which Men In Love

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mostly offers only puritanical solutions toward coming to terms with our animal nature.

How can a child understand that it is not mother, all by herself, who has decided sex is dangerous, but that in this, as in so much else, she is reflecting what she perceives is reality? And if, after making sexual experiments, the child finds that mother first grows angry and punishes him, but then repents and shows him her love in atonement, how easy is the next step: A woman’s punishment is a woman’s love.

After such realization, how can rage at women not follow?

The happy ending in fairy tales is reassuring to children because it says that the dark forest will eventually end and they will all live happily ever after. The orgasmic end of S&M fantasies is no formal convention either; it reassures men that their pain will be rewarded. The convoluted train of dread events, the hidden contradictory emotions that seem to have been inverted in a nightmare mirror, have succeeded: The past has been avenged and made into pleasure.

VINCENT

The resume of the writer:

A
. From birth to date – solidly heterosexual; at once revolted by and compassionate toward any who are otherwise. I consider myself to be a highly moral individual who obeys the Golden Rule, the Scout Law, and my Conscience.

B
. Between ages eight and thirty-five-troubled, tortured, and tormented by both guilt and fear due to masturbation and fantasizing. At eight, I had already developed two contradictory fantasies: One, which I have succeeded in actualizing, was to find the best woman in the world, court her, marry her forever, and raise a family. At the age of eight, this was no less a fantasy than the other, which remains pure fiction: to be attacked, overpowered, and disciplined by one or more beautiful women, always wearing long, black kid Nancy Friday

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gloves. By about fifteen, I had, with the help of society and Mr. Webster’s dictionary, classified myself as a sexual pervert – specifically, a masochist) with a fetish!! who masturbated!!!

This period of my life included two years in the navy during World War II (throughout which I feared a dishonorable discharge should I be discovered), a college degree, and my first ten years of wedded bliss.

C
. Thirty-five to mid-forties – The discovery of pornography and the fact that there are others like me. I was able to reclassify myself as merely a deviate with submissive fantasies and a hang-up about kid gloves. The torment disappeared, but much of the guilt remained.

D
. I am convinced that I am one of many, many normal males who is turned on by his fantasies, which, incidentally, include specific costuming. I am not truly a masochist, because I don’t desire pain – only playful domination. I am not truly a fetishist, because I function quite normally without the presence or thought of the specific object. As a youth I prayed that my fantasies and desire to masturbate would disappear; now I pray that they do not.