by Eurydice (c) 1995

MASTERS OF CEREMONY

'You'll find neither lock nor bolt to bound you, but lonelinesses will surround and hound you.' Goethe,  Faust

 

    In the heart of Manhattan's meatpacking district, where the wind off the Hudson blends with the stink of spilled cow's blood on sawdust, on a poorly paved and lit street with empty metal hooks hanging above it, hides the entrance of a famed S/M club. When I first walk past the clothes-check clerk, following a quick pat-down and bag inspection, I come upon an extraordinary scene: a model-pretty dominatrix is slapping pounds of raw hamburger meat onto a naked pale man, spraying him with ketchup, and grinding the meat into his own with her stiletto heels until he looks like a hideous traffic accident. The room smells of butchery. The dom, undeterred by the dead animal scent, stands up, her body squeezed into a sweaty hourglass by a rubber dress strapped open over her ass, and invites us to piss on him. A reedy man in a mask of mail, and ankles pierced so wide he could be hung from a meat hook by them, whose muscular back bears 12 equidistant piercings tied together with leather string into a corset-shape, obliges. Ice-T is singing 'KKK Bitch'.
     A bystander tells me the 'hamburger act' is inspired by Christian saints' massacres; he points out another man who does 'Spartacus on the cross'. A St. Andrews cross hangs in the corner across from a '77 Harley. 'Spartacus', mustached and hairy-chested, looking like the Marlboro Man dress-ed in a leather penis cuff and 8 rings around his testicles, is presently talking with a firearms specialist about using explosives in his 'scene'. Hollywood seems grotesquely alive in this basement.
     My new companion, watery-eyed and crisp, is a major league umpire, Vietnam vet, and 'the survivor of a loveless marriage'. He soon tells me: "When I treat them like animals, I free the sexual animal in them. It's common sense. I knew I was S/M when I was 4; I beat up kids and the sound my fists made on them turned me on." I tell him I don't quite understand the aesthetics of blood."All beauty is made of blood," he preaches with a bare-toothed smile; "blood is life." He then breaks into a description of the 'traditional' tortures for a suspected witch: flogging, scalding water, looking for the mark of Satan?the body part that had the kiss of Satan was supposed to be numb, so investiga-tors put needles in the accused's body until they found a spot where pricking her didn't make her scream; if they didn't, they kept at it until she confessed, if they did, they hanged her."I have a witch who won't confess," he proudly concludes and leads me to a radiant queen-sized blonde in dog collar and waist cincher and needles through her nipples, lashed on a torture wheel. She hangs limply, breathing heavily. Convex ruby lines cross her belly, breasts and thighs. "I'm a chubby chaser, I like my canvas big," he winks at me and generously offers me a go at her. I decline. "I took you for a top learning the ropes," he says perplexed. "You aren't dressed for a slave. A switch?" Voyeur, I say, realizing the roles in this realm are painfully limited. Eager to initiate me into altitudes of pleasure, he showily pours watered alcohol on his quivering slave, announces, "I've come for you, my bride!" and sets her on fire. For a moment she is hidden by flailing tongues of blue flame. She screeches. The fire goes out fast and I smell burned hair. The stereo is playing Depeche Mode.
     The torching draws a smatter of polite applause. My umpire asks for a volunteer to put his penis in ice, then in a condom, and penetrate the witch. "In the military," he personably tells me, "I had an affair with an officer and beat him so bad he was hospitalized; so I saw I had to learn how to inflict pain. In the S/M tribe the wisdom is handed down verbally from our elders. I took classes, apprenticed with a master. My motto is No Unintentional Pain. I had a slave for 9 years I practiced on. You'll need a Master to study under; the guy you need to talk to is Roy; I'll give you his card." Meanwhile, Spartacus' icy cock breaks into the witch in a single, abrupt, dispirited surge. I watch it spasm. She smiles wickedly. "I'd come here to see what others were doing in the field and get inspired," the umpire prattles away in the manner of a busy conventioneer. "Now it's tame except on special party nights." Fridays are Slave Auction nights; Sundays are N.Y. Jacks' jackoffs. On Shaved Pussy night, women who show a shaved pussy get in for free; on BBW Big Girl night 200lb-and-up women get in for free; on Little Girl night 'schoolgirls' do the spanking. House rules forbid exchange of bodily fluids and alcohol consumption. The clientele seems superbly civilized.
     The place smells of urine, leather, mold and dirt. Dozens of enormous men dressed as cops, soldiers, construction workers, bikers, posture about, like horses pawing the ground. The mass of store-bought gear simulating machismo is sinisterly offputting. America's ethos of discipline and forbearance and bravado has come to this: the family man who nurses a lust for the whip, the businessman who yearns to be hung on a cross, the yuppie with a taste for piss; maleness is worn in effigy and fun, like a pawnshop war ribbon. The Wild West mystique of the sudden quiet produced by a stranger's longshaded entry into a bar of men anxious to do battle, measure their masculinities and earn communal respect, has been degraded to histrionic hypermasculinity as a weekend stance. Primal tests (scarification, ingestion of bullets or piss) and codes of manhood, still extant in Appalach-ian burghs, urban ghettoes and jails, are reduced here to brightly colored bandannas in back pockets that signal predilections. Right is submissive, left dominant; blue worn on the left means 'cock-&-ball torturer', on the right, 'cock-&-ball torturee'; red is for 'fister,' yellow for 'pisser', green is 'for money', brown for scat, gray for bondage, purple for piercing, white for novice, pink for tit-torture, black for pain, orange for anything goes—sex by code, with genitals cuffed, chained and subdued.
     I estimate 15 men to a woman, mostly stir-crazy submissives on the prowl. Studies confirm what tonight's attendance shows: S/Ms are mostly men. Women usually get introduced to S/M by male lovers, and find that the loss of control suits their socialization. Men discover S/M like they find bungee-jumping (which originated as an African initiation rite) or the men's liberation movement—while searching to define masculinity in an egalitarian world. S/M provides many with a faux initiation ceremony: a public spanking or fistfuck under the guidance of an elder, followed by a hug or slap on the back, is a figurative affirmation of courage that shows the clan one is now a man. According to academic theorists at least, S/M is an 'allegorical field' for normal transgression. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders, S/M is a mental disorder. According to the people who feel good when they hurt other people who feel good when they are hurt by other people, S/M is a seminal self-realization. "S/M makes me strong," Spartacus boasts to me in a telling string of clichés, "brave enough to withstand torture in patience.I'm a big boy, I got more balls than guys out there. We're all born into a world of suffering.We face death every day. No Pain, No Gain. You always hurt the one you love. Nothing good comes easy. What's life without pain?"

     New York, with its choking accumulation of alert, discordant bodies crammed on a grimy isle, seems a 'natural' greenhouse for compulsions that involve self-exposure and helplessness. The impersonal, forbidding city can induce in its denizens a sense of fatalism or worthlessness: there're always hundreds of people richer, prettier, more interesting than oneself in plain view. The city also fosters exhibitionism: a fanatic commitment to survive and be noticed in the throng and appreciated.
     The most mainstream NYC theme-park dungeon is The Vault. Admission is $40 for men, $50 for couples, $10 for women and TVs. The premises offer horse saddles, cattleprods, suspension devices, a basement jail cell, and the requisite grunts, groans, sighs, sobs. Here the odor is of sweat and pine-cleaner. In the middle of the complex, idle guests?welloff tourists, men in suits, naked slaves, crossdressers?sip sodas and juices on couches or in empty cages, gaze at videos of tortures, and talk of Monday Night football and flyrods. The bartenders are topless and stressed out. A clutch of pudenda-flashing middle-management types compare canes nodding gravely, as I stand at the bar, glass in hand, watching an old Master painstakingly immobilize a gagged earplugged slave with an intricate web of ropes; when he's done, he listlessly whips her thighs and her pelvis rocks against the ropes as if against a lover. But her pleasure doesn't seem to be the issue: her orgasm confirms the success of his domination, demonstrates his power and his technique, and proves that he is a master of the means of production of pleasure. In and of herself, without the pain, she doesn't exist.
      A heavily eyelined mistress in a half-shaved mohawked scalp, leather hiphuggers and a lacy jacket with holes over her nipples, checks me out with a 'Don't fuck with me' air and barks, in a Long Island accent, "You're looking at a lady, girl, lower your eyes." Do get off it, I reply. It works. "I get paid by assholes to beat them up," she confides, trading the bellicose tone for a sisterly one. "It's the perfect relationship with a man. An hour or two and they're out of my life." To illustrate her point, she recruits a volunteer from the audience, ogles him disapprovingly, pinches his nipples to test his pain threshold, orders him to his knees and applies a paddle. She soon sits on a chair and turns him into her footstool, still hitting him indifferently, pausing to tighten the fastenings around his balls. Many onlookers jerk off in dim corners. He's shouting, 'Oh God, have mercy, Mistress!' Most of the clientele watches this pageant sedately: it is rough sex play as a modern spectator sport.
     Men are strolling hungrily, mumbling indignities they want performed on them. Don, a West Pointer commercial pilot in heels and slip, offers himself to me as a slave. "I'd love to lick your tiles clean," he baits me—a great come-on line for post-feminists. "The ideal mistress is never pleased," he adds, standing at military attention, showing off his S/M scars. Don is proud to bear 'marks from the battlefield of lust.' "A negligent pro used a cat-o'-nine-tails of dog-collar chains that gave me scabs for months—earned me a reputation," he brags. He tells me what got him into S/M was AIDS.
     AIDS is credited for the proliferation of paraphilias among America's middle class. Experts first sanctioned light S/M in the '80s as an alternative to risky sex because it does not require penetration or exchange of fluids and could keep people from straying into the disease pool. In The New Joy of Sex, Dr. Alex Comfort lists 'loving' S/M as a healthy variation; Dr. Ruth takes a benevolent view of spanking and bondage 'as long as nobody gets hurt.' Because most S/M deals with toys and stereotypes in 'scenes' less impulsive than the Sunday sex of an average couple, S/M has come to be seen as a harmless acting out of power themes—a fantasy sport for aging babyboomers. This is the 'demise of casual sex' predicted in the wake of the AIDS panic: swingers now attend safe-sex parties in which genital contact is replaced by roleplaying; the byword is 'consensual,' positing volition as the crucial differentiating factor between getting clobbered, and getting clobbered for pleasure.
     'Forced sex,' such as bondage and group play, is Americans' top reported fantasy in current research studies. The Kinsey Institute estimates that 50% of middle and upper middle class Americans have tried bondage, 40% have experimented with S/M, and 5-10% engage in S/M for sexual pleasure regularly. These are more people than ever attended the Coliseum or Gilles de Rais' orgies. They are people raised on The Little Mermaid and TV cartoons, who follow the directives of MTV and the fashion industry, read Anne Rice or Linda Barlow, have seen Silence of the Lambs and Tie Me Up and the publisher of S/M News on talkshows supplying his expert's opinion on mothers being spanked by their daughters' boyfriends; they may be patrician Junior League wives who hold sex toy buying parties or teens who roam big-chain sex shops in malls or romantic couples who weekend in bed-and-breakfasts that offer video cameras and fisting slings or Wall-Streeters who dine at La Nouvelle Justine after a hockey game, the NYC sports bar where a busboy-slave cleans their table and also licks their boots. These days torture is a trendy backdrop for fevered consumerism.
     "Outsiders are taking over S/M," Don complains bitterly, the metal bar in his tongue glistening with saliva. "They just want to look like they do it. S/M is becoming costume drama. We lifestylers resent the New Age glitz and its safe words." 'Safe words' refer to verbal codes devised to give a 'bottom' control over the amount of pain endured. Pleading for mercy is the 'act', but a code word is an express request to 'stop'."To me S/M is primitive, a thrill like having survived an attack," Don says, his face flushed with dismay. "If you want the truth, you got to meet this guy Roy I know."

     Roy turns out to be a laid-back Maine native with thinning dirty-blond hair, sideburns, insecure blue eyes enlarged by spectacles, a Ph.D. in Colonial Lit., an aptitude for making wood cuts of slave drawings, hunting with bow-and-arrow, collecting Puritan-era artifacts, and teaching 'classic sadism'. He says things like, "My kit always contains five 5-foot lengths, five 10-foot lengths, a 20-footer and two 50-footers; I code my ropes by length, a trick of my Dad's who was a Marine." Tops are the nut-and-bolters of sex, the engineers. In the sense that we're all prisoners of sex (a misleading truism), they are prisoners of its hardware, at anachronistic odds with a world that values comfort over obedience, nostalgic for a time when power was visible and roles were assumed for life.
     In a Tribeca cafe, I ask Roy about the joys of topping. "I get a feeling of accomplishment," he says. "The rewards of a teacher. I teach women their needs; the laws, rules, and rituals of their nature." I tell him I think his S/M returns women to the position of property. "S/M is knowledge. In the modern world, people are nonconsensually dominating and submitting all the time," he retorts, impressively self-aware; he's said all this before. "We're ruled by outside factors, clients, CEOs, suppliers. In sex I depend only on my tools I can test and retest. I'm in complete control to fail or succeed." This is not two people having sex, I say; this is intercourse as a contest in which only the man can lose, whose outcome depends solely on his competence. Roy isn't a lover but an ironsmith who humiliates apprentices or a guild elder who stages gory tests of new members because he fears novelty. "This culture debases men," Roy says; "the cover of Newsweek touts Viagra as the harbinger of the next sexual revolution." Like France's Sadeian impoverished nobles, Roy uses his lovers as instruments to give him a semblance of the control the world doesn't offer most men any more.
     His eyes flash with distemper. "For an in-depth interview, you must let me tie you up," he says in a chilling, vitriolic tone. "Your needs for mine: we'll barter." I try to talk him out of it but my reasoning is useless: I can find no common ground of reference. He implies I am a coward. With little respect for me left, he drops a note on the table with the phone numbers of his slaves and walks off.

     Karen is a strikingly beautiful, studious 19-year-old Yale sophomore who visits commercial dungeons, conscientiously saving her weekly allowance for the $200 half-hour fee. Short of masturbation, she's never had any other sex. "I'm a Christian," she explains righteously; "I won't submit to the whims of a Y chromosome with a tan." Her catalytic S/M inspiration was the Village Voice; she masturbated to the D/S personals until she gathered the courage to call advertised houses of domination, chose the most expensive as the safest, and made an appointment. She was 16. "I was lucky my age and gender got the attention of the head mistress. I was treated with kid gloves. I can go for free if I let a client play with me, but I'm very private and I'd never trust my body to an amateur." I wonder if this is the future of sex: a service only specialists can perform. "I'm happy with my Mistress. I'm untormented and free to concentrate on my work, and I'm sexually fulfilled."
     She picks me up in a Saab, dressed in Jil Sander. On our way to meet her dom ("the best society dom in the U.S."), she quotes Irigaray and Kristeva and says that "at the end of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler explains that only violence can make the body 'real' anymore." Karen may be the feminist, and Christian, of the future. She says: "Being submissive puts chains on my body, but it removes my soul from bondage. I'm stronger than my vanilla sisters. S/M is a higher moral ground. My dom removes my imperfections. I am redeemed by every stroke of the lash. S/M is like faith in God. You either get it or you don't. All of my religious upbringing leads me to accept its truth."
     At a Greenwich Village historical building we enter a Swiss-chalet-like parlor and are led to a short muscular woman in her 50s with pulled-back hair and a big matronly face, dressed in black fishtail dress, combat boots, and seamed stockings. She tells me to change her name to 'Psyche' because 'it's still illegal to treat a minor.' Her firm no-nonsense approach reminds me of my school headmistress, a hirsute spinster with a weakness for the ruler and an ambition to teach third-graders calculus. Psyche strikes me as the ineffectual postmodern incarnation of that extinct disciplinarian.
     "Psyche is all about love," Karen whispers circumspectly (I hope in euphemism), leaving us; Psyche pops a Hershey's Kiss in Karen's mouth with a gesture of communion. "S/M heals," Psyche contends, leading me deeper into shadowy corridors."As I bring a whip down on flesh, I bring a soul to integration. I call it a faith experience. Patriarchal religions took our trust away from each other and placed it on God. With S/M, instead of putting your faith in God, you give it to another human."
      Psyche's computerized client list has 2,000 names; 80% are lawyers ("Attorneys work with power and manipulation and don't know how to give it up without help"). 99% are men, 95% married. Most are treated by one of her 'companions' who is selected from a scrapbook, along with a scene, during the $50 consultation session. Psyche mostly travels giving workshops, attending S/M balls and shows; and she's on worldwide outcall. Like a film director, Psyche stages psychodramas. Her portfolio offers corporal punishments in colonial jails, in an 1880s reformatory, on a plantation, on an English estate for offenses of manor or manner, in a Bible sect, at home by a stepmother; kidnappings and interrogations by terrorists, mercenary soldiers, survivalists, skinheads, the Inquisition, the KGB. Some clients keep diaries recording their failings ("tardiness, clutter, being argumentative, forgetful, overspending, breaking valuables, bending a fender") and pay to be punished for them.
     "I will allow you a glimpse," she decides in her haughty, condescending monotone, pulling me on through a gothic maze, "if you remain absolutely quiet and stern." She describes the client we're going to see: "Verbal humiliation and electrical genitorture interrogations. He likes to be a hero, but he can't go home to his wife with welts." She says he is a curator for one of the nation's greatest museums, has a penthouse, a Hamptons home, a yacht. He visits a dom and draws on S/M memories to perform in his conjugal bed. "Showtime," she intones harshly, opening a red side door.
     He is conventionally handsome. His nails are manicured, his hair tastefully highlighted. His lonely nudity stands out in the spartan, mirrored room and discomforts me. "It bores me to humiliate him," Psyche says by way of introduction, with a derisive laugh her clients reportedly prize. "Your tribute, slime?" she asks, putting on leather gloves. He hands her three hundred-dollar bills, eyes down. She opens a cabinet and throws him a needle-lined restraint jockstrap to wear. "Now, leech, await your examiner." "Mistress, may I speak?" he asks in a bland obsequious voice. I surmise he's accountably worried about my outside-world presence which Psyche has sprung on him as an impromptu humiliation. His cheek touches her boot. "You may not, shit!" she howls as we stomp off.
     Most submissive men are achievers who feel overburdened by social responsibilities (for wives, children, employees, shareholders, patients) but are loath to delegate their power. They may spend $60,000 a year to find release from their tensions in torturing their manhood behind closed doors. Paying to be abused when and as they want to be, by visiting dungeons on their lunch hours or summoning doms to their offices to act out scripts they compose, they retain control. By allowing themselves to enter servitude, they defy societal expectations and feel a temporary liberation. When they don't even have to get an erection or to give an orgasm, when they are dependent, trussed and trapped, they feel happy; their pleasure is located in temporary self-erasure?in a semblance of death.
     The best doms are female phallocrats who serve this masculine sexual economy as specializing craftsmen: they can be experts at caning, mummification, suffocation, 'altered states'; bondage alone is divided into 'tie and tease,' heavy leather, rubber, genital, Japanese rope, macramé square or slipped knot, Sweet Gwendoline, bondage sculpture, suspension, sensory deprivation and so on. Middle-of-the-road doms, such as those in the Domination Directory International, are ex-strippers or call-girls with accumulated resentment toward men who turned to S/M because slaves like older women who represent mother figures, or even fat demonic-looking women before whom they can feel helpless. They don't have to smile and say 'yes,' be touched or even looked at, and they never strip. Many adopt S/M and get a live-in slave, unable to deny themselves the comfort of a man who will scrub the toilet with a toothbrush and get hard doing it and still want to be called an insignific-ant worm. Unlike male tops, straight women get into 'dom space' not because they're power hungry but because they like to have men put them on a pedestal. Some even find their power oppressive or feel guilty. But demand is growing: PONY (Prostitutes of N.Y.) reports show that intercourse, the most commonly requested service until 1980, has been replaced by S/M performed on the client as today's top preference. Smart hookers now gross $1000 a week working part-time as doms.
       Mistress Leah is such a converted professional. A 'glam dom', vigorous and athletic, with impish eyes and the style of Louise Brooks, she works out of her home and pays taxes. A Hassidic Jew pays her to subject him to Nazi tortures; a banker pays her to steal money from his wallet before which he kneels naked; a company boss pays her to be the company boss and punish him for embez-zling. When I visit her, she's wrapping a jowly middle-aged corporate executive named Doug with Saran wrap. It takes her over two hours and a dozen rolls to swathe him. "I've as much time as you need," he mumbles hastily, his diction feeble from constriction, "my wife is picking up the kids." Doug has been buried in wet concrete, glue, marsh and bogs. He found constriction when he was given a body wrap at a mud spa to lose weight and got aroused. He now raises the ante each time.
     "It's spiritual," he croaks as Leah wraps his toneless torso. "It helps me stay calm and overcome my need to move around. I will myself into another consciousness. In captivity, I go into a heightened state; I come out like a butterfly." "Be quiet or I'll have to cut your tongue out," Leah admonishes, immobilizing his head in an inflatable hood with a breath-tube. She secures the wrap with electrical tape, hoists her mummified creation off the floor with winches and suspends him. "I see myself as a sex educator," Leah says; "at the end of this, he'll run home and fuck his wife."
     While Doug dangles overhead, she unlaces her boots and makes tea. I ask if domination is the 'woman as voracious virago' cliché. We balance our cups on a bondage table with hooks on the sides to fasten lacings and a lid that opens for sensory deprivation. Leah, sitting demure and inert, tells me domination is feminism. "I was raised in a materialistic household. My Mom had four husbands, all lawyers, very proper. I was a nice Jewish girl who knew nothing about sex. In college I worked as a model, a stripper, even a call-girl, as my secret rebellion. I still had no personality, I was a walking coma attached to a TV. Then I took a class in S/M and it was like I saw the light. In my life, S/M has been a path to enlightenment and marital unity. If I wasn't a top, I'd turn back into a vegetable." Leah is married to a submissive travel-agent. "We're into health, cooking, travel, exercise. Our S/M roles symbolize the union of opposites that is perfection." S/M devotees consistently bring up this creed: pain lifts them onto a higher spiritual purity. As people progress in S/M, their 'games' become less likely to end in sexual release; few have intercourse outside procreation.
     Because its erotic euphoria is tinged with religious zealotry, today's S/M fad reminds me of an ascetic movement that swept across Europe at another chiliastic age. Like S/M in the 90s, the outbreak of penitential scourging in the 14th century was the abnormal intensification of a practice that had existed for centuries: scourging by superiors had been a common correction and abbots advocated substituting self-flagellation for the reading of Psalms (1,000 strokes for 10 Psalms). The outbreak of the Plague in 1259 inspired the first public flagellants. Soon, nobles and peasants led by bishops and monks whipped themselves in naked processions with scourges of knotted leather thongs; sins were confessed, follies renounced, people readied for a new spiritual life. From Italy the 'contagion' spread to Germany, Hungary, Bavaria, France and in 1349 the brotherhood of Flagellants was formed upon another outbreak of the Black Death. Members vowed to obey a captain and lieutenants and scourged themselves twice a day for 33 days till their souls were free of stain. They marched through cities arousing enthusiasm and spreading the plague they were striving to exorcise.
     The mass psychology that animated the 'flagellant hysteria' resembles the S/M message of spiritual catharsis. The earlier S/M scene was hit first and hardest by the AIDS epidemic so its nascent spirituality may be a direct reaction to the 'scourge'. S/M traces itself to religious (fetishistic) rituals of punishment and redemption, trial and reward. S/M is a symbolic exorcism of the reality of pain and mortality through strict, sterile ritualistic reenactment. In that sense S/M is sex mutated into Christian dogma, and its resurgence may stem from a similar impulse as the revival of fundamentalism.

     Ted and Stef are married doctors who live in a luxurious gated New Jersey bedroom community. The house showcases prominent photos of their scrubbed blond children, ages four, six and ten, silvered-copper furniture, murano-glass doorknobs, and Hockneys on copper-leafed walls. Balinese music twangs through massive speakers. "The kids are at Grandma's—normally we keep the den locked," Stef explains, offering me a tray of sushi. "We avoid clubs because of our professional image, so this is the best we can do. We do hope you'll participate. S/M is an icebreaker." The 30 or so members of Stef and Ted's social group arrive punctually and are introduced to me, first names only. They wear sweats and carry outfits in paper bags, like bums carry beer. After they change, we gather near a marble table bearing sake, wine, scotch and dainty hors-d'oeuvres. People chat: "How is your mother?" "Your team got the contract?" "Did you see the game?" The doors are locked.
      Men smoke cigars and sip single-malt, women munch, and slaves fidget. Except for a sober-looking girl of 20 and a robust 67-year-old professor who's been 'in the scene 40 years, since its inception,' most guests are in their forties, dressed in costly vests, corsets, catsuits, and cumbersome heels that sink in the plush carpet. Some full-breasted women like Stef are naked from the waist up.
     Male submissives gather about me like urchins on a street: "You'll write about us?" "What exactly do you want to know?" A pushy collared slave named Max recites a lifestory everyone's heard before: "I was a sickly kid. I'd lie in bed and rub against the sheets to turn my pain to orgasm. I read the Stations of the Cross and Jesus whipping the money-changers and wanted to be a martyr; I fasted and knelt; when the rest of the family was watching TV, I was in the bathroom whacking myself with a ping-pong paddle.This endurance made me less of a nerd. In College I went to S/M farms and built a dungeon, but it felt fake until I met my wife. It was a relationship with a man she'd never dreamed of?a gender demolition. I'm her houseboy. She decides where I sleep, what I eat, where I eat, if I eat, everything. We fuck with her on top in a strap-on?I like being penetrated more than she does. We've been monogamous 16 years and have a contract like Sacher-Masoch's for life. She owns me, which is a tremendous responsibility for her." Is she the breadwinner? "She does my payroll, taxes, and trains rottweilers. I'm an eye-surgeon. At work I'm a tyrant. It feels like a split personality, but it's perfectly balanced." He is a fine-boned man with a neatly trimmed beard, antique frames and unemotional, watchful, doctor's eyes. "Trust me, I've had decades of therapy on this."
     At his leash's end, I notice his wife say to other wives holding leashes: "I put him in collar and jockstrap and had him run on all fours, chase the ball, pick it up in his mouth and put it at my feet. The kids were laughing. It's good discipline for them. Next time he misbehaves, I'll take him on a dog walk round the block." I stand aghast, absolutely speechless as I picture those children. "S/M couples don't divorce," she tells me in her Betty Boop voice, noticing my recoil. She sweeps her hand to include everyone present. "We have the white picket fence, the American Dream. More women would see their dreams come true if they understood that men want to be overpowered."
     "My wife and I like strangulation," Max gossips on; "she chokes me as she comes. It produces a bond you never get in any other relationship; a huge trust. It's the ultimate intimacy." Do they ever fuck without violence? "In Mommy role, she has me eat formula in bottles. She read up on baby-men and bought me diapers and big pacifiers. I like to operate in diapers," he chuckles.
      Louis, another leashed slave in leather thong and shaved scrotum, interrupts Max: "S/M is about going through fire and coming out a man.Your mistress is your platoon leader, your S/M buddies your comrades. It's community. Submission is a desire to be special, significant. History used to be intense. We had things to die for. Now we have S/M. S/M is an act of courage, and courage is a natural heroin shot." Louis is a millionaire race-car aficionado, and a Salomon Bros. trader.
     Stef asks if I'm having fun. I ask how she got started in S/M. "Ted introduced me to it," she says with a blissful smile. "I met him at a conference; no man had captivated me like that. A month after our first date, I was wearing his rings through my labia. Me! I was never so happy. I swooned into his arms and stayed there." I ask Ted how he got into it. "Millions of years of social condition-ing have made men the aggressors," he says quietly. "We're descended from men who raped. Consensual sex is new; it's not cool to say, but most women I know could use a heavy hand in bed." His mirthless laugh rings uneasily. "It's only roleplaying," Stef enthuses with an enlightened tourist's smile. "I feel sexy all day if Ted spanks me in the morning before he goes to the hospital. S/M frees me from shame and from the anxiety of having to orgasm. I was socialized to please men; bondage makes my desire to please irrelevant." She overcomes her Calvinism by punishing herself for her pleasure; she finds freedom by being whipped into senselessness. I'd say she buys into repression wholeheartedly if she needs to be 'forced' into sex. "This theory of S/M being the product of repression is hogwash," Ted retorts. "We laugh at repression; we use sex in its purest, rawest power."
     Ted invites us to his den, coyly announcing, "The house safe word is 'rape'." The den walls are black aluminum and lit with flickering candles. My hosts give me a tour of their 'state-of-the-art ' racks, manacles, swings, a coffin with a leather lid, a 'Black Maiden' sarcophagus embedded with blades. I wonder what this Bluebeard's forbidden room does to their children's imaginations.
     The guests cheerfully help themselves to pegboards of tools and couple in 'tableaux.' Max's wife shackles him to Colonial stocks and applies a bull's pizzle to his shuddering back; he lets out low growls and fervid streams of Thank you Mistress's. Her beatings are methodical, devoid of anger or passion or lust. Soon she glistens with sweat. She lashes his back, then stomach, then nipples. His eyes are bloodshot. No one flinches. No one coughs. It's like being in a theater or a church. He is shrieking as she inserts a dildo in his anus and stuffs the pizzle into his mouth; he kisses it.
     "Watch his technique," Roger, the 67-year-old chemistry professor, whispers in my ear; he's already hog-tied his 20-year-old date in knots and sealed her in the coffin. "As the endorphins build, the cone of positive pain widens and the top gets more range. Tools matter less than technique. S/M is body jazz—I know where I go, but I improvise my way. It's like any work of art." He leaves momentarily and returns with the empty cheeseboard. "This makes a sublime splat," he says didactical-ly. "So do spatulas, flyswatters, mixers, vice grips, shoe stretchers; an egg opener is a cock ring, a rubber glove a hood. The world is kinky." His crafty gray eyes watch to see if his words turn me on. "I travel the Eastern seaboard conducting private sessions with women who want to submit to me. May I give you an honorary demonstration? You have to try it to write about it. I've won over many vanillas. S/M is like lab work, conducting a chemical experiment; especially with a vanilla." S/Ms believe we'd all love sex their way, if we were not too inhibited to admit our deepest desires.
     "You don't want to be hopelessly mired in your genitalism," Roger lectures. The laboring couples before us duly direct their sexual energies away from their aroused or idle genitals, which they carry like more props they can use to recreate bodily carnage, or embellish it. S/M directs the erotic impulse away from genital copulation, inoculating the original object of desire.A pewter Buddha is burning floral incense. Philip Glass is on the stereo. Louis is giving head to his wife's boot; as she shoves the heel down his throat, he emits a muffled moan, like he's just entered a woman. Stef prances around with a saddle on her back. If she slows down, Ted's riding crop flicks her nipples, making her jump like a skittish thoroughbred. The sight of this friendly panting woman performing like a prize horse in a contest ring disturbs me. Ted mounts her, whips her ass more soundly, rubs his chaps on her skin, digs his stirrups into her hips, and rides her, smiling contentedly.
     "If I put myself in your mind," Roger whispers, his voice beginning to drip with contempt, "you're thinking Ted Bundy. So, I'll let you have my submission." He pulls down his pants and lies on a saddle, presenting me with a withered butt. "Take your discomfort out on me." For a second, there is pregnant silence; everyone is watching me. I do want to silence his patter and I don't want to seem hopelessly mired. I want to remain outside the grip of his authority; but his logic co-opts me. So I finally pick up a red suede flogger. Don't say another word, I order him in the chilly timbre I've heard tops use, one sound from you and I stop. I aim at fat and endeavor to produce a steady rhythm of chastening stings and puffs of his breath. My palms get clammy, my mouth dry. The swish on his frail skin frightens me. I am using a stranger as I have only used an inanimate object before—a mattress, a dusty rug, a TV set that won't work. I have no motive for this act. I force all empathy out of my mind. The margin of error seems enormous, and the encounter is not at all sexual. I feel very distant from this prone body I'm being 'intimate' with. I don't feel any raw, pure sexual power surging in my body. In fact I feel mitigated, replaceable. An S/M relationship is not between people but their tools of pain, which are insensible extensions of each other.

     Back at my hotel room, I find Daphne in an underdressed heap outside my door, patiently waiting to talk to me about her enslavement. She informs me her improptu visit has been ordered by Roy, her Master. I'm flustered because I never called any of Roy's slaves. It must have angered him.
     She looks at me with awe. She combines the caring frumpy air of a nun and the flaunted ardor of a precocious adolescent. She's in her forties, with a plump capable body and a guileless clement expression. She apologizes for 'not changing into vanilla clothing': she 'wasn't told to'. Even as I find my key, she's extolling Master Roy: "He's a lifeguard: he inspects dungeons to make sure things are done right. I've had many owners. I've been bartered and sold. He's the meanest, the most detached and paranoid. He's my life source." She leans against the wall, her body contorted in the anguish of not knowing how to be around me. I ask why her erogenous zones require increasing physical and mental abuse. "Pain is an acquired taste, like sushi. I am a pain slut. I've ended in the hospital, like in 91/2 Weeks. My therapist put me on drugs to decrease my sex drive. But sex and S/M are different. S/M is freedom." Her only freedom I can perceive is freedom to give up her freedom. How can slavery, a vilified custom, be an attractive lifestyle to her? "It's a safety net," she says. "Everybody saves themselves as they can. Master Roy is good at protecting himself. S/M guards him from his rage.People who are fragile, like fine china, need to protect themselves and not waver unstably from lamb to beast. Since 1987 he hasn't been able to have sex," she adds, suddenly changing tune in an outburst of dispirited defiance. "He doesn't know how to orgasm and trust, he's killed his feminine part. He's denying the soul. He's dead inside. There's beauty in that because there's intensity."
     She sits on my bed and cries for a while, fists clenched. She wanted to cut her wrists today in the shower, but she had to call Roy for permission and he didn't give it. "He sent me to you. But if I can menstruate, why can't I cut my wrists?" she says in a simple twist of logic. "Men live outside themselves and don't understand. We women have to do what we need to stay alive. I talk to God about that. I made the decision to live with God. And that too was a mistake. I recreate my abuse to get control of the original act that left me powerless. My parents beat me. It's a terrible fact." I find her hazy, possibly endorphin-overdosed. "I'm giving birth to myself right now and it's excruciating. The body is not enough. That's why I beat it. The body is the seat of trauma. My Master saves me from myself." Intense pain may erase her memories or fears, but it doesn't kill them, I suggest; if it did, she'd quit S/M when she healed. "Maybe I haven't found the right Master yet. Any time Madame I may serve you, I will do whatever I can. No one will ever know what you do in this room, you can do with me anything you want. Feel free to make good use of me," she recites humbly and sincerely, unyieldingly helpless, and crawls under the covers. The hotel blanket quivers with her sobs. She begs me to let her stay. It all feels like a test, a critical moment when I find out who I am.
     I pity her and I fear her, as if her weakness were infectious. I have no doubt that she was ordered to spend the night. I'd like to kick her out and sabotage her Master's will, but I won't use the undeserved power she's passed on to me. She's preempted my hurting her by welcoming it, and by making me responsible for her very being. My pillow is wet with her tears. I can't send her off. So I turn off the light and spend the night in the armchair, tortured by an irrational premonition that if I doze off, I will wake up to find a bloody corpse in my bed. It's Master Roy's unarousing revenge.