A dear friend and I were talking over coffee about “Fifty Shades of
Grey” now that the movie has come out. She has read all three books, a very
respectable climb, something like reading “War and Peace” front to back, or
maybe reading the first five books of the Old Testament without stopping. To
achieve something like that, I suspect she has an unexplored kinky streak
inside her but so far I haven’t asked. But she got me re-thinking the world of
BDSM (Bondage Domination Submission Masochism) and how all that works. I myself
am not kinky as far as I can know, which I kind of regret. I think I’m missing
out on something. I might be a more interesting, or relatively less boring
person, if I had a kinky streak. 

I think that Dominance and Submission are to sex what espresso is to
ordinary coffee. They are extreme expressions, concentrated to their essence,
of what has always existed in a latent form in all eroticism – the dynamic of
power.

I want to make a distinction here between eroticism and sex. To my way of
thinking they are not the same, just as creativity and, say, writing poetry is
not the same. Eroticism is your nature, your wiring, how you relate to the
world and to the experience of union, and most especially the frustrated desire
for union. Sex is a media for expressing eroticism but its not the only media
of expression. Sex is an act that you do, just as writing a poem is an act.
Fucking is an act. Eroticism is who you are.

The forces of nature work off a fundamental state of existence, which
is the dynamic state of latent, unmanifested energy. This restless energy
acquires a direction and then takes on a form that expresses it’s unique nature
for that brief moment. This is the heart of the mystical experience with the
spiritual. This is also the heart of eroticism, which further convinces me that
spirituality, creativity and eroticism are three faces of the same god. It is
the same quality of energy in three distinct, but related forms of expression.
It explains to me the competitive dynamic that has always existed between
religion and sex. These are sister forces vying for dominance in our psyche.

In erotic relationships, and in the act of sex, there is a dynamic of
dominance and submission even among the unkinky. Its the nature of the desire
manifesting itself into the motion of the act. My criticism of some of the limp
wristed attempts at BDSM fiction I’ve read here and there is that this dynamic
is not being understood by the authors. There’s too much spanky-spanky and
mustache twirling, without any actual eroticism happening. Too much What, not
enough Why.

Four skillful writers in this genre form have always stood out to me
regarding this power dynamic – Lisabet Sarai, Remittance Girl, M. Christian and
in the past Mike Kimera. These are good writers for the ambitious BDSM author
to study because in their best stories they have never been about the What,
they have been about the Why. Eroticism in it’s mysteries is what we’re talking
about. I think this is partly because at least two of them have had intimate
personal experience with being submissives or dominants in reality. They know
the emotional territory first hand. I also recommend people who need a clue to
study the autobiographies, and there are plenty out there, of professional
dominatrices such as ”Whip Smart” by Melissa Febos. They tell similar tales.
What does a submissive do? Allow herself to be handcuffed and spanked? No! That
is incidental. Who gives a shit what she does – WHY does she do it? What need
does it serve, rather than, say knitting baby booties instead? What is
“subspace”? What does it feel like, how do you get there? Why is it so
addictive that you crave to go back? If you don’t know what “subspace” is, you
need to stop writing and start studying.

Think about this for a moment – what is naked?  There are many levels
of naked, more than we usually think of associated with that word.  There
is the basic nudity of the body, right before love making.  But there are
deeper, non-physical levels of exposure as well.  The nudity of the raw
emotions exposed in those moments we let our inner guard down.  Think of a
woman in the throes of orgasm, racked with the wildest pleasure, longing to
experience more and deeper, and yet fighting the feeling of emotional rawness
that is tearing her open.  Imagine looking in that woman’s eyes in the
instant of her perfect rawness, her perfect, ecstatic vulnerability.  The
mind in conflict with the body, the mind fearing to let go completely, the body
demanding everything.  We long to let go.  The more in control we
are, the more we long to let go of the rope for just a while.  Its what we
experience dancing, that Dionysian letting go of control, or voodoo trances in
which some allow themselves to be possessed, or evangelicals allowing
themselves to be taken by the Holy Spirit and babble in strange tongues. 
It’s what we experience in mediation when the mind finally, at long last, falls
silent for a moment. 

There is within us, a tender, wounded emotional core.  The core no one
sees, no one touches, too often not even touched by ourselves.  Yet I
think every soul longs to be touched there by a worthy person, someone they can
trust their soul to, their ultimate nakedness to.  Maybe that’s why people
follow charismatic gurus, or fall in love over and over without success. 
I think, in some ways, that is what subspace is.  I would like to
understand that better, that soul nakedness, which is maybe achieved when you
allow a person, within specific boundaries, an absolute trust and power over
you, even the power to inflict pain so that for a while you are no longer
afraid of pain, because in giving a person that permission  you have given
yourself permission too.  Maybe subspace is when you also allow that
tenderest place to be touched deeply by another, even a stranger.  In
fact, maybe a stranger is best, someone whose power is ultimately
disposable.

 Some are born kinky. Some have kinky thrust upon them. Some of us are
forever kinky-challenged. And then there is the seduction of the innocent.
Finding a girl, like Ana in the Fifty Shades novel, who has a kinky side she
doesn’t even know exists and bringing it out and making it bloom like a dark
rose. BDSM classics such as “The Story of O” and the “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy
of Anne Roquelaure (Anne Rice discreetly disguised)are all about this dark
blooming, as well as Lisabet Sarai’s early novels such as “Raw Silk” and
Remittance Girl’s savage novel “Gaijin”. These are not about the old
spanky-spanky, but about the unfolding of something hidden in response to a
power dynamic that is bitter and delicious and sometimes terrifying.

Every act of social intercourse has power dynamics. Having a cup of coffee
with a friend has unspoken power dynamics. The act of sex, as well as the act
of courtship, is the constant shifting of unmanifested power dynamics coming
into manifestation. Pick up a copy of Anne Hooper’s “Kama Sutra” coffee table
book and look at the color photos explicitly illustrating heterosexual sex
positions. Each position of man and woman joined in the act expresses a power
dynamic which you can viscerally feel, either when you’re engaged in the act of
copulating with a partner or fantasizing about it. And you need to be aware of
the physical and emotional feel of this dynamic if you ever hope to write
effectively about it. It isn’t just that a man assumes the missionary position
above a woman. A manly man, a man with some big balls hanging down MOUNTS a
woman in that position. Mounts her like a fucking stud horse. He takes her,
dominates her gently or strongly with his rising tension of male assertiveness
and sweet Jesus he mounts her and fucks her silly. Make no doubt about it. It
may be rough or it may be gentle, it may be slow, tender and loving or rough
and crazy but there’s no question who’s riding on top and who’s getting ridden.
What if the woman is on top? If the man asks her to be on top, that’s a reduced
but balanced dynamic. Partners as equals. The woman is receiving and expressing
power because he wants her to. But if the woman rolls him on his back,
you-come-here-to-mama-you-sexy-sonuvabitch, climbs on top and she mounts him,
puts her man inside herself and works that thing good, that’s her goddess
coming out. She’s taking him, and I think that is the very sexiest thing a man
can pray for, being screwed brainless and fuckless by a goddess. Doggy style?
Male assertive. Standing up? Could be either or. Ankles over her head? Male
assertive almost to the edge of rape. Each position, and the act performed in that
position, expresses a dynamic of who is asserting and who is submitting – but
only in that moment. Enthusiastic and adventurous lovers might switch positions
and acts several times in the moment of passion with the power of dominance and
submission switching back and forth like alternating current. Rarely is it in
balance for long, not if they’re having fun.

And then there’s what the dominatrices call “Topping from the Bottom”.

Think about oral sex. There’s an act which is fraught with power. In a scene
in my story “The Lady and the Unicorn”, my vampire girl Nixie assertively
seduces and dominates her mortal male lover by suddenly opening his pants,
going down on him and taking his phallus in her mouth. This is an act, not of
female submission, but of strong female dominance. She has never done this for
him before, only thought of it on the spur of the moment, and at first he’s
startled and then thrilled. On her part, this is a calculated and even
predatory act of initiating fellatio on him in order to thoroughly cast her
spell over him. As long as she has those lips around his dick, he is helpless
man jelly in her hands. Experienced women know this power very well. A good
lover will generously and lovingly perform oral sex on a woman, but this
is a subtle act. The power dynamics in giving cunnilingus are not well defined
in the moment of the act. It is more of a giving and savoring experience than a
dominance. Giving oral sex to a woman in hopes of bringing her to orgasm is
more of a eliciting act as if you were leading her on a dance floor, drawing
something out of her carefully and patiently. When a woman is giving oral sex
to a man in reality, the man clearly feels his male energy rising inside of him
as though it were being honored in some way. It is a thrilling experience to
see another human being on their knees in front of you giving you pleasure. You
feel so powerful and men love to feel powerful and are easily seduced by this
feelng. But power is an illusion we bestow. Sometimes bestowing power, as in
Nixie’s impulsive act of seduction, can be an illusion, the woman giving the
man the feeling of dominance when in fact she has brought him exactly to the
emotional place where she wants him to be. That’s Topping from the Bottom.

In another story of mine, “You Belong to Me”, Frankenstein’s creature is
having a passionate love affair with a blind woman in the mountains, which is
fated to end badly. They live together, absolutely adore each other and hump
like bunnies. She has carefully and meticulously trained him how to make love
to her. In a scene of love making he pleads, demands, over and over for her to
say to him “I’m your woman”, and she refuses because this is the power dynamic
of that scene. He needs to hear those words and she teasingly dangles the words
just out of his reach every time, making him more and more fiercely passionate
as he tries to excite her into saying them. That’s a power dynamic.

 That scene is not about sexual expertise, although she has made him an
expert. It’s about power between two people who love and understand eachother
and know how to play off eachother’s hunger, working it up into a frenzy. They
don’t just fuck, they make love, with knowledge. The sexual tension in the
scene doesn’t come from what they do. It’s from why they do it.

 I think so many of the sex scenes I see these days fail to reach me
emotionally, because that is the missing element. The dynamic of power. I don’t
want to know what they’re doing, I want to know why. How did they get there?
What do they see in eachother that makes them different? Why don’t they play
miniature golf instead? It’s not always the guy doing the mounting, who maybe
just thinks he’s on top when he’s actually being played by his lover; “topped
from the bottom” in the dominatrix parlance, like an expert fisherman with a
lure.