(Note: some chunks of this may show up in my key-note speech for the Leather Leadership Conference in Atlanta next weekend. I'm mulling.)
I've been semi-out as a sadomasochist since the late 1980s and then fully out since Different Loving was published under my real name in 1993. Like most SMers of the day, I used a handle on-line and in clubs (Mistress Cleopatra in the mid-80s, then Mistress Angelique through the early 90s.) Only people who became email buddies or met me in real-life knew me as Gloria. I might have kept it that way indefinitely too if not for the political significance of using my real name instead of a fake one on DifLove.
Though I was absolutely committed to coming out to everyone in my real life I was considerably less interested in coming out, as it were, to the world. I felt reasonably sure that my friends would accept my sexual identity. If they didn't, they probably weren't real friends in the first place, so the hell with them. I also felt pretty sure that people who did not know me would likely paint me with a broad brush as "that pervert." Since I am a pervert, I don't really mind that word, at least not when used by fellow pervs. Kind of the way a Jew can make jokes about Jews but suspects it's anti-Semitism in the mouth of a gentile. When a friend or partner says I'm depraved, it makes me laugh and want to playfully prove them right. When prudes say it, I despise their ignorance and bigotry. I don't want to argue with them. I have zero interest in winning converts. I just try to write candidly about stuff I know for people who are open to my opinions.
In my therapy practice, I tend to advise clients not to reveal too much about their sexuality outside of their circles of trusted family and friends. Be honest about who you are and what you need -- but don't provide graphic details unless they are relevant. Put another way, if your friends don't regale you with stories of their adventures in intercourse, why do you need to tell them that you have a penchant for mummification?
I believe wholeheartedly in the value of candor and being yourself, without apology. What I question is the proliferation of explicit details about WIITWD. Does anyone but your partner really need to know that you prefer a whip to a paddle or that humiliation makes you wet? Yet everywhere you go on-line, you see people chatting up what they do in graphic detail and essentially inviting voyeurs to mumble, sputter and choke over our predilections.
Surely at least one reason media sensationalizes BDSM is because, let's face it, the props and scenarios are thrilling. I get that. But does the reading public? Do they realize that media types inject SM details into stories because they want to cash in on latent kinky urges in their shocked and gasping readership? Hey, how about some candid dialogue on vanilla denial? Maybe the next time a reporter adds in details about someone's SM life, they can preface it with "the following is included because we know it totally turns you on, you sick closeted fuck." No?
Another, even more depressing reason BDSM details get so much press is because words like "sadomasochist" and "perversion" reliably elicit knee-jerk prudery and frothing anti-SM rants. Controversy sells, as does thinly-veiled hate speech.
Some days it seems to me that the more there is for vanillas to see, the more there is for them to misunderstand because they are seeing BDSM out of its genuine (emotional) context. Some bloggers who pride themselves on being hip, post-modern feminists are still grinding out the same rhetoric I read in the 90s about how a woman in bondage is automatically degrading to all women, bla bla bla. Of course they had to do a thorough and laborious investigation of women in bondage to reaffirm their original prejudice, right? Meanwhile, the number of religious loonies leering and drooling at SM sex, telling themselves they're only doing it to decry its depravity, seems to be growing. Personally, I do not wish to provide sneaky orgasmic thrills to people who want to kill me. Maybe that's just me.
At age 53, I would much rather be known as a sadomasochist than as a dominatrix, precisely for this reason: I don't think the straight world DESERVES to know what role I play in the bedroom. No more so, anyway, than I am entitled to know whether my mayor performs cunnilingus or my mail-carrier likes it doggie style. The most exasperating part of the many interviews I gave for Different Loving was that while I was there to talk about the phenomenon of BDSM and power relationships and fetishes -- its social, cultural, and historical meanings -- they wanted me to tell them what I did to men in bed. I seldom answered that question directly because, as I saw it, it was totally beside the point. You don't invite Dr. Ruth onto your show to find out whether she gives her husband blow-jobs. So why are BDSMers expected to spill all the kinky beans when we are interviewed?
Which leads to my real point here. Have we come so far out that we've lost our way? Why are we so much further out than, say, the gay, lesbian and TG communities? Seems to me that gay and lesbian activists have done a much better job controlling their image, by steering dialogue away from "what we do in bed" to "what rights should we expect as Americans" -- an infinitely more fruitful political path, IMO.
If I had to analyze it (and I do, I do), I believe one reason we've lost control of the dialogue about BDSM is that public opinions about our communities are shaped by our most visible component: professional dominants. I support sex-workers of every ilk but I don't believe they are the best voices for the key issues facing the rest of us. While a pro-dom's blithe candor about intimate aspects of BDSM is fabulous and deserves its own platform, she doesn't speak for those of us who do this for love, or obsession or better orgasms and often all three. It's like an actor speaking for all environmentalists because he once starred in a movie where he saved a whale.
The vast majority of sadomasochists are, IMO, somewhat closeted. Even those who are out tend to be private people who form relationships based on physical chemistry and emotional compatibility, and prefer being with committed partners. You know, like normal people. Huh. We don't do BDSM because it pays well or seems like a fast track to 15 minutes of fame. We to do BDSM for one chief reason: it's more of a turn on than vanilla sex.
La! That's it. It's how we're wired. It's what we need to feel satisfied. And we get fucked over by law-makers, employers, clergy, neighbors, and even angry vanilla partners or ex-partners because of it. That is why open dialogue on BDSM is critical: because we are indeed an oppressed sexual minority, subject to busts at the whim of prosecutors, demeaned by religious leaders, dissed by feminists, exploited by media, and bereft of all legal rights, as anyone who has ever wished they could add a submissive or a dominant to their insurance policy knows. In Georgia, I have absolutely no legal status as being in a relationship with my girlie partner, although we have co-habited for about seven years now. She can't add her Master to her insurance policy as long as he is legally married to me. Poly people, SM people, and especially poly SM people are really pretty fucked. Health benefits is the tip of a giant bureacratic iceberg that includes inheritance issues and decision-making for critically ill partners. Meanwhile, since laws do not make exceptions for consensual BDSM, you can't even legally consent to a spanking (because you cannot legally consent to "assault" or "domestic violence"). That means that at any time, any prosecutor who really wants to screw you, can screw you for having rough sex, whether you're doing it at a club or in the privacy of your own home.
Can media be blamed for always digging out the BDSM details in any and every story they find when BDSMers themselves fuel the fascination with lurid details? When activists stress elements of play is that activism or is it exhibitionism? I suspect it leaves the public believing that BDSM is all about the sex acts you perform rather than, say, a full-fledged sexual identity which should be placed into proper perspective on that most fluid and diverse of gamuts known as adult sexuality.
I think the specifics of our fantasies and sex games are irrelevant to the public debate about BDSM. What's important is that we develop the political power to fight job discrimination, selective prosecution, and all the other social injustices we have lived with. Perhaps we need to regroup and move a few toes back into the closet and then come out fighting for an end to anti-SM prejudice and for equal treatment under law.
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