BDSM: The New Church

In the baby-boomer generation and the generations that follow, as the Church fails, the commercial BDSM industry takes it place in providing people with a feeling of 'divine rapture' -- and if it continues to do so, underground sexuality will become one of the most powerful psyche-shaping forces of the modern world. Already, this segment of human sexuality that is considered 'shameful' and 'unholy' by the teachings of churches has become a multi-billion dollar industry, growing steadily and unlikely to stop anytime between now and the destruction of all life on the planet. Interestingly, this 'shameful' side of the modern world (actually, it goes back tens of thousands of years, but was not commodified until our current era) was created by and for the average person; the average God-believing, sex-seeking, materialistic person with a background flooded in Judeo-Christianity.

When I worked as a BDSM practitioner (i.e. dominatrix) in Seattle from 1999 to 2004, I had a list of questions for each person I spoke with on the telephone, and another extended list of questions for each person I saw live in my studio/theater. Two of the questions I asked all of my clients and prospective clients were "what religion are you, if any?" and "what religion, if any, did you grow up surrounded by or immersed in?" Of approximately 6,000 persons I asked this question to (most by telephone) over a five-year period, about 80 percent of them told me that they were 'Christian', about 15 percent told me they were 'Jewish', and of the 80 percent who said they were Christian, about 75 percent told me they were 'Catholic'. Only 5 percent of those 6,000 people I talked to said that they are some other religion, such as Hindu or Buddhist, or they were non-theistic, without any religious beliefs.

With this data we can say that it appears that in the US, the kinky sex industry is propagated almost entirely by Judeo-Christians. My clients were from many different places all over the US, with some from Canada, the UK, and Australia, who visited Seattle on business trips. Other dominatrices I knew who were practicing in New York City had much higher percentages of Jewish clients, some even 80 percent, and that is because New York has a very high population of Jews.

Well now, what are all these Judeo-Christians doing visiting dominatrixes, asking to be tied up, put in chains, whipped, flogged, caned, poked with needles, burned with candle wax, and countless other means of being put into measured, controlled, sustained pain while requesting to be bound by rope or chain in a crucifix position, on a St. Andrew's bondage cross? Is it to try to make themselves feel like God actually does exist after all? That may sound like a preposterous idea at first glance, that people engage in extreme role-playing scenes involving being tortured, in order to feel some kind of 'religious ecstacy', (which does not need to include a feeling of 'God' because God is just a fetish object, an idea used as a conduit to reach the ecstatic state, and that same 'divine rapture' can be achieved through other kinds of fetishes) but if we look very closely at the symbolic meanings of the objects, gestures, movements, and requests involved in these rituals of pain and humiliation, we find that below the surface, there is indeed a heavily religious theme being played out.

The underground alternative sex industry is a very complex phenomenon with multiple layers, and it would take hundreds of pages of a book for me to explain everything I've discovered about human nature during the 15 years that I spent working the sex industry -- first as an exotic dancer in Miami, San Francisco, and Texas (of all places!), then as a BDSM and fetish stage performance artist (which was fantastic fun!), and finally as a dominatrix in Seattle -- but there is a common theme that appeared hundreds of times to me over the years that I experimented in BDSM and fetishism, both in my private life beginning at age 18, and as a hired professional more than a decade later, and that single, significant common theme is the focus of this article.

The first and main thing above all else that I noticed about these hundreds of men who visited me is that they were all craving intimacy, but not really 'sexual intimacy' though they may have had fantasies about sex, the kind of intimacy that I am referencing goes far beyond a mere act of sex, and comes from the absolute core of the human. Intimacy, in my definition, is a very deep emotional exchange in a moment of extraordinary time in which one is totally real, totally helpless and vulnerable, not hiding behind an ego, not pretending to be strong and unafraid of the uncertainty and pain of life. It is this level of intimacy, of authentic exchange, that has tremendous healing potential, no matter the medium used to create it. It is in this way that the profane becomes the sacred. Because the men who propagate the sex industry, especially the segment involving extreme acts such as S/M or D/H, were not consciously aware of their own loneliness, fear, and pain, their craving for intimacy appeared as a craving for an erotic and painful experience.

My conception of intimacy includes sharing the fact that we will die and that all we really want is to live as fully alive as possible before we die, to feel fully, to breathe deeply, to not deny any part of the whole self, to allow all of it in its entirety, to simply let it all be whatever it is, in all its ecstacy and agony, and to share this deepest part of ourselves with others as our witnesses, friends, lovers, and fellows on the same journey. Intimacy is a connection from the heart, from the core part of ourselves, and does not have to involve sex, but because most persons experience a profound intimate exchange only through their sexuality -- they are not aware that intimacy can be achieved in many ways other than through sex -- they constantly go back to the only thing they know, their sexuality. Those who have never had a profound intimate exchange outside of a sexual context tend to seek sex whenever they are actually craving intimacy. So, the main common thread is the intense craving for a profoundly intimate exchange. Why? Simply because it is this experience that heals the heart, and anyone who lives in the world and is not zombified by constant escapes into empty entertainment, but who feels the effects of life on this planet in this age, is constantly heart-broken and in need of purification and healing of the heart on a regular basis.

Those who find solace in religion usually experience a profound intimate exchange when they participate in their religion, in the form of attending evangelical diatribes, prostrating themselves before the icons which represent to them the lost or inaccessible parts of their psyche, and whatever other rituals their religions gives them as a means to create a deeply intimate exchange with themselves, with their self-created fetish object (i.e. 'God' used as conduit to enter a transcendent state of being), or with another zealot belonging to the same cult or religious sect. For those who find immersion in a chosen set of beliefs about supernatural entities, religion works, but for most, religion fails to deliver its promises, and therefore some other means of reaching the same aim is unconsciously sought because it is a human need to find a way to transcend the toil and sorrow of ordinary life.

The formula is simple : intimacy = vulnerability + authenticity = healing + growing

It would probably be difficult for people with no experience in BDSM to imagine that it could actually be a medium used for personal growth. It may be easier to recognize this if we think about what sort of state we are in whenever we go through a process of profound personal growth: we go through a range of very intense emotions, mostly pain, fear, and anguish, while inside a helpless, vulnerable state while a guide, orchestrator, or administrator of the process takes on the duty of ensuring our safety. The process ends in joy, rapture, or happiness (which of course wears off through life's toil, and the ritual needs to be repeated again). The natural process of healing through an intimate exchange contains all of the same elements at the BDSM scene, and it may happen in a variety of contexts such as the psychotherapist's office, at home with a friend or lover, on the professional massage therapist's table, in a moment alone in the forest with Nature as the orchestrator, etc. The difference between the man who engages in a compulsive BDSM scene and the man who visits some sort of therapist for a specific purpose is that the former is unconscious of his motivations, while the latter is aware on a conscious level why he is seeking a healing practitioner.

Aside from the obvious longing for intimacy on a profound level, I also observed through my years of experience, that the physical pain requested by the men who visit professionals who play a sadistic role, was symbolic of the emotional pain that these men were already in before they arrived at the domina's doorstep, and what they were actually doing on an unconscious level, was to connect with their existential angst or anguish through a symbolic ritual which allowed them and encouraged them to express their pain. The pain that the dominatrix gives is incidental pain, the man knows that he is not really being physically harmed even though it hurts to be whipped, and this fact allows his mind to let go of the need for control, and then he begins to enter into his body, into the pain that is already there and is brought forth out of its burial or suppression or denial, through the incidental, superficial pain caused by the dominatrix. If we think about the alternative sex industry as only a cultural phenomenon, we must ask: when are men allowed in society to cry? When are men allowed be in pain and admit how much they hurt? When are men allowed to sob and scream and feel helpless and out of control? These emotions, though they are natural, and beautiful because they require courage to express, are forbidden expression by society because society fears these emotions and regards them as signs of weakness and failure. It is ironic that this kind of suppression is demanded by society, as if there is something unnatural about feeling such things, when the society itself creates the feelings through its constant psychological brutality of its inhabitants.

Considering the phenomena that underlie the sex industry, we can see that social, cultural, and religious sicknesses go underground and appear in the sex industry. So, when the man is tied up to a bondage cross, and is being whipped and screaming as loud as he can, what he is doing unconsciously is using the incidental pain of the whip striking him as a doorway or conduit to access the buried, forbidden existential pain that brings him to the dominatrix. I always found it amazing whenever men with no experience of being put into physical pain requested that experience, I would begin by barely striking them, using a very soft flogger that really couldn't hurt even if I were to strike as hard as I could (I tested all of my whips, floggers, etc. on myself before I ever used them on anyone else) and some of these men would scream loudly even when barely touched, which I thought was interesting because it revealed that they were bringing an immense amount of fear into the scene from their personal lives. Even though we had a discussion and it was made clear that I would not actually harm them physically and they were capable of trusting my professional skills, some were still extremely fearful far beyond the extent of what was actually happening to them, which also showed that their fear was carried into the scene, not created by the scene. It was even more interesting when these particular men insisted on being put into pain even though they were terrified of the prospect. Clearly, it was a way for them to express the fear they carried in their hearts, using pain as a tool to strip away the unreal, leaving only the most real aspects of their lives. After contemplating this for some time, I realized that this fear of pain is fear of life itself, because pain is unavoidable in life; it is a natural part of life that must be embraced and dealt with directly, in order to mature, grow stronger, and thus become capable of moving towards fulfillment of higher potentials in life. To push the natural pain of life away in denial is to create an emotional disturbance and to stultify personal growth.

Though it is true that the people who visit dominatrixes are emotionally disturbed, and their disturbance is exactly what brings them to the domina, it is also true that almost everyone on the the entire planet is emotionally disturbed in some way (to varying degrees of course!), especially those living in industrialized societies, because these types of societies are extremely unnatural, and require people to conform to roles that society dictates rather than encouraging exploration and development of one's true self. The existential angst that is caused by this societal conditioning is enormous and nearly entirely overlooked by clinical psychology and is one of the reasons why these men turn to dominatrixes and not to psychologists, because psychologists, who live in their own fear and denial because they are just normal persons, utterly fail at knowing what to do with pain on the level contained within these men. I think that the men who visit dommes are actually instinctually looking for a modern-day shaman, and though the shamans of Western culture were all systematically killed by the Judeo-Christians out of fear and ignorance during the Dark and Mediaeval eras when religious zealots ruled the Western world, the need to go into and through one's pain, to the point of release, through a ritual with a guide, is still very much alive within the human heart and soul. It is primaeval nature. We know what we need to heal, though we may not be conscously aware of our internal wisdom, and when we're not, we tend to create bizarre rituals in an attempt to create the experience that is needed to delve down into the depths of the self, embrace the terror that lies within, and bring out, into the world, expressing it through performance art. BDSM is a type of performance art. (And like all performers, some are highly skilled while others are sloppy and immature.)

Old cultures were much better at creating these necessary performance art rituals. It was not uncommon in old cultures for whole villages to take part in elaborate rituals, sometimes lasting days or weeks, in which the purpose was to finish the unfinished, express the unexpressed, fulfill the unfulfilled, or whatever other ontological need was pressing and demanding resolution and release. Old cultures lived more closely to life and death. It seems that in the modern world, people are no longer allowed to be 'too strange', to do anything 'too weird', and the need to do healing rituals that dig deep into the core of the self has been largely relegated to the sex industry! And this is why the sex industry will continue to grow, because every year society, culture, and religion grows more and more sickened, enveloping millions of people into the organized sicknesses with very few outlets and mediums where ontological healing rituals are allowed and encouraged.