BDSM AND MAGIC

I practiced magic with my work as a dominatrix. 

A quick word about words. The word power for me means energy but more than energy or vibes or even flow states. It is a fundamental vitality that is in everything to a greater or lesser extent. Personal power is called Mana in Maori and Megin in Old Norse. It is not good or bad in itself but a river to be stepped into, and we choose what we do with that to the extent we are aware of it and can manage our own power. 

I have written previously about how sex can change states of consciousness. You know this: a shifting in time, a tampering with memory, a loss of boundaries. This is how magic is done. In the D/s part of BDSM (Domme/sub), submissives experience 'sub space' where they experience this change of consciousness. It is not necessarily transcendent, although it may be, but it is often a state of openness, vulnerability, and changed perception. Through pain can come ecstasy, and that is transcendent. Humiliation can impart self knowledge and a sense of being part of something bigger than oneself, that is meaningful across people. For a wise submissive, getting it right, subjugating ego, is a discipline in itself.

I was taught by Paddy the Sadist. Paddy came across me brand new. He was fiercely intelligent, always respectful, a gentleman and a socialist. He had taken on pretty much anyone in the community who was female and a bit subby at one time or another. His thing was pain (giving), and he was very experienced and innovative with it. I said, before we began, what if I fight you? And he looked at me sideways, and said, I will win.

Well, I was the worst submissive. I took it way too seriously and worked hard to retain my sense of self throughout our sessions. I analyzed my reactions to the nth degree. I treated the whole thing like a project. After our first session, he asked afterwards if I wanted a hug. To my surprise, I decided I did. As we hugged, I asked him, Is this the Stockholm Syndrome? And the next day, examining the bruises and feeling my heart rate up and down, I found I had little memory of how I had gained them. 

I also discovered I had limits but no gears. In other words I didn't know what my limits were until I was hard up against them. I could start off thinking this was interesting, or challenging, or useful, and ten seconds later I would be swearing and shouting and I would try to escape no matter what state I was in. I was determined not to submit. I found many things interesting, and I learned a lot, especially about the use of breath, predicament bondage ( a great intellectual exercise), and what constricting movement does to consciousness. But submit I would not.  

In the end, Paddy said to me, never get into a pissing contest with a Domme. We parted friends. I am grateful to him and consider he taught me well, although not in the way he might have hoped for. That was the first time I heard the word Domme, in relation to myself.

I have talked about sub space, but what is in it for the Dom/me? 

For a start, I want to say something about sex. We are way beyond sex in the sense of fucking or love making. Sexual arousal is a part of this but it forms only one part of the gestalt, using the term as being something that is more than the sum of its parts. There is a deep psychological pleasure in in a good flogging, but it has to be in the service of the gestalt. The gestalt is the understanding you have between you, the ritual space you make, the whole scene, and it is also often the case that the gestalt is in the service of the sub. When lives changed in my whoring room, under my cane or at the end of my truly huge strap on, that was my service to my sub. 

I think there is also a kind of Dom/me space. For me it was in flow, in intuitive knowing, in being able to predict my sub's responses as if we were dancing together. It was also in having power and working that power, in sheer energetic work, which is magic of course. It was the magical act of creating a reality, by which I don't mean LARPing at all, but weaving narrative, and controlling sensations. Mine and my sub's. This is beyond the teaching or priestessing I have mentioned before; it is an expansion of consciousness.

While the sub ascends, the Dom/me descends. While the sub expands and becomes diffuse, the Dom/me becomes more dense, more real. The sub might be transcendent, but the Dom/me is immanent. Oh, so immanent, you have no idea. 

I was fairly well into it professionally before I remade contact with the kink world. I went to a lecture and demo of erotic hypnosis. I was considering the extent to which I was playing with my subs' states of consciousness and wanted to know more. On a table was a small, cheaply produced book called 'The Forked Tongue: The Art of Treating People Badly'. I picked it up. The host actually physically took the book out of my hands, and told me kindly that it was not for beginners. I downloaded it as soon as I got home. It is by a famous Dom called Flagg who was big in the New York scene a long time ago. I did ethics in philosophy at university and Flagg should teach the course.* It is the most sophisticated exposition of ethics I have ever read. Flagg knew a lot about disruption and changing expectations, and that is magical stuff. He talked about dread. The difference between fear and dread, for Flagg, is that you can adjust to fear. You can't adjust to dread. You can plan for the dentist or the exam. You can't plan for dread, because it subverts you. Paddy the Sadist couldn't subvert me; I put all my energy into predicting his moves, even when I was an absolute novice. I got some of my best kicks out of subverting my subs. I learned to evoke dread.

I was always such a reasonable mistress, and wonderfully kind. I  so seldom raised my voice. I gave orders only once, and very quietly. I was a great believer in the CIA trick of showing the implements. I allowed my subs to choose the implements. They would choose, and then I would choose, and it was quite often not how they wanted it at all, oh no. I trained with eye contact, or the lack of it. I encouraged more sensitivity, rather than desensitizing, by being unpredictable and intuitive. Disrupting expectations is part of the work of magic, to repeat. 

I have tried to domme people I didn't like, in the course of my work. It did not go well. In vanilla sex work, you meet many different clients and you learn a bit of unconditional positive regard. You find what's attractive about them even if you have to look really hard. In sex work, you make a reality, a fantasy,a magical persona, using the magical art of glamour and the conscious use of power. That is your own magic, made for your own purposes. In BDSM, you always co-create the reality together. In that sense, whether you are bottom or top, sub or Dom/me, you are equal.

Our vanilla society thinks it has a very modern and kinda clinical take on pain. It is to be eliminated. When you are in hospital they ask your pain scale from one to ten. Clearly, one is better than ten. Clearly. But pleasure and pain are not binaries. There are states where I have been unsure whether I am experiencing pain or pleasure or something else. Whole body awareness is something else. Athletes know this too, I think, when they talk about out of body experiences when running ultra distances. There is pleasure in pain, then there is transcending both, there is a jolt of agony that means you can only be in your body, and then there is the hard grind that makes you drift above it. There is pain you know is good for you, like the hard stretch at the gym. We use the term comfort zone as if we know that the best stuff happens outside of it. I worked with male subs who had deep and complex relationships with pain. Pain is a gateway to what philosopher George Bataille calls a limit experience, which can be experienced through other ordeals such as the Shamanic vision quest, or the use of entheogens. What I think is very cool about the world of BDSM is that its inhabitants are otherwise daily people. The person at your work in the next cubicle or on the construction site might be undertaking heavy anal training to serve their master, or be nursing some weals  under their work shirt. Talking to a group of fem Dommes, they liked how they could go about their days knowing they were much more than what met the eye. I felt the same way. I have never met a BDSM or kink practitioner who did not have an enhanced capacity for self reflection.

I did not work with anyone who practiced magic as such. For them the experience was enough.  Magic goes one step further; it asks what do you do with this expanded state of consciousness or power. Magic is also intentional, as a rule, although I think accidental magic happens all the time both in the kink world and in sex work. There is often too much power floating around to be ignored. I have yet to write about what to do with that power. Meanwhile, BDSM and the kink world generally are great lessons in things that aren't called magic but actually are, and accidental or non-intentional magic, or the use of transgression for personal growth which in itself is a magical act.

I will have a bibliography at the end of all of this, but for this post I want to recommend three works:

Flagg, 'The Forked Tongue: The Art of Treating People Badly'. Go download it now on your Kindle. 

Dr Angela Puca 'Angela's Symposium'. Angela has a YouTube channel about the academic study of magic, shamanism and the occult. 'BDSM and Religion, Magick and Esotericism' is a superb interview with Dr Alison Robertson, uploaded on 20/12/21. I would very much like to meet Dr Robertson. Dr Puca's whole channel is worth a watch. 

Jonas Ceika 'CCK Philosophy' ask Cuck Philosophy on YouTube has an episode 'Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences' from October 30, 2018. This is a good quick piece on the slightly disturbing thought of George Bataille, from a genuine philosopher on the left. (I don't know what it is about mid twentieth century French philosophers - Foucault and Genet come to mind with their equally antinomian sexual practices!)

As always, blessings on you, gentle reader.

* Except he is dead unfortunately.

 

 

 

 

DODGY AS FUCK AND YOU JUST KNOW IT: THE ANATOMICAL VENUS

 She lies on her back in a glass case, like Snow White, but for grownups. She’s young and conventionally attractive. Her head is tilted back slightly on her white pillow. Her pale face is calm, even beatific. Her arms relax at her sides. It is a pose of languor. She might be very newly dead, or even sleeping. Her abdomen is peeled back to reveal her organs. A near-born baby rests within her womb. She is the medical craze of eighteenth century Europe, a life sized model designed to be viewed and, ahem, experimented on, by the male medical students of the day. She is the Anatomical Venus, an exquisite example of eighteenth century aestheticized science.  This was a time when Europeans were fascinated by anatomy and artists captured the wary eroticism of it with paintings of old male doctors spending way too much time on their own with young female cadavers. Its piquancy comes from true High Transgression. It is not just being naughty. Anyone can break laws and norms unthinkingly and selfishly.  The purpose here is lofty and serious and knowing. And yet it is as dodgy as fuck and you just know that intuitively.  It is in the space of tension between lofty scientific endeavour and Baudelaisian smut that High Transgression flourishes.

TRANSGRESSION, MORALITY AND AESTHETICS

'Confessional', the true story I wrote to illustrate the idiosyncratic meanings around sex, also illustrates the power of transgression. For this man, the power of what he was doing came from the certainty that it was wrong. Transgression is bigger than that, though. If transgression was merely about wrongdoing, many of our daily weaknesses and not a few of our major sins and crimes would be transformative for us. In fact, most of the things we think of as wrong just keep us stuck in low places. We learn nothing except rinse and repeat. Transgression means to carry across. It is crossing boundaries, finding edges, jumping off, taking what we know into the unknown, from light to dark, from dark to light.

TRANSGRESSION HIGH AND LOW

A woman I knew was experimenting with Left Hand Path magic and wanted to explore transgression. She worked in a supermarket where there was a door only customers were allowed through. All the other staff routinely broke the rule and went through this door, but she had always been painfully law abiding and never went through it. For her, going through this door was an act of High Transgression. She thought about it for some time, made a kind of pact with herself to do it, and after she had done it she was a braver person who had been through not just a door in a supermarket but a minor rite of passage.

When it comes to sex, low transgression is fun and frequent. It is the frisson of the forbidden liaison, or the thrill of doing something new. Sexual acts such as dogging (sex in public) are always transgressive simply because they go against social norms. High sexual transgression may or may not look similar. Perhaps simply allowing yourself an orgasm is transgressive for you. Perhaps genuine Self love is transgressive for you. Perhaps it is doing That Thing. I’m sure you know the one I mean.

The stupidest thing I have ever done was break beer bottles on a picnic bench in a park. I mean I have done lots of stupid things, but this was a conscious attempt at low transgression, in that it was a study in meaningless damage. Come on, said my friend, in his best Homer Simpson fashion. It’s fun to smash things. So I did, to please him and it wasn’t fun at all. I did not come out of it with any useful learning and I mention it here as a tasteless example of naughtiness without any potential for growth or beauty. It was not High Transgression.

 

 FEATURES OF HIGH TRANSGRESSION

High Transgression is Aestheticized: It is consciously beautiful or consciously challenging. It knows how it appears. Some modern art experiments with forms of ugliness, deformity or decay located in the body in attempts to confront and challenge. I refer you to the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, and the paintings in blood of Vincent Castiglia. It’s become a trope of sorts, within the art world. Just add corpses! And yet, compare this with common or garden Low Transgression porn, which is also self conscious but is usually designed to reaffirm the tastes you already have, so that you want more and more of it.

High Transgression is Difficult: It has to stretch you mentally and/or physically. It has to take time and effort. It tests endurance, patience, strength and courage.

High Transgression is Deliberate: You can’t do it accidentally or retrospectively, although you can reflect on something transgressive you have done and then do it again as an act of High Transgression. You can say, wow that was weird and gross and I liked it, but that just makes it low transgression. High Transgression is always intentional, and therein lies a good part of the magic.

High Transgression is Mature: It is made by healthy adults, and it is never trauma-based or regressive. There is much that is therapeutically useful in sexual transgression, and I have given examples of men using painful sexual submission to play our early trauma in a safe manner. This is not necessarily High Transgression, if it is serves to comfort, reaffirm and calm the psyche, rather than to challenge it. But it may be High if it results in an intentional remaking of the self or genuinely seeks to cross boundaries.

High Transgression is Spiritually Risky: If you get it wrong, you form more of the unhealthy attachments from which you are trying to free yourself. Hindu sadhus or holy people called the Aghori, in India,  use transgression in a very deliberate manner. They eat rotting human corpses from the sacred Ganges river, meditate sitting on corpses, and in a final initiation ingest semen, meat, forbidden grains, urine and faeces. They are frequently antisocial, assaulting those who approach them. All of this is about detachment from material things and the ego. They give up all social attachments as well as all sense of the normative, in order to propel themselves into the void. This is Left Hand path practice in its most rigorous form.

 High Transgression is best done sparingly. Plan it, reflect on it, design it with care, use it for self reflection and spiritual development. Does all this planning and thinking and consciousness bullshit take the fun out of it? I think not. I think it enhances the experience and deepens it. Low transgression is morally arid, dull and stereotyped in comparison. Porn can often be low transgression. I am not at all against porn, but at its worst it has that stereotyped, repetitive, arid quality that means watching it is unlikely to gain the viewer transcendence.