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At some point in the development of this little hobby of mine-- the one in which I spend a great deal of time contemplating a culture that creates sexual transgressors and then defines them as somehow outside the norm-- I found it necessary to read that old French classic The Story of O. I wanted to understand what would drive a person, of her own free will, to allow herself to be pierced, branded, beaten, sodomized and led into subjugation, all towards the fulfillment of a sexual relationship. I found her story extreme. There's no doubt about that. I found that the author's insights into her motivations unsatisfactorily skim the surface of O's psyche. Most of the time. I say "most of the time" because there were a few moments when I was able to step outside of my own pretty deeply ingrained you-just-don't-hit-girls sensibilities and SEE what benefits and thrills she receives from her proscribed arrangement with her "master." How her giving-over of herself to another is ultimately freeing for her, how allowing herself to submit to such extremes of humiliation makes her not only immune to humiliation but also one for whom social rules were by-and-large irrelevant. And truth be told, regardless of my own blog-anonymity-related bravado, I know good and well I'm far more bottom than top-- that taking direction is more fun than giving them, that, while actual pain scares me (outside of my chiropractor's office, that is), the desire to be stripped of everything save my capacity as a vessel for someone else's pleasure exists in me. After all, for all the intellectualizing and analyzing about sex that I do, sometimes I want nothing more than to have someone so divert my attention to an extreme such that that particular gushing faucet in my head can just shut the hell off for a while!

All this is preamble and explanation for why I chose to sit through a difficult little documentary called Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Bob Flanagan was a performance and visual artist, and also poet, who died a few years ago, but lived many years beyond expectations, seeing as he had the congenital disease, cystic fibrosis. He also liked to hammer his dick to boards every now and again. Now, in real life, I've encountered a couple of folks who've got this disease, and really, I cannot imagine such a life. There was a friend of a friend in college... and I have a distinct memory of watching him push a handful of pills--probably 20 of them--into his mouth and swallow them all at once. He said he had to do it about 3 times a day. He said that he was maxed out in terms of prescription strength of all these various drugs that enabled him to continue breathing and quasi-digesting. He was 19. Most folks with this disease won't see age 30. I also remember this same kid walking me back to my dorm room one night after a party. Rather unexpectedly, he shoved me--hard--against the cement block wall of the little hallway between rooms in my quad. He tasted strangely salty (I understand that salty skin is one of the first clues many mothers of CF kids receive that something is amiss with their brand new children) and slightly chlorine-y, because he was also on the swim team. The next morning, I found bruises on my shoulder blades and scratch-marks on my stomach where he'd been gouging at my clothes. Frankly, I was thrilled, though he had desisted and left as abruptly as he'd begun.

Everything else I know about this disease I've learned from the blog of a poet with whom I went to grad school. I recall feeling fairly intimidated by this poet's formidable talents when I was in workshop with him and on the rare occasions that he posts about his disease, well, the writing is, let's say, effective on many levels.

But, in the interest of getting back to my discussion of this movie, let me just say that it's not for the weak of stomach, nor the light of heart. There's a lengthy montage of footage of Bob choking on phlegm. There's a slow, painstaking interview with Bob's wife Sheree that plays out while she's lovingly running needles through the skin in the underside of his penis. Bob trusses himself up, naked, onto various contraptions with some frequency and then he hangs there, coughing. Bob really does nail his dick to a board (not through the skin on the side but Right. Through. The. Center. And it's shot in very tight close-up.) and then he removes the nail and lets the blood spurt all over the camera for what feels like an extraordinary amount of time. There are a lot of vesicles in a penis. And then, Bob dies and Sheree's photography of his skinny, slack little corpse winds up in the film, too.

I wondered if some of this stuff might be a bit gratuitous. But Bob was a masochist first and an artist second. His sexual and artistic partnership with Sheree became as much a part of his creative project as anything else that he might have tried to explore. Interestingly, it seems that, instead of conceptualizing his sick body as a distraction from his art-making endeavors, the sick body became part of the show. Or maybe even the whole show, in and of itself. He has one piece that he called "Visible Man" which is one of those plastic models of the human body through which you can see the layers of musculature, organs, bones and everything else. He rigged the thing up such that it excreted the particular substances with which he was most familiar. Green phlegm comes out of its mouth. It shits out a gloppy mixture of tempera paint and VO5 hair conditioner so as to replicate the consistency of the bowel movements of the CF sufferer. And it comes. This particular piece seems really indicative of Bob's particular creative obsessions in that that which is sick and that which is sexual are so irreversibly tangled in his own mind that he can't help but put himself on display, in a circus of his own making.


The thing about Bob, though, is that he spends a great deal of time pontificating about how his masochistic drives have granted him unique coping strategies when it comes to facing down his disease. And it not "well, my body's in pain all the time anyway. What's a little more?" And it's also not "this clothespin in my bellybutton and this c-clamp on my nipple and this plug up my anus hurt so much worse than the infection in my lungs that I've forgotten all about that lung business." No, instead he feels that the mental discipline of overriding the body's flight instinct on the occasion of physical pain makes him stronger both mentally and physiologically. He says at one point something about how a common perception of Sub-Dom relationships is that the submissive is the weak one. He argues that, in fact, the submissive is actually, by nature, the more constitutionally substantive between the two because the submissive is the one who withstands so many barrages of torture. And comes back for more. And I guess I kinda buy that argument.

However, one of the more difficult parts of watching this film for me was watching Sheree's pre-grieving process. At one point when he's so sick he can't even move around a whole lot, she begins suggesting that they should break up. It makes him angry, because, obviously, he's in need of moral support. She says, "I really need you to submit to me. I don't feel like you love me if you don't submit to me." And more or less, he is such a slave to his impending death at this point that her demands that he demonstrate his submissiveness to her in their habitual fashion seem cruel--and petulant--beyond the usual master/slave set of rules. The disease creates this distance between the two of them and her usual tools prove wholly ineffective. During one of the final interviews with Sheree, while she's sitting in the hospital waiting room, she says something about how she doesn't think he's even a masochist anymore because the pain of the disease is too great for him to be able to process anything but. She is heartbroken then, as though, not only is the disease stealing her lover's life but it's stealing his very identity while he still lives. None of this-- her frustration, her anger, his anger, the ways in which they blame each other for the pain of it all-- is atypical of situations in which one of a couple is dying but it is interesting that the film refuses to make a saint out of this woman who built a life out of making her lover bleed. Instead, it makes her into something of a mother figure whose child is perpetually on the verge of outgrowing his need for her. And that is really at the heart of her grief.

So, uh, yeah. Happy 4th of July. Let us all give thanks that we live in a country wherein we're all free to be as kinky as we want to be, but in which our government does not see fit to throw any bones towards researching the applications of stem cells, such that some doctors might bring to light some treatments against the horrors of CF... and hundreds of other diseases. What a great fucking country.