Hello, shoulder devil

*Yesterday, I went to visit the chiropractor. The first thing he said to me was, "So, I guess you're voting for Obama." I looked at him dubiously, as if to say, "There's an alternative?" He said, "What's the appeal?" What ensued was a small skirmish in which he asked me why he should pay more taxes to support people who don't work as hard as he does (You rub asses for a living, dude. And you're subsidied by bloated health insurance companies. When you work three jobs and still barely break $40K a year, then you can come talk to me about how you work harder than people who make less money than you.) and I said, "Consider it punishment for voting this last joker into office. Twice."

Perhaps we don't have the most orthodox patient/doctor relationship. He's used the f-word in my presence before. *blush* 'Course, so have I, in his. But sometimes it hurts.

Then the appointment began in earnest. He said, "I'm mad at you now. I'm gonna make it really hurt this time." In my last couple sessions, I think, at last, he's found the exact locale of my hip injury. He dug his thumb deep into the most inflamed nook of my hip socket. "I'll stop of you say 'Nobama.' I'll press harder if you don't," he said. I said, "Press harder." The gasping and sighing that followed (mine) might lead the casual observer to consider that we are better friends that we, ahem, are.

All this is just to say that, if he really wanted to change my long-ago-decided vote, the poor man was totally taking the wrong tactic. The sort of pain that he exacts upon me is intense, for sure. But it's the good pain. It's the kind of pain that loosens the blood flow or sends sparks out the top of my spine. And as I've told him a hundred times, I can take it. More than that, though, I like it. And he really doesn't believe me when I tell him that. That what he does makes all my nerve endings perk to attention.

In other words, I'm no kinda sadist. It's debatable as to whether the foil to the sadist is the masochist or the saint-- is it the person who enjoys receiving pain or is it the person who's never felt even the slightest schadenfreude? Regardless, sadism really is not one of my vices. Too prone to tripping into the sinkhole of empathy am I. Also, too deserving of the whip-sting am I. But, that's another story.

I bring up my chiropractor's slightly unusual voting coercion tactics because, in my travels today, I found this interesting ethics paper about sadistic satisfaction. It's basic premise is an inquiry into whether an argument can be made that would assert that there is moral value in enjoying the pain of others. Ultimately, however, agreeing with its author is neither here nor there. For a scholarly ethics paper, this thing it truly an entertaining read. Watching this guy spiral in an out of his own logic is something of a joy unto itself.

More than that, though, his underlying argument is based on the assumption that there is intrinsic value in pleasure, in specific regard to our well-being. Regardless of the source of the pleasure. That's an exciting idea. Is that a dangerous idea?

Read the article. It's a fun jumping jack. Pleasure, in other words, waiting to be had.

*The story related in the opening paragraphs of this post is true. Mostly. His portion of the dialogue is transcribed almost exactly. Mine is edited to make me sound cleverer and more on-the-spot than I am in real life.

New Trends in Perversion

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I just watched the IFC's series Indie Sex on DVD. This is a series not so much about unfunded sexual renegades as the title might suggest, but rather about sex in film-- where it's meaningful, where it's been censored, where it's hot, where it's new and creative, where it's pressed envelopes and so on. It's divided into four categories-- "Censored," "Taboos," "Extremes" (as pertains to kink, fetish and BDSM), and "Teens" (as pertains to teen sex comedies, dramas... with only minimal attention to hebephilia and other more "imbalanced" relations).

The writing of this blog has led me to seek out an awful lot of movies that do weird/new/interesting things with sex-- or at least the ones that are purported to do so. But there are still a lot out there of which I have not yet heard... and Indie Sex brought a few new ones to my attention, and, subsequently, to my NetFlix queue.

Among my new finds is a goofy little porn-lite flick called Preaching to the Perverted. It's a rather silly comedy that follows the story of a dewy young lad charged with infiltrating a raucous band of fetishists for the purposes of bolstering evidence against them for a morality trial-- in the sort of court that wants to say that some sex acts are Just Not Okay even when everyone participating is a consenting adult. And along the way, our dewy young lad falls in love with-- and impregnates-- the ringleader, one Miss Tanya Cheex (oh, I just love those dominatrices and their funny, punny sobriquets).

Ultimately, the film follows a pattern not all that dissimilar to many romantic comedies (ending with a bland, hetero-normative endorsement of near-monogamy), and, in my opinion, it kinda sells itself out in the end. When our boy is called upon to testify before the court, he perjures himself, saying that all acts on some tapes (ones he made during some early, intended-to-be-comical (the film's supposed to be funny, but it's just barely so-- it's interesting for other reasons, though) attempts at espionage) were simulated and that no one really gets hurt-- even if they want to be. Though he does prevent his beloved and her minions from going off to jail, his lie before the court undermines the message of the film-- that being, if everyone playing the kinky little games agrees that the rules of said games are acceptable, there shouldn't be legislation that says otherwise.

So, the movie's not the most brilliantly conceived gem of cinematic pleasure ever. Still, it's a fascinating curio cabinet of late '90s socio-sexual attitudes. It was made in the 1997 and, even in 10 years, I think a lot has changed about what seems risque. Most of the show is populated with assorted circus freaks dressed in sequins, feathers, vinyl, rubber, leather and other squeaking textiles. The fetish scene itself is portrayed as exactly that-- a circus. People perform. They get pierced on stage. They light firecrackers on their own chests. They rig up sexy suits of armor and apply dull drill bits to them so that they can shoot sprays of sparks on to the asses of the other people in their acts. And, because it's still supposed to be sexual, women have explosive, dildo-assisted orgasms on stage. But so much of it seems not so much about the sex as about the showmanship. Women wear costumes that expose their breasts, but there's nary a dick to be found. There are plenty of codpieces and other dick-shaped items, but no actual dick. Sex simply informs the way the performers are costumed, but few of the club scenes actually have much sex in them. In other words, it's not really all that titillating.

In the late '90s, internet porn was just gaining steam, and for many mainstream audiences, videos of leathered-up people being electrically shocked, spanked, burned and bruised were very new... and very sensational. Sure, we'd seen Bettie Page's good-humored riding crop games ... and people have been performing these acts for centuries in sideshows and traveling minstrel shows, but you add rubber and black tasseled pasties? Suddenly, ritual scarification becomes perverted, sexual, obscene-- whether or not the participants are actually HAVING sex-- or even getting sexually aroused. Seeing a film like this 11 years after it was made just doesn't affect me in the same way it once would have. It reads as fun, ebullient, sexually gleeful, but not so much something that really attacks any mores head on. We've all seen this kind of fetish burlesque stage show before, now. And it just doesn't have the same kind of shock value... especially once you've seen something along the lines of the documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (about which I wrote here).

Beyond that, there are some other odd little late-'90s attitudinal quirks played out in this film. The late '90s were the acme of the public consciousness' love affair with the clit. Somewhere in the '60s, as the Women's Movement left the ground and women starting claiming the right to sexual pleasure for themselves, much was made of the fact that the locus, for us, was there in that teeny nub of flesh. And by the '90s, a few things were taken for granted about the way the female body works: a) We all need foreplay and lots of it. A woman's body is like an electric burner, taking a few minutes to heat up, whereas a man's runs on gas and is immediately ready at the flip of a switch. (Hint: that's not true for all of us.) b) Women need to be friends with and feel emotional connection to our partners for us to feel sexual with them. (Uh, the hint above applies here, too.) c) The clit is all you need. (Yeah. No!) and d) Women are turned on by touch while men are turned on by visual stimuli, hence their *need* for porn (and women's *dislike* of it)(This ain't universally true, either).

And then came niche market porn. And an upsurge in interest in the Tantra. And suddenly squirter jokes echoed through the corridors of pop culture. Yes, we were/are witnessing the apotheosis of the g-spot and her gushy little offspring, the female ejaculation. Laura Kipnis offers a much more fleshed-out and better researched timeline about how different female pleasure sensors go in and out of style in her "Sex" chapter in the (totally kick-ass) book, The Female Thing... but you get the picture. Our ideas about sexuality fall in stride with the ebb and flow of trends-- social, scientific, political-- just like anything else.

But Preaching to the Perverted was clearly made before the g-spot orgasm became a symbol of female-empowering hetero sex. It was made in a much clit-friendlier era. Early in the film, Tanya Cheex expels her slave from her kingdom for good-- because he committed the infraction of attempting to penetrate her. She spits at him, "My clit ring can give me more pleasure in just a few seconds than that thing (abusively grabbing his cock, just below the camera's frame) could in a million years!" And she is fully distraught in the morning after the eventual consummation with Peter (hehe-- also slightly punny, if you ask me!), our boy mentioned above. Penetration, in this film, is associated with acceding female autonomy to men. And that was an attitude I found still rather prevalent when I was an undergraduate... in, of course, the late '90s.

Frankly, I'm thrilled that it's not anti-feminist to like being penetrated anymore. It's a glorious time to be a sexually active woman, in that we are, at last, able to own our own turn-ons. We're no longer looking for someone to blame (the patriarchal culture, our low self-esteem as determined by the patriarchal culture, or our "seriously ruptured relationships with our fathers" as Susie Bright puts it in her fascinating essay "Rape Scenes") for our rape fantasies, for our desires to Bottoms (assuming not all of us, no matter how much we try, can be the Top sort). (Please also note that, in this dated school of thought, blaming that amorphous patriarchy was just another way of conceding power to it-- when taking personal responsibility is, as always, the more empowering, though more fraught, route.) We're allowed to be aroused by that which actually arouses us. We get to enjoy fucking men. We can even enjoy giving blow jobs, which has previously been the ultimate symbol of female denigration. Being a slut is no longer something about which we should be ashamed, many of us wearing the moniker like a Brownie badge. And on top of all that, bottom-y sluts have the same rights to the varied, multiple paths to feminism as do the dominatrices and the celibates and the strictest of lesbians. Regardless of vehicle that gets us there, we are finally beginning to recognize that the Temple of Feminism is open to all who value women's contributions to our culture, our consciousness-- our very lives. Not just the ones who follow certain limiting rules in the sack.

***

Meanwhile, I'm also reading A. M. Homes novel, The End of Alice. Published in '96, it's another clear product of its recently bygone era. It's the story of a correspondence between two pederasts, one duly jailed and the other at the onset of *her* molestation career. Even putting aside the slightly unusual conceptualizing of the molester profile as female, the book obviously arose out of this rising tide of panic with regard to sex and kids. Now, I'm certainly not saying we're not still in the midst of this particular panic-- we're still putting up with the fear-pandering entrapment-fests of Dateline: To Catch a Predator every now and again. But this book really capitalizes on the most popular psychological theories about the causes of pedophilia. Theories that have been gathering momentum just in the last 10 to 15 years.

Early in the book, Homes offers us, by way of explanation, very Lolita-esque flashbacks to the childhoods of her two lead characters. The man in jail was once in love with a twelve-year-old girl named Alice, but she died (we learn later that HE actually stabbed her to death). The girl had a kinky, pre-pubescent relationship with her best friend that involved her tying him to a radiator and making him watch her masturbate while his flesh singed. But then, the boy died (through no fault of hers). As in Lolita, the thinking behind this sort of story represents an older model for this sort of pathology: some stressful event in the midst of sexual development causes the subject's sexual preferences to crystallize around the image of the (extremely) youthful paramour. And as a result, the subject's predilections never really mature to "normal" adulthood. This was the operating theory behind this sort of behavior when Nabokov published Lolita in 1955. This is Homes' point of entry.

However, at roughly the halfway mark, another story, another flashback slowly emerges. The man in jail tells us of his mother's release from a sanitarium when he was 9 years old. He tells us that she took him to a private Roman bath. And then he relays an incredibly disturbing (even for me, and I am not easily disturbed) series of events that result in the mother goading the child into fisting her to orgasm in the bath. I read this passage in my hair salon yesterday while waiting for my color to set and accidentally caught myself in the mirror a couple of times notably cringing as I read. But what's interesting to me is that the story emerges as "the real reason" behind this man's fucked-upedness. Why? Well, haven't we heard everywhere from The Today Show to Dr. Phil that most child molesters were molested as kids themselves? The story represents the new psychology. Clear as day. Why did we never learn about Humbert Humbert being fondled as a boy? Because, in the '50s, that's not what made you a molester. But now? Such things have gained new relevance.

Do we know for sure that either of these theories is correct? That either is incorrect? That it's not an amalgam of the two? That, tomorrow, scientists won't find "the molester gene" in some of our brains? No. We know none of those things. But I DO find it fascinating that this particular writer bought this particular theory AND its hook, its line and its sinker! She couldn't have written this book ten years earlier-- not because such things didn't happen, but because we conceived of them so differently.

The style of the book is also, um, notable. It may be the grossest thing I've ever read (no, I still haven't figured out how to get my hands on an English translation of Feuchtgebiete but I'll let you know when I do). It's full of scab-eating and licking of fingers that have recently been extracted from assholes. It has gluttonous, purple passages on the degustation of junk food-- in revolting binges. Little girls die with weapons in their vaginae. The blurb on the back says it "is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive." The "horror story" part is certainly true, though in an unexpected way. The detail Homes expends driving home the fact that children are really and truly unhygienic and foul is, um, effective. However, the sum total of all this repellence is that Homes creates some rather one-dimensional characters. They are all too awful to be anything beyond comically unsympathetic. No tortured monster like Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children. Not even a sadly stunted, but passionate man like ol' Humbert.

Though, I should say, our jailed molester sure wishes he was Humbert Humbert. He, our primary narrator, has this over-the-top, urbane diction that lands him somewhere between Nabokov and Hannibal Lector-- which Homes uses to great comic effect. Within the first couple of pages, Homes has the girl ask the old man, "The way you talk is so peculiar--did you go to school in England?" He replies, "University of Virginia, B.A., 1961. The speech impediment is an affectation." Indeed it is. Clever girl, this Homes. However, it's still a little prosier, a little more over-written, overly expository than I like. But that's just quibbling.

***

So, after all this thinking about the shifting sands of sexual mores, it occurs to me that we're currently watching something else that was once normal become a new taboo. Just in the past couple of days, there have been a series of articles (mostly commenting on each other) circulating through Sex Blog World about the illicit thrills of condom-free sex. A Jezebel post speaks of it as though it's a substitute for engagement (does that mean I've got diamonds coming my way?). The Frisky weighs in in response. And Boinkology jumps into the fray as well.

Now, I know we're not supposed to refer to our current epoch as "The Post-AIDS Era", because, well, it's not. But there IS a palpable easing of tensions regarding STDs right now, when, in this country anyway, provided you are insured, AIDS is a lifelong but treatable disease, rather than an automatic death sentence. We still have the conversations: Have you been tested? How long ago? How many times have you been fucked since then? How many without condoms? And if we're smart, we wait until another round of tests turn up clean before we engage in any frictive skin-on-skin action, before we proceed unsheathed.

But condomless sex is like the new kinky thing to do. Even though 30 years ago, it was the norm. Now, suddenly, even reading and writing articles about how its a possibility feels like a huge social transgression. And a huge, arousing, slippery, private transgression, too.

To bring this inordinately long post full circle, I wonder if part of the feminist anti-penetration stance was subconsciously fueled by AIDS anxiety. Would Tanya Cheex had felt so laid bare by getting laid if she hadn't been afraid for her life? If letting someone cum in her hadn't exposed her to the contingency of being laid to waste by the least empowering, most undignified plague of the 20th Century? Obviously, there was real (second wave) feminist rigor behind the idea that penetrative, vanilla sex put the female at an inherent, biological, anatomical disadvantage (well, it kinda does, but that's part of the fun!), but I can't help but wonder if this little subsurface fear of disease didn't bolster the steadfastness of those who held that opinion. Just a theory. And we all know theories are subject to erosion, addition and changes of all sorts.

In any case, it seems to me that the whole whips-n-chains leather scene was a logical release in an era when performing penetrative sex acts meant taking your life in your hands. There even arose a little subset of the fetishistic arts that surrounded very clinical practices involving rubber gloves and other assorted prophylactic measures.

I know all this stuff still goes on--and preceded the '80s and '90s AIDS-fear-pervasive culture by millennia. Maybe it's just that we're all a little jaded, a little less shockable by that which is labeled "kink" or "fetish." But it seems to me that, when intercourse is a less socially-sanctioned activity, humans don't lose their desires to feel something intense. Enter pain play. Enter pain play in the common discourse. Is that too big a stretch?

*gasp*

Photo by Clayton Cubitt (aka Seige), from his Blue series.


This makes my heart pound.

Dumbed-down spirituality and the quest for a really good Top

I'm home in DC now, but I still have several films about which I want to write-- mostly because most of them won't find theatrical release and I hope to encourage my reader(s) to seek them out via alternative venues. Though, certainly, some are more worthy than others.

Case in point: I took my mom to see a documentary called Spiritual Revolution. She's always got at least one toe dipped into the metaphysical community here in Nashville, and I thought she might be more amenable to sitting through an exploration of non-mainstream spirituality than most of my more skeptical friends. Unfortunately, though this movie was, indeed, billed as "a look at Eastern spirituality in the Western World," it's really not much beyond a precursory billboard for meditation. If I'm going to be fair, I would say that this movie could serve as a really great primer for folks who've never ever ever thought to consider the basic tenets of Buddhist and Hindu mysticism. But, as I said, my mom's been thinking these thoughts for quite a while... and I've also done my fair share of poking around in Eastern philosophy (such that I've been able to determine that, while the focus is often different than Judeo-Christian thinking, it's still religion and therefore has a bunch of rules for living that I'll never be capable of adopting wholesale). Although I'm certainly nothing beyond a novice, neither of us learned anything new-- or anything we both weren't deeply familiar already.

In fact, most of the talking heads (assorted gurus and psychology scholars) didn't say much of anything that was even remotely profound. They spoke in abstracted soundbites without delving into any of the real meaty explorations of the mind with which they have all doubtlessly been engaged for some years. They occasionally hinted at anecdotes from their own lives, but I never grasped a full understanding of how these people came to believe that they'd gained greater access to peace, enlightenment, what have you, than your average churchgoer. I blame not so much the interviewees for this flaw in the film as I do the whole interview process and, probably, the editing. They were clearly asked questions designed to flatter them (oh, Swami! You're so enlightened! How'd you get that way?) and that merely skimmed the surfaces of their studies. And if they offered any more complicated, nuanced or scholarly answers, those responses were doubtlessly omitted from the final cut. Dumb editorial decision, I'd say.

And then I encountered a couple of structural and attitudinal problems that have really stuck in my craw. If I'm going to be honest, I'd probably have to admit that, had I not sat through the director's Q&A after, I might not be quite so irked, but man! He really hit a couple sour notes. First of all, he explained how this film came to be included in the NaFF. While NaFF has hosted countless religious documentaries, most of them have poured forth from a Christian perspective--- assuming that those sorts of films will find greater audience in this here Bible Belt. Well, this dude (the director) said that when NaFF approached him, he balked. Nashville? Who in Nashville, with all the country music and bumpkins, is gonna be open to a film about Buddhist meditation? And he seemed shocked to have found a receptive audience here. Well, I got news for you, dude! Not all of Nashville is composed of rednecks and banjo strummers. I hate it that comments like his make me feel so defensive about this city in which I've spent so many years, but honestly! Nashville's like Hipster Central these days and I just don't know when this town's going to outlive its reputation. Really, the only people around here who wear cowboy boots do so with irony. Wise up, rest of the country! Nashvillians ain't all the inbred hayseed Christian zealots you might think we are. So, immediately, even though he thanked the audience (smugly, as far as I could tell) for "helping him break through his own stereotypes," I was immediately annoyed that he'd been so uncouth as to bring them up in the first place.

And then this poor woman in the audience asked a question about why there were so few women in the movie. She had an accent and didn't articulate her question very well. But he copped a little attitude and blustered, "Well, what about the whole section in there ABOUT women?" And it was all I could do to not be completely rude and to hold my tongue. I really just wanted to blurt out, "Oh, you mean the little ghetto-chapter you set up for them?" But he'd never have understood what I meant. Here's the woman problem in this film as I see it: he said he wanted to approach the film from the stance of tradition and then move into newer developments in the field of Eastern religious study in America. OK, that's fine. But women's participation in Eastern religion is new? Are you sure about that? Isn't Kuan Yin, the mother of the Buddha, one of the primary figures in the religion? Along with assorted other female boddhisatvas? And, as Kuan Yin supposedly birthed Siddhartha, wouldn't she actually predate Buddhism? His is a problematic conceit, to say the least.

Anyway, instead of integrating the women's stories throughout, he made a special section in which he interviewed them-- and then, with deplorably limited vision and understanding with regard to their actual roles in their field, he asked them only questions that pertained to the female experience of being a spiritual seeker in a so-called male-dominated world. Or, at least, these were the only responses that he included in the film, so I can only assume that they were not asked anything more interesting. They were not asked to tell their stories of religious epiphanies, nor were they asked to contribute to the greater discussions with regard to modern science and meditation or anything else.

Their voices were only present so that they could say that, yes, indeed, Buddhism and Hinduism are still primarily male endeavors and we women have won our status only by hardscrabbling and and putting up with marginalization. And this line of thinking can only perpetuate their marginalization within the religions. So, ultimately, despite his smug self-congratulations that he had, indeed, had the brilliant idea to ask some of the girls to join in the documentarian fun, he's done nothing but ghettoize their experiences, simply by setting aside a chapter for them, rather than including their contributions as equal perspectives within the whole. Really, it was his smugness in his response to that poor woman from the audience that irked me so-- moreso, even, than the film itself.

I realize that those less versed in this sort of gender politics make this mistake in documentaries-- and more commonly, in TV programs like Dateline, 20/20 and pretty much everything you'll ever see on the History Channel-- all the time. I see it a lot and yeah, it's annoying, but those programs are meant to be consumable by a largely uninformed public. So, it would be understandable if the director had pointedly made such a concession for the sake of his audience. But he made it clear that this editorial decision was made on the basis of obliviousness, rather than audience awareness.

So, here's how my imaginary conversation with this director might have gone (were I as articulate in spontaneous conversation as I am when I have time to think and write):

A play in one act:

Dramatis personae:
Me (to be played by Jessica Alba)
Smug Director (to be played by a slovenly gas station attendant from Neptune, NJ)
Lady in the Audience (to be played by Charlotte Gainsbourg)
My Mom (to be played by Mrs. Potts, the teapot in the Disney Sleeping Beauty, wearing a bindi)

Lady: But what about the women?

Him: (rolls eyes) Don't you remember the whole section on women?

Me: (interrupting rudely) Oh, you must mean that chapter you devised for them. The one that's nothing beyond an textual ghetto?

Him: (blankly, chewing the end of a drinking straw) Huh? What do you mean?

Me: Rather than integrating their individual experiences into the greater collective experience, you set the women in your film aside and provided them an outlet in which they were only permitted to discuss "issues important to women."

Him: (blinks four times, wiggling the drinking straw between his thumb and index finger) I didn't mean it that way.

Me: (getting pink, talking too fast, gesticulating a little too aggressively) Oh, I know you didn't intend it to be that way. But you have, in fact, created a structural implication that merely perpetuates the sense of female marginalization within your film. Your obliviousness kind of makes it worse. Because now it's an oversight-- a political blindspot. You didn't even consider that they might have something to contribute other than complaints that the system is biased against them? Did it ever once occur to you to ask them the same questions you asked the rest of your talking heads?

Him: Huh? (six blinks, followed by a George W-esque squint. He drops the drinking straw.)

Me: (audible sigh, with jaw set with resignation) Right. (Aside to My Mom, the teapot, who has the bareliest whisper of steam emerging from around her lid) And this joker thinks he's so evolved? Let's stomp out. Noisily.

My Mom and Me: (simultaneous bird flippage. Exeunt theater.)

Fin



Despite all the generally shoddy craftsmanship at work in this film, I have to admit that there was actually a tiny firecracker within it that jangled some other bells in my head. A section of this film pertains to a program called Inner Kids, based at UCLA, that's really pretty nifty. This is a program designed to expose kids, some of whom are quite troubled, to assorted self-soothing practices, including meditation. In some of the footage, one of the leaders has the kids partake in this interesting little exercise. He has the kids hold ice cubes in the palms of their hands. He asks them to just sit with the sensation, trying not to judge it as good or bad, even if it hurts a little. Now, I'm super-sensitive to cold things. Holding an ice cube is really very painful for me. I can touch hot things to the point where my skin gets damaged before it really hurts, but I have no tolerance for cold. So, I really understood what this exercise was attempting to show these kids-- that being, if you can just sit with an experience, and turn off the fear-of-pain mechanism in your brain, you open yourself more fully to the experience itself.

Now. Wanna know of what that reminded me? S&M. Yep. Sure did. Well, in particular, the theory behind the transcendence of submission. Dominating holds very little appeal for me. In my day-to-day life, I feel pretty self-posessed. I'm hopelessly independent and don't much like it when people make decisions for me. When I've been put in supervisory positions at work, I feel no compunctions against telling other people what to do-- and I respect the people who report to me, so I like to think they respect me in return. But the practice of submission fascinates me. The process by which I'd make myself-- body and mind-- so utterly available and vulnerable to another person both thrills me and makes me nervous as hell. In my opinion, being a bottom requires far more mental fortitude than being a top does. Submitting means enduring whims beyond your control-- whims that could possibly cause you physical pain. It means sitting still with yourself until you figure out how to quell your petulant rebellions. And it means forgoing all self-preservation instincts in favor of trusting another person exhaustively -- someone outside of you who has his or her own free will. It's not easy.

Recently, I quietly added a new blog to my blogroll. This woman over at Beautiful, depraved is plumbing through some truly fascinating netherregions. I'm very drawn to her work here because, not only is her writing limpid and exact, but she pushes beyond simple smuttiness to finger her way into the psyschology of all that is sexual. This post in particular describes the exact thing I'm attempting to articulate.

Here's a paragraph that I find particularly relevant:

After a beating, I was malleable. Soft. Suppliant. Full of feeling. After each blow, he had me thank him. I didn’t understand the power of this until one day I was at my gym after a workout, in the communal showers. I turned the faucet all the way to cold and I felt the water hit my skin. Something curious had happened. I didn’t distinguish anymore that the water was cold or that it was uncomfortable. I was only aware of it as a sensation. I had no judgment of it, only the experience of noticing it was cold. I did not flinch, I did not back away, I accepted it completely. That’s when I realized that I’d ceased to let the fear of pain prevent me from living. Or more precisely, from loving. The thank yous became a thank you to life, and to all that it might bring me.

Do you see the connection? Yielding your own autonomy and allowing your lover to beat you or holding an ice cube in your hand-- it's the same instinct. The instinct towards transcendence. But also, it's the instinct toward mindfulness. And being present. And living as fully as possible. And it's perhaps exactly why sex, as a mental exercise, fascinates me beyond all other aspects of the human experience. Sex is such a singular experience that it consumes one's focus whole. It's at once unequivocally physical and, if it's good, unreservedly intellective. It blows the roof off your crown chakra, right?

So, Spiritual Revolution is a poorly founded, poorly edited film that belongs on basic cable. But it's subject matter is important. And it bears relevance to so many other ideas about which I ponder frequently. I wish the thing was better-made. I really do. Because I do think it's important that information about Eastern thought be made available to any and all comers. Hopefully, smarter filmmakers will come along and do just that. And quick.