A Ramble on Kink, Ritual, and Making
By Zac B.
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The following notes were written by Zac B. and used during his presentation at KinkForAll Providence, the 6th of February 2010. They are reproduced here with author permission.
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I’ve been kinky for as long as I can remember.
When I was 5 or 6, my parents had to talk me out of sleeping with a piece of rope I’d been playing with – they were afraid it’s get twisted around my neck as I slept.
A few years later, I tied an overhand knot in a piece of old, soft climbing rope and did tie it around my neck, to see what it felt like. I didn’t want to harm myself, and knew enough not to use a knot that would lock, but I knew it wasn’t something I was supposed to do. That didn’t stop me either from trying it or from telling my parents about it in a subsequent fit of conscience. I think that was when they started to worry about my interests. My mother, I only realized this past year, had a thorough background – and belief – in Freudian psychology. For her, masochism and sadism were both permutations of a desire for death (and the fact of a rope around her kid’s neck didn’t help matters).
That connection never occurred to me – even when I was clinically depressed in my teens, suicide was never something I considered. I just liked the idea of being tied up.
I first learned about BDSM in fifth or sixth grade, when I could finally visit the high school library. Perhaps the naughtiest book there was the venerable Dictionary of American Slang, complete with a sheaf of torn-out pages from Fr to Fy – I never knew if that was the result of censorship or greed.
Regardless, “Sadie-Masie” was the word I found that piqued my interest – Kinsey-era slang for S/M, which led to reading about each abbreviation and definition, more and more terms, and finally to the DSM-IV, where I found pages and pages of case studies of sexual pathology. I sat on the floor between the library shelves, riveted by stories of autoerotic asphyxiation, unusual masturbation techniques, and strange fetishes. Usually the people described there had carried their compulsions to such an extent as to end up dead, something I had no interest in, but the things they did were fascinating.
I was later to learn that both my mother’s attitudes and the DSM-IV traced their origin to a prudish misinterpretation of Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s writings; the negotiated scenes that he’d described in the seminal Venus in Furs were taken as actual violence and a wish for self-harm by Krafft-Ebbing and later Freud, and it was not until the late twentieth century that this perception began to change to any significant extent.
When I got to college, I started exploring what I’d been so curious about in earnest. I had an eager partner and set out to explore my kinks and hers, as well as investigating the formal kink scene. We ended up starting a small kink group on campus, throwing some play parties and leading weekly discussions. At about the same time, I started down the road to a major in theater. Sophomore year, I took a class on “the intersections of theater and ritual.” In that class, something clicked. I found an echo of the readings and the topic in my life not in my theatrical practice (although I loved shaping and studying theatrical space) but in the kinky activities that I was pursuing on the side. I wrote my final paper on “BDSM as theatrical ritual.” Academically, my study of the subject ended there, as my thesis advisor (and parents) weren’t prepared to deal with anything that controversial (I ended up comparing the spatial characteristics of churches and theaters).
My personal interest in the subject has continued, however, which brings us to the talk you all came here to see.
BDSM is a personal theatrical ritual.
This is simultaneously a pretty basic and a highly complicated statement.
By ritual I don’t mean simply that it involves “ritualized” behavior, but rather that it bears an anthropological resemblance to rites of initiation in pre-industrial civilizations.
Anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner examined these rites in the early twentieth century, and observed that they all share a similar, three-part structure – phases that they called “separation”, “transition”, and “incorporation”.
This parallels the pattern of a scene – the participants negotiate to separate themselves from everyday life and assume a distinct roles unique to the circumstances of the scene, carry out the actions and interactions of the scene, ideally leading to a transcendental experience – what’s sometimes referred to as subspace or topspace – and then finally leaving those roles and relationships, and mental states to re-enter their daily lives. (This also means that aftercare is far from a luxury; it’s a hard-wired anthropological necessity for the proper conclusion of the format of the ritual).
BDSM is also theatrical – it’s a private performance, in which the participants are actor, director, writer, audience and stunt double. The successful carrying out of a scene depends on their mutual engagement in a shared fantasy, and this depends on effective and mindful negotiation and communication.
I would contend that navigating the mental & ethical twists and turns involved in this scene-setting has, at best, the potential for helping people navigate issues of consent and coercion in other venues of their lives.
To look at this further, it’s perhaps informative to look at the opposition. Anti-porn activist Melissa Farley has notably compared the porn production at Kink.com’s San Francisco Armory to the war crimes of Abu Ghraib; while the interweaving of state torture, sexual play, and power dynamics has been explored much more thoroughly by Wesleyan U’s Margot Weiss (y’all should read what she’s written, as should I), it’s worth referring briefly to a talk given by an expert witness in the case, the researcher in charge of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo. In this TED talk on evil, he lays out seven conditions for such abuses to occur:
There’s no place in that rubric for interactions between two individuals, outside the structure of social institutions, based on negotiation, discussion, communication, and empathy.
What does all of this have to do with making, you ask? Remember that I started out as a set designer, moonlighting as a rave and play party planner along the way. I’m fascinated by the idea of setting up spaces for both transcendent and transformative experiences. Play parties, particularly larger ones, are particularly interesting, as the object is to provide a space that can accommodate many different worlds – a harem, a kennel, a bedroom, a dark lonely alley, a slave auction – and suit the attitudes, interactions, and intents of each player engaged in sustaining each mutual fantasy. That’s one tremendously interesting challenge.
This is also a gear- and tool-heavy community. Many of us are fetishists, and actually physically aroused by specific objects we use in our play – shoes, leather, latex, even fur, the first fetishwear. We also use specialized tools to facilitate certain scenarios and tropes – floggers, St. Andrew’s crosses, restraints, gags, an almost endless catalogue of accessories for the endless possible permutations of kinky sex.
Now, having or making inexpensive toys, is something I want to encourage wholeheartedly. One doesn’t even need toys per se to play; some of the hottest scenes I’ve been a part of have involved nothing more han my partner’s hands. However, the Scene is full of these specialized items designed for hurting people, sold at outrageous prices. These are often designed with little imagination and made with less skill and attention to craft.
We use ritual tools – and here it’s crucial to remember that this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re made from the branches of a certain tree, blessed in a certain way.
Here I would like to quote from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
“The first tappet is right on, no adjustment required, so I move on to the next. … I always feel like I’m in church when I do this — .The gage is some kind of religious icon and I’m performing a holy rite with it. It is a member of a set called “precision measuring instruments” which in a classic sense has a profound meaning. In a motorcycle this precision isn’t maintained for any romantic or perfectionist reasons. It’s simply that the enormous forces of heat and explosive pressure inside this engine can only be controlled through the kind of precision these instruments give. When each explosion takes place it drives a connecting rod onto the crankshaft with a surface pressure of many tons per square inch. If the fit of the rod to the crankshaft is precise the explosion force will be transferred smoothly and the metal will be able to stand it. But if the fit is loose by a distance of only a few thousandths of an inch the force will be delivered suddenly, like a hammer blow, and the rod, bearing and crankshaft surface will soon be pounded flat … his can be prevented by a few thousandths of an inch fit which precision measuring instruments give, and this is their classical beauty…not what you see, but what they mean…what they are capable of in terms of control of underlying form.”
With sufficient attention to precision and quality, craft can approach the realm of magic.
So why does so much of what we use look like it came straight from a 1970’s swinger’s club, and work worse? The “BDSM aesthetic” has been studied – in visual representations and clothing – by Robert Bienvenu, but he has yet to answer why so much of what we have looks so silly.
In this, I’m reminded of a quote from one of the practitioners of ritual theater I studied in college, Jerzy Grotowski – “most often the people who practice so-called ‘improvisation’ are plunged in dilettantism … For working on improvisation, one needs bloody competence. It is not goodwill which will save the work, but it is mastery … Heart without mastery is shit.”
Why is this set of tools, ideally beloved of their users, verging on magical implements at times, so functionally and aesthetically stunted?
Let’s look to other aesthetic vocabularies.
Let’s consider aesthetics – imagine an Art Nouveau collar or a Arts & Crafts-inspired suspension arch?
Let’s look at the armamentaria of other bodily practices – medical, dental, veterinary, prosthetic…
Let’s look more closely at other ritual tools and try to make ours as ergonomic and pleasing to use.
Let’s let luxurious objects be designed luxuriously.
Let’s make out own tools and toys, instead of trying to adapt convenient readymades.
Let’s do our damndest to incorporate the best practices of each industry or activity we borrow from.
Let’s make our toys as ergonomical and aesthetically pleasing as possible. Let’s not use things that are not quite suited to the task. Let’s make sure that when we appropriate tools, we use them correctly, and well, and beautifully.