Gender roles are a powerful and symbolic catalyst in eroticism and sadomasochism. I perceive them as archetypical ingredients to cook up a reality with. One can experiment safely with social and genetic conditioning or go on a brave adventure into the unknown. Being packed, ready and prepared before embarking on such a journey would be a huge plus, rather than being forced into it.
I ventured from being an almost asexual vanilla to being extremely turned on by powerful women in the ‘90s (thank you, Courtney Love, I love you) to being a wannabe gay in the leather techno scene. Later I became a slave in a new country before exploring my more dominant side, and almost always as some aspect of a man.
Once, someone asked me if a woman can’t be dominant? While it is less common – sadomasochistic desires tend to be pretty heteronormative – women can of course be dominant. My personal experience with this is rather limited, much of it coming from my time being a mistress’ slave in my mid twenties in Montreal. I believe that the lack of dominant female figures in sadomasochistic subculture is rooted in play being stuck in the physical practicalities, flesh to be whipped, while where the mistress shines is in her connection to the divine.
The Mystique And The Dominatrix
A dear Finnish friend of mine has been teaching a nordic mixture of spirituality and eroticism. In that legacy, men can’t be teachers because spirituality represents the mystical left hand-path of the unknown being. Men are practical servants on the right-hand path, and valuable assistants for raising the kundalini energy, but they are neither gods nor goddesses. Yes, these are symbolic gender roles that are worthy of being questioned or maybe even dissolved, but they can also be played with.
One of my favourite movies is The Ceremony (2014), about the French dominatrix Jean de Berg. She was the muse of the writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. She inherited a countryside chateau when he died and became the infamous dominatrix JdB. The movie starts by interviewing a man obsessed with belonging to her. He wants her initials cut into his bleeding flesh. But what does it mean to belong? That she is always in his mind, that he is always thinking about her. Her kink is to orchestrate ceremonies. Men are trained as dogs fighting over a piece of raw meat. A woman gives birth to a raw egg to be hatched over her head. Jean de Berg is old, always dressed in black, somewhere between a nun and a theatre director. She has two muscular male lovers; they undress her, wash her body, and make love to her. Her lovers are always wearing blindfolds, as her skin is not to be seen by them. She is divine.
Whenever I watch the movie, I wonder, what if it was a man in her place? This strikes me as impossible. A man could not behave like that. He can be Hugh Hefner or Andy Warhol, but they are not divine. He could be Jesus, but he is not very dominant. He can be Prince, but Prince is no longer he; he is a symbol. So I give up. It may be impossible to be a man and dominant and divine simultaneously, so one of these three needs to go.
Caretaking Man Versus Selfish Bitch
I’m so curious about her, my inner bitch, as I like to call her. As a man that is into sadomasochism, mainly as the dominant, I always feel very care-taking. And it has been a conscious struggle to become more selfish and more focused on my own experience. So many men that I meet share the same story. Maybe it comes from growing up in Sweden during the ‘80s and ‘90s. One of my first big eye-openers when connecting with eroticism and spirituality was the reconnection to my own body and my desires. During regular sex and sadomasochistic play, I learned to shift the focus toward myself; from that, my definition of pleasure grew immensely.
Sometimes I do an exercise in retreats wherein people get to practise using their bodies, first to explore another and then use the other to feel themselves. And many men report that they are most directly in contact with direct pleasure through their genitals, while the rest of the body is used in understanding their surroundings.
One thing I have learned is that people long more for surrender than for submission. Perhaps the offerings in submission must be greater than the potential of self-pleasure in surrender. Once someone can connect that offering to what we might call Divinity, the game changes completely. This is the opposite of the beastly carnal love of the flesh. The question then becomes: how divine can you be in your dominance? And if you are a leather daddy dom, for example, is there room for the Divine?
Transforming from the care-taking man into the divine selfish bitch that’s using others for her direct pleasure and being worshipped for doing so; feels like a great challenge and a curious calling. The divine bitch gives nothing more than her mere presence, where her servants are allowed to love her. She assumes their diligence and this makes her powerful. It’s almost like becoming an object of fetishisation; thigh-high shiny leather boots, the upper part of a military parade uniform, and a long single-tail whip. The more worshipped she becomes, the less she needs to give back, and the more wrathful she responds when displeased. Such is the mutual dependence in the polarity between the divine and her worshipper.
It’s funny when I remember one of my teachers in Japan telling me to only dress in black, wear sunglasses and hide behind my partner because no one wants to see my ugly face when being bakushi.
