The Last Closet

It Was, Yes, S/M Pride Day. Along Fifth Avenue they came--goose-stepping, duck-walking, frog-marching, hobbling, crawling--3000 or so by police count, past Tiffany & Co., led by grand marshal Leon F. Christ, crucified on his own fiberglass cross, set tall in the back of a Ford pickup truck. You could hear them far off. Tink-clunk of shackle against chastity belt against spur. Paddles on flesh made a butcher-shop noise. And atonal, irregular yelping. Several hundred dominatrices, each in exquisite, sweatless leather despite the late-spring sun. Slave people behind, nipple and navel and even an occasional ear lobe pierced. Then floats, built with the care that fetishism alone can stimulate in this era of cheesy workmanship. Torquemada scene. Turkish prison. Nero. Witches burning perpetually to bottled propane. Apache initiation, Lubyanka, Eton. Black women for sale (proceeds to the Negro College Fund) on a flat-bed truck. Some gotten-up Marquis de Sade waving from his Lincoln convertible. Men on all fours, so aroused by submission that they were practically on all fives. It wound, weird, toward sheep Meadow in Central Park. Like a half-time show at the Pain Bowl.

And signs:

You Can't Get Clap From a Whip.

I Only Laugh When it Hurts.

Way Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Latex Workers of America, Local 1124.

All We're Saying is, Give Agony a Chance.

Near the Plaza Fountain, through, Fifth Avenue became a vicious gantlet. There was throwing: just an empty Tofutti cup at first. Then overpriced pretzels and half-eaten falafel. Those into lapidation took the pelting as a love gift. But Saturday-afternoon New York had gone righteousmean: made uncomfortable by these consent-age men and women who, unlike you or me, needed to endure more than Driver Allergic cabs, John Zaccaro and yet another Third World briefcase playing prince at jet-plane-noise level on the subway. People who dared march for their inalienable right of inequality. Among policemen was felt much severe morale loss and doubt. Hey, what use clapping handcuffs on a masochist? How do you plead? On my knees, Your Honor. Inevitably, someone in a Gore-Tex safari suit screamed, "Kill those fascist sufferers!" And the sidewalk mob, like some wonderful fantasy of group martyrdom, surged forward.

When did it happen? Never, of course. And it never will. In this permissive time, one deviation remains as intolerable as the Horst Wessel Lied at Passover. So abhorrent and frightening is S/M--so well connected in popular thought to Hitler, Genghis Khan, plantation cruelness, rape, pillage and general dismemberment-- that a public figure who might espouse or just defend it would be cut dead quicker than someone with green-monkey disease. Both far right and far left, Moral Majoritarian and radical feminist call time out to gob spit all over S/M. Even I--who have reported on transvestite culture, incest and cannibalism--am anxious writing about it. Yet S/M is there and ever was there: a terrific, incurable obsession that has bossed around some of the brightest, most productive and likable minds we have had. What, at last, is left in that notorious sexual closet? A lot of rope, wood, leather, metal and suspension equipment. The closet, in fact, looks like your basement workshop now.

And that, pretty much, is how S/M people prefer it. They don't demand legislation allowing them to wear a ball gag and iron thigh boots when in Federal employment. They don't want Our S/M Heritage taught throughout the public-school system. They seldom evangelize. "All I ever wanted was freedom to do what I want behind closed doors with someone I care for," said submissive Ed. "Without a stigma being placed on it." Yet that stigma is there, and all the perfumes of Chanel won't sweeten it--even now, when dominance-fetish gear has become rather chic in ad layout and pop-music video. As we shall see, guilt (plus fear of exposure) is intertwined more strictly than corset lacing through S/M--until it has become both cause and effect. At the Eulenspiegel Society, an S/M consciousness-boosting group, members are on a first-name basis from day one--but that first name may be false. So hidden is the S/M population (from you, from one another, often even from self) that no confident estimate of number could ever be advanced. But we may assume it is significant in America and worth a thoughtful, charitable reassessment. And, so you can check some of your natural prejudice at the door, that reassessment should begin with language.

Like, no way sadistic will ever become a halo word. Might better try to market swastika wallpaper. Not only are sadism and masochism unflattering, they are also quite inaccurate. From here on I intend to use the generic brand name, D/S-- domination and submission. All forms of S/M fall under that more inclusive expression, D/S. But the reverse isn't true. Lee, for example, loves to hire himself out as chauffeur or housemaid and be insulted whenever possible. His submission is purely psychological: no pain or sexual contact, thank you. The people I'm writing about are so various, so brilliantly strange and--almost without exception-- so harmless that to confine them by ironmaiden verbal usage in the domain of cruel or suicidal knuckle walkers is both misleading and, well, sadistic.

Furthermore, I mean consensual, affectionate D/S master-slave theater mounted by two people inside relationships of some duration and structure for their mutual erotic heightening. This is not, as might be thought, rarer than a cat with insomnia. Professionalism aside, loving and consensual D/S couples are the rule, not the exception. By that reading, of course, rape could never be D/S--no consent. Nor would wife-battering qualify. Husband will banjax spouse out of anger or frustration, not for an erotic schmooze. Actually, despite those stool-softening tales you may have heard, I can recall no heterosexual D/S relationship that resulted even in accidental, let alone intentional, hospital-size harm or death. It just doesn't happen. And, beyond love or human respect, there is a pragmatic reason for this. Dominant partner and submissive partner become fiercely dependent on each other. In this secretive scene, a compatible negative charge for your positive pole is harder to locate than diaper services in 1986. When you find one, you don't vivisect him or her. Because you want to play again tomorrow. And it's tough making love in a full-body cast.

•

Take that couple, the one up on stage. He has just fastened a hungry steel nipple clip to her left breast. In black garter belt and hose, she hangs like supple breadfruit from the hoist mechanism. He is nude except for leather jock and shoulder holster full of torment hardware. They kiss: Strobe light will make 1000 still shots of their pleasure on the watching retina. He has stood back. The whip tongue lashes her again, again, a hot cinch belt. Her body is receptive, even confident. Yet it jerks, galvanic: current in a frog leg. Earlier, she has whipped him (was it bad for you, too, dear?). A largely male audience of three dozen or so is under arrest. This dramatic, ritualized Wednesday-night performance and teach-in at The Castle in New York City has been running almost as long as A Chorus Line. Jay and Diane Hartwell could be the Parents Magazine D/S couple. Through a 31-year marriage, which must've included more whipping than Willie Shoemaker ever gave out, they are without scar. Jay and Diane are still quite in love. And afterward, their eldest daughter will help serve nonalcoholic punch. The family that flays together stays together.

Hartwell, though, isn't their real name. He has an upper-bracket, spanking-clean executive job. If anyone at his firm associated Jay with grope suits and flagellation, he'd get the sack, and it wouldn't be made of leather. "I feel guilty about not coming out. I would, if it were possible to earn a living."

With gentleness, Diane answers, "You have a responsibility to the family. You know you can't." Yet, more than any other two people in America, they have taken up the D/S cross and put each other on it. Their Wednesday-night Chautauqua is half show, half discussion/meeting place, half outpatient ward. The shame-ridden come and receive comfort. On other nights, Diane will structure fantasy sessions at a price. But "This is, I think, the one house in New York that doesn't do sex. We'd be millionaires by now if we did. I choose not to. It's beneath me."

From 1977 to 1981, Jay wrote, edited and distributed S-M Express, a newspaper that became both the Variety and the Workbench of D/S. "I felt someone should say something about us. We sold an average of 75 percent of our print run. Our last three issues sold 95 percent. National Geographic doesn't sell 95 percent. Gives you some idea of how desperate the need for straight information was." S-M Express featured Mr. Fixit advice on how to construct a pillory or a bondage yoke in your own garage. And Hartwell got away from the inhibitive language of Psychopathia Sexualis, replacing S/M with "sexual mastery" and "sexual submission" whenever possible. D/S is no place for careless-pilot error, so S-M Express carried more safety admonitions than OSHA has. There was also advertising, the kind that goes, "He dom-TV, she sub-bi, into B & D, W/S, French, Swedish, English and gourmet cooking." Jay and Diane tried to screen these personals personally. Their contact list was impressive. During the same period, they had started a (purely social) D/S couples club in that unheard-of Sodom, Newburgh, New York. Twelve came to their first meeting. Within one year, 400 had joined--some from as far away as Australia, England and Japan.

And, always, Hartwell scourged the D/S sleaze-porn trade, which is distortive and sordid as an old vaginal strep culture. Bondage in Buchenwald. Female Captives of the Rising Sun. Whatever. But almost no other literature has been available. "I don't think anybody should be used or abused." Even self-spoken "artistic" efforts like Story of O make his whip go flaccid. "I said to myself, 'This thing must've been written by a bi-TV.' Because who on earth would want this plastic piece of shit, this O? Diane is sexually submissive to me, and I am absolutely responsible for her--though she is her own woman, and don't let anybody think that you could (continued on page 178) Last Closet (continued from page 138) step on this lady."

Even 9-1/2 Weeks--purportedly autobiographical--doesn't pass his amniocentesis-needle test. In the book, "Elizabeth McNeil" was led by a psychological nose ring through degree after degree of erotic servitude. Beyond your usual whipping and bondage and humiliation, she got fed, bathed, tamponed and--God--read to by him. Eventually, Elizabeth had a breakdown and cut out. "Often," Hartwell said, "the woman will consent because 'I love him.' Or because she's afraid to lose him. That's the wrong kind of consent." 9-1/2 was recently--and, oh, so nervously--translated into a film starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke. Use some phrase like D/S or S/M, and spokesmen for the project come down with calcified heads. They can see Women Against Pornography poisoning a popcorn concession at RKO Simplex. No, no, "It's not like that. It's a love story. She won't have a breakdown." Which would mean that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the book. We shall see. D/S, I think, isn't ready for general release.

The Hartwell golden rule is clear. "Have him or her do unto you only what you enjoy having done." And nothing, nothing else. "All my life, I wanted to tie ladies up--and be tied up. From, oh, the age of five. And I spent my life trying to find out what was wrong with me. From my background, I will tell you that people into S/M will not change. The need is going to stay there."

Diane, whom he had known from high school, was straight. After their marriage, though, she began to have wild surmises about Jay. And one day she said, "Why don't you try tying me up?" As Hartwell put it, "The dam broke. I was like a drowning man that got a rope. I wasn't about to let go." It took a long time--more like nine and a half years than nine and a half weeks--for Diane and Jay to learn their own golden rule. In between, Diane did much that she didn't much relish. Out of love, out of duty, not--as must be--for sexual pleasure.

"I tell people they must be honest with each other. The process takes time. Trust grows. If you're truly only doing those things you both enjoy, it's called positive reinforcement. And people expand and sex gets better. Now, you don't end up with your fantasies--believe me, you don't. You end up with a synthesis. But it doesn't stop, it keeps getting better and better. And you will become a more caring, responsible, sensitive individual than you were, unlike the stereotype of S/M. Because you can't abuse people and expect them to come back for more."

•

D/S has unique attributes. It is, for a starter, the one human sexual deviation not practiced by any other animal type. Fido may sit up and beg, but he won't make Mrs. Fido sit up and beg. This is because D/S has developed as man's quintessential mind-groin game. Think: all that hominid evolution, Ramapithecus upward, brain fold on brain fold, occurred just to make a dominatrix with seven-inch stiletto heels and high-colonic equipment possible. You might say. In her 1971 Village Voice article, Terry Kolb, female submissive and Eulenspiegel founder, wrote, "Reik states categorically that a person with a weakly developed imagination cannot become a masochist. In the eyes of the public, a sadomasochistic scene is a very sordid affair with a 'sex-fiend' brutalizing an equally weird victim.... The exact opposite is the case. The S/M relationship is the most democratic that exists ... the two consenting partners must work very hard to achieve compatible relationships because so much depends on relating the fantasies of each partner to the other."

Moreover, D/S is an upscale deviation. (Listen, friend, leather doesn't come cheap.) Hartwell, some time ago, prepared a questionnaire in cooperation with the Institute of Human sexuality in Berkeley. There were about 1000 D/S respondents. Breaking the data down: (A) 87 percent considered themselves switchable to some degree; (B) your average D/S had better education and a more responsible job (lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, entrepreneur) than the American norm; (C) dominant or submissive, he or she was in a higher income bracket and, odd fact, held more real estate (I guess land acts as acoustic insulation. Whip crack and loud begging go right through a cheap plasterboard apartment wall); (D) D/S people are liberal sexually but otherwise quite conservative. Not swingers: monogamous; (E) they are extremely individualistic. "We're doers, not talkers. We tend to be tennis players, not basketball players. Hunters and people who fly their own planes. The salt of this country, we make America go."

And what does it erupt from, this compulsive bent to surrender or control? Is it in all men and women--a matter just of degree, the difference between love tap and spank--or is it some peculiar, limited backcourt foul? Hartwell would say that "women will always be sexually submissive. And men will always be sexually dominant, as long as we are human beings." The subject is, I needn't remind you, touchier than Bernie Goetz on a subway. Still, what man has never felt, mounting his woman, some rush of mastery, of imposed will and seed? And what female hasn't taken snug delight in her own spread acquiescence? These are not culturally acceptable thoughts. We have politicized sex: equal access, fair labor practices, collective bargaining all pertain now. Even that innocuous, jocular phrase "missionary position" can suggest colonialism. The apologetic way we discuss gender traits in sex is a symptom of fear--our secret animal might get loose, perform antisocial acts and, worse, be undemocratic.

If, then, you assume (as I will) that Hartwell is correct, that men are dominant, how come so many of them are down on their knees tongue shining a ten-inch platform heel?

Where there's smoke, there's often a smoke machine. First, dominant women are generally professional, not innate. Mistress Von Himmelfahrt took up men-slaughter because it was a crab-free way to pull down $150 an hour without ever unsnapping her stainless-steel bra. Diane Hartwell says, "I find very, very few real dominant women out there. These 22-year-old girls who buy a whip and a leather skirt and an ad--that isn't dominant." In fact, dominant women can be rather pathetic. Go to any D/S club, you'll see 200-pound mistresses, limp as fabric sculpture, so disreputable-looking that their bitch power would seem to derive from a scintillating ugliness. Most, though, pander to male-submissive tastes because--as Ed put it--"they couldn't get a man interested in them otherwise."

Second, and even more revealing, submissive men are downright bossy. Their Milquetoast must be buttered just so. Jay Hartwell: "Submissive men are demanding about how submissiveness is given them. You vill do it this way." These are often responsible, paging-beeper types who find, in sexual submission, a kind of unpaid holiday. This controlled schizophrenia can furlough them from job tension. Nonetheless, even on the rack, they're still delegating. Administrators of their own punishment. Ed phrased it so: "As for professional dominant women ... hell, I consider them hired help."

Overt submissive women are rarer than pin boys in a bowling alley. The first reason should be obvious: wise caution. A female form that is too user friendly might be taken advantage of by the wrong Sir Stephen. Moreover, women still aren't as mobile as men. They don't have the cruising time that even a husband who "works late" one night each week can manage. And, I suspect, it is easier for women to load-shed their passive need in the normal, respectable wife-under sexual mode. Female orgasmic noise has a plaintive, defenseless ring to it. Men, by contrast--even if they just pin the lady's wrist down or thrust with overmuch triumph--may be accused of crassness or brutality. Love and dominance are still considered antithetical.

And I have yet to mention the most significant dynamic. Namely, that dominance and submission are both less a matter of desire or drive than of perspective. Neither phenomenon is ever found in the pure state. Freud guessed that a long time ago. "He who experiences pleasure by causing pain to others in sexual relations is also capable of experiencing pain in sexual relations as pleasure. A sadist is simultaneously a masochist.... [And] masochism is nothing but a continuation of sadism directed against one's own person in which the latter at first takes the place of the sexual object." That female in her strait jacket is you, objectified. That whip arm about to descend is your own arm, externalized. All D/S people are, in effect, self-flagellants. This'll hurt me more than it will hurt you, dear. I hope.

•

D/S, then, is a sexual Möbius strip. And in any Monday-night Eulenspiegel session at 25 East Fourth Street in New York, you can sense the endless flip-siding. "I'm submissive by preference. But I will switch." Most members who major in D or S are also minoring (maybe with reluctance and small appetite) in the opposite. But specialization is inhibitive: it hurts social mobility. There are no "scenes," no titillation at Eulenspiegel. It is middle class, dullish, informative and about as raunchy as your local hepatitis support group.

T.E.S., a not-for-profit corporation, was set up in 1971 by militant masochists. After some while it went coed, you might say, and dominant folk were allowed to matriculate. Now, though heterosexual by and large, Eulenspiegel will tolerate just about anyone. The strangeness range is, indeed, wonderful. One dominant pre-op transsexual. One chap who likes to wrestle with (and be pinned by) women. One houseboy/valet (but will he do windows?). One savior who is into re-creating the Crucifixion for a spiritual, nonsexual high-- "And would anybody here care to celebrate Good Friday with me?" More than one student (Eulenspiegel is in the syllabus of several college sex-education courses). Another 25 or so, each with his or her peculiar sexual salt lick. Most are Yuppie attractive, clean-cut. Some, yes, look like they got to Eulenspiegel only after an exhumation order was signed. The motto is "Safe, consensual, loving S/M." People are courteous to one another. After all, everyone at Eulenspiegel lives in a glass house of some sort. Monday procedure is calendar, business, speaker, break for wine and conversation, round table. Tonight our topic will be "Flirting in the Scene."

And there is so much to learn. Did you know, say, that a spiky leather wristlet means dominant on the left arm but submissive on the right? That S/M is M/S out in L.A.? (S stands for slave, not sadist; M for master, not masochist.) Further-more, Charley, just because you're a pervert doesn't mean you're excused from the social graces. It is still uncouth to ask a Mistress Caligula if she'd mind strapping you on first acquaintance. Good conversation, a pleasant manner and compatible interests are important. Dominant Helen had this to say: "If you put a chain on somebody's neck, you own him. Now I see chains and collars and locks on people's necks on the first date. I don't know what they do for an encore by the second or third month.... I guess I'm too traditional."

Most Eulenspiegelers aren't promiscuous. Heck, it's tough to run around a lot when maybe one man or woman out of 200 can share your idiosyncratic D/S scene. And, like any other intense human interaction, a D/S match requires perseverance, care and adaptability. You should also be somewhat more attractive than, oh, Zinjanthropus. Slaves and masters are courted first as people. Submissive (but switchable) Ed told me, "You have to be dominant, even as a submissive, to get a woman to care for you and love you. You have to maintain respect. Once you lose that, you're a goner. These guys who come on submissive right away--'Can I kiss your feet, mistress?'--they can never, from that position, be a boyfriend. I also find, in a relationship, if you fuck them good it doesn't hurt, either. My problem is, I'm such a good dominant, girlfriends often don't want to switch over."

Submissiveness, heightened by enough passion, can approximate a meditative exercise--hot-coal walkers manage something similar. It will actually transmute the unpleasant message registered by a sore nerve ending. Ed explains, "If I'm in love with someone, I can turn pain into pleasure totally. You know what it's like if you're making love and a woman gives you a hickey or bites your neck. If you're hot enough and the love is hot enough, you don't feel it as pain. The more I care for her, the more I can make the conversion."

But there are recreational hazards. "I keep a lookout for myself. Even though I convert pain into pleasure, I know the price I'm going to pay the next day. I think, Well, these are two-day welts, that's a three-week scratch. I try to get the maximum amount of pain with the least physical damage." Has he ever experienced fear with an irresponsible partner? "Uh, once. I used to do self-bondage, and one time I hooked myself up with my arms and just couldn't get out. If I hollered, someone would've come, but then he'd've had to break my apartment door down. I finally maneuvered free, but what a scene. I was really shitting a pill."

The instructive word here is scene. Scene, in Eulenspiegelese, covers each and every D/S combination. They are all acted out, played. More than any other sexual water ballet, D/S assumes theatrical form. As a novelist, I can appreciate D/S, because it is, yes, literate. Stories get told: there is confrontation, dialog, physical and intellectual climax. When done well, a D/S scene will reel itself off like some tight suspense film. It is, after all, anticipation--not penetration or paddle thwack--that stirs a sensuous flush. One D/S porn-loop director told me, "I prefer having two women on the set. Because, while the first is being bound or raped, I can cut to the second, to her face. She's anticipating what will happen to her. She's becomes the audience's P.O.V. And the audience experiences her fear or desire." In fact, D/S is Aristotelian. A ceremonial, pseudo-tragic drama that has been structured to induce catharsis. Catharsis, in D/S, is often the orgasm itself. Something Aristotle didn't think of.

And, as with any drama, costume will provide lots of the illusion. Face it, most people look better in bondage. Restraint articulates the body. Indeed, so-called straight people wear bondage gear every day. What else is your wife's bra--a restraint gadget to accentuate the bustline. Or paint-tight jeans? The most common--and commonly painful--bondage implement is a high heel. Yet women know that heels improve leg silhouette by cording calf and thigh. Watch any woman walk heeled: you see there the hobbling, insecure stride of someone in ankle irons.

Moreover, D/S drama (or, more properly, melodrama) is a historical romance. D/S doesn't occur in the present tense. Judging from costume--garter belt, corset--what you have very often are little Victorian period pieces. Or a reenactment of some ideal childhood when physical discipline was at least thinkable. Here the controlled schizophrenia spoken of before applies chronologically and culturally as well. Modernism is at a stop. Nuclear war, airport-luggage handling, adultproof caps all appear less importunate when you're bent nude in front of some woman dressed like Kitty from Gun-smoke. And, for the dominant man, costume can reprise an age when his gender role had positive definition. Wives in 1880 and 1890 were submissive to their men (kept so symbolically by whalebone bondage). Male prepotence didn't connote breechcloth and tribal-scar savagery. D/S repertory theater signals sharp longing for some less ambiguous and stressful human time.

But you'd be sore-pressed, even in legitimate drama, to distinguish between art and exhibitionism. The D/S mind-set is strongly narcissistic. Mistresses, not just their slave clientele, wear flattering bondage (push-up bra, laced boot). Leather and latex simulate flesh: a paradigmatic flesh that feels smooth, perspirationless, streamlined, unhuman. Skin has become artifice. Even in partner-partner privacy or mirrored self-restraint, the hung, muscle-bound human physique is an alluring tableau vivant. D/S people, despite their obsession with anonymity, are inveterate Polaroid swingers. And often a "spontaneous" scene played at some D/S club will be more ostentation than impulsive outburst. All give intensity by the forbidden status of D/S. Deliberate outrage: like pissing in a Salvation Army kettle on Seventh Avenue at Christmas.

Moreover, as when actors perform for some authoritarian director, there is cession of both responsibility and free will. George Orwell made it clear in Shooting an Elephant that colonial governments (dominant) have to gratify whatever image and expectation their subject people (submissive) conceive. The ruler is ruled. Thus, in return for control, D men and women work harder than Michael Jackson's clipping service. The D is auteur, scenarist, best boy, stage and costume designer. Long-term D/S relationships require more imagination than you'd sweat off producing a 72-episode series of M*A*S*H.

But, in exchange for all that production value, the dominant is released from immediate sexual-performance pressure. He or she can budget lust. The porn-role model in our civilization--indefatigable Homo erectus, woman lubricated better than frictionless bearings--is enough to put anyone through a sexual power stall. One writer (name unknown) said it this way: "The bound woman is both helpless (unthreatening, undemanding) slave and voluptuary--breasts outthrust, legs spread, wriggling. She is the sexual superhuman we've been conditioned to find or emulate. But she is also helpless and sensual only at the dominant male's leisure." She can't escape his control. And she can't require avalanchine efforts from his masculinity. D/S theater is a dialog in fine balance, even when one speaker has been gagged.

•

But, understand this, for all the intellectual and artistic pageantry--plot, costume, crawl-on part--D/S remains neurotic and compulsive. It is never just a limited engagement. As one submissive male told me, "I live S/M, think S/M, 24 hours a day, every day." The question on deck, then, is, Has D/S, overt and covert, become more prevalent in America? Yes, it has. Sure, solid arithmetical evidence on proton decay is more easily collected. Eulenspiegel, Hartwell & Co., correspondence magazines each represent just a thin scattering layer. Many D/S people won't announce their existence even to themselves. And that condition will never change. However, if you extrapolate from certain assumptions about D/S certain assumptions about the cultural and psychological weather in America, there is a credible inference left. I mean, we haven't gotten cozy yet with guilt.

Here I draw on conjectures first proposed to me by Professor Steven Marcus in 1963. Marcus, who later would coedit the complete Freud, had then just reread "A Child Is Being Beaten." In that obscure essay, Freud wrote about six men and women, each obsessed with similar D/S fantasies. They would imagine--and had done so from earliest youth--an unknown child experiencing strict corporal punishment. Freud, as I have said, knew well enough that sadism and masochism were interchangeable. But Marcus, who was to write a superb socio-sexual history, The Other Victorians, took this narrow yet suggestive essay further. He recognized that none of those six men and women had had much significant physical discipline as children. Thence he elaborated a hypothesis that, ever since, I have thought the most useful single insight into D/S and its queer dynamic.

Punishment is moral and emotional restitution. Children who do wrong and get corporeal attention for it (and, afterward, are made whole by remedial love) have gone through a closed process--sin, retaliation, forgiveness. On the other hand, children who do wrong and are merely reasoned with (told of displeasure: "Mom is upset," "God will punish," "Why can't you be better?"), these children may own no sure psychological appliance for expiation. Their process remains open. They are left--talk about sadism--with the endless responsibility for exorcising their own guilt. These, Marcus thought, might begin to fixate on physical punishment. But, since they had no one who would spank them, they often externalized self in another--hence that unknown child being beaten. The exercise would remain fantastical. In some extreme instances, though, it might develop into active D/S--which, we have seen, has theatrical or ritual structure that can resemble religious services in both repetition and solemnity. Atonement of a quite uncanonical sort.

But, as penitential rite, D/S is crucially flawed. First, because the sinner will derive morbid pleasure from it--and that pleasure tends to be sexual in large part. Second, because he is committing, through either thought or deed, a deviant act thoroughly condemned by Western civilization. Sisyphus, at least, could walk downhill now and then. For a D/Ser, guilt, after momentary cathartic release, will both continue as before and, worse, be obscured. His obsessive acts of contrition hatch fresh remorse. An inescapable, circular syndrome has been generated. Punishment won't fit the crime, because no one can remember what the crime was. And having, like Ed, converted pain into pleasure, he is anyhow incapable of atonement. Invulnerable, in a terrible way, to expiation.

A Brooklyn whore into dominance once told me her most lucrative and heaviest repeat sessions were with Hasidic Jewish men. They felt guilt because, good grief, the holocaust had somehow snubbed them. If a Jew can fabricate such unwarranted tsimmes, and we assume guilt to be one decisive element in D/S, then Caucasian, middle-class American men had better bend over and grab ankles right now. Hell, we're so affluent, powerful, climatecontrolled--no purgation is available. In babu Latin, Americans are--more than ever--homo culpus, the guilt-making man. Some while ago, Christianity offered a quite elegant moral Clorox. Sin, repentance, sacrament, absolution. But now fewer and fewer can fit religion into their One Minute Management.

The American male is contrite about everything: Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, white flight, whale death, wind erosion, spina bifida, abortion, anti-abortion, Mother, feline leukemia, nonunion water cress, his doorman, his elevator man, car pooling, blue algae, his new leaf blower, his new mulcherizer and--probably--galactic red shift. No wonder some men put on adult diapers and book rehearsal time with Diane Hartwell. No wonder some demonstrate outside a South African trade mission--to let policemen handcuff and subdue them in socially acceptable dominance.

But the big road apple, the great brown log of guilt is our present lust for egalitarianism. I quote William Manchester: "In egalitaria, if you acquire a light, you cast about quickly for a bushel. Athletes were first observed wearing their letter sweaters inside out and then discarding them; today letter sweaters are rarely seen anywhere, except among women athletes, who are making a very different political point. Legion of Honor ribbons are selfdom seen; that is also true of Phi Beta Kappa keys and all other bijoux of distinction in which people once took pride. In their place is a strange, false humility." You should apologize now for intelligence or hard work or even good looks. I can see reverse cosmetic surgery or hair uprooting in the future. Absolute gender equality has been inserted into the guilt package. Dominant males didn't have it hard enough before. To the stigma of aggression and sexual kinkiness--never mind whatever guilt those derived from--here affix a political stigma as well. D/S is, worst perhaps, either self-assertion or self-deprecation and, in egalitaria, both are unforgivably vulgar. Men must at least pretend to be mortified by their aggressive nature.

Today, in truth, both male and female are afraid of impinging on another's "space." Forget D/S here. Disregard even the missionary position and its politics. Let me suggest that when you just embrace your wife, draw her to you, restraint is exercised. You hold her fondly prisoner. It is emblematic of possession, of dominance. It may even arouse, but it is natural to human love. Take her hand in some questionable neighborhood and you assert both protection and superior physical strength. What is caring, after all, but kind dominance and stewardship? The shame that people caught by D/S feel--shame that we reinforce by our bitter, nervous contempt of them--is in all of us. Egalitarians embarrassed to presume on each other, even with love. An Episcopal marriage service mentions binding two people together. There is rope all around us. Rope of mystery and rope of love. It is dangerous always to ask who will be the binder and who the bound.