***Note: This piece has plot spoilers about the show Spring Awakening. If that is going to upset you, don't read it.***A kinky friend and I went to see the Broadway musical Spring Awakening the other day, and I was reminded both about how mainstream some BDSM is and how little that means people actually understand it. There is a scene in the play where Wendla, a young woman, talks about how she fantasizes about being beaten and then begs her friend Melchior to beat her with a switch so that she will "feel something, anything." He eventually acquiesces and hits her. When he does, she repeatedly begs him to hit her harder until he ends up beating her with his fists and then, filled with horror at his actions, running away. This, by the way, is the controversial scene that got the original play banned for many, many years, although in this political climate I think that an earlier scene where the mother refuses to teach her daughter where babies come from may actually ring more true. But I digress...
What I found really fascinating about the scene was the audience reaction to it. A small minority of the audience - including my playmate and I, as well as the gorgeous pair of British queens sitting behind us - spent the scene giggling in recognition. We'd had that conversation, that experience, from one direction or the other. We'd fantasized about pain, understood that desire before or after we grasped our bodies' longing for gentler sensations, and seeing it on stage was a revelation not because it was unfamiliar but because it was so completely on target. "For every masochist, God makes a sadist," indeed. The vast majority of the audience just seemed vaguely mystified or uncomfortable, which was what I expected. Then there was the other group. The group, like the couple in front of us who were so disgusted that they talked, loudly enough for us to hear, about whether or not they should get up and leave.
I forget, sometimes, that this is often the reaction to my sexuality. Horror, disgust, derision, and an unshakeable belief that there is something
wrong with me because one of the things that most profoundly sexually excites me is pain. It is bad enough, to much of society, that I am a woman who admits to liking sex, that I am aggressive about it, that I approach men, and women, with prurient intent. Still, for most of them, there is something about that they can at least understand. I may be improper, in their eyes, not womanly, not genteel, or whatever, but sex is a sensation they can generally understand desiring. The quest for the holy orgasm is sacred, or at least comprehensible. Seeking out pain, however, must be a sign of some fundamental deviance or flaw. It is proof that I am broken, and allows those who would find other reasons to despise me an easy nail on which to hang the less acceptable placards of their disgust (too smart for her own good, too loud for polite society, not pretty enough to get a normal man, too fat, too weird, too...)
The thing that sometimes makes it difficult to argue is that I am broken, and in the past I have used my masochism as a way to handle it. For a long time I found vanilla sexuality far more stressful than BDSM when it came to addressing my issues of risk vs. reward. In addition, I felt prettier, sexier, and more accepted in the kink community than I did among my more vanilla peers. I had discovered a community that valued differences, girls who were smart, loud, alt-pretty, weird, and ridiculous as much as those who were quiet, beautiful, normal, and sane, and I liked it. It was a glorious place to be, in part because of my flaws. But the counter-intuitive thing is this: in no way has my masochism ever rendered me broken, or wedged itself into little cracked pieces of my soul and forced them open the way that mainstream expectation has so often done. If anything, it has made me stronger, more self confident, healthier, and closer to whole. Still, the fact that I am broken makes it harder to convince people that my being a masochist has nothing to do with flaws in my character or my upbringing, holes in my psyche, active abuse, or benign neglect. It gives them an out from believing that I am just wired to like pain. That, for me, being beaten so hard I can't sit down comfortably for three days is simply a remarkable amount of fun.
I was listening to the Spring Awakening soundtrack and thinking, earlier today, about how joyful masochism can be. Reminiscing, really, about
recent experiences, playing masochist-in-the-middle, ending up in a pile of giggling, writhing, screaming biters and bitees on a floor, laughing hysterically from pain, and grinning shamelessly while cursing my head off. I don't think most people get that - that for some of us, at least, there can be a connection between a love of pain and the possibility of simple joy (to quote another musical.) I don't like stubbing my toe or walking into a wall
* any more than anyone else does, but the skillful application of pain or other intense sensations is often the most direct neurological highway to a grand old time.
Submission often comes from a darker place in me, a place of untamed longing or restless discontent, but pure masochism is usually straightforward, light, and untainted joy. It's transporting in the same way as getting
caught up in beautiful, intricate music - some small amount of which I experienced when listening to Spring Awakening
**.
*Shut up. I know it happens to the rest of you too. **Full disclosure, I enjoyed the show a lot, but I do not think it was the brilliant masterpiece that so many reviews have implied. It was a good show with some very good music and some very strange staging and choreography - one really annoying bit of which was explained by a remarkably useful review. Since I should not have to rely on written analysis to enjoy directorial choices, I actually think I may like the soundtrack better than the performance, but I am very glad I got to see it before it closed. I have access to cheap enough tickets that I might even be convinced to go again. Especially since I now know to think of it more as a play and concert than as a standard musical, something which will drastically change my experience and expectations.
