Play

By  AJB

Play. It’s one of my favorite euphemisms in the BDSM community. Its use is ubiquitous: play parties, play dates, role-play, and the crucial questions we ask our delectable dungeon target of the eve, “are you playing with anyone tonight? Do you want to play?” Of course, the word’s common connotations refer to innocence and childhood – hence the paradox, for the “playing” we generate in the BDSM community is adult, often erotic, sometimes perverse. In no way is it the “play” Tom, Jane and their 2.3 children imagine behind their white-picket fence.

Yet, the word resonates in our community. It’s entirely appropriate – if you’ve ever heard the chuckle of laughter shared between a Dom and sub even as s/he is shackled to the St. John’s cross, or quizzically witnessed a face beam with the grin of utter contentment despite the tears, the running mascara and the red welts of the lash. In the serious business of adult life, what sparse recreations are parceled out to us, beyond the erotic? Despite the protestation of clerical and conservative forces that sex should remain utilitarian and procreative, man and womankind have always experientially discovered and intuitively known sex can be pleasurable and enjoyable. The near-universal acceptance of that idea, without accompanying shame or guilt, is a hallmark of 20^th century thought. Marx knew the role of sex as entertainment well, when he called it “the theatre of the poor.” This comment may denigrate and restrict the sexual experience, but it illustrates my thought here: sex can be play, may possess the theatricality of a play, and often has a link to the erotic “playing” of our childhood. 

For example, when anyone asks the origins of my particular sexuality I have an anecdote I can recall with great certainty. I have always been an avid reader and at the age of five the text of comic books was, for me, light reading. I particularly enjoyed the sword and sorcery genre and Conan the Barbarian, far before the California governator popularized the series on film, was a favorite (this is the early Conan of the 1970’s).  One spin-off of the Conan series, probably to attract a female audience or horny geeks, was Red Sonja (later a film with Amazonian ex-Stallone bride Brigitte Nielson, far before she became a blowsy characture for reality television). Now the character Red Sonja was a sword maiden with flaming red hair and a lusciously sculpted and impossibly curvaceous body, who wore a chain metal microkini. And she fought, very well indeed, in this getup.  But apparently not well enough in one episode, where, captured, she is tied to a cross and paraded before the town before suffering the ignominities of the whip on her white flesh. (Eventually she is rescued by some heroic type).

Damn that image gives me a hard on just remembering it. 

It is not only that my infantile mind knew there was something striking about this image, but that I’d later enact it. Up the block was a German girl named Michelle, my playmate, perhaps two years older than me. One morning alone in my living room she rather playfully pulled down my shorts to see my but. My reaction was swift – embarrassed I “demanded” to see her ass- and pushed her to the wall where she obediently pulled them down. Thinking that, like Red Sonja, she should be humiliated and punished, I spanked her bottom. And then we heard the adults and stopped – and never played like that again.  My thoughts soon turned to baseball and the general ickiness of girls until the preteen years. 

I’m not the only one who recalls childhood “play” as formative in their BDSM orientation. I recently interviewed Jessica B., a 22 year old female submissive, who related this tale to me: at the tender age of seven, she played the game of  “the two cruel witches and the princess” with her cousins, of the same age and gender. The game largely consisted of the two witches capturing the princess, tying her up, torturing and touching her, stripping her and “forcing” her to participate in a fashion show for the witches and their imaginary guests, and forced masturbation, where they would taunt her: “you have to go faster until it hurts you!” If I could guess, these cousins are working at the whipped ass site of kink.com these days! “I didn’t see how it connected until recently, when I put two and two together,” says Jessica. “Now I do have fantasies of forceful women – but I don’t imagine them as a witch – more of a dominatrix-type.” 

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was among the first to recognize and publish on childhood sexual desires. Despite Freud’s controversial status in contemporary psychology and current critical evaluations of his therapeutic procedures, some of his basic suppositions: that our unconscious desires have a profound impact on our lives, and that early childhood is not an entirely innocent and latent, retain validity in the study of human sexuality. Think of the games we play as children. Doctor, the typical game of genital exploration among children, may easily correspond to future medical-play fetishes. Cowboys and Indians typically involve captivity scenarios and light bondage play. The various heroes, heroines, villains and victims kids play when imaging themselves in settings of sci-fi or fantasy all teach powerful lessons in the role of Dominant/powerful and helpless/submissive. It may even be that the current social emphasis on hyper structured and supervised play, an emphasis that I believe is both intellectually and socially damaging to children, is part of a puritanical backlash. We cannot trust our children alone not because we fear perverts, but because they are the perverts. A healthier social view would see this play as natural and the adult outcomes of this play as private, informed, consensual choices that are also natural, but the BDSM scene has far to go before it achieves mainstream social acceptance. 

Recently, I heard a story similar to Jessica’s from Claire M., a 29-year-old female submissive. Around the age of ten, she participated with most of her friends including two cousins, one younger and one older, in reenacting a series of stories they had found in her mother’s romance novels. Somehow these stories translated into lesbian playacting of scenarios of domination/submission – a massage that becomes a rape, a doctor who goes “too far,” a pirate who kidnaps and touches the heroine. She was particularly influenced by a romance novel called The Wolf and the Dove – a tale of Norman invaders who take over a village, kill the men, and have forced sex with the heroine until she orgasms. “My mom caught me reading it and took it away.  It was very embarrassing,” Claire said. “It was totally formative [to her sexual identity]. I didn’t realize it until two years ago, when I realized other people did this [BDSM] too.”

Play. The poet John Keats urged “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” The agonies and ecstasies of play in our subculture are tinted by enigmatic, paradoxical joys, and we employ this word without hesitance, with confidence.  It makes us forever young, even as time’s tendrils advance us –confused childhood tendencies blossom into our dark secret desires: we whisper and giggle to one another by the candlelight of a dungeon or our bedchambers. We know there is no wrong in our play, only the very pleasure and beauty promised in the word, and again, as Keats acknowledged, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness.”

-AJB