From: jfriday@ada.stat.uga.edu (Paul Stacy)
Subject: ARCHIVE: Guido
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>From harryu@warpten.EBay.Sun.COM (Harry Ugol)
Newsgroups: alt.sex.bondage
Subject: Re: Take Two: Limits was Humor and SM
Message-ID: <3168@male.EBay.Sun.COM>
Date: 5 Sep 90 22:35:48 GMT
References: <6777@crabcake> <1990Aug29.201915.16330@thelema.uucp>
<256@brat.UUCP> <1990Sep3.223933.9230@thelema.uucp>
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In article <1990Sep3.223933.9230@thelema.uucp> STella@thelema.uucp (STella) writes: > >I think one of the reasons SM people seem, in face-to-face >contact, at least, to be so relatively open, and exceptionally >merry, is just that we have chosen to play games on the edges of >limits, and therefore are alert to the panorama of diffracting >expectations which is the earth, air, and fire of humor. > >And even when we do get bent out of shape, I think there's >something in the games we dance that make us more ductile, more >amenable to getting bent back into shape. (I hope that's true >for the participants in the earlier portions of this discus- >sion....) For the water of humor is the ability to flow with >the diffractions when they grate on you. >
Hmmmm. I don't know exactly how they're relevant, but I've a few stories floating in my head that deal with many of the elements STella's talking about - mindfucks, limits, humor (and the situa- tions in which it is and is not appropriate), and something which could be labeled abuse, assuming that word can be stripped of its criminal-act connotations. I don't know what conclusions to draw from these stories; perhaps that should be an exercise left to the reader.
One story concerns a scene at last summer's Leather Fairy gather- ing. The bottom was a man named Northwind; he can best be de- scribed (at the risk of stereotyping him, a very difficult thing to actually do to a person as strange as Northwind) as a typical high-strung creative artist type, passionate and graceful but not necessarily centered. The Top was a woman I'll call Mom (leather fairies by and large don't have fairy names, at least not yet (Northwind, as usual, being an exception); that makes life diffi- cult for people like me, who likes to tell stories about people in order to illustrate points but will not use their legal names or anything which can be used by strangers to trace them. I suspect this woman would not want the fairy name Mom, at least not permanently (actually she's going to get another fairy name later on in this article, one which suits her much better - but I can't tell too much too soon :-), but "Mom" is an OK name for this particular vignette). We had hired Mom as the gathering's chief caterer, and she had spent most of the gathering in the kitchen. This was the last night, though, and her work was done, and it was time for her to play. I had never seen Mom play before - I hadn't really met her before the gathering, although I'd heard of her - and all I knew of her up to the final few days of the gathering was that she smiled easily, laughed easily, loved a good hug (and gave as good as she got - yummm), and had an indefinable quality (gobs of it; she's a *big* woman, in all senses of the word) which I call "earth mother". That night, I saw another side to the earth mother.
Mom's been around the S&M scene for many years. Her favorite fetish is psychological S&M, a/k/a terror; she's equally adept at playing both sides of that game, although she's so powerful and experienced that very few people have the strength to top her. I hadn't encountered psychological S&M before the gathering, but I've become a convert, let me tell you. That night she became Mommy, The Hell Goddess - a ravening, cannabilistic, screaming harpy, the embodiment of everyone's worst childhood nightmare of the Mother/Monster that eats you up and spits out the bones, and all because she *loves* you. She was dressed in a pink frilly tutu and nothing else (fairy drag is an exercise in experiential art); she would rush up, grab Northwind by the waist (Northwind was cuffed to an overhead beam with just the right amount of slack so he could either stand up straight with his arms slightly bent over his head or sag forward and hang by his wrists), toss him back and forth a few times like a rag doll (Mom's just as strong as she is big), then throw him forward and CRACK!! out came the whip. The dialogue was something like this (with obse- quious 'umble pardons requested for the excessive punctuation; the printed word just doesn't do justice to sound effects like these):
"YOU'RE GOING TO GIVE IT TO ME, AREN'T YOU!!!" <*CRACK*!!!>
"YES MOMMY!!"
<tossa-tossa-tossa-throw-*CRACK**CRACK*!!!> "ALL OF IT!!!!"
"*YES MOMMY*!!!"
<*CRACK*!!!> "AREN'T YOU!!!!!"
"**YES MOMMY**!!! **YES MOMMY**!!!"
Northwind was screaming; She was yelling; I swear to God, She was using and creating so much raw power, She dimmed the lights in the room. I swear to God...
Northwind collapsed into total catharsis partway through the scene. After it ended, and he was let down, they were cuddling ever so tenderly (there's no lovemaking I know quite like a good scene, and this was one of the best I had ever witnessed), and he said, "You know, you didn't hit me very hard," and she nodded and replied, "I didn't need to." It turns out Northwind had some very very dark Stuff buried deep in his subconscious, something having to do with his early childhood family (it doesn't matter what), and Mommy had tapped into that dark vein. There was no way she could have known it was there beforehand, but I suspect she did anyway; she's one of the best Tops I've ever seen - later on that night we were watching another scene, and, as it was drawing to a close, she said "she's going to break down and cry." I asked her "You really see that far ahead?" for such an event would not have been appropriate at that point in the scene; she just nodded. Sure enough, the bottom broke into sobs - a full three minutes later (which in a scene is enough for about two chapters' worth of events).
She's good. She's *real* good.
When she needs to or wants to, though, Mom can hit very hard indeed. Later on that night she worked over an especially be- loved of hers, one she had been playing with for years; she left bruises and marks the likes of which I've never seen before - in my estimation, they must have taken weeks to heal - and over an area that stretched from thighs to neck. Such force was neces- sary for the scene she was making and the magic was weaving; nothing less would have sufficed. However, in both the scenes she made that night, and likely in most of the scenes she does, humor is *not* one of the ingredients she uses; as a matter of fact, even random noises are poison - she had to keep quieting the people around her for the second scene (it was a very small play space we were using, with too many people constantly going from here to there or watching the scenes and talking among themselves - but them's the breaks; this gathering was held out in the sticks, and we made the best use of the spaces we had), and you could see the extraneous noises from people around her sapping the scene's energy. If someone had actually tried to crack a joke during that scene, I think she would have snapped his or her neck. And I would have applauded; what was going on (*very* powerful magic) was far too important for wise-asseries.
That isn't to say Mom doesn't have a sense of humor, or doesn't enjoy it where appropriate - far from it. As I said, she came to the gathering as our chief caterer; she was at the same time co- chair of one of the more important subcommittees of the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Committee, and her male co-co-chair, when he heard she was going to be away for the entire second week of June (the Parade itself occurs the fourth Sunday in June; for the higher-ups in the Parade Committee, the previous month is hell on wheels), said to her, "You can't do that to me! You'll see! I'm gonna send <dramatic pause> *Guido* after you!" Guido turned out to be the co-co-chair's lover (actually that's the wrong word. The word the co-co-chair's lover used to describe the co-co-chair was "property"; I suppose therefore she (e.g. Guido - yes, Guido was a she) was his "owner" - but I don't know. S&M relationships come in many flavors; you have to be real careful with the titles... :-); but I'll call her Sir, which is the title she likes to use in scenes, at least when she's Top, which is most of the time. Sir was another of the women I met for the first time at the Leather Fairy gathering (at which, btw, and in no small way due to Sir and her partner for the week (as well as Mom and her lover), I came to the conclusion that when it comes to brutal power, vicious strength, creative intelligence, and sheer nastiness, men are just pussies compared to women. Humbling, but IMO true); Sir was a woman with the face and smile and voice of a sweetly carnivorous killer canary.
Sir and Mom played games with Guido all week ( <<<== humor alert; humor dead ahead!). There was a sign stuck onto the wall outside the kitchen with a cleaver: "Guido -- I know you're out there -- I'm ready for you. --(Mom)". There was a message written in blood (beef blood) on a cutting board: "Guido was here." We all kept the ball in play, threatening Mom and each other with Guido, ascribing random events to Guido, invoking Him like a god (leath- er fairies can use *all* kinds of symbols in their spiritual work
Well, Mom also happens to be an expert at cuttings (an S&M prac- tice found mostly in the lesbian community; drawings are cut right into the skin with a razor blade. The scars are very pretty; the scene can be very painful), and Sir told Mom that at some point she wanted a cutting. Mom waited until the end of the gathering; then, one day when Sir was sitting down having lunch (actually being fed lunch - she was bound for some reason, I forget why), Mom came over, lifted Sir up off the couch with one hand by her hair (ouch), tossed her down onto the floor, ripped her shirt open, and, with the rest of us helping with the isopro- pyl and other medical supplies (word had been spread an hour or two beforehand), cut an ornate "G" into Sir's breast. Sir loved it.
And so it was that we found out *Mom* had been Guido all along. I don't know what Sir's property had to say about the matter...
I was going to include another story that throws yet a different light on the uses and limits of humor in and out of scenes, but this article has gone on long enough. Someone remind me to tell some stories some day about the Swissman and the Parisian doing counting scenes...
>One of the things I, as a bottom, cultivate is a cheery (if >possible) acceptance of the inevitable.
STella, if you or anyone else here hears of a technique which would also apply to chronic pain from no-doubt-terminal cancer ( :-( :-( ), I'd very much like to hear about it. I've been asked to help; I haven't tried yet, and I'm not sure my experience and the techniques I've learned in S&M will apply to something like that.
Harry Ugol UUCP: {backbone}!sun!warpten!harryu ARPA: harryu@warpten.EBay.sun.com
"Rivendell household rule #5: Dessert is the most important meal of the day."
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