Susie's Complaint (Part two of three and a half) - Slumming

The day after I read Sexual Sanity, Murre woke me up by stroking me. She held my legs in a vice grip between hers, and held my hands over my head as I bucked and writhed, my hips finally lifting clear off the bed in desperation. And then she stopped, pleased with her work, and rolled back over. I made a mischievous pounce at her pubis—tasting her is one of the only things that takes the edge off that sharp frustration—and I was stopped short. I had been sleeping collared, and my collar was connected to the wall by a short lead. I came up short a few inches from her vulva, and gasped in annoyance, my face no doubt a picture of embarrassment and disappointment. Murre laughed and laughed.

And then I got up, made her breakfast, helped her with her medications, and helped her get ready for work. And I stayed home to clean the house, cook her lunch, plan dinner, and squirm with unreleased passion. And in the afternoon I read some kink blogs. All of which is a typical day in the neighborhood around here. I am a housewife, of sorts. I mean, I'm writing this in the laundromat. So in a mechanical sense, my days are a lot like Susie's days.

But this comparison is false, at many levels: Murre and I chose this arrangement, which suits me so well I feel guilty about it. Susie and Bill ostensibly did not choose their arrangement, and certainly don't enjoy it. Moreover, the fact that we could make those choices, that we had a wide range of life options, suggests that we have all kinds of privilege that Susie and Bill didn't. Money, opportunities, education, lack of fundamentalist repression...but most of all, perhaps, in comparison to Susie, I especially have the privilege of being male.

Now, there is a word—a slur, in fact—for people who use their privilege to emulate things other people do out of necessity: slumming. (Academics use the closely related “appropriation.”) In this instance, I am slumming as a housewife, and we are jointly slumming as a 1950s couple, albeit with the gender roles reversed.

Many of the radical-feminist criticisms of BDSM have to do with the notion of slumming, though I've never seen that exact term used. A number of authors (whom I won't cite here, 'cause I got a whole other blog for that) imply or flat-out state that BDSM is a kind of pathology of privilege: people with lots of power emulating abuse victims, slaves, animals, prisoners...and of course housewives. This critique is especially pulled out where submissive men or lesbians are concerned—the submission of straight women is usually explained as bona fide oppression.

Slumming is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, not so much because I'm kinky, but because I've spent years living...errr...in slums. Or on the street, or in a swamp in the third world, or in other circumstances that are much too sketchy for a Nice White Boy Like Me. My ostensible motivation was absurd romantic wanderlust. I wanted to be free from bosses and teachers and parents; wanted to have the sort of raw, visceral, even traumatic experiences that I was afraid my idyllic childhood had deprived me of. It is as old a recipe as Jack Kerouak and Huckleberry Finn and Lancelot, right? And quintessentially male, at least in that flavor. Not that young women don't seek to test themselves with peril, but they can do so more conveniently: they can find Mr. Wrong. Which is also an ancient recipe.

And so, because I collect critiques of myself, I spent a long time sleeping in church doorways and abandoned buildings, all the while trying to decide if this was some perversion of my bourgeois white privilege (And also my privilege as an intelligent, able-bodied person, US citizen, etc.) After all, Jawbone across the street wasn't sleeping on a heating grate because he had read too much Huckleberry Finn and Le Morte D'Arthur, he was sleeping there because he was black and had no money and no family and he was an alcoholic and a junkie. Weren't my choices, in some way, a kind of existential insult to Jawbone's whole life? And isn't my submission to Murre an insult to Susie's more banal oppression at the hands of her husband and the patriarchy?

Maybe. Probably. In fact, I think this is one of the stronger lines of criticism against BDSM. It is especially strong if it is (only) employed as a silencing tactic. Radical feminists are generally careful to say that they don't object to people slumming as slaves and housewives as long as those people don't talk about it. And that concern seems respectable, though it often is placed as an insincere coda to essays condemning BDSM in any fashion whatsoever. Obviously society can't afford any discussion of sexuality to drown out the voices of actual slaves, abused women, abused men, or even people like Susie, who seem backed into a corner by casual repression.

But.

Back in my abandoned-warehouse-and-boxcar days, I started to doubt that this policy of silence-for-slummers made sense. For a lot of reasons, which....(yawn)....I will return to later on...

Unspeakable Horror (Part II: Tower House)

In between hospital visits, Murre was invited to speak at a conference in her field. We were put up at the Tower House, a Victorian Inn near the institution that held the conference. I have stayed in a few very nice hotels, mostly overseas, but in the US, my experience of hotels is that expensive = modernist. Concrete cantilevered balconies with braided ficus plants in big concrete pots, and giant chandeliers made of plastic and monofilament. Roughly the aesthetic of a large airport. Tower House was the other end of the spectrum. It felt almost Dickensian: cherry paneling, marble floors, ancient furniture and bookshelves full of old books that people actually read. The patina of age everywhere. It was very lovely.

But.

As the conference approached, it became clear that Murre had chosen the Tower Hotel as the scene for the long-threatened enema. This is typical of her diabolical ways. She had me buy an enema kit, and then left it in its box, unopened, on the shelf in our bathroom. Every time I went in there, I saw it. I thought about it. Then she opened the box, admired it, and put it back on the shelf in plain view. Every time I went in there, I saw it. I thought about it. And by little pieces, I came to accept that this would happen to me, and it was OK, and it was in large part OK because I knew exactly where it would happen: she would—she had said—bend me over the rim of the bathtub. And while I had this incredible dread of making a mess, at least it would be right there in my own bathroom, which is kind of a sanctuary of the physical and private in the way one's bathroom is. (Witness Psycho...)

But in fact, Murre was going to do the deed in the ornate, tiled bathroom of Tower House. And that did not seem OK at all. I would be making a mess, perhaps, on someone else's turf. Some housekeeper would be coming in after me to clean up. It was appallingly horrible, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The suite was impressive—antique botanical prints and a king-size bed, which I had never seen before. Apparently they are designed for foursomes. There was an equally huge clawfoot slipper tub (if you'll pardon a plumbing moment....it was European style, with the hardware wall-mounted to one side. The sexiest and most comfortable of the clawfoots.)

“I think,” Murre said, as if she was just reviewing the amenities, “that you should stay on your knees whenever you're in the bedroom.”

And so I did, and as I unpacked her suitcase I quickly learned that it was much easier to move around on all fours than in a kneeling-walk.

The next morning, when I woke up, Murre was beaming at me. Unusually so, because she is by no stretch a morning person.

“Time for your enema,” she announced. I protested, of course. We had a breakfast date in an hour, that was my excuse, but I always have an excuse. (My backup plan was that everyone knows Fridays are no good for enemas.) It was no use. She was clipping a leash to the heavy leather collar I'd been sleeping in, and I knew that this thing was actually going to happen, right now, and I would have to accept it and then go have breakfast in the conservatory.

Murre took out the bulb of the enema kit, folded it double, and stuck it into my mouth. It tried to expand, of course, quickly spreading my jaws like (I think?) an inflatable gag would. I had to struggle to keep it from popping out. Taking the leash in hand, she walked me on all fours into the bathroom, quite briskly, and had me stop on the bathmat. She was gleeful, and not all perturbed to discover that a breaker had tripped in the night: there were no lights in the bathroom, only filtered light from the adjacent foyer. She tied her end of the leash to the doorknob, and filled the sink with water.

“Warm or cold?” She asked.

“Warm please,” I managed to say, becoming complicit in my torment.

“Get into the bathtub,” she replied. “On your hands and knees.” She fondled my ass, telling me how gorgeous I was. It was darker in the bathtub, and sounds echoed slightly.

“I want to put washcloths under your knees,” she said.

“No,” I retorted, surprising myself at my own petulance. It was mainly just knee-jerk obstinacy, but I liked the feeling of the cold, smooth enamel under my knees and shins. It felt grounding. She made no response to being contradicted, but I could hear her filling the bulb with water.

“Stick your butt up, Orlando,” she told me, and she would have to repeat that phrase several times in what followed. I had to hold myself there as the cold little nozzle entered me, over and over. At this point, I could feel the water pushing into me—it took much longer than I expected—but I didn't have any great sense of fullness or urgency. Physically, it was nowhere near as dramatic as being fucked or even just plugged. But mentally it was a three-ring circus spectacular. I felt tiny and humble, trying desperately to keep some semblance of control over my body, even though I knew I would not, in the end, be allowed to.

My erection was painfully hard, and I felt as if I had to come, as if getting the teaspoon of semen out of me would in some way make up for the pints of water that were pouring into me. I groaned and begged and bucked, and got admonished for not holding my ass up where she wanted it. But she would reach between my legs and stroke me as she forced the water in.

And then she began to count, stroking me gently as she squeezed still more into me. I was completely taken aback. It had been a while since I had come, but a very long while since she had counted me down to orgasm, and I really wasn't expecting it. She was not, after all, finished with the enema. In my surprise, I came early, really just the ejaculation without the orgasm. A little water spurted out of my anus in sympathy. I felt startled and ashamed, but she only said:

“That's good. One more bulb.”

I had thought for a moment that this sudden permission to come was a kind of merciful favor. But as the last of the water gurgled into me—and now I was starting to feel a little swollen—I had to revise that sense. She wanted to humble me, and now all my pride was indeed gone. Water from my ass was dripping down the curls of hair behind my scrotum. A gossamer pendulum of semen hung from my cock. I was drooling and moaning. I was collared and leashed and mounted in a bathtub in the half-light. My body, all too obviously, was not mine to control. And my orgasm was not being held out as a possible reward after this trial, it was simply another thing I had no control over.

And then, with a tug on the leash and a steady hand on my shoulder, she had me kneel upright in the tub. And it all instantly became agonizing. The two pounds of water that had been weighing more or less harmlessly on my gut was now trying to escape in earnest. I gasped, loudly, and my moans took on a kind of panic speed. And I begged her, not in a careful, measured way as I had earlier, but desperately.

“I need to let it out,” I whined, “O please I need to. Murre, please...”

“Shhh.” She said. She helped me step out of the bathtub. I was absolutely sure I was going to lose this last, sordid vestige of control and spill myself on the tile floor. She guided me onto the toliet—still leashed—and pulled my head into her belly.

“Please.” I moaned. “Murre. Murre.”

“All right,” she said at last.

There is no sexy, demure way to release a quart of water from your bowels. But that seemed to be exactly the point. She held me there, tenderly, telling me how much she loved me as I was reduced to a leaking vessel of dubious fluids. It felt like a personal nadir of degradation, and yet Murre was there, and she loved me in spite of all that. (The parallel to my love for her during the grotesqueries of her own hospitalizations was clearly playing in the background. In fact, we were back in the ER not 48 hours later.)

She let me take a quick shower, and then I curled up in bed beside her, still trembling. She was wet as a lake...I believe she had come while she was pumping me full of water, but in truth I wasn't paying attention. And then we got dressed and had the most wonderful breakfast...

Hmmmm. In retrospect, Murre let me off very easy on the physical end of things. I wound up thinking that giving oneself an enema, (prior to anal sex, say) might not be any more onerous than brushing one's teeth.  And it felt nice afterwards, the way being thoroughly fucked feels nice afterwards.  But I don't think being given an enema is ever going to feel other than perfect humiliation.

Two nights later, we were back in the hospital, and the doctors—almost for the hell of it, it seemed—gave Murre another barium enema. Later, in her gurney and hopped on pain and morphine, she gave me a look.

“Dammit,” she said. “I'm back out in the lead, enema-wise. But not for long.”

Susie's Complaint (Part one of three and half(?))

I'm reading Sexual Sanity by Earl Wilson, who taught clinical and counseling psych at the Conservative Baptist Seminary. Wilson is an old-school Christian conservative sex counselor. He views sex as a blessing from God, but one that easily veers into “obsessions” like masturbation and homosexuality and “voyeurism,” by which he means pornography. He doesn't mention BDSM, and I'm going to assume that it would appall him into cardiac arrest, but maybe not. His epitome of a healthy relationship, after all, is infrakinky D/s with the man in charge.

So. One of his case studies is about “Susie,” and it has set me thinking along several different lines So here's the story:

Susie's complaint was this: she was a housewife. Her husband worked a night shift and came home, tired, around the time when she got up. She would wake up horny, and he would play with her a bit and then go back to sleep. She would try snuggling with him and encouraging him, but he wasn't interested in fucking her. So she would be left there wet...all caressed up and nowhere to go.

“Much to Susie's surprise,” Wilson writes, she began to spend time during the day fantasizing about sex. In fact, she began to read pulp romance novels—I'm imagining the supermarket check-out-line variety, that have about one sex scene per pound of paper, and even that is veiled in opaque paraphrasis: “And then, in the gauzy moonlight, Raimundo tore off Natasha's gown and made her his own. His passion was a tumultuous tempest, and she throbbed with ecstasy at the moment of their body's merging, sighing 'Raimundo! I have waited for six hundred pages...'”

But Susie's slide into sin did not stop with Raimundo and Natasha. She started watching soap operas in the afternoon, fantasizing about the sex lives of the characters in the soaps. After two hours or so of watching soap operas, she would often “rub herself.” (Wilson doesn't say 'masturbate,' which is a word he knows, and doesn't say she reached orgasm....there is kind of an implication that she didn't.) All of this cut into her ability to do the housework and be a good mother. Moreover, she recognized it was sinful and obsessive, and she wanted help. So she went to Wilson.

(Please take a moment to consider some possible solutions to Susie's problem...............Thank you.)

Wilson began by helping Susie to understand that her problems were behavioral: that she was obsessed with sex, essentially a sex addict. Following behavior-mod methods for dealing with addiction, he helped Susie break her day down into a 22-link chain of events, and then helped her devise plans for breaking free from her obsession at the crucial links. When she woke up, for instance, rather than think about her sexual frustration, she would just pray and read the Bible. She got rid of (most of) her romance novels, and made an intention to spend the time she would otherwise be reading romance novels in playing with her kids. She and Wilson then came up with a careful plan to structure her afternoon so she would not be tempted to watch soap operas. Susie's husband Bill was also enlisted to help give his wife positive reinforcement about not reading romance novels, watching soap operas, or touching herself. As kind of an afterthought, Wilson asked Bill to “be more sexually responsive to her.”

 

Now, don't laugh too much.  Everything about the story suggests that Bill and Susie are working-class, and are locked down into their current lifestyle in many ways.  My own knee-jerk reaction is: "Lose your inconsiderate husband, your prudish God, and your idiot therapist."  But that really isn't very helpful, right?  So what is the helpful response?

OTB III: My Elbows

Murre-

    My elbows belong to you.  Clearly.  Because you can kiss them, and I can't.

-Orlando