0 comments/ 11236 views/ 2 favorites Masochistic Me By: Cal Y. Pygia Late in purchasing a home computer, I was late in surfing the 'net. However, when I first took to cyberspace, spending hours perusing porn, like any other red-blooded, all-American boy, I soon discovered spanking, both as it is represented in drawings and photographs, still and (in the form of video clips) moving. I also discovered Literotica, to which, by today's count, I have submitted (lovely word, that!) over 682 works, about half of which are poems. The remainder, the prose, essays and stories alike, fall into such categories as BDSM, gay male, transsexuals and cross dressers, how to, humor and satire, celebrities, incest/taboo, exhibitionist/voyeur, and nonhuman. Predominant among the stories are those involving gay male and transsexual characters. My BDSM stories are mostly about spanking: "A Lark" ("A dare brought them closer together--much closer!"); "A Tale of a Tail" ("Sarah Owens tries on the beast within"); "First-Timer," Parts 1 through 5, in which "a sadistic Dom punishes his male sub," using his hand, a paddle, a wide belt, and a narrow belt, before the psychological effects are detailed in the first four parts' "aftermath"; "Hanky Panky" ("He was about to learn what it's like to be a woman scorned"); "Lysistrata Revisited" ("Aristophanes' brilliance saves the day. . . again"); "Nothing At All" ("Spankings are fun - for the spanker"); "Nothing At All: Alternative Version" (a gay version of the original heterosexual version); "Quality Control" (a five-part series in which a scientist discovers the lesbian lurking within her sadistic self); "The Princess of Pain" ("Which suitor would win the princess' hand?"); and The Sarah Owens Story (a 23-chapter novel in which the protagonist, a cheerleader, submits to her new coach's unusual, but successful, sadistic coaching methods). In addition, some of my other stories (and many of my poems) also contain spanking scenes, although they are not themselves primarily about spanking. One of the benefits of writing erotic stories is that doing so helps one to identify the topics of one's sexual interests and to explore the meanings and the implications of such interests--in short, to know him- or herself better, both sexually and personally. As anyone who's given thought to any sexual interest knows, it is extraordinarily difficult to understand why a particular behavior, such as being spanked (as opposed to spanking, which is an altogether different experience), is so overwhelmingly attractive. From the perspective of one who is willingly, even gladly, spanked, it seems as if the experience attracts him or her, rather than his or her being attracted to it. The individual who bares his or her buttocks to another to be humiliated and spanked by the spanker is hard-pressed to comprehend his or her motive for such behavior. The aching desire to be spanked is a mystery that is seemingly impenetrable to both understanding and explication. It isn't, though. At least, it (finally) is no longer so for me. Such enlightenment has been difficult, certainly; I puzzled over my attraction to being spanked, off and on, for months, if not years, until, in writing the last installment of my "First Timer" series ("First Timer: The Aftermath"), I confronted this question head-on, in the very first paragraphs: Gary had taken his clothes off in front of another man. He'd allowed another man to spank him with his hand, to paddle him, and to beat his ass with two belts. He'd let another man turn his ass from pink to red to purple. He'd drunk another man's piss. He'd sucked another man's cock and swallowed his ejaculate. He'd allowed himself to be reduced to tears, humiliated beyond belief, and physically and emotionally abused. Why? What had possessed him to acquiesce to such maltreatment? More importantly, what was the matter with him that he'd permitted such mistreatment to begin with? Where was his self-respect, his self-esteem? No man who cared about himself would do the things he'd done. Why had Gary? He was submissive--but what did that mean? He liked to please. He hated to say no. He wanted to be popular. All his life, he'd wanted others to like and to accept him. He was acquiescent, compliant, obedient--in a word, submissive. Although these words defined him perfectly, Gary had long pretended otherwise, claiming that he was rebellious, insubordinate, resistant, and, if not dominant, assertive. His behavior today, in this motel room, with Russ, showed which of these two versions of himself was true. Gary was a wimp. He'd done everything that Russ had ordered him to do. He'd proven himself to be Russ' servant, Russ' slut, Russ' bitch. Although he'd tried to reject it, the truth was, as he'd found out, that he was a dependent personality, unable to think or feel or judge for himself. His sense of self, like his sense of self-worth, depended upon other people--people who were only too happy to use him for their own purposes and pleasures, as Russ had done and would continue to do, if Gary allowed it, which, of course, was so likely as to be a foregone conclusion. It was said of actors and actresses in general that they lacked a true self. Therefore, they were able, as it were, to become any character. People with fully developed identities, it was said, had much more difficulty in pretending to be other individuals. Ray Bradbury had written a short story that seemed to support this idea. In his story, an extraterrestrial shape shifter took whatever form people wanted him to adopt, becoming a son to a childless couple, a brother to an only child, or a child who'd been slain in an accident. The problem for him was that everyone he met wanted him to be someone other than himself, and, in trying to please everyone at once, he overstressed his vital organs and died. The moral of the story was not lost on Gary, but he'd found a solution. Although a person couldn't please everyone, he could, at least sometimes, please one person. For the present--and, Gary hoped, from now on--this one person would be Russ. By satisfying and pleasing Russ, Gary could find acceptance, an identity, security, and, eventually, maybe even a semblance of love. But there was another reason that Gary had allowed Russ to use him. Gary regarded himself as a loser. He was a nobody and a nothing. He was so worthless that he deserved to be punished, and, since he was infinitely unworthy, he deserved endless punishment, the crueler the better. Through suffering for others, he might, someday, become worthy by providing a worthwhile service, as had, for example, the whipping boys of the middle ages. It was unseemly that a prince should be spanked or beaten, for he was of royal blood. Therefore, when it was considered necessary that a wayward heir to the throne be disciplined for misbehavior, it was not his ass, but that of his stand-in, the whipping boy's, to be flogged. Gary saw himself as serving a like function for men who were, by virtue of their dominance and aggressiveness, his superiors. By serving and servicing Russ' needs and desires, by fulfilling his every whim, Gary would be sacrificing himself in the interest of Russ' emotional and spiritual health and happiness. As a result, by making himself useful in this manner, his own otherwise miserable existence would become worthwhile; he would, over time, perhaps thereby redeem himself. That which was unworthy might become worthy. Of course, the spankings would continue, even when he had become worthy, for they alone, along with the other services, such as fellatio and his imbibing the golden nectar of Russ' bladder, would continue to make him worthy. Russ was providing an even greater service to Gary than Gary was providing for him, for it was Russ' use and abuse of him that bestowed upon the worthless Gary whatever worthiness he was thereby given and by Russ' use and abuse of him that Gary continued to maintain such worthiness. These revelations did not come to Gary immediately. They were insights born of hours of reflection concerning why he took pleasure in being used by another man and why he felt joy at being abused by another man. However, once Gary had attained this wisdom, all the many spankings he'd received during the set that Russ had bestowed upon him during their first session had been well worth it. Now, for the first time in his life, thanks to the help of his mentor, Gary had come to understand who he was and why he was as he was. A great, perplexing mystery had been resolved, and the pieces of his personality had, as it were, come together, completing a whole of his fractured psyche. By the stripes that Russ had inflicted upon Gary's satin-smooth buttocks, Russ had healed him. He had made Gary whole. (For my take, thus far, at least, on sadism, take a gander at my essay, "Cruel Art," which, I argue, "brings out the savage beast in all of us.") Further reflection on the matter has caused me to realize that I have feminized part of my own personality or, perhaps, in Freudian terms, I have recognized and accepted my anima as a true and powerful component of my deepest identity. I do not treat "her" as a woman in her own right, but as the woman in me, and I generally subject her to the demands, insults, reprimands, chastisements, and other emasculating and, indeed, dehumanizing behaviors of others, both male and female, that anyone must encounter who works for a living, socializes, or simply goes about the business of existing in a cold, cruel world that he or she never made. Perhaps, in doing so, I can isolate my anima as the weak, relatively helpless and ineffective "loser" who deserves punishment while I, the manly man, remain, well, the manly man. It's an interesting psychodynamic. (It's also a bit of pain, literally, from time to time.) Lately, I have found, quite by chance, another theory that supports the one that I have already worked out for myself, which I have shared, in a less-than-clinical, literary manner both in this essay and in "First Timer: The Aftermath." This theory, as it turns out, was expounded by none other than Sigmund Freud himself. I came across a summary of Freud's explanation of masochism in chapter two, "Passionate Fictions: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness," of Jean Bobby Noble's excellent study, Masculinity Without Men?: Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions (Vancouver: The University of British Columbia, 2004). Although Noble's own interest, in this volume, at least, is primarily related to lesbian literature, her summary of Freud's take on masochism is too good not to share with Literotica's readers (and writers). The explanation may have been a long time coming for others, as it has for me, and, whether one is a devotee of spanking, in either the sadistic or the masochistic role, a fellow writer who is interested in describing the pyschodynamics of his or her masochistic characters in a believable and psychologically grounded manner, or simply interested in this aspect of BDSM, Noble's summary of Freud's insightful analysis of masochism is apt to be informative, engrossing, and enlightening. This, then, is Noble's summary of Freud's take on the topic: -- Sigmund Freud (1984) theorized three kinds of masochism: (1) erotogenic, a primary instinct or corporeal pleasure in pain that is constitutive of the other two types; (2) feminine, which positions its presumably male sufferer as a woman whose desires are to be placed in characteristically female situations like being treated as a small, helpless, naughty child, being castrated, being copulated with, or giving birth to a child; and (3) moral, in which "an unconscious sense of guilt" gives way to a need for punishment. . . . Freud focuses primarily on moral masochism, which, he argues, begins when "the ego reacts with feelings of anxiety. . . to the perception that it has failed to perform to the behests of its ideal, the superego. . . As Freud himself argued, many of his own patients who were diagnosed as masochistic were either men or effeminized men who sought to be punished by the symbolic father and to have passive (feminine) sexual relations to him. For the moral masochist, the ego reacts with feelings of anxiety to the perception that it has not lived up to the demands either of the super-ego (the introjected representative of the parents) or the influences of the past or traditions of teachers, publicly recognized heroes as authorities, or self-chosen models. . . . This introjected super-ego may become harsh, cruel, and inexorable against the ego that is in its charge. So it becomes a representative of the external world and a model for the endeavors of the ego. The result is that those suffering as moral masochists are suffering under the domination of an especially sensitive conscience and an unconscious untramorality that "provoke[s] punishment from this last representative of the parents [i. e., a monstrously large and harsh, indeed, titanic super-ego [and] must do what is expedient, must act against his own interest, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence" (62). -- In the same chapter, Noble also summarizes Theodore Reik's 1941 "study of masochism," which attributes the masochist's pleasure in pain to a messianic complex. Basically, Noble says, Reik argues that "Reik's Christian masochist is both the victim and the victimizer and thus seeks punishment from within. . . . There is something of the public spectacle--indeed, one might even argue something of the exhibitionist--that is constitutive of the pleasurable punishments for Reik's masochist" (63). Reik's masochist is identifiable, Noble says, by "four primary features": he (Reik's masochist is male) (1) "seeks out the gaze of those who can either reward his deeds or witness his suffering"; (2) has a need for fantasy, especially one in which he imagines that "what is beaten is not so much the body as the flesh and, beyond that, sin itself"; (3) "the suspension of punishment (or reward) for as long as possible"; and (4) "the orchestration of a punishment imperative where the masochist aggressively demands punishment to relieve the accumulating anxiety" (63-64). According to Reik, Noble says, "Ultimately, or perhaps penultimately, the moral masochist seeks to be raised on an invisible pedestal and, eventually, to assume his place within a divine family in the same way that Christ himself came to be installed in a suffering and castrated position as the living promise of redemption" (64). For masochistic me, Freud's analysis better fits my own deepest, if not darkest, psychodynamics. Unlike many masochists, I neither require nor desire fantasy, role-playing, or other such imaginative adjuncts to spankings. I simply want to bare my buttocks to another man (or to a woman or a shemale, for that matter), be told what to do (e. g., "lie across my lap," "bend over and clutch the seat of the stool," "stand in the corner with your hands atop your head"), and receive the strokes of his hand, paddle, or belt. I also enjoy his rubbing my buttocks between one set of strokes and another and welcome the honor and privilege of masturbating him or sucking his cock before, during, and/or after the spanking session. As one can see, Freud's analysis explains my own masochism better than Reik's, although I don't doubt that, for others, Reik's messianic model is more on the mark. Ultimately, we musty work out the method in the apparent madness of our own peculiar perversions and fetishes for ourselves, "with fear and trembling," as the apostle Paul says, concerning another (or maybe the same) matter, one's salvation. We must examine closely our own thoughts and feelings, our own pasts and presents, and ask the difficult question of "why?" concerning our own needs, desires, and behaviors as masochists (subs) (or, for that matter, as sadists, or Doms). When one has done so, though, I'm betting that he or she will find that one or the other of these psychoanalysts will have beaten him or her to the punch and that his or her own masochism will have been explained, already, either in terms of "Freud's masochist" or "Reik's masochist." One or the other, I daresay, will turn out, as Freud's does for me, to be one's own "masochistic me" as well.