After a lifetime of self-punishment, the question is that arises is why. Here are some of the reasons, though there may always be a deeper one. As we peel back some of the layers of the onion, is it really an onion or is it something else, something darker and more disturbing? Is it cosmically ordained? Or just a perverse habit?
Like most “fetishes,” it undoubtedly started with a childhood incident of some kind. Often these are suppressed, and it takes years of psychotherapy, or something like the Landmark Forum, to unlock them. I can’t remember if I was always aware of its origin, or just remembered it in the Forum, but over the years it has become congealed as “the” explanation. Not surprisingly, it involved my sister — or rather half-sister, Joyce — with whom, in the end, I could never make my peace.
When I was six or seven, my sister came to teach at the Cahall School. I was elated. She was twenty years older than me, so she would have been 26 or 27 at the time and, as I recall, quite attractive. I was thrilled to have my big sister as a classroom teacher. On that first day I was bubbling over with excitement, proud to show her off to my classmates. I couldn’t sit still, but persisted in grinning and making remarks to the whole class. At first I think she tried to shush me, but I wouldn’t stop she sent me to stand outside the door while she got another teacher to come and take over the class. I had no inkling of what was in store for me, but continued to think that we were kidding around and having fun. Even when she said she was going to teach me a lesson I thought she was still playing along.
She marched me up upstairs, still giggling, to what was the principal’s office, though at the time I could see through the open door that he wasn’t there. She told me to wait outside while she went into the office to retrieve what I think was a ping-pong paddle — which Mr. Cahall reserved for the worst behaving children.
I should explain that this was a private boarding school for emotionally-disturbed boys and girls, I assume quite unusual for the times (early 1950s) and generally quite progressive, but this was still at a time when spanking was considered a normal punishment for serious misbehavior. My mother had repeatedly assured me that it was not because I was disturbed, but simply that the school was close to where we lived in semi-rural Maryland outside of D.C., and that she admired the Cahalls for what they were doing to provide a loving environment for such an assortment of misfits. It was also convenient for her to drop me off each weekday morning while she went off to work in the city, where she could always come and pick me up late if necessary. So I knew that bad little boys would get spanked, but it had never happened to me.
Besides, I didn’t think I had done anything bad. I was just playing around, and thought that Joyce was going along with it, and just pretending that she was going to spank me for being “uppity,” as I think she called it. Even after she got the paddle and marched me off to one of the kids’ dormitory rooms and told me to take my pants down and bend over the bed I still thought she was kidding. So when she actually hit me, quite hard, I was taken by surprise, and without thinking I turned around and punched her in the stomach. It’s possible that I immediately felt some remorse, or perhaps it was only later that I came to feel that way and wished I hadn’t stopped her and had taken it like a little man. But at the time I think I felt justified and that we were even.
In any event, I feel I’ve been paying myself back over all these years. Afterward things with Joyce were never the same; though I still admired her from afar I kept me distance, and so did she. Soon thereafter she left the school. I have always felt that she was embarrassed by the incident — perhaps more that she had failed to punish me properly and had let me “get away with it,” but perhaps it was for other reasons. In any case, much later in life she denied even remembering the event, this event that meant so much to me over the years.
Of course over time there were other things that got tangled up with it. After we moved to Mexico when I was 9, so that my socialist mother could avoid being called before the McCarthy Committee, I spent my most formative years “in the bosom,” as they say, of the Catholic Church, where I poured over stories of the saints and the nuns flagellating themselves and each other. I imbibed the belief that suffering was pleasing to God, and came close to converting. I was already practicing self-flagellation with a belt by the age of thirteen or so. The thought of it got me aroused, so it always was and has been connected with sex.
But it’s also its own separate activity, that leads to heightened desire and to a kind of slight feverishness that borders on delirium. An intensely pleasurable feeling coming along with the pain, and learning to take more of it over time.
In a sense that’s the whole story; the rest is just living it out in whatever ways we get pulled through life. In another sense this was just the beginning of a lifelong journey. Once you’ve acquired a taste for corporal punishment, it becomes something that’s both obsessive and compulsive. There were times when I though about it more often during the day than I thought about sex — and that’s saying something, since until my prostate cancer diagnosis, I would say that I had pretty strong sex drive. (The day it was diagnosed I was given a shot by the urologist that drained all of my testosterone, which left me unresponsive to sex for several years. And my desire and capacity have never fully returned.)
The whole complex of feelings and behaviors that are today called BDSM are also deviant, perverted, taboo. More so than sex, because a predilection for punishment seems contrary to common sense. For some of us that’s part of the point, that it’s counter-intuitive for most people. If it doesn’t interest you, cause you to tingle with anticipation and arousal, it’s as if it doesn’t exist, or is simply incomprehensible. Yet the success of 50 Shades of Grey is evidence that something like the desire for dominance and submission is latent in most of us.
There’s also an insight to be had from the theory of self-regulation. Following a punishment I feel calmer and less stress — in other words, returned to myself and to a state of inner peace (rather than the one of inner turmoil that triggers the desire in the first place). I’m sure there’s plenty one could say about hormone production and neurochemical response,
What interests me most is not the physiology but the psychology. What does it mean that I desire it — or rather that I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame?
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Given my lifelong inclination to be an iconoclast — I even published a magazine briefly under that name — it’s strange that I should be preoccupied with discipline. There is a part of me that does not want to be free, but rather subject to the direction of another (in this case Victoria). That way I do not have to decide what to do on a moment-by-moment basis, but simply do what I’m told. It’s odd, isn’t it?
When she is not around, my first thought is to go and punish myself. for some imagined infraction of my own obligations. It’s also to distract me from eating, so as to continue my weight loss trajectory to below 140lbs Though it seems to be losing some of its effectiveness in that regard since I eat right away anyway.