Not long ago a man in his mid 20's asked me
how he should go about learning to become a Master. After a few seconds
thought, I realized that I didn't know what to tell him. After a lot more
thought, I've decided to write my answer down. Maybe it will be helpful for
others. My problem in giving advice was that I realized that the world I lived
in when I learned my role, and the world we live in today, are very different.
Would the way I learned seem outdated? Quaint? Is the way people learn today
superior? Or just different? Or inferior? To work through these thoughts, I
went through a quick historical tour of my first- hand knowledge of SM.
Back in the late 1950's, when I was in my
mid-teens, there weren't any "Adult Bookstores" to try to sneak
into. Pornography was illegal. People went to jail for making porn, and even
just for selling it. And "it" included things as mild as photos of
bare breasted women. No kidding. In that climate, there was almost no way a
person could find out about SM and similar interests. Many people who had
kinky interests thought that they were the only ones with those feelings and
thoughts, because they never saw or heard about anything kinky in magazines,
or in movies, nor on early television. And the video camera hadn't been
invented yet, and wouldn't be for many years to come, so there weren't
"adult videos" at the local video store- there weren't any local
video stores. And the "home" or "personal" computer didn't
exist, not even on paper.
In light of all this, how could a desperate
and frustrated person find out about SM and kinky sex? For most, it was in
large bookstores in large cities, where hours of browsing could turn up such
books as Justine, Juliet, 120 Days in Sodom, and other works by the Marquis de
Sade. The view these books gave of SM was of pain oriented sex among
non-consenting people (children as well as adults), of dismemberment, torture
until death, and the burning down of orphanages, to name some of the
descriptions found in these books.
These descriptions also dwelt on bondage,
and forced humiliations, such as "victims" turned into the shoe
licking sex slaves of their Dominants. It was scenes like these, the less
violent and more legal, that caught the attention of most people who thirsted
to find examples of "what to do" and "how to act" to play
in their head while masturbating. I say masturbating because most people
didn't know others who also had kinky interests to have sex with.
Besides books by de Sade, other books, such
as The Story of O and The Image, could sometimes be found. These books
involved relationships among people, and became the standard (if they could be
found) "texts" for what S&M and B&D were about, and how the
participants should act, and what they should do. Both of these books dealt
with consensual sex, in which one person recognized the dominance of another,
and all the characters portrayed acted in what could be seen as formalized
roles toward others of a higher or lower "class". For instance, it
was from these books (and one or two others that I can't remember the names of
now) that people learned to address each other as "Sir" or
"Madam" or "slave", and that (female) slaves should sit
with their legs slightly apart to show that they were always available, and
never cross their legs, and that they should go without underwear, and that
slaves should keep their eyes cast downwards, etc.
Beginning around the early 1960's, things
began to change. Adult bookstores started cropping up. They had a section
where bondage and spanking magazines were sold. The pictures in the magazines
usually showed a fully dressed woman being spanked by a man or woman seated on
a couch in a living room. Although not very exciting, it was better than
nothing. These pictures of people involved in a spanking scene were proof that
others liked that sort of thing. Otherwise people wouldn't be making these
magazines and selling them. But these magazines didn't do anything to teach
people to be Masters or slaves. That was what the "stroke books",
also sold in the bookstores, were for. They were nicknamed stroke books
because they were used by men to masturbate to. Women, except for a few
shameless ones, didn't venture into adult bookstores, and so just about
everything sold was geared towards men.
The stroke books had names like,
"Spanked Wife" and "His Sister's Slave" and "Lesbian
Bondage Island" and "Trained to Serve" and "Male
Maid". These were the books people (mostly men) used not only to
masturbate to, but from which they also learned "what to do" and
"how to do it". Most of these books had similar ideas of what an
"S&M relationship" or SM sex was like. This could be because
only a few companies published these books, and only a few writers wrote for
the few publishers, which meant that these few people's ideas and views were
repeated over and over again in the numerous books that were sold in the
bookstores. Many books written by few people meant that only a few ideas got
published.
Since there were relatively few people
writing these stroke books and few companies publishing the magazines (and 8mm
spanking and bondage films), people who read them shared the same information.
They all learned the same things. They all knew that the slave curtsied when
the Master entered the room, because that is what most of the stroke books
said, and most people read the stroke books. They all knew that a female
dominant could be called a Mistress or a Master. They all knew that a slave
had to ask for his or her spanking or other punishment. That is what the
stroke books said, and the same books were sold at adult book stores
throughout the country. So a person at one end of the country had pretty much
the same view of what kinky sex was about as someone on the other side,
assuming that each went to adult bookstores to find material to use for
masturbation.
Women usually learned from their lovers, who
would bring home or share their stroke books and spanking magazines. If they
didn't have a kinky lover, women were hard pressed to learn about S&M.
They didn't go into adult book stores, if for no other reason than they were
scared. They were afraid of being raped or solicited. In those days (which
weren't all that long ago), a woman who went into such a store was thought to
be either a prostitute or a "whore" who could be easily approached.
So women just didn't have an easy way to find out about kinky sex.
Interestingly, just about every woman I knew "way back then" had
read "The Story of O", so there must have been a network among women
that mentioned this (among other?) books a woman should read. Eventually, mail
order "bookstores" started advertising in Playboy and later Playgirl
and similar magazines. Besides porn books, vibrators were also advertised.
This is where some of the more adventurous women got their SM porn and
vibrators. Other women didn't want to have their names and addresses on some
porn company's mailing list, and just did without. Welllll, there were a lot
of women who bought electric toothbrushes, but that's another story.
For about 20 years this is how most men
learned about sadomasochism, from what they bought at adult book stores. In
large cities there were some support groups, such as The Eulenspiegel* Society
in New York, and the Society of Janus in San Francisco, where people could
meet and discuss SM, and occasionally have a party, and occasionally see a
bondage demonstration, but you had to live in a large city and hunt down these
support groups. (*I never could spell their name, and neither could anyone
else I knew, which might be why they changed it to TES.)
By the mid 1980's things began to change.
The video camera had been invented, and enough people owned home videotape
recorders that video rental shops started opening everywhere. And most of
these stores had adult sections, where bondage and spanking videos could be
rented. Since women could go into these stores without being stared at, they
could rent, either alone or with their husband/boyfriend, or in a group of
other women, X-rated films, including those involving kinky sex. Since people
are, basically, lazy, and will take the easy way over the more difficult way
just about every time, a shift away from reading stroke books to viewing
videos started taking place. And videos were things women could get a lot
easier than books at adult book stores or mail order. Books took more work and
had to be held. Videos were easy to watch and left both hands free
<grin>. Finally, videos were something couples or groups could watch
together, while books were a solitary endeavor. So people started renting
videos and stopped reading stroke books.
The videos also differed from the stroke
books in how they depicted SMBD. The main difference was that the stroke books
tried to show some character development. They tried to show WHY the people
did what they did. They tried to show the feelings the slave had for the
Master, and the feelings the Master had for the slave. The videos, on the
other hand, dispensed with character development. For example, a man would
walk into a dungeon and say something to the effect that he was there for his
discipline, and a leather clad woman would grab him by the ear and take him
away. The next scene would show him in stocks, being paddled by the Domme. The
paddling scene might go on for quite some time, only to be changed to a light
whipping scene.
People who started finding out about SMBD at
this time, and who skipped the stroke books stage, got a very different
introduction to the scene. They missed the "tenderness" or
"dominance" or "ritual" or "humiliation" aspects
that were stressed in the stroke books, and were left with the more mechanical
approach to SM sex that were the meat of the videos. Additionally, kinky sex
scenes started becoming routine in standard Hollywood films. A scene with a
prostitute became a scene with an SM prostitute. While these videos and films
showed how people dressed (or the video/film makers concept or fantasy of how
kinky people dressed), they did nothing for teaching people how to act, what
the subtleties were, etc. People just starting out at this time got the idea
that Mistresses wore leather, but were clueless as to how to talk to and treat
and be with other kinky people- other then grab someone by the ear and paddle
them.
About ten years later, around 1995, there
was one more major change affecting how people learned, or didn't learn, about
sadomasochism. It was the development of an easy to use Internet. Before that
time, the Internet existed, but logging on was something best left to geeks.
With the development of such companies as Compuserve and later AOL, both of
which had free connection software and easy to use browsers, many people were
put in the position of being able to leave their thoughts for others to read
on human sexuality pages, and soon after that they could chat in real time
with others who shared their interest in SM. People started learning from each
other, and teaching each other. These lessons weren't formal, but usually
couched in the guise of "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts". Since
there were so many people voicing their opinions (usually as fact), a lot of
confusion ensued. For example, one could read that people could be either a
dominant or a slave, but couldn't switch between the two, while elsewhere one
could read that people who switched were the best dominants and slaves, since
they understood both roles intimately. At this time, most novices learned
their roles from reading discussions about being a dominant or submissive, and
from suggestions given to requests for help in training a wayward slave. The
answers became lessons absorbed by the novice. Unfortunately, numerous
differing answers may have caused the novice some confusion. Besides these
informal "lessons", some books such as "SM 101" appeared,
which attempted to teach novices about the scene.
I see a continuum ranging from the rather
simplistic ritualized view of sadomasochism depicted in the stroke books of
the 1960's-1980's, to the "babble" and confusion of the differing
positions of today. In the bad old days, a dominant man who wanted to dress
like a woman felt isolated because the stroke books didn't have characters
like that. I think it's great that today a male transvestite dominant can
voice his interests and discuss the joy he gets from his role, but I also see
the confusion a novice can find from being bombarded by hundreds, if not
thousands of differing and often conflicting views. For instance, some people
might adamantly say that a transvestite can't be a dominant, while others will
just as adamantly say that they can. There once was a problem of too little
diversity, but today the problem is of too much diversity. Especially for one
who is just beginning to explore the kinky side of his or her sexuality.
With all this in mind, what would I tell
that novice Master today? I'd tell him to:
"Search the Internet for SMBD stories.
Try using a search engine for 'bdsm AND stories'. Start reading. When
something turns you on, add it to your growing bag of tricks. Over time you'll
see how YOU want to act. Do you identify with the gentlemanly Master who
requests, with a certain no-nonsense tone of voice, that his slave freshen his
drink, or are you the type who feels comfortable barking out orders? Or
sometimes one way and sometimes another? It doesn't matter which way you see
yourself. Be yourself. Don't let others try to force you to be something you
don't feel comfortable being. No matter what type you are, you will find
slaves/submissives who like that type, and others who don't. You can't please
everyone. Why not try to just please yourself. And see who you attract."
"As for the rituals and rules and the
things to do, you'll find more than you can deal with in the stories. As for
"hands on experience", hunt down a support group in your neck of the
woods. Use a search engine and look for munches or "bdsm support
groups" where you can meet others and see demonstrations and even take
part in some. Learning how to put someone in bondage is a skill that needs
practice, knowing how to make such a scene erotic takes imagination. Use the
stories to jump start your imagination. Use friends and contacts you make at
support groups and munches for people to practice with."
That is what I would tell him. Yes, there
are other ways. Finding a willing submissive/slave who will help him learn,
for instance. But that will limit him to only one person's opinion, which is a
situation similar to that of the people learning during the 1960's-1970's from
the stroke books. It would be silly not to take advantage of all the mental
energy floating around the Internet today.
Finally, I would tell him that when he goes
to his first party at a support group or even at a private party given by a
new found friend, he will worry about what he should wear. This seems to be a
universal thing for people to worry about. My advice would be, once again, to
wear what makes him feel comfortable. If he wants to "dress up",
fine. Or maybe he just wants to wear black clothes. Fine. Or maybe he's like
me and wears his everyday jeans. (If someone should suggest to me that I'm
inappropriately dressed, I'd growl at him or her. But since this has never
happened...). I have seen dominant women wearing leather, but also I've seen
them wearing pretty and feminine dresses. I've seen submissive women wearing
little girls outfits, and I've seen them wearing a skirt and blouse. All of
these were people who wore what they felt comfortable wearing, not what they
thought they were expected to wear.
I hope this has been of help to some of you
novices just starting out.
Elliot (an old time Master)
Copyright 2000 by Elliot Roth. All Rights
Reserved. Reprinted on the Asj website with permission of the author.
[A personal note: You will have noticed
that I used the following, seemingly arbitrarily- S&M, SM, SMBD, BDSM. In
the 1950's and 1960's it was S&M and then also B&D and still later
D&S and C&P came into use. Eventually the ampersand was omitted. Just
before the Internet became big, kinky magazines would use SMBD. When the
Internet became popular, SMBD somehow became BDSM. I've put my foot down. I've
made too many changes. I'm getting old. I'm not gonna change again. For me,
and some others, it will remain SMBD.]
About the Author:
"I've spent a lifetime accumulating my experiences and forming my views,
and I'll be damned if I let them disappear when I die." So saying, Elliot
has written a 250,000 word e-book autobiography entitled Elliot's Story by
Hugo.
