The Problem of Pain (with apologies to C.S.

Lewis)
by Skian McGuire

Funny, she said in an e-mail, you dont act like somebody whos iffy about their sadism. It had been a long scene, physically draining for both of us. Shed been having some emotional rough waters, and I offered to give her such release as I could. The session would not be about sex. She wore underwear that I could cut off, to please me. I brought all my canes, expecting to use them to break her down, and I put in my toy bag all the thuddy things I had, to start her off, since she prefers thud to sting. I strung her up to an overhead bar by the wrists, with grip cuffs, and began with my hands, kneading and punching and slapping, bringing up the circulation. I teased her with my knife. I nipped. She growled. We laughed together over the white cotton underpants she couldnt believe she was wearing to a scene party. I brought out my floggers and not feeling at home with them, soon put them away my kink is more for stinging things, both top-wise and as a bottom. I drummed her with my blacksticks. I returned to fists, which she seemed to prefer, and in the end settled on a knotted rope bludgeon her master had made for her, an enormous, heavy thing that landed with a deep bone-rattling thud when swung hard. Swinging it lightly was not an option. I swung it moderately. She sighed and groaned. I swung it hard. She said, Yum. I swung the rope bludgeon until the grip end started to unravel; she said to go ahead as long as the huge knot held out. I beat her back and her ass and the fleshy part of

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her pecs. I joked that I felt like a cheerleader beating her with a pom-pom. I twisted the loose strands together and swung the knot as hard as I could. Sweat dripped off me. I held the unraveling rope in both hands and swung it like a baseball bat at her ass. She said, Yum. It was late. Her hands began to bother her; I took her down. We moved across the room where she leant against the wall so I could continue. I swung the heavy rope as hard as I could, over and over. Slower and slower. I switched hands. I used both. I swung the rope. Time stopped. There was nothing in the universe but her and me, the rope, my tired arms, her pain, the deep shuddering blows she braced herself against the wall to absorb, my sweat, her guttural moans and yelps, my heavy breathing. It seemed to me as if a great wave were building, far offshore. I could see it rolling in but didnt know how long it would be before it crashed against the sand. I swung the rope. In the end, she called me off because she was feeling ill. Just a little ill. She wanted to rest. I put my arms around her and tried to help her lower herself to the floor. I held her and felt for her heartbeat. I told her she was strong. She crumbled then, weeping a little, only a little, her shoulders quivering in the circle of my arms. I murmured all the sweet words I could think of, which I am embarrassed to say were mostly the same silly nothings I tell my best-loved dog: Youre a good girl. Such a good girl. I told her it was all right. Cry, I said, its all right, Im here, Ill take care of you. She sobbed. Her body shook. I held her. The great wave broke. I know that wave. While I knew only in the vaguest terms what was welling up from the depths of her soul, I knew how deep it came from, because Ive been there. I know first-hand the power of that release, how necessary it is sometimes, to be driven by pain that is deliberately and, yes, tenderly, inflicted, to a place beyond language, beyond conscious thought, to a place of pure feeling unrestricted by obligation or constraint. A place where the bars of the Self are ripped open. I told her before the scene that Id do what I could to bring her that release, even though Im not much of a sadist, because I knew from my own experience as a bottom how necessary it can be. Like water, I told her: sometimes I need it like water. But

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inflicting it? She tells me, Anybody who likes to throw a cane is a sadist. Okay, tiger? Canes are sharp, mean things, and even though Ive never drawn blood with one, I know how easy it would be. I have a beautiful collection of them, seldom used, including one made of some rubbery white plastic material (Formica, I think) that hurts worse than a bullwhip. I have never been able to inflict more than one blow with that cane. I look forward someday to finding someone who would take three. My style as a top has nearly always been SM Lite gray hanky, not black and I have no illusions about my qualifications. But I know what a true sadist is. Once upon a time, when I was young and eager for bottom experience, I sat at a party where a TV was showing an SM video. Four heavy tops were watching it, one of whom was my Master at the time. The video was of a deaf bottomman being bullwhipped by his very sadistic master. When he started to scream in pain, it was an unearthly bellow, a noise like an animal would make, that raised the hair on my neck. The tops watched it (as I watched them) with a concentration I have seen in only one other place. Remember Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom? They were like predator animals, lions or jackals maybe, watching a wounded wildebeest. And I was not horrified; rather, I was fascinated and turned on, by them, not what was happening on the screen. When my Master beat me from then on, it was something even closer to seeing God than it had been. Before our scene with the rope bludgeon, my friend and I passed many e-mails back and forth, negotiating, getting to know each other, talking about boots and Tom of Finland and music and all manner of interesting things. I told her that as a top, I played for fun, that it was all about the sex, that I had never brought anyone to that point of catharsis, although I had been there myself as a bottom. When she asked, how can anyone into caning people not think of themselves as a sadist? I told her the story about the sadists and the deaf bottomman. Because we are both switches, I asked her to tell me what it was like for her as a top, and she answered: yes, sadism can speak to me on that level. i don't usually experience it in a vacuum that sounds wrong. i mean i'd normally feel that hunger awakening gradually as part of my entire interaction with

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someone, or in scene (when the beast wakes hungry indeed.) it would come up for me sometimes a response to a bottom's particular vibe, how they were experiencing pain. one or two playmates really called the beast forth. And I thought about that. About the beast waking hungry. About my own beast. I told her it was like leaving behind the thinking part the human part and letting the beast take over, letting that rush go up through me, through my cunt and my lungs and heart and the power in my arm wielding the belt or the strap or cane, feeling my blood fizzing, something like a train roaring through me, a volcano of light going out the top of my head, and the woman whose sounds and smells and the heat of her skin, the way she moves, all lure that beast on. It's the human part of me watching her to make sure everything is okay, remembering not to hit her there because she doesn't like it, touch her there because I know she finds it intensely erotic And I asked her, What if the beast breaks its chain? My childhood is something I don't remember very well, but it's there in the shadows. Somewhere, I do remember what my father's rage was like, something that could completely obliterate his reason and the love I knew he had for me, and explode in force. I never hit anyone in anger, never in my adult life. When I do SM with my lover there must not be any lingering issues between us, because it's impossible not to sometimes be angry at each other, impossible not to make compromises to live with another human being, day in and day out for 20 years, impossible not to sometimes find those compromises difficult. I make sure I'm not nursing some kind of injury inside myself, but what if... Does the beast know about consent? Would that deaf bottomman's bellows have sounded any different if he'd been tortured against his will? (For the record, I think yes: I think terror must sound different than pain alone, even though I have never heard it as an

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adult real terror, not movie-terror.) But would the beast care about the difference? Part of me identifies so strongly with my dogs and feels so alien to humanity that I have at times in my life felt like a creature at the edge of a forest, something outside the circle of light, looking in. The moral compunctions that keep us from doing violence to our own kind rely very heavily on what we define as our own kind; white Europeans defined Africans and Native Americans as something other than human, so did many "Christian" Germans define Jews, so have men defined women and children. Will the beast remember I'm human? I know I think too much. Thinking is my magic against the dark. Thinking is what allows me to lay aside what was done to me and never do it against another. Thinking is what lets me trust the belay line and the person holding it so I can step backward off a cliff and rappel down; thinking is what lets me quell the inner fear and ever trust another human being, for anything. Only my rational mind knows that I will not fall to my death. Only my rational mind knows that this top is not my mother. Is it only my rational mind that knows that my pleasure in causing pain depends on the pleasure of the pains recipient? What if the beast breaks its chain? This is the thing I am always afraid of. Is it truly possible, as my friend suggests, to feed and care for the beast so that it doesnt break free and turn my pleasure into something ugly, something irreparable and incomprehensible and heinous? There is a point in the experience of some bottoms who are both masochists and submissives myself included when the pain we are accepting becomes more pain than we care to take for the sake of eros. Pain hurts. Oblivion isnt always what Im looking for. But the top whos hurting me is enjoying it so much! I hear it in her ragged breathing, feel the heat rising from her when she touches me, smell arousal in her sweat, feel the vibration of her excitement as she dances with her whip, as she drives the intensity of her pleasure into me with every blistering stroke. I dont want any more pain, but I want her pleasure to go on. I want to bask in that bright light no matter how it burns. And I want to give that to her as a gift. My friend says that this gift is exactly whats called for, to feed and care for the beast. Mine, she says, has always needed to get at least a little taste of something (pain or

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submission or tears or something) that the bottom must work to give me really reach in and stretch to be able to offer me. like the three strokes, as hard as i can give them, after a long, bloody, painful caning. or the knife cut that truly terrifies and leaves blood dripping on my blade. she reaches in and finds the strength, though she doubted her ability; i get at least a bit of what the beast really hungers for. As a top, I am reluctant to tip that balance, where the pain stops being something a bottom takes for herself and becomes something she gives me, as a sacrifice. I worry about hubris, as if I have any right to such an offering. But more than that, I am afraid Ill like it too much, and having gotten a taste of what it really wants, the beast will strain against its bonds for more. Im not sure Im stronger than the beast. There are volumes full of real-life horror stories of people who were not stronger than theirs: Ted Bundy. Aileen Wuornos. Jeffrey Dahmer. What if the beast breaks its chain? Were those terrible, pitiful humans really more damaged than me? The answer that comes back to me from my own reflections is, maybe not. But I was a whole lot luckier. I know what love is. I know, too, that the beast is not something separate from myself, whatever metaphor I might use to articulate it. Just as bottoming allows me to complete an equation that was formulated in my childhood (which I only dimly understand as being about the indestructibility of self, among other things), I think the powerful response I possess for inflicting consensual pain also has something to teach me. Maybe even something to complete me. I told my friend, I feel my animal nature most strongly as a top, but as a bottom, I don't feel like a beast at all, in spite of the fact that I want to be driven out of words, past words, away from words. I sometimes think that my masochistic self is the most human part of me. That going there, into bottom-space, is a conscious choice only a human can make, leaving behind the animal-being in me that feels more comfortable, leaving behind my pack, doing something that they could never understand. Animals do not seek out pain. Animals would never lay themselves at someone's altar. Animals want to live and would chew off their own feet to do so; I wonder sometimes what I chewed off myself to

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survive my childhood. Maybe, being a sadist in consensual SM, I get to reclaim the part of me that demands my needs be met, that puts me first, something I was never really allowed as the child of self-involved and violent parents. There is in me an eagerness to please others, even when Im playing top I want everyone to have a good time. I try to honor this desire; even if I could cure myself of it through years of therapy, I dont think I really want to. Its a way of showing love, after all; I only want to please people I care about, which includes the strong and competent women who give up their control for me in carefully negotiated play. I am grateful to be given their trust, and humbled by it; of course I want to please them. Never mind that Ive been told its ridiculously pathetic by one femme bottom for whom I turned out to be too much of a wimp. Call it my inner lapdog, maybe. Its just as much a part of me as the beast is. But sometimes, perhaps, I have to tell it no. Maybe sometimes I have to accept the gift that a masochist gives me, taking pain for the sake of my pleasure, because she wants to, and isnt that a form of love, too? In my adult life, I have told only five people that I love them. My sister. My friend Elyse, with whom I played for nearly ten years before we finally drifted apart. Two lovers before my partner Chuck, each of whom I thought I would stay with forever and be faithful to. And Chuck, who was big-hearted and sensible and brave enough to work out a relationship with me that would last and not depend on sexual fidelity (which I knew by then I was not capable of). Even so, it took me nearly a year with her before I could bring myself to say the words, I love you. Now I have been saying them for almost twenty years, and they are always true, and always my salvation. Except to her, who is the greatest blessing of my abundantly blessed life, I find those words hard to say. Maybe because I was told them as a child when the opposite emotion was patently obvious; maybe Im just afraid the words will be misunderstood and refused. Its certainly not because Im stingy with the feeling itself. Exactly the opposite: Im a sucker for people who touch me. I become foolishly fond of people who are generous, warmhearted, who laugh at themselves easily, who stand up for underdogs and put their money (and time and passion) where their mouth is. I am absolutely besotted by Quakers, collectively if not individually. I have lots of heroes, almost none of whom are famous. I experience one of those Sally Field moments nearly every day, when I realize that

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someone I like, likes me, and it just bowls me over. And then, of course, theres the dogs. Always the dogs. Recently, someone Id known only briefly told me that she loved me. I believe her feeling was genuine, but what if I was wrong? Im a lousy judge of sincerity; I want to take everyone at face value. And besides, having spent a childhood with love in such short supply, like water in a desert, I tend to see every puddle as an oasis. I am embarrassed to be so needy, so easily lured by a mirage. What if she was just fooling me, pumping me up with something she called love but really wasnt, something that would turn out to be just like Lucys football, and me the perpetually hapless Charlie Brown? It scared me. It pissed me off. I can love someone just fine, thank you, without making a big wordy deal of it. I can show it to someone, by doing some little thing to make her happy. By being eager to please. By giving her something she needs. I had something of an epiphany, one morning as I was delivering newspapers (my second job), driving around in the dark, thinking of that friend and her rough waters. I didnt know and still dont the exact nature of her tribulations. I had not heard from her in many days, and e-mail can be so awkward. Its possible to become intimate in such a deep but narrow way, that I didnt know how to express my concern for her without feeling like I was prying or intruding. I told her I just wanted her to know I was thinking of her. I asked her to imagine me standing over there, just out of sight a warm presence, offering her my tender care without expectation and without demand. I said, I know when I'm feeling emotionally ragged, I begin to crave a really good beating, to let me cry and get clear of it. I don't remember if you were at the party where [another friend] beat the bejesus out of me but that's what it was for, why I asked him to do it, because I had been in such a funk It dawned on me that if I know I'm beating someone specifically in order to give them that release, I am absolutely sure I could do it. Yes; beyond any doubt. I know, because I know that while I could never deliberately hurt one of my beloved companions, I have no trouble cleaning their wounds or pulling quills something that [others] cant do.

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And so she allowed me to give that to her, and she honored me with her trust. And so the rope bludgeon, and falling out of time, and the great wave that broke over us, releasing my friends pain of the heart, for a little while at least, by letting her body bear the burden. The next morning, I got up to run with the dogs after only a few hours sleep, into a day of brilliant blue sky, the light falling in golden shafts through the hemlock woods and glittering in a million bright beads of dew. It was just cool enough to see our breath puffing out when we stopped, and I felt as alive as it is possible to feel, grateful and humble and incredibly blessed. I felt like I had been given back some part of myself I hadnt even realized I was missing. C.S. Lewis wrote about the problem of pain from the standpoint of Christianity if God, omniscient and omnipotent, truly loves us, how could He allow pain to exist? Theres really no answer to the question, even though countless theologians have wrestled faithfully with it. No answer, that is, except that there is no God. Or that He isnt omniscient and omnipotent, just some petty tyrant who wants us to believe Hes all weve got. Or that He doesnt love us, after all. Not much of a Dad. Ive always found it difficult to imagine a deity as any sort of supernatural parent, either father or mother, probably because my own earthly ones were so untrustworthy. I can more easily imagine a goddess as a lover: capricious, whimsical, seductive, sometimes cruel. Certainly never faithful, and thankfully, She doesnt seem to demand fidelity of me, either. Shes the femme bitch top, not the nurturing Mommy. So pain is not a problem for me, at least in the spiritual sense. Pain happens. The people who get it hardly ever deserve it. But the people (like me) who get good luck and many blessings hardly ever deserve them, either. It just happens. Thats just the way She is: full of surprises. So my own problem with pain is of a very different nature than C.S. Lewis or is it? If I care about someone, how can I hurt her, especially, how can I hurt her just because I enjoy it, if shes enduring pain only for the sake of my pleasure? I can hurt someone I care about for the purpose of healing, like pulling porcupine quills. Catholics especially love to look at pain as an offering to Jesus, who suffered such tortures for them; they find it easy, at least in the abstract, to imagine that horrendous pain and

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hardship is being given to them for some loving purpose, for their own good, even though they dont understand it. That sounds like an abusive parent to me, and partly why Im a Catholic no longer. And who am I to compare myself to anyones deity? Is it easier to endure pain when we understand the reason for it, because we have chosen it for some greater good? Of course it is. Thats what makes all kinds of real-life catastrophes ultimately endurable. Unfortunately, most real-life shit happens with no explanation, no greater good, no redeeming value whatsoever; thats why we humans had to invent religion. And if it really is some Big Daddy God in the Sky deliberately loading us down with a weight of misery, its a lie that He gives us only as much as we can bear. Sometimes, were crushed by it. Maybe my Irish grandmother was consoled by the notion that shed get her reward in Heaven, but Im not. Im no saint. And every misery I endure for no reason and no return, takes a bit of my substance, steals a little bit of my soul. I endure suffering because its either that or die, and beneath this thinking, rationalizing, decision-making veneer of humanness, I am still an animal that not only clings to life ferociously, but wallows in its pleasures every chance I get. In BDSM, we play out our inner dramas in a theater of the body, where language is hardly more than stage dressing. We make the heros journey. We die and are reborn. We celebrate life with intense sexual pleasure, and when we suffer, we do so by choice, always knowing that our suffering will be rewarded. Within the microcosm of the scene, in one moment out of time, there is no such thing as senseless suffering. The equation always balances. Sometimes pain equals pleasure; sometime pain equals emotional release. Sometimes pain is a sacrifice we give someone, not only because weve been promised some tangible reward, but because we know the sacrifice itself is pleasing. Delicious, even. And the gift, after all, is love: enlarging, ennobling, nourishing, sustaining. All of a sudden I realize that Ive been thinking about the beast, as I let my passion for metaphor run away with me, with all the gruesome glory an overactive imagination can dream up. I imagine it slavering, snapping, gnashing, barely under control. Certainly, I flatter myself: I really am not that much of a sadist. Im imagining something the size of a grizzly bear, when something more like a ferret would probably do. And in summoning up all that snarling, ravening ferocity, I have never once imagined

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the chain that binds it. How sturdy is it, anyway? What is it made of? When I was fourteen, Id lie on my bed for hours, bathed in blacklight, listening to records. Upstairs, my parents screamed at each other, but in my basement room, Grace Slick sang When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, dont you want somebody to love? Dont you need somebody to love? I did. I knew that love was salvation. All you need is love, the Beatles told me. At night, my dog my own dog, not my mothers dog, mine curled up behind my knee, and I knew there was someone who loved me. He was a small nervous dog, who needed me just as much as I needed him. I wasnt alone. I mattered. I was safe in that room my father built for me, with the blacklight he wired in and the record rack and built-in bookcases he made himself; it was the only refuge he could give me. In the war between my parents, my mother made sure there was no such thing as an innocent bystander. My father couldnt even keep me safe from his own rage. Whatever love he had to give me, was in two-by-fours and fake wood paneling, and a door with a real lock. You may say Im a dreamer, John Lennon sang, but Im not the only one. The piano chords poured into me, in the dark, in the fragmented peace of my parents bitter silence, and I did imagine a world that would live as one, where love meant something. I yearned for it. I believed it could be. I was a dreamer, too, and I suppose I still am. An optimist. A bleeding-heart liberal. An idealist. No matter how cynical I may be about the institutions we humans cobble together, mostly to do our dirty work for us and absolve ourselves of any blame, I still believe that individual humans want to do right, want to love each other and have their actions reflect that love. I believe love is stronger than hate. I want to believe that love is stronger than fear, too, even though I know that it often isnt. What is the chain that binds the beast, if not love? I am afraid of the beast in me, but I cant deny its existence. I am a sadist. I am aroused by the sounds a masochist makes when I hurt her. I love the sound a cane makes, striking sharp on a womans full warm ass. I am aroused by the idea of my cane raising angry welts and maybe even drawing blood. I would very much like to bring someone to her knees, shivering and gasping for air, tears wetting her face from the pain I have caused her. I want to make her writhe away from my blows. I want to make her yelp and holler. And more than anything, I want her to want it. The idea gets me wet. It gets her

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wet, too, and I know it does, because thats what weve negotiated. Without that feedback loop, we wouldnt be here. But the process of scene negotiation is more than just a formality of BDSM play, a tedious but necessary precursor. By the time I top someone, I know more than her likes and dislikes and what her boundaries are. I know something, at least, of who she is, and even if I dont know her last name or what she does for a living, she has become someone I care about. I dont think Ive ever topped someone I didnt have a great deal of respect and even affection for. As a bottom, I might imagine giving myself up for a stranger, but my top fantasies dont work that way. (Of course, other pervs experience may vary; I can only speak for myself.) I realize, also, how absolutely essential the leather community is to my experience of kink. Its not just the place where I connect with partners. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I could do that on-line, exclusively, and never go to another munch or business meeting or conference or play demo. Rather, the leather community is where we get to know and care about each other as human beings. In a way, its very much like the other community I cherish, my spiritual home in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Within it, we nurture beliefs that the larger society may not value. We commit ourselves to relationships of honesty and mutual support. We know others and are known by them in deeply meaningful ways, and try to treat each other with tender concern. We know that we dont act alone, but that all our actions take place within the context of community, to whom we answer if our ethics fail and by whom we are protected if another members ethics are questionable. Everything we do together, we arrive at by consensus. In the leather community just as in my local Monthly Meeting, there are elders to guide me, and my own experience is respected and valued. Quakers believe that there is that of God in everyone; in BDSM, I know that I am participating in a mystery much greater than the scene of the moment. Through it, I can discover the divinity in myself and my partner and partake in a communion of the body more complex and metaphorically meaningful than ordinary vanilla sex. I imagine that pagans have an easier, or at least more natural, connection to the spirituality inherent in BDSM play, enacting rituals in which they embody the Goddess and Her consort. I would be a pagan, if I could; the ancient stories theyve reclaimed resonate to the bottom of my

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Celtic soul like a great bell tolling out through the fog. But I cant. Growing up Catholic, I loved the Mass. If I couldnt cloak myself in its beauty because the dogma of small and fallible men rejected my very existence, I preferred to go naked of any ritual at all. The language my heart speaks to my soul is the language of the Gospels. So I came to the Quakers, who dont pray for things but hold them in the Light. Just as every Friend seems to have a different definition of his or her faith, so Id guess we each have a different idea of the Light. Once again, I cant speak for anyone but myself, and I know Im not a very good Quaker. When we sit in silent meeting, grounding our physical beings, centering ourselves, opening ourselves to the spirit, I imagine the Light as something that pours through us. We are making ourselves as transparent as we can, to be a better vessel and vehicle for that Light. I dont know what the Light is; I cant say I see it as God, or Jesus the Light of the World. Im not much of a Christian. I let my mind latch on to the most literal interpretation, picturing light that is more golden than white, more like the sun that comes through the feathery bows of hemlock trees on a bright summer morning. I open my eyes and see the light that cascades in through the high windows of the meeting house, shining like a great diffuse halo on us all. At the rise of Meeting for Worship, we go around in a circle and say our names, holding each other in the Light. Most of their names I already know; most Friends know mine. We stand and let ourselves be known. We sit and give each other our deepest attention, cherishing each other. The Light pours in me and through me; I am the Light, and so are these people I love, all of them, the Light. When I try for a more precise definition of holding someone in the Light, this is the best I can come up with: that I am giving my entire attention to the present moment, focused with great particularity and tenderness on the person before me, trying to be as open to them as I can. And isnt that exactly what I do, as a top? Of course, theres more to it than that. Were dwelling in the realm of body, after all, where mindfulness resides in my hands, her back, my sweat, her breath, the smack of my palm against her ass, her yelp, the smell of her pussy, the wetness between my legs. The sound my stick makes as it strikes, the cry she looses, raise a shiver in me. My lips press against her damp, salty neck; she trembles. I bite. She gasps and flinches away. My

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cunt floods. The heavy rope hits like a sandbag, over and over, and my arms are remembering for themselves other burdens, other pleasures, without words. I hold her, murmuring as she weeps, but the words dont matter. Words may be the knife that carves up my experience into something manageable, but theyre also the knife that slices my Self from my Body. I dont need them now. The beast doesnt need them. I circle my friend with my arms, as close to another human being as it is possible to be, and the satiated beast is curled up there, too, as much a part of me as my heartbeat. Afterward she told me, you dont act like somebody whos iffy about their sadism. No, I didnt feel at all iffy. But I have to be completely honest it didnt feel like sadism. What it felt like, after all, was love.