I didn't dare look up. Laying face down in the dry grass, my eyes were watering from the pollen and dust, but I was too frightened to sneeze. Each time that I inhaled, the sound in my ears was as loud as howling wind. My fear, however, kept me from exhaling in a smooth and natural way. Instead, my breath came out in a stuttering fashion, as if there was a faulty valve in my throat. She was standing no more than five feet away and spoke in a whisper that was not quite threatening, but was clearly distinct and menacing in its calmness.
"Come on, you fucking baby. Let's play."
I wanted to cry. The "play" wasn't fun anymore, and my helpless state as I lay here in the grass was the consequence of pursuing her dangerous form of "play" a bit too vigorously. At one time I used to dream about being in this very position. I had fantasized, in the midst of mounting sexual excitement, that I was under the complete control of a dangerous and dominating woman who, with the blow of a hammer or the twist of a knife could bring me to the delicious and painful brink of death. She could prolong my physical suffering while preserving my mental pleasure, never quite letting me die, but making me think that at any moment I would. She would be a woman capable of tricking my body and emotions, thereby bringing me that state of intellectual pleasure that no individual can bring to himself. I would be introduced to nothingness, swim in its warmth, feel its fullness, and then be pulled back at the very moment that I was about to be dissolved in it. This evening my pleasure in the fantasy evaporated with the intellectual understanding that I would not return. She was breaking the agreed upon rules of the "game" tonight. Instead of tricking my instincts, she was using them as a conduit to my intellect. I would soon be dead.
In truth, the development of a sexual fetish is not that dissimilar to the development of any other type of taste or predisposition. Remember the first time that you smoked a cigarette? Remember the unpleasant taste of burning paper and tobacco as it filled your mouth with that unfamiliar thick smoke? Remember the first time that you inhaled that same smoke and it burned your lungs? You painfully ejaculated blue-grey clouds out into the air with a loud, deep cough, signaling to everyone that this was your first time. It was not to be your last, of course. You learned to enjoy those very same sensations that had initially caused choking discomfort. You relaxed and took pleasure from the way the smoke slid through your throat and into your lungs. You learned to hold it in for a moment and then expel it, this time with no coughing. The light headedness which had at first nauseated you was now a soft diversion from the world. For the length of a cigarette you learned to control your bodily reactions. Your intellect gained a special pleasure in reinterpreting these reactions through the lens of discipline, undermining all that was automatic and natural. You learned to appreciate the taste of certain poisons, and dislike the tastes of others. American cigarettes have a generally honest, sharp taste while British cigarettes taste softer and somehow mildewed. Like their British cousins, Canadian smokes seem stale, yet they are nowhere near as repugnant as the French product. The reigning kings of all cigarettes are Turkish. The Turks have developed the most truly delicious cigarette ever manufactured. Yes, you learned to smoke for pleasure, but it didn't start out that way.
Sexual fetishism develops in the same way as cigarette smoking. The first introduction to sex is unpleasant and embarrassing. There's the groping and uncertainty. How do you know what the other person is thinking or what she wants you to do? There's slobbering and kissing, grabbing and squeezing. There's insertion and pumping and a growing crescendo of confusing lust and excitement. Soon, it's over and the natural course of the drama is complete. Instinct tells you that something important and potentially dangerous has just occurred; that you've done something to expand the genetic pool. But this is a trick since your intellect knows that a birth control device has short circuited the act of procreation. You learn that sex and reproduction are not necessarily associated. Sex is a pleasure to be cultivated, and your special tastes, though perhaps unusual, are to be respected.
Some men find that their special taste is in blond women, while others prefer black women, or Asian women. Still others discover that a certain kind of dress or underwear provokes the desired mental state towards which the sexual act becomes directed. Some don't even desire women, but prefer other men, children, animals or themselves. Those with the most highly developed tastes tend towards the really exotic. Their disciplined minds overthrow the order that nature has imposed upon them and they learn to desire the most degenerate specimens and activities. The incompleteness of an amputee promotes a feeling of mental completeness, and in stroking the end of a stump the troubles of the world seem far away. Sinking into the folds of a morbidly obese partner reassures that you are safe and that all is well. Spilling urine and feces onto the chest of your partner reminds you that your filthiest functions arouse, excite and are valuable to some people. But then there are those whose tastes are so highly developed and honed that they cannot even be implemented because they are simply physically impossible. Some men desire, for instance, to be crushed under the heel of a gigantic woman. Their sexual pleasure is dependent upon a fantasy of complete powerlessness to a non existent creature. Others imagine themselves to be wild animals with none of the thoughts of human beings. Their ironic desire is to become mentally nonhuman in order to experience raw passion through a human body. These desires, perhaps bizarre, are simply the result of a progressive sharpening of tastes. Each of these individuals desires to experience a very specific mental state. The intellect becomes the main organ for pleasure.
I first saw her at the bank standing in line ahead of me. Her facial features were of ambiguous ethnic heritage, but it wasn't her face that kept my attention. It was the dragon tattoo creeping up the side of her perfect, unblemished thigh, poking its head underneath her very short skirt that held me fixated. I instantly wished that I was that dragon so that I could live my life with my head buried in her crotch.
Her name turned out to be Mina. She was a secretary at a local law firm who hated her job, but loved the effect she had on men. We drank some coffee together and talked. All of the time it was obvious to me that this talk was simply a prelude to other things. What else was obvious to me was that Mina had had this kind of talk with many other men. She was doing her form of research, feeling out the mental territory that she was out to conquer. I liked this. She was in control and I trusted that she knew what to do. I was there to be played with by her.
As it turned out, Mina introduced me to sexual activities that I had never dreamed I would consent to. The "play" began sedately enough; if you consider bondage and submission to be sedate. Mina enjoyed being in a position of dominance which included not only the physical situation but also the mental situation during sex. She restrained me, slapped and spanked me and had me suck her toes. This slavish posture suited me and I quickly adapted to the role in which I had been cast. (A role, incidentally, that could not easily end at the completion of our "games." I'm sure you've noticed that when you become friends with a person, you become accustomed to dealing with them in a very specific way. The initial conditions under which a relationship is established sets the tone for that relationship forever. The relationship between Mina and I was the relationship between a master and a slave.)
Mina's tastes dictated my tastes. She introduced me to the playfulness of dominance and submission games as a first step in my development. It was here that I learned the pleasure in abandoning all responsibility. I became an inactive child. I became a passive "thing" capable of deriving pleasure not from genital stimulation, but from an awareness of the uneven power balance between me and my partner. The less power that I asserted, or was capable of asserting in the relationship, the greater the feeling of pleasure that I derived from the experience. I was tasting the abyss and slowly moving towards the warmth of nothingness. As a man I had responsibility and asserted control. As Mina's "thing" I was less than a bug. I was a fluctuation in the fabric of space/time. I was a wrinkle on the surface of the ocean. I was an ugly reflection that disappeared when the mirror was turned away.
The problem was that I was still more than nothing.
In the attempt to overcome my "thingness," Mina subjected me to enemas, branding and shit blistering. This last ordeal consisted of Mina injecting her shit underneath the surface of my skin until a blister formed. I was ordered to allow the blister to fester for days until she would order me to tear it open with my own teeth. As she berated me verbally and beat me with a television antenna I would lick my wound until it was clean of all pus and shit. We engaged in this drama a number of times, the blisters becoming bigger and more numerous each time. It wasn't long before I became sick. A painful and persistent nausea became a constant presence for me, but Mina refused to allow me to see a doctor. She would call me a "fucking little baby," and force me to lick her anus while she sat on my face and farted. She felt smooth and slick as she slid back and forth over my nose, and the sensation of her soft brown thighs gripping my head threw me into fits of excitement. But this highly pleasurable experience became associated, more and more, with the stench and filth of her bowel excretions. I could not separate the pleasure of having sex with Mina from the displeasure of being forced to wallow in her excrement. Being a helpless mastabatory aid and shit receptacle became an important and indispensable part of the sexual act with her. The more of her shit that I was forced to eat and have injected under my skin, the sicker I became. Yet I could not stop seeing her. More to the point, I did not want to stop seeing her. I craved the humiliation that she subjected me to in my pursuit of nothingness. I was becoming less and less of what I had been by virtue of the fact that I was becoming less and less of anything. Soon I would disappear and never experience pain again.
The intense pleasure of sexual union is always accompanied by a proportional discomfort which arises from the fact that everything afterwards seems painful in comparison. Living involves anxiety and the flight from pain towards pleasure, but it is only the human animal that has the ability to reinterpret his pain as pleasure. Ever since exiting the womb, this intellectual capacity has allowed man to survive in the most unusual and hostile of circumstances, perpetuating ways of life that would otherwise be seen as "unnatural." The ultimate desire of all men is to survive in a prolonged and predictable state free from suffering, and the ability to control one's mental evaluation of the environment is one way of accomplishing this. In the end though, nothing (except "nothing") promises uninterrupted, eternal certainty.