I am on course to write about one man’s experience and the expenditure of those experiences.
There is science, conceptual models, forecasts, projections and then – there is real life. As much as I can study the great theorists, rationalise the impetus and the opposing aspects of sadism and masochism, highlight capitalism, ascertain the blueness of the sex industry and quantify the vast quantum leap we have taken in the last century of human sexuality. I realise all I need to do is administer real-life evidence.
I have always been interested in neuroplasticity, the control we think we have vs the control our brains have, and the battle for our perceived ownership. I am always biting at the heel of a psychological inquest, and during every encounter, I edge-play it, for all it’s worth.
Sometimes kink surprises me; it doesn’t always come from the stereotypical places that first spring to mind; sometimes, it percolates up as an adult with no previous kink history of which to speak.
This is his story.
He told me on the phone that he was in a wheelchair and hadn’t walked for 20 years after a terrible accident at the steelworks where he had worked. I wondered what this man’s fetish could be.
Due to his accident and being in a wheelchair, we found it difficult to find a suitable venue to both interview him and dominate him, so we somehow ended up at a garden centre!
After we settled down with refreshment and my roast circumference Yorkshire, with the dinner in its innards, with all the trimmings, him just sipping on tap water, he began to tell me his story.
There was a terrible explosion in his workplace, and a ton of weight crushed him down. He was unconscious for a split second, and then ‘I felt wicked pain, sensation’ he said and “I remember all the sirens going off”.
He was rushed straight to hospital. When the doctors examined him, they found he had instantly broken his spinal cord.
The doctors had operated to straighten his back and put plates in, but they told him he would never walk again.
He loved the outdoors and had previously been a runner who could have easily run a marathon.
It turns out that his fetish was scissors. He wanted me, as his dominatrix, to walk around with scissors as my hands like Edward Scissorhands. This film depicted his feelings of isolation, and I was viewing a man who grew tired of his two-wheeled isolation.
He asked me to bring scissors to our session and to cut his hair. I’m bad enough at just cutting my fringe! But why scissors?
While he lay incapacitated in the hospital, a particularly assertive and strict nurse determined he needed a haircut. Despite his inability to move, he tried to refuse. Regrettably, the staff disregarded his plea, leaving him powerless to resist. Covered by a blanket, he watched helplessly as his hair fell onto the fabric while the nurse, unmoved by his protests, carried on. Afterwards, she simply walked away.
He told me, ‘I felt out of control, I had something done that I didn’t even ask for, but I liked it, in a way’.
The feeling from this event stayed with him; it lingered on indefinitely after this huge trauma, and trauma is the keyword here.
Sometime after being hospitalised, he sat at home watching a prisoner of war movie. He started to feel a deep satiation watching as the prisoners were taken into German concentration camps, as they had their hair cut off and were shackled and chained. He had found a connection, a way back and yet forward.
Before he had this accident, he would watch these films with nonchalance, but after the accident, upon viewing them, he simply said ‘wow’.
What particularly excited him was the sound of the scissors, the razor, the raw sound of the blades gliding up and down on one another, just a breath away.
Now he gets a mistress of his choosing to bind him up, strap him down, and let him struggle in his chair with a tight collar on and a bar for his hands tied behind his back as they chop away mercilessly.
He is married and says if he outlives his wife, he will pay for a dominatrix full-time to subdue him, ration him with life, to make him ‘feel’ again. To take away is to feel for him.
Having every supposed whim catered for, due to his payoff, it felt like he had everything and yet nothing. Nothing he truly desired, so here I was something to off-kilter the balance.
He felt he wasn’t paid enough by his company for the accident and then said a price couldn’t be put on his legs, never being able to walk again. He said, ‘My legs are priceless; I would give everything back today, all the houses, holiday home, flashy cars. If I could, I would give it all back, and I would walk into the woods with a tent on my back and start from scratch.
I asked him ‘What has BDSM given you?’
‘Something to look forward to in life. If I can please somebody like yourself, I know I am going be thrashed, shaved, locked up, and I will look forward to it every night; my heart will be pounding.
‘I am spoilt, and I need to be corrected, I’ve got no boss, nobody telling me what to do, and nobody controlling me’.
His wife doesn’t control him, and she doesn’t seem interested in controlling him, and he doesn’t seem interested in controlling her.
Go figure….
The mind is a puzzling and elusive thing. Nobody knows what the mind is or how the brain creates it. How does 3 pounds of gelatinous pudding give us thought and consciousness even?
We can retrace steps, and we can create new pathways, but when something is so hardwired, those connections fuse hard for many years and many men don’t want to feel any other way than they ‘normally’ do because pleasure has been born in the conscious and unconscious.
A quote from a Buddhist.
‘Sometimes you come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization you are completely crazy. Your mind is shrieking, gibbering madhouse of wheels barrelling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and helpless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you have never noticed.
I don’t know if BDSM is the right course every time. I don’t know if he has gone through counselling or therapy or if an addiction plays a part. I feel the number of times he has contacted me since our meeting may indicate something obsessive in his behaviour.
I am not advocating domination is always the way, but it’s his way. Maybe Kink is just a road that will eventually lead him on to something else, somewhere beyond kink, where he could be truly at peace.
‘It’s not about our absolute filth, but our absolute freedom, or our fight for it’
Charlie Suede