The Humanness of Sexual Bondage

From Kinky Magazine, Number 2, Feb-Mar Issue 1975

As more and more married couples investigate the joys of unusual foreplay without the taint or onus of "unnatural" entering into the privacy of their bedrooms, the idea of practicing "bondage" is becoming more and more popular. Thus, the male or female, feeling particularly aggressive, somehow manages to subdue and tie up his or her partner for the initiation on the sexual rites. Strictly speaking, bondage as foreplay is a part of the spectrum of sadomasochism which can be said to enter into the psychic make-up of all of us. It is part of the sexual processes of the "doer" and the "done to"—a variant on the passive-aggressive nature of the sexual act.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the genius of a forward looking man like Havelock Ellis recognized how strong the erotic fantasies of being rendered helpless in a sexual encounter were. The idea of being chained and "fettered" (an archaic but effective word for "tied") often arises at an early age and is explained by Ellis as ''a purely psychic fantasia founded on the elementary psychical fact, that restraint of emotion, like suspension, produces a heightening of emotion." Perhaps the explanation is even more effectively illustrated with the idea of suppressed laughter. When a subject is placed in a laugh-inducing situation and then is told he cannot laugh, he wants to laugh all the more. And usually he discovers that his laughter is endless and much more raucous than it would have been had he been permitted to relieve his tension to begin with.

Let us assume that laughter is a substitute for sexual gratification. Told not to enjoy it, the subject is geared to enjoy it all the more, and then by being tied up to prevent enjoyment, the subject finds himself even more prone to excitation. It is the simple principle of reverse psychology. Therefore, what emerges is a kind of sexual paradox where the sexual partner seems to be saying, "I want to prevent you from enjoying this," but is in effect saying, "I want you to enjoy this more than you ever have before." There are, of course, innumerable variations of bondage as a sexual turn-on. From a sexual seasoning it can become a sexual obsession. There are sexually repressed men and women who can only enjoy the act when they see themselves treated as unwilling victims "raped" by their partners. And there are those who only enjoy seeing themselves in the role of tormentor, capable of gratification only when their partner is reduced to an object.

Ellis cites a case of bondage "fascination," as far back as 1907. And it. is worth retelling only because a good deal of the subliminal sexual feelings of most people are grossly exaggerated and play a relentlessly active part in the subject's conscious life. The subject, whom we shall call Pierre recalled a deep interest in shackled prisoners being sent to prison from the age of five. It was the chains which interested him and he spent a good deal of time trying to imagine the feelings of the prisoners, often putting himself in their places. He delighted in stories and pictures of "fettered" persons. By the age of fifteen the sex of the person had become important and his interest lay only in women who found themselves in such a sad predicament. A new element also appeared in Pierre's bizarre fantasy of bondage. He was attracted to well-dressed women, especially those wearing elegant shoes. These were the women he imagined being helplessly chained and carted off to the depths of Siberia. He fastened his own feet together with chains and attempted to walk in this condition, but he experienced comparatively little pleasure this way.

Then, quite by accident, he encountered a shrewdly intelligent woman about ten years older than he was. As their friendship grew more intimate she allowed him to take great sexual liberties with her, and he began to practice his fantasy of bondage on her. When he fastened her hands behind her back, he felt a violent and pleasurable sexual sensation that he had never felt before. When he fastened her feet together as well as her hands and allowed her shoes to touch his penis he experienced the same extreme sexual pleasure plus erection and ejaculation. Pierre had no wish to see his lady friend naked or to undress himself, and for as long as the relationship lasted, he didn't experience sexual desire at other times or in connection with other people. Pierre's fantasies of bondage were sadistic in nature and prompted almost exclusively by the desire to humiliate. As the "doer," he felt more like a man. His sexual prowess could hardly be challenged; and, of course there was something else. The forbidden nature of the fantasies made them all the more exciting. When one examines the practice of bondage from the point of view of a highly neurotic individual it can also reflect homosexuality and/or frigidity and/or impotence. But in the course of modern sexual events it is often less a symptom of sexual dysfunction, than a sexual additive, practiced by couples in search of variety and more sexual freedom.

Nick and Mabel A. are two people who accidentally stumbled onto bondage. They are in their early thirties and have been married for over ten years. When a friend of theirs was giving a costume party they decided to go as Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis, Dr. Moriarity. Dr. Moriarity, Mabel, wore a black and white prisoner's suit and was handcuffed. The two were the smash of the party, and towards the end of the evening Nick discovered he'd lost. the keys to his wife's handcuffs.

"I didn't tell her at first because I was sure she'd have a hissy fit. She'd begin to worry and the good time she seemed to be having would go right out the window. But when we left and got in the car she asked me to unlock the cuffs. I pretended I didn't want to. I told her I liked her that way. And although she asked me over and over right up until we finally got home and into the bedroom, I kept telling her to wait.

"I figured I'd call her father who was a policeman, and after all, they were his handcuffs. Well, he was on duty and wasn't going to be off until the morning. Anyway, there was Mabel without any hands, and I had to help her out of her striped suit. It was the strangest thing! We'd dressed and undressed in front of each other for so long that we weren't really excited by the sight of each other nude. In fact, the truth is, we just weren't really excited by each other. Our sex life had never been unlimited passion. Mabel was a restrained woman. Oh, she'd have orgasms, but they were quiet things, and sometimes I could barely tell. "Well, she was really mad, calling me all sorts of names for not unlocking the cuffs and threatening to break my head when I finally did. And this, I can't really explain, I just began to make love to her. She was furious and tried to break away. And then she began to laugh because the whole thing was so ridiculous. Somehow I managed to get her arms around the bedpost. Then I pulled her so she was flat on her back and spread her legs. I mean, you should have seen the bulge in my pants. You'd have thought old Mabel was Helen of Troy. Instinctively my hand began to play on her thighs around the red lips of her vagina. And would you believe neither one of us after all those years had had much hand contact during our sexual intercourse. I had this feeling I'd be sorry in the morning when I finally set her loose, but I just couldn't help myself. I started licking her thighs with my lips at the same time pressing my fingers into her vagina. Usually Mabel didn't lubricate very much, and I was really surprised to discover how wet she was. There she was yelling for me to stop and hardly able to keep from coming right then and there. That was the first time and she did come, just from the touch of my tongue, and it was the biggest orgasm she'd ever had, Well, afterwards I finally confessed that I'd lost the keys, and we laughed a lot. She seemed more relaxed, old Mabel, than she'd ever been after we had sex. Afterwards she used to seem, you know, guilty, as if she were afraid her father would find out or something. She told me she minded but 1 knew she didn't and so I was determined to try it again." Nick and Mabel continued to experiment, with the handcuffs for several nights in a row. Mabel was always passive until the final night when she performed fellatio on her husband. As he tells it: "Of course, by this time I was pretty horny. I hadn't had an orgasm in days and she must have had about ten. Under normal circumstance I never would have tried it, but all of a sudden I found myself inching my body to her face so that my pecker was right in line with her mouth. And all of a sudden old Mabel was scarfing on it. Wow, who'd have thought it could have been so beautiful between us after all those years, particularly when it never was anything special to begin with. "Neither Nick nor Mabel enjoy bondage all the time in bed now. Mabel came to realize what her sexual potential was and can now orgasm as freely as she did when she found herself handcuffed in her husband's clutches on that first night. And it doesn't take the most brilliant of psychological sleuths to put the reasons for Mabel's behavior together. Her love for her father was always incredibly strong, and Mabel maintained, long after adulthood, unconscious incestuous desires for him. Unresolved, these desires affected her sexual performance, and she always felt a bit guilty, as if having sex with another man, in some way betrayed him. The handcuffs became a symbol of her father, and perhaps that is why she chose, even before Nick lost the keys, to attend the costume party as a prisoner. Hence, she had sex symbolically with her father, was helpless toward it off, and even, in a way symbolically punished for it. But what the act did do to help Mabel overcome old neuroses was more important. Mabel realized she was capable of total sexual gratification and this, in effect has helped her to exorcise the old demons.

Mabel's understanding of what the handcuffs brought to the surface enabled her to face up to her own problems and visit, an analyst. He helped her to verbalize all her feelings—feelings that she as a woman and a wife and a daughter had been evading for years.

"I still like being submissive," she says, "but I don't lie about it. I don't say 'no' and mean 'yes.' You know, it's kind of ironic because being tied up, I was free for the first time to experience all those wonderful feelings I'd kept locked up. And I've been able for the first time to see my father as a human being and not a paragon of virtue. He was always so strong, so dominant. But I don't think he ever was a very good lover to my mother. He always came home so tired, and she told me once that. after the first month marriage moves out of the bedroom into the kitchen. I think she was just commenting on her own frustrations. Yeah, I see my father as a human being now and I think his first love all those years was his handcuffs."

We have now discussed a case history of the fetter "obsession" with Pierre from Havelock Ellis' Psychology of Sex, a case of neurosis brought to the fore by "fetter" sex, and thus we have spent some time looking into its sadistic components and its masochistic component. Interestingly enough, Freud maintained that the masochistic component had an intimate relationship to feminity, and the behavior of the male masochist certainly displays many features which justify this relationship. The masochist is timid, passive whining and the sadistic is aggressive, dominating and eternally the boss. But these characteristics are, in effect, role assignments, bred through generations by conditioning and not organic to the chemical and emotional make-up of the genders. "All the world is a stage," said Shakespeare," and all the men and women merely players." We emulate those attitudes which we are encouraged to emulate and they become absorbed into our psyches. Realizing that a good deal of our masculinity and feminity is essentially role assignments has helped a good many men and women free themselves from societal and cultural limitations. Masochism in the male has always been assumed to be a symptom of homosexuality suppressed or expressed. But the modern view alters this somewhat. In the first place there are homosexual components in everyone, but a homosexual component does not a homosexual make. Jung told us that there was an alter ego male inside every female and an alter-ego female inside every male. But he did not define it in terms of homosexuality, but rather as some mystical sexual force, an erotic force, almost love images. If this isn't very easy to understand it is because Jung's view was mystic and defied easy explanations.

In essence, man creates masculine/feminine and then confuses what he has created with what has been created for him. His Frankenstein controls him, manipulates his realities, redistributes his priorities. And so it is that the masochistic component of human nature is defined as homosexual rather than sexual. The period of change is upon us, but many of us are still victims of our own arbitrary definitions. Nevertheless, the masochist frequently has fantasies in which women are the inflictors of pain. These used to be defined as masked homosexual fantasies, spin-offs of Sacher-Masoch's classic wherein the hero, Severin, finds himself a hopeless victim of the beautiful Wanda. At the book's climax the hapless Severin is beaten by Wanda's Greek lover and realizes this is what he's yearned for all along. The male beating the male has, in the past, been considered as a symbol of the sex act. Dr. I.T. Woodward uses the Masoch novel to explain the thousands of similar male fantasies experienced daily by men. One of his examples, directly related to bondage bears repeating. A huge man with definite masochistic fantasies constantly dreamed that he was chained to a huge idol on a desert island. Manacled hand and foot and stark naked, he lay spread-eagled and writhing in pain on the idol as beautiful naked women approached him. While several of the nude women tightened his chains until the agony was all but unbearable, another gorgeous woman stroked his genitals lovingly with her hands, exciting him to powerful erection. The twin forces of pain and sexual stimulation caused the chained man to explode in orgasm. The patient had had this fantasy for years, as an erotic dream and it inevitably ended in nocturnal emission. When his mind drifted to it during his waking hours he would find himself compulsively masturbating. Then one day in the midst of the fantasy a thought struck him. Supposing the hand stroking his genitals belonged to a male! The thought so paralyzed him, he could no longer enjoy his fantasy, and he headed for the nearest psychologist to examine his problem. The modern view of sexuality would find the answer of latent homosexuality too pat and simplistic. There are too many alternatives. In the first place we know that the components of sadism and masochism work together and most human beings have both components. The masochist has his sadistic streak and vice-versa. In the second place the meaning of the symbols depends on the conditioning of the individual. In the third place the child-parent relationship often sculptors our sexual reality and the passive-aggressive nature of sexuality need not reflect male/female natures so much as they reflect infant/adult relationships. And there is a child in all of us. He is, as Wordsworth once put it, "Father to the man." And he is not necessarily a destructive force as he is a creative one. Again it all depends on definitions and they are changing.

Let us examine the case of Harriet, and Lars, two young and extremely attractive professional people. Harriet is a legal secretary and spends most of her days carrying out the orders of her superiors, She is well-paid, but the job affords her very little responsibility or creativity. Harriet is very much a modern woman shackled to a subservient role in the contemporary business world. Someday she hoped to start her own business, but that day is far off and its coming depends on how much she can salt away. Lars, on the other hand, is the executive of an insurance company, and he spends his days being responsible for everything that his staff does. The responsibility often leaves him exhausted, and while he is happy in his work there are times when as he puts it, "I feel I need a transfusion."

The young couple discovered bondage in the most bizarre way. Harriet returned from shopping one early Saturday night and found her husband gagged and the house ransacked. Practically everything of value had been taken, from the stereo to the silver tray that was a wadding gift from Lars' mother. "At first, I wanted to cry. I rushed over to Lars and undid the gag that the bastards had placed over his mouth. He wasn't, hurt and I was at least grateful for that. I found myself hugging him and weeping and just a hopeless unthinking mess. Incredible as it may seem, I also found myself turned-on. Our kisses changed from relief to desire and I found myself undressing my husband and delighted to find him in such a passive position. Apparently Lars was turned on too. His erection was enormous when I finally unzipped his fly. I pulled his trousers and underwear down to his shoes. Both of us in the midst of our absurd sexual excitement, found ourselves laughing. "Help,rape!' Lars whispered, struggling half-heartedly to get out of his bonds. We knew what it was almost immediately. A game. A wonderful game in which we had both exchanged roles." Somehow I managed to get him out of the chair without untying him, and we settled on the living-room rug, which was just about the only thing the burglars didn't run off with.

"I was more sexually active than I'd ever been in my life. I had to take my own clothes off! And for the two years that we'd been married, I'd never done that when Lars and I had made love. It was always he who undressed me. It was always he who showered me with caresses. And, of course, I was responsive, but it was always very clear who was to be the most aggressive. I just accepted it after a while and enjoyed it. "But now things were different. I wanted to make love to him, and I suspect he never would have let me even though he secretly might have wanted to, if he had not been tied up. Can you imagine. The first thing most people would do in a situation like that is call the police, and we hadn't even thought of that yet. "Lars lay on the floor on his back, his enormous penis just, well, throbbing with excitement. My God, I remember thinking, now that I've got the upper hand, what do I do? I spread my legs and sat on top of his belly, so that the rounded head of his cock was nudging the lips of my vagina. I can't tell you how excited I was! What an incredibly new experience it was for me. Then I moved back and forth so that the cock head went sliding along the length of my vaginal lips. Finally, and very, very slowly, I lowered myself onto his shaft, moving up and down and from side to side. Oh, yes, I was sitting with my back to him, and I really can't tell you why I chose that position, maybe because there was some level of embarrassment in me, or maybe because I wanted to make him feel like a sex object. We have since altered our positions, but it was just fine for that first time. I remember, I lifted his legs and began to spank his buttocks lightly, my intensity growing as my movements grew more frenzied.

"Can you believe it? And I found myself chiding him kiddingly, 'You lousy kid, you let them take everything! Naughty! Naughty!' Both of us were aroused and yet laughing at the same time, and of course, there was something else. I was so relieved that Lars was safe. I think that helped to make me so uninhibited."

Harriet and Lars discovered that bondage actually helps them deal with their day to day pressures. Lars could enjoy being a child, and Harriet, the responsible adult. It was a welcome and healthy reversal, and something that. both of them had been seeking desperately to balance out. Their relationship. Can this be defined as latent homosexuality?

As Harriet explains, "What happens, happens between Lars and me. That can hardly be considered homosexual."

The young couple, of course, are hardly locked into the practice of bondage in order to get turned on to each other. It's a sexual variant, a stimulant and it works very well.

"Essentially," Lars says, "we make love to each other. We are each other's sex objects. And also the most important person in each other's lives. We reject definitions because we have such a happy marriage. Oh, we have friends who have very rigid definitions, but most of them seem to live out their lives in a kind of quiet desperation. Ours is filled with humor and compassion. We like to go places together. I'd rather stay home than go out with the boys, and Harriet would rather stay home with me than shop with the girls. We actually like each other."

And that last statement in an age of endemic female discontent and cries of male chauvinism is almost a rarity. The modern male and female are becoming aware that society is no longer founded on back breaking work and the preservation of the family against, external threats. We have evolved to that high point where animal cunning and slavery are no longer essential to the preservation of the race. There are other potentials of human endeavor that can, at last be recognized. Essentially the Darwinism is at work here. Our species has evolved one way physically and psychologically in order to survive in a certain environment That environment has changed, and so our psychological orientation must too. Empires have fallen when they have not been able to adjust. And what are empires but structures created by men and women to meet their needs. The male as well as the woman is in a period of total reevaluation of his role, and although the cries of women's liberation can be heard loud and clear reverberating around the world, the liberation of the male is equally if not more important. For the female cannot be free until he is. When he is able to reject, the image of brute force, of cop, gangster, killer, football player, and develop his gentler nature without fear of confusing it with sexual inversion, the woman will be able to realize her own potentials. It is largely our self-imposed human bondage which makes the physical act of bondage so appealing and ultimately, liberating.