Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (89 page)

Anything and everything that anyone does has some spiritual component. We don’t escape our spiritual existence any more than we escape being bipeds: You can crawl, but you’re still a biped. When we do anything that is difficult, extreme, anything that is ecstatic—[
something
which is] really hard for us to achieve or really extreme from our personal point of view, or [which] produces a state of genuine joy—when we do anything that goes to those levels, we engage ourselves very deeply. The key to that is very often connected with our sexuality. If piss is connected with our sexuality, as it is for a lot of people, then it’s going to be, at least sometimes, difficult. I’ve never had an ecstatic experience, an experience that changed my consciousness, even momentarily, in vanilla sex. But I would be very surprised to find that I had fewer than 100 experiences of mind-altering ecstasy in S/M. The fact that this can happen, however rarely, is one of the attractions of S/M.

There’s another important issue: We make our way through childhood bearing the [knowledge] that we have to learn to piss and shit when and where appropriate. And we’re told to give absolutely no attention to the body parts involved: none, ever. There is no appropriate moment to look at your own penis or to touch your own asshole, and yet you have to be in control of their functions, which are only marginally acceptable. So in a way, we establish in childhood that to be involved in any way with piss is frontier territory. I think that may serve as an initial fascination for a lot of people. [But] beyond that, you eventually arrive at pleasure; you sort out your sexual activities on that basis.

I lived on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks when I was little. The bathroom facilities were an outhouse. I was fascinated by the fact that my uncles and other adults who lived on the farm could stop any place and pull it out and
piss. That fascination never went away. I always liked the sound of it; I always liked to see it. There was also some thrill for me in the thought of other people hearing or seeing me pissing. The fascination with male urination [was there when I was six or seven], but I had no involvement in any sense. But I imagined being able to see it, having my uncles know that I was seeing it, and [I] imagined that they enjoyed that. I didn’t really think about it again until I discovered that I was homosexual.

I began to hear of people who pissed on each other or [drank] each other’s piss, and I wanted to find such people. When you [heard about this] in the ’60s as I was coming out, it was only in the most derogatory terms. It was some queen saying, “You wouldn’t believe it, he wanted to piss on me!” and they were disgusted and horrified and humiliated. I didn’t know how to find anyone who would not be horrified by it.

In the early ’70s, when there was sexual activity in gay bars, it became easier to sort people out. One day I was in a Los Angeles [bar]. I cupped my hand [over] a guy’s crotch and was kind of squeezing and rubbing, and he started pissing in my hand. I felt like I’d come home. During the next few years I discovered that even in many bars that had no other sexual activities the bathrooms were awesome places to find someone who wanted to play. I quickly discovered that the great majority of the people [shared my] attitude: That it was a pleasure and not some method by which tops could humiliate or degrade bottoms. Eventually I learned to play that way [as well], because you run into bottoms who must think of water sports as humiliating to be involved. I’d rather do that to work them up to the point where they recognize that it can just be joyful, externalized exuberance. Humiliation can be a fun scene, [but] for me, using piss play as humiliation takes the best edge off.

For a lot of people the first turn-on is going to be that they want to submit. We get our hierarchy of categories of sexual turn-on from our early experiences in any area of sex. So if the top says, “You must do this,” and we’re learning to be submissive—that gives it a sexual charge.

One of the things that makes a wide category of S/M more sexual, even hypersexual, is that it assaults multiple senses at the same time. I dislike sounding overly academic about these things, but if you were orchestrating a scene in the way that a composer writes a piece of music, you would see that there are moments when you want to bind together the people in the scene—with all their senses—to make it as solid as possible. With the sight and the smell and taste and the feel all at once, piss [play] can be very effective in that regard.

I don’t particularly think [consensual coercion is part of the attraction], although it often is involved for people who know they’re interested but can’t
give themselves permission to do that [because] it’s too disgusting. Labeling it humiliation and instigating consensual coercion covers that base for them. I think that’s true in a lot of S/M. I know that there are other mechanisms involved, but I think at least in water sports, that’s often the mechanism that’s engaged.

The idea of piss play is approached with tremendous circumspection [among S/Mers]. The taboo is so strong it makes any idea of the numbers impossible to get, but the fascination clearly [exists]. Whether the practice is as widespread is another matter. Recently, when QSM [Authors’ note: Quality SM, an educational and support group] called and asked what I would like to do a class about, I said, “We’re not ready to do flogging and whipping again, and I don’t feel up to preparing a mummification class at the moment. [So] maybe nothing, because no one wants to do a water-sports class.” And [the director] said, “I do.” So we scheduled it. Ordinarily when a new how-to fetish class is presented, we get maybe as many as 18 people. For the water-sports class—which was fairly early on the slate, so [there wasn’t much time] for people to register—there were 32 actively interested people. They were all saying, “I have [x number] of friends who wanted to [and] didn’t want to be here.” I discovered that even among people who were willing to spend $15 or $20 to be in the room, there was still a tremendous residual taboo and embarrassment hanging over [everyone], except for [a few] friends of mine who sat in the front row—a couple of women who were very active participants. Most people were very reticent to raise their hands. So while it was a fun class to do, it was still one of the most difficult, because the participation level was so low. At certain points, I did get sudden flurries of tremendous activity from the crowd, which proved that it wasn’t a lack of interest [or] that it wasn’t going well. It was the taboo in effect.

The AIDS epidemic has been really chilling even for activities as safe as water sports. Usually I get clinical and point out the historical stuff about people who, [as] in India, of course, drink their own piss because it’s the only safe fluid to drink, and in the U.S. Army, my father—and I suppose generations of soldiers before—were taught to treat athlete’s foot by pissing on feet. But in the age of AIDS all body fluids were suddenly filthy again, despite the sexual revolution. It was [former Surgeon General C. Everett] Koop who made the first real public statement. He said this is ludicrous—[that] we’ve known for centuries that human urine cannot be infected in [this] way. [But] a lot of people, doctors primarily, who were disgusted by the thought that men, especially gay men, were pissing on or in each other, continued to press for all body fluids, most particularly urine, to be seen as unclean. Some medical studies were undertaken, and it was very firmly determined [that],
like almost every other virus and bacterium in the world, HIV breaks down in piss.

I don’t know that [AIDS has] changed the way that serious players play: Serious players tend to look into the safety of what they’re doing and take great pride in knowing what is and isn’t true. I think it’s probably powerfully affected the way that novices, and nervous people who don’t take that responsibility, play.

Twenty-Five

U
rine has always been a substance of some mystery—and cultural schizophrenia: It is at once naughty and nice, sacred and profane. Although taboos have instilled an abiding horror of urine in many people, the substance nonetheless has been (and is still) used as a disinfectant in folk medicines; it has been (and still is) important in some religious and mystical functions. Western physicians rely on urinalysis to evaluate aspects of health and to ascertain pregnancy. The body’s “water” both figuratively and literally possesses life-affirming qualities.

Since urine has so many different meanings to so many different people, that it may also hold deep erotic meaning to some is no surprise. In this chapter we hear from:

The uses of urine in ritualistic and health processes are legion. Even when it is perceived uniquely as waste, customs, traditions, and attitudes regarding urine vary enormously. The national hero of Belgium is
Mannequin Pis
, the legendary figure of a little boy whose blithe urination during a royal procession centuries ago is credited with foiling the assassination of a king. In America parents frequently seem to find a male infant’s urination to be a precious act and evidence of the child’s good health. Bed-wetting by an older child however is often treated as an insult and a crime, punishable by a spectrum of humiliations intended to shame the child into continence.

The erotic interest in urine is undoubtedly formed early and is probably an outgrowth of children’s fascination with the enigmas of the body and its functions. A native curiosity about the flow of urine—its unique sound, sight, and odor—prompt most (if not all) children to engage secretly in games, whether socially voyeuristic or privately experimental. In some cases significant emotional experiences may influence a child’s perceptions and impulses. For example, incontinence or a traumatic experience with an adult may give urination a particularly powerful place in a child’s erotic hierarchy.

But trauma is neither the unique nor the primary cause for eroticizing urine. For many, urine is never perceived as an unpleasant substance. While some adults may perceive urine to be “dirty” and exciting precisely for that reason, the genuine enthusiast tends to believe that urine is a clean product that can be safely ingested.

Just as elements of sadomasochism and bondage can be observed in most children’s patterns of body exploration, urine figures large in childhood play. For children to refrain from urinating as long as possible in order to create enhanced physical stimulation when they finally relieve themselves is not uncommon. And some children discover that urination causes agreeable sensations to the genitals, a knowledge which may be carried into adulthood.

The proximity of these organs to one another may also be confusing. Many young girls seem unaware of the distinction between the urethra and the vaginal opening until they receive adequate sex education, if sex education is available. Some adult women remain ignorant, and physicians have reported cases of baffled newlyweds who attempt penetration of the wrong orifice.

This confusion is particularly meaningful in males, where the urethra serves a dual function as a passage for both urine and seminal fluids. Some boys discover that the urethra may be as susceptible to pleasure as other parts of the penis. The result of these confusions is that boys and girls—and men and women—begin to associate urine with sexual fluids such as semen or vaginal lubricant. Wilhelm Stekel, who considered uro-eroticism to be a neurotic disorder, extensively describes the connections between urination and autoeroticism and believed that, for the urophile, urine is a substitute for seminal emissions. The latter assumption, at least, seems confirmed by our interviewees, who described the excitement of the sensation and pointed out that the urine stream may be analogous to prolonged emission of semen.