The Other Side of Desire (8 page)

No one had an easy time leaving at the end of their stays, he claimed. He talked of a young corporate lawyer’s adjustment each time he walked out the bungalow’s peeling front door and drove back to his life in Manhattan. “How can you go out into the world afterward? People are trembling physically.”

The Baroness was not trembling. But she recalled the day with Elvis. They’d agreed that she would roast him, and she’d called Master R for assistance. One of his slaves, a welder, built a massive spit: huge bases supporting a metal pole that was about ten feet long, a wheel at one end and spoke handles at the other. It joined a vegetable garden behind the bungalow. Maple and birch trees rose around it, leaves in brilliant color on that bright autumn afternoon. Slaves spread coals onto the bed. Elvis, naked except for a leather jock, was led from the house blindfolded, strapped to the pole, basted with honey and ginger. The coals glowed; the spit was a foot or so above them.

Skin turned red, on the verge of blistering. Elvis screamed while around him the guests, masters and submissives, entered into an orgy of pain inflicted and received. Under the Baroness’s direction, slaves turned the spit slowly. The roasting went on for three and a half hours. When the pole was at last raised away from the heat and Elvis removed from it, he couldn’t stand upright. His eyes were glazed. He collapsed and was carried to bed, guests forcing him to drink water and trying to keep him from going into shock.

“My thighs press together just to think of it,” the Baroness said. She spoke about the different kinds of orgasms she experienced in vanilla sex with her husband, to whom she was faithful as far as vanilla sex went, and in the rest of her erotic life, which some might not have recognized as sex at all: it involved no intercourse, no touching of breasts or genitals. The orgasms in conventional sex were “spikier.” The others were far longer, deeper, left her half-blind, mostly deaf, mute, slack-jawed.

IN
the S-M world, Master R told me, orgasms without typical sexual touching weren’t uncommon, especially for women. He mentioned training a slave to climax when he brushed the roof of her mouth with his finger. And I thought of the woman I’d met after a lecture the Baroness had given, the speech therapist for stroke victims, who reviled her own orgasmic sensitivity: if a sadistic lover whispered in her ear in the right way, she could come without any touch beyond the grazing of his breath. An Orthodox Jew whose grandparents had been slaughtered in the Holocaust, she felt tormented by her own craving for harm.

There was science to support such orgasmic claims. Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk, professors at Rutgers University, along with Gina Ogden of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, had collaborated in measuring the increased heart rate, blood pressure, pupil diameter, and tolerance for pain during orgasm in women who said they could come—without any touch at all—by imagining lovers or phrases of music. In the lab, the women were strapped to monitors. They rested their chins on an ophthalmology platform and stared through the eyepieces of a pupillometer. Then they made themselves climax both merely by thinking and by stroking their clitorises. No matter the method, the measurements were similar.

I wondered not only about the Baroness’s orgasms but about the law governing how she got there. Was roasting someone on a spit legal? Did a submissive’s consent mean that the sadist couldn’t be prosecuted? In legal terms, could a person rationally agree to be assaulted, or was such willingness viewed as inherently irrational and legally void? The law was blurry. Probably the most relevant case involved a doctoral candidate in microbiology who, in the late 1990s, spent almost two years in prison for allegedly raping and burning, beating and biting a college student while keeping her roped to a futon for twenty hours. The conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, because the trial judge had refused to allow the jury to consider e-mail messages sent by the girl to the defendant laying out her masochistic desires. Consent, the ruling implied, couldn’t be disregarded.

The S-M community had its own standards, its own principles. “Safe, sane, consensual” were the hallowed words. Neither the Baroness nor Master R had much use for them. “Safe is limiting,” Master R said disdainfully. “And what is sanity?” Consent was just a beginning. He preferred to adhere to a different code, “the code of love.” He loved his slaves, he said, and expounded on the meaning of the word, paraphrasing the philosopher George Santayana: “Love is a physical drive with an ideal intent.”

AT
dawn, after my night at Master R’s, I walked outside to the spit, which remained, two years later, next to an untended vegetable garden, tomato and zucchini stalks from seasons ago softening to mulch beneath a riot of blackberry bushes. The sky was clearing fast, clouds skating toward oblivion. The gray steel immensity looked like one of Richard Serra’s outdoor sculptures: hulking, incomprehensible. “That day had that wonderful incongruity,” the Baroness had said. “The gorgeous autumn weather, the sun, the blue sky, and the next thing you know you’re at the heart of darkness.”

We drove back to the city. As we came close to Manhattan, the Baroness phoned her husband to say she was almost home. “Hello, handsome,” she began adoringly, and the affection stayed in her voice throughout the conversation. She called again a half hour later to say she was very near. When we reached her building he was waiting there to kiss her and welcome her back.

THE
Girl in her horse blinkers, Greg with his spiral notebook, Elvis on his spit—all were in important company. Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent his life yearning to replicate the whippings of his childhood governess but never, he wrote, “daring to declare my tastes.” And in ancient Athens, in the marketplace, the philosopher Peregrinus Proteus masturbated while Athenians lashed him at his request. He later cremated himself at the Olympic Games of 165.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German psychiatrist, coined the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in the late nineteenth century. Sadism he drew from the Marquis de Sade, the French aristocrat and author who, a century earlier, lived in an ecstasy of assaulting women—slicing, poisoning, whipping—and lived often, too, in prison or a lunatic asylum. “Sex without pain,” he said, “is like food without taste.” Krafft-Ebing derived masochism from Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the nineteenth-century author of
Venus in Furs
, an autobiographical novel of submission that some of the Baroness’s acolytes treated as a bible.

“A differentiation of original and acquired cases of sadism is scarcely possible,” Krafft-Ebing wrote. “Many individuals, tainted from birth, for a long time do everything to conquer the perverse instinct…. Later, when the opposing motives of an ethical and aesthetic kind have been gradually overcome, and when oft-repeated experience has proved the natural act to give but incomplete satisfaction, the abnormal instinct suddenly bursts forth. Owing to this late expression, in acts, of an originally perverse disposition, the appearances are those of an acquired perversion. As a rule, it may be safely assumed that this psychopathic state exists from birth.” He believed the same about masochism and most other erotic deviance: the conditions were inborn. And in
Psychopathia Sexualis
he recounted hundreds of case histories of the afflicted.

“Case 21. Vincenz Verzeni, born 1849: ‘I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure…. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating.’”

“Case 28. In the 60s the inhabitants of Leipzig were frightened by a man who was accustomed to attack young girls on the street, stabbing them in the upper arm with a dagger. Finally arrested, he was recognized as a sadist, who at the instant of stabbing had an ejaculation, and with whom the wounding of the girls was an equivalent for coitus.”

“Case 57. ‘I am thirty-five years old, mentally and physically normal…. Even in my early childhood I loved to revel in ideas about the absolute mastery of one man over others…. In reading
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(which I read about the beginning of puberty), I had erections. Particularly exciting for me was the thought of a man being hitched to a wagon in which another man sat with a whip, driving and whipping him.’”

Krafft-Ebing’s heir, Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician whose library on sexuality was burned by the Nazis, collected cases of deviance in a similar way. But with the desire to give or absorb pain and degradation, Hirschfeld saw an impulse so widespread that the word “deviance” couldn’t fairly be applied. Soon after his death, his students put together a book of his teaching,
Sexual Anomalies
: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the flagellomania of Englishwomen became a sort of epidemic. One of the most remarkable manifestations of this tendency was the formation of female flagellation clubs, whose members were recruited exclusively from the upper classes.” The women would meet one evening each week, much as a book club might, to whip each other, and brothels specializing in whippings were a popular and even accepted part of London life.

To read Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld between spending time with the Baroness was to see her within a long history but also to understand her rarity. Both scientists suggested that female masochism was common enough. But true female sadism was so hard to find that Krafft-Ebing, for all his avid assembling, related only two cases in
Psychopathia Sexualis
, both of women whose erotic charge came in sucking their husbands’ blood. Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld included any number of prostitutes adept with whips and wives implored to enact scenes of punishment, but there was no woman to match Sacher-Masoch’s ideal lover, the fictionalized master of
Venus in Furs
, who was compelled by her own desire.

The Baroness would have stood out in Krafft-Ebing’s and Hirschfeld’s research, as she did now in the night world of New York. There was no shortage of professionals. To type in “dominatrix Manhattan” on Google’s search engine was to find Mistress Troy and Mistress Elizabeth and Mistress Rebecca. It was to read about a mistress who specialized in “kidnapping and abduction” and “full toilet training,” and another, Mz. Black Mistress, who declared, “I will confiscate your worthless nuts when you bow down to me baby.” There were hundreds and maybe thousands of others who made or supplemented their living by supplying customers with subjection at an hourly rate, but, except possibly in a broad psychological sense, there was no sign of their taking pleasure. Some of them attended the monthly parties the Baroness threw at a bar near her shop: a tall, knife-bodied black woman; a pygmy-sized white woman whose makeup was pale as plaster; an art student with multicolored hair who hoped to find customers to help pay her tuition. They laughed as they gave out their floggings. They spat derision and condemnation as they flailed away with studded paddles, causing not only flesh but spines to shudder. They smiled as they ground their spiked heels into the testicles of men who lay beneath them. And perhaps they took satisfaction in having such power over the gender that, as a rule, had more. But they didn’t speak of pleasure the way the Baroness did. They didn’t speak of lips swelling. They didn’t talk of protracted orgasms. They didn’t talk, as the Baroness did when she remembered Genevieve or another slave, a man she’d named Luminous, about a transcendent connection, about a mutual desire so strong that sadist and masochist couldn’t keep themselves away from each other; they didn’t talk about being desperate and destined for each other; they didn’t talk in terms of
each other
. They didn’t speak—didn’t come close to speaking—about being in the thrall of love.

The Baroness was a true female paraphiliac. There weren’t many, except in the realm of masochism. In all the other categories, from acrotomophilia to zoophilia, women were, according to every sexologist I talked with, drastically underrepresented. Some estimated the imbalance at ten to one. Most refused to estimate; the statistics just weren’t there. But no one doubted the disproportion.

One theory, at least with the paraphilias that centered on body parts rather than sexual acts—on feet, say, as opposed to floggings—was that male desire arose much more from the visual, and so it was more vulnerable to misdirection. The theory was frequently linked to the idea of imprinting. In 1935, the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz had performed an experiment. As a brood of goslings hatched, he made sure that he, and not the mother goose, was the first being the hatchlings saw. The goslings, who would normally have followed their mother everywhere, instead followed Lorenz. He had successfully become their mother by presenting himself during the brief window when the goslings’ brains were innately programmed to take in and store their mother’s identity, to be imprinted with this information. Some sexologists believed that similar factors might be at work with the particulars of male desire, that during boyhood periods when certain hormonal surges occur, surges that may be momentary or protracted and that come most likely before puberty, the brain is open to imprinting that then defines erotic attraction. A boy’s endocrine and neurological systems are intertwined so that, at these susceptible times, his erotic ideals become fixed in the brain. The times for imprinting may not be as limited as the goslings’—a few seconds or minutes don’t necessarily determine the direction of eros. No proponent of the theory was sure about the windows of susceptibility, or about all the hormones involved, or about the mechanism of imprinting. When it came to desire, few sexologists were sure about anything.

And such theorizing didn’t fully address the question of why women are so rarely paraphilic—or address the problem of how female desire finds its direction. Meredith Chivers, a psychologist in Toronto, had chosen to devote her young career to these unknowns.