The unbearable joy of spanking
May. 31st, 2004 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azbukivedi"The Secretary". I don't even remember the last time a movie turned me on so. No, porn is not included - it's a different animal. I keep wondering, every time I see James Spader in yet another sexually charged out-of-the-mainstream flick, whether he is into something kinky in real life. The fact that he is so convincing can, of course, be explained quite simply: he is a good actor. However, how would we explain the consistent choice of roles? That's the guy I wouldn't mind getting a good spanking from... Umm, what was I talking about? Oh, S&M in general and spanking in particular. The movie got one thing right: it takes the right man to give it and the right woman to receive. If either one is not up to par (the scene where she tries to get her fiance to spank her is hilarious and sad at the same time), expect silliness at best and very hurt feelings at worst. The people in the movie, though, are a very special breed: a depressed half-psycho just out of an institution who routinely cuts herself, and a disturbed weirdo with serious psychological issues. The movie tells a great story but it inadvertently reinforces the common stereotypes: people who do these sorts of things are disturbed. The men are sleazy wackos with sadistic tendencies (killed the neighborhood cats in their childhood, probably), incapable of true intimacy; the women are either masochists who love pain, or comely girls with no self-esteem who hope that being a doormat would win the guy. And then there is another group, think Polanski's "Bitter Moon": madly-in-lust couples who want to try everything under the sun, if at least once. For some reason, it doesn't usually end well, even if the end result is not necessarily murder.
Poor souls, I pity them. Few things out there can turn an upcoming so-so orgasm into an explosive one the way a well-placed, well-measured spank could. Oh, and by the way: my psychological profile says (quoting verbatum), "You set the standard for emotional health." I don't know about the heavy-duty stuff, it's not my cup of tea, but most versions of S&M are for the emotionally healthy people. Otherwise, it is more about messing with each other's heads, humiliation, asserting one at the expense of the other, and other similarly unseemly things. In fact, it's more about true intimacy and trust than any other form of sex, because you have to REALLY trust the person to do it. The level of vulnerability is off the scale. And it feels great, provided the partners are emotionally healthy, normal people. The only kind of people you would want to get in bed with anyway.
Finally, one more stereotype: people who engage in S&M are so addicted to it, they can't get off any other way and can't have tender-cuddling-lovey-dovey sex anymore. While possibly true for some, most of us think of kinky sex as an additional tool in the repertoire, something used to occasionally spice up our sex lives. There is a huge S&M community out there, with many subdivisions (rubber, spanking, asphyxiation, etc.), and most people in it are normal, healthy, quite sane individuals in committed relationships. Unfortunately, many, usually men, lead secret lives precisely because their wives/girlfriends think in the aforementioned stereotypes. These are not happy men. Worse even, their women lose out on the exhilaration of being on the razor-thin edge between pain and pleasure, sensory deprivation and sensory overload, roughness and intimacy.
I am probably preaching to the choire here: those who "get it", know all this already, and those who don't probably won't. One of my close friends offered his wife to try anal sex. "And you consider yourself a cultured, intelligent man!" she replied with a scorn.
Poor souls, I pity them. Few things out there can turn an upcoming so-so orgasm into an explosive one the way a well-placed, well-measured spank could. Oh, and by the way: my psychological profile says (quoting verbatum), "You set the standard for emotional health." I don't know about the heavy-duty stuff, it's not my cup of tea, but most versions of S&M are for the emotionally healthy people. Otherwise, it is more about messing with each other's heads, humiliation, asserting one at the expense of the other, and other similarly unseemly things. In fact, it's more about true intimacy and trust than any other form of sex, because you have to REALLY trust the person to do it. The level of vulnerability is off the scale. And it feels great, provided the partners are emotionally healthy, normal people. The only kind of people you would want to get in bed with anyway.
Finally, one more stereotype: people who engage in S&M are so addicted to it, they can't get off any other way and can't have tender-cuddling-lovey-dovey sex anymore. While possibly true for some, most of us think of kinky sex as an additional tool in the repertoire, something used to occasionally spice up our sex lives. There is a huge S&M community out there, with many subdivisions (rubber, spanking, asphyxiation, etc.), and most people in it are normal, healthy, quite sane individuals in committed relationships. Unfortunately, many, usually men, lead secret lives precisely because their wives/girlfriends think in the aforementioned stereotypes. These are not happy men. Worse even, their women lose out on the exhilaration of being on the razor-thin edge between pain and pleasure, sensory deprivation and sensory overload, roughness and intimacy.
I am probably preaching to the choire here: those who "get it", know all this already, and those who don't probably won't. One of my close friends offered his wife to try anal sex. "And you consider yourself a cultured, intelligent man!" she replied with a scorn.
