How many BD/SM lovers can trace back their taste for bondage and/or discipline to real family abuse during their childhood and/or early adolescence? My friend Mick and I were tossing that question back and forth the other day. Mick’s a well-known professional top in New York City with a growing number of clients who want him to tie them up. He’s happy to oblige.
A female acquaintance of mine has a dreadful family history, the kind you read about in textbooks, full of those great American family values such as being encouraged with kisses to make daddy happy or get beaten while mommy does the dishes loudly in the kitchen (cleanliness being next to godliness, God knows), after the whole happy family’s come home from a prayer meeting holler. She shudders at the mention of Bound & Gagged, and is convinced that people into bondage/sm all come from abusive households similar to hers and had similarly horrible experiences in their childhood which they may only deny happened because they’ve managed to repress them.
One of the things Mick’s noticed about his bondage/sm-oriented clients is how practically all of them seem to come from seemingly happy, “normal” (whatever that may mean) middle-class family backgrounds. No getting smacked around as kids, tied up, beaten, possibly raped or forced to sexually satisfy older and stronger family members.
To the best of our recollection, both Lee and I grew up in fairly ordinary white middle class families with a fairly unmemorable amount of abuse in them. Before I was twelve my father spanked me maybe half a dozen times (mine was one of those “Wait till your father comes home” families, which meant I spent a pretty good amount of time trying to suck up to my mother when I’d done something bad, and usually succeeded by the time my father got home) and my mother herself would let out with the occasional smack or go after me with a dish towel around the dining room table until I discovered, and informed her, that I could run faster than she could and she’d never catch me, at which point it would either come down to “Wait till your father comes home,” or she’d laugh.
After I was twelve my father never laid a hand on me.
Lee’s background was not dissimilar to mine. Nor were the backgrounds of five or six friends who came over during the Christmas holidays, and to whom we asked the question.
Of the thousands of letters and e-mails I’ve received, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of correspondents who wrote to tell me their bondage/sm turn-ons derived from harrowing abusive childhood family experiences. One of these came from a man whose stepfather occasionally punished him and his brother when they were young children by putting them in a gunny sack which he then suspended from a closet rod; another, truly terrifying tale, came from a man who was raised by a drunken uncle who constantly bound and beat him, his twin and their older brother.
As far as I can tell, most people’s bondage fantasies come not from bad home experiences but from TV and movies and books and, for the lucky ones who actually had real turn-on bondage experiences in their younger years, from the loving attentions of their playmates.
And then there’s peer abuse, which I suspect is much more common for its future turn-on value than family abuse. The summer when I was sixteen, I was obliged to entertain the son of a business colleague of my father's who was in New York with his family for a few weeks. The kid, whom I’ll call Mike, was about my age, and all the adults loved him, he had such perfect manners. On top of that, he was an extremely handsome boy, beautifully built, graceful, an excellent athlete, in short a young gay boy’s fantasy. Not mine, however. At that time, not only was I trying to repress my homosexual desires, and would Mike probably have killed me if I’d come on to him, but he was a consummate bully, full of rage at his own apparently difficult father, and only too eager to take his barely repressed anger out on me. I was a small kid, and he was considerably bigger and stronger than me. He delighted in punching me in the arm, hard, every time something was said he thought was funny, or he asked me a question I took too long to answer, in other words longer than a nanosecond, or I said something he thought was stupid, which was practically everything I said. He did this only when others weren’t looking, so nobody in my family could understand why I didn’t seem as fond of him as everyone else.
He was my first and only experience of being bullied, and I didn’t like it at all when it was happening.
Mike and his family returned to Chicago, not a moment too soon as far as I was concerned, the thudding pain in my arm disappeared, the black and blue marks went away, I went off to college and went on with the rest of my life. And then one day, or rather one night, many, many years later, when I thought he’d been totally forgotten, evil, grinning Mike, several years older than he was the last time we met, walked into one of my jerk-off fantasies and took over. He became my Master, made me his 24/7 slave, face-fucked me silly when he felt like it, fucked my ass when he felt like it, forced me to lick his shoes, boots, sneaks, feet, armpits, ass, you name it, tied me up for his pleasure, generally humiliated me and made me obey his every whim. To this day I can call him up to do the occasional star turn in my submissive fantasies if no one more immediately appealing comes to mind to play the role. (One thing Mike has never done in those fantasies is punch me in the arm, which still has no turn-on value for me).
We tend to eroticize not only what happened to us, but what we wish had happened to us. Does the bully fantasy translate into the Master/slave fantasy for any of you? Or do you have different ideas on the matter? Please let me know.
It’s serendipity, I guess. A few days ago, I got a request to reprint “The Shocking Confessions of a British Bully,” which appeared in the long-out-of-print Issue 12. I guess that contributed to my writing these thoughts up today. Unfortunately, given the present political climate in this country, and the fragility these days of even our sacred first amendment rights (which I’ll be writing about in the next few days), I am reluctant to reprint that story on this website. On the other hand, I'm happy to reprint another requested story, also a favorite of mine, called “Natural Slave Meets Natural Master,” from Issue #54. Look for it in the "Requested Stories" section (eventually I'll learn how to put the link in here).
BONDAGE IN THESE UNITED STATES
My partner Lee had a pretty amusing and flattering experience the other day at the supermarket near our home in Bucks County, PA. I asked him to write it up for me in his own words:
When I got to the check-out counter, I noticed that the older woman who was bagging my groceries was using a paper bag inside a plastic bag without my having had to ask her to do that. When I told her she’d read my mind, she smiled and said, “Oh, I know how to bag a man!” At that, the woman on the cash register looked up and said, “Yeah, and you always get the keepers.” Before I knew it, the woman at the next register looked over at me and said, “And he’s a keeper. Go get some rope.” I couldn't help blushing, but at the same time smiled and, not to be outdone, said, “I might like that.” My cashier looked up. “I can give you something you’ll really like, baby,” she said
Suddenly the woman standing in line behind me chimed in. “I’ve got some handcuffs and duct tape in my truck with his name on it. But that means I get him first.” Everybody laughed, and I said, “I have to congratulate you on your customer appreciation program.” When everybody laughed again, the guy at the next counter asked what I’d said to get all this attention. “All I did was ask for paper and plastic,” I said, which prompted, “Shit man, I have to try that!” from him. “Sorry, feller,” said the older woman who’d started it all, “it only works for this guy.”
REMINDERS
I tend to worry that, once a new blog gets posted, the old ones, and the questions I may have asked in them, fall into some black webhole and die. I’ve asked you to write me about a number of bondage-related matters over the past few weeks, and haven’t gotten nearly as many replies as I’d like. The fact that one posting has been superseded by another doesn’t mean the questions asked in earlier posting(s) aren’t still (always) relevant. I want to hear from you about them. Write me, please. Either place your comments in the comment section here, or write me at length, e-mailing me at Bob@Boundandgagged.com
Here are some of the questions I’ve asked recently:
1) Write me about your bondage evolution: Have the turn-ons and fantasies that got you going when you first started jerking-off to the idea of being tied up or tying stayed the same, or have they changed? And if they have changed, how?
2) How many of you are into bondage, but not into leather, and sometimes feel discomfitted by the pressure to accommodate your bondage turn-ons to what you get the feeling are more accepted, more “correct” ones?
3) What sort of attentions do you as a bondage bottom require from your top(s). Is it enough for you just to be tied up and helpless, or do you need to have attention paid to you much if not all of the time?
The Chain Story. Weeks ago, a reader sent me the first part of what both he and I hoped would be a continuing story, with sections or episodes written by different readers. I’m still waiting for the next entry.
EBAY ALERT
This evening I listed a bunch of items on eBay. I have just received an e-mail from ebay informing me that my account has been suspended. No reasons have been given. I have been offering these same products for months without a problem. I will inquire into this and get back to you about it.
Hey Bob,
Thanks for posting this ... as you know, it is a curiosity for me. Since our conversation on this subject, I have asked more BD/SM clients the same question, and as before, no family abuse or horror stories ... just healthy imaginations & sexual appetites that need satisfying!
Best,
Mick
Posted by: Mick | January 30, 2006 at 01:03 AM