## S & M, bondage, love & sex

Post by Jack Roper » Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:03 pm

Here is an excerpt from The Sun magazine (current issue) of an interview with therapist Ester Perel by Mark Leviton called: "A More Perfect Union." Below is a link to the entire article, which is long but fascinating. I've only excerpted the S & M, B & D remarks.
Leviton: I want to talk about fantasy. You point out that if you fantasize about having a Hawaiian vacation, you probably would really like to go to Hawaii, but if you fantasize about being tied up in bed, it may not be something you actually want to do in real life. How do you see the role of fantasy in relationships?
Perel: We need a better example than Hawaii. If a kid plays prisoner, he doesn’t really want to be a prisoner; he just wants to play at being prisoner, partly because it helps him master his fear of being locked up, and partly because we can only play at something that isn’t an aspect of our everyday condition. That is the central ingredient for the imagination.
Some erotic fantasies people want to enact, some they just want to talk about, and some they only want to think about. Knowledge is finite; imagination is endless. If we don’t want to act on a fantasy, the question is: Are we really not interested in its materializing, or are we ashamed of it? Sometimes our sexual fantasies baffle us. We can’t believe we’d actually be turned on by that. What does it say about us? We’re weird. But, like dreams, fantasies are symbolic scripts for our deepest emotional needs. They rarely mean what they appear to mean on the surface and must be decoded. What does being tied up mean to you? One person might say, “It helps me realize that I have no choice but to receive. I don’t have to feel guilty about receiving, because it’s the other person who decides to give.” As psychologist Michael Bader so beautifully says, a good fantasy both states the problem and offers the solution. I always ask: What need does this fantasy serve? I might fantasize about spreading peanut butter on my skin because I never thought someone could delight in licking me. It could be a redemptive experience: I can be delicious.
If you want to know the deepest feelings a person brings to sex, ask about her fantasies. The gestures involved, the physicality of it, are like words for a poet. You need the words, but the poem has another meaning beneath the words. Octavio Paz says, “Eroticism is the poetry of the body, the way poetry is the eroticism of the word.”
Leviton: People often fear their partners will judge them for having a particular fantasy.
Perel: Yes, we don’t want to reveal our fantasies, because we can smell judgment. So the fantasy will go underground and not emerge until it feels safe. A fantasy is a more naked truth than many others. And couples don’t have to share their fantasies; they can be kept personal and private. Everybody has a little secret garden.
Leviton: You’ve said that adult intimacy is like hide-and-seek.
Perel: Yes, because there is nothing more thrilling than to hide when you know somebody’s looking for you. And it’s terrifying to think that person has stopped looking for you. When children who are hiding think no one is seeking, they cry and come out, afraid they’ve been forgotten. So we play the adult version of hide-and-seek. And you need two or more people to play. Otherwise it’s like sitting alone and playing a board game and pretending you are all the players.
When you fantasize alone, you do play all the parts. Kids don’t want to go to the doctor, but they like to play doctor. They don’t want their house to burn, but they like to play fireman. A fantasy is a piece of fiction, and you are the scriptwriter, the actor, and the director. You get to decide the whole thing, and always for the purpose of pleasure.
Leviton: Aren’t some fantasies symptoms of something that needs to be healed in the psyche, rather than something that deserves expression?
Perel: Why should any fantasy be seen as a sickness to be cured? If we can’t have fantasies, we can’t tolerate living. It’s because we have the capacity to fantasize that we can avoid thinking about death all the time. We can fantasize about the breasts we no longer have, the hair we no longer have, the youth we no longer have.
Leviton: So you reject shame?
Perel: Society’s major mechanisms for controlling sexuality have always been shame and guilt. This is true in every culture and every religion. The liberal Western outlook says that as long as the activity is between consenting adults, people should be able to do anything they want. And if two individuals have personal sovereignty, take responsibility for their choices, and choose freely, then there is nothing wrong with that. But bringing that idea to a culture with a different perspective is a problem. A collectivist system, where a person’s actions are understood to affect his or her community, cannot accept the Western liberal framework.
So if we want to talk about sexual fantasy and transgression and what is “normal” or “deviant,” all I can tell you is that what was once deviant is now normal practice, and what today is an aberration was in previous eras commonplace, from pedophilia, to homosexuality, to masturbation, to circumcision. Today, if you do it — whatever “it” is — something’s wrong, but before, if you didn’t do it, you were suspect. “Normal” is a fluctuating concept.
For example, for most of history women were accused of having too much desire. Now they have too little! Today in the U.S. we don’t talk about “nymphomaniacs” or worry about “oversexed” females. Instead we spend billions of dollars on research into “hyposexual desire disorder” in women — a lack of sexual interest. Why? Because we want to invent a female Viagra and make millions of dollars. In the seventies oral sex was considered more intimate than intercourse. Today blow jobs are nothing, and what’s considered really intimate is kissing!
Every civilization controls sexuality, from Greeks to Romans, Jews to Christians. We have Lent, and we have the bacchanals. Every civilization decides what’s normal, what’s needed, what’s desired, what’s perverse.
The Zohar, a book of Jewish mysticism, is all about eroticism and about maintaining our sense of aliveness in the face of suffering. Judaism is a pro-sex religion. There’s no cult of chastity in it. Jewish tradition didn’t vilify the body and make it debased in relation to the spirit. So when people talk about a “Judeo-Christian perspective” on sexuality, they actually conflate two very different views.
Leviton: The culture defines the norms, but individuals often want to go outside them. Why is the forbidden so erotic?
Perel: It’s one thing to do what you want when you’re allowed to do it, but another to do what you want when it is not allowed. We experience true freedom not when we don’t have any restrictions but when we trample restrictions. Even if we move as a society toward a more fluid definition of monogamy as a “continuum,” as sex-and-relationship expert Tammy Nelson so insightfully writes about it, we’ll still need the generative force of tasting the forbidden fruit, breaking taboos, overcoming limitations — and not just societal ones but internal ones as well. Think of a boy who does something naughty and gives you a look that says, “See what I just did?” He’s on top of the world. He owns it. You feel more alive when you are transgressing. It doesn’t have to be big — just something you don’t typically do, something that goes beyond your own boundaries. Staying in bed an extra ten minutes in the morning can be enough for some.
Leviton: Most of us have an inner voice of shame, and when we transgress, we are talking back to it.
Perel: Yes. It’s such fun. It doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Everyone knows creativity and transgression are related. When you create, you come up with something no one else has. Every new movement in art is transgressive, because it goes against the rules. This is the creative force. It’s the juice that can fuel your art, your sports, your social life, your sex life. Modernity turned the meaning of eros to sex, but it once meant anything you use to beat back deadness. Eroticism is an energy you can apply everywhere.
Octavio Paz wrote a book called The Double Flame in which he explains the difference between sexuality and eroticism. Sexuality, he says, is the biology, the primordial urge, and the animal instinct, and it can’t be separated from its reproductive function. Eroticism is sexuality transformed and socialized by the human imagination.
That opened up a whole new vista to me when I read it. I began to realize that the central agent of the erotic act is the imagination. You can “make love” for hours and experience bliss but physically touch nobody. You don’t even need the act. Eroticism is about the poetics of sex. It’s linked to ritual, to celebration.
Leviton: With such a multicultural experience and professional practice, you must be very aware of cultural differences.
Perel: Of course. I once saw a presentation at a U.S. conference about a couple who’d experienced a sharp decline in their sexual activity. Previously they had engaged in light sadomasochism, but after their second child was born, the wife wanted more-conventional sex. They were stuck. The presenter talked about working through the emotional dynamics of the marriage and their status as parents, but it was clear from the discussion afterward that the audience was far more interested in the sadomasochistic sex. Several people wanted to know what was behind the husband’s need to “objectify” his wife. After two hours, no one had mentioned pleasure or eroticism, so I finally spoke up. I said I couldn’t help wondering whether the clinicians in the room believed that the couple’s sexual activities — though consensual and nonviolent — were too kinky for the ponderous world of marriage and children.
Ironically some of this country’s best features — such as its belief in equality, tolerance, and compromise — when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, can make for boring sex. Sexual desire is not about being good citizens. Sexual excitement is politically incorrect and often thrives on power plays, role reversals, demands, seduction, manipulation. But Americans don’t appreciate ambiguity in sexual relations; they want clarity. They experiment sexually outside their primary relationships but are tame and puritanical with their partners at home. So their sex lives suffer. They grow bored. Some of my patients are aroused only by affairs, pornography, prostitutes, cybersex. There’s an enormous commoditization of sex in the world today. The explicitness of sexual products undermines the mystery, the pleasure of the hidden. Where nothing is hidden, nothing is erotic. And porn and cybersex can be very isolating, disconnected forms of interaction.
http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/456/a_ ... fect_union