TOP DOG PRESS

The Nature of the Beast

by Skian McGuire

    I’ve been thinking about the nature of the Beast that lives inside me. I posted something about him to my blog, and a commenter noted that he should speak for himself. I wondered if he even could, and would I want him to? What if I let the Beast do what he pleases?

    The Beast isn’t real, of course: the Beast is a metaphor. Metaphor – or Story, actually – is pretty much the only thing I believe in. I find it really hard to believe in anything I can’t touch or smell, and even those senses are suspect. Most of the time I can’t believe in God; in the absence of a deity, I don’t know if our human lives have any meaning at all. If all we are is another species evolved to propagate itself as efficiently as possible, then we are a cancer, and the earth would be better off without us. If we were created for a purpose, it seems that it would be our job to find out what that purpose is, as if we were tools, and we could only find out what we were for by figuring out what we’re good at. But most of the time I think that it’s just our human nature to search for meaning whether there is any or not, like making constellations out of the random patterns of the stars. We know too much, and we have to believe it all means something, or else it breaks our hearts. Putting experience into words – making stories of them – is how we cut it into manageable chunks, and saying “this” is to “this” as “that” is to “that” – making metaphor – is how we connect them again, reassembling them into meaning.

    We humans are exquisitely self-conscious creatures. I don’t think we’re the only sentient beings with self-awareness, but having the capacity for complex language makes us uniquely able to indulge in it. We want to figure out what things mean, we want to understand things, and first and foremost and nearly exclusively the thing we want to understand is ourselves. It seems to me that understanding ourselves is such an important survival tool – if we understand our own inner workings, maybe we can project that understanding on others and predict their behavior, for protecting ourselves from our most deadly predator just as much as for mating – that it might be the genesis of understanding, itself. All of this is just to say that I want to understand myself (like humans do) and I use the tool I have, dissecting my own self with language, separating and naming the parts, creating metaphors.

    It’s a nifty tool, capable of some pretty keen tricks. When I was around 30 and my childhood came back at me with a vengeance, I was overwhelmed by feelings of fear and anger. I was pretty much on my own in dealing with it all, since I had no health insurance, no money for therapy, and (back in 1988 – the Reagan era) very few community resources available. It took me a while to figure out what was happening to me; then I read everything I could. There was a technique I’d already been using to help cope with cluster headaches (of which I suffered cycles for many years – they seem to have stopped now) which involved asking questions about the thing one is feeling, in this case a headache. What color is it? How big is it? What temperature? How fast is it going? What does it sound like? What kind of underwear does it have on? Any kind of ridiculous question. When I applied the technique to the emotions I was getting knocked flat by, I ended up with a metaphor. Two, actually – big dumb no-neck frat brothers, identical twins in letter sweaters: Fear and Anger. They were always hanging around. They were always getting in my way. They were pretty threatening. What the heck were they doing here, anyway? Ah. They were my bodyguards, of course. And this was a wonderful, miraculous revelation, because if they were my bodyguards, then I was their Boss. They worked for me. Thinking wasn’t their job, it was mine; their job was to keep me safe. I could reason with them; point out things they didn’t know. If I got hurt by them, it might be because I got in their way. And because I was paying them to do a job (in time, energy, attention), I ought to listen to them and respect them. Wow. How cool is that?

    Years pass. The childhood gets sorted out. Fear and Anger return to on-call status. After a long hiatus from leather (thanks to PTSD, jobs, car payments, mortgage, etc.), my partner and I get back into the scene. Now I’m a writer. I’m thinking about the kinky stuff I do in a way that’s different than I ever did before, partly because I’m mining it for material to use in the porn I write, and partly because (thanks to PTSD) I know things about my inner workings that I didn’t know before. I know what I like, but why? What does it mean? And why does it make me so darn uncomfortable?

    In answer to some of these musings, I wrote an essay called "The Problem of Pain (with apologies to C.S. Lewis).”  That’s where I started thinking about the Beast.

    The Beast is a metaphor. The Beast is the part of me that wants to hurt people and make them afraid – my inner sadist. The Beast is male. Language is really not the Beast’s forte, I think, although he can be pretty good at saying what he wants, he’s just not into saying why. “Why” doesn’t matter to him in the slightest. Consequences don’t matter, either, which is why he must never, ever be allowed to do exactly as he pleases, with no supervision from me. He is, however, very good at imagining things – what it might feel like, to kick somebody in the ribs. What would happen if the point of his knife were to be inserted here, and drawn downward. How incredibly, effervescently, hilariously good it would feel, to just explode, hitting, kicking, punching, breaking.

    The Beast was there, obviously, when I was a teenager, watching slasher films at the drive-in with my buddies, $7 the carload. Every Stephen King story I read, he was reading over my shoulder. Morbidly fascinated by disasters of all kinds – even as a child I remember reading about things like the wreck of the Essex (the Donner party at sea, more or less) – the Beast absorbed everything I read. Vietnam was on the nightly news. As a teenager, becoming a pacifist, I read about World War II, about the Holocaust, and Hiroshima. In my 20’s, I read everything I could find on the Civil War – not the battles and strategies, but the conditions of the soldiers’ lives and the experience of the first modern war. At the same time I was horrified and – there are really no adequate words for the grief and outrage – felt all those feelings, something in me was filing things away.

    I can see now that reading about horrible tragedies was a way of dealing with the stuff I had put aside from childhood, the things I couldn’t (and still don’t) remember because I had to get on with life. Reading about those things was at the same time (or so it seems) a way of saying, somewhere deep inside where my own awful things resided, “Gee, mine wasn’t so bad; look how awful it was for them,” and also, making a metaphor for myself. That’s what it felt like – that’s how the bad things that happened to me felt. They felt like cannibalism. They felt like Hiroshima. They felt like Auschwitz. They felt like Gettysburg and Antietam. The Stephen King stories and slasher films must have done the same thing – remember the guy in Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Mom, is that you?

    Barbara Kingsolver, one of my all-time favorite writers, has an essay in her book High Tide in Tucson, called “Careful What You Let in the Door,” in which she discusses the creation of imaginary violence in fiction. She says this:

"I find that I’m prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world."

    She thinks there’s enough violence in the world without us writers making it up for entertainment, thereby making it a little less shocking and a little less unthinkable. The essay is a thoughtful, important one, and I agree with her. I also disagree with her, because some stories aren’t about the world we live in, they’re about the world that lives in us.

    The world that lives in me includes a Beast. I would guess that the world inside most of us includes a Beast, judging by the multi-million dollar industry in cinematic and fictional horror that exists today. Horror fills more than one need, I’m sure – some people like it purely for the adrenaline rush, I’d guess, like a roller coaster, only stationary. I’d guess it fulfills the same metaphoric function for other people as it does for me, that something in their lives feels like that, too. For some people, maybe (and I’m sure this applies to me, too, now that I think of it) seeing or reading about somebody doing something grotesquely horrible to someone else lets us vent rage, frustration, etc., by proxy. Football and pro wrestling probably do this, too. In fact, I’d guess that this is the most important function of violence-for-spectators (hereafter called spectator violence, like spectator sports, okay? explained so as not to confuse it with football hooliganism, of which the Brits are so fond.)

    Anger is not an emotion our Mommies generally approved of. Bosses don’t, either, and neither do airport security officers or the State Police, but we’ve still got it. Do most people just quash it? Let it out in passive-aggressive ways? Get ulcers and various other somatic complaints? Drive too fast? Probably all this, and also watch hockey and Friday the 13th part 485. Spectator violence, viewed in this context is a really useful thing. The circus part of bread and circuses, as old as dirt.

    Barbara Kingsolver and many more scientifically credentialed experts believe that exposure to acts of violence on TV and film inure one to it and make it seem more acceptable to perform. I don’t doubt they’re right. I think there must be a fine line between how much spectator violence serves our needs of venting-by-proxy, and how much is, well, overkill. I don’t doubt that our culture provides the latter, since anything that makes money is bound to become ever more available, until supply so satiates demand that it is no longer profitable. Our society’s demand for spectator violence has thus clearly not been satiated yet, although horror fiction in print may have reached that point. Horror (now called dark fantasy) has been in the decline for some years now. (My biggest professional sale as a writer was a piece of dark fantasy to a paying website from whom the check bounced. Q.E.D.) (It was called “Actaeon,” on Gothic.Net, and I’ll send it to anybody who wants to read it, for free – my small revenge.)

    But anyway, spectator violence is big business, and there won’t be any stopping it, any more than the bluenoses can stop porn. There are many well-meaning groups that want to stop both porn and spectator violence (as well as many assholes who just want to impose their morality on the rest of us, but I don’t consider them well-meaning.) I came out in the 70’s, when most feminists believed that all pornography, however mild, promoted violence against women by objectifying them. I believed (still do) in the basic tenets of feminism, but even then I knew their heads were up their asses about porn. I mean, jeez, don’t we like sex, too? Regarding spectator violence, my own spiritual community (the Religious Society of Friends, aka Quakers) regards it as anathema, and I respect that viewpoint. I am not in unity with it, however.

    I am a pacifist. I believe profoundly in Friends’ Peace Testimony, by which we choose to live, as George Fox said, “in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.” I believe that we humans must choose not to do violence, rejecting not just war between nations but violence of the interpersonal kind and even interspecies. (I’m not a vegetarian now, though I have been and probably will be again; I think the greater virtue is to be found there, for myself anyway. William Penn asked George Fox if he should stop wearing a sword, which was a basic gentleman’s accessory of the day, and Fox told him to “wear thy sword as long as thou may.” When my conscience won’t stand for it anymore, I’ll give up meat. Again.) I believe violence includes the mean things people say to each other, which is violence to the other person’s self. I do NOT believe SM is violence, any more than football or boxing is – though this is another disagreement among Quakers. (I also do not believe that the Peace Testimony is most effectively embodied by picketing in front of the gates of Westover or hanging antiwar banners off highway overpasses, but I am a curmudgeon that way. A warning to those who would Get Me Started.)

    It seems to me that violence is part of human nature. We are predators; we have randomly evolved (or a deity has designed us) to catch and kill and eat other animals. Being a Christian (in upbringing and practice and community, if not in faith), the language I use to speak of spiritual beliefs is the language of the Bible, and I find the story of the creation of humankind deeply meaningful as a metaphor. Genesis tells us that God created us in Hir image – yes. But not in the sense of what we look like: in the sense that we alone among animals have the capacity to create things out of nothing but our imagination, including our own selves. We don’t have to do only what is hardwired into our genetic code. We can choose something else. We can forego even the instinct to preserve our own lives. We can choose not to procreate. We can choose not to be violent. However, we are still animals, and anger and fear are hardwired into us, and we can’t just make them go away. If violence is the expression of anger and fear in physical terms, then it seems we have to find some other way of expressing them. Ways that aren’t real, just play, just pretend, with rules and boundaries and handshakes or bows before and after, to frame it in.

    Like slasher movies (with title and credits instead of handshakes.) Like football. Like BDSM.

    Oh, I don’t think BDSM is just a way to express anger and fear without violence. I think it does a lot of stuff, deeper still and more meaningful, and impossible to put into words. I believe that BDSM is, at root, a profoundly spiritual experience. Not everybody needs it; maybe those of us who had abusive childhoods need it more than those of us who didn’t, but I still don’t think BDSM is pathology resulting from abuse. I know plenty of kinky people who had perfectly lovely childhoods. I know people who had horrible childhoods who have no interest in BDSM. Go figure. I think there are big chunks of ourselves that operate without words, where only pictures will do, or only the movement and sensations of the body. It makes sense to me that BDSM is a kind of theater of the body, where the animal parts of ourselves, or the parts of ourselves that are really, really small children, or the parts of ourselves that have been shocked dumb by the things that were done to us, can finally find expression.

    And so I make my tedious, circuitous way back to the Beast.

     I said that the Beast was looking over my shoulder while I read about Auschwitz and Antietam, but was the Beast the part of me to seek out those experiences? I don’t really think so; I’d say that that hunger had more to do with my inner masochist than my inner sadist. After all, I was looking for experiences of suffering that could stand as metaphors and measures of my own. I can see that part of my desire for pain is to re-enact the childhood abuse under circumstances I can control, so seeking out horror stories and seeking out pain come from the same place of injury. But even so, my experience as a masochist is more complicated than that. Yes, in some part, I keep replaying the drama until it loses its charge, or falls apart like a tattered old script fingered too many times. In another, I need to prove again and again the indestructibility of self, that no matter what is done to my body, my Self survives – like the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune:

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

    …substituting “pain” for “fear,” and maybe “self” for “mind.” And in yet another part, I find absolution for the sin of being born, and a state of grace. I find catharsis, exchanging pain of the spirit for pain of the body, and get it out of myself. I get driven beyond words. I get to complete an equation that was written in childhood, and this time the suffering is not for nothing; this time I get something out of it. All these things, and more that I haven’t figured out yet. The Beast seems like an animal entity; conversely, my masochist self seems the most human part of me. What does all this have to do with the Beast?

    The Beast is not really human, I think, but something else. Maybe the Beast is the predator, who wants the emotional equivalent of the hot spurt of blood – actually ( the Beast pants in my ear) he wouldn’t mind the hot spurt of blood, in its literal reality. If the Beast was looking over my shoulder while I read Stephen King, I don’t think he was looking for pathos. Maybe he was just picking up ideas.

    The Beast wants to scare people – I want to scare people. I can make a direct parallel between this desire and what my mother did to me. In this respect perhaps BDSM is part of what spares me from continuing the cycle of abuse – that and the biological sex I was born with. Maybe, since I can pull out the desire to scare people and look at it and make up games about it, I don’t have to do it for real. But the things that my mother did to scare me as a child wouldn’t work on my adult play partners. Maybe part of my fascination with the grotesque inventions of dark fantasy come from the Beast’s need for more compelling material. Enter the Serial Killer.

    The Serial Killer is another name of the Beast (oh, I’m having really uncomfortable overtones to fundamentalist Christian ideas – I’ll get back to that another day). I started jokingly calling my fetish for fear-play by that name, for holding my knife at a bottom’s throat and what if I really were crazy, hmmm? It seemed rather a step beyond just cutting off his clothes and poking about a bit with that sharp point. But oh, I did enjoy it. And I could enjoy a good bit more of that, more detailed verbal elaborations of just exactly what my knife could do, and you could not possibly be quick enough to stop me. Especially if my locked handcuffs are biting into your wrists, pulled tight behind your back.

    The enjoyment itself is spiced with the realization that I am truly a sick fuck. If the Beast has been cribbing details from the nasty things I’ve read all my life, composing an encyclopedia of terror so that I might make up a little story at bedtime for a special bottom or two, well, what comes next? It’s like playing with matches.

    I am not afraid that I will actually turn into a full-fledged psychopath. As I concluded in  “The Problem of Pain,” the Beast is chained by love. The chain is welded on and can’t be slipped, because that’s how I’m made. Even if conscience failed me, I can’t not care about the people I play with. If I’m worried about hurting someone because I love them, at least I know I can trust that the chain will hold. I don’t have to haul it up quite so tight: I can stop issuing corrections via the Kohler method. Train my Beast by clicker and lots of lovely orgasms, the sadomasochistic equivalent of freeze-dried liver?

    Right. So how do I do that?

    And what does the Beast really want, anyway? What if the Beast could speak for himself?

    I think, in the end, it might not matter what the Beast really wants, whether it’s the gasping and yelping of a bottom in pain or the delicious quaking terror of a bottom who has just begun to doubt the wisdom of letting himself be bound, as long as the Beast is allowed to have it. It seems like a Catch-22: the Beast wants to be free of the constraints of love and conscience, free to find his own pleasure and not care about what anyone else wants, but he can only be allowed to play because he is bound.

    Ahhh. Not too long ago I remember telling someone that I thought selfishness was limited by conscience. The less conscience one has, the more selfish one is allowed to be. The same is true of love. I sometimes think my Beast is a beast of power (the antithesis of helplessness) and sometimes I think it’s a beast of rage. I wonder if what it really is, is just a beast of selfishness, and a little of that now and then might not be such a bad thing. Is it?

    But still, I’m left where I began. If I can have exactly what I want, well, what is that, exactly? Maybe it changes. Maybe it’s just like food – “Sometimes you feel like a nut…sometimes you don’t.” (Thanks, Peter Paul. Now all I can think of is an Almond Joy bar.) Maybe all that matters is that every now and then, the Beast gets a taste of what it really wants – what I really want – whatever that might be.

    Like the advice they give dieters. If I can have a little taste of somebody’s fear and helplessness, perhaps I don’t have to be afraid I might someday just binge and eviscerate someone. No, I’m only joking, really; I don’t want that. Even in my most brutal fantasies, all I really want is for someone to be afraid I’ll do that. Maybe my anxiety that I would go berserk with the knife is just a bit of unconscious method acting for the sake of verisimilitude and the proper calibration of a victim’s fear. Who knows? The desire to hurt someone is more problematic; I feel a strong urge to cause visible damage, not just make my victim scream. Breaking bones is definitely beyond the pale, however much my fists itch. Even more than the fear fetish, this desire makes me wonder how much of my top-side kink comes out of what was done to me as a child. Do I want to make someone afraid because doing that takes it back, somehow puts me on the other side of it the equation and cancels it out? Would breaking bones – or some suitable-feeling substitute – do the same? I don’t know. As long as I do no harm, as long as I do nothing without understanding and consent, as long as I am bound by not only love and conscience but by my own nature, does it matter?

    I don’t know.

	

 

Ó Skian McGuire 2004