As civilized life requires control and discipline, most cultures have
festivals where order and restraints are broken, and the everyday limits
overruled. For some time, order is destroyed and (somewhat controlled) chaos
reign, because chaos is fun, and it is good to have fun now and then.
Unavoidably, the day after, normal life will come back, with its limits,
duties and problems. And some of these festivals include some BDSM like
activities.
The Czech's pomlazka and the
Cajun's Mardi Gras Chase are of that kind, and
both have many common features. First, both are played for its own fun, all
the religious or magical overtones forgotten. No Czech farmer nowadays
believes the harvest will be improved by flogging a woman, no chaser
remembers the kids are supposed to be flogged as a preparation for Lent.
The people who celebrate them are like us, the Czech modern Europeans, the
Cajun U.S. citizens. Both enjoy hamburgers at McDonald’s, cable TV and blue
jeans. These are not rites of far-off natives with strange cultural values.
(Forgive us if we are being parochial. We can’t avoid being westerners).
Both are celebrated mostly in small closed-knit communities (the pomlazka,
even if still celebrated in large cities, is there little more than a family
affair). You cannot let strangers enter your house and mistreat your
daughter, or chase and whip your children. Chaos, for being fun, cannot be
so... chaotic. It is only possible where everybody knows everybody else,
because that is what keeps the chaos under some control. (In those small
communities, chaser’s masks can scare small children, but do not provide
real anonymity. Somebody is going to recognize you, one way or the other).
Also, the elder’s normal protection of their young is abandoned for that
day. Fathers who frown when their “little girl” on her teens dates a boy,
let several boys enter his house and mishandle and whip her. Parents that
care for their children, and that perhaps don’t spank them, allow and even
encourage them being publicly humiliated and flogged . Curiously, both are
celebrated by people of Catholic heritage.
And of course, both are played by “normal” people, most of whom wouldn’t
want even to hear about BDSM.
To survive in time these festivals have to give something to all
participants. Even the chased and whipped must enjoy the game, because girls
that dreaded the Easter Monday or kids that were physically or psychically
hurt in the chase would not allow the same happening years later to their
own beloved kids. Eventually, the cycle would break.
What the whippers and chasers get from the game? It seems to be that they
enjoy having power over the other, seeing them helpless, seeing the fear in
their eyes, watching them subdued. And what can the “victims” get? We would
say the adrenaline high from being hunted, the feeling of being defenseless,
the humiliation of kneeling or being doused publicly, the endorphins from
the mild pain of the flogging. And both sides can enjoy it with no guilt,
because it is just a game, just for the day, not for real.
But oh! we recognize those feelings (as probably you do). Those are the same
feelings that we get from our BDSM games.
There are more similarities with BDSM: the festivals are consensual, all
participants agree on the game to be played, and everybody knows that it is
a game, not real life. And they are played just for the fun (and perhaps the
kick) of playing them.
Ann (the author of the Manual, and a friend who receives some articles' drafts for
her
comments) made us notice that BDSM can be considered also a break on
everyday rules. In it is right to hit, humiliate and disrespect your
partner, it is right allowing your partner to hit, humiliate and disrespect you as part of the game. Showing deep feelings, restrained in normal life,
is also allowed. It is (somewhat controlled) chaos and perhaps that is one
of the reasons for BDSM being fun. Is BDSM our own “chaotic festival”?
But it seems that not only we, declared “perverts”, enjoy these games. Whole
communities of “normal” people enjoy similar games when the rules can be
forgotten and the feelings allowed to surface.
As human sexuality is as much psychical as it is physical, sexual reactions
can be manipulated. For centuries “good” women didn’t have orgasms, because
they were told that it was wrong having them (and information on the
contrary was carefully hidden from them). For many years now, women tried to
have “vaginal orgasms” because, according to Freud, that was the “adult”
way, even when it is anatomically impossible. (Freud was not the final
expert on female anatomy).
Then, these festivals make us wonder. What if religion hadn’t told us for
centuries what is right and wrong in sex? What if psychologists hadn’t for
two hundred years told us what is “normal” and what is “sick” or
“perverted”? (In the early nineteen century in England, going to a brothel
to get a flogging was considered as is now paying a prostitute, sinful,
wicked and publicly disapproved, but tolerated, not “sick”).
Maybe we are not different from “normal” people for what we feel, but
because we let us feel it and accept that it is good, while, perhaps, many
people deny (even to them) that they feel the same, and don’t even think in
trying to play, believing it “sick” . Without the society’s pressures, would BDSMers be just about a ten percent of the population?
Published: 05/31/03