Two men are enjoying a romantic dinner and, unexpectedly, it takes a delightful turn into the darker passions of cruelty and the joy of administering pain to one who will accept it. This demonstrates an explicit negotiation of consent: container, ritual, practice.
From the lofty towers of our highly polished personas, it is seldom easy to admit to one’s desire to hurt another; to rule over our comrades. Of course it is difficult; we are survivors of a war-game that has been played since our births. We have had little choice but to fight back against the wills of our gods, fathers, bullies on playgrounds, and authorities who might have extinguished our boyish vulnerabilities had we not buried them deeply within the walls of our psyches. We do our best to present a wholesome, likable chap on the outside; however, to be sure, a war has taken place, and we have likely hidden the resultant fractures from even our own conscious selves.
In the corners of our unsocialized minds, each of us harbors a selective crew of little monsters. Though we may never admit it outright, we commonly expose our demons in surprising ways: we may secretly delight in the failure of another; we may call a friend to discuss our terrible dislike of an acquaintance; we hurl insults at drivers who impede our tyranny of the road; we likely shame others for behaviors or traits that appear perilously close to the very sensitivities within us from which we hide. Each of us shelters a relentless inner critic, a merciless sadist who would like nothing more than to extinguish our best efforts to thrive in the face of our collective suffering.
It can be a powerful maneuver to integrate this feature of brutal animalism into a conscious experience of one’s self. After all, if the monsters are there, why not invite them over for a bit of tea and a nice mutual fuck? It can be liberating, not only sexually, but ultimately, spiritually, because in so doing, one ceases to construct himself against a primordial truth of his existence. He is both tooth-and-nail and unabashedly godly. The reward for this game can be the union of opposites, the collapse of wrong and right.
