The Pleasure Boy 35

The Pleasure Boy 35

In Japanese archery (Kyudo), there is a saying, 'One shot, one life.' The surface meaning, of course, is that every arrow fired in combat or hunting should hit its mark and kill. The deeper meaning is that every shot should be backed by total focus, total concentration, with perfect alignment of the archer's whole Being. But there is more. The deepest meaning is that the archer's life is itself a shot: the only shot he gets to take. He himself is the arrow, shot by his parents, shot by the Cosmos that made him. He chooses his target; or his target is assigned to him; or a target appears before him and attracts his attention. In a whole lifetime, each man or woman gets just a single shot, and must shoot well, at a target wisely chosen.

I love this saying. I first heard it many years ago when I was practising aikido at Guild school. I can't think of another proverb that says so much, in so few words, about human existence as a single brief venture of consciousness and purpose. In the long history of human civilization - or human evolution, for that matter - a life is like the trajectory of a single arrow from the time it is pulled from the quiver to the moment when it hits - or misses - its mark.

First, as the archer prepares to shoot, the arrow is nocked on the bowstring and the bow is drawn. All the energy that will drive the shot is lined up behind it on the bow string. If this alignment is not completely sure and stable, the point of aim will not matter as the arrow is sure to go somewhere else.

Next a target is acquired and the shot is aimed. The archer relaxes into his stance and aim, and becomes one with his drawn bow, his arrow and his target. The contradiction of this moment - its state of relaxation-in-tension - is the paradox marksmanship: its Zen, if you like.

With the release, which occurs on an outbreath when the shot is 'ripe,' just as a part of the archer's breathing, the whole energy of the drawn bow is transferred to the arrow. Of course, this must be done as smoothly as possible, without giving the arrow any extra nudge that would affect its path.

Then, after the actual shot, there is a follow-through, in which the archer follows the arrow with his spirit on its parabolic flight, as it is influenced predictably by the Earth's gravity and unpredictably by wind.

And finally, there is a consummation, in which the arrow hits something, penetrates, and does its potentially lethal work.

Master archers emphasize that practising the routine of shooting is much more important than trying to hit a target. As consistency and form of your shooting improve, your shots will effortlessly become more accurate. Striving too much for accuracy will only make you needlessly tense and spoil your shooting. In this same way, how you live matters much more than what you try to accomplish. As the Stoics taught, we can only control our own thoughts and actions. Their effect in the world is never quite what we expected. That is why real changes in society and culture always happens from the bottom up, and never from the top down - why revolutions, when they occur, always take some direction of their own, and never go where their great leaders thought they should go, or were trying to take them.

And yet aims do matter, for without some worthwhile aim, the manner and form of shooting are meaningless. The overt aim, for all the men and women who worked around me at Woodruffe Electronics was to colonize Mars. Indirectly, that was an aim for me as well. But my true aim, the core of everything I did while I worked at my father's company was to give pleasure and satisfaction to Judith Arruda - first as the executive of human resources in my father's company, but then for the woman herself.

Looking back over my life as a whole, I must recognize that my attachment to Judith was largely an accident. Possibly, I might have remained in the collar of Natasha Sorkin or, more likely, broken with her at some point and attached myself to someone else The real purpose of my existence was not to please and satisfy anyone in particular, but to do this for a special someone, whoever that turned out to be. In early youth, I'd thought that my purpose was to study and understand cultural history - the way we humans had learned to give pleasure and satisfaction to ourselves and why our success at doing so was so limited and flawed. But it soon turned out that I was really after was something less abstract, and much more fleshly and personal. What I really wanted, as my Mom found when she tested my sexual proclivities, was to please one special woman - a mother-substitute. I was a natural submissive.

Looking back, I see my life, like other people's lives, as falling into three phases, organized quite nicely in my imagination by that metaphor of archery: There is a phase of preparation before one's life gets launched on the direction it will take - before the arrow leaves the bowstring, so to speak. For me, this was the period that began when my mother's ovum was fertilized by my father's sperm, and ended when I had that quarrel with my father, when I enrolled with Mistress Lotte and commenced my training as an apprentice geisho and submissive. At the time, I just wanted to earn a living while exploring and giving form to my sexuality. In hindsight I see that this was the end of my childhood, and the beginning of my adult life.

Next, is the phase of trajectory, in which the arrow follows its path to some destination in which it sticks, vibrates for a moment, and comes to rest. For me, this second phase ended when Judith and I signed our permanent contract, a year after our lifemate program was approved. After that I was no longer flying toward a target but doing my life's work in Judith's service and my father's company - vibrating in place one might say. In this long, third phase, my arrow made its small contribution to the Mars project, and to a new phase of human history as a spacefaring species. More importantly to me, it served and pleasured Judith.

At this point, the archery metaphor breaks down. Committed to Judith's service, I was already - have been for those years since - much more like a barnacle clinging to its place in the world than like an arrow flying toward, or quivering in, its target. By now, the main achievements of my life are in the past, and I am now planning what I think of as an afterlife to occupy my last years, and perhaps live on in some small way after my death. I will write a book. It's working title is Sex and Submission, and I already know quite a lot of what I want to say, though I expect to learn much more as I begin to write.

My starting point will be the dictum (source unknown, but central in my training as a geisho) that "Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." If this is true, then the Playboy theory that sex is just good clean fun must be as wrong-headed and misleading as the traditional Christian idea that sex should be performed only for purposes of reproduction, by sacramentally married couples. The first claim here, that everything is about sex, is just what Freud was getting at with his concept of libido - the psychic energy of desire itself, not just its sexual expressions. The focus of Freudian libido is on the acquisitive, dominant face of eros: the desire to possess and use others and the whole world, for one's own good pleasure. The obverse, submissive aspect of eroticism tends to be forgotten, and I mean to argue that this is wrong and needs to be corrected. Certainly women have been known to desire and enjoy a good fuck. And at least some men can let themselves enjoy being pegged and come to desire it. In general, submission and acceptance are more pleasurable than Western culture, faithful to its competitive Greek and Roman roots, has been willing to admit.

The second claim, that 'Sex is about Power' suggests that the D/s polarity is central to our sexual desires and emotions - not a mere 'kink' or 'perversion,' but a primary characteristic of the encounter. Sex is rarely just a matter of two bodies playing with each other. At any given time, even when there is no explicit 'power-sharing,' when the pair are on an equal footing, there will be a fucker and fuckee - one who takes and one who is taken. The Greeks and Romans, who were much less prudish about sex than we are, attached no shame to sex itself, nor to homosexual sex per se, but did consider it shameful, at least relatively so, to be the 'bottom' in a relationship - to be taken, penetrated, fucked by someone else. This attitude is still with us; and it works very much to the detriment of women who biologically and anatomically seem destined to be the 'taken' in a sexual encounter. But in cowgirl positions, face fucking and pegging, for example, and certainly in BDSM, females can and do become the takers of the situation. And many males, (count me as one), love when they do so.

By temperament, training and professional experience, this writer is a submissive male, and the book I mean to write will be a discussion of the submissive side of sexual desire and experience. It will be frankly self-serving, in that one key point I wish to make is that submissive males need not and should not be weak, unmasculine, spineless or servile - even if our fantasies may run that way. On the contrary, my experience has been that we fare better both in bedroom play and in lifestyle D/s, if we are strong, bold and capable types who genuinely enjoy being topped and taken by a woman who understands and enjoys her feminine power. Our role is not to be clingy or dependent, but to follow our authentic temperament toward a life of intelligent, active, pleasurable, and (above all) intimately personal service and submission.

If sex is about power, then at each moment, there will be a Dom and a sub - a fucker and a fuckee. In (what is called) 'vanilla sex' - which is often pretty damn good, and which I have no wish to disparage - fucker and fuckee change freely, playfully from moment to moment. When this happens, we can't really speak of Dominant and submissive roles because there are no stable roles, only on-going, pleasurable competition for dominance (with acceptance and pleasure in being dominated) in which the pleasure is supposed to be mutual, and neither side gets to 'win.' In this case, the 'D' and 's' roles have not been separated out, and there is no reason to think separately about the submissive role and its pleasures. Unfortunately, women and natural submissives tend to lose out because they are discouraged from recognizing, thinking about and pursuing the distinct values and powers of the 'bottom' role.

To repeat, I have no wish to disparage 'vanilla sex' and, I believe, kinksters are wrong to sneer at it when we do. But in the book I hope to write, what interests me is the sexuality of Dominance and submission - specifically, from the submissive's point of view. Still more specifically, what interests me is the empowered submissive and the inherent power of the submissive role.

This is by no means as paradoxical as it sounds. The world needs more loyal, intelligent followers than it needs wilful leaders squabbling for power. It only needs enough of those to ensure that the alternative values and possibilities of a situation are thoroughly explored, and that implementation is skilfully organized and coordinated once the plans are made.

In the consent, obedience, endurance and devotion of the submissive role - above all, in its choice of loyalties - there is real power which can be projected, focused and trained on some objective, just like other forms of power. Consent means the acceptance of things as they are - a willingness to 'go with the flow' rather than 'tilt at windmills.' It is the power of that Taoists recognized and sought. Intelligent obedience is a practice of setting aside one's own volition to help another to implement theirs. Its power is to free you from your own desires and habits, broaden your horizons and create dependence in the one who is obeyed. It is the opposite of addiction and self-enslavement to caprice. Endurance speaks for itself. As Nietzsche pointed out, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you strong." And 'devotion' is just another word for focus, concentration. To devote means to commit, to promise irrevocably, to vow loyalty and service ('vow' being the root from which the verb 'devote' was formed).

This is the gist of my intended book - a precis of what I learned as a geisho and professional submissive, in service for all these years to Mistress Judith. What I can say now, as an old man, is that there were worse ways I could have spent my life. There are few better than to offer oneself wholeheartedly to someone or something worth serving.