Personal Journal

Masochism

This is one of my "crazy" entries.
It is going to be disturbing to read for the casual reader, and probably for the handful of you who know me in passing or more, because these are the kinds of issues that I would always write about in absolute privacy. I wouldn't make these accessible to the public. I'm going to recommend you don't read it, but if you do, don't complain to me about it. I warned you.

Tonight I'm going to, because having a secret life, or a secret side of me that I hide away from people, is a source of alienation to me. If I write it here, at least I know I am letting it out, even though our mutual interest through this site, is for most of us, fairly casual.

I wrote about this the other day. I have a need in my life to take claim for what and who I am. Some of it is very normal, and positive by standard cultural values. Other parts of it, for instance my crossdressing, to name but a minor one of these "secrets", aren't something a casual reader will want to know about me. Some of them, like tonight's subject, will perhaps make it impossible for some to ever look at me again in the same light (which is why I have kept it hidden).

I don't know when I got into experimenting with pain. Pain was a very unwelcome feeling physically to me, and I know that I experienced a fair amount of it at my brothers hands in the many beatings he gave me as a youth. Those were not pleasant feelings.

I discovered I enjoyed having my nipples pinched, hard, when I first had a sexual partner (which for me was 21). I don't think I'd ever known about it before then. My first lover could make them bleed (slightly) and that was simply a stunning erotic sensation.

It was around that time that I started considering having my nipples pierced. She would have none of it, and after she and I broke up, I decided I wanted to explore that.

One day when I was 22, I got out some left-over medical supplies I had kept since the gulf war - two 14-guage needles, sterile, with catheters. I could pierce my nipple with a sharp, sterile device,then leave the rubber catheter in while they became permanent.

So one Saturday afternoon I went ahead and did it. Myself. I remember that at first it was difficult. A nipple is actually a pretty hard surface, and unlike muscle, it doesn't really give easily. What I found was that I had to use enough pressure on the needle to drive it all the way through in one shot - there was no coaxing it like one could with an IV needle (which is how I had those supplies, I received extra medical training for the first gulf war and had saved my medic bag - it was a couple years after the war at that point.

I think of this now, because I'm remembering how Sandra and I talked on Friday about trancing, which is a trauma reaction (and it has other terms, too), and I said I tranced during sex, and during pain, and whenever I became super angry or scared and had to yield to my fight instinct. That's when I remembered trancing during pain. Looking down at my hand pushing the needle through me, and realizing all I can feel is a pressure, and a little burn. It took so much pressure from my hand, I remember. But my nippleis barely registering it.

Now, it was a sharp needle, and that helped. But I eventually let those holes close, and when next I needed to pierce my own nipples, there were no IV needles around (I just had the 2 - I've never used IV drugs). So it was safety-pin time. And that wasn't really much difference. It was easier that time, actually, because I iced my nipples up quite a lot before hand.

Then, because piercing was becoming popular, I had a friend, a professional piercer, put a second piercing in my left nipple (so I had 3, two on a side, one on the other). It was quite gorgeous, actually, and a rarity even now. I have prominent nipples for a man, Ozzy said, the biggest he'd ever seen, LOL. Somewhere in UT EL Paso is a picture of him putting that piercing in, actually. It made the front page ! (I'm cheating, I was the editor in chief that semester of the paper)

As an aside, I found out that having pierced nipples is actually detrimental to the kind of sexplay that I like. With piercings, when your nipples are pinched, the pressure is compounded - instead of just having the nipple between fingers, there is a ring in there two, pushing outward, so to speak, so the pain is coming from an additional direction - inside.

Anyhow, the level of intensity that I liked with this would always leed to a little bleeding inside the area of the piercing, and I was scabbing, so I had to remove them. Now I have different methods, but that's not relevant. Oh, and if you know someone with nipple rings, explain to them that pulling the ring away from the chest will at some pressure result in a torn nipple. My friend Ozzy has a "forked nipple" from some sort of accident that I don't want to know about.

I was lucky, my nipple ring gave way before my flesh did one time. That's when that practice ended.

So, this brings me, in an almost complete non-sequitur, to the movie A Man Called Horse. To try to be to the point, in it, the protagonist undergoes a Sioux rite of passage. Some sort of eagle talons are used to pierce his actual pectoral muscles, then the talons are tied to stay closed in his flesh. His arms are tied behind his back, and then the talons are tied to tethers, and he is lifted up only by the talons. The entire weight of his body is held aloft against itself by his pierced body tissue.

And I want to do that. Or the modern more medically hygienic equivalent. I've seen piercing "cultists" for lack of a better word - let's say they are animistic about finding god through intense encounters with such pain that the spirit can escape the body.

I feel that drawing me toward it. It appealed to me 10 years ago - not even as a sexual kind of experience - but because it made me think about masochism beyond the sex - masochism to have intense spiritual experiences (and for me, sex is always ... okay not ALWAYS... spiritual. I don't have sex with partners I don't have spiritual feelings for - how's that).

Maybe I can't do it, maybe I'm not "intense" enough for that. Maybe if I look into it, the risk of serious injury turns out to be more than I'm willing to take. But I want to look into it, nonetheless. It might also be something I can work toward, which puts me in a strange position of trying to figure out how to spiritually hurt myself.

We shall see. But I'm a masochist, and it's not about being beaten by some mindless bitch. It's about finding a way to listen to the spirit by drowning out the messages of the body in pain.

I think that makes me very abnormal. I'm not sure if it's "sick". It depends on what definitions you use, more importantly "whose" definitions. No one has god's dictionary, so I'm left to wonder a lot. Is it an abomination? Is it a simple mental health disorder? Or is it a valid technique by which to make introspective and theological inquiry, like running is to some, or woodworking.

I'm not trying to hurt anyone, even myself, as normal people would define the verb "hurt". I'm trying to entice pain and transcend my body - or at least that's what I'm interested in.

One of the reasons that I have to write this here is because I have to be willing and able to understand - there are those who will definitely answer "yes, it's sick" and there will be those who understand my analogy to running and woodworking.

It's time for me to figure out which side of those two viewpoints I stand, because I've been trying to have it both ways. I don't think I'm sick, obviously. I'm just not sure how to justify that. That's too damn big a question for me tonight.

But that's where I need to go from here, and I wouldn't have realized the thought in the previous paragraph if I didn't write this publically. I could have hidden from that if this were a private entry.