QUESTION NO. 2: WHO ARE YOU?
Excerpted from “The Sex Project: a Dangerous and Poetic Love Story”

Easier to say what I am not than who I am. Easier to say my body is on fire. Easier to say the woman who prepares to emerge struggles with big ideas of morality and feminism that stand guard at the door of my sexuality like two three hundred pound ex-con bouncers who have no sense of humor and who will grant me admission to this very exclusive club only if I am properly dressed and have the right attitude. Otherwise, I can just go home.

Who am I? I am not a prude. I no longer make judgments about others’ sexuality or my own. My body is essentially a blank page though you can see layer upon layer of erasure marks.

I am not lesbian and though women’s bodies command my eye more frequently than do men’s it is a man I want beside me for dreamtime and day-to-day intimacies.

I am not… No. I am on fire. That’s for sure. What ever I’m doing it’s very hot, so hot it feels cool. Dig those guys who walk hot coals. Yeow. I am a hunka hunka burnin’ love. Elvis and me get down. Know?

I come in a small package but am in reality ten feet tall. When I am kind or extend myself, I am a hero because kindness and connection are previously unknown in my behavioral lexicon. I am not the self-contained unit I used to be and it took a kind of heroism to get here from where I was. It takes a kind of heroism to allow one’s self to feel rather than numb out.

What is it I do that’s so hot? I give myself over to a man is what I do. A man who understands what I need and is not afraid to give it is what. To admit the need is one thing. To act on it another, though for years I have taken sips from this apparently bitter cup but now take a full drought, at least as much as the man thinks advisable. He decides when and how much.

And what is this liqueur? Why, it is the liqueur of discipline: tough, unrelenting, focusing, and a kind of nightmare.

It’s difficult to say what I do but I shall say it: I submit. I give it up. I open myself very wide. But my nature is not yet able to accommodate self-motivated automatic opening. I must be opened manually.

Mistress said something important last time we were together. She said as I writhed and cried in the cuffs because hands and feet cold and tingly numb I ’d been bound almost long enough, “It is a very, very good thing to be splayed and vulnerable like this.” She made me cry with the paddle, cane and crop. She makes me feel without thinking first. She manually opens my legs and in doing so takes away the volition I’d never forgiven myself for exercising when as a girl I joined my abusers in their sex games, eager and hoping each time for release.

I don’t know which came first, my need for pain and sex or the sex and pain. In the end, knowing doesn’t really matter for knowing the answer will not exacerbate the need. I only know that if I do not acknowledge and act on this need that something beautiful inside will die.

I fear losing myself but perhaps it is a self worth losing. Something tells me loss is not possible because in point of fact I may discover a self more real than I ever imagined.

We are just beginning our odyssey of discipline this man, this dominant man and me. I hold any emotion I might feel toward him in strict check, but the more time I spend with him the more I learn to trust his judgment, intelligence, knowledge, care, and wishes for my well-being. He takes it slow. Sometimes excruciatingly slow.

Each time we meet we go longer and more deeply into the pain, farther into the dangerous psychological territory of bondage. Each time we meet I know the extrapolation will progress, and the shape of the algorithm makes me terrified and wet. Each time he gives and I take more. He tells me he is a hard player. I have no context within which to judge whether this is true but I believe him. He wants this experiment to succeed and is not married to expectation of outcome. I can’t fathom what the outcome might be either. The possibilities are innumerable.

How can the immolation of the body be a good thing? So long as its effects seem long-term positive I shall continue to explore. The effects? The endorphin rush is an intoxicant that stays with me for days afterward. In the throes of this rush nothing is impossible. I am open in body and spirit. I walk taller and allow my natural womanly grace its expression rather than hold my body tense with control. I don’t get nervous around emotional subjects and talk too much like I usually do. There is a core of centered peacefulness that replaces anxiety, loneliness, and fear.

So far it is only the discipline we explore. We have not yet studied service. Service terrifies me more than the welts and red, black and blue marks that stay with me as long as a week. Like Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." And so I shall.

Jan McLaughlin’s life has a life of its own. She enjoys anything having to do with sound: conversation, film, dance, theater, music, chaos, and silence. Despite her life-long romance with language, McLaughlin says, “Words mean nothing. Action is everything."

Princess-at-Large

• messageboard feedback •