“There’s a point in our clients’ lives, when they’re 30 or 40 – maybe they have a wife or kids – when they wonder what’s going to make them happy. ... I have clients that make six -digits and they come and bark for me, “ purrs Jade. “I like that power exchange ... If a lawyer can come and get dressed like a woman and get humiliated, then getting up in front of people at his job is that much easier.”
---- Mistress Jade Steel, Chicago dominatrix. According to the February 13 issue of UR, Steel teaches a bondage and domination class through the Discovery Center and lectures each spring at Northwestern University.
“Months of burning looks and thrilling innuendos...but when we were finally in bed, it became clear that he’d had too few girlfriends and watched way too many triple-X videos. He wanted to get it on doggy style...and then come all over my face...I did what he wanted, but I felt like a whore.”
Patty, 24, Nagones, AZ, as told to Blanche Vernon in an article, “The Worst Sex I Ever Had,” in which young women described sexual encounters. Mademoiselle magazine; May 1998.
“In late January 1998,...Variety, the show-biz trade paper...reported that the adult video business ‘saw record revenues last year’ of some $4.2 billion in rentals and sales. ...But that’s literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States when you toss in porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, Internet Web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys...and magazines”.
---- Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2001
How
reassuring to know that the “successful” individuals
whose position of social prestige places them in the ranks
of the elite — those who are in charge of decisions
that affect our lives in general — cannot find happiness
with a wife and children and a six-figure income.
How comforting that they assuage their spiritual bankruptcy by going to Ms. Steel’s establishment, where they dress as women and proceed to be ritually humiliated. Perhaps the next day they have to stop some pesky environmental legislation dead in its tracks, stop it from affecting their corporation’s profit margin, the sacrosanct bottom line. What better way to expunge their brutality in the world of business than to play-act, mask themselves as women, assuming the outward trappings of the feminine principal, and submit to degradation?
How heartening to know that our young daughters and sisters (mothers-to-be of the next generation) are entering the sexual realm through experiences, likewise, of degradation and humiliation. How enlightened of (the now-defunct) Mademoiselle magazine, how hip, to place this reportage next to slick shiny ads of the next hot look for spring and the newest shades of nail polish (if the existing 669 other varieties are not satisfactory).
Business as usual, while our young women and young men, buried in an avalanche of internet porn, porn-videos and zines — instructed and guided into adult sexuality by mass media outlets (like some crazed parody of an ever-present, over-weening tribal elder) — visualize and then realize sexual encounters with the opposite sex...or same sex. Tennis rackets shoved God knows where? Come all over their faces? (Is this the “freedom” our peers in Iraq are dying to defend?) What marvelous moments to tuck into their memory bank, to share with the world, to savour in their old age.
Blind to the connection between soul hunger and body hunger, our young are left to wander in a carnival fun-house where spiritual desire and physical desire are distorted, divorced, and lost to each other.
In Peter Gold’s brilliant book Navajo & Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of the Spirit, he addresses the necessity of actively seeking spiritual balance, of recognizing ourselves as spiritual warriors, of establishing and safe-guarding the harmony between the masculine and feminine principles. He says, “In some other contemporary traditions, such as ours, that have separated humanity from its divine roots, the goddess is all but absent. There, the male principle is artificially inflated by her enforced absence and careens helter-skelter in his fool’s paradise of the real world, oblivious to or jealous of any remnants of her ideal reality.”
Some used to bemoan the state of the “natural” world, the debasement of Mother Nature, the deadly toxins poisoning our waters, air, soil. Yet the source of the poison lies within ourselves ---- we pollute our bodies, and worse, our minds, souls and spirits on a regular basis and then are in shock and awe that “the chickens are coming home to roost”in the form of terrorism, cancers, heart failures, addictions (sexual and otherwise).
My personal conviction is that the historically negative attitude towards the feminine principle has led us to the brink of ecological and spiritual disaster.
The commodification of women, on a global basis, is pandemic. And from this base attitude ensues the commodification of all other phenomena.
However, the young men are not getting much in this bargain struck with the Devil either. High-end magazines like Maxim and gentlemen’s clubs like the Admiral and Déjà Vu drag the men around by their throbbing male member; they sanitize their product in the guise of entertainment, lulling the young males into what can end up being an expensive and debilitating trance. Until one night they wake up and find themselves barking for Ms. Steel. If they wake up. Ever.
“Where The Party Never Ends...”
---- Déjà Vu slogan
The Déjà Vu is a sex industry emporium. It is run by a corporation, operating as a middle-man between male clients and their “forbidden” sexual fantasies, as embodied by the female sex workers. The women ordinarily work twelve hour shifts. This work consists of mimicking and simulating intense, extreme human sexual behaviour. The women’s work is physically very strenuous. They are required to perform athletic stunts wearing high-heels and regularly sustain injuries. They are not unionized to protect their interests and are subjected to the whims and tyranny of their bosses; they have no benefits or health insurance. The club demands a percentage of the women’s take.
There are two important house rules: 1.) No alcohol on the premises. Soft drinks and coffee are in the $5 to $8 range, but customers are encouraged to go to their cars to “refresh” themselves. The ban on in-house alcohol meets ordinances allowing the establishment to feature topless and bottomless dancers. 2.) The men are explicitly forbidden to touch any of the women. Security keeps a hawk’s eye on everyone and immediately and forcibly removes any offender.
The women interviewed speak of the “burnout” factor. At first, the amount of money they bring in is stunning. All the women I spoke to were from working class, blue-collar backgrounds and see this job as their most likely shot at the American dream. They said they often represent themselves as college girls working their way through school, since this appeared to be a fantasy particularly appealing to the male customers. Initially, because they are “fresh meat,” they are considered hot, they get covered in a blizzard of money. (What’s the most lucrative night of the year? Interestingly enough, Christmas Eve). They buy houses and sports cars. They consider themselves showgirls. They call themselves dancers, not strippers. They look and act like stars. They develop a following. They have men eating from their hands ---- or more precisely, from between their legs. (One of the “special events” offered was “muffin diving,” in which a woman holds a muffin between her genitals and an audience member eats it). These women believe they have left behind the dreary anonymity of their lives as proles and are in the spotlight at last.
However, the grueling hours and the suppressed emotional trauma imposed by their job necessitates self-administered anesthesia. They often drug themselves before and after the ritual of self-degradation performed in front of total strangers. Burnout sets in. They stop doing their hair or washing before work; maybe they become somewhat listless in their acrobatics. Apparently, the men sense the “burnout” and their response to the woman’s depressed state is to withhold their money. No matter how she gyrates and exposes herself to the males, she begins to get next to nothing as she makes the rounds to collect her payment in her g-string. It’s payback time. The power base shifts to the males. The car and house payments cannot be met. More drug abuse. Vicious cycle established.
The women spoke quite openly about their general distaste, and occasionally outright hatred, for the clientele; they had actually rebelled at some of the humiliating rituals lined up for them by management. The particular one they had succeeded in abolishing was the “flashlight special” – men paid extra to obtain the use of a flashlight which they then beamed at the genitals of the woman doing a table dance in front of them. This frisson of sublimated warfare between the sexes is part and parcel of the club’s atmosphere, and is possibly the bread and butter of the sex industry in general.
I know of no primal, indigenous culture anywhere in recorded history that has created anything even remotely similar to this behavior. Caligula’s Rome, which has a similar resonance, is not an indigenous culture as the term is defined in the dictionary ----“having originated in and living (naturally) in a particular region or environment.” Rather, it was the brutal and degenerate urban center of an empire that has since morphed itself into several further reincarnations.
It would be great to bring in some cultural anthropologists to do fieldwork in these “gentlemen’s” establishments, objectively explaining to us the cause and effect operating here.
Enough already about those primitive peoples and their quaint and tedious notions of living in harmony with nature, and their ancient and rigorous taboos and prescriptions for correct behaviour between the sexes, and silly childish prattle about Father Sky and Mother Earth. How dated.
Some years back President Reagan exclaimed that he wanted to bring civilization (ours, I surmise) to the backward areas of the world. Well, let’s get the show on the road. See you on opening night of the Déjà Vu Baghdad.
I had the good fortune of knowing my great-grandfather. He reminisced about having loved the woman who became my great-grandmother so much that, after a tryst at the seaside, he kissed the imprints of her footsteps in the sand. I can hear Beavis and Butthead sniggering. But they will never know the full range of human emotion that was given to them as their birthright – because they have accepted a description of themselves as meat puppets.