More Flavors

May 11, 2013 Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

One of the keys to successful therapy is managing our feelings towards our clients. These are called by the psychoanalytic term ‘counter-transference,’ even by non-Freudian therapists. There are two sources of counter-transference. Some feelings are brought to mind because the client is treating you in a particular way that may well be related to the problems you are working on together. At its most powerful, a client brings a disposition to treat many people that way, and pointing it out in therapy can create insight and facilitate change. I call this ‘induced counter-transference.’

In order to be sensitive to client’s dynamics, effective therapists are aware of their own dispositional tendencies so they can be empathic without their own unresolved issues getting in the way. When the therapist’s feelings and prejudices do interfere, that is ‘neurotic counter-transference,’ and it is a formidable barrier to hearing the client’s point of view in his or her own terms.

Not all neurotic counter-transference is provoked by full blown psychopathology. People choose their professional and recreation roles in life for systematic reasons, and for the great majority of therapists who are not themselves kinky, there is good chance that they see the world differently than their sexually variant clients. This is an important idea to keep in mind when looking at a few important dimensions of kinky activities that are implicit in kinks, even though they do not contribute initials to ‘BDSM.’

“Can you hang on just another minute? I’m trying to get a peak centered in the background!”

Risk: This is an unstated dimension in BDSM activity, but given that kinky behavior is socially stigmatized activity, every participant comes to some provisional adjustments about risks associated with possible discovery. For some, the fact that variant activities are novel or even dangerous is part of the erotic frisson; overcoming or managing risk can be erotic and/or counter-phobic. For others it is a potential turn off that needs to be managed. Of critical importance is the fact that subjective risk experienced by kinky clients and actual risk (in so far as you can know it) may be very different. Everyone into BDSM makes decisions about the risks and benefits of being out, but sometimes the risks that are being played with are highly symbolic reenactments childhood issues. Sometimes variant behaviors involve here-and-now safety risks with self-damaging potential consequences. Psychologically or physically dangerous activities are openly acknowledged by the BDSM communities, and are referred to as ‘edge play.’

In my experiences, the average therapist is a good deal more risk averse than the typical kinkster. And taking sexual risks does not imply that kinky people are taking other life risks, like playing penny stocks, drag racing on the street or cage fighting. It is always wise to research the risks of client behaviors more thoroughly if they make you uncomfortable. Maybe its just you, or maybe the client is in therapy because of her own mixed feelings about the risks.

Sometimes its good to be bad!

Transgression: This unstated dimension is important to assess because it is seldom explicitly examined. Many BDSM participants are turned on by the fact that what they are doing is regarded as bad or naughty, breaks the rules, or defies convention. BDSM is sometimes a bid for acceptance of ideas, feelings or fantasies that one feels would likely be rejected if others knew. Finding a partner who understands this feels like achieving special acceptance. A common danger is that this conflict becomes externalized, and clients cannot get satisfactory acceptance from others for things about which they are judgmental in themselves. Playing with pain, fear, horror, and loss of freedom can feel like defiance of the boundaries that constrain others, and sometimes the shock value is part of the thrill.

BDSM’ers tend to be more transgressive as a group than most therapists, at least about sex. It is not necessary to be willing to do the things that transgressive clients do to talk about and understand them, but it is important to recognize that, even when their behavior seems hostile or unloving to you, very few sexually variant clients come to therapy unaware that other people think they are bad. They are in your office because of the limited therapeutic value of social disapproval.

Looks worse than it probably is!

Probably worse than it looks!

Fantasy: Fantasy is very important in sexuality for variant and vanilla folk alike. Sex therapists talk about this in terms of taking a sexual history, and determining how much of a client’s sexual outlet is partner activity or autoerotic. Because a relatively small portion of people are out about their variations, it can be hard to find partners, and pornography and autoerotic outlets are all that are available to some clients. When they show signs of shame or feelings of inferiority, or compulsive sexual behavior in the treatment, it is important to ask if they are primarily showing these symptoms because of the desires themselves, or the pain at lack of a partner, lack of a community, or self-blame for not having solved the problem, or conflict about their unconventionality and problems of social acceptance.

BDSM activities are often dramatic, and it is easy to fantasize that something seen in pornography would feel better (or worse) than it does in live play. This can be true for the client, and for you. Unless you have very wide-ranging sexual interests or are very tolerant, and/or kinky yourself, you are bound to encounter activities that make you uncomfortable at some point. So it is important to explore the relationship between fantasy and actual experiences when problems of sexual variation are brought into the consulting room. Frankly, this is often true in sex therapy for vanilla clients, too.

A pair of good examples would be the examples of Florentine flogging and ballet boots. In sensation play, being hit relatively slowly by relatively large floggers looks horrifying, but is not very intense. Thin stinging thongs hurt much more. It is simple physics really, more pounds/square inch. So just looking at a Florentine demo, where the poor masochist is being hit with two floggers at once, is likely to provoke misplaced empathy. The ballet boots may look sexy, but they would be nearly impossible to walk in, and it takes a very special sensibility to find walking in them sensual, even if classically trained. They are far more likely to be a turn on for the viewer than the wearer.


“Decalcomania 1966” Rene Magritte

Identity: Kinky folk sometimes do stuff because they are curious, it is fun, and it is the flavor of the moment, or simply because they can. Others are expressing what feels like the innermost core of their being. Yet others times, they do things they are otherwise indifferent to out of the wish to please their partner(s). Often the connection between identity and behavior is relatively unexamined, and clients vary tremendously in how articulate they are about that relationship. Because many sexually variant activities are socially stigmatized, clients often keep them secret, and this makes the activities feel very important in their self-concept. Cognitive dissonance alone would suggest that clients would hold especially tightly to beliefs for which they feel they have made great sacrifices.

There is an excellent cognitive behavioral training film in which Aaron Beck, one of its founders, talks to a depressed woman about her fantasy that her husband doesn’t love her because she is morosely depressed. He challenges her idea that he might love her less simply because she is depressed. I always wondered how Dr Beck responded next session when she came in with the report that the husband had just left her for a vivacious cocktail waitress and she is depressed about becoming impoverished in the upcoming divorce? But kidding aside, it will do no client any good to suggest he should not be turned on by ballet boots because it is unrealistic to expect his partner to walk in them! Kinky clients may not know where they got their kinks, but often desire is attached to identity in complex and subterranean ways. It is important to be respectful of that.

Ambivalence: A consequence of higher cortical function in humans is ambivalence. Even many vertebrates can be observed to vacillate between competing emotions such as hunger and fear. So it is presumably evolutionarily adaptive to be able to hold competing ideas in the mind at the same time. This is how we decide whether we can afford to remodel the kitchen, take a new job, or switch laundry detergents. As will be discussed here when the topic of diagnostic criteria gets explored, one of the criteria for deciding when a sexual variation might be pathological is excessive ambivalence. Modern diagnostic manuals like the DSMs demand that we assess it.

It is just about impossible for sexually variant people to avoid ambivalence in a larger social context where they can readily imagine everyone around them would be afraid, shaming, angry, hurt and judgmental about their kinks. Making a determination with your client about whether they are being hurt primarily by their kinks, or mostly by the concerns about the reactions of others, can be a slow and ambiguous process. It is necessary to wade through it without rushing to judgment to get the best results for your clients.

An adjustable spanner

Looking back on all the flavors in these two posts, whether you have noticed it or not, I have tossed a spanner (the British term for a wrench) into the works of one of modern psychiatry’s central ideas: that we can reliably diagnose psychopathology by agreeing about observable behaviors. A corollary is that similar sets of behaviors have similar meanings. There are times and places where this seems to be true. This is not one of them. Behavior needs context, hence the sub-title of this blog.

It is fitting that I close this post with a spanner, because that is the subject of my next post, Operation Spanner, and its relevance to the critical concept of consent.

Flavors

May 10, 2013 Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Henry Ford (1922)

The Model T came in just one flavor!

Thinking about BDSM as a therapist…

If there is one thing that BDSM is not, it is a single monolithic, disciplined organization. Likewise, the sexually variant do not all desire similar things, form community with one another, or vote as a block. Anarchic libertarian diversity mostly prevails. It is quite difficult to specify any single activity that all kinky people enjoy. Membership in a BDSM community is likely to overlap many other communities, and because of the social risks of being out, many participants limit their participation. It is an excellent bet that, while the top two overt social gatherings, the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco’s Mission District, and New England Leather Alliance’s Fetish Fair and Flea Market draw thousands of visitors–The Folsom Street Fair boasts 400,000 attendees, a veritable Woodstock of kink!–the vast majority of kinky people have never joined a face-to-face organization, never attended a munch, and have never gone to a marquee event like the aforementioned fairs.

The Folsom Street Fair

Kinky people often use the ice cream analogy to understand sexual variability. If the sex ‘average’ people do is vanilla, kinky folk have the run of the entire ice cream parlor. There are as many flavors as there are different kinky people. Some want try them all, and others stick to butter pecan, in a waffle cone, please.

The organization of BDSM into various dimensions presented here is a way to think thoroughly about BDSM when it comes into treatment. Not all of the distinctions drawn here will be relevant most of the time, and often, clinicians do not need to know very much about the world of kink to treat the client’s presenting problem. The biggest single mistake clinicians have made in the past, and have alienated and ill-served many clients thereby, is to assume that the kinks are the presenting problems. But thinking about these dimensions, and exploring them with clients will make working with problems that arise from sexual variations easier.

I think of BDSM as a series of overlapping Venn diagrams centered on activities and fetishes. Many of the activities in the dimensions I’m about to describe are almost entirely within the world of BDSM, such as Boot–blacking, or pony-play. But others, like infantilism and gender play are viewed by some participants as BDSM, while others do not identify themselves that way.

I’m agnostic as to whether BDSM is an orientation or sexual identity. For some, this may feel true, for others, it may not. Whether it should be viewed this way is sometimes occasion for political debate, much as it was for homosexuals about whether homosexuality is a choice, a lifestyle preference, or an immutable identity.

Here are some of the dimensions of BDSM, and when I’m done, I’m sure someone will be able to find something left out. We will start with the explicit dimensions centered on kinky activities:

Female Domination, an example of power exchange

Power Exchange: This reflects the Dominance and Submission dimension of BDSM. Someone gives up control of him/herself to someone else for pleasure or other satisfactions. This could be as vanilla as one partner being thrilled to have the other call all the shots of sexual activity that is centered on coitus and conventional foreplay. Or it could entail 24/7 lifestyle sexual slavery. Often it involves feeling that one is being forced to do something by the will and command of another. Being forced may be associated with feelings of freedom from responsibility, pleasure at serving the other, or conversely with shame, humiliation, and degradation. Forcing may be associated with feelings of power, control, service or caring. Power exchange can be subtle and complex, and people in BDSM debate whether the dominant or the submissive is ultimately in charge. But when a scene is actually contracted, the dominant drives the action and the submissive complies with the dominant’s directions. A person in a contracted long-term relationship, or who typically plays the role of dominant is called a Dom or Domme. ‘Dominatrix’ is now mostly used for women who top for money. The terms ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ tend to refer to temporary relationships, where people are only briefly taking the dominant or submissive roles. They can also be used as verbs for performing domination or submission, as I did in the definition of ‘dominatrix’. Slaves are submissives who play with deeper, longer-term power exchange relationships in which consent is temporarily or permanently given up. ‘Master’ is generally an honorary title, but sometimes applies to people who hold slave’s contracts.

Florentine Flogging Technique, a type of Sensation Play.

Sensation Play: This reflects the sadism/masochism dimension of BDSM. Although it is very common for kinky people to enjoy some sensation play and some power exchange together, there are pure forms, where only sensation is given or received. This means that a masochist could be a top who commands someone to hurt him or her just right, or a sadist could be a bottom looking for someone to tell her exactly how he wants his pain administered. Sometimes the importance of pain is symbolic; it is punishment for sins real or imagined. Sometimes it is a reward for good behavior. And sometimes people who enjoy pain actually feel it as pleasure, others are bidding for endorphins to kick in, and endure pain as the price of getting to later ecstasy. Even people who like lots of pain tend to be ambivalent about it, and I have never met anyone who has an orgasm when they stub their toe in the dark on their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Shibari, Japanese Rope Bondage

Bondage: This reflects the Bondage and Discipline dimension of BDSM. Bondage lies astride both the power exchange and the sensation play dimensions. Some people like the feel of rope or leather restraints, some like the helplessness, others use it as a way enforcing feelings of helplessness, or to control a feared aggressive response that would break the scene. Bondage is relatively dangerous activity, and requires a measure of technical expertise to do safely, and to avoid unintended discomfort. Bondage is often important in sensory deprivation and breath play scenes. A tremendous amount of commercial equipment is marketed or home made to enable bondage scenes, and it somewhat overlaps with the next dimension: Fetishes.

Fetishwear: Ballet Boots, Latex Tights, and a Corset. Walking in them is sensation play!

Fetishes: This dimension reflects the degree to which the various material components of BDSM activity are eroticized. Some kinky people are indifferent to fetish, for others, the gear is the main course. As this term has come to be used among the kinky, it is far removed from its original clinical meaning: a non-sexual body part or material object not ordinarily used for procreation that has become essential for sexual response. As used in BDSM, a fetish is synonymous with a kink, it’s the script of whatever you are into. But as I’m using it here, I’m reflecting the relative importance of stuff. The most common fetishes are items and materials associated with sex. That may include sex toys, sex-specific clothing like lingerie, shoes, leather, latex, rubber, PVC and the like. Sometimes the instruments of sensation play, or restraints are fetishized. Often costumes and accessories associated with role play are eroticized and this eventually overlaps with the world of fashion where the costumes of BDSM are expropriated by designers like Vivienne Westwood, and Jean-Paul Gaultier for haute couture. Many BDSM events have a dress code, so everyone looks like a fetishist, whatever their intrinsic enthusiasms; black is always fashionable.

BDSM Cosplay, role play that features costumes. Many are from anime

Role Play: This dimension reflects the degree to which one plays oneself during BDSM sex, or pretends to be somebody else. This is significant because intimacy is not always valued. Sometimes it drives BDSM action, and sometimes players need to feel like they are not in their workaday roles, or even their mundane identities, to find satisfaction. Even when one needs to be a different age or gender than one’s ordinary role, some pretend to be someone else, for others, they feel like they are younger, older, or a different sex versions of themselves. Age play refers to playing a younger or older social role, gender play refers to gender role. There is substantial overlap between the BDSM and transgendered communities, but they are far from identical. Likewise, many people into diaper play and infantilism do not see themselves as part of the BDSM community.

Orgasm Control using a male chastity device. Sometimes it is erotic to be denied sex.

Sex: It is by no means to be assumed that BDSM play results in coitus or orgasm. Partly as a result of legal issues; for many years, paid female domination was legal in many jurisdictions as long as the professional did not engage in certain overt sex acts, there is a perception that BDSM does not involve any sex at all. Sometimes partner experiences are arranged for the purposes of driving later auto-erotic activity. Sometimes there is no sex, and behavior is experienced as pleasurable or satisfying without direct stimulation or orgasm. My guess is that in these cases, BDSM activity is more about identity or anxiety reduction than sexual pleasure. Often, such as in cuckolding, participants indulge in the erotic fantasy that they are not allowed to have sex. In fact, it is a very interesting question how we know sex is happening at all in some BDSM contexts. But often, BDSM activities are thought of and experienced as directly sexual and pleasurable and lead to orgasm. Play can be heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

Kinky, Poly, and out!

Polyamory: This is not necessarily an explicit dimension of BDSM activity, and poly has a scene all its own, but many people in the BDSM world are also poly. Sometimes multiple partnerships violate the rules of the polyamorous lifestyle. Kinky folk are often unable to reveal their wishes to (presumed) non-kinky partners and solve the problem by cheating. Some explicitly polyamorous relationships reflect power exchange; the dominant gets the power to say who the submissive can play with, but reserves the right to choose other partners as s/he sees fit. Sometimes polyamory reflects logistical and economic restraints when there is a scarcity in the community of people who wish to take on roles or activities that are in demand. Needless to say, auto-eroticism, monogamy, and serial monogamy are also commonly encountered.

Introduction, Part II: Why Kink is Important

May 8, 2013 Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

“The rich aren’t like you and me.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“They have more money.” Ernest Hemingway

“Kink’ as used herein refers to consensual sexual variations. The most common of these are BDSM: Bondage Discipline and Sadomasochism, and Polyamory.

Sexual variation has been important in the past because of its importance in the sociology of certain helping professions, such as psychiatry and psychology, especially its relevance to theory construction and the scope and boundaries of professional practice. As stated in my previous post, this blog seeks to expand the scope and competence of psychology and sex therapy. Many upcoming posts will explore the history of social science thought about sexual variation.

Kink is also important because of the near universality of societal definitions of sexual deviance, so it has presented a problem of social control. In today’s New York Times there is an account on the front page of three women, kidnapped as girls and held for a decade as slaves to three brothers in Cleveland, Ohio. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/us/cleveland-kidnapping.html?_r=0 Expert opinion in that case suggested the men had paraphilias for dominating and controlling unwilling women. This case reflects the social challenge of differentiating which sexual variations require labeling and control.

I am not going to talk very much about sexual variation as criminal behavior, although rape, child exploitation and prostitution are variant behaviors that are commonly criminalized. Those variant behaviors are not kinky in the sense employed in this blog, nor is kidnapping the unwilling. We will talk some about criminal behavior in looking at the history of sexual deviation, and social science theories about it. Criminality is fuzzy, because some kinky behaviors are criminal in some jurisdictions, even when they involve fully consenting adults. Consent is by no means a firm legal boundary. Since the notorious Operation Spanner case, The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1997 that Great Britain was within its rights to rule that consent was not a defense against assault charges brought against sadomasochistic behavior. Ideas of consent and criminality vary widely across jurisdictions, and change over time. This will be the preoccupation of many later posts. Suffice it to say that kink is important because it involves human rights issues.

Although Kinsey’s research suggested that sexual variation was far greater than public assumptions admitted, prevailing social stereotypes create unrealistic expectations. A history of ignorance means that sexual variation is a suspect field of study, and sexually variant clients cannot expect sophisticated, neutral and client-centered treatment approaches, even when their variations are benign. We may not understand deviants, but according to Kinsey, we do not understand ourselves very well.

Social shame engenders psychological and social conflict, making it difficult for partners to negotiate sexual differences. These dynamics isolate people with sexual variations, promote self-stigmatization, and interfere with kinky people finding community. These assumptions are also a tremendous source of hurt, much of it unnecessary, for their non-kinky partners.

With changes in communications technology, kinky communities are becoming larger, more diverse, more politically and socially active, and more visible. Considerable attention will be devoted to kink as a Western subculture.


Leo DiCaprio in the title role of the May 2013 release of The Great Gatsby	.

I opened with a famous non-quote; Fitzgerald and Hemingway never sat down and said this to one another. Hemingway replied to sentiments in The Great Gatsby, long after Fitzgerald penned them. But they illustrate the process of turning strangers into the Other.

Having concluded that Others are not like us, we can label, represent and manage them as we will. What many have decried as ‘objectification’ is actually a process that goes well beyond routine treatment of strangers, and sets Others up for special aggression. They become a symbol of what we are not, and need to be devalued. Discrimination against the Other never feels arbitrary. We shut down our native capacity for empathy willingly.

However comforting this position may be, it is not one from which psychotherapy can operate effectively. Understanding kink is important so that we will not limit and misunderstand ourselves as healers. The best way to avoid becoming an Other, is not to create them ourselves.

Introduction: Part I

May 7, 2013 Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

Hamlet: … What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern: Prison, My lord?

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.

Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.

Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th‘ worst.

Rosencrantz: We think not so my lord.

Hamlet: Then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.

John Godfrey Saxe’s poem is a witty illustration of the problem of epistemology: how those of us with fundamentally different assumptions and experiences can talk about our personal realities in a way that we can understand one another. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Often ‘knowing’ includes many different assumptions, and fundamentally different ways of understanding our experiences. Multiculturalism contends that we should all profit from sharing these diverse perspectives. Often, cacophony and alienation overwhelm the ballyhooed enlightenment.

While the study of epistemology could be brought to many fields, as luck would have it, I am a clinical sexologist by trade, and no field could be more ripe for deconstruction of its epistemological assumptions. Peggy Kleinplatz has summarized the field of sex therapy as a set of techniques in search of a theoretical model. If this criticism is taken seriously, we have no over-arching model of what makes sex good, therapy effective, or even what boundaries the field should have. Harsh perhaps, but perhaps deeper investigation will find reasons for solace even if Dr. Kleinplatz is on the right track.

Sex therapy as a field is young, having arrived on the map essentially with the publication of Master’s and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response in 1966. Two years later, The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists got organized. Sex research on a scientific basis started to surface in medical journals in the 19^th century. Sigmund Freud, with his notion that sex was the fundamental motivation for practically everything–including writing about sex–made sex research semi-respectable. In the late 1940’s, Alfred Kinsey, started to use some of the methods of social research to study the social prevalence of sexual behaviors. But it wasn’t until the mid 1950’s that The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality was founded. Today, there are only a handful of graduate programs in American universities and colleges that offer a systematic graduate level human sexuality program, so perhaps Dr. Klienplatz’s criticism is understandable.

Furthermore, the illustrious therapists and sex researchers just mentioned are fabulously diverse in their training, interests and professional credentials. Freud was an early psychiatrist, interested in modeling the human mind and creating an overarching theory and practice for treating mental disorders. Kinsey was an entomologist, and worked to bring the detached neutrality of zoology to human sexuality through survey research. Masters and Johnson were physician and social worker, but obsessively focused on human physiology of sex. They got dragged into teaching others about therapy mainly because they were the first to actually see sex response going right, and going wrong. If I threw in more examples of great researchers in human sexuality; Helen Singer Kaplan, John Money, David Schnarch, Eli Coleman, and Beverly Whipple, their training backgrounds, theoretical perspectives, and research interests only become more diverse. So it is not always so easy to talk to one another in such a multidisciplinary field.

Relative to the challenges of talking amongst ourselves, however, the prospect of talking to the lay public, the other sciences, and to our clients is particularly daunting. Everyone knows that in modern society you can rivet people’s attention even faster by yelling “Sex!” in crowded theater than by yelling “Fire!” However, in the age of self help, sound bites, changing professional roles, and electronic communities, sex doesn’t sell the way it used to. Not only are we awash in sex, but the voice of our clinical community is dwarfed by politicians and pornographers, clergy and media, rock stars, porn stars, and reality TV celebrities. There are more professional dominatrices advertising (based on a quick sample of 5 sites –surely a dirty job someone had to do!) on the internet than Certified Sex Therapists listed on the AASECT membership database! And anyone in the public square can easily outspend the professional community to get their messages heard above ours. We do not have much of a bully pulpit. A week seldom passes when some legislative body isn’t introducing new legislation to regulate marriage, reproduction, and sexual behavior. And no, we professionals were not asked for our opinion in this process.

While this blog surely can’t be expected to fix all of that, it might promote dialogue and create more community among a diverse group of educators, researchers, advocates, alternate lifestyle enthusiasts and therapists about what the boundaries of our field should be, and how we can make it more ‘therapeutic’ for a group far larger than the clients we shall ever get to see, face-to-face. We will try to talk about sexual variation and psychotherapy in ways that are commonly overlooked, thus the analogy to the elephant in the room.

To that end, I very much welcome all manner of thoughtful feedback. The water is nice and warm. Come on in. Its time we talked about the elephant in the hot tub!

Preface:

May 7, 2013 Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP1 Comment

The Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context

The reason for this blog is best exemplified with a poem, in this case:

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” By John Godfery Saxe

It was six men of Hindustan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind)
That each by observation
Might satisfy the mind.

The first approached the Elephant
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side
At once began to bawl:
“Bless me, it seems the Elephant
Is very like a wall”.

The second, feeling of his tusk,
Cried, “Ho! What have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear”.

The third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Then boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake.”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Hindustan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong.

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Elephant In The Hot Tub

Month: May 2013

More Flavors

Flavors

Introduction, Part II: Why Kink is Important

Introduction: Part I

Preface: