Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity

“Yeah, it makes sense,” Jed answers, “but for me, I don’t see it as forgetting you, forgetting your identity. For me, I see it as I’m honoring you by being willing to completely step outside my armor of defense and say, ‘Well, I trust you enough to show you this.’”

In order for us to move forward, Jed and Coral each need a stronger sense of where the other is coming from. We do an exercise in which they divide a piece of paper by drawing a line down the middle, then separately write their immediate associations of the word “love” on the left-hand side. I give them prompts: “When I think of love, I think of…” “When I love I feel…” “When I am loved I feel…” “In love, I look for…” As soon as they finish, they write their answers to the next set of prompts on the right-hand side: “When I think of sex I think…” “When I desire, I feel…” “When I am desired, I feel…” “In sex, I look for…”

This exercise, though simple, is remarkably illuminating. First, because it lays out exactly how love and desire are parsed in each partner’s mind—how separate they are and how interwoven. Second, it enables me to look at the congruence of these arrangements between partners. As I suspected, Jed and Coral experience sex in opposing ways, and they look to sex for different things. Coral seeks intimate connection through sex, and love charges her desire. She associates love with warmth and security. Being loved makes her feel safe. Being wanted does the same. For her, sex is sanguine, wholesome, luxe. “I’ve connected with every person I’ve had sex with. Even in one-night stands I would walk away smiling, thinking I was in love. I had to learn that sex and love aren’t always the same thing, that I didn’t have to want to marry every man I slept with.”

For Jed, intimate connection emerges after the fact, and love and sex don’t blend nearly as seamlessly as they do for Coral. Love feels safe, but also confining. It is laced with conflict. “I feel like I have to restrict what I do and say to avoid hurting her. I feel vulnerable, exposed, and disoriented. It’s painful. I think I may not deserve it because I just don’t feel worth it. It’s still hard to see sometimes what inspires her to love me. I’m anxious.” But when it comes to sex, he has an entirely different experience. “Sex has always fascinated me. It’s the one place I can really be myself, where I can express all kinds of feelings I usually keep under wraps. Sex is deeply entwined with power; they’re not fully distinct for me.” Aggression is an intrinsic part of his sexuality. It emboldens him. He doesn’t need to subordinate himself to the woman’s needs or feelings; nor does he get lost in them. “I need the power because I felt so powerless for so long in my life. I need to compartmentalize.”

“When the emotional connection is too intense it hinders the sex because you start confining yourself. The same confining you described in the ‘love’ column.” I suggest.

“If I care about her too much, I can’t risk exposing my aggression. I care about what she thinks of me, see? The person can’t be too close to me, or I feel threatened. I need distance to be turned on.”

Jed is trying to map out the structure of his sexuality for Coral. Aggression is the initial motivator, but the real sexual charge is the autonomy that aggression permits him. “It’s about how manners don’t matter anymore. What other people think doesn’t matter anymore. Dignity doesn’t matter anymore. All there is is need, animal desire. It’s freedom, which I’ve been fighting for my whole life.”

Let’s face it: Jed and Coral aren’t an ideal sexual fit. And it’s possible that this part of their relationship will never become Nine and 1/2 Weeks . Yet each time they’ve considered parting, they’ve realized that they may find a better sexual match, but not a better life partner.

Here’s the direction I took. Given Jed’s ability to feel mastery largely in sexual dominance, I endorsed Coral’s request that she experience some of Jed’s assertiveness beyond the bedroom. “Part of what makes this so weird for me is that Jed is incredibly passive in every other aspect of our life. The contrast is totally jarring. I wish he were more decisive and less deferential generally.” I encourage Jed to start making some claims outside the sexual arena. He’s a novice at this kind of assertiveness. Choosing a restaurant or a movie is hard for him; telling her he wants to stay in New York for Thanksgiving (and not see her entire extended family, as they do every year) is almost impossible. I never suggest to Jed that he needs to reconfigure his sexuality. But I do urge him to learn to wield power in other areas of his life as well. It’s important for Jed to know that his wants will be honored outside the rituals of S-M.

By the same token, he wouldn’t mind it if Coral transferred some of her directorial boldness from the editing room to their four-poster bed. Jed makes the point that Coral, too, could bring some assertiveness to their sex life. “When you finish brushing your teeth and putting on your pajamas, and then you ask me if we’re going to have sex tonight in this matter-of-fact, nudging way, it just doesn’t do anything for me. I need more of a charge. Tell me you want me, unzip my pants, walk naked into the room. Something, anything, besides, ‘Are we going to have sex tonight?’ I do it for you. I light the candles, create the mood you like, make love to you slowly. I do the vanilla for you. I try; you don’t.”

For Coral’s part, she may never like Jed’s sexual kinks, but I encourage her to be open to understanding them. By holding court, judging him, and failing to grasp his red-light tastes, she’s condemned to feeling demeaned. Sadly, she fails to see that Jed is actually taking a big risk by trusting her to enter the primal bog of his erotic self.

Rebalancing the “Dominant” Culture

Most fans of kinky sex, at least those I’ve encountered, are drawn by the erotics of power and not, as it may appear to an outsider, by violence or pain. In fact, the carefully negotiated contracts, which specify what can and cannot be done, by whom, to whom, and for how long, are meant to guarantee both pleasure and safety. You submit only as much as you’re willing; you dominate only as far as you’re allowed.

In the parallel universe of sex, power bids become a plaything, an experiment, a way to temporarily experience relations we’re loath to inhabit in real life. If, in our daily life, we shun dependence, in our erotic life we might welcome it. If it is our aggression that makes us twitch with discomfort, sexual enactments can permit a safe experience of power. Whether our real-life aversion is to submission, as it is for Elizabeth, or to autonomy, as it is for Jed, the sexual drama can offer catharsis.

For years S-M and D-S (domination and submission) were fringe behaviors that roamed on the outskirts of conventional sexuality. They were primarily a practice of gay men, who tended to be more successful than heterosexuals at isolating sexual aggression for the purpose of pleasure (as the sociologist Anthony Giddens notes). In recent years these marginal practices have moved into the mainstream. A growing number of citizens in the early twenty-first century—gay and straight, male and female, left and right, urban and suburban—get their sexual kicks from giving and taking orders. There are far too many of them to fit a minority psychological profile.

The social critic Camille Paglia sees this rise in domination and submission as a collective fantasy that tweaks the rough spots of our egalitarian culture. It seems to me that rituals of domination and submission are a subversive way to put one over on a society that glorifies control, belittles dependency, and demands equality. In cultures where these values are at a premium—America, for example—we find more and more people seeking to give up control, revel in dependency, and recognize the very inequities no one wants to talk about. Seen in this light, sex clubs are havens of acceptance for what society rejects. This explicit exchange of power, which transfers freely and consensually from one party to another, is a far cry from the rigid distribution of power that pervades our society. In real life, power is much harder to negotiate, and almost impossible either to acquire or to relinquish. No one wants to give up her piece of the pie.