PTSD, BDSM, and Mac McClelland’s “Violent Sex” (At Gunpoint) Memoir

A journalist named Mac McClelland covers human rights issues and politics for Mother Jones and other publications. I decided she’s extra cool when I saw her phenomenally ballsy, if problematic, piece about wanting to get fucked at gunpoint.

That’s a gross oversimplification of what the article is about; basically, it’s about how her traumatic experiences in Haiti affected not just her sex life, but her psyche overall. A certain flavor of sex was how she helped herself move through that, and — like much first-person journalism — the article gives the almost certainly ultra-oversimplified impression that one “thing” was all it took. Still, the article is thought provoking as hell.

Here’s an excerpt of the passage that, frankly, set me off and had me ready to write an outraged piece about the problems of engaging in fucked-up, highly dysfunctional and highly risky kink (which McClelland certainly did not invent). Here’s the interesting and disturbing opener to the article:

It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That’s what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, “I’m not completely nuuuuts!” Upon further consideration, a more explanative [sic] response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there.

“There” would be Haiti, where I’d just spent two weeks covering the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that shook the country into ugly chaos. There, a local regular at my hotel restaurant who is not accustomed to taking no for an answer had gotten desperate. After proposing for the 87th time that I have intercourse with him, he was grasping for anything that might change my mind, trying eventually, wildly, “We can do this at gunpoint if that sells it for you.” And actually, it did, yeah.

There are a lot of guns in Haiti. Guns on security guards in front of banks and gas stations. Guns on kidnappers who make a living snatching rich people, guns on rich people who are afraid of kidnappers….Guns in the hands of the 12,000 United Nations peacekeepers, who sometimes draw them too quickly in civilians’ faces and always sling them carelessly across their laps in the back of UN trucks, barrels pointed inadvertently at your face while you drive behind them in traffic. On that reporting trip, I’d been fantasizing about precisely what the local guy proposed, my back against a wall or a mattress with a friendly gun to my throat. But the plan was vetoed about as soon as it was hatched, when I asked him if his firearm had a safety and he said no. Like I say: I am not completely nuts.

[Link.]

Okay, so…I’m not sure what I find most disturbing from a gun-nut perspective. It’s weird enough that that was the question she asked of her potential gunfuck/guerrilla psychotherapy partner, but…his answer was a simple “no?” Um….was this a revolver, a zip gun, or some kind of howitzer? “Do you fucking know what the fuck you’re fucking doing when you handle a gun” would, for the record, have been the way I asked that particular question, and generally speaking someone I picked up in a restaurant would not be the person whose “yes” I would be most inclined to trust in matters of any caliber. No matter how kinky you are, gun sex role plays with real guns are not something I’d encourage after going home with a guy you met at the local hash house with a $6.99 half-carafe of chardonnay shimmy-shaking in your tum-tum atop your guacamole burger.

But the article’s about far more than that. With a spoiler alert, I’ll tell you that the kinky sex she ends up having is with an occasional partner (sort of a fuckbuddy) she trusts. This is someone with whom she’d done a bit of such things before, which to my mind makes it utterly within the realm of not-off-your-rocker, no matter how much personal trauma is involved. It’s not death-defying; no lethal weapons come out of their holsters. It’s garden-variety kinky-sex rape-role play; it could even be called, if you wish, a little bit o’ rasslin‘. But anyone who’s done it knows how fucking intense it can be — and again, we’re talking someone with recent PTSD symptoms, here.

Why do I think you care? Not because, as you might expect because I’m writing about it, because the media (in this case McClelland) fucked up in the way it/she wrote about sex. (More on that later, but for now let’s just say I think it’s one of the most interesting first-person articles about sex that I’ve ever had the privilege to read).

I believe that McClelland’s article actually cuts to the core of what’s been bugging the shit out of me about the very idea of kink and even just “good sex” in a world where everything’s as fucked up as it is. What’s more, it illuminates a deep rift that I’ve always felt within the BDSM community — one that caused me to virtually amputate that part of my life, because I got sick of hearing lectures about emotional “issues” and BDSM.

See, I take a particular interest in McClelland’s experiences partially ’cause I’ve been reading and writing about places like Zimbabwe, Egypt, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Saudi Arabia and the zillion other fucked-up cold-and-hot war zones of the world. I’ve got a major soft spot for the Western journalists who forge their ways into those places so I can comfortably educate myself on the sufferings of the world’s less fortunate while slugging back double lattes and listening to Johnny Cash on my iPod. But I’ve also spent years-of-my-life twenty-five through forty-two educating adults about some bona fide outré-as-hell sexual practices. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s kinky sex, and then there’s “processing,” and then there’s therapy. For “serious” BDSM or D/s players, there are hard-and-fast lines between those things. And for “serious” BDSM or D/s players with serious trauma in their background — and there are a lot of us — those boundaries are sometimes inexplicably and unpredictably discovered to mean fuck-all.

In the midst of a completely “average” spanking, a bondage session, or even just a little dirty talk, childhood hurts, sexual trauma, non-consensual experiences and generalized bugfuck-ness can reach critical mass somewhere between the sternum and the huevos (or XX equivalent) and scald both (or all) parties with radioactive steam. From a mellow evening hair-pulling adventure, one can walk away glowing — and not in a good way.

At its core, the technique of the safeword helps to guard against this and a zillion other things that power-exchange role plays can bring up in practitioners — usually, though certainly not always, in the “bottom.” But even an experienced bottom can’t predict every twist and turn of their brain’s stinky back-alleys. Everybody has some trauma in their background, and one doesn’t always know it’s there, or that it will become an issue, until it becomes an issue. What’s more, anybody can decide something isn’t working with them. But even a safeword doesn’t protect against the kind of trauma that a pair of consensual role-player can crowbar out of each others’ psyches when one has recent trauma severe enough to cause PTSD symptoms.

That said, I’m the last person who’s going to claim if you’re suffering from the symptoms of PTSD you should shut down your sex life or your fantasy life, even if your interests are extraordinarily out-of-the-unusual or even risky. There is a sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle attitude I pick up from “safe, sane, consensual and ultra-fucking-healthy” players in the BDSM and D/s communities — the same sort of people who like to trumpet proudly and self-righteously that “What I do in bed as a BDSM player is safer than what most vanilla people do in bed,” because it is so heavily negotiated and so many safety precautions are taken, and the speaker feels that they’re just doing their part to make the world a better place by having safety shears, an EpiPen and a tongue depressor at the foot of the bed in a stylish little leather play bag.

But that doesn’t describe the experience of the vast majority of people who do kinky sex or role play. Far more of us, even those of us who spend our lives reading, writing and thinking about the kinkiest sexual fantasies imaginable and what they “really mean,” live our sex lives in the real world, where emotional risk is part and parcel of living — let alone of jerking off, let alone of having sex with other people.

The sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken rule of thumb in the organized BDSM community in San Francisco, in my admittedly limited experience, has always been that “If your bottom’s doing therapy in the dungeon, run away.” But, in my, again, limited experience, even the ultra-safe, ultra-sane commandos out there don’t follow that rule. Psychodrama and danger are just too hot to the majority of us, and there’s a fairly wide gap between “someone with trauma in their background” and a drama-addicted psycho running his or her way through the community chewing up tops with a chainsaw built of “issues.”

Unfortunately, in the BDSM community, as in so many other places, it’s all too common to do all one’s thinking with an erect flogger, and not realize one’s doing it.

Still, while McClelland might be far from an unassailable advocate for safe, sane and consensual kinky sex, her disclosures hit me hard and emotionally.

Speaking for myself, my professional work is not just impacted by my sexuality and my emotional states, but on a daily basis my productivity is often determined by them. Never having been to a war zone or a major humanitarian crisis, I can only speculate that the same must be true a hundred times over of women who operate in risky environments like McClelland. Maybe that’s why I find it so moving when McClelland writes passages like this:

The shocking lack of sympathy I got from some industry people I talked to about my breakdown was only compounding my concerns that I didn’t deserve to be this distraught. “Editors are going to think I’m a liability now. What kind of fucking pussy cries and pukes about getting almost hurt or having to watch bad things happen to other people?”

“Dude,” she said. “Marines.”

[Link.]

My sex educator self worries a lot about what the “average” reader will take away from this piece, especially because it opens with a passage about a restaurant-pickup offering to fuck the author at gunpoint. (And I can’t stop thinking about that safety question….flintlock musket? Glock? some kinda blunderbuss or something?) That’s not exactly the place I’d advise the “average” reader to start with D/s or BDSM play. Seriously…try a little slap-and-tickle first, a spanking or two, and then move on to the heavy artillery.

But I assert that it takes brass ones the size of cannonballs for a respected and award nominated female journalist to air this kind of stuff in public. The big risk, like it even needs to be said, is that by writing about a certain flavor of “perversion,” she’ll encourage certain douchebags to stop taking her seriously as a journalist. But for what it’s worth, I think anyone who can walk into what amounts to a war zone in Haiti and come out in public as having fantasized about being fucked at gunpoint is pretty bad-ass.

Image: Suki Alice by Kate Bellm for Fleet Ilya Fall 2010 Lookbook, via FashionGoneRogue.com.