The Sense of an Ending

I spent just over half an hour yesterday watching a stunningly sexy video on XTube: a beautiful man tied to a door frame, and later to a bed, edged by a friendly, playful expert, babbling all the while, eventually exploding into a prolonged, shattering orgasm, then emerging back into the world of ordinary time and space in the last two minutes of the clip. 

I'm all for voyeurism and exhibitionism. I'm unhappy about the bad rap they often get. Witnessing the helpless, undefended pleasure of another, allowing oneself to be witnessed: if the heart is opened, these are potentially acts of erotic generosity and transpersonal love. As such, they're sacred, not profane. Miraculously, a streaming service for homemade erotica can become a vehicle to invite the viewer into those luminous depths. 

In the clip, we don't see the beginning of this ritual--for in my book, it's clearly a ritual. We do see the ending. Both men move from total immersion in the erotic energy flowing between them, gradually detaching from the experience. They exchange comments that begin to distance them from the experience even as they rehearse it:

"I've never seen you orgasm like that on film," the dom says playfully.  

"Yeah, that was intense." 

"I love what I do." They both laugh.

The dom wipes his hands on a towel, attentively wipes his boy's belly, undoes the restraints on his wrists. Boy lays his freed hands on Dom's forearms. There's more laughter, a little more banter. It's over. Boy rises off the mattress onto his elbows, looks briefly toward the camera, says again, "That was intense," and then, "Good stuff." End of clip.

Why was I so drawn in (aside, duh, from my own arousal)? I loved watching the two of them interact. The video stood out from a gazillion other bondage/masturbation scenes because of what passed between them emotionally. Fetishized body parts and money shots, on their own, don't measure up. (In fact, given the lighting, you only know for sure after the fact that Boy has ejaculated, when Dom holds his semen-slicked hand up to the camera.) I felt invited in as a witness, not only to the man in restraints, but to their shared experience--both the rapport between them throughout the scene, and the beginning of their transition back into Life As We Know It. 

And yet, I found myself in the last seconds longing for something subtly different. I wanted  them to emerge from sacred time and space back into the ordinary while still acknowledging the profundity of what had just happened between them. I wanted them to affirm together that what they'd created was way beyond "good stuff." It was pure sexual alchemy. I wanted an erotic equivalent of "The Mass has ended. Go in peace." 

In a sense, that's exactly what they were doing. But I've experienced my share of powerful sexual encounters that end with one or both (or all) of us feeling nervous that maybe we've been changed a little too much for comfort, so we'd better stuff the magic back in the bottle, label it mere fun, and put it back on the shelf. "Wow, that was hot" can be a way of reassuring ourselves, and stressing to each other, that it was No Big Deal.

How might we transform our erotic experience of ourselves, others, and the world, if our encounters could end with a shared recognition of the depths we've just plumbed? How much of what gets dismissed as "just sex" could we recognize as something deeper, more integrated into the wholeness of our lives, by mindful shared attention to the way we end the encounter?

Judith Butler says in the opening pages of Undoing Gender, "Face it, we're undone by each other. And if we're not, what's the point?" Transformative erotic experiences, like any sacred acts, have to be fenced off from the ordinary, or we might run the danger of never going back to our daily lives. We have to give them the sense of an ending. But an ending, ideally, that still gives us access to their power.