Clayton Cubitt
Chelsea Summers
/The Value of Shock
Why we need the gasp and shudder of the unfamiliar
By Chelsea G. Summers
A few years ago, I attended a sex blogger soiree. The lone monogamist in a group of X-Game level perverts, I felt overmatched. These were people who treated sex with the kind of hobbyist devotion usually seen in Civil War re-enactors and ham radio enthusiasts. They had special clothing, a schedule of activities, DIY books and DVDs. They went to sex camp.
I don’t give this back-story to cast aspersions; I say it with a sense of marvel. I respect people who devote themselves to the pursuit of arcane bodies of knowledge—I was, after all, an academic. I am just too much of a dilettante with the attention span of a fruit fly to throw myself so whole-heartedly, or whole-genitally, into any activity for any length of time. I also give this back-story to provide context. This group was bonded by a shared experience, and I was an outsider. And this relationship, that of one who knows and one who does not, is necessary for shock, which is what I felt when one of the group told a story that happened at sex camp.
Stolidly middle-aged with a life-long hippie’s mane of gray, the woman told the story of the event she witnessed with neon bright eyes. “First,” she said, “he tied her to a chair, took out a phlebotomist’s kit, tied on a tourniquet and withdrew a pint of blood. Then he untied her, led her to a waiting St. Andrew’s cross, and bound her to it upside down with her legs spread. He took the pint of blood and poured it into her pussy. Then he stuck in a stalk of celery and stirred.” She paused for effect. “He called it a ‘Bloody Mary.’”
Even at a safe and civil remove, even at a site perfumed with Lapsang Souchong, littered with China cups, currant scones and the creamy detritus of a proper British tea, even being merely the recipient of the story and not the witness of it, I felt shock. It was an image that was hard to process. What, exactly, makes this act of exsanguination, inversion, reinsanguination and punning sexy and/or sexual? Why would anyone submit to this daisy chain of unparseable humiliation? What machinations would make a human mind devise it? And where precisely lay the pleasure?
I was not alone at feeling shock and confusion. It was pretty clear that even the sex campers had a hard time wrapping their kinky brains around the Bloody Mary. They could—and did—get the fleshy love of activities that most folk would struggle to understand in the real: caning, bukkake, glory holes, electricity play, suturing, saline engorgement, polyamory so baroque that it makes the Army’s Powerpoint look straightforward, and, of course, gleeful participation in sex camp were activities they could nod and smile at in genial recognition. To find an act that shocks the outsiders is shocking indeed. And it embodies the very somatic nature, as well as the power structure, of the value of shock.
“Shock” is a mercurial word. It’s a noun, it’s a verb. It’s medical jargon, it’s farming parlance. It’s physical, it’s emotional. It’s amazingly plastic as a concept, but perhaps the best evocation of “shock” is that of electricity. Growing up in Vermont, I lived around a lot of electrified fences. Just sticks of wood, small pristinely white porcelain buttons, and two thin wires, electric fences are deceptively innocent. Touch one, though, and that deeply visceral thrill runs up your limb with a fluttering agony. It’s painful, and it is, at the same time, not. That is the embodiment of shock. We fear it, but we can’t exactly say we dislike it. Unless, of course, it is too great; the increment of shock is as important as its existence.
Even the most horrible, shocking news carries with it the searing power of catharsis. Betrayal is painful, but it raises you, the betrayed, in a sudden apotheosis. Betrayed, every sinning human is a saint. But this piece is less an investigation of painful emotional shock—though that can’t ever be discounted, for shock is perhaps the great signifier that our minds and our bodies are a union, indivisible—than it is a look at joyful physical shock. Even if the idea of Bloody Mary horrified me (and, I suspect, the jaded sex campers), I can’t honestly say that it wasn’t also somehow pleasing. For if it weren’t, I’d have forgotten it. I don’t think I ever shall.
Touch one, though, and that deeply visceral thrill runs up your limb with a fluttering agony.
Stolidly middle-aged with a life-long hippie’s mane of gray, the woman told the story of the event she witnessed with neon bright eyes. “First,” she said, “he tied her to a chair, took out a phlebotomist’s kit, tied on a tourniquet and withdrew a pint of blood. Then he untied her, led her to a waiting St. Andrew’s cross, and bound her to it upside down with her legs spread. He took the pint of blood and poured it into her pussy. Then he stuck in a stalk of celery and stirred.” She paused for effect. “He called it a ‘Bloody Mary.’”
Even at a safe and civil remove, even at a site perfumed with Lapsang Souchong, littered with China cups, currant scones and the creamy detritus of a proper British tea, even being merely the recipient of the story and not the witness of it, I felt shock. It was an image that was hard to process. What, exactly, makes this act of exsanguination, inversion, reinsanguination and punning sexy and/or sexual? Why would anyone submit to this daisy chain of unparseable humiliation? What machinations would make a human mind devise it? And where precisely lay the pleasure?
I was not alone at feeling shock and confusion. It was pretty clear that even the sex campers had a hard time wrapping their kinky brains around the Bloody Mary. They could—and did—get the fleshy love of activities that most folk would struggle to understand in the real: caning, bukkake, glory holes, electricity play, suturing, saline engorgement, polyamory so baroque that it makes the Army’s Powerpoint look straightforward, and, of course, gleeful participation in sex camp were activities they could nod and smile at in genial recognition. To find an act that shocks the outsiders is shocking indeed. And it embodies the very somatic nature, as well as the power structure, of the value of shock.
“Shock” is a mercurial word. It’s a noun, it’s a verb. It’s medical jargon, it’s farming parlance. It’s physical, it’s emotional. It’s amazingly plastic as a concept, but perhaps the best evocation of “shock” is that of electricity. Growing up in Vermont, I lived around a lot of electrified fences. Just sticks of wood, small pristinely white porcelain buttons, and two thin wires, electric fences are deceptively innocent. Touch one, though, and that deeply visceral thrill runs up your limb with a fluttering agony. It’s painful, and it is, at the same time, not. That is the embodiment of shock. We fear it, but we can’t exactly say we dislike it. Unless, of course, it is too great; the increment of shock is as important as its existence.
Even the most horrible, shocking news carries with it the searing power of catharsis. Betrayal is painful, but it raises you, the betrayed, in a sudden apotheosis. Betrayed, every sinning human is a saint. But this piece is less an investigation of painful emotional shock—though that can’t ever be discounted, for shock is perhaps the great signifier that our minds and our bodies are a union, indivisible—than it is a look at joyful physical shock. Even if the idea of Bloody Mary horrified me (and, I suspect, the jaded sex campers), I can’t honestly say that it wasn’t also somehow pleasing. For if it weren’t, I’d have forgotten it. I don’t think I ever shall.
Clayton Cubitt
A woman with a history of emotional hyperbole unto Wagnerian proportions, I spent a lot of my youth in the throes of shock value. When I was younger, Philip Roth’s character Monkey from Good-Bye Columbus served as a role model; I went great swaths of my life not owning a single pair of panties. In fact, I eschewed undergarments so thoroughly that I was reprimanded at work more than once. I upskirted before “upskirt” was commonplace.
I fucked more than one pair of brothers not so much because I was interested in fucking them both but because I liked the concept of it being known that I had done so. Ditto the outdoor sex on a tarmac. And the school bus blow-job. I once arrived at the Burlington, Vermont airport in a tight t-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon of a winking kitty and the words “Pussy Scented”; my mother met me, as I knew she would. From 30-37, I worked as a stripper, after all, and not merely because the money was good but also because the stories were awesome. Shock has long been a part of my being.
It’s fair to say that I made a heavy preponderance of my life’s choices predicated on the value of shock. It’s fun to shock. As the shocker, you’re in control. You’re the one with the power, the one telling the story to an enthralled—if horrified—audience. But it’s more than stealing the big-D Dominant spot. It’s that the spot of shocker (three-finger, pink-and-stink variety or not), rather than shockee, is also inescapably erotic. Shock, surprise, horror, titillation, seduction: it’s a fine narrative line from one to the next. If you really want to get laid, you bring your date to a horror movie; our bodies don’t care that the dopamine is produced in response to fear; they only notice that it feels good.
And yet. There is danger in being shocked—see above the parable of the electric fence. Grievous physical harm puts our body into shock, the first step in the long power-down that precedes death. Short of that terminality, once you are shocked, you can never regain that pre-shock innocence. You can never, for example, once you’ve seen “Two Girls, One Cup” ever unsee it. I have never seen it; I won’t. I don’t want the images blazed upon my mind’s Platonic walls. There is too the danger of becoming inured to being shocked—or the danger of becoming seduced by it. No one either wants to live beyond surprise nor to live always in it. Shock is a land best visited on vacation, when you have a choice, when your plane isn’t downed there on that Pacific island by accident.
Which is all to say that shock has inherent, indefinable, and eliding value. At seven, I thought kissing boys was gross. At eleven, I thought kissing sounded tolerable, but was grossed out by the concept of a boy putting his penis in my vagina (we took to the medically correct in my home). At fifteen, I had embraced the idea of sucking cock and made peace with the concept of fucking, but was appalled at the very concept of anal. By the time I was in my twenties, I could accept the notion of anal, but it would be another ten years before I gloried in it. These days, I return to the notion of imagined sex camp antics to discover the shock and the awe. And these are feelings I do not want to lose. I protect the last tatters of my innocence. I like them in their deconstructed, threadbare state. I like to think, to feel that visceral nasty thrill, but not to be it. And those limits—as well as the thrill—may be another imbrication of shock’s promiscuous value. It tells us when too much is enough.
I don’t need to see for myself, but visiting the unfamiliar lands provides that frisson residing between horror and pleasure, between the shudder of delectation and the gasp of disgust (or vice versa). The value in shock is in taking you places you’d never expected to go, even if only in your head.
- 01/04/2011
