Happy Valentines day! You know what I like best about this special holiday, besides hating on it? Getting slapped in the face by women.
Hold on, hold on — let me elaborate. See, I get sexually aroused when a gal hauls off and socks me. I do. I like it when women smack me across the face. (Well, wait, I don’t like it all the time. I don’t walk around hoping random women will backhand me. Women typically wear at least one ring, and who can afford a facial scar In This Economy?)
The soufflé of pain and pleasure that I feel after a woman slaps me melts me to my very core. It all started in 7th grade. I made some crack to Carolyn Hester* which didn’t sit well with her friend Catherine Chang*, who proceeded to wallop me about the head. The shock! Oh it was a brilliant, blinding white light that ate up everything and everyone around me. The pain! It was pure and clear and deliciously hot. Our fellow seventh graders gawked in stunned silence as my face was consumed in flames.
I remember my brain convulsing with information — do I cry or do I laugh? I wanted to do both, but I ended up smiling, and this seemed to piss her off even more. She called me a jerk and, they stormed off while my peers crowded around me guffawing and giggling. In my pre-pubescent pants, things were happening.
How to Be a Hit Man
Being only eleven at the time, the sex part was naturally brutally overtaken by self-disgust, confusion, and fear. What the hell is wrong with me, I wondered? What kind of horrible pervert gets wood from pain? Are the cops going to burst into homeroom and haul me off to pervert camp? Then, of course, guilt swept in and I figured I should probably go ahead and tell my parents the Bar Mitzvah is off as I’m clearly the devil.
For a long, long time, people who engaged in or were aroused by the thought of sadomasochism were considered mentally ill. According to Psychology Today, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the American Psychiatric Association removed BDSM as a category in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Now granted, I’ve never been lashed to a radiator or had hot wax dribbled upon my nips, so I don’t think I qualify as a full-on masochist, but if pain via a wildly mismatched power relationship with another person turns me on, then let’s not split hairs.
For a long time, my enjoyment of being publicly or privately humiliated laid dormant. In college, I could only dream of a girl loosing my spit onto a wall with her hand. But as the years passed and my interactions with women became a just a touch more sophisticated, opportunities to be slapped across the face increased.
The Girl Who Gloved me
Then something magical happened. I met this beautiful lesbian at a press event in Paris, where everyone was high off expensive champagne and the notion that journalism was a viable career path. We were flirting the way you can with other people when there’s no chance of anything actually happening between you, all mind games and teasing. There’s was no fear because there are no expectations — we both liked girls.
I was being particularly flirtatious/obnoxious when she said “If you’re not careful, I’m going to f*** you tonight.” I was all, Whaaaa? Yet she had said it in front of the group, in a mock-serious manner, despite the fact that she prefers women. Regardless, I became hallucinatory with arousal. So I said, without remembering to make the decision, “So slap me.” It was the closest to sex I was going to get.
After a lot of giggling from the group, she asked me if I was serious. I said yes. When it became clear she was going to slap me, she held up her hand and waited. The anticipation was brutal and exquisite. My cheeks twitched. But she was tentative and her slap was too much wrist and too little arm and shoulder. The pain was just a low-flame sizzle, but the electric current warmed everyone at the table. “Hit me again,” I said, and she did — this time, harder.
The Hurt Locker
What follows a good slap to the face is a sort of psychic release. Although, ostensibly, I was getting the opposite of what I supposedly wanted (violence instead of tenderness) there’s something deeply, emotionally satisfying about it. Who, on some level, doesn’t crave punishment? Orgasm is replaced with validation. My insecurities about my abilities to understand and conquer women are realized concretely, and then somehow magically banished. There’s no abstractions, no games, no pointless posturing.
And there’s something beautiful about that millisecond of physical contact. What’s more tender than placing your open palm on another’s cheek? The slap is the super-heated version, made brilliantly brief. For just the most fractional of moments, there was her hand and my face and nothing but fire.
That second time, she’d smiled, raised her hand at shoulder height, palm facing down, and finally let go. Her aim was true. Like the abyss that comes with climax, that moment where everything drains from your consciousness and the only thing that exists is the pleasure (or in this case, the pain) I ceased existing. It felt insanely right. And the amazing thing was instead of the typical desire for retreat I feel after an orgasm, I had a miniature, sublime blackout.
Meanwhile, all around us, one by one, my fellow journalists started smacking each other.
*names changed to protect the violent.
[Redacted] is the resident Single Guy writer for Lemondrop. He’s a lovable pervert who likes peanut butter sandwiches, white wine, and referring to the characters on “True Blood” by their first names, as if they were old friends. In 1999, the Rev.Jerry Falwell said the Antichrist would probably arrive soon in the form of a Jewish guy — just something to think about.
