Pathways of Desire

Years ago, I heard the term "pathways of desire" on a program on NPR. These are the paths that are worn into the landscape by people or animals getting from one point to another, usually in a more direct manner than urban planners had accounted for. Sweet Juniper has a piece on the appearance of these paths after a snow:

This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.

Desire is manifest in space. The more I hike, the more I appreciate these unplanned paths. In Texas, they often led to stunning vistas in the Greenbelt. I am not so sure about Ohio yet, as the snow has mostly prevented a comparison between the planned and the desired. The phrase, "pathways of desire," haunts me.

There has been a lot of debate about whether BDSM is acceptable (see the Slate / Dan Savage / Slate exchange). This appears to me as a normal backlash to the 50 Shades phenomenon. In another post, I went on at length why I think the book itself is deplorable. However, I was fascinated by the brief flash of women, in particular middle-aged mothers from conservative backgrounds, speaking publicly about desire. All too quickly, the focus shifted from the hot sex to the romance of the story, at least in the circle of women I interacted with. The media attention given to women's consumption of porn (no matter how poorly written) was bound to create a backlash, in some outlets more quickly than others. BDSM just happens to be the crystallization of a bunch of different cultural motions at this point in time.

In all the uproar about how BDSM is socially unacceptable or what it means for the state of feminism or even in the defense of kinksters' rights to get it on however they like, people do not speak about desire. It has been my experience that people in the vanilla world think that BDSM is about sex. Period. There must be some perverts out there that get off on dirty, taboo things for sexual pleasure. This misses out on a large part of the appeal of kinky behaviors (the kinky community is a subject for a different post). It is occasionally difficult to tease out other motivations from an outsider's perspective, as much of kink is framed by eroticism.  However, kink, when done well, offers access to a wellspring of deep emotive experiences - terror, ecstasy, humiliation, power, and yes, sometimes sexual pleasure.

When I began to work in the kinky community, I realized that scenes can actually serve as shortcuts to altered states, pathways of desire, if you will. Most of us will never experience the god-complex that comes with being a heart surgeon or a four star general, with lives literally and figuratively in one's hands. But to have a way to taste that power is a powerful lure for many. Ecstasy, however one gets there - drugs, religion, sex, dancing - is difficult for society to manage. I think that part of the mass movement to organize and standardize kink through a proliferation of how-to manuals and national conferences is akin to an urban planner paving a path that countless feet had already eroded.

At the end of the day, a paved path may be easier to trod, but does it get you to where you desire to go?