Still, the S/M or D/S community remains deeply divided along lines of gender and sexual orientation. Each subgroup tends to prefer to devote most of its time and attention to itself, which makes sense, considering that the political act most frequently engaged in by kinky people is the simple matter of negotiating a scene. Most of our energy still goes into helping community members find one another for friendship, romance, and play. Prejudice against “the others” remains fairly strong in each subgroup. And there’s one bunch of people that just about everybody (no matter how pervy) looks at askance—heterosexual male dominants and female submissives.

Just why this is, I am not certain. I suspect it has something to do with public relations. Power-exchange sex, often denigrated as merely a version of rape or some other form of violence against women, is regarded by antiporn feminists as the ultimate act of sexism and misogyny. If the couple in a scene consists of two women, two men, or a dominant woman and a submissive man, attempts to connect what’s happening to rape or woman-hating are patently absurd. But if the fantasy Master is a man and the fantasy slave is a woman, an apologist for the leather community needs to demand much more of the audience he or she is trying to educate. It then becomes necessary to talk in more detail about concepts like consent, mutual pleasure, catharsis, the paradoxical nature of sex and power, the real equality of top and bottom which makes pretended inequality exciting, and a dozen other sophisticated factors.

That’s why it’s important for books like this one to be in print. Imaginative Sex was first published by DAW Books, Inc., in 1974. It did well enough to be kept in bookstores until recently, when (for reasons I am at a loss to explain) it became necessary for Masquerade to make it available once more. It was one of the first above-ground nonfiction books to offer a rationalization for dominant/submissive role-playing and some instructions about how to do it. Norman does not use terminology that is current in today’s leather community (for the very simple reason that the jargon and conventions we take for granted had not been created when he wrote the book). So familiar concepts such as negotiation, safe words, limits, etc., are not to be found in these pages. But it is clear that he is describing activity between consenting adults which is intended to be mutually pleasurable, respectful, loving, and physically and emotionally safe. In Norman’s work, the focus is on the pleasure of the female slave, much more so than on the gratification of her master. Her arousal is the centerpiece of his work: Without the consent implied by her sexual excitement, this whole worldview falls apart.