What I attempt to express when I have sex with someone is not my self, but love.
Is it possible to express love when you are encumbered from the beginning by a script (S/M, etc.)? specific expectations? specific roles? Or is love essentially free and open?
I find my "self" and other "selves" to be dreary, predictable, petty, self-serving. The self, for me, is a door to step through, not a place to stop.
You call Paul a puritan for imposing some judgemet on a "free" consensual act. But the act you describe doesn't sound very free to me at all. If it is puritannical to delimit sexual expression, is it not equally puritanical to delimit it through technique, through a scenario?
I understand that "kinky" people flatter themselves with the idea that they are radical and free; I understand that the left pats itself on the back for being tolerant of consensual kink. I spent a good dozen years experimenting with sex -- but, paradoxically, I think I was as limited by this practice as the most repressed prude. A difficult paradox to explain, to be sure. What it comes down to is that so long as the mind dictates what the body may or may not do, the body is not free at all and the mind is distinctly not radical.
Joanna