is for Piercing.  For many members of the leather community, S/M is no longer about tying people up or crawling worshipfully on one's belly before figures of masculine authority who force their hungry slaves to chow down on Milkbones or eat Alpo and Gravy Train out of dog dishes.  Rather, it is about inflicting pain to achieve higher levels of consciousness and to induce a state of ecstatic mysticism, which the S/M avant garde uses to escape the onus of Western culture, reenacting ceremonies loosely based on American Indian O-Kee-Pa suspension rituals and ancient Hindu Kavandi piercings.