Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (12 page)

Russ was, of course, not Heather’s father. In this sense, this particular scene can be understood as role play. Importantly, though, Russ and Heather were not pretending to be father and daughter, but drawing on language and meanings surrounding power, abuse, and incest to form the narrative of their pain play. Nils-Hennes Stear maintains that SM is “relevantly similar to reading a book or watching a film, for example” (Stear 2009, 23). Even as the contexts are (merely)
simulations
of dominance and submission (Hopkins 1994), the pain in their scene was quite real.
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When these kinds of scenes do occur, they occur as sites of spontaneous interaction within a general set of rules. In this regard, they are more akin to improvisational theater than scripted performance. In improv, performers (who refer to themselves as “players”) create, and they often do not know what the scene will involve or where it will “take” them. The success of an improv scene depends in part on the “agreement” of the players, generally and before the scene. This “like-mindedness” refers not to the procession of a particular plot or the development of particular characters, but a willingness to follow one another for the sake of the scene (Seham 2001). SM participants enter into play from a similar perspective; negotiation and consent set the parameters for a scene, and participants regard their interactions within those constraints as spontaneous, pure, and authentic.

Yet the “performances” of SM differ even from improvisational theater in important ways. During an improv scene, actual characters, complete with fictional names, histories, and plotlines, often emerge. Unlike SM, improv play- ers play roles that they develop as such, however spontaneous and fleeting these roles might be.

Further, in improv, these roles exist for the sake of the audience. In SM, in contrast, there is no “audience”; the significance of bystanders or even specta-

tors is not that of the improv audience. For SM participants, there is no “show” for which to prepare on a conscious or discursive level. Nearly all SM scenes begin without onlookers. There are no curtains to raise nor lights to dim. Observers drift from scene to scene, moving through an SM club and sampling the goings-on, rather than witnessing a scene from beginning to end. Often, the most private play spaces in a venue are the most desirable, and at times players even enlist friends to help direct potential onlookers elsewhere.

While the presence of onlookers certainly impacts public play in numerous ways, SM participants are not playing
to
the audience. In fact, participants’ reputations can be harmed by appearing aware of spectators beyond the extent necessary for safety. A top must be vigilant enough that she checks behind her before she throws a whip, but she will be sanctioned for appearing dis- tracted, preoccupied, self-conscious, or otherwise inappropriately concerned with onlookers during a scene. SM is unlike other spontaneous performances such as professional wrestling and improv, in which players generally attempt to affect the audience together. SM participants seek instead to affect
each other
in the presence of onlookers. The goal in SM experience is a successful performance not for the sake of the audience, but for the sake of the players. For Stear, the performance metaphor of SM breaks down for this reason. The emotional engagement of SM participants, he argues, is akin to that of the audience: “an audience member’s game of make-believe is dependent on her or his psychological states, just as a role-playing sadomasochist’s game is” (Stear 2009, 29).

Some people do adopt a pseudonym upon entering the Caeden SM scene, to minimize potential damage to their personal and professional reputations. Most of these pseudonyms, however, are simply that: Larry instead of Joseph. Alter egos entrenched in fantasy characters—Dark Lord and Mistress Pandora, for example—are products far more of online chat rooms and email discus- sion lists than of the SM life in Caeden. Moreover, pseudonyms are adopted as an overarching identity in the community; while Joseph might be Larry “in the scene,” he is not Bob in one scene, Jacob when he plays with a different partner, and Thomas on Friday nights. To the extent, then, that pseudonyms reflect and create respite from one’s “other” life, the Caeden community does provide a space for that. However, the “identity” is consistent across all interac- tions in community space. Community space spans dozens of places and times and kinds of events, and for many, community time is all waking hours. These “identities” are therefore the very same “selves” from which SM participants are presumed to be stepping back when they play.

SM and Role Play in the Literature

Early sociological research on SM has helped to shape the perception of SM as role play. In a pioneering study, Weinberg, Williams, and Moser argued that role play is one of five “components” of SM (1984). This work was based on SM as it was practiced in cities on the east and west coasts of the United States between 1976 and 1983. Since then, profound cultural changes, especially regarding gender relations and the advent of the Internet, may have resulted in a different SM, or at least in a different understanding of it. Importantly, the study included members of two particular groups whose SM is not included in the Caeden SM scene: (1) people whose SM activity occurs around economic relationships and (2) leathermen.

Professional dominatrixes (pro-dommes) and their clients, who are by definition engaged in role play, are rarely considered part of the Caeden SM community, though some work suggests this may be different elsewhere (Sisson and Moser 2005). In Caeden, on the whole, pro-dommes do not attend “lay” SM events, clubs, or meetings, and though pro-domme clients occasionally drift through the club or a party, most are not active members in the community. Pro-dommes and their clients are therefore not represented in this book, except in rare cases in which individuals are also members of the larger community.

In Caeden between 2002 and 2006, the pansexual SM scene was separate from the more exclusively gay scene. The two were distinct in several regards, includ- ing SM practices and discourses about play. Weinberg, Williams, and Moser’s work focused on SM as it occurred in gay SM communities. The leathermen in the Weinberg, Williams, and Moser study engaged in behaviors that are con- sidered SM in Caeden (fisting, whipping, scat,
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and beating with chains), but they did not view these activities as SM. It may be that because these activities did not occur alongside fantasies about hierarchical relationships, these men rejected the term “SM” precisely because of the role-play frame, in which SM is understood as a game of pretend.
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SM play does occupy an ambiguous space between role play and reality. On the night of my first foray into the SM club, I walked through the door and into the main section of the Playground. Having never watched an SM scene before, I was not surprised to see a woman sitting on top of a long table (which I later realized was a rack) wearing a nurse’s uniform. I could see only her back, but she wore a nurse’s cap, dress, and white shoes. My assumption was that they were “playing” nurse and patient (or perhaps nurse and doctor). I walked

around the table to watch the scene, and was taken aback to see her quietly nailing a man’s scrotum to a wooden board. The man (her patient, I suppose, if they were indeed role-playing) hissed and screamed. She said nothing, method- ically spreading the skin of his scrotum between her fingers, in order to drive each nail through with one or two quick swings of her hammer.

Costumes in scene are rare in Caeden, and when they are worn they are worn as fetish wear rather than as costumes. Nevertheless, outside of a medical setting, her uniform certainly suggested role play. The bottom, however, was not calling her “Nurse,” and she was not addressing him as a patient. And she was, in fact,
actually
nailing his scrotum to a wooden board.

In one particular kind of SM (known as “D/s,” for Dominance/submission), scene activities approach “role play” more than elsewhere in the SM commu- nity. However, for many of these participants, these practices are manifestations and strategies of the
relationship
the players are attempting to create. They are as likely to be engaging in a similar style of interaction at a coffee shop or a family gathering.

Other participants eschew the symbols of performance and focus on the carnal experience of play. Early in my fieldwork, I attended a singletail dem- onstration by a man well-known in the national SM community for whip- throwing. The presenter, Dean, had much to say on the topic of safewords—the community-wide practice of using code words in order to change the course of a scene without detracting from the various illusions being constructed. My field notes described his perspective:

Dean was [also] against safewords as a rule, insisting that clear commu- nication between people who know each other makes the most sense. His position was that safewords are silly and unsafe—they can be difficult to remember and therefore dangerous for the bottom. An audience member pointed out that people like to play in situations in which no does not mean no, but he either didn’t understand her (she wasn’t very clear) or didn’t want to deal with it. He harped on the idea of saying what you mean to each other—play for him seemed very straightforward and technical—there was no room in his view for struggle or nonconsensual fantasy—and not much room for anything D/s oriented, either.

Though Dean’s “realist” perspective seemed to me to be more extreme than that of some of his audience members, the realist approach is the more com- mon perspective in the scene. For most players, SM is about constructing expe- riences of imbalanced power relationships at least in part through actions on

the body. This is not to say that SM play is identical to the authentic experiences of the narratives with which it engages, but to worry the binary between pre- tense and reality, to which debates about SM still so often resort.

The Sex Problem: Gawkers and Wankers

One night, several months into my fieldwork, I arrived at the club to find it markedly different than usual. After making my way past hordes of relative- ly young, good-looking, well-dressed “gawkers,” I located several disgruntled regulars and asked what was happening. The club, I was told, had just been featured in some “Erotic Guide to (Caeden)” book. The inside word was that the place would be overrun with the “stand and model” crowd for a while.

“See ya!” said Adam, and headed off in search of female college students, a group with which he frequently had success initiating spanking scenes on nights like this. I wandered around trying to ascertain why it was, precisely, that the place suddenly seemed so unfamiliar.

Some of the gawkers were no longer gawking, and instead were draped over one another’s knees. Though spanking scenes are a part of everyday life in Caeden, these were different. They were lighter and punctuated with feigned protests. It seemed, too, that there were generally more woman-woman scenes going on in the club that night than I had seen in total thus far. I stopped to watch a light flogging scene between two young women.

Within moments, James (the owner of the Playground) entered the room, strode purposefully over to a man near me and said loudly, “Hey—knock it off—this is not that kind of place.” I whipped around to see the man yank his hand out of his pants and slink away.
The wankers are here,
I realized.

In the city of Caeden, the wankers (men who attend SM clubs to mastur- bate while watching scenes) most clearly represent the boundary between the SM community and outsiders. Wankers never play, or introduce themselves to people. They do not attend meetings or other social events. They are phantom cultural parasites, drifting in and out of view just long enough to ejaculate in their pants and leave. Wanking had been permitted at a club that had been closed down by the city a few months prior, and since then James had been “battling” them on a regular basis, posting “
no masturbation
” signs around the club and policing the scenes systematically. Because the wankers generally caused resentment and uneasiness, they were bad for business.
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I wandered to the stage, where a man and three naked women were doing something that looked like a flogging version of the seventies dance I knew as

“The Bump.” The women hopped around, breasts bouncing, and took turns wiggling their asses in the direction of the flogger. Several of the regulars at the club looked and shook their heads as they passed. A few rolled their eyes. Suddenly, I realized what the difference was: this was
pornographic
SM, the stuff that sold videos and fueled the fantasies of the hundreds of people who had, apparently, read “The Erotic Guide to (Caeden).”

The perception of SM as alternative sex is woven through the academic literature on SM. Early depictions of what we continue to consider SM fre- quently involved the eroticization of nonconsensual relations. Our contempo- rary understanding of SM is indebted to various works by de Sade (1795, 1797), Sacher von Masoch (1870), and early psychologists and sexologists (Ellis 1927, 1938; Freud 1905; Kraft-Ebbing 1886, 1912).

Later, SM entered both mainstream consciousness and academic literature through the gay and lesbian communities (at a time when homosexuality was also assumed to be unequivocally about sex), further ensconcing SM in dis- courses of sexuality. The view of SM as sexuality persists in contemporary work despite recognition that SM is not always considered sex by participants. This both presents and represents a significant obstacle to understanding play. For Weinberg, Williams, and Moser, another of the five components of SM was “a sexual context.” This was again informed by the inclusion of pro-dommes; the fact that paying customers masturbated at the end of their sessions evidences a sexual context. This distinction, however, might well be among the reasons that these interactions are not considered part of the larger Caeden SM community. Relevantly, much as I am excluding professionals from my analysis, Weinberg, Williams, and Moser drop from consideration lay people who rejected a sexual context for their participation in SM: “Some people engaged in SM-type activi- ties but did not give them sexual meaning and thus were not considered to be ‘into SM’” (1984).