Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (17 page)

Bottoms also learn criteria for playing safely, such as how to choose a play partner wisely and disclose concerns, issues, and health problems. Like tops, many bottoms wrestle with reconciling their activities with identities and senses of self. Finally, bottoms “learn” how to process, navigate, and negotiate

pain or unpleasant sensation. Unlike the formalized, technical learning process in becoming a top, this is a meaning-making process. Participants who bottom choose from sometimes competing discourses to contextualize, recast, make sense of, and enjoy the pain, anguish, or subservience of bottoming.

Social-Psychological Rewards of SM

EMPOWERMENT

Both topping and bottoming result in feelings of empowerment, though experi- ences of bottoming are less often framed this way. Nonetheless, SM players describe the benefits of play as feelings of trust, efficacy, competence, and strength.

Trust

Trust is a central feature of the experience of SM play as well as of the discourse of the community. Participants talk easily and casually about the importance of trust as a prerequisite for play and as an outcome of play, and of play as an indicator of being trusted. For people who top, being trusted is an important component of the experience. Tops, as the initiators of action during the scene, solicit additional, and greater, trust with each risk they take. At the simplest level, each pushed limit, new toy, or higher level of intensity risks (at least) error and rejection, and each acceptance on the part of the bottom evidences and increases his trust in the top. This sense of feeling trusted is often empowering and meaningful, as both Seth and Greg indicate:

And topping is a lot about—and this is something that we haven’t talked about yet, but trust is a huge factor. On both sides. But topping is—it’s very much an honor for me, that someone has considered me trustwor- thy enough that they’re willing to put their safety into my hands . . . You put yourself in my hands, trusting my skill, and in exchange, so in that way—our agreement is that we’re both doing this for pleasure, and that’s our ultimate goal, and you’re willing to give up a certain amount of safety and control in exchange for my skill and my taking responsibility for that length of time. (Interview transcript, Seth)

I have been given this power over you, by you, to allow me to create this [ . . . ] sensational experience for you. And you’re giving me a great gift, in allowing me to do that, and displaying trust. (Interview transcript, Greg)

The connection between trust and SM play is taken for granted in the Caeden community. Play is experienced
as
trust, and this inextricability is

rarely questioned. Yet the nature of the trust—defined broadly by Guido Möl- lering as “a state of favourable expectations regarding other people’s actions and intentions” (2001, 404)—is paradoxical in SM play. In a social interaction built around narratives of power inequalities, the notion of “favorable expectations” is exceedingly complicated. Yet in a public SM club, under the often watchful eyes of other community members, and with the knowledge of community- wide safewords, SM participants feel safe when they play. The members of this community express that they are trusting play partners with something pro- found, yet they are not able to identify or articulate precisely the currencies in an SM scene. Shortly after I began playing with Adam, for example, I realized that I was consistently and unreflectively writing about trust in my field notes about our scenes. This prompted the following musing in my field journal:

What do I trust him with? I trust him to . . . I don’t even know. I don’t trust him not to hurt me, because he does. I don’t trust him not to harm me, because sometimes it happens . . . it certainly can, theoretically . . . I don’t trust him to do what I want him to do. . . . I don’t trust him to do only what I’m comfortable with. So why does this feel like trust?

If there were a way to play in which I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to

. . . if playing without a safeword really meant what it tries to capture . . . would I do it, I wonder?

I might. I just might. . . . I trust him to get me, I think. I trust him to be in my head. That’s a whole lot of trust, really—and it came so early . . . I’m probably being foolish.

My attempt to explain my trust in Adam was, as Luhmann’s work illustrates, something of an exercise in futility, arguably made more compulsory by my role as a researcher: “Although the one who trusts is never at a loss for reasons and is quite capable of giving an account of why he shows trust in this or that case, the point of such reasons is really to uphold his self-respect and justify him socially. They prevent him from appearing to himself and others as a fool, as an inexperienced man ill-adapted to live, in the event of his trust being abused” (Luhmann 1979, 26).

In Caeden, this inability to account for reasons to trust is accepted; there is little concern about appearing to others, in Luhmann’s terms, as “fools” or as “ill-adapted to live.” Already on the social margins, SM participants immerse themselves rather readily in the interstitial space that is trust. This space, rec- ognized in Simmel’s work (1907), is more recently beginning to be more fully theorized.
7
As Möllering argues, Simmel’s understanding of trust “differs radi-

cally from conventional trust theories in that it embraces fully the reflexive duality of knowledge . . . and, in doing so, is able to capture the leap of trust as such (which is otherwise taken for granted)” (Möllering 2001). The recognition of the centrality of a “further element” in trust experience allows for a focus on the space in an interaction—the moment—in which prediction ends. SM play is an empirical illustration of Simmel’s trust dialectic, constructed around, because of, and to result in feelings of trust. Jack, for example, marveled at the power of this dialectic trust in SM play:

There’s also, especially during, there’s trust. You have to have that. It won’t work otherwise. It won’t work for you otherwise, because you just won’t let yourself go if you don’t trust the person. You can’t believe that you’ll ever come back if you don’t trust them. And I find it weird that both people go, and yet they both come back. And they both trust the other person to bring them back, but it’s really their trust in the person that brings them back, it’s not actually them.

Eric also referred to the power of being trusted to “bring back” the bottom:

You [are] in a trust relationship in which they’re saying, “Do whatever you want to me. I trust you to do what is needed. Not necessarily what is correct, what is needed. It may not be safe, it may not be intelligent, but you’re the person in charge. I trust you to bring me back.

On the most basic level, “bringing the bottom back” means keeping her alive. More commonly, it refers to ensuring that the bottom returns to a functional cognitive state after the scene. The absence of this guarantee creates the space for trust and imbues the space with emotional and psychological meaning for participants.

SM play requires and evidences trust from tops as well as bottoms. A top must trust that a play partner is not omitting relevant information (such as a heart condition or a tendency to hit back), that the bottom will not later claim that the play was nonconsensual, and that the bottom in fact understands and respects the top’s desire to do the things he is preparing to do in scene. Trey, for example, once told me that it took time between when we began talking about playing and when we actually played, because “I had to know
you.
When I felt comfortable with knowing you, I felt comfortable with exposing those elements of
me.
I’m not going to expose those elements of
me
to somebody I don’t trust.”

Simmel’s “further element” is fraught with emotional power; the experi- ence of being trusted, precisely because it is irrational, suggests that the trustee

has transcended the level of the ordinary to become someone special and worthy of such an irrational risk. Among SM participants, this recognition can lead to feelings of self-worth and empowerment. SM participants, through play, immerse themselves in trust relationships. These experiences are often empowering and validating. Other implications of these trust relationships will be more fully explored later.

Efficacy

Feelings of efficacy comprise experiences of both topping and bottoming for many SM participants. Feelings of efficacy during topping come from eliciting change in a person. These changes can be manifested physically, in skin color or texture, tears, screams, or blushes. On a very tactile level, topping can be about impacting the body—watching skin yield to one’s hand, drawing blood, seeing the emergence of a bruise. Change can also manifest emotionally or psychologically, such as when a bottom does something the top believes she would not have otherwise done.

Feelings of efficacy are not merely rewarding, but often an objective of play, especially given the effort topping demands. Longtime community member Eric categorized one scene as his worst because the effort he expended gener- ated no observable change in the bottom:

And I started to flog this person. This person, as it turns out, that I didn’t know, is known as basically “the wall.” In order to make her feel like you hit her, you had to . . . I had to slam her so hard that the next day I could not feel my wrists. That’s how numb I was. And I realized that I was set up, it was basically like these people wanted to see me fail, basically. They were setting me up for a joke. She was perfectly happy to go along with it. But it was the worst scene, because basically I had no reason to play with this person. And then it became a matter of pride, you know, I gotta hit them. And I killed myself doing it—I really didn’t have to, I could’ve said lady, I can’t do this. Let’s put it this way, when I finally slammed her full force, she was like, “Are you doing anything?” She was not being very heavily affected.

Players also feel effectual through submission (as opposed to bottoming in “straight” SM). Submissive-identified bottoms, or bottoms who suddenly “feel submissive” in scene sometimes cast their physical experience as being neces- sary for the top. In this way they view themselves, or their bodies, as effecting a change in the mental or emotional state of the top. At a meeting entitled “The

Mind of a Submissive: Why We Do What We Do,” I was struck by this com- mon theme. The panel members, five in all, couched the appeal of submission in feelings of helpfulness, usefulness, and effectiveness. Georgia said she liked “feeling like you’ve done something right,” and Tony said that he submitted for the same reason he was a paramedic, “to help people.”

During our interview, Sophie described a scene in which she understood her submission as meeting a need for her play partner:

It felt incredibly important to me. This was like probably the first expe- rience that I had that was really about submission. Even though it wasn’t what was asked for or whatever. It felt incredibly important to me to give him the outlet to let go of whatever it was that he needed to let go of. And I suspected that if I didn’t, he just wasn’t going to let go of it. [ . . . ] It felt really important, it felt important. It felt like more than just play—that there was this serious import, and that if I did not let this continue, I’d be all right, but that was very very important for me, to provide this outlet.

Casting a top’s demands as a need, a bottom can view her actions as the only or the best way for the top to meet that need. The bottom eliminates this perceived deficit in the top, thereby drawing feelings of efficacy and empower- ment from her acquiescence.

Another component of power performances outside SM play among people who engage in D/s is often to “serve” people who are not part of their D/s dynamic. Though submissives do not usually respond to
expectations
that they will “serve” others, they frequently offer to run errands, bring refreshments, or be otherwise helpful. Because this occurs only in the presence of the sub’s dominant, it is not an overarching desire to serve all people, but an extension of their D/s dynamic beyond scene space.

Competence

The skills involved in topping are not easily acquired. They require practice, dexterity, and dedication to their improvement. These skills thus provide a backdrop for feelings of technical, psychological, and emotional competence through play. Because SM play is about doing and being asked to do, it provides opportunities to feel competent on all “sides” of the interaction. Most bottoms describe feelings of competence and success through bottoming, particularly through service. Seth, who switches, captures it well from both “sides” of the SM interaction:

Topping feeds very much on my need for competency. We’ve talked about this before. When a scene is going very well, then there’s a great deal of—I would say pride, in that fact, in skill well-executed.

There’s a mode I get into which is very cooperative and service-oriented when I’m subbing. Cooperative and it’s extraordinarily competent and strong. Like, just give me anything that you want me to do, and it will fucking get done.

SM play provides myriad opportunities to feel especially competent. Feelings of competence come not only from the provision of excellent service, but from being able to conduct a stellar sensation scene or a heavy pain scene, from being highly perceptive about one’s partner’s emotional or psychological state during play, or from managing aspects of a partner’s daily life.

Toughness/Strength

Finally, both topping and bottoming provide players with opportunities to revel in their physical strength. Feelings of physical strength come from delivering or withstanding pain or intense sensation. For bottoms, particularly those who engage in straight SM, this can be particularly salient. Some incorporate addi- tional challenges and obstacles to increase this reward. Faye, a retired military officer, said that she prefers to stand free during intense scenes, that she “likes having to control [her]self while giving up control.”

PERSONAL GROWTH

The considerable extent to which a top must trust oneself when s/he plays is less a matter of public discussion than it is part of the experience of topping. With the responsibility of the direction of the scene comes the need to know one’s own impulses and temptations. Ruminations about this can be unsettling, given the kinds of activities involved in SM play. The process of self-analysis, therefore, some- times contributes to a stronger sense of self-reliance and self-confidence for tops.