Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (2 page)

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Surprised, I started to stammer out an answer. “Well . . . sure, I guess . . . I mean, the story goes . . .”

Jacob grinned. “He forgot his safeword.”

I laughed and playfully punched him in the arm. The club was noisy, filled with the sounds of chatter and hitting. Slaps, groans, grunts, and screams punc- tuated the music.

Someone came up behind us, put his hand on the back of my neck, and said hello. I recognized Russ’s voice and turned to greet him. Russ is in his mid-forties, a tall, heavy man with a brown goatee. His dark straight hair hung freely down to his waist tonight. He wore black jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt and black sneakers. He looked good in the black light; he was always one of the few people at the club who was not shrouded in a blanket of glowing white lint.

Russ told me that there had been a newbie meeting tonight and some of the newbies had come to the club for the outing afterward. I gestured toward two people I hadn’t seen before, and he confirmed: Joey, a muscular, young guy with a buzz cut, who looked very much out of place here, and a barely twenty-something woman who was calling herself Goddess Indigo.

I laughed. “Straight out of the chatrooms, huh?”

“Yeah, AOL probably. I tell ya . . .” Russ trailed off, shaking his head in vague irritation.

I excused myself and headed past the soda counter and the row of diner-style booths that lined the opposite wall. In the main room, Schuyler was perched in a bondage chair along the right wall. She sat spread-eagled, one leg on each plank, bunching up the hem of her jeans so that she could shackle her own ankle to one of the cuffs.

“I can reach, I told you!” she laughed at Liam, who was giggling beside her. I stopped and cocked my head at the two of them. Schuyler kept laughing,

and Liam threw his arms around me in a hug and lifted me several inches off of the ground. We chatted for a few minutes, and then I walked up the stairs on the opposite side of the room. The chocolatey waffle smell faded into stale smoke and too much perfume as I stepped onto the balcony. Upstairs, I found myself directly facing the naked buttocks of a skinny elderly man. He was draped over the lap of a very large redheaded woman wearing a corset shirt and jeans. I did not know either of them. I glanced at the black bistro tables scattered about the balcony. No one else was there.

The music changed, to alternative New-Agey rock . . . B-tribe maybe. I wan- dered back downstairs to check out the back room. It smelled of fresh smoke and old sweat. Yellowish light glowed from the naked bulbs that dotted the concrete

walls. As I rounded the corner into the back room, I heard someone say my name. I turned, and saw that it was Ernie. At over six feet tall and relatively fit, with an Irish, blue-collar savvy all over his face, Ernie likely struck an imposing figure outside the club. At the moment, he was locked inside a human-sized birdcage, clad in white cotton briefs, his arms hanging limply at his side. We chatted for a few minutes before I wandered back to the other room.

Trey had arrived, carrying a black leather toy bag that looked big enough to carry a large dog. Nearly forty, Trey is a big guy, tall and broad—an unkempt man with glasses and a frizzy graying ponytail. Trey was talking to Sam, who, at nineteen, was likely the youngest person there. He is slight of build, with milk- white skin and a head full of impossibly curly red hair. I walked over to say hello. After hugs, we moved to a booth and sat beside Jill.

In what seemed like record time, Trey managed to steer the conversation toward the topic of rope. I asked how I might tie my shoelaces so that they won’t come undone every two blocks. Needing no additional inspiration, Trey extracted rope from his bag and asked for my wrists. Not particularly liking the idea of rope around my wrists, but curious about the hoopla about it, I obliged and extended my arms across the table.

He wrapped my wrists, explaining to Jill and Sam what he was doing at each step. As he worked, the impromptu demo grew more involved. He wrapped it underneath my thighs and around my back. Someone asked if I was able to stand. I slid out of the booth, with my arms bound across my torso. At least two people asked whether my nose itched.

I lifted my arms and scratched my suddenly itchy nose. Trey interpreted this as either a challenge or an invitation. He ramped up the bondage. Within about a minute, my arms were immobilized and my long hair was caught in its clip between the rope and my neck. Jill noticed and tried to help, but had trouble with it. Patrice joined the effort, and I shook my hair loose. Almost immediately, Trey grabbed it, very close to my scalp, and tugged me toward the stage. Someone laughed and called, “Have fun!”

Once on the stage, we were even more of a spectacle. I had made no secret of the fact that the particular appeal of bondage still eluded me. The onlookers shared their amusement at my predicament loudly and to raucous laughter. At some point, James, the owner of the club, joined the comedy act; he turned off the lights, announced that the club was closing, and ordered everyone out immediately. More raucous laughter.

About an hour and several positions later, I grew uncomfortable. My joints were vaguely achy. My limbs felt antsy to move. And I was bored. I told Trey I’d

had enough, and he untied me quickly and easily. By then, the club was actually closing and the buzz began about who was going where to eat. Russ walked by and announced that he wasn’t going out, so I hugged him good-bye. He sauntered toward the door. I leaned over to get my bag. When I stood up and turned around, I found myself face-to-chest with Joey from the newbie meeting.

Startled, I took a step back, but the booth was behind me.

Standing much too close to me, Joey said, “I liked your scene. It’s good to meet people who think deviant.”

I blinked at him, at a loss for words. He asked me whether I was leaving.

I heard Russ’s voice before I could answer. Striding toward us, he called, “Hey, Dakota, you taking that ride?”

Puzzled, I glanced at him, and he winked. I nodded and bid Joey good-night. Russ stepped behind me as I walked away from Joey, who never returned to the club.

The National SM Community

Prior to 1971, the SM community (“the scene”) in the United States was under- ground, and mainly gay. Heterosexual people with interest in SM likely either pursued it privately or didn’t pursue it. In 1971, the first SM organization (The Eulenspiegel Society, or TES) in the country was founded in New York City, and the heterosexual SM scene was born. Three years later, the pansexual Society of Janus was founded in San Francisco. The two remain the oldest and largest SM organizations in the United States.

Founded by a heterosexual man, TES paved the way for the public pansexual SM scene in terms of both consciousness and practice. Nonetheless, the public SM scene remained male for over a decade, during which time organizations such as TES
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functioned largely as support groups and sources of SM education.

On the East Coast during the seventies, there were two distinct SM commu- nities—the gay male leather scene and the pansexual scene. The lesbian public SM community first took root on the West Coast when SAMOIS was formed by former Janus members in 1978. New York followed with its own lesbian SM scene in 1981.

By the end of the 1980s, women of all orientations had become more visible in the heterosexual SM scenes on both coasts. Advertisements were appear- ing in local papers with discreet references to SM activities, and women were obtaining information about safe places to pursue SM through phone sex lines and word of mouth. The arrival of the Internet, however, changed things significantly. For the first time, information about SM was accessible even to

people who were reluctant to enter a public space and declare themselves curi- ous. In particular, straight women and college students, underrepresented in earlier incarnations of the leather scene, now had easy access to SM organiza- tions. Across the United States and Europe today, the Internet facilitates the cultivation and perpetuation of SM communities.

Yet to date, very few people have undertaken ethnographic research in real- life pansexual SM communities. Some recent work on SM focuses on self-report psychological profiles (Donnelly and Fraser 1998; Sandnabba, Santtila, and Nordling 1999; Nordling et al. 2006). Other contemporary qualitative studies of SM-related matters draw respondents from websites and chat rooms (Cross and Matheson 2006; Langdridge and Butt 2004; Taylor 1997), in which SM “participants” may never have engaged in SM at all. This book is based on ethnographic research (and I use “ethnographic” in the way that it has histori- cally been used in anthropology, to mean immersive, long-term, multi-sited, full participant observation) in a pansexual SM community.

The Caeden SM Community

The SM participants in this study are not merely a group of individuals who engage in SM activities, or “play.”
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In the loud, large, and bustling northeastern metropolis of Caeden,
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“the scene” is a community unto itself. It is also connected cross-nationally to other SM scenes, reflecting a larger, national sense of commu- nity among SM participants in the United States.

Community life in the Caeden scene revolves around participation in at least one, but usually multiple, sites and venues for SM play, socialization, informa- tion-sharing, and activism. In 2002, there were at least five different SM-related formal organizations, three public play spaces, three private dungeons in which play parties were held, several informal SM-related social organizations, and a vast number of Internet discussion lists. Events included informational lectures, demonstrations and workshops, public play parties, privately hosted play par- ties, social lunches and dinners, organizational planning meetings, and activist fundraising benefits, as well as multi-day events that included most of these things. It is not uncommon for participants to spend nearly all of their free time in the scene in one capacity or another. This level of involvement—and the crash-burn-resurrect cycle that almost necessarily accompanies it—is the norm among core members of the community.

Within the wide array of related activities, though, the community is built around SM play interaction. Many SM participants in Caeden cannot play com-

fortably at home. Most are not homeowners, and many have roommates or live with family members where auditory and visual privacy is difficult to ensure. Many kinds of play require adequate space and equipment. SM clubs provide a safe and private venue for SM play. They also serve as a site of community building and sustenance.

The city of Caeden was home to two SM clubs when I began my fieldwork. One closed just after I entered the scene, leaving the other (The Playground) as the main public play space for the Caeden community. It therefore functioned as one of the primary community spaces. Between 2002 and 2006, three other SM clubs opened in the Caeden area. Despite community support and atten- dance, each closed within a year. The Playground had been in existence for nearly two decades. Its reputation was as a “friendly” place; the owner obeyed local public-sex ordinances and generally ran things smoothly. Women, par- ticularly college-aged women, generally said they were more comfortable at The Playground than any other club that had come and gone in recent years.

The community mainly comprises people who are affiliated with one of two major SM organizations. One of these (Horizons) is larger, older, and less heterosexually oriented than the other (Erotic Power Players, or EPP). Mem- bership in either organization grants insider status to would-be visitors and thus, to an important extent, sets one apart from the unknown and potentially unsafe. This is a particularly central function and objective in Horizons; the organization sponsors regular safety classes and novice meetings, and is gener- ally viewed as the foundation of the scene. There are members of the scene who are unaffiliated, but it is difficult to become a well-established regular without forming at least social connections with members of an organization.

The size of the SM scene in Caeden varies over time and according to the definition of the scene. During my time in the field, I counted nearly two hun- dred people whom I saw frequently and I knew by name, and approximately another fifty whom I never met but recognized. The official membership in Horizons fluctuated between about six hundred and eight hundred people while I was a member, but most of these people were not regularly visible in the public community (which is also wider than Horizons). Among core mem- bers of the Caeden scene—for example, those who hold elected positions in the organizations or who teach SM-related classes—turnover is fairly low; when I last checked (2008), roughly sixty people who regularly participate in local organizations and events had also been involved when I joined in 2002.

Both Horizons and EPP were open to people nationwide; hence participants from other communities were often members. Additionally, because most SM

organizations across the nation recognize other memberships in their benefits (such as discounted admission to events and meetings), a portion of the Hori- zons membership list were out-of-town memberships.

The Caeden SM Scene as Community

The esoteric knowledge of SM, including vocabulary, technique, safety issues, and national SM-community celebrities, connects SM scenes across the coun- try. At the local level, important community ties are rooted in familiarity with Caeden scene, such as the reputations of members of the local scene and local SM history and politics. This shared knowledge overlaps with shared space. Knowledge of local play spaces is intertwined with shared experiences in those spaces, and the memories that emerge from participation in local events over time contributes further to the sense of cohesiveness. A group identity is cre- ated in the Caeden scene that stands apart from, for example, the San Francisco scene or the Denver scene.

Despite the increasing visibility of SM activity in popular culture (Weinberg and Magill 1995; Weiss 2006a), SM participants are unified further by the per- ception of a common enemy, given the marginal status of SM and the reality that public SM remains a mostly underground activity. In 2000, a police raid of a private party in Attleboro, Massachusetts, resulted in arrests on assault charges, despite the fact that no alleged victims pressed charges. In Caeden, under a particularly conservative mayor, The Playground was twice closed by fire marshals claiming violations of paperwork regulations. A major SM orga- nization based in the Washington, D.C., area was forced to cancel its annual national event because the residents of the city—and the tourists who flock to the city—viewed it as an assault on the “family values” that had apparently, prior to the booking of this event, prevailed there. SM participants continue to fear damage to their personal and professional reputations, and the loss of the custody of their children, should their activities become public knowledge (see also Klein and Moser 2006).