Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (20 page)

We laughed a lot during the scene. I felt very comfortable, as if we’d known each other for years. After we had tried all of his toys, he led me away from the bench and slowly backed me into the wall beside it. He held my arms up over my head and pinned them to the wall—my cue to struggle.

I started tentatively; I was concerned about making it difficult for him. Though we had not defined the terms, somehow it became clear that this was an arm- strength struggle. I was attempting to break out of his hold, and he was attempting to keep me there, but we only used arms. I exerted enough energy to determine that he was much stronger than I, and then stopped.

“Okay, you win,” I laughed.

On the surface, gender does not organize community life or play in Caeden. It is remarkably absent from the discourse of the scene. SM, of course, is deeply gendered, as is community life, but in many ways, the binary between top and bottom replaces the gender dichotomy in the social fabric of the community. Through play, however, gender is performed, mimicked, extended, challenged, and subverted.

Embodiments of Masculinity and Femininity

The term I introduced earlier, “incidental androgyny,” implies that “doing” masculinity and femininity are active processes. The (relative) absence of masculinity and femininity markers is simply that: absence. In this analysis, gender becomes an addition, something above and beyond what exists prior

to gender performance, and this “incidental” androgyny is less an actively constituted gender than the consequences of not “doing” gender quite so fully or quite so well.

On the level of personal appearance, gender is not done as widely, as consis- tently, or as successfully as it is outside the community.
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The social organiza- tion of the Caeden community is not especially intertwined with embodiments of masculinity and femininity. Instead, the community is organized around the related but significantly distinct identities built around topping and bottoming.

The social constructionist argument that gender is something that is “done” in the first place is indebted to the ethnomethodological concept of situated action (Garfinkel 1967) and Goffman’s interactionist approach to gender display (1976, 1977). West and Zimmerman’s subsequent introduction of the concept “doing gender” (1987) shifted the sociological discourse from the occupation of roles to the constitution of social identities.

Incidental androgyny is not a deliberate gender identity project. It is not an attempt to hide biological sex, nor to cross gender boundaries. There are simply fewer explicit attempts to “do” gender; in short, gender is less performed in incidentally androgynous presentations. This naturalness, however, should not be mistaken for the ostensible “naturalness” central to performances of mas- culinity (Connell 1995; Halberstam 1998; Hole 2003). Successful hegemonic performances of masculinity
imitate
the natural; it is part of the performance. When the natural aspect of a masculine performance fails, it is precisely because performative quality feminizes it. Femininity, though, is inauthentic; it is not only perfectly feminine for one to
apply
one’s femininity, but application is a core component of feminity. If gender performance depends on the recognition of others for validation
as
gender performance (the ontological claim at the core of performance theory) then incidental androgyny is the effect produced when femininity is not put on
and
naturalized masculinity is not performed, when the sum total (relative to others) of what is apparent is biological sex.

Topping, Bottoming, and Performance

The conceptual unpacking of gender from sex takes a more radical turn in Judith Butler’s work in which gender is constituted through quotidian perfor- mance, rather than accomplished by preexisting (gendered) subjects (Butler 1990, 1993, 2004). The performances with which Butler is concerned are con- stitutive; they are intended to
become
by way of being, and to
be
by way of repeat performance.

Topping and bottoming differ from gender performance in several impor- tant regards. Because play occupies a liminal space between authenticity and role play, the performances of topping and bottoming are not quite real and not quite mimicry. They are not performative in the quotidian sense of “girling” (Butler 1993), or in the donning of “naturalized” masculinity that Judith Hal- berstam describes (1998). A man whipping a woman during an SM scene is a different kind of masculine performance from a man ordering her dinner and from a man rushing into a burning building. It does not conform to a cultural
expectation
of masculinity, but instead symbolizes a (discursively)
unacceptable
masculinity. In this sense, it is a hyperbolic masculinity that is represented—but not constituted—through topping. It is not a presentation or performance of a masculine persona, but the assumption of a hyper-masculine symbolism. Simi- larly, while bottoming is not a feminine performance in the way that applying lipstick or stripping is, it is symbolically hyper-feminine.

Given the incidentally androgynous presentations common in Caeden, there is a dissonance between what Goffman considers aspects of personal setting in much of SM play in Caeden. Presentations of selves, Goffman suggests, are most effective (and most comfortable) when behaviors (manners) are consis- tent with appearances (1959). In topping and bottoming, then, as symbolically hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine performances, masculine and feminine
manners
are frequently incongruous with androgynous
appearances
. The sym- bolically hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine performance is offset by the extent to which gender is
not
being done on the quotidian level.

These symbolic performances are not accompanied by performance in the way that Butler intends it, and they cannot be understood as realism, pretense, or parody. SM play cannot therefore be easily viewed as either accomplishing or performing gender; it is not, in and of itself, a doing of gender on the quotidian level. Instead it is a symbolic performance of gender extremes, engaged in by people who do not live the gender norms. It synthesizes—and blurs—the levels on which gender is “done”
in each moment of each interaction,
often contra- dictorily. It is a symbolic gender performance over, above, and not necessarily consistent with the repeated quotidian gender performances.

Archetypal Strategies

The symbolism and the practice of topping and bottoming are each intertwined with gender ideology,
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but the conceptual divide between dominants and submissives in the scene is the most significant hermeneutic distinction. SM

identifications have primacy in the community. More than any other identity category, these identifications shape interaction, and despite the close associa- tion between SM identification and gender, the former cannot be understood simply as a displacement of the latter.

Community members distinguish between SM activities in which they may engage and the particular identities they choose to adopt or construct. Gender shapes and constrains these choices in important ways. A self-identified male top who sometimes bottoms, for example, is more likely to claim identity as a top than as a switch. A woman with the same inclinations is likelier in Caeden to consider herself a switch. Even within the complex and gendered identity choices made by the members of this community, SM play itself reveals inter- esting relationships between gender and play.

The strategies in SM play are informed by several gendered archetypes, which illuminate the ways in which gender operates and is negotiated in this pansex- ual SM community. I frame these archetypes in terms of their use during play, rather than as kinds of players. Most play incorporates at least some aspects of more than one type. It is important to note that topping and bottoming are
not
understood this way in Caeden (or in any SM community, so far as I am aware); these are my own analytic categories, not actual SM identifications.

BADASS TOPPING

If an image of SM exists in mainstream culture that is not pornonormative, badass topping is likely it. Badass topping involves performances of victimizing and per- sonal desire to inflict pain or suffering. During a scene with Adam (months after the night described in the prologue to this chapter), I realized I wanted another sip of water from the bottle I had just bought as he was cuffing my wrists to chains embedded in the concrete wall behind us. I told him that I wanted the water.

“In a minute,” he said, and finished cuffing my right wrist. Slightly irritated with him—but hardly any more than I usually was—and curious about where he thought he was going with this, I raised my eyebrows. He laughed.

He started to hit me with the quirt, across my breasts and my stomach. He started slowly at first, but ramped it up very quickly. The quirt sliced back and forth across my waist, hitting the same spot repeatedly. It hurt, I was hot, and I was breathing heavily—and he was still not giving me my water.

I suddenly realized what was going on. He wanted me to ask him for the water, after I was in the cuffs. He wanted me to make the point that I couldn’t get it on my own. I laughed.

“Wow—there already?” he asked.

“No. Give me my damned water,” I said.

Laughing with me, he put down the quirt and picked up the whip he’d nick- named “the gray meanie.” Only about eight inches long, it’s very thin and made of a synthetic material, lighter than leather but softer than nylon. It simultane- ously reverberates like a cane—the blow “echoes” through the skin—and slices like a single tail.

He approached me and began whipping my breasts. I writhed and stomped and pulled on the cuffs. After a few minutes, the right cuff started to loosen. I worked it for a while longer, then slipped my hand out and reached for the water, dangling from the other cuff while I did.

Adam got to it first, picked up the bottle and opened the cap. He brought the bottle close to me and tilted it toward my mouth. He looked at me steadily, and threw the water in my face.

Elements of badass topping are found in nearly all topping, for it is most effective at constructing and upholding illusions of power and powerlessness. The more authentic the top’s enjoyment of her or his effect on the bottom appears, the more s/he appropriates this archetype. For this reason, badass top- ping is often closely linked with the willingness to risk taking an action or a course that the bottom may not like.

BENEVOLENT DICTATORSHIP

This strategy involves an exchange of obedience for protectiveness. While the dynamics of obedience and protection appear elsewhere in SM play, these themes occupy a central role here. Topping is understood as simultaneously nurturing and authoritarian. Often the dynamics are not restricted to SM play and are part of a broader D/s relationship:

Jody bragged about having gotten her clit piercing, which somehow marked her as Russ’s, though I don’t quite understand why it wasn’t just a clit piercing. She said that he arranged it and took her for it, and it was something she’d apparently wanted “from” him and he “finally” consent- ed. As she told the story of the trip, she included a long-winded digression about a strange happening in which she was almost hurt through some bizarre circumstance that Russ thwarted.

Russ interrupted, “Don’t I look out for you?” “Yes,” she said.

Russ waited a beat, then repeated, “See, I take care of you.”

Russ’s reminders, to Jody and to others present for the conversation, served as both a declaration and reinforcement of his benevolent dictatorship topping. Highlighting that Jody did not get hurt and did get her clit piercing, Russ is at once protector, hero, and decision-maker.

SERVICE TOPPING

Though it is almost never critically engaged, service topping is the only arche- type that occupies a place in the discourse of the community. It involves either the (arguably courageous) admission of an ultimate desire to please the bottom, or the awareness on the part of the bottom (or sometimes of onlookers) that the top’s actions in scene are being determined by the bottom:
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I knew that we’d have good energy if I took on a more dominant role. It wasn’t so much “well, I’m going to be dominant because it’s going to make her happy.” Now, I do have that thought in my mind; I do want to make her happy. But if I did the scene in a more dominant role, I also knew that her reaction would be all the . . . better. And if her reactions were heightened, more vivid, that would make me happier. So it’s a wonderful mutual give and take. (Interview transcript, Lawrence)

Because service topping threatens the fantasy of the top’s absolute power and the bottom’s powerlessness, “service top” is occasionally used as a vaguely pejorative description, by both tops and bottoms. In its purest form, service topping is the antithesis of badass topping, which is borne out in the discourses about topping and in performances of power outside of play.

MARTYRDOM

The relinquishment of accountability for one’s “suffering” is a central goal in martyr bottoming. Martyr bottoming therefore involves performances and experiences of helplessness and victimization, but conceptualizes this as a sacrifice for the good of another:

And even if I was putting myself in a frightening situation, I wanted to do that for him. That was the first time I had this “I’m doing it for you” period. So through the whole thing, I’m thinking, “Can I say the safe- word now? Maybe now I should safeword. All right, maaaaybe I should be safewording now. Maybe now’s the time I should—Hey, how about that safeword?” But I never said it.

Most accounts of martyr bottoming end without a challenge to the fantasy, leaving undisturbed the conclusion that the bottom “really” did not want to do what she was doing, but was compelled to for the sake of the top. However, Sophie, cognizant of her own martyr script, continued without prompting:

And I will be honest, it wasn’t like this total altruistic experience, because even though I was fearful, (a) the fear was partially a turn-on, and (b) me being this appreciator of sadism, it was also very hot.