Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (22 page)

Because the community regulates identity through the SM dualism instead of through gender, the relative prevalence of male topping and female submis- sion is less important than the fact that these identities confer no greater status than their cross-gender counterparts; a man who tops is no more a top than a woman who tops.
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Additionally, the conceptualization of SM as a “journey” reflects and contributes to a fluidity in both SM and gender identities, and therefore to challenges to gender as an organizing category of social life.

SM provides a space for constructions and constitutions of gendered and (hetero)sexed experience. These joint collaborations in the creation of the illu- sion and experience of powerless and powerful (and thereby of masculine and feminine), symbolize masculinity and femininity to varying degrees, but can involve gender accomplishment as either ends
or
means. The plethora of moti-

vations and objectives in SM and of gender signification
during
these symbolic performances allow SM play to challenge gender essentialism and problematize the male/female dualism itself. In this way, SM creates a space in which partici- pants achieve a gendered experience; the participants inhabit gender paradoxes of action and service, passivity and strength, powerfulness and powerlessness, but these paradoxes are linked neither to biological sex nor to gender identity. SM is constructed around conquest and defeat, dominance and submission, and power and powerlessness. Power differences (whether lived, performed, or fantasized) lie at the core of all SM interaction. Based on this quest for inegali- tarian experience, SM is not subversive at the level of gender ideology. Gender is about power, and SM builds on, draws from, romanticizes, and eroticizes power differentials between actors. If the feminist agenda depends upon attack- ing inegalitarianism at the sites of all its manifestations, it follows that SM

should be under assault.

If, however, it can be feminist to disentangle inegalitarian dynamics and realities both from sex and from gender at the level of everyday life, then there is room for another feminist perspective on SM. SM explicitly rejects gender as an organizing category of social life, often subverts gender roles as norma- tive and sex-based, and contains the potential for further and more extreme subversion. That is, SM often extricates power differentials from genitals and gendered presentations. Further, for many players, this subversion is a con- scious objective of SM.

Moreover, even entirely apart from SM, (heteronormative) eroticism itself cannot be disengaged from questions of power (MacKinnon 1989; Dworkin 1997; Hardy 2000). The process by which we have come to understand and experi- ence the erotic as such is inseparable from gendered power relations, so that all understandings and experiences of eroticism, are, on the ground, currently gen- dered. A feminist perspective on sexuality, as MacKinnon (1989) argues, is one that recognizes not only this legacy, but also the masculinist imperative of the eroticism of dominance and submission and explores sexuality “as a dimension along which gender pervasively occurs and through which gender is socially con- structed” (1989, 318). The fact that hegemonic, heteronormative (and therefore masculinist) sexuality is a dimension on which gender inequality is played out does not mean that the former causes the latter.

Relatedly, the subversive possibilities of SM exist also in the risks it takes. SM functions as a space in which women engage in risk-taking behaviors on levels, in ways, and for reasons that have conventionally been the domains of men. The ways in which erotic life is gendered is intertwined also with the ways in which

risk is gendered. SM challenges relationships between gender and risk. SM func- tions also as a space in which people enact different and diverging masculinities and femininities. SM play allows for the discursive, physical, and sexual position- ing of selves in different relationships to gender. While gender is too oppressive and constraining a regime to allow for simple adoption of different positions from one interaction to the next, the cultural space of SM can be viewed as a corollary to the theoretical space of R. W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic mas- culinities; SM participants “dodge among multiple meanings according to their interactional needs” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 841).

Not all SM play is subversive of gender roles, and not all SM participants understand it as such. Many do, however, and their intellectual engagements with issues of gender inequality warrant further study. The consideration of intersections of gender performances at the levels of the everyday, symbolic, and meta-performance may offer an answer to Judith Butler’s provocative call: “[W]hat kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire?” (Butler 1990, 177).

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Play

Reconcilable Differences
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Part 3.
Edges

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Edges

Reconcilable Differences
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Chapter 6

Reconcilable Differences

Pain, Eroticism, and Violence

I was sitting cross-legged on a couch in the back of the dungeon, with a paper cup of water in one hand and a rich fistful of Shaun’s long, soft hair in the other. As we chatted casually about the success of the party, I tugged gently on his hair from time to time. His eyes were closed, but he looked at me longingly when I yanked his head backward to expose his throat. He moaned. I ran my hand around the base of his throat. I was wondering how he would respond if I laid my hand across his mouth and nose, when Trey approached.

Trey squeezed onto the couch on the other side of me and put his arm around my shoulders. Shaun opened his eyes and asked Trey how many paid admissions we’d had thus far. I gathered more of his hair into my hand and pulled it, hard, drawing from him a deeply satisfying hiss.

Trey didn’t know about the attendance and changed the subject to something about a moving brownie—a “brownie in motion.” Shaun chuckled. Trey put his hand in my hair. I put my head on his shoulder.

“I have something for you,” he said suddenly. “What?”

“Close your eyes.”

I did. I felt him shift; his arm hung heavier on my shoulders as his other hand dug into his pocket.

Something hard pushed into my breastbone, driving a sharp pain deep into my chest. I gasped and released Shaun’s hair.

“Hey . . .” Shaun objected, to Trey.

I opened my eyes and laid a hand against Shaun’s cheek. He closed his eyes. “You might want to get your face away from her hand,” Trey advised, as he

jammed the whatever-the-fuck-it-was into my temple.

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I can’t find the word for the sound I made when I felt that pain. It was quieter than a scream, louder than a whimper, and much higher-pitched than a moan. The hurt seared me, scared me—it was a panicky, desperate hurt.

“Jesus! What
is
that?” I panted.

He ignored my question. He lifted the thing from my temple. I tried to see it, but his hand closed over it quickly. Holding my head firmly, he pointed it into the empty-seeming space where the jawbone meets the skin of the neck. He pressed it into my flesh.

I couldn’t even understand what was happening. It was so tiny, that one spot, and yet it took over my entire body. All at once, it shot up into my head, seared straight through to my back, and slammed my body into his. My eyes welled with tears.

“I can’t . . . I can’t . . .” I whispered. I closed my eyes. “Sure you can,” Trey replied. “Here, look. It’s called a fid.”

It had a name, the thing. Trey held it up for me to see. It was made out of either wood or a very hard plastic, about six inches long. It was brown and tan, and tapered from one end to the other, but both ends were blunt. It was a sailing tool, he explained, used to untie knots in heavy rope.

I looked at him, incredulous. He grinned. I had never heard of a fid. I had never heard of being poked with anything as part of SM play. He placed the fid on my shirt, directly in the center of my breastbone, and pushed it into me.

I gasped. “But it hurts . . . oh god, it really hurts.”

I was amazed by the pain, by its precision and its intensity. It was so . . . big, somehow. I couldn’t understand it. It went so deep. It was sharp at first, then more diffuse as it seemed to plow through layers and layers of skin and bone—of me. I was amazed that so much feeling could come so quickly and easily.

He placed the fid in the crease above my upper lip. Weird, I thought—what a weird place to put something. But when he pressed it into my face, it was . . . crazy. Everything was crazy. I felt my eyes fluttering, rolling back in to my head, closing, opening, welling up, rolling back. My fingers dug into his leg, clutching him out of some emotionally unintelligible mélange of desperation and frenzy and anger. The cup of water in my hand had long since been crushed and dropped. He used the fid on all sorts of spots—pressure points, he later told me. I heard myself making sounds that I didn’t particularly want to be making . . . my fists were clenched and a couple of times I shivered or shuddered or shook my head suddenly, trying to regain control.

When he stopped, I took a deep, grounding breath. When next I looked at him, he had a knife in his hand. It was different; the handle and the blade were all the same material, the same dimension; the handle simply curved into the blade.

He pulled my hair to stand me up, and guided me against the wall beside the couch. He tilted my head back, exposing my neck to him. He put the blade to my throat, just under my jaw, and murmured something to me about the position of the knife. His playfulness had disappeared completely; things suddenly felt more serious.

His fingers were close to the tip of the knife, nearly touching my skin. He watched the blade as he dragged it slowly along the sides of my neck and across my throat. I began to tremble. He put his arm around my shoulders and held me very firmly. Keeping the point pressed into my neck, he moved the knife under my chin, across my jawbone and down the other side of my neck.