Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (23 page)

My trembling intensified. It wasn’t fear, though, exactly; whatever fear there perhaps should have been was lost in the experience of being overwhelmed. I felt the trembling as a result of general sensory and psychological overload, not a fear specifically.

He whispered directly into my ear. It didn’t sound at all like him. When he whispers he is less familiar to me even as it seems more intimate.

“Do you feel how sharp this is?”

The knife was at my throat, just under my jaw; I felt it push into me as I started to nod.

“Yes,” I said—said, breathed, panted, whatever; my lips were dry and I wasn’t really able to speak. But it didn’t occur to me to do anything but answer him.

He slid the point up the left side of my face, stopping at my temple. He pushed it into my head. It scared me. I yanked my head away. He slid the blade upward. I felt it scratch my skin as he dragged it across my forehead. Slowly he brought the blade down to my eye. He rested the point directly at the outside corner of my eye, where the top lash meets the bottom lash.

I looked at him. He looked at me. My heart pounded; he was no longer look- ing at the knife, which was
awfully
close to my eye. I tried not to breathe. He held the blade steady as he looked me in the eyes for what felt like a very, very long time.

I closed my eyes. “Open,” he whispered.

When I did, he dragged the knife just along my lower lid, from the outside corner to the inside corner, tracing the shape with sharp side of the blade. He dragged it down my cheek, and across my mouth. The blade skipped and caught on my dry lips. I tasted blood.

He put the knife into my mouth and, using the very tip, pinned my tongue to the bottom of my mouth. I closed my eyes and tried to keep still.

Moments passed. I don’t know how long we stood like that.

Then, with a sudden, horrifying quickness, he put the knife to my neck and drew it horizontally across my throat.

The lightning-brief terror sent me reeling. My eyes closed, or rolled back, I’m not sure which, but I suddenly didn’t see anything. I slumped onto the floor. The fact that it had been the dull end of the blade did not fully register until a few seconds later.

The Erotic-Violent Dualism

In her deconstruction of the feminist reconceptualization of rape as violence rather than sex, Catharine MacKinnon (1989) argues that this position maintains the ideological and conceptual distinction between sex and violence: “Whatever is sex, cannot be violent; whatever is violent, cannot be sex” (1989, 323). Her underlying objection in this argument, of course, is to the ideological preserva- tion of “the ‘sex is good’ norm,” rather than to the implications of its corollary, “violence is bad.” Regardless of the moral position of her argument, MacKinnon’s point is important; violence and eroticism are positioned in diametric opposi- tion to one another. Where overlap is suspected or identified, it is pathologized, legislated, or reconceptualized as not “really” one or the other. A conscious and deliberate relationship between the erotic and the violent is ethically unaccept- able. In the context of powerful feminist critiques of (hetero)sexuality over the past three decades, the conflation is especially problematic.

While the conceptualization of SM as an alternative kind of sex is reduc- tionist, SM is, for most people in Caeden, sexualized, at least to some extent. SM is almost always presented and performed as having erotic meaning. It is normative to pay attention of one kind or another to the breasts, buttocks, and genitals of bottoms. The bottom is often dressed in conventionally sexually provocative or exhibitionist clothing. Most of my respondents considered SM a part of—or entirely—their “sexual identity,” and themselves members of a sexual community. For some, the recollections of SM scenes serve as masturba- tory fantasy. Though SM interaction is not simply, solely, or always experienced as sexual, it is nonetheless linked to eroticism.

Yet the relationship between sex and SM is problematic for participants. The link is difficult to identify and even more difficult for participants to articulate. The eroticism of SM is not quite the same experience as the eroticism of sexual arousal. Physically and psychologically, SM differs from conventional sexual experience, leaving participants grappling for language:

When I play with somebody, casual play in the club, I’m getting something out of it. I’m getting turned on, but it’s not from a standpoint—like, I know no sex is coming. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s still something—don’t have a word yet. Don’t know what that word would be. But it’s something, it’s a turn on, it’s exciting, it’s fulfilling—it’s definitely fulfilling some need, whatever that need can be defined as. (Interview transcript, Laura)

Kyle explained that for him, SM and sex “are separated, for the most part, and were, early on, separated. For me, when I was doing SM, it was about SM, it was about endorphin rush.” Although he said that they were “separated,” he did not say that SM was one and not the other. When pushed to explain further the relationship, if any, he clarified:

It’d be kind of like reading the fantasy book prior to masturbation. You don’t necessarily get hard at the time because you’re busy concentrating, but certainly when you’re done, it was like, wow.

Even when SM is not understood as sex, it is
sexually relevant
for partici- pants. It matters in and for the sexual understandings and experiences of most (but not all) players. It is also linked to power and to violence. The connection between SM and violence is often deeply problematic for SM participants as much as it is for social (and particularly feminist) theory. In their illumination of the important relationships between heteronormative sexuality and ideolo- gies of domination and violence, feminist analyses
1
have helped to transform an ideological objection to the conflation of the erotic with the violent into a theoretical and conceptual limitation. As Pat Califia pointed out, “Anybody who questioned [the anti-pornography activists’] definition of porn or violence was accused of having bad consciousness about violence against women” (1981, 256–57). Violence, then, could not be problematized; conflated with violent crime, “violence” is intrinsically morally problematic.

SM participants do not generally use “violent” as an adjective to describe their play. Most would, understandably, vociferously object to its categori- zation as violence, as Carol Truscott did: “Consensual sadomasochism has nothing to do with violence. Consensual sadomasochism is about safely enacting sexual fantasies with a consenting partner. Violence is the epitome of nonconsensuality, an act perpetrated by a predator on a victim. Consen- sual sadomasochism neither perpetuates violence nor serves as catharsis of the violent in the human spirit” (Truscott 1991, 30). Yet transgressions of the boundary between eroticism and violence are fundamental in SM play. In

the scene described in the prologue to this chapter, Trey and I were undeni- ably engaging with fictions of violence—of murder in particular. His sudden flip of the blade to draw it quickly across my throat was intended precisely to overwhelm me with the idea that he could, might, or had slit my throat. While this is an extreme illustration of the symbolic violence of SM, most play is practiced around and predicated on either actual or symbolic violence. Beyond the obvious connections between violence and injurious treatment of the body during SM play, the rhetoric of SM in Caeden is the rhetoric of violence. Many SM participants speak with pleasure of “getting beat,” or share that they “bloodied her back” or “pummeled the hell out of him.” Toys are sometimes referred to as “arsenal,” and impact play, including spanking, is often called “beating.” SM play is profoundly and significantly different from nonconsensual interactions in nonconsensual contexts, but it is nonetheless a performance of violence. Whether these dynamics are constructed at the level of the psychological (e.g., service) or the physical (e.g., pain) or some combi- nation, playing with hierarchies, exploitation, and dominance and submission
is
playing, if only symbolically, with violence.

In Caeden, this occurs in a particular context: between men and women, long after the peak of second-wave feminism, and among people for whom feminist arguments are familiar, meaningful, and even resonant. The intersec- tion of eroticism and violence thus poses a challenge for participants them- selves. The language of eroticism is an obstacle to the articulations of their experiences in a meaningful way. If desire feels sexual—that is, it manifests itself in bodily understandings, such that one can “feel” it in one’s body, but the site is not in genitalia (or other “erogenous zones”), what do we call this? What if the desire—desire that is understood in the same essentialist terms as normative eroticism (ache, hunger, want)—is for pain or tears or blood? And what do we make of circumstances in which people orgasm from blows to the back or being kept in a cage? While psychological perspectives, and psy- choanalytical approaches in particular, offer entry points into exploring these conflations, they do so in the wake and shadow of essentialist models that themselves pathologize intersections of eroticism and violence. Further, if we wish to understand these experiences as socially situated and constituted, we need to explore these dynamics as they are produced within and understood through the interaction in which they occur.

The sociological literature of violence presents its own challenges to understanding the intersection of eroticism and violence in a productive way. Randall Collins’s recent powerhouse of a monograph on violence (2009) pro-

vides a complex and nuanced perspective on violence at the microsociologi- cal level, but consensual activities cannot be understood as violence within his framework. For Collins, violence is “a set of pathways around confronta- tional tension and fear.” Injury to the body in the absence of confrontational tension and fear does not qualify as violence. Despite, for example, the “pat- terned violence of slamming body against body under shared control” (2009,

279) in slam-dancing, Collins excludes the mosh pit from consideration as a violent situation. Thus boxing merely “pretends to be a real fight” (2009, 286). These inflictions of physical harm on the body of another become what Collins calls “pseudo-violence,” given that participants and bystanders are not necessarily tense and fearful. Violence, then, cannot be that which is welcomed. This assertion, alongside Elaine Scarry’s premise that pain can be defined as such only if the person in pain feels averse to it (1985), informs us that SM does not hurt, and it is not violent. Pain and violence are, from these perspectives, fundamentally
bad;
Collins writes that there is “no sin- gle remedy for the ills of violence. Different mechanisms of violence need to be headed off in different ways” (2009, 466). Yet if we use a definition of violence framed by assumptions that violence is inherently undesirable, antagonistic, or otherwise bad, we obscure not only the ways in which SM resembles violence, but countless other sites of intersections between violence and everyday life. Alternatively, we reject the premise that these sites of inter- section are sociological phenomena, and (continue to) relegate their study to psychology and theology.

In his analysis of Lonnie Athens’s work (1992) on socialization into violent acts (“violentization”), Ian O’Donnell recognizes the importance of theorizing a multitude of social contexts for violence. Acknowledging that violentization may be a useful way to understand displays of extreme violence for some peo- ple, O’Donnell maintains that for others violent displays result “from obedi- ence to a higher authority, conformity to a social role, adherence to a code of conduct or the search for pleasure. To think of violence as largely the preserve of the violentized is to constrain our search for understanding” (O’Donnell 2003, 766–67).

Hamstrung by the moral heft attached to the word, the sociology of vio- lence remains what Mary Jackman calls a “conceptual quagmire” of issues con- cerning intent, complicity, intention, and context. Recognizing that our (often competing) conceptions of violence are “biased and morally charged,” Jackman proposes an understanding of violence that extricates it from its moral tether: “Actions that inflict, threaten, or cause injury. Actions may be corporal, written

or verbal. Injuries may be corporal, psychological, material, or social” (2002, 405). Violence here is not defined by the intention of the actor, nor by the judg- ment of the recipient. Most importantly, it is not inherently aggressive, hostile, unwanted, or otherwise negative. It does not conflate violence with domination, but recognizes it as a component of social interaction. Under Jackman’s concise and logically inclusive definition, SM can be usefully understood as violence, without its accompanying and limiting moral position.

The adoption of this definition is of course problematic. The violence of SM is constructed, performed, and enacted specifically toward the achievement of objectives that are consciously intertwined with the
symbolism
of violence. To dilute the conceptual potency of violence by including SM in its definition is understandably ideologically troubling, as would be (yet another) contribution to the criminalization of SM. This is not an argument that SM is tantamount to
that which we generally understand
as violence, but a recognition of violence as such despite the contextual complexity. Lacking adequate vocabulary, the foray into SM studies has had little recourse other than to try to render SM more palatable and graspable by pretending that it is merely kinky sex. Jack- man’s crucial recognition that “without the full population of violent actions held coherently in view, we impoverish the quest to understand the place of violence in social life” (2002, 415) urges us to accept an understanding of SM as violence, even as it avoids condemning it for being so. The violence of SM is thus
not
simulated, as Hopkins claims when he maintains that “SM scenes gut the behaviors they simulate of their violent, patriarchal, defining features” (Hopkins 1994). The conflation of violence with badness muddies Hopkins’ argument; while it is true that in SM, “core features of real patri- archal violence, coercive violence, are absent” (Hopkins 1994, 123), and that “what makes events like rape, kidnapping, slavery and bondage evil in the first place is the fact that they cause harm, limit freedom, terrify, scar, destroy and coerce” (Hopkins 1994, 124), none of this makes SM (at least some of it) any less violent. Violence in SM is often authentic as well as symbolic—yet not coercive, antagonistic, or evil.