Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (26 page)

The subjective experiences of inflictors of pain—the feelings, motivations, and understandings of people who inflict pain in noncriminal contexts—are similarly absent from the literature. Experiences of infliction might be under- stood through examination of the experiences of, for example, emergency medical professionals who perform excruciating procedures on unanesthetized people and boxers whose objective is to cause pain to the point of unconscious- ness. In the endeavor to make sense of pain, whether as social-psychological experience or an existential reality, if context matters then it is crucial to explore the motivations and experiences of people who cause pain.

This negation of pain does not occur in other narratives of the body; child- birth is romanticized and glorified even as its pain is recognized as such. The

pain of childbirth is “worth it,” as is the pain of contact sports when victory is at stake. For SM participants, the pain of SM is “worth it” in submission; submission becomes the higher cause and the pain necessary to withstand. Bot- toms who “like” the pain, however, do not borrow this rationale, and are left with no understanding other than the pathological. This theoretical parallel of the previously unchallenged assumptions about risk in the scholarly literature can be similarly addressed. When risk was intrinsically undesirable, voluntary risk-taking was paradoxical, and the examination of risk among people who seek it leads to a fuller understanding of risk as a social phenomenon. No less socially constructed, the meaning-making of pain can be similarly explored.

Similarly, we are willing to apply the term “violence” to other consensual sit- uations; sports are considered violent when they require aggression and physical contact, so consent is not the issue. The presence of women also fails to explain the disinclination to consider SM violent; women’s contact sports (rugby, for example) are not exempt from the consideration as violence. Generally, though, we understand participants in violent sports to be “only playing.”

SM is different. Jackman attributes some of the acceptance of violence in sports to voluntarism in sport, but this not the only, or perhaps even the most relevant, issue. We can understand that athletes are “only playing” because first, the infliction of pain is not perceived as the goal of the sport, and second, we do not understand the sport to be a sexual experience. Critics of SM have often directed their outrage at the
eroticization
of violence (Nichols et al. 1982; Stoltenberg 1982; Wagner 1982). The implication is that violence on its own is terrible enough, but when it meets the realm of the erotic, it is especially dis- turbing. The spoken prelude to each episode of the long-running crime drama
Law and Order: SVU
captures this perspective: “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous.”

Violence, Eroticism, and the Infliction of Pain

There is therefore a tendency in Caeden for participants to speak of their play in terms that might be plotted on a continuum between eroticism and vio- lence, and the further one moves toward one end, the less likely one is to draw, discursively, on the concept at the other end. Despite the fact that they are nonconformist in many ways and that SM play negotiates multiple boundaries, their play is constructed and processed through and alongside cultural filters that compel conceptual acrobatics in order to make sense of their experiences and their enjoyment of them.

In the first of these conceptual moves, the sublimation of the carnal experience of SM to an ostensibly nobler experience (the quest to gain or relinquish power) legitimizes their satisfaction. Secondly, in the absence of a non-pathologized conceptual frame in which eroticism and violence might be reconciled, SM participants define their satisfaction as one or the other, thereby disavowing the conflation that lies at the core of SM. Far from having successfully merged the concepts of sex and violence, many members of this community seek ways to understand—or at least to render discursively—SM as one or the other; even for people engaging in SM, it simply cannot be both.

Whether SM participants would seek to merge the erotic with the violent at all if a theoretical reconciliation were easily reached is an interesting question, but one that cannot be answered using the current frameworks for violence and eroticism. Moreover, nonconsensual sites of intersection between the two— including sexual assault, rape, serial homicide, and kidnapping—will continue to be relegated to the fringe of sociological understanding if we cannot make sense of these relationships. A broader, cleaner focus on the social criteria for, and construction of, both violence and eroticism is necessary to understand these relationships far beyond consensual sadomasochism.

In the quest to understand social-sexual behavior, conceptualizations of the erotic need to be extricated from their moral underpinnings. We must rec- ognize the similarities between experiences of serial homicide, spousal abuse, sadomasochism, animal cruelty, cosmetic surgery, consensual bloodletting, and spiritual body suspension (hanging by hooks through the skin), in our efforts to make sense of their differences.

Even more importantly, when we confront the discursive inaccessibility of the coalescence of eroticism and violence, the function of this limitation as a mechanism for the social control of sexuality becomes staggeringly clear. As Foucault has illustrated, the linguistic and conceptual limits of discourse are also very much a part of its regulation (1978). The inadequacy of our language in the discussion of experiences of desirable violence anchors SM to its mar- ginal position, both in society at large and in academic work.

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Edges

Chapter 7

Collaborating the Edge

Feminism and Edgework

I paced the room nervously, uncharacteristically tidying things that weren’t mine and looking for people who weren’t there. Perhaps it was the bed; it was strange that I was about to play in a room with a bed. In fact, I realized as I looked around, it seemed likely I was going to play
on
the bed, since there wasn’t much free wall space.

Perhaps it was the fact that we’d just been watching
Law and Order
reruns and eating Chinese takeout. Or maybe it was the fact that I was wearing sweat pants and a T-shirt; it had seemed silly to get dressed in order to hang out in an apartment. He walked into the bedroom. I wondered how scenes even begin in a private space. What are the cues? Where are the cuffs? Who’s going to laugh with us when

funny things happen? Just us?

I followed him into the bedroom. “It’s weird,” I said.

“What is?”

“Being here, playing in private. You don’t think it’s weird?” “It’s different. Where’s the light bulb?”

I’d forgotten he was supposed to replace the light bulb—our payment for bor- rowing the apartment from a friend. I found it on her dresser, handed it to him, and sat on the bed while he climbed up to reach it. When he finished, he stepped down and looked around the room.

“Guess it’s the bed,” he said as he walked into the living room and picked up his toy bag.

While he set up his toys, I sent my “I’m okay” text message. The confirmation— ”Message sent”—flooded me with guilt. Trey knew who to call if something went wrong. And I trusted him enough to be here in the first place.

144

He sat down and guided me backward. I knew at once that I was about a thousand times more comfortable standing against a concrete wall.

He knelt over me, straddling my waist, and laid a thick, rubbery cord across my throat. By itself, it was just uncomfortable. Then he placed his hands at each end of the cord and leaned into it, pinning my throat to the bed.

I began to gasp for air. My hands flew to his hands; I tried to pry his fingers off the cord. He pressed harder into the base of my throat. I was slightly dizzy and although I felt that I couldn’t breathe, I was actually breathing, at least a little bit. Without loosening his hold across my neck, he told me to tap his shoulder if I felt I was going to pass out. I nodded.

For a moment, I marveled at the feeling, wondering how it was that I could be breathing and still losing consciousness. I looked into his eyes; he was watching my expression intently. Weak and lightheaded, it suddenly hit me that he had not told me to tap him
if
I felt I would pass out . . . he had said “
when.
” He wasn’t going to stop until I tapped him.

I also realized that I had not really known him very long . . . that no one else was here . . . that stranger things have happened. For the first time since beginning my research, I felt a quick flash of real and unambivalent panic.

The room began to spin. It grew darker. My hands found his shoulder. I tapped.

He released me instantly.

My heart racing, I lay there and tried to shake it off. I felt strange, slightly removed from myself, heady but vigilant. He straightened up, watching my face, waiting for my breathing to slow. When it did, he lifted his arm to the side as though he were going to slap me. Trey’s slaps were always rigid and forceful. I braced myself for it.

Instead, he bent his arm across his chest and swung out, away from his body. The back of his hand smashed across my face. I cried out, as much from surprise as pain. He hit me again, hard enough to knock my head aside, into the bed. This time I cried out purely in pain. His knuckles bore into skin and bone.

He backhanded me repeatedly, and quickly, switching from one arm to the other. I lifted my arms in a vague motion to stop him. With one arm he brought my hands down over my head. He closed the other hand into a fist. Holding it above my eyes, he studied me for a moment. He brought his fist down slowly and landed it on the side of my face.

He mock-punched me in the face several times, almost lazily, as if he didn’t yet feel like a full punch, but he was thinking about it. I wondered if he was.

He opened his hand and moved it over my nose and mouth. He pinched my nose closed and drove his hand into my face. I tried to inhale. Usually, I can find

a crack between his fingers, or by moving my mouth around, I can shift his hand to find air. This time there was no crack and no shifting. There was no space for breathing. Not even a little.

I looked up at him. His eyes assured me that he knew the difference. I was not entirely sure whether this was better or worse.

“Sssshhhhh,” he said. I hadn’t heard myself until then, but I was making noise—the same stifled, wordless protests one expects to hear when someone’s air supply is cut off—the stuff of crime dramas. About a dozen misogynistic cultural scripts flashed through my mind, vying for my attention.

He released my nose and mouth. Gasping, I sat up. I think I blinked repeatedly, shaking my head from side to side, trying to get my bearings. He stood silently and leaned across the nightstand. When he sat down beside me, he pressed a blade to my cheek.

I didn’t recognize the feeling; it wasn’t a knife. It was paper thin, and not pointy. Trying to see what it was, I tentatively turned my face toward it. I felt its sharpness immediately; it sliced a teeny tiny tear into my flesh. I froze.

He smiled as he dragged it horizontally down my face, scraping my skin. Then I felt its precise sharpness again, at the corner of my mouth . . . then across my lips. It was lightweight—it didn’t have the heft of a knife. Again I tried to see, but his hand blocked my view. I pulled back toward the wall, away from his hand, suddenly desperate to identify the blade. He put his hand in my hair and tugged my head backward. I waited. He brought his other hand into my view and brandished the straight-edged razor blade in front of my eyes. He held it for a moment, between his thumb and forefinger, before bringing it again to my lips. His fingers opened my mouth. He set the blade on my tongue. His hand closed my mouth and clamped my jaw shut.

The credo of the SM community is SSC—Safe, Sane, and Consensual. For participants, SSC is what differentiates SM from other (allegedly less moral and more criminal) activities, such as assault and rape. Though the three con- cepts are subjective, most of the community is in consensus about their use and meaning. The criteria for “sane” are most ambiguous. Generally, “sane” is understood as having full awareness of the risks involved; activities are con- sidered sane when participants are informed of the risks and in full control of their faculties when making the decision to take them.

SSC serves as the basis for internal policing of play. It is also a tool for com- munity outreach. For the community, there is much at stake politically in the adherence to (or abandonment of) SSC. It is used to allay the fears of concerned

family members, to convince hotels and catering halls to allow SM events, and in legal defenses of community members as evidence of their upstanding citi- zenship. On these levels, SSC is a much-needed conceptual tool for achieving understanding and acceptance.

SSC also functions as a social-psychological security blanket, a moral barom- eter against which participants can judge the acceptability, within the commu- nity, of their actions, experiences, and responses. “Safe, sane, and consensual” is what makes SM morally acceptable. The concept thus has come to constitute SM; what is not safe and sane and consensual is not SM, and therefore does not belong in the community.