Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (28 page)

Once the needles were all in place, the top affixed a birthday-sized candle to a needle on her lower back. He did this with three more candles

across her lower back. I watched in fascination as he lit each candle and then stood back and watched them burn. He didn’t touch her, he didn’t talk; he just stood there and watched silently as the dripping wax inter- mingled with tiny trickles of blood on her skin.

Josephine shook her head in apparent disapproval, but she left them alone. Several people were visibly freaked out, wincing at the needles as he inserted them, or raising eyebrows at the candles. It looked as if this was not something most people there would do. Gladys and Adam each commented to me that they did not see the appeal. Some people would watch for a few minutes, react negatively but politely, and then walk away as if they couldn’t bear to watch more. The top seemed unconcerned with anyone else’s reaction. (Field notes)

Regular members of the Caeden community would not likely have engaged in this scene during a regular night at the club. The use of needles plays with boundaries between temporary and permanent, and the potentiality of blood navigates the space between ethical and unethical. Given this, the sheer quan- tity of needles caused
onlookers
to feel faint, negotiating at least projected boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness. At the most basic level, the general impression was that the club’s owner didn’t like blood play. Still, James—via Josephine—allowed the scene to continue. The players may have discussed the scene with James beforehand, which is the custom when one plans an edgy scene in a public space. The top was clearly skilled, had taken all the necessary safety precautions, and few in the community would disagree that they were playing safely. The owner allowed the scene to continue, though not without a disapproving response, however polite, from the onlookers.

On another night, a group of people engaged in similar play were stopped and asked to leave the club. It was during a citywide fetish weekend (that night in particular, the club attracted people from different Caeden communities and different cities), and a group of three people in their twenties, heavily tattooed and with multiple piercings, began a needle play scene, also focusing on the upper back. They were not wearing gloves or using a drop cloth, and they were playing in a poorly lit, high-traffic area. When James asked them to stop the scene, they refused. He insisted that they leave the club.

In terms of reputation and status in the community, playing—and policing— the edge is a precarious endeavor. The interruption of a scene, at least when undertaken by an experienced member of the community, is not only an insult, but a public declaration of a loss of control, poor decision-making, or both. The

interrupter runs the risk of being labeled “a safety Nazi,” and the interrupted must choose between casting the event as an irrational persecution of edgeplay- ers or accepting that the scene was problematic.

Edgeplayers, then, threaten SSC, and hence the safety of the community on both a political and an emotional level, as well as the harmony of the com- munity. While the community discourse accepts and encourages narratives of edgeplay and the expertise of edgeplayers, participants are often less comfort- able with edgeplay in public spaces. By continually challenging the rules and the role of the community in their enforcement, edgeplayers call into ques- tion issues of social status and authority. These are salient issues in the lives of community members, and closely intertwined with participation in this SM community.

Edgework

Research on risk has conventionally focused on risk taken for a particular, dis- tinct objective—the risk of contracting an STD for the sake of enjoying unpro- tected sex, for example. These considerations—for example, as calculations in decision-making in modern life (Beck 1992; Giddens 1992; Luhmann 1993) are limited to the sphere of risk as a condition, and risk-taking as the decision to enter into that otherwise undesirable condition. This posits risk as a phenom- enon to be explained; as Donnelly notes, “Implicit in this view is the value- laden assumption that no one would take a voluntary risk if he or she were not driven to it by circumstances” (2004, 43). The objectives of social scientists in risk studies are often to understand why, when, and for what purpose actors take risks (Lupton 1999). Only within the past two decades has work on risk begun to consider instances in which risk
is
part of the cognitive and phenom- enological value of particular experience.

In sociology, the perspective on risk as an objective in its own right has emerged in the related studies of sport and deviance. An alternative to the frame of risk as an unfortunate necessity in achieving certain goals, this rec- ognizes risk-taking as an end—though not the only end—unto itself. Stephen Lyng’s seminal work (1990) shifted the conceptualization of risk from means to ends. Borrowing the term “edgework” from journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who used it to describe the quest for extreme experience (most frequently and famously through drug use), Lyng’s model for understanding voluntary risk- taking as a social process in and of itself, hinges on one common aspect of all edgework experiences: “they all involve a clearly observable threat to one’s

physical or mental well-being or one’s sense of an ordered existence” (1990, 857). For Lyng, these boundaries can be constituted by the lines between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sanity and insanity, and order and chaos, of self and environment.

Lyng’s framework has since been widely applied, mainly to extreme sports and criminal behavior.
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As the first explicit treatment of risk-taking as volun- tary, it has come to subsume risk-taking as part of the motive itself.

That Lyng’s edgework is gendered, raced, and classed, broadly speaking, has been noted elsewhere (Miller 1991; Lyng 1991, 2005; Laurendeau 2008). In these critiques, the problem has often been understood as the gendered nature of participation in these risk-taking endeavors. The idea of edgework is gendered because edgework
is
gendered. Attempts to rectify this problem have thus included the consideration of dangerous but feminized activities as edgework (Gailey 2009), focusing on the emotional dimensions of edgework (Lois 2001) and considering the factors that shape gendered participation in edgework (Laurendeau 2007).

The problem with the edgework concept, however, is not that women do not engage in these activities to the same extent as men. While this certainly appears to be true, the more fundamental problem is one of theory and appli- cation. Lyng’s concept theorizes the edge itself from a (hyper-)masculinist per- spective, thereby limiting its usefulness to edges that resonate for masculinity. Laurendeau’s attempt to shift the analytical focus from different (gendered) ways of doing edgework to gender differences in whether or how people engage in edgework suffers from the same problem: one overarching perspective on what edgework looks like, or more specifically, which edges being negotiated “count” as edgework.

Edgework is rooted in a masculinist perspective on three levels. Its framing of the boundaries being negotiated reflects the romanticism of conquest of the natural world, particularly through a reliance on a combination of technology and skill. The edgeworker successfully negotiates the edge through his skill and technological superiority, and in so doing, defeats it.

Secondly, the risk itself in edgework studies is limited to bodily risk; what is most risky is that which threatens physical safety. A broader perspective rec- ognizes that the negotiation of boundaries between being in control and out of control can be a meaningful experience only for those who are accustomed to being in control. Similarly, gambling with one’s physical safety can be edge- work only for people who do not perceive themselves as making that gamble in everyday life, outside their edgeworking. Although Lyng’s original model

incorporates the flexibility for emotional and psychological risk, this has not been the standard application of his framework.

Lastly, in studies of edgework thus far, risk-taking is a solitary endeavor. Though the risks may occur in social groups and have a social component (Lois 2003; Laurendeau 2006), the risks themselves appear to be selected, undertaken, and negotiated independently. The underlying assumption is that edgeworkers come together in order to add a social component to their edgework (Lyng 2005; Ferrell 1996, 2005; Miller 2005).

Lyng’s original writing on edgework explicitly excludes risk-taking in which the risk is perceived as in the control of others; roller-coaster riding, for exam- ple, however thrill-seeking, is not edgework. In this perspective, edgework is about not only conquering, but conquering alone; dependence on the roller- coaster operators, engineers, or maintenance workers hardly affirms the rugged self-reliance intrinsic to Lyng’s edgework. Though interdependence is a likely aspect of what might otherwise be considered edgework (rock-climbing and mountain rescue work come to mind), the literature has not explored joint negotiations of the edge.

Edgework, then, as it was originally conceived of by Lyng and as it is current- ly most commonly used, emerges from and reinforces the romanticization of the man-versus-nature narrative. Although Lyng recognizes the ways in which the engagement of edgework is classed, raced, and gendered, the application of the model thus far is
itself
classed, raced, and gendered. This does not make it less useful in studying some kinds of edgework; not surprisingly, edgeplayers in Caeden are mostly white, middle-class men. Lyng’s model, however, only implicitly assumes these masculinist principles; they are not intrinsic to the edgework concept. The idea of the edge is sufficiently fluid so as to understand differently understood and defined edges.

Edgeplay as (Masculinist) Edgework

Because the boundaries on which edgeplayers play are extreme, and often phys- ical, edgeplay offers the clearest example of edgework in SM. In a voluntary and recreational context, tying plastic bags over a partner’s head engages in the thrill-seeking risk of life and limb that has generally been regarded as edgework. One challenge, though, from the perspective of Lyng’s original paradigm, is to identify which is the edgeworker. Only the bottom is risking her life, and only the top is risking a prison sentence
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(and a life of psychological torment, should the bottom die). Peter Donnelly observes the complexity of the philosophical

question about responsibility in risk-taking and notes the social pressures for women not to risk (2004). Edgeplay in SM complicates this question further; at least according to the way the edgework paradigm has been applied thus far, it is not immediately clear whether the top or the bottom is the edgeworker.

Both participants in an edgeplay scene are playing at the same edge. Nei- ther could be negotiating this boundary (between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, control and loss of control) without the other. Both are, together, exploring the lines between chaos and order, sanity and insanity, and sometimes life and death. The edgework of the top is no less “embodied,” in the sense that Lyng means when he notes that “the emotions and sensations [of edgework] are produced through a process in which the ‘knowings’ and the skills of the body organize action in the absence of the social mind” (2004, 360). Even outside edgeplay, sadistic experience (i.e., the experience of topping) is as embodied as all aspects of SM. The discourse of topping is the language of embodied experience: desires, for example, to hear whimpers and feel the heat of welted skin.

Nonetheless, tops in edgeplay are engaging in threats to their mental well- being and ordered sense of self and environment (and more, if imprisonment can be understood as a threat to one’s physical well-being). On one level, the risks to the top emerge from the fact that he is the one who needs to stay “in control.” As with skydivers and BASE jumpers, this includes technical control; a top cannot afford to forget to secure a knot in a suspension bondage scene, or fumble with one in a breath play scene. The risks of edgeplay inform decision- making and the emotional experiences of risk in the scene. Eric illustrates:

I’m not going to risk my life [ . . . ] What if I do take it that far and some- body dies? I don’t know this person. I mean, this is like, what the fuck am I doing here? At that point, I’m in serious fucking trouble. The element is—you’re playing with somebody, there’s a risk element which is part of that relationship. But at the same time, you’re not stupid.

On another level, SM play depends heavily on the psychological and emo- tional self-control of the top. In intense circumstances involving extreme pain, anguish, and the aspiration to extreme indicators of power, the risk of a top “losing control” is real for participants.

A scene between Sophie and Ari provides a good example. When I watched it, their play was familiar to me. I knew Sophie fairly well, and Ari and I were friends. Still, as I watched the scene he seemed unfamiliar to me, and as it progressed he seemed to grow less and less “recognizable” to me. The scene

was pivotal for Ari; during it he had allowed himself to “go someplace” that was new for him. Sometime later, Sophie described her experience of the scene to me:

He said something that almost sounded—I don’t remember the words now, but if anyone else had heard it, it wouldn’t have sounded like a warn- ing, but he meant it as a warning and I heard it as a warning. And I responded in some way that signified like I get it, and I’ll come along for the ride. So then he stood up, he dragged me across the room, threw me to the ground. So then he restrains me to some piece of apparatus and he’s singletailing my back [ . . . ] Then he turns me around. So several things were going on, one of which is that he’s going to be singletailing me in the front, which I had just said that’s not going to happen. So I’m thinking, okay. He’s never done this to anyone before, and he doesn’t have all that experience with me doing it to my back, and there’s a lot more here, you know, my boobies
and
my face, and do I really feel safe about this, from a purely technical point of view? Then because I was turned around I could also see his face. Which had completely changed. It was the first time I had ever seen him look like that. And to hear him talk about it afterward, to a certain extent, the first time he said he let that [side of him] out. And it really—it was like watching somebody be possessed. It did not look like the same person anymore. And I started thinking to myself, Oh my God. How well do I know this guy, and what is he going through right now, and does he have the capacity to hold it together, or is so . . . altered by whatever is going on in his head that I should stop? And I was absolutely petrified through the entire scene. [ . . . ]