Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (29 page)

I called him afterward and said I was really worried through the whole time that you were actually going to lose it. I said I wasn’t sure how much control you had, just because you looked so transported, that I really didn’t know whether you were still in control of yourself. I really wasn’t sure. And he said, “I was in complete control the whole time.” I honestly will never know how true that was [ . . . ] I don’t know if at that point, when he was experiencing it in that way for the first time, he really was completely in control of it or not.

The edges here are boundaries of edgework as it has been most commonly understood. Importantly, though, the edgework of SM is jointly undertaken and jointly accomplished. Participants
need
each other along two distinct axes in SM play. They need each other in order to play on these boundaries, for the

boundaries are social and interpersonal. They also
represent
the boundaries for one another. An edgeplaying top’s line between sane and insane, ethical and unethical, temporary and permanent, in control and loss of control, citizen and criminal,
is
the bottom; the two are inextricable, for in the scene, the bottom exists to constitute this boundary. The bottom’s line—between temporary and permanent, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death,
is
the top.

The chaos and order are not only physical, but social; the boundaries between the body and other (access to the body), violence and nonviolence, and safety and harm are socially defined and regulated limits. Precisely because it involves risks at the hands of others, edgeplay explores the boundary between social regulation and anarchy. In edgeplay, the chaos and order extend beyond the realm of the physical to play on the limits of social experiential meaning.

Not all SM is edgeplay, and thus cannot be understood as “edgework” in the precise way it has most often been understood and applied. If, however, we expand edgework beyond its masculinist underpinnings, then all SM can be usefully understood as edgework.

(Feminist) Edgework

COLLABORATING THE EDGE

In her critique of the edgework model as masculinist, Eleanor Miller asks: “If men have a skill orientation toward the environment, what do women have?” (1991,1532). It is true that narratives of womanhood are not bound in control over the natural world through skill, and true that the edgework model has peered through only this lens. An expansion of edgework beyond its masculin- ist frame requires a challenge to its emphases on particular masculinist skills, as well as on the masculinist values of independence, physical risk, and control and conquest. However, to move away from the utilization of skill sets as a cri- terion for consideration of an activity as edgework in order to include women, as some have attempted (Rajah 2006), is also problematic. Lyng’s edgework, skill-based, intense, and deeply fulfilling,
is
a particular social phenomenon, and one that warrants attention. If we apply “edgework” to all risky behaviors, all emotionally intense situations, or all coping strategies in dangerous situ- ations, we lose the value of edgework, which lies in its framing of voluntary risk-taking endeavors as a leisure activity—that is, for enjoyment. The charge for a feminist edgework is not, as I see it, to recast all of women’s risk-taking behaviors as edgework, nor to find evidence of rushes or empowerment that may come from surviving victimization. A feminist edgework model needs to

move beyond the particular masculinist conceptualizations of “the edge” and of “skill,” while preserving its fundamental core: skill-based, voluntary risk- taking that seeks to (and does) negotiate extreme boundaries between chaos and order.

The case of SM poses these challenges, inspiring a feminist model for the use of edgework as an analytic category. The consideration of what I call “col- laborative edgework” is one step. Activities in which edgeworkers depend on each other for successful boundary negotiation reveal the potential of edgework as an interactive social process. This extension of edgework to
shared transcen- dence
of existential boundaries allows for a broader and less gendered lens on voluntary risk-taking.

A second step is to contextualize risk in the lived experiences and social positions of women. Because risk—actual risk as well as what is experienced as risk—is shaped by broader forces and structures, voluntary risk-taking needs to be understood in relation to what is (and what is not) risky for the particular risk-takers involved.

Finally, understanding of control and conquest can be shifted to the realm of the emotional without sacrificing the theoretical value of the concept of edge- work. “Edgework involves not only activity-specific skills but also a general ability to maintain control
of
a situation that verges on total chaos, a situation most people would regard as entirely uncontrollable. . . . [M]ost edgeworkers regard this skill as essentially cognitive in nature, and refer to it as a special form of ‘mental toughness’” (Lyng 1990, 871, emphasis added).

If “total chaos” includes emotional chaos (for example, overwhelming rage or fear, nervous breakdowns, or other instances of “freaking out”), then con- trol of one’s emotions and of one’s actions is the source of the “order” at the other boundary. Viewed this way—in which “order” is control of the self—the boundary between order and chaos is negotiated in any situation in which most people would regard these feelings as so intense as to be uncontrollable. Edge- work thus becomes applicable to the realm of the emotional and psychological. The inclusion of emotional and psychological risks allows for a broader view of edgework and edgeworkers. This expansion is important not simply for the sake of it, but to understand the experiences of people who develop and acquire particular skills in order to voluntarily negotiate extreme emotional and psy- chological boundaries.

The shift away from a masculinist understanding of what the edge is and what it means would allow for a shift from control
of
a situation to control
in
a situation. In practice, this has at times been the case. Jennifer Lois’s work, for

example, is not about control of mountain rescue situations so much as control of emotions during high-risk, intense crises. If edgework refers to control of situations as well as self-control in situations that verge on “total chaos,” then it moves a step away from its masculinist perspective, as the quest for control moves away from others to self.

Still, a consideration of emotion management in edgework situations is not necessarily a feminist perspective on edgework. By focusing on the emotional dimensions of edgework, Lois brings a feminist component to edgework. The paradigm itself, however, remains masculinist; Lois’s work studies the emo- tional aspects of masculine edgework. A feminist framework needs to be useful for kinds of edgework that are not rooted so entirely in hegemonic masculine ideals. One possibility for a feminist direction for edgework is to look for exam- ples of “emotional edgework”—that is, not emotional aspects of edgework, but edgework that negotiates
emotional edges.

EMOTIONAL EDGEWORK

All SM is about risk. While some kinds of play (such as fire, knife, and breath play) are inherently riskier than others, most SM play is not inherently physi- cally dangerous (e.g., spanking, flogging, and role play). However, SM is often laden with other kinds of risk. In each scene, players take the risks that normally accompany self-disclosure, uncertain how a particular action or response will be received. The Caeden community is small, the national community is well- linked, and community status is meaningful to participants. Further, both tops and bottoms risk the experience of liking or wanting something they feel they should not, each time they play. These recognitions are common in Caeden, and additionally, the recognition process is rarely private.

In SM scenes, trust can be violated at three distinct levels. First, the bot- tom trusts the top technically; she trusts his competence and his ability. The top also trusts in the bottom’s competence; he might trust her, for example, to know not to grab his hand if he is holding a knife. They trust that neither player will make poor judgments that will lead to serious harm, and that neither will “miss” the mark. This is not trust that there will never be accidents, but trust that accidents will not be severely detrimental. The cost of violating trust here is minimal. Accidents are, most often, forgiven; as was the case with Adam’s injurious slap to my ear, the bottom does not generally
feel
deeply violated by minor accidents. The sense of trust that accompanies play in which accidents are likely to be more serious is therefore heightened, as Bobby explained:

Bobby:
I’ve done breath play. That can be very dangerous, but it’s like a swimming pool. You hold your breath and you go underwater. You don’t leave anyone unaccompanied, you don’t leave anyone alone, but the idea of having a plastic bag over the gal’s head and sealed around the neck and she’s starting to, you know, [makes gestures of panic].

Me:
Panic—

Bobby:
Yeah. And unable to—her life is literally in your hands is a big charge. [ . . . ] That’s something, when she’s able to trust me to that level. And a lot of women have.

Bobby here values not only the experience of trustworthiness, but being trusted “to that level”; the greater potential for harm imbues the trust with more meaning.

A second level of implicit trust is that, should accidents occur, the mem- bers involved will take the incident seriously, express remorse, and perhaps be informed by the situation. A member of the community once shared with me a story of an accident in-scene for which s/he was responsible. The speaker appeared devastated by having failed to maintain control and safety of the scene. No one was severely hurt, and the speaker insisted that the details remain private—not because s/he was embarrassed, but to spare the bottom from public knowledge that trust appeared to have been misplaced. In SM play, things sometimes go awry; a mistimed throw of the whip can slash the skin, or an utterance can trigger a difficult emotional or psychological reaction. The trust, at this level, is that if something should happen, the people involved will direct their efforts toward improving the situation. Had Adam laughed when he realized that he had slapped me, or shrugged his shoulders and said that I moved, or told me to shake it off, the consequences of the accident would have been more substantial.

SM players also trust one another’s integrity, or goodwill. They trust that neither will
intentionally
harm the other. In my time in the field, I never wit- nessed, nor even heard of, a violation of trust at this level. There were, however, one or two members of the community that did not play because they were not trusted. Andy, for example, was a visible and involved member of the commu- nity who very rarely played. During the four years that I was in the scene, if newcomers expressed interest in playing with Andy, veteran participants cau- tioned them against it. This was not because Andy had explicitly violated trust in any known scene, but because his broader ineptitude with boundaries cast doubt on his intentions. By most members of the scene, though, he was viewed not as a poor decision-maker, but as lecherous and untrustworthy. I had also

heard, on several occasions, a tale of a participant who had violated a safeword years before I had entered the scene; his play partner was having a severe emo- tional reaction and safeworded, and he continued to hit her. I had already heard of him on discussion lists with an entirely different SM demographic; he had, the story went, been immediately blacklisted at the national level for failing to stop the scene. The cost of violation at this level is high; most obviously, SM play can result in death or severe psycho-emotional trauma induced not only by the physical experience, but from the betrayal of trust itself.

All risk, of course, is not edgework. For example, flogging (limited in SM to muscular areas of the body) is not a particularly dangerous activity in and of itself, but for Faye,
5
flogging scenes were emotionally and psychologically threatening. From a feminist perspective, though, all SM is edgework. Even when SM is not edgeplay, it is “emotional edgework.” It exists on and
for
the edges of what people should and should not feel in given situations. This is dis- tinct from the emotional culture of edgework that Lois explores among rescue workers. This emotional edgework is not about the emotions that come with edgework or their management, but about the risk in emotional experiences. Emotional edgework explores the line between emotional chaos and emotional order, between emotional form and emotional formlessness, between the self and the obliteration of the self. SM, at its most fundamental, and therefore even when it is not edgeplay, is emotional edgework, seeking heights of emo- tional experience. On the symbolic level, SM transgresses normative boundar- ies and separates the acceptable from the unacceptable and the moral from the immoral. The boundary between violence and nonviolence is the bound- ary between chaos and order, transposed onto the social realm. SM negotiates social and cultural boundaries between chaos and order.

SM play is the joint boundary transgression of personal boundaries between people, of hegemonic social and ethical boundaries, and often of physical and physiological boundaries. This distinguishes it from solo boundary play, as well as from risk-taking and from escape from self. It changes the edge experience into a social one, achieved in and constituted through social interaction. It is intrinsically and necessarily
collaborative.
Unlike even partnered edgework, in which people may require each other’s assistance in the safe exploration of the boundary, SM requires another person in order to first
create
the bounded situ- ation and then to transgress it.

The authenticity of the edges in SM is less clear. SM is entirely a consensual

social
interaction; the thrill of the edge is neither the rescue of participants