Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (30 page)

who presumably would rather not be part of this edgework situation, nor vic- tory over natural elements (e.g., wind, mountains, water). The transgression of boundaries in SM depends almost entirely on the social interaction. Even in SM that explores the boundary between life and death, the rush, the victory, comes from the interaction itself—it lies in the
doing to,
and being
done to by,
another person. SM is therefore both collaborative and performative in a way that Lyng’s edgework is not.

As a stigmatized social activity and a reputation as a deviant sexuality, SM transgresses normative boundaries of interaction and sexual behavior. Beyond that, because one of the overarching objectives is to stretch limits and to push one another further, either emotionally, physically, or psychologically, it trans- gresses personal—and interpersonal—boundaries. Further still, SM is inher- ently transgressive at the ideological-conceptual level, and normally crosses physical-physiological edges as well.

Viewed this way, edgework retains its fundamental tenets of voluntary risk- taking that negotiates boundaries between chaos and order, control and lack of control, life and death. Moreover, the autonomy of edgework is not necessarily sacrificed in the shift of edgework from a solo endeavor to a joint one, as Sophie illustrates:

I guess it was just having a boundary pushed that was not a fun bound- ary to have pushed, and not having that acknowledged until it was really too late. Like until it had clearly gone very, very badly. Now that’s part of the risk I like to take, because I always say to the person who I’m playing with, “Don’t set my limits for me.” And I want to have the responsibility to say, enough. And so I would say okay, so then the other really bad scene is, when I should’ve said, enough, and didn’t. And so it was too late. And I don’t put the blame on the other person at all.

SM occurs at the point of intersection of physical, fixed boundaries, social, normative boundaries, and boundaries of self and other, in real and consequen- tial ways. For Lyng, edgework involves “an effort to define the performance limits of some form or object, and in the process, explore the line between form and formlessness” (1993, 111). By extending “form” beyond the body to include notions of identity and the self, all SM explores this line, seeking as it does to negotiate the boundaries of violence and nonviolence carnally and symbolically. Order and chaos and form and formlessness, viewed this way, are negotiated also along the lines between self and other.

This extension provides us with a more feminist model for the application of edgework as it moves away from masculinist emphases on physical control, strength, and independence. Secondly, this feminist model allows us to under- stand SM as edgework, which in turn allows us to understand the experience of SM play as voluntary risk-taking and transgressive.

The inclusion of emotional and psychological risks allows for a broader view of edgework and edgeworkers. This expansion is important in understanding the experiences of people who develop and acquire particular skills in order to voluntarily negotiate extreme emotional and psychological boundaries. There are two aspects to feminist edgework in the extension I propose: collaborating the edge, and
voluntarily undertaking
emotional risks as emotional edgework. While these aspects can be explored separately, they intersect in SM in ways that help illustrate how we might expand edgework beyond its current con- straints. The development of a feminist perspective on edgework might proceed from this attention to the ways in which edges are defined and understood by women. It also requires additional steps toward the fuller consideration of the gendered social contexts of risk-taking.

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Edges

Chapter 8

“What It Is That We Do”

Intimate Edgework

There was something going on with him tonight, I thought; the look in his eyes was different somehow. One minute we were smiling and laughing as he cuffed me to the wall, and in the very next he smashed me across the face with his open hand.

He picked up the quirt. I hate the quirt. I really hate it. I used to wonder, when bottoms said they hated a particular toy, why they used it. It didn’t make any sense. If you don’t like it, I thought, don’t use it . . . yet there I was, playing with the quirt again. I swear I hate it. But I love to hate it—it’s becoming symbolic now—of contest, of strength, of antagonism, and of the play relationship itself. It’s not something I can’t take. It doesn’t bother me philosophically and it doesn’t cause me any harm. And still I say that I hate it.

My back was on fire. I was raw and chafed. He must’ve drawn blood—it felt like my back was a complete mess. I spun myself away from him, giving him my side instead of my back. Usually, he stops and waits for my back—waits for me to be ready for the next blow. Tonight it didn’t matter in the least. He wasn’t letting up. He was going to keep swinging, and it would land wherever it landed.

When he put the quirt down, I took a deep breath. My panting subsided a bit. He moved closer to me, took my nipples in his hand, and pinched.
hard
. Obnoxious. His hands were sweaty and cruel. I threw my weight forward, knock- ing him off kilter a bit, but he pinched harder. I spun back around and banged his hands into the wall to which I was chained, trying to force him to let go by hurting his hand.

“Oh . . .
so
close . . . ,” he taunted.

His hand closed around my throat. Something happened to me. I forgot that I had agreed to this. I forgot that this was research. I forgot that he was not going

166

to harm me, that we were in a club filled with people, that I could stop him with a single word.

With my arms chained to the wall and my neck suddenly pinned by his hand, I kicked him, hard, with my right leg. It caught him off-guard and he doubled over, releasing my throat. I stood still, watching him with satisfaction, wondering who the hell he thought he was.

“You kicked me. You fucking kicked me.” Disbelief.

He walked over to me, and stood very close. Quietly, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, he said, “Don’t do that again. You understand?”

We were chest to chest, nose to nose—he’s not that tall and I was in boots with two-inch stack heels. Something about his swagger, his cockiness—the very things that often made our play what it was—tonight made me want to kill him. I swung my elbow around to the side of his face and at the same time drove my knee into his stomach.

He ducked my elbow, but my knee caught him.

“You
bitch.
You want to fight? Is that what you want? You think you can take me. Let’s go. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

In a flash, he uncuffed my wrists.

I threw a punch. He sidestepped me and grabbed my arms. I wrenched one arm free and punched him in the back. He grabbed it again and we wrestled for control of my arms.

He wrapped my arms in his, behind my back. My face pressed against the rough concrete wall, cold against the heat of my skin. He was panting. I bent my knees and spun around, breaking his grasp on my arms and knocking him off balance with my shoulder. He reached for my hair and yanked my head back. He bent me backward, so far that I was almost on my knees.

I was not going to hit my knees.

At 4:00 in the morning, we’d been playing for over two hours. We were exhaust- ed, drenched in sweat, and emotionally spent. The club was, technically, closed.

A puff came over the loudspeaker, then the owner’s voice.

“Adam, stop hurting that poor girl and get the hell out of the club.”

We laughed. For a long moment, we looked at each other. Then Adam walked away from me and plucked my shirt from the table near our play space. He spun around and threw it at me.

The shirt landed on the floor in front of me. Suddenly, I began to cry. I did not sob and I did not reach out to him. I just stood immobile for a moment, tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t quite know why. I found the gesture ugly and hurtful and I felt confused.

I bent to pick up the shirt, but Adam got to it first. Without a word, he picked it up and shook it . . . as if it had even had the chance to get dusty. He held it against his chest and smoothed it. He folded it neatly and handed it to me. Once I pulled it over my head, he put his arms around me and held me close.

SM is paradoxical. It is subversive and conformist, liberating and constrain- ing, performative and authentic, and misogynistic and feminist. Most funda- mentally, though, it is about intimacy. Through play SM participants construct deep feelings of intimate connection. Because it challenges our assumptions about intimacy, its examination contributes to theorizing intimacy on a broad- er level: what we mean when we call an experience intimate, and in what pro- cesses we engage in order to achieve and construct it.

The etiological root of the word “intimacy”—the Latin “intimus,” for inner- most—translated to and for the social world is the revelation of that which is innermost to another actor. Theories regarding intimacy and intimate relation- ships take this perspective as a foundation, but move in vastly different direc- tions, resulting in, as Register and Henley note, “a disturbing divergence in the scope and nature” of its conceptualization (1992, 468).

Most theoretical and empirical treatments of the concept of intimacy occur in the fields of psychology and social psychology. Erik Erikson’s highly influential positing of the intimacy-versus-identity crisis stage frames each as necessary for the other, but sets personal identity in conflict with the achieve- ment of intimacy, the one threatening to overwhelm the other (Erikson 1950, 1968). Intimacy becomes one side of a binary, the diametric opposition to per- sonal identity; too much self-disclosure is unhealthy and undesirable. Since then, much of the work in psychology has proceeded from an assumption of the nature of intimacy as intrinsically a positive, healthy, good feeling.
1

Part of the difficulty in the study of intimacy is the conflation of the emo- tional experience of “intimacy” with the characteristics and benefits of “inti- mate relationships.” Taking an “intimate relationship” as the unit of analysis frames intimacy as a characteristic embedded within or produced by that rela- tionship. Intimacy is also most often understood, within these literatures, as inextricably linked to feelings of closeness and connectedness. The assumption of intimacy as a close, connected, and healthy characteristic of an “intimate relationship” precludes an understanding of intimate experiences that may fall outside the margins of social acceptability and our paradigms of psychological wellness. It means also that intimacy, at the conceptual level, is trapped in a circular logic; intimacy is the closeness that arises in intimate relationships, and

intimate relationships are those that are especially close. Intimacy can instead be viewed as a social situation, with a focus on the moments in, through, and by which people construct intimate experience, regardless of the nature of the relationship, or of the emotional experience of the intimacy.

Sociological approaches to intimacy suffer from the same limiting assump- tions, from Nelson Foote’s consideration of intimacy as “a social-psychological achievement . . . the acme of communication and exposure of self” (1954, 162), to more contemporary work.
2
Particularly in research on exotic dancing and prostitution, the widely used notion of “counterfeit intimacy” or “feigned intimacy”
3
refers to an implicit promise of closeness in a relationship (usually romantic or sexual) that does not exist and will not likely occur. The notion of counterfeit intimacy rests upon the assumption of a “true intimacy,” of a par- ticular kind—good, honest, reciprocal, and, as Katherine Frank observes, not commodified (2007). It also, though, conflates the moment of intimate experi- ence with the nature of the relationship between actors.

Anthony Giddens’s widely reviewed
The Transformation of Intimacy
proceeds from the well-established view of intimacy as self-disclosure. Following a psycho- logical model, Giddens understands intimacy as a healthy and desirable condition of a relationship, fueled by open but bounded communication between partners. Giddens’s work is not an epistemological or phenomenological engagement with the experience of “intimacy,” but a procession from this unquestioned assump- tion toward an exploration of the changes in sexual and family lives in modern society. As Lynn Jamieson points out, Giddens “draws relatively uncritically on therapeutic literature” (Jamieson 1999); the conceptualization of intimacy in Giddens’s treatise is drawn from a 1988 self-help book entitled
Intimacy: Strategies for Successful Relationships
.
4
Thus Giddens explains the importance of boundaries in “intimacy,” in a quote that warrants including at length:

Clear boundaries within a relationship are obviously important for confluent love and the sustaining of intimacy. Intimacy is not being absorbed by the other, but knowing his or her characteristics and mak- ing available one’s own. Opening out to the other, paradoxically, requires personal boundaries, because it is a communicative phenomenon; it also requires sensitivity and tact, because it is not the same as living with no private thoughts at all. The balance of openness, vulnerability and trust developed in a relationship governs whether or not personal boundaries become divisions which obstruct rather than encourage such communi- cations. (Giddens 1992, 94)