Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (35 page)

Finally, this was a new and profound bodily experience, and Russ was not only the person with whom I shared it, but also the person at whose hands it occurred. The movements of the body during a flogging (and during most SM play) are not the same as movements during dancing, sports, or sex. The responses that were being produced in and performed by me were unfamiliar. I did not recognize the sounds I made, and I assume that the expressions on my face would not be recognizable to people I know in other social contexts.

Boundaries—both normative and personal—were transgressed with every strike of the flogger, every bodily response, and every glance of the observers. I was aware that I was granting Russ and the onlookers access to normally hid- den (and previously unfamiliar) aspects of my self. Somehow, I felt, they now “knew” me better. From the decision to be there to the actions and my respons- es, these boundary transgressions generated in me a greater sense of intimacy with Russ, and to a lesser extent, with all those who had witnessed it.

These aspects of the SM experience—feelings of gratitude, access, and inti- macy—are not readily apparent in the discourse of the community. Some of these emotional experiences are so taken for granted that it is uninteresting to community members. Some of it is simply unexplored. My willingness to examine the very personal sense that I made of my first SM scene—and how it “made me feel”—generated questions and problems and new perspectives that I was able to explore with the people in Caeden.

Pain and Meaning-Making

When I was starting to think about leaving the field, I reflected regularly on my experiences of play as a whole. In one entry in my field journal, I tried to articulate the physical sensations I had experienced, and my responses to them, while bottoming:

The singletail hurts. It hurts my skin; it slices me and feels hot, sharp, mean, and sadistic. I have to work to take the singletail. It’s somehow personal—much more personal than the flogger—it hurts because this person wants to hurt me. And the fact that this person can hurt me so much from so far away is trippy.

“Hurt” isn’t the right word for the way flogging feels. It knocks me around, it knocks the wind out of me, it makes me feel strong and tough, and it’s an intense sensation, but unless the flogger is particularly stingy, or my back is already abraded, the pain of flogging doesn’t “hurt” me. But it is pain—the too-hot-bath kind of pain. It’s diffuse, it’s everywhere, it makes everything stop because it’s bigger than I am. But it’s a pain that just feels good, that doesn’t need to be recontextualized or worked through or ridden . . . the pain of massaging sore muscles. Just more intense.

Pressure point stuff, on the other hand, hurts a lot. It hurts deep and sharp at the same time . . . it reverberates through my body and makes

me feel overcome, but it’s so focused, so not diffuse. It directs everything to

that spot and the pain of that is dizzying—the physiological reactions hap- pen pretty much immediately for me—I get light-headed and loopy and weak almost instantly. The effects disappear quickly when the sensation stops, though—I think they last longer from sustained pain like a whip- ping. Pressure point play makes me shake my head back and forth quickly, as if I’m trying to shake off the effect of a drug that’s setting in (blades do this to me too)—the sensation is too overwhelming to handle and I don’t quite know how to process it. (This also happens when there are multiple things going on at the same time; multiple pressure points make me feel like I’m going to implode—short-circuit.) More than anything else I’ve done, pressure point stuff seems to be much more about sensation than context—context changes it, helps it, forms it, but it isn’t very relevant.

Pressure points hurt so badly, so easily, and so immediately that I just stop in my tracks.

Punching is also very much about context. I think it’s very personal. It’s not something I can do casually, or at least it feels that way. The pain feels very deep. It’s thuddy like a flogger but much less diffuse, much more focused. It’s just so fucked up. To stand there and let someone punch me,

over and over—without anything but his fists and an intent to hurt me . . . that’s a big experience, and it can be very heady. Each time a punch lands, my entire system is shocked. Somehow, over and over I’m stunned by the punches, the physical connection of fist to muscle, the depth of the (physi- cal) pain—it drives into me, moves my body. On a psychological/emotional level, punching assaults me, like nothing else does. I experience punching

as an attack—as something is he is doing because he wants me, personally, to be hurt, by him and with his hands. The fact that I’m
allowing
this makes it all the more fucked up.

Backhanding is a similar kind of assault-feel for me, but it’s wrapped up in completely different symbolism, and the pain is vastly different. There’s thud with a backhand, but the predominant feeling is knuckle, and the length of the hand across the face . . . so much bone-to-bone; it’s more a crunch than a thud. It’s much more frightening than punching, and it can feel out-of-control in a way that punching doesn’t.

Blades are another story altogether. Playing with blades can run the gamut for me—they can tickle and feel lovely, they can hurt a little, and they can hurt a lot. Even the hurt can be different. It depends a little bit on the technical aspects—where it is, how sharp, how it’s being moved—but it’s also very much intertwined with symbolism and emotional/psychological

responses to symbolic meaning. The pain can be precise and exquisite and intense, but it can also be ticklish and giggly (and yet still be pain); that may be context also. Sometimes blades don’t hurt at all, but they require such focus and restraint that the intensity of the sensation is “mistaken” for pain. When they hurt and when they don’t, and whatever kind of hurt it is, they cause an instant physiological reaction in me, akin to pressure points— my heart rate increases, I pant, I shudder and tremble, all pretty quickly after the blade touches my skin. On the psychological level, blades can fuck me up. They make me feel like I’ll do absolutely anything. They make me high, as instantly as pressure points but with much less pain. They make me feel reckless and risky and on the edge of everything.

My analysis of these notes led me to thoroughly explore the ways others talked about pain and sensation, in my field notes, in interview transcripts, and in con- versations during my fieldwork. At that point, I had not thought very deeply or conceptually about pain itself, beyond noting who claimed to like it and who claimed to be averse to it. My writing about my own pain illustrated that for me there were different kinds of pain, different functions of pain, and different strategies in talking (and not talking) about pain. Because others had not thought about it, they were not likely to proactively list the ways in which they understood pain, or even tell me whether the pain of a singletail was qualitatively different for them than the pain of a blade. The impetus to ask these questions, and many others, came from reflecting on my personal experiences of SM.

Erotic Subjectivity

Despite an increase in the tendency toward reflexivity in ethnographic accounts, subjectivity specifically regarding sexuality in the field remains a challenge for many ethnographers. Don Kulick recounts three reasons that anthropologists have “remained very tight-lipped about their own sexuality” in the field (Kulick 1995, 3). These reasons extend to ethnography outside of the discipline also; sociology shares the inheritance of the positivist-realist tradition in social sci- ence. Until relatively recently, fieldworkers have tended to render themselves invisible in their texts across all realms. Yet even as this has changed in both disciplines, erotic subjectivity of ethnographers has only rarely made appear- ances in their texts.
2

Esther Newton posits that the exploration of sex in the field, for anthropolo- gists, explodes the question of the racialized and sexualized other; Don Kulick

reminds us that “the sexual behavior of the other has been widely understood to be a point of irreconcilable difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Kulick 1995, 4). In my case, that of an American sociologist studying a mostly white, mostly Jewish community in an American city, my erotic position in the field is not so easily understood as intertwined with colonialism of the exoticized Other.

However, in the Caeden SM community, the boundary between myself and “Other”
was,
on one level, the presumably sexual behavior of SM participants. Once I engaged in many of the behaviors, the most obvious boundary between the ethnographic self and Other was much blurrier. On another level, though, it is not the behaviors themselves but the eroticization of those behaviors that constitutes SM participants as Other. Specifically erotic subjectivity, then, would have been problematic for me in this work. The members of this community, defined as Other by the
eroticization
of SM, are widely viewed as unwell, either dangerous or deeply troubled. Treating myself as an erotic subject would have left me with two choices. The confirmation that SM was
not
erotic for me would reinforce an essentialist perspective of eroticism and pathologize SM, position- ing me as the “normal” researcher who engaged in SM but did not find it erotic. The alternative (the confirmation that it
was
erotic for me) would render
me
unwell; in that case, I would become either dangerous or deeply troubled (and likely, I must have been all along), and my work might be received very dif- ferently. Ultimately, then, as sympathetic as I am to the call for ethnographers to deal theoretically and methodologically with their own erotic experience in the field, I have permitted these concerns to constrain both my fieldwork and my representation.

The fact that I experienced the field as much less explicitly a sexed space than I had anticipated seemed initially to simplify matters, but this was not the case. In the first place, I needed to explore why I was finding this, why I had expected otherwise, and exactly what that meant. Second, my obligation to represent the surprising nonsexual richness in SM seemed to me to directly compete with my obligation to represent the eroticism of SM (for most people in the com- munity). Finally—and perhaps most importantly—the extent to which I saw so much more than sex in SM, coupled with my erotic invisibility in the text, might, I feared, threaten my ethnographic authority; would the reader trust me as I tried to explain that I ultimately concluded that SM was not quite “about” sex? And if I were “erotically subjective” in my text—if I did choose one of the two decidedly unfavorable options—wouldn’t that undermine this very point? My aim at present is to share the context in which I came to understand SM, including its relationship to eroticism, the way that I did.

Like all ethnographers, I made decisions in the field that led me to see the community as I did and to represent it as I have. The most significant of these was the choice not to engage in spanking. In Caeden, there is a subset of the SM scene that consists of people who
only
spank. This is not the case for other SM activities; there were no people who engaged in only whipping scenes or blade scenes. Partially for this reason, and partially because the demographic was dif- ferent, people who limited their SM to spanking were generally viewed as a sub- set of the scene, not quite “real” members of the SM community. Very early, I viewed spankers (and there is an organization in the Caeden community devoted entirely to spanking) as categorically distinct from the larger SM scene.

As one activity in an SM repertoire, however, spanking is ubiquitous in Caeden. It is considered the least risky kind of sensation scene, and hence the one that newcomers are most likely to choose. It is also perhaps the least objec- tionable of all SM activities for outsiders. Most members of the community engage in spanking on occasion, even if it is not among their primary or favor- ite activities.

Spanking functioned not only as a scene activity, but as a greeting, as a flirtation and as an explicit invitation. Although consent is generally taken very seriously in the community, it seemed unnecessary with spanking; even among acquaintances, casual swats on the ass were rarely negotiated, and not consid- ered particularly meaningful to anyone, it often seemed, except me. Consent seemed simply to exclude all activities directed toward the ass. In part because of this, and for closely related political and ideological reasons, I was, quite personally, averse to spanking.

My bias was rooted in my inability to separate spanking from two distinct but related sets of symbolic meanings: discipline and punishment, and the related conflation of love and violence in adult-child relationships. Members of the community did not see spanking as intrinsically interwoven with these ideas. I saw spanking as being firmly and necessarily rooted in structural and hierarchical violence and domination. Although I engaged in countless conver- sations with participants and friends about this, I never did arrive at an under- standing of spanking outside of the context of adult-child role play.

Ultimately, though, as (I like to think) any committed ethnographer, I did try spanking (and caning). These were more challenging scenes for me than anything else I did in the field. What I viewed as “corporal play” was easier for me as a top than as a bottom, but I found it troubling regardless. I find it trou- bling to write this even now, much more willing to invite readers to imagine me being punched in the face than being spanked.

Of course, my inclination to bottom the way that I did could have arisen only within and because of the gender regime. I had not entirely abandoned the fierceness of my “third-wave” emotional response to what Naomi Wolf called “victim feminism” (1993). Even in SM (perhaps especially in SM), I felt, women must be viewed as at least
potentially
equal to men. In a consen- sual situation, a man who hits a woman is privileging her status as a decision- maker
over
her status of presumably inferior physical strength; he refuses to protect her. In the narrative that I wrote, and drew on, for, with, and through my fieldwork, my play partner hits me because I want him to, not because I am naughty or incorrigible or evil, and not because I am childlike. In that context, he may be an assailant, but I am not, hierarchically, a victim. All things being equal (though of course they are not), in a consensual situation, a man who hits me
as if I were a man
is engaging, with me, in a subversively feminist act.