Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (36 page)

My feelings about spanking, then, were inextricable not only from the masculine-feminine binary in the first place, but from the cultural-historical deployment of this conflation as a tool for the social control of women and chil- dren. Nevertheless, my decision impacted my project in several important ways. First, because safe spanking requires much less of a learning curve than other activities, my reluctance to engage in it meant that I could safely play only with people with some experience in the scene. Playing with more experi- enced tops granted me access that I would not otherwise have easily obtained. Through these associations, I gained social status and a greater understanding of the political aspects of the community. More significantly, it opened different avenues in my SM play. Because I played most often with veteran tops, I played along boundaries that I would not have otherwise. Newer tops would not have been inclined to play as close to “the edge” as some of my partners were, and I would not have been as comfortable with risk as I was with experienced play partners. The elimination of spanking from my repertoire seems therefore to have functioned as a shortcut to a wider variety of high-sensation play with more experienced players, which I view as having had a significant impact on

my understanding of SM itself and this community.

For the same reason, the fact that I did not play with spanking also rendered topping even less likely for me. Throughout most of my time in the field, I did not have the skills or experience to offer alternatives to spanking. It was fairly late in my fieldwork before I could even begin to acquire the skill set to top.

Third, my reluctance to spank coded me as less flexible and less easygoing than most people—particularly compared with most people who bottomed.

This continually called my identity as a bottom into question. In turn, it prompted questions for me (and, by extension, for others) about relationships between SM identifications, gender, and power in the community.

Finally, of course, my aversion to spanking precluded me from gaining an understanding of an activity that is popular in the scene; I continue to have difficulty understanding spanking from a perspective other than my own. The subset of people in Caeden who limit their activities to spanking are in many ways excluded from my analysis. This subset appeared to be uncharacteristic of the larger community in three ways: they were disproportionately men, they were older (over sixty-five), and, also in contrast to the larger community, many of them were thin. I do not know whether my analysis in this book resonates for spanking, or whether it will make sense to people whose sole or primary related interest is spanking.

In this light, of course, it is not surprising that SM seemed less about sex to me than about violence, eroticism, and intimacy. Had I endeavored to better understand spanking from the perspective of people in the community, or had I focused on those who only spanked, these activities might seem more pro- foundly about sex (and perhaps less about violence). Nevertheless, the range of SM activities in which I
did
engage was much broader than the range of those that I viewed as inextricably rooted in structural hierarchy. On many levels, then, I believe that these decisions ultimately served me well.

This is not to argue that violence
itself
is not also patriarchal, structural, or hierarchical. Violence, particularly against women, is all of these things. Whatever way I played, I still, as both a biological and a social category, under- stood myself as a woman. Therefore, violence that was explicitly sexual (that is, directed at my breasts or hips or cunt), or even inextricably gendered (as I viewed spanking to be), evoked in me a different response than violence that was not, and I began to seek the latter fairly early in my fieldwork. I sought to complicate questions of gender regimes and sexuality and power and violence, and by playing in these ways, I was better able to do so. Significantly too, these insights were remarkably late in coming; it was well over a year after I left the field before I understood my limits and approaches to play the way that I now understand them.

As is always the case in fieldwork, the choices that I made constructed the field and my writing in particular ways. It is my hope that my attention to these choices and their implications help me, and my readers, understand the limits of my analysis. However, these same choices led me to understand things I could not otherwise have. It is important also to note that I did not have to

look long or far in order to find people who played in ways with which I was more comfortable. The community that I came to understand it is no less real than the one I would have understood had I made different decisions.

Ethnographic Voices

My conversation with my colleague Anna also illuminates the tension between ethnographic responsibility and the ethnographer’s right to privacy. It is true that a deeper exploration of my own emotional experiences in play could provide insight into SM—but it would also provide insight, and perhaps even its deep- est insight, into
me.
Anna’s question forced me to consider, more consciously, what I wanted to reveal in my work about SM play about my own responses to SM play, and to what ends. This engenders a host of important questions about ethnographic representation: at what point, and in what contexts, do insights into the ethnographer’s emotions become a desire or expectation on the part of the audience, and how reasonable is this expectation? What does the ethnographer “owe” her audience in her representation of a community or of her experience? The realization that readers may want more—not about the community, but about me—underscores questions about representation, privacy, distance, authority, and competing ideas about what does and what does not constitute violation.

I did not set out to ask or to answer questions such about whether SM was erotic, healthy, or anti-feminist. I wondered all of these things, but I endeavored to ask first, “What’s going on here?” In exploring this question, I asked count- less times what was going on with
me.
In regard to an understudied and highly stigmatized community, the questions that Anna asked me—how, qualitatively, did I find it, whether it was erotic for me, whether I “do” SM now—ask me to serve as a voice of academic legitimacy, a researcher’s authoritative stamp on the questions of whether SM is acceptable or not, erotic or not, feminist or not. I did not wish to do this. I hope instead to have rendered SM more understand- able (by which I mean differently and sociologically understandable), and I include my experiences and reflections as a means to this end.

There are, though, personal reflections and experiences that I do view as rel- evant to conversations about ethnographic methodologies. My struggle to find, or choose, an ethnographic voice is one of these. As a neophyte ethnographer, I vacillated between the voices of participant, observer, erotic subject, sexual object, bottom, feminist, sociologist, and ethnographer. When ultimately I came to realize, as Carol Ronai (1997) points out, that I cannot switch neatly

back and forth, I was bothered, for if I cannot change my voice, then I can- not change the representation of my perspective. And if I cannot change my perspective, then how do I understand the differences between my fictions and my “truths”? Perhaps in part because of my discomfort with the gray spaces in between reality and fiction in which an ethnographer builds, understands, and tells stories, I reflected often on my experience on the boundary between my work and my increasingly fragmented sense of self:

Ethnography is a very lonely endeavor, even as it leaves me no time for my own head, my own peace of mind—even as it never leaves me quite to myself, it is lonely. The role is unique, and no one in either “world” can quite understand . . . in many ways I think this lends itself to self-

obsession, though not, by necessity, absorption, since I am so fully absorbed in everyone else. As I’m absorbed in them, however, I’m obsessed with me—my role, my impact, my thoughts, my perceptions, my theories, the way I am received and treated, my perspective. . . everything is about me even as I immerse myself in them.

Several months into my fieldwork, my identity conflict arrived at its resolu- tion (inasmuch as it was going to) at the Playground. The night before, I had written in my journal:

Ethnography depends on, I think, the constant, all-encompassing endeavor to be liked. To remain conscious of being liked nearly all of the time is exhausting. The most fundamental difference between Dakota and Staci, I think, is that Dakota is nice. She may get opinionated and snippy if pushed, but ultimately, it is important to her that as many people like her as pos- sible. When this is threatened, she has to think about it . . . how to fix it, is it worth it, should she repair this relationship, cultivate that one . . . Dakota often cannot extricate her feelings about people from what she knows they can contribute to her work, on every level, including the emotional experi- ence of being involved with them . . . and thus is not very “true.”

I’m starting to not like Dakota very much. And I don’t know what to do about that, because I can’t just get rid of her. Staci would ruin my research. But it’s going to be Staci who has to deal with the post-research fallout—when Dakota leaves, Staci will be left to defend herself, and Staci isn’t quite sure that any of this is defensible.

That night, at the club, I was suddenly sick of everyone around me. I was tired of the scripts I heard repeatedly, tired of having to explain why I didn’t

want to play with this person or that person, tired of hearing my own repeti- tions of who I was and why I was there. By writing in my journal, I had brought my sense of fragmentation (and hypocrisy) to the surface, and I was tired of being nice. I was tired of the social dysfunction, tired of feeling pity for people I was “studying,” tired of my own relentless ethical dilemmas over authentic and inauthentic presentations, tired of trying to figure out whether I “really” liked someone or “really” wanted to play with him or her. I was sick of my own questions about whether it was imperative that I learn to top soon, imperative that I play with a woman, imperative that I engage in spanking.

Exhausted by the tension between my identity as researcher and my identity as a community member, I found a quiet corner of the club and sat on the floor. Adam found me, sat next to me, and asked me what was going on. Without hesitation, I told him everything. I hated all of these people. I hated myself. I hated him. What the hell was I doing here?

“Ah. Hello, Staci,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

His use of my real name in the field crystallized for me that my problem was my own reluctance to use one voice. His implication that it was only a matter of time before I lost the ability to live dually, deceitfully (in my view), clarified for me that all of this was my hang-up, my problem. In asking his subsequent questions about whether I had to be quite so careful, Adam granted me the “permission” of the insider to just be there. This compelled me to think about what exactly I found so concerning. Where was my courage? Was I afraid that if I offended people in the scene that I would have no project? Was I afraid that my academic peers would conclude that I was (also) a pervert—and therefore not a legitimate researcher?

One of my earliest concerns, among many, about undertaking this project was the fear that it would be sensationalized. I thought I had interesting ques- tions and I wanted the project to be taken seriously. When my work progressed and I began to present my thinking at conferences, attendees wanted so many details about SM that I rarely had a chance to engage them in theorizing play as social interaction. On the relatively rare occasions on which I divulged my topic in professional situations, people winked and giggled, wagered over whether I needed a spanking, or asked me whether the members of the community had all been abused. As I endeavored to wrap my mind around my argument that SM is not quite “sex,” these exchanges grew increasingly frustrating for me. This was a specifically sexual sensationalism, and I was at the center of it. It was a titillating topic for people. I did not want it to be. Their voyeurism made me personally uncomfortable, and it offended me intellectually. I began

to guard against it in casual conversation and in professional situations. Ulti- mately, although I have consciously struggled against it, this defensive posture made its way into my writing.

The relationship between SM and sexuality was thus the central struggle for me at every level throughout this project. The assumption that SM is always “about” sex was too often refuted by the goings-on of the community. Com- munity discourse vacillated on the matter; eroticism and sex and heat were not quite the same thing. My own experience in the field only complicated things, constrained by my ethnographic choices, my politics, and my own erotic maps.

For most people, sex is intimate. For most people who engage in SM, play is also intimate. If intimacy is erotic, it is easy to see how people come to under- stand SM as erotic. These assumptions and conceptualizations need to be fur- ther problematized. The SM community is more complex than the available research suggests. It challenges us to think differently about the relationships between intimacy, eroticism, and sexuality. It provides a space for the replica- tion, and the simulation, of patriarchal power and for the glorification of vio- lence and cruelty, but it also demands that we look critically at the assumptions that these are all necessarily one and the same. SM provides a space—or at least Caeden did while I was there—in which people can, potentially, navigate the constraints of gender and power and violence differently than they do in their everyday lives.