Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (9 page)

McMillan and Chavis (1986) propose a definition of sense of community with four elements—membership, influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. These aspects of life in Caeden are important to its members; the community is built around these experiences and understandings, through discourse and through SM play. It is not simply that the community offers these emotional benefits, but that it exists in order to provide them.

Membership: Coming Home to Caeden

When asked about the role SM played in his life, Seth’s response focused not on SM itself, but on the community:

BDSM is home. BDSM is being amongst people who stroke each other’s hair. Give each other backrubs. I think it’s inherent in the BDSM com- munity, a willingness to be more open about contact. I need contact. My deepest desire is driven by contact. It’s where I found it—and it’s home. . . . It’s the place where I’ve really felt the opportunity to be myself, the person I’ve been my whole life, amongst people who understand the nature of freaks and geeks . . . people are much more open about touching each other, more than anywhere else I’ve ever been in. I’m a touch slut . . . that’s the way I would describe myself. I’m a touch slut. I mean . . . my life has been very touch denied.

Despite Seth’s conceptualization elsewhere of BDSM as a primal need, he entered the SM scene in order to find companionship—to be touched. With his acute awareness of a loneliness that came from feeling like an outsider in all other social situations, Seth’s decision to join the SM community was fueled, consciously, by a desire to join a community.

In high school I was a total loser. I struggled a lot with my sense of not being particularly attractive, not really knowing how to deal with people on a human basis. I was like . . . I spent my teenage years being the guy at [The Playground] who can’t talk to anybody. . . . Except on an intellectual basis, I really found no way to breach [sic] the subject of relationships or even friendships with women. I had a very hard time accepting that anybody would want to, you know, interact with me. It was very lonely. It really was.

Then, at twenty-three, according to Seth, someone took an interest. He and Sara, twenty-five, had been a couple for several months and planned to get mar- ried. On the day Seth planned to propose, he and Sara were on his motorcycle when a car plowed through a stop sign and hit them. Seth awoke in the hospital a few days later, engagement ring still in his pocket, and learned that Sara had been killed.

Having lost his brother and his almost-fiancée within a year of each other, Seth again tried to find a community where he felt comfortable. A longtime science-fiction fan, he attended a sci-fi convention, and the program included a stage show with whips, chains, and leather. Seth viewed the show as something separate from the topic of the convention, and it marked his introduction to the SM community; he said he now had “a place to go.”

The SM scene interested him because it was unfamiliar and required an intellectual investment. Although he and Sara had experimented with SM, Seth considered his interest fairly newfound, describing his discovery of the com- plexity of SM as “Oh, look, something to learn about! Something to read!” He bought several SM books, began to identify as “kinky,” and began to search for other kinky people.

Newly anchored in the SM scene, Seth found a space for socializing, people to touch, and new material for intellectual exploration. The community brought an end to his loneliness and rendered his social marginality less relevant. He was “home”; for him, the community was a sanctuary of unconditional accep- tance and emotional opportunity.

Reflections like this are typical in Caeden; the “how-I-found-the-scene” narrative seems obligatory in introductions and discussions of identity, and the metaphor of the SM community as home is a widely accepted component of community discourse. Greg felt that his life changed when he went to his first Horizons meeting:

“October 9, 2001,
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and the rest is all good . . . I had heard wonderful things about it. Discovered I liked the people. And it was just home . . . immediately.”

Frank went to his first Horizons meeting at eighteen years old. He had brought a friend with him who wanted to leave early, but Frank refused: “I looked around and I said ‘I’m home.’”

In light of identities of marginality, it is not surprising that the entrance into the community is a metaphor for finding a home. Members of the scene readily share the perspective that they did not belong anywhere prior to finding the SM scene. They frequently assert that “people here
get
it,” and the “it” refers not narrowly to SM interest, but to marginality more broadly, for the reasons and in the ways that are so common in Caeden. The sense of being understood, of being known, underlies the importance of community for many people in Caeden. By subsuming the marginalities under one overarching identity, the community offers understanding of the experiences of outsiderness that many have lived. The metaphor of home conveys not only like-minded people, but a belief in kindred spirits, acceptance, and connectedness.

Membership involves a “sense of belonging and identification,” a category in which they include the feeling, belief, and expectation of fitting in, as well as a sense of acceptance within the group (McMillan and Chavis 1986). The search for an in-group, a place where we belong more than others do, is central to the experience of community membership. McMillan and Chavis use “It is my group” and “I am part of the group” as indicators of this identification. The arguably more romantic “I am home” is especially powerful in light of the rar- ity of the home as sanctuary in the lives of the people in Caeden.

As much as community membership is derived from identification, it is defined by drawing boundaries between people who belong in a group and those who do not. These lines are linked not only to familiarity, but to trust; the shift from outsider to insider begins with visibility and moves quickly to immersion in the public scene.

For the people in Caeden, the most common criterion for inclusion in “the scene” is involvement; unknown SM participants may be “kinky,” but they are not considered part of the community. Opinions vary about whether partici- pants need to play in public to be considered part of the scene; although several people did argue this, most felt that regular community involvement consti- tuted membership.

Players are able to, and many do, successfully arrange their lives around scene activities—politically troubling as the term is, avoiding “normals” (Goffman 1963) is often achieved through participation in the Caeden SM community. It is a well- established and multi-faceted group. During any given week, there are at least five SM-related events one can attend, of varying types—educational, activist, social

and/or play-oriented. Most of the time, there are more than five; the more active one is in the community, the more opportunities exist for participation.

Immersion in the scene is common and easily achieved. Through Web blogs, organization discussion lists, instant messaging, and organization volunteer- ism, the most involved members of the community spend most of their waking hours interacting with other members. In addition, several times a year, multi- day, multi-level SM events provide the opportunity for complete immersion in the social, political, educational, and sexual milieu of the scene. Though many of these events do not take place in Caeden, many members of the community frequently travel across the country, and more commonly along the East Coast, to participate in these events.

Several people in the scene also travel frequently to teach and speak at regu- lar, smaller-scale meetings and events of other organizations throughout the year. They invest a considerable amount of time in networking, planning, and participating in these events.

In 1963, Howard Becker’s pivotal work shifted academic focus from why people engage in “deviant” behaviors to why everyone else follows “the rules.” He argued that we must ask how a person “manages to avoid the impact of con- ventional commitments,” and posited that “a person who does not have a repu- tation to maintain or a conventional job he must keep may follow his impulses. He has nothing staked on continuing to appear conventional” (Becker 1963, 28). The fact that careers (and career paths) tend also to be unconventional among people in the Caeden community is highly conducive to immersion in the scene. It is also the case that people sometimes structure their work lives around their involvement in the scene, even declining opportunities for income that would interfere with their volunteer responsibilities and participation in the community. It is not that the members of the Caeden scene simply have nothing staked in appearing conventional; it is that they are quite deliberately rejecting the conventional as a legitimate place for a stake.

It is not unusual for community members to have relatively little everyday contact with people outside the scene. Even among people with conventional work lives and contact with their families, many report that their “vanilla” (people outside the community) friendships have dwindled or disappeared since joining the community.

Social status in Caeden is linked to the extent of immersion in the scene. The relationship of this link to play and status will be further explored later, but in general, one’s social status increases as one’s involvement in the com- munity increases.

In drawing these boundaries, the community reinforces and legitimizes group identity, and creates a safe social space for participants. Lily explained the value, for her, of the interplay between SM itself and the social-psychological appeal of a community of people who accept SM:

I enjoy the combination of meetings where I get to learn and socialize and club time where I get to play and see friends who I might also play with and I like that it’s not just play. [ . . . ] I always kind of said I wanted a group of friends who could make an offhand joke, like somebody cuff that girl, you know? And I remember saying early on, I was like, wouldn’t that be great? To be part of a group that could just like joke about it, it was so commonplace. And I’m part of that now. I’m part of a group where like Richie can give me a spank when I walk in the door, and that’s common. That’s us. It’s not scary or weird or odd. I love that . . . [ . . . ] I like com- munity, I like having friends who are into it the way I am, in a lifestyle way. [ . . . ] It’s a big part of who I am, and I don’t think I can change that. I don’t think it’s a phase. I think it may be something I go in and out of throughout my life, like, there may be years where I’m not submissive someday. But I think it’ll always be there, as a part of me.

Identities of marginality in the lives of the members of this community are recast, blended, and romanticized; in and through Caeden, to be a “pervert”
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is to be open-minded, geeky, and creative. Though a good deal of this is accom- plished through play itself, the potential for this identity shift has much to do with members’ immersion in the community itself. The mitigation of the stigma of SM participation, then, is part of the value of the community to its members.

The paths people take to the SM community in Caeden reveal the interde- pendence of identity formation, community seeking, and community building. Some, like Laura and Jack, sought the SM community specifically in order to validate and share an SM interest they had already recognized. Although Laura viewed her SM as simply an “alternative interest,” she wanted to spend time with people among whom she felt less conspicuous:

I wanted people like me, who were essentially normal, living normal lives, who just had alternative interests. And that behind closed doors they liked certain things . . . I felt like I didn’t stand out for the first time. It was a very comfortable place to be. I just remember the not-standing-out part. I’m the same here.

Jack joined for similar validation:

Well, when I first figured out that there was actually a scene, I was like okay, that’s what I gotta find. Because . . . as you already know, I’ve been interested in this lifestyle and the whole S&M thing ever since I can remember . . . so the scene was just kind of the natural development of that. It was like, if there’s an organized group for it, then I might want to join it . . . kind of thing. Same reason why soccer players join teams. I wanted to join the team. That, and also just to find the sense of, I’m not actually a creep.

Aware of the marginality of SM, Jack found reassurance in the community. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder by then, Jack understood himself as different in several ways. Although he was not looking to feel “normal” by joining the SM community, he frames his motivation in terms of social acceptance of a stigmatized—and pathologized—interest in SM.

Others, like Frank, cast their finding of the scene as a happy accident, but nonetheless understand the value of the community to them as one of valida- tion and reassurance at the stage of entry:

I stumbled onto [the scene]. Probably searching for perverted things because I was perverted. But I stumbled onto SM and then it was the finding other people, going “wait a minute—maybe I’m not that fucked up. Or, if I am, there’s a lot of other people who are fucked up. Like me.” And that was a big, big, big deal.

Community and Identity

Although many of the members of this SM community subscribe to a belief in a preexisting (often essentialized) interest in SM, many also understand their interest as part of a larger creative epistemological approach to the social world. This paradoxical juxtaposition transpires not only in the discourse of the origins and importance of SM identity, but also in discourses of noncon- formity and marginality in Caeden. For most members of this community, SM identification is a salient part of their larger social identity. Greg’s description is typical:

I identify as someone who is leather, who is a scene person, who is a pervert. And who is happy being one. And that part about it’s self- acceptance, and not rejecting myself. . . . It’s where I’m happiest. If I was

in a vanilla—I would probably not choose to be in a vanilla relationship at any point in the foreseeable future in my life. And I can understand people do. I personally find that this works better for me and I’m staying with it as long as I can.