Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (11 page)

Further, he explained, he was extremely uncomfortable with the activities he was witnessing. He was interested in the light bottoming known in Caeden as “slap and tickle”—ice, silk scarves, and light spanking. He thought everyone around him was insane, and the fact that he found so many of them unattractive rendered everything even less understandable to him. As I later wrote in my notes, all of this “clearly freaked him out.” He made no mention of leaving the event, but he paced, tapped his hands and feet, and all but trembled with anxiety.

As we talked, I found his agitation unsettling. Hoping to calm him down, I introduced him to several strategically chosen members of the local scene. At one point while we were talking, Kevin approached me and commented on the scene I had done the night before (described in the prologue to chapter 4). Scott, who had finally begun to seem more settled, asked about the scene. I changed the subject, but he pressed for details. When I described the scene, as generally as I could, he asked to see my back.

I lifted my shirt. He gasped and stammered, “But . . . you seem so . . . so . . . so . . .”

“Normal?” I asked.

He grew flustered again, afraid, I think, that he was offending me. “No, no, I didn’t mean that—I didn’t mean that at all. You just seem so . . . down to earth.” Out of a sense of loyalty to the community, I regretted confirming his sense, on the basis of my appearance, that I was anomalous, but when I told him that I was a researcher, he appeared confused. For him, that explained why I was not the same “type” as most of the other attendees, but not why my back was welted. Scott and I talked for most of the night. When Danielle was free, I told her that he was there, but she had just finished playing and was not up to meeting him.

They never did meet, and as far as I know, Scott never attended another scene event in Caeden.

Scott’s response to the social setting in which he found himself underscores not only the marginality of the people in Caeden, but the absence of a space for them outside of this community. Scott, mainstream in his appearance (and arguably in his “SM” interests), despite the interest or openness that had brought him to the event, embodied the antithesis of the “open-mindedness” that community members attribute to one another, and so highly value in the community.

Anthony Cohen has argued that, given the symbolic nature of the opposi- tion of any given community to the larger society in which it lives, “people can think themselves into difference” (1985, 117). In Caeden, intersections of marginal experiences on multiple fronts coalesce into identities of marginality that underlie participation in the SM community and in SM itself.

To some, the community serves as a place to conform to the standards and expectations of those around them. To others, it serves as a place where rebels go to find new ways to rebel. Regardless, the “how-I-found-the-scene” stories are constructed and retold precisely because many people view their discovery of this community as a pivotal moment in their lives. Although some narratives are constructed around top/bottom identities, many are not. Moreover, among narratives in which an essentialist SM identity figures prominently, many are tales of finding the scene and meaning in the community, quite apart from top- ping and bottoming specifically. The members of this community tell stories of coming to the community not because they felt like sadists and masochists, but because they felt they were different.

The feeling of social acceptance many people reported upon entering the scene, then, was an acceptance not of their SM interest, but of their more gen- eral outsiderness. Even if these narratives are cultivated or nurtured in and

through the community, their resonance is a testament to the marginal experi- ences of community members long before their entrance into the scene.

This is not to say that the members of Caeden are, simply put, sadists and masochists because they are misfits, nor the reverse. It is instead to illustrate the ways in which marginal identities and experiences have intersected in the lives of its members, to cultivate a creative worldview and an exploratory approach to social relationships. It is also to deny, along with others, that the social pursuit of SM emerges directly from a fundamental interest, whether sourced in genet- ics or childhood trauma, in that which we know as sadism and/or masochism (Weinberg, Williams, and Moser 1984; Langdridge and Butt 2004; Langdridge 2006; Weiss 2006b).

The Caeden SM community serves its members in ways beyond providing a social network and opportunities and partners for SM play. In the first place, it is a place of support, where in-group identities of marginality are cultivated and maintained in contrast to out-group identities of conformity. Secondly, it is a marketplace for particular social currency elsewhere unrecognized, and as such it offers pathways to prestige and status often unattainable to its members in other social settings. The conflation of these pathways to high status with iden- tities of marginality, in turn, provides a sense of acceptance powerful enough for members of the scene to refer to the community as “home.”

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People

Tipping the Scales
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Part 2.
Play

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Play

Tipping the Scales
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Chapter 3

Tipping the Scales

Striving for Imbalance

I stood facing him, trying to keep my abraded back from brushing against the rough concrete wall. I was exhausted. We’d been playing for a long time; it must have been at least two hours. I think he used just about every toy he owned. My legs were stiff. My arms ached from straining against the cuffs. I was depleted from the scene, ready to go home and crawl into bed.

He set his flogger on the table beside him. He moved close to me and stroked my hair.

“How ya doin’?” he asked softly.

“Good . . . ,” I responded, “. . . sleepy.” I smiled and he laughed at me. “What?” I asked, half-dazed.

Mimicking me, Adam smiled—a wide, spacey, extremely goofy grin. “Here, let me get that,” he said, miming wiping drool from my chin. I laughed. He laughed.

Then he hit me, open-handed, across my left cheek, probably about as hard as I had ever been hit. My face swung toward the wall.

I was stunned. I stared at him in disbelief, recognizing nothing in his expres- sion. I was silent. No words came to mind.

I felt something like fear, though fear doesn’t quite describe it. I wasn’t worried about any particular consequences; I wasn’t clear-headed enough for worry. I was on edge—not quite needing to run, but wide-eyed and vigilant. I had no idea what he might do next. It bred a strange state of something akin to fear, without the consciousness that fear normally requires.

As I stared at him wordlessly, he hit me again. Then again, almost as soon as his hand left my face, another, followed by a dizzying series of rapid-fire slaps.

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He stopped and looked at me. He hit me again, followed by another pause, more time between slaps—then faster, then slow again.

Completely off-kilter, I winced in anticipation of slaps that never came— relaxing my body just before they landed. I was overwhelmed by the constant barrage of blows, the never having had the chance to get my head together in the scene, no chance to shake my mind clear, assess how I was feeling—too much, too fast, all on top of itself.

I don’t remember how it ended, exactly. He must have uncuffed me . . . he hugged me and we walked over to the booths. He kept his arms around me and stroked my hair. After a while, I started to talk.

I couldn’t really communicate. I kept losing the words I wanted, and instead I started to giggle. The giggling became uncontrollable. I felt completely intoxicated. Every time I opened my mouth, I found the situation hysterically funny.

He rubbed my back and smoothed my hair silently for awhile, and then conver- sations began to crop up around me. I remember none of them. I lay there feeling relaxed—drained—trying to get back into my own head. When I was ready to sit up, I did so. He kissed my forehead, near the temple.

SM is often viewed as an alternative sexual practice. It is also frequently under- stood as role play. Neither of these, by itself, is an especially useful frame for understanding SM play. Perhaps partly in an effort to avoid miring current SM research in longstanding feminist debates over patriarchal gender perfor- mances, the view of SM as either (simply) sex or (simply) fantasy is implicit in contemporary work on the topic.

The Role-Play Problem

In the perspective of SM as role play, consenting adults are free to suspend their individual lived realities for the sake of erotic enjoyment; the teacher spanks the misbehaving student in order to enhance the sex life of the couple. Role- playing, as Gary Alan Fine illustrates in his study of fantasy gaming, involves a distancing from their roles even as they are engaged; during play, they say, for example, “I hit him” rather than actually hit him (Fine 1983). These roles are not the everyday performative roles that Erving Goffman regards as compris- ing all social interaction, but “contrived performances,” in which the actors are insincere (Goffman 1959b).

Contrived performances do not typify SM interaction in Caeden. Real-life SM, at least in this community, is rarely role play. Scenes do not typically involve

the adoption of alternate personae or plotlines. SM is not fantasy, but the enact- ment of fantasy. For many, it is the transformation of fantasy into reality—or the closest approximation of it in which they are interested, or that they are willing to achieve. SM scenes are unscripted and unrehearsed, and participants experience them as interpersonal adventures rather than performances. When roles are adopted, pain is often a central aspect of the scene. During one of the few scenes I saw that might be understood as role play, Russ used more than forty clothespins on Heather, clamping them around the outside of her breasts, areolae, and vaginal lips. He left these on her as he flogged her with several different floggers. Throughout the scene, Heather screamed several times, and called Russ “Daddy.”