Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (5 page)

Although SM is sometimes pronounced “S and M” in the community (and sometimes written S/M or S&M), it is more commonly pronounced as two consecutive letters: “SM.” I deliberately avoid the perhaps more familiar term

S&M, or “S and M,” for two reasons. The separator “and” implies that SM activity hinges on two separate and distinct interests or practices, sadism and masochism. First, it is not my experience that these are in fact two distinct interests or practices among people who engage in these activities. Secondly, SM play may involve activities that are neither sadistic nor masochistic, in the clinical sense. The focus on the clinical dichotomy renders the term “S and M” less relevant to SM experiences that do not involve pain, bondage, or humilia- tion. In this sense, I view “SM” as a compromise between the awkward, Inter- net-based “BDSM” and the specific, arguably less appropriate “S and M.”

Finally, a note about SM identities is important. The distinctions between identification labels are complex and contested. Not everyone in Caeden, let alone nationally and cross-nationally, agrees on the hermeneutic differences between “top” and “dominant,” or between “bottom” and “submissive.” I explore some of the underlying issues in these debates throughout the book, but I would like to clarify my own usage at the outset. I use “top” and “bottom” very broadly, as categories of play and players that can subsume other scene identities, including dominant, submissive, sadist, and masochist. Although this may be a contested decision, I do this because, for most people in this community, “dominant” and “submissive” necessarily draw on and connote narratives and discourses of power imbalances. Sadist and masochist, both nouns, involve discourses of pain that not all SM participants share, and thus I view them as more specific terms than top and bottom. “Top” and “bottom,” in my view, may incorporate these narratives, but they are not intrinsic to the identities. I view top and bottom as the most flexible terms in the community; they are, for instance, both verbs
and
nouns without changing the form of the words. The way I am deploying them, then, a person submitting is also bottom- ing, but not everyone bottoming is submitting. I would not subsume “master” and “slave” (also nouns) under the terms “top” and “bottom,” for these terms in the community often refer to long-term and/or contractual relationships, or to identities understood as fixed, rather than as kinds of play.

The Objectives of This Book

Because so little is known and understood about SM, one important aim of this book is to represent it to outsiders, illustrating the way that it works and what it accomplishes. In many ways, though, SM demonstrates the complexity of interpersonal and interactional processes in which we all engage, including negotiating gender, managing risk, and constructing intimate experience. It is

not my goal to explain why some people like SM and why some do not; as Howard Becker first pointed out in 1953, “the deviant behavior produces the deviant motivation” (in Becker 1963, 42). I have tried instead to render SM understandable in the social contexts in which it occurs. I have also taken it as a case study to illuminate much broader interactional processes.

The life stories of community members figure prominently in the first part of this book, which examines the intersection of social marginality and com- munity in Caeden. Chapter 1 illustrates the marginal experiences common in Caeden among members long before their entry into this community and traces the role of defiance and broader identities of marginality in their lives. In chap- ter 2 I explore the ways in which these marginal identities inform and shape the meaning of community, and therefore of SM, in the lives of members.

The second part of this book focuses on the varieties, structure, meanings, and social implications of SM play. In chapter 3, I explore the common under- standings of SM as sex and as role play, in the context of the complex issue of power performances. I analyze the structure of SM scenes and examine the various strategies employed toward the achievement and maintenance of power-imbalanced experiences. Chapter 4 frames SM as “serious leisure” (Steb- bins 1982) and illustrates the benefits and rewards of engaging in play in this community. Chapter 5 provides an analysis of gender performance and sym- bolism in play, in the context of the many ways in which gender is performed and lived in the community.

The last part of this book grapples with some of the larger theoretical chal- lenges that SM poses and inspires. In chapter 6 I examine and demonstrate the usefulness of SM in understanding and exploring relationships between eroticism and violence, and the role of pain and discourses of pain in making sense of these relationships. In chapter 7, I argue that SM is edgework (Lyng 1990), first through an exploration of particular activities that are intended to transgress or transcend more extreme physical, emotional, or psychological boundaries. Second, I offer a feminist expansion of the edgework perspective. Chapter 8 draws on this analysis to explore broader issues surrounding the con- struction of intimacy, the erotic and the violent, and gendered negotiations of risk. In chapter 8, I frame SM as the engagement in
intimate edgework,
through which intimate experience is constructed through the transgression of personal boundaries. Finally, the conclusion provides insight into the ways in which this ethnographic text was shaped by particular decisions I made in the field.

Defiance
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Part 1.
People

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People

Defiance
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Chapter 1

Defiance

Bodies, Minds, and Marginality

It was the last committee meeting. Tomorrow was the big event. We had rented three floors of a large hotel. One floor was going to be devoted to educational classes throughout the weekend. One floor was going to be devoted to vendors of SM and fetish products, and one floor was to be the dungeon. It was being designed and set up by a man who owned an SM club in another city. I had heard very good things about his work.

It had taken seven months of almost weekly meetings, several hours each. And the IMs and the emails. God, the emails. Seven months of general snippiness and petty arguments. Seven months of asking Noah to relax and imploring Amy to be nice, and trying very hard not to tell everyone to stop acting like the rise and fall of civilization was entirely wrapped up in this event.

The communication was abominable. At each and every meeting lately, I found myself wondering why everyone was so snotty. Was I the only one who noticed? How did they get away with talking to people like this? All of it was driving me nuts: the tension, the drama . . . the body odor.

Wearily, I looked around the room.

Maggie is cross-eyed, and her hair looks as if she never washes it. Jacob weighs over 350 pounds. Dottie is a six-foot-four woman who weighs nearly as much, and Robert has both of them beat by about a hundred pounds. Liam has a severe overbite, and twenty-seven-year-old Malcolm is five-foot-one. Adam cuts off the sleeves of his T-shirts—so that they’re what we once called “muscle shirts”—and wears the collar of his jacket turned up. Ellis rocks back and forth when he talks. Trey talks with his eyes closed much of the time. Ronny practices tae kwon do moves whenever he’s standing. He smiles a lot at no one in particular.

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I started to sigh, but instead I laughed midway through. I couldn’t help myself.

Sometimes it all seemed surreal.

And really, this event was a big deal. It was a four-day, nationally publicized SM gala, the first for the organization in several years. Though the process had been infuriating and thoroughly draining, I had enjoyed it. I was proud of the planning and the troubleshooting and, ultimately, the pulling it off, with this group of volunteers who found this important enough to devote such tremendous time and effort to it.

I was sharing a room with Adam, Liam, and Phyllis. Faye was going to spend a night on our floor. On Thursday and Friday, I ran around like a maniac, sleep- ing for a couple of hours here and there. By dawn on Saturday, every inch of my body was desperate for bed. I dragged myself back to my room.

I changed my clothes and slipped into bed beside Adam, whose last shift had ended not long before mine. I sunk into the mattress and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, Liam’s alarm went off. I groaned.

From the bed next to ours, Liam rose.

Clink-clank, clink-clank. Clink-clank!

“Liam, what the hell?” I said. The room was dark.

“Sorry,” he replied. “I have to be at the programming desk by six.”

Adam sat up in bed beside me. “And the programming desk needs the Tin Man?” he asked.

Adam switched on the lamp on his side of the bed. I groaned again, but I glanced in Liam’s direction. He was wearing only black briefs and heavy chains around his wrists and neck.

“You wore those to bed??” Adam asked, incredulous. “Yes. She told me not to take them off,” he said.

He headed for the bathroom.
Clink-clank, clink-clank.

“Come on, Liam. Just take them off while you’re getting ready. They’re so loud.

We just got back!” I pleaded.

“No, I’m not taking them off! I’m honored to be wearing them. I’ll be quiet,” he assured us.

I sighed and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, he walked back into the room.

Clink-clank. Clink-clank.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Adam said.

I hurled a pillow at Liam. He stepped aside.
Clink-clank.
I continued to try to reason with him, though Adam assured me it was futile.

Somehow Adam managed to fall asleep and was breathing deeply beside me. I was still grumbling into my pillow when Liam finally clink-clanked his way out of the room an hour later.

The people in Caeden view themselves as outsiders. They live their lives on the fringes of social acceptance. For much of this marginal experience, they are indebted to particular and shared characteristics. These characteristics would seem, at first glance, to exist entirely independently of sadomasochism. Many of the members of this community lived on the margins prior to developing an SM identity.

In sociological research, studies of “sexual identity” emerged in response to a broader tendency to ignore the experience of the individual, particularly the sexually marginalized individual. Thus identity research has generally focused on recognizing distinctions between members of groups socially marked as different from the norm (Brekhus 1996) in a climate in which sexual devi- ance functioned as an overarching marker of pathological difference. While this approach is crucial in addressing inaccurate and destructive assumptions of sameness among members of stigmatized groups, it is primarily concerned with issues of identity that are externally derived, or “other-defined” (Brekhus 1996). For an examination of identity as interactively constructed, the emphasis on individual differences is less helpful.

My objective therefore departs somewhat from the established approach to identity in sexual communities. Rather than seeking to shatter the stereotype of SM participants as similar on any given dimension, I aim to explore the multiple levels of their similarities, which, in this case, converge on the ways in which they perceive themselves as different from others.