Archetypes, Pain and Compatibility

Alright, I lied.

In this post, I said:

One question to look at is to try to sort the pain discourses into a gendered hierarchy, the way Newmahr did with the archetypes (she started this idea by suggesting that payoff pain discourse is strongly masculine). Then observing whether there is a tendency for the combinations that result in contradictions or disconnections to occur where the discourse is strongly one gender and the archetype is strongly the other, and whether the "natural" pairings occur where the discourse and archetype are similarly gendered.

Another analytic question would be to look at which combinations would play well with which other combinations, based on (for example) the "top archetype/bottom pain discourse" table as a reference. Given that there are potentially dozens of combinations, I really don't have the energy to look at that myself, although readers are invited to make suggestions in comments.

Well, in the end I have been obsessing about just these questions ever since and couldn't leave them alone until I had at least made some kind of effort to piece it together.

All of the following is incredibly sensitive to the personal interpretations of Yours Truly, and may in the final analysis actually reveal more about me than about the subject matter. Be that as it may, I now present to you the tentative conclusions that I have drawn.

First up, it became necessary to work out the gender categories of each pain discourse and each archetype as described by Staci Newmahr. That meant I also had to do some thinking about what the pain discourses looked like from a top's point of view specifically. As noted in the previous post, it is quite a bit trickier than it is for the bottom, who is usually the one directly engaged in the physical pain. What the discourses look like from a top's perspective is harder to work out.

Autotelic pain discourse is, for the top, "I enjoy giving pain for its own sake." This much is given in Newmahr's book. But what of the other three?

Sacrificial pain is perhaps the easiest to understand. If to the bottom it is "I give my pain as a sacrifice for your benefit", then the top who understands pain on a Sacrificial discourse presumably understands the bottom's pain as being in some way a gift, tribute or service to hir.

Payoff pain can be understood by a similar reflection: if the bottom sees it as "pain to be endured to reach the 'plateau' of endorphin rush" or to gain some form of self-improvement, then for the top, the pain is something given in order to help the bottom reach that goal - what could be termed a "Tough Love" discourse (that is, "I have to hurt you so that you can get to your end goal").

That leaves Transforming pain, which is the trickiest. Since Transforming is a process that takes place entirely in the bottom's mind, what is the top's connection with the discourse? I reasoned that, since the goal of "transforming" pain is to make it into pleasure in a direct way, then the top who understands pain through the Transforming discourse would be interested in that short-term pleasure outcome: the top becomes the provider of stimuli that can be transmuted by the sub into something positive. From the top's perspective, the relationship to the pain is a giving relationship with no longer-term goal. In her book, Newmahr notes that many SM practitioners prefer to talk about "giving pain" rather than "hurting", and the Transforming top would be the most directly connected with this language structure. So this can be described as a "Giving" discourse from the perspective of the top.

How might these topping pain discourses be gendered?

Using the suggestions for grounds to gender the archetypes given by Newmahr, we can look at the "giving" discourses, Giving (Transforming) and Tough Love (Payoff), as being the more feminine pain discourses when topping. Autotelic and Sacrificial become more masculine through their self-oriented rather than other-oriented nature.

Using the concept of male entitlement as a guideline, I ranked them thus, in order from most to least masculine:

1. Sacrificial
2. Autotelic
3. Tough Love
4. Giving

Newmahr identifies Payoff as being the most masculine bottoming pain discourse, and Sacrificial as being the most feminine (at least partly due to being the most other-oriented, and the most related to victimhood). I reasoned that Autotelic pain, being self-oriented pleasure for its own sake, would be more masculine than Transforming pain (which is more about, "How should I feel about this?" and therefore can be argued as a more feminine discourse).

So, bottoming discourses of pain can be ranked, masculine to feminine, thus:

1. Payoff
2. Autotelic
3. Transforming
4. Sacrificial

The archetypes are already ranked by Newmahr. The topping archetypes are given as Service Top being the most feminine, while Badass Top and Benevolent Dictatorship are seen as performing aspects of masculinity. I have ranked BD as lower than BAT because as I explained before, some of the aspects of BD could equally be interpreted as archetypes of femininity (especially motherhood).

That gives us:

1. Badass Top
2. Benevolent Dictatorship
3. Service Top

The bottoming archetypes are similarly ranked by Newmahr, who is much more clear in the ordering: Martyr, as being the purest performance of powerlessness and victimhood, is the most feminine. Badass Bottom, as a competitive and self-oriented (and power-claiming) archetype, is the most masculine. Indispensable Service, since it claims some power but still performs victimhood, falls in between the two.

So the bottoming archetypes are ranked as follows:

1. Badass Bottom
2. Indispensable Service
3. Martyr

Of course, my personal interpretation of the gender of the pain discourses is open to debate and alternative interpretations are possible. Equally, my decision to rank BD as less masculine than BAT is based on a personal interpretation; and giving each step an equal ranking may be misleading (that is, it may be that the gap in gender performance between ST and BD may be much greater than the gap between BD and BAT.

So the next thing to do was to work out all the viable combinations.

Using the term "style" to refer to the combination of a pain discourse with an archetype, there are in theory twelve topping styles and twelve bottoming styles.

However, as discussed in the previous post, a few topping styles seem to be contradictions in terms, and the same with bottom styles. So we don't have to look at all 144 possible combinations. In fact, of the twelve possible topping styles, in the analysis in my previous post only nine seemed to be consistent so that both would be used together in the same scene. Of the bottoming styles, only eight seemed realistic in this sense. That makes a total of 72 combinations of tops and bottoms.

The first thing I did was think about how I thought those combinations would mesh together for a scene, and whether it would be good or bad. I scored each combination for how compatible I thought the top and bottom would be in that scene, based on whether or not they would both be getting what they wanted from the other, and how well they would get on. I awarded a 5 for combinations where I thought they would seem like natural pairings, a 4 where they would certainly have a strongly shared vibe, and a 3 for a combination where they would certainly get what they wanted from each other, even if they didn't have a "natural" compatibility. Where one or both would feel like they were not fully getting their needs met, I scored a 1 or a 2 depending on how frustrating I thought the combination would be for the participants. I scored a 0 if I felt as though there would be absolutely no connection or it would be a completely bad outcome.

Obviously, all these scores are entirely sensitive to my own personal interpretations, values and experiences and so have no real scientific value!

After that, I gave each top and bottom style a "Gender Score". For each category (pain discourse or archetype), I awarded a score of 0 to 3 based on the rankings worked out above. 0 was most feminine and 3 was most masculine. Topping archetypes scored 1 to 3 while bottoming archetypes scores 0 to 2, with the difference being based on the assumption (stated in Newmahr's book) that topping, as the "active" role, is more masculine than bottoming.

That meant tops could have a gender score of between 1 and 6, while bottoms could have a gender score of between 0 and 5.

From there, I could create a new value, the "gender difference" between the top and the bottom in any specific pairing, which was the absolute value of top's gender score minus bottom's gender score. This difference could range between 0 and 6. (The value could actually range from -4 to +6, where a zero or negative number would indicate that the bottom was more masculine than the top). My reason for taking the absolute value is that I was interested in how the difference between gendered performance worked, given that Newmahr suggests that the power exchange roles serve to re-gender the "incidentally androgynous" space of the SM community. So my idea was that it didn't really matter who was the more feminine in working out how compatible two participants were, as long as there was a significant gender difference (for example, one would expect that a "feminine" Service Top playing with a "masculine" Badass Bottom would go as well together as a "masculine" Badass Top and a "feminine" Martyr).

This enabled me to compile a big sheet in Excel with archetypes, pain discourses, gender scores, gender difference and compatibility scores for each pairing of top and bottom styles. I made notes to remind myself why I scored the compatibility the way I did, often in terms of "he said, she said" scripts. Here are a few examples:

Autotelic BAT with Transforming BAB (Gender difference 2, Compatibility 5): Top says, "I love dishing it out!" and the bottom replies, "Let's see how much I can enjoy!" (that is, how much pain the bottom can successfully re-interpret as pleasure)

Giving BAT with Transforming Martyr (Gender difference 1, Compatibility 5): Bottom says, "I will force myself to enjoy it because I have no choice but to take it." Top says, "I will force you to take it, because I know you can enjoy it." The similarity in pain discourse helps this work.

Tough Love BAT with Payoff Martyr (Gender difference 1, Compatibility 4): Bottom says, "You're so cruel for forcing me to the next level." Top says, "I'm your Drill Sergeant, it's my job (and I love my job)."

Giving BAT with Sacrificial Martyr (Gender difference 3, Compatibility 1): Bottom says, "I suffer for your benefit and no other reason." Top says, "But I want you to enjoy it when I am mean to you." Conflict between the "Giving" discourse and the performance of Badass archetype.

Tough Love BAT with Sacrificial Martyr (Gender difference 4, Compatibility 0): Bottom says, "I suffer for your benefit and no other reason." Top says, "I will keep going until you start to enjoy it." This is a very bad combination because the bottom's Sacrificial pain discourse means zie will never start to enjoy it, while the top's Badass archetype means that zie is performing a "force the issue/don't back down" concept. This could lead to a very upsetting and unpleasant experience for the bottom.

Some "styles" produced the same script several times. These were fewer for tops than bottoms, because I often envisaged the top's dialogue as a reply to the bottom's dialogue, meaning that it was more specific "how would this top respond to that bottom's script?":

Payoff Martyr: "You're so cruel for forcing me to the next level!"
Transforming Martyr: "I will force myself to enjoy it, because I have no choice but to take it." (Subtext: "I will, actually, enjoy it, but it's not my fault that I enjoy it.")
Sacrificial Martyr: "I suffer for your benefit and no other reason."

Transforming Indispensable Service Bottom: "I interpret pain as pleasure, so I can take more pain for your pleasure."
Sacrificial Indispensable Service Bottom: "I suffer in order to serve."

Transforming Badass Bottom: "Let's see how much I can enjoy."
Payoff Badass Bottom: "Keep going until I reach the plateau!"
Autotelic Badass Bottom: "I want it all!"

Autotelic Badass Top: "I love dishing it out!"
Tough Love Badass Top: "I'm your Drill Sergeant for the day, let's lick you into shape!"
Giving Service Top: "I want to give you pleasure through pain."

The "Tough Love Badass Top" became in my mind the "Drill Sergeant" character, because in my mind the Tough Love discourse seemed to apply not just to the physical/neurological "endorphin rush" but any personal gain that the bottom wanted for hirself, that could be achieved as an end goal by going through the pain barrier.

Now I had all these figures, what could I find out from them?

Well, I took the numbers of combinations that had each of the Gender Difference, and created a table matching that distribution showing how I thought the compatibility ought to balance out theoretically if the hypothesis that gender performance is the key to understanding SM interactions. In doing so, I reasoned that for very similarly gendered top and bottom, then you would expect either very good interactions or very bad interactions - either both would get a huge amount (for example, a masculine bottom and a masculine top ought to get a lot) or else both would find their desires were not being met and would be very frustrated. I reasoned that matches that simply gave what was wanted would be fewer. As gender difference increased, I felt that the middling compatibility scores (especially 3) should become more common, while strong incompatibility should fade away. The very high compatibility scores (4 and 5) ought to become rarer in the middling gender differences (2 and 3) but become more common again for the higher gender difference scores.

I was in two minds about whether to include the only Gender Difference 6 combination (Sacrificial Martyr bottom playing with Sacrificial Badass Top), because this combination could be either a 5 or a 0 on compatibility (it seemed to have the most potential in the long term to tip over into an abusive relationship). The fact that there could only be one score at that gender difference also seemed to make it less indicative of overall trends. In the end, I gave it a 5 and included it on the charts.

Here's the "Theoretical SM Gender Hypothesis" chart:

Compatibility scores are shown in "traffic light colours: Red for a zero, orange for a 1 and yellow for a 2. A three or above is compatible and therefore in varying shades of green - "pale" for a 3, "dark" for a 4 and "bright" for a 5.

That's what I thought it might look like if the gender hypothesis were accurate.

Here's what I actually got:

At first sight, they look pretty similar, and it might be assumed that the "blip" of a zero for gender difference 4 might correspond to an indication that maybe I should not have taken the absolute value after all and that a masculine bottom hates a feminine top. however, that score was actually from a Tough Love Badass top playing with a Sacrificial Martyr bottom: I envisaged a script: Bottom, "I suffer for your benefit and no other reason!" - Top, "I will keep going until you start to enjoy it." I felt that the top's expectation that there will be a payoff for the bottom, combined with the bottom's belief that it is all for the top's benefit, would lead to a very bad experience for the bottom, and the top would feel that zie had somehow let the bottom down by not being able to get hir to the payoff, meaning it was bad for both.

However, there are some key differences:

• The "5" compatibility is evenly distributed across all gender differences, implying that gender differential in the SM roles would not be a significant predictor of the satisfaction that could be derived from a scene.
• The "3" compatibility does not show the swell in the middle range of gender difference (this is taken up by the "5" and "4" category).
• In gender difference of zero, the middling compatibility scores of 2 and 3 are much bigger than my prediction based on the gender/SM hypothesis, squeezing both the high and low compatibility scores.

Given that all of this is based on at least 3 stages of pure speculation and my personal guesswork, there is not a lot that can be drawn as a conclusion from this. Probably all you can gather from it is what I already stated, which is that I am not convinced that gender is a key component in understanding how SM roles work. On the other hand, I think that it suggests that there are so many more questions surrounding how SM play works in practice that are raised by Newmahr's suggestions and observations!

I noticed something else from all this figuring:

Newmahr wrote that BAT usually plays at least a small part in most scenes because it is the most authentic performance of power. She also noted that ST and BAB were less popular play partners, because they mess with the gender or power performance (a serving top and a powerful bottom respectively).

In the above chart, there are fewer scene types that involve a Service Top dynamic - this is because it makes no sense to conceive of a service top who wishes to receive a tribute of suffering, or who takes pleasure in pain as an end in itself, which thus makes for fewer styles of service top (in the definitions above). Playing with a service top seems to be quite likely to be satisfying, however.

However, there seem to be more BAB combinations available, and most of them seem to offer satisfaction for both parties. The Martyr, on the other hand, seems more often to struggle to find hir own satisfaction and also satisfy hir partner, based on the interpretations I made.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the service orientation of the ISB archetype, I tended to score this archetype of bottom a higher proportion of satisfaction than the other bottom archetypes.

Possibly indicative of the higher priority that a bottom has in needing to find the right top to play with, bottoms in this chart show lower proportions of satisfaction than the tops do, with the exception of the Benevolent Dictatorship archetype. I believe I scored the BD in this way because of the more specific expectations that a BD has with regards to service and offering protection, sometimes the service is not offered or the protection is not wanted.

Also important to notice is that zero compatibility scores appeared for every archetype, suggesting there is nobody who is guaranteed to play well with every person of the opposite role (top or bottom).

The apparently high number of BAB combinations, and the fact that BAB also had, in my hypothetical compatibility scores, the highest number of 5s of any bottom (and second only to the BAT over all archetypes), is intriguing, given that BABs were, in Newmahr's experience, less likely to get play partners. Either my suggested scores are way off (which, let's face it, is actually quite likely!) or the relative frequencies of the topping "styles" and of the types of scene that work well for BABs are quite low compared to those of other styles and scene types, or both.

And that, of course, opens up another whole area of research and questions that would require observation of thousands of SM scenes to answer!

I feel like this was mostly a complete waste of time since nothing can really be concluded from it, but as I said at the beginning: I was obsessing over this stuff and couldn't leave it alone until I had written a post and played with Excel for hours on end, so I played and I wrote, and here you are!

To conclude, just because I thought all the colours were pretty, here is the table I made of the scene types, "styles", compatibility and gender scores. Blue is more masculine, pink is more feminine:

If you're curious about why I scored a particular combination the way I did, feel free to ask by email or in comments, and I'll share with you the notes I made for myself.