I think my sadism is broken

I have nearly reached the end of Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy" (just about 20 pages to go).

It's just reduced me to tears and a very bad place. In the language that Newmahr introduced, this has gone beyond the edge into chaos.

Several people now know about the episode of severe depression that led to a severe crisis (it's now well over 5 years ago) that I outlined at And You Thought I Was Sweet, and what I felt about that (trigger warnings for discussion of rape feelings on both posts). Many of my readers will know from previous posts about how I felt growing up - that I was destined to become a rapist-serial killer, because of my sadist sexuality.

Unfortunately for me, Newmahr's argument for a feminist understanding of SM has keyed very heavily into those same narratives and emotions and reduced me back to that state.

In a passage titled, "The Feminist Question", Newmahr writes:

As Elizabeth Stanko has argued, the space for potential violation is the space in which women live their everyday lives. The continued immersion in cycles of potential violations of body and mind, viewed from the radical feminist perspective, is a ritual engagement in women's oppression, the repeated enjoyment of the playing out of male violence on the body. These cycles, though, are not merely cycles of violence and potential violation, but cycles of trust. From this same perspective, trust, in regard to the safety and strength of the body, is not part of the space in which women live their everyday lives.

...

What Stanko calls the 'bravado' of men is the sense of being able to handle risk, of being able to withstand whatever attack may occur. Men move through their worlds with trust, if not that they will not be assaulted, then at least that they will emerge intact.

On the same point, Newmahr adds:

SM play is a space in which women can insist, 'I will not be hurt … even if I put myself in harm's way.' It is a path to feelings of invincibility to which men only have historically been privy, in a particular and deeply gendered context.

I wish I had that trust! Being a man sounds great, I wonder when I get to be one? But here's my experience of this so-called trust. No, I did not trust I would escape intact, and I don't feel able to trust in that in future either. I carry (quite illegally) a bladed weapon when I go out at night because I believe I will not emerge intact next time. That the next time could be terminal for me. This safety, this trust, these "feelings of invincibility" that men have? They are not mine.

Newmahr continues her case:

The immersion in spaces of potential violation, then, may constitute and construct women's own bravado. Through bottoming, women confront and withstand and symbolically survive male violence.

...

These women are not celebrating violation, but actively defying the cultural proscription to live in fear of it.

...

An edgeworker who revels in the sense of control over the natural world relishes the rush of power that comes with having ascended the mountain (albeit with a rope tied around his waist). The rush of power that accompanies having survived a knife to the throat or a bag over one's head (albeit with a man who is not 'supposed' to kill her) facilitates a similar sense of control.

...

Whether women are topping men or bottoming to them, the potential for men to 'snap,' to overpower them, to lay claim to women's bodies, and to violate their trust is part of the chaotic edge. This edge for women may be no less thrilling than the edge of the cliff that threatens the rock-climber's sense of order through its reminder of his mortality.

At this point I broke down in tears.

Through the tears, I typed out the following in my notes intended for future blog posts about the ideas in the book. I still intend to write those posts once I've finished, because there's an awful lot of good in Newmahr's ideas. But I needed to get this off my chest:

Shit, I think this just killed my sadism :-( If all SM is this, then I can't do it. I can only bottom [in future] because I don't feel that power, I don't feel the ability to be that "safe rapist" or whatever. I mean, my whole fear was that my sadism was going to turn me into a rapist-murderer and my relief on finding out I wouldn't be that was total. I can't live with the idea of being even symbolically that again, even though in my fantasies I am.

And what does my masochism mean? In fact, my bottoming, I can relate to this – it's owning power over my fears, in this way, my fear of other men. Even though I would generally bottom to women, they are acting the "masculine" role as top, no?

(The last sentence is based in Newmahr's earlier examination of how power roles replace and subvert gender roles in SM)

I was catapulted back to my teenage self-loathing and self-fears. I was catapulted back to that mentally-ill me on the golf course 7 years ago, or more accurately, to the me who had just arrived home and realised what I had almost done then.

In the linked "interview with a sadist" post above, I wrote that:

...a lot of my kink revolves around extreme emotions, and works in terms of the mind rather than the body of the person in the fantasy (or indeed, in real-life, although the real-life is a lot different from the fantasy). So concepts and ideas that involve desperation, fear, pain, helplessness, terror, humiliation, anxiety, denial, and so on, are right alongside lust, passion, need, tenderness and warmth for me as erotic responses in a partner.

But I don't think I can be comfortable with that as a reflection, even safely, of "real" (i.e. non-SSC/RACK) situations, because I am, or have been, too afraid of actually being those "real" situations; if I think it is about that (even in a positive way such as Newmahr presents) then I don't think I can live with the conflict that that produces. Since I think the reasoning Newmahr uses is sound, the only thing left that can "give" is my own sexual expression. But I don't have any other sexual expression to replace it with, I don't know how to be vanilla.

Newmahr later adds:

This is not an argument that women engage in SM as a conscious (or even subconscious) strategy for coping with oppression or the pervasiveness of male violence.

...

We can simultaneously recognize the social contexts in which risk-taking acquires meaning and reject the notion that risk-taking is always a coping mechanism with some (ostensibly unfortunate) social condition.

This, unfortunately, does not mend me. It is the association with the social contexts as outlined above that broke me; it wasn't the "coping mechanism" idea that did it. I don't know how to break the association now that it's made. I don't know how to feel okay again in my sadism. I feel like the safe space away from the world where my sexuality could only be perceived as a threat, has been stripped away from me. BDSM was where I could be a sadist and it was safe to be so because it wasn't associated with the reality except by fantasy parallel. Now it feels equivalent again. I'm being cast as what I escaped from being destined to be, what I narrowly avoided becoming.

***

I always knew I was vulnerable. I sometimes feel that my life has left me psychically at least as much scar tissue as natural flesh, even though relative to lots of people my wounds have been small. I learned defences, cobbled together ways to cope. I am not so easy to hurt, but when I am hurt, it goes all the way.

I knew I was taking a risk in reading such deep research into SM. That I might encounter something that would offend or hurt me deeply. It's just that I was sure that if I did, then I would have an answer, would be able to explain why the author had got it wrong on some crucial point, and that therefore it wasn't like that. That I would be able to brush it aside and carry on. A sort of emotional version of that male bravado mentioned earlier. I never expected the thing that did it to be so clearly grounded and right. I never imagined that there might be no obvious loose brick that could be removed and bring the whole shebang tumbling down.

What do I do now? I'm a rubbish bottom, because emotionally I don't really have what it takes to do it (for reasons that seemed to be illuminated by some of Newmahr's earlier chapters, as it happens - I actually enjoyed those bits when I was reading them). I feel like I can't top safely from my own mental perspective - I still have the skills and knowledge and such that I had before, I can perform the job of topping, it is just that emotionally I feel like I can't do it any more without hurting myself. I won't give up my sense of ethics to the extent where I can just ignore the connection and adopt a misogynist approach that it doesn't matter to me. I can't just forget that I read it. I can't think of a way to argue around it, or to make it feel okay despite the connection. And I have no clue how to do vanilla, and it wouldn't turn me on even if I could.

I am reminded of what parents tell their children: "It's all fun and games, until someone gets hurt." I don't know how I can get back on my bike after this tumble, though.