Newmahr on Intimacy: my responses to Chapter 8 of "Playing on the Edge"

Still working backwards through Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge", after discussing some of the deliberations raised in her "Concluding Notes", we come to Chapter 8, which is also the final chapter.

Headings in bold are section headings from the book.

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Chapter 8 is titles, "What It Is That We Do", which is presented as being a very common term in the US national BDSM community. However, I think I have only encountered its use in the specific context of BDSM on a very small number of occasions, and mostly am aware of it through Maymay's usage. So the first comments I have are about this phrase.

To me it is a very generalised phrase. I may be mistaken, but I think I have heard it used in a similar way in other marginalised groups of which I am a member - or if not, phrases that seem ideologically similar to me have been.

To me the central idea that is captured in the phrase is one of "it is hard to produce a clear definition of 'us' that neither includes too many 'others', nor excludes those who are 'us'." In filk, there is a fallback position when seeking definitions that, "Filk is what I point to when I say, 'This is filk.'" That, to me, feels the "same" as "What It Is That We Do." Which means that WIITWD becomes a term for any marginalised group to self-identify.

The main purpose of Chapter 8 is to discuss the role of intimacy in BDSM. Newmahr opens by observing that there are many different theories of intimacy. Newmahr therefore sets down what she thinks the key characteristics of intimacy are:

Intimacy is:

• understood as "distinguishing the relationship from others."
• "lies not necessarily in marriage, disclosure, or sex, but anywhere that people experience each other differently enough than other people experience them."

Newmahr puts intimacy in a combative framework based on this. It is about having something that others don't (a "different enough" experience of someone), and therefore represents competition, and conquest. "The experience of intimacy is always a victory."

The big question to which I kept returning as Newmahr built on this argument was this: How different is "different enough", and what happens when two different people have different ideas about how different is "enough", and therefore take differing feelings of intimacy from an event? Is there a way in which we can look at something and say whether or not it is "different enough" to constitute intimacy? If there isn't, what follows from that?

From this, I thought about there being, by this interpretation, necessarily two different kinds of intimacy: "receptive" and "transmittive" (yes, I know I just invented that word, but it's useful and you know what I mean, or will do soon!). Receptive intimacy is the feeling when a person "experiences someone differently enough than other people" experience that person. Transmittive intimacy is the feeling when a person feels as though they have shown something that they do not normally show to people. With the question about differing definitions of "different enough", we can refine it further and ask two different questions: "What happens when one person's experience of receptive intimacy is different from the other person's experience of transmittive intimacy?" And, "What happens when two people share an event in which only one person feels that they have experienced receptive intimacy, or in which only one person feels that they have experienced transmittive intimacy?" Arguably, huge chunks of the world of literature deal with the personal consequences of such issues.

The other question at this point was: If intimacy is conquest and victory, then conquest of what? Victory over what or whom? If the prize is "having something that others don't", then most logically, it is about victory over people not in the relationship. That would seem to base the importance that we attach to intimacy on other people and not on a relationship to each other. If, on the other hand, it is "conquest" of, or "victory" over our partners, then it implies that intimacy is always something taken rather than given. This does not seem to follow from the basic premises about intimacy noted above. Newmahr discusses violent conquest as a form of intimacy later, but it does not follow that all intimacy must be conquest. But if intimacy is about victory over the other people who are not in the relationship, then where does that leave the intrinsic value of the intimate experience being shared? We are left with, "I think this is important because I won't share it with anyone else," rather than "I think this is an important thing about me." This also has the issue that usually we experience our reasoning as, "I won't tell anyone else about this, because it is important and about me." Intimacy and trust are related in these usual formulations, and crucially, it makes it about the two people and their (known to each other) qualities. This produces the "differently enough", because we can only trust those whom we know well enough to do so, which means differently enough from how we understand others. But it does so not by competition or conquest, but by closeness. For this reason, I reject Newmahr's version of intimacy as "victory". Newmahr uses similar language elsewhere in the book, and I rejected it there as well.

Intimacy in SM Play

Under this heading, Newmahr only made a couple of points to which I wish to respond. Discussing the discourse in Caeden, Newmahr notes that:

The word 'intimacy' is not part of the discourse of the Caeden community; rather, words such as 'connection' and 'energy' are used to describe the experience that I am calling intimacy. These narratives focus on access – on knowing others in ways that they are not normally known, and on feeling known in ways that one usually does not.

And that it is a "basic assumption" that intimacy of this kind happens.

From this, she says that in public play, observers also feel intimacy with players:

Even the observation of play is understood as revelatory; the statement 'I've seen you play' is a common means of claiming intimate knowledge, euphemistic in Caeden for 'I know you.'

I noted when I first read this, that the idea made me feel "creepy". I think my emotional response to public play is different from Newmahr's. In her concluding notes, Newmahr discusses how her feelings of having shared intimately when she first played shaped the way that she conceptualised the importance of SM to its participants and gave her avenues to investigate.

I have not played very publicly (when I played in a public venue, I found a quieter spot with my partner), although I have watched play. Maybe it is different for tops with playing, I don't know. I felt, neither as I watched nor as I played, that there was intimacy between observer and players. If intimacy is based in experiencing a person "differently enough" from other people's experiences of that person, then surely the more people share the experience of that person, the less intimate it becomes?

There are two ways my personality may affect my perception and make it different from Newmahr's observations:

Firstly, I am an introvert, so that social gatherings cost me emotional energy whereas extraverts are people for whom social gatherings are energising. Logically, one would expect to find a public play space to be full of extraverts! It is not hard to imagine that introverts and extraverts would experience public play differently in terms of understanding it as intimate: the introverted (literally, "inward-turned") person may well feel bombarded with communication and thus not have the same connection that the extraverted people feel. That is, I feel less receptive intimacy.

Secondly, although I often open up quite a lot about many things, both on this blog and face-to-face, I am ultimately intensely private. In this, my reaction may be a negative acknowledgement that intimacy does work the way Newmahr describes. Because I feel private, the idea of sharing intimately with people I do not know very well becomes threatening. That means that I (would) put up my emotional shielding and reduce as far as possible what I reveal about myself - I try to shut down the transmittive intimacy. A part of my feeling when I've been in a SM club was that, if I did play in a genuinely public way (with people watching) then it would be a performance and not "genuine" play. If I were to play as a bottom in a public space then my limits in that space would undoubtedly be far more restrictive than in private, for similar reasons.

In essence, then, my experience is or would be that public play reduces actual intimacy (between myself and my partner) precisely because of the implied intimacy with the wider audience.

Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence

Newmahr argues that heteronormative sexuality is about "issues and questions of access," and that it follows from this that there is a link between eroticism and intimacy based on, "their emphasis on access to particular aspects of others."

From this, she moves to discuss intimacy and violence, arguing that intimacy can be understood to exist in rape and murder, because those extreme moments reveal things not normally shown to others:

Understanding intimacy as the experience of achieving access to protected aspects of others' selves provides a theoretical framework for understanding the intimacy of interpersonal violence.

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In sharp contrast with most intimacy research, particularly in social psychology and in psychology, this perspective does not treat intimacy as, inherently, an experience of closeness and connectedness, but as an experience of accessing in another that which is normally thought inaccessible. This is not to draw a qualitative or ethical parallel between violent crime and SM, in which intimacy is a reciprocal and positive experience. The intimacy of SM play illustrates the limitations of current thinking about intimacy.

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While experiences of intimacy are different when access is consensual and reciprocal than when it is not, it does not cease to be intimate simply because it is unwanted, unpleasant, or violent.

These points, I feel, bring into sharp relief the questions I raised about unequal feelings of intimacy; when a rapist or murderer defines his or her feelings towards the victim as "intimacy", does it follow that it has to be felt as intimacy in a negative way by the victim? Can it be that the attacker believes there is receptive intimacy, but the victim believes there is no transmittive intimacy?

SM, Intimacy, and Trust

After recapping the "consent debate" that so often characterises pro-SM vs anti-SM feminist debate, Newmahr dives in and answers my questions at the end of the last section:

A rapist may feel that a rape was intimate, but the victim does not. When access is gained without consent, the subsequent distancing is a rejection of the intimacy, a refusal to condone the intimacy of the violation.

In a curious way, this links back to my thoughts about why I might not feel the same way about public play intimacy as Newmahr (and evidently, the Caeden community) did - to me, playing publicly is not granting access, and my response would be "a rejection of the intimacy" claimed by others.

Newmahr reasons that:

To be violated is an intimate experience, yet violation changes intimacy. It is the feeling of unwelcome intimate experience, but there is no being violated without feelings of intimacy. The warm, positive feeling that people mean when they speak of 'intimacy' is the state of appreciation of that transgression.

The word "transgression" here harks back to the conceptualisation of intimacy as "conquest", and "victory", mentioned before. But when I am invited into a place then I do not transgress by going there. It is still "access to protected aspects", but when the door is opened and someone shows me around, that is access without transgression. Arguably, most intimacy does not involve transgression, and certainly not all of it does.

SM play is fundamentally based on trust. It is not violative, but it is potentially so, always and deliberately. It plays with the dialectic relationship between trust and risk.

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It is here, in this unknown, risky space, that intimate experience is constructed and understood as such."

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If intimacy is access to pieces of the self that are otherwise inaccessible, then even the threat of violation is an inherently intimate space.

In these sentences we start to see how BDSM intimacy (or some types of it) could be considered as "welcome transgression" and where that might lead. As will be seen when I get to the earleir chapters, it also raises questions about vanilla dating and just how different or similar Newmahr's ideas actually make vanilla from BDSM.

The rest of this chapter (or those parts to which I wanted to respond in this piece) I have already analysed heavily, thanks to needing to work through it from an emotional perspective.