"Playing on the Edge" - my responses to Chapter 6

Continuing to move backwards through Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy".

Since chapter 8 was "intimacy" and chapter 7 was "risk", that must mean we come now to "sadomasochism"...

Chapter 6: Reconcilable Differences – Pain, Eroticism, and Violence

The Erotic-Violent Dualism

When Newmahr introduced Catharine MacKinnon as a reference point, my heart sank. "Oh, aye-aye," I thought, "Here comes the traditional feminist onslaught..."

Oh me of little faith!

MacKinnon's criticism that the feminist argument that rape is violence rather than sex is simply preserving the "sex is good" norm, is introduced not to attack BDSM but to analyse and even uphold it:

Regardless of the moral position of her argument, MacKinnon's point is important; violence and eroticism are positioned in diametric opposition to one another. Where overlap is suspected or identified, it is pathologized, legislated, or reconceptualized as not 'really' one or the other. A conscious and deliberate relationship between the erotic and the violent is ethically unacceptable. In the context of powerful feminist critiques of (hetero)sexuality over the past three decades, the conflation is especially problematic.

...

Though SM interaction is not simply, solely, or always experienced as sexual, it is nonetheless linked to eroticism.

This obviously leads to some awkward issues for society in general, and also for participants:

Physically and psychologically, SM differs from conventional sexual experience, leaving participants grappling for language

And arguments are frequently made for why SM is not violence, usually hinging on the consent issue, with Newmahr noting that, "SM participants do not generally use 'violent' as an adjective to describe their play."

All of which leaves the big question of how hitting someone or torturing them, cutting, pinching, or "zapping" them, is not violent, or if it is violent, then how is it also sexual? If it isn't violent, what does it mean? If it is violent, then what does it mean?

In a beautiful passage, Newmahr asks:

What if the desire – desire that is understood in the same essentialist terms as normative eroticism (ache, hunger, want) – is for pain or tears or blood? And what do we make of circumstances in which people orgasm from blows to the back or being kept in a cage?

What, indeed!

Noting that participants also tend to struggle with the combination, Newmahr says that they tended to deny one side or the other.

I will address my own relationship to these ideas as we progress through the next section:

Strategies of Resolution

- DISAVOWAL AND DETACHMENT -

Returning to MacKinnon, to perform another mental wrestling "flip", Newmahr notes that MacKinnon argues that "If it's not sex, then why didn't he just hit her?" and says that, "Violence is sex when it is practiced as sex."

Again, SM poses an interesting turnabout: what is it if he often does just hit her?' [MacKinnon's case] implies that the hitting itself cannot be sex, in which case we would be left to conclude that SM is only violence, since it is not being 'practiced' as sex

But of course, SM is sexual on some level so what's going on?

After revisiting consent as the distinction between "violence" and "SM", we get to the interesting stuff - buried in the interview transcripts, Newmahr discovered that pain, though not "a thematic focus" of the interviews, was often the "elephant in the room" that the community "resisted, disavowed, refused, or ignored."

So Newmahr sets out to analyse and classify these undercurrents:

- DISCOURSES OF PAIN -

Newmahr identifies four different ways of understanding or relating to pain:

1. Transformed pain
2. Sacrificial pain
3. Investment pain
4. Autotelic pain

(I want to state at this point that I love the word "autotelic" - it makes my word-nerd senses tingle with excitement at its rhythm and meaning. I am going to have to find ways of working it into everyday conversation!)

Each of these four discourses is fascinating and I could probably write a whole post about each of them.

Transformed Pain: Turning Pain Into Pleasure

A conscious, or "barely conscious" process by which:

SM participants who frame pain this way tend to engage in mild to moderate pain play, but when pain is experienced, it is understood as not hurting. Instead, pain is 'transformed into pleasure.'

Interestingly, there is some medical research that relates closely to this, and that was covered by BBC documentaries earlier this year (I reviewed them both: Pleasure and Pain and The Secret World of Pain); when Newmahr writes:

This relies on a conceptualization of pain as an objective stimulus, which may or may not result in the feeling of hurt

This ties in directly with some of the techniques and science being discussed in those programmes (and consequently, my blog posts about those programmes!) - for example, this passage from my discussion of the "Secret World of Pain" programme:

The first research they were discussing looked at ways of helping burn victims who suffer through rehab. The technique that they covered was basically one of distraction. Professor Hunter Hoffman explained his development of a virtual reality video game called "Snow World" which is essentially a 3d shoot-em-up using snowballs to take out penguins and snowmen who throw snowballs back. High action, attention-demanding stuff, even though the game itself is quite simple. The theory of why it works is simply that because the game is drawing on so much of the patient's attention, there isn't enough processing power left over for the brain to register the pain signals properly. It also worked by cutting down on the visual cues that increased anxiety (as discussed in Prof. Tracey's work).

My favourite story of this type of discourse in my own journey with pain is when I was frying some bacon and the fat spat; it landed on my foot, covered only by a thin sock. It hurt. Then I thought, "Can I reinterpret this as sexual, SM, pain?" I could, I did, and it stopped being "bad" pain and felt pleasurable instead. Then I realised that it was still hot fat in contact with my skin and I should probably run it under some cold water or something. I was a little late in doing that, and have a permanent branding to show for the experiment. (Since it represents no actual damage, just a permanent mark, I feel this is a good mark to have.)

I noted in the "Secret World..." post that:

...a key component in many BDSM scenes is a demand that a bottom stay focussed on the scene, on the here-and-now, on the Top. This is often precisely to stop a bottom from distracting hirself from the sensations inflicted upon hir.

This leads neatly into...

Sacrificial Pain: For a Greater Good

This is pain that is actual suffering, but is cast as a sacrifice for the benefit of the top:

Pain hurts, and the bottom derives no pleasure from it. It is a gift in the other direction; the bottom gives her experience of pain willingly, a token to the top of her affection or devotion.

Since I identify as a sadist and that I take pleasure from causing pain that isn't fun for the bottom, this naturally is a type of discourse that appeals from that perspective. As an element of D/s, the casting of a sub's pain as a gift to me is quite a powerful emotional headrush, and Newmahr notes that the Sacrifial Pain discourse is most often used in a D/s context, where, "The emphasis on dominance and submission also helps these participants navigate this challenging moral territory." Newmahr also makes the interesting assertion that this shifts the emphasis to "power" rather than "violence", avoiding conflating violence with eroticism.

Investment Pain: Pain Payoffs

Newmahr identifies a masculine relationship to pain in this one, and says that it is much more common in male bottoms.

The experienced payoff is the endorphin rush, and pain must be endured to get there.

Pain is not sought, appreciated, or eroticized. Its infliction is a means to an end, its value derived from and located in the body of the bottom. It is impersonal, experienced not as an assault but as a desired catalyst toward another end. The violence of its infliction disappears in the higher value of its physiological provisions.

I found this particularly interesting, because it is the inverse of most of what I have to say in my post about how I understand my relationship to pain in general:

My first introduction to Pain that I remember, then, is that she came with pleasure in one hand and suffering in the other: for falling off my bike, tripping up, brambles and stinging nettles - these were the inevitable consequences of riding a bike enthusiastically, of running around, and of going on adventures in the woodlands and scrubland around where I lived. And those things were FUN! Doing them meant accepting that Pain was going to follow you and pounce unexpectedly, when she chose.

Where the "Payoff Pain" model is pain first, then pleasure, here I wrote about "I want to do this pleasurable thing, but I know I run the risk of being hurt if I do it. The pain is a worthwhile price."

I think that I do not relate to the Payoff model as either a top or a bottom, and it is hard to phrase SM pain in the way that I phrase the "falling of a bike" pain.

This leaves us with:

Autotelic Pain: Liking the Hurting

Put simply, "The pain hurts, but the hurt also feels good." A lot of my liking of pain as a bottom falls into this category, I certainly think that being scratched, spanked and "zapped" have this nature.

Newmahr writes:

…the terms 'sadist' and 'masochist' are used to describe people who frame their relationships to pain in positive terms. These identity labels are somewhat stigmatic in the community.

...

Participants who transform or provide pain, for example, distinguish themselves from masochists, who they believe 'like the pain,' and also from sadists, who 'like to hurt people.' Interestingly, the only discourse in the SM community in which pain appears as an (almost) unqualified 'good' thing is the least common.

Regular readers will know that I identify happily (usually!) as a sadist, and from my earlier remarks on Sacrificial Pain, may already have realised that I relate to autotelic understandings of pain as a top. I also like autotelic bottoms when I top for them. I have always noted that I like both the suffering bottom and the "I love it when it hurts" bottom, but in different ways. Giving pleasure by hurting is also a neat headrush, just a different one from the "she's giving it for me" headrush.

In discussing other forms of pain outside of SM, Newmahr notes that:

Sadists and masochists, self-defined and other-defined, do not appear to enjoy pain in other, solo contexts (such as medical pain, accidentally harm, or self-injury). Nonetheless, they claim to enjoy pain in and of itself, extricated from contexts of power and control.

In discussing the "Pain and Pleasure" programme, I observed that:

When we talk about "good" or "bad" pain, one of the most common distinctions masochists make is between medical conditions and deliberately caused pain. For example, my gout when it was bad was not something I could persuade my brain to enjoy, because it was indeterminate in length and out of anyone's control.

So how do we square these ideas with the claims of enjoying, "pain in and of itself, extricated from contexts of power and control."?

I think we go back to the ideas of edgework to make sense of this. Any of these discourses brings a physical element to the emotional edgework discussed in chapter 7, but autotelic pain seems to key into the physical side of collaborative edgework most directly, almost leaving the emotional side out of it. Pain caused by illness or serious injury is beyond the edge and firmly in the realm of chaos and formlessness, where it must be understood as communicating not pleasure but a threat to the self. Only pain that can be understood as under control has the potential for pleasure. But that seems to put pain back into, "contexts of power and control." However, as I understood the concept of edgework, the point of it was to push things to the edge of what is controlled and controllable. Autotelic pain is independent of control-based contexts not because it is pleasurable when there is control, but because it is pleasurable even when there is the danger of losing control of it, that is, when control can be cast into doubt. Alternatively, when it is not controlled but could, in principle, be brought back under control (i.e. stopped) by someone.

Another way in which narratives of control appear in BDSM is in the context of D/s; by saying that they enjoy pain outside of control structures, autotelic pain respondents may simply be indicating that the power structure is not important (i.e. it can be a relationship of equals) but not that control of the pain is irrelevant.

Newmahr notes of autotelic pain respondents:

Yet among these participants, eroticism is often denied or recast. Most of the people who say they like to hurt or be hurt also say that SM is not sexual for them.

I do know of people like that, but I am not one of them. Both as top and bottom, autotelic pain (direct pleasure in causing or receiving pain) is directly sexual in nature. But I have felt the same difficulty with defining it as was outlined earlier: Newmahr wrote, in posing this question:

If desire feels sexual - that is, it manifests itself in bodily understandings, such that one can 'feel' it in one's body, but the site is not in genitalia (or other 'erogenous zones'), what do we call this?

I don't know that I would call it desire, but I think my (bottoming) autotelic pain response is definitely a sexual, bodily, response that is "not [sited] in genitalia (or other 'erogenous zones')." I have specifically noted that it does not, for example, seem to result in an erection, but the feelings resemble sexual arousal "all over".

As a top, it is some response in the brain (I am still fond of the line my biology teacher gave us in sex ed - "The brain is the biggest sexual organ"). The best I have been able to come up with so far is that emotional or pain responses in a partner result in the most direct arousal; it would appear as though the experience of edgeworking is what turns me on, and is what I understand as sexual, in a way that I don't find "vanilla" sex to be!

Newmahr notes that most research on pain is in terms of medicine or sports injuries (involuntary or byproduct) so there is nothing to discuss autotelic pain (this was a frustration I had with the pain documentaries linked above!)

This negation of pain does not occur in other narratives of the body; childbirth is romanticized and glorified even as its pain is recognized as such. The pain of childbirth is 'worth it,' as is the pain of contact sports when victory is at stake.

I wanted to comment on this passage particularly because I was surprised by the sentence that followed it: "For SM participants, the pain of SM is 'worth it' in submission; submission becomes the higher cause and the pain necessary to withstand." This obviously links childbirth and contact sports to Sacrificial pain, whereas I had been expecting the association to be Payoff pain. In Newmahr's conception of Payoff pain, she wrote that the payoff was sited in the bottom's body, but in Sacrificial pain the payoff seemed to be sited in someone else. So I read the passage as meaning the payoff of victory or having a new baby was still sited in the pain sufferer (though not necessarily as a physical payoff). For Newmahr, it seems that the psychological rather than physical payoff makes it Sacrificial.

***

In concluding, Newmahr makes three statements that seem to me to sum up the chapter:

Far from having successfully merged the concepts of sex and violence, many members of this community seek ways to understand – or at least to render discursively – SM as one or the other; even for people engaging in SM, it simply cannot be both.

Although, as noted, this has not been my personal experience, I have certainly seen these juggling exercises in the discussions around various communities.

A broader, cleaner focus on the social criteria for, and construction of, both violence and eroticism is necessary to understand these relationships far beyond consensual sadomasochism.

...

The inadequacy of our language in the discussion of experiences of desirable violence anchors SM to its marginal position, both in society at large and in academic work.

With these two sentences, the gauntlet is thrown down, and some of the issues at stake are discussed in chapters 7 and 8.

For my last word on these debates, I give you Alice Cooper's "Poison":