Newmahr on "gawkers and wankers" (Part 2 of my response to Chapter 3 of "Playing on the Edge")

In my previous post on this chapter, I said that I would deal with Newmahr's addressing of the question of whether BDSM is sex or something else separately, so here we are.

The section of Chapter 3 of Playing on the Edge that deals with this question is headed "Gawkers and Wankers".

Obviously, the issues raised here parallel the question of the relationship between pain, eroticism and violence in BDSM, that Newmahr discusses in Chapter 6 (to which I have already responded, but which reading the book in the right order one would not have read yet!) In Chapter 6, Newmahr talks about the difficulty in squaring the violent with the sexual, so that researchers often frame BDSM as "kinky sex", and practitioners often struggle to hold both concepts simultaneously, saying either, "It's not really sex," or, "It's not really violence." (Or, indeed, "It's not really either.") In Chapter 6, Newmahr concludes:

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."

In Chapter 3, Newmahr talks about the ways in which this perception has shaped academic research, and in some cases even produced selection bias that 'confirms" the academic's original belief. By starting from the definition that SM has "a sexual content", research groups like Weinberg/Williams/Moser (1984) and Taylor/Ussher (2001) ended up finding that people that they recognised as sadomasochists all viewed their kink as sexual - but only because anyone who didn't was defined as not being "really" a sadomasochist!

Now, in Chapter 6, Newmahr concludes that BDSM is "sexually relevant", even when it is not actually sex. She writes there that, "Though SM interaction is not simply, solely, or always experienced as sexual, it is nonetheless linked to eroticism."

This seems to sit oddly with Chapter 3's statement that:

The characterization of sexual fulfilment as a motivation for SM is problematic for several reasons. The dismissal of the members of the community as denying their 'true' motives evokes the very same essentialist identities against which Langdridge is arguing. The rationale for privileging the paradigm of sexuality as the motive and reward for engaging in SM appears to be that it is the more common paradigm among participants.

In which Newmahr appears to be denying that there must necessarily be a sexual relevance understood in SM play, and castigating researchers and campaigners who insist on SM as sexual.

So, when it comes to the practical issues of what actually happens in public SM play, what chance do we have of answering the question?

That leads us to an exclusion type of definition.

Gawkers are people who visit the club to see the freaks and try to get some sexay goin' on. That is, to "gawk".

Wankers, of course, are those who go to a club in order to wank (for those unfamiliar with British colloquial English, it means "masturbate"- Newmahr uses the longer word to describe their activities!) I am kind of curious as to how the term "wankers" became a part of the common parlance in Caeden, and is it a case of a term used in British SM finding its way via teh internetz to the other side of the Atlantic?

Newmahr explains further:

In the city of Caeden, the wankers (men who attend SM clubs to masturbate while watching scenes) most clearly represent the boundary between the SM community and outsiders. Wankers never play, or introduce themselves to people. They do not attend meetings or other social events. They are phantom parasites, drifting in and out of view just long enough to ejaculate in their pants and leave.

Obviously, such activities are outlawed in public venues (and the people who do them don't get into private venues!)

Newmahr describes gawkers thus:

After making my way past hordes or relatively young, good-looking, well-dressed "gawkers," I located several disgruntled regulars and asked what was happening. The club, I was told, had just been featured in some "Erotic Guide to (Caeden" book. The inside word was that the place would be overrun with the "stand and model" crowd for a bit.

...

Some of the gawkers were no longer gawking ... Suddenly, I realised what the difference was: this was pornographic SM, the stuff that sold videos and fueled the fantasies of the hundreds of people who had, apparently, read "The Erotic Guide to (Caeden)."

As I understand it, this is a problem everywhere, and a major reason why the majority of SM/fetish clubs in the UK have a strict "fetish" dress code - if you're not dressed up, then the suspicion is that you are there just to watch and/or wank, without any real involvement in BDSM, so people are expected to make an effort to "look the part" - it is hoped that having to look like a freak will scare the casual "vanilla" viewer away long enough for the real "freaks" (us BDSM folks) to do our thing in peace.

These outsiders, who clearly view SM as primarily sexual, are obviously understood by the community as being in some way wrong about this identity.

Newmahr discusses several key distinctions that mark SM as being erotic without necessarily being "sex" as the term is usually understood, writing, "In Caeden during the time I was there, SM was neither a precursor to conventional sexual activity, nor a replacement for it, but an end unto itself."

The distinctions she identified were:

• 1 person always dressed
• Kissing is rare
• Genital play is much less common than other kinds of play
• "Participants often play with people they do not (initially) find sexually attractive, and with whom they are not interested in being sexual."
• "After play, participants normally go out to eat or home to sleep."

I notice some points about this that make me feel as though Newmahr has some selection bias of her own (although not nearly as disastrous as that of the researchers she criticised earlier!): I feel as though the fact that this is based solely on public play skews the findings the other way (when I play in private, for example, none of the above statements are true, except possibly the last one, because we're already at home!) Public play, for various reasons, tends to discourage explicitly sexual play, for example. In my experience, kissing is common between couples, but I would hazard that it is not a common element of public play either.

Newmahr seems to address these differences in this passage:

While SM communities certainly include people who engage in sadomasochistic sex, they are also sites of engagement in sadomasochistic activities that are not so clearly or necessarily experienced as 'sexual.' Some SM participants insist that their play has nothing to do with sex at all, and there are community members who decry the presence of any sexual activity in SM clubs, lest SM be conflated with 'kinky sex.' Others view SM as potentially sexual, but not a core aspect of SM experience.

My understanding of this passage, in conjunction with the above remarks and the list of points made by Newmahr, is that the public, community, spaces are not primarily sexual, even for those whose connection with SM is very much on a sexual level.

Newmahr also notes that:

It is of course likely that SM differs, to some extent, by community. Much of the recent work on SM has been conducted in the UK. It is possible that British SM is unequivocally about sex, and that, in turn, British participants are disavowing this.

Certainly, I know that at the club I have attended, there was an upstairs "private" area where explicitly sexual activities were permitted, and it was not that private. Nevertheless, the less-sexual nature of public "community spaces" is valid, and I think all the strands that Newmahr identifies are present in UK BDSM as well (though possibly in different proportions when compared to the Caeden scene).

Where does that leave us with the dichotomy presented by Newmahr's own words?

Newmahr concludes this section of the chapter thus:

In part, then, this is an issue of narrative and meaning-making. The extent to which SM participants understand their experiences as sex or not as sex is important, as are the social contexts in which they come to make these meanings. These questions cannot be adequately addressed outside an understanding of what it is SM participants actually do during SM play.

Out of which, we may be tempted to suggest that after considering "what it is SM participants actually do during SM play", Newmahr concludes that it is always "sexually relevant", even though it may not be understood as sexual by the participants. I am cautious to make that assumption, though.

Perhaps more useful are these elements from Chapter 6:

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

and

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?

At first, this seems to be restating the question. But in fact, it makes sense of how it is possible for something to be "sexually relevant" and yet not be understood by the person experiencing it as being a part of "sex". The understanding of BDSM as a physical desire on a par with sexual desire but not sited in erogenous zones, also makes sense of the understanding that, "SM was neither a precursor to conventional sexual activity, nor a replacement for it, but an end unto itself."

Because it is like a sexual pleasure but something different as well, it can be understood as its own kind of thing - "an end unto itself".

And that is certainly a conclusion with which I can identify from personal experience, even as I also identify as someone for whom BDSM is very strongly sexual a lot of the time. There are also plenty of times when it also isn't, but just "its own kind of thing".