Learning to meet more people (and potential dates): Days 1, 2 and 3

Inspired by the threads about Pick-Up Artist (PUA) advice on Clarisse Thorn's blog, and by my own feeling of the biological clock ticking, I decided to try to put into practice some of the stuff discussed there, and linked from the "Ethical PUA" thread especially, but also the discussion thread on "Detrimental attitudes...". I am on many levels deeply suspicious of the PUA approach to these things, and a lot of their advice is just useless to me, or else sufficiently outside my ethical framework as to be beyond my ability to exercise. Nevertheless, some useful tips exist that I can adapt to fit into my introvert personality, or use to work around that to get to what I want (namely, meeting more women and possibly getting to date one or two of them).

Probably the biggest point of advice is from Mark Manson's "Practical Pick-Up" - probably the most obvious thing, really: you get better by trying it out. Practice makes perfect. Getting over shyness or feeling inhibited around women is a matter of quantity of low-level encounters to get you "desensitised" (his word - I'm going to call it "acclimatised" instead). Just about any skill or ability gets better the more you do it, after all - as long as you don't practice it wrongly!

If I've got the lingo correct, PUA usually call this type of post a "field report". I am not going to use that terminology. This is just a progress update, as I attempt to become less shy and inhibited.

So, on to the reports - *ahem* - updates!

DAY 1

Thursday evening, I decided to go out to a pub and see if I could manage to talk to at least one person of the female gender who wasn't paid to talk to me (that is, talking to the bar maid didn't count!)

It took me long enough to summon up the courage to go to a bar on my own that I felt that the only one within reasonable distance was the one just up the road, about 100yards from my home. I knew that this was unlikely to be a "target-rich environment", but as far as I was concerned, the idea of going there and feeling like I could talk to a woman if the opportunity arose would be enough to get the ball rolling. As it happened, this has opened up a different opportunity, more of which later.

I nearly bottled it entirely. Walked past the pub, glancing through the windows to try to figure out if there was anyone there I could talk to. Didn't see any such women, almost decided to turn right around and go home. However, I decided to take the plunge, after all, someone might turn up later, and besides, the point by this stage was to get comfortable with being in a public space as a singleton - so I went in and ordered a drink.

I saw a total of 3 female customers, maybe 4. One was clearly on a date with a guy. Another was surrounded by 4 men, making approach utterly impossible from my point of view. The third was in another part of the bar and I was not confident enough (or was too self-conscious) to walk around there without some secondary purpose in mind that I could act uninterested if it turned out that she was also on a date with someone. Basically, I did bottle it a bit. Nevertheless, I had it in my mind that if a woman or group of women arrived, then I would make the effort at least to say hi and offer the prospect of conversation. It never happened, but feeling in that frame of mind was a step.

DAY 2

Friday was the bank holiday for the Royal Wedding, but I went to the supermarket for some basic groceries that were running low. I also thought that I might as well try to spark up conversations with women while out shopping.

Most women I saw were either with partners or with a gaggle of children in tow thanks to schools being closed for the bank holiday. All the same, I think I saw five women in total who looked unencumbered by children and not obviously attached. I managed to say something to exactly one of these women - which is one better than I would normally manage, anyway.

On the basis that at this stage, just saying something counts as a success, this successful encounter came thanks to a situation that I felt gave me a natural opening line. It got a smile and nod, but adding a second neutral remark did not go so well, and had the point been other than simply to get on with talking to someone, then it would count as a failure. But there we go. I was more bothered about the other four women to whom I did not speak, than about the slightly annoyed frown of the woman I did speak to.

DAY 3

The previous two days were building up to today, when I knew I had to go to the Big Town to pick up a library book I had on order (ironically, or not, it's Eric Berne's "What Do You Say After You Say Hello?" which may or may not prove relevant to pick-up advice). I decided that I might as well make the effort and go all-out to put Mark Manson's advice into action. Setting my sights on a target I believed to be "doable", I decided to try to approach and exchange words with at least five women around the shopping area.

I managed 3.

Mr Manson suggests as an initial exercise, asking 10 women in the space of an hour or two for the time. I realised that I would feel like a right plonker asking the time that frequently, and that would be counter-productive. Nevertheless, the "what's the time, please?" gambit was my first one (another "slightly annoyed look" encounter). The second was noting the woman's demeanour, I remarked that "You look like you've lost someone!" She laughed and said that she had indeed, but that she was sure they would turn up. I agreed that they would, and left her to carry on looking. The third was entirely accidental: I had just visited the cash machine, but I forgot to pick up my cash as I left. the woman queuing behind me called me and pointed out my mistake, I thanked her, and added a quip about it defeating the object of visiting the machine in the first place. She laughed and agreed, and I finished by saying that the machine was "all yours now!" End of encounter.

A few minutes after that, as I was heading back to the bus stop to come home, I had my first real failure - I totally bottled it when I had the perfect opportunity.

This failure was that I saw a woman standing outside a door to the main shopping mall, she had a great hairdo and a flower in her hair (so I even had an option for a flirty opening line available). She looked up and our eyes met briefly, and I looked away. I glanced back, she was looking down again, and I thought to myself, "Go on, tell her you like her hair!" Then she glanced up again, and our eyes met again, and at that moment I really feel I should have changed direction and been bold - walked right up and declared outright what was in my head ("I like your hair!") I didn't. I glanced away all shy again. I felt like a third such eyes-meeting would just have felt creepy s I had to chalk it up as a missed opportunity. By the time I looked back again, she had gone.

Nevertheless, that was a learning experience. I feel as though recognising that the opportunity was there, and that I had the chance but didn't take it that time, is a step forwards. I would never even have recognised that as a chance before. And I will be honest, that glance when our eyes met - I didn't see any suspicion or offence in her eyes, so there was nothing to say I shouldn't approach. So my feeling is that I can be more alert to that sort of chance in future and (maybe) seize it when I see it. It's just a matter of overcoming that ingrained tendency towards displaying embarrassment, and instead choosing to be bold.

All of which leads up to the prospect of Day 4. When I visited the pub on Thursday evening, I discovered something very interesting, and a definite chance to try developing my experience around people (and around women especially). It turns out that every second Sunday, they have a social games evening (cards and board games). This opportunity for adding to my paltry list of social events is ideal, and may well lead to encounters that offer a ready-made situation for starting conversation.

The main thing I have noticed about my inhibitions surrounding approaching women, is that I have a general (i.e. not gender-specific) inhibition about interrupting someone. Not just in terms of them having a conversation with someone else (a large number of the women I saw were in pairs or groups who were talking to one another most of the time). If a person looks "busy", or "engrossed", or "in a hurry", then I feel that it is rude to break into their focussed mental state. I just think how annoyed I would feel if someone did that to me. The woman whom I asked to give me the time did not look that busy or focussed, but her look of annoyance was what I associate with, "Who's this interrupting my train of thought!?" The question is, is it possible to find many people in casual situations (i.e. not set up for the purpose or opportunity of meeting others) who don't at least look as though they are "busy"? Is it, or can it be, ethical to push past that barrier and interrupt the other person as they go about whatever it is they are going about, for no other reason that to attempt a pick-up? Is it possible to tell the difference between those who actually are busy (and would be unhappy about an interruption) and those who only look as though they are busy, but might have time to exchange a few words at least?

Regardless of those considerations, when I see a woman who does not look "busy", I can do better on simply going for it. I am not good at this: I overthink just about everything, and saying "hello" to someone I've never met before is certainly no exception. So "just go for it" is a problem. It's much easier if I can picture what I'm going to say first in advance.

Well, tomorrow, expect a further update after the games evening!

RIP Poly Styrene

Feminist punk icon Poly Styrene has died aged 53, of breast cancer.

(Edit to add: the Guardian's full obituary)

I am not that big a fan of the X-Ray Spex, although I do enjoy some of the songs they recorded with Poly Styrene at the mic. However, her name is one of those that is etched deeply into the history of punk music and most people who have an interest in the punk of the 1970s will have some idea of who she was and what she did for the music.

The Guardian's quote from Beth Ditto puts it into perspective, Ms Ditto being a punk feminist icon for the present day: "Poly Styrene [was] so ahead of her time. She recreated punk."

What I didn't know until reading the Guardian article was her later troubles. To have come through misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, being hit by a fire engine, and more recently to promote a new album while suffering from breast cancer that had spread to lungs and spine. That was one heck of a tough cookie! But alas, the universe is bigger than any of us and cares not one jot who lives or dies.

And so yet another cultural feminist icon from the seventies has passed away, following Lis Sladen's death last week.

RIP Poly Styrene

Newmahr on the rewards of SM play (Chapter 4 of "Playing on the Edge")

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

This chapter discusses some of the ways in which participants gain on a social and personal level from being involved:

Chapter 4: Fringe Benefits - The Rewards of SM Play

Newmahr opens by comparing BDSM to the categorisation of leisure by Robert Stebbins, as either "casual leisure" and "serious leisure", where casual leisure is immediately rewarding, whereas serious leisure takes some work. Newmahr's thesis is that BDSM qualifies as "serious leisure", because it requires, "specialized skills and resources, and provides particular benefits."

Newmahr states that, "Above all else, SM is a recreational activity in the Caeden community." While I am happy to go along with the "serious leisure" definition in the specific terms introduced from Stebbin, I find this statement to be curiously dismissive of something that I feel forms a core part of my self-identity. But the community to which Newmahr refers is the public play community and their activities. Rather than saying "heterosexuality is a recreational activity", this is more like saying, "going out on the pull is a recreational activity" - and if we roll in Pick-Up Artistry into that conception then it could even be considered a "serious leisure" activity at that (since PUA is supposedly about working to acquire specialised skills for success in pulling!)

Short version: "'SM is a recreational activity' because it seems to me that public play is recreational by default, whereas in other spaces and contexts it might be something else."

In Stebbins' model, notes Newmahr, these benefits focus on, "the personal, social, and psychological rewards and benefits provided by participation."

Newmahr breaks these down, in the context of public SM participation, as follows:

• Accomplishment (acquiring of new skills, competence)
• Empowerment (through feelings of trust, having an effect as a top, feeling strong)
• Personal growth
• Catharsis and healing
• "Flow"
• Reinvention and rebirth
• Social status (as a volunteer and as a participant)

The rewards of accomplishment are discussed under a heading "The Making of a Player", which is awkward because "player" can have two meanings depending on context or who is speaking. Some people use the term, as Newmahr does, to mean an active participant. Others, however, use the term to mean someone who does not take it seriously (i.e. who tries to treat BDSM as a "casual leisure" rather than "serious leisure" activity) and is thus a term of derision or censure towards that person.

In discussing the learning process by which one acquires skills and competence, Newmahr makes what I feel to be a contentious statement:

Some people enter the scene with a broadly defined interest in SM or D/s. Others come to the community 'knowing' their SM identification. It is common, though, for SM interests, and, by extension, identification labels, to change, sometimes multiple times. Often this change emerges in part from learning to top or bottom; the acquisition of skills co-constructs the desire to practice them. Learning to play is an integral part of becoming a sadomasochist, shaping motivations and forming identities in the process.

My specific point of contention with the above paragraph is with the assertion that interest (and consequent adjustments of identity) result from learning new skills, rather than a developing interest prompting further exploration and learning.

I have made no secret of the fact that I identify strongly as a top, both sadist and Dominant, and did so before finding the BDSM community. However, as I learned more about what was available and possible in terms of techniques, some of these seemed interesting, others seemed to me to be difficult and not interesting enough to me to be worth following up. Interest, therefore, prompted acquisition of skills, or lack of interest meant that I did not bother with those skills.

Similarly, bottoming is something that interests me not because I wish to practise new skills but because I wish for new experiences.

I suspect that this difference in interpretation may stem from the fact that Newmahr focusses solely on the public play scene, and also that it may be that the relative prevalence of teaching activities in the Caden community also produces a tendency to learn something more-or-less at random because it happens to be the demonstration on that week, and then want to try it out. Either of these could produce a greater emphasis on learning as the first step, then producing desire, whereas I tend only to seek out learning after I have identified a desire.

- LEARNING TO TOP -

Newmahr identifies four "distinct processes", requiring, "specialized information sets and modes of practice."

• Acquiring technical skills
• Learning safety
• Learning in-scene communications
• Understanding the emotional and psychological effects on bottoms

Technical skills are the practical things of how to tie different knots, how to make sure you hit what you're aiming at, and so on.

Safety includes basic first aid, where it is safe to strike the body with an implement, and how to identify physiological signals that a bottom may be in trouble.

On communication, Newmahr observes that, "Direct communication threatens power performances and handicaps the accomplishment of 'pushing limits,' a common objective of SM play." This means that reading subtle non-verbal signals becomes a key skill. As noted in the "what I would have done differently" post, context is everything and with several of the scenes Newmahr described and I discussed there, the lack of the subconscious communication may be why things that would seem hot, felt awkward or uncomfortable.

Finally, there is recognition of the significance and implication of different things for a particular bottom. I once had a top refuse to play with me in an online scene because she felt like she kept tripping over awkward things for me that were unusual in her experience and therefore she felt she lacked this level of competence in understanding my emotional reactions.

Newmahr discusses the tradition within the community of passing on knowledge and making sure that the next generation of participants will be able to hand the information on the people who come after them. She also notes that the importance of safety means that, "Contrary to images of 'rough sex,' a sense of genuine recklessness and chaos is normally undesirable in SM interactions."

Safety also plays a social role with reputation on the line, but also genuine concern for people's wellbeing. Newmahr recounts a situation where a symptom raised a mild concern and immediately concern was expressed by other members of the community, while the top also had worries about reputation.

Newmahr identifies one final part of the process of "becoming" a top:

Most tops grapple with feelings of guilt, shame, and fear at some point during their topping careers… More commonly, tops process these feelings with their friends in the scene, and turn to other tops for reassurance and support.

People who read my posts about suffering a crisis from one particular passage of Newmahr's book, will be well aware that this is very familiar territory to me! At the time I first read this passage, I noted that I had tended to find reassurance from bottoms rather than tops. One of the very first online articles I read after discovering consensual BDSM communities existed concerned this very topic, and how to deal with it.

I had believed that I had resolved my issues already, but obviously, there was still at least a bit more to do, and that's how come I was tripped up by a particular passage.

Newmahr's discussions of violence and intimacy in later chapters throw some light on these feelings; Newmahr discusses how society has a tendency to separate sex and violence as two opposites, and how even within SM, where the two clearly intermingle freely, there is a tendency for practitioners to keep them separate in their minds: either SM is not really about sex, or it's not really about violence.

At some point, of course, that attempt to "sanitise" the conceptions of sex and violence within SM comes a cropper and the challenge to the social norms is laid bare. This point of dissonance could well be a key element in these feelings.

- LEARNING TO BOTTOM -

If topping involves a lot of technical learning, both in the physical techniques of practice and of safety, and in the mental techniques of communication and emotional understanding, then bottoming is much more generalised:

Unlike the formalized, technical learning process in becoming a top, this is a meaning-making process. Participants who bottom choose from sometimes competing discourses to contextualise, recast, make sense of, and enjoy the pain, anguish, or subservience of bottoming.

This seems to be part and parcel of the power/powerlessness element at the heart of BDSM, such that the learning is itself cast as "how to wield power" versus "how to be cool with not having power." Newmahr noted that the "top crisis moment" of guilt, shame and fear, is not typically addressed in workshops and suchlike, even though that "how to be cool with having and wielding power" problem is obviously highly prevalent, probably even more so that the issues that bottoms are invited to address as a matter of course. But to discuss emotional elements of topping in this way could challenge the perception of power imbalance and inequality.

There are, of course, technical aspects of "how to bottom" that can be learned or taught, but it is typical to find that it is considered in a relationship that the top (Dom) partner should teach the sub the specifics. Newmahr discusses elsewhere in the book how bottoms can learn techniques both of non-verbal communication (to complement the top's skill in reading these) and of physical presentation (that is, making it easier for the top to do hir job, for example, by making the target areas easier to hit). These, especially the non-verbal communication (which, if played too heavily, may result in accusations of trying to manipulate the top or "top from the bottom"), would challenge the perception of the top as wielding all the power.

Social-Psychological Rewards of SM

- EMPOWERMENT -

Trust

Newmahr identifies trust as, "a central feature of the experience of SM play." In discussing it, she talks about various ways in which "trust" is understood, or is hard to understand, intellectually, both in general and in terms of her own specific experience. The community was okay with this lack of rational explanation and accepted trust as normal without needing to explain it.

Above all, Newmahr observed that the sense of trusting or of being trusted is "empowering and meaningful". This again ties into the discussions in Chapter 8 of how intimacy works. To trust effectively means to allow oneself to be vulnerable to another and knowing that it will be okay.

Efficacy

Feelings of efficacy appears in Newmahr's text to mean "feelings of having an effect on someone." While I think that "efficacy" is a more appropriate word in terms of direct meaning, I noted here that I might have preferred "agency" because "efficacy" seemed to me to carry slightly impersonal connotations, as though referring to inanimate objects rather than people.

While the top's effects on a bottom are usually quite apparent, Newmahr notes that efficacy is also a goal of bottoming:

Casting a top's demands as a need, a bottom can view her actions as the only or best way for the top to meet that need. The bottom eliminates this perceived deficit in the top, thereby drawing feelings of efficacy and empowerment from her acquiescence.

This ties in well to the concepts behind the Martyr and Indispensable Service bottoming archetypes, as well as to the Sacrificial pain discourse. That draws the question of why the Badass bottom archetype does not appear to produce the same efficacy. Is it that BABs feel no need for the efficacy element of the empowerment, due to other elements (such as "toughness/strength")? Or does BAB produce feelings of efficacy in a different way?

Competence

As discussed, a top acquires skills and must practice them, producing accomplishment and competence as rewards. As for bottoms, Newmahr notes that, "Most bottoms describe feelings of competence and success through bottoming, particularly through service."

Toughness/Strength

This is summarised easily by a single sentence from Newmahr: "Feelings of physical strength come from delivering or withstanding pain or intense sensation."

Obviously, this is the key goal of the Badass bottoming archetype, in which a competitive element is present, testing or extending the boundaries of endurance. Whether that makes the efficacy element irrelevant or not is open to dabate, as mentioned above.

- PERSONAL GROWTH -

Newmahr explains this in terms of a top's personal examination, both of hir own desires ("Ruminations about this can be unsettling, given the kinds of activities involved in SM play." - No kidding!) and the resulting self-trust (again, look at some of my other posts about this book!)

For a bottom, Newmahr limits her discussion to various kinds of testing one's limits, especially when, "...having previously cast a limit as a source of fear, discomfort or anxiety, [they] overcome this concern within and through play, and frame this experience as an accomplishment."

I think that for both bottoms and tops, the personal growth aspect can be drawn much bigger. For example, much of the technical skills or service skills covered under competence and learning can also be understood as an element of personal growth as well. More significant, however, is the sense of partnered personal growth. Newmahr's discussion casts a top's personal growth in terms of self-examination within BDSM and in relationship to it. But it seems to me that personal growth from BDSM can also be through reflection from a partner as well, and in terms of wider emotional development in ways not directly related to play. For example, my change in understanding of myself as being attractive and desirable came out of partners' responses as well as internal personal work of my own; and it does not directly relate to play as such, but is a much wider and social development.

Similarly, I think that bottoms can experience personal growth in ways other than simply testing limits and overcoming sources of fear. Examples can be in the acquisition of new skills outside of those necessary for direct play (for example, through service) and, as with tops, other emotional benefits. I know that learning to understand oneself as attractive and desirable quite independently of one's role as a bottom is a commonly reported benefit for bottoms. (Emphasis included to distinguish this effect from a contingent or conditional regard by the top, but as something sited in the bottom hirself and lasting beyond relationship status if top and bottom should separate.)

The benefits that Newmahr identifies seem to tie in with the discussion of edgeplay in Chapter 7, but the ones that I suggest probably link more closely to the discussion of intimacy in Chapter 8 as well, since they depend on seeing oneself from another's perspective through their and one's own openness (or transgression of personal boundaries, in the terms that Newmahr used).

- CATHARSIS AND HEALING -

Regardless of whether catharsis is the objective of a given scene, the physical, emotional, and psychological intensity of SM, combined with its marginalized status, generates emotional responses of an intensity that players often find cathartic. Some participants play with the express purpose of healing from past trauma

Catharsis does not have to be from something big and horrible in the past. Another commonly-reported use of, for example, a "good spanking", is to de-stress after a difficult day at work: this can work for both top or bottom in a relationship. Newmahr describes the sensation of her first flogging as being, "akin to that of a rigorous deep tissue massage." (It appears that "deep pressure massage" is the correct technical term here.) It may be argued that both the mental discipline required for good topping, and the physical discipline thereof, provide relaxing benefits for a top, just as the physical stimulation provided by a flogging or spanking or other play can provide a way to relax after a hard day, just as a massage would.

- FLOW -

Newmahr draws a parallel between BDSM and the concept of "flow" introduced by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who identifies "optimal experience" as an "end in and of itself, for its own sake." Flow, in this sense, is, "the result of attention so intense and all-encompassing that one achieves a sense of order in consciousness, against the default state of psychic entropy."

Since "flow" includes "challenge, utilization of skills, intense concentration" and "the loss of self-consciousness, goals", it is not hard to draw a parallel between this and what is involved in a BDSM scene, based on some of the other remarks in this chapter. Newmahr suggests that subspace may be a form of "flow", although I am not certain about this (for some people at least, the term seems to refer particularly to the endorphin high, which is neurological rather than psychological, and so may or may not be related to "flow").

Newmahr also says that, "Tops also experience flow through the physical act of topping; the physical and auditory rhythm of flogging, juxtaposed with the concentration required to do so safely, can be meditative." (Compare to my remarks on de-stressing under "catharsis".) I think I have gone to this space a few times, mostly through providing a spanking "just for the fun of it". I think a lot of the time, I personally tend to have my brain racing, planning out what next in a scene and worrying about loads of things, but delivering a good, hard spanking does have that meditative effect.

This also can be linked back to the concept of edgeplay explored in Chapter 7, where the idea of voluntary risk-taking based on personal skill might be understood as an endeavour to produce just this kind of focussed "altered state".

- REINVENTION AND REBIRTH -

This ties in to the question about learning and changing interests. In Newmahr's explanation, because in the Caeden community, identity is fluid, reinvention is a regular part of involvement in the scene, and "arises ... out of play, moment to moment."

Topping and bottoming identities are, "not understood as fixed for most participants. For a given individual, they change often, sometimes even day-to-day."

This is an adventure of the self, a trip to different parts of the self, that may ultimately function to integrate them."

These remarks intrigue me in particular in terms of how Newmahr casts topping and bottoming into archetypes (see earlier link). The archetypes in chapter 5 were cast as being both overlapping and temporary, performed in a particular scene rather than necessarily being carried from one scene to another. A Badass Top in one scene might be a Benevolent Dictator in another, or even a Service Top in the right circumstances; and similarly, a bottom who normally plays Indispensable Service could play Martyr or Badass Bottom in different scenes (and for both these participants, the different archetypes could overlap and appear simultaneously in a scene).

- STATUS -

This is probably the element with which I identify least, especially when Newmahr talks about "community leadership". While I am happy to take a leadership role when I believe I have something specific to offer, in very unDomly fashion my general attitude to leadership is almost one of embarrassment when I find people looking to me for it: most particularly when friends ask me what they think they should do about a romantic situation (I am at best 25% correct, although according to Robert Townsend that's not actually that bad: "Two out of every three decisions I made were wrong. ... Beware the boss who walks on water and never makes a mistake.")

That said, Newmahr has the following observations:

Social status within the Caeden SM community operates on multiple levels. Paths to high status are varied and related to identification labels, and means of status achievement are clear to most participants.

Status is either as a volunteer or as a player.

Volunteering can get a person's name recognised, which in turn leads to people feeling more confident in playing with that person; this makes it more important for tops:

Because most participants want to play soon after they enter the scene, and because bottoms do not need to become involved in order to obtain play, the result is the cultivation of tops as community leaders far more frequently than bottoms.

This is interesting because my impression had been that bottoms have been more involved in organising things in this area, but I may have developed a false impression somehow. I have noticed that bottoms can be quite politically active in that sense of community leadership.

Status as a player is obtained through achievement, variety and particular skills; it can also be acquired through playing with high-status participants. In Newmahr's Concluding Notes, she discusses how her aversion to spanking scenes led to her playing more with the highly-respected, "harder", tops, which in turn gave her a certain status.

***

Newmahr sums up these observations succinctly, thus:

SM participants gain a number of social and emotional benefits from play itself and from the community more broadly. These particular rewards are especially meaningful for people with marginal identities, whose life stories are organized around themes of isolation, loss and trauma.

Her final comment bothers me a little, just as I pointed out at the start of this piece:

Framing SM as a serious leisure pursuit shifts the focus away from the ultimately unhelpful questions about whether SM is or is not deviant sex, and allows us to understand SM as, most fundamentally, social behavior.

Again, my concern is that Newmahr studied a public play scene community, which almost by definition is a social incarnation of SM play. That does not make SM fundamentally social behaviour; it makes public play fundamentally social, which seems almost tautological as a statement. I think there are a lot of useful points about the "serious leisure pursuit" formulation, but I do feel as though it does not capture all of SM, and tends to reveal the public play focus of Newmahr's research, unless it can be shown that what vanilla folks get up to together as bonding experiences and displays, can also be shown to be at heart "serious leisure" in some sense.

Elisabeth Sladen, RIP

Elisabeth Sladen, beloved by Doctor Who fans for her portrayal over a course of nearly 40 years of the character Sarah Jane Smith, has died of cancer, aged 63.

Edit to Add: Talis Kimberley (a great singer/songwriter) has uploaded on Bandcamp a song, Goodnight Sarah Jane. It moved me to tears, but in kind of a good way too.

The character was an investigative journalist whose nose for a story led her to become a well-informed person who knew how to ask the right questions, even when teamed up with an alien saving the planet from other aliens, with the help of a military force set up by the UN. The mixture of brains, charm and occasionally needing to be rescued was, of course a big hit.

The children's spin-off series, the Sarah Jane Adventures, gave her more power, and let her be the one doing the rescuing more often than not.

Lis Sladen played the part with gusto and I think was one of many former Doctor Who performers who have been stalwarts in keeping in touch with the fans at events of all kinds.

It seems too early to lose such a personality, but then, it always does, no matter what age they are when they die. All the same, in the world of story and dream, it seems as though the Earth lost another of its great protectors and in real life, one of the good people, along with The Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) earlier this year.

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.

SM Archetypes and Pain

As soon as I realised that Staci Newmahr had created two different classification schemes in her book about sadomasochism, "Playing on the Edge", I knew that I would have to see if I could figure out how those two schemes related to one another.   Were they independent variables in a multi-dimensional space, or were identifications linked, so that one's identity in one would imply something about one's identity in the other?   I was not so bothered about "if you're this then you can't be that" as I was by "if you're this, then you must be that", so long as the "can't be" only eliminated one element and was based on an obvious contradiction in terms.

The two classifications were "topping and bottoming archetypes" (three archetypes each for topping and bottoming), introduced in Chapter 5, and four "discourses of pain", introduced in Chapter 6.

To investigate this, I made a few rough-and-ready tables in Word to try to see if I could pick out recognisable interaction types from BDSM that fit the intersection of each archetype with each discourse of pain.

Firstly, a recap of the six archetypes and the four discourses:

Archetypes:

Archetypal identities are fluid and can change from scene to scene in the same person, and can overlap at the same time as one another.   they are also, so far as I can tell, not intended to be exhaustive but simply describe the most commonly observed types as seen by Newmahr.

Martyr

The Martyr bottom most clearly constructs a sense of helplessness, presenting as, "I do not want to do this, but I am being made to!"   It is presented as being "for the good of another".   The aim is to relinquish responsibility for one's suffering.

Indispensable Service (or ISB)

Centring around performing in a pleasing way for the top, this can be in terms of direct responses in a scene, or in other ways.   This is the archetype most closely linked with the "good boy!" or "good girl!" reward scheme in D/s especially.

Badass Bottom (or BAB)

The BAB pushes hirself, or the top, to new heights (or depths, depending on one's perspective), with the aim of proving or improving hirself.   Newmahr describes this as "competitive", and "an explicit dare".

Badass Top (or BAT)

The "mean" and "cruel" top.   A performance of being a nasty person, a victimiser, someone who just loves to see you suffer.

Benevolent Dictatorship (or BD)

Whether cast as the Emperor or the Mother, this centres on asking for obedience in return for protection or nurture.   Key words are discipline, caring, decision-maker.

Service Top (or ST)

The explicit aim is to please the bottom, and most openly acknowledges the bottom's agency within the scene.   The ST is understood as deriving hir pleasure from the bottom's pleasure, rather than any other source.

Discourses of Pain:

Again, it is possible for one person to use more than one discourse of pain, either in serial or simultaneously

Transforming

Pain is felt and then reinterpreted either consciously or subconsciously as a pleasurable stimulus.   How a top relates to causing "transforming" pain is not quite clear to me, because it is the one that is most wholly sited in the bottom's own body and mind.   It might be understood in terms of the intention that the bottom should transform it.

Sacrificial

Pain is felt as suffering, but accepted for "a greater good", that is, for the benefit of the top.   The top's understanding of pain in this discourse is as a gift for hir benefit.   For example, "I cause the pain to receive it as a gift."

Payoff

Pain is understood as a barrier to break through to get to the "endorphin rush" as a payoff for oneself.   Like "transforming" pain, it is sited in the bottom's own body, but arguably a top would understand this from the point of view of pushing someone through the barrier.

Autotelic

Pain is felt directly and simultaneously as pleasure in its own right.   Similarly, the causing of pain is understood as a pleasure in its own right.

***
 I have created three tables: "topping archetypes against bottoming pain discourses", "topping archetypes against topping pain discourses" and "bottoming archetypes against bottoming pain discourses".   I did not feel confident in figuring out the scripts or roles that might emerge from "bottoming archetypes against topping pain discourses" because of the less clear-cut relationship of a top to pain discourses (with the notable exception of autotelic understandings of pain).   I felt more confident with the "top/top" because I am a top and could try using introspection to some degree on that one.

The first table, then, is "Topping archetype" listed across the top, and "Bottoming pain discourse" listed down the left.   What you see is the screen cap of my initial attempts at making sense of the intersections:

In "Transforming / BAT", the idea is that the bottom's tendency to transform pain into pleasure is a form of "permission" for the top to be cruel in the BAT way.   However, Newmahr noted that transforming pain tends to happen mostly for those bottoms who play with slight to moderate pain (I typed the wrong word in my notes, as you can see!), so there is a sense that the BAT may have to hold back if the transforming pain discourse is to work.

A bottom who relates to pain through the sacrificial discourse would be anathema for the service top, who only enjoys it when the bottom enjoys it too.

The BD archetype sits awkwardly in this table: while there is no intrinsic contradiction between BD and an autotelic bottom, or between a BD and a transforming bottom, in each case there is no real interaction between the pain discourse and the object of the archetype.   A bottom who is "transforming pain" might, in fact, be a frustration to the BD when the purpose is discipline rather than play; while offering pain as reward has a strong overlap instead with ST.   The autotelic bottom might be rewarded with pain for a "job well done", but it does not sit neatly with the protection/nurture side of the BD archetype, and is like an inverse of the discipline side.

The last note to make here is on the BAT faced with an autotelic bottom.   I am at once proud and disappointed to have been told by a top, "You enjoy this too much, I'm not going to do it to you any more!"   That seems to be the natural conclusion to the BAT/autotelic scene, where the "cruel" performance is punctured because the "cruelty" only results in "Mmmmm, more!"   The only way to be cruel is not to play!

Next, there is the internal script generated by a top of each archetype, crossed with that top's understanding of pain:

 

Given my note on the difficulty of interpreting the "transforming" pain discourse particularly from a top's perspective, that row more or less repeats the same row of the first table.

When a BAT understands a bottom as transforming pain, I reasoned that the performance of cruelty requires creating a challenge: "You think you can transform pain into pleasure?   Well, how about this, then!"   This is the same tension as I mentioned before, that the performance almost requires a pushing of the bottom's boundaries.

When the BD has the same interpretation, there is also a challenge, because "pain as discipline" is now off the table, and so either the bottom must be nudged into a different discourse, or discipline play is not based in corporal means of discipline.   As before, while a "reward" scheme can be understood in the application of pain, it is harder to paint this as coming from the BD archetype rather than the ST archetype.

And the ST views the tranforming pain discourse as being evidence of a job well done.

Sacrificial pain is more interesting.   As the table shows, it seems to me that when the pleasure of giving pain is seen in terms of receiving it as a gift of sacrifice, then the BAT performing cruelty has the natural script of "Thank you.   I want more!"   This is a familiar script: the bottom performs well, and then is told "now do it all again!"   Whether it is under direct stimulation or in performing arduous tasks, the BAT is simply taking the sacrifice and saying, "and another!"

When a BD understands pain as a gift, it naturally becomes the "price" for "my protection", and the bottom is understood as saying, "I gladly pay the price in suffering."

A ST who understands pain as a gift makes no sense within a scene; the goal of a ST is to give a gift of pleasure, not to take a sacrifice of pain.

The Payoff discourse also has some interesting structures that seem to emerge.   When the top understands pain as something zie puts the bottom through for some goal of the bottoms, it makes some curious - but recognisable - scripts.

The BAT who likes payoff pain is the "Drill Sergeant" play role: it results in the script, "I like making you suffer to get what you want, so I will make you suffer as much as possible on the way!"   The payoff bottom them replies, "The more it hurts, the better the end result will be!"

It seems to me that the BD and the ST both would accept the bottom's end goal as their own payoff; however, the ST sees the causing of suffering as a cost to be borne, just as the pain is a cost to be borne for the Payoff bottom.   The BD sees the causing of pain for the payoff to be a journey and a reward in and of itself, not from the causing of pain but from seeing the evolution of the pain into the final reward of pleasure - a "nurture" relationship.

Probably the box I fall into as a Dominant-sadist is the "autotelic-BD" box.   Like with Sacrificial pain, the surface script is, "this pain is the price you pay for my protection and guidance."   However, where sacrificial pain is a gift given and accepted, the autotelic BD takes the pain as tribute, demanded from hir subject.

Finally, we have the bottoming archetypes combining with bottoming discourses of pain:

The combination of Martyr with Transforming pain was a curious one, because on the face of it, they should not match up well, but in fact it feels to me as though this is probably in real life the most common combination on the table.   The reason is that the martyrdom archetype is an excuse to feel pain that can then be turned into pleasure - if the aim is to give up responsibility, then one can say, "I have to feel this pain anyway, so I may as well try to understand it as pleasurable!"   Arguably, this is also where my "anti-Martyr" script comes into play most easily.

Similarly, there is a deeper level to be found when Transforming pain combines with ISB.   The process described above seems to me to fit what I have been told by some bottoms about how the "transforming pain" discourse works for them.   When pain is delivered as a punishment, that breaks this transforming mechanism and explains why context is a big factor in how much something hurts.

The Badass Bottom who uses Transforming pain discourse is summarised in the table as a grunt of pain, followed by the pleasure, followed by "I enjoyed that!   Give me another!"   This, again, is something that I have observed in action.

The concept of an "autotelic martyr" seems to be a contradiction in terms: if pain is a pleasure in itself then how can it also be something one is forced to endure?   The only way I can see this combination as making sense is when a bottom agrees to play on the edges of consent, and safety - edgeplay, in other words.

There is no contradiction between autotelic pain discourse and the ISB archetype, but as with BD playing with autotelic or transforming pain, there is also no connection either.   The pleasure an autotelic pain bottom might have from pain is incidental to the pleasure obtained from performing well in a given task (with the possible exception of things like, "orgasm while I whip you bloody", I suppose).   In terms of a given scene, it therefore seems unlikely that a bottom would use the combination of the ISB archetype and the autotelic pain discourse at the same time.

This leaves the interesting conclusion that an autotelic pain bottom ought to use that discourse only when playing as a BAB.   I said at the start that one of my concerns was whether or not a particular identity on one axis would automatically imply an identity on the other axis, because to my mind that would suggest that there is some underlying, perhaps unstated, assumption at the heart of both classifications.

In this case, my suspicion is that the missing element lies in the archetypes: since they are not exhaustive but allow for gaps, my suspicion is that other archetypes exist into which autotelic pain bottoming fits more naturally.

The second point of weakness is in the limited applicability of BD and ISB.   Both of them in various ways were incidental to (rather than contradictory of) some of the pain discourses.   In my post on Chapter 5, I wondered whether there was any D/s relationship that did not include some element of BD.   Arguably, the same question could be put concerning ISB.   This raises a suspicion is that these are implicit "fiddle factors" to account for the overlap between D/s and SM and are not like the other archetypes outlined.   While SM players can certainly use these archetypes in play, they seem to be designed around those who identify most clearly as "Dominant" or "submissive", whereas the other archetypes are designed more clearly around SM play.

This points to an area for further research: looking at the community of longer-term D/s relationships, and seeing if there are underlying narratives, archetypes and discourses there that may have different qualities from those in the SM community.

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.

Newmahr, gender and SM - my Chapter 5 responses

Moving backwards, we leave behind the part of Newmahr's book called "Edges" and start at the end of the part labelled "Play", with chapter 5.

In this chapter, Newmahr seeks to make a connection with BDSM roles and gender performance, such that topping and bottoming come to replace traditional gender identification in constructing gendered identity. This then feeds back into a feminist analysis of the role of gender in BDSM versus that in mainstream society.

Chapter 5: Badasses, Servants, and Martyrs – Gender Performances

In one of the early chapters, Newmahr observes that many BDSM practitioners do not conform physically to mainstream definitions of their supposed gender, leading to what she calls an "incidental androgyny" in the community. This is simply "the consequences of not 'doing' gender quite so fully or quite so well," rather than a "deliberate gender identity project." Newmahr writes that, "In this analysis, gender becomes an addition, something above and beyond what exists prior to gender performance," which implies that gender has to be added on to BDSM. Newmahr's contention appears to be that top and bottom represent the means by which gender is re-enacted as an addition to the "incidental androgyny" norm.

Topping, Bottoming, and Performance

Newmahr discusses briefly Judith Butler's casting of gender as something that comes into being by virtue of continued presentation of gender: "The performances with which Butler is concerned are constitutive; they are intended to become by way of being, and to be by way of repeat performance."

Newmahr starts by drawing a distinction between these gendered performances and those of topping and bottoming:

Because play occupies a liminal space between authenticity and role play, the performances of topping and bottoming are not quite real and not quite mimickry.

[The nature of that "liminal space" appears in a chapter earlier than this one, meaning that in this backwards journey we will get to it in due course]

SM play instead becomes a symbolic performance:

A man whipping a woman during an SM scene is a different kind of masculine performance from a man ordering her dinner and from a man rushing into a burning building. It does not conform to a cultural expectation of masculinity, but instead symbolizes a (discursively) unacceptable masculinity. In this sense, it is a hyperbolic masculinity that is represented – but not constituted – through topping.

...

Similarly, … , [bottoming] is symbolically hyper-feminine.

This immediately raises a question for me in the light of "Payoff pain" as discussed in Chapter 6, which is identified as a masculine discourse for the bottom.

Similarly, I do not associate my bottoming enjoyment with femininity even on a symbolic level. Although there is a tendency in society to see everything in binaries and associate one side with "feminine" and the other with "masculine" (the common understanding, at least in Western society, of the yin-yang dichotomy), while bottoming certainly would fit the "yin" and topping the "yang" category, it does not follow that all yin is symbolically feminine, and all yang is symbolically masculine.

I think it is true that weak gender associations of this kind appear in a number of ways in the communities of which I am aware; I also find that they mess up my personal expression of both topping and bottoming in symbolic ways. These issues come into further focus in this chapter, but it is worth noting here that Newmahr observes that:

Community members distinguish between SM activities in which they may engage and the particular identities they choose to adopt or construct. Gender shapes and constrains these choices in important ways. A self-identified male top who sometimes bottoms, for example, is more likely to claim identity as a top than as a switch. A woman with the same inclinations is likelier in Caeden to consider herself a switch. Even within the complex and gendered identity choices made by the members of the community, SM play itself reveals interesting relationships between gender and play.

I identify as a top who sometimes bottoms, but not as a switch!

The next section is one of my favourites, because it's another classification scheme devised by Newmahr.

Archetypal Strategies

The strategies in SM play are informed by several gendered archetypes… I frame these archetypes in terms of their use during play, rather than as kinds of players. Most play incorporates at least some aspects of more than one type. It is important to note that topping and bottoming are not understood this way in Caeden (or in any SM community, so far as I am aware); these are my own analytic categories, not actual SM identifications.

So at this point, my ears pricked up and I started asking, "Where do I fit in with this?" Bearing in mind that it is about roles within individual scenes, rather than consistent roles throughout all play, I was still interested to see if I saw myself reflected.

- BADASS TOPPING -

For reference, I'll call this one "BAT". It is, in essence, the "evil meanie" performance, and Newmahr gives as an example a brief scene description in which her request for water ends up with her receiving it splashed across her face. She observes that:

Elements of badass topping are found in nearly all topping, for it is most effective at constructing and upholding illusions of power and powerlessness. The more authentic the top's enjoyment of her or his effect on the bottom appears, the more s/he appropriates this archetype.

We can instantly connect this with the comment on autotelic (enjoying it for its own sake) pain in Chapter 6, that: "Tops who frame pain this way are often desired as play partners precisely because of their sadism; the stronger the belief that the top enjoys the actual infliction of pain, the more authentic the scene becomes for bottoms." I am planning a post after this one in which I try to relate, or cross-reference, the "pain discourses" from chapter 6 with the play archetypes from this chapter.

Since I identified with the autotelic pain discourse, my readers can quickly surmise that I do quite a lot of BAT. One of the phrases I hear most often is, "That's so MEAN!" (or "CRUEL!" or other synonym). I usually just smile and say, "What do you expect? I'm a sadist!" Although if it happens often enough, I just say "Six letter word, begins with 'S'..." It's a big reason why my sex blog is called "And You Thought I Was Sweet?"

It should be noted that BAT archetype is described as a performance of liking to cause suffering, whereas autotelic pain discourse is about actually enjoying it on some level.

- BENEVOLENT DICTATORSHIP -

(BD in future references)

... an exchange of obedience for protectiveness ... Topping is understood as simultaneously nurturing and authoritarian. Often the dynamics are not restricted to SM play and are part of a broader D/s relationship.

...

...at once protector, hero and decision-maker.

Probably most clearly seen in the non-ageplay related forms of "Daddy/girl" power exchange in terms of D/s, although a lot of other forms of D/s and M/s include strong elements of this type of framing of a relationship. In terms of D/s, this is probably my strongest archetypal role, with BAT coming more into play when actually playing. Strictness being a big part of what I do (and having a tag on this blog of "benevolent tyrannical overlord"!), this seems to be where that role of disciplinarian comes in.

In fact, it is hard for me to conceive of any D/s relationship that does not in some way involve this archetype, and it makes me wonder if its usefulness is limited to the public SM communities and less so in discussing BDSM in other contexts?

- SERVICE TOPPING -

(Reference abbreviation: ST)

Centred around a desire to please the bottom, and/or an acknowledgement that the bottom gets to call the shots, Newmahr describes this as the only archetype that is discussed in the community.

Newmahr also notes the bad reputation that the term has:

Because service topping threatens the fantasy of the top's absolute power and the bottom's powerlessness, 'service top' is occasionally used as a vaguely pejorative description, by both tops and bottoms.

Personally, I do not see the problem with service topping, but I cannot deny that the community views it in the way Newmahr describes. I thought for some time about my own relation to service topping, and whether or not I do it. I think there is some element in which I do, which is that there are times that I just want to give my bottom what she wants. On the other hand, even in those circumstances, I am sure to make certain that she asks specifically: the power discourse remains in my favour as a top, because I emphasise that I could, if I so chose, deny her. There is also the chance of it tipping over into "BAT" whereby the script becomes, "Alright, you asked for it!"

From here, we move on to the bottoming archetypes:

- MARTYRDOM -

Newmahr describes this as having a goal of relinquishment of responsibility for the bottom's own suffering.

Martyr bottoming therefore involves performances and experiences of helplessness and victimization, but conceptualizes this as a sacrifice for the good of another.

This ties in neatly with the "Sacrificial pain" discourse from Chapter 6

From my bottoming perspective, I cannot relate to this at all, and I suspect this may be why I reject the term "switch".

As a top, on the other hand, I have an odd relationship to the Martyr. For me, I find it difficult if someone is playing Martyr to my BAT; if Martyr is playing then I need to be in BD mode. This seems contradictory, since the BAT and Autotelic top ought to relish the Martyr's suffering most. However, a too-convincing performance of "I don't want this" ties into my fears about consent and messes with the BAT performance. Instead, I tend to play a second-level "meta-BAT" in which the aim is to induce humiliation and suffering on that level, by forcing the bottom to admit that she is not, after all, a martyr but that really, deep down, she wants it. In other words, to dispel the Martyr archetype.

This "meta-BAT", and the subsequent "anti-Martyr" (a-M) bottoming role, do not seem to fit well into the classifications outlined by Newmahr, but I shall compare "anti-Martyr" to the other bottoming archetypes to demonstrate this.

The other thing is, if I am going to play BAT to a Martyr, then it has to be understood either that "I want to be pushed" or "I will definitely use my safeword if I need to". My interest in consensual nonconsent is the first of these; most play falls into the second and I will try to make sure we have that understanding of safeword usage before going there. This almost feels like a meta-ST, with the script:

Martyr: I want to be made to do things I don't want to.
Meta-ST: I will force you, to please you.

However, the Autotelic discourse from chapter 6 means that I cannot quite identify with the Meta-ST's role in that exchange!

The relationship of BD/Martyr is also interesting, and I think it indicates overlap with Martyr and the next archetype, the "Indispensable Service" bottom. Where the Martyr suffers for the BAT because BAT enjoys the suffering, the Martyr suffers for the BD because Martyr is being given difficult tasks and being disciplined. But this sounds a lot like:

- INDISPENSABLE SERVICE -

(ISB in future references)

Newmahr says that the goal here is, "the successful fulfilling of the expectations of the top." It is also, "often thought of as a kind of submission."

The distinction between the BD/Martyr and ISB is given by Newmahr's statement that:

Unlike martyrdom, the discourse of service is one in which providing pleasure or utility or otherwise being of value is enjoyable for the bottom

For the Martyr bottoming to a BD, it is about control: i.e. "I suffer because I am being made to perform this arduous task." For the ISB, however, it is "I take pleasure in performing this arduous task, though I may suffer in my efforts to do so."

In my first reading, I wondered whether ISB was specific to performances of reactions in play, or whether it was a wider performance in D/s. In email conversations, Newmahr confirmed that ISB relates to D/s-based play (as opposed to wider D/s relationships, on which she does not have the same reference basis). On my first reading, I related ISB to BAT, in which the "arduous task" of the script mentioned is the direct infliction of pain, and responding to it:

BAT: I want to hurt you!
ISB: I will show you how much it hurts me

Now, the next question is, does my "anti-Martyr" fit the ISB archetype? Since the basis of a-M is turning "I don't want it" into "I do want it", the performance of expectations is not directly involved. The Martyr is the selfless sufferer, and the end-point of a-M is proclaimed desire for oneself. So there is not really a way in to painting a-M as a form of ISB.

Finally - how do I, personally, relate to the ISB? As a top, pretty much in the ways described above: in BD mode, I will put the ISB through arduous tasks for her pleasure in performing them to the best of hir ability. In BAT/Autotelic mode, the service of (performing) suffering so that I can "hear you scream" is very welcome.

As a bottom, I think I am drawn to ISB in a D/s sense, but I would not play ISB for a BAT in the way I outlined above. So bottoming, I believe I have an interest (although rarely gone there) in playing ISB to a BD. However, I do not really associate my bottoming with service as such.

This leaves the final archetype in Newmahr's outline:

- BADASS BOTTOMING -

(What else could it be, but "BAB"?)

Badass bottoming approaches SM play competitively. It is an explicit dare, either to self or other. It can be internally competitive, in which the bottom seeks to withstand or endure more than ever before or more than the bottom thinks he or she can. It can also, though less commonly, seek to outlast the top or exceed the top's physical or ethical limits.

This ties in with the discussions of Payoff pain in chapter 6 and with edgeplay as edgework in chapter 7.

There are some pejorative terms that skirt around the edges of this conception, such as "SAM" and "brat" (both of which refer to various ways of acting up in order to receive punishment - an implicit "dare" to the top). These terms refer directly to the element of "seeking to outlast the top or exceed the top's ... limits." Obviously, tops who are deliberately pushed in that way tend not to like it very much.

BAB therefore needs to be broken down further: first, there are the "pushy" types - such as the SAM and "brat" - who seek to manipulate a top into hurting them. Then there is the "Give me your best shot!" type, who negotiates the challenge openly as "I bet I can outlast you". As a top, I do not relate well to "pushy" bottoms: if I feel manipulated, then I withdraw from a scene, and the more they act up, the less I engage. "Give me your best shot!" also does not work well for me, because my "best shot" is the Red Beast of Fire. I am scared of my best shot, except in much safer conditions than usually are available.

The other side is the self-dare. This does not break down so easily into different versions, since "how much can I take?" does not hinge on challenging the other and drawing a response in the same way.

One of my favourite scenes was with SNS, in which she asked me for "a really long spanking session with all your toys". I happily obliged, and pushed her hard. A lot of her requests to me during our relationship were centred around pushing her farther and harder, not to challenge me but to test her own levels. I mention this first to show that I like, as a top, to say "Okay, I will test you and push you," but also to make a distinction.

SNS had never played in real life before, so everything was a new experience and could be framed as, "seeking to withstand or endure more than ever before." When you have never done anything before, seeking to try anything is "more than ever before." So there must be a distinction between the BAB archetype and the "exploratory bottoming" that is familiar to both SNS and me. The "exploratory bottom" experience is not, "How far can I go?" but, "How will I take this - good, or bad? Can I take it at all?" The exploratory bottom relates most closely to the BD archetype (protection, guidance and discipline), whereas BAB challenges the BAT or asks the ST to challenge hir.

The a-M role that I identified earlier does not fit here either, because here the challenge is made by the bottom. The a-M bottom has been challenged to admit to wanting it, but has not necessarily been challenged (and has not challenged hirself) to test limits or endurance.

The competitive aspect to BAB is what makes me reject it as a way of explaining my own bottoming. I am not interested in challenging another to out-top me, nor am I interested (most of the time) in pushing against my endurance limits. I just want to enjoy the pain and temporary loss of control.

My understanding of Newmahr's system of archetypes is that they are not meant to be exhaustive; she identifies these common themes as running through SM, but it is possible to fall outside of them. Reflecting on them is interesting and certainly sheds light on some of the inner workings of my kink, but it is a little bit frustrating to find that (as a bottom anyway) I do not appear much in the archetypes she identifies. The "anti-Martyr" and "exploratory bottoming" roles that I have identified may or may not be common (I think exploratory bottoming is very common - as noted, I think that it pairs neatly with the Benevolent Dictator archetype) but certainly intrigue me in terms of how they relate to the rest of this.

***

Having produced these archetypes, Newmahr prceeds to explore them as gender performances:

SM and Gender Symbolism

While recognising the importance of the distinction between a consensual performance of victimisation and the real thing, Newmahr writes of these archetypes:

Beyond performances of powerful and powerless circumstances, they are active representations of being powerful and powerless, or of victimizing and being victimized.

This, says Newmahr, means that they are gender stereotypes, even though the categories of "man" and "woman" are not directly involved. Newmahr states that, "it is the existence and cultural coding of victimization that gives these performances meaning."

Looking back at the definitions of topping as "hyper-masculinity" and bottoming as "hyper-femininity", this produces associations:

When Newmahr writes, "Bottoming performs either victimization or powerlessness or both," we appear to be being invited to accept that these are understood as inherently feminine.

Similarly, being powerful, and victimising, are apparently to be understood as being inherently masculine as well as part of the topping performances.

If I follow the reasoning correctly, this comes about because in Patriarchal society, women currently have the role of victims, therefore we must understand all performances of victimhood as being in some way feminine or influenced by constructions of femininity. (That is, the "cultural coding" creates the feminine "meaning".) Later in this section, Newmahr writes:

The process by which we have come to understand and experience the erotic as such is inseparable from gendered power relations, so that all understandings and experiences of eroticism, are, on the ground, currently gendered.

Given the later discussion of the duality of violence and eroticism, it seems pertinent to at least question whether that association holds, at least in the same ways, for the SM community.

After all, there are other dimensions of power and victimhood that can also provide reference points for understanding BDSM archetypes.

In a post titled "Forms of Power", Trinity @ Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces writes:

The thing is, I don't think that all of us magically outgrow relations in which consensual hierarchy or consensual power dynamics exist. Yes, most of us leave school at some point in our lives, but plenty of us still learn things, take classes, put ourselves under the informal tutelage of friends. We all have limitations, things that others we know do better than we do. We all have situations in which we want to be sheltered and comforted, and to lose ourselves at least in the illusion that a more powerful loved one can protect us. We all -- I hope -- have situations arise in which others respect us as trusted authorities too, whether as wise bosses, senior members of organizations, or even just good givers of advice.

Which leads me to see power relations in which one person has more power than another as quite natural and, much of the time, rather unremarkable and boring.

This more or less encapsulated why I feel as though the conflation of bottoming in BDSM with femininity is a mistake in analysis. Of course, some performances of topping and bottoming call on specifically gendered power relations to produce their representations of power and victimisation, but it is a mistake to reason as though the association is automatic.

A good example is given by Newmahr's assessment of the BD archetype:

The objectives of ... benevolent dictatorship mirror common characteristics of hegemonic masculinity: ... ultimate discretionary power and the provision of protection.

(snipped out are references to BAT)

This language looks very like the masculine archetype represented in Tarot by the Emperor.

But if we replace "provision of protection" with "nurture", and "ultimate discretionary power" with "guidance" (both are reasonable symbolic substitutions in terms of BDSM archetypes, and are in fact the terms I prefer to use for my own BD role), then arguably we have the archetypal role of the Mother.

When Newmahr claims of her archetypes that:

At the most basic level, of course, they manifest gendered power differentials. Their relative statuses within each group reflect this; on a continuum of masculinity and femininity, the closer topping moves towards bottoming, the lower its status, and vice versa.

I feel as though there is no actual proof that they are specifically gendered power differentials. Is it not the fact that power differentials are an aim of SM (discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) that would most clearly explain such a hierarchy? Recall that:

Because service topping threatens the fantasy of the top's absolute power and the bottom's powerlessness, 'service top' is occasionally used as a vaguely pejorative description, by both tops and bottoms.

Now, Newmahr claims that the focus on pleasing the other makes service topping "feminized".

Newmahr draws this hierarchy on the basis of gender performance, from masculine to feminine:

BAT, BD
ST
BAB
ISB
Martyr

BAB and ST being seen in Newmahr's conception as the most "androgynous" archetypes, and she notes that these are the identities who are most likely to switch, while BAT and BD are much less likely to call it bottoming even if they do.

However, this still does not allow for a gendered interpretation.

The strongest evidence that Newmahr presents is that:

...switching, badass bottoming, and service topping are more common (and higher-status identifications) in subsets of the community in which gender and SM identities are linked less frequently than they are in Caeden. Where SM is queerer, these kinds of play, as sites of gender subversion, proliferate more widely than in the heavily heterosexual male-top, female-bottom community.

My first question is, "who makes that link?" Newmahr introduces the association, and it feels as though this is interpreting the data to fit the theory rather than actually providing proof of the theory. My second question is, "What about heavily heterosexual female-top, male-bottom communities?"

This fundamental question of whether or not there is an intrinsic performance of gender associated with topping and bottoming, I think, is summed up in my note on an element of Newmahr's concluding feminist defence of BDSM power differentials:

SM is constructed around conquest and defeat, dominance and submission, and power and powerlessness. Power differences (whether lived, performed, or fantasized) lie at the core of all SM interaction. Based on this quest for inegalitarian experience, SM is not subversive at the level of gender ideology. Gender is about power, and SM builds on, draws from, romanticizes, and eroticizes power differentials between actors.

My remark in my notes is simply: "But 'gender is about power' does not imply 'power is about gender.'"

(It should also be noted that I do not accept the construction of SM as about "conquest and defeat".)

While the nature of the entanglement of symbolic gender with topping or bottoming performances is clearly a point of difference between Newmahr and me, the outcome of the focus on the top/bottom dichotomy instead of the man/woman dichotomy is the same regardless, and to close this piece, I will leave you with two passages from the end of the chapter with which I have complete agreement:

If, however, it can be feminist to disentangle inegalitarian dynamics and realities from both sex and gender, then there is room for another feminist perspective on SM. SM explicitly rejects gender as an organizing category of social life, often subverts gender roles as normative and sex-based, and contains the potential for further and more extreme subversion. That is, SM often extricates power differentials from genitals and gendered presentations. Further, for many players, this subversion is a conscious objective of SM.

...

Not all SM play is subversive of gender roles, and not all SM participants understand it as such. Many do, however, and their intellectual engagements with issues of gender inequality warrant further study.