Politically Incorrect BDSM Play (trigger warning for discussion of forced-sex fantasies and slave roleplay)

Via Role/Reboot:

Salon.com has an article titled "BDSM: It’s less transgressive than you think", based on Margot Weiss' latest work, discussing the BDSM scene in the San Francisco Bay area. I have seen Weiss' work on BDSM sexuality referenced in a few places around the web, where social justice and kink are discussed in parallel. She's also used as a reference in Staci Newmahr's description of a north eastern US BDSM community, my responses to which are discussed at length in this series of posts.

The problem I have had with these references to Weiss' work is that I have felt as though it is coming from an outsider, who does not really "get" BDSM. I don't know how true that impression is, but it has put me off wanting to read her works to find out in more detail. Newmahr, by contrast, directly engaged in the community and its activities, and as I wrote on reading the first few pages, I felt, "OMG she's writing about me! She gets it!" The words quoted in the Salon article still feel to me like this is an outsider preaching, and even finger-wagging at BDSMers from an assumed position of authority.

Nevertheless, I think that the points raised are important to examine. There are things in BDSM that are directly linked to "politically incorrect" tropes.

This scene from a BDSM “slave auction” — before a predominantly white audience – makes for one of the most viscerally challenging passages in “Techniques of Pleasure,” Weiss’ book-length investigation of San Francisco’s kink community, although there are other examples, ranging from father-daughter incest to Nazi guard-prisoner scenarios. These encounters aren’t described in much detail — instead, they’re used as passing evidence of the depths of politically incorrect play that she observed, or heard about, during the three years spent observing this world.

The slave auction has a Black woman in the role of slave.

Now, I am aware of all these, and more. They do not trouble me in the way that they would in the real world. MArgot Weiss rejects the "fanatsy world/real world" distinction, thus:

Most kinksters see such “scenes” as standing apart from racism, sexism and all manner of ugliness that happens in the real world — but Weiss does not. “The fantasy of the scene as a safe space of private desire justifies and reinforces certain social inequalities,” she argues. The truth, she says, is that S/M “depends for its erotic power on precisely these real-world relations, within which it is given form and content.”

Oddly, this reminds me of why I think it's okay (or rather, why it can be okay). Some of these ideas are present in Newmahr's work, when she discusses BDSM as emotional edgework. It is like another area of BDSM play that is considered extremely politically incorrect: that of the rape roleplay, or forced-sex fantasy. BDSM presents a space in which these incredibly harmful types of experience or roles can be addressed directly in which the experiences may be taken and in which there is, at the bottom line, the option of control over it A rape victim cannot make the rapist stop; but in roleplaying it, she (or he) can use a safeword or other signal, and be safe. Some people who have been victims of rape have used rape roleplay in just this way; others use it to work on that safe/unsafe emotional edge that Newmahr discusses.

Similarly, Nazi roleplay (apart from those incredibly cool uniforms - aesthetically, they knew how to dress for domination *ahem*) can be used to confront and overcome what cannot be overcome in real life; incest roleplay (I hope that it was roleplay to which the article referred!) is the same. I have read about people with disabilities wanting to use BDSM in ways that directly target and "abuse" them for their disabilities (I wish I could remember where I read that piece, but alas the link eludes me).

I cannot speak for the POC in the SF Bay Area scene as to how they use these slave auction scenes or interpret them. Weiss said, in an interview with the article's author:

Most people that I talked to didn’t see S/M slavery play as having anything to do with historical slavery in the United States — but none of the people of color I talked to thought that this was the case. I talked to an African-American woman in the scene who’s well-known for doing race play and she said, “You know, I don’t think these white people ever think about handcuffs and whipping and the slave auction as connected to histories of slavery, but I can’t help but think about that when I play.”

What I don't see there is any discussion of what that thinking involves, and what it does with those issues - to me, it's an unanswered question. I don't pretend my idea above is "right" on this, but I think that it is points like this where Weiss comes across as an "outsider". Maybe, if I read her book, I would find this addressed more fully (the article says that, "Weiss looks at how particular scenes, whether it’s a slave auction or make-believe child abuse, affect the people participating, watching or (here’s looking at you) reading about it.") However, I feel from this representation of the work as though Weiss is putting her spin on it from the outside, and is declaring how it affects people rather than learning how it affects them, despite her stated aims:

There are scenes in my book that really do open up people, get them to think differently, provide a new vantage point for thinking about inequality, but there are other scenes that don’t. The very same scene has different effects on differently positioned people.

The other point I would make is that I'm from the UK, so "slavery" for me immediately means Ancient Rome: that's the cultural reference that feels closest to home, and that I see referenced most in BDSM roleplay of slavery [Edit To Add: I am aware that this may just be my privilege talking, of course]. This makes it hard for me to appreciate viscerally how deeply the 18-19th Century slave trade is embedded in US consciousness or how to read the apparent denial of it in the SF Bay Area scene's attitudes (while Britain was, of course, deeply involved in that business, and British Afro-Caribbeans living here today are descended from victims of that trade, as part of the national consciousness it seems to be much lesser). This comes across especially in the fact that White people are more likely to be "sold" as "slaves" in BDSM events than are POC, simply by the fact that (as Weiss discusses) the BDSM scene tends to be very White, with low representation of POC in it. I know that some BDSMers set up scenes to be deliberately referencing certain periods of history, and I know one or two do roleplay plantation owner/slave scenes.

I think it is very important for BDSMers to think about what the meaning and ideas are that we play with, including the language, lifestyle and scene-based roleplays of slavery (some prefer the term "slavehood" to distinguish between the consensual lifestyle, and the non-consensual rape or theft of labour that real slavery involves).

However, Weiss states that she isn't looking so much at the representations in the roleplay itself, but rather in the actual BDSM community.

The subliminal (to the privileged White folks, like me) racism that pervades society also pervades BDSM communities. This should come as no surprise to us, although mentioning it often feels (again, to us White folks) like it's a criticism of the community specifically (it sort of is, in that we (like everyone else) aren't doing enough; it isn't, because we are just as bad, we are not worse than, the rest of the society of which we are a part).

She also zeroes in on the contradictions of kink: “On the one hand, SM is figured as outlaw: as transgressive of normative sexual values,” Weiss writes. “On the other hand, SM is dependent on social norms: practitioners draw on social hierarchies to produce SM scenes.” The mostly-white, mostly-middle-class community is itself an example of real-world social inequality: ”These [sexual] experiments are more possible and more accessible to those with class, race and gender privilege: heterosexual men playing with sexism, white bodies at a charity slave auction, professional information technology (IT) workers with several rooms filled with custom-made bondage toys.”

Speaking of toys, she further questions S/M’s “outlaw” status by painting a portrait of a social network built on capitalism and consumerism: Just consider the rainbow’s array of classes (on everything from spanking to rope bondage) and fetish toys (from handcuffs to latex vacuum beds) that practitioners can, and are to some degree expected to, invest in. BDSM is not as transgressive as most assume, says Weiss.

Now, it is possible to transgress in one area (sexual activities) and be entirely normative in others (race, gender and class representation).

On race and gender, I tend to fall into the privileged categories: I'm White, and mostly male-identified with body to match. It is intriguing to note that Newmahr described a form of "incidental androgyny" in her study, in which gender is not an axis on which BDSMers' bodies support a great deal of privilege.

The thing that gets me is that Weiss seems to approach this as something people choose to do. We would consider it somewhat homophobic if a person were to write of gay people:

It was definitely not what I expected. ... They were wearing not the most cutting-edge fetish outfits — they weren’t all black leather and riding in on their motorcycles. I realized then that these were people that I was comfortable with, they were professional-class people. They weren’t the radical people I expected to find: They were more like my colleagues or like my parents.

That's how Weiss described the BDSM community she entered. (The snipped sentence read, "There were way more heterosexual people and they were older than I thought they would be" - in which there seems to be a hangover from the 1970s and 80s of assuming a link between symbols of the gay scene and of the BDSM scene mixed in with Weiss' prejudices.)

It is still a very open debate on the extent to which BDSM is something innate and to which it is something that is chosen or learned as a lifestyle (Newmahr describes how she learned it, making it seem like a choice; but many practitioners feel as though it is something more deeply rooted than that). Given these questions, it feels very insulting and privileged of Weiss to come with these ideas about people choosing BDSM in order to transgress society. This is an issue that has been debated in the UK scene, at least, about whether we would still like it as much if it weren't seen as socially transgressive - people come up with different answers depending on their own attitudes to it. For some people, yes: it is a mode of rebellion, on some dimension. For others (like me) it is just a mode of being, and frankly, I would be very glad if society would get off my back about it (it seems as though the UK may be drifting in that direction, with internet hardcore gay BDSM porn apparently no longer deemed "obscene" by a jury of 12).

The most interesting part for me, was Weiss' discussion of class as a dimension of privilege in BDSM. I am better off than a lot of people, and in some ways my lifestyle could be described as middle class. Nevertheless, I number among the long-term unemployed, and have struggled on a low income for many years. The key disadvantages I have experienced as a result of this are mobility, and partly resulting from that, a lack of opportunities to participate in the public scene. there again, I haven't felt a great desire to do so (indeed, until the smoking ban came into force, I would have been excluded from most BDSM venues because of the tobacco smoke anyway).

A lot of the things that Weiss discusses as a seat of consumerism and capitalism within the SF Bay Area BDSM community, are just things that haven't affected me. I don't know how much of this is a difference in the culture between south eastern UK and San Francisco, and how much is just down to me being creative: for instance, I have very few toys that I have bought, but plenty I have managed to improvise or make myself for a low budget. I can't afford the types of bondage furniture that are discussed, but I don't know many who can, either: some do invest in vastly expensive toys of that nature, but most are happy to tie a partner to an existing piece of furniture (for instance, I have attached sturdy rings to my normal bed and can now use cuffs to restrain a partner there).

In Newmahr's book, she seemed to describe many more seminars and classes (workshops) than I am familiar with seeing advertised in my region; this is another aspect of what Weiss describes that seems like an aspect where I have not been all that disadvantaged. There are some skills that I could, perhaps, benefit from learning through such a source but in general, my reading and experiences have been sufficient, and also, sufficient to enable me to engage (when I choose to) with the rest of the community in public ways.

I think Weiss raises some very important issues, and I am by no means stating that racism, sexism and classism do not exist in BDSM in this country, because they undoubtedly do (for instance, I don't think I've met in person a kinky POC, and their representation on BDSM websites seems to be far below the UK national population percentage, so that issue is clearly present here). We need to be aware that BDSM communities are a subset of the wider community in which they exist, and any -isms that exist in the wider community will be found represented in various ways within the smaller community. Questioning where and how we use ideas from history and the wrongs of wider society is a part of that and a part of the personal and emotional work of becoming better at "What It Is That We Do".

At the same time, I am finding that with these exposures to ethnographic research such as Weiss' and Newmahr's, that BDSM is as varied in its expression as are the societies in which it is sited. The US scene, it appears, is something very different from what I hear about the UK scene (and what I have participated in). I get the impression, moreover, that there are significant differences in expression between Newmahr's "Caeden" and Weiss' SF Bay Area. This at once puzzles and heartens me, because it says that BDSM is not something separate from normal society, but is a part of it in various ways. My impression is that Weiss may be trying to get at that thought too in her work.