Playing on the Edge

Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy

Staci Newmahr

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780253355973
• eBook ISBN: 9780253005120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Representations of consensual sadomasochism range from the dark, seedy undergrounds of crime thrillers to the fetishized pornographic images of sitcoms and erotica. In this pathbreaking book, ethnographer Staci Newmahr delves into the social space of a public, pansexual SM community to understand sadomasochism from the inside out. Based on four years of in-depth and immersive participant observation, she juxtaposes her experiences in the field with the life stories of community members, providing a richly detailed portrait of SM as a social space in which experiences of "violence" intersect with experiences of the erotic. She shows that SM is a recreational and deeply gendered risk-taking endeavor, through which participants negotiate boundaries between chaos and order. Playing on the Edge challenges our assumptions about sadomasochism, sexuality, eroticism, and emotional experience, exploring what we mean by intimacy, and how, exactly, we achieve it.

Part 1. People

Chapter 1

Defiance

Bodies, Minds, and Marginality

It was the last committee meeting. Tomorrow was the big event. We had rented three floors of a large hotel. One floor was going to be devoted to educational classes throughout the weekend. One floor was going to be devoted to vendors of SM and fetish products, and one floor was to be the dungeon. It was being designed and set up by a man who owned an SM club in another city. I had heard very good things about his work.

It had taken seven months of almost weekly meetings, several hours each. And the IMs and the emails. God, the emails. Seven months of general snippiness and petty arguments. Seven months of asking Noah to relax and imploring Amy to be nice, and trying very hard not to tell everyone to stop acting like the rise and fall of civilization was entirely wrapped up in this event.

The communication was abominable. At each and every meeting lately, I found myself wondering why everyone was so snotty. Was I the only one who noticed? How did they get away with talking to people like this? All of it was driving me nuts: the tension, the drama…the body odor.

Wearily, I looked around the room.

Maggie is cross-eyed, and her hair looks as if she never washes it. Jacob weighs over 350 pounds. Dottie is a six-foot-four woman who weighs nearly as much, and Robert has both of them beat by about a hundred pounds. Liam has a severe overbite, and twenty-seven-year-old Malcolm is five-foot-one. Adam cuts off the sleeves of his T-shirts—so that they're what we once called “muscle shirts”—and wears the collar of his jacket turned up. Ellis rocks back and forth when he talks. Trey talks with his eyes closed much of the time. Ronny practices tae kwon do moves whenever he's standing. He smiles a lot at no one in particular.

I started to sigh, but instead I laughed midway through. I couldn't help myself. Sometimes it all seemed surreal.

And really, this event was a big deal. It was a four-day, nationally publicized SM gala, the first for the organization in several years. Though the process had been infuriating and thoroughly draining, I had enjoyed it. I was proud of the planning and the troubleshooting and, ultimately, the pulling it off, with this group of volunteers who found this important enough to devote such tremendous time and effort to it.

I was sharing a room with Adam, Liam, and Phyllis. Faye was going to spend a night on our floor. On Thursday and Friday, I ran around like a maniac, sleeping for a couple of hours here and there. By dawn on Saturday, every inch of my body was desperate for bed. I dragged myself back to my room.

I changed my clothes and slipped into bed beside Adam, whose last shift had ended not long before mine. I sunk into the mattress and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, Liam's alarm went off. I groaned.

From the bed next to ours, Liam rose.

Clink-clank, clink-clank. Clink-clank!

“Liam, what the hell?” I said. The room was dark.

“Sorry,” he replied. “I have to be at the programming desk by six.”

Adam sat up in bed beside me. “And the programming desk needs the Tin Man?” he asked.

Adam switched on the lamp on his side of the bed. I groaned again, but I glanced in Liam's direction. He was wearing only black briefs and heavy chains around his wrists and neck.

“You wore those to bed??” Adam asked, incredulous.

“Yes. She told me not to take them off,” he said.

He headed for the bathroom. Clink-clank, clink-clank.

“Come on, Liam. Just take them off while you're getting ready. They're so loud. We just got back!” I pleaded.

“No, I'm not taking them off! I'm honored to be wearing them. I'll be quiet,” he assured us.

I sighed and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, he walked back into the room. Clink-clank. Clink-clank.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Adam said.

I hurled a pillow at Liam. He stepped aside. Clink-clank. I continued to try to reason with him, though Adam assured me it was futile.

Somehow Adam managed to fall asleep and was breathing deeply beside me. I was still grumbling into my pillow when Liam finally clink-clanked his way out of the room an hour later.

The people in Caeden view themselves as outsiders. They live their lives on the fringes of social acceptance. For much of this marginal experience, they are indebted to particular and shared characteristics. These characteristics would seem, at first glance, to exist entirely independently of sadomasochism. Many of the members of this community lived on the margins prior to developing an SM identity.

In sociological research, studies of “sexual identity” emerged in response to a broader tendency to ignore the experience of the individual, particularly the sexually marginalized individual. Thus identity research has generally focused on recognizing distinctions between members of groups socially marked as different from the norm (Brekhus 1996) in a climate in which sexual deviance functioned as an overarching marker of pathological difference. While this approach is crucial in addressing inaccurate and destructive assumptions of sameness among members of stigmatized groups, it is primarily concerned with issues of identity that are externally derived, or “other-defined” (Brekhus 1996). For an examination of identity as interactively constructed, the emphasis on individual differences is less helpful.

My objective therefore departs somewhat from the established approach to identity in sexual communities. Rather than seeking to shatter the stereotype of SM participants as similar on any given dimension, I aim to explore the multiple levels of their similarities, which, in this case, converge on the ways in which they perceive themselves as different from others.

Defiant Bodies

In stark contrast to the popular culture fantasies of leather-clad vixens and bare-chested musclemen with black hoods, most of the people in Caeden are overweight. Weight is not a salient part of the discourse of the community; its members are not fat activists, nor do they publicly lament their weights. Though at times weight is invoked as an explanation for lack of attraction to other community members, self-deprecating remarks are rare. During their life history narratives, most of my respondents did not indicate struggles to lose weight nor struggles to maintain body image in their life stories, and this is not a general discursive issue in the community. The issue is sometimes mentioned in the context of SM play; a larger back provides a larger “canvas,” for example, and discussions of safety always take into account—respectfully but not particularly gingerly—the size of the players. Apart from these exceptions, however, conversations about weight were relatively absent from community discourse while I was there; it was not treated as a socially interesting or relevant fact.

Though initially I hypothesized that perhaps conventional standards of beauty (and health) were of no concern here, I quickly learned otherwise. While there is truth in the claim that particular SM-related traits often trump conventional attractiveness as social currency, it is equally true that in the absence of a trump card, those who conform more closely to conventional notions of sexual desirability are far more desirable as play partners. Further evidence that I was incorrect arrived in 2003 with the Atkins diet, which several members followed successfully. (Most have since regained their weight.)

Fatness, then, is not particularly desirable in Caeden, but it does not necessarily detract from desirability within the community. It does not appear to inhibit nudity or sexualized presentation in a scene context, and it does not underlie complaints about desirability, fitting into clothing, or athletic ability. Nonetheless, in a community in which fatness is recognized as common but neither reclaimed nor stigmatized, it ceases to be a social marker, at least in the space constructed within and by the group. Instead, thinness is a social marker in Caeden, indicated by the prevalence of comments regarding the smaller size of some participants.¹

In this context, fatness can be viewed as a means of resistance. If, as Samantha Murray notes, “the act of living fat is an act of defiance, an eschewal of discursive modes of bodily being” (Murray 2005, 155), then the people in Caeden were accustomed to defiance long before their entrance into the SM scene. In this way, many community members identified as nonconformist even prior to their SM participation.

Laura, who weighed 350 pounds during my time in the field, is also over six feet tall. A gender-identified and biological woman, Laura found her height to be a main source of marginal experience. Before joining the SM scene, she was a member of an organization for tall people (Highstanders). Laura told me:

In Highstanders, one of the things that I got out of that was, not only was I eye to eye and not different…a lot of the people had grown up with the same feelings I did, feelings of awkwardness and being different. Feeling accepted there was a very common thread, and it kind of kept people there. And people were warm and welcoming and friendly. So that was what kept me going to Highstanders.

Six-foot-one-and-a-half is, of course, a perfectly acceptable height for a man. The margins on which Laura lives are gendered. Her height positioned her, quite literally, outside the norms of femininity, and therefore outside the norms of the heterosexed female body, in addition to the desexualized space she inhabited as an overweight person.

For women, obesity represents a challenge to identification both as feminine and as sexual (Murray 2004). The overweight female body is not quite “Woman” (Hole 2003). It occupies a space between the femininity of flesh and curves, and the simultaneous symbolic representations of consumption and domination, overtly defying expectations of the sexual female body. The bodies of fat women are “potentially disruptive” in their resistance of both “maleness” and standards for the feminine body (Shaw 2006). Carla Rice argues that fat women are “other-gendered,” relegated to gender margins for the failure to meet the standards for attractiveness in girls as well as those for athleticism in boys (Rice 2007). The everyday performances of femininity by heavy women therefore lie somewhere between inauthentic and farcical.

Fatness also threatens masculine performances by undermining hegemonic masculinity.² Culturally, fatness is interpreted as a lack of self-discipline, physical strength and agility, and morality.³

Greg, who had been heavy since the age of six, said that as a child “some work went into fitting in” and that it took two years for him to “get accepted.”

In Caeden, even men who were not overweight structured their narratives of marginality in part around unmasculine bodies. These men regarded themselves as “scrawny” or “puny.” Bobby, for example, described himself as

a little tyke, as a kid. I was advanced in my grade, so I was one of the youngest in there, and also extraordinarily light and small. There were kids two years younger than I was who were bigger than I was. […] The joke I tell—and it's only half a joke—is that I was beaten up every day on the way home from school. And it was quite often; sometimes even by the boys (laughs). And that's the joke, but there was some truth to that. It was just physical fear for my first year in high school. I was in the land of the giants. And asking a girl out or something like that became laughter and joke around the school the next day.

In recounting their failure to meet normative standards of masculinity, both Greg and Bobby referred to being bullied by girls in particular, which they each experienced as especially emasculating.

Similarly, some women structured their narratives around other sources of gendered bodily marginality. At thirteen years old, Lily was heavier than average, but she recalled the transition from a prepubescent body to needing a bra in size DD within a year as far more of an issue. “They got way too much attention. They made me look fatter. They hurt. They were just—grotesque.” Nonetheless Lily characterized her social-sexual development as delayed:

I'm a late bloomer in most everything. I was a virgin until I was, like, twenty-seven. I'm like, so late, it's amazing. So I was like, twelve or thirteen, and I didn't know how sex worked. I had a general idea, I knew the anatomy, but I still hadn't quite figured it all out. And my mom was trying to teach me how to put on a tampon. She was on the other side of the door, and I was trying to feel it, and I'm like, “It won't go in, it won't fit.” And my mom said to me, “Lily, a man's penis can fit in there. A tampon will fit.” And it was like a light bulb.

If the overweight female body is not quite Woman, the overweight adolescent with extremely large breasts who knows nothing of sex inhabits an especially ambivalently gendered space. Hyper-feminine (and therefore hyper-sexualized) in presentation, Lily lacked sexual curiosity, communication, and experience, contributing to marginal experiences in multiple directions.

Among my respondents in Caeden, narratives of the body are built around deviation from hegemonic gender standards. These modes of defiance are as sexed as they are gendered, defying heteronormative sexual attraction as they defy notions of masculinity and femininity. The members physically defy hegemonic gender standards in two distinct ways: their bodies are fat and therefore inhabit de-gendered spaces, or they are underdeveloped, and thus fall short of the sexualized standards for bodily masculinity and femininity.

Respondents also told shared examples of active performances of defiance, particularly located in and performed through the body. Jack's retelling of an elementary school experience is one example:

I was a small kid, first of all, I was one of the shortest guys, shortest people in the entire grade, which did not bode well for me as a boy—and there was this little space between a bookshelf and a cubby that was in the third grade classroom. And I wedged myself in between them, and I fit perfectly because I was little, and I wouldn't move. And not just wouldn't move, but wouldn't move. At all. Barely any blinking, staring very straight ahead. There was a point where a girl named Jessica actually came up to me, waved her hand in front of my face and sang a song to try and get me to respond, and I just acted like she wasn't there. So that just convinced everybody that I was literally insane. And then they were like, yeah—don't mess with him. He'll actually hurt you. [laughs] Because you know he's insane.

Here Jack's small size became a source of defiance, as he wedged himself into a space into which he was not permitted, and in which only he could fit. His defiance increased when confronted; his refusal to acknowledge the interventions of others represented a refusal to conform to social expectations.

In the life histories of many of the people in Caeden, defiance is symbolic, in and of the body, and actively performed through the body in ways that are gendered and sexed, and in ways that existed prior to their participation in SM.

Incidental Androgyny

Gender, of course, is “done” not only through the body, but through quotidian actions that construct and maintain gender identities (West and Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990; Halberstam 1998). In Caeden, these everyday performances of masculinity and femininity are rare. The resulting presentation of selves is gender nonconformist. Yet this implies a deliberateness that is not entirely accurate. Rather than a gender-bending effort or sex-role ambivalence, this nonconformity appears as the absence of either aspirations or traits necessary to conform to conventional gender standards.

This “incidental androgyny” is immediately and physically evident as the absence of markers of femininity and masculinity. Many women in the scene, for example, live their daily lives without makeup and jewelry, have long (often unstyled) hair, and wear clothes that do not fit them well. Most men in the community have little interest in sports, as either participants or fans. They do not have expensive cars (or the ability to fix them) nor traditional good looks, nor the social finesse to banter and flirt. Many dress in ill-fitting, outdated clothing that is often clean but unkempt. Neither butch nor femme, these (usually heterosexual) women and men do not follow or overturn the rules of gender presentation. They simply live outside of them. Understood in the context of West and Zimmerman's work, in which “doing” masculinity and femininity are active, quotidian processes (1987), this “incidental” androgyny is less an actively constituted gender than what we are left with when we do not “do” gender quite so fully or quite so well.

Following their work, several gender theorists have identified examples of, and challenges to, doing masculinity. R. W. Connell's concept of “hegemonic masculinity projects” (1995) inspires Messerschmidt (2000) to what he calls “masculinity challenges,” which he defines as “contextual interactions that result in masculine degradation” in the lives of men. While it is likely that most men at one time or another have had experiences of “masculine degradation,” many of the men in Caeden have faced several different and repeated masculinity challenges, stemming in part from either being so small that they were bullied and beaten up, particularly by girls, or by being too overweight to do masculinity appropriately. Conventional masculine “successes” such as athleticism, financial success, social panache, aggressiveness, and hegemonic indicators of interpersonal power and physical strength are rare among the men in Caeden.

Though the idea that femininity is affected, performative, and achieved has been widely and well argued,⁴ work on “doing” femininity is in its infancy. An application of Messerschmidt's model to women in the Caeden community, then, would suggest that “femininity challenges” include being too tall, too heavy, too awkward, and too inept at feminine adornment for the achievement of socially appropriate femininity, or “emphasized femininity” (Connell 1987). While women in Caeden often do wear makeup and fancy clothing or fetish wear for parties, the lack of primping proficiency is frequently apparent, resulting in a less expert feminine presentation than that of either more conventionally “feminine” women or drag queens. On the occasions during which women in the scene “do femininity,” these performances are therefore less than successful.

Gender is not only “done” but also achieved and accomplished; a successful doing is tantamount to the avoidance of lived incompetence. Viewed this way, many of the men and women of Caeden live in gender-incompetent bodies—bodies that defy or ignore hegemonic gender presentations, and bodies that they do not use to engage in conventional hegemonic gender performances at the quotidian level.

Geekiness

Bodies in Caeden are non-normative on several intersecting, gendered, and sexed levels. In addition, community members construct their narratives around life on intellectual margins. More than half of my respondents either had skipped at least one grade in school or had been enrolled in an intell...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: People
• Part 2: Play
• Part 3: Edges
• Concluding Notes: Erotic Subjectivity and the Construction of the Field
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index