Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 1
Our Edgy Sexual Bodies
A social scientific analysis of sexual bodies looking to come closer to the Lacanian notion of the Real
Our Edgy Sexual Bodies
Student: Nienke Schlette (6043151) nienke.schlette@gmail.com
Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of Development University of Amsterdam
First corrector: Prof. Dr. Mattijs van de Port Second corrector: Dr. Gert Hekma
Date: May 17th 2013 Wordcount: 11.605
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 2 Our Edgy Sexual Bodies
A social scientific analysis of sexual bodies looking to come closer to the Lacanian notion of the Real
“The challenge before us is not to answer the unanswerable. It is to understand its presence and its effects in all world – making”
(Van de Port 2011: 23).
“My body is not only an object among all objects … but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way it receives them”
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 3
Table of Contents Page
Introduction 4
The increased visibility of SM 6
The absence and presence of the sexual body in Dutch society and academia 9
SM as ‘play’ and ‘serious leisure’ 13
Lacan, an approach to SM in a postmodern society 19
Pain and the bodily pleasure of SM 22
Conclusion 29
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 4 Introduction
“At the touch of leather, I quiver and gasp. He walks around me again, trailing the crop around the middle of my body. On his second circuit, he suddenly flicks the crop, and it hits me underneath my behind … against my sex. I cry out in surprise as all my nerve endings stand to attention. I pull against the restraints. The shock runs through me, and it’s the sweetest, strangest, hedonistic feeling. “Quiet”, he whispers as he walks around me again, the crop slightly higher around the middle of my body. This time when he flicks it against me in the same place, I’m anticipating it. My body convulses at the sweet, stinging bite. As he makes his way around me, he flicks again, this time hitting my nipple, and I throw my head back as my nerve endings sing. He hits the other … a brief, swift, sweet chastisement. My nipples harden and elongate from the assault, and I moan loudly, pulling on my leather cuffs. “Does that feel good?” he breathes. “Yes”. He hits me again across the buttocks, the crop stings this time. “Yes, what?” “Yes, Sir,” I whimper.
He comes to a stop … but I can no longer see him. My eyes are closed as I try to absorb the myriad sensations coursing through my body. Very slowly, he rains small, biting licks of the crop down my belly, heading south. I know where this is leading, and I try to psyche myself up for it - but when he hits my clitoris, I cry out loudly. “Oh … please!” I groan. “Quiet,” he orders, and he hits me again on my behind. I did not expect this to be like this … I am lost. Lost in a sea of sensation.
And suddenly, he’s dragging the crop against my sex, through my pubic hair, down to the entrance of my vagina. “See how wet you are for this Anastasia. Open your eyes and your mouth.” I do as I’m told, completely seduced. He pushes the tip of the crop into my mouth, like my dream. Holy shit. “See how you taste. Suck. Suck hard, baby.” My mouth closes around the crop as my eyes lock on his. I can taste the rich leather and the saltiness of my arousal. His eyes are blazing. He’s in his element. He pulls the tip from my mouth, and he stands forward and grabs me and kisses me hard, his tongue invading my mouth. Wrapping his arms around me, he pulls me against him. His chest crushes mine, and I itch to touch, but I can’t, my hands useless above me. “Oh Anastasia, you taste mighty fine,” he breathes. “Shall I make you come?” “Please,” I beg. The crop bites my buttock. Ow! “Please, what?” “Please, Sir,” I whimper. He smiles at me, triumphant. “With this?” He holds the crop up so I can see it. “Yes, Sir.” “Are you sure?” He looks sternly at me. “Yes, please, Sir.” “Close your eyes”. I shut the room out, him out… the crop out. He starts small,
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 5 biting licks of the crop against my belly once more. Moving down, soft small licks against my clitoris, once, twice, three times, again and again, until finally, that’s it – I can take no more – and I come, gloriously, loudly, sagging weakly. His arms curl around me as my legs turn to jelly” (James 2012: 324).
With the release of the book ’50 Shades of Grey’ and its immense success, many people who had been unfamiliar with SM before, were introduced into a world of stinging riding crops, stiff cuffed hands, cool wooden crosses, sweet chastisement, wanting bodies and impressive playrooms. This did not happen only through the book of E.L. James: many other forms of media increasingly represented SM in a mainstream way in the last twenty years (Weiss 2006b). Even in an 2001 Ikea advertisement we see how a couple admires the organised living room of their neighbours (“I wish we could be that organised”), as they watch, a man runs through the living room, pursued by a woman in a dominatrix outfit who whips the couch. In academic anthropological and sociological literature, SM is often analysed as the performance of classic gender roles, as if it is not real, but mere role play. I think that the experience of practicing SM is, to the contrary, really real, and that Ana her experience of feeling like her ‘nerve endings sing’ should be part of the academic understanding of SM.
Astonished by the myriad of sensations we can experience through our sensuous bodies and inspired by the notion of the Lacanian Real and phenomenology, I argue that it is about time for a more bodily academic understanding of SM. Before I will be able to do so, I will discuss the increased mainstream representation of SM in more detail. Then, I will analyse how the sensuous body has been absent and present in Dutch society and in anthropological and sociological literature, and look into two current modes of understanding SM who find their origin in this academic tradition. Recently, there have been several attempts to create an anthropological paradigm that does justice to bodily and sensuous experiences. I think that the writings of several thinkers inspired by the three registers in consciousness (of which the Real is one) introduced by Lacan can help us to fine tune this paradigm, even while the body is surprisingly absent in Lacanian thinking. In the last part of this article, I will analyse sensuous bodies practicing SM as if they are looking to come closer to the Lacanian Real through the experience of pain and pleasure. This shows us other aspects of the body in SM than we have come to know so far. Some people bungee jump to experience the feeling that ‘you’ve really lived’, I believe that others try to get the same feeling from being flogged.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 6 The increasing visibility of SM
Illustrative for the increased visibility of SM in our Western society is the acknowledgement of SM student society ‘Kajira’ by the University of Gent in spring 2013. It is the first official SM student society in Europe. Kajira’s members are now allowed to use university rooms for meetings, workshops and other activities, which is not different from any other student society in Gent, they only needed to assure that they exclude any sexual activity from their meetings. The visibility of SM increased in the last twenty years especially through representation in different forms of media. Marketers (even Ikea) “have tapped into the allure and exoticism of SM sexuality to sell an ever widening array of products” (Weiss 2006b: 108). Margot Weiss describes several commercial advertisements and the film ‘Secretary’ (2002) to illustrate how we have come to know SM through its increased representation, I think that the book ’50 Shades of Grey’ is a good example of this too.
Weiss wrote on how we come to understand SM in its increased visibility, through
acceptance via normalisation and understanding via pathologising. An example of the first
mechanism is romanticising SM, as happens in the book and in the film. (Excuse me for the spoiler) Ana and Mister Grey are getting married and have three kids at the end of the third book. The main characters of the film also marry and happily continue their dominant/submissive relationship. SM is here ‘folded back’ into a Westerns mainstream and domesticated version of romance, namely marriage (Ibid.: 115). In these stories, SM is slowly pulled away from the grey area on the edge of society, where it used to reside, and pushed towards normalisation and social acceptance. Examples of the second mechanism are evident in the film and the book too. The main character in the film used to cut herself, and her sexual masochism is pictured as a natural extension of this (Ibid.: 117). In ’50 Shades’ we read that Mister Grey is adopted and that his live with his biological mother (who was a drug addict) was very tough. We learn that he ‘does not want to talk about it’. Throughout the book, Ana keeps speculating on the possible causal relation between this childhood trauma and his sexual SM practices. Mister Grey even mentions it himself when Ana asks him why she can’t touch him. “Because I’m 50 Shades of fucked up.” Thus we might say that “SM is acceptable only when it falls under the rubric of normative […] sexuality” and “SM is understandable only when it is the symptom of a deviant type of person with a sick, damaged core” (Ibid.: 105).
So, although the increased visibility of SM allows us to flirt with its danger and excitement, the approaches used to represent SM ultimately reinforce existing boundaries. “SM promises a fantasy of kinkiness that can titillate the viewer-citizen out of the banal and
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 7 lifeless existence of socially compliant bodies, while at the same time it serves as a limit against which a normal, vanilla, procreative, heterosexual, and suburban sexuality is defined” (Ibid.: 127). The audience desires a realness, transgression and authenticity, but is only allowed to accept SM when it remains “squarely normal” (Ibid.: 112). SM is perceived to be real, raw and dirty, “[v]iewers do not want BDSM to be something acceptable (and normal) or something understandable (and pathological); they want BDSM to be somehow outside these systems of power and privilege, discipline and control” (Ibid.: 22). It is disappointing and boring when these representations of BDSM have been ‘predigested’ by the ideological schemas of normal/abnormal, shifted from exotic to mundane (Ibid.: 105). An Ikea ad named in the article (see introduction) is said to take the “perversity attached to SM away, even the most normal of the normal do SM” (participant in focus group in Weiss 2006b: 110). One interviewee said “I’m much more curious about the really sick and twisted side, less commonly seen and not in any Ikea ads.” (Ibid.: 123). Thus, despite its increased visibility and its understanding through normalisation, SM “remains popular because it continues to stand for something that can disturb these dominant categories, even as it is absorbed” (Ibid.: 121).
In this process of increased representation and visibility, SM is re – mediated from sexual, sensuous, and mysterious bodies into a form of media text, be it a book, film or advertisement through which we come to ‘accept it via normalisation’ or ‘understand it via pathologising’, but there is something else going on as well. The viewers and readers are not only introduced to SM together with the main character on an abstract cognitive level, but on a sensuous one too. Vivian Sobchack wrote about the carnal and sensual experience of watching a film. “The point to be stressed here is that we do not experience any movie only with our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and knowledge of our sensorium” (Sobchack 2000: 7). She mainly uses her own bodily experience of watching the film ‘The Piano’ (1993) to illustrate this:
“Thus, what is extraordinary about the opening shot of The Piano is that it offers (at
least on first viewing) a relatively rare instance at the movies in which the cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown, an instance in which my eyes did not “see” anything meaningful and experienced “an almost blindness” at the same time that my tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image’s sense in a way that my forestalled or “baffled” vision could not” (Sobchack 2000: 7).
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 8 The sensuous body of the viewer and the body(ies) on the screen inform each other constantly in a circular connection in which it is sometimes not clear what flesh belongs to who: “commingling flesh and consciousness, the human and technological sensorium, so that meaning and where it is made does not have a discrete origin in either bodies or representation but emerges from both” (Ibid.: 7). “The film experience is meaningful, because of my body” (Ibid.: 1), “being both “here” and “there,” in being able both to sense and to be sensible, both the subject and the object of tactile desire” (Ibid.: 8). I think that this sensuous experience also occurs when the bodies involved are represented through another medium, a book for example. This makes a more than mere abstract introduction to SM possible reading ’50 Shades’, especially women who can identify themselves with Ana will experience ‘a bit of the other’ and learn about the ‘sick and twisted side’ without being flogged themselves. In an interview with a Dutch magazine (Volkskrant Magazine), Anna Karolina (a Dutch writer who is going to write ‘the Dutch answer on ’50 Shades’’) said that she would be pleased if women get turned on so much by her book, that they need to put the book away to play with themselves (Van Veen 2013: 26) [Free translation by Nienke Schlette]. I think that this carnal and sensual bodily dimension of reading a book and watching a film is an important part of the experience of the increased visibility and re – mediation of SM. It allows you to flirt with danger and excitement without feeling pain.
The sensuous body is further strikingly absent in SM its increased visibility through re - mediation. Student society Kajira is for example only recognized as an official society as long as they keep their sensuous and sexually active bodies out of the university buildings. Only activities in which the mind is supreme over the fleshy body, such as meetings, are allowed by the university. The increased representation of bodies in SM occurs through bodiless media, namely words on pages in a book and colours, shapes and sounds in a film, and if the sensuous, sexual and dangerous bodies represented come too close, they are accepted via normalisation or understood through pathologising. In short, the place of the sensuous body is ambivalent in the increased visibility of SM.
In the following part of this article, I would like to look at this ambivalence of the body in a larger context, namely in Dutch society and the social sciences.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 9 The absence and presence of the sexual body in Dutch society and academia
Dutch society has been a coming together of many kinds of bodies for many years, but these smelling, hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling and experiencing fleshy bodies have not always been central to Western society or to the social sciences studying these. With the coming into being of the exact sciences, control over the body and the mind became divided between the Church and hard sciences. God came to reside in the nobler mind, and the sinful flesh of the body needed to be tamed. There are still traces of this dualism in Dutch society and academia today, and I would like to analyse this ambivalence in this part of my article. However, the view words you are about to read on this do no justice to the many extensive works that are written on the body. Since I will only focus on a few authors, whose ideas are interesting and relevant to the larger argument I try to make in this article. First, I would like to analyse the body in Dutch society, before we turn to the body in sociological and anthropological literature.
We have come a long way since the time when “a good Christian needed to tame the beast inside (Mol 2008: 34) and sex was only allowed in marriage to produce offspring, or have we? At the beginning of the 20th century friendships between different genders became more common with the increase in mixed gender education and time to get to know each other before official engagement (‘verkeering’) became more socially accepted (Wouters 2005: 4). Since then, the times and places where you could experience your sexual body grew, with the 1960s as ultimate celebration of this liberation trend. The birth control pill became available, which made it a lot easier for women to have sex just for the experience of pleasure. In these years, women claimed their bodies back from male control and fought for the right on abortion. The influence of the Church ceased while the sexual revolution took off in the Netherlands in which the gap between the petty sexual moral and the growing freedom of individual sexual bodies was closed: “The Netherlands became a permissive nation” (Hekma 1994: 5). The sexual revolution flourished and the sexual moral became more and more liberal, which resulted, among other things, in the legalisation of gay marriage in 2001. It seems that there is nothing left to restrict our bodies in our daily lives, but bodily behaviour still has to the brought under control and the body is apparent absent, even today (Mol 2008:34).
At first glance our body seems to be very present in our Western society, since the body plays an important role in the identity of the individual, but the body is quite absent in its presence when you look a little closer. Television programmes focus on bodily make – overs, plastic surgery, dieting, losing weight and working out. The candidates of the show
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 10 will, with their renewed bodies live a better and happier life than they have ever done before. Even outside television, it is a trend to fine tune your body, by jogging in the park, going to the gym, join yoga classes and eat healthy and organic. Your body is the carrier of your identity, it is therefore important to listen to it and keep it in shape. The individual body is seen as a project, something to be worked on. But, despite this growing interest and reflexivity towards our bodies, they are for an important part still absent in our society. We have practiced with taming our bodies since Christianity told us to do so, and you could say that we have become experts in the meantime. The business meeting is for example such a place where our “body is supposed to be able to postpone its need for food, beverages and toilet breaks (not to mention sex)” (Ibid.: 34). In its apparent absence, the body functions primarily as carrier of the professional identity and the mind of a specific person. “Civil bodies are to be subjected to the agenda of the meeting” (Ibid.: 35) and they need to postpone its needs for the higher good of the meeting and society to function well. This can result in awkward situations, since a hungry body can become rather noisy, producing gurgling noises from the stomach, which are ought to be ignored by everyone present. This presence yet absence is also evident in the discrepancy between sexual moral and sexual practice in the Netherlands. Many years have passed since the sexual revolution, in which we came to think more and more liberal about sex, but its bodily experience in the form of sexual pleasure stayed behind and is still poor says Hekma (1994: 5). (This has to do with the Western sexual mindset, in which people barely practice what they desire) (Ibid.: 7). The popularity of the book ’50 Shades of Grey’ and other books in the ‘cliterature’ genre (Van Veen 2013) caters for this ambiguous state of the sexual body. We are curious enough to read a novel on SM and give it as a Christmas present to our friends and experience SM through Ana her body, but we are not curious enough to have our bodies involved directly. We can trace this presence yet absence of bodies in anthropological and sociological literature too.
Despite the recent growth in interest for the body, social sciences know an academic tradition in Cartesian Dualism. “Body theorists were struggling against the dominant philosophical approach in Western thought that had for centuries revolved around a dualism that prized the mind above the flesh” (Schilling 2012: 211). In the same way the body is present yet absent in society, the body has been often merely a canvas on which society was projected in academia. Durkheim wanted to establish a disciplinary field than was distinct from, and irreducible to, natural sciences and he focussed “on the mind as that which defines humans as social beings” (Ibid.: 12), looking at the body as merely a passive target of social control (Ibid.: 20). Chris Schilling argues that, historically, the body has been something of an
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 11
absent presence in sociology (Ibid.: 12). Absent in that sociology has rarely focused directly
on the embodiment of humanity, since bodies were viewed as existing outside the boundaries of the discipline. While at the same time the body was present, although it tried to remain hidden from view, it nourished and sustained that which surrounded it. “The fleshy body may often have escaped explicit sociological concern, but facets of human embodiment, such as language and the emotions that motivated action, became central to the discipline’s development” (Ibid.: 21). But it is exactly this ‘fleshy body’ I am interested in. In anthropology, the body was already more part of the discipline, “because human evolution and variation among human populations have always been part of the anthropological bailiwick” (Keat in Lock 1993: 134). But not alert enough, I would say. Here I wish to analyse the rise of the fleshy body in sociology and anthropology.
Feminism has played an important role in bringing the body into social science. During its second wave (in the 1960s) control over fertility and abortion rights was placed on the political agenda. Female activists portrayed the gender inequalities in society on their bodies, burned bras, and used their politicised bodies as banners in a demonstration (Lock 1993: 136). The (fleshy) body gradually became to be seen as a subject that could throw new light on many of the problems that traditionally preoccupied sociologists” (Ibid.: 33). Also the growing concept of and emphasis on the reflexive ‘I’, the self and identity helped to bring the body under attention of social science. In 1995 the international journal Body&Society was founded. This was an important step in the establishment of the sociology of the body. At first, many researchers simply “‘bracketed’ it as a black box and set it aside” (Lock 1993: 133). But soon, many attempts were made to move away from the Cartesian dualism and the problem of absent/presence in which bodies are objectified and constructed as social phenomena. But I think that we have not moved far away enough. Since reality is that we live our lives in “fleshy bodies that allow us to taste, smell, touch and exchange bodily fluids (Schilling 2012: 12). We need a “more radical role for the body than that typical in the “anthropology of the body” that has been with us since the 1970s (Csordas 1994: 4). Daily live is all about “experiencing, managing and responding to our own and other people’s bodies” (Schilling 2012: 24) and we need to move towards a paradigm that acknowledges this.
This discussion on the body seems to be part of a larger discussion on the limitations of a constructivist approach, as shows the example of Van de Port his research on Bahian Candomblé. “[T]his body that has now entered the anthropological text does not move us beyond the constructivist deadlock. To the contrary, all too often this body is merely a new
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 12 object on which the constructivist project can feed itself and display its prowess” (van de Port 2011: 28). A constructivist argumentation can be a very limited and incomplete approach to reality. This becomes clear when you would deconstruct your own life. A postmodern constructivist approach teaches you that “reality is artifice yet, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on living, pretending (…) that we live facts, not fictions” (Taussig 1993: xv in Van de Port 2011: 27). Van de Port discusses in his book (2011) a Baroque and an academic way of generating knowledge, in which the Baroque does more justice to the “fullness of live as we know it from experience” (Ibid.: 21). Baroque encourages you to ‘let yourself be written by the world’, which is almost the opposite of generating academic knowledge, where you “first make a picture of the world and then you step inside its frame. “This particular form of world – making produces all kinds of pleasurable experiences: it gives a structure to hold on to, a sensation of being in control, a guideline of what to look for, a fixed and manageable horizon” (Ibid.: 16). But, “all you will ever be is a spectator to a world of your own making” (Ibid.: 16). Therefore, the academic way of producing knowledge is incapable to generate true knowledge about Candomblé, simply because it fails to grasp the experience of the sensuous and mysterious body (Ibid.: 28). “Interestingly however, more and more thinkers in academia have expressed their dissatisfaction with being locked up in the rigid, conventional schemes of the scientific text” (Ibid.: 20) and made efforts to bring back the dimensions of being that hover beyond the horizon of academic imagination” (Ibid.: 21). Here, the mysterious body is seen as a portal to that what is ‘beyond the horizon of academic imagination’, which Van de Port calls ‘the – rest – of – what – is’ (Ibid.: 28). “Deconstructing this mysterious body would not lead you to a complete picture, but maybe we should not want to try to reach that goal at all. I think we should move towards a methodological stance in which we are not trying to answer the unanswerable, but one in which we try to “understand its presence and its effects in all world – making” (Ibid.: 23).
I believe that we should look at the body in SM as if it is mysterious and a reminder of what is beyond our horizons of meaning too, before I’ll elaborate on this, I would like to analyse two different ways of understanding SM, namely analysing it as ‘play’ and ‘serious leisure’.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 13 SM as ‘play’ and ‘serious leisure’
SM has recently intruded many homes through the book ’50 Shades of Grey’ by E.L. James in a different form than most of us used to know it. The book tells the story of student Anastasia Steel who is going to interview the young and successful entrepreneur Christian Grey and falls madly in love with him. As the book proceeds, Mister Grey introduces Ana, and with Ana the reader, to the world of Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission and Sadism & Masochism. The insiders look we get from this book, shows us the (fictional) bodily experience of SM. We read how Ana’s sensuous body is constantly driven to the edge by Mister Grey who spanks and flogs her, feeling pain and pleasure, and ‘falling’ into the most intense orgasms. These experiences stand in contrast to how SM often is understood in several social science studies, where it is explained as the performance of traditional gender roles in sexual scenes. “Yet to date, very few people have undertaken ethnographic research in real-life pansexual SM communities, much of the current qualitative work on SM draws respondents from websites and chat rooms” (Cross and Matheson 2006; Langdridge and Butt 2004; Taylor 1997 in Newmahr 2010: 317). “The subject of recent work on SM is disembodied from who SM participants are and what they actually do” (Newmahr 2008: 626). Studies can tell us little about SM itself or the people who engage in it, how it works (Ibid.: 625). This inspired me to try to understand SM through the experience of the sensuous body. But before we’re going to do so, I would like to take a closer look at two other models through which we could understand SM, analysing it as ‘play’ or ‘serious leisure’. In what follows, I’ll take a look at every model to see what it does and does not show us and how it does and does not help us in understanding SM.
“I argue that analytical attention to my own experience of “becoming” a member of this community illuminated for me some of the discursive, psychological, and carnal processes through which SM comes to be a central and fulfilling part of participants’ lives” (Ibid.: 619). Staci Newmahr became fascinated by the world of SM outside its gay/feminist celebration: “If feminist theories were so passionate about the role of the patriarchy in the lesbian bedrooms, what did they think about women who were doing it with men?” (Newmahr 2011: 9). In order to gain more insight in the topic, Staci Newmahr decided to join a community and engage in her first public scene. She found that few people had actually studied SM as it happens and where it happens (Ibid.: 10). “As has been true for other studies of communities and cultures built around carnal experience, this work necessitated intellectual and theoretical attention to the body as a source of data and a tool for meaning – making [..] for there is no way to understand SM, or its participants, without a sense of what it feels like
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 14 to engage in it” (Ibid.: 15). Staci Newmahr underscores here the importance of subjective bodily knowledge of the experience of SM, and I’ll use her research in this part of my article to illustrate some abstract theoretical findings.
Play1
The first model suggests that we should understand SM as ‘play’. This word is used very often by the members of the community Staci Newmahr studies, the SM practitioners, to indicate the act of ‘doing a scene’, but in this analytical model ‘play’ highlights the following ideas. First, it refers to the activity of children, which adds an idea of childlike lightness to the behaviour of adults. Second, play is expressive and intrinsic in motivation, as is doing a SM scene. The last, and perhaps the most important one, is that in play the consequences are not serious. You create a temporary own world of meaning, which is often a shadow of the ‘real world’ (Kelly in Williams 2006: 337). It is this last idea of ‘escaping reality’ through play which is most relevant to this explanatory model
All obligations vanquish when the flogger hits the flesh, being merely a physical creature in the here and now, escaping the stress caused by the high demands our Western Culture places in the individual self. Sadomasochism is a way in which people can forget themselves, escape the stress and temporarily lose your normal identity (Baumeister in Apostolides 1999: 4). Panther, a community member in Caeden agrees on this: “I think there are a lot of people that can relate to the power exchange: losing control, who holds the remote, who holds the checkbook, who chooses the radio station, who's driving, who decides where we're eating, where we are going on vacation” (Weiss 2006a: 232). Staci Newmahr experienced the pleasure of losing control herself too: “But at some point I thought of noting except the feeling … I don’t think I’ve ever felt that single – minded before. The only thing on my mind was when the next blow was going to come” (Newmahr 2011: 189). Lily Fines is a professional Dominatrix, she says it slowly, making her slave wait for every sound, forcing him to focus only on her. Anxieties about mortgages and taxes, stresses about business partners and job deadlines are vanquished each time the flogger hits the flesh. “The businessman is reduced to a physical creature existing only in the here and now, feeling the pain and pleasure”. “I’m interested in manipulating the mind. The brain is the greatest erogenous zone” says Lily (in Apostolides 1999: 4). SM play is a safe way for many individuals to creatively escape, “whether it be through letting go of control (submission),
1
See for more on analysing culture as play, Johan Huizinga his work: Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 15 experiencing pain or extreme sensation (focus on the body and/or natural endorphin rush), or temporarily become a different identity (fantasy/role play)” (Williams 2006: 340).
This all takes places in ‘the scene’, a place that is literally and figuratively separated from reality. Staci Newmahr found a similar space during her research. “SM provides a space – or at least Caeden did while I was there – in which people can, potentially, navigate the constraints of gender and power and violence differently than they do in their everyday lives” (Newmahr 2011: 202) and Margot Weiss says: “play is pleasurable because it is an intervention into the social world; it recodes familiar and mundane experiences of power, relationships and intimacy in new ways, in a safe space called "the scene." (Weiss 2006a: 238). The scene is not only a safe space because it is bracketed from reality, but also because safety is an important feature within SM play. New members to the Caeden community, for example, were trained in ‘how to safely use a flogger’ and players who were known for playing safe, enjoyed a higher status than players who don’t. “The freedom to experiment with alternative subjectivities is real, but because the space is bracketed, special and, above all, safe, it is also insulated from the real” (Ibid.: 238)2
.
The space where the playing takes place is often literally and figuratively bracketed from reality, but this is not to say that playing is not experienced as being very real by its practitioners:
The reality is, that's [SM is] your reality. This [the real world] is the fantasy out here; this is where we put the mask on and go battle the world. This is where you follow the rules. This is a trite fantasy world where you conceal who you are, where you conceal your feelings, where you conceal the truth because you have to get along with people. And the fantasy world, that's the reality because that's where people come out, that's where you see who people are and people see who you are. And you live for that world; you live for those few hours that you play in the evening. That's what drives you if you're a player, if you're a part of the community, that's the serious part of it. Everything else is paying the rent, getting by, but that's where you live. That's where the masks come off. That's where you become yourself and that's why it's important to people to play because that's their reality” (Hailstorm in Weiss
2006a: 239).
2
More ‘mundane signs’ of SM, foremost piercings, are part of what is thought of as daily fashion. This shows a more porous boundary between ‘doing’ SM in the scene and reality.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 16 Hailstorm keeps the bifurcated thinking about reality and play intact, but at the same time he turns it the other way around. To him, the reality outside the scene is played, that is the fantasy world where you wear a mask, ‘playing’ is much more real.
Despite the innocent, romantic and leisure-like connotation of ‘play’, it is experienced as being very real. “But let me tell you, when I do it, it sure feels real then” (Ibid.: 239). “The pleasure of this play lies in its depth, in the creation and subsequent transgression of boundaries around what one is and can be, what is safe and what is dangerous and what is set aside-and what is reconnected” (Ibid.: 240). Practitioners use the term ‘play’ to indicate the ‘doing of a scene’, but used as an analytical tool, ‘play’ is not so much about the actual experience of ‘doing a scene’ but more about the idea that players want to flee postmodern reality. To me, analysing SM as being ‘play’ highlights an important aspect of SM, namely the idea of escaping reality through playing but it does not capture the complete sensuous experience of players ‘doing’ SM.
Serious leisure
Staci Newmahr argued that SM is poorly understood as social phenomenon and that it can be more fully understood as ‘serious leisure’ (a term from Stebbins 1982 in Newmahr 2010: 314). Serious leisure is “a devotion to the pursuit of an activity that requires specialised skills and resources, and provides particular benefits” (Ibid.: 318). This definition is still very broad, it becomes more concrete when we try to analyse serious leisure’s qualities in SM. These qualities are: the need for perseverance, the leisure as a career, effort involving the acquisition of knowledge and training, durable benefits, unique ethos and personal identification with the leisure activity. “BDSM as a lifestyle includes each of these qualities, and may be viewed as serious leisure, similar to other pursuits such as mountain climbing, seakayaking, or photography” (Williams 2006: 341).
The first quality ‘the need for perseverance’ becomes more evident when we look at the qualities ‘unique ethos’ and ‘personal identification’ too. Staci Newmahr found that the SM community in Caeden is more than merely a group of individuals. Many members spend nearly all of their free time in the scene, which felt as a ‘home’ to many members who have been ‘outsiders’ in other social settings throughout their lives. “They came here not because they felt like sadist and masochist, but because they felt different” (Newmahr 2008: 633) and have the desire to join a community. “A large part of the pleasure of being an SM practitioner is about belonging to the SM community” (Weiss 2006a: 223). ‘The playground’ (the club where community members can play) served as the main public space for the community
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 17 (Newmahr 2011: 7). The high level of immersion of the members can lead to a ‘burnout’, “during which participants become overwhelmed by the scene, often questioning their identity and their psychological wellbeing, and temporarily leave the scene. Generally, they return a few weeks or months later, and immerse themselves once again. This commitment to remain involved in the community despite periods of diminishing returns is one example of what Stebbins calls ‘perseverance’, and illustrates the centrality of SM identity for the members of this community” (Newmahr 2010: 319). So yes, perhaps we could qualify SM in Caeden as being ‘serious leisure’ when it comes down to these three qualities, since members of the community feel at home in the scene, identify themselves with other members and are perseverant.
What other qualities of ‘serious leisure’ can be found in SM? Training and knowledge is required before you are able to play, not only because you need to obtain knowledge on how to use a flogger optimally, but also because you need to know how to do this safely. Newmahr found that emotional, physical and psychological safety were taken very seriously in the Caeden community and that even someone’s social status was related to his or her ability to play safe. The safer you play, the higher your status. During the week, several workshops are organised to facilitate the members in their ability to keep learning and improving themselves. “You have to really work at it, it is like a project, you know?” (Weiss 2006a: 236). Many practitioners in Caeden devote a large amount of time, money and energy to SM - organising and attending workshops, buying new toys and clothing, and spending almost all of their free time in the community – as other practitioners of any ‘serious leisure’ would do. “The experience of play often involves intense concentration, intense sensation, and intense psychological and emotional stimulation. This results in an immersive and re-energizing experience” (Newmahr 2010: 324), this ‘self – renewal’ or ‘flow’ experience is something SM shares with other serious leisure pursuits too, as mountain climbing, kayaking and snowboarding (Ibid.: 327). This ‘self – renewal’ and the feeling of being ‘home’ in a community, are the more durable benefits SM has to offer. So yes, there are many commonalities between SM and other serious leisure pursuits. Community members even often liken SM to extreme sports such as skydiving and rock climbing (Newmahr 2011: 8). They are very similar in the effort, time and practice you have to put in. Yet, I think that we should look at SM as being one level more serious than mere ‘serious leisure’ in order to do justice to the carnal and sensuous experience of playing.
So far we have looked at two models through which we can understand SM, analysing it as ‘play’ and ‘serious leisure’. Each model highlighted a different aspect of SM, from its
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 18 possibility to escape reality to the all-encompassing lifestyle it can be. But none of these models highlighted the sensuous aspect of SM, of which I believe is crucial to its experience. Feeling the pain of a biting riding crop smacking your behind while experiencing the pleasure of the feeling that your nerve endings ‘sing’ at the same time is what I believe is central to the experience of SM. I think that we can try to understand SM best as sensuous bodies that are not only trying to escape reality, but are looking to come closer to what is ‘beyond our horizons of meaning’.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 19 Lacan, an approach to SM in a postmodern society.
David le Breton writes about amateur sportsmen, who, in the context of Western individualism, search for truth by undertaking long and physical intensive ordeals, in which they might encounter personal suffering. “When we are in the plane climbing to the altitude for the jump, I always feel frightened and surprised that I am undertaking such a peculiar activity – jumping from a plane. But as soon as I’ve left the plane, it’s like being in another dimension. Suddenly everything seems so real. Free fall is much more real than everyday life” (Breton 2000: 18) experienced one of the sportsmen. In a society where values are in crisis and reference points are contradictory, individuals are constantly being called upon to prove themselves, to test their strength of character (Ibid.: 1), and one way of legitimizing life, is imposing themselves with a task. The more the achievement has a reassuring personal significance, the more fulfilling the satisfaction of having resisted the temptation to give up. The clash between body and nature is like seeking the ultimate truth of Western individualism, it is seen as “the only partner of any value” (Ibid.: 2). The thrill of adrenaline, ecstasy, fear and sensation is like feeling being in perfect harmony with the world for a split second, fusing an individual with the cosmos (Ibid.: 2 - 7). “Because it restores and carries the individual to the heights of the feeling of existing, the commitment to the action causes exaltation when succeeding in the ordeal” (Ibid.: 9). The search for this truth is described by Le Breton as playing a symbolic game with Death: “with the body as the currency, nature as the site of the event and Death respected only remotely, metaphorically solicited rather than approached for real, even though sometimes it arrives on the scene with a reminder that it is the one limit that can never be exceeded” (Ibid.: 6). These people are looking for the guarantee of life fully lived on the edges of life and reality (and sometimes on the edge of space3): free fall is much more real than everyday life. I invited these sportsmen in this article, because I believe that they are, in the essence, working towards the same goal as SM practitioners: using their sensuous bodies to look for what Lacanians call the Real. Before we are able to analyse how, it is first important to get to know more about this mystic notion of the Real and why are we looking for it.
The Lacanian notion of the Real (one of his three registers of consciousness) does not register itself directly, but as the outer limit of our discourse or the silence inscribed within it (Eagleton 2009:144). Several writes who are inspired by Jacques Lacan his thinking, write about the Real as what resists being symbolised (Ibid.: 144). The Real is almost opposite to
3
Recenlty Felix Baumgartner did a free fall from the edge of space. He holds now the world record for highest, longest and the free fall with the highest speed ever. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 20 our common reality (everything that can be symbolised). It is a dimension of being that brings home to us that all symbolic structures fail to capture lived experience in its entirety” (Van de Port 2011: 23). The Real makes us aware of the fact that the symbolic constructions we have to make sense of our world are lacking, that the network of signifiers in which we give meaning to our being, is not all there is. The Real is the surplus, the excess of our reality definitions, therefore it remains outside the field of representation. The Real is a dimension of being, excluded from the symbolic world in order to be possible. “We can grasp this alien phenomenon only by constructing it backwards, so to speak, from its effects” (Eagleton 2009: 143). The Real is impenetrable, yet that doesn’t keep the sportsmen, among others, from looking for it.
Recently, more efforts have been undertaken to open up ‘the gate to the great unknown’ in order to experience a terror as well as ecstasy in this feeling of extreme risk and exposure, beyond the protective habits of the symbolic order (Ibid.: 145). But what is it in this era that makes it so attractive to look for the mysticism behind our ‘horizons of meaning’? We have read several motivations between the lines already. People try to escape stress and are looking for truth and authenticity, which is apparently lacking in times of postmodern Western individualism. Due to lack of time and space, I will solely focus on one thinker on postmodernism, namely Fredric Jameson. He sees postmodernism not as a style, but as an historical period in which “premonitions of future have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that” (Jameson 1984: 53). It is a radical break with the assumption that the foundations on which our Western society is build are true, “the very concept of truth itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon” (Ibid.: 61). Put very short: concepts and structures on which our reality is founded are merely constructions and are therefore no longer true. We now need to look outside the realm of reality in order to find truth and authenticity, namely in what Lacanians call the Real. Le Breton already spoke about Western individualism and the need to convince yourself, and the people around you, that you’ve really lived. To obtain this feeling, some sportsmen jump from a plane, others run for hours on end and other people clip their nipples. Looking for the ‘beyond of our horizon’, where Western reality definitions do not protect you, nor withhold you from ‘really living’. The ‘symbolic order’ violates the subjective experience of being (Van de Port 2011: 23).
The subjective experience of being is ungraspable by the classic way of producing academic knowledge. “Intellectual reasoning does not provide us with all the answers” (Ibid.: 16). “Will we continue to ‘colonize’ the flesh, stubbornly subjugating it to the powers of the mind, dragging it into the empire of language? Or will we allow ourselves to be challenged
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 21 by the inarticulability of the flesh, have it ‘colonize’ us? Will we reduce the body to our categories of thought? Or are we ready to accept that to introduce the body is to make visible the lack in our signifying capacities, to bring in an unsettling surplus to the structure of meaning, an ‘excess’ that will mess up our narratives by highlighting ‘the rest of what is’? (Van de Port 2009: 223). Van de Port argues that the Lacanian notion of the Real should have a more central place in anthropological theory, and in particular in anthropological theory on the body. But, Van de Port warns us, we should not forget that, as anthropologists, we are in the business of writing. We should bring science and mysticism together and make our readers aware of "the point at which our sign-making trails off into incoherence and our meanings begin to unravel at the edges", "the outer limit of our discourse" and "the silence inscribed within it" (Eagleton 2009:144). We are searching for a new way of producing knowledge, somewhere between academic and baroque, away from constructivism and Cartesian dualism, one that is more in coherence with the experienced reality of fleshy and sensuous bodies.
Inspired by Van de Port, Merleau – Ponty, Jaques Lacan and ‘50 Shades of Grey’ I would like to analyse sensuous fleshy bodies experiencing SM as being ‘portals’ to the Lacanian register of the Real. I think that when we try to understand the presence and the effects of the Real in sadomasochism, this will shed a whole new light on the phenomenon. One that will be different from previous constructivist views on SM, looking, for example, at the embodiment of gender roles. Analysing the sensuous, fleshy body full of passion, lust and desire performing SM as a way of coming closer to the Real, might be more true to the experience of the individuals, and is also relevant to the analysis of collective life. Second, such an analysis might function very well as an example to the theoretical approach Van der Port advocates, making it more concrete.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 22 Pain and the bodily pleasure of SM
Many times a day, at work, in the supermarket or when you interview someone for the college’s newspaper (as happened to Ana in the book), we experience our body to be sexual, yet, not much research is devoted to “the narratives and the joys of sexuality” (Beth Schneider (1994: 296 in William et al. 1999: 78). Literature focuses for example on sexual harassment in the workplace and on its effects on women’s careers, but many questions about the joys of sexuality in the workplace remain unanswered (Williams et al. 1999: 81). Flirting can relieve stress amongst employees. Employers as Ben and Jerry’s acknowledge the sexual bodies of their employees: “We expect that our employees will date, fall in love, and become partners” (In Williams et al. 1999: 84). “Human beings are sexual and consequently so are the places where they work” (Ibid.: 91). Despite the lack of academic interest, we do experience our bodies as sexual several times a day, at different places and I think that the sense of touch plays an important role in this.
Touch is an important sense in our daily experience of the world. I’m not only talking about flirtatious communication through touch, but touch as being the basis engagement of the self with the world. Recently, psychology started to look at touch as if it is a language. “If anything, experts have barely begun documenting its grammar and vocabulary” (Chillot 2013: 2). “Until recently, the idea that people can impart and interpret emotional content via another nonverbal modality—touch—seemed iffy, even to researchers” (Ibid.: 1). But an experiment in 2009 showed that “we appear to be wired to interpret the touch of our fellow humans” and that “we have an innate ability to decode emotions via touch alone” (Ibid.: 1 - 2) and that we use this language even before birth. When we would explain touch on a chemical level, you would come to know that when you “stimulate the pressure receptors in the skin, you lower stress hormones” (Ibid.: 4) and slow the heart rate. A touch can reveal a great deal of information about someone’s state of mind, “and sometimes, during intense grief or fear, but also in ecstatic moments of joy or love, only the language of touch can fully express what we feel” (Ibid.: 6). I think the language of touch is an important way in which our sexual bodies communicate; flirting by holding a handshake a bit too long (combined with a gaze), or softly placing a hand on your hand, arm, shoulder or back. A warm touch stimulates the release of the cuddle hormone (oxytocin), which enhances a sense of trust and attachment (Ibid.: 4), but what about a painful touch?
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 23
“It was immediately intense; it burned and it hurt. It felt mean—hot and sharp and like it was slicing my skin, or like little mini-hot irons, super-fast. It fucking hurt” (Newmahr 2008: 635 [emphasis by author]).
Pain is seen as a primary experience in SM. Elaine Scarry (1985) taught us, among many other things, that pain is the most absolute definer of reality, it is incontestable, it is there, for real, and it fucking hurts. Most studies on pain are concentrated in medical literature and in the sociology of sport (Newmahr 2011: 141), and in both disciplines, pain is analysed to be an experience that is not the intended outcome of any action. Pain is seen as a by-product; you feel pain after running a marathon or when a flesh wound needs to heal. Activities of which pain is the intended outcome have been explored with a focus on the emotional and psychological experience, a view concentrated on the mind rather than on the bodily and sensory (Ibid.: 141). The incontestability of pain is here part of the explanatory model to understand ‘self – cutters’ and I think that it also might be useful to understand the experience of pain in SM. “Bottoms who like the pain however, are left with no understanding other than the pathological” (Ibid.: 142). The lack of literature on pain as a primary bodily and sensory experience makes our attempt to understand flogging in SM as such not easier. Let’s take a look at the bodily and sensory experience of pain, with this idea of ‘incontestability’ in the back of our heads.
“He trailed his fingers along my shoulders and back before beginning to flog me with a very light, barely stingy touch, which felt nice. It changed rather quickly; I don’t really remember the transition, he hit me and I thought “Whoa, that was hard . . .”—but it didn’t quite hurt. [ . . . ]”(Newmahr 2008: 621).
Staci Newmahr used her own subjective bodily experience of being flogged in her research on SM. “I assume that I can understand something about SM by understanding how I respond to it” (Newmahr 2008: 640). She advocates the importance of carnal experience in her research. She experienced pain and pleasure as her scene alter – ego Dakota (many members of the community use a different name in the scene than they do in real life, which indicates a further separation of the scene space from reality). “What I offer here is not merely communication of my subjective experience, but an analysis of it. They are, for me, means to a larger end of understanding something about constructions of pain, pleasure, about sexuality
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 24 and the erotic, about paradox and power” (Ibid.: 640). Her subjective experience is concentrated around the experience of being flogged:
“It’s a difficult sensation to describe. It’s quite forceful; I was aware that it was somehow hard. I knew that he was swinging it hard and I knew it was landing hard; I felt the profundity of the blows . . . but I never thought “Ow” It’s not an “ow” really. It feels like the noise you make when you get into a really hot bath and it’s too hot but you like it anyway . . . a sigh and a moan at the same time. No matter how hard it was, it felt like that sound—intense but ambiguous” (Newmahr 2008: 622).
Staci experiences an intense but ambiguous feeling, painful and yet pleasurable at the same time. Though, it was difficult for her to make sense of this feeling. “I found myself completely unable to determine whether to categorise this flogging as painful. It felt, I later tried to explain to friends and colleagues, ‘like a 500 pound gorilla pounding me across the upper back with his forearm’ – diffuse but very hard” (Newmahr 2011: 190). “The fact that the sensation was pleasurable seemed to indicate to me that it could not (therefore) be painful” (Ibid.: 190).
“’Hurt’ isn’t the right word for the way the flogging feels. It knocks me around, it knocks the wind out of me, it makes me feel strong and tough, and it’s an intense sensation, but unless the flogger is particularly stingy, or my back is already abraded, the pain of flogging doesn’t “hurt” me. But it is pain – the too-hot-bath kind of pain. It’s diffuse, it’s everywhere, it makes everything stop, because it is bigger than I am. But it’s a pain that just feels good, that doesn’t need to be recontextualised or worked through or ridden … the pain of massaging sore muscles. Just more intense” (Newmahr 2011: 192).
This including of the ethnographers own subjective bodily experience of pain and pleasure and ‘single mindedness’ in their research is fairly new. Questions as what the ethnographer needs to do with his or her feelings, sexuality, body and sensuality is a matter of interest across various disciplines. Newmahr is very careful not to be accused of navel – gazing. She wants to be self – reflexive, but not self – obsessed. “Critics of postmodernist and autoethnography fail to recognize one of the most valuable aspects of subjectivity: if we treat ourselves as products of our cultures, our interactions and our ethnographic research, then the
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 25 question of why we might feel the way we do in the field ought not to be ignored” (Newmahr 2008: 640). “My own participation in SM illuminated dynamics of SM and undercurrents in this community that I could not have otherwise identified” (Newmahr 2011: 15).
Staci Newmahr found four different discourses on pain in the Caeden community. Three of these “maintain and reproduce the conceptualisation of pain as aversive”. The most common views in the SM community in Caeden is that pain is something to “be withstood, endured, altered, or conquered” (Ibid.: 139). A common discourse is the one in which pain is transformed, and turned into pleasure. When pain is experienced it is understood as not hurting. “Instead, pain is transformed into pleasure. This transformation occurs almost instantly, usually in a process that is understood as conscious, though barely” (Ibid.: 135). Faye, a community member, describes it as follows: “I can make my body produce chemicals, by changing the context in her conscious experience” (Ibid.: 135). Seth adds: “SM is the seeking of pleasure, I think, in a way, by people who can translate pain into pleasure, and by people who can translate the act of giving pain … or seeing that the other person … is having pleasure” (Ibid.: 135 – 136). “The participant who modifies pain is actively changing the sensation, working to claim it and process it differently, toward an eventual understanding of the pain as pleasure” (Ibid.: 137).
Another discourse is the one in which the experience of pain is seen as a sacrifice to a greater good. Pain remains an undesirable sensation, a suffering for the bottom. “This sacrifice is conceptualised as being for the benefit or desires of the bottom. Pain hurts, and the bottom derives no pleasure from it” (Ibid.: 137). “It is a gift in the other direction; the bottom gives her experience of pain willingly, a token to the top of her affection or devotion” (Ibid.: 137).
In contrast of this discourse is the ‘investment pain’ discourse. This frames pain as an unpleasant stimulus that promises further rewards” (Ibid.: 138) and is common to sportsmen as well. Pain is here more than just an unfortunate by-product. It is a means to a particular end. “It is competitive – a challenge to the self – an investment given of free will, and, more importantly, framed as such” (Ibid.: 138). Kyle elaborated on the feeling as follows. “After I got over the pain of it, and I was – you know, with any sort of play in the scene, there’s a time early on where it just hurts. And then after a while, the endorphins kinda build up and it doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s kinda how it was too”. “I stopped caring about the pain of it and just wanted the experience” (Kyle in Newmahr 2011: 138).
And last but not least, there is the discourse in which pain is a positive end in itself. Frank identifies himself as a sadist. He elaborates on this: “I do enjoy inflicting pain. I do get
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 26 turned on, and sometimes get hard, seeing someone in pain. Knowing that I caused it. It just so happens” (Frank in Newmahr 2011: 132). Kevin experienced hazing in Fraternity College, he realised that there was some part of him that found it pleasurable (Ibid.: 140). The foundation of this discourse is fairly simple: “the pain hurts, but then the hurt also feels good” (Ibid.: 139). From the bottom’s perspective: “the stronger the belief that the top enjoys the actual infliction of pain, the more authentic the scene becomes for bottoms” (Ibid.: 140). “Autotelic pain begins as pain, ends as pain, and is enjoyable nonetheless” (Ibid.: 140). In all the four discourses, pain is something that is there, no matter whether you experience it in a positive or negative way. The feeling is there when you are spanked, thwacked or flogged without any question.
We have learned a lot about several kinds of pleasures SM can provide. It gives you the opportunity to play with reality and temporarily escape your ‘self’, to be part of a community in which you feel ‘home’. Now, what bodily and sensory pleasures is SM able to provide on top of Ana her ‘singing nerve endings’? SM play constitutes “flashes of intense living against the dull background of everyday life” (Csikszentmihalyi 1997 in Newmahr 2011: 102). This intensity was experienced by Newmahr and other members of the community in Caeden in ‘catharsis’ and being in a ‘subspace’ or ‘flow’.
“Russ stood behind Janelle and swung the flogger as hard as I’d ever seen anyone swing anything, and it landed on her back with a tremendous thwack. I thought she was going to break in half. She screamed, loudly, and he hit her again. Over and over he hit her that hard, breaking a serious sweat by the fifth swing. And over and over again she screamed, until one – the last one- brought her to her knees. He turned her around, played with her nipples and she dissolved into tears. Russ later told me that this was a formula for them; Janelle’s goal was to cry” (Newmahr 2011:
95).
“Regardless of whether catharsis is the objective of a given scene, the physical, emotional, and psychological intensity of SM, combined with its marginalised status, generates emotional responses of an intensity that players often find cathartic” (Newmahr 2011: 95). This is often experienced as self – renewal, says Newmahr (2010: 324). Another result of the intensity sometimes experienced in a scene is the achievement of another state of consciousness in which you experience an altered sense of time and where the ego falls away.
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 27 “Sometimes those who are bottoming during a scene reach a point where their own endorphins produce a powerful natural high, called subspace” (Williams 2006: 339). Leah calls it ‘the happy place’: “It actually has a colour, it’s really strange. Cause sometimes it has, sometimes it’s really tropical and beachy. And it’s just a place where I’m so blissed out from whatever is going on that all I can do is pretty much smile and nod and try not to drool” (Newmahr 2011: 97). Kyle puts his experience this way: “I was at that point notched up so high that they needed to bring me down from that […] and it stimulated every nerve just right, and I just soared. I’ve never had an experience like that since” (Ibid.: 97). When Newmahr asks him to elaborate a bit more on his experience, Kyle has a difficulty to find the right language. Ultimately he compares his feeling with walking through a desert:
“Trying to put something like that in words is difficult, because a lot gets lost in translation. But I’ll do the best I can. Picture for a moment that you are in a desert. And it’s very hot and uncomfortable and you’re dehydrated, and you’ve been walking for days and your muscles are tired. And you’re just about to fall over. And then, all of a sudden, you fall off a cliff and you land in a tropical paradise of an oasis. In the water, but it’s drinkable. And it’s the perfect temperature and it’s very refreshing. And you come out of it and you’re clean – shaven automatically, and everything is 100 per cent perfect. You went from really really difficult to deal with and like doing your best just to hang on, to everything’s groovy, just like that. That’s soaring” (Newmahr 2011: 97).
This experience comes very close to Ana her fictional ‘singing nerve endings’. Eric says that the flow experience is a feeling of “infinity, of pure control, of being one with everything” (Newmahr 2010: 328). Lawrence experiences it as a “very intense buzz”:
“My body was very light; I didn’t feel the weight of my body. I didn’t lose awareness of where I was, but my head cleared up completely which was really wonderful because I’m always thinking. I have a very busy mind and sometimes that gets the better of me. And it was wonderful just to be able to relax and not have to force myself to relax…I’d describe it as more as a high than a buzz. The closest thing I can say is that it’s like being drunk…so it was really amazing at that moment to be—all that I was, was the sum of my five senses. That was the thing that I most relished, being able to use my body to the utmost” (Newmahr 2010: 328).
Nienke Schlette Our Edgy Sexual Bodies 28 ‘Stimulating every nerve just right’, feeling like ‘all that I was, was the sum of my five senses’, ‘being able to use my body to the utmost’, and experiencing a ‘feeling of infinity’ are all results of attempts to come closer to the Lacanian notion of the Real and grasp its mysticism, through our sensuous body in SM. Sometimes, practitioners were not able to put their experience into words, ‘a lot gets lost in translation’. They are literally unable to fit what they’ve felt in the discourse we have to make sense of the world around us, just as how the notion of the Real cannot be grasped by our discourse, since it registers itself ‘as its outer limit’. And at other times practitioners would literally play “close to the edge” something “newer tops would not have been inclined to” do (Newmahr 2011: 197). We already have come across the experience of ‘being at one with everything/the world’ in the analysis of the amateur sportsmen by David Le Breton. It is a feeling both, SM practitioners and amateur sportsmen, get through using and stimulating their sensuous bodies. To me, both are looking for the dimension of being in the world that Lacanians refer to with the concept of the Real, one by running a marathon bare footed on the North Pole, the other stimulating his/her sensuous body feeling the pain and pleasure of the biting licks of a riding crop.
When we use the Lacanian notion of the Real to try to understand SM, we are able to pay more attention to the mystical side of its experience, than when we would analyse SM as (‘role’) ‘play’ or ‘serious leisure’. Being in subspace, Ana describes it in the book as “being lost in a sea of sensation” (James 2012: 324), feeling single – minded, fictional ‘singing nerve endings’ become very real when you feel like you are falling into a perfect paradise like oasis after walking for days on end in a hot desert without any water. This sensuous body is central to the experience of SM, and it should therefore be central to any attempt to understand SM too.
