Boundaries: The Shifting Senses of SM

by Des de Moor

Disentangling the Ropes: SM Activities

It is perhaps most sensible to characterize SM, initially at least, not in terms of abstract notions of psychology, sociology or politics, but operationally, as a set of activities. This is the approach of Larry Townsend in his hilariously prescriptive introductions to the US gay male 'leather' milieu. Most 'scenes' (individual sexual interactions), according to Townsend, involve six characteristics: a dominant-submissive relationship, pleasurable pain, fantasy and/or role-playing, conscious humbling or humiliation, 'some form of fetish involvement', and 'the acting out of one or more ritualized interactions (bondage, flagellation, etc.)' (1983:15). Townsend's list is fairly comprehensive, but can probably be further reduced to three elements. The relative importance of these three varies between individual scenes more than Townsend seems to think, and one or more of them may be absent entirely though we may still feel we want to label the scene in question as an SM encounter.

Domination and Submission

The first is the acting out of domination and submission, which Krafft-Ebing originally identified only with masochism and which Ellis ignored. This can be expressed in various symbolic postures and activities such as kneeling and crawling, kissing and licking feet and footwear, the wearing of dog collars and leads and other items associated with the control of animals, various 'humiliations' such as stripping and exhibiting oneself, verbal abuse, use of special terms of address like 'sir/madam', 'boy/girl' etc. or even by the simple obeying of instructions. Bondage, the subjecting of someone to physical restraint, carries a powerful charge of dominance and submission too.

And for many people certain common sexual acts are also charged with these distinctions -- the insertive and receptive partners in sexual intercourse, particularly anal intercourse, can be seen as respectively dominant and submissive, and in the 'hanky codes' with which some SMers traditionally advertised their preferences, the conventions of dominant, active left and the passive, submissive right can apply to the polarities of fucking as much as to more specialized activities. For many people, dominance and submission is enough; and though it's likely most SM involves at least some element of it, there are some who eschew fixed roles and swap or free play entirely with our second element, pain.

Pain

Pain is taken by many to be at the core of SM and indeed there are some for whom the main pleasure of SM is in the intensity of the physical stimulation it can involve, which means not only sensations that most would agree are painful, such as hard beatings, but those that are unusual and invasive though not necessarily painful such as piercings, enemas, catheters and the like. But there are many people for whom Dom-sub play is enough and others who actually do not enjoy pain itself but get a kick out of anticipating it or looking back with pride at having endured it. And, as Ellis realised, those who inflict pain may get more out their 'victim's' enjoyment of it than from inflicting pain for its own sake. Sometimes people call those who enjoy giving and receiving pain 'true sadists' and 'true masochists', though Krafft-Ebing originally argued that masochism was more to do with submission than pain; Ellis's preferred term 'algolagnia', meaning 'enjoyment of pain' in Greek, is more accurate if more unwieldy.

In any case, the body's response to pain is complex. The boundary between pleasure and pain can shift according to context and recedes noticeably when other sexual stimulation is involved, which accounts for the popularity of the 'horseplay' Krafft-Ebing noticed even among 'normal' couples; good SMers learn to play with these boundaries, building up the level of stimulation subtly to warm the body up to take more. Some of this is to do with body chemistry, and the production of the body's own pain-control substances, endorphins; these are stimulated by exercise and by painful activity and as well as making pain easier to cope with can also give an intense and dreamy sense of well-being like that obtained from opiate drugs, which are chemically similar. Some of it is psychological, to do with the pleasure of mentally coping with pain, or exploring intense sensations in a safe context to find out what they feel like and enjoying their apparent extremity.

Fetishism

The third and possibly the most important factor is fetishism. Fetishes were originally inanimate objects thought by members of some technologically primitive societies to possess supernatural powers. In both classical sexual psychology and in common usage, fetishism is the obtaining of sexual excitement and gratification from an object which, in Freud's terms, 'bears some relation to the normal sexual object but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim' (1953:153) and according to Freud, the fetish object is a substitute for the mother's missing penis, an explanation that incidentally seems inadequate to explain fetishism amongst women. Fetishism could be for another part of the body, such as the shoulder or the foot, but the classic examples of fetish objects are materials like leather and rubber and items of clothing like boots and underwear; the necessity for the presence of a fetish object varies from fetishist to fetishist, and in rare cases supplants any other form of sexual desire.

Some people do not regard classical fetishism of this kind sufficient to count as SM, and those who are 'just' fetishists with no interest in dom-sub or pain scenes have sometimes been looked down upon in certain sections of the SM scene. However, as Townsend notes, an element of fetishism seems to be present alongside other factors in most SM encounters, and it is no accident that the word 'leather' has often been used as a euphemism for SM.

There is a more important sense, however, in which all SM could be said in some way to be fetishistic, and it partly hinges upon how we interpret what Freud terms things 'unsuited to the normal sexual aim'. Talk of normality in psychology is often fraught with oversimplification and value-judgement, and supporters of sexual freedom quickly go on the defensive at the mention of terms like 'normal' and 'natural'. This is understandable, since our history as human beings has been one of progressively overcoming nature, making and remaking ourselves through societies where 'normality' is in a state of constant flux. But there is still in our society a residue that we have failed to entirely socialise, particularly in the areas of reproduction and the family; and while a residual reproductive function of sex exists alongside its recreational function, the identification of sexual normalcy with heterosexual procreative sex still has real force. In this context, SM sexual activity, which need not involve intercourse and orgasm and, as Sacher-Masoch showed, may not even require genital contact, seems a very long way from the 'normal sexual aim'.

At the same time, our society is fetishistic in a wider sense, since it is based on an economic system where workers are alienated from the products of their labour, and where those products are produced and distributed not according to their usefulness or desirability but according to their exchange-value through the mystified forces of money and the market. This gives rise to the phenomenon Karl Marx termed 'commodity fetishism', where 'the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour... a definite social relation between men... assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (1954:76-77).

The effects of commodity fetishism run deep, and can be clearly seen, for example, in the way we are encouraged to express our views of ourselves as individuals through the consumption of commodities, a tendency even more evident today than in Marx's time. This tendency is underlined since commodities themselves often seem to provide security in a world where many aspects of our lives seem beyond our control. And it might be suggested that commodity fetishism extends beyond commodities as actual objects and into the direct objectification of people and their activities into specific roles and characteristics.

This is something that affects all our lives, not just our sex lives, and its sexual repercussions are by no means limited to SMers: it can be seen, for example, in the tendency to disintegrate the body into separate parts and single out particular ones, typically the penis and breasts, with obsessive concern for physical characteristics and size. But in many SMers' preoccupations with paraphenalia, clothing, equipment, definite physical states such as that of being pierced or bound in certain ways, and strictly defined roles and activities it does seem to find a particularly poignant expression. Through the multiple objectifications of an SM encounter we assert control, in a limited way, over at least a small and very personal part of our lives. And, interestingly, we do it through the appropriation of images and activities associated most strongly with the limiting of freedom and control.