Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (21 page)

Martyrdom bottoming does not rely on the ultimate denial of pleasure, but adherence to a martyr script. Admissions of selfish enjoyment occur, in private and to people other than the top, but are tempered by indicators of secrecy; hence Sophie’s declaration that “[I] will be honest,” marks the acknowledge- ment of her own enjoyment as a claim that runs counter to the script.

INDISPENSABLE SERVICE

Service bottoming is often thought of as a kind of submission, though submis- sion often incorporates more than service. Both service and submission seek to meet the needs or fulfill the wishes of the top. Both place high value on approval, skills, commitment, and loyalty; the goal is the successful fulfilling of the expectations of the top:

There’s a thrill in submission. I wanted to be submissive. And there is this thrill in knowing I could cheat and choosing not to do it anyway, in knowing that I could be good. And I
could
be bad, but then I’d be
bad
—I’d be a bad submissive. And I wanted to be a good one. I wanted to do what he wanted. I wanted to please him. (Interview transcript, Lily; italics reflect spoken emphasis)

Service bottoming challenges itself to “goodness.” In part, service is an exercise in perceptiveness, and of evidence of familiarity with one’s partner; excellent service often requires anticipating the desires of a top before being asked. Unlike martyrdom, the discourse of service is one in which providing pleasure or utility or otherwise being of value is enjoyable for the bottom.

BADASS BOTTOMING

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

Kirby stood with his bare back against the concrete wall. His arms hung limply at his sides. Tammy, at least six inches taller than Kirby and considerably heavier, was standing four feet in front of him, wearing sweat pants and a ratty T-shirt, and holding a singletail.

They locked eyes and laughed.

“You ready?” Tammy asked, grinning affectionately. “Bring it on,” Kirby replied, still smiling.

Tammy checked behind her to make sure she was clear. Then she smiled at Kirby again, and in one smooth motion, she threw the whip horizontally through the air. It landed on his chest and he gasped. She waited, just a beat, and threw it again. Kirby closed his eyes. Tammy got into a rhythm and began whipping him faster, harder, and always across the center of his chest. As the whipping grew more rhythmic, Kirby opened his eyes and kept them on Tammy’s face.

Tammy’s whipping was serious. It’s difficult to see a singletail land, and Kirby has a hairy chest, and it was dark, but I could see how quickly it connected once she threw it, and even in the dim light I could see his skin reddening in places.

Kirby made a lot of hissing whistling sounds—that sharp “sssssssst!” that people tend to make when they feel very precise sorts of pain. He stomped a couple of times and slammed his hand into the wall behind him. Once he fairly screamed and jumped sideways out of her range. She looked at him impatiently, half-smirking, with her eyebrows raised and a challenge in her eyes, and he glared at her as if she’d been the one to jump away. He put himself back against the wall and puffed his chest out. (Field notes)

Similar to service topping, badass bottoming is rarely discussed, for it threat- ens the powerful-/powerless-ness illusion.
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SM and Gender Symbolism

Taken together, these archetypal strategies represent the dynamics of topping and bottoming in the Caeden SM community. SM participants do not take this approach in thinking about play, nor do they limit themselves to one type of topping or bottoming. In the vast majority of SM scenes in Caeden, players move between these types, at least occasionally. Nevertheless this taxonomy is useful in understanding a complex activity from an intersectional perspective. Benefits, rewards, and motivations of SM play differ in accordance with the

deployment of these strategies, as do decision-making processes and illusions of power and powerlessness.

It is impossible to understand the archetypes that inspire these strategies out- side gender; they are themselves gender stereotypes. Beyond performances of powerful and powerless circumstances, they are active representations of
being
powerful and powerless, or of victimizing and being victimized. Topping and bottoming are both active processes undertaken
to and as
engagement in perfor- mances of victimization and power differentials. This is not to claim that these performances are therefore anti-feminist or otherwise philosophically objec- tionable (a question to which I return in chapter 8). There is, as SM researchers and practitioners have long insisted, an important distinction between victim- ization and consensual engagement in performances of victimization. Nonethe- less, while the latter precludes the former, it is the existence and cultural coding of victimization that gives these performances meaning. In this sense, we can explore these performances within their gendered contexts, yet move away from the categories of “woman” and “man” as the salient hermeneutic constructs. This is important theoretically, but especially so in the case of this community, which comprises multiple sexual, SM, and gender identities.

The objectives of badass topping and benevolent dictatorship mirror com- mon characteristics of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987): respectively, phys- ical aggression and risk-taking, and ultimate discretionary power and the pro- vision of protection. These types perform victimization most clearly and at the symbolic level, most unapologetically (though one could argue that the benevo- lence itself is an apology for what would otherwise be badass topping).

The analogous feminine archetypes of bottoming are martyrdom and ser- vice bottoming, though both are, not surprisingly, more complicated. All bot- toming constitutes performances of either victimization or powerlessness, but not necessarily both. Martyrdom romanticizes the ideas of both victimization and powerlessness, and actively performs both. It requires the casting of the experience as one of powerlessness, claiming passivity and helplessness, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Service bottoming, however, performs powerlessness, but not necessarily (and not usually) victimization. More active than either the martyr or the badass bot- tom, service bottoming is constructed around principles of approval and compe- tence, and is generally not understood nor performed in terms of helplessness.

The presence of these distinct and varied dynamics in topping and bottom- ing constructs far more than a community offering of “something for everyone.” At the most basic level, of course, they manifest gendered power differentials.

Their relative statuses within each group reflect this; on a continuum of mas- culinity and femininity, the closer topping moves toward bottoming, the lower its status, and vice versa.

In the cases of service topping and badass bottoming, performances of power differentials are especially interesting. Because the goal of satisfying the bottom is
implicit
in badass topping and benevolent dictatorship, it is perfor- matively and discursively disavowed. In stark contrast, service topping takes the satisfaction of the bottom as its
explicit
goal and is therefore feminized, even as it inflicts pain or performs dominance. In conflating action (masculine) with servitude (feminine) it occupies a lower status than the exclusively masculine archetypes. Not surprisingly, then, service tops are most commonly switches; people who top in badass and benevolent dictatorship are often less likely to bottom or less likely to label their bottoming as such.

Badass bottoming poses a similar theoretical quandary. It epitomizes being done
unto
—the quintessential passivity—but it does not frame these experi- ences as powerlessness. In fact, badass bottoming refuses to code even extreme performances of victimization as powerlessness. Wrapped tightly around con- cepts of toughness, strength, and endurance (both physical and emotional), badass bottoming conflates victimization performances at their most extreme (beating, torture, kidnapping, rape) with a masculine commitment to victory through endurance.

Much like service topping, badass bottoms occupy the lowest status among bottoms; terms like “do-me bottom” and “just a masochist” illustrate the per- spective that without claims to powerlessness, SM play is less meaningful. As with service topping among tops, badass bottoms are also more likely than other bottoms to be switches. The lower relative status of switches in the scene, then, is not, as is commonly understood, simply about switching itself, but about the challenges that switches pose to the top/bottom–man/woman paradigm that underlies much of SM play.

There is truth in the argument that topping symbolizes (male) dominance and bottoming (female) submission. Most simply understood, topping and bottoming are ways of doing masculinity and femininity, respectively. Even as they symbolically recreate a gendered
system,
however, the complexity within SM play, and play across genders, problematizes the understanding of SM as a categorical reinforcement of gender inequality. If, at the symbolic level, some “doings” of masculinity are more feminine than others, and both men and women are doing masculinity and femininity, alternately as well as simul- taneously, then SM is not a simple patriarchal performance. Neither does it

simply invert the gender enactments of patriarchal narratives; in complicating our indicators of power, pain, dominance, submission, and surrender, it also troubles the space in which we envision gender relations. Therefore, while it is important to recognize the sources of the symbolism of these performances, it is insufficient to begin and end analysis of SM at the ideological level, as non-empirically based essays about SM have so often done. SM interactions are constructed and constituted by people, through which cultural meaning is not only utilized and thereby reproduced, but potentially reshaped, challenged, and subverted.

The participation of tops and bottoms in these symbolic performances should also not be viewed outside the context of the active performances at the individual level. The view of gender as something to be either accomplished or constituted through quotidian “doings” is not fundamentally incompatible with the argument that gender is performative, for gender operates interperson- ally, intrapersonally, and structurally. We can examine the ways in which gen- der is being accomplished less consciously and deliberately, while also exploring the ways it is, even in the very same individual at the very same moment, per- formed, signified, and constituted.

These quotidian gender performances change the social space and mean- ing of this community, and distinguish it from other alternative cultural sites. One of the distinctions between SM and the Goth scene, for example, may be their relationships to gender. Amy Wilkins finds that in one Goth community, Goth is about presenting a highly stylized and feminized self, negotiating gen- der through the appropriation of stylized clothing and the social positioning of oneself as a spectacle (2008). In the young, northeastern Goth community she studied, men and women place themselves at the center of the public gaze through intense body work and strive for sexual equality in a pornonorma- tive context. In contrast, the SM community in Caeden (not to be confused with the fetish scene, which overlaps with the Goth scene) negotiates gender through its performances of hyper-masculinity and -femininity. In the Caeden SM scene, masculinity and femininity are done at the symbolic level, regard- less of the gender of the doers. This is not necessarily an objective; people do not top to “feel like” men or women, on the conscious level. Nonetheless, the engagement in SM is a
symbolic
engagement in masculinity and femininity. These performances occur only within community space—another argument for Hopkins’s simulation rather than replication (1994)—and people of all gen- ders can engage in any kinds of gender performance. Both communities can be understood as emerging from gender “challenges,” but both also arise in a

post-feminist
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context of gender anomie, where expectations for behavior are less clearly governed by gender membership—and therefore less clear.

Gender in SM play complicates ideas about gender performativity by jux- taposing these symbolic performances against the ways in which participants perform gender at the quotidian level. These negotiations may be gender syn- thesizing and thereby arguably gender conformist, or gender bending and subversive, and everywhere in between. Not surprisingly, switching, badass bottoming, and service topping are more common (and are higher-status identifications) in subsets of the community in which gender and SM identities are linked less frequently than they are in Caeden. Where SM is queerer, these kinds of play, as sites of gender subversion, proliferate more widely than in the heavily hetersosexual male-top, female-bottom community.

Nonetheless, gender is not policed in the ubiquitous sense in which it is outside of Caeden. In the scene, identity is fluid, and gender is not an excep- tion. Though the transgendered population in Caeden is not especially large, it is growing and supported by the wider community. At the ideological level, of course, SM identifications parallel the masculine/feminine dualism. In this way, gender regulation is replaced by SM-identity regulation in Caeden.

This can be read as gender-subversive in two ways. Most basically, because of the ways in which topping and bottoming have primacy over gender, the space for men to bottom and women to top constitutes a space to defy gender expec- tations.
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Though top and bottom identifications do reinforce the gender binary, this link is troubled by cross-gender engagements in topping and bottoming, as well as by the “switch” identity. Secondly, the range of dynamics of topping and bottoming facilitates sites of conflation of masculinities and femininities in SM, as is clear in the cases of badass bottoming and service topping.