Just saw an interesting article this morning This scene from a BDSM “slave auction” — before a predominantly white
audience – makes for one of the most viscerally challenging passages in
“Techniques of Pleasure,” Weiss’ book-length investigation of San
Francisco’s kink community, although there are other examples, ranging
from father-daughter incest to Nazi guard-prisoner scenarios. These
encounters aren’t described in much detail — instead, they’re used as
passing evidence of the depths of politically incorrect play that she
observed, or heard about, during the three years spent observing this
world. Most kinksters see such “scenes” as standing apart from racism,
sexism and all manner of ugliness that happens in the real world — but
Weiss does not. “The fantasy of the scene as a safe space of private
desire justifies and reinforces certain social inequalities,” she
argues. The truth, she says, is that S/M “depends for its erotic power
on precisely these real-world relations, within which it is given form
and content.” That said, Weiss objects to the idea that this sort of sexual
make-believe is “the same as the violence that it mimes,” as some BDSM
critics argue. Instead, Weiss looks at how particular scenes, whether
it’s a slave auction or make-believe child abuse, affect the people
participating, watching or (here’s looking at you) reading about it. She also zeroes in on the contradictions of kink: “On the one hand,
SM is figured as outlaw: as transgressive of normative sexual values,”
Weiss writes. “On the other hand, SM is dependent on social norms:
practitioners draw on social hierarchies to produce SM scenes.” The
mostly-white, mostly-middle-class community is itself an example of
real-world social inequality: ”These [sexual] experiments are more
possible and more accessible to those with class, race and gender
privilege: heterosexual men playing with sexism, white bodies at a
charity slave auction, professional information technology (IT) workers
with several rooms filled with custom-made bondage toys.” Speaking of toys, she further questions S/M’s “outlaw” status by
painting a portrait of a social network built on capitalism and
consumerism: Just consider the rainbow’s array of classes (on everything
from spanking to rope bondage) and fetish toys (from handcuffs to latex
vacuum beds) that practitioners can, and are to some degree expected
to, invest in. BDSM is not as transgressive as most assume, says Weiss. As you’ve probably gathered, “Techniques of Pleasure” is a smart, but
not particularly sexy, read. It’s light on kinky lingo and heavy on the
academic jargon. So, I got Weiss, an assistant anthropology professor
at Wesleyan University, on the phone for a more relaxed chat about the
ambivalent politics of the BDSM community.
You write in the book about your initial surprise at your
first BDSM event that everyone seemed so darned “normal” and
“wholesome.” How so?
It was definitely not what I expected. There were way more
heterosexual people and they were older than I thought they would be.
They were wearing not the most cutting-edge fetish outfits — they
weren’t all black leather and riding in on their motorcycles. I realized
then that these were people that I was comfortable with, they were
professional-class people. They weren’t the radical people I expected to
find: They were more like my colleagues or like my parents. You also talk in the book about how the strict rules and regulations within S/M seem to contradict the scene’s rebel identity. People find themselves participating in social formations that they
themselves didn’t construct. In the ’80s, there was a concern in the
scene about federal regulation, the possibility of busts, but also
primarily a need to protect people from HIV transmission. The Bay Area
leather scene was so decimated by HIV and AIDS, so safety and control
became a a major concern for different S/M organizations. Plenty of people in S/M now hate the rules. They say, “It used to be
you could do all this crazy stuff and it was a lot more fun and a lot
sexier and now you go to a play party and you start to do something and
the dungeon monitor is right there yelling at you, ‘That’s not
allowed!’” One thing that I found interesting was that resenting the
rules was one way that you became a respected S/M practitioner. People outside of the scene tend to think that S/M is totally wild,
there are no rules, people are just doing whatever they feel like doing —
but if you show them a 10-page negotiation form or a checklist or the
20-minute safety lecture that goes into almost any kind of play, people
are amazed.
What about the consumerist and capitalist elements that you found? I was amazed at how much stuff there was to buy; there are toys,
manuals, books, classes. A lot of scholars have argued that in late
capitalism in the United States, people’s identity is about what they
consume. In S/M, there is a kind of “work on the self,” or self-mastery,
that’s about different practices, different kinds of technique, but
then those techniques are then tied back into toys,
different paraphernalia, different kinds of commodities. You become a
bondage master in relation to different commodities. Not everyone in the S/M scene can afford to buy all this stuff. In
the same way that whiteness is normative, it’s in the center, there is
this normative professional-class person who has the money and leisure
time to devote to S/M practice, and that is the ideal for consumer
capitalism. S/M is not alone in this. This is just a way that communities based
around sexualities work in the U.S. today. But S/M is also a really
great example of this, and you can see what that does to the community.
People have debates about toys: Are they destroying social connections,
did it used to be more authentic? And how now you can just buy your S/M
identity, and that creates a lot of anxiety for people.
More so even than gender dynamics, you found some complex and interesting racial issues within the scene. The scene in San Francisco, at least the pansexual
scene, is almost entirely white, which was surprising to me given the
demographics of the Bay Area, and that was something that most of the
white people that I interviewed didn’t seem to notice. It wasn’t until
[the BDSM organization] Society of Janus did a panel presentation on
race in the scene that the people I was interviewing said, “Oh yeah, I
guess the scene really is white, that’s so strange.” The people of color I talked to felt marginalized by the scene’s
normative whiteness. It wasn’t so much that white people doing S/M were
overtly racist or didn’t want to play with people of color, it was that
the scene itself had a normative, assumptive whiteness at its center, so
that people of color doing S/M experience themselves as marginal to
that community. Most people that I talked to didn’t see S/M slavery play as having
anything to do with historical slavery in the United States — but none
of the people of color I talked to thought that this was the case. I
talked to an African-American woman in the scene who’s well-known for
doing race play and she said, “You know, I don’t think these white
people ever think about handcuffs and whipping and the slave auction as
connected to histories of slavery, but I can’t help but think about that
when I play.” So, for me, it’s not that charity slave auctions are simply terrible,
politically suspect and clearly wrong, nor is it that they’re
transgressive and that they open up new radical possibilities.
Debates about S/M so often come down to their ultimate social
impact — whether it reinforces or transgresses sexism, racism and the
like. Is that question answerable? You can’t before the fact decide on the politics of S/M. The way that
S/M is talked about in feminist theory, the way it’s debated by
practitioners, it’s in the stark pro or con, binary debate. You can’t
really make these political decisions on such a simplified basis. You
have to really ask, “For whom?” There are scenes in my book that really
do open up people, get them to think differently, provide a new vantage
point for thinking about inequality, but there are other scenes that
don’t. The very same scene has different effects on differently
positioned people. My book is a call to get away from abstracted
thinking about the relationship between sexuality and social power, and
to think more concretely, more socially. |
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