'From the Dungeons to the Streets - Lesbian Origins of SM Politics' by Jan Szpilka

In 1981, Gayle Rubin, an American feminist, lesbian and sexual minorities’ rights activist, first published her text The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M. It appeared in a famous collection Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, brought to print by lesbian collective Samois. The titular “leather menace” was an obvious allusion to the term “the lavender menace”, first used in 1969 by Betty Friedman to brand lesbians active in the women’s movement, seen by her as posing a danger to the feminist cause.

 The intent behind Rubin’s text was clear. By describing examples of legal sanction imposed on (primarily male – it is important to keep that in mind) sadomasochists, Rubin foresaw a time in which those practising sadism and masochism would become victims of a repression similar to the one that homosexual people were living through. Even more damning, the feminist circles, instead of closing ranks and defending such people from victimisation, also turned against sadomasochists, seeing their forms of sexual expression as a manifestation of the patriarchal, violence-based arrangement of the society. Such feminist prejudice was particularly vitriolic towards female sadomasochists (especially those who were also lesbian) active within the women’s movement. Such “sisters” were, by and large, seen as hostile agents at best. In other words, Rubin argued that female sadomasochists were assuming the role of lesbians from a decade before: victims of persecution from the same community that was supposed to support and protect them against bigoted politicians and activists. It was this observation that revealed the full intent behind the title of her next.

 Rubin’s predictions went unfulfilled. Throughout the 1980s, most cases of the legal persecution of sadomasochists - both as people and communities - happened where the victims were also gay. It therefore appears that attacks on sadomasochism were overwhelmingly a side-effect of the moral panic and legal suppression of homosexual men. No centralised mechanism of action against sadomasochism itself came be. Yet, it did not stop Rubin’s text – and the entire volume in which it was published – from becoming a kick to the feminist anthill. The reaction was almost immediate. Within a year of the publication of Coming to Power, a polemic collection under the telling title of Against Masochism was assembled and published. When in 1982 Rubin was invited to Pleasure and Danger conference in Barnard College, along with a few other SM-positive authors, National Organisation for Women organised a boycott, coming close to preventing the conference from even happening. In short order, sadomasochism became an object of one of the famous “sex wars”, a series of conflicts that defined the American feminist movement of the 1980s.

 The anti-SM side argued that popularising sadomasochism or even presenting it as a safe and sane activity was nothing but popularising sexual violence and reinforcing the patriarchal sexual paradigm based on power-exchange, dominance and submission. Likewise, the fact that the most visible SM communities tended to be gay was brought as evidence that such forms of sexual expression were eminently male, and therefore impossible to integrate into a feminist outlook.

The other side, meanwhile, pointed out that symbolic (and legal) persecution and condemnation of sadomasochism was no different from any other form of persecuting sexual nonconformity, and that it resulted in silencing and shaming the female sadomasochists. The vitriolic and confrontational rhetoric of anti-SM activists was likened to that employed by the most hateful of Republican politicians. For parts of the feminist-lesbian community, sadomasochist practice became a means of rebellion against those who attempted to impose a softer, more “feminine”, more “boring” sex onto them. By donning leather and latex and playing with ropes and whips, they made it clear that they not only strayed far from the “good sex”, but were not afraid to have sex which was labelled “perverse” and “lustful.”

The conflict around sadomasochism died down in the 90s, along with the other “sex wars” such as the one surrounding pornography. Several factors contributed to this, but especially the increase in popularity of constructionist approach to sexuality. Such theories appeared to have a lot in common with the writings of SM-positive thinkers about freedom of choice of role and position within a sadomasochistic play. Furthermore, the “radical” nature of SM pleasures postulated by the same thinkers won those practices much good will in a newer, queerer time. Therefore, the 90s saw the popularisation of the view that the radical pleasures of SM are inherently subversive, and that practising them is striking a blow against the choking sexual norm. The radical lesbian-SM idea of sadomasochism as an attack against societal restraint and an act of liberating self-actualization became surprisingly mainstream, or at least as mainstream as any thought so closely tied to the queerer side of the feminist movement could ever become. The capstone for such framing of sadomasochism was provided by Samantha MacKendrick in her book counterpleasures.

 By tracing back this conflict to its origins, we can realise something very important about sadomasochism today, or – as it came to be known in the 90s – BDSM. The first community to put serious thought to the problem of sadomasochism as a practice and a form of sexual expression was born in the context of lesbian (and, although it is a separate root, gay) sexuality, and the conflict about what sex is good and how sex can fight – or reinforce – the patriarchy. Unfortunately, those circumstances have, by now, been mostly forgotten.

In the 90s, a new wave of academic research on sadomasochism/BDSM emerged, likely motivated by the increasing visibility of such practices both in the Western society and the popular culture. One of the distinguishing characteristics of this new scholarly scrutiny was putting the focus on sadomasochism as a form of sexual expression. Although this may seem obvious, the prior scholarship of the subject was pointedly uninterested (with few exceptions) in this aspect of the field. When a look is taken on pre-90s non-feminist writings on sadomasochism, what is seen are two distinct traditions, one of which could be called “philosophical” (or “literary”) and the other “psychiatric”.

The “philosophical” trend descended directly from consideration of marquis de Sade - the godfather of sadism - as a thinker. Therefore, it was founded on the literary analysis and criticism of the depictions of sadism and masochism as seen through the lens of de Sade’s and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s writing. Being highly textual and more preoccupied with sadism and masochism as philosophical concepts rather than practice, it produced a rich body of considerations which was hardly, if at all, applicable to the living practice of sadomasochism. The “psychiatric” tradition, meanwhile, was rooted in the fact that “sadism” and “masochism”, seen as psychiatric disorders, had long since been subjects of psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytic interest.

 While the new generation of researchers was heavily indebted to both of those trends, it was in many ways founded on the rejection of certain core assumptions built into them. The “philosophical” tradition was problematic in its disregard for the lived experience and its highly detached, theoretical outlook, while the “psychiatric” one was approached with heavy skepticism because of its pathological framing of sadomasochists as people who are “disordered” and in need of help. In other words, the turn towards sadomasochism as a practice signified the break away from interpretation and psychology for the sake of the study of its anthropological and sociological aspects.

In that, the new research neared the feminist perspective, which had been closely occupied with sadomasochism as something that one does, not thinks or senses. The SM-positive feminists writers such as Rubin or Pat Califia had, during the 80s, done an impressive amount of work in producing a corpus of texts referring to the theory of sadomasochist practice, and while the new generation of researchers did not necessarily identify with the feminist movement, they found that it was the pro-SM feminist theory of sadomasochism as radical sexuality that aligned best with their aims and interests.

As a result, the pro-SM feminist view heavily informed the emerging field of sadomasochism/BDSM research. Its influence can be seen in a number of assumptions initially held to be ironclad within that area. The first among them was the notion that sadomasochist practice is by necessity non-normative, that it is by nature queer. From that followed the view that the people who practice SM (no matter their gender or sexual orientation) understand themselves as not being normative and are largely liberated from the cultural prejudices such as assuming males to be naturally dominant and females naturally submissive. In the early writing, the submissive man and the dominant women acted the role of emblems of sadomasochistic freedom. Unfortunately, in this translation from feminist critique to more broader anthropological and sociological research, something got lost.

 While the older, lesbian-feminist critique was written explicitly in the context of homosexual sadomasochistic sex, the new generation of researchers made heterosexual SM communities the object of their focus. Part of this was due to different priorities (not being lesbian theoreticians themselves, the new research did not feel as urgent of a need to deal with the lesbian/feminist community), and part of it was in the change of the nature of SM communities itself. While in the late 70s and 80s when Rubin or Califia were writing, most of SM communities were homosexual in one way or another, in the early 90s the AIDS induced collapse of the gay scenes paved the way for the emergence and new visibility of theoretically pan- but chiefly hetero- sexual sadomasochistic scenes. As a result, while a researcher in the 70s attempting to do fieldwork in sadomasochistic communities would likely have found themselves in a gay bar, by the 90s that was far less of a given. Furthermore, the lesbian sex wars had petered out, and the revolutionary ardency of radical sex sublimated into gender theories and the rejection of essentialist gender viewpoint.

However, this change of circumstances did not reflect itself in theoretical development.  In hindsight, the problem seems obvious: theoretical and polemic frameworks built for the purpose of discussing homosexual relations were not fit for describing and analysing heterosexual SM sex. However, it should be kept in mind that the dominance of the lesbian-feminist (and generally sexually transgressive) discourse on SM in the academic circles meant that it was difficult to imagine there being a world of kinky sex other than the ones written about by the likes of Rubin or Califia - even if the world in which Rubin or Califia wrote could no longer be found by the early 80s.
 
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 Although it attempted to turn towards practice, the new wave of sadomasochism scholarship never quite liberated itself from the “philosophical” tradition. The best evidence of that is MacKendrick’s aforementioned counterpleasures, a classic of theory that blends observation on the practice of sex with heavy debt towards writers such as Giles Deluze or Georges Bataille. Therefore, the 1990s and 2000s writings on sadomasochism/BDSM developed in two closely related, but distinct directions. One of them was more theoretically inclined and based primarily on literary criticism and desk research. In many ways, it arose as a response to the development of gender and queer studies, and attempted to work sadomasochism into those frameworks. Overtly and directly descended from the pro-SM feminist perspectives, it often ended up a repetition of their arguments from the 80s, only applied to a wider group of people.

 The second, coming to fruition in late 2000s, was more ethnographically minded and made foundation the postulate of classically-understood participant observation. Furthermore, the researchers who built it up tended to be less directly involved in politically-charged theories descended from feminist or queer studies. Their choice to stick to fieldwork performed directly within the SM communities: its parties, munches, workshops, and fairs, yielded results vastly different than expected. Very quickly, it turned out that the sacrosanct assumptions about the inescapable subversiveness and queerness of sadomasochism/BDSM were impossible to reconcile with earlier theoretical frameworks. Researchers such as Staci Newmahr (doing fieldwork on the East Coast of the US), Margot Weiss (who worked in the Bay Area) and Danielle Lindemann (focusing on the professional dominatrixes and the community around them) noted, time after time, that the people they met with in the field were strikingly normal. The revolutionary ardency of the “leather menace”, called to arms by Rubin two decades prior, was no object to them. Furthermore, the research seemed to indicate that the chief issues faced by those communities were not of identity and queerness. The ethnographic data  contained far less evidence of external persecution or alienation than of the surprising mainstreaming of such communities, where heteronormativity and traditional gender roles appeared to dominate. One of the conclusions drawn was that those communities were afflicted with the same problems as their contemporary American society, only reflected down in micro-scale.

 Such findings engendered disappointment. The “normalcy” of the communities was a far cry from the postulated perennial parabasis of subversion (to quote the title of a paper by a Polish literary critic Tomasz Wróblewski). The sense of failed expectations became especially prominent in the findings of Margot Weiss. To counter the overly-optimistic view of SM posited by others, she forwarded a theory that sadomasochism/BDSM is nothing but a realization of the neo-liberal dogma of post-Fordist capitalism in the sphere of one’s intimate, sexual life. Her opinions, however infinitely more subdued and nuanced in their condemnations, harkened back to the criticisms raised by the contributors to Against Sadomasochism.
 
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Partially inspired by the ethnographic turn in the SM study, I’ve been doing participant observation in the Polish SM communities for about two years now. In the course of my personal field-work, I would often ask Polish practitioners of BDSM what they find repulsive and problematic in their practice and community. Some of the responses I received were highly telling. For example, here is a fragment of an interview with a young woman, self-identified as a submissive:
 
I think… well, it is kind of funny, but ours is a hermetic community, and it is Polish, well, let’s say there are things in it which are the same that annoy me every day in Poland. I’m talking about about people who are intolerant, because they are more visible, because there is less of us. If there are hundred and twenty people [practicing BDSM] in the city then I know, let’s say, a hundred of them. And I know their flaws, well their merits too. And for example I think that people too often see BDSM as an excuse, that is to say, in their approach to women and like. They assume that they wouldn’t do something there [in the non-BDSM communities] or do not want do something there, because what would the people think, but then kink is a sufficient excuse to do it. I think it is stupid. On one side, it is incredibly chauvinistic, because they say “oh, what a slut” and so on in kink… in kink, like it is a joke, but then it turns out not to be. And it is very hurtful and, in my opinion, bad practice. It like making a submissive person an unpaid whore.
          
This description of everyday, casual sexism, prejudice and chauvinism is startlingly familiar. It would be easy to remove the element of kink from it and just apply it to partying or any other form of social interaction where strict codes of behaviour become loosened. Accordingly, those are the problems of Poland in a microcosm. It is telling that there are people who treat “kink” as an excuse, as if the very fact that they are hiding away in a club or a dungeon obviated all other rules of sexual conduct.

This brings to mind another anecdote from the field. After a casual scene where a submissive man was dominated by a woman, another woman, identifying herself as a submissive, and a witness to the scene, reacted with incredulity. With genuine surprise, she commented that she did not think it was possible for a submissive man to be normal.

What was striking about this scene is that it helped to unearth a sentiment prevalent throughout the BDSM scene in Poland, that a man who identifies and plays as a submissive is assumed to probably be not normal, in the most pejorative sense of this phrase. What’s more, persons branding him as such can themselves be practicing submissives and see no contradiction in their belief. A normal submissive is a woman, and for such a woman her state as a submissive participant in BDSM play is hardly detached from normalcy. Quite the opposite, actually: she sees the fact that she is normal as obvious and uncontestable.
 
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This rift in scholarship of sadomasochism culminates in a pertinent question. What are the politics of SM that Rubin put in the title of her essay? Do they even exist? Answering this question will require a short digression and appraisal of a different issue present in various discourses on sadomasochism/BDSM - both the one of academics and researchers as well as the practitioners’ own.

I am talking about a question of identity, or to be precise, the ambiguity of whether sadomasochism can be described as a sexual identity. Can such forms of sexual expression become a basis for self-identification in the way  that homosexuality became in the twentieth century? Gayle Rubin, equating the “leather” with the “lavender” menace, and expecting the coming of sadomasochist repression, likely was close to such understanding. In her view, sadomasochists constituted another sexual minority touched by bigotry and prejudice, a minority that needed to fight for its rights, for the ability to speak in its own voice.

However touching that view is, Rubin’s equation does not entirely check out and can be accused of being appropriative. For all the prejudice and negative stereotyping suffered by sadomasochism and sadomasochists, we shouldn’t forget that sadomasochism did not have its trial of Oscar Wilde, that it did not have its Stonewall, that it was never attacked by any Moral Majority, that sadomasochists were not denied to marry, to appear, to exist. The most famous example of legal persecution of sadomasochist practice, the British “Spanner case” happened as a result of a sting operation targeting a gay community. The SM play was merely an excuse to persecute homosexuality.

Yet, that accusation is not entirely fair, either. While sadomasochism and sadomasochists at large were never targets of systematic persecution, the situation of sadomasochistic women in the feminist movement of the 70s and 80s was substantively different. Reminiscing on the time when Samois was being established, Califia notes that back then, a woman could be harassed by fellow feminists for as little as wearing a leather jacket.  At the height of the power of the anti-pornography movement (to which the anti-SM feminism was closely related), sadomasochistic lesbian feminists who refused to give up on their sexual expression for the sake of ideological conformity faced persecution from their own. Therefore, Rubin’s equation held true, not for the society in general, but specifically for the narrow social context from which she had been writing, and which had ended along with its phase in the history of the women’s movement.

The experiences of modern practitioners that I have interviewed in the course of my research are not that.   They are highly skeptical of sadomasochism-as-identity. In most of my interviews and observations, they seemed closer to seeing sadomasochism/BDSM as something they do and not are. Identifications and identities for them tended to take on a highly practical dimension: “I am submitting” or “I am dominating”, “I am a sadist” or “I am a masochist”; such identifications rarely moved beyond the boundaries of SM play. Being a sadist or a masochist did not extend for them beyond a certain set of favoured practices. Sense of community and commonality of shared experiences, which Polish Encyklopedia gender [The Gender Encyclopedia] posits as key for the development and identification of a sexual identity, was notably absent from the responses I had received. Even when the respondents ultimately conceded to self-identifying with BDSM, they did so grudgingly and apprehensively, always with a number of reservations.

Paradoxically, the general lack of direct repression is likely one of the reasons why sadomasochists (particularly heterosexual ones) did not evolve a strong sense of identity and community. The stigma and danger to being a sadomasochist was never quite on the same level as the one suffered by LGBT+ people. The heterosexual sadomasochistic practice, especially in its non-extreme forms, has enough in common with normative sexual codes of behaviour to be able to be essentially politically neutral. Although as Gayle Rubin observed in another, more famous essay of hers (Thinking Sex. Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality), sadomasochistic sex is culturally framed as “wrong”, it is often a matter of scale, not essence. As long as the sadomasochistic encounter remains heterosexual and male-dominated, its only “wrongdoing” is in exaggeration of the common dominant position of a man in a sexual act. As the ethnographic evidence indicated, most of SM done in heterosexual communities fits into such scheme, therefore allowing the practitioners to situate themselves squarely on the “normal” side of sexual activity.

Once this observation is made, it becomes increasingly apparent the problem of the misalignment between the academic theory and heterosexual sadomasochistic practice is, in essence, a square-peg/round-hole type of an issue. It results from a blithe application of the view that sadomasochism/BDSM is yet another persecuted, queer minority that can be studied with tools developed by the feminist critique and queer theory. This misalignment is at the absolute heart of the question of politics of sadomasochism, and it is based on an omission.

The lesbian-feminist situation in the 80s was substantially different to any and all other circumstances in the modern history of sadomasochism. When Gayle Rubin and other contributors to Coming to Power practised lesbian SM, it was an indisputable act of political manifestation, an action that was not only meant to fulfil certain erotic desires, but also to protest the myopia and bigotry of the feminist community itself. Gayle Rubin’s sadomasochism was brave and, even more importantly, politically effective. The enormous debate Coming to Power caused serves as a testament to that. Furthermore, that politicization had to take place within sadomasochistic activity. Only sadomasochism, Rubin suggested, provided the means with which to successfully strike against the stances and outlooks she rebelled against. It was in itself such a mean.

But the politics of a practice are not set in the practice itself, but in the context in which it is performed. Sadomasochism of lesbian feminists could not help but be political, because the notion that what is private is political was an axiom for them. But sadomasochism wasn’t and isn’t practiced solely in this environment. The bulk of the people who practice it are far away from such contexts. They are heterosexual and not very well-oriented in the philosophical background of those things they do. And in that, they are usually comfortable with their situation. They do not feel particularly threatened, nor particularly persecuted. They are often hurt by the wrongful and unnecessarily branding representation they receive in the media, and annoyed by the fact that a lot of people who talk about BDSM in public have no idea what they are saying. However, such issues are, seen in perspective, not that significant. They are no impulse for taking it from the dungeons to the streets. After all, what rights are there to fight for?

The sadomasochists I research predominantly view themselves as normal. They say that they are “Poles like any other”, whose hobbies should not be treated as any stranger or more alienating than a predisposition towards hiking, hunting or board-game playing. As a consequence, the fact that their communities tend to not be very subversive or inclusive does not trouble them: it merely reflects the normal state of affairs.

Does it then mean that the entire argument around the queerness of sadomasochism/BDSM is one enormous mistake and the political nature of such practices is best described as non-existent? While it would be tempting to concede to the apparent evidence, I believe that too would be a shallow admission of defeat. There is something else to be taken into account here.

Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest political thinkers of the XXth century, and the person for whom the question of political activity remained ever-burning, wrote about how thinking - the mental operation of the retreat from the world of daily necessity into the realm of the internal dialogue and search for meaning - was often non-political, turning the thinker inwards and away from action (which happens only in the made world of human relation). However, she observed that this non-politicization of thinking has its exceptions, namely in what she, after Karl Jaspers, named “boundary situations”:
 
“When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call with some reason the most political of man’s mental abilities. It is the faculty that judges particulars without subsuming them under general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules.”
 
Earlier in the text, Arendt also notes that thinking has the capacity of moving past the present and into the potential. Its capacity to disregard the necessity of now for the sake of the possible was for Arendt at once scandalous and invaluable in the time of crisis.

When Rubin – all the others who took inspiration from her and similar thinkers – wrote about how with ropes, whip and leather change can be effected and new forms of pleasure and expression discovered, she was thinking in an emergency, in a boundary situation. Therefore the subject of her description was the not the actuality, but the potential present in practices which touch on areas as incredibly political and important as sexuality and gender. Such thinking was action, with all the effort and danger that it entails. Boycotted in Barnard College, Rubin was perfectly aware of that and indeed fulfilled the Arendtian role Socratic midwifery.
In the end there is no better evidence for the political potential of her action than the fact that the view she supported against the grain of common thought managed to worm its way past opposition and criticism and become so powerful as to discredit and destroy the arguments once raised against it. However, it is an error to consider those results as being inherent to thinking sadomasochism, and it is an error that keeps repeating itself in interpretations of sadomasochism/BDSM. If the aforementioned misalignment of theory and practice that I see in academic discourse on BDSM can be metaphorized as trying to fit square pegs in round holes, the appropriate metaphor for thinking that sadomasochistic pleasures are by themselves political is mistaking the trees for the forest. We need to remain aware of the fact that Rubin was not just a person who practiced sadomasochism, but also one that with sadomasochism practiced politics, as if their queerness, feminism, politicization and subversiveness was a part of their nature, not something that they can be used for.
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In that sense, however misaimed her predictions, Rubin remains highly actual: not in its portrayal of the sadomasochistic community and practice (which had changed considerably over the last thirty five years), but in the exposure of the potential present in sadomasochism to make us think radically - think in an emergency.