http://un-cool.blogspot.com/2008/08/inco
http://bppa.blogspot.com/2008/08/barely-l
My comments: First of all, I don't think I even noticed the picture at Sugasm. I think my first note of it was just "ho-hum, something in a post that looks like it belongs in a sidebar ad *scrolldown*. When I later looked back at it, I liked it some. When I really studied the face of the model on the right, I could both see that she looks young and why some people might be bothered, but also found her face unique looking and a refreshing break from faces that don't appeal to me.
(The woman in the Uncool post? That sort of face, with the wide sparkly grin, is usually sexually unappealing to me, for whatever it's worth. That sort of smile... I'm trying to put into words what puts me off about it, and I can't. I guess for me... it's a kind of smile that makes the sex seem not very... deep? No, I don't want sex to always be meaningful. And I like sex to be silly and fun, so I'm not saying don't smile joyfully or laugh or be silly.
But also, as an SMer I like my sex to be a little scary, a little edgy at least emotionally, a dip into where there be dragons -- whether that's because there's pain or because it's really passionate or because it's emotionally intense or... anything. That kind of Polident smile puts me off. But this is JUST ME, and in no way is supposed to say that the model "means" her smile to "say" these things, or that she's fake, or that she's not smart, or not intense. It's just my explanation of why such a smile is anti-erotic to me.
Because of the "barely legal blogwar", I've been "examining" and trying to figure out if I'm actually secretly gunning for the Lolita-face, revealing that I don't like women who look fully adult. I worried this might be the case, an unconscious prejudice against women who are too mature or confident-looking. I decided that's probably not it -- though I will freely admit that as someone who's sexually dominant, I have and do eroticize certain kinds of innocence, which are not there in the other picture. Make of that whatever you will.)
But my main point was: Barely Legal porn, and how I feel about it. When I was younger, I used to be deeply angry that it existed. The mere thought of it would trigger me. I once asked a lover what men saw in it. According TO HIM, the fantasy was about remembering one's first stirrings of desire in adolescence, when sexual desire is new and particularly intense. According TO HIM, the idea was not that HE would want the cheerleader because she's naive, but that he would use it to remember first seeing attractive people dressed in those uniforms. He also reminded me repeatedly that cheerleaders are athletes and not necessarily ditzes, and that while associating the two things is culturally popular, it's not what HE HIMSELF really thought of when he thought about them. He saw them as out of his league, perfect -- smart AND athletic, the marriage of two poles, while he was just a geek.
While I now find that answer reasonable (though I think he's a lot more feminist than many men, and than many pornographers choose to be), at the time the whole thing bothered me so bad I cried for an hour. He was bewildered? Why would I?
And I realized that for me, it's personal. When others were "sweet sixteen," I was in a body cast, a wheelchair, changing bloody dressings, wondering if my scars would ever stop hurting. It dawned on me that I was less concerned about what bothers many people -- the youthful look of the women and the possible connections to pedophilia -- and more about my own lack of a childhood. While some other girls got to experience sexual awakenings that were fun and exploratory, I was fantasizing about SM to keep myself from drowning in overwhelming, and very real, physical and emotional pain. I did not trust anyone who was not like me. If you weren't a sadomasochist, or at least someone who flirted with such themes, no matter who you were and what you liked, you were the Enemy.
So the only images of teen sexuality that I was comfortable with, if I was with any at all, were ones like my own. Dark, sinister, gothy. If it wasn't Serious Business -- if it didn't involve, somewhere, the piper being paid, some kind of confession or pain or paying the price for inhabiting your body -- it made me angry and bitter... because it made me envious.
I envied "people" (including characters in images) whose sexuality wasn't hard, tough, dark, crisscrossed with battle scars. "Innocent" sexualities dredged up my rage not centrally because I feared women being taken advantage of, but because I felt ugly, tattered, dented up by comparison. Although I had hardly any sexual experience until the very ripe age of 21, I was already old-souled. Even my shiny-new, "cherry-popping" explorations were the explorations of an old soul.
Now this is not to say that my sexuality was bad. I don't consider my SM leanings to be the result of the damage. I think they were always there, but that they went from a marked leaning toward dominance and curiosity about erotic pain ("is that POSSIBLE? If it were, it'd be really COOL!") to a major, and necessary, coping mechanism when I found myself sexually developing in the midst of terrible pain.
And so images of youthful sexuality that made it about eagerness, curiosity, any such that didn't involve paying some piper somewhere, made me instantly suspicious. And when I saw critiques that said "oh, she's depicted as too innocent" well, if the shoe fit, wear it. Because "too innocent" was me before I found SM. And if these eager sorority party girls weren't making the men pay in blood for a look, they hadn't transformed like me, and must be naive.
So... now. Yeah, the critique of barely legal isn't what I thought it was. And I can see the new one. But the thing is, it doesn't -- rightly or wrongly -- have the same force to me as the other one. Maybe it's because I too eroticize some kinds of "innocence", as long as it's a smart kind of innocence, an innocence that learns and plays along, rather than one that's defenseless.
Maybe it's because "mature vanilla" isn't what I grew into, so "mature vanilla" was always a little suspect to me until I matured enough not to expect everyone to be the same. Maybe it's because there's still a grain in me that thinks "mature vanilla" is naive in a bad way, is the sexuality of people who've gotten older, but haven't yet seen pain like I saw. Maybe part of me, deep in my unconscious, believes that people who really knew the horror in the world would have more of an SM streak... even though I've long since realized that's irrational.
But my big turning point came when I started to watch Hentai. I'd always shunned it, on the theory that I just didn't like the whole youthful-as-erotic idea. But I found myself, as I usually am, intellectually curious about the genre as a kind of erotic media. And I watched some. And I remember looking at a youthfully drawn girl, in a schoolgirl skirt, and suddenly feeling a pang of desire before I could think to stop it.
And suddenly something changed in my head: how can I condemn this... when this is me too?
So that's where I am with it now. "I'd rather be a creep than a hypocrite" is, well, really the whole of it.
You know, what I was saying in my post about how I pre-judged the audience I think is an important part of judging porn altogether (that was the point of the post, but hey :). My 'objective' side thought that the guys who were into barely legal might also be 'barely legal' themselves, but that's interesting what you say about sort of regressing (bad word?) to a time when it was more 'intense', I'd never considered that.
ReplyDeleteJust so people know, I know a lot of people thought that I thought Mima was ugly, but I really didn't think that at all. I do think the 'original' Sugasm girl was exceptionally pretty, but that wasn't 'in contrast' with Mima. I only said it because, as regular readers know, I very rarely use pictures like that on my blog (just cos my original readers are the academic lot who use blogs to procrastinate while in uni!), but, well, I felt like using the pic, and I thought she was really pretty.
Caroline: I've no idea if that's the majority of people who like "barely legal" -- for all I know 97.2% of its audience could be people who like the idea of naive and stupid airhead children they can manipulate. I really don't know. I just know that when I actually sat down and talked to a real breathing person, I heard not "I love degrading dumb little sluts" but "those were the girls I knew I could never even say hello to, and these were the secret fantasies of taking them to bed some day."
ReplyDeleteSo yeah... it's not so much that I don't get the squick or feel bad about it as that, well, I think a lot of the time when someone HAS a squick it can be so visceral that no one BOTHERS to ask "wait, I know I think this is horrid. But you're a decent-seeming fellow and you've said you like it. Can you tell me why?"
I wish people did a bit more of that -- and I do not in any way mean saying that as a dig on your post, your feelings, or your comments.
I've asked a few blokes, well, say 5 and all of them denied it vehemently - that makes me think not that you're wrong but that they might think it's something to be ashamed of. I accept, naturally, that my post would have emphasised that for men, but the fact is I don't have very men reading my blog at all and I write for a feminist audience, so I was writing to show something altogether different.
ReplyDeleteI agree very much with what you say about talking to men. I think that feminist studies has a tendency to ignore men (I understand the principle) whereas in fact understanding men's thoughts can shed a different light. Like 'Letters From Johns', you'll have seen that blog I expect.
Yeah, I've seen that blog. (I have to say I was most intrigued by the letters from *janes* though... heh)
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I do think that men may very well behave one way when observed and another when not. In fact, it's something a lot of people talk about, how supposedly "reality" comes out in the locker room and is full of women-hating.
But I'm not sure: I've had men tell me that the breezy locker-room misogyny is also a performance, something many people don't feel but dare not neglect, as many woman dare not neglect their mascara.
But then AGAIN, I tend to be attracted to gentle geeks and submissive guys, so perhaps THEY perform what others mean. I doubt I'll ever know the truth.
Trinity,
ReplyDeleteIf we may take a moment off from the aggro here, I'd like to comment on something from your original post that struck home like a bullet.
I make a lot of vanilla porn because that's what I get paid to do in video (though thankfully in print I have more freedom to explore a kind of sexuality closer to my own). But frankly, with very few exceptions, vanilla porn doesn't resonate with me at all.
In fact the very thing that seems to have caused such conflict here - barely legal porn - bores my ass off. I work in the office where Barely Legal, the magazine that brought the genre out into the open, is made. I love it's editor, who is one of the smartest, funniest women ever to run a porn mag. We compete for who can create the most offensive cover lines for our respective books. My favorite of hers: "Catholic School Girl Worries - If I Only Have Butt Sex, Am I Still a Virgin?" I do not deny that this rolled me, but it also mystified me because that kind of naughty thrill is just too far from my own kind. As she put it "you have to be able to channel your inner eighteen-year-old" and my inner eighteen-year-old isn't interested in virginity, though it certainly relates to butt sex.
I don't think that barely legal porn is much about closet pedophilia (which is really a fixation on pre-pubescent children rather than post-pubescent adolescents - not exactly a fine distinction), but about a kind of nostalgia, hinted at by some of the men whose testimony has made it into this conversation. It's about the hot girls they desired when they themselves were young and who were for whatever reason hopelessly out of reach.
Much porn is about that kind of wish-fulfillment based on fantasies ginned up in the minds of young adults. That's part of the reason so much porn is not only focused on juvenile-appearing bodies, but on juvenile notions of sexuality. That's where a lot of porn consumers are stuck. They don't see themselves as powerful adults lusting after innocent youngsters, but rather as innocent youngsters themselves still hoping to realize the failed dreams of their own teenage years. Viewed in that light, this genre is more pitiful than menacing.
Bear in mind that most of the directors making commercial porn are pretty young themselves, generally somewhere in their early thirties. Memories of their excruciating youths are not that distant. They're still working through their crush on the unattainable cheer-leader a year a head of them in high school.
But I didn't have that kind of adolescence and while I can understand this kind of obsession intellectually, it means absolutely nothing to me.
Like you, Trinity, my early years were all about physical suffering and disability and pain and all the things, good and bad, that come with being isolated from the "normal" process of early maturation. Barely Legal and all its imitators is just far too wholesome, odd as that may sound, to push the buttons my early life installed in me.
This is where the story gets interesting. There is almost no clinical literature regarding BDSM. Research funding to explore it is almost impossible to get, thanks to the political prejudices of grant review committees, and it's a dead-end career choice for psychological or social science researchers. Check out your local university library and you'll find an empty shelf where BDSM is concerned. Much is supposed about it and where it comes from, but almost nothing is "known" in the scientific sense of the word.
That was the very reason my late friend, the kind and lovely Dr. Robert J. Stoller, chose to make some preliminary "ethnographic" sorties into the BDSM world about twenty years ago. He was legendary for his work with transgendered people, about whom volumes of literature can be found, but when he tried to get a little background on BDSM to assist him in his studies on transpeople who were also kinky, he came up with nothing, and that just wasn't acceptable to his scientist's ever-curious mind.
Knowing he wouldn't have any support for BDSM exploration and not much spare time to pursue it, he simply used his connections through the trans community to get a few BDSM players into his office for informal chats. That's how I met him.
There weren't a lot of out kinksters at the time. This was back in the Reagan era and the leather culture was just beginning to slip a Dehner out of the closet. I'm sure his sampling, which was self-selected to a great degree, was skewed in all kinds of ways, but even the informal group discussions he organized revealed some fascinating surprises.
In a mix of gay, straight and bi tops and bottoms from a great variety of socio-economic backgrounds, more differences than similarities quickly emerged. But one curious consistency was exposed at the very first meeting of our little study group.
Virtually all we had in common, and that ALL of us had in common, were childhoods characterized by long periods of isolation due to injury or illness. It was a total shocker when it came out, as much to all of us as it was to him, but impossible to overlook. The predictable histories of sexual abuse and family violence offered up as the usual explanations were largely absent, but the injury and illness thing was everywhere. No doubt PTSD played a role, but the sources of the PTSD didn't seem to be the usual suspects.
The list of medical misfortunes was varied both in nature and severity, but it was unmistakably there. At one extreme, there was the late, great "super-masochist" Bob Flanagan, who was struggling mightily against the Cystic Fibrosis that would ultimately kill him. At the other was a middle-aged suburban stay-at-home mom who had missed a lot of school due to crippling migraine headaches. In between there were immobilizing back surgeries to correct Scoliosis, coccyx fractures, chronic tendonitis and in my case, a near still-birth resulting in permanent respiratory impairment.
The collective shock of recognition in that room was palpable and unforgettable. Here were all these BDSM-identified people with completely different specific orientations and nothing much else in common who had suffered the horrors of pediatric medicine as their only common experience.
We all instantly knew it meant something, but what? Stoller, ethical scientist that he was, couldn't be drawn into any speculations about the causal connection, if any, between these traumas and our adult kinks, and I have no idea to this day what the internal mechanisms might have been. But I'm convinced they were there and are there now, working away in my head.
Perhaps the experience of prolonged helplessness and suffering, surrounded by anxious adults holding you down and doing hurtful things to you while insisting (and clearly believing) that you would feel better afterward, sometimes even achieving that result at least temporarily, had some impact on our perceptions of affection and intimacy.
It certainly created atypical relationships with our own bodies, which generated misery and relief in vast and totally unpredictable quantities. Perhaps the experience created a psychological link between invasive treatment and endophin release. No doubt it raised a lifetime's worth of control issues.
But this is all pure guesswork. Because clinical investigation is such a non-starter, we'll never know much more than we know now about this phenomenon. I personally believe that these things tended to trigger latent genetic tendencies toward what Stoller called "the erotocization of hate." Some of us are wired for BDSM the way others are wired for same-sex attraction, and long periods of bodily unruliness, coupled with the social marginalization that creates, informed our fantasy lives in a way that people who had neither the predisposition nor the experiences that set it off can never know.
So, that's my interesting by woefully incomplete information on this phenomenon, but I think it deserves our attention because it runs counter to all the political baggage loaded onto BDSM, its practitioners and their tastes in entertainment by unfriendly outsiders.
No one knows anything about this, but many people think they do, and what they think they know would seem to be pretty far off the mark from what little information we do have.
Could it be that other things we think we know about sexual orientations outside the mainstream and how they originate are equally under-informed?
I'd bet on it.
Thanks for pointing that out, Ernest. I would also agree, a lot of sexual fantasy, and porn as an expression of that fantasy, is about wish fulfillment, even about downright juvenile wish fulfillment. I think a lot of discussion about porn even in pro-porn circles, really seems to want porn that is in some way normative, in line with ones actual sexual practices and looking like oneself and one's partner. That's fine if you're one of those lucky people who's sex life and fantasy life are all on the same page.
ReplyDeleteBut I suspect people who are 100% well-adjusted are a relative rarity, and many people have at least a few sexual hobgoblins and unfulfilled wishes running around in their attic. The fact that so much porn is "unrealistic" simply shows that there are a lot of people with "unrealistic" fantasies, and that's something that's hardly surprising.
Ernest,
ReplyDeleteIs this the same Stoller that wrote that awful book claiming that SM is the eroticization of hatred?
If it is, I'd really like to talk more with you about whether what he says in his book was really a good reflection of his observations. Because I've had that book used to tell me, to my face, that I don't understand the aggressive undercurrents of SM because a *real* psychotherapist saw them there.
So I'd really like to talk about this. I'd appreciate private email -- I'm trinityva at yahoo -- most, but if you like we can talk here instead/too.
oh, yes, there it is: eroticization of hate.
ReplyDeletedude, uh... NO. Just NO.
"I don't think that barely legal porn is much about closet pedophilia (which is really a fixation on pre-pubescent children rather than post-pubescent adolescents - not exactly a fine distinction), but about a kind of nostalgia, hinted at by some of the men whose testimony has made it into this conversation. It's about the hot girls they desired when they themselves were young and who were for whatever reason hopelessly out of reach.
ReplyDeleteMuch porn is about that kind of wish-fulfillment based on fantasies ginned up in the minds of young adults. That's part of the reason so much porn is not only focused on juvenile-appearing bodies, but on juvenile notions of sexuality. That's where a lot of porn consumers are stuck. They don't see themselves as powerful adults lusting after innocent youngsters, but rather as innocent youngsters themselves still hoping to realize the failed dreams of their own teenage years. Viewed in that light, this genre is more pitiful than menacing."
Yeah, that's how my old lover described it. Again, I don't know who is fantasizing this way and who is fantasizing about coercive control... but, well, as soon as he told me this and I calmed down enough to think it over, it made perfect sense to me too.
There's so much more even I could have done at that age, if I'd had the guts to accept myself. My own fantasies about gothy boys and girls who are, well, not so old (but not kids) are fantasies about the same thing, really: What would it have been like if I'd come right out and said Yes, I want this, Yes, I like you? and they'd said I do too?
And... yeah, like you say too, the whole cheerleader thing was not for me either. But the idea that that was some vanilla boy's highest fantasy? Yeah, I can buy that.
And yeah, I can buy that seeing those girls being "the sluts of the sorority" MIGHT be about revenge or taking advantage (and THAT, to me, is "eroticizing hatred" -- eroticizing dark parts of power strikes me as much more Temet Nosce territory than I Hate You territory), but it might also be about "hey, what if my absurd secret wishes were right and she wanted/loved/craved EVERYONE... even ME?"
As far as the observation you mention... I honestly think kinky orientations are quite common among people with disabilities, and I've been open before about my opinion that some people's anti-SM sentiments (or better said anti-*pain play* sentiments) strike me as honestly ableist.
ReplyDeleteBecause what they boil down to is telling people how they can, or how they ought, use their bodies. What kinds of stimulation mean pleasure, and what kind mean badness. It's taking a normative body-map and saying everyone should fit it, and if you don't you're consenting to be abused.
Trinity,
ReplyDeleteYes that is the same Dr. Stoller and yes the quote is from him. But it is taken out of a much broader context and totally misused by BDSM bashers, which was an unending source of misery to Bob, who did not regard BDSM as pathological in any way and worked tirelessly behind the scenes to have "Sadomasochistic Personality Disorder" removed as a classification from the DSM-IV. Others love to claim credit for that happening, but he was the one who actually got it done.
He did believe, and I share this view, that BDSM is rooted in aggression, but by very complex processes both emotional and physical and when he speaks of hate in this way, it's not "I hate you" kind of hate directed at a partner, but rather the generalized sensation of anger brought to heel by the erotic imagination's capacity to reinvent emotions in new forms of expression.
I'll be delighted to discuss this with you via email tomorrow, but in the meantime, I want everyone here to understand that Stoller was a hugely misunderstood figure whose work has become a political football in the porn and BDSM wars in a way he would have hated. He was a shy, sweet guy who was unfailingly kind and caring toward all of us who worked with him and who avoided controversy whenever he could. He told me toward the end that he had decided to stop doing academic presentations "because of the sadistic behavior of my colleagues."
Now, after his untimely death in a horrific accident caused by a drunk driver, he's the target of all kinds of revisionism inside the kink community and his work on porn, equally misunderstood, ends up on radfem reading lists. I especially loathe that because, for fuck's sake, I co-authored his last book, Coming Attractions - The Making of an X-Rated Video, and I know exactly where he stood on the subject as no one else in this world could.
The only more misappropriated research in the field is the work of his UCLA colleagues Donnerstein and Malamuth, who are still writing to newspapers rebutting the false claim that their studies showed increased aggression from viewing porn when, in fact, they showed nothing of the sort.
Poor Bob. The thought that someone had used his book to bludgeon you over your sexual identity would have filled him with horror. He spent his whole career arguing for understanding and tolerance toward sexual non-conformists.
At the end, he was working on a big book about BDSM that he hoped would clear up all the earlier misunderstandings. The outline, along with his research materials, was entrusted to me for safe-keeping after his death until, after nearly three years of looking, someone his widow found suitable, was nominated to fill his chair. I know, or at least I think I know, what that book would have said and it's a tragedy for us all he didn't get to finish it.
Okay, let's take this email. it's really way OT for here at this point anyway.
And thanks for engaging me about it. After an experience such as you describe, I wouldn't blame you if you never wanted to hear another word on the subject.
Ernest,
ReplyDeleteI'm going to wait for your email to address your individual points (particularly on SM as eroticized aggression -- my short answer is "sometimes"), because I think it's all really complicated.
I did want to do two things: First, to thank you for letting me know that you understand and are aware of people using Stoller to bash us, and second, for letting me know that such was not what Stoller intended and that his work was misunderstoood.
But I do want to make one comment publicly about the word "hatred."
I see "hatred" as a very cultivated form of negative emotion. It's an endpoint. It's what happens when aggressiveness has been carefully nurtured and then allowed to cool, simmer, become a colder resentment. And that takes a LOT of doing.
I may totally alienate everyone saying this, but, well, think of the Nazis. Yeah, as I understand it Hitler was turning already present, and already strong, anti-Semitic sentiment into national policy. But look at the massive propaganda campaign, all designed to cultivate hatred. That hatred took very careful husbandry, husbandry that was everywhere.
And yes, that was on a massive scale, but hatred is similar for individuals, I think. It takes TIME. It takes aggressive feelings that settle into a long, deep, simmering grudge.
We dislike people we don't know. We feel anger toward them, sometimes blinding and violent. We don't hate them until we're intimate with them -- or intimately tied up in something that has to do with them.
So the idea that BDSM is eroticized hatred just makes zero sense. It strikes me as a wild misunderstanding of what hatred actually is, what the word actually means. I don't think anyone's ever walked up to me and wanted me to hate them -- and it would take WAY too long for me to do so, and why would I want to?
"Behave aggressively," sure. "Engage/indulge the Beast/the Shadow/insert name here," yeah, all the time. Hate? Huh? WHAT?
And masochism as self-hatred... well, it's a cliche. But I do think it may be true for some people who are already deeply emotionally unhealthy. And many things prime us for self-hatred, and do so for long enough to really lead to it. Abuse, particularly as children, can and does lead to self-image that's riddled with guilt, doubt, hostility to oneself, feeling broken, feeling defiled, feeling undeserving. So perhaps there's self-hatred there, for some.
But to claim that's everyone, to claim all bottoms' behavior is rooted in such a self-image... well, that just strikes me as the kind of wild speculation that the honorable scientist you describe would never be sloppy enough to engage in.
Unless he means something really flimsy by "hatred."
And the thing is, I do think I *have* had fantasies that centered around hatred. And yeah, the violence one might imagine was in them... but I don't feel that they are the sum, or the pinnacle, of my sadomasochistic fantasies. They're revenge fantasies, usually. So hatred might be the core of *revenge* fantasy, but the core of BDSM fantasy?
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't think so... especially when a lot of us are into D/s and not SM at all.
Trinity,
ReplyDeleteI'm still working on the email, but a quick reply seems needed to what you say here.
I think you're taking something literally that was meant as a metaphor. Bob wasn't talking about "hate" in the narrow sense you define it here. And he never intended for it to be attached to the usual cliches about BDSM and its roots. Exactly the opposite.
His definition of hatred wasn't flimsy. It was broad and symbolic, referring to the sublimation of what he saw as driving natural forces at work in all human personalities. Remember that he started his work from the perspective of an old-school, orthodox Freudian. What he was talking about in the bigger sense was the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos, and his rather startlingly progressive notion (and i think it wasn't much more than a notion at the time, as his research was just getting revved up) that consensual BDSM was an unusual form of sublimation, transmuting the latter into the former by way of conscious sexual choice. What he was positing was a sort of dialectal process, with love and hate as thesis and antithesis, with resulting consensual BDSM as a creative synthesis
He wasn't talking about hate directed toward a specific partner or toward partners in particular relationships. He was talking about the powerful, conflicting urges to procreate and consume and how they were reconciled, in an unusual manner, by BDSM players.
He explains all this at great length in Perversions, but as usual, the explanation gets lost and the grabber sentence is expropriated as propaganda by the very people who opposed his whole mission. It doesn't help that Bob, by his own admission, wasn't much of a writer, but rather a scientist trying to write about complex ideas that had never been considered in this light before. I readily concede, as he did, that his early works fail at the task in terms of making his very preliminary analyses understandable.
Robert was terribly naive about politics and never realized that what he wrote would even be read by those with hostile political agendas, much less extracted for their use. Tending like most folks to believe the world was full of sane, reasonable individuals like himself, he figured his work would be considered as scientific exploration, not fodder for somebody's prejudiced agenda.
He even tried to fix the damage with a slim second volume specifically addressing BDSM in a very favorable light. It's called Pain and Passion, but few have ever seen it, because his usual publisher, Yale Press, thought it was too "inflammatory" and too "partisan" (read: too supportive toward BDSM). He ended up taking it to Plenum, a much smaller press, where his editor turned out to be a bitterly anti-BDSM radfem who bullied him into cutting out whole sections of the book that didn't, in her mind "examine" the testimony of the BDSM players he interviewed "critically enough." For her, it was all just a new iteration of apologias for violence against women and she did everything she could to gut it.
There was an exchange of long and bitter letters between Bob and that editor that would be a real eye-opener for anyone who has the idea that academic publishers are any less politicized than commercial publishers. In the end, it wasn't Bob's vision that prevailed.
After reading those letters and seeing what was left of Pain and Passion after the editor - who should have worked for The Ministry of Truth" in 1984 - got done with it, I urged him to simply kill the book, as he didn't need the tiny sum they paid for it and I doubted it would do much good as it was.
However, he was so determined to undo what he saw as the terrible misreading of the previous book, he let them run with what they would allow, thinking something was better than nothing.
Not surprisingly, Plenum sat on the book, and outside of the small circle of people who participated in the interview process and who were allowed to speak for themselves in it as much as the publisher would allow, I've never run into anyone who has read Pain and Passion. It's been out of print for years and it's unfortunate indeed that the bigger, more celebrated and to both his mind and mine less accurate book Perversions is still being read, misunderstood and used to beat up people for whom he had nothing but a kind of amazed admiration.
Summing up, Bob saw BDSM as a remarkable behavioral adaptation and in no way pathological, and that stance cost him dearly in academic circles. There's at least one shrink, very trendy now in BDSM Studies (a branch of psychological research that didn't even exist in Bob's day) who goes around insisting that Bob's work was motivated out of his guilt over his own concealed perversity, a completely preposterous suggestion to anyone who actually knew the guy. Like any good scientist, he looked for bias in his own work before anyone else saw it, and racking his conscious mind at length, could find no more personal identification with BDSM than he did with the complexities of transgenderism that had been the focus of his earlier work.
In short, he's been misunderstood, oversimplified and reinvented by those who whose views he opposed throughout his career.
It's a pretty sad legacy for a man who had been a recognized scientific pioneer until he dared to try and bring some reason and sense to the hysterical projections surrounding psychiatric "theories" about BDSM
More in the email. And all questions answered honestly, I promise. As I'm sure you can tell, Bob and I were very close, but it would be a disservice to his memory to try and whitewash what he and I both knew were his limitations as a very conventional outsider trying to understand a complex and contradictory alternative universe.
"I think you're taking something literally that was meant as a metaphor. Bob wasn't talking about "hate" in the narrow sense you define it here. And he never intended for it to be attached to the usual cliches about BDSM and its roots. Exactly the opposite."
ReplyDeleteErnest,
But this is *precisely* the problem I have with Stoller using the word! When one broadens words in the way that so many old-school Freudians did, cavalierly and with reference to vague forces in the psyche, one gives ammo to the precise people you and I both consider enemies: the sort who point precisely to vague tendencies in eroticism that they can deem negative.
Using a word such as "hatred", which specifically brings to mind genocidal violence, is the sort of thing a person needs to do with forethought and understanding. I did not know Stoller... and if he were here today I'd try to contact him and ask him why he chose such a phrase. But knowing the little I do, and hearing from you that he was in fact someone who fought tirelessly FOR us, I can only assume that it was a bizarre and thoughtless lapse of the sort Freudians are all too prone to do so as to make their conclusions sound exciting.
Also, as unpopular as my view may be, I have to say that the concept of "thanatos" has always struck me as off, *especially* as I've seen it applied to SM.
ReplyDeleteWhile I don't recall much of Stoller, save the "hatred" quote and the fact that his interviewees struck me as spectacularly poor choices unless he intended to present us in a bad light (sexists and drug addicts and sex workers of the sort people love to think of as particularly sleazy, while I sat there thinking "Where are people from SigMa? Janus? Apex? Black Rose? TES? GMSMA?"), I've seen quite a bit that calls BDSM a kind of lust for the peace of death.
Where, to my mind, that's absolutely wrong -- a unique thing about pain play to me* is precisely that it gives those who participate in it a thrilling sense of their own *aliveness*, and their own *ability to endure.* I had a long conversation about this with a similarly old-school Freudian, and he was shocked and startled to hear me say that, for at least some of us, the desire is not for little-death, but for invincibility.
*And of course, then there is the fact that all this applies to pain play, but little to D/s. Yes, some D/s is an erotic romp through totalitarianism... but where does that leave, for example, service oriented submissives like Dw3t-Hthr? I can't imagine her desire to be the most useful support she can to her liege being framed in terms of eros and thanatos. Rather, if you listen to her -- and, I'd argue, to MANY other service-oriented types -- it's about what it is to be a valued support, the kind of power that comes from being in a supporting role (roles that are, as she points out, deeply devalued in modern Western culture.)