Sadomasochism from Edmund White

But on any night of the week such sights can be observed in the Village at a private club. Four dollars at the door buys drink and admission to the huge painhouse. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you see one guy whipping another. Over there someone Who checked all his clothes in the coatroom is hoisted aloft in a leather swing. Those men are pressed to the wall, facing it. A punishment? No, the wall, you discover, has been pierced with crotch-high ‘glory holes’, and on the other side of the partition someone even now is being covered in glory. In the basement two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire’s swan bathing its wings in the dust.

The oldest and dumbest joke about S and M has the masochist saying ‘Beat me’, and the sadist replying ‘No’. What’s all wrong about the joke is that it assumes sadism is the same thing as psychological cruelty. A playwright who’s known to be a sadist is presumed to be cruel to his audiences (‘No wonder that play went on so long’). Of an English poet whose verse follows strictly traditional forms, some Wiseacre remarks, ‘But of course the forms are strict. If you’d seen him in his saturnine leathers you’d understand his craving for discipline.’

So thoroughly corrupted are we by the Freudian parlor game that such interpretations have become the ordinary stuff of conversation; we are all rabbis, and life is the copious Talmud

awaiting our narrow exegesis. The hermeneutics convince us that a life my life, your life, anyone’s life is all of a piece. He’s cruel in bed and cruel at work. Proust tortured mice for fun ”[14 tortures us by going on and on in his Big Book.

But what if each of us is not unified, but piecemeal? What .' parts oppose rather than duplicate one another? Sam the sadist is a loyal and loving son, a beneficent employer; and the motorcycle club he heads sponsors an annual benefit for handicapped kids. The playwright is famous for his own work with the disabled, the poet for his long hours of patient advice to his students; and Proust was a proverb of kindness (when he found 200 mistakes in twenty-three galley pages, he begged the proofreader not to take the discovery of these errors ‘for a reproach’).

More to the point, sadism itself is not cruel. Those gay ‘top men’ I’ve quizzed have admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they seldom inflict much pain beyond a few slaps and light licks with a belt. So theatrical (or filmic) is sado-masochism that even the blows are designed to look and sound more violent to the (usually imaginary) audience than they actually are; the belt is doubled, the punishing hand is cupped.

Marijuana, poppers, mescalin and beer stimulate the imagination to such a fever that by merely standing over the cowering slave a master is able to suggest an assault. At every point the experienced master can judge whether his slave wants more or less pain. And sometimes the sadist will ask sotto voce if things are getting too heavy. Naturally there are some sadists who, like Sade himself, can be aroused only by inflicting pain, but these are in the minority. Ankle restraints are plush-lined; the paddle is commedia dell’arte slapstick.

The violence resides almost entirely in the language. One man licking another’s Frye boots would be hilarious were the act not labeled ‘humiliation’. Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography; the S and M rap (that muttered or shouted stream of abuse, obscenity, military commands) is the conflation of pornography and sex, the marriage of signifier and signified, an act of extraordinary semiotic condensation. 

There’s another theory: that gay S and M is a safe outlet for throttled rage. Sadism is, presumably, a way for uptight men to release their thunderbolts under the guise of passion. The masochist has indicated his readiness to be punished, and to abuse him seems to be simple compliance, almost charity. Still better, the anger can always be ‘disavowed and laughed off later as just part of a game.

Some of Gregersen’s findings support this interpretation. Leather men he’s interviewed report that they are or have been vegetarians or pacifists. If not always liberal, many are at least libertarian in their politics, averse to authoritarianism of every stripe and hell-bent on defending individual rights.

If one rather cynically assumes that pacifism, vegetarianism, humaneness towards animals and libertarianism are indicative of repressed urges towards violence, then a case could be made for the theory that links S and M to contained rage. To me, however, these beliefs and character traits are. more readily attributable to an active imagination, to empathy, to what Keats called ‘negative capability’ the power to project oneself into another creature’s skin. Such a capacity makes S and M itself possible; no one would be drawn towards the drama of domination (nor would he be good at it) unless he could project himself into the mind of the dominated.