Abstract
The place of sadomasochism (s/m) within the larger arena of sexual politics has tended to be an uncertain one. On the one hand, I write this review in the week of the UK premier of the hotly anticipated cinema adaptation of EL James’ ‘hilariously successful’ (Freeman 2014) Fifty Shades of Grey, a series of novels that in selling over 100 million copies to a mostly female readership has surely more than a modest claim to having normalized s/m and to have brought it into the respectable home. On the other hand, s/m continues to be held in suspicion; that in all but its mildest and benign forms (that we might call its ‘Anne Summers’ form) it is at best premised on inequality between individuals that fetishizes victimization, that it rehearses scenarios of sexual violence that can only be appealing to people who are mentally ill or survivors of childhood trauma, and at worst offers excuses for individuals who want to exercise dangerous and dehumanizing levels of control over others and for serious domestic violence. We find evidence of all of these ‘shades’ in the various forms of legal, academic and popular culture that Khan embraces in her interdisciplinary work. However, the dominant narrative that emerges in Vicarious Kinks is of s/m as widely and violently denigrated, marginalized and punished. In demonstrating this abject status for her subject, Khan takes readers through a number of reasons for it, which represent broadly three ‘expert’ perspectives, and interconnected in some revealing ways: s/m is dangerous for its practitioners and for ‘bottoms’ (masochists) in particular (the legal gaze); s/m is unhealthy and unconducive to human relationships and flourishing (the ‘psy’ medical gaze); and s/m is variously a form of misogyny, patriarchy, even racism (the anti-s/m feminist gaze).
Khan anchors her analysis in Julia Kristeva’s rendering of Freud’s sadistic ‘anal’ stage of psychosexual development to describe this coalition of anti-s/m knowledge and opinion as united by a desire to expel, evacuate and destroy. Just as the child of Freud’s observations gains pleasure from giving and withholding faeces – and thus powerfully experiences a sense of control both over his own body and over his parents – so those hostile to s/m gain a pleasure of sorts by seeing that hateful practise evacuated and expelled from society and ideally destroyed. To this end, s/m is everywhere assailed by a myriad of ‘truths’ that s/m desire is a problematic deviation from the norm (‘Who’s your Daddy?’); that it is a manifestation of patriarchy such that lesbians engaging in power play, domination and submission role play or even dildo-use represent a betrayal and a pollution of feminism (‘feminists divided’); and that the testimony of those who consent to playing ‘bottom’ to another person’s ‘top’ may be disregarded in order to punish ‘sexual violence’ (‘Legal Fondling of s/m practice’). Each of these claims contributes to an essentializing view of s/m practitioners that leads to marginalization and discrimination.
What is remarkable about the sorts of chauvinism that s/m has to contend with (and hence worthy of study) is that, unlike racism, sexism, homophobia, it routinely enlists the support of individuals who in all other respects would self-identify as socially progressive, even radical in defence of marginalized communities. Khan demonstrates how arguments from anti-s/m feminists have had an important impact on legal policy. This is apparently particularly true in Canada, where the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund’s (LEAF) incredulity at the idea of any woman desiring to engage in activities they deemed to be ‘degrading’ or ‘exploitative’ convinced the Supreme Court to take a repressive position in decisions such as R v. Butler (on pornography) and more recently R v. J.A. (on s/m in the form of erotic asphyxiation). Popular cultural representations of s/m tend to affirm the expert views that it is inherently unhealthy, violent, dangerously addictive, morally corrupting and something to be got rid of. Khan cites as an example the 1993 film Body of Evidence, which has Madonna’s sexually dominant and murderous Rebecca finally being shot, crashing through a window and then disappearing to be washed away in the ocean. For both the anti-s/m feminists of LEAF and the hegemonic narrative in cinema, unusual or marginal sexual practises may be tolerated only when they are bounded in normative constraints: marriage, for example, as in Secretary (2002), or by modest and moderate sexual proclivities, as implied by LEAF’s identification as degrading any depiction in pornography of women who desire (or seem to desire) ‘multiple or diverse forms of penetration’ (p. 188).
In rendering all of these methods of s/m’s ‘expulsion’ within a theoretical framework, Vicarious Kinks wears its debt to psychoanalysis very lightly indeed. Readers will not find anything like a detailed account of how the Freudian notion of a ‘return’ to repressed desire of the anal psychosexual phase actually translates into an analysis of s/m in the sociolegal imaginary. Instead of any potentially risky (i.e. alienating) talk about the unconscious, symptoms or repression, we find ourselves turning sharply into a Foucauldian understanding of pleasure and the sense that the way that s/m is framed in the sociolegal imaginary as a whole produces a kind of pleasure in itself. The endless proliferation and redoubling of discourse about s/m through prurient and voyeuristic fixation on the sordid facts and the moral dangers and impurities of s/m is the thing: ‘knowledge is pleasure’, as Khan puts it at one point. To the extent that this raises a theoretical question about whether this proliferation of negative discourse is in fact identical with pleasure as such, Vicarious Kinks does not go out of its way to establish. On an empirical level however, Khan does produce plenty of examples of s/m’s abject status producing sexual pleasure for both those who are against s/m and its and practitioners: lesbian pornographic fantasies in which the figure of the ‘top’ or ‘dom’ is in fact a dominant anti-s/m feminist, and judges and prosecutors who seem to take just a little too much interest in the ‘disgusting’ facts of cases. Pro-s/m readers of this book are furthermore invited to enjoy the suggestion that all the vile abuse and disgust directed at s/m is a mask for repressed and hypocritical sadism. It is clear too that Khan herself has taken not inconsiderable pleasure in the fierce way with which she denounces those who speak against s/m and who are allowed to rely on unfounded assertions about the (real or potential) harms of s/m and pornography, without distinguishing adequately between consensual and non-consensual pleasures, between s/m and simple sadism, between the enjoyment of an erotic fantasy and its enactment in reality.
Khan’s own approaches and criticisms in turn do themselves pose certain questions. For example, in the chapter on feminists divided on whether s/m is inherently patriarchal or whether it has a place within feminism – we get the impression that Khan’s central concern is to advocate on behalf of lesbian s/m practitioners against the oppressive anti-s/m vitriol of radical and carceral feminists. Elsewhere – chapters on s/m in ‘showbiz’ and in pornography – the focus is very much more on heterosexual practices and on consent. It is possible that readers for whom heterosexual s/m occupies a privileged place as compared to lesbian s/m will feel that Khan seems to abandon the latter. However, Khan’s approach is consistent with her embrace of sex-positive and sex-radical feminism and her rejection of the radical feminist view that s/m and interest in men and their penises is essentially a symptom of patriarchy (and how many mainstream films depict lesbian s/m?). In any case, over the course of the book, Khan convincingly and eloquently demonstrates that, to the extent that s/m is treated sympathetically or unsympathetically within the sociolegal imaginary, these judgements are made (consciously or unconsciously) with reference to a predictable set of normativity indicators that more often than not have an effect that is in some sense marginalizing.
A second question arises from the glimpse that Khan allows us via the semi-autobiographical ‘play’ that prefaces the text, in which Khan narrates her own personal journey that led her to embrace sex-positive over radical feminism and into s/m clubs ‘teetering on hazardously high stiletto heels’ (p. 8). This is undoubtedly a fresh and innovative move in a largely academic work like this, but it becomes clear later on in the book that it is itself part of Khan’s attack against anti- and even pro-s/m voices. At various points, Khan alludes to the defensiveness with which the anti-s/m lobby speak of their own ‘vanilla’ pleasures, and the (as Khan sees it) suspiciously exaggerated insistence with which they claim that it is not boring, that it is fulfilling and worthwhile in a temperate, respectful and moderate way (p. 82). She also criticizes prominent Canadian lawyer and legal academic Alan Young for remarking that he was not personally attracted by s/m – that to the contrary his own sexual interests were vanilla – although he publically defended s/m in court (pp. 277–278). Khan therefore implies that to disavow a personal interest in s/m is somehow a disavowal of s/m itself and thus a contribution to its marginalization. But surely this cannot be right since this seems to confirm (albeit in reverse) the prejudice of the anti-s/m feminists Khan so persuasively critiques: that to be a good feminist/citizen/sexual agent, the content of one’s own sexual fantasies, interests and practices either admits one to the privileged club of truth tellers or marks one as an interloper there.
These are however points for further discussion and reflection rather than criticisms as such. They certainly do not detract from my overall view that this is a highly impressive piece of work and a valuable addition to the pro-s/m intellectual armory. The key ‘findings’ of Vicarious Kinks – that the value (or lack of value) in s/m is almost always a question about something else (be it monogamy, marriage, healing or whatever, and that its denigration comes from its practise being found to occupy the wrong side of the prioritization of (for example) the mind (relationships committed to intellectual discovery, love and equality) over the body (mere lust, need and satisfaction) – have very great potential for development in subsequent work. This is a clear-sighted and courageous critique of a tripartite of powerful interest groups and the collective effect of the marginalizing effects of their discourse that I, and no doubt many other, have found inspiring.