Violence, S/M, and Consent

[pantryslut]

For wild_irises. (Trade you for a commentary on your theory of shyness.)

I mentioned earlier that I oppose the rhetoric of certain sectors of the S/M community that tries to distinguish what we do from violence, i.e., “if it’s violence, it’s not S/M, and vice-versa.”

Take, for example, this quote from Garth Barriere, a lawyer in a Canadian court case involving S/M videos. “This judge was willing to look more deeply and see that SM is not violence—it’s consensual role playing.”

Well, I’m sorry. Hitting someone is violent. Whether it’s a hand, a flogger, or a paddle. Biting someone is violent. I don’t think that all of what we do is violent, but when I’m twisting someone’s arm behind their back and swatting at their ass with all I can muster, it seems a little disingenuous to claim that “that’s not violent, because it’s consensual.”

It’s a rhetorical trick. Permission by definition. If we define S/M as ‘not violence,” then we’re given (or so we think) a Get Out Of Jail Free card whenever anyone accuses us of being bad, horrible, hurtful people. No, no, no! It’s not violence, it’s S/M! Violence is scary and undesirable; we like and desire S/M; therefore S/M is not violence and you should let us get on with our lives and make videos and publish stories and import glossy magazines with pictures of hundreds of needles stabbed (oops! I meant “lovingly and consensually inserted”) into someone’s body.

I once did a scene where I wore a t-shirt that said, “This is a violence-free zone!” on the back. I got flogged in it. I got flogged so hard I had marks for a week. That was fun. And the people watching, most of them seemed to get the joke.

I once worked at a domestic violence shelter, and one of its side gigs was a violence prevention education project. I was involved in a number of highly conceptual discussions of what “violence” really entailed. Was an explosion violence? An earthquake? Was it ridiculous of us to talk about preventing violence, if so?

So I want to acknowledge that my flesh, when it bruises and welts and marks, knows that what we do is violent. Regardless of consent, it colors up the same damn way every time. Consent is what makes the difference in my head. So I guess for me, violence is not a head game.

Does this make any sense? Anything I missed? Should elaborate on? Let me know.

Comments

I agree.

[cheekytubemouse.livejournal.com]

Part of what I find arousing about being bitten, spanked, etc. is that it is violence. It's primal and that can be very sexy sometimes, but what makes it sexy is intent and consent.

When my lover bites me during sex, it increases my arousal which is what they intend to do. When my ex-husband pulled me across the bed by my hair and bit me so hard on the back of the neck that it left a black and purple bruise that clearly defined every tooth, that was terrifying for me because his motivation was anger and his intent was to punish me.

Re: I agree.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Part of what I find arousing about being bitten, spanked, etc. is that it is violence.

Yes, yes, exactly.

I find it weird, too, that biting, hair-pulling, bare-hand spanking, etc. is sometimes reduced to "rough sex," as if this were different and lesser than S/M, and folks who do it aren't really kinky. Huh?

Re: I agree.

[cheekytubemouse.livejournal.com]

People afraid of being seen as something that other people view as unacceptable--queer, kinky, whatever. But, then again, I don't have to tell you that.

Re: I agree.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Except that I hear S/M people do it, too -- "oh, that doesn't count. That's just rough sex." Though it's certainly possible they've bought into a larger cultural paradigm.

Re: I agree.

[cheekytubemouse.livejournal.com]

Do you think that might be come from a desire to be cooler/better/more "hardcore" than other people?

"Pffft, spanking isn't s/m, you didn't even leave a mark! It's not s/m unless someone is bruised and bleeding!"

Re: I agree.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Yes, and a fetishization (deliberate word choice :))of skill and technique. "*Andybody* can do *that*. But watch my two-handed whirling whip technique!"

Re: I agree.

[thette.livejournal.com]

Mark Loy comment on that kind of word twisting.

(Comment on the Wheel of Time series, but universially applicable. Also, NSFW text.)

Re: I agree.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that taking pleasure [ as a sensation felt by a person ] from pain [ as a nervous reaction ] is a broad spectrum with lots of different values of what works and what's too much for any given individual, and I find myself increasingly less inclined to split it a coarse-grained level into what is and isn't S/M or rough sex or whatever, they just don't feel like useful categories for me any more because in any situation where it's relevant to me they reduce the amount of conversation needed to sort out what is and isn't mutually fun not a whit.

Re: I agree.

[redbird]

If anything, they may increase the amount of conversation, because I suspect that there are so many different ideas of where the borders are that it would require an additional "so, how do you distinguish between 'rough sex' and S/M?" And the answer to that question is almost certainly going to be two fairly large categories, and leave open the question of which things in box A are desirable.

I'm as fond of abstraction and conversation as the next intellectual weirdo, but there are more and less useful abstractions.

Re: I agree.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I don't think very many people use these categories, beyond the broadest strokes, to determine what is and isn't mutually fun. I do think they use them to form a hierarchy of kink, see above. Such an exercise is not particularly relevant to me, either.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

The first definition of violence on dictionary.com is physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing.

I'm one of the people who doesn't think that SM is inherently violent. Some of it is, some of it isn't. If I flip someone over my knee and spank him, and he squirms and giggles and moans, I don't perceive that as violent. If I tie someone up and cover his body with clothespins while petting him and snuggling with him, that doesn't feel like violence to me.

And yet, I do perceive these things as SM.

For me, the right statement is that some SM is violent.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I never said that it was inherently violent.

[manomano.livejournal.com]

I think there's another view of the problem, the slippery slope view. If you say that some kinds of violence are OK, people have trouble with the concept that they can't always tell. If violence in S/M is OK, why aren't other forms of violence. I don't agree with this line of thinking, but I can see why some poeple have trouble distinguishing. I also think that a lot of people who do SM, like a lot of people who don't, were at one point subjected to non-consensual violence. That makes it hard for them to reconcile that what they do for fun has anything in common with what happened to them in some other context.

[felicks.livejournal.com]

I like what you said. And what is interesting me most about my sm identity right now is the ways that it is violent and the desires I have that are desires to hurt and be hurt (rather than the nurture/be nurtured part, which is probably my primary attraction to sm)

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Much food for thought. (I was pretty close to right about what I thought you meant, and I really appreciate the detailed clarification.

I'll do a shyness piece in the next few days.

[rgay.livejournal.com]

You've really quite eloquently put much of how I feel about S/m. I retired from public life, so to speak, because it was just so much nonsense and pc verbiage and ideology and I wasn't having any fun. I think it is disingenuous to disclaim the violence inherent to many S/m activities. Frankly, its the violence that gets me off. I think one of the stranger dynamics in the community is this sort of hierarchical caste system that seems to develop whenever two or more S/m inclined people congregate where your worth is measured by how you engage in what activities and you rise and fall along that system in different ways with different groups. Anyway, this is a rambly, incoherent, drug-addled response that really means to say , very well put.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

For me, the whole "is it violence" question got an added layer when I was reading some Victorian novel and hit the phrase "violent exercise". That took a lot of the overtones away from the word for me.

[nadyalec.livejournal.com]

forgive me. i'm reading delany on harroway tonight, and i must:

"Frankly, I do not see how reading can be other than a violent process. The violence of the letter is the violence of the reader-- a reader inolved in an unclear, cloudy, struggling, masochistic relationship with a text that, at any moment it would produce joy, must do so violently."

we played at rape when i had my period and the smell of blood was everywhere and blood was everywhere, smeared on both our bodies, smeared on his hands and on my cunt and on his cock, and this is what it takes to open me, this is what it takes to make me come.

or, to quote jane's addiction,

..."[his] sex is violent..."

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

The "S/M is not violence" rhetoric reminds me of a similar bit of mental gymnastics about conflict. How many times have you heard someone say, "I don't like conflict" when what they mean is "they don't like contention?" I mean, if we have one computer between us and you want to play games and I want to surf for porn, that's a conflict.

By performing these odd transform folks neuters an otherwise useful terms in a seeming effort to make all of life bland and fuzzy and happy.