As promised, I wanted to jump back into this discussion—but, and I say this with some trepidation, relatively briefly because I am just too overwhelmed for much more than a dip back into these particular theoretical pools. Here’s the background:

creatrixtiara:

So this conservation happened on Twitter:

@maymaym: Free #Porn Lowers #Rape Rates http://is.gd/aw1Bqp 15-19yo men largest contributor to fewer assaults when given ‘net access. /via @Broadsnark

@tiaramerchgirl @maymaym @Broadsnark doesn’t that reinforce the idea that rape has to do with sexual desire (Rather than power or control)?

@maymaym @tiaramerchgirl Can’t it be both? Dichotomizing #rape as “not about#sex” is inaccurate even if #power’s the salient factor. 

@tiaramerchgirl How so? (then I RT @maymaym’s tweet)

@maymaym @tiaramerchgirl Um…what do you mean “how so”? #Rape is “not about #sex” in the same way anorexia is “not about food.” C’mon.

@tiaramerchgirl @maymaym Um. I feel you’re heading into MAJORLY problematic territory here (even if I’m too inarticulate to express it) 

 @maymaym @tiaramerchgirl That’s true, I am. :) I’m also thinking of some of @SocDocSN’s work. See p. 126 of “Playing on the Edge”http://ur1.ca/2fcpg

I don’t have a copy of the book he linked, so I can’t refer to what he’s pointing to. But I find huge issues with his statements and would like some help articulating them (or hell, if you agree with him, help explain why).

Some thoughts:

• Rape is about dehumanising - sex just happens to be a tool for dehumanising. It hits at intimacy, personal boundaries, trust, consent.
• It’s about treating the other person as property rather than a living human being (the person who raped me kept saying I was her “sex toy”)
• Does it even need to involve sexual activity to be rape? Which definition of “sex”? What about verbal, non-penetrative, other senses?
• Anorexia - control of body, dysphoria of body image: not just food control, but other issues too - again, food is just a tool
• Where do you go if you’ve been raped in a sex-positive environment then? (like me)
• Watching porn still doesn’t necessarily impart good consent skills
• Sexual frustration and desire - how to release?

Claiming fair use, I’ll transcribe the relevant portions of Newmahr’s text, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy. Page 126 offers some useful context to the remainder of the discussion, but feel free to skip to the quotes from page 174 if you’re already well-versed in feminist discourse regarding both rape and BDSM. And if you’re not, please do read this through, because it is actually important:

The Erotic-Violent Dualism

In her deconstruction of the feminist reconceptualization of rape as violence rather than sex, Catharine MacKinnon (1989) argues that this position maintains the ideological and conceptual distinction between sex and violence: “Whatever is sex, cannot be violent; whatever is violent, cannot be sex” (1989, 323). Her underlying objection in this argument, of course, is to the ideological preservation of “the ‘sex is good’ norm,” rather than to the implications of its corollary, “violence is bad.” Regardless of the moral position of her argument, MacKinnon’s point is important; violence and eroticism are positioned in a diametric opposition to one another. Where overlap is suspected or identified, it is pathologized, legislated, or reconceptualized as not “really” one or the other. A conscious and deliberate relationship between the erotic and the violent is ethically unacceptable. In the context of powerful feminist critiques of (hetero)sexuality over the past three decades, the conflation is especially problematic.

At this point in the book, Newmahr seems to be trying to do several things at once:

1. preempt the knee-jerk reaction many people have to any conflation of sex with violence, as is frequently seen in the staunchly anti-SM crowd;
2. summarize salient discourse surrounding the intersection of sex and violence; and
3. challenge the notion that SM is “just sex”.

This is really difficult because in order to succeed at any one of these goals, you need to hold multiple perspectives in your head at once. You need “both/and” thinking. The fact of the matter is that SM thoroughly problematizes traditional notions of both “feminist” and ”gender” theory from all kinds of angles, and perhaps intersectionally so most of all.

To the third point, Newmahr continues, writing, “While the conceptualization of SM as an alternative kind of sex is reductionist, SM is, for most people in Caeden, sexualized, at least to some extent.” Then she gives examples of why this is, such as people’s self-labeling of SM as part of their “sexual identity,” that much attention is paid to one’s genitals, breasts, buttocks, and other erogenous zones in play/scenes, and so on. This exposition continues for a while, focusing on how “the relationship between sex and SM is problematic for participants” because “[t]he eroticism of SM is not quite the same experience as the eroticism of sexual arousal.” More examples are cited in the following pages, including interview transcripts in which one participant, “explained that for him, SM and sex ‘are separated, for the most part, and were, early on, separated.’”

But in the middle of all this, Newmahr notes that while SM and sex are wholly “separated” for some participants, “it is sexually relevant [and] is also linked to power and to violence.” On this most important thread, she writes:

In their illumination of the important relationships between heteronormative sexuality and ideologies of domination and violence, feminist analyses have helped to transform an ideological objection to the conflation of the erotic with the violent into a theoretical and conceptual limitation. As Pat Califia pointed out, “Anybody who questioned [the anti-pornography activists’] definition of porn or violence was accused of having bad consciousness about violence against women” (1981, 256-57). Violence, then, could not be problematized; conflated with violent crime, “violence” is intrinsically morally problematic.

This, then, is the more palatable side of the coin to my assertion that “rape is ‘not about sex’” in the same way that “anorexia is ‘not about food.’” Since rape is an abhorrent (violent) crime, and since the anti-SM feminist viewpoint has so thoroughly monopolized discourse regarding social values in all their myriad applications, accepting “violence” as being a potential part of “sex,” much less a potentially desirable and valuable facet of some consensual sexual activity, is believed even in pro-BDSM circles simply to be unconscionable. It is rejected out of hand, uncritically, without nary a shred of self-reflection; we who tout ourselves non-judgmental cowardly judge that which we value.

Newmahr recognizes this, writing:

Most [SM participants] would, understandably, vociferously object to [SM’s] categorization as violence, as Carol Truscott did: “Consensual sadomasochism has nothing to do with violence. Consensual sadomasochism is about safely enacting sexual fantasies with a consenting partner. Violence is the epitome of nonconsensuality, an act perpetrated by a predator on a victim. Consensual sadomasochism neither perpetuates violence nor serves as catharsis of the violent in the human spirit” (Truscott 1991, 30). Yet tansgressions of the boundary between eroticism and violence are fundamental in SM play. […] SM play is profoundly and significantly different from nonconsensual interactions in nonconsensual contexts, but it is nonetheless a performance of violence.

Anyone familiar with SM play knows, of course, that Newmahr is correct. I certainly do. “And what do we make of circumstances in which people orgasm from blows to the back or being kept in a cage? While psychological perspectives, and psychoanalytical approaches in particular, offer entry points into exploring these conflations, they do so in the wake and shadow of essentialist models that themselves pathologize intersections of eroticism and violence,” Newmahr says. And I agree.

The point, in case it wasn’t clear, is that SM is both violent and sexual, but not merely sex. With an understanding of BDSM and freed from the constraints of the “violence is bad” trope, we can now complicate things further by discussing nonconsensual sexual violence. It is from here that I remarked, “Dichotomizing rape as ‘not about sex’ is inaccurate even if power’s the salient factor.”

At this point in the book, Newmahr spends a number of pages discussing the sociological literature on violence. I’ll encourage you to go through it on your own. Then she returns to her own ethnography.

Newmahr discusses various “strategies of resolution” with which people tackle this “conceptual quagmire.” The most obvious is “disavowal and detachment,” which is MacKinnon’s apparent strategy and the strategy of most BDSM’ers who consider consent to be the be-all-end-all factor in segregating (nonconsensual) violence from (consensual, if “kinky”) sex. Regardless of whether it’s employed by anti-SM crusaders or BDSM’ers, this strategy is fundamentally dishonest. It is, again, the flip side of the coin to discussing rape as purely about violence and not in any way about sex—because it so clearly is about sex, but not merely about sex, as you and many others have correctly pointed out.

In discussions of sex-that’s-not-merely-about-sex, everyone, but perhaps mostly the sex-positive community and academia, does a huge disservice to one another by not examining intimacy as separate from sexuality. This is why I am so often so loudly supportive of asexuality; they examine the liminal space of the non-erotically sexual. It is within this space that plenty of consensual SM and nonconsensual sexual crimes inhabit.

Although Newmahr did not research, discuss, or even hint at asexuality in her work, she’s circling some of the same things I’ve been observing the asexuality community discuss for years. Namely, the relationship of intimacy with other areas of life.

Fast forward to page 174 in Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy where, after setting the theoretical stage for this, Newmahr returns to examinations of the intersection of sex and violence by examining the nature of intimacy:

The challenges in understanding intimacy parallel the problems in conceptualizing violence, pain, and eroticism. Trapped in moral frameworks and tethered to political agendas, these ideas are rarely deconstructed. SM forces us to confront the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes contained within them. In doing so, we can trace conceptual links between intimacy, eroticism, and violence that move beyond psychological models of innate drives and pathologies.

Newmahr independently theorizes intimacy not as only lovey-dovey, good feelings of “connection” and “energy,” which are words most members of the BDSM Scene use instead of intimacy, but rather as “access to otherwise unknown parts of people.” (And that, I’ll note, is a remarkably similar articulation to the powerful articulations by asexual activists.) With this amoral, apolitical framework of intimacy, society can be reexamined in a more constructive way. In this sense, perhaps the single most understated consequence of the “sexual revolution” was that, to use Newmahr’s words, “As regulatory (and thereby disciplinary) forces regarding sexuality are challenged and sexual practices and identities change, other aspects of self acquire the potential to supplant sexuality as a highly protected aspect of self.”

In other words, in a world where cultural doctrines of virginity or monogamy no longer hold sway, what would intimacy, or “connection,” look like? As a sex-positive movement, we are leading the way there, but after we dismantle the sexist tropes of sexual purity and the world’s homophobic heteronormativity, what will we offer in their place? Is “sex for everybody!” really the best we can come up with? That’s not only horribly inarticulate, it’s resoundingly dull, reminiscent of Syndrome’s stupid plan to turn everyone “super.” We need better understandings of intimacy, and of sex, and of violence, or our generation’s sexual revolution—the one about sexual information—will, for all intents and purposes, fail as spectacularly as the first.

But I digress. Newmahr did so far less than I. In any event, she continues:

Understanding intimacy as the experience of achieving access to protected aspects of others’ selves provides a theoretical framework for understanding the intimacy of interpersonal violence. Nonconsensual violence (what most people mean when they say “real violence”) transgresses physical, social, emotional, and ethical boundaries between actors. Perpetrators of interpersonal violence gain access to experiences of others that most do not. The “sneaky thrills” that Jack Katz finds among thieves are intimate thrills (1988). The sexual metaphor he uncovers in the narratives of the thieves follows, for the thrill in both heteronormative eroticism and theft lies in gaining access. To violate, and to be violated, are intimate experiences. If we cease to reserve the word “intimate” for situations that are desirable or healthy, we can see, for example, the intimacy of violent crime. Rape, which many of us would shudder to consider “intimacy,” is so heinous precisely because it is so intimate.

And so, in much the same way as rape is so heinous precisely because it is so intimate, it is also so “violent” precisely because it is sexual. In a world where access to sexual experience were not so closely guarded and equated with social closeness, rape might be less sexually violating (which is what most people say when they mean, “nonconsensual intimacy”) but I doubt it would be any less sexual.

I hope this helps deconstruct a few things for you, as it did for me. Consider picking up a copy of Playing on the Edge—it’s an awesome book. And while you’re waiting for it to ship or whatever, consider listening to Kink On Tap episode 70, in which Newmahr discuses the book with me—it was grand.