On BDSM

1. Statement of Purpose

Why am I writing about BDSM? I am writing about BDSM for many reasons. It is partly because I should not write about BDSM. I should rather triangulate the significance of an interesting and confusing motif in one of the works we read, or I should exegete a particularly sticky passage, or I should compare and contrast the perspective of one philosopher against that of another. I should do one of these things, but instead I have chosen to write about BDSM. How naughty of me!

Well, no — it is not so much naughty per se as it is genuinely philosophical; moreover, it is only naughty insofar as it is philosophical. BDSM is something that mainstream culture relegates to the shadows, that even BDSMers relegate to “dungeons” or “play spaces,” places explicitly demarcated as different from what is normal and real. I am writing about BDSM because doing so is essential to philosophy. As Nietzsche says in the preface of Ecce Homo, philosophy means “seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality” (Nietzsche, 1992a, pg. 674). The sexual practice of binding, disciplining, dominating, submitting, giving and receiving pain (sadomasochism) — this is one of those strange and questionable things that needs sustained, meticulous, philosophical attention. It is a sort of “X” — or rather an “XXX” — that marks the spot of a place where the philosopher might dig to uncover forgotten jewels of the human mind. Some philosophize with a hammer; I philosophize with a shovel.

“And what have you found so far, you with your shovel?” I have found traces of BDSM in all of the works that we have read this semester — both continuous and discontinuous clues with unobvious relationships. Buried beneath the “obscene” mark on the ground I found a picture of humanity more visceral, more sexual, more power-apt, more truthful to itself, more healthful, more vibrant, and more — human? Could that be it? Could BDSM actually make someone more human? —

2. Pain as Conduit for the Externalization of Inner Experience

Pain is a conduit for expression. What do I mean by that? Expression — the pressing-out of congested, inner experience. The speaking of a word, for example, is the pressing-out of a thought that had swelled in the mind. A word written down on paper or typed on a keyboard — these also remove an experience from the individual and lay it before her, bound and helpless on the dungeon floor, so to speak. The words we use to conceptualize these transformations from internal to external always trace the external back to its internal source. A “cry of pain” is a pressing-out like all the rest, but it presses out a specific subjective experience; it is the cry of pain precisely because of the inner experience that it frees. The production of sound is an example of this transformation; it externalizes the internal.

“I went to my Sir’s apartment after work, and he saw that I was all uptight and, you know, nervous…and he lined me up against the wall and gave me a good flogging. And it flogged the stress right out of me” — a self-professed submissive (Hebert & Weaver, 2015).

All of this happens so automatically that the process is unknown to us; the space between the thought and the utterance is so small sometimes that it might not even be there. Expression usually doesn’t feel like squeezing some pressurized substance out of a tight opening, but a sensation of chronic mental constipation does occur when our inner life becomes compressed and convoluted. The results: confusion, “bad conscience,” neurosis, misery.

3. Culture Does not Eliminate, but only Redirects the Impulse to Violence

It is clear that culture does not align with every human impulse that screams for expression. Freud says that the “tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition” and “constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture,” and similarly one could say that culture, with all its negative incentives to suppress one’s instincts, poses the greatest obstacle to fundamental human instincts. Human instinct and the suppression thereof are diametrically, even tautologically opposed. But the former is much stronger than the latter; it is a rocket propelled by a chemical juggernaut, and, try as culture may, human instinct cannot be suppressed. It does not disappear. It is only redirected.

“Sometimes if [my submissive] is having a hard time, there are things that we’ll do if she gets on her knees, you know, at my feet, that help her. It sort of calms her. So there are things that we do, or you know, my putting a collar on her that, that has a calming or settling effect — an effect somebody else might have from drinking a glass of wine” — a self-professed dominant (Hebert & Weaver, 2015).

The “psychical cruelty” that results from extreme internalizations of one’s animal instincts leads a person to “will to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for…to erect an ideal — that of the “holy God” — and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness” (Nietzsche, 1992b, pg. 529). The internalization of the aggressive impulse, among others commonly rejected in society, digs a deep drench in the human psyche. And in this trench the instincts fester until they are like a rotting corpse — repulsive, poisonous, and unrecognizable. Freud remarks, “What an overwhelming obstacle to civilization aggression must be if the defence against it can cause as much misery as aggression itself!” (Freud, 2011, pg. 140). And Nietzsche agrees: “What bestiality of thought erupts as soon as [man] is prevented from being a beast in deed!” (Nietzsche, 1992b, 529). When humans fail to recognize their destructive instincts as drives that satisfy themselves only in their externalization, those instincts magnify themselves into — monsters.

Not only that, but to suppress the instinct is to relinquish one’s already transient control of it; it is to banish the beast into the wilderness of the unconscious mind, where it can multiply indefinitely — like Felis catus in Australia. In other words, to divert the conscious impulse to cruelty away from consciousness only frees the impulse from the authority of consciousness. “Get out of here, you beastly thought!” we snarl at our anger; and so the angry urge, like a furtive mole, tunnels back beneath the surface of our thoughts to places outside our reach and beyond our understanding. To forget or to repress is not an “annihilation of the memory-trace,” but rather “nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish” (Freud, 2011, pg. 15). To reject one’s own thoughts does not destroy them; it merely sends them off to dress themselves in a subtler disguise. And who knows when they will reemerge, or in what manner they will appear?

A violent impulse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out. We don’t serve your kind here.” The impulse replies, “I’ll be back again tomorrow.” The next day, a man walks into the bar and asks the bartender for a drink. The bartender angrily strikes him across the face. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” says the bartender. “I thought you were the bloke from yesterday. Here’s your beer.”

The “bad conscience” — the monster that devours its host — it becomes so “firmly rooted” that one’s own inner experiences are obscured by its overgrowth, and one’s expression becomes so incoherent that one cannot trace the branch back to its subterranean stem. One’s outer and inner life then have little apparent connection, and the human acts erratically, in contradiction to his or her own judgment, and potentially poses a danger to him- or herself. The “instincts that do not discharge themselves turn inward” and impress themselves onto the unobservable parts of the soul (Nietzsche, 1992b, pg. 521). How does one discharge the “bad conscience”? Under what conditions can one “[bring] to light again” the stifled spirits (Freud, 2011, pg. 15)? Through pain.

4. Punishment as Spiritual Catharsis

Punishment balances Schulden and releases the spirit. In the primitive contractual relationships that Nietzsche sees in man’s prehistory, suffering was able to do this “to the extent that to make suffer was in the highest degree pleasurable” (Nietzsche, 1992b, pg. 501). In the wronged, displeasure caused by injury was counterbalanced by this pleasure caused by inflicting suffering. And in the guilty one, the infliction of pain prevents the internalization of one’s Schuld and its poisonous transmogrification into “bad conscience.” Nietzsche notes that bad conscience is conspicuously absent in the worst of criminals, those who have received the most severe punishment (pg. 517). The power of pain to free the individual from guilt is particularly evident in submissives who have internalized sexual shame from an austere upbringing and who find liberty in sexual expression only after being whipped for enjoying their bodies. Nietzsche says, “In punishment there is so much that is festive!” (pg. 503). Yes, and the sadist becomes a master of ceremonies, a grand facilitator, and a magnanimous host to whom the masochist is a grateful guest.

If, as Nietzsche says, “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward,” then the ritual catharsis of the content of one’s deepest self serves to re-establish the link between one’s inner and outer life (Nietzsche, 1992b, pg. 521).

“You can’t be consensually tied up, spread-eagle on the bed, having agreed to be submissive to someone else, and keep a sense of self-consciousness — you can’t be that willingly open and vulnerable while harboring years of pent-up shame. At least I found that I couldn’t.” (Devin, 2012)

Accordingly, BDSM “play” is not a time to play pretend; it is a time to stop pretending. As one practicer says, “Who I am as a person inside my soul is the same way that I am in my scenes” (Hébert & Weaver, 2015, pg. 52). Despite this deep identification with one’s BDSM personality, BDSMers are forced to alienate themselves from the identities they consider real. The existence of BDSM culture within the dominant liberal, democratic, egalitarian culture forces BDSM to define itself in terms that the latter culture will not see as its direct antithesis. The culture of equal persons without overtly asymmetrical power dynamics is “real life,” and the environment in which BDSM takes place is called “play.” In this way, the dominance of the mainstream definitions of good human interactions coerce BDSMers to legitimize their practice by delegitimizing it. They are bound to call it “play” because BDSM could not be serious. It could not be real. It could not have any real relation to the identities of real citizens. It can’t be these things because, then, according to mainstream culture, the BDSMers are committing crimes against human dignity. In their refusing to identify with the overtly asymmetrical power relationships among BDSMers, the egalitarianism of liberal democracies do violence to BDSM. They rape and pillage its essence.

5. An “Objection”

“What is this paper? What are you doing? Why are you belaboring these insignificant and questionable points and jumping from one topic to the next without ostensible transitions? You’re not a philosopher — you’re a hyperactive kangaroo with a laptop. What is your thesis?”

What’s yours?

6. Domination as Apotheosis (Becoming God)

A better question: what is domination? On its surface it is merely a show of force that manifests one individual’s will to power. But true domination is apotheosis. To strike, to flagellate, to singe, to scrape, to slap, to spank — all these brutalities bring about a double catharsis: they elevate the dominant beyond herself, and they unite her to herself. They rid the dominant of her “humanity” in rocketing her to the apex of her nature, the creative goddess, and they unite the human being with herself as she can finally sing the song of her deepest heart and revel in its visceral music. The sadist ascends Olympus to seat herself among the gods, “in whom,” Nietzsche says, “the animal in man felt deified and did not lacerate itself, did not rage against itself” but instead raged outwardly in one direction like an undammed river. There on the mountaintop she can breathe again the “air of the heights” (Niezsche, 1992b, pg. 529; 1992a, pg. 674).

“That’s the ultimate power exchange: to renew a person, return them to themselves” — a woman who calls herself subjanice (Prior, 2013).

If sadism is apotheosis, masochism is liberation. And a double liberation at that! As the cat-o-nine-tails digs its tiny teeth into the masochist’s back, so it also plunges a psychological shovel deep into the muck of rejected, internalized instincts, which clog the conduit of transformative externalization. The skin is pierced, but pierced also are the outer layers of the spirit on which the strictures of culture have caused to accumulate a hard plaque. But the immediacy of physical pain breaks this psychological boundary and intercedes for the mind where a mind cannot intercede for itself. At the slap of the belt, the silence of holding everything in becomes a palpable yelp, a whimper — perhaps a guttural scream. At the drip of hot wax, the pressure of chronic suppression becomes the joy of release. What was previously painfully internalized becomes externalized through pain. And the wielder of the whip — she, too, finds liberation as well as gratification: liberation by cleansing herself of the will to “harm”, and vicarious, empathetic gratification in knowing that her whip gives her masochist true release.

“Compared with the control group…BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable.” — Wismeijer and van Assen (2013)

I ask you, is this surprising?

If we take the transformative activity of expression seriously — if we see it as a transformation of the internal into the external — then is not masochism also a form of domination? “Now you’re just showing off, brandishing your shovel like a fool.” The inward stew of impulse, if left to fester in the mind, threatens to dominate the individual. It becomes the “bad conscience,” a self-destructive force that blocks autonomous expression. Thus the will to receive physical pain — to have one’s body and spirit cleansed of “the sickening fumes of inner corruption and the hidden rot of disease” — is a will to purge the “nausea at [oneself],” to destroy one’s abnegation and affirm one’s own power through self-expression (Nietzsche, 1992b, 561). Masochism is then a double domination: domination of the self by another, and domination of the self by oneself. And for what purpose? Just a bit of fresh air!

7. Visit Vermont

Ah, fresh air! Some say you have to live in the mountains to get it, but even in the mountains the congestion of suppressed self can make it hard to breathe. Only when a person has blown his nose can he actually take it in — You are rolling your eyes…Do you think I am joking?

8. BDSM Resonates with a Primal Nature

BDSM reenacts a primal power drama. What does that mean? It could mean two things: one, primal “play” is an emerging subgenre of BDSM that resembles “wrestling” with “raw, emotional, sexual feelings displayed” (slavekathy, 2013). This is half of what I mean. The other half is this: the reaching down of BDSM deep into the mammalian brain to access its ancient, genuine, and enduring nature. The human animal knows its place among its peers, and the knowledge of its location in the social hierarchy permeates its self-perception and sexual selection. High status in males promises many offspring; low status in females discourages infidelity. Thus, it is no surprise that the polarization of social power in dominance-submission relationships, even if merely in simulation, enhances sexual desirability for both participants (Jozifkova, 2013). The animalism of domination and submission summons the forgotten characters of an ancient mating ritual — archetypes of power: master and slave.

“Surely, the human has become more than this! We are not mere animals driven to mate by instinct. We are free agents! Bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, masochism — how can these repugnancies even cross the minds of sane, well-brought-up, dignified Americans? Do they not know that every human being ought to be treated with respect? Do they not know that every human being has a right to liberty? What gratification is there in being collared like a dog, or whipped like a slave, or bound like a prisoner? How does restriction, constriction, interdiction — how does giving up of one’s autonomy affirm the rational, free essence of man?”

— — Thus, my next point.

9. BDSM’s Inherent Dignity

I understand, the temptation is strong to call BDSM animalistic. With all BDSM’s blood, pain, hitting and scratching, yelling, demanding, coercing — with all this animal brutishness, and with all our “human” equanimity, reason, refinement, language, freedom, and truth, it is hard to see how the two worlds could overlap. But the concept of civilization depends on its antithesis, and so the civilized depend for their existence on their own subterranean incivility. Yes, the practice of BDSM is animalistic insofar as it is a gaggle of animals who practice it (we, these animals), but it is also its antithesis; it is far from animalistic in that the dungeons’ quintessential criterion of entry is a uniquely human behavior: the formal establishment of consent.

“What I am consenting to is giving you authority over my power.” — a slave called Barbara (Prior, 2013)

No act distinguishes human interactions more starkly from interactions among other animals than the promise. As Nietzsche says, nature has endowed no other creature besides humans with “the right to make promises” (1992b, pg. 493). Thus, trust, the subjective crystallization of a pattern of making and upholding promises, is one of the behaviors that make human beings human. In the worst case, broken trust diminishes the traitor into little more than an animal. She is an unpredictable threat to the betrayed’s higher human wellbeing; she is wild and unworthy of dignity. But in the best case, the trust between humans is like a staircase: each stone that the builders mortar to its structure brings them one step closer to the sky. Trust is the fulfillment of “the extraordinary privilege of responsibility…this rare freedom, this power over oneself” and, in the case of submission/domination relationships, the power to give one’s authority away or to accept the gift (Nietzsche, 1992b, pg. 496). In the practice of BDSM, this tower of mutual trust — to give power, to wield power — allows two people to climb to the heights of pleasure, catharsis, self-discovery, and self-consciousness. It allows them to transcend the chaotic world of nature and become gods.

“The fear [of my submissive] is part of the turn-on.” — a self-professed dominant (Hebert & Weaver, 2015).

The requirement of consent makes BDSM distinctly human because it explicates subjectivity — something humans typically only grant to other human animals (and familiar pets). In consenting, the submissive makes his subjectivity known to another subjectivity in the form of intelligible desires, limits, and safe-words. This submissive’s and dominant’s formalization of terms-consented-to is each person’s direct acknowledgement of the subjectivity of the other, and the agreement to uphold the terms is again an acknowledgement of that subjectivity. Thus the power exchange of BDSM begins with a subjective exchange, a looking into the others eyes and affirming the seeing self in the other.

Effective domination and submission requires a Hegelian exchange of subjectivities. Recall, as Hegel explains, that a self before another self loses itself. It finds itself when it negates the second self as “other.” In sublating, or dominating, the self “gets back itself, because it becomes one with itself again through the cancelling of its otherness” — that is, by becoming 100% subject. “But secondly,” Hegel continues, “[the self] likewise gives otherness back again to the other self-consciousness, for it was aware of [itself] being in the other, it cancels this its own being in the other” — i.e., dominates itself — “and thus lets the other again go free” (Hegel, [n.d.], Φ 182). Hegel summarizes: two self-consciousnesses “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (Hegel, [n.d.], Φ 184).

The glue that holds the BDSM session or relationship together is, however ironic it may sound, this mutual respect for the subjectivity of the other. This is what separates the practiced dominator from the local sex offender: consent. The dominant uses one’s own self-consciousness to empathize with the domination of the other, and so to bring about a double domination: the domination of the submissive, and the dominant’s self-domination. The dominance/submission relationship is grounded in trust, which consists of a circular self-consciousness and a mutual trust: the submissive trusts the dominant not to overstep her boundaries, and the dominant trusts the submissive to demand what she wants and object to what she doesn’t want. The stop safe-word, for example, derives its significance exclusively from its relation to the submissive-dominant contract; unless the dominant promises to stop the scene at the faintest utterance of the stop safe-word, the safe-word itself is meaningless. In this way, two people cannot perform a scene successfully without understanding that the other, the object, is at the same time a subject, to whom the one is both a subject and object as well. Who is the “bad” dominant? He is the one who ignores or fails to attune with his submissives’ subjective experience. He is not self-conscious, for he treats his submissive too much as an object. Worst case scenario, he forgets to respond to the safe-word, at which point he jeopardizes both the safety of the submissive and his membership in the BDSM community — if he is not immediately and forcefully ejected. The “good” dominants demonstrate humanity by honoring their promises and act not only to satisfy their drive to command and control, but to take full responsibility for their submissives’ wellbeing and, in a spiritual sense, to instigate transformative catharsis in the submissives’ soul.

“When I hit him hard, he giggled, making me laugh too. He trusted me to [pleasure him] without harming him. I trusted him to respond in a way that would let me know if everything was okay” (Prior, 2013).

10. The Cathartic Act is Empty — only a Conduit

“Stop now, you with the shovel! When Freud described the instinct for cruelty, he emphasized non-consent. Do you understand this? A man’s neighbor is ‘a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, the use him sexually without his consent…to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him’ (Freud, 2011, pg. 85). What good does BDSM do for a person when he wants to harm, not merely simulate harm? What good is BDSM for our instincts if we long in our deepest selves to harm without consent?”

I may have struck bedrock with this question, but I will continue to philosophize with dynamite. If Freud is correct that human beings truly wish to harm one another, and not merely to vent their feelings of aggression, then it seems that a consensual session of sadomasochistic domination/submission would not suffice to satisfy them. It seems that the only solution is comprehensive, verbatim satisfaction of every impulse. But on my conception of expression, the means to externalization is not necessarily identical to or even resembling the original impulse. For instance, a boy compelled to attack his friend, whom he envies for his toy truck, could satisfy his impulses just as well by hurling rocks at a wall for an hour. A woman with a strong desire to bang her employer can satisfy her impulses (at least temporarily) by touching herself while fantasizing about such an encounter. Freud has, as Nietzsche would say many shoddy psychologists have done, mistaken the effect of aggression for its cause. It is not a desire to harm without consent that leads men to harm without consent; it is an aggressive energy without a specific object, in combination with a paucity of consenting subjects, that leaves men with no options but either to internalize their instinct and go crazy or to vent their wrath on the only objects they can find — non-consenting innocents. The cause is aggression sans objet; the likely effect, due to circumstances, is violence. So, both Freud and my objector are confused: humans do not long to kill per se; they do so merely because they lack institutions that facilitate non-lethal, consensual harm.

“Honey, what do you want to do for National Whipping Day?”

11. Conclusion

Red! — And I bring our play to its sudden end. Allow me to tie all of this together with the silken rope of Nietzsche’s Epigrams. First, my summary: the practice of BDSM has the power to relieve physical and emotional stress, to open a conduit for the expression of trapped thoughts and feelings, to elevate the soul, to unite a person to her deepest self, to awaken an inner god, to foster empathy through an exchange and acknowledgement of subjectivity, to establish and nurture trust through the creation and upholding of contracts and thereby to demonstrate the quintessence of humanity, to quench the destructive and aggressive impulses, to alleviate the feeling of Schulden, and to arouse the body and the mind sexually. Not least of all, it is — how do you say it? Ah! — fun! It is no wonder Nietzsche wrote that “maturity…consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play” (Nietzsche, 1992c, pg. 273, my emphasis). So much unity and freedom — so much humanity comes from finding the core of one’s being and being it. Finally, “The great epochs of our life,” he says, “come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us” (pg. 276); so let us, who as human beings share the burden of this great “evil” and “perversion” of exchanging power and loving pain — let us call the sexual “sin” of BDSM a sacrament instead.