Reflection's Edge

Chains of Words: Writing Sadomasochism

by Meredith Schwartz

So you want to write about kinky sex, but you've never personally experienced it? Here is one BDSMer's take on how to make your portrayal compelling and believable. (BDSM is a portmanteau word that stands for bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadomasochism - plus a grab bag of other fetishes.)

Fantasy versus Realism

Are you writing the fantasy, or are you writing the reality? There's room for both, or a blend, but if you're writing a fantasy scenario that a kinky person might enjoy imagining - anything from a harem to a sadistic doctor to a rape - that calls for a different treatment than if your characters are consensually acting something out.

Consensual BDSM and the community that’s grown up around it have an awful lot of safeguards built in. Safewords and slow words, formal negotiation, checklists, meetings, slogans and mantras, support groups, and social stigmas against people who don’t respect those things. Basically those safeguards are there to minimize the chances of people getting hurt - especially emotionally, which is much harder to deal with than most physical injuries.

Naturally, these protections are very important to the community and its members. But few of them are sexy, in much the same way that helmets, kneepads, condoms, seatbelts, and speed limits are not sexy. When writing kink, don't lard all of this stuff into the story just to be responsible or photo-realist. The story is already sufficiently safe and diluted by virtue of being a story and not real life. A story about a runaway train doesn’t need to mention shoulder harnesses just because they're needed on roller coasters.

That doesn't mean you can't ever include BDSM practices, and should create a world of Zipless Fucks, à la Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. A couple of carefully chosen real-world details might add a note of believable grit or illustrate a character trait, but mentioning too many of them without a character or plot- driven reason is as distracting as transcribing dialect phonetically.

SM Cultures

Are you writing your BDSMers as members of a larger community of kinky people, or not? If not, you have characterization issues to deal with: how did the characters come to know about BDSM? How did they get the vocabulary to talk about it? Are they comfortable with the darker aspects of their sexualities? How do they explain their kinks to their partners?

Some people know they're kinky from earliest childhood. Others discover it as teens, or when exposed to BDSM through a partner, book, or movie. Some people wrestle with self-loathing all their lives; some never see what the big deal is. There's no one right answer - just the one that fits your character's personality.

If you're planning to set your story in the current real world, the quasi-organized BDSM community is called "the scene", and its current incarnation goes back to about the mid 20th century. The traditions mostly derive from gay male leathermen, who originated a system where everyone started as a bottom (also called "sub" or "masochist") and learned to top (or "dom") through apprenticeship.

Although today's BDSM community is pansexual, it tends to break down into several distinct parts - gay men, lesbians, and heterosexuals, as well as subcultures within those groupings (such as bear-lovers, Daddy role-players, and femdoms. Bisexuals do not tend to have a seperate group; they mingle.)

It's not essential to throw these words about with mad abandon. Just be aware of the circles that your character moves in, because different circles come with different social norms and expectations.

Particularly since the explosion of the Internet led to many more people finding the scene, the apprenticeship system was swamped and largely abandoned. These days, most people learn from books and workshops. Many dominants never bottom, and acceptance of switches (those who play both roles) is growing. Many members of the Old Guard (or Old Leather) decry the lack of seriousness, standards, and knowledge of the New Guard (or New Leather) who in turn regard Old Leather as insufficiently fun and freewheeling - if they even know of its existence.

Old Leather also has a firm code about never mentioning or revealing a fellow BDSMer's identity, even by appearing to know someone in another context. New Leather includes many more "out" people, so expectations of discretion have become somewhat less stringent. It's still rude to walk up to someone at work and say "Didn't I see you at the slave auction?" but it's less common to keep a total wall between your scene and real life identities.

If you are putting your characters in a larger historical context, what kind of community are they a part of? The practices that make up BDSM's toolbox go much further back in history than the 20th century. Do your research, as much of it as possible, to avoid the trap of giving your historical character a modern mindset on sexual identity. While behaviors and desires don't change that much, how people think about them does.

By the same token, if you're constructing a fantasy world, that world's core assumptions and their effects on its society should be reflected in the way your characters practice and think about BDSM - which is not necessarily the way we do. A world without cities, specialization, feminism, or psychology, for example, is unlikely to have a 20th century concept of sexual orientation.

Beliefs and taboos about sex are shaped by religion, history, economics, and social pressures. If there's a particular mindset you want your characters to share, think about what factors would cause that attitude to become prevalent - or, if it's a minority view, what experiences would cause them to break with the majority.

Normal is what you're used to

BDSMers aren't exotic to BDSMers. At least, not after they've been in the scene a while. As the saying goes, in China they just call it food. It is certainly true that cultivating an erotic mystique is an important part of SM play for many people, but it's also true that every single person in an SM club has dishes to wash, dogs to walk, high school reunions to dread, aspirations and insecurities and pimples. Almost all of them have day jobs, and the ones that have turned their kink into their profession have discovered that it also has its disconcertingly mundane side.

Once, when I was at a play party, a newbie came up to me and asked, in a prurient tone of voice, whether I thought a woman in a corset, tied to a St. Andrew's Cross and being teased with a vibrator, enjoyed it. He was quite disconcerted when I explained that yes, I thought so, since she'd designed the outfit herself and was a professional costume designer in real life. It was the reminder that she had a real life that disconcerted him - he was seeing her as the embodiment of a fantasy. And she certainly was - but hers as well as his.

It's more than fine to have an outsider or a newcomer be dazzled or intimidated by the trappings of BDSM, but try to avoid having a character that is supposedly a long-time practitioner react that way. Characters' own kinks are normal to them, as is what they're used to seeing in the clubs or on the Internet. When in doubt, introduce a newbie or outsider as a POV character - this can make it easier to provide explanations for your audience.

Common Tropes of Literary Kink Exploded

1. It's not necessary to give your character a troubled or abused past as a reason to be kinky. Some people just are. However, if a character happens to have a troubled past, it will interact with his or her BDSM play - and not always predictably. Some people take pleasure and strength from reenacting traumatic events in a safe setting with a happy ending; others avoid anything that gets too close to a triggery hot button.

2. Sadism is not sufficient reason to be a villain. There are plenty of ways to enjoy hurting people without resorting to non-consensual Evil Plans. Indeed, there are usually far more available bottoms than tops.

3. Heroes and heroines can be kinky too.

4. We’re not all Deeply Conflicted, or in the closet and blackmailable for it. Our sex is not all joyless and humorless. Most of us also enjoy "vanilla" (non-BDSM) sex.

5. We're not all gay. We're not all straight. We're not all oversexed. We're not all male. (Believe it or not a respectable professor had to do a whole study to prove as much.) We're not all male tops with female bottoms.

6. Finally, not everyone in the SM subculture is young and beautiful and free of all other sexual hang-ups. Not by a long shot. Indeed, the value SM culture places on attributes that have nothing to do with youth or beauty - expertise, experience, and a good toy collection, for tops; attitude, reaction, pain tolerance, and skills, for bottoms - makes the scene a particularly welcoming place for older people, heavy people, and people with disabilities.

Why Does Anybody Do This Stuff?

Like runner's high, SM produces endorphins. Some people like to prove their endurance, as in the manhood testing rituals of cultures like the Xhosa, the Sioux, and the Goan coalwalkers. Some like the thrill of risk without the real danger, like horror movies or roller coasters. Some want to flirt with the edge of danger. Some want to push past fear to try new things and experience new sensations.

Some want to show trust in their partners, or please them. Some find that, like meditation, it helps them be fully present in the moment, being rather than doing. Some like the chance to role play aspects of themselves they don’t get to be in the rest of their lives. Some find it helps them focus on and relax into sensations without worrying about making decisions, taking care of themselves or others. Some find it makes them feel wanted and valued, secure and taken care of.

Some people don't know why they like it, and don't care. They just know it gets them hot.

Psychological Generalizations

Most submissives are strong people. They tend to be in charge of their lives, have strong opinions, and be relied on in a crisis. They’re often not very good at drawing and enforcing their own boundaries - instead, they take on too much responsibility for meeting other people's needs and desires.

Explicitly negotiating which behaviors are acceptable in an upcoming BDSM scene is good practice for finding your boundaries and having your right to set them validated. Indeed, so is submission itself - boundaries may be crossed, but even the act of crossing them teaches you where they are and that they matter. Basically, submissives tend to be people who experience themselves as having too much responsibility and want to stop for a while.

On the other hand, many (though not all) doms are people who experience themselves as having not enough control in their daily lives. Sometimes they don't feel they have enough control of themselves; other times, they feel they don't control their environments. Someone who feels at the mercy of forces (s)he can't control - at work, in traffic jams, in the vagaries of health and wealth, or even in family relationships - can find it soothing and rewarding to create a world within a world where, for a little while, everything goes precisely as (s)he chooses.

Being dominant can restore a sense of power and efficacy to people who fear they will fail in their responsibilities. To have a submissive trust you enough to become vulnerable to you, and to succeed at taking care of him or her, can be deeply reassuring.

These are not perfectly opposed sets. Responsibility and control, while related, don’t equate. And different personalities react to different aspects of the same situation. But it's a place to start. If you take nothing else away from this essay, remember that submissives don't have to be weak characters. Rather, they deliberately make themselves vulnerable, which is its own kind of strength.

The Joys of Being Bad

This essay has focused on the happy, functional, communication-based, consensual world that we call BDSM. But it can be very powerful to write rape and other non-consensual fantasies, as well as the grey areas of Stockholm Syndrome, blackmail, power imbalances, mind control, and all the other forms of coercion or influence.

These stories, when played for eroticism, often appeal to BDSMers, and I definitely encourage you not to shy away from them. Just don't conflate consensual BDSM with coercion, or assume that one leads to the other. A consensual top is not a rapist waiting to happen. It's the difference between writing two lovers pretending to be a vampire and victim, and writing about a vampire killing its prey. Both are fun to read, and to write, but only one is fun to experience.



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