marksimpson.com

A good sadist is hard to find.

But, I can reveal, a good masochist is even harder to find. When­ever I hear the words, ‘Use me, abuse me, do any­thing you want with me!’ my heart and my man­hood always sinks. This is not because I have any prob­lem with the idea of using some­one. Rather it’s that I know that not far behind this invi­ta­tion to self­ish­ness are always the words, ‘Not that! This! Not there! Here!’

And Anita Phillips, author of In Defence of Masochism, won­ders why masochists have such a bad name. It’s a word that promises so much but then woe­fully fails to deliver. Far from being a slave to your desires, it turns out to be their plea­sure that they’re inter­ested in, just like every­one else. Worse, not only is their plea­sure even more tediously exact­ing than most people’s, you also have to pre­tend that it is your plea­sure. While the idea of hav­ing some­one around the home to clean the toi­let and bath­room floor with their tongue might appeal in abstract kind of way, it always, always turns out to be much more work and much, much more tedious than doing it your­self and con­duct­ing a common-all-garden, non-masochistic, missionary-position, under-the-floral-duvet-every-Sunday-morning rela­tion­ship. As Phillips admits, the best part­ner for a masochist is not a sadist, but another masochist.

Sado-masochism, when all’s said and done, is a bit of a con and should be pros­e­cuted under the Trade Descrip­tions Act.

Nonethe­less, there’s plenty of it about these days — and it’s sell­ing like hot candle-wax. Madonna’s early Nineties flir­ta­tion with s/m chic seems to have sent it squeak­ing and creak­ing up and down the cat­walks and into adver­tis­ing ever since — to the point where a stilet­toed heel threat­en­ing a man’s bum-hole on a bill­board hardly pro­vokes any com­ment, let alone the rear-end pile-up it might have done just ten years ago. And while David Cronenberg’s Crash, a film about peo­ple who take plea­sure being on the receiv­ing end of muti­lat­ing car acci­dents, did pro­voke out­rage and cen­sor­ship from some quar­ters, many found it rather banal. Mean­while the recent film Sick: the Life and Death of Bob Flana­gan, Super­masochist seems to have ele­vated masochism to a kind of super-heroism; how long before we hear lit­tle boys whin­ing: ‘Mum, can I have a leather har­ness and cling-film cape for Xmas, please?’.

Which almost begs the point of a book with the name In Defence of Masochism. How­ever, a recent Euro­pean Court rul­ing asserted that assault can­not be con­sented to (which means, of course, an end to box­ing, surgery and sup­port­ing Arse­nal) sug­gests that there is still an argu­ment to be made. And, even if most peo­ple who don’t wear wigs and sus­penders for a liv­ing are more laid back about the issue, there are still a num­ber of com­mon mis­con­cep­tions and prej­u­dices about masochism — most of which Anita Phillips dis­patches here with aplomb. Most notably, the idea that masochism is always some­one else’s per­ver­sion. Phillips inves­ti­gates, via Freud and Amer­i­can aca­d­e­mic Leo Bersani the uni­ver­sal­ity of masochis­tic impulses, the thin line between plea­sure and pain, and shows how the cur­dling of these impulses into a con­di­tion and a type changed what it means to be human.

‘Masochism’ is one of the inven­tions of late nine­teenth cen­tury sex­ol­ogy in the Gothic shape of Baron Dr Richard Von Kraft-Ebing. It was only ever intended to apply to men; women were ‘nat­u­rally’ masochis­tic, so plea­sure in pain on their part was not ‘per­verse’ and there­fore not a prob­lem to be explained or pathol­o­gised. This was part of a shift in gen­der roles in the West in the Nine­teenth Cen­tury which was con­cerned with, we are told, insti­tu­tion­al­is­ing women’s sub­ju­ga­tion. As Phillips points out, ‘Dante’s ordeal in the Inferno to be reunited with Beat­rice, to John Donne’s love poetry, sac­ri­fi­cial mas­cu­line love has been a cru­cial theme, only in this cen­tury has what for many cen­turies seemed the nat­ural, desir­able form of male love been rede­fined as effem­i­nate per­ver­sity, masochism.’

Phillips believes that this refor­mu­la­tion of male iden­tity that excluded masochism made mas­culin­ity ‘bla­tantly misog­y­nisitc, emo­tion­ally inept and homo­pho­bic’. She also believes that it was this new mas­culin­ity which led in part to the ‘cor­rec­tive’ of fem­i­nism. Iron­i­cally, the exclu­sion of masochism from the male psy­che has pro­duced a pub­lic sce­nario of their pun­ish­ment and chas­tise­ment by women which con­tin­ues today. The fem­i­nist is Ms Whiplash.

To be sure, we can see that male masochism is now mak­ing some­thing of a come­back — what else could explain The Verve and the tor­tured, feel-my-stigmata ‘soft lad’/‘Emo’ ten­dency? And while this rise of male self-dramatisation/self-obsession may or may not be good news for women in gen­eral, it is def­i­nitely good news for women like Phillips who enjoy masochis­tic sex. Para­dox­i­cally, now that men are relin­quish­ing their grip on the whip han­dle, women need no longer feel like they are betray­ing their sex by express­ing fan­tasies of domination.

But as with most cases of spe­cial plead­ing, Phillips’ argu­ment often slips into evan­ge­lism. We are told that masochists are ‘imag­i­na­tive risk-takers’ and that ‘real eroti­cism’ requires a cer­tain ‘shat­ter­ing of the self’. In other words, masochists are on a higher sex­ual plane to those poor souls who don’t want to get whipped, trussed up and locked in a cup­board for three days. Appar­ently, ‘the shat­ter­ing qual­ity of sex needs to be diluted for those who can­not fully han­dle it.… {and they} make a kind of civic virtue from their own neces­sity to retreat from the chal­lenge of a full-blooded encounter.’

But those of us who pre­fer our sex weak and thin, with the gore and entrails strained out are not nec­es­sar­ily lily-livered. Per­haps most peo­ple refuse to indulge their masochist lean­ings any fur­ther than a spot of slightly embar­rassed spank­ing or coy nip­ple tweak­ing because they have bet­ter things to do with their time than try­ing to ‘dis­cover their lim­its’ remak­ing Hellraiser.

Orig­i­nally appeared in Inde­pen­dent on Sunday, 1997