“Sado Machismo” is an essay written by Edmund White and published in New Times, 8 January 1979, reprinted in the collection The Burning Library (Knopf, 1994)
White wrote this at a very different time: Not even ten years after Stonewall, before Cruising and definitely before HIV. The collection notes this essay was “… published during the height of Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexual campaign in Florida and in the midst of the Briggs Amendment campaign in California.” Gays and lesbians fighting for their rights to work as teachers were in the news, but a certain kind of “queer chic” was in the air too.
While hip straights are socializing with gays and coyly hinting that they themselves might have ‘tendencies’, that they, too, might swing, gays in small towns are losing their jobs and being ostracized for their sexual orientation.
And so it may seem a bit ill-timed on my part to bring up the unassimilable new fact of gay sado-masochism. Most of the straight people I know, especially women, are revolted by it. [Pg.56-7]
White could have done a little more research, as straight/bi groups like TES and SOJ were well-established by ’79. Still, he does foresee a crossover between gays and straights via sadomasochism.
Gay fashions quickly become Fashion, and gay sado-masochism may portend yet another trend among straights, at least those living in this decade rather than some more comfortable time past. The dirty book stores are already crowded with magazines for heterosexual sadists and masochists (Barbarella in stiletto heels whipping a supine man in a French maid’s mobcap and starched white apron). Not long ago, one New York leather bar for gay men experimented for setting aside Tuesday for straight S and M couples, and one woman prostitute I know makes a killing pissing on male commodities brokers. Even the S and M boutiques attract timid straight couples asking to examine that, uh, restraint harness… [Pg.57]
White questions whether the theatricalized sadism of S&M scenes is the same thing as actual cruelty and violence.
More to the point, sadism itself is not cruel. Those gay ‘top men’ I’ve quizzed have admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that they seldom inflict much pain beyond a few slaps and light licks with a belt. So theatrical (or filmic) is sado-masochism that even the blows are designed to look and sound more violent to the (usually imaginary) audience than they actually are; the belt is doubled, the punishing hand is cupped.
[…] Ankle restraints are plush-lined; the paddle is commedia dell’arte slapstick.
The violence resides almost entirely in the language.[Pg.59]
Like Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and other intellectuals of the time, White asks:
Why is S and M erupting now, precisely when gays presumably have been liberated from role-playing stereotypes and may at last be on the verge of integration into straight society? Could it be that gays don’t want to go respectable, that S and M is a nostalgia for the criminal past? Could it be that liberation has given gays permission to stop being sissies and to become the he-men forbidden by the typology of the past? [Pg.60]
He dismisses the ideas that gay leathermen are “identifying with the aggressor” and attempting to blend into straight society, or “that gay S and M is a safe outlet for throttled rage.” Instead, he says that the leatherman is playing out the tensions that drive society but are largely disavowed.
These tensions are largely political. Like Marie Antoinette’s milkmaids or those Spanish ladies who dressed up as majas, the gay sado-masochist, though himself a member of the elite, impersonates working men — truck drivers, construction workers, telephone linemen. When I’ve asked leather guys whether they’d rather make it with a real Con Ed man or a lawyer who looks like one, the question baffles them. It lies outside the system of their fantasies. In their hearts they may know that the lawyer would be the more adventurous and uninhibited lover, but their passion demands he at least appear to be a worker. [Pg.62]
(Compare this to Genet’s The Balcony, in which the clients of the brothel request a high degree of verisimilitude in the performances of the sex workers in their roleplay scenarios, yet also demand assurance that the sex workers are not actually what they are performing.)
White sees BDSM’s (supposed) lack of humor and irony as its point:
Whereas ordinary social interactions are characterized by the joke, humor has always been inimical to sadism, just as light is to vampires. This humor that defuses outrage (no matter how justified) and dampens indignation (no matter how righteous) is just another name for surrender. Sado-masochism rejects the laugh that paralyzes social conscience. Within the charged space surrounding the master and his slave, true deeds are performed. One man does submit to another. One man does humiliate another. The same relief we experience in watching a Shakespeare play, the relief of participating in action devoid of irony and freighted with clear values, is the release offered to the sadist and masochist.
[Pg.63]
(This is the opposite position of many other theorizers of BDSM, who see BDSM’s theatricality, its artifice, as both its saving grace and its virtue.)
He goes on to explain that BDSM is safe, redemptive re-enactment of the violence and domination latent in society, that we dare not express directly.
White walks back his more extreme claims, and discusses his concern about how “All too many leather men become so addicted to the scene that they won’t venture into jobs or social situations where they can’t wear their costumes; the fantasy of power has confined them to the gay ghetto.” [Pg.65] He makes the point that BDSM has nothing to do with the psychodynamics of fascism. “Political oppression feeds on sexual repression; S and M is too anarchic to serve the designs of Fascists.” [Pg.66]
More than 40 years later, what would White say? The irony he feared in the late 1970s has become the dominant mode of social and political discourse. Irony cloaks and enables right-wing violence and hatred, and centrist apathy and detachment. The worst thing you can be is “cringe”, to be too sincere, insufficiently ironic.
The works of fiction that have brought BDSM to the (hetero) mainstream, such as Secretary and the Fifty Shades books and movies, have reflected, rather than subverted or parodied, society’s dominant power dynamics: not just male/female, but employer/employee and husband/wife. In White’s theory, the women who enjoy these works do so because they are a more truthful representation of their experience of disempowerment in the workplace and the home.
