Hurt me, Daddy
Femininity and the problem of masochism
I like to tell my friends that I’ll die knowing I truly suffered for desire, and not many people can say that. New friends ask, “Do you mean love?”, but my old friends don’t. They know I mean desire.
I’ve known love too, but love is different. Love illuminates, adapts and accommodates. Love requires an elastic heart, infinite flexibility, eternal adaptability. Desire just needs a rack and a boot. A man who could (and who may want to) kill you with his hand on your neck.
I often say that young men who want a little taste of death go to war, and women pick a man who’ll knock them around. This isn’t true for every abusive relationship dynamic – I’ve known the sweetest women and girls, with infinitely elastic hearts, who end up on the receiving end of the darkest male fantasies. But for your Lana del Reys (‘He hit me, and it felt like a kiss’) and the feminine counterpart of Rihanna’s Desperado (‘A man whose heart is hollow… I'm not trying to go against you. Actually, I'm going with you’) the desire to be destroyed is their own. Choosing to hurt is as much of an activity as anything else; in making that choice, feminine passivity is exposed for the myth it is.
You can consider this shadow feminism, as Jack Halberstam defined it in The Queer Art of Failure. Seeking destruction with a lover’s hand is a grand refusal to conform to a western positivist mode of being, where ‘success’ (social, economic, reproductive) is the standard aspiration. Embracing subjugation recognises femininity, in part, as a failure to be masculine, an idea first articulated explicitly by Freud. Many of the most compelling contemporary feminine art practitioners – your Lana del Rey figures, E-girls, Red Scare post-leftists, sodomitical mothers like Maggie Nelson – lean in hard to the configuration of womanhood associated with masochism, sacrifice, self-subjugation and unbecoming, and find this unreproductive, nonnormative, even queer, state a fertile ground for artistic creation.
Channelling a femininity that refuses to conform to positive, vitalist ways of being clearly has creative potential for the feminine artist, but can it be personally productive? Can embodying this negativity offer a queer line of flight from the oppression of the suburbs, the dry inertia of conversations about decor at the bourgeoise dinner party? Or will it destroy women, with the shit and shame that comes with containing this dynamics’ complexities in a soft, affective body that strives to live, to be, to persevere?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I spent two years of my early twenties with a weak man who degraded me. The sex was electric; I had never felt as powerful, divine, erotic or energised before as I did under him. He was a piece of shit. And I was… what?
When it ended, I didn’t masturbate for a year. Achieving orgasm alone still isn’t easy. I don’t let my happy, unbound perversions blossom and take me. The shadows that stimulate me, frighten me. But they still exist.
I recently read artist Brad Phillip’s literary debut Essays and Fictions, which is mostly concerned with addiction and sadomasochism. For him, sadism is a conceptual, sexual exercise — a substitute for the cock that opiates make useless. So, the ability to fuck is gone but the desire remains, and from there, the imagination departs for perversions to stimulate it where the body won’t satisfy. He writes about delivering orders to women via email, commanding how to degrade themselves and when, continents away from him; women with teen proportions chained to radiators; and little cumsluts, bound to beds, stimulated by vibrators for hours, unable to escape, racked by their ecstasy.
If sadism can be intellectual/conceptual, masochism is often physical: a way of imposing intensity on the body. Pain is an unavoidable reminder that you’re living, sensitive, receptive.
Sadomasochists who are responsible for their desires have safe words and distinct boundaries. I once looked into experiencing a Shibari (Japanese rope bondage) session. The idea of being hung, hurting and untouched deeply appeals to me. My interest went so far that the Shibari practitioner sent me the pre-session document full of terms and conditions, health and safety guidance, rules, advice. Then, my desire fell off. I don’t want to know the risks or how to avoid them; I want to hurt and experience the fall.
In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the master is one who is recognised, and the slave is one whose identity is negated. Establishing identity always requires winning the recognition of the other. Once that recognition is won, you must acknowledge the other exists for herself, as someone who can differentiate, and not only for you. In that process, the master risks becoming dependent on the slave, and slowly losing subjectivity to her. To maintain subjectivity as a master, you must scrupulously deny your dependence on the slave.
Maintaining subjectivity and avoiding dependence is a hard line for the master to walk. Deny the slave to the point she loses all will and becomes an object, and the master can no longer recognise himself as a subject through the slave’s recognition of him. Then, he can’t help but think of himself as somehow an object, too. In Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love, she compellingly argues that the question “Do you consent?”, when asked during ritual sexual humiliation in The Story of O, stops the slave from becoming mere object to the master – she can still recognise the master’s omnipotence and acquiesce to it.
Freud argued that the masochist derives pleasure in pain, but Benjamin argues that “current psychoanalytic theory appreciates that pain is a route to pleasure only when it involves submission to an idealised figure” (2013: p.139). If feminine identity is a negation of subjecthood – or more like, if one iteration of feminine identity can be taken as a failure to be masculine (as in, positivist, productive, vital; a human figure the upholds the social order, rather than a force of nature that erodes it) then the idealised figure must be man. Man, who was made in the image of God. Man, from whose rib we sprung.
Desire takes you to the desert, where you’ll fast for forty days and forty nights.
And if it’s your fate, while you wait in the desert, you’ll be tempted by the Devil.
Feminine artists have a lot to contend with. Christine Battersby in Gender and Genius: Toward a Feminist Aesthetics makes the case that the scalpel, the chisel, the pen – all the tools of artistic practice – have been seen as a kind of ‘penis-extension’ to re-establish male divinity on a new, intellectual level (1986: p.50). Battersby reasons that the creative capacity of male artists has been analogised throughout history with the creative potential of the male God, in whose image they were made. The male artists’ relationship with God is privileged; from Him they receive their visions, to enact His will on earth. There’s no better example of this than St Augustine, one of our great writers of desire, suffering, and sublimity – canonised for his miraculous ability to commune with God and reveal His insights with his pen. As the male artist is likened to God through his mastery of the earth – his ability to transform mud into substance – the penis itself comes to symbolise male mastery; that is, what distinguishes masculine creative potential from feminine absence. A key has a door to contain its possibilities; a hand has a glove.
In the masochistic relationship where “pain is a route to pleasure only when it involves submission to an idealised figure” (Benjamin, 2013: p.139), the idealised figure could be Man-in-the-image-of-God. That is, God the Father. When the feminine masochist begs, “hurt me, Daddy”, she might be engaging in a play with divinity. The Old Testament’s Song of Solomon is usually seen as one of the first texts where the longing for recognition from the beloved is viewed as a metaphor for the ceaseless, unsatisfied, longing for God.
Of course, God is the light of the world; the healer of the blind, a white shining beacon of hope. His counterpart in darkness, decrepitude and negation is the Devil.
Lucifer was the first rebel. The power of rebellion doesn’t exist in success; Satan lost the war in heaven. But from then out, God had to contend with the forces of evil corrupting his perfect creation – and it was Eve, made from a bit of spare male rib, who invited Adam to bite into the apple of the knowledge of good and evil. Lucifer is known as the Lightbringer.
Before Lucifer was the Christian devil, he was the male personification of the planet belonging to Venus, goddess of Love. Venus had many aspects; at one time she would be worshipped as a goddess of Heavenly Love, and at another, as Venus Cloacina, Our Lady of the Sewers. Her forms encompass desires both sacred and profane.
Lucifer – the bringer of the knowledge of good and evil – is necessarily a representation of Venus, the goddess of sex. And Eve, as a woman, had to be the human catalyst to birth the essential knowledge of negativity into our world.
To desire and fuck is to play with good and evil, life and death. When you cum, death erupts in life – you achieve the willing abandonment, the absolute negation of self in a moment. There’s the reason the French so artfully call it le petit mort.
Dredging through all this metaphor has a purpose. Feminine masochism should be considered a play with sublimity, that lies where physical sex meets the symbolic. In Albert Camus’ The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, the rebel slave “affirms his own power through continually questioning the superiority of the master” (1992; p.24). The feminine masochist affirms her subjecthood – the source of her power – through recognition from the Master. And that’s when the play begins.
If you’ve listened to the Red Scare podcast, or know anything about gay subculture, you’ll probably have heard the expression “topping from the bottom”. A source of impish delight for the female masochist (the true masochist; not the one who wants their desire reified in a bureaucratic contract with safe words, opt-outs, a suspension of the Real) must be forcing the master to recognise the subjectivity of the slave. For the master to acknowledge his slave is a subject like himself, he must become aware that his own understanding of himself as a person is dependent on the slave’s recognition of him. And this is where we have to leave the dialectic – the binary opposition of master or slave, behind.
To fuck is to move. To move from the kitchen to the bedroom, from standing to the floor, from above to below. Desire itself is a movement between intensities. When a woman chooses a sadist who wants to negate, deny and humiliate her, her desire may originate in the hope that the master will question his own superiority, as he comes to understand that he needs to be recognised as an authority by the feminine slave.
Like Camus’ slave affirms his power by persistently challenging the authority of the master, the feminine slave aims at destabilising masculine authority by proving his selfhood is dependent on her. Like Lucifer, the feminine masochist rebels against the good (the comfort of nurturing love, the stability of procreative sex) to make space for darkness in life. To bring a little light, if you will. Maybe then another movement can occur – the hunter might resemble the hunted. New forms of desire may emerge from the original rebellion – strange, free, happy, unbound perversities, blossoming. New forms of desire are always liberated whenever the people rebel against old authority. When you top from the bottom, are you actually a switch?
I expect that, usually, the feminine masochist won’t pull off the heist (I know that I failed, fail, will continue to fail). But the erotic potential of the desire doesn’t lie in succeeding. The desire is for the rebellion.
