COMING UP FOR AIR: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN’S MASOCHISM

J. M.

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ABSTRACT: In this short piece, I explore my personal formation as a sexual subject in relation to male power. I combine memories, dreams, and fantasies with theoretical reflections informed by feminist psychoanalytic thought, in particular Jessica Benjamin’s work in The Bonds of Love. I use my own experience to illustrate the inevitable ways in which women’s selfhood becomes split along the lines of activity/passivity and subjectivity/objectification, and how these divisions are often expressed most vividly in embodied communications between men and women rather than in language. I consider the ways in which the intense bodily experience of sadomasochistic play has helped me to heal these divisions in myself.

“We love, and we play, in order to learn how to survive letting go.” – Lynda Hart

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I am flying through the forest on my father’s shoulders. His eyes are bright and steam curls from his nose with each heavy breath. I dig my fingers into his soft flannel collar. I am Atreyu and the sky is endless.

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In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin traces the roots of women’s masochistic desires to the conditions of patriarchy, in which women can only attain recognition vicariously through their attachments to men. Our early relationships, writes Benjamin, determine the ways in which this structure becomes psychically installed. Fathers in particular often act as the culturally ordained gatekeepers of subjectivity, determining whether their daughters’ gestures of activity, desire, and power will be validated. Reading Benjamin, I remember the father of my early childhood. He throws me in the air; swings me wide out in his arms; carries me to the roof to sit beside him as he works. In doing these things, he demonstrates that while I may be small, I am made of strong stuff. I am a weighty, solid being; propelled by his energy, I am introduced to the air. My father’s style of play allows me to feel safe while feeling thrillingly afraid. The pleasures of passivity and activity are inseparable in these early moments of identificatory love.

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Two tiny girl bodies in a vast and roaring sea, my cousin Laura and I are practicing our mastery over the waves. When we hear yelling in the distance we realize that we can no longer touch bottom. Laura’s father emerges in front of us, grabs me in his arms, and throws me towards the shore, my head filling with salt water as I crash below the surface. Again and again I am thrown roughly forward and then held briefly by the water as Laura gets her turn. Back at the cottage, we sit one each on his knees, wrapped in towels and glowing with pride as he recounts the story of our rescue to our mothers.

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It is a requirement of the social world that girls learn to live a split between subject and object, developing the self along two separate tracks. Laura and I are mermaid queens when we play in the water, but how long can two girls survive on their own? It is for our own good that we are violently returned to the shore, to a world where we do not make the rules. D. W. Winnicott writes that “it is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found” (185). Winnicott is a paternal presence woven throughout Benjamin’s text. Laura and I hold our private ocean world inside even as we delight to be given roles in Uncle Peek’s drama.

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In an old family movie showing a trip to the pool, the camera turns to my brother with his arms plunged beneath the water. A laughing voice behind the camera asks “Where’s J.?” and my brother grins. Several moments pass before he lets me rise to the surface. I throw my arms around his neck. My hero.

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“No matter what theory you read,” writes Benjamin, “the father is always the way into the world” (93). In psychoanalytic theories of the family, it is the father’s role to inaugurate the child’s romance with social and cultural life. For me, however, this role was clearly played by my older brother. While a father stays at home next to mother, a brother leads one swiftly out the door: to school, to the arcade, to movies and songs, to older boys who invent their own language in which to joke and jeer. My brother, an awkward and troubled kid who was largely rejected by his peers, was my idol and my guru.

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I am watching TV on my mother’s bed when my brother comes into the room. Do you know about Zen meditation? he asks me. One big hand pins my shoulder to the bed and the other begins to wiggle its fingers into my rib cage. Don’t smile, he instructs. Don’t laugh. Mind over body. Later, at my father’s house, he tells me to stand on the arm of the couch, to make my body stiff and fall straight onto the cushions, resisting the urge to throw my hands out to protect myself. My eyes begin to tear as the fabric drags across my cheek, but again and again I fall, feeling the rush of pleasure in my gut. Body over mind.

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Benjamin carefully captures the paradoxes inherent in sadomasochistic desire. From the outside, she notes, the scene of erotic domination appears to involve a total polarization of roles: the dominant partner inflates his subjective power by reducing the other to an object through repeated acts of violation and control. Yet, according to Benjamin, what each member of the sadomasochistic couple actually seeks is quite the opposite: an experience of mutuality, release, safety, pleasure (72). The masochist, who appears to pursue pain, terror, and debasement, in fact longs to be truly seen, held, and protected by her partner. The sadist, in his turn, depends on the masochist to contain and detoxify his destructive impulses. In my experience with sadomasochistic play, this confluence of desires leads to a powerful unconscious alliance between sadist and masochist, who conjointly invest in the masochist’s ability to tolerate increasing levels of intensity. For both partners, the scene only succeeds if the masochist emerges more vital and present than when they began.

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Bound and blindfolded, I feel my lover’s hand wrap around my throat. I am skin that reddens and chafes. I am a muscle that clenches and spasms. At the point where my body gives up, my self struggles to the surface, gasping for air.

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“Masochism,” writes Lynda Hart, “can be seen not only as a strategy of escaping aloneness, but also a search for aloneness with the other: by letting the other remain in control, the masochist hopes to find a safe open space in which to abandon the protective false self and allow the hidden self to emerge” (72). Usually, I stay alert while my lover tortures me, watching his eyes and guiding his hands. But, sometimes, I sink so deep into myself that I forget he is there, holding me under.

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During my first weeks of college, a memory surfaces. It is evening at my father’s house; I am already in my nightgown. I return from the bathroom and sit on the floor in front of the couch where my teenaged brother is reclining. A moment later he is behind me, leaning over my shoulder, examining me as he manipulates my labia with his hands. The memory feels mundane; it could be any evening in any number of years. I focus on the TV and keep very still, trying to be a good patient.

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When the body is placed in situations of overwhelming threat, its automatic response is to prepare to flee or to fight: the muscles tense, the heart rate rises, and the senses become hyper-attuned to cues from the environment (Ogden, Pain, and Fisher 268). If fighting or fleeing is not viable, the body switches to an immobilizing tactic: it goes limp, freezes, or becomes an automaton, unthinkingly complying with commands. Sometimes the body may shut down internally as well, entering a trance-like state. In other cases, the externally motionless body maintains an internal state of hyper-arousal, constantly searching for a moment in which fighting back or escaping might be possible (Ibid. 270-271). An immobilized body may carry the mark of this experience long after the threat has dissipated: maintaining a state of tension, forever awaiting an opportunity to come alive (Ibid. 272).

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My earliest sexual fantasy begins with an entry way into a dark, masculine space, filled with smoke and leather. A man casually splayed on a couch throws darts at a woman who is bound spread-eagle against the wall, aiming for her nipples and crotch. Past this corridor is an enormous warehouse with harsh fluorescent lighting, where rows and rows of women lie on white cots. Their bodies are covered by a curtain above the waist, forming a small white fort around their heads. At the foot of each cot stands a teenaged boy, whose role is to learn to manipulate and penetrate the women’s genitals. Older men walk through the rows, instructing the timid boys. The women keep very still, playing dead.

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In retrospect, I realize that this fantasy emerged during the first year I began to grow breasts–little anthills that I stubbornly hid beneath a coat, even during the warmer months. In her book Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, Carol Gilligan vividly describes the pubescent girl’s fall from grace as her social world suddenly stops responding to her assertions of subjectivity. Some girls learn to shut up and look pretty; others of us walk around all day with our fists balled up in our pockets. Though at the time my fantasy was saturated with pleasure, it now sounds like a nightmarish rendering of the colonization and commodification of the female body; a terrifying vision of what lay ahead of me as a woman. I remember focusing on the tension between the women’s exposed, objectified lower halves and the secret of their subjectivities, safely hidden behind the curtains. Removed completely from the gaze of the male world, the women were free to experience unbounded pleasure, pain, or rage. As I approached climax, I would imagine the moment when one of the women would accidentally flinch, revealing herself to be a living, breathing creature.

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In a dream, my brother flies a boat over the ocean. Laura and I cling to each other in the back seat, giddy, exhilarated. He turns us towards the shore, and suddenly the boat is hurtling downward while we scream for him to hit the brakes. After the crash, under the surface, there is slowness and peace; we regain control, free ourselves from the boat, and determine which direction to swim to come ashore. Just as I grasp my suitcase, I feel my brother’s hands around my ankles. Is he asking me to save him, or is he trying to make me drown?

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In a jocular footnote, Benjamin points out that “a good sadist is hard to find” (64). The sadist of our fantasies intuits our every desire, giving us what we want before we know we want it. He perceives our limits with perfect clarity, bringing us right up to the edge but never pushing us over. He is always full of power and strength, surprising and thrilling, but never reckless, retaliatory, or selfish; he takes us for a ride and then smoothly brings us to the earth. Sometimes in sadomasochistic play we crash violently against the disjunction between this fantasy and reality–the reality that the person to whom we grant total responsibility for our pleasure and safety is fallible, merely human. These days I find myself wondering whether I could lay the wish for a savior to rest, and open myself to the gentle eyes of a witness.

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Over time my fantasy scene forms a narrative. One of the girls on the cots becomes particular. She reaches her hand down, crossing the boundary of the curtain, and the boy at her feet reaches his hand up to meet it. They are found out and punished for their transgression, forced through a series of trials. On raised platforms far above the factory floor, they lie on a bed of spikes; they spend days in a room that is first burning hot and then freezing cold. The naked lovers cling together and endure.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Gilligan, Carol, and Lyn Mikel Brown. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Hart, Lynda. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Ogden, Pat, Clare Pain, and Janina Fisher. “Sensorimotor Approach to the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 29 (2006): 263-279.

Winnicott, Donald W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. New York: International Universities Press,  1965.

J. M. is a graduate student in clinical psychology at the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University in New York. She received her undergraduate degree at Grinnell College, where she pursued an independent course of study combining psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. Her MA thesis investigated the body experiences of transgender men and was presented at the APA’s Division 39 conference in 2013. She is currently beginning her dissertation work on the topic of women’s masochism.

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