Henry, one of my older interviewees, insisted to start the interview with a reconstruction: “If I first tell you, how I find myself in this sort of situ- ation. Firstly, you know, when a youngster, a boy that’s growing up, he has a nocturnal emission or a wet dream or whatever you want to call it. I can remember mine very clearly and what it was, my parents played quite a bit of ‘Whist’, you know the card-game ‘Whist’. (...) And in my dream, as they were playing cards, this long carpet formed a tent, underneath them. And in my dream, I was under that tent, amongst a sea of legs. And suddenly, again in my dream, my head was gripped, you know, by my hair, by my aunt. And she forced my head there [her ‘genitals’] and I was made to be there and just take it from there. And she was wearing nothing. Obviously, this is all a dream. And I suddenly found myself wet and sticky and its hap- pened. And that to me, is the first sort of sign of submissiveness to ladies” (Interview-file H.: 1).
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Henry thus quite clearly identifies his ‘deviant’ fantasies that do not revolve around the obligatory coitus, but still caused him to have ‘sexual relief’, to be the first ‘signifiers’ of his ‘submissiveness’ towards women. This reflects the powerful impact the ‘psychiatrization of perversions’ can have on individual conceptions and relations to ‘self’.
In ‘The History of Sexuality’ (Vol. 1) Michel Foucault argued that the dominant culture’s repression of marginal groups was responsible for creat- ing the stereotypicality of elements that defined a deviant identity.
Andrea: Could you tell me about your experience with SM?
Diabolo: My experience with SM. How, how much do you want to know?
I tell you the whole thing, a whole life-story as quick as I can. O.K. I was at a Spanner-meeting and they asked us, what our first experi- ence of an ‘SM-impulse’ was. I said: ‘When I was nine years old my favourite teacher, I stood outside her office and I thought I was going to be punished and got excited. I was a little bit frightened about it but more excited. In those times they still had caning so I thought I would get that but she just left me standing outside. Since then I did nothing, I was in the closet. (In D.: 1)
Apart from the fact that the notion of a ‘SM’-impulse was an a priori in this situation, Diabolo tried to explain his interest and enjoyment of the ‘bod- ily practices’ of consensual ‘SM’ with recollections of ‘deviant’ fantasies. At a later interview Diabolo ‘traced’ his interests back to another situation. D.: “... I remember one aunt of mine used to watch wrestling on the televi- sion and that gave me an enormous erotic kind of impulse later on. I think that was a sort of very early, pre-puberscent sort of inclination towards a certain fascination” (In D.: 9).
Through a coincidence Diabolo felt forced to let go of his ‘face’ (Goffman 1967) of ‘normality’: “I just pretended that I was an ordinary heterosexual guy and I had no submissive inclinations or interest in SM. Until I had a girlfriend who was an acupuncturist and everything came out. Particularly when she got into electro-acupuncture to cure my arthritis. And it seemed to work as well, it did me a world of good but anyway there was no denying with her after that. And no denying to myself.”
Andrea: So that was more or less the trigger that you thought: ‘Well,
now, now I do it.’?
D.: Yeah, then I knew that it was for real. That it wasn’t just some sick- ness in my head. It transcended from fantasy into reality and then I’d taken a step and from then on it was just a matter of time, I think, until I found what I was looking for. (Interview-file D.: 3)
Through the perceived sensations of ‘lived body’ Diabolo felt able to reject the notion of ‘pathology’ and started to practice consensual ‘SM’.
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Asked about the meaning consensual ‘SM’ had for herself, Sue tried to remember the starting-point of her ‘sexual inclinations’ and thus applies the ‘regulatory fictions’ of power/knowledge (Foucault) onto herself: “I’m not really sure when my first inclinations towards S/M really started but I do know that I’ve always been sadomasochistic in a submissive rather than a dominant way ..., the first real sort of inclinations probably occurred about ehm two or three years ago” (In S. 2.: 1).
Berger and Luckmann (1966) argued that social identity is derived from a dialectical process between the individual and society. This dialectical phenomenon becomes apparent in some of the expressions of the inter- viewees. Pat, who defines herself as a lesbian ‘bottom’, stated: “..., well, even when I was a child I had a sort of strange attraction to things like, there was a program on TV called ‘Branded’, which was a TV-series about a man that was thrown out of the foreign legion and the beginning sequence was always him being, you know his buttons were ritually ripped of his jacket and then his sword got broken and he was sent off into the desert. I kind of identified with him, I felt like the outcast, the noble outcast. And I didn’t quite understand that as a sexual feeling, I was only 8 years old or whatever. But ...”
Andrea: It was sort of identifying with someone being cast out?
Pat: Yes, and having this sort of and being, and being and, and, he
was cast out but he was a shame and honorable at the same time, they, he was thrown out for something he didn’t really do, you know that’s the scenario for SM. I thought about that, since then I identified that as perhaps early, early, not roots but early signposts. (Interview-file 1: 1)
These examples show how deeply the traditional discourses of ‘sexuality’ are internalized by some interviewees. As they conceive their specific social- ization as the determination of their ‘sexual identity’, their view of ‘self’ remains more or less static. In this process separate and disparate events are ‘melted’ into a coherent life-history and the narrativization enables indi- viduals to construct a meaningful story of their lives.
Shiva: “My SM-practices are very light, but I started to discover that I had those interests when I was sixteen years old. I had a boyfriend then and we had a game of tennis and it annoyed me. And afterwards we went into the kitchen and he said: ‘I am going to put you over my knee and spank you.’ And he did and it gave me the most sexual ‘high’ ” (Interview-file 2: 1). At a later point Shiva links ‘those interests to experiences in her early child- hood: “When I was three I had a nurse-maid who used to spank me and I can remember it very distinctively, I wouldn’t say it gave me a sexual high at three years old. I never forgot the experience and she used to come and try to humiliate me in public by parading me in the park in a nappy when I was three years old. And take me back to the house and put me over her
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knee, spank me and she told me that the fan that was going round and round would come down crashing on me and kill me if I was naughty” (Interview-file 2: 5).
Stereotypes about ‘sexuality’ and ‘sadomasochism’ are widespread in society and as families, schools and early friendships are generally not included in the private sphere of ‘sexuality’, most of my interviewees got labelled informally at a later point in their life through contacts within the Scene or they attached the label and/or modifications of it onto themselves after being influenced through discourses of ‘sexuality’ (e.g. books, magazines, contact ads).