Power Struggles: Pain and Authenticity

in SM Play
Staci Newmahr
Buffalo State College

Despite a good deal of work on pain as a social/emotional construc-

tion, the assumption persists that pain is understood and experienced
as inherently and originally negative. Postmodern and constructionist
treatments of pain alike focus on negotiations and mediations of pain
from that point forward. This article explores the ways in which mem-
bers of an SM (sadomasochism) community frame, cast, and understand
the role of pain in their SM activities, toward the ultimate achievement
of authenticity in experiences of power-imbalanced social interaction.
This analysis, based on an in-depth ethnographic study of an SM com-
munity, identifies four main discourses of pain, three of which conform
to hegemonic understandings of pain as intrinsically negative experi-
ence. It reveals the complex strategies SM participants employ to make
sense of pain and contrasts this with a minority discourse in the com-
munity in which the provision and experience of pain is framed as a
desirable social, carnal, and emotional experience.
Keywords: pain, sadomasochism, ethnography, social construction

The growing scholarship on physical pain most often understands it in one of two
cultural contexts. The largest body of work on pain focuses on pain in the context
of disease and disability. From this medicalized view, people suffer pain, live with
pain, and give voice to their pain. Often chronic, pain is understood as a burden to
bear or negotiate, because of a failure of the body to live a pain-free (and therefore
healthy) life. Theoretically interesting questions focus on the impact of cultural, so-
cial, psychological, and emotional conditions on pain (Aldrich and Eccleston 2000;
Zborowski 1969).
In what initially appears to be a sharp contrast, postmodern research on the body
and emotion has broadened the parameters for the study of pain. Several scholars
have illustrated that pain is a socially contextualized and mediated experience
(Best 2007; Hughes and Paterson 1997), and some have argued that pain needs to

Please direct all correspondence to Staci Newmahr, Department of Sociology, Buffalo State College,
1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222; e-mail: newmahsd@buffalostate.edu.

Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 33, Issue 3, pp. 389–411, ISSN 0195-6086, electronic ISSN 1533-8665. © 2010
by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-
sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/si.2010.33.3.389.

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 390 Symbolic Interaction  Volume 33, Number 3, 2010

be understood as an emotion, contextualized and constructed in the social like all

other emotions (Bendelow 2006; Bendelow and Williams 1995). Still others have
focused on experiences, narratives, and implications of chronic pain (Alford and
Szanto 1996; Honkasalo 1998). Most of this work, however, assumes a particular and
fundamental characteristic of pain: that it is a negative experience. The argument
that people have the power to reshape the meaning of pain proceeds from the as-
sumption that pain is undesirable.
Morris’s seminal work (1991:285) sought to establish a postmodernist conceptu-
alization of pain in which the person in pain has “the power to create and to reshape
its meanings.” Yet even Morris’s analysis reinforces the medical model he thorough-
ly deconstructs, arguing, for example, that anyone who has endured intense pain
asks, “Why me? Why is this happening? Why won’t it stop?” (p. 31). Here he asserts
that the experience of pain is necessarily undesirable, so much so that it requires an
explanation.
This suggests that known or directed experiences of pain do not constitute pain
at all. If, as Morris argues earlier, “We experience pain only and entirely as we in-
terpret it” (p. 29), then it is plausible that people enduring intense pain might ask,
“How long can I do this? Will I pass out? Why don’t other people like this?” rather
than “Why won’t it stop?” After an exploration of the impact of the Marquis de
Sade on contemporary conceptualizations of pain, Morris calls for a postmodern
sociology of pain in which we triumph over it: “If we fail to rethink our pain we must
automatically accept the worn-out cultural thinking that is already in place and only
aggravating our torment” (p. 290). In his closing line he predicts that if we rethink
pain, we may find “a future worth the pain it takes to create” (p. 290). The quest to
conceptualize pain in such a way that its “torment” may be transcended assumes an
essential character of pain. Thus Morris’s analysis understands pain as intrinsically
negative. At “best,” it is a sacrifice, an investment toward its own defeat.
In her provocative treatise on pain, social theorist Elaine Scarry (1985) draws on
narratives of torture to deconstruct the language of pain and explore its symbolic
relationship to war and power. Though she argues at the abstract level that all pain is
entwined with symbolism of torture, power, and the unmaking of the self, she clearly
and deliberately defines pain as nonvoluntary. Following Melzack (1973), Scarry
(1985:52) posits that the most essential characteristic of pain is “sheer aversiveness.
. . . if to the person in pain it does not feel averse, and if it does not in turn elicit in
that person aversive feelings toward it, it is not in either philosophical discussions or
psychological definitions of it called pain.”
This confronts the constructionist problem directly; if the person in pain does not
feel averse to it, it is not pain. Though theoretically powerful, this solution leaves us
wanting; what, then, do we call experiences that “hurt,” but to which individuals are
not averse? What of ambivalent feelings about pain; does the consideration of an
experience as pain require aversion as the only feeling? Or must the aversion some-
how supersede all other responses? Scarry’s analysis of pain as the unmaking of the
self leaves little room for emotional ambivalence in and about pain experience.

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 Power Struggles 391

In recent years, sociologists of sport have undertaken a good deal of work on

pain, focusing more often on acute rather than chronic pain. Similarly invested in a
postmodern perspective on pain, scholars explore the cultural and social symbolism
of pain, and its relationship to gender (Howe 2004; Malcolm 2006; Messner 1990).
This literature emphasizes meaning-making processes of pain, exploring how ath-
letes interpret the pain, learn to hurt less, hurt tolerably, or ignore or romanticize the
pain. In this shift away from the medical model, the mediation of pain is a socially
constructed process, but the reality of pain—the hurt and the aversion to it—is again
taken for granted.
Much of this work, in which pain occurs in a competitive context, examines strate-
gies for enduring the pain for the sake of victory. In these cases, athletes are “man-
aging the emotional dimensions of pain that fuel the desire to surrender” (Downey
2007:218) because surrender is tantamount to defeat. Defeat, in turn, brings the
loss of income or earning potential, prestige, and aspirations to athletic fame. Oth-
ers view pain as the cost, willingly paid, of participation in the sport (Smith 2008;
Wacquant 2004).
Perceptions of pain among athletes are thus linked to cultures of risk (Curry 1993;
Donnelly 2004; Frey 1991; Howe 2004; Nixon 1993). This literature departs from al-
lopathic considerations of pain by frequent attention to acute rather than chronic
pain, but here the very definition of pain is as “athleticized,” as it is medicalized in
the other. Howe (2004:74), for example, defines acute pain as “a short, sharp sensa-
tion that is experienced at the point when injury occurs and for a limited period
thereafter.” As a pain descriptor, “sharp” connotes pain that occurs quickly—the
pain of breaking bones, for instance. “Sharp” does not describe other acute injury,
such as the impact of a thuddy cane or the burn of fire. Howe’s pain is the pain of
athletes. It is negotiated in a different context than medicalized models, but because
it proceeds from the assumption of a particular kind of pain, it is similarly limited.
An oft-overlooked issue in the literature on pain concerns its infliction. The
pain in contact sports (e.g., of a head driven into a chest) occurs in a different con-
text than the burning ache of a calf muscle at the end of a marathon. Pain that is
the direct consequence of the physical actions of another actor engenders, draws
on, and contributes to a different set of emotional responses. The pain experience
is intertwined with notions of control and power, not only of one’s own body but
also of others’ bodies. When these actions and their consequences are intentional,
these relationships grow more complex. The experience of pain during self-injury,
for example, is likely qualitatively different from that of being cut by another during
an SM interaction.
The study of pain begins with an a priori understanding of what pain is and pro-
ceeds to explore how it is understood, negotiated, and lived. Widely understood as
an evolutionary protection against danger, pain is difficult to understand as an ex-
perience that is rewarding unto itself. Theorists thus wrestle with the same problem
that Lupton (1999) notes has plagued studies of risk: its theorizing begins with the
assumption that, by itself, it offers nothing, at least to a rational actor. Voluntary pain

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experience, then, much like voluntary risk experience, finds an explanation some-
where between irrationality and psycho-pathology. It becomes impossible to under-
stand these experiences from the perspective of the actor without challenging the
unquestioned premise that pain is always an undesirable experience.
Further, this creates a space in which experiences of inflicting pain are neglected
or lost. By restricting our conceptualization of “pain” to the feeling of hurt, we rel-
egate the experience of inflicting pain to the domains of criminology and psychology.
Yet in medical procedures, though perhaps not in disease itself, pain is often inflicted.
In torture, and often in sports, pain is the intended and desired outcome of the ac-
tions of another actor. These infliction experiences, however they may (or may not)
differ from one another, are also mediated and negotiated in a particular cultural
context and during a particular social interaction. In these interactions, the inflict-
ing of the pain and the feeling of the pain are jointly constructed, negotiated, and
accomplished. If “aversive” is the ultimate criterion for pain, our understanding of
people who inflict pain—from parents who spank their children to dentists to serial
killers—relies solely on the moral rationalizations we construct for their actions.
Thus far, the literature has not explored pain itself as socially constructed and so-
cially mediated experience. Although researchers have studied what might be con-
sidered “pain-positive” activities such as body modification (Sanders and Vail 2008;
Vail 1999), firewalking (Bromley 2007; Edwards 1998; Sansom 1998), extreme sports
(Downey 2007; Le Breton 2000), self-injury (Adler and Adler 2007), and sadomas-
ochism (Newmahr 2008; Weiss 2006; Williams 2007), pain has not been the thematic
focus of these analyses. Conscious and deliberate engagements with pain experience
therefore warrant attention, in the effort to understand pain as situationally and
contextually constituted.
Among sadomasochists, the use of pain is a complex issue, especially given the ob-
stacles to understanding pain from a constructionist standpoint. If the fundamental
criterion for pain is that it is aversive, then an understanding of pain-friendly behav-
ior must wrestle not only with the reasons people appear to seek pain but whether it
is “really” pain, and what else it may be.
To that end, I explore the ways in which participants in sadomasochism negotiate
the tension between pain experience and questions of authenticity. For my purposes
here, I consider “pain” as either of two kinds of experiences: those to which partici-
pants feel some aversion and draw on discourses of pain to understand and express
their experience, or those that damage the body in such a way that, in another con-
text, would likely cause an individual to feel some aversion and draw on the same
discourses to the same ends.

METHOD
This analysis emerges out of fieldwork in an urban SM community in the northeast-
ern United States (which I call Caeden). This was a multisite ethnographic project;
I joined a well-established SM organization and attended informational lectures,

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 Power Struggles 393

demonstrations and workshops, public and private SM parties, social lunches and
dinners, organizational planning meetings, and activist fund-raising benefits. I was a
member of this community for four years (2002–6), normally participating in politi-
cal and social activities, including SM interactions (called “scenes,” or “play”) sev-
eral times a week. Very quickly, my involvement came to dominate my life in much
the same way as it does for many people in this community.
While I was in the field, privately owned SM clubs functioned as the most im-
portant community space in Caeden. An SM “scene” is a social interaction that in-
volves the mutually consensual and conscious use, among two or more people, of
pain, power, perceptions about power, or any combination thereof, for psychologi-
cal, emotional, or sensory pleasure. For most people, SM play is not feasible at home.
Clubs provide adequate space, equipment, soundproofing, and privacy for SM play,
as well as a place to socialize.
Often during my fieldwork, weekend nights at the primary SM club in Caeden be-
gan with dinner, followed by six hours at the club. After the club closed, community
members normally went out to eat at an all-night diner. This frequently resulted in
several more hours of conversation, and then breakfast. On several occasions, break-
fast spilled over into lunch, and the next night was another club night. There were
thus weekends during which I was in the field, and awake, from Friday night until
Sunday afternoon. Throughout the week, I maintained near-constant contact with
community members via e-mail, telephone, Web blogging, and instant messaging. I
also attended multiday events in Caeden and other cities.
After approximately six months (and countless informal discussions), I began
conducting formal ethnographic interviews. The interviews focused on entire life
histories, but also explored SM-related questions. To ensure thematic uniformity,
I employed an interview guide, but the format was flexible and dynamic in terms
of structure, off-topic conversation, and sequence. In total, I conducted twenty
ethnographic-thematic interviews, ranging from four to eleven hours. The average
duration was six and a half hours.
I transcribed interviews verbatim, with the occasional exception of a bracketed
description of an extremely lengthy and off-topic digression. Field notes, interview
transcripts, and my field journals were coded using qualitative software (Atlas.ti),
broadly and for discursive and conceptual themes, and recoded as themes emerged
and my analysis developed. All names have been changed. As an additional precau-
tion, pseudonyms for respondents are not the same as pseudonyms that appear in
field notes.

SM AND PERFORMANCE
Outside the community, SM is often framed as “role play.” In this image, consent-
ing adults are free to suspend their individual lived realities for the sake of erotic
enjoyment: the “teacher” spanks the misbehaving “student,” in an eroticization of
hierarchy. Pain is not central in these understandings of SM. It is either entirely

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absent or relegated to a less important role than the aesthetic of the interaction.
More than any other mainstream image of SM, this view is “playful,” innocent by
way of the nonseriousness of pain. The role-play view of SM thus mitigates what
might otherwise be understood as violence. It is, first and foremost, a game of “make-
believe.” Second, it does not really hurt.
This is not the prevailing discourse of SM within the community, in which role
play occurs only occasionally. SM is not understood as either a pretense or a perfor-
mance. When roles are adopted, pain is often a central aspect of the scene. During
one of the few scenes I saw that might be understood as role play, Russ used over
forty clothespins on Heather, clamping them around the outside of her breasts, are-
olae, and vaginal lips. He left these on her as he flogged her with several different
floggers.1 Throughout the scene, Heather screamed several times and called Russ
“Daddy.”
Russ was, of course, not Heather’s father. In this sense, this particular scene can be
understood as role play. Importantly, though, Russ and Heather were not pretend-
ing to be father and daughter but drawing on language and meanings surrounding
power, abuse, and incest. The intersections of pain, taboo, eroticism, and power were
primary in their scene.
When these kinds of scenes do occur, they occur as sites of spontaneous interac-
tion within a general set of rules. In this regard, they are more akin to improvisational
theater than scripted performance. In improv, performers (who call themselves
“players”) create, and they often do not know what the scene will involve or where
it will “take” them. The success of an improv scene depends in part on the “agreement”
of the players, generally before the scene. This “likemindedness” refers not to the
procession of a particular plot or the development of particular characters but a
willingness to follow one another for the sake of the scene (Seham 2001). SM par-
ticipants enter into play from a similar perspective; negotiation and consent set the
parameters for a scene, and participants regard their interactions within those con-
straints as spontaneous, pure, and authentic.
Despite these parallels, the “performances” of SM differ even from improvisa-
tional theater in important ways. During an improv scene, actual characters, com-
plete with fictional names, histories, and plotlines, often emerge. Unlike SM, improv
players play roles that they develop as such, however spontaneous and fleeting these
roles might be.
Further, these roles exist for the sake of the audience. In SM, in contrast, there
is no “audience”; the significance of bystanders or even spectators is not that of the
improv audience. For SM participants, there is no “show” for which to prepare on a
conscious or discursive level. Nearly all SM scenes begin without onlookers. There
are no curtains to raise or lights to dim. Observers drift from scene to scene, mov-
ing through an SM club and sampling the goings-on, rather than witnessing a scene
from beginning to end. Often, the most private play spaces in a venue are the most
desirable, and at times players even enlist friends to help direct potential onlookers
elsewhere.

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 Power Struggles 395

While the presence of onlookers certainly impacts public play in numerous ways,
SM participants are not playing to the audience. In fact, participants’ reputations can
be harmed by appearing aware of spectators beyond the extent necessary for safety.
A “top” (a person who appears to be directing the action in an SM scene, in contrast
to the “bottom”) must be vigilant enough that she checks behind her before she
throws a whip, but she will be sanctioned for appearing distracted, preoccupied, self-
conscious, or otherwise inappropriately concerned with onlookers during a scene.
SM is unlike other spontaneous performances such as professional wrestling and
improv, in which players generally attempt to affect the audience together. SM par-
ticipants seek instead to affect each other in the presence of onlookers. The goal in
SM experience is a successful performance not for the sake of the audience but for
the sake of the players.

“POWER EXCHANGE”: QUESTS FOR AUTHENTICITY

In the SM community nationwide, the term power exchange is used to describe
both the objective and the dynamics of SM interactions. Its meaning is taken for
granted in the community, and it is difficult to identify a precise and universally
accepted meaning. There is a good deal of agreement that SM is intertwined with
power and that power exchange is the objective of most SM play. Leading SM texts
that emerge from, and are written for, the community help frame power exchange.
In Different Loving, it is defined as “the willing surrender of sensual control by a
submissive to a dominant” (Brame et al. 1996). The definition in Patrick Califia’s
Sensuous Magic (2002:237) is “a temporary, consensual transfer of control from the
bottom to the top for the duration of an S/M scene or an S/M relationship. Used as
a synonym for S/M.”
An entry on Wikipedia further reflects the perspective of many people in the com-
munity: power exchange “refers to a relationship or activity in which the submissive
partner exchanges his or her authority to make decisions for the dominant partner’s
agreement to take responsibility for the submissive’s happiness and health.”2
This belief in SM as the actual transfer of control hinges on the suspension of
belief in the agency of the bottom. As Laura points out,
I mean, ultimately one of the things that I love about the scene, one of my fa-
vorite paradoxes, it’s the submissive who’s really in control. Okay? Because you
can’t do anything the submissive didn’t say you could. So am I actually giving up
control? Or am I really . . . saying, “do me?”3

At its core, the link between SM participants is a quest for a sense of authenticity
in experiences of power imbalance. To achieve this, participants must suspend belief
in their own egalitarian relations for the duration of the scene. When this is success-
ful, the sense of power imbalance feels real. This is sought, and what often occurs, in
and through power exchange.
SM participants seek authenticity in emotional, physical, and psychological expe-
rience, rather than authenticity in their presentation to others. I use “authenticity”

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 396 Symbolic Interaction  Volume 33, Number 3, 2010

to refer to participants’ feelings and experiences of relative powerfulness or power-

lessness, during and as a consequence of their SM scenes. This achievement of au-
thenticity is beyond that of what one might experience when playing a role. In other
words, SM participants who, when they play, feel as if they are playing a role (as an
actor might) do not achieve the authenticity of players who say that they feel afraid,
helpless, evil, or invincible during their play. Unlike in improv or other kinds of per-
formance, the authenticity in SM lies in the extent to which SM participants are able
to convince themselves, and each other, of the realness of the experience.
SM is a social interaction, and it occurs in the context of a larger community. SM
players must collaborate in their quest for authenticity. Members of the commu-
nity collectively employ discursive strategies to construct and maintain the belief
that power relations are imbalanced in SM. Additionally, participants in-scene col-
laborate toward authentic experiences of power imbalance. The work toward the
ultimate goal of authentic experiences of power imbalance occurs partly through
discourses of pain.
Many people in the community do not focus on pain in their identities or narra-
tives, talk about pain as a central or necessary feature of SM, or engage in heavy pain
play. Yet most SM participants draw on discourses of pain in constructing authentic
experiences of power imbalances. The notion of pain is utilized, even among people
who do not engage in pain play, precisely in order to set SM apart from fantasy.
SM is a carnal experience. It is enacted, performed, processed, lived, and expe-
rienced on and through the body. Bodily manifestations and consequences of SM,
such as bruises, scratches, and scars, are deeply entwined in ideologies of power. For
SM participants, “marks” are indicators of authenticity, as well as visible sites of its
accomplishment. Similarly, the spilling of blood (less common in public play but not
unusual), is a powerful symbol of authenticity.
Phoebe stood in the brightly lit conference room beside a small steel table that
held supplies for the demonstration. She unwrapped a cotton-looking scalpel
pack and laid it beside a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a first aid kit, and a large box
of cotton gauze. Aidan, shirtless and in jeans, was lying face down on the table
with his arms at his sides. I moved farther into the room, closer to the top half of
his body. . . .
When Phoebe cut into the flesh of Aidan’s shoulder, he hissed. He came up on his
toes, feet flexed and his back muscles visibly rigid. She put her hand on his back
and waited a second, while blood trickled from the wound. She continued her
work, inserting the tip of the scalpel into his skin and making small slices. Slowly
she cut a simple pattern, angled and tribal looking. Every couple of minutes, she
wiped the blood off of the scalpel on a swathe of gauze she kept on the small
table. Once or twice she blotted his wound with a fresh piece of gauze (in order
to see what she was doing, she later explained). Aidan was quiet throughout,
punctuating the silence with only an occasional pained (sounding) moan—soft,
deep and brief. (May 2003)

In the scene described above, whether Aidan feels that he was “hurting” or not,
Phoebe is injuring his body. The blood testifies to her ability and willingness to

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 Power Struggles 397

wound him, and to his mortality. The power exchange—the suspension of belief in
egalitarianism—here is assisted by the visibility of Aidan’s blood.
In negotiating the tension between the aspirations for authentic experiences of
power imbalance and the desire to play safely, SM participants must navigate con-
ceptually muddy waters. Their experiences are constructed and interpreted through
a complex, and sometimes competing, set of discursive and social-psychological
strategies in the community. Pain, as a concept, is central to these strategies. In SM,
pain may be experienced, disavowed, evidenced, sought, and avoided, but it plays a
crucial role in the quest for authenticity.

FRAMING PAIN
Although I am arguing that the concept of pain is of fundamental importance in the
experience of SM in this community, most SM participants do not view pain as inte-
gral to their play or to their identities. Therefore pain was not a thematic focus of my
interviews. Having begun interviewing after I had been a member of the community
for six months, I was aware of the wide variety of SM activities and the multiple and
divergent functions and meanings of pain within them. Because meanings surround-
ing pain were so varied, I did not identify it as an especially salient concept across
the community. Later analysis of interview transcripts and field notes revealed that
pain was central for the community even when it was being resisted, disavowed,
refused, or ignored.
My analysis identified four distinct discourses of pain, which I call “transformed
pain,” “sacrificial pain,” “investment pain,” and “autotelic pain.” These discourses
intersect with decisions to engage in or refrain from particular activities, motivations
participants claim for engaging in SM, the SM-identifications they adopt, and ideolo-
gies of power and powerlessness.4
Discourses of pain in this SM community also intertwine with larger narratives
of pain in interesting ways. Participants most commonly draw on the overarching
cultural narrative of pain as fundamentally undesirable or a necessary evil. In three
of the discourses—transformed pain, sacrificial pain, and investment pain—pain is
framed as inherently unpleasant. Only one competing discourse challenges this as-
sumption, and this challenge is met with resistance within the community.
In exploring these discourses, I have chosen to blur the distinctions between
topping and bottoming (being “done to” or providing service in an SM scene), for
several reasons. In part, the choice reflects my position that SM is best understood
a collaborative social interaction, rather than the site of interaction of two concep-
tually opposed objectives.5 Additionally, many SM participants “switch,” topping in
some scenes and bottoming others. Because of this, the attribution of particular dis-
courses to either tops or bottoms would be misleading. Finally, the people in Caeden
did not divide themselves socially along lines of “top” and “bottom.” Therefore all
community members participate in, or at least are privy to, all discourses. Where I have
found that particular discourses resonate more strongly in one group than another,

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I explore this. Overall, however, I view these discourses as being constructed through
and for the community as a whole, and around participation not only in SM itself
but also in the social life that SM constitutes for the people in Caeden. For my pur-
poses here, I use “top” and “bottom” to refer to actions in moments in time, rather
than as indicative of fixed identities. However, where this might contradict the self-
identification labels of my respondents, I privilege their identity markers.

Transformed Pain: Turning Pain into Pleasure

Among many members of this community, the belief that power differentials be-
tween participants in a scene are authentic (experienced as real) is fortified by the
claim that the pain is not authentic. For many members of this community, which
is predominantly urban, middle-class, Jewish, and politically liberal, SM is ethically
problematic. This discourse rejects the assumption of the mainstream “SM as role
play” by acknowledging the symbolic value of the pain, at least at the outset, and
through the primacy it accords the performance of the situated (in-scene) hierarchi-
cal relationship. If the pain is real, if it hurts, then the top is cruel and the bottom is a
victim. This discourse provides moral reconciliation of the symbolic meanings of SM
activities with acceptable egalitarian ideologies. The hierarchical relationship can
thus exist in a loving, kind, considerate context for participants.
The transformed pain discourse centers on a disavowal of pain as such. SM par-
ticipants who frame pain this way tend to engage in mild to moderate pain play, but
when pain is experienced, it is understood as not hurting. Instead, pain is “trans-
formed into pleasure.” This transformation occurs almost instantly, usually in a pro-
cess that is understood as conscious, though barely. Viewed this way, would-be pain-
ful situations are not experienced as hurt. This relies on a conceptualization of pain
as an objective stimulus, which may or may not result in the feeling of hurt. During
a conversation at a restaurant one night, Faye captured this idea; she said that she
“can convert pain to pleasure . . . make my body produce chemicals” by changing the
context in her conscious experience.
This “processing” of pain sensations as pleasurable, within seconds or less, fuels
a discourse in which pain can be real but not bad, without sacrificing perceptions of
authentic power imbalances. For bottoms, this discourse reconciles masochism with
rational thought; if pain does not “really” hurt, it is depathologized and therefore
unproblematic a thing to enjoy. Tops engage in the same discourse, potentially miti-
gating some of the struggles with guilt that often accompany topping, particularly for
newer players. When I asked Seth about a scene I had watched, in which it seemed to
me he had caused Stephanie a good deal of (intended and desired) pain, I used the
word “hurt.” Seth was quick to correct me:
Seth: She doesn’t want to be hurt. She wants to be given the sensation of pain.
No. I want to provide the sensation of pleasure. If that pleasure is pain transmog-
rified into pleasure, I’m very happy to provide it.
Me: What if it’s not?

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 Power Struggles 399

Seth: I don’t want to beat somebody who wants to be beaten so that they feel
something. I’ll beat somebody—I’ll flog somebody or I’ll cane somebody who is
enjoying the sensation of being caned. The experience. It’s having a good time.
That’s what I’m there for. . . . If they’re going, “Fuck, that hurts!” Generally, my
agreement is—what I say to people is, for me, if you say “Ow,” in a way that indi-
cates that you don’t like it, I’m going to yellow.6 I’m gonna yellow on our scene
and I’m going to slow down or do something else. I use “Ow” as a safeword. My
default position is “Ow” is bad. Generally when someone says “Ow,” it’s some-
thing that they don’t like.

Seth’s sense was that his play partners’ experience of pain is, “I like pain; pain
feels like pleasure,” rather than “I like to be hurt.” His definition of SM hinges on
this distinction:
SM is the seeking of pleasure, I think, in a way, by people who can translate pain
into pleasure, and by people who can translate the act of giving pain . . . or seeing
that the other person . . . is having pleasure. I think a good sadist is somebody
who is really empathic—somebody who really can feel what the other person is
feeling, and take joy in that.

By recasting pain as something other than hurt, Seth, like other participants for
whom this frame resonates, does not draw explicitly on discourses of violence and
victimization, relying on other aspects of SM play to construct authentically imbal-
anced experience.
Bobby draws on the same discourse. Having known women who enjoy playing
with “punishment” (as, I would argue, a means to the experience of authenticity of
power-imbalanced experience), he reflects on his view of these dynamics:
I get very upset when I hear that some guy has grabbed a gal who shows up as a
submissive and starts yelling at her. There are women who enjoy that, it’s not—
the abuse is not what I’m into. I’ve had many of my relationships, the ladies have
wanted to be, they’ve wanted to push it to the point where they’re saying, “Look,
I’m gonna be deliberately disobedient, and do things you don’t like, so I can get
punished.” . . . If the gal has been enjoying that, the next fantasy that seems to be
there, is “I want more. I want more pain, I want more . . .” and that’s not necessarily
my—making me unhappy and then having to punish you is not something I enjoy.
If you’re enjoying it, yes. But if you’re doing it because you want me to get angry,
that’s no longer fun for me. I’m not there to punish, or discipline. Unless this is
something we both are enjoying—I just don’t—and this is where I would gener-
ally have to say—and this is where sometimes the relationship would break— was
because they would want more than—or something different—than what I wanted.
Look, this is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. You want to get me—you want to
get punished by getting me angry. Getting me screaming, yelling, and angry is not a
safe place to play. And it’s not fun, and I don’t get any charge out of it.

For Bobby, the presence of anger threatens the context of his infliction of pain, which
he finds enjoyable only if he interprets it as pleasurable for the bottom. In the context
of punishment or discipline, pain is experienced and performed as pain. Although
Bobby is interested in power-imbalanced experiences, this particular construction of
imbalance is uncomfortable for him. During our interview, I found it challenging to

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address pain in its own right, divorced from pleasure. I tried rather doggedly to talk
about pain, resulting in the following exchange about his enjoyment of caning:

Bobby: It’s from her reaction. And not in—from seeing the rear end getting a
strike, but the end that I prefer to watch is the front end. Watching her eyes, and
her reaction to what’s going on.
Me: If it hurts—?
Bobby: Yeah, the pain, the reaction, or the pleasure of being in pain. That’s what
has to be there.
Me: It has to look like pleasure . . .?
Bobby: Oh, she can be grimacing and yelping and so forth, but I will also check and
make sure that’s something that she wants. But I have a young lady who’s playing
with me, and she’s hanging up naked by her ankles on the front stage of the Play-
room.7 . . . My favorite place is to be holding her head in my hand. And watching
her and headspacing her. But she’s under control; it’s a male control, while the body
is being [makes snapping sound)] by an expert if the pain is being inflicted on the
other side. But that’s my favorite place to be is in her face, watching the eyes.
Me: But if it just looks like it hurts, then it doesn’t do anything for you?
Bobby: Not—that’s fantasy, yes, but in real life, no. In real life, no.

Although Bobby is clearly interested in power imbalance, he is not interested in

feeling as if he is actually hurting a woman. In the transformed pain discourse, “hurt”
is a negative word and an undesirable experience for all involved. This perspective
reflects a wider cultural understanding of the desire to hurt or be hurt as ethically
problematic or individually pathological. Thus it draws a binary distinction between
the active and intimate “hurting,” on one side, and the abstract, nebulous, and pas-
sive provision of “the sensation of pain,” on the other.
This recasting of pain as transformed frames the pain in accordance with the
hegemonic views of pain, but modifies the pain (and the narrative) by turning it
into not pain. The participant who modifies pain is actively changing the sensation,
working to claim it and process it differently, toward an eventual understanding of
the pain as pleasure.
Significantly, this differs from the denial of pain found among athletes (Smith 2008;
Young 2004) and musicians (Alford and Szanto 1996), in which experiences of pain
are hidden, ignored, or minimized, in order to maintain control and status. In the
SM community, being hurt is not understood as a sign of weakness or as a threat to
their status as players. Rather, this discourse views pain as Melzack and Scarry do;
the desirability of the pain—the pleasure into which it is transformed—renders it
something other than actual pain. Here the disavowal of pain is not a denial of the in-
tensity of sensation or of the injury to the body but a denial that the would-be painful
sensation hurts. Once the pain is not aversive, that is, once it is transformed, it is not
pain. This is an active process undertaken by the bottom to change the emotional and
ethical context that surrounds the infliction of pain. It constructs power-imbalanced
experiences that feel authentic, but do not feel threatening, dangerous, or cruel.

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 Power Struggles 401

Sacrificial Pain: For a Greater Good

In a definitive contrast, pain is framed as undesirable sensation that remains an
undesirable sensation throughout (as in, for example, punishment and discipline).
In this conceptual move, pain does not transform into pleasurable sensation. Pain
is, and must remain, suffering, for the suffering is a sacrifice on the part of the bot-
tom. This sacrifice is conceptualized as being for the benefit or desires of the top.
Framed this way, pain is a primary tool used to reinforce and construct a power
imbalance between players. Leah said, of the first time that she “got the concept of
power exchange”:
He’s doing all this really horrible stuff to me. I’m going I don’t like this. He’s
going, I do. And I want you to take five more, seven more, three more, whatever
it was, depending on how miserable I looked at the time (laughs) I don’t know
where he was fishing his numbers from. But he was going, you know, it was just it
was the first time it was like okay you have the power. Because you’re doing all
this nasty stuff. I’m trying to exert what little power I have, going “I don’t like it.”
I’m not safewording, which might be stupid, or might not be, but I really didn’t—I
didn’t want to, and I don’t know why. . . . And it was like okay, well if you want
to, and this is going to please you, then that’s a good enough reason for me and I
guess I can do this, and I’m going to just draw off on the fact that you want to and
that’s going to make you happy. And I’m just going to draw from that and that’ll
work for me at some level.

Actively constructing a narrative in which she is powerless to stop the activities in

the scene, Leah uses the pain first to justify her acquiescence to this “horrible” treat-
ment and then to provide a sense of purpose: to make the top happy. Understanding
her “miserable” experience as a sacrifice for his happiness in this way requires her to
process the pain as suffering. If the pain were to be pleasurable in its own right, she
would be sacrificing nothing for him, and thus the play would lose its value.
Sophie, who also draws on the discourse of “transformed pain,” here describes a
situation in which she actively resists transforming pain into pleasure, precisely for
the sake of experiencing her pain as a sacrifice instead:
What we had gotten into the practice of doing, is when he was using clamps on me,
and it was almost impossible for me to take, he had gotten into the habit of having
me sort of like focus on his eyes, almost like hypnotizing. So I would focus on his
eyes, and he would say things like “You can take this because you know I want you
to feel this, and you want to do it for me, and like, you know . . . and I would almost
get into this trance sort of state, and then it would stop feeling—it wouldn’t stop
feeling like pain, but it would stop feeling like pain that I had to stop. Does that
make sense? And it’s not that it hurt less, necessarily. I think once, a long time ago,
we were at a diner and you were saying things like you don’t understand people
could transform pain into pleasure. It was important to me always to—like I’ve
heard people ask “how do you cope with pain?” Well, I go into this space where I
don’t feel the pain anymore, or I move beyond the pain, or whatever. When play-
ing with Joe, it was always really really important to me to not do that. Because
if the whole point of doing it was to let him exercise his sadism, which is what I
also ultimately enjoyed, if I was not experiencing the pain, then he wasn’t really
getting to be sadistic. And it wasn’t gonna be as much fun for him. So I would like

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almost deliberately stop myself from trying to do that defense thing that your
mind might want to do, and be like, No! Concentrate on how bad it feels (laughs).
So here I am, so I’m not not feeling the pain, but now I’m like “I’m feeling the
pain and it feels horrible, but that’s good because it’s like this gift I’m giving you
when I want to feel horrible for you.” So I’d be doing that little mental gymnastic
as he’s looking at me.

Sophie describes the work of resisting her usual process of making meaning of
her pain. She wants instead to feel the pain as more entirely unpleasant, so that she
can revel in the sacrifice she understands herself to be making.
This is significantly distinct from transformed pain; when pain is cast as pleasur-
able, bottoms do not view themselves as victims and tops do not view themselves
as victimizing, in scene space. Transformed pain necessitates a reliance on cues and
rituals designed to create the sense of a power imbalance, such as the use of honorific
titles or the wearing of collars. Conversely, when pain is cast as hurting, and hurting is
understood as unpleasant, bottoms are martyrs. In this view, paradoxically, reluctant
“victims” “must” not enjoy the pain and “must” withstand it anyway. In this discourse,
pain is both an instrument and a symbol of a power imbalance between players.
In Caeden the discourse of sacrificial pain is more commonly deployed by women
who bottom, particularly those who identify as “submissive,” than by other partici-
pants. The authenticity is bolstered in part through the identity of the “submissive,”
distinguishing it from role play by its emphasis on the “realness” of the hierarchical
relationship between players. Interestingly, the transformed pain discourse is also
sometimes given voice within the larger frame of sacrificial pain. Here the bottom is
understood as pain-averse because she or he (usually she) does not have the “abil-
ity” to transform pain into pleasure. This at times mimics a deeply gendered fairy-
tale narrative; the bottom lacks the ability until a particular moment in a particular
scene in which the connection between play partners bestows this transformative
power on the bottom.

Investment Pain: Pain Payoffs

In contrast, the investment pain discourse draws heavily on hypermasculine narra-
tives of pain (“No pain, no gain”). This discourse frames pain as an unpleasant stimu-
lus that promises future rewards. Not surprisingly, men, whether bottoming or topping,
frame pain this way more often than women do.
Sociologists of sport find that pain is often framed as an investment toward a greater
reward. Pain is understood not merely as an unfortunate by-product but as a means to
a particular end. While the hurting is not the goal, in and of itself, it is rewarding both
for what it evidences and for what it produces. Downey (2007:217) finds, for example,
that participants in no-holds-barred fighting “must steel their wills against pain so that
they can venture further and further into suffering without dissolution . . . fighters must
learn from pain and, in some sense, are legitimated by it.” Because this suffering is not
for the sake of another, it is uniquely masculine. It is competitive—a challenge to the
self—an investment given of free will, and, more importantly, framed as such.

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 Power Struggles 403

Describing a hook-suspension scene, Kyle, for example, did not romanticize the
pain itself but wanted it for what it could provide him, physiologically:
After I got over the pain of it, and I was—you know, with any sort of play in the
scene, there’s a time early on where it just hurts. And then after a while, the en-
dorphins kinda build up and it doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s kinda how this was
too. Once I got past the pain of it and I could really pull back, and really pull,
and have the hooks pull forward. . . . at one point, early on, when that happened,
I stopped caring about the pain of it and just wanted the experience.

Similarly, when discussing a heavy flogging scene, Lawrence said:

It was a very intense buzz. My body was very light. I didn’t feel the weight of my
body. I didn’t lose awareness of where I was, but my head cleared up completely,
which was really wonderful, because I’m always thinking. I have a very busy mind
and sometimes that gets the better of me. And it was wonderful just to be able to
relax and not have to force yourself to relax.
Me: Did it hurt?
Lawrence: Oh, it hurt immensely.

“Investment pain” is often less personal than sacrificial pain, in which the experience
of pain is wrapped up in the bottom’s relationship to the person inflicting the pain.
Investment pain, in sharp contrast, is rewarded by the result of the pain, regardless
of the relationship to the inflictor.
Investment pain can also be a reward that comes from having withstood pain,
rather than from pain itself. The investment here is not in order to play but for what
the pain itself will yield. The pain is undesirable, and the experience of pain is not
for the sake of the sport (as it is in athletic contexts of pain) but because it pro-
vides its own rewards. In this slant, investment pain remains relatively impersonal.
It appears ideologically more selfish than sacrificial pain, but nevertheless seeks to
reconcile the experience of infliction with the notion of a loving (rewarding) top,
without sacrificing authenticity. In the excerpt below, Greg explores the appeal of
being “dominated”:
Greg: It’s the Hardy Boys thing. Infliction, followed by reward. In other words,
going through this, going through this, going through this. . . . here’s the milkshake
at the end. Here’s the orgasm at the end. Here’s breakfast at the end.
Me: The reward can be varied . . . you just want to have one?
Greg: Yes. The reward can be food, the reward can be—it doesn’t have to be,
“Oh, master, may I eat from this bowl?” As long as it’s there. And the reward
can be permission to do something, even if it’s not direct permission. Even if it’s
implied.

Importantly, the investment pain discourse in SM involves the withstanding of the

infliction of pain by another actor. The player is capable not just of enduring harsh
conditions or bodily injury but of surviving assault. The flexibility in the community
of contexts for pain stops short of this one; in all discourses and for all SM partici-
pants, pain is inflicted (or provided) by another actor.

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At times, investment pain can also incorporate the discourse of victory found
among athletes. Jack frames his investment this way:
Jack: And he was like “sure,” and he pulled out [a] stiletto dagger and pushed
me into the wall and started this knife play thing down my neck and down my
chest. . . . So after a little bit of a warm-up with that, he moved me over to a chair,
and had me on it. . . . By the end of it, I was just . . . I could actually not stand; he
actually had to hold me up. That’s how weak at the knees I was.
Me: How did it feel?
Jack: It hurt like fucking hell (laughs).
Me: Is that kind of scene erotic for you?
Jack: No, that’s the thing, though. And that’s why it was that last break that inte-
grated all the topping from the bottom thing. Because the thing that I got out of it
most was a pure sense of accomplishment and of—a kind of victory, really. It felt
like I’d just [been in] some incredibly tough battle, you know, and won. But—and
won. (emphasis in original)

The investment pain discourse contains a few different variations on the same
theme. The overarching connection in this frame, however, is that there are dividends
to be earned as a result of the pain. Pain is thus inherently aversive, but worth the
endurance. Not surprisingly, this is a more common frame among men who bottom,
and the frame of sacrificial pain is more commonly used by women who bottom.

Autotelic Pain: Liking the Hurting

The three discourses described thus far maintain and reproduce the conceptu-
alization of pain as aversive. Pain is something to be withstood, endured, altered,
or conquered. To be able to do so provides rewards, but pain is still, in and of itself,
negative. Most people in the Caeden SM community draw on one or more of these
discourses. Generally, people who understand pain in these ways do not say that
pain itself feels good, do not claim to desire pain, and take care in the community to
clarify that they are not pain-seekers.
In contrast, the terms sadist and masochist are used to describe people who frame
their relationships to pain in positive terms. These identity labels are somewhat stig-
matic in the community. In some instances, these are self-identifications. They are
also attributed to people who do not appear to rely on strategies to achieve authen-
tic experiences of power imbalance. Participants who transform or provide pain, for
example, distinguish themselves from masochists, who they believe “like the pain,”
and also from sadists, who “like to hurt people.” Interestingly, the only discourse in
the SM community in which pain appears as an (almost) unqualified “good” thing is,
by far, the least common.
The foundation of this discourse is fairly simple for those who draw on it: the pain
hurts, but the hurt also feels good. Participants who frame pain this way have an ex-
traordinarily difficult time articulating their experience of pain. They generally distin-
guish between kinds of pain that they do like and kinds of pain that they do not like;

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 Power Struggles 405

the particular kind of pain, rather than the context, determines whether the response
is favorable. In an interview, Laura (having already discussed the considerable extent
to which pain hurts her) attempted to clarify for me what she liked about pain:
Laura: Thuddy, deep pain. It feels good.
Me: While it hurts?
Laura: Yes and no. It’s a very difficult thing to explain. It registers as pain. But
it also registers as good. Like, I like this feeling. Like flogging—it hurts but it
doesn’t. Spanking—it hurts but it doesn’t. I don’t like stingy pain all that much.
A little bit, but not all that much. I like thuddy pain.

Laura’s paradigm did not depend on the relationship, the rewards for her or for
the top, or on the conceptualization of pain as not hurting. Instead, Laura articulated
an intersection between pain and pleasure, a place where it hurts and it is enjoyable.
People who frame pain this way struggle to express it in conversation, reluctant to
choose between the seemingly dichotomous experiences of pain and pleasure. Usu-
ally, bottoms who view pain this way simply rely on the less-stigmatized identity
labels like “pain slut” and “heavy bottom”; these terms dismiss the question of pain
experience and shut down conversation about the liking of the pain. Frank, for ex-
ample, whom I had seen play with what is sometimes considered “heavy pain,” used
the phrase “processing pain,” but had difficulty articulating this experience:
Me: How do you process pain?
Frank: I used to breathe a lot and then I’d slump and I’d be mush. Now it’s scream-
ing, jumping up and down, lots of breathing.
Me: But how do you feel it—when it hits, does it hurt?
Frank: Depends on the pain, depends on the instrument. . . . Like a flogging is go-
ing to be much more force . . . impact, hard, breath coming out of me, versus the
singletail, you know, trying to resist the tearing sensation.
Me: Do you like the pain?
Frank: I think so. It’s not a like, like “oh yeah, yeah, give it to me.” But I do, but
it’s not a hard-on thing, but, you know, it hurts, certainly. But not necessarily hurts.
It’s pain, I can identify it as pain . . .
Me: When someone says do you like pain, what’s your answer?
Frank: No. I guess no.
Me: But you . . . enjoy it, in the context of certain scenes?
Frank: Yes. Yes.

At times, the autotelic pain discourse is also used publicly to represent pain as
positive. For example, during an educational presentation on the use of canes, the
following occurred:
At some point a woman in the audience . . . asked what to do if you’re playing
with someone who can’t leave with marks. Jamie talked a bit about how to avoid
leaving marks, even when using a cane, but then someone in the audience

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 406 Symbolic Interaction  Volume 33, Number 3, 2010

offered an alternative solution: there’s something in Chinese-herbal type stores

to get rid of bruises. He said that it needs to be rubbed in and he warned that it
was “exceedingly painful—more painful than the scene.”
Chelsea, who was sitting beside him, said, very loudly, “That’s not a bad thing. . . .
how is that a bad thing??!” Everyone laughed.

The idea that the pain would be welcome even after the scene suggests that the
“play” context is not necessary for the enjoyment of pain. The pain is its own end.
Kevin, for example, said that he sought the SM community after pledging a frater-
nity in college. The twelve-week hazing period included physical beatings of various
degrees. Kevin said that when the hazing was over, he “realized that there was some
part of me that found it pleasurable.”
This extrication of pain from the context of the cordoned-off SM interaction is a
slippery slope in a community that espouses and teaches a credo of “safe, sane and
consensual” (SSC). The widely held and passionately defended position (to outsid-
ers, for it is not usually challenged within the community) is that SM participants
simply would not enjoy pain in a nonconsensual situation. When Frank responded
to the pervasive claim that self-identified sadists could not enjoy nonconsensual
sadism, it was the first and only time I heard a community member consider the
alternative:
I don’t know if you can necessarily make that argument. I think a sadist in the
scene might enjoy inflicting pain in a nonconsensual fashion, but a person who
is the scene has the temerity and the self-awareness and the restraint not to. You
know, I always—when articles come out about a killer, there’s “oh, you know, this
guy was a sado-masochistic killer, so clearly”—look, yes. The difference between
him—yes, I guess he was a sadist—but he’s a sadist who also is a murderer. You
can be both.

Frank’s acceptance of the desire to inflict pain as fundamentally a desire to inflict

pain, is ethically and politically problematic in the community. Even among players
who identify as sadists, consent is deeply intertwined with the desirability of sadism.
Nonetheless, in contrast to tops who perceive themselves as “providing pain,” sadists
view the enjoyment of inflicting pain as central to their SM identity and to play.
Eric explored the trouble with explaining his SM interest, as well as the para-
doxes involved in consensual sadism and masochism regarding pain:
I can’t think of anything in my childhood that would say “This made Eric a
sadist.” What I’ve come to terms with is, Eric is a sadist. I remember as a kid not
wanting to hurt people because that was bad. You were told that was bad. Now I
know there are people who like that. . . . Treating people like dirt is bad. You’re
not supposed to humiliate people. Pissing on people is bad! Using people as sex
toys—bad! Well, what if they really, really want you to treat them like that?

For Eric, the bottom’s desire for pain does not detract from his understanding of
his sadism as authentic. His enjoyment of sadism emerges from, and relies on, the
awareness that his activities are desirable to the person with whom he is playing,
rendering his sadism not “bad” even as he enjoys the infliction of pain.

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 Power Struggles 407

Autotelic pain is experienced, valued, and appreciated as pain. Bottoms who frame
pain this way say that it hurts and that they like it anyway. Unlike those who frame
pain as transformed, those who view pain as autotelic do not feel that they engage in a
conversion process; the hurting itself feels good, instantly and without work. For tops,
this discourse casts them as villainous, drawing on a romantic, Sadean concept of the
seductive evildoer. Tops who frame pain this way are often desired as play partners
precisely because of their sadism; the stronger the belief that the top enjoys the actual
infliction of pain, the more authentic the scene becomes for bottoms.
Tops and bottoms who identify as wanting pain, for its own sake and to its own
ends, are in the minority in the community. The autotelic pain discourse rejects con-
ventional conceptualizations of pain as undesirable and, by extension, pain-seeking
as pathological. Most SM participants actively employ strategies to disavow, mini-
mize, or rationalize their engagement with pain, perhaps precisely to avoid under-
standing their activities in the pathological terms of sadism and masochism.
Ultimately, this discourse appears to disentangle the enjoyment of pain from the
understanding of pain as bad. While the end result of transformed pain is pleasure,
it becomes, posttransformation, pleasure instead of pain. Autotelic pain begins as
pain, ends as pain, and is enjoyable nonetheless. The overarching context, however,
must remain one of inflictor/inflictee. Sadists and masochists, self-defined and other-
identified, do not appear to enjoy pain in other, solo contexts (such as medical pain,
accidental harm, or self-injury).8 Nonetheless, they claim to enjoy pain in and of it-
self, extricated from contexts of power and control.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PAIN

To understand pain, we must look at the situations in which people seek pain. In
this SM community, ideologies of power and discourses of pain are constructed in
relation to one another. “Power exchange” is the attempt to achieve authentic expe-
riences of power imbalances within social, legal, and ethical limitations. SM partici-
pants engage in the closest translation they can approximate within two sets of over-
lapping constraints: the community-policed mantra of “safe, sane and consensual,”
and their own ethical and physical boundaries.
Discourses of pain assist in this translation process. All of these discourses blur
the contradictions between otherwise-egalitarian relations and embodied experi-
ences of power differentials. In so doing, they each help construct SM experience in
accordance with ideologies of powerfulness and powerlessness, without sacrificing
authenticity.
These discourses of pain also lessen, or sometimes mitigate, ethical qualms for
participants. Viewing the pain as not ultimately painful (transformed) or worth the
cost of the pain (sacrificial or investment) allows participants to more comfortably
understand their activities alongside moral proscriptions against hurting and being
hurt. In the autotelic discourse, the pain hurts but can be simultaneously pleasur-
able, thereby justifying its appeal. More commonly, though, this discourse subsumes

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the claim, “It hurts but I like it anyway.” Here the ethical “problem” of SM stands
unconfronted, and people who make these claims are rare and stigmatized within
the community. Nonetheless, by allowing pain to stand as nothing other than painful,
authenticity is achieved more exclusively through carnal experience; when the idea
that one body is authentically hurting another body in a context that emphasizes the
hurting, the belief in an egalitarian relationship can be fairly easily suspended.
Finally, these frames allow participants to carve out a range of metaphoric spaces
in which to locate and understand their SM involvement. Community members can
move along and between multiple dimensions of identity, pain, power, and gender
relations. Hence the same person may identify as a “masochist,” a “service top,” and
a “slave,” playing with shifting parameters of authentic experience of power imbal-
ances in any given SM scene.
Three of the four discourses—transformed pain, sacrificial pain, and investment
pain—are consistent with an overarching cultural narrative that views pain as inher-
ently undesirable. The strength of this narrative is revealed in its ubiquity in the SM
community, for it is counterintuitive; one might reasonably expect that people who
seek pain experience reject the assumption that pain is aversive. Yet most SM par-
ticipants speak of pain as if they regard it, in and of itself, as a negative experience,
valuable only when it changes into something else, when it is a sacrifice, or when it
is an investment. Autotelic pain, the only discursive frame in which pain can be un-
derstood as an affirmative experience, is rare in the SM community. Challenging our
cultural and academic understandings of pain, this perspective assumes that pain,
even as an experience of hurting, can also and simultaneously be enjoyable, in the
body and for the body.
This counteressentialist thread has not been explored in the literature. The
premise that pain is fundamentally aversive permeates the scholarly work on pain.
If pain is an evolutionary protection, its function depends on our aversion to pain.
Instances in which pain hurts but is not aversive are especially difficult to under-
stand. If pain is not merely a physiological response to stimuli but an emotion con-
structed, mediated, and negotiated under complex physical and social conditions,
then what is and is not “pain” is fluid, across time, space, and between individuals.
Simultaneously evocative of both life and death, pain is rife with paradox, as emo-
tion and as carnal experience.
The idea that pain is socially situated, negotiated, and mediated is not new. How-
ever, the argument contained within this discourse is more radical than that; here the
social construction of pain moves beyond the claim that the negativity of pain can
be transcended by social-psychological contexts and processes. Even constructionist
analyses have assumed that pain experience fundamentally begins as negative, but
can be mediated and negotiated in positive ways. The autotelic pain frame challeng-
es the understanding of pain as ontologically negative and resists the medicalized
perspective of the enjoyment of pain as pathological.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand the autotelic pain discourse outside the
context of power. Given that participants who frame pain this way do not seek or

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 Power Struggles 409

welcome pain in other contexts, such as nonconsensual, accidental, or self-inflicted

pain, the claim to the enjoyment of pain as such must be examined within the con-
texts in which this holds true for SM participants. Even in a consensual situation,
the experience of inflicted pain, for both top and bottom, cannot be extricated from
experiences of relative power.
The range and complexity of discourses about pain in the SM community evi-
dence the strength and depth of the hegemonic essentialist narrative about the body
in pain. Among many people who engage in activities that would seem to “hurt,”
meanings of bodily pain are most often negative and therefore must be consciously
negotiated and mediated to become positive. These experiences of pain therefore
need to be situated in the context of power. Struggles for authenticity in experiences
of power imbalance between SM participants shape and mediate interpretations of,
and thus responses to, pain. Assumptions about pain that continue to appear in even
postmodern work—for example, that it is better avoided than recast or reframed,
that its seeking is tantamount to the enjoyment of hurt, and that the sites and strat-
egies for the enjoyment of hurt occur in the body—warrant further empirical and
theoretical engagement, to better understand pain as a social experience.

Acknowledgments:  This article is much richer because of the incisive and tre-
mendously thoughtful comments of three anonymous reviewers, and I am grateful
for their time and intellectual engagement. Special thanks to Emine Ercan, Paul
Fuller, Jonathan Hardy, Lisa Hunter, Paul Kress, and Ann Liao for their insights and
contributions on earlier drafts of this work, and to Carol Rambo for her support.

NOTES
1. A flogger is a whip with multiple flat strands (falls) attached to a stiff handle.
2. Retrieved September 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_exchange_(BDSM).
3. In all excerpts, ellipses indicate pauses in the respondents’ speech, and bracketed ellipses indi-
cate editorial omission. I have omitted idiosyncratic utterances such as “uhs” and “ums.”
4. This work focuses only on the discourses themselves; a full exploration of these relationships
would require more space than is available here.
5. This is not a new argument; Ellis (1927) viewed SM as a dialectic phenomenon in individuals,
rather than the presence of an inclination toward either sadism or masochism.
6. Yellow is a communitywide “safeword,” used to slow a scene down without threatening
authenticity.
7. This is a pseudonym.
8. Although I did not find it especially common, some members of the community can enjoy pain
in these contexts if they construct a fantasy of inflictee and inflictor to accompany or frame
their pain experience.

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