Representations and coverage of S&M have become quite common
nowadays, whether we see them in the fashion industry, commercials,
the news, on television, film, the internet, and so on. But in the
population at large and in the academic community, too, it is still
persistently stigmatized. This marginalization, along with its
ambivalently persecuted status, is a result, significantly, of a
nineteenth century legacy. This legacy begins with Kraftt-Ebing's
designation of sadomasochism, along with gay and lesbian desire, as
a perversion, and continues in the popular and expert
(mis)understandings which prevail. More generally, most people
today will recognize that all human relations are power relations.
Yet most people will also deny this and mask these power relations
by invoking all sorts of things, like romantic love, sentimental
attachment, companionate marriage, friendship, peace, non-violence,
harmony, and the list goes on, ad nauseam. Not that these do not
exist in a sadomasochistic relation, but sadomasochists are
unflinching in their recognition that all of these are also
permeated by power relations. It is not only impossible to purge
these relations of power but for sadomasochists it is also
undesirable to do so. It is not only more honest to acknowledge the
power that saturates these relations but also more instructive in
the sense that S&M provides a context in which one learns to
exercise power and to submit to it in a responsible way. Even in
scholarly critical and theoretical discussions of S&M, the
prevailing opinion is that the power exercised in sadomasochism is
not "real." It is of course not real in the sense that slavery and
violence no longer has a legal status. But reality cannot of course
be gauged or even approximated by its legal status alone. For most
practitioners, it is hard to deny the reality of pain, of
humiliation, of degradation, in the moment of its enactment. One
can hardly deny the reality of bringing the whip down on someone's
back or of having it sear across one's buttocks.
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