I feel the need to return to the topic of sadism and sadists. Some of the comments left on my post from a few days ago were thought provoking. In particular I was struck by how overloaded the term ‘sadist’ is.
Most labels we apply to people also carry a judgement about their behavior. Consent (or the lack of it) is seen as so important it’s often baked right into the label itself. For example, if I have consensual sex with a partner them I’m a lover, but non-consensual sex with anyone makes me a rapist. I can be a consensual flirt, but never a non-consensual one. That’s sexual harassment. I can be an employer of consenting workers, but only a slaver or trafficker of non-consensual ones. Actions themselves can be neutral, but the labels we use on people rarely are. A punch is neutral, but a boxer is not the same as a mugger.
Sadism is fairly unusual in that respect. It carries no information on consent. It’s accurate to describe a domme who enjoys S&M as a sadist. It’s also accurate to describe a horror movie psychopath in the same way. This strikes me as problematic when talking about kink in a mainstream context. As hmp accurately pointed out, non-kinky people really don’t get the idea of consensual sadism at a gut level. Having the same label used for very different behaviors is therefore particularly confusing. People are used to labels implying judgement about behavior, and given their gut feel about the infliction of pain, their default view of sadism will always be a bad one.
Masochism doesn’t have this problem. It’s a more passive label and consent is naturally implied. We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist. That way we could leave sadism as the general label for non-consent and save the new word for only when masochists are consensually on the receiving end. I’ve no idea what that word should be however. Any suggestions? Maybe I should get Dan Savage on the case. He’s done a pretty good job so far coining pegging, GGG and Santorum.
Given the subject matter it seems only fitting to finish with an image of a sadist in action. This is from the Divine Bitches site.
Hi paltego.
Thanks for this thoughtful post.
I’m not sure whether the dear Marquis would have understood what the term consensual sadism’ was about, since it seems that his brand of pain-infliction was of the non-consenting kind.
The semantic issues that you raise are important and well-observed.
“We really need another word for sadist that pairs more tightly with masochist.”
Actually, we don’t.
There’s a perfectly good term in English for consensual sadist, it’s errrrm ‘consensual sadist’. The fact that a lot of people don’t get it is down to *their* ignorance and bigotry rather than any semantic deficits in the English language.
This general lack of understanding of consensual practices in the bedroom is a cultural phenomenon rooted in patriarchal ideology which insists on legislating about what people may or may not do with their bodies in private.
This may be seen as part of patriarchy’s delusional obsession with gender fixity and the assumed fixity of sexuality that it implies.
Despite 50 years of feminism and the struggle for gay rights, we still live in a world in which the supervening sexual culture is badly contaminated with toxic, procrustean prejudice.
With regard to how we got here, I don’t necessarily disagree, but I also think it’s kind of moot. I like to think about how we can improve the position, and in that respect I think language is important. As I’m sure you know, it shapes how people think.
As for the word itself, I think your term kind of proves my point. You haven’t come up with a new word, but you have come up with a new term. I’ve never seen anyone use ‘Consensual Sadist’ anywhere. It doesn’t parse as a straightforward description (what is the sadist consenting to?), but it does make sense as a label (a sadist who only acts when given consent). So it’s clearly a term people could use as a replacement for the broad sadist term in kinky circumstances, but don’t currently.
So the question moves to – is that a good alternative to use? Personally I’m not so sure. As I said in the post, consent is such an important term we typically bake it into the label. We don’t have non-consensual sexual partners, we have rapists. We don’t have non-consensual software programmers, we have hackers. Creating a label with an optional qualifier for (arguably) the important case seems less than ideal.
Put it another way – if we’d just invented boxing as a sport, would we want to call it consensual assault? It’s an accurate description, but it doesn’t seem like a good way to sell the idea. People have a reasonable dislike of being assaulted, so the association would not be a good one. Trying to convince parents to let their kids learn how to consensually assault people would be a touch sell! Teaching them boxing? Sure. That’s an entirely different thing.
-paltego
I’m going to agree with Grumpyoldswitch here, I don’t think we need another word as such. I’m happy to keep sadist as a word which means ‘someone who enjoys inflicting pain’ – what would be nice is recognition that this can be consensual, non-consensual, carried out for very different reasons etc. I’m happy to call myself a woman, but I’m not happy with certain assumptions people make because of that label. Not all people make those assumptions. Changing terms for things can help, but in this instance I think it’s more about recognising how many different types of behaviour are sadistic, with different intentions – just as there are many different kinds of woman. Do you see what I’m getting at?
I do see what you’re getting at, but also see my reply to Grumpyoldswitch. š
I think purely in logical terms there’s nothing wrong with having a simple and very broad label which we qualify as necessary. But I also think that people aren’t logical, language shapes thinking, and most other labels in the language don’t work like that. If you start with emotive label, that’s what people focus on, no matter what gets wrapped around it. So I think it makes sense to use the word ‘assault’ rather than non-consensual touching. But in turn it makes sense to say ‘martial arts’ rather than ‘consensual assault’.
-paltego
Regulist? Emphasiser? Instructionist? … leave it as to sadist. We know what it means…