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Friday, June 19, 2009

Romance, Villainy and BDSM


Sarah's at Romancing the Blog today, discussing BDSM, and particularly sadomasochism, in romance:
while the world has changed enough that it is mostly unacceptable to use homosexuality as a short-cut symbol of depravity, sadism is a natural, obvious, and logical replacement in popular romance.

Ironically, even BDSM romances use sadism as a marker for villainy. [...] Almost all romances that bill themselves as BDSM romances [...] are actually D/s romances, following a relationship as it’s built through sexual power exchange, a formal, ritualized version of the underlying power negotiations of ALL popular romance, vanilla or kinky. The bad characters, though, are sadists or masochists. [...] True sadism and masochism are usually a sign, even in BDSM romance, that something isn’t quite right with a character.
Since I've just finished reading Amanda Quick's The River Knows I thought I'd provide an example of a masochistic villain: Elwin Hastings, murderer, blackmailer and the organiser of fraudulent financial schemes is finally brought to justice when he is found alive but "face up on a bed covered in black silk, his wrists and ankles shackled to the bedposts. He was naked. There was a gag in his mouth" (340-41). It should perhaps be noted that the wife he attempted to murder was also his dominatrix, and it was she who "taught him everything he knows about manipulating money and the greed that consumes most people" (318). She is also a murderer and one of the novel's villains. It remains unclear whether or not BDSM was actually her sexual preference, however, or whether she engaged in it primarily because she believed that "once you comprehend those things that a man desires above all else, you have him in your power" (321).

If you'd like to join in the discussion with Sarah, please head over to Romancing the Blog.
  • Quick, Amanda. The River Knows. London: Piatkus: 2008.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons, was taken by Fred Holland Day and is intended to represent St. Sebastian.

9 comments:

  1. I just commented on RtB that the
    Gay + Power = Evil
    equation appears in fiction whether or not the power is sadistic. But now that I read your Amanda Quick example, I think I should have stopped at
    Power = Evil
    or perhaps
    Power + Unconventional Wielder = Evil
    because clearly,
    Women + Power can = Evil
    too :)

    The Quick example reminds me of the saying that behind every successful man stands a woman. Though the definition of success has to be a little flexible in this instance! And from your description, I gather that the woman was the cause of first his success and then his downfall. Shades of Lady Macbeth.

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  2. I think I should have stopped at
    Power = Evil
    or perhaps
    Power + Unconventional Wielder = Evil
    because clearly,
    Women + Power can = Evil
    too :)


    I've really not done a lot of thinking about this issue, I haven't read any BDSM romances, and have only read a very few romances of any kind with sadistic or masochistic villains. I tend to try to avoid romances which include a lot of violence. So what follows is, if not quite "stream of consciousness," no more than my initial thoughts on the subject and I'm open to contradiction and alternative hypotheses about the issue.

    One can find some heroines with power, so it's not automatically the case that women + power are shown to be evil.

    That said, it does seem to me that there's a generally accepted equation of Power + Male Hero = Very Sexy (though may need some "taming" from a heroine). It seems that romance heroes can be assassins etc and still be considered sexy and deserving of the "emotional justice" of a HEA.

    However, power, its use and misuse can raise really tricky ethical questions, so it's probably comforting and easier for authors and readers to feel sure they know who the "Good Guys" are. One consequence of this is there may end up being a desire to distinguish very clearly between the violence committed by a hero-assassin/criminal and the violence committed by the villain-assassin/criminal. There seem to be a few easy short-cuts to do this. One which seems to have been more popular in the past is to make the hero white and the villain from a different ethnic group that, due to racism, is associated with unpleasant character traits. There's the "gay villain" option that Sarah mentioned, but nowadays that kind of solution might well be considered heterosexist.

    So one easy way that still seems to acceptable is to use the enjoyment of inflicting pain (or enjoyment of suffering) as a marker of a disordered relationship with power in general, whereas the implicit message seems to be that the hero goes around assassinating or carrying out criminal acts because he's really ensuring justice (like Robin Hood) or acting in self-defence.

    An essential part of making sadism/masochism a marker of evil is to blur (or ignore) the difference between pain inflicted during consensual sex and pain inflicted in a variety of other contexts.

    The end result seems to be a legitimisation of violence by The Good Guys in a way which often bypasses the justice system (which may, as in the case of Robin Hood, be shown to be not working properly).

    from your description, I gather that the woman was the cause of first his success and then his downfall. Shades of Lady Macbeth.

    One got the impression that if he hadn't decided that he could manage to be a villain all on his own, without his wife's guidance, then they might have carried on with their schemes for much longer without anything going wrong. I wonder if there's some association between masculine incompetence, "hen-pecked" husbands and heterosexual male submissives/masochists. I've not read enough romances featuring masochistic villains to know if there's a pattern like that, but I do think I recall Sarah saying something to the effect that there seems to be a cultural assumption that a dominant, "alpha" male will also be a dominant in the bedroom, and that a sexually submissive man will be weak/easily dominated in other areas of his life.

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  3. "An essential part of making sadism/masochism a marker of evil is to blur (or ignore) the difference between pain inflicted during consensual sex and pain inflicted in a variety of other contexts."

    Actually, this is a wider issue, isn't it? It occurs to me that the idea that a person's sexual status and preferences is in some ways a symbol of their virtue in general (or lack of virtue) has been around for a while. In romance (in the past, certainly, though perhaps not so much nowadays) there was a trend for "other women" to be both sexually voracious and prone to lying and other immoral behaviours. Going back a lot further, The Fall came to be seen as a story about sexual sin, as well as the way in which humans became prey to all the sins. Then there's the way that virtue (in its original sense of virtus/manliness) was associated with power and male sexuality:

    In Rome who penetrated whom was crucial. Anal rape was feared. There were no discussions of the boy’s pleasure, indeed the assumption was made that the passive male could not be pleasured. Those who brandished accusations of effeminacy tended to liken passive men to slaves and women. Yet the worst thing a man could be accused of – even worse than servicing another man by fallatio – was, as noted in Martial (Epigram 2.28), that of servicing a woman by cunnilingus.
    The ancients’ concerns for potency can only be fully understood when viewed in the context of a culture that lauded male dominance and feared the mythical, sexually voracious female.
    (McLaren 6)


    McLaren, Angus. Impotence: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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  4. one easy way that still seems to acceptable is to use the enjoyment of inflicting pain (or enjoyment of suffering) as a marker of a disordered relationship with power in general

    This is interesting to me. Speaking to Jessica of Racy Romance Reviews at PCA in New Orleans, we discussed how sadism in particular, but also masochism, are peculiarly selfish acts. The sadist literally gets aroused in hurting someone else--whether that someone else is consenting to being hurt can be a site of conflict and uncertainty. A masochist, at least, usually has the consent of his tormentor.

    This was more profound when we talked about it. I've got notes somewhere....

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  5. This was more profound when we talked about it. I've got notes somewhere....

    Ah, yes. I've been wondering what happened to the notes about the PCA conference, and I don't think you finished posting write-ups of all of the Princeton conference presentations either. But I know you've been very, very busy preparing things for IASPR and the RWA conference. Any more news about JPRS yet? I have a feeling you said there would be an announcement soon.

    A masochist, at least, usually has the consent of his tormentor.

    It strikes me that another of the differences is the way that gender plays into things, because as you wrote in your post,

    Almost all romances that bill themselves as BDSM romances [...] are actually D/s romances, following a relationship as it’s built through sexual power exchange, a formal, ritualized version of the underlying power negotiations of ALL popular romance, vanilla or kinky.

    I'm not sure that this is true of beta heroes, but I can definitely see most alpha heroes as being towards the dominant end of the spectrum, whereas the heroines who endure (and secretly thrill to/enjoy) punishing kisses, bruising embraces etc seem to be more towards the masochistic end of things, though obviously as they're still "vanilla" romances, "the underlying power negotiations" aren't made explicit in the same way. Nor is the question of the extent to which both of them (and the readers?) enjoy the power negotiations.

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  6. "It remains unclear whether or not BDSM was actually her sexual preference, however, or whether she engaged in it primarily because she believed that "once you comprehend those things that a man desires above all else, you have him in your power""

    Thinking of a discussion I once had with a dominatrix, I would guess possibly both. That is, she engaged in it to get him in her power, because having him in her power was what turned her on. -- willaful

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  7. Willaful, the backstory for Mrs Hastings is as follows:

    "My stepfather sold me to a brothel when I was twelve years old. I learned the business very well, indeed. By the time I was eighteen, I was running the place. I met Elwin Hastings when I was twenty-two. He was a client. We were married eight months later when I convinced him that I could make him rich. [...]" (320)

    It's apparent that she's very ruthless and ambitious, so clearly she does like power, but it seems quite possible that she was taught how to be a dominatrix while she was a prostitute, along with other skills, but that this happened to be the one that appealed to Mr. Hastings, so was what she used in order to get power over him.

    Another tiny bit of insight into her feelings for him now, after he's tried to murder her, and she's planning to murder him, is that when he comes to the brothel she runs under the name "Madame Phoenix" she's shown watching part of the session secretly but then she leaves because "There was no pleasure to be had watching Elwin Hastings undergo his punishment. The bastard enjoyed it, after all" (228).

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  8. Slightly off on a tangent -- This photo reminded me of a scene in one of Rudolph Valentino's movies (The Son of the Sheikh) that gets talked about as an example of the possibility of the female gaze in cinema (and some other stuff) where a shirtless Valentino is whipped by one of the villains. In a way it puts the viewer in the position of enjoying Valentino's semi-nude pain - sadism?

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  9. I hadn't read about that until you mentioned it, but a Google search turned up a discussion of The Son of the Sheik by Miriam Hansen (in "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship." Stardom: Industry of Desire. Ed. Christine Gledhill) and there's a picture of part of that scene in her essay, in which she writes that:

    The distinctiveness of the Valentino films lies in focusing spectatorial pleasure on the image of a male hero/performer. If a man is made to occupy the place of erotic object, how does this affect the organisation of vision? If the desiring look is aligned with the position of a female viewer, does this open up a space for female subjectivity and, by the same token, an alternative conception of visual pleasure? (261)

    and

    There is hardly a Valentino film that does not display a whip, in whatever marginal function, and most of them feature seemingly insignificant subplots in which the spectator is offered a position that entails enjoying the tortures inflicted on Valentino or others.
    The oscillation of the Valentino persona between sadistic and masochistic positions is yet another expression of the ambivalence that governs the specular organisation of the films. (270)

    and

    In making sadomasochistic rituals an explicit component of the erotic relationship, Valentino's films subvert the socially imposed dominance/submission hierarchy of gender roles, dissolving subject/object dichotomies into erotic reciprocity. The vulnerability Valentino displays in his films, the traces of feminine masochism in his persona, may partly account for the threat he posed to prevalent standards of masculinity [...]
    Sadomasochistic role-playing most strikingly intersects with the choreography of vision in The Son of the Sheik. (271)

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