Nothing Natural: Jenny Diski’s 1986 Novel of a Sadomasochistic Affair

Nothing Natural, Jenny Diski’s debut novel, was first issued in hardback by Simon & Schuster in 1986. For readers tracking literary BDSM it is a sharp, uncomfortable object from that decade. It is not a practice manual. The novel treats power exchange as moral weather, and it shows desire, in a 1980s setting with no community ethics and no clear safeword, turning into something the characters cannot steer. Both leads are adults. The story follows Rachel Kee, a depressed single mother, into a rough and unstable sadomasochistic relationship with Joshua, who is charming and domineering.

Rachel’s childhood is a disaster she is still carrying. Her father abandoned the family. Her mother slid further into madness. Rachel was placed in foster care. When she meets Joshua the attraction is almost immediate. The relationship settles into a grim loop: he arrives, they have rough sex, he disappears for months. For Rachel, isolated and depressed, his intermittent intensity feels like weather she cannot control. It is the classic literary picture of dominance and submission without modern negotiation. She starts to question the arrangement, especially after she reads about the kidnapping and rape of a young girl and a composite sketch of the suspect looks uncomfortably like Joshua. That turn drags the book out of private erotic pathology into public crime horror. The reader has to sit with the possibility that the captivating sadist is a predator rather than a fantasy partner. Diski is not writing a flattering portrait of kinky dating. She is writing obsession, damage, and the fear that private rough sex and real violence might share a face. The crime is not a set of instructions, and this article does not expand it.

The reviews map the sex wars of the mid-1980s. Kirkus Reviews called it an S&M novel with soul and praised its force. The New York Times was colder, calling the book uninspired, arguing that Diski lectures rather than lets the reader experience, and that she fails to warm Rachel’s “cold bones” so a reader might see their own desperation in her. The Washington Post framed it as a sad day for feminism. The reviewer half-joked about trading back Title IX and Justice O’Connor to keep any reader from finishing the book convinced that women degrade themselves the way the women in this novel do. Critic Anthony Thwaite called it the most revolting book he had ever read. The feminist magazine Sisterwrite banned Diski from publishing with them. SM in women’s fiction could be read as liberation candor or as collaboration with misogyny. Dr. Doris McIlwain later noted that Diski uses the characters’ failure to show proper feelings, and their unlikely continuances, to underline how monstrous the plot is, especially once Joshua’s shadow includes the rape of a child. That is a literary device, not a crime manual, and the details stay off the page.

Readers who know BDSM, or who watch adult film, will not find a compromise here. Unlike romantic dominance that ends in a collar and a cure, Nothing Natural treats the intermittent contact as a symptom and a trap. It does not endorse the disappearing top, and it does not blur consensual SM into sexual crime. Scholarly talk continues in volumes such as Nadal and Calvo’s Trauma in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2014). The book sits with literary SM and controversy, far from a beginner’s consent guide. It shows a woman novelist in 1986 refusing to make sadomasochism look healthy, sisterly, or safe. What it does show is obsession, damage, and the chance that private rough sex shares a face with real violence.