Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis is a 1982 anthology edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star. The writers attack sadomasochism and BDSM. Most of them treat SM as an expression of “patriarchal sexual ideology.” For anyone who plays, or who has been told their play is politics in costume, this is the book that made the charge in one volume: the scene is not a bedroom preference, it is the master’s house rebuilt as sex.
Who is in the book
The table of contents is a roll call of 1970s–80s radical feminism: Alice Walker, Robin Morgan, Kathleen Barry, Diana E. H. Russell, Susan Leigh Star, Ti-Grace Atkinson, John Stoltenberg, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Darlene Pagano, Susan Griffin, Cheri Lesh, and Judith Butler. Butler appears as “Judy Butler,” with the essay “Lesbian S&M: The Politics of Dis-Illusion,” which goes after Samois, the San Francisco lesbian SM group. Several other pieces in the book also attack Samois. There is an interview between Audre Lorde and Susan Leigh Star. The arguments do not all sound the same. They share a refusal to treat negotiated pain and master/slave theater as politically neutral.
Samois, Story of O, swastikas, master/slave
Three pieces — Alice Walker’s letter, the Lorde interview, and a conversation among Karen Sims, Darlene Pagano, and Rose Mason — say the SM movement is deaf to Black women’s experience, and they single out “master/slave” roleplay. Susan Leigh Star calls the use of swastikas and other Nazi imagery by some BDSM people anti-Semitic and racist. Marissa Jonel and Elizabeth Harris write from personal SM history. Paula Tiklicorect and Melissa Bay Mathis use satire. Susan Griffin’s essay, reprinted from Pornography and Silence with a new introduction, goes after Story of O, the book whose title Samois took. Griffin’s line is that the novel shows “how a pornographic society turns a woman’s heart against herself.” That is the anthology’s method in miniature: take a scene people in leather defend as play, and read it as a social script that trains women to consent to their own destruction.
Off Our Backs said yes; Charles Moser said no
Carol Anne Douglas, reviewing for the lesbian feminist magazine Off Our Backs, recommended the book hard, called the arguments convincing, and said parts of it were “moving.” Charles Moser, writing in The Journal of Sex Research, granted that the essays were “well-written” and still called the book “infuriating.” He compared the feminist case against SM to religious cases against homosexuality, and said both pile on guilt that is not required. Those two reviews are still the useful pair: one side hears testimony; the other hears a moral panic with better footnotes. The fight did not end in 1982. Samois’s Coming to Power is the opposite shelf. This volume is the one that told lesbian SM it was not a liberation project.
