Marcelo Martinez
November 24 2014
EWS 407
Shayda Kafai
Sadomasochism
In "If I Ask You to Tie Me Up, Will You Still Want to Love Me?" Juicy Lucy states that sexual S/M is "a healing tool"(Lucy 35) and “very cathartic”(Lucy 35). She was a battered woman for years and now says that she has "the right to release & transform the pain & fear of those experiences," any way she pleases. She describes S/M as
"growthful," "trust building," "loving," "creative, spiritual, integrating, a development of inner power as strength"(Lucy 31). Through lesbian S/M, Lucy faces what she calls her
"inner side," rather than denying it as she had done, and thereby begins to rediscover herself, and begins to erase the pain and powerlessness she had experienced through former rapes and beatings.
The definition of S/M (or Sadomasochism) is giving or receiving pleasure from acts involving the infliction or reception of pain, usually in sexual ways. But there is more to S/M than that. S/M is much more deeper and complex than just inflicting or receiving pain. Lucy states that “In a sexual context sadist and masochist are roles that define erotic poles of power”(Lucy 30). And that it involves a “passion of trust and intensity that flow from a fully consensual situation”(Lucy 30). She goes on to explain that S/M can be performed in both a sexual and non­sexual way. Lucy states that “In a non­sexual context sadist and masochist are roles in power­over situations involving pain and cruelty where the consensual agreement to these roles in unacknowledged or absent”(Lucy 30). I found her definition of S/M extremely interesting. Before reading this

essay, whenever i heard of the term S/M all I thought of was leather, whips and chains. I had no idea there were so many facets to this type of sexual pleasure. For example,
Lucy goes on to describe the two basic power positions of S/M: tops and bottoms. One of which delivers the pain while the other receives it. At first reading it sounds like one person is receiving all of the sexual pleasure. But as I progress in the reading I find out how wrong I am. Lucy states that “each side has many levels of apparent and actual power”(Lucy 31). But even though one is dominate over the other the exchange is mutual, with both sides giving and receiving erotic intensity. Lucy goes on to state in her essay that many lesbians who do not practice S/M can get “offended by the language of S/M” (Lucy 31). And that these anti S/M feminists have accused her of being a
“rapist, brutalizer, and male­identified oppressor of battered women” (Lucy 31). But this is due to their lack of knowledge regarding S/M. They do not understand that S/M seeks to open each partner up as much as possible. S/M helps to develop a trust much stronger than any other sexual act. Lucy states that S/M is used “to turn each other on so intensely that there is no possibility but full satisfaction, not just physically but emotionally and psychically as well” (Lucy 31).
Lucy's journey into S/M began somewhere in her twenties. Up until then she had only been in relationships with men. But at a certain point she wanted to leave behind the “power­over relationships and power imbalances”(Lucy 32), that enveloped heterosexual couples. This power imbalance that Lucy describes in her essay is something that i found extremely interesting. Lucy states that in every relationship one person is dominate and the other is passive. She suggests that the problem with

heterosexuality is