The Power of Absolute Nothing:Psycho-Sexual Fascination and Sadomasochism in Secretary

January 7, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 2, January 2020

Kwasu D. Tembo (bio)

Abstract

In the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Lacan, the term fascination – which connotes being immobilized, charmed, enchanted, attracted, enraptured, seized, captured, and/or dazzled by the power of the gaze – also evokes dynamics of power. Fascination is associated with the hypnotic bondage of love that paralyzes critical faculties and leads to dependence, docile submission, and jejune credulity; it is also associated with sexual relationships. This paper theorizes the psycho-sexual consequences of the relationship between sadomasochism and fascination through Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002).

Introduction: Secretary and Fascination

Applied to states, objects, and persons in sources as diverse as songs, films, and viral videos, the term fascination typically has positive connotations in contemporary usage. However, the etymological associations of fascination, which include being immobilized by the power of the gaze, charmed, enchanted, attracted, enraptured, seized, captured, dazzled, suggest more sinister origins in its predication on power and the dynamics of interpersonal/interobjective mediation. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, Sigmund Freud connects fascination with amorousness in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in which psycho-sexual fascination refers to the negatively dis-agential binding properties that Freud calls the “bondage” of love (113). In Seminar XI and in Écrits, Jacques Lacan uses the term to explore the problem of the imaginary relationship between the self and the loved Other or the authority figure, whereby fascination is inextricable from the process of ego formation.

The inextricable relationship between psycho-sexual amorousness and fascination is a germane point of departure in the exploration of the issues and debates surrounding feminist responses to and critiques of sadomasochism, and the broader idea of female masochism. Even a cursory glance at the work of feminist scholars engaging with sadomasochism—including Patricia Cross and Kim Matheson, Lisa Downing, Andrea Beckmann, Katherine Martinez, and Ingrid Olson—suggests that the relationships between feminism, sadomasochism, and other paraphilias in which explicit tension between sexuality and power are central, are controversial. While it could be argued that an auteur can portray the physical dynamics, flows, and negotiations of power within both sexual and non-sexual contexts using acts or symbols of power—for example, through sociopolitical or economic affluence as in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 50 Shades of Grey (2015), or more directly through extreme impact violence in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010)—it is vastly more difficult to portray the ephemeral phenomena associated with and resulting from such acts, particularly the role of fascination in sadomasochistic relationships. This paper theorizes sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination by exploring common phenomenological and philological understandings of fascination alongside Freudian and Lacanian interpretations in relation to Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002). I begin by discussing psychoanalytical thought on fascination in order to orient my subsequent analysis of Secretary. I then explore the relation between fascination and sadomasochism in Secretary in the context of feminist critiques of power and female masochism more broadly.

The Power and the State: A Sketch of Common Interpretations of Fascination

Non-psychoanalytic definitions of fascination typically refer to the same set of concepts. Steven Connor describes the phenomenon as a direct derivation of the Latin fascinare, “meaning to bewitch or enchant” (9): “until the nineteenth century and even beyond, the word retained this strong association with the idea of the maleficent exercise of occult or supernatural force” (9). Similarly, Brigette Weingart states that the Greco-Roman etymology of fascination both explicitly and implicitly “locates the notion within the history of magic (or, depending upon your perspective, superstition)” (74). Historically, the power of fascination, its transmission and experience, has characteristically been assumed to be the province of sight/looking, predicated on the Medusa-Perseus archetype in Greco-Roman mythology. According to Tobin Siebers, the head of Medusa fascinates because “its horrifying countenance spontaneously transforms its beholder to stone [and] yet the mask of Medusa also serves an apotropaic function, as do all masks, by protecting its wearer against fascination. The mask of Medusa once more presents a familiar paradox: the Gorgoneion both causes and cures the evil eye. Yet Perseus also carries and cures the disease of fascination” (58). Louis Marin notes that this central paradox, between elevation and the degeneration inherent in fascination, is also at the heart of the symbol of Medusa’s head: “we have, then, two Medusas in one: a horrible monster as well as a striking beauty: the fascination of contraries mixed together” (140). Jean-Pierre Vernant explicates the notion of fascination as a type of infection or psychologically viral power that entraps and ensnares, whose functioning also latently involves reciprocity, mutuality, and transference: “fascination means that man can no longer detach his gaze and turn his face away from this Power; it means that his eye is lost in the eye of this Power, which looks at him as he looks at it, and that he himself is thrust into the world over which this Power presides” (221).

The understanding of fascination as a force of transmission and reception through an invisible but omnipresent substance or effluvium saw a revival in the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with the occult, spiritualism, hypnosis, and mesmerism. Connor notes that “the power of the mesmerist to fascinate or entrance his subjects was most commonly explained as the effect of magnetic or electrical forces originating in the body of the mesmerizer and passing across to his subjects” (11). The implication here is that the actions of the power of fascination, while seeming mono-directional, are in fact fundamentally governed by a bidirectional exchange between reciprocally fascinated subjects and/or entities. Alongside this nineteenth-century understanding of fascination as a pseudo-supernatural force, which produces alterations in the psyche that simultaneously liberate and enslave, is a decidedly aesthetic understanding of fascination. According to Hans Ulrich Seeber, the value of fascination, its “raison d’etre, [is to] be justified by the degree of intense admiration it can, by means of its beauty, provoke, both in the artist and the recipient. But intense admiration means simply that the work of art must be an object that fascinates, that lives from the radiant power of its suggestion, its ambiguous surface” (322; emphasis mine).

Even if pursued from a purely aesthetic standpoint, psycho-sexual fascination can similarly have numerous modalities and flows: the body, its curves, sensuous movements, and lineaments, but also its scars, wounds, scents, and maladies. However, the psycho-sexual fascination of BDSM takes the purely aesthetic dimension of fascination further into (oftentimes radical) haptic zones, whereby fascination becomes sensationalized and not merely aestheticized. In sadomasochistic interactions, fascination is both seen and felt. It is brought into the body, into its climactic capacities and the ephemeral zones of the subconscious, the innenwelt, in which the play between desire, passion, fantasy, and ethical negotiations of trust and consent in domination and submissiveness occurs. Here, there is a distinct difference between interest (or liking) and fascination. The former connotes fleetingness, alterability, and even its antonym, boredom. The latter carries with it connotations of witchcraft and, at its most radical, obsession, fanaticism, and madness: “[w]hereas ‘liking’ designates a relatively mild feeling in the aesthetic sphere, ‘fascination’, like hypnosis, affects the whole personality perhaps to the point of unbalance” (Seeber 332). Due to its power to destabilize, inherent in fascination is always already the suggestion that it also “contains an admixture of something potentially disturbing and powerful which makes it impossible for the beholder to retain an aloof, aesthetic stance” (Seeber 329).

The notion of being drawn forth in an irresistible manner despite or because of the intimated dangers of agential loss in fascination may suggest the inescapable negativity in/of fascination. However, this very negativity is also an essential part of the power and appeal of fascination. For sadomasochism it is important that the state of being fascinated “does not necessarily have to be experienced as an oppressive loss of self-determination, but can take the form of a readiness to be invaded and/or borne away by exterior forces” (Weingart 97). The fascinating experience does not, however, occur in isolation. Implied in this definition is also the notion of a transmission of emotions, a connective process between a subject and an exterior agency, which, by being fascinating, cannot be fully appropriated (Weingart 74).

Verliebte Hörigkeit, Pleasure, Excess, and Death: On the Psychoanalytics of Fascination in Freud and Lacan

My attempt to theorize fascination in relation to sadomasochism is indebted to psychoanalytic interpretations of fascination and its associated phenomena, which have been developed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freudian fascination takes as a part of its basic definition the etymological intimations of immobility, charm, dazzle, and enchantment outlined above. However, Freud draws these meanings together with the idea of the paralysis of the critical faculties of lovers, as well as the phenomena of (co)dependence, docility, submission, and psycho-emotional impressionability that occur when in love.1 Freud’s earliest considerations of the relationship between fascination, love, and hypnagogic states appear in his 1890 essay “Psychical (or Mental) Treatment.” Referring to the docility, obedience, and credulity of the hypnotized individual, Freud argues that a situation producing this type of “subjection on the part of one person towards another has only one parallel, though a complete one—namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion. A combination of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience is in general among the characteristics of love” (296). Freud returns to this reading in 1918 in his essay “The Taboo of Virginity,” in which he discusses the psychoanalytic aspects of love and sexual bondage. Here, “sexual bondage” refers to “the phenomenon of a person’s acquiring an unusually high degree of dependence and lack of self-reliance in relation to another person with whom he [or she] has a sexual relationship” (193). Freud goes on to posit that “this bondage can on occasion extend very far, as far as the loss of all independent will and as far as causing a person to suffer the greatest sacrifices of his [or her] own interests” (193). A basic affective tenet of Freudian fascination is that the fascinated individual is subject to psychological and emotional entrapment and to the perceptible and manipulable diminishment of the will and the faculties: a disadvantaging of the self that is the primary determinant of the value of being itself. It is important to note that the development of Freud’s thinking about fascination can be plotted on a rather steep incline, the antipodes of which centralize the oppositional states of passivity and activity. From a static state of psycho-emotional hypnosis to the forceful submission of the fascinated devotee, Freudian fascination indirectly contains within it the kernel of a sadomasochistic truth: namely, that to be fascinated is to occupy and/or be subject to a paradoxical force/subject position. To be fascinated is simultaneously to be all powerful and powerless, to be the enclosure of an empty space (metaphorically, like the cosmological phenomenon of the black hole); to be fascinated is to both be and to be subject to the seemingly insuperable power of absolute nothing.

The principal functioning of fascination as a bidirectional exchange is seemingly absent from Freud’s thinking on the subject. It is an odd omission considering that inherent in the idea of binding one thing to another is the concept of cooperation, which, in turn, is implicit in Freud’s conceptualization of fascination as a state of amorous bondage (verliebte Hörigkeit). The most interesting and pertinent aspect of Freud’s and Lacan’s respective discussions of fascination is the relation to sadomasochism, the death drive, and jouissance. While Freud identifies fascination and/or fascinated states with the death drive and indeed amorousness and its devotions—as always already tending toward termination and repetition—he does not explicitly associate the death drive with sexual drives. In 1964, Freud and Lacan diverge on the status of the death drive, Lacan viewing the phenomenon as an irreducible aspect of every drive. In Seminar XI, Lacan states that “the distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive” (257). He underscores this position in his essay “Position of the Unconscious” (1960), stating that “every drive is virtually a death drive” for three reasons, two of which are relevant to my discussion of psycho-sexual fascination (275). First, every drive is a death drive because every drive pursues its own extinction. Second, every drive presents an attempt to go beyond the ideological prohibitions against the subject’s pursuit and eventual attainment of supra-moral pleasure—known in psychoanalysis as the pleasure principle. The subject seeks to transgress the stricture of the pleasure principle in relation to a psycho-sexual zone of excess, or jouissance, where pleasure/enjoyment is experienced as pain/suffering. The relationship between sexuality and excessive stimuli is succinctly summed up by Ruth Stein, who notes that excessive over and/or under-stimulation, including affective states of heightened anxiety, pain, and humiliation, can become or be experientially “transformed” into psycho-sexual pleasure (50).

What is most interesting to note here is that both psycho-sexual fascination and the death drive operate through the action of a paradoxical undifferentiating ambivalence in the bondage of fascinated and fascinator to one another. While the essential bidirectional exchange that occurs between fascinator and fascinated—or for example between a dominant (dom) and a submissive (sub) in the context of a BDSM relationship—may suggest a mono-directional flow of power from f to f (dom to sub), both are ultimately fascinated by each other. Because the dominant ultimately submits to the submissive’s submission, the distinction between dominated and dominator, as with the distinction between the life drive and the death drive, is ultimately symbolic. Denuded of their “symbols of office,” both the fascination and desire of the dominant and the submissive tend toward the same terminus. While one might assume from observing the symbolic behavior of master and bondsman practiced in BDSM that it is only the submissive who somehow seeks transcendence from themself through the radical acquiescence of submission and the violence and degradation of domination (which are brought together in play to result in a symbolic death), the dominant is equally engaged in seeking symbolic death and transcendence in, through, and because of the submissive. The submissive “makes himself the instrument of the Other’s jouissance” just as much, albeit through different procedures, as the dominant (Lacan, Écrits 320). Both dominant and submissive, sadist and masochist, are fascinated by the same thing in their attempt to transgress the pleasure principle to its limit; both are ultimately trying to go “as far as [they] can along the path of jouissance” through, against, and because of one another (323). As Pansy Duncan rightly notes, fascination’s supra-subjective status ultimately suggests that “what fascinates [ … ] is always fascination itself” (89).

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, sadism and masochism are both modalities of the drive for/of fascination, which underpins all human sexuality and is brought into stark relief in psycho-sexual relationships involving power play up to and including death. My understanding of sadomaschism derives from Gary Taylor and Jane Ussher’s definition: “SM is best understood as comprising those behaviours which are characterized by a contrived, often symbolic, unequable distribution of power involving the giving and/or receiving of physical and/or psychological stimulation. It often involves acts which would generally be considered ‘painful’ and/or humiliating or subjugating, but which are consensual and for the purpose of sexual arousal, and are understood by the participant to be SM” (301). Taylor and Ussher go on to note that reductive definitions of sadomasochism that emphasize pain do so at the risk of obfuscating the primacy of the experience of power differentials as erotic.2 BDSM practices that are considered “extreme” or “dangerous” are thus said to provoke the greatest risks of psychic and physical harm. As Downing suggests, the very notion of “edgeplay” suggests that such practices function precisely through their proximity to a limit, which simultaneously necessitates both their judicial and clinical prohibition and their transgressive pursuit.3 In the case of extreme psycho-sexual fascinations involving power play that potentiates death as an essential part of eroticism (symphorophilia, knife and/or extreme breathplay), Downing suggests that psycho-sexual extremes of this and lesser natures still hold fascination—as well as controversy—over death-driven sexuality in our contemporary milieu of so-called sexual liberalism because “it is more specifically that we have a problem with the idea of validating the right to consent to a sexually pleasurable death” (10).4

The relationship between psycho-sexual fascination and sadomasochism starts with Freud’s interpolation of Krafft-Ebing’s 1893 coinage.5 In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud’s usage of the term sadomasochism similarly posits an inherent link between sadism and masochism. Unlike Freud, who posits sadism as primary, Lacan argues that masochism is primary and that sadism is derived therefrom. In Seminar XI, Lacan states that “sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism” (186). Lacan gives special privilege to masochism among the drives, regarding it as the limit-experience in the subject’s attempt to transgress the pleasure principle through a preferred experience of eroticized, psycho-sexually fascinating pain (Écrits 778).6

Lacan’s views on the nature of sexual relationships also help elucidate an interesting aspect of psycho-sexual fascination; namely, that successful, or sustained, psycho-sexual fascination is predicated on ignorance. According to Lacan, the sexual drives are essentially partial in that they are not directed toward a complete or whole person but towards what he calls part objects. In this sense, the psycho-sexual relationship is not between two subjects but rather two partial objects, whose partiality is not only reciprocal but also reciprocally fascinating. In order for fascination to maintain itself as long as possible for both fascinator and fascinated, each cannot fully know the other. The imprecise intimations of the mutual unknown are, paradoxically, precisely what compel the shared fascination produced and experienced between the two. Similarly, in a sadomasochistic arrangement, the fascination of the sub in the dom is partially based on the sub’s ignorance of the depth of what we could call the dom’s will or drive to death. It is this undisclosed potential, with all its connotations of danger, that excites the sub’s fascination, not necessarily in the dom themself, but in how far they are willing to go, how near death they are willing to push the sub. Equally, the depths of the sub’s submissiveness, that is, the sub’s potential will to submit to death, must also remain mysterious to the dom in order to excite their fascination in attempting to test this limit of death, both in themself and in/through the sub. While this position may seem extreme, Katherine Franke points out that psycho-sexual fascination is, in many ways and to many different degrees, a necessarily dangerous idea of what can be a necessarily dangerous feeling:

Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial. It is precisely the proximity to danger, the lure of prohibition, the seamy side of shame that creates the heat that draws us toward our desires, and that makes desire and pleasure so resistant to rational explanation. It is also what makes pleasure, not a contradiction of or haven from danger, but rather a close relation. These aspects of desire have been marginalized, if not vanquished, from feminist legal theorizing about women’s sexuality. (207)

The truly extreme (and, I argue, beautiful) aspect of the above proposition centers on the idea of the trust required not only to accept this potentially deadly ignorance, but to experience it as ecstatic pleasure, to pursue the inherent potential danger of psycho-sexual fascination—up to and including death—as an essential part of the rapprochement of sadomasochistic relationships, which should not be limned by either dom or sub. While the dom and sub are mutually undifferentiated by the supra-subjective force of psycho-sexual fascination, they are also mutually undifferentiated by the necessity of ignorance in its exploration and pursuit. Within the context of sadomasochistic relations, the notion of fascination helps us to think about the profoundly bidirectional exchange of bondage.

Entangled Emancipation: Fascination, Sadomasochism, and Feminism

The subject of sadomasochism, or power play, is fraught within feminist critical literatures in which its positional demarcations are clear. Each position attempts to negotiate the sociopolitical, cultural, and medical issues and debates that confirm and contradict what Jane Gallop describes as Western post-feminist sexual norms: “The norm for feminist sexuality is an egalitarian relation of tenderness and caring where each partner is considered as a ‘whole person’ rather than as an object of sexual fantasy” (107). Simultaneously, however, this norm, constructed as a response to oppressive heterosexist relationships, has its own oppressive moralizing force that “condemns pleasure that is not subordinate to it” (108). Within this discursive milieu, feminist perspectives on sadomasochism are generally bifurcated. On the one hand, one feminist position typically holds that sadomasochism is condemnable on account of its professed objectification of women and its eroticization of violence. On the other hand, sex-radical (sometimes known as sex-positive) feminists maintain that S/M is merely one aspect of its overarching pursuit of sexual pluralism and alternative sexualities. Maneesha Deckha describes sex-radicalism as a feminist position that champions “sexual practices such as pornography, sex work/prostitution, and sadomasochism as empowering practices for women and correspondingly characterize attempts to regulate sex as repressive” (430).7 For some, the type of psycho-sexual fascination represented in Secretary can be considered incompatible with feminist ideals of healthy sexuality. However, I argue that such a position must also and necessarily acknowledge a simple fact: in view of the vastly inexhaustible, powerful, complex, and indeed fascinating manifolds of human sexuality, “it would be too dismissive to immediately regard consensual rough or painful sex as unfeminist” (Deckha 435).

The complexity pervading the interrelationships between pain and pleasure, morality and immorality, health and malady, social justice and patriarchal oppression defies facile categorization. There are two primary reasons for this. First, psycho-sexually sadomasochistic relationships have an interesting sense of radical play inherent in them, which simultaneously appears to affirm and negate the repressive power of heteronormative sexuality. In this way, S/M has an inherently subversive dimension where both men and women consensually (and often radically) exchange power for their own (mutual) erotic fascination. Even where women are masochists, the nature of sadomasochism contravenes the conservative fantasy of ideal romantic love, and the sacralized fetish-cum-norm of white female heterosexual innocence. More importantly, sadomasochism challenges any essentializing understanding of heterosexual masculine and feminine identities as fundamentally empowered or disempowered. In sadomasochistic encounters, it is typical for masochists to act as “dictatorial submissives” who, by and through their submission, determine the remit of play, which is another way of saying that they determine the distance from the limit that both dom and sub will reach during said encounters.

The second reason these positions defy classification pertains to the nature of submission itself. Deckha argues that while the source of physical power may ostensibly reside with the sadist/dom—especially obvious in impact play scenarios in which the giver of violence is assumed to wield all power—the direction of its discharge is not only solely focused on but determined by the masochist/sub. Downing refers to this paradox as the “dialectical nature of S&M, the fact that it is the bottom, rather than the top, who calls the shots by setting the limits of the scene, making the demands, and having attention paid to his or her desires” (12). The implication here is that there is a more complex relationship between psycho-sexual submission and surrender. Following Deckha, I suggest that the psycho-sexual submissive does not lose (and in many ways actually accrues) agency as such: “the masochist’s intentions may be understood as a complete and active surrender to the activity and the sensations and effects it produces for the surrendered (rather than submissive or pornographic) subject” (438).8 Thomas Weinberg’s seemingly commonsense observation is important in terms of our approach to sadomasochism and other forms of non-normative psycho-sexual fascination. Weinberg argues that “if we wish to understand S/M motivations and behavior, we must look to the definitions provided by these people rather than attempt to impose our own preconceived notions upon this activity” (58). In my discussion of Secretary, the protagonists’ descriptions of their own sexuality are imperative to interpreting the nature of their respective psycho-sexual fascinations.

Other feminist scholars have championed this sex-positive position of sadomasochistic plurality and both the causal and the participatory dynamism that approaches extreme psycho-sexual fascinations beyond pathological and judicial stigma, as well as the repressiveness of biopower. Martha Nussbaum, for example, states that consensual S/M acts can be empowering because the “willingness to be vulnerable to the infliction of pain, in some respects a sharper stimulus than pleasure, manifests a more complete trust and receptivity than could be found in other sexual acts” (280). Adjacent to this philosophico-ethical position is the problem of sadomasochism’s relationship with capitalism. More recent feminist perspectives see sadomasochism—perhaps the ur-representation of kink in the collective imagination—as having been systematically interpellated into the various ideological apparatuses of the state, from cinema to haute couture, advertising, pop music, and numerous other modes of commercialized mainstream representations of sexuality, as well as the expansion of both the ideology of sexual libertarianism and the sexo-industrial marketplace. It is right, therefore, to consider Alex Dymock’s point concerning the enervation of psycho-sexual fascination: “if kink is not protected from the normalizing effects of the commercialization of sex, it loses a validity and authenticity that it might have otherwise” (55). Issues concerning self-care and sexual health are also included in this institutionalizing movement. As a result, while capitalist enterprise often attempts to monetize the public’s ongoing fascination with their own psycho-sexual extremes, which are simultaneously prohibited and encouraged by the state itself, sadomasochism has also been claimed as a potent and effective means of encouraging self-discovery. Far from a tool for galvanizing record or movie ticket sales, many practitioners and non-practitioners alike argue that sadomasochistic psycho-sexuality represents a form of radical “safer” sex, and that it can also contribute to relaxation.

With the above psychoanalytic and feminist understandings of the way psycho-sexual fascination involves power play, the main questions precipitating my exploration of Secretary are: does the text present the extreme fascinations of sadomasochism in a positive or negative light? And how does this text help to further elucidate the psychological and emotional subtleties of psycho-sexual fascination? Narrativized and consumed in media, the cases presented in Secretary also become a part of the Hollywood media-industrial machine. Commentaries on psycho-sexual fascination and its modalities emanate from this cultural and sociopolitical position, one that “still operate[s] as a kind of disciplinary mechanism, further marginalizing paradigms of female masochism that are cast outside the legal and clinical binary of health and harm” (Dymock 55). With that in mind, how does psycho-sexual fascination function in Secretary?

“You Are Part of a Great Tradition”: Sadomasochistic Fascination in Secretary

Secretary follows Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the socially awkward youngest daughter of a dysfunctional family, as she adjusts to life outside of psychiatric care. The film’s opening reveals that Lee was institutionalized following a near-fatal incident of self-harm. Her reintegration into society involves her striking up an amorous relationship with a high school acquaintance named Peter (Jeremy Davies), learning to type, and endeavoring to find employment as a secretary. She is eventually hired by an idiosyncratic attorney named E. Edward Grey (James Spader), who is attracted to and ensnared by Lee’s social awkwardness, disheveled appearance, and technical over-qualification for the position. Their initial exchange acts as a prelude for the pair’s subsequent mutual, that is, bidirectional exchange of bondage, or fascination. Ostensibly, Grey is perturbed at first by Lee’s own quietly eccentric behavior as well as by the errors in her work. However, he is simultaneously psycho-sexually aroused by her unlimited submissiveness, drawn to the ostensibly unending space she makes of and within herself, which is presented as an unspoken invitation for Grey to occupy and fill, but also leads to his becoming ensnared by and bound to her. After discovering Lee’s propensity for self-harm, Grey commands her to cease such behavior entirely. She agrees and the pair begin a sadomasochistic relationship. Her submission to Grey precipitates a psychological, sexual, emotional, and identitarian awakening in Lee. In contrast, Lee’s power as a submissive creates heightened feelings of insecurity and vulnerability in Grey, most severely in the form of shame and self-disgust at his sadistic psycho-sexual fascinations. The bidirectional exchange of bondage and the phenomenon of the submissive’s power in being fascinating are precisely what fascinates Grey and what binds him to her radical acquiescence, ultimately causing him to submit to the power of Lee’s submission. Grey subsequently fires Lee, who then attempts to find other avenues for her burgeoning submissiveness. Alongside these failed attempts is her decision to pursue a more conventional relationship with Peter, who proposes to Lee. While Lee initially accepts the proposal, she later flees to Grey during a fitting for her wedding gown. She confronts Grey at his office, declaring her love for him. He commands her to sit in a chair, hands and feet planted firm, and to remain that way until he releases her, a test not only of her submissiveness, but of his fascination by it. Lee submits and maintains this position for three days and nights. Numerous individuals, including Peter, family members, and acquaintances, visit Lee, each attempting to either dissuade or encourage her in her submissiveness. Grey watches unseen, psycho-sexually fascinated—that is, bound to her binding to the bondage he imposes upon her—by the seemingly inexhaustible depths of Lee’s submissiveness. After the event that local media refer to as “The Lee Holloway Hunger Strike,” Grey returns to the office and takes the dehydrated and malnourished Lee to his home where he bathes and attends to her. The film concludes with the suggestion that Lee and Grey begin a happy sadomasochistic relationship following their marriage.

A cursory glance at the critical responses to Secretary suggests a mixture of contentious and defensive positions. For example, reviewer Merle Bertrand writes that “Feminists Will Hate This Movie,” while Ed Gonzales of Slant Magazine writes, “Secretary May Fray Some Feminist Nerves.” More elaborate stances, marked by a latently defensive (and indeed male) sentiment, also emerge. Carlo Cavagna of AboutFilm argues that “[t]raditional feminist thinking, of course, would see Lee’s [Maggie Gyllenhaal] behaviour as incompatible with feminine equality. The analysis would be that Lee is objectified, used, and the repository of all Mr. Grey’s [James Spader] abusive male desires.” Cavagna goes on to claim that “if the roles were reversed, the gender politics of the relationship would not need to be discussed. The roles could easily be reversed. You could make almost exactly the same movie with male Lee and a Ms. Grey … or with two men … or with two women. Only when the male is dominant and the female is submissive do people insist on seeing the relationship as an expression of society’s patriarchal power structure.” Arguing that the film should not be viewed in intractably gendered terms—a difficult task considering the narrative and its subject matter—New York Times reviewer Stephan Holden suggests that “[s]ome may see Secretary [ … ] as a slap in the face to orthodox feminist thinking, since the concept of sexual harassment doesn’t seem to occur to anybody.”

Perhaps the most vociferous critique of the film from a feminist perspective comes from Brenda Cossman. Cossman writes that, on the one hand, Lee can be construed as “an emotionally abused young woman (she comes from a dysfunctional family, with an alcoholic father), who first learns to abuse herself through self-mutilation, and then learns to redirect her abuse outward, by having someone else do it for her,” whereby her narrative is nothing but

a story of abuse, self and other. And it is a story of the conventional exercise of heterosexual power and desire; a rescue fantasy in which the young woman is saved only to be abused again by her saviour (to say nothing of the sexual objectification of women for audience consumption). It is a film that celebrates the eroticizing of dominance and the submission of women, made all the worse by its tongue-in-cheek irony and its fantastical settings. This feminist narrative might also comment on the plot twist, in which Lee and Gray [sic] settle down into wedded, domestic bliss. The storybook ending is simply the story of the sexual subordination of all women—sexual dominance and submission within heterosexual marriage.(868)

This position contrasts strongly with screenwriter Erin Wilson’s authorial position, which could be described as following sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination as a bidirectional exchange of bondage. As Wilson writes in commentary on the screenplay, Lee’s story engages with “the sexiest, strongest, and most empowering part of being submissive: that it can be an expression of strength of character to bow down and surrender to love and passion,” what Wilson describes as her “idea of feminism” (qtd. in Cossman 869).

According to Cossman, the sex-radical position would, first, not view S/M practices, desires, and/or fascinations as invariably harmful to Lee. It acknowledges that these are, even if only potentially so, subversive and pleasurable practices, desires, and/or fascinations, and as such, bi-directional exchanges of power. The goal would be to countenance Lee’s complex of submission, domination, degradation, abuse, and fascination (that is, also a binding/being bound to) for/toward these areas of play as equally complex expressions of the inexhaustible flows of female sexuality. In view of the sex-radical acknowledgement that sex and sexuality are ambivalent, the focus of any critique launched from this position would focus on the fact that the sadomasochistic fascinations pursued by Lee and Grey are mutually consensual, bidirectional exchanges of psycho-sexual power and energy, each expressing agency and will in pursuit of exploring their respective and shared psycho-sexual fascinations (Cossman 869). From a sex-radical perspective, Lee and Grey affirmatively interpellate the psycho-sexual power and fascination of abjection, shame, danger, and potential death in both their respective and shared explorations of psycho-sexual fascination. Each seeks the self-annihilation and/or undoing of subjecthood and a merger with powerful forces beyond the self that are discussed by Leo Bersani, who suggests that the “sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits” (217) and further that “sexual pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those connected with psychic organization” (197). This accords with Lee’s own description of her fascination, her entrapment by the potently alluring but also redemptive forces and ideas of sadomasochism distilled by an excerpt from the audio cassette book she listens to during one of her lunch breaks in the early part of the second act of the film titled, “How to Come out as a Dominant/Submissive”: “Most people think that the best way to live is to run from pain. But a much more joyful life…embraces the entire spectrum of human feeling. If we can fully experience pain as well as pleasure, we can live a much deeper and more meaningful life.”

It could be argued by detractors of the film and its sex-radical message that the said message is already undermined by the film’s opening, when the viewer learns that Lee has just been released from psychiatric care. On the one hand, the criticism here would hold that any sex-radical hermeneutic concerning her sense of psycho-sexual growth and development must first take into account her pathological status and behavior; namely, the fact that the Lee ritually self-harms and keeps a self-harm kit (what I call a “masokit”) under her bed, full of sharp implements, such as scalpel blades and cuticle scissors, which she makes recourse to as a means of both expressing and nullifying her psycho-emotional turmoil. On the other hand, it could also be argued that Lee’s reliance on stricture, rule, and the rigidity of a schedule that offers her stability, order, and peace of mind (which she is reluctant to leave behind in institutional form) is not the only way she can attain these same effects. For Lee, regardless of method and safety, the ardent pursuit of pain acts as an emotional valve through which she can attain an emotional release. Her fascination, as well as her binding, is with/to the paradoxically psycho-emotionally ameliorative attributes of physical pain. In so many respects, an individual with a psycho-sexual fascination with pain and stricture is an ideal vessel/practitioner for the fascinating power of sadomasochism.

The seemingly perfect union of Lee and Grey is announced in the introduction of Grey himself. He is shown to be a man both deeply obsessed and fascinated with order. During Lee’s interview, Grey is shown to be deeply drawn to her, predisposed to “fall” into her on account of how closed off she seems, and yet how open she is to accepting/acquiescing to power, instruction, and domination. This is confirmed early in the film when Grey cannot find a file of case notes. Without hesitating out of concern for odor, illness, or injury, Lee offers to jump into the garbage dumpster in order to try and locate them. Grey is subsequently entrapped, enfolded, invited, and drawn in by Lee’s willingness to debase herself for him. He watches secretly yet excitedly from the window as she rummages, having to resort to physical exercise to literally work off the bodily effects of his psycho-sexual fascination, his burgeoning binding to her, in what he observes. Interestingly, he throws away the very same notes she struggled so hard to find as a test not only of her submissive willingness, but the limits of her submissiveness. This preoccupation with the limit causes the dynamic and character of their relationship to deteriorate into cruelty for detractors of the film, and to bloom or intensify into cruelty for its supporters. Grey becomes increasingly critical and dismissive of Lee, giving her large amounts of unnecessary work to complete. Because she continues to obey, so too does his entrapment by/within the seeming limitlessness of Lee’s submissiveness continue, a directly proportional exchange of fascination that ultimately compels him further and further down a path of mutually binding psycho-sexual fascination.

Perhaps the most devastating way Grey exerts power over Lee is by first removing her primary fascination, namely her self-harm, and replacing its affective aptitude with himself. Consider the following exchange:

GREY:
Why do you cut yourself, Lee?

LEE: I don’t know.

GREY:
Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface … and when you see evidence of the pain inside … you finally know you’re really here? Then when you watch the wound heal it’s comforting, isn’t it?

LEE:
I … that’s a way to put it.

GREY:
I’m going to tell you something. Are you ready to listen?

LEE:
Yes.

GREY:
Are you listening? You will never … ever … cut yourself again. Do you understand? Have I made that perfectly clear? You’re over that now. It’s in the past.

LEE:
Yes.

GREY:
Never again.

LEE:
Okay.

[ … ] GREY:
I want you to take a nice walk home … in the fresh air, because you require relief. Because you won’t be doing that anymore, will you?

LEE:
No, sir.

GREY:
Good.

Grey takes Lee’s cutting and her fascination for and binding to it from her, a process she submits to as the most important, albeit subtle, symbol of her total submission to him. This substitution, and indeed exchange, of fascination comes to a climax during the first overtly sadomasochistic encounter between the two. After Grey spanks Lee for the first time, she staggers to the bathroom as if mesmerized and upon gaining some privacy, she inspects her bruised buttocks. She is shown to experience a moment of orgasmic relief. It is clear at this point that the fascination Lee had with the implements of her masokit was not contained by them, but was an effect of what they could produce, namely relief through pain. Unlike the inert cuticle scissors she uses to attain psycho-emotional relief, Grey has a will of his own. In taking the kit away and subjecting her to the release of acute physical pain, he becomes her relief and/or transfers or exchanges the power of her psycho-sexual relief through pain from the implements and her manipulation of them to himself. In so doing, he also becomes her primary implement, that is, means, of psycho-sexual fascination. This transfer or exchange of fascinating power is bidirectional and binds each to the other; it is formally and symbolically marked by the fact that after this initial beating, Lee discards her masokit. The bidirectionality or mutuality of this exchange cannot be stressed enough. While Grey succeeds in becoming her fascination and further stoking her need for it by denying her it, Lee also becomes his fascination. This exchange is symbolized most clearly by Grey’s discarding the symbol of his domination, which is not a whip, or collar, or chastity belt, as is common in sadomasochistic relationships. Instead, Grey disposes of his collection of red markers. In controlling her fascination, he controls her pleasure, sense of self, and raison d’etre but also simultaneously submits to its (re)discovery, development, and power.

Born in the Absolute: The Limits of Psycho-Sexual Fascination as a Bidirectional Exchange of Bondage in Secretary

While it would seem that Secretary concludes that the transfer of fascinating power between Lee and Grey is completely mono-directional, the most interesting subtext of Shainberg’s exploration of sadomasochism is the limit of the psycho-sexual power the sadist/dom exerts over the masochist/sub. The first instance of this limit is very subtle. After having engaged in various forms of sadomasochism, from pony play to food denial to psychedelic masturbatory fantasy sessions, Lee purposefully leaves a typing error uncorrected in the hopes that Grey will punish her for the infraction. Not only does he fail to spot it, he also appears too busy to notice her sensually and overtly licking an envelope in a direct attempt to coax his (des)ire. She offers to return later and is left frustrated by his limited attention. Here, something interesting begins to take shape whereby his normative reaction is seen as frustrating and hurtful to Lee, whereas non-normative behavior between the attorney and his secretary is not only a source of pleasure and identity for the latter, but also one of comfort.

The removal of her means of relief but not the fascination that impels it (which is here the exigency of her binding to it) drives Lee to try and re-fascinate, that is, to re-bind and claim Grey. Her methods are both quaint and bizarre, and involve placing an erotic portrait of herself in a gilt frame on his desk, suggestively bending over it, and making deliberate errors in her work. After many attempts, she finally succeeds, by placing a dead earthworm in an envelope and mailing it to him. Upon receiving the dead worm, Grey has to perform crunches in his office to work off his arousal. Aside from the obvious phallic connotations of the worm, what fascinates, that is, re-captures, Grey most is the fact that it is a dead worm. For Grey, the dead worm is a symbol not only of Lee’s courage, but of her ostensible commitment to psycho-sexual explorations and play whose intensity and morbidity are not limited by death. Grey places the worm on a sheet of paper, retrieves the last red marker he keeps secretly in his desk drawer, and circles the carcass obsessively. Lee overhears, and, when called into his office, smiles, sighs, and enters, saying “finally.”

The reciprocal nature of their fascination—the bidirectional exchange of bondage—may not be entirely disrupted or broken but it certainly is uneven, and it is intimately tied to the problem of commitment to sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination. This manifests most clearly in a scene in which Grey masturbates and climaxes on Lee’s back while she is bent over his desk with her skirt hiked up. While exposed, Grey states, “you’re not worried that I’m going to fuck you, are you? I’m not interested in that, not in the least. Now pull up your skirt.” Immediately afterwards, Grey tells her to straighten herself up and take her lunch break as if the level of intimacy in their shared fascination, in the power dynamics subtending and constituting their exchange of bondage, had not irrevocably changed. Lee locates precisely what it is that fascinates her, what compels her binding to Grey, in this scene. After wiping Grey’s semen off of her blouse and back with an error-filled page she typed, she enters a bathroom stall somewhat confused, ashamed, aroused, and fascinated, ensnared by a complex of paradoxical psycho-emotional affects. Despite being disappointed with the fact that Grey made no gesture to suggest that his commitment to his fascination in her has deepened following the encounter, she places the document on the wall of the stall and masturbates into it, sensually, if not desperately whispering to herself, “Mr. Grey. Cock. Place your prick in my mouth. Screw me. Oh shit. Fuck. Mayonnaise. Orchid. Oh, Mr. Grey … ! Edward.” While the camera focuses on the misspelled words on the page, she is intent on symbolically carrying out the theme of commitment to her fascination, her binding in and to the possibility of his commitment to her. Yet something more radical is also taking place. In a very real sense, Lee’s will to sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination has, in this scene, begun to outgrow Grey’s own, and what she brings to the exchange of bondage constituting their mutual fascination with one another cannot be matched by that which Grey offers in turn. The implication here is that she does not need Grey anymore as a means to activate either the psycho-sexual relief she needs or her fascination, that is, her binding to/in it or its affects. Grey has opened a door to her sexualized pain outside the pathological context of the clinic. In doing so, he in(tro)duces the fascination in(to) her. All she requires is a symbol of that key/trigger to achieve pleasure and relief for herself, by herself. It is true that his fluctuations of fascination and commitment to both his own relief as well as to hers do not undo the fact that Grey helped Lee discover her own sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination. However, this “selfish” act of pleasure does not diminish her power as a submissive but in fact increases it.

After Lee leaves the office, Grey smashes all the error-filled pages he had framed and hung in his office hallway. This retaliatory act takes place after he notices a spot of semen on his pants zipper and tries to wipe it off. In essence, he realizes that Lee’s presence and his psycho-sexual fascination with her completely divert his attention to detail. Not only is the symbolic power of the male Gaze-in-observation here eroded by his total fascination in and by Lee, his ostensibly solipsistic focus is derailed by the fact that Lee has also become the only/primary object of fascination in his life. This very subtle and complex reciprocity of fascinating power encapsulates the power of submissiveness that the title of this essay refers to as the power of absolute nothing: the deceptive and subversive superiority that results from an apparently subordinate position. In becoming empty/open for him, Grey not only fills/falls into Lee, but is closed/caught in the gravity of her fascinating power. In short, the more willing and submissive Lee is shown to be, the wider and deeper the black hole of their fascinating power and the heavier its pull, which Grey is shown to be maddened, aroused, angered, and ultimately fascinated, that is, bound, by.

Grey’s ultimate failure as an object of fascination for Lee occurs near the end of the second act of the film. Having destroyed his secret folder of Polaroid portraits of previous secretaries under his employ, Grey attempts to type a letter to Lee, which reads, “Dear Lee, This is disgusting. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m like this.” Grey’s shame in his own fascination, that is, his bondage to her, his submission to her submissiveness, interrupts his ability to provide the domination Lee is both fascinated by and needs. He shreds the letter, overturns his office, and fires Lee the following day. He tells her he is firing her because of her “very bad behavior”: for kicking off her shoes while working and having odorous feet, for listening to music on a Walkman at her desk while working, and for various other idiosyncrasies. In citing these idiosyncrasies as grounds for her dismissal, he inadvertently catalogues precisely what it is about her that has psycho-sexually fascinating power over him, yet that manifests outside the typical heteronormative bounds of overt sexuality. He ends the letter, “you have to go or I won’t stop,” to which Lee defiantly responds, “don’t [ … ] I want to know you.” Again, the fascinating power of absolute nothing emerges. Grey’s use of maximal disciplinary force in the context of his office represents his ultimate weakness and failure as a dom. He uses the power of his office to redress the power disequilibrium between himself and Lee, the latter of which has a total and demanding fascination over him. Here, Lee’s dismissal is tantamount to Grey’s admission of and reaction against his weakness and, more poignantly, his submission to her submissiveness.

During the final scenes, Lee breaks off her engagement to Peter, flees to Grey, and confesses her love for him. He responds hesitatingly, “we can’t do this 24 hours, 7 days a week,” to which Lee responds, “why not?” What results is that Grey is completely overwhelmed by Lee’s willingness to completely submit to her fascination, pleasure, and self-identification as a masochist; a depth of fascination she assumes is reciprocal in Grey as well. In this sense, Lee’s hunger strike that follows is, on the surface, a display of submissive obedience, which Grey is fascinated, that is, bound, by. On a deeper level, however, like the wedding gown she wears while performing it, her display is actually symbolic of commitment, both to herself and to him, a final test she passes. She rejects Peter, who asks her if what she is doing is about sex, failing to grasp the fact that while ostensibly divided along clear lines of agency, sex is a deeply connective exchange of bondage within the context of BDSM, functioning as a main line of power that connects fascinated parties to one another. Without the predicate of psycho-sexual fascination in the mutual giving and receiving of this power, there is nothing to connect. Sex is just sex. It carries with it no commitment, revelation, intimacy, real power(lessness), vulnerability, or affirmation of that which lays in the ever-present umbra just beyond the pleasure principle. Not only does she proceed to turn away her mother, in-laws, local media, concerned citizens, and a feminist scholar—all of whom implore Lee to seek more conventional, and arguably less committed sources and expressions of affection—Lee is clearly willing to risk death, as after three days she is severely dehydrated and malnourished. In a statement to the press, Lee beautifully draws together her willingness to die for masochistic fascination and its nature as a bridge, as well as an exchange, between love and death in all their modalities, from commitment to isolation. When asked if she is willing to starve herself to death, she responds: “In one way or another, I’ve always suffered. I didn’t know why, exactly. But I do know that I’m not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I’ve ever felt … and I’ve found someone to feel with, to play with, to love … in a way that feels right for me. I hope he knows that I can see that he suffers too … and that I want to love him.” In this sense, a part of Lee’s fascination in Grey is predicated on the assumed necessity of a mutual and/or exchanged joyful suffering.

The film concludes with all of Lee and Grey’s “activities melting into an everyday sort of life until [they resemble] any other couple you’d see” (Shainberg). From being his secretary, Lee becomes Grey’s housewife, and she appears to have attained everything she thought she wanted. However, perhaps the most radical aspect of the film is its final shot, which lingers on Lee staring first down the street as Grey drives to work, then directly at the viewer with an ambiguous expression. Within this expression are subtle, essential, questions. Is this the life I want now that I’m awake? Is there something/someone/others whose limits of fascination are deeper and wider than his? There is seemingly nothing else to know about him. The implication is that their non-normative fascination, that is exchange of bi-directional binding in and to one another, ossifies to routine union, thus becoming the normative fantasy of domestic bliss and socioeconomic white upper middle-class stability. Ironically, Lee and the burgeoning power, identity, and the pleasure she feels through her psycho-sexually sadomasochistic fascination are brought to such a conclusive and stiffing terminus of non-fascination by fascination itself. The brilliant suggestion of this final shot is that while Lee seems to have fully satisfied Grey’s fascination, which amounts to a fascination with not being alone, he does not satisfy her masochistic fascinations in the last instance. While the fetters and tethers of spreader bar and collar liberate her, the trappings of a “regular” relationship are actual traps to her. The viewer is left to consider whether a mainstream film about BDSM like Secretary portrays BDSM in a positive light. In the last instance, I feel that this is beside the point. The most important aspect of the film, crystallized in this final scene, is the deceptively simple yet extremely radical insight that fascination, psycho-sexual or otherwise, is predicated upon the sustained ignorance in its own depths. The binding power of psycho-sexual fascination as an exchange of bondage ossifies and dies when its intimation of the absolute becomes fathomable or known.

Conclusion

Ostensibly, Shainberg’s exploration of sadomasochism subtends numerous dialectics: power/powerlessness, domination/submission, pain/pleasure, commitment/isolation. These dialectics are all embodied, reified, and ultimately countermanded by Lee’s journey as a submissive. While it appears that it is Lee’s submission to Grey and her initiation of the mysterious reliefs of power play that “heal” her, it is actually Lee’s submission to herself that, paradoxically, offers her not only psycho-sexual pleasure, but psycho-emotional relief. In the last instance, Grey presents Lee with a set of psycho-sexual tools that he himself enjoys at a remove and can only engage with as partial objects of psycho-sexual relief. He is ultimately shown to be uncertain (to the point of self-disgust) about his sadomasochistic fascinations, that is, his submission to their power over him. His reluctance does not, however, stop the said psycho-sexual fascinations from exerting their power over him, a power compounded by Lee’s open and honest acquiescence to the power of her own masochistic needs and self-identification as such. The fact that Secretary sees Lee occupy an ostensibly submissive subject position deconstructs the still pervasive assumption that there is an inextricable link between powerlessness and submissiveness. I have shown that through the psycho-sexually fascinating power of absolute nothing, sadomasochistic sexualities produce interestingly paradoxical modalities of love, death, violence, pleasure, and power. Moreover, I have attempted to illustrate that sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascination does not necessarily recirculate phallogocentric reductivisms concerning female sexuality and that a psycho-sexual subject position assumed to be absolutely powerless is in fact all powerful because of it. Assumptions about sadomasochistic psycho-sexual fascinations ultimately express themselves in contempt of the paradoxical reality that they attempt to sublimate through the essentialisms of the law, the court of public opinion, and the pathological repressiveness of the clinic, all of which oversimplify or eschew entirely the play of power, pleasure, pain, and death in psycho-sexual fascination.

Footnotes

1. Freud refers to this aspect of fascination indirectly in Medusa’s Head (1922).

2. For further discussion of agency and the eroticism of power differentials, see also Cross and Matheson, “Understanding Sadomasochism” and Langdridge and Butt, “Erotic Construction.”

3. While there exists a limited corpus of theoretical scholarship exploring the critical implications of “extreme” BDSM practices described as gesturing “beyond safety” in praxis, far less empirical work is focused on “edgeplay” that does not make recourse to clinical pathologization. See Downing, “Beyond Safety”; Downing and Gillett, “Viewing Critical Psychology.”

4. Symphorophilia is a diagnostic term used to describe a paraphilia that involves sexual arousal primarily derived from staging, observing, or participating in a tragedy, such as a fire or traffic accident. The term is formed from the Greek root συμφορά (“symphora,” event, misfortune) and first appears in John Money’s 1984 paper “Paraphilias.” I use the term as an example of extreme psycho-sexual fascination, not diagnostically in any clinical or judicial sense.

5. The terms sadism and masochism were coined by Krafft-Ebing in 1893, with reference to the Marquis de Sade and Baron Sacher von Masoch. Krafft-Ebing used the terms exclusively in reference to the essentiality of practices of seeking sexual satisfaction through the infliction of pain (sadism) or receiving it (masochism) as perverse.

6. The term limit-experience is a reference to Michel Foucault’s notion of the limit: “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” See Foucault, Remarks on Marx, pp. 30-31.

7. For arguments against S/M, see Linden et al., eds., Against Sadomasochism; Hanna, “Sex”. For arguments in favor of S/M, see SAMOIS editors, “Coming to Power”; Califia and Sweeney, eds. The Second Coming; Califia, “Feminism”; and Pa, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

8. For an exploration of masochistic submission out of desire as opposed to fear, see Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, esp. pp. 55-61.

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