The softer side of S/M

In his new collection of stories, Stephen Elliott examines his experiences with torture and love through admirably clear eyes.

By Donna Minkowitz

Read more: Books, S/M, Donna Minkowitz, Reviews, Amsterdam, Book reviews

Nov. 29, 2006 | At the age of 20, Stephen Elliott writes, nearly penniless and staying at a scuzzy Amsterdam youth hostel, he meets a woman with "a bored expression on her face" who was "old compared to me, and not pretty. She had thick shoulders, a football player's body, and short spiky hair that had gone grey in patches ... Her skin was the color of clay." Oh, and she's very pockmarked. Yet Elliott's interested in her because he's seen her torturing a "soft and shapeless" man at a local S/M bar.

He encounters the woman hanging out by the hostel's lockers, where two men are trying to force their way upstairs so they can beat up a guest who owes them money. Outside are lots of muggers and pickpockets, "gays in chaps and shirtless women cruising" and "junkies [who] sat on bags of garbage sticking their arms." Elliott tells the clay-colored woman where he saw her before (she asks, "What were you doing in that bar?") and, although he's terrified he will have to walk back to the hostel alone -- because "there was no safe way back to the hostel at night" -- he goes with her for a drink, then to her hotel room.

Without asking his consent, preferences or anything else ("take your clothes off and put them in the corner" is all she says) she cuts his legs with a knife (threatening his balls), burns him with a cigarette, and temporarily asphyxiates him. It's his first S/M scene after a childhood and adolescence full of experiences of rape and assault in youth homes, after being thrown out of the house by his abusive father at the age of 13. His reaction? "I was very comfortable," Elliott writes. "I don't think I had ever been comfortable before."

That passage is one of the reasons to love this book. "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is a collection of linked stories that Elliott says amount to something "damn close" to a memoir. But Elliott, a Salon contributor and author of the critically acclaimed novel "Happy Baby," also says he "knowingly made up" some details and created a few composite characters, so "My Girlfriend " should more narrowly be considered fiction. Still, the author wishes to acknowledge "the general if not complete truth of this book" and, in particular, the fact that "every sexual act" depicted happened.

To Elliott, it's important to affirm his book's veracity because he wants all S/M people to feel freer and less ashamed. But I'm glad that he puts it out as true for a slightly different reason: because it shows the genuine, unmitigable weirdness of all human beings, sexually and otherwise. Elliott's emotional truthfulness is what is bravest here, not his sexual candor. His willingness to reveal himself in all his vulnerable glory is moving and strangely redemptive in the sense that it makes all our strange feelings and self-destructive acts comprehensible and worthy of compassion.

Leather folk or not, we all have some perilous or disturbing desires, and we all have, at least once, acted on them. In this context, S/M is a good cypher for all counter-rational deeds: We've all been, at least metaphorically, in that scuzzy hostel in Amsterdam.

When Elliott wakes up with the clay-colored woman, for example, it is probably the first time he has ever felt emotionally close to another human being because of sex. Like so many of us, he feels the need to flee immediately after feeling so intimate, actually going straight to the train station and out of the country. "I didn't understand what I was feeling. I thought it was an urge to be buried alive or drowned but it was probably a desire to crawl back into bed and stay." In Berlin he rents a tiny room and lies in bed for two weeks, "listening to German radio and sleeping and masturbating until my penis was lined with friction sores and broken skin." Then he heads back to Amsterdam, can't find her -- he doesn't even know her name -- and feels only loss.

What makes Stephen Elliott's writing most distinctive is that he's not afraid of sadness, even sadness that is inspired by crazy feelings or sadness that is not ever redeemed. In my time, I've certainly confused attraction and love with being drowned or buried alive -- haven't you, at least once? And I have also felt safer, on occasion, with ugly or dangerous people, as Elliott does. But few writers of memoir take up the challenge and go to frightening places like this, because America hates sadness and sad facts, and hates imperfection -- the quality of not being "OK" -- most of all.

Strangely, S/M writers are sometimes the most squeamish of all when it comes to revealing imperfection, moral haziness or even ambiguity in themselves and their erotic relationships. Under attack from the right, S/M authors are so often worried about letting down their side that they present sadomasochists in a sanitized, even whitewashed way that refuses to acknowledge the existence of tops who sometimes violate their bottoms' consent, or occasions when consent is equivocal. Or, even more heretical, encounters that leave some participants sad or unfulfilled.

But Elliott, an S/M activist and a fierce activist for progressive causes generally, is unwilling to bowdlerize his own life. In the title piece, "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up," a woman Elliott meets online purposefully gets enraged at him at the beginning of each date so that she can hurt him as much as she wants to. Many tops do this, of course, but this suburban woman does it so cloyingly and obviously that beyond being ethically questionable, it's just not sexy. "Why don't you just tell me my scene? Why don't you do that?" she yells when he asks what she would like him to do. "It's too late for sorry." Then she hits him so hard in the ears that he's afraid it will damage his hearing. He tries to rev himself up for her. "It's not like outside of the bedroom we had interesting conversations ... Maybe if I was tied up or something I could get in the mood. But what do you do when you're not in the mood and someone is hitting you and you want them to stop?"

Next page: "Why do I want her to hurt me now? Now that I feel so vulnerable and sad"