“The act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.”
– Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Two weeks before Christmas of last year, my father was diagnosed with cancer. The months that followed involved a succession of treatments and a major surgery. Throughout the experience, there was much discussion of clinical, medicalized pain: a necessary series of infusions, needles, stitches and the painful sensations that go along with every step of that process. My father’s pain had to be managed, organized, orally dissected, in order for it to be dealt with and understood. The shared experience of living with my father’s cancer forced me as an individual to examine what pain really meant to me: not just because I am my father’s daughter, but also because I am a professional Dominant.
I’ve been a professional Dominatrix for four years now. My father has had cancer for a fourth of that time. My favorite activities as a professional Dominatrix all involve pain, in some form or another: psychological, psychosocial, or just purely physical. The body in pain: something I thought I knew a thing or two about. It’s been something important to me, valuable to me as an artist and a performer. It’s been something that kept me full of life, infused my work with meaning, and brought me to a heightened awareness of myself: something I had always thought of as expansive and mind-blowing. Not something I saw as soul-crushing and hurtful. Yet to imagine my father in pain has hurt me more than I can even understand, more than I even want to understand. And to think, in the past, how often I’d taken pleasure in the pain of others…
Of course, in theory, it is easy to see that the pain my father goes through is very different from the pain my clients pay for. To quote the S&M writer Dossie Easton, “For those exploring pain as a gateway to sexual wholeness, a stubbed toe (for instance) is still painful.” I know intellectually that the pain of cancer isn’t the same as S&M pain. S&M pain is about having fun with pain, making a theatrical event of its presence. And when I explain my job to others, on the most reductive of levels, I tell people that I put my clients in pain in a way that is pleasurable for them as well as for me. From the first moment of my explanation, the pain is a positive force and the difference between that and “normal” human pains seems therefore more clear.
Still, the boundaries that exist between these two forms of sensation, linguistically held within in the same word, became increasingly undefined to me in the months that followed my father’s diagnosis. I looked at my father in pain and felt inconsolable with grief at my inability to end it. Until then, I hadn’t imagined the physical pain of another person could be so palpable to me, yet in no way pleasant. For as visceral and incisive as the pain I’d inflicted on others was, both affecting my clients’ states of mind and my own mental being, it was nothing in comparison to the pain I felt knowing my father was, potentially, dying. That, it seemed was just… too real.
Perhaps this was where the distinction lies: perhaps I saw masochistic pain as a fantastic mental endeavor, a purposeful mind game, existing within a different psychic plain than the chronic, overbearing state I knew my father endured. Perhaps that’s why I had such an easy time talking about S&M with others, while so few people in my life knew my father was sick. Indeed, I could always talk about the pain of my clients, because it was purposeful. It had a reason behind it: it brought me satisfaction, as both a sexual sadist and as a fiscal opportunist. There was a person, namely me, that was orchestrating everything. Making the fantasy real.
And wasn’t that why I did what I did as a profession, so that I could take that kind of power away from nature? So that the universe that be couldn’t tell me when the pain started and stopped? So that I, and I alone, could be in control of its happenings? Of course it was. I saw it as my liberation from a world filled with chaos, from that confinement of the natural (dis)order of things. No wonder it was now crippling to me to know that those same forces could show me just how small and powerless I was in the world.
I felt the way I felt about my father’s pain because I couldn’t control it. And what a horror it was, indeed: to find a pain in my life that I couldn’t control. I had convinced myself that pain was what flowed through me, disseminated from my fingers, was my tool and my artifice. Beautiful and impressive, making me beautiful and impressive as a result. I could feel so powerful, so in command of my self and my world. I could say when it stopped and started. I made the rules.
In cancer, there are no rules. The doctors explain what they can, but they don’t make the rules either. I can study what I can know about my father’s cancer, prepare myself for what might be coming, but it wasn’t like training myself for a scene. It wasn’t like prepping for some intense edge play. It wasn’t going to follow my set plan. The cancer would be playing its own game all along, having nothing to do with the supposed reality I had created for myself and for others around me. For my part, I was merely an ensnared observer, helpless and wounded.
When a Dominatrix loses her control of her own sadism, when a scene goes bad or wrong, too far for either of the players, the dominatrix is at fault. She has to bear the burden of that mistake. For my own part, I can blame myself, for not being more safe or sane or consensual. I can take that responsibility on. But here, what was there to take upon myself? Something had gone wrong, and whose fault was it? Who is there to blame, when your father’s body fills with cancer? Who is there for me to blame, when I can’t stop it?
In the months during my father’s recovery, when he reacted negatively to surgery and had to return to the hospital, I wanted nothing more than to march into a dungeon and obtain that pound of flesh for his release from this sickness. I hoped over and over again that someone would present themselves to me as a replacement for him; somewhere in my mind, I wished that I could present the world with a pain large enough to release my father from his own.
Because of course, the thing I wanted to disregard the most in this whole process was my own suffering. I was the one psychologically bound to my father’s physical bondage. Even now, as my father lives happily in remission, free from the confines of cancer and its physical workings, I still keep my pain locked away from discussion or regard. Only now can I admit how much it has crippled my heart beyond my own conception. But maybe I am wrong about the pain of s&m and the pain of life being so distant from one another. Maybe, just maybe, I will return to my work with the knowledge that my own pain can flow away from me, out my fingertips, the same way it drained out from my father’s face. Maybe then, I too can be free of this pain, as real as any imaginary world I have ever created.
