A Taste for Pain: On Masochism and Female Sexuality
by Maria Marcus
St. Martin's Press 1981
Original Danish publisher and publication date unknown


Maria Marcus is a masochist and feminist, and in this book she tells us of her search for self-understanding. The first paragraph of the book takes us directly into her masochistic desire:

When I was between four and seven years old, I used to play a game called 'Laying Eggs'. It was a game you played alone. You threw a ball backwards against a wall in a certain way, and when you missed, you were punished.

As the book proceeds she talks about her ongoing fantasy life, the many and various stimulants to it, and of the books she has read in hopes of understanding her masochism. Her book is divided into three parts. The authors and books she tells us about in Part One include Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sexual Life by J. Fabricus-Møller, Psychopathia Sexualis by R. von Krafft-Ebing, Boy Girl Man Woman by Bent H. Claesson, ABZ of Love by Inge and Sten Hegeler, The Erotic Minorities by Lars Ullerstam, Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, Justine by de Sade, Marie Grubbe by J. P. Jacobsen, The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare, and The Trial by Franz Kafka. In Part Two she discusses the psychoanalytic theories on masochism by Freud (an entire chapter), Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Helen Deutsch, Marie Bonaparte, and Wilhelm Reich (an entire chapter), along with thoughts from Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, and Simone de Beauvoir. Part Two ends with a nineteen page chapter on the novel Story of O.

Here are two paragraphs on Story of O from the book:

When I first read The Story of O, it filled me with a mixture of sexual excitement, horror, anxiety — and envy. I read it many times, each time with the same feelings. But gradually, as I had the good fortune to plunge to some extent into acting out an "Imitation of O", my envy, anyhow, lessened, because no one imitates O without overstepping a boundary into a state which is not particularly enviable. (p. 207)

I have kept back The Story of O for so long because I know no other book expressing so well all the contradictions involved in our image of womanhood. It features them so sharply and intensely that we cannot avoid feeling them in our bodies and deep down in our souls. What shall we do about those contradictions? (p. 208)

Marcus has admitted at the start that her masochism is a fundamental fact of her sexual self, and that she has memories of it as far back as age four or seven. In this book she is telling us how she has sought an explanation for that fact, and perhaps even for a cure (not necessarily psychoanalytic), if indeed the need for a cure is part of the full analysis and explanation of her masochism. On the first page of the book, Marcus quotes a Danish woman who during a 1972 meeting in Copenhagen where Germaine Greer spoke, raised the question: "But how can we start a woman's movement when I bet three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?" This exemplifies the conflict in Marcus' mind about her own masochism and the implications it has for her chosen political agenda. Her masochism she did not choose and her politics seem to her beyond debate. If 75% of all women are masochists, her own masochism is then fairly representative of the majority of women. Therefore, if she can uncover the meaning of her own masochism, especially if she finds it to be the result of social programming (in other words, a form of coercion) and not an essential characteristic of being female, this discovery will have great political value.

After three pages where she talks about the complex dynamics of her sexual arousal, she says:

To put it directly: what is the connection between domination and sex? Why does blood pour into my genitals when I hear those words — whip, slave, order, discipline, obey, humble, submission ... all those terms, all those signals, why do they send the symbols of oppression down into my cunt? (p. 155)

Marcus is not happy with any of the psychoanalytic explanations of her masochism but seems to reject less than the others the theory of (one time marxist) Wilhelm Reich, who theorizes that society and child raising techniques are finally responsible for neuroses, and thus for her masochism. Freud, it should be noted here, viewed neuroses as arising within and through the (in his view) unavoidable, psycho-biological dynamics and structure of the Oedipus Complex. For Reich, neuroses, because they arise out of changeable social structures, are ultimately avoidable. An interesting thing happens in the chapter on Reich. At the end, Marcus says that Reich's theory focused on male masochism but that she can imagine its application to women. She then briefly mentions some anxieties that may under Reich's theory account for female masochism. The paragraph, and with it the chapter, ends, to my mind, abruptly, as if she refuses to explore the anxieties further and to place them within Reich's theory. For her political sake she wants to lose her masochism, yet for her sexual sake she wants to keep it.

Her resolute dismissal of male masochism as unimportant to her research is also interesting. Marcus is focused on her masochism as the masochism of a female in what her political vocabulary calls a "patriarchal society". It bothers her that there so many female masochists, but not that some men are too — or, at least, the existence of male masochism doesn't seem to raise any political alarms for her. She believes that men are ultimately responsible for female masochism. How it is possible for any individual or group to place a psycho-sexual structure ex nihilo within another human being, she doesn't say. In other words, the fact of masochism still needs an explanation, and if it's more prominent in females, this is a secondary and interesting fact. Examination of this secondary fact may even provide some explanation for the phenomenon of male masochism, if the prominence in females has any significance for its existence in males. But if female masochism exists because men want to dominate women and they've somehow created an environment to assure this and to in fact trick women into wanting it themselves, what is the explanation for male masochism?

Part Three is the polemical section of the book. Here Marcus sets aside her search for understanding and takes an eclectic approach, mixing together bits (with no theoretical foundation or structure) from the theorists she's presented to us in the previous sections, focusing on the politically expedient view that it really is society's fault after all, or more specifically, the fault of those in power. This is a conspiracy theory, at bottom, and evidence isn't needed. If it feels true, it is. To clear matters up, she distinguishes two types of masochism: authoritarian masochism and sexual masochism. The first is essentially political and social submission to those in power who oppress classes of individuals and in which the authoritarian masochists exist. The primary oppressor or progenitor of authoritarian masochism is the family (she says blatantly near the end of the book on page 248 that "the nuclear family is an instrument of oppression"), and its burgeoning masochist is the child (not specifically female, although if Marcus took the time to spell out her ideas she might say here that the larger society offers a release from authoritarian masochism to the male child as he matures whereas the power of oppression is simply transferred from the family to society at large for the female child). Marcus even plays her marxist hand (finally) and mentions false consciousness, the state of seeing yourself only as your oppressor(s) want you to see yourself, not as things really are. Women are in Marcus' view an oppressed class, and any authoritarian masochism in individual females is a form of false consciousness. Since men (with the probable exception of masochistic males and homosexual males and those too young to know or those not in the know and whoever else isn't in on the conspiracy or not judged guilty by association) are collectively the oppressing class (the marxist Marcus goes farther and says on page 250 that "male society and capitalism go hand in hand"), the authoritarian masochistic female quite "naturally" submits to her man and to men in general. Marcus feels that authoritarian masochism, because it upholds social oppression, should be gotten over; and she believes it can be gotten over through the group efforts of the oppressed class, the awakening of the will, and through individuals getting a real "taste of freedom". A simple cure, it seems, for something so pervasive and defining within an individual's psychology.

Let's not forget four or seven year old Maria playing her game of 'Laying Eggs' which has nothing to do with sexuality per se and therefore must be a form of authoritarian masochism, to use the adult Maria's terms. Why Marcus thinks she's not slipping psychoanalysis into her discussion here is a mystery to me. Her childhood game is (if you intend eventually to label thoughts of this sort as authoritarian masochism arising under oppression) a second-order representation of experienced oppression, i.e. in Freudian terms she has introjected the authority of an "oppressor" (in fact, of her parents, and probably teachers if the girl is seven and not four) and directed that authority towards herself in a way no so-called oppressor has likely done. She is expanding on the possibilities and power of an authority that most likely she has no conscious awareness of as oppressive at all. She is already, Marcus could say, within the clutches of false consciousness, and to make matters worse, her imagination is at its service.

Since in Freud's later system the introjection of the parent's "law", and also indirectly that of society, results in the formation of the superego, what Marcus is railing against, implicitly — since she has not fully abandoned the Freudian scheme in halfway embracing Reich's ideas — is the "oppression" of the psyche by the superego, or more forthrightly said, the specific appropriation by the developing superego of the (patriarchal) "law" of the parents and society. This is what lies behind her complaint about the nuclear family. And this is why some feminists have wanted to dismiss Freud. Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex is founded on the gender distinction of male and female and presupposes that heterosexuality determines the dynamics of the Oedipal conflict. Thus the boy takes special interest in his mother and the girl has eyes for her father. The superego arises during the resolution of the Oedipal conflict and it is the "law of the father" that is introjected. The superego, then, is some sense "male" or at least oriented towards the male. From a radical-feminist point of view this is an indoctrination of the very worst sort, because it is a fusion or growth within the very composition of the female psyche of structures, concepts and values that derive from a male. To make matters worse, Freud says it's inevitable. So for the radical-feminist, either Freud is wrong about the genesis of the superego, or he's wrong about the inevitability of it being the father who's "law" is weaved into the psyche, or he's just plain wrong all around, and our psychological development in these areas doesn't happen anything like Freud thought. But it's still men's fault.

The second form of masochism, sexual masochism, Marcus says was "fully developed" in her before she was seven years old. She does not consider it a subset of authoritarian masochism, but an independent form. This must mean she had specifically sexual, masochistic fantasies by age seven along with those non-sexual fantasies explored, for example, in her game 'Laying Eggs'. She admits, too, that men did not in any other sense make her (the adult Maria) a sexual masochist, and in fact she's had difficulty finding men to dominate her in the ways she needs. Her strident feminist marxism, however, would insist, upon political principle, that the nuclear family and "patriarchal capitalism" are responsible for it.

The distinction she's made between the two types of masochism allows her to separate out social oppression from sexual domination. Authoritarian masochism allows social oppression to continue; sexual masochism is just very rough sex. She doesn't elaborate on sexual masochism's place in the non-sexual moments of a relationship. Is it only about physical acts for the purpose of sexual arousal or does non-sexual submission play some role in her sexuality also?

Marcus declares, as if it is true in every case for every masochist, that sexual masochism, as a state of mind, does not exist unless there is an imagined or real person consciously aware of how the masochist is being treated. She is not saying that someone needs to be doing something to her, although she does speak of being made into an object, but that someone (imagined or actual) needs more or less to watch it being done to her. The watcher could, of course, also be the doer. She doesn't explain this any further.

But she wants to rid herself of sexual masochism too, and she speculates, using bits of Reichian theory concerning the body as mirror of the mind, that it just might be possible. Yet then, again, she doesn't wish to really lose it. On page 257, after a long polemic against the present (circa 1981) conditions as marxist feminists see things, she writes that "perhaps there is something in it [sexual masochism] we can use when we have cleared up all the muck it is mixed with." She has gone around in circles. She knows where she stands politically, but sexually, she doesn't know what she wants, because her politics seems to deny her body's desire.

© 2001 Dubnglas

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