Techniques of Pleasure

Techniques of Pleasure is an ethnography of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM scene, a community of practitioners of bondage, domination/submission, role‐playing, fetishes, and other forms of eroticism. Margot Weiss’s research entailed attending business meetings of the Society of Janus, one of America’s oldest BDSM organizations; workshops on SM techniques; and dungeon play parties. She also interviewed more than sixty BDSM practitioners, including well‐known prodommes (professional dominants) and leading writers and community experts.

Weiss vividly evokes the feel of the BDSM scene in San Francisco area in the early 2000s. At the same time, she challenges notions of SM as inherently transgressive, revealing a technique-orientated community, largely organized around classes, rules, and the acquisition of expensive sex toys. Most of the members of the Bay Area BDSM scene were white, heterosexual, middle-aged, well-off, and involved in long‐term relationships. Weiss analyzed SM “scenes”—sexual encounters involving roles, costumes, and props—including dramatizations of slave markets and the creation of the Abu Ghraib photographs. She contends that such performances eroticize social inequality, reproducing hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, rather than offering a safe space, separate from real‐world inequities.

Margot Weiss is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.