Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, Duke University Press, 2012, 336 pages, $24.95 paper, ISBN 9780822351597.

In Techniques of Pleasure Margot Weiss offers an ethnography of the pansexual BDSM scene in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s. The book draws on interviews with more than sixty BDSM practitioners, as well as extended ethnographic observations at dungeon play parties, community social gatherings (‘munches’), and workshops teaching BDSM techniques and etiquette around bondage, flogging, and forms of erotic role play. She describes a scene that is organised around rules and regulations, the consumption of sex toys and erotic play spaces, the cultivation of skilled techniques in the use of those toys, and forms of self-mastery. This is a study of the sexual politics of neoliberalism. Weiss moves beyond both tired celebrations of BDSM as an inherently transgressive form of sexuality and simplistic understandings of it as replicating social inequalities. Weiss theorises the Bay Area BDSM scene as a late-capitalist ‘circuit’ in which the promise of emancipatory pleasures is connected to the reproduction of social norms and inequalities.

The book starts by charting the changing geography of the BDSM scene in the Bay Area, notably the “change from Folsom Street to Palo Alto” (page 35). Weiss provides compelling evidence that this represents more than just a shift from a predominantly gay male leather scene to the contemporary pansexual BDSM scene she studied. In contrast to the dense cluster of gay male leather venues around Folsom Street, the new scene is diffuse, networked, and online. It is also predominantly suburban. If Folsom Street and, by extension San Francisco, still functions as the symbolic centre of leather sexuality and BDSM in the Bay Area (and beyond), it is no longer the spatial centre. Weiss argues that the development of the new BDSM community (and the decline of Folsom Street) is dependent on post-industrial economic changes in the Bay Area, including the growth of high tech IT industries, the expansion of suburban developments, and the neoliberal urban policies pursued within San Francisco itself. The pansexual BDSM scene has also created new spaces through which it is articulated: dungeons and play parties located in suburban homes, social ‘munches’, and conferences and workshops through which BDSM techniques and ethics are taught. Geographies of sexuality have frequently been criticised for paying too much attention to city centre gay spaces and red light districts. In contrast, Weiss offers a study of the spatiality of BDSM sexuality across the Bay Area city-region as a whole. Although she makes some reference to geographical literature, I was left wondering how her study might have been enriched by a greater engagement with debates in geography.

In Chapter Three, Weiss examines the spaces, relationships, and practices through which members of the BDSM scene cultivate their position as BDSM ‘practitioners’. Here again, Weiss offers a contrast between the old guard of (mostly) gay leathermen and the new pansexual scene, which she suggests is far more formally organised than what preceded it. Central to the new scene are a plethora of workshops and courses offering training in BDMS techniques, safety, and risk reduction. Weiss argues that individualised neoliberal ‘freedoms’ and forms of governmentality shape social belonging within the BDSM community. Central to this is the expectation that authentic community members practice their erotic play in a ‘safe, sane and consensual’ manner. Risk management in the new BDSM community is a biopolitical operation ensured by technical proficiency and contributing to the cultivation of the self. The community expectation is that practitioners should take personal responsibility for playing safely. Weiss draws the obvious conclusion that this is an expression of neoliberal governmentality. Many of the practitioners Weiss interviewed expressed ambivalence about this community norm, with some expressing nostalgia for a time when the BDSM community supposedly operated without so many ‘rules’. Risk, therefore, becomes positioned at the movable boundary of skill and self-improvement. Accomplished BDSM practitioners are ones who can interpret and position themselves in relation to these rules. The fact that this parallels aspects of professional habitus in the workplace is not lost on Weiss, and she suggests it positions the ability to safely negotiate risk as a marker of social privilege within the BDSM scene. This adds a useful new dimension to the study of contemporary sexualities.

In addition to the workshops and courses that teach technical proficiency and awareness of community norms, being a BDSM practitioner is increasingly commodified through the accumulation of sex toys to play with. As Weiss highlights, sexual freedom for the BDSM community is freedom to consume. She makes a compelling case that sex toys are central to BDSM practice and buying toys produces “certain types of subjects in accordance with larger social, political and economic relations,” (page 102). She argues that the accumulation of toys signifies one’s commitment to the BDSM scene, both through the financial investment and the development of appropriate technical proficiency in their use. These sex toys become ‘technological prostheses’ (page 103) mediating between self/other and subject/object. For the accomplished practitioner, toys become tools. Their consumption is productive – both of practitioners and new forms of bodily pleasures. The materiality and sensuality of sex toys matter to the effectiveness of the erotic scenes in which they are used. Here once again, the biopolitics of BDSM comes to the fore as “SM relies on, and produces, particular bodily knowledges” (page 115). The skilled practitioner develops the self-control and technical ability to use particular toys/tools safely but effectively on specific parts of the body – producing the desired affects and sensations, whilst managing risk. But, just like the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ guidelines, the consumption of BDSM sex toys is a source of anxiety and ambivalence for (experienced) practitioners. Whilst they cultivate hierarchies of distinction around accumulating toys of the best possible provenance, they also fear that newcomers to the scene can too easily ‘buy and identify’ without cultivating an appropriate level of technical proficiency in practice.

The theme of anxiety and ambivalence is pursued further in the final two chapters, where Weiss engages with long-standing feminist concerns about the reproduction of unequal social relations within BDSM erotics. Chapter Four considers the anxiety of some of the heterosexual white dominant men concerning the extent to which they are complicit in reproducing social hierarchy and privilege in their sexual encounters. Their enrolment of a liberal feminist argument that their female partners have a freedom to choose a submissive sexual role is rightly problematized. Similarly, in the final chapter, Weiss interrogates the ways in which discourses of choice and consent are utilized to justify the use of imagery from slavery and contemporary American military torture in BDSM play. Weiss is clear that sexuality is a social relation and cannot be separated from other power relations. While she recognises that these potentially taboo scenarios must seem real enough to have erotic efficacy, she stops short of suggesting that they simplistically reproduce social inequalities. Nevertheless, she asserts that the individualising rhetoric of consent and free choice obscures any sense that the white professionals at the centre of the Bay Area pansexual BDSM community might be complicit in the reproduction of structural inequalities at various spatial scales. While I think Weiss makes some interesting arguments in these closing chapters, I found them the less convincing than the first half of the book.

Techniques of Pleasure has a problematic lack of a conclusion (chapter five may have been intended as one, but it introduces too much new material and as a result there is a little sense at the end of the book of how the different components of the circuit come together). While Weiss’s book offers a fascinating extension of debates about the sexual politics of neoliberalism, and a consideration of how local economic changes in the San Francisco Bay Area have reconfigured sexual communities there, I was left questioning what economic practices and relations she was overlooking in her study by being so fixated on neoliberalism. What would the Bay Area pansexual BDSM community look like if studied through a diverse economies approach?