Free Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy by Staci Newmahr

wasn’t completely accepted. I wasn’t invited to things. Even when the geeks got together, I wasn’t invited. I was not a social person. I didn’t know how to be. That’s what it kinda came down to. I didn’t know how to be. I just didn’t fit in anywhere.
    Experiences of life on the social margins are pervasive in the life stories of interview respondents, salient in the conversations among community mem- bers, and a generally assumed aspect of community life in Caeden. Whether these marginal experiences were meaningful for the members of this commu- nity before they arrived, or have been jointly constructed through community narratives since, the stories of marginality resonate very strongly for people in Caeden. The loneliness captured in many of these stories is striking, as is the framing of marginality as an affinity for nonconformity:
    I would have these things that I was weird about, but I liked being weird about [them]. I would bring a book sometimes during recess and I’d get like friends to do it too; I’d be like “bring a book at recess and we’ll sit by the dumpsters and read!” I wasn’t a loner, I was just—I liked being different. There were usually like sixty kids in a class, in a grade. I was always, though my whole life, somewhere in the middle. (Interview transcript, Lily)
    Membership in the Caeden SM community cultivates, reinforces, and sus- tains identities of marginality that draw from sources far beyond members’
    interest in sadomasochistic play. Entrance into the community provides imme- diate reassurance that kindred spirits—and bodies and minds—exist. This observable validation suggests to participants that their interest in SM must somehow be connected to their other marginal experiences. By providing them the chance to cast SM as the (essentialist) explanation for why they have been different all along, the community reaffirms a broader and farther-reaching identity of marginality. This identity trumps the pre-community sources of nonconformity and highly values living life “outside the box.”
    The members of this community make unconventional life choices at almost every turn. They generally view themselves as especially sexually libidinous. Many were sexually active earlier than average and engaged in less norma- tive sexual activities at a young age. Careers (and career paths) tend also to be unconventional; many people work at home, freelance, or live off passive income of one sort or another. They participate in a broad range of other non- conforming, extreme, or marginal activities, including Wicca, Satanism, the Society for Creative Anachronism, civil war reenactments, shamanism, fencing, barbershop quartets, marathon running, skydiving, and vampirism. In their livelihood and in their hobbies, the members of this community are noncon- formists. They are accustomed to defining themselves as outsiders.
    Importantly, the alternative movements that attract the members of this community are pastime or hobby-based, rather than aesthetic or stylistic. Many members of the community reported having “Goth” friends in high school; Seth was not the only one to remark that he could have been Goth. In some ways, they bear strong similarities to members of the Goth communities (Wilkins 2008). Yet they are not Goth; they do not conform to a countercul- tural fashion style that would contextualize and present their outsiderness to the world. Their freakiness does not “resolve the dilemmas” of coolness that Wilkins observes for Goths, who consciously and deliberately construct their freakiness on their bodies as they move through heteronormative spaces from which they may have previously been excluded. The members of the Caeden SM community do not make these stylistic and declarative choices regarding self- presentation. Even when they are “out” about their SM identities, this declara- tion does not resolve their dilemma; they continue to live on the social margins