Title: Different Loving

Author/Artist: Gloria Brame (Ed)

Publisher: Century

Media: Book

Reviewer: Pan

The history of sex surveys is long and tortuous, but the one thing that they all have in common is that they display their authors' own prejudices and ideologies as much as anything else. Whether it's Krafft Ebing using Psychopathia Sexualis to pathologise `deviance', or Nancy Friday refusing to find female fetishists, each survey has something to tell us about its author's own agenda, (and we won't even mention the recent Janus Report). We've all got a point to prove, only some people like to dress it in the language of science and number, turning the rest of us into lab exhibits to be gawped at vicariously.

Still, there are surveys and there are surveys. Some are all facts and figures, trend lines and statistical analyses, others are all interviews, fantasies and selected texts. Both of these approaches have their place of course, and the facts and figures approach needn't be less humane than the other impressionistic route. For example Sexual Variations by Chris Gosselin and Glen Wilson is probably the most interesting example of this approach. Now sadly out of print this was a book largely sympathetic to the world of pervery, and peering out from under the charts were the genuine faces of real SMers, TVs and fetishists.

The other approach is best exemplified by Nancy Friday's collections of sexual fantasies. Here it seems that people are left to speak for themselves, but of course the choice of fantasies is with Nancy Friday, and her comments and views preface each selection of texts. So here we can see Nancy repeating what every other `sexologist' has repeated: women do not fetishise, despite the evidence going back to Krafft Ebing, and later Freud and Lacan and the rest, she refuses to see just as they did. Still, Nancy Friday had other ideological battles to fight at the time, so perhaps this was one orthodoxy too many to challenge, (see Female Fetishism by Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen for more on this denial of reality).

Now, at last, we have an interview type survey devoted exclusively to SM and fetishism. Different Loving, edited by Gloria Brame, William Brame and Jon Jacobs, and sub-titled An exploration of the world of sexual dominance and submission, is a Nancy Friday sized book of voices from the American SM scene. There are no charts or diagrams here, only the voices of perves like the rest of us. No judgemental over-view, no snotty nosed scientific objectivity, only the voices of the editors and people talking about themselves and what they do.

And what don't they do! The coverage is quite extensive, there isn't a single major area of SM that isn't covered: CP, bondage, gender games, dressing up, piercing, infantilism...all SM life is here. Even when some of the things described make you personally cringe, (and I read the section on catheters with legs tightly crossed), I was able to gain insights into what turns other people on, and an idea of the pleasure they got out of it. The non-judgemental tone of the book helps this, the subliminal voice of the editor isn't there to force you onto the defensive.

If there are no facts and figures in the book does that mean that there's nothing we can learn from it? The first thing that stands out is the enormous diversity of sexual fun and games that people play, the cliché whips and chains and kissing heels is only a small part of an enormous mosaic of sexuality and experimentation. Diversity is the key word here, and it applies not just to what people do and say but also to the kinds of relationships that SM people are engaged with. What comes across is the wide range of life-styles and relationships that people have evolved, and it ranges from the entirely monogamous on the one side, to the 'body fluid' monogamous, to the completely open, to the fluidly polygamous at the other end of the scale.

Very few claimed to have hit on the perfect relationship, but warts and all at least they were aware of where they were and what they wanted. Clearly there is no one relationship that is right, we are all different and changing all the time, but the sheer diversity makes me hopeful that this thing we call the SM community is wide enough to encompass all sorts of situations and is not about laying down the law on what is right and wrong.

It was also interesting to note how many people introduced themselves as `mostly het', or 'often gay', or 'currently lesbian'...Again there was a wide range of sexualities, but also the inference that this was a fluid, dynamic thing. It even seemed that gender attraction was secondary, an incidental more than anything else. Is there a distinct SM sexuality that transcends labels of 'gay', 'straight' or 'bi'? On the evidence presented here the answer has to be a definite maybe.

The other thing that is noticeable early on is that the power roles of top and bottom seemed even more dynamic than gender attraction. Most people were evolving, experimenting, changing all the time. The number of people claiming to be exclusively dom or sub was lower than expected, and the number of these that had not tried the other role was even lower. It emphasised once more that in SM the game is more important than the roles. A number of people stressed that if it came down to a choice they would switch from dom or sub rather than stop playing altogether.

There is so much more to say, but I could go on all day and you'd get bored. It's not all good though, there were a number of annoying things about the book but these were pretty trivial. An index would have been good, as would have some discussion and conclusions at the end. There was a lot of skating around political issues, but this wasn't the book for that. This is a book about people and pleasure, a chance to hear what other people do, and a chance to say yeah, that's exactly how it feels!

Highly recommended.