International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
The term ‘sadism’ was coined by Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). For KrafftEbing, sadism was a degenerate category of male sexual cruelty that reflected the violence in the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenthcentury works. Ellis disputed Krafft-Ebing’s definition of sadism, arguing for its redefinition as a type of sexual play that heightened sensual feelings and depended on empathy instead of antipathy. Although Ellis concluded that sadism was not exclusively a male category, Freud not only realigned it with aggressive masculinity but reinstated Krafft-Ebing’s notion of antipathetic cruelty.
The Krafft-Ebing/Freud definition of sadism informed twentieth-century American, Australian, British and Canadian radical feminist movements’ notion of ‘cultural sadism’. In Female Sexual Slavery (1979), Barry described cultural sadism as male sexual violence against women that is elevated to the level of a cultural norm. Radical feminists formed two main camps regarding the origins of male sadism: one who saw it as an extension of the male aggression demonstrated in penetrative heterosexual intercourse and another who conceived it as the learned expression of a cultural ideology that normalised violence against women. This version of sadism, however, did not remain unchallenged. Ellis’s de-gendered idea of sadism as sexual play reemerged in groups such as the San Francisco lesbian S/M organisation Samois and in the gay and queer movements hailed by Halperin as incarnating the sensual enjoyment of the body.
Outside the confmes of this sexological paradigm, what radical feminists called sadism could be explained as a Machiavellian approach to the world where the rational deployment of cruelty is both accepted and celebrated as a means to successfully gain or retain power.
Sadism in this sense is a strategic mode of securing male supremacy in every sphere of life from the sexual to the political. Its logic is that the end always justifies the means and that the use of force yields power, respect and awe. This defmition of sadism explains not only male sexual violence against women, but also men’s cruelty against other men.
References and further reading
Barry, K. (1979) Female Sexual Slavery, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ellis, H. [18971 (1941) ‘Love and pain’, in H.Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 1, New York: Random House.
Freud, S. [1919] (1941) ‘A child is being beaten’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, London: Hogarth.
Halperin, D. (1995) Saint Foucault, New York: Oxford University.
Krafft-Ebing, R. [1886] (1965) Psychopathia Sexualis, New York: Bantam.
LINDA D.WAYNE
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