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Sara Adamson's The Slave
Tue, 30 Aug, 1994
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WARNING! The text below contains spoilers for The Slave, an S&M
novel by Sara Adamson. If you haven't read this book. and don't
want to know a lot of the gory details now, please don't read
this message or the second one (Part 2) that follows it in the
thread.
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Dear Rob,
Near the beginning of August I wrote but did not post:
>>> There's been a short lull in the storm I call my worklife, and
so I am going to make a stab at doing to The Slave what I did to
the first book in the Beauty series, I hope before the eye passes
over. <<<
Looks like I didn't quite make it , but here, finally, over
three weeks later, is my analysis of Sara Adamson's book The
Slave. For those just coming into this thread, note that this
isn't your standard piece of literary criticism. My point in
writing this is to describe what about this book struck me as
unrealistic in terms of the way I and the real people I know do
S&M. These comments have little to do with how well I liked the
book. In spite of my mild annoyance and impatience with the main
character, I actually found this novel quite a hot read. As
someone mentioned recently (I think in the 9.5 Weeks thread),
erotic fiction has to be unrealistic, otherwise it wouldn't be hot
and exciting, and no one would want to read it. That's absolutely
true in my opinion, and I wouldn't want it any other way, but
since so many newcomers to S&M make the common mistake of looking
upon such fiction as realistic or ideal models of dominance and
submission (or sadism and masochism) that one should emulate and
base one's own relationships on, it never hurts for someone who's
done "the real thang" to write a message that points out where a
specific book meets reality and where it radically departs from
the real.
In your message to me, you asked about my statement that the
slaves or wannabe slaves in Adamson's book are portrayed with
stupid, lazy, emotionally dishonest, physically unappealing and
other negative attributes:
>>> Um, really?...Are you thinking more of The Marketplace when
you say this? (What did you think of Robin herself?) <<<
To answer your first question, yes, I probably was thinking of
Adamson's The Marketplace when I went into my long adjective
list. I read the two books back-to-back and was probably mixing
some of the details. As for what I thought about Robin herself,
well, it's quite a mouthful. Since it gets me into the "real
verses fantasy" analysis of the book a bit, however, it is a good
jumping-off point.
I'm finding it difficult to pinpoint why I wasn't absolutely
thrilled by Robin as a protagonist and why I, a self-identified
slave, had difficulty relating to her. Her willingness to try and
her need for submission were both strong and very appealing parts
of her personality: she did seem made for slavery. I think that what
I first objected to emotionally about Robin was her mediocre
intelligence. She consistently presented herself as thoughtful but
not very bright throughout this book, and while she wasn't
out-and-out clueless in any specific or striking way (unlike the
novice slaves in The Marketplace, who had a charmingly
Dickensesque tendency to be walking exhibits of one main
personality feature...or fault), her general behavior--her
decisions, especially, but also her reactions, thoughts, and
conclusions--struck me as not the sort that someone intelligent
would have or make.
Now let me see if I can support this general impression with any
hard evidence. This book is a lot more complex than the Beauty
series tended to be, so I doubt if I am going to be able to draw a
single quote out of my hat and say "Ah hah! See, this proves Robin
is dumb," but let's try the chapter-by-chapter approach and mix
the other "reality vs. fantasy" commentary in with it.
In Chapter One, we find Robin in a hotel room being interviewed by
Chris. (As I did in my Beauty books message, I'm only going to
repeat the details from this novel necessary to make my point. For
those of you who can't figure out what's going on, get on the
phone to Masquerade or some other supplier of Ms. Adamson's, and
order the book.) First detail: she's willing, it seems, to throw
herself wholeheartedly into something (the Marketplace slave
system) that she knows very little about, and what little she has
heard, we learn later, she got from a benefactress of the system,
a female dominant who purchases their products and who perhaps gets a
significant finder's fee for bringing in promising fresh meat.
So Robin is here in this hotel room because someone who's going to
profit highly from what evolves from this meeting (that is, her
eventual sale on the auction block) has sold her on the idea. And
it wasn't hard to do, apparently, given Robin's tendency to be a
greedy, impatient little sub (you know, they say it takes one to
know one--g). She wants it all, and she wants it now (or at least
as soon as possible), and if that means jumping before she is
ready, then so be it. An intelligent individual would have,
before she even set foot in such a hotel room, gotten her hormones
under control and then, just for starters, done at least the
following (a more cautious individual might have done much more):
(a) Ascertained the true motivations of the person trying to push
her in a particular direction (in this case, her spotter or
finder) and completely satisfied herself in regard to questions
like "What's in it for her?" "What's her stake in all of this?"
"Why is she being so nice to me and so concerned for my submissive
welfare?" "Does she truly have only my happiness at heart?" And if
such a person responded to her queries suspiciously, dishonestly,
or evasively, a big red warning light should have started blinking
in her head.
(b) Insisted that she be allowed to speak in person with actual
slaves who had spent a long time in this system about their
personal happiness or level of fulfillment. Afterwards, she would
judge the worth of their words using her personal impressions of
their sincerity and would have ignored the statements of the obvious
propagandists or the ones who struck her as too self-ignorant to
be able to judge anything accurately. (I used to run into the
latter type all the time when investigating religious cults during
my teens. Extremes of all sorts attract that type of person, so
I'd expect Robin would meet a few such unreflecting fanatics in
the Marketplace system.)
(c) Assumed that for every hundred or so integrated happy slaves
there had to be a disgruntled castaway or two, and sought them out
to hear their unique impressions of the Marketplace. Afterwards,
she would again balance their words against what she had been
able to discern of their personalities and ignored those who
seemed to be speaking from dishonest motivations, such as having an
axe to grind.
(d) Spent a considerable amount of time getting to know Chris and
evaluating his strengths and weaknesses, as a trainer and as a
person in general. Met him for dinner. Met him for coffee. Gone
clubbing with him. Watched him interact with others. And, most
importantly, watched him train others. In other words, done
everything but be alone in a hotel room with him and, under his
(perhaps unfair) influence and pressure, felt obligated to make a
decision she was by no means prepared to make: a decision that
will radically affect her life for years to come, until she felt
absolutely sure of him. She also should have made absolutely sure
of herself: that she wasn't just making a spur-of-the-moment
decision based on the dictates of her pussy.
The sort of evaluation described above may have taken as little as
a week or two, or it may have taken months, or with some people,
even years, but when you're dealing with a decision that's going
to change your life profoundly, you damn well better give it all
the time it takes or be prepared to live with the unpleasant
results of a stupid mistake. Decisions may take a short or a long
time to make, but if you hope to be happy in life through making
choices that are right for you, then at the very least your decisions
ought to be
afforded an amount of research and thought that is in direct proportion
to their importance.
Yes, such careful evaluation is quite unsexy and so probably would
not work in a novel like this, but similar actions are the minimum
that's required, in real life, before one gives oneself
away--absolutely--as a slave. You have to be completely sure of
who (and in Robin's case, of what) you are giving yourself away
to, and then by all means madly jump, immerse yourself with all
the enthusiasm and strength your being can muster. Hesitating
after one is as sure as one is going to be--sure enough
to take the risk--is as serious a
mistake as jumping into something too soon: both actions mess with
one's future happiness--never a wise idea. So dive into it,
knowing you've done all you could to make sure that the waters you
are entering are pure and holy and what you are really looking
for. Look, if Robin had taken the time to do her homework on the
Marketplace, she probably wouldn't have uncovered miserable
slaves, or discovered Chris was an untrustworthy ass, or any other
horrid surprises. But she may very well have discovered (because
this is the way it often works between two people in real life, as
Robin's past relationships illustrate) that the Marketplace's
idea of slavery, while just fine and dandy for some people, was
incompatible with her own ideas and, more importantly, her deepest
desires in this regard.
Had Robin known where she and the Marketplace differed in their
conceptions of slavery, she could have been able to determine
whether that difference was something she could live with, given
the other positive features of the system. Alternatively, if the
incompatibility were just too large, she would have had to muster
the courage to seek elsewhere. Had she done her homework on
Chris, she might have discovered that his personal style of
training was not one that would bring out the best in her, and she
could have found the patience to wait until a trainer with a
different style became available.
In real life, incaution often takes the form of falling for a
dominant because she has a pretty face or because he dresses the
sexy way your fantasies tell you a dominant should dress. Or you
could be impressed by the fact that he can stand up in front of a
group and give a talk, or by her whipping style at a play party,
or by his sophisticated sense of humor, or by her ability to "give
good email." In fact, in Netland, where words are the true
coin of the realm, I've noticed that new submissives, more often
than not, roll over for dominants whose writing style manages to
impress them or whose stories make them hot.
But it is an artifact of sheer stupidity, inexperience, or
ignorance to let such superficial aspects of a personality
influence you when you're considering something as monumental as
becoming the absolute and permanent slave of its owner. What does
parsing a
good argument have to do with one's ability to dominate? Damn
little, in my experience. Look around you: the bottoms in this
place are equal or in many cases better wordsmiths than the tops.
What does having a dungeon that resembles a whip museum have to do
with being able to control you over the long term? Even less than
an ability to write a coherent sentence, I'd say. Yet subs
sometimes let such trifles, such inconsequential items, convince
them that Dominant X should be their lifetime owner.
Such things, in fact, tell you absolutely nothing about whether
any person would make a good owner and manager of of human property. You
should really check them out, their background, their former
slaves (or masters--everything I'm saying applies to
dominants--just turn the terms around), talk to the people who've
met them in person, who've seen them play, and who have no hidden
agendas in recommending him or her to you. Don't just
talk to one person about your potential master or slave and think,
"Tra-la-la, that's done with! Person A says she or he great, so I've
got nothing to worry about!" Instead, get as many opinions as
possible as to the worth of this person.
The more time and care you put into this initial research, the
more likely the decision you eventually make will be the right one
for you and one you can live with for years into the future. Don't
let your initial impression of a dominant's "marvelousness" or
"perfection" blind you to the need to check up on him: remember
how every infatuation, at the beginning, has this rosy tone of
"He's so Wonderful!" to it. And just how many people that you
have been involved with in the past have turned out to live up to
the superlative ways in which you initially viewed them? I don't know about
you, but I can count mine on the fingers of one finger .
But our girl Robin (remember our girl Robin?) seems to be all
gonads in the frontal nodes when it comes to leading a slave's
life, and she appears to leap as blindly into Chris's power as she
leapt into the other unsuccessful relationships in her life. I
posit that it is this habit (some would term it a vice) of
impatience, the flip side of the coin of her intense sincerity
about and enthusiasm for slavery, which is her primary problem and
something which a reputable and perceptive individual or a more
selfless organization would have made her face and work on before
accepting her submission. But the Marketplace is not selfless. It
is a business venture, and, like most organizations out to make a
buck, it's not about to turn away a healthy profit when it has one
within its grasp. You can almost see the little dollar signs in
their eyes when the representatives of this hallowed organization
get a gander at sincere, struggling Robin.
Sound cynical? Well, it was meant to be! I am one of those
tiresome (and just maybe experienced--g) people who is convinced
to her very core that business and sexuality do not, ever, mix. I
have seen people try it, and I have seen people fail, over and
over and over. I'm not talking about writing books or making
whips. I'm not talking about having an affair at work. I'm not
even talking about standing behind the porn camera (although those
folks walk a thin edge, and most fall over into the chasm of
inhumanity); I'm talking primarily of sexual performers: pro doms,
pro subs, strippers, actors in B&D porn movies, and the like.
The business aspect of a sexuality venture inevitably (although it
can take years) ends up warping or maiming one's personal
sexuality, if it doesn't kill your soul first. I briefly met a
woman at Stonewall, an obvious professional dominant and an
exquisitely beautiful woman in the fashion-magazine aesthetic, who
was at the same time completely repulsive because she was so
totally dead. All the light was gone from her eyes; she smiled
only with her lips. She was a walking corpse--she had that
absolutely recognizable reptilian stare that so many of the
political types interviewed on the "McNeil Leaher News Hour" do
(shudder). In a business concern, the profit motive interferes
with and drowns your personal motives, and sexuality, a most
sensitive part of ourselves highly responsive to seemingly
outside and unrelated forces (think of all the mysteriously
impotent or frigid individuals out there) cannot survive in its
killing environment. The fact that the Marketplace is a 100%
percent business venture is the first thing about this book that
was clearly, for me, a fantasy departure from reality. In our
real, gritty, grimy capitalist world, nothing good could come from
such a for-profit venture. Someone would pay; someone would be
hurt; someone would become incapable of normal loving human
relations.
Ok, back to Chapter One and why I think our girl is dumb, besides
the fact that she doesn't look before she leaps (nor does she
learn from past mistakes, it appears--her past failures seem to
have taught her nothing about caution and patience). I think that
Robin consistently draws the wrong conclusions from her
experiences. She does this because she has a negative,
self-deprecating mindset, and that false modesty, while
superficially attractive, is actually quite repulsive to view
in a person if it is
really an indication of extravagant dishonesty about oneself. So
when Robin relates to Chris how she lost her virginity (p.p. 10-15),
she demeans herself in what I thought was a characteristically
adolescent way by saying that it was all her fault that her first
boyfriend didn't figure out that she had submissive fantasies of
being controlled and ravished: "I should have been clearer about
what I needed. I mean, I wrote these coy little phrases in this
love letter, about wanting to be swept away, to be made
powerless...but I never really said, 'Hey, Greg, I want you to tie
me up and pretend you're a pirate, okay?'" When I read those lines,
I thought that had I been Chris, I would have given Robin the
benefit of the doubt, and, assuming her words really represented a
low self-opinion and weren't some contrivance designed to impress
me, said with great intensity, "Look, if Greg had been the type to
be interested in such things, he would have picked up on your
clues immediately. Quit getting down on yourself for your imagined
inability to communicate! You did it right! And if the guy had
been intelligent and kinky he would have known what he was dealing
with and what to do about it. You need to realize that this sexual
misadventure was the outcome of your getting involved with someone
with whom you are sexually incompatible, a perfectly
understandable state of affairs, given your lack of prior
experience with relationships. Many people's first times are a
sorry mess. But we learn from that mess (and usually the next few
messes that follow it) what we really want from relationships and
from sexuality."
Robin's lack of self-confidence, Robin's sense that she is the
problem and that she makes all the mistakes while others are
perfect, annoys me and isolates me from her. "Why doesn't she
have better self-worth?" I found myself asking, when I read
passages like the one on page 10: "Everything depends on this
interview, she reminded herself. He's accepted me for now but I
can still mess things up. I have to be perfect." Robin is, in
Robin's eyes, a natural fuck-up who has to be watched over by her
vigilant superego. She is also an unrealistic perfectionist.
Double yuck! In her shoes, a heroine dear to my heart would be
thinking, "Relax, girl. Nothing essential rides on this interview.
Either he likes you or he doesn't, and he'd probably made up 80%
of his mind about you before you even met. But even if he hasn't,
you don't want him accepting you on false grounds--this is
training, after all, and he won't be expecting to train someone
who is already perfect. You want him to sign you on in spite of
your imperfections, not because you're hiding them. So you need
to be perfectly honest with him about all of your traits, because
if he accepts you under false pretences, it'll be the worse for
you both when these are uncovered, as they probably will be,
during the training. Besides, you are a great person, with many
delightful qualities, and you know it. If you get nervous, think
of the dweebs and the poseurs in SM bars and how different you are
from them. Think of how other people you respect have recognized
something special in you. If you are yourself, Chris will be too,
unless he's incredibly stupid. And in that case, you don't want to
have anything to do with him. You should be doing with Chris
exactly what you do on your job interviews: think of this as an
opportunity to interview and evaluate him and decide if he is a
good fit, the right trainer for you, and a fair representation of
what you want from the Marketplace, just as he is evaluating you."
I suspect that the author purposely created in Robin an
inexperienced (in the sense of life experiences and people smarts)
individual who has never been very self-reflective, but it is
those characteristics of hers, plus her unpleasantly low level of
intelligence and a certain lack of creative verve (essential for
an interesting submissive, in my opinion), that make her difficult
for me to relate to. As I read this book, I found myself scolding
her: "Why don't you do [fill in any activity here], dummy!"
Or, "Come on, girl, wake up!
Look at the situation around you, figure it out, and act
appropriately--given your sexual background and professional
experience, you can't possibly be this dumb-innocent-naive-
inexperienced!" There is often this jarring discontinuity between
what I expect someone of Robin's approximate age and experience
level should know and what she actually knows.
For the most part the physical scenes between Robin and Chris in
the first chapter seem realistic enough, and the author gets the
emotional tone of dominance and submission right--it feels real
and very hot, but Chris's assumptions, throughout his play and
testing of her--that she should know more than she does or have
more manners that she actually has--struck a phony note with me.
These alleged manners are not something everyone who wants to be a
slave has a genetic knowledge of, nor are they things Robin was
likely to have learned in her prior pseudo-power-exchange
experiences, and Chris should have known that from her file, if
nothing else. So his anger and impatience at her lack of "slave
etiquette" (which is specific only to the Marketplace and could
have been known only to those already trained in the Marketplace's
way of doing things) struck me as dishonest. Why be pissed at her
for something she couldn't possibly know or help?
As all of us who do this on a regular basis know, there are a
myriad of ways to create the mood of a power dynamic. False (or
actual) anger is just one of them, and it is a most dangerous
method to choose with someone you are unfamiliar with, because it
so often backfires. If Robin had the kinds of emotional problems
that so many of us do, she might have reacted to Chris's unjust
anger and disgust with withdrawal, rage, lying hypocrisy, attempts
at manipulation, or an unspoken decision to escape the situation
at the earliest opportunity.
On a related topic, while I loved the scenes of physical abuse,
the verbal abuse made me a little nauseous. I mean, is it
really necessary when you purposefully throw someone off balance
to say, "Keep yourself up, you clumsy idiot!" (page 20)? It seems
awfully close to lying to accuse someone of doing something that
you actually were the cause of. When Chris drags her toward him
by her hair, causing her to go crashing into his knee, he could
have chuckled and said, "You must learn to be graceful, dear,
even under adverse circumstances!" Instead she gets told what a
clumsy oaf she is, something I felt that this girl in particular,
with her already marked tendency to put herself down, does not
need to hear. With someone who has more confidence or a stronger
ego, verbal abuse would probably not be a problem, but Robin struck me
precisely as the type who might internalize such comments and add
them to her already enormous pile of reasons that explain why she
is not good enough. Again, in real life, a sensitive dominant
would be aware of the potential soft spots and weaknesses of his
slave and would design his play around that (or err on the side of
caution, if he did not know her well before playing with her).
Later, when the slave was more secure emotionally and capable of
taking more, would be the time to add those elements that
initially could have caused freakouts or other problems. The more
I read of this novel, the more convinced I became that Chris was
not the type of trainer who could bring out the best in a person
like Robin, and so I was surprised (and a quite a bit skeptical)
when she ultimately seemed to thrive under his tutelage.
Jumping to Chapter Two, we see that Chris seems to conspire in
reinforcing Robin's low self-opinion. Robin, for once, shows a
little spark of life when confronted with an idea that for many of
us is preposterous and out of the question for a variety of complex
reasons: outing oneself to one's family. When, on page 42, Chris
idly suggests she "just tell them the truth," Robin, for once, has
an honest reaction, uncensored by her ideas of how a good little
slave should act. She sarcastically snaps back, "Hi, mom, just
wanted to call and tell you that your daughter has run off to be a
slave! Love to dad!" (page 42). She then apologizes profusely for
daring to be a real human being around him. Instead of laughing at
that remark (which is genuinely funny and to the point) or
supporting Robin for dropping her "I'm just a meek little slave"
act, Chris sinks a vicious barb: "Apparently you are so used to
hiding everything about yourself, the very thought of declaring it
openly is utterly ridiculous to you." There you go, Chris; don't
build her up; don't support her pathetically shaky ego; instead
tear it down with remarks like that! Sure, according to The
Slave, about 50% of all Marketplace applicants are actually out
to their families, but for a variety of reasons, which can include
cowardice but which can also include very real fears of legal and
financial repercussions, or the fact that one's parents have the
combined IQ of 70 and the viciousness of Rottweilers trained to
kill on sight, many kinky people, outside of a
novel, are, quite understandably, unwilling to take that risk.
[To be continued in Part 2]
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