Feminist Experiences and Perceptions of Sadomasochism, Rough Sex and Digital Communications Technology in Liberal Society.

This doctoral thesis looks at the experiences and perspectives of grassroots feminists on the relationship between sexuality, violence/power, politics, and technology. Specifically, it explores the relationship between sadomasochism and modern communications technologies, such as digital pornography and social media. It uses the phenomenon of ‘rough sex’ – the version of sadomasochism that is typified by heteronormative aggression - and its relationship with sexist legal defences, hypermasculinity, liberal ethics, and pornography, due to the controversy around its perceived growth in popularity from feminists and in women’s media. It situates its understanding of these issues from within the context of ‘platform’ capitalism, posthumanity, and the notion of increasing economised techno-mediation into human socio-sexual life.

It utilises a materialist or ‘critical realist’ feminist framework for analysing the data, specifically Beauvoirian and radical feminism, which in the former case perceives fantasy as key to understanding sadomasochism and in the latter case, perceives violence as key to understanding sadomasochism. In order to accumulate data on these questions a survey of 100 people who identified as feminists or feminist allies (largely women) and a further 13 semi-structured interviews with 11 women, 1 transwoman and 1 bisexual man (all under 35 apart from 1) was conducted. It then used a thematic analysis to organise the data into four chapters, on liberalism, modern sadomasochism, digital pornography, and fantasy/digital sexual cultures.

The primary finding throughout the data shows that participants were ambivalent or critical about social liberalism’s ability to confront the profundity of the problems pertaining to relationships between sex, violence, and masculinity, particularly in an era of pornography and global, highspeed communication. This feeling was not born of a reactionary distaste for sex, as historically has been argued, but a consequence of experiencing or witnessing sexual violence and extremist masculinity and trying to balance a respect for the danger these phenomena cause, with a sympathy for some of the precepts of individualist liberalism. A desire for freedom and fantasy balanced with a need to articulate the alienation of having experienced masculinist dehumanisation and aggression and having that exploitation justified socially as ‘sexual fantasy’. As a consequence, many participants were looking to radical or other older versions of ‘classic’ feminism, to find meaning and understanding about the negative sexual experiences they had themselves or witnessed in their communities (digital and real life).

The findings indicate a need to conduct broader scholarship on new appraisals of radical feminist theory to women’s politics, and to situate the relationship between fantasy, violence, sexuality, pornography, and technology as key to this further study.