David Davis XII
Warning for discussion of suicide
If you somehow weren’t depressed before March, you’re probably depressed now. If you were depressed before, you just might have faced a mental health crisis or six since then.
As of 2018, America has the highest suicide rate it’s had since 1941 (not a banner year for morale, 1941!). Obviously, this isn’t factoring some of the more depressing events of the past seven months—which include a pandemic mismanaged into biological warfare, the third recession of the last 20 years, violent state repression around anti-racist and abolitionist organizing, and the lead-up to a presidential election that has obliterated any pretense of institutional credibility for even the most credulous of American citizens.
Death as either escape from dystopic circumstances or reprieve from suffering has gotten more broadly appealing, but why stop there? Why be born at all? More than once over the past month, my teen sister kidded about not having consented to the life that she was forced into (her dry sense of humor saved the joke from being dramatic, but not from making me sad). A teenager living through COVID lockdown in a region that has burned down for the past three autumns, culminating this year in California’s largest wildfire season in its modern history, has reason enough for a little gallows humor.
In a recent newsletter, Haley Nahman wrote about anti-natalism, the belief system that assigns negative value to birth. Its contemporary poster child, an almost comically sad philosopher named David Benatar, “believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion.”
This isn’t Edelman taking down reproductive futurism, but something more straightforward, and on its face more concerned with compassion. “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering,” writes Benatar, “few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.” Won’t somebody think of the children? Benatar has.
Gentle though it was, Nahman’s exploration of Benatar’s philosophy left me feeling irritated and contemptuous of the guy. His New Yorker profile changed my perspective a bit: I came away feeling more pity than irritation (though I certainly do still feel irritated). It’s easy for me to glibly assign egg status to a person like Benatar—who carefully guards his privacy to prevent “readers from psychologizing him and attributing his views to depression, trauma, or some other aspect of his personality”—whose baleful, martyred take on humanity seems to come from the joyless emptiness that I instinctively attribute to the gender dysphoria blues. Exhibit B: Benatar also wrote a book about sexism against men, which I shan’t read but which from the reviews seems to fit into a feminist study rather than react against it, a la MRA “theory.”
But even if I knew why he arrived at the conclusion he has, it wouldn’t change the fact that Benatar is convinced that since suffering is worse than joy is good, it’s better not to be born at all. Because no one would trade five minutes of the worst pain for five minutes of the greatest pleasure, right? he asks.
“But wouldn’t they?” Nahman pushes back. “Why do people run marathons, or write novels, or maintain complicated friendships? The negotiation between pain and pleasure seems almost like an organizing principle for a life well lived. Thinking, on a micro level, of massaging a sore muscle, or scratching a mosquito bite, or putting a heating pad on my cramping uterus. Thinking, on a macro level, of finding my calling, or falling in love, or making and sharing art—all experiences which would be dulled if not for the pain that preceded them.”
Like Nahman, I don’t disagree with Benatar’s position so much as I’m curious about the philosophical limitations it reveals. It does sort of smell like a trauma response—but when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. In its defense, it also smells like a corrective for our cultural insistence that procreation is good and necessary and even an obligation if you’re white and straight and cis and a member of one of them there religions, which I very much appreciate. But in any case, Nahman’s engagement with Benatar got me thinking about the pain/pleasure binary, and what it does for us and our purposes.
As someone who, perhaps presumptuously, thinks of themself as a student of pain, I’ve tried to keep up on my reading. There’s the big hitters like The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry and a fair amount of SM theory (Califia, Rubin, and Weiss), as well as more expansive studies of pain and suffering, like Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s by Kathy O’Dell, The Culture of Pain by David B. Morris, and Black on Both Sides, by C. Riley Snorton. There’s de Sade (and then de Beauvoir) and Sontag, LeGuin and the Bible. I’ve recently begun Ariane Cruz’s The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, which has thus far more than lived up to its stellar reputation, and am looking forward to Leigh Cowart’s Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose dropping next year. (If you’ll forgive me for making assumptions about some of these authors’ personal proclivities, I’m much more interested in learning about pain on purpose from people who experience that interest, or at least experience parallel interests.) What I’ve gathered is that what constitutes pain and suffering, and whether these experiences are “worthwhile,” varies not just from (sub)culture to (sub)culture, but from person to person. This matters to Benatar not at all, who seems pretty convinced that even if others have learned to rationalize their experiences of suffering, the fact of the matter is that nothing to be gained because of, or despite, pain is worth the experience.
What Nahman suggests, as I’m sure others have before her, is that the pain/pleasure binary is an unwieldy tool for our understanding of goodness and badness and purpose and meaning. It’s not that it can’t inform our thought process, but as an end-all, be-all, it’s not convincing, especially in the way that Benatar deploys it. Personally, I would seriously consider five minutes of the worst pain in exchange for five minutes of the ultimate pleasure, though Benatar might dismiss that as an example of my false consciousness; moreover, I think it’s a bargain similar to the kind a lot of us make on a regular basis, as anyone with experience with addiction or chronic pain—or simply an interest in eating Taco Bell, as the joke goes—can attest. Furthermore (!), as someone who asks others to hurt their body on a semi-regular basis, I’m fascinated with the way that pain disappears when I am not inside of it. As I believe Scarry expands upon in her book, we are unable to physically recall physical pain when we are not feeling it, because to do so would be to feel it all over again.
I haven’t read Benatar’s book, so I don’t know where he lands on the nuances of mental, emotional, and physical pain, though I’m sure he speaks to those. I do wonder if he speaks to the (admittedly, very tiny subset of) people who are born with the inability to feel pain and who are thus endangered in a world where pain is one of the senses that guide mammals away from danger and toward safety; I wonder if he speaks to the experiences of masochists for whom pain is experienced as “normal” people experience pleasure; or to the many guilt-ridden, whether because of acculturation or faith or what have you, for whom pleasure—or at least contentment—can only be attained through purging of some kind. I wonder if he speaks to the people who have learned how to manage their pain, whether through mindfulness, religion, CBT, radical acceptance, or even other, less “healthy,” means, like substance use or disassociation.
While reading through the Lesbian SM Safety Manual last week, I was reflecting on the power of pain to bring people together into various communities, including the ones organized around leather. Pain is also an adaptive intimacy, as I like to call it (or a counter intimacy, as Cruz puts it in The Color of Kink); as I often harp about here on DAVID, for a lot of us, more normative kinds of closeness are not always available.
If vampirism is my working metaphor for a binary-busting, third-rail sexuality, and BDSM occupies or creates a liminal space between sex and non-sex, I wonder if SM plays a similar role at a time and in a place in which pain and pleasure demarcate two ends of a spectrum.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.