How One Plays

Abstract

Let’s shift gears. The ethnographic technique I now display—another way the anthropologist can collect observations—uses a different mode from the field study; no more looking over the B & D clubs. Instead, you will observe me talking with informants I have known for years, who have spent dozens of hours describing their S & M activities; their relationship with me becomes one of trust as I discover, in the breadth and intensity of my curiosity, the pleasure in being with them. In this process, my preconceived and powerfully held beliefs—buttressed by disgust, righteousness, diagnostic manuals, sex texts, and magnificently elaborated psychoanalytic theory—have given way to the brilliant insight that things are not always what they seem. Play only simulates reality.