Francis Bacon - Sado-masochistic Painter or Just a Stereotype?

I read a quite interesting article over at Guardian.co.uk about Francis Bacon, the artist; Sado-masochism and stolen shoe polish: Bacon’s legacy revisited.

Art historian, John Richardson has been interviewed by Charlotte Higgins in a very interesting article about the famous painter, which Richardson knew and spent time with in his younger years. Stories told by the painter are revealed:

Francis Bacon‘s was a life lived to extravagant extremes. His drunken excesses in the Colony Room Club in Soho; his carnivalesque, ruinous generosity; the formative occasion on which, as a teenager, his father found him wearing his mother’s underwear and beat the living daylights out of him – all this is almost as celebrated as his riotously tortured paintings.

This was a life changing event in Francis’ life and was something that would affect him for the rest of his life.

Richardson continues:

It was that early beating by his father to which Bacon attributed his taste for masochism – desires that were played out in adulthood with his lover Peter Lacy

Richardson has argued that Bacon’s best art came out of his emotional states, which were mostly connected to his sado-masochistic streak.

…the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the death of at least one of his lovers.

The article is very interesting, but I react to the ambition to make the sado-masochistic elements into a little bit of a sensation and the fact that there was a life changing event that actually turned Francis Bacon into a sado-masochist.

Why is it that people are looking causalities that enables them, with uncomfortable ease, to explain exactly why person has turned into a Dominant, submissive or a sado-masochist? I see certain similarities with the argumentation brought forward by certain groups regarding homosexuality, who believes that there is a chain of events or a specific event that will turn a person into a homosexual.

As you probably understood by know, I do not believe in explanations based on specific events which are made out to be specific turning points for our sexuality and how it is expressed.

Let me present you with an alternative point of view; We are predisposed towards certain expressions of our sexuality from the start. Some of you might think that I am going to go for that it is in our genes, but I am actually not a believer of that type of argumentation either.

The human brain is a very good tool for sorting information and make conclusions from the information we have at hand. What we usually have a hard time with is to, in a good way, judge if the information we have is enough for us to be able to draw a valid conclusion. This is one of the reason why stereotypes occurs; we boil down complex information and categorize it into “facts” that are, of course, always valid in every situation. If I mention the word “Librarian” you will probably come up with some nifty things that characterizes a librarian. The question is if your image is valid; Do real librarians actually look the way you imagine them?

There are a lot of stereotypes out there when it comes to explanations on why people express their sexuality in certain ways – I have heard a few of them:

• A victim of rape participate in rape play in order to process the unimaginable abuse they had to live through
• A victim of child abuse participate in age play as a part of their own regression therapy
• A Dominant is a person that longs for control in their everyday life and is trying to process lack thereof by doing D/s related activities
• A submissive is a person that has control issues and want to hand of over to the Dominant in order to be free of the need for control

The more kinky the person is, the worse is the level of abuse that is made out to be the significant reason for the person to turn kinky. I am sure that the explanations above will apply to some people, but not everyone. They are not cookie cutter explanations, but they are almost expressed or applied like they were.

All this is of course connected to the predominant norm as well; Heterosexuality. When something is outside the predominant norm, then there has to be a pathological reason. I have never experienced, as  heterosexual Dominant, that my heterosexuality has been questioned in the same way as my Dominant side and my BDSM related activities.

I’m not trying to deny that our social heritage plays a big part in shaping us into who we are, but I am not convinced that singling out specific events will give us the cookie cutter explanation that we sometimes are so desperately looking for, to why a person acts or live their life in a certain way.

In the end I believe it’s a matter of predisposition and that we do things because we want to and that we enjoy them.