Love After the Ice Age
by Jess AKA JESSISONLINE
this piece is part of OPTIMISED LOVE, our first digital collection of works.
My favourite part of the dating app Hinge, was my favourite part of Instagram as a teenager; that is, the curation and creation of a perfect JESSISONLINE. I can create a plastic doll of myself through the curation of selfie after ironic selfie after sardonic selfie, with the curation of 6 perfect photos of me posing with a book that none of the boys who match with me on Hinge would know. I know within the algorithm of the dating app, a magical purification would occur where I would no longer be Jessica ****** and become a JESS where the abstraction of myself could receive likes and comments which never really addressed me could be received and ignored. Over 3 years on Hinge: 1000s of matches, 1 date. He was boring, stupid, made me pay for his coffee and refused to eat. I asked the question: how would I have looked eating my eggs? 8 months later, I read Bataille’s Story of the Eye and decided the answer was: Hot.
All this to say: I found the digital dating space not be a space to ‘authentically’ and efficiently match myself to a partner, but another optimisation of my own sexual persona through the purification of the dating app algorithm. This development, inherently untactile and plastic, belongs to the realm of what Deleuze refers to as, in my favourite book, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, the realm of the super-sensual. Super-sensuality is the move beyond tactile expressions of lust, to the realm of the ideal and sentimental. The world of the masochist is the world in which sensuality or tactile sexuality is turned away due to being too human, too physical and ultimately too personal. What occurs instead is an impersonal sentimentality, a continued desire which remains addressed but unfulfilled by a world where the passion of the subject is secondary to a feminised ‘primary nature’ reachable only through the process of the imaginary. I think the masochistic experience of the super-sensual speaks strongly to what I believe many women’s experiences of online dating are, but this super-sensuality is not contained to woman as subject online but also women as they purify themselves into becoming an element.
I laid the claim on my meme account dedicated to Sacher-Masoch that in 2025 we are entering ‘a New Ice Age’, an allusion to what Deleuze describes as the masochist’s sexualisation of history in his essay on masochism, Coldness and Cruelty. This may be more wishful thinking than reality, but what is masochism but the use of history to create and ground a fantasy? The masochist, according to Deleuze, uses history as a “a theoretical and ideological structure which transforms it into a general conception of human nature and of the world” (Deleuze 1989, p. 53). The particular history that Masoch and thus masochistic desire uses to ground the fantasy is the combination of the ‘catastrophe of the Ice Age’ and the gendered development of consciousness in response to the Ice Age. I believe these historical conditions, described further in the chapter of Deleuze’s essay titled ‘The Three Women in Masoch’, have lost their primacy and impact in terms of how we understand masochism, and the legacy of Sacher-Masoch culturally.
In her recent article on chatbots and celibacy, Bogna Konior describes the way in which under neoliberalism, love becomes “regulated so as to not interfere with our main duty—to understand ourselves as individuals and express ourselves as successful workers” (Konior 2024). She references the “regulatory love paradigm” of Fifty Shades of Grey, where contracts and regulation of the individual in order to be formed or fashioned into an appropriate lover occurs under the guise of BDSM (Konior, 2024). Her reference to Fifty Shades of Grey and BDSM in this article is an important indicator of the similarities between our current social conception of masochism and self regulation, and further how our cultural conception of masochism has transformed since Sacher-Masoch into a completely different kind of formation of the subject. It is true that the masochist proper is celibate, regulates themselves through the means of the contract and longs for an impersonal, super-sensual encounter. The problem with this more commonplace conception of masochism, such as the masochism presented in Fifty Shades of Grey, or even more considered accounts of sadomasochistic dynamics, is that people can fall into the category or identity of the ‘masochistic’ or ‘sadistic’ subject. But this is a hollow identification which reduces the subjectivity of both parties due to the inherent incompatibility between a masochistic or sadistic subject proper. Further, it is often that the pseudo-masochistic subject is feminised, and coerced into their position of submission. What we are left with is what I call the problem of lady-masochism.
Lady-masochism is italisised because the italics are cuter (although she is sinister), and she is a pseudo-masochism. Lady-masochism is when Kraft-Ebbing says, in Psychopathia Sexualis, that woman has a “passive role in procreation” and an “instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination to man”, and thus not as clearly a perversion as male masochism. Lady-masochism is when women are assumed guilty of being a masochistic subject because of their gender. Lady-masochism is when the postion of masochistic subject is never fully granted for the lady-masochist, because she has her subjectivity relegated to the secondary position to the MALE-PSEUDO-SADIST, who does not use italics like the lady-masochist. Lady-masochism is the combination of the false assumption of woman’s inclination towards masochism and the false assumption sadomasochistic unity leads to ‘sadomasochistic art’. Lady-masochism insists upon its own existence when actually it is more likely that lady-masochist is either an unwilling victim to the sadist or that this dynamic should be called something else. Lady-masochism is sadist-masochist dynamics in BDSM, pornography, fanfiction and smut, trite movies such as Fifty Shades of Grey, good movies such as Secretary, erotic literature, horror films and more. Lady-masochism has the same themes of regulation through means such as the contract that Sacher-Masoch utilises, but rebukes the condition of the masochistic subject by making the subject the primary element of the artwork and simultaneously depicting the lady-masochist as imposed into her position.
My biggest gripe with lady-masochism at the moment is its false identification of women’s submission or pain with masochism, when the most masochistic behaviour of women we see today is through their becoming-element through the regulation of online platforms such as dating apps. When I put a selfie of me reading Freud up on my Hinge profile and then ignore every person who sends me a like, thats not me experiencing desire as a subject, but rather transforming myself into a element by the mechanical contract of the dating app’s algorithm. I am a subsuming of myself into something greater than myself. I experience an objectification that isn’t dehumanising, but the admission of my position as experiencing subject as secondary to nature (or in my case the algorithm) itself. This is not objectification, but honesty.
Our confusion surrounding masochism currently, where the masochistic and sadistic subjects hold priority to any other element or aspect of their relative conditions, warring both subjects within a unity, does not accept the primacy or importance of the non-subject in masochism. I care about masochism and Sacher-Masoch because it exposes how our hyper-fixation on the subject in both literature and love hyper-regulates two things that should not be so tightly bound (aesthetics and desire) into characteristics of an individual’s identity. We are currently stuck in a debate whether it is immoral for women to be masochistic, spurred by questions such as “does Lana Del Rey’s music glamourise abuse”, with reactionaries claiming the position of the lady-masochist to uphold a non-existent identity of woman as subject in the masochistic situation. But truth be told, the glamour of the pop star, the doe-eyed stare of a girl in a selfie, the mountain of non-answered matches on my hinge, these are the things which hold more similarities between woman and the masochistic situation. This is the rise of the female element which finds itself unveiled through cracks in the ice. But for the answer of what this Ice Age entails, we must turn to Deleuze.
The primacy of the historical moment of the Ice Age grounds the fantasy of masochism, preventing the ways in which masochism aesthetically and romantically has been transformed into a condition which orders the desires of women to a pre-existing structure which denies the very subject element relationship required in masochism. Deleuze describes that in response to this Ice Age comes the dissolution of “the world of the Greeks and with it the type of the Grecian woman” (Deleuze 1989, p. 54). Particularly, after this Ice Age, Deleuze describes that in Masoch’s historically grounded fantasy:
“both sexes found themselves impoverished. Man became coarse and sought a new dignity in the development of consciousness and thought; as a reaction to man's heightened consciousness woman developed sentimentality, and toward his coarseness, severity.” (Deleuze 1989, p.54)
This ‘impoverishment’ in response to the Ice Age seems to simultaneously coincide with the sovereignty of man’s consciousness. The consciousness in this new era of man positions him as subject within the masochistic situation; the origin story of the Ice Age wiping away the freedom and subjectivity of the pagan archetype of woman directly results in the seeming primacy of man in terms of consciousness and reason. This sovereign consciousness of man is referenced throughout Venus in Furs, such as in the Goddess’s speech in the dream which opens the novel. If this was the condition of masochism alone, that is the primacy of man’s consciousness over woman, where man focuses on fashioning the perfect woman to increase his subjective experience of desire, it would certainly be uninteresting as an aesthetic phenomenon. It would also be susceptible to the critique of BDSM as a form of social conditioning or regulation to subdue the strength of one or both parties' desires. More simply, it would commit the sin of boring misogyny (I think everyone who is sexist should at least be interesting). However, this access to consciousness man has in comparison to woman in the imagined event of the Ice Age is a pseudo-consciousness or ‘impoverishment’ in Deleuze’s terms. This is revealed in Venus’ speech in the opening of Venus in Furs:
“You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity; indeed this kind of love is disastrous for men like you, for as soon as you try to be natural you become vulgar.” (Sacher-Masoch 1989, p.145)
The vulgarity and coarseness of modern men, the way in which they position their reason as primary, invariably leads to a disaster, a disaster which harkens back to the Ice Age which placed them in such a position. Thus, the masochistic process is not simply the fashioning of a cruel woman into a desirable element, but an acknowledgement of the way in which woman has been cast aside from the position of sexual subject and a criticism of the hollow subjectivity contained by the masochistic hero. This is why waiting is the aesthetic experience of masochism; the masochistic hero does not just create his situation of waiting, but waiting seems to be the condition of the masochistic situation for the subject, as he is disposed into an inactive position of observation. This is where the strength of Deleuze’s primary and secondary nature of masochism distinction (borrowed from Klossowski and Bataille’s accounts of Sade’s primary and secondary nature) reveals the way in which the masochistic subject is in search of an undermining of his consciousness through the position
of woman as the non-subject. The primary and secondary nature distinction, as described by Deleuze, describes secondary or “coarse nature” as “ruled by individual arbitrariness: cunning and violence, hatred and destruction, disorder and sensuality are everywhere at work”. Beyond coarse nature lies primary nature “which is impersonal and self-conscious, sentimental and supersensual” (Deleuze 1989, p.54). The impersonality of primary nature, as the base of nature and life itself grounds the fantasy of the masochist in a kind of reality, whilst rebuking the masochistic subject’s authority within their lived situation.
Returning to our current conceptions of masochism, namely lady-masochism, we witness the disparity between pseudo-masochism and masochism proper. Whilst masochism proper relies on suspense, waiting, super-sensual celibacy and the contract as the means of governing behaviour, the erotic dynamic is not concerned with regulating participants into the language and category of identities, where a sadist comes out on top and the other subject becomes a masochist out of convenience. Instead, the masochistic relationship between subject and element is a criticism of the dominance of the subject, identifying the subject of masochism as a secondary nature as they undergo their odyssey of waiting for the unveiling of an impersonal, feminine, and primary nature, or of an element. But it is not a gender essentialism which requires the masochist to undergo this journey; woman is not nature out of necessity. Instead, Sacher-Masoch creates the basis for his masochistic fantasies through the use of history; he creates a historical event of the Ice Age to explain the situation of man assuming the position of subject within an erotic situation, and critiques said situation through revealing the contingency of woman’s elemental position, as well as praising woman as element by exposing the hollowness of the position of the lover-as-subject more generally.
So what would love under a new Ice Age look like? Currently, the modern assumption of masochistic and sadistic subjects into a unity, such as in BDSM inspired media or the description of art as sadomasochistic, is intentionally a battle of the subjects. By this I mean that the categories of the dominant and submissive in art and “love”, the categories of the ‘masochist’ and ‘sadist’ become an associative collection of social traits which signify being a kind of lover that one must hone or curate themselves into fitting. The prime example is the popularity of things such as the BDSM test, which, in my experience, almost serves an asexual function for Gen Z. The infamous BDSM test is actually a marketing quiz designed to advertise BDSM products and social media to those who contain it. The BDSM test is a joke and a party trick, although I remember kids in high school very seriously taking it in classes, as if it were the Myers-Briggs. But despite the insistence of BDSM’s function within a dynamic as the test suggests, the test is done at this point to posit what kind of lover you are. It is not even done to understand our desires, or diagnose ourselves in any meaningful sense, but rather done to conform ourselves to an archetype. It is not sexual, let alone supersensual and instead requires the tearing of ourselves into an isolated category of identity as possible. By a return to Sacher-Masoch, we can negate the priority of conformance to identity in a desiring situation, to picking a side in the battle of the subjects, and clarify the condition of masochism which does not prioritise the subject. Further, by understanding the fantasy of masochism as grounded in terms of a historical event (the Ice Age), and the relationship between the masochistic subject, their lover, and the world at large, the subject and thus the subject’s self-identification becomes the lowest priority and most secondary part of the masochistic situation. The masochistic experience with the other is not merely the objectification of one’s lover into the perfect desiring product, but rather it is the admission of the subject’s hollow historical primacy and their acceptance of a primary giver of consciousness greater than the empirical, the super-sensual. This account of love is severely underrepresented in modern experiences of love which, at best, advocate for the experience of desire as only embodied and only empirical or sensual. At worst, they advocate for a far more sinister abstraction of the body by replacing experience with a political identity.
I don’t know if my dating app hijinks quantify as me truly becoming a masochistic element, but what I do know is that the experience of the algorithm already curates people into elements to desire rather than a competing subject. Instead of this being a flaw with dating apps, I think this is a clarifying experience, which exposes the way in which the dynamic of love does not require us to identify as a subject. I think if we were more honest in our use of dating apps, as purificatations into an experience of love beyond being a subject that reveals something greater than the dominance of our own subjectivity as experienced through identity, we would certainly enjoy them a lot more. All I know is that my eggs were like an eye and that we need a new Ice Age, almost like an ice bucket challenge, to awaken us from our identitarian slumber.
REFERENCES:
Deleuze, G 1989, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. J McNeil, Zone Books, Garden City, New York.
Konior, B 2024 ‘Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy and Other Erotic Suspension’, ŠUM journal, issue #22.
Sacher-Masoch, L.V. 1989, ‘Venus in Furs’, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. J McNeil, Zone Books, Garden City, New York.
𝓳𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓪𝓴𝓪 𝓙𝓔𝓢𝓢𝓘𝓢𝓞𝓝𝓛𝓘𝓝𝓔
Jess is the admin of jessisonline333, a meme account and altar dedicated to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, as well as the gorgeously designed 1989 Zone Books publication of ‘Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty’. She is interested in how aesthetic masochism (‘Killer Frost’) undermines the ‘Lady-Masochism’ of our times. She is apparently working on a book called 'Lady-Masochism is not a Masochism', but for now she writes on her Substack, ‘JESSISONLINE’.
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