I received a lot of gratifying comments on my last post on the subject, but it reminded me that I perhaps had an obligation to balance it. The wired world has become a mosaic of communities who share common interests. There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you spend too long in the company of like-minded individuals to become oblivious to the experiences of others. From time to time they collide and flame wars ensue, but it is always worth keeping in mind that the online world is, by its very nature, a privileged one. A large proportion of the world doesn’t have regular internet access at all, doesn’t speak English, or has a lot of its internet access blocked by governments, like China, who prefer to maintain an internal virtual playground rather than a global one.
More specifically, I wanted to address the issue of people who associate, either online or in real life, or both with BDSM and their surrounding issues. It is the happy couple who find their sexual tastes intersect. People who lived steeped in the language and the subculture of BDSM often forget that they are, in fact, a subculture. It is a non-normative form of sexuality. And I feel that, in attempting to validate our own desires, we forget that.
We also forget that choice and consent are at the very heart of how BDSM can remain non-normative yet still tolerable within a modern, diverse society. This ‘outness’ is a very modern phenomena. Its increasingly public nature is something I have ambivalent feelings about. I’m quite sure the popularity of books like Fifty Shades of Grey have sent many, especially women, flocking to the darker side of the social net to seek what they think of as a way to spice up their sex lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not belittling anyone who is curious and adventurous and looks for broader horizons in the experience of their lives as a whole or their sexuality in particular. But I’d like to point out that demanding that someone participate in that adventure with you is fundamentally unfair. To make someone feel like a prude or selfish or unaccommodating for not wanting to smack your ass or have theirs smacked is just as wrong as treating someone like a freak for wanting it.
Furthermore, many people who have come from cultures where physical abuse, cruelty, corporal punishment or sexual control are mainstream, normative practices may not see the sexual fun side to indulging in power play. Similarly, people who have been caught up in institutions where power hierarchies are dominant structures in their lives may see the voluntary taking on of sexually dominant or submissive roles as something approaching their worst nightmare.
I don’t wish to pathologize perverse sexualities and yet I can’t ignore (through my own anecdotal experiences) that some people seek to ritually play out in adulthood the power dynamics they experienced in childhood. No, I’m not saying everyone in the BDSM community has been abused, or neglected. I’m saying it has been my experience that for some people who have been, the BDSM paradigm can be an alluringly familiar structural orientation. Nor do I think it is bad that they have found it and found comfort in it. I’m not making a judgement. It’s just what it is.
What is worth remembering is that a considerable portion of the world lives under circumstances that, to us, would look like institutionalized BDSM. With one very salient difference: it’s not consensual. And for people who have experienced that kind of power imbalance, without their consent, BDSM can seem like a disorienting dose of PTSD. To believe that you have grown up and escaped physical abuse, power imparity and lack of sexual choice only to be confronted with it in the guise of liberated sexual fun can make you feel like you’ve walked into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
So – the point of this post? Just that while we are all busy congratulating ourselves on our openmindedness and adventurism, our liberating demands to have our ‘needs met,’ it is worth recalling that our current circumstances are born of having immense scope in our choices. And that is not everyone’s reality.
POSTSCRIPT:
Since posting this post, someone quoted some of it on MetaFilter and a commenter on that platform (which I cannot join and therefore cannot rebut) named ‘nadawi‘ egregiously misrepresented my discussion of practitioners of BDSM who have a history of abuse.
First: When I say I don’t wish to pathologize – I FUCKING MEAN WHAT I SAY.
Second: I went on to say that SOME practitioners of BDSM ritually play out power dynamics experienced in childhood. Not all, not many. SOME. This isn’t a generalization.
Third: I qualified my own experience that SOME people who were abused as children and pursue BDSM practices in adulthood as ANECDOTAL. Freely acknowledging my own very individual experience and knowledge. I’m not going to leave it out because it offends someone hell bent on representing all BDSM practitioners as models of mental health.
Four: Since I am an erotic fiction writer who writes about SEX, I’m not likely to address knitters, teachers or video gamers.
I resent being misrepresented and misquoted because someone has a specific axe to grind. Anyone who has read my fiction is fully aware of the fact that I thoroughly despise the current trend towards superficializing issues for the sake of political correctness or special interest agendas.
Fifty Shades of Grey (the first book in the trilogy) was about a girl who was in love with a man who was working out his childhood issues through being a Dominant. She didn’t want to be “hit” (as she put it) she wanted him to love her. I don’t think it’s the best book out there for people to use as an introduction to BDSM. I suggest Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns. It’s a fun “how-to” book written by a couple.
BDSM without mutual consent and a specific understanding of what is deeply desired, possibly an option and not at all acceptable is going to turn into somebody’s nightmare.
If people who aren’t interested understand that this “power play” IS “play” it shouldn’t be a big deal for them to leave it to those who like it. It’s not illegal or immoral, it’s just unusual, although I don’t know how much longer it will stay unusual.
If people who are into it understand that yapping about your sex life to all and sundry without regard for the sensibilities of the people being yapped at is idiotic, again, it shouldn’t be a big deal to leave those who aren’t interested alone.
I don’t think people should feel obliged to explain why they like what they like and don’t like what they don’t like, as long as it doesn’t involve children or non-consent. Sexual desire is a part of each person’s psychological makeup.
I don’t think kinky people should be overly proud of how cool it is to be kinky. Is it really? If you need everyone to know you’re kinky, to prove that you’re cool, you’re not cool.
In an ideal world, no-one would ever do anything, sexually, that they don’t want to do. But in reality, we’ve probably all had pity-sex or good-bye sex or it’s-a-little-late-to-change-my-mind sex. This stuff happens.
Having kinky sex when you don’t want to isn’t the same thing. It should never happen to anyone and no-one should have to apologize if they want to try it or they don’t want to try it.
What worries me (slightly) is the poor couple that discovers, goofing around with kink, that one of them loves it and the other hates it. That’s going to cause problems. Viagra causes problems, too. There’s always a negative to anything positive, and vice versa.
You know, I was a census-taker for the Canadian government and the people who adamantly did not want to participate (which is against the law) were Eastern Europeans. I patiently explained the reasoning behind the census: if we know where the population is migrating to, for instance, we know where there will soon be a need for more schools. Once these people understood that their personal information wasn’t going to be used AGAINST them by fascists, they relaxed.
There’s a lot of weird kink out there. But nobody HAS to play. Everyone who lives where they have privilege of choice should just relax, a little, and focus on bigger issues, like whether people should be allowed to marry their pets or their freakin’ cars.
Well said RG.
Hey there — I’m a moderator on MetaFilter. If you want an account so you can comment in the thread you are more than welcome to drop me an email and I can send you a link where you can sign up for free.
Hello jessamyn. Thank you for the very kind offer. I will decline it partly because I feel my response here is probably more appropriate since it comes after the entirety of the post as well as in the context of a considerable collection of both my fiction and non-fiction writing. Also, I am almost certain I would end up spending many hours of fun on there and those would be hours I don’t currently have. But thank you for the offer.
i didn’t misrepresent you and i didn’t quote you, i responded to your post. there’s a difference. i’m allowed to be annoyed that in a post about being respectful to non-bdsm’ers you just threw in a paragraph out of nowhere about how some people who like this sort of thing have been abused. what does it even have to do with the point of this post? i mean, you made no mention of all the boy and girl scouts who were really into knots who later found the lifestyle. why the special mention of abuse victims?
The paragraph was not out of nowhere. I previously mention that there were probably a number of people drawn to BDSM from reading Fifty Shades of Grey, where the male protagonist is into it, supposedly, because he was abused as a child and not because he was a boyscout. So it was germane to the post. Perhaps – and if you’re lucky – you haven’t had the torture of reading that particular novel.
well, i haven’t read 50 shades. i read a page and was like “wow, this is shit writing.” so what seems obvious to you about the connection isn’t obvious to everyone reading. as a survivor who hasn’t read the book you post read to me like “good point, i agree, yep, yep, yep, makes sense, wait why are we talking about abuse victims who are in the scene?” and so i made a comment on another page about that – a comment i felt was pretty level headed and i even said that i agreed with most of what you said.
i guess i’m confused at the strength of your reaction with all the bolding and the cursing – it seems pretty over the top to what i said. i don’t mind you disagreeing with my read, but there’s probably a better way you could have done that.
It is supremely shit writing. And I had to read all three volumes in order to present a paper on it for a conference. It was truly one of the most teeth-grindingly nasty chores I’ve ever had to complete.
I am a person of strong reactions and a lot of cursing and bolding. It’s just who I am. If you want measured, spend time on my academic blog where I restrain myself admirably – usually.
My interest in BDSM is both an academic and a personal one. I have always been extremely interested in power dynamics in sexual relationships and I’ve been writing about it both fictionally and non-fictionally for more than a decade. Everything I write has something to do with eroticism and very often the darker side of it. I’m deeply interested in the psycho-sexual and so it is what I focus on.
Ironically, this post arose from a personal discussion I had with a woman who is involved with a man who has spent many years in prison. She was bemoaning the fact that he was not interesting in experimenting as a Dom. It started me thinking about how people who spend a long time within a BDSM paradigm can often lose sight of the many reasons why a person might not want to experiment with it. In his case, having lived in an enforced and non-consensual power structure for so long, he may find the idea of doing it for pleasure very distasteful. It also reminded me of a number of conversations I have had with trans sexworkers in Bangkok who just don’t ‘get’ why Westerners think powerplay is so sexy.
Meanwhile, out of the five dominants I’ve come to know intimately, four of them were abused in childhood either physically, mentally or sexually. This in no way represents any sort of general statistic. It’s simply my anecdotal experience. On the other hand, none of the submissives I’ve known well have had similar childhood traumas. This does interest me – as a writer, as a teller of stories, as someone interested in individual experience and individual causation.
it’s weird how different experience shape things – of the other survivors i know who are also interested in bdsm, most of them (myself included) are submissive normally.
your story about your friend would have made some of your connections make a lot more sense and i might have reacted differently to the paragraph that stuck in my craw.
i don’t mind cursing or bolding or strong reactions – but to yell about misrepresenting you and then to respond how you did both here and in other places – i feel like you really misrepresented the strength of my comment or disagreement with you. i think we could have avoided some hurt feelings if you had simply been like “man i really disagree with that reading because xyz” instead of calling me names and acting like i had visited some great injustice on you.
it’s weird how different experience shape things – of the other survivors i know who are also interested in bdsm, most of them (myself included) are submissive normally.
arg, must learn to edit -what i meant was how different experiences shape impressions – not speaking of the connection to abuse and liking kink, but just how we view maybe differently that because of the people we know.
Absolutely. My experience is highly subjective. And also shaded by my interests. There is a huge majority of people into BDSM for whom the experience has little or nothing to do with their psychosexual development. I just happen to have a particular interest for those whom it does.
And I apologize for misspelling your account name. I have corrected that.
by the way, for someone so exercised about being misquoted, you’re misspelling nadawi’s username.
And MetaFilter hasn’t been a closed system for years; accounts cost $5. And MeFi moderator jessamyn says she’s offered you a free account so you can respond there.
Now that I do apologize for. And it’s funny how being ‘exercised’ does tend to get me making typos. I will correct it.
I have responded here. This is my blog. The entirety of my post – in the context of the considerable volume of both my fiction and my blog posts are here. I think I’m happy with that.
“There are groups for every interest under the sun and it becomes easy, if you spend too long in the company of like-minded individuals to become oblivious to the experiences of others.”
This is what I took from this writing….