“I Don’t Want to Belong to Any Club That Will Accept Me as a Member”
Groucho Marx
In a comment on I, Sadist’s post “Sorry, it’s already been decided for you” Shelby left a link to her to her post What’s Your Flavor? It’s worth a read. I also caught an interesting exchange between two doms on twitter discussing the fairness of considering every masochist as submissive by nature. Someone else posed the question ‘Is there such a thing as a sadistic submissive?”
(Well, yes, as it turns out there is. ‘Nuff said.)
It occurs to me that we’re very busy classifying each other. I, Sadist’s description of feeling alienated even within a community that is supposedly ‘open-minded’ and ‘sex positive’ really crowns the issue.
Information chunking is, of course, part of cognitive assonance. If we didn’t classify and group our sensory input, we’d go nuts. In fact, one of the primary diagnostic factors in autism is an inability to do this. Every piece of information is unique and carries equal weight. It overwhelms the brain’s capacity to cope.
However, we are not incapable of making fine distinctions. And we are not unable to look within classifications and recognize disparities when the need arises. I’d like to propose that when it comes to understanding our fellow creatures, it’s not acceptable to be mentally lazy and ‘chunk’.
Humans are not fit subjects for syllogysms, no matter what Aristotle says.
In a way, both Shelby’s and I, Sadist’s experiences are the same. In a world where people resort to being mental slackers and ‘chunk’ each other, a lot of us are going to feel dehumanized and alienated. It’s easy to demand no judgement, but in fact we all DO judge. For in each of the groups they encountered themselves in, Shelby wanted ‘too little’ and I, Sadist wanted ‘too much’. That, in essence, was the judgement of the group. Kink taxonomy.
I hate to keep bringing this up, but I think the rise of a money-focused culture has substantially contributed to our casual acceptance of being described within a demographic group. We simplify each other because we’re used to being simplified. We are no longer offended at being described as a ‘target market’ and we’ve come to think of others in the same way. In fact, we’re subtly encouraged to commodify each other because that will keep the machine running smoothly. Buyers, sellers, products. It’s all so much less complex when we see each other in those terms. And of course, aligning our worldviews to that mentality allows us to be excellent consumers of, not only products, but each other.
I’d like to propose that removing sex from the equation makes this practice of classification even more likely. Because ultimately, sex between two people does have a tendency to strip us down to our individual selves. It’s very hard to find a place to pin your membership badges when you’re naked.
I think, in retrospect, this is one of the things I attempt to revisit over and over again in my erotic writing. I try very hard not to use words like dominant or submissive or sadist or masochist or spanking fetishist. I try to let the emotions and the actions of my characters speak for themselves and reflect their desires in a humanized way. And I’m torn, even when the story is finished and I’m posting it on my stories page, about classifying it. Certainly I wouldn’t want someone to jump into a story that might not be to their taste. But then again, why am I so worried? If a reader begins to realize the subject matter is offensive to them, can’t I simply trust them to stop reading and close the page?
It appears not. Because this is yet another negative part of dependance on ‘chunking’. In acclimatizing ourselves to having everything made simple for us, we believe we’re safe from being offended. As if somehow all this grouping is going to ensure that we never encounter anything that is distasteful to us. God forbid we should be faced with a product we don’t want, or a fetish that doesn’t turn our crank, or a person we don’t find desirable.
I fear this is making us very weak as a culture. Unable to cope with what displeases us.
I know for a fact that there are sadistic submissives – just as there are masochistic dominants. Human nature, hell, MOTHER nature has taught us that every possible combination can be completed under the right circumstance. Science has proven the impossible… possible. Nature has done it just by sticking us on a floating rock in the middle of space (excuse the lyric use here). HUMAN NATURE is invariably more complex. Choice. Higher thought. Animal nature. It all blends together to make the human possible and impossible to sort out.
Thank the fucking god!
I’d really be disappointed if you knew my moves ahead of time.
I just said this in response to the post she listed in her comment, RG, but in applying labels, it’s best to stick it on one’s self, because in applying it to anything, or anyone else, we are going to fuck it up.
“It’s very hard to find a place to pin your membership badges when you’re naked.” Reminded me of being a kid and threading my mums sewing pins or bobby pins under the skin of my fingers utterly enthralled by it.Really that’s just a share.
I agree with most of the rest. Except in simplifying things I believe we’ve created so much red-tape we’ve over-complicated it instead. But that’s just me. I think the worlds fucked up and only getting worse anyway.
thanks for another thought provoking post RG
I think the bigger weakness is not the ability to avoid being offended, but the fact that classification of people allows us to demonize and maltreat the ones who aren’t us.
However, keeping it to the kink/sex world, I find that the problem with classifications is that it allows short cuts that eventually suck the juice out. Take incest porn. Can’t get the “juice” from the characters–well, let’s make them related! There are exceptions, but most of the stuff I’ve found online, and the pseudo-incest sold by Amazon, fits that definition. We lose out on the sexiness and powerfulness of the relationship between two people by immediately jumping to that short cut.
Besides, in the kink world, my experience was that the most enjoyable individuals to talk with were pansexual. It was all good to them, and they treated each encounter as it’s own, without any particular care about labels or roles or much beyond, “that was good! Let’s do it some more!”
I’m a sucker for labels. Mostly because my experience of the world is so limited and self-centred that they help me to understand things – gives me an “in”, if you will. I’m only recently discovering all of the wonderful diversity if kink (just this last year or so). Well, actually, allowing myself to discover it (i was bought up to be a “good girl”, don’tcherknow), and it constantly reminds me of the individuality that is out there and, better, reminds me to respect individuals and their choices and drives as never before. Labels are useful to me, but only as a springboard to understanding.
The idea of sadistic submissives intrigues me; not because I think they don’t exist – in fact I am absolutely certain they do – but because, in my head, I find it hard to understand how that would manifest. Any clarity?
Two things occurred to me whilst reading this. The first pre-empted your use of the term “target market”, and was my sudden remembering of the cover of (I think) a Radiohead EP which reads “You are a target market”. That idea really haunted me and I couldn’t think of a way for it to not be true. Because we are; but we’re also so much more than that. It’s a very unsettling idea.
The second thing I realised was that I have been tip toeing around the idea that we need “more relationship models” – a term I think I stole from Rachel Rabbit White – when, actually, I think it’s that we need to recognise that relationships should be fluid, just as emotions are fluid and sexuality is fluid, etc. What I would rather see is a breaking of assumptions. We enter into everything with so many assumptions, and I feel it would be far more human to try and see outside the confines of assumption. I think many writers do that in their work, either because they know that labeling their characters simplifies them, or because they don’t want to be predictable. In any case, I think this lies quite parallel to your point about not classifying people’s sexuality as well.
When we stop labeling, we start thinking. And that must be a good thing.