Comments Elsewhere

BritGirlSF:

I think a lot of people are failing to distunguish between the actual BSDM scene and the facsimile of it produced by the porn industry. … Honestly, I think that part of the problem is that the porn industry loves to use BSDM themes, and that gives people a distorted picture of what it’s really about. In my experience it was always a playful thing – silly at times, absurd at others, but certainly never scary,dangerous or abusive.

I think that this has it backwards. Sadomasochistic pornography is not taking “themes” from the “scene” and making “facsimiles” of them. Sadomasochistic pornography predated anything like the “scene” you’re involved in (going back, as it does, to de Sade and Sacher-Masoch). Of course, if people try to mechanically apply what they know about sadomasochistic pornography to the scene that you’re involved in they may say any number of things that are ignorant or selective. But I think that a responsible discussion of BDSM as a cultural and social phenomenon does have to discuss not only the scene that you’re defending, but also pornography (both the stories that it tells, and also the “scene” involved in the real people used in its production); it also has to discuss people involved in forms of BDSM who haven’t joined any sort of formal (or even informal) “scene”. The kind of community defense mechanisms that Dim talks about are worrisome when they obscure the fact that we’re talking about something broader than just the community that you’ve found.

As for Twisty, who was explicitly talking about the “official” BDSM scene and not the phenomenon of BDSM as a whole, well, she didn’t say that the scene defended by BDSM defenders was scary, dangerous, or abusive. She said that it was self-important and dorky.

Lis Riba:

I think people may be missing the cause-and-effect.

Part of the reason there’s so much more communication regarding BDSM scenes and so much more emphasis on active consent is because BDSM can so easily be misread or misinterpreted as (or possibly even slide into) abuse. … Because the actions taken in so-called vanilla sex are not seen as inherently abusive by mainstream society, participants don’t feel the same need for negotiation and explicit consent. It’s quite easy for people in the heat of the moment to slide from first to third, because there aren’t as many risks if somebody goes too far and the other objects.

Right, I understand why the necessities of BDSM (in particular) are supposed to demand much more explicit discussion of boundaries and consent, and I’m sure that it does often work out that way in much of the “official” BDSM scene. (My own concerns about BDSM lie elsewhere.) My point is that this situation isn’t unchangeable; there’s nothing about so-called “vanilla” sex that prevents communication between partners and explicit care about consent. Talking as if it were just a choice between communication-rich kinky sex and wordless, manipulative non-kinky sex — which is what Aero was doing above, even if that’s not what s/he intended — confines the issue unnecessarily. And that this isn’t something that feminist BDSM critics are unaware of, or sanguine about.