KinkInExile has a short and to the point post up replying to a post by Ferns that bemoans what she sees as changing attitudes towards dominance and submission among younger BDSM practitioners. Ferns wrote:
[M]ostly, what young people are doing is Really Good Stuff. They are, for the most part, smart and thoughtful and considerate and concerned and all of that: They are super aware of consent, worried about abuse, all about negotiation and understanding the boundaries, all of that. And that’s wonderful.
But what I often read in that goes towards the level of “Well, if the submissive doesn’t want to do it, then a good dominant will understand and not make them.â€
And what I have seen is that the ‘it’ in that statement extends to *everything*.
If the submissive doesn’t feel like going to that party, doesn’t feel like doing that chore, doesn’t feel like playing that way, doesn’t feel like getting up off the couch, doesn’t feel like doing what they’re told… well then, that’s perfectly fine.
I feel a bit like some old dinosaur going “That’s great kids, but *how is that submission?!*“.
This attitude (“submission is doing what you don’t want to do”) is at the core of why the BDSM culture is a rape school that teaches people to gaslight themselves when it comes to what consent feels like. BDSM’ers talk a lot about consent but they have no fucking idea what it is. What Ferns betrays in her post here is how much lip service—and only lip service—she pays to consent.
KinkInExile’s response fumbled around a little trying to get to the root of this issue:
Logically, I could reason my way into “sure, yes, they want to submit, maybe they should do things you ask for even when they don’t want to.†Hell, I have to assume that sometimes, when a boy who is comfortably sleeping wakes up to my bouncing and makes me coffee, or when my now ex partner waited some 50 odd days for an orgasm in part due to my insistence, at some points that is what someone acting against their wishes looks like.
My gut response though, is a resounding WTF? You are playing with an adult presumably in a country with laws similar to our 13th Amendment. Your play happens in the real world. Anything short of respecting your partner’s boundaries is coercion at best. If you have an issue around trust that’s resulting from your partner breaking commitments, you have an issue around trust. That’s totally valid, I’ve had that issue, it sucks. But it’s not a BDSM issue.
Her point is spot-fucking-on, if a bit obscured by the verbosity of diplomatic politeness in her post. In the comments, Tomio Hall-Black (a brainwashed BDSM’er male submissive) needed to “logically, reason [his] way” into arguing against the very simple idea that you don’t pull the “but I’m the Mistress card” when you’re not playing. And that’s when I figured I’d offer the same point KinkInExile made without the politeness, so I commented:
[T]he fact that people like Ferns, Tomio, et. al. don’t seem to grok or actualize [that anything short of respecting your partner’s boundaries is coercion at best] is what makes them, at their core, no different than rapists.
Just because they wrap their coercion up in a pretty rhetorical framework doesn’t make it magically different.
In the rest of the world, people who don’t agree with what KinkInExile is saying are called rapists. If you call yourself a dominant and you disagree with what KinkInExile is saying, what you are is a rapist who calls yourself a dominant. This doesn’t change depending on how many times you stopped when someone safeworded.
The short exchange between Tomio “I’m-All-About-Consent” Hall-Black and I is illustrative to say the least. Tomio replied:
You cheapen the word rape by comparing it to ANY consensual activity, even a consensual activity that I might not enjoy as much as my partner.
You once got pissy with me because I said we were friendly, claiming I didn’t know you well enough to say that. Well, it’s time to wear the shoe you are putting on everyone else’s foot. You don’t know me well enough to say things like this.
I don’t “grok†anything because that’s an entirely made up word without any real meaning. I UNDERSTAND what rape is, and what it isn’t. Rape is NOT doing something for which someone has already obtained consent for.
I challenge you to find one single instance where I said it is okay to continue after someone used a safeword. The examples I used are “car maintenance†and “washing dishes†and “doing laundry.â€
If you can’t find me claiming that safewords should be ignored; then I would imagine that an adult would apologize for making such a horrendous and offensive accusation. I hold little hope of that from you.
No, Tomio. You cheapen the word rape by treating consent like a contract. Everything you wrote in your comments makes this blatantly clear. Great example: “already obtained consent for.†You don’t understand rape because you obviously don’t understand consent.
I wrote “this doesn’t change depending on how many times you stopped when someone safeworded.†I didn’t write what you seem to be replying to, which is “this doesn’t change even if you only didn’t stop once.†Are you just angry at me or is your reading comprehension really that piss-poor?
You, and the people like you who believe the way you do, are fundamentally treating consent like contracts people enter into instead of core aspects of how to engage with autonomous human beings, and my point is that this is the same fundamental way rapists behave. Truth hurts, my “friend.â€
If that strikes a nerve with you, which it seems to have done, maybe that’s because I’m on to something you’re unwilling to admit. And, by the way, this is one reason we are not friends.
Get it through your fucking skull. ‘Til then, don’t dare assume friendship with me. You are a mental cancer to submissives everywhere.
And, as is usually the case when people are confronted with the hard radical conclusion to a very simple point, their true colors emerge. Tomio’s colors look like this.
There’s a way of talking about consent that’s currently dominating the conversation about rape culture and I think it’s…flawed, to say the least. Let’s call it the “consent-as-permission†model.
The consent-as-permission model defines “consent†as the act of communicating to someone that it is okay for them to interact with you in a particular way. I “consented†to sex if you asked me, “Do you want to have sex?†and I said “yes.†(Or, under the Enthusiastic Consent variant, if I said, “YES!â€) It’s essentially a legalistic model that asks questions like, “What counts as a ‘yes’?†“Under what circumstances is a ‘yes’ inadmissible?†“In the case of a dispute, what kinds of documentation are required to prove the presence or absence of a ‘yes’?†The consent-as-permission model makes consent very much about what we say or don’t say to each other. It treats rape primarily as the violation of a contract. It has very little to say about how our erotic experiences feel.
But think about this: I’ve had my boundaries violated in the past. You probably have, too. If that experience was traumatic, where did the trauma come from? Did it come from the fact that someone broke a rule? (Maybe. A trust violation can be traumatizing even if no other harm occurred.) Or did it come from the fact that someone interacted with me in a way that made me feel unsafe, hurt, and violated? Have you ever said, “Yes†and still come away feeling unsafe, hurt, and violated? I have.
In BDSM culture, you are not allowed to say “yes,” have everything go according to plan, and still come away feeling unsafe, hurt, and violated. That’s verboten ostensibly because BDSM is de-facto consensual (i.e., it cannot be abuse, because in their world, if it is abuse, it is not BDSM, which is obviously bullshit in exactly the same way that some BDSM’ers themselves critique the second-wave feminist notion that rape cannot be sex). So when something like this happens (and it does happen), the experience of violation is minimized if it’s even acknowledged at all.
For submissive people like me, this is often extremely confusing because everything around us tells us it wasn’t really a violation, it was just a miscommunication, or some such gaslighting.
When Ferns asks “how is that submission?” what she is actually asking is “why aren’t submissives okay with having their consent violated anymore?” And when Tomio insists that “rape is NOT doing something for which someone has already obtained consent for,” what he is doing is covering for dominants who believe permission is synonymous with consent (it’s not), and gaslighting fellow submissives to make sure they never talk about their experiences of violations in ways that could damage a dominant’s reputation. That’s called rape culture, and that’s how the BDSM Scene rape school teaches dominants and submissives to support it.
So what I think I’m trying to say is that, like old dinosaurs, dominants should be extinct.
See also: Wait! Don’t rape me! I’m a DOM!
by IsaacSapphire
26 Oct 2013 at 05:01
Why do you posts always make me cry?
It’s probably that they make me see parts of myself that are so mindblowingly broken that I didn’t even realize they were broken. It’s like I look into myself and holy fuck, where’d this abyss come from? Except I know it’s been there all along, I just wasn’t letting myself know.
I’m tired. Tired of not being rich enough, tired of being treated like a budget prodomme, tired of knowing almost from the beginning that the label of “dominant” doesn’t fit but knowing deep down that I had the tiger by the tail, believing I couldn’t identify as anything else and not be raped.
Tired of knowing that certainty and confidence were what was required of a domly dom, but knowing that checking in throughout a scene (eg. not viewing consent as a binary contract, but dynamic and constantly revocable and wanting my partners to have a GOOD time, not just not a bad time) doesn’t seem confident and domly enough, but otherwise I either have to be psychic or risk being a bad person and I just can’t do it. I can’t figure out a way to be a good dom and a good person simultaneously and maybe the problem is me, being an inexperienced idiot again. But maybe it’s not, you’d know better than me.
My whole life since I became physically developed enough to be desired, nine or ten years old, has been lived in the shadow of sexual harassment and rape, of physical danger and not enough social status to protect me. The only person who had both the inclination and the ability to protect me was me for most of that time, and my own ability was limited, but it was enough that I don’t think I was ever actually raped, although I’m not completely sure I haven’t blocked out something.
In the past, I’ve had to think of sexual harassment as “the price of admission to life” because that was the only way to survive psychologically (mostly in relation to the workplace). I’m pretty well over that fuckery, but every time I’m about finished fixing one thing I realize there’s some other huge broken thing in me.
I recently got a new boyfriend, Z, who was not socialized in the Scene. He’s very adamant about not getting a girl pregnant. The first time we’re making out I find myself rolling him on top of me without thinking. And I out of that I realized how much of my “dominance” has been fear of rape and pregnancy. The pregnancy part of which is probably largely related to my upbringing in the Prolife movement (that’s another huge can of worms and shit I’m slowly going through). I write in my journal, unthinking, “I want to tie them up so they won’t rape me” And there IS more to it than that, but that’s a majority of it.
Mostly, I just want to make my partner make really happy noises. And my mind skitters around what *I* want for myself, because it is simply to be held and patted on the head and told that I am good and useful and wanted and I’m not even sure why typing that makes me want to cry. Maybe because I don’t think I’ll ever get it, maybe because it’s so tiny, because it drives everything that I am, everything that I do in every arena of life.
I stand ready to be corrected if anything I said was wrong in any way; I want to learn and become a better person.
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by Submit: (verb, active) | Switch Studies
27 Oct 2013 at 21:55
[…] MayMay declared that “dominants are rapists.” It is flat-out appalling. I’ve read every post on his blog, I’ve agreed with […]
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by More on “Dominants are rapists”: If “Consent Is Not Enough,” what else do we need? « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
30 Oct 2013 at 01:31
[…] practitioners. If you’re just joining us, you’ll want to start at my overview, “Dominants are rapists,” followed by unquietpirate’s “Consent Is Not Enough” paired with my own […]
by Cicero
30 Oct 2013 at 01:36
Where in your philosophy do you make room for people who derive pleasure from submitting to a dominant? Sometimes, I’ve done things for someone else that I normally wouldn’t want to do, but I wanted to do it because of the joy it brought me to do it for my (now ex) dom.
I’ve never been a part of the BDSM scene-proper, and I do know that some doms engage in abusive, shitty behavior, but to imply that every time a sub-identified person chooses of their own free will submit to a dom-identified person they’re somehow being coerced takes the agency away from the sub. I don’t do this because somebody makes me. I do it because I like it. Submitting, and masochistic acts as well while we’re on the topic of eroticizing violence, bring me joy and pleasure and saying that I’ve somehow been coerced or abused? That’s fucked up, dude.
“If you have an issue around trust that’s resulting from your partner breaking commitments, you have an issue around trust. That’s totally valid, I’ve had that issue, it sucks. But it’s not a BDSM issue.”
You quoted this. In your article about dominants being rapists. See the part where “it’s not a BDSM[-specific] issue”. Dominants who are rapists, who abuse their power, do exist. And we need to talk about this. But your black-and-white dyad of ‘all dominants are rapists or none are’ isn’t helping anything.
by maymay
30 Oct 2013 at 02:00
Nothing in what I wrote excludes this possibility.
There is not a single post on this blog that contains the phrase “all dominants are rapists.”
I’ll tell you what I told others who responded in a similar way to how you have:
Future comments in the same vein as the sort Cicero left, above, will not be published. Either you leave a comment responding to what I wrote, or you respond to whatever delusions you made up for yourself in your head, but you have to do that elsewhere.
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by I want Dominants to spend more time with the parts of themselves they’re scared of. | Bandana Blog
01 Nov 2013 at 16:00
[…] been posting a bunch of legit political theory this week about Dominance in the context of rape culture. Although they’ve been linking a ton of my work, I had a killer week at school, so I […]
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by I want Submissives to take better care of themselves. | Bandana Blog
02 Nov 2013 at 09:10
[…] more time with the parts of themselves they’re scared of. Like, for example, the parts that enjoy violating consent. Not because they should be ashamed of those parts, but because they need to be informed about […]
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by Explaining “Dominants are rapists” in excruciating detail: a step-by-step walkthrough « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
04 Nov 2013 at 13:56
[…] couple days ago I shared my series of posts starting with “Dominants are rapists” on a few different subreddits to see what the reactions would be like in each of them. […]
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by Continuing Discussions on “Dominants are rapists”: Useful Self-Reflections from the Blogosphere « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
04 Nov 2013 at 14:26
[…] a prototypical response to my series of posts “Dominants are rapists,†“Prologue to Consent Is Not Enough,†and “More on ‘Dominants are rapists’” that […]
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by “Dominants are rapists” is making people ask, “So, what’s healthy D/s like?” « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
04 Nov 2013 at 14:40
[…] the past week, I wrote a series of posts starting with “Dominants are rapists” that really struck a nerve with a lot of people. Some people just dug their heels in the […]
by ncn
09 Nov 2013 at 00:52
When I first read this, and the batch of essays around it, I felt horrified and gleeful, all at once. Took me a while to process how to start processing it. You have given us a marvelous, challenging, unexpected gift, wrapped in stink bomb wrapping paper. Thank you. I’m excited to see where it leads intrapersonally, interpersonally, and on broad cultural levels.
by Ellie
27 Feb 2014 at 12:53
Thank you for writing this. I’d never even thought about this side to things before. I’ve always gone along with the idea that BDSM can’t be abusive and coercion is part of submission. I think I need to rethink that. It’s rare to have someone halt a personal belief and make you question it with just one piece of writing.
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by Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
09 Mar 2014 at 15:24
[…] Dominants are rapists, and the subsequent “Explaining ‘dominants are rapists’ in excruciating detail,” which detail why rape in the BDSM community is not an anomaly, but rather the central and most fundamental pillar of the community’s existence. […]
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by Another survey shows consent violations rampant in BDSM Scene, play parties worst of all « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed
28 Apr 2014 at 21:23
[…] should come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog, who may by now be well-versed with my oft-articulated premise that consent violations are the defining pillar of BDSM Scene subcultural activity. But, if […]