I see what the issue here, is. You’re taking my descriptions of patterns of behavior from experience and extrapolating that to mean I’m describing all people or to speak for the BDSM community at large. You actually did that with every single one of these replies, here, and it’s intellectually dishonest, to say the least, although also probably accidental. When I give an example of something I’ve experienced, and then go on to discuss people engaging in that behavior afterward, it’s safe to say I’m talking about those specific people who practice that behavior only. Also, forgive me for thinking that the idea that your year dabbling in BDSM or internet research on the subject probably doesn’t cover every single situation one could find themselves in and the situations I’m describing happen to real people, that’s not even counting the fact that the different styles and actitivies can tend to blur together, making the rigid lines of the words and identities we use to describe them ambiguous, at the very least.
You replied, “No, for some people it’s not a game,” to which I’ll simply shrug and say, “Okay? I’m not talking about those people, then, so, why is this an issue?” Forgive me if this seems like the BDSM variant of the “Not all men!” excuse to redirect the conversation into something that I’m not talking about and then claim some sort of sense of personal injury from that. It’s as if this happened:
- Me: You want to watch out for guys who punch holes in walls!
- You: But, not all guys punch holes in walls and us guys who don’t punch holes in walls find it offensive that you’d say that people should want to watch out for us!
This is a bit of a sleight of hand, here. I’m not a spokesman for BDSM, at least not in this piece, anyways, what I am doing is describing behaviors that people practice, not every single person within the BDSM community…an example being…
Obviously “lifestyle” isn’t synonymous with “consensual non-consent,” because consensual non-consent is a practice carried out by some segment of practitioners within in the way that flogging isn’t practiced by everyone in the lifestyle…an extremely small subset of BDSM practitioners practice consensual non-consent which is why I held it up as an example of how I’m not exactly trying to police people and tell them what to do — I’m telling them, rather, that they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to and that their relationships aren’t relationships which pracitce consensual non-consent by default.
I’m trying to give the readers who might be new to BDSM a pro-tip on what they might want to do so they can learn from the pitfalls of my mistakes. If people aren’t comfortable with possibly being hit at any moment, they shouldn’t be expected to live that way without it being clarified up front and agreed to. They should know that they have the right to terminate the encounter at any time. If some subset of the population wants to have encounters that cannot be terminated, so be it, if they obtain consent to do that, fine, but let’s not pretend that I’m speaking about them.
You can get lost in the sematics if you want, but it’s not okay to hit people without their consent, and just because they allow you to spank them tonight, doesn’t mean they’ll want you to spank them tomorrow or at any time— the same goes with dirty talking, the same goes with binding, etc., unless there’s a specific agreement between the parties for a determined (or indefinite) amount of time (like with consensual non-consent).
This really touches on a lot of issues here, one major one is the idea that consent isn’t something we obtain only once and then go to town and that consent can be revoked unless that’s made explicit.
Since this has happened on several of my stories, I’ll reiterate, that I’m not some official spokesperson for all practitioners of some behavior, I speak from my experiences and the experiences of those who’ve entrusted me to tell their stories. If someone wants to get upset and all bent out of shape because I’m using the wrong words to describe them, hey, that’s fine, because I’m not even describing them.
