Does dom/sub sex play tacitly support slavery? (Warning: potentially graphic)

Great Debates
21

I’m glad I could help you understand something a bit better. As I said, that was written to my boyfriend, and he tends to inspire me to all forms of eloquence. :wink:

Yeah, one of the major factors about d/s stuff for me is that it tends to involve one person slightly dissociating from some part of their own physical or emotional stuff in order to create a larger, different, or particular effect for the other. (This may not be very coherent; I don’t think I’ve ever verbalised this before.)

This can lead to some very intense stuff if done right, with the ‘dissociated’ emotions and urges expressing through the channels that are appropriate to the interaction and heightening them, and the expressed things getting a very focused treatment because all the energy is going through them, not a broadband. On the other hand, if it goes wrong, it can get very, very strange and sometimes messy, with the detachment winding up in places it really doesn’t belong.

And a slightly obsessively geeky bit of my brain wants to say that it’s like taking a phase as a specialist wizard in D&D for me. Sure, you lose an entire school of spells, but the spells of the chosen school come out significantly more potent. And unlike being a specialist wizard, one can stop doing it if one doesn’t feel like it.

(I don’t know if the detachment is universal or anything, but it’s definitely how things wind up for me, and I’d guess that it’s some of how it works for your friend from your descriptions above. One of the things that I’ve done with this particular corner of my mind is feel out where some of the detachment goes in good directions and where it goes in bad, messy directions, so I know what sort of situations I’m comfortable in.)

I feel like noting that one of the things that I can successfully detach from as a sub is a feeling of needing to be perpetually on-guard, perpetually ready to deal with crisis or the like. I’m very, very control-freaky, and it can be horribly draining of my energy, mental and emotional. When I go sub, one of the major benefits I get out of it is that my dom is handling that sort of thing for me – I’m safe, I trust him, I don’t have to worry about that, I just have to worry about what he’s doing and what he wants me to do. If I need to be protected, he’ll protect me, and because of the trust dynamic, I can shut that entire part of my brain down for maintenance.

(And, to your OP, there may be something of that for your friend; I wouldn’t be surprised if a goodly fraction of specific-context submissives were very dominant personalities in other parts of their life.)

22

I am a male dom-switch, Ms UnwrittenNocturne is sub-switch. We play d/s games together and in company.

One thing to note with this, is that the sub (as I think has been noted) is always the one in control of the situation. Whilst whoever is dom appears to have control, the sub, by way of safewords and pre-agreed controls.

Slavery? Not really in that I (definitions above aside) think that slavery connotes a non-consensual situation, whereas d/s is by definition a consensual act.

23

“How nice that you’ve trained it to hold its own leash.”

24

:confused: :confused:

25

In a healthy dom/sub scenario, the veto is a very powerful thing. In fact, it’s everything. Any time the dom gets out of line, he/she is expected to curtail the behavior at the sub’s request.

Which is why the scenario in the OP is bothersome, to me. If the sub isn’t getting any pleasure out of the act (either physical or, as clairobscur astutely pointed out, mental/emotional), then the whole point of the relationship, to me, has been violated. It’s supposed to be mutually satisfying. The dom is supposed to get off partly on the domination, and partly because he/she knows the sub is enjoying him/herself.

So I’d say there’s a simple test for your friend to determine whether or not this is a healthy relationship. She should tell her dom partner, “I didn’t get a lot of pleasure out of that.”

If he’s got a healthy view of his role, he’ll respond, “I’m sorry. Is there a way we can change that, or do you not want to do that again?” And then they work out better rules so she can get off as much as he does.

If he’s got an unhealthy view of his role, he’ll respond, “I don’t care. Do what I tell you to do.” And then she runs for the hills.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

26

Okay, if this is a sex club, then her masturbating on his shoe in public is a problem? (I’m just trying to understand how this works, that’s all. Yeah, it sounds pretty humiliating).

27

That seems very straightforward to me as well, Cervaise. If I have the opportunity to recommend this to her, I will. It would be interesting to see the result.

Guin, it wasn’t really the act itself that I saw a problem in. I’ve seen similar things at the same sex club, and honestly, I’ve seen far worse than that (blood play, etc.). More than the act itself it was the feelings she described in her reaction to the act that raised a red flag for me. The act itself did seem somewhat debasing (no matter the location), but if she had later described enjoying it I could let my own perceptions go a little more easily. That she did not express that still bothers me a bit.

A more recent episode with her and her partner involved him holding her head underwater while she performed oral sex, until she actually choked, then later choking her with his hand around her throat. She decribed feelings of lightheadedness and even apparently lost conciousness for a minute or so. Though she says they were taking “precautions,” she hasn’t really identified what those were, and she seems to be equivocating quite a bit on the subject. Also, when decribing some of their more hardcore S/M play later, she described feelings of pretty extreme discomfort and unease, when she was considering safewording out. “I was trying really, really hard, though, to take this for him, because he wanted it,” is what she said. This also concerns me a bit.

I share Cervaise’s concern now, not about D/S relationships in general but about this one in particular. It seems like an unfairly balanced thing, at least at the moment, and it also seems to be becoming somewhat unsafe for her. She has always been a woman who feels the need to push boundaries, especially sexual ones, farther and farther to get pleasure in the act. Now, she just seems to be pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries, and I’m concerned that she’s looking for pleasure but not finding it, and possibly compromising her safety and well-being in the process.

And for those who recommend that I have this discussion with her, my wife has already begun just that. I’m just interested in other perspectives on the subject, to see if I’m off-base here.

28

Okay. Yes, this does sound like an unhealthy relationship. I could be wrong, of course.

29

A masochist says “Hurt me.” A sadist says “No.”

Avalonian, you mentioned in your OP that your friend was pretty competant IRL, and this surprised you. I submit that that is actually normal. Seems to me that the people that enjoy subbing get little real humiliation in their daily lives, and need to fill that void.

I once read an article (can’t remember where) in which a professional dom woman was interviewed. She said that her biggest (and most submissive) clients were very powerful men, such as politicians and lawyers, who IRL had enormous control over people.

30

This is very, very troubling. That sort of behavior can lead to brain damage or death, two things you don’t want to fool around with.

31

On an earlier discussion board on another system, there was an active BDSM discussion group. One guy actually said he wouldn’t mind having one of his fingers cut off if it were in the right sort of SM ceremony.

I dunno if he was boasting or not – you hear a lot of loose talk on the Internet – no, really! – but at that point I decided that if this guy were telling the truth, there probably were people out there who were a little too consensual for their own good. I posted my thoughts on these matters and was pooh-poohed as a fuddy-duddy. Or words to that effect.

32

With a name like Evil Captor, you were a fuddy-duddy? Lol.

33

That seems to be a pretty common thing in the BDSM world… when confronted with viewpoints alternative to their own, they dismiss them as “vanilla” or “close-minded.”

I find it rather ironic.

34

I don’t. I mean on the surface I can see that, but thoise into D&S are people too. And people to have a tendancy to judgemental, no matter what their peccidilloes are. Once they find a group with a common interest, even the most progressively liberal causes become extremely conservative in their outlook on the rest of the world, very often dismissing those who don’t agree as ignorant, unitiated, or close minded.
I took a good long (and open minded), look at the D&S lifestyle, and in the end realised that there was anything new with it. Not only did it not do anything for me, but it occured to me that most of those in its practice have more void-filling than actual lifestyle improvement going on.
When I pointed this out Avalonian, you’ll never guess what I heard, lol.
Things like sexual abuse or abandonment issues in their past never seemed to enter their equations for some reason, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

35

I think it’s a human thing rather than a specifically BDSM thing; lots of people try to build themselves up by tearing other people down. (And subcultures are often worse about it than the mainstream, as they have more tenuous positions.) I suspect this is related to some people trying really hard to get more and more shocking. . . .

Incidentally, the BDSM culture people I know have as their motto “Safe, sane, and consensual.” I can’t speak to the consensuality of your friend’s stuff, but I think it’s pretty clear that “safe” and “sane” are not being managed consistently or at all.

One thing that I can speak to as a sub: it can be really psychologically difficult to get out of a situation where the dynamic isn’t doing good things. I’d guess that that’s especially true for someone without much experience with BDSM, and possibly also someone who’s in some way trying to measure up against the people who take extreme behaviour as a merit. The urge to get this thing right for a dom can be very, very powerful, especially if it’s a difficult thing to handle and thus has a personal-accomplishment cookie attached.

If your friend is in a dynamic where all of that gets in the way of an ability to safeword – which sounds like a possibility from what you’ve written and my own experience with a similar mental issue – the dynamic is broken. I also suspect that many experienced BDSM-folk would get very, very twitchy with two inexperienced people doing the sort of extreme stuff that you’ve described.

I don’t know how likely you are to be able to get your friend to a place where she can think about the situation objectively (that is, without engaging that particular mental state); that’s the sort of thing I would try to do, because that’s what helped get me out of the situation where I had a similarly broken dynamic.

Also, a note. If you do want to talk to your friend, and want to have a better understanding of how a broken dynamic can affect someone, please feel free to email me to ask me about my experience of broken dynamics. I don’t know how strong a parallel my experiences might be to your friend’s, but I want to offer the possibility of giving you insight if it might help you keep her from getting hurt. I’ll check to make sure I’m emailable in my profile before I go to bed.

36

I’m opining here about something I have essentially no experience in, but this sounds to me like this could be just your standard abusive relationship, with the abuser using the pretense of a D/s relationship as camoflauge.

I expect it could be hard to tell the difference.

37

Well, you’ve identified exactly what I’m concerned about at this point, RT. The thing is, from the outside, many D/S relationships can look like abuse to me… what makes the difference is what’s going on on the inside. I’m not sure how to determine the difference from my perspective.

Lilairen, thank you. I may just take you up on that…

38

Sorry if I took too much for granted IEatFood! but when you said that DS was for people who hadn’t grown out of being teenagers, I guessed your experience with your SO made you feel she was being immature.
I am a little worried that you refer to your SO as ‘it’, is this simply how he/she likes to be refered to? I hope you aren’t using this term to dennigrate his/her gender choices.

Cheers, Bippy

39

Bippy,

Wasn’t aware it could chose to be one gender or another (it’s a she btw.) No, I just don’t think it(she) is self-aware enough for that type of description.
In all seriousness though, she is a decently mature person, it’s just that with the choices she has made over her lifetime, I cannot possibly be asked to take anything she does seriously. Most of the time she does ok, but the few mistakes she has made are more than enough to return the balance to red.
She can be an S all she wants, just not on my time (or my daughter’s. No need to expose her to this pretentious, erm, lifestyle.)

40

Fair enough, just living near San Francisco I know quite a few people who have changed their gender (some simply through clothing, others through medical procedure as well), most such people prefer to be addressed as appropriate for their current (apparent) gender. To call such a person ‘it’ because of their lifestyle would be a verey nasty insult. It is clear however from what you said, that you weren’t attacking gender choices, but were attacking someone whom you have reasons to hate without tarring others with the same brush.
As mentioned earlier ‘safe, sane, and consensual’ is the mantra of all bdsm lifestyle proponents. Anything outside of these bounds (;)) is as much an anathema to proponents as rape is to every moral person.

Cheers, Bippy (will bend over backwards to please)