How do we draw the line between normalization and condemnation?

[gunhilltrain]

I mostly keep what I do here quiet out of practicality, but I did go through a mid life crisis recently when I realized my online erotic writings may be my only lasting legacy and I told a lot of people among my family and friends. Not one negative reaction to my face, everyone accepted it. Not encouraging people to follow my path, just saying it can work out positively.

I suspect this is common on, and maybe even the whole point of Lit existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictosexuality

Listing it as a subcategory of "asexuality" strikes me as being ridiculous.

 

[AchtungNight]

I suspect this is common on, and maybe even the whole point of Lit existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictosexuality

Listing it as a subcategory of "asexuality" strikes me as being ridiculous.

I agree. I'm attracted to fictional characters, and real people too. I'm aware there are people who are attracted to exclusively fictional characters, but that seems impractical to me for various reasons. [shrug]

 

[gunhilltrain]

I agree. I'm attracted to fictional characters, and real people too. I'm aware there are people who are attracted to exclusively fictional characters, but that seems impractical to me for various reasons. [shrug]

I wasn't able to get my final line in, which is that we are free to edit Wikipedia ourselves if we wish. I've only bothered with that for a couple of minor things years ago.

 

[Britva415]

I never claimed what I said was anything other than my opinion...

It's just that you do that very weakly. You make a bunch of blanket statements as if they apply globally to everyone, and handwave a quick "just my thoughts" at the end as if you didn't just challenge someone with your thoughts because theirs didn't match. That's why you're getting all this push-back.

 

[lustychimera]

Being a dom in the bedroom doesn't turn me into a controlling partner all the other hours in the day any more than playing D&D makes me think I'm a wizard.

I somewhat agree if it's just an occasional roleplay. If someone's always playing the Dom and the other partner is always playing the sub when they're doing bedroom things, it's hard to imagine how that wouldn't affect their everyday relationship, even when they turn it off.

The toy play I see as just that. It's just pleasure. But if someone's into humiliation, shaming, and verbal abuse, and it's a consistent bedroom play, that's where I have a very hard time imaging that it doesn't bleed over into other parts of their relationship unless the couple is really big on honest nonjudgmental communication--as in above and beyond a vanilla couple's--and frequent outsider perspective to help ground it. People get wrapped up in their own world, and things get normalized. Abuse is insidious because it's often subtle.

I don't find anything wrong with that kind of play, but I do see it as something people need to be very respectful of.

 

[Mogrem]

Of the B, the D, the S and the M I have to agree with the OP to at least the extent that no society should promote sadism, or allow people to think of sadism as respectable, in matters of sex or in any other matters. Its not so terrible to collectively passively disapprove of certain acts by default whilst still allowing for them.

See also Morris dancing: You wouldn't want to live in a world where that wasn't tacitly understood as at least eccentric and mildly errant, would you? Even if you're partial to a little of it yourself.

I think I can understand sadism in sex; I'm not there myself but not a million miles away either. Close enough to understand, or at least be interested. I write it quite often because its interesting to explore that character trait.*

So we don't have to go out our way to condemn sexual sadism as such. But letting people come to it in their own way, if they are going to, making sure they know how to do it safely if they do and ultimately just live and let live is different to saying, "Its cool! Its a healthy part of some relationships, kids, and if you think you might be a sadist there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying it out! Just get her consent first and get choking."

Sometimes not kink shaming seems to have been taken as, "don't stop me from spreading my potentially dicey kink in the public sphere where anyone can stumble across it without having been looking for it".

I am not a sociologist, this is just a hunch. I could be wrong. In case anyone take the above as an attack then that's not the intent. None of the above applies to Literotica. I'm thinking of recent examples I know in towns near me where childrens' sex education shows covered subjects like breath play and consensual non-consent rape play in a positive light. That sort of thing is supposed to be hyperbole from the tabloid press--- not real. But it is actually happening in some places and it never would have ten years ago... That particular example even received Government money! [EDIT: That particular show eventually closed down after all the hoopla, but not before plenty of respectable institutions and a lot of local worthies had defended it to the hilt. That reaction, the knee-jerk reaction to defend anything against 'kink shaming' is what I'm slightly concerned about.]

________
* You should see my most recent pending story...

 

[Cagivagurl]

It's just that you do that very weakly. You make a bunch of blanket statements as if they apply globally to everyone, and handwave a quick "just my thoughts" at the end as if you didn't just challenge someone with your thoughts because theirs didn't match. That's why you're getting all this push-back.

Weakly huh.... Your opinion... LOL... You're welcome to it...
I don't make blanket statements. Just offer my thoughts, just like you... Offering me your opinion...
I hope I did challenge somebody's thoughts. That's what conversation does. Or is intended to do.
If my opinion differs from yours. So be it.
As for pushback... Just people expressing their opinions. They vary from mine, which by the way is OK...
We are allowed, perhaps encouraged to share our thoughts. We do not have to agree...
Oh.... In my opinion...

Cagivagurl

 

[gunhilltrain]

FWIW, Wiseman's "Bad Five" - the ones he considers inherently dangerous, in ways that can't be reasonably mitigated by education and best practices - are self-bondage, ball kicking (fun fact! a hard kick to the testicles can trigger a heart attack), gun play, breath play, and chest punching.

That ranks them as more dangerous than knife play, electroplay and fire play, all of which he classes as things that can be done safely with the right precautions.

Wiseman certainly goes into great detail; I've never heard of him before. But, yes, unlike what is shown in movies (I'd guess films are a cause of such misconceptions), punching or kicking a person can easily kill them.

Some of the things on that list are rare but extremely dangerous, if that is the right word. Anthropophagolagnia: raping and cannibalizing another person. Or Jeffrey Dahmer syndrome, I might call it. That crosses the line between "atypical sexuality" into psychopathy. He didn't last very long in prison, not surprisingly.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I somewhat agree if it's just an occasional roleplay. If someone's always playing the Dom and the other partner is always playing the sub when they're doing bedroom things, it's hard to imagine how that wouldn't affect their everyday relationship, even when they turn it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

The toy play I see as just that. It's just pleasure. But if someone's into humiliation, shaming, and verbal abuse, and it's a consistent bedroom play, that's where I have a very hard time imaging that it doesn't bleed over into other parts of their relationship unless the couple is really big on honest nonjudgmental communication--as in above and beyond a vanilla couple's--and frequent outsider perspective to help ground it. People get wrapped up in their own world, and things get normalized. Abuse is insidious because it's often subtle.

D&S play, OTOH, is rarely subtle.

I could equally suggest that roleplaying these kinds of situations provides a kind of "vaccination" against abusive relationships, since it encourages people to think about what an abusive dynamic might look like and helps them to recognise it when they encounter it outside the scene. (It would be speculation, but it doesn't strike me as any more unlikely than the reverse proposition.)

What I can say is that D&S fosters communication. We pretty much have to talk about things like consent and boundaries in order to figure out how we're going to play together, and that's good practice for thinking and talking about those things outside the scene.

If anything, I think that D&S experience has made me a little more punctilious about consent etc. in non-scene life. For instance, I've spent a lot of my time in social circles where hugging was pretty standard, and there was a time I'd take it as read that hugging was a good way to greet people in those circles. But D&S familiarised me with the idea that everybody has their own boundaries, and that rather than making assumptions like "if you're with this crowd you must be a hugger", it's better to ascertain each person's preferences individually.

It would be an interesting experiment to take some number of D&S-involved couples, let vanilla folk interact with them socially for a while, seeing their dynamic as couples, and then ask those people to guess which of the two was the dom and which was the sub. I doubt many people would do significantly better than 50/50.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Wiseman certainly goes into great detail; I've never heard of him before. But, yes, unlike what is shown in movies (I'd guess films are a cause of such misconceptions), punching or kicking a person can easily kill them.

He's a fairly prominent figure in the BDSM world; his book "SM 101" is one of the best-selling books on the topic, and as you might guess from those essays, there's a strong safety focus.

Some of the things on that list are rare but extremely dangerous, if that is the right word. Anthropophagolagnia: raping and cannibalizing another person. Or Jeffrey Dahmer syndrome, I might call it. That crosses the line between "atypical sexuality" into psychopathy. He didn't last very long in prison, not surprisingly.

I don't think that falls within the scope of "BDSM" though!

 

[gunhilltrain]

I completely agree. It's role play. It's fantasy. This is my personal experience. In my brief forays into D/S activity I've enjoyed playing the Dom, but it's not at all a 24/7 thing for me, and I wouldn't want it that way.

I can see the difference between role plays about naughty "employees" or "students" and full-time lifestyles. Probably it's actually a spectrum of various activities. One could say that "consent" is the important thing, and mostly it is. Yet it all falls into the "sadism/masochism" dynamic anyway.

I admit, I don't know exactly where I'd draw the line. Like everything else that humans do, there is a point where "craziness," literal mental illness, comes into play. That can affect the dominants or the the submissives in such things, or often both. That is beyond mere "kink shaming."

 

[gunhilltrain]

I guess "sane" is entirely subjective and cultural, and "safe" is all about your risk tolerance, but I can imagine some forms of breath play that are safer than, say, crossing a busy street in the US or working as a feller. What do you think of, say,

1. covering someone's mouth and pinching their nostrils
2. having someone seal a gas mask by pressing upward against your hand, so that they have to fight gravity to maintain the seal
3. forcing someone's head down in water, with the caveat that they have to keep resisting or you pull them up

A "feller?" Oh, a lumberjack. "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay." And we've got some bad streets here (Queens Boulevard, the "Boulevard of Death") but usually they can be handled well with some caution. So is it entirely subjective and cultural? Partially so, maybe. I wouldn't want to around when the Aztecs or Mongols were in a bad mood. And as George Carlin said, "Humans are capable of anything."

To bring it down to relevance, breath play games seem to be on he wrong side of the line, even if some people get satisfaction from them. I suppose they don't get called to task unless they injure or kill somebody. Like frat house "pranks" with alcohol, then they wake up to the consequences.

 

[lustychimera]

I could equally suggest that roleplaying these kinds of situations provides a kind of "vaccination" against abusive relationships, since it encourages people to think about what an abusive dynamic might look like and helps them to recognise it when they encounter it outside the scene. (It would be speculation, but it doesn't strike me as any more unlikely than the reverse proposition.)

"Abuse" was probably too strong of a word to get my point across. For most people it tends to bring to mind a spouse berating their partner or trying to control their lives.

I meant more akin to unhealthy relationship dynamics, the snippy things like "We're going to my parents' for Christmas, and that's final." Or "I'm not comfortable with you having friends of the opposite sex. You need to cut that person out of you life." Or even "How could you possibly forget the onions? They were right there on the list. All you had to do was read, Janice."

Talking about consent and boundaries doesn't do much to prevent those kinds of things from seeping into your life, and I believe a consistent Dom/sub roleplay does affect the power dynamics in a relationship even when it's turned off.

For your DnD example, it's not like playing a vanilla wizard. It more akin to playing a wizard who drags your spouse's character around the campaign in shackles--and you're playing 3 nights a week. Like when the DM ends the game, going from "That orc was ten feet away! How could you miss your shot, you stupid dirty slut. Get down and suck my cock as penance. If it happens again I'll"--(DM 'Okay, lets end the session there.')--"Oh hey, babe, wanna go get ice cream?"

Like, if you can't make that abrupt transition between the roleplay and real life, that means the roleplay does bleed over into real life. And I don't see it as a lightswitch--which I suppose is what the aftercare is for. They recognize that, too.

If anything, I think that D&S experience has made me a little more punctilious about consent etc.

I tend to think that's also largely the fact that people nowadays are very hip to consent. I said in another thread about exhibitionism that, while it turns me on, it's also involving nonconsenting people in a kink which is very frowned upon by modern society. Whereas, even as recently as the 90's, there were still states that made a legal distinction between marital and non-marital rapes.

I see it more as the progression of society in general. But yes, certainly kinks being more acceptable has helped that along.

It would be an interesting experiment to take some number of D&S-involved couples, let vanilla folk interact with them socially for a while, seeing their dynamic as couples, and then ask those people to guess which of the two was the dom and which was the sub. I doubt many people would do significantly better than 50/50.

I doubt anybody really could. That's the thing I'm getting at is most abuse or unhealthy relationship dynamics or whatever you want to call it tends to be a very subtle behind-closed-doors type of thing. Most everybody has a very good public mask.

It's a thing that involves a lot of excuses. "They love me. This is just how they express themselves." "It's just one of their quirks." "They are the sweetest, most loving partner except for this one little quirk. It's not even that big of a deal."

I'm not saying that power play causes that. But I do have a hard time thinking that it doesn't exacerbate existing issues, which is where the outsiders perspective is important. People run all kinds of mental gymnastics to protect their image of a loved one. So consent isn't always consent if they're in an unhealthy dynamic.

It's an interesting topic though. I'm glad that the internet has given people a way to discuss this kind of thing. It really keeps things from being swept under the rug or excused--which is why to OP's point, honest neutral information is so important.

 

[AG31]

You say you never felt guilty about your fantasy's?
Yet in the next sentence you say. You keep it all very private...
----
If you don't feel comfortable talking about it in front of your friends or family. It's because you do feel shame and guilt....

I address that specifically in this reply in this thread. I don't talk about it with friends or family because THEY would feel uncomfortable.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I don't think that falls within the scope of "BDSM" though!

Oh, of course. Sometimes Wikipedia gets a bit out of hand with their list-making.

 

[AG31]

It might be you're quite comfortable in your own mind about whatever it is you do, but others might not be.

Precisely.

 

[AG31]

I completely agree. It's role play. It's fantasy. This is my personal experience. In my brief forays into D/S activity I've enjoyed playing the Dom, but it's not at all a 24/7 thing for me, and I wouldn't want it that way.

I got my impressions from sub-reddits where people talk about relationships that are totally defined by a dom/sub dynamic. Not sure how representative it is but there are a number of such real life relationships going on.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

I got my impressions from sub-reddits where people talk about relationships that are totally defined by a dom/sub dynamic. Not sure how representative it is but there are a number of such real life relationships going on.

I'm gonna guess extremely rare in the general population and maybe not even the majority among participants in these forums. Definitely not the majority among lurkers on these forums.

 

[AG31]

So we don't have to go out our way to condemn sexual sadism as such. But letting people come to it in their own way, if they are going to, making sure they know how to do it safely if they do and ultimately just live and let live is different to saying, "Its cool! Its a healthy part of some relationships, kids, and if you think you might be a sadist there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying it out! Just get her consent first and get choking."

Well stated!

 

[joy_of_cooking]

@Bramblethorn @AwkwardMD

Welp, today I learned it's common to do breathplay to the point of unconsciousness? Wild. I totally thought it was like a bondage thing, where you control when someone gets to breathe but don't, you know, deny it entirely.

I also found some reddit threads where people are like, "I don't like air chokes but blood chokes to unconsciousness are awesome! I wake up feeling so relaxed." Yeah, that's probably the reflex bradycardia they're feeling. (Not a medical doctor, not a medical diagnosis.)

I read Wiseman's first essay and I found the focus on PVCs puzzling given that most people experience them on a daily basis and you have to be pretty unlucky for a few PVCs to turn into V-fib (which is why we don't see people routinely going into V-fib from the isolated PVCs they're experiencing every day). I'd also be curious to hear what he makes of freedivers, who inflict a lot more apnea on themselves than your typical breath play enjoyer is going to do (I hope).

Anyway, I'm probably not going to argue this point any farther given that I don't do this stuff or particularly want to encourage other people to do it.

Maybe the takeaway for me from all this is that the breath play story I've been researching should have an even bigger disclaimer than I was previously planning.

 

[Bramblethorn]

"Abuse" was probably too strong of a word to get my point across. For most people it tends to bring to mind a spouse berating their partner or trying to control their lives.

I meant more akin to unhealthy relationship dynamics, the snippy things like "We're going to my parents' for Christmas, and that's final." Or "I'm not comfortable with you having friends of the opposite sex. You need to cut that person out of you life." Or even "How could you possibly forget the onions? They were right there on the list. All you had to do was read, Janice."

I actually think "abuse" fits better than "snippy" for the second of those. Cutting somebody off from half the human race is a major form of control over their lives; it might be only half as abusive as preventing them from having any friends at all, but it's still pretty damn abusive.

But I'm not seeing how D&S play is likely to encourage those kinds of behaviours in the non-scene parts of a relationship.

(I'm not arguing that the D&S scene is free from abuse, BTW; it has its share of assholes and predators, and some of them do tailor their tactics to fit into the scene. But I'm far from convinced that it creates them.)

Talking about consent and boundaries doesn't do much to prevent those kinds of things from seeping into your life, and I believe a consistent Dom/sub roleplay does affect the power dynamics in a relationship even when it's turned off.

Okay, but: is that belief based in observation? Have you met D&S couples in real life, watched them over time, and seen that dynamic leak out of the bedroom to affect the rest of their relationship? Or heard from somebody who did that? Or is this purely an imagining of how it would work?

For your DnD example, it's not like playing a vanilla wizard. It more akin to playing a wizard who drags your spouse's character around the campaign in shackles--and you're playing 3 nights a week. Like when the DM ends the game, going from "That orc was ten feet away! How could you miss your shot, you stupid dirty slut. Get down and suck my cock as penance. If it happens again I'll"--(DM 'Okay, lets end the session there.')--"Oh hey, babe, wanna go get ice cream?"

I can't say I've ever played in that kind of game, or at least not since the long-ago days when I was playing in groups dominated by teenage boys who were using D&D as a substitute for the sex they weren't getting IRL.

But I have played in quite a few grown-up D&D games where there were significant interpersonal relationships of one kind or another, and I'm having difficulty remembering any time when in-game stuff spilled over into RL behaviour (as opposed to pre-existing RL stuff affecting the game, which has happened occasionally).

Like, if you can't make that abrupt transition between the roleplay and real life, that means the roleplay does bleed over into real life.

As mentioned above, I've played in quite a few D&D and other roleplaying games, some of them quite dark. My experience has been that the vast majority of adults have no difficulty at all in making an abrupt transition from Grignak The Spike-Lord, Skull-King of Terror into Regular Non-Murderous Human Being. The very few who do have difficulty with that are people who already had major issues before they sat down at the gaming table.

And I don't see it as a lightswitch--which I suppose is what the aftercare is for. They recognize that, too.

Aftercare is different things to different people, and by no means a universal feature of BDSM play. I think it'd be fair to say that it's generally about a transition back from "scene" to "RL", but I don't think the kind of transition you're implying here is accurate.

There's an old saying post coitum, omnia animalium triste est: "after sex, every animal [including the human variety] is sad." Many people experience feelings of sadness after sex; it's a recognised medical condition that can be overwhelming for some people.

When I got a tattoo some years back, at first the experience was "ow fuck" and then it was "actually this is kind of good" and eventually "I don't want this to end". Endorphins will do that, especially when combined with complex emotional baggage attached to the thing the tattoo was about. But when it did end, I was cold and shaky and needed some time to get back to a state where I would've been safe to drive a car.

The first time I pushed myself to climb a high wall at the climbing gym, again, I was cold and shaky afterwards, from a combination of physical exhaustion and dealing with fear of heights. Again, I needed to stop and chill for a while before I was ready to go on with doing whatever the next thing was that day.

Plenty of other physical/emotional experiences can have similar effects. BDSM play is often physically and/or emotionally intense, often combined with sex. It can leave people feeling fragile and shaky for a bit, and for a lot of people aftercare is about getting through that aftermath.

(Not just a sub/bottom thing, either; there's a term "top drop" for when it happens to the top/dom.)

What it's not about is switching off some "abuser" mindset and switching the "responsible caring person" mindset back on, because "responsible caring person" was never switched off. During a scene, at the same time that I'm inflicting unspeakable torments on my hapless victim, I also need to be looking out for their physical and emotional well-being - not just waiting for a safeword but proactively. If something goes wrong and I need to take action to protect their safety, that needs to happen immediately. Not "oh, you used your safeword? Okay gimme fifteen minutes to reboot my brain from DomOS to RegularOS and then I can untie you."

I'm not saying that power play causes that. But I do have a hard time thinking that it doesn't exacerbate existing issues,

Okay. But what's the evidence? Have you seen it exacerbate existing issues? Have you seen credible testimony from others who've witnessed that? I find that what other people think about how my mind might work, absent observation, is a very unreliable predictor to how it actually does work.

which is where the outsiders perspective is important. People run all kinds of mental gymnastics to protect their image of a loved one. So consent isn't always consent if they're in an unhealthy dynamic.

I agree with this. So much so, that I already wrote a story on that exact theme. Every awful thing that happens to the people in that story happens with their consent, as obtained by somebody who knows how to manipulate people into consenting.

What I'm not sold on is the part where D&S (or any other form of BDSM) exacerbates that. Coerced consent, rationalisation of abusive behaviour, all that stuff is depressingly common in vanilla relationships.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Of the B, the D, the S and the M I have to agree with the OP to at least the extent that no society should promote sadism, or allow people to think of sadism as respectable, in matters of sex or in any other matters. Its not so terrible to collectively passively disapprove of certain acts by default whilst still allowing for them.

See also Morris dancing: You wouldn't want to live in a world where that wasn't tacitly understood as at least eccentric and mildly errant, would you? Even if you're partial to a little of it yourself.

I don't get this at all, sorry. Why on earth would it bother me if Morris dancing was considered normal? I already live in a country where cricket is considered normal, for Cthulhu's sake. Morris dancing is mild by comparison.

So we don't have to go out our way to condemn sexual sadism as such. But letting people come to it in their own way, if they are going to, making sure they know how to do it safely if they do and ultimately just live and let live is different to saying, "Its cool! Its a healthy part of some relationships, kids, and if you think you might be a sadist there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying it out! Just get her consent first and get choking."

Who is actually saying that, though?

I am not a sociologist, this is just a hunch. I could be wrong. In case anyone take the above as an attack then that's not the intent. None of the above applies to Literotica. I'm thinking of recent examples I know in towns near me where childrens' sex education shows covered subjects like breath play and consensual non-consent rape play in a positive light. That sort of thing is supposed to be hyperbole from the tabloid press--- not real. But it is actually happening in some places and it never would have ten years ago... That particular example even received Government money! [EDIT: That particular show eventually closed down after all the hoopla, but not before plenty of respectable institutions and a lot of local worthies had defended it to the hilt. That reaction, the knee-jerk reaction to defend anything against 'kink shaming' is what I'm slightly concerned about.]

Which sex-ed shows? What did they actually do/say?

I appreciate that you may not want to give out info on your location, so that may not be a question you can answer. But I've seen such stories pushed many times before - yes, by tabloid press - and every time I've been able to go to sources and check the facts, it has indeed turned out to be hyperbole and distortion. Enough times that I have difficulty believing that This Time It's Different.

 

[lustychimera]

What I'm not sold on is the part where D&S (or any other form of BDSM) exacerbates that. Coerced consent, rationalisation of abusive behaviour, all that stuff is depressingly common in vanilla relationships.

If somebody's calling their partner a filthy useless whore while taking a piss on their face, I don't need a study to draw a connection between that and potentially exacerbating latent abusive tendencies should that person already be predisposed to them.

And if one person is always the person who gets their face pissed on while being verbally berated in the most humiliating ways. And their spouse is always the person doing the pissing and berating, you don't think that has any effect whatsoever on the power dynamics of their relationship?

Maybe a study needs to be done, but that seems pretty cut and dry to me.

Edit: I'll check your story out though.

 

[Writer61]

I think kids are replicating what they see on the internet. You can't stop that so you have to address the problem through education.

 

[nice90sguy]

I think kids are replicating what they see on the internet. You can't stop that so you have to address the problem through education.

Basically the problem.

People talk a lot of crap about sexual practices, and forget common sense. Knives can cut you. A plastic bag over your head can asphyxiate you. Duh.

My stories have featured rape, stangling, breath play and smothering (leading to death), cutting, extreme violence. All good fun.