Kinks, humiliation and implied consent

[HairFucker]

Hello to all -

I've been thinking about this over the last few weeks - I'm a newish writer of stories with a male haircutting kink as their focus. The stories usually feature some kind of scenario in which a guy gets a haircut or a head shave, although often without any overt sexual element beyond the obvious fetishy-nature of the scene itself.

I usually cover themes that are common to a bunch of other kinks and fetishes: humiliation, submission, domination, control, exhibitionism, etc. etc. So they're not so much 'guy goes into a barber shop and asks for a nice lil' haircut' - more 'guy gets the worst haircut of his life and has his self-image stripped away'.

I have a bunch of stories on my HDD but only one chapter published here so far. I had a couple of the stories on another fetish-specific site but got them taken down because they were next to underage material - so they're sort of homeless at the minute.

My concern is that these stories are eventually going to bump up against Literotica's guidelines on consent and whether the participant gets any enjoyment from the activity.

Does the consent guideline apply to all actions or only those featuring depicted sexual activity? Is a non-consensual haircut acceptable? None of the stories I've written so far feature non-consensual haircuts and head shaving anyway but they might in the future!

A related issue is implied consent - I've written a series of chapters based around a fictional 1950s' gameshow. The contestants all take part knowing full well that failure to win one of the rounds will result in a trip to the barber's chair where they'll get a 'punishment' makeover at the hands of a sadistic Stylist.

This is made clear at the start of the story and throughout. All the guys except the winner end up with a humiliating new look. Some of them are turned on by it, despite themselves, while others have to sit there and endure it and get no enjoyment at all from the process. To what extent would this sort of scenario fall foul of the following guideline:

• Ravishment/non-consent fantasies in which the “victim” receives no thrill or enjoyment from the acts, or is seriously and/or permanently physically harmed/abused/maimed/killed.

I feel one of the issues with writing certain kinds of kink is that if you take away the niche eroticism then the story can just come across as cruel or gratuitous especially if it becomes psychologically intense and/or extreme. I'm not sure I'm explaining it every well. Maybe I'm over-thinking it.

I've included an excerpt below of the sort of writing that appears in one of the scenes of the first story. I think it's pretty innocuous but I can also see how passages like this, and there are many throughout the story, sail close to the wind.

He'd been expecting his hair to be cut, of course, but seeing the reality of it? Seeing Tommy stood there, bare-chested, wielding the scissors... touching his hair, holding it, and then destroying it, almost on a whim? And knowing Lisa was in the studio watching? Knowing his humiliation was going to be broadcast across the nation? That his friends and colleagues would see his entire ordeal. The whole greaser community watching as his pride and joy was eviscerated!

The feeling of degradation, of exposure, that swept over him was worse than he ever imagined.

There was a smattering of applause as Tommy turned to the audience and held up the oily forelock like some sort of sick trophy. It lay across his fingers like a limp, black eel.

"I love you, Lisa!!" he bellowed, provoking a few laughs from the crowd. He then tossed the hair over Luca's shoulder. It slithered down Luca's chest and came to rest in his lap, incongruous against the pure white cape.

Tommy picked up another of the long locks at Luca's hairline and snipped it off in the same way, dumping it onto the cape to join the first one. Then he cut another, and another. With just five or six snips of the scissors, Luca's oily fringe had been decimated, hacked down to little more than an inch in length, all the severed hair now joining a growing pile in Luca's lap.

The glorious pompadour was already irretrievably ruined.

Looking down at the harvested hair on the white cape, Luca realized how much of his life it represented. Whether styling it to perfection before his first date with Lisa, going to watch a movie at the Vineland drive-in, or hanging out at the diner with his greaser buddies, his pomp had been an ever-present part of his identity for a decade. And now it was being stripped away like it was so much trash.

He glanced up at Tommy in the mirror as his rival continued to indiscriminately destroy his hair, his eyes fixing on Tommy's perfectly-styled jelly roll: lush and dense, and greased, it was Tommy's own pride and joy. And Luca knew, absolutely knew in that moment that he'd annihilate Tommy's hair, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Any input welcome

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Wow, hair-cutting as a fetish per se. I know some BDSM stories feature head shaving for slaves but that's a new one for me. Every now and then I get reminded how vanilla I am despite my own kinks.

Welcome to the board.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Does the consent guideline apply to all actions or only those featuring depicted sexual activity? Is a non-consensual haircut acceptable? None of the stories I've written so far feature non-consensual haircuts and head shaving anyway but they might in the future!

To be honest, I don't think there's a problem with consent in this context. The Lit policy, in a nutshell, is to prevent rapist stories.

You're pretty safe with this fetish, I think. There's no correlation to the hard core non-con that goes on.

 

[gunhilltrain]

When I write any story involving domination or humiliation, the participants usually have a "safe word" or "phrase" that signals a stop or pause in whatever is happening. They may both be amateurs, or one might be a professional dominatrix, say. One dominatrix states that her clients rarely use it, but it's there anyway. I think that is pretty standard in such scenes, but somebody can comment further if they know otherwise. It's often something humorous that can't be mistaken for some other meaning.

I think the participants in this game show know going in what's at stake. A severe haircut is not the worst thing that could happen to a person. It reminds me of female collaborators (usually with the now-expelled Germans) who got their heads shaved after being captured. I've only heard of this happening at the end of World War II. It was done to humiliate, but hair grows back and I'm not aware of any women who were shot instead. Perhaps that did happen too.

 

[HairFucker]

To be honest, I don't think there's a problem with consent in this context. The Lit policy, in a nutshell, is to prevent rapist stories.

You're pretty safe with this fetish, I think. There's no correlation to the hard core non-con that goes on.

Thanks for the reply! I'll plough on with the story and see how it goes. I'm aware that some of the language can get pretty aggressive, in the context of haircutting anyway: hacked, botched, butchered, annihilated - I wondered if maybe that was going to be an issue if a bot scans the story for triggers. Anyway, thanks again!

 

[HairFucker]

Wow, hair-cutting as a fetish per se. I know some BDSM stories feature head shaving for slaves but that's a new one for me. Every now and then I get reminded how vanilla I am despite my own kinks.

Welcome to the board.

In the right setting, or even the wrong one, a haircut can be incredibly erotic! I think it plays into a ton of stuff associated with more uh... regular kinks: domination, submission, transformation, power play, temporary power exchange especially.

There are a few sites out there catering for it but most of the decent ones fell into obscurity long ago with the demise of Yahoo Groups and sites like Geocities, etc. The site I uploaded one of my stories too had underage material with sexual content which is why I'm posting here, hopefully.

There's always an audience, no matter how niche, and I discovered the other day that there's a fetish for people wearing dental braces, which makes haircuts seem not so extreme! Thanks for the welcome

 

[HairFucker]

When I write any story involving domination or humiliation, the participants usually have a "safe word" or "phrase" that signals a stop or pause in whatever is happening. They may both be amateurs, or one might be a professional dominatrix, say. One dominatrix states that her clients rarely use it, but it's there anyway. I think that is pretty standard in such scenes, but somebody can comment further if they know otherwise. It's often something humorous that can't be mistaken for some other meaning.

I think the participants in this game show know going in what's at stake. A severe haircut is not the worst thing that could happen to a person. It reminds me of female collaborators (usually with the now-expelled Germans) who got their heads shaved after being captured. I've only heard of this happening at the end of World War II. It was done to humiliate, but hair grows back and I'm not aware of any women who were shot instead. Perhaps that did happen too.

Yes, it's made clear that the participants know that losing a round means getting into the barber's chair, which I think is probably consent enough, IMO anyway. They don't all enjoy it though, for obvious reasons, which is what gave me pause, but there's no suggestion of it being forced in the sense of physically tied down and shaved bald. As I said to another responder, I guess all I can do is submit the chapters and see if they get rejected.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[nice90sguy]

It's actually one of my submissive fantasies too, well ,almost. Shaving a guy's head is an obvious sign of asserting dominance, or rather, imposing submission. Think prison and army (not to mention Samson + Delilah)

But in reality, I remember getting an incredibly bad, and incredbly expensive haircut once, from Vidal Sassoon, when I felt really low and felt and that I needed a radical change in self-image. I ended up shaving it all off in disgust, and felt like shit for months until it grew back.

 

[HairFucker]

It's actually one of my submissive fantasies too, well ,almost. Shaving a guy's head is an obvious sign of asserting dominance, or rather, imposing submission. Think prison and army (not to mention Samson + Delilah)

But in reality, I remember getting an incredibly bad, and incredbly expensive haircut once, from Vidal Sassoon, when I felt really low and felt and that I needed a radical change in self-image. I ended up shaving it all off in disgust, and felt like shit for months until it grew back.

Yes, head shaving has always played a role in the BDSM scene. Nothing screams dominance like putting a guy in some homemade stocks and stripping his hair off as he watches in the mirror. And obviously the more prized or attractive the haircut, the more satisfaction in seeing it get demolished.

Reality can sometimes live up to the fantasy though! I guess it depends which buttons you want to press. For some, having to live with the fall-out of a terrible haircut is part of the erotic charm. That 'what have I done to myself' vibe can be incredibly exciting in the right circumstances

 

[nice90sguy]

I guess the turn-on for you is kind of like being made to apply shitty make-up and lipstick. Being turned into an object of ridicule. There's also a symbolic element of castration perhaps, or maybe I'm getting a bit Freudian here

 

[Britva415]

Enjoyment without consent vs. consent without enjoyment - both “Lit legal”

 

[HairFucker]

I guess the turn-on for you is kind of like being made to apply shitty make-up and lipstick. Being turned into an object of ridicule. There's also a symbolic element of castration perhaps, or maybe I'm getting a bit Freudian here

For sure. For a bunch of people with a haircut kink there's a humiliation aspect to it. The fact you're stuck with it until it grows back just adds to the thrill [or not in your case!]. And for guys there's definitely a sort of emasculation as well, especially given the value our culture places on having hair generally and the condescension towards male-pattern baldness.

One time I got my head shaved totally bald in a barber shop, and I had almost shoulder-length hair at the time. Having to walk out afterwards and through the streets, full chromedome, with my untanned head glowing like a lightbulb... It was embarrassing, humiliating but also weirdly liberating