When I was in high school, I knew a 19 year old girl named Christina who had lived a sheltered life. Her elder brother died on a plane flight to Mexico when he was 19, so her parents kept her very close to home. She wasn’t allowed to go out late, and she’d never had a date.<\/p>\n
Christina was something of a genius. She graduated from high school at 16, and by 19 she was in her final year of college.<\/p>\n
At this time, she met a man.<\/p>\n
He was 35. He was a sadist. Her parents were frightened of him. They forbade her to continue seeing him. She pretended to agree, but snuck out and continued seeing him anyway. When they caught her, they gave her an ultimatum, hoping to force her to choose them over him.<\/p>\n
Instead, she dropped out of school and moved with him to another state where she knew no one.<\/p>\n
He forbade her from contacting myself and our group of friends. A youth pastor who was friendly with us repeatedly offered her a safe house; he was the first to be banned from speaking to her. I lost contact quickly. We’d never been close.<\/p>\n
Rumors trickled in from the single friend of ours who was still in contact with her. They snuck phone calls when her abuser was at work. They were careful to make sure the contact wasn’t discovered.<\/p>\n
He had given her a collar, which she was to wear at all times. When he came home from work, she was to present herself naked for his inspection, on all fours and acting like a dog until he gave her permission to be upright and human again. He would examine her body, and then examine the house. If everything was not as he preferred, he would beat her.<\/p>\n
My friend told me, “I asked her to stop telling me about it. He bashes her head into the sink, over and over again. She won’t stop it. She won’t let me help her. I can’t bear to hear her anymore.”<\/p>\n
I saw Christina once after the abuse started, when she stumbled back to her home state for a brief vacation, after which she returned to her abuser. She was pained, and tired. Before, she had been mercurial and childish. Now, she flashed between moments of intense childlike pouting, and a kind of hard-used suffering when she would suddenly become still and talk about her life in a halting, labored tone.<\/p>\n
I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’ve long since lost the last thread that tied us together. I very much hope that she is alive and safe.<\/p>\n
They called their relationship BDSM.<\/p>\n
Tonight, I spent some time talking to Myca about BDSM. As he’s mentioned here, he’s a practitioner. He and I have been chatting about the subject, and he’s been kind enough to let me interview him — with some interesting results that I hope to put up on the blog sometime when I feel like I can process the subject.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I told him about a man I know who is strongly aroused by women’s fear, even outside of consensual sexual situations. He appears to seek it out, often causing it himself. I don’t think his behavior is deliberate, which is almost more frightening. He receives a neurochemical reward whenever he scares women, and so he continues to do it.<\/p>\n
“There’s a line,” said Myca, “between a man who practices BDSM, and a sociopath who uses BDSM as a beard.”<\/p>\n
I believe Myca is correct. Neither of these two men is practicing good BDSM as I seem to be encountering it when I talk to friendly, enthusiastic, healthy practitioners, or when I read blogs like this one, which has some exceptional writing: Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces<\/a>.<\/p>\n Myca talks about the positives of the BDSM culture, of which there appear to be many. The culture of BDSM — as opposed to the desires — emphasizes limits and safe words. Submissives who are versed in a healthy BDSM culture may be better equipped to avoid dangerous situations like Christina’s. Hopefully, submissives are being taught what the signals of a dangerous and abusive relationship are. And hopefully, they’re also being taught that they have rights — that it’s okay for them to assert themselves, even though they’re in a position where they are supposed to be submissive.<\/p>\n Lord knows, that last point — that it’s okay to assert yourself even when you’re supposed to be submissive — is enough of a pitfall in vanilla relationships. In my first heterosexual partnership, I took on the submissive gender role modeled for women. I never refused sex. When sexual relations became painful, I smiled and concentrated on preventing myself from showing any sign of pain, so that my partner wouldn’t be disturbed.<\/p>\n I bring this up because I think it’s important to reinforce that vanilla relationships and BDSM relationships can go wrong in many of the same ways. Men who would never frame their desire for control in terms of BDSM can still socially isolate, hit, and terrify their wives. Wives who don’t understand themselves as submissive can still find it difficult to object to rape and abuse.*<\/p>\n Increasingly, I think this is an important point. Abusive men who would never frame their desire for control in terms of BDSM are still experiencing a desire for control. Submissive wives who are too timid to protest rape may not be thinking of themselves as sexual masochists, but they may be acting in ways that are consistent with submission.<\/p>\n On television, we see sexualized rape scenes. We see the torture of women framed as titilating. We see women wilting from abuse who are still being filmed as sex objects.<\/p>\n This is *unacknowledged* sadomasochism — it’s sadomasochism divorced from the safety rules of BDSM culture and unleashed into the mainstream. It’s BDSM without honest discussion or contemplation. It’s BDSM without the name BDSM. It’s BDSM that isn’t a game. The issue of BDSM is one that nettles at me. In college, I thought of myself as strongly pro-sex. After a few terrible experiences with certain exploitative men, I’ve veered away from that camp. I’m not sure where I am now — someplace neutral and undefined.<\/p>\n I am uncomfortable with the idea of heterosexual male sadists. Not heterosexual male dominants who like being in control, not heterosexual male switch-hitters who like giving and receiving pain, just heterosexual male sadists. Specifically, paraphilic heterosexual male sadists who require women’s pain or fear for arousal. Virtually everything else I can understand, but this group of people scares me.<\/p>\n They scare me because they have institutional power in a way that women and gay men don’t. Sexualized male violence against women is not a rarity. It’s something that is often carried out.<\/p>\n As long as these men have appropriate boundaries, I’m sure they can be great people. I’m not sure I know any that do (although, it’s always possible that I’m forgetting someone). Of course, if I knew someone who felt this way and who did have appropriate boundaries, then I might not ever know they felt that way. They’d have to tell me since it wouldn’t come up when they harrassed or raped someone I knew. And men whose sexuality makes a lot of people nervous have good reasons for biting their tongues.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, I have known several heterosexual male sadists who had poor boundaries. They’re scary people. They often come across as being like serial killers. When they have a blindness about boundaries, they elicit fear and pain in women who have not consented to it. They are literally taking something away from women for their own benefit. They are turning women’s pain into their pleasure.<\/p>\n When men are getting pleasure from women’s pain in meaningfully consensual<\/i> BDSM relationships, they aren’t taking something away from the consenting women. The women gain pleasure, and the men gain pleasure. This is the same thing I want in my vanilla sexual encounters: pleasure for pleasure. They obtain it in a different way. I don’t really understand how that dynamic works in a way that makes me comfortable, but my comfort is not a requirement for other people’s sex lives.<\/p>\n I have class-based critiques of men gaining pleasure from women in this way. But that’s about broad sociocultural movements. I find the proclivity for this behavior in a patriarchal society to be somewhat suspect. However, I think that the solution to the problem is culturally based — if maleness were not defined as power, and femaleness as lack of it — then I would be much more comfortable with whatever form of BDSM continued.<\/p>\n I don’t know what kinds of BDSM would continue. My suspicion is that more people would be switch-hitters, and that there would be close to parity between the sexes in terms of who was dominant and who submissive. It seems likely that some people would continue to obtain sexual pleasure from the neurochemical release of adrenaline — and that’s fine.<\/p>\n However, after my conversations with Myca, I am beginning to think that my discomfort with BDSM is rather like the cultural terror of stranger pedophiles. Some stranger pedophiles exist; some BDSM relationships go wrong. BDSM can exemplify some nasty things about our culture. But what’s much more common are the abusers who are in trusted positions as parents and teachers — in this case, the BDSM that exists unacknowledged in mainstream culture, masquerading as the kind of vanilla sexual behavior that most people don’t think of as needing limits and safe words.**<\/p>\n A few years ago, a friend of mine was walking alone on a deserted beach where she’d gone to relax during the dress rehearsal for a play. A group of men who were fishing catcalled her. They wanted her number. She smiled, told them she was engaged, and went on her way. They followed her, these five men, all of them together, and she alone.<\/p>\n I doubt these men understood their actions in terms of dominance and sadism, but they were feeding their comeraderie and their arousal on my friend’s fear. This vanilla interaction is every bit as much about transforming a woman’s terror into men’s pleasure as my acknowledged sadist acquaintance’s harrassment of women at bars.<\/p>\n BDSM culture is sometimes a problem. But I think the tendency to blame it is like the tendency to focus on stranger pedophiles. It takes a problem that is terrifying and close to home and projects it outward into the shadows: the scary man lurking at the border of the playground, the strangers wearing leather and ball gags.<\/p>\n BDSM culture frightens us because it shows us, naked and acknowledged, the sadistic behaviors that exist elsewhere. Sadism is scary. It can be very problematic. But proper use of BDSM culture is itself the salve. BDSM is a game. It has rules and escapes. It has limits and safe words. It defines boundaries. It stimulates articulation of power dynamics which otherwise fester unacknowledged.<\/p>\n If everyone who fetishized control acknowledged it, and respected the rules of BDSM, probably the world would be a safer place.<\/p>\n Instead, we teach men that any woman is available for their gratification. Some BDSM men fall prey to this teaching, and so do some vanilla men. The vanilla harrasser grabs a woman’s breast. The sadist harrasser corners her at a bar while she cringes away. Male privilege suggests to both men that women’s bodies, fear, and pain are at their disposal. Institutional power often allows them to harrass those women with impugnity.<\/p>\n I admit: I am more troubled by the sadist harrasser who likes to scare women than I am by the vanilla harrasser who grabs their breasts. My body is mine, and men should not touch it without invitation. Men who do so steal some portion of my sense of well-being. But men who deliberately frighten me are stealing more, and more likely to make me fear for my life.<\/p>\n Still, all this behavior has to be stopped. It is unacceptable for the sadist to frighten a woman for his gratification. It is unacceptable for a frat boy to rape his date because she doesn’t struggle. It is unacceptable for a sociopath to sexually torture a stranger. We may look at these behaviors as related to BDSM, vanilla sexuality, and insanity respectively, but they are all united by the concept of control without consent. That’s the real spectre.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n *I’m focusing on this gendered dynamic because it’s the one that causes me the most reservations, because of the way that it interacts with privilege and institutional power. Other dynamics are certainly worth discussing, but I’m not going to get to them in this post.<\/p>\n **Of course, it does need limits and safe words, which feminists know. “Limit” = “nothing you don’t obtain enthusiastic consent for.” Safe words = no, fuck off, go away, excuse me, I’m a lesbian, I’m not interested, Stop, and no reply at all.<\/p>\n Note to commenters<\/b>: Comments are locked to feminists only. Perspectives that are skeptical of BDSM are welcome, but shouldn’t cross the line into attacking individuals. For instance, it’s fine to express reservations about the boundaries of the class sadists; it’s not fine to tell a commenter that his wife is insane because she’s a masochist. BDSM people, the same basic rules apply, and don’t attack skeptics who may have good reason (such as personal experience or experience with friends or loved ones) for their stances. Bear in mind, as always, that we are talking about real people (Christina and Myca, for instance) who have real lives.<\/p>\n This post is not meant to be comprehensive. I have other thoughts and questions about BDSM, some of which I will express in subsequent posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was in high school, I knew a 19 year old girl named Christina who had lived a sheltered life. Her elder brother died on a plane flight to Mexico when he was 19, so her parents kept her … Continue reading
\n<\/p>\n