Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
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I don't have any interest in resolving the sub vs. slave debate. I would like to step around it in order to give it a well-deserved rest, instead.
The original post in another current thread had at its conceptual center (I think,) this:
quote:
ORIGINAL: FemmeSensei
...
I believe there is a singular important criterion that makes a submissive a submissive, and a slave a slave, and it has everything to do with...
I'd like to modestly suggest a single change which you, or anyone else might consider when embarking on a thread like the one FemmeSensei was generous enough to start up with her thorough, carefully presented initial post.
Instead of discussing Criterion X as the defining mark for this label vs. that label, why not just explain that in your view the thing you were going to label Criterion X is a psychological feature (emotional tendency, behavioral habit, or what-have you) of submissives, say, which is worth looking closely at. Say in what way you think this is so and what benefit you imagine (or have experienced) from looking at things in this way.
If this criterion is in any way a candidate for The Thing To Settle The Permanent Debate About Sub-vs. Slave, then it presumably has some considerable importance in its own right outside of that debate.
I believe that the thing at issue in FemmeSensei's criterion does, for instance, warrant careful thought. Regrettably, a great deal of the ensuing conversation in that thread ends up being repetiton of well-known postures regarding the controversial attempts to define these words; or about the value, or lack of value of defining these words; or about the perils of "labelling", etc, etc.
Why not take up the same subject but on a basis which does not mire it in the eternal controversies over definitions and labels?
Ask not what your observation can do to get everyone in BDSM to agree on the meaning of some term. Ask ... well ... what else it can do.
Someone might post:
Here is something worth noting about (submissives, dominants, relationships, etc) in a very general way. People seem to fall into 2 (or 3 or 4 or whatever you find) general categories when considered in terms of this issue, and here is how I think consideration and discussion of this observation might help us to:
... understand ourselves better
... appreciate others in the community
... improve relationships
... avoid danger
... find meaning
... have fun
... begin to resolve other conundrums
... conquer restless leg syndrome
... or whatever else you might want to suggest.
Others may respond to validate or invalidate, refine or generalize your observations. They may say this seems like a silly way to line things up, because of AB and C. Or they may say that lining things up this way helps clarify for them things like DE and F.
Who knows what the may say?
But they wouldn't have one more reason to say the same old inconclusive things about the sub vs. slave debate, and "labeling" and so forth, that they've said and we've heard for years and years all over again.
Please post what you care to. I'm not trying to rule anything in or out.
I'm trying to suggest a framework which might help someone to share their insights and start potentially fun, productive conversations on the very issue that is taking up his or her attention, with a little less risk of descending into the same-old same-old.
Okay. Who wants to start?
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The end of the sub vs. slave debate - 
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