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amayos -> RE: Defining yourself (3/18/2006 12:13:30 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyMorgynn
Not to split hairs here, but before you go telling people that they are not "literal* slaves, I could point out that, if you live in the United States and many other countries in the world, you too are not a literal slave. You can wrap it and contract it and legal verbiage it any way you want, but at the end of the day, you can walk away and no court in the land will return you to your master if you decide you want out. It's still consensual, any way you swing it.
Slavery does not exist in the United States and other countries?
This would seem to run contrary to State Department findings, which estimated three years ago that approximately 900,000 people are sold into slavery across international borders every year. Roughly 20,000 were brought into the United States alone. It's important to note this does not account for internal trafficking within our own borders, or natural cases of ongoing domestic abuse and captivity that widely go unreported. All this despite the fact that article four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, specifically prohibits such actions.
Further considering that torture, mistreatment and the private circumvention of law seems to have been a deliberate part of the current administration's "counterterrorism strategy", one can't help but view the "Land of the Free" with a certain sense of irony. If one watches the actions of their government and citizens closely enough, they will inevitably note a number of legal, corporate, political, religious and cultural behaviors and motives not entirely in line with the idea of universal human rights.
But is the above relevant, in context to the discussions here on BDSM internet message boards? Only when one makes a blanket statement similar to the likes of which this comment is replying.
To address the form of slavery as it applies to some here, there are definitions which do fit—specfically the existence of slavery that isn't relegated to chattel definition. In short, a human being who, by entering upon initial consent, is made to be excessively dependant upon, subject to and controlled entirely by another.
But as I pull my head away from all this cold, technical diarrhea of the keyboard, I realize that no matter how needle accurate our litigious and cognitive squabblings inevitably become on this matter, they dismiss an entire world of psychological, physiological and spiritual dimension fathomlessly present in this idealized slave; an experiential essence which transcends the rote mantras argued endlessly and without resolve. That these experiences in unison serve as a bond stronger than chain, that inevitably what is stronger than law or sword are convictions and ideas in one's own mind. One who denies the sincerity of these bonds likewise dismisses the reality of countless souls—be they soldiers, civilians, acolytes, servants or slaves—who have died defending a belief, a conviction, an idea or way of life. That one's inability to comprehend these depths and trappings of the human mind and soul due to their own crassly voluptuous cynicism, cultural brainwashing, frivolity or ignorance does not mean they do not exist.
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