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AnimusRex -> RE: transition from sub to slave (1/15/2010 1:43:43 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Rule
I have met a genuine slave, the real McCoy.
I am not sure what you mean by a "real slave".
No, I am not being snarky or sly here. Its just that the word is used by so many is so many different ways that a "real slave" can be anything
This person you met, was it a girl kidnapped and sold for sex traficking?
A man working in a sweatshop in indebted to his employer?
Or a woman in a BDSM relationship who freely chose to enter into a relationship where she ceded control of her life to another person?
See, the problem is that the BDSM/ Gor communities are claiming ownership of a word that means something very different than it was ever intended to mean.
When the word "slave" was coined, it meant economic slavery, implicitly by force or coercion. Standard dictionaries are written by standard people, and assume that all people want to be free.
The concept of consentual non-consent doesn't have a standard English word because it is not a standard thought. We are a tiny subculture, and we have never coined a unique word for it.
Instead we take a standard English word out of its normal context and adapt it to our meanings. What we mean by "slavery" is very different than what the UN might mean. The more we insist that our form of slavery is "real", the more confusion we create.
I think this is the reason this topic never seems to die; BDSM/ Gor/ D/s are things that inhabit that twilight world between dreams and waking life. What we call a "dungeon" is usually a converted warehouse with all the proper permits to allow consenting adults to engage in mutually agreed upon activities; What we call "torture" is two consenting adults inflicting painful play on each other. In short, everything is couched in metaphor and draped in fantasy, and the more people chase after the word "real" the more elusive it becomes.
Even the line between fantasy and reality itself becomes elusive; although the "torture" of being strapped to a rack and whipped is metaphorical, the pain and intense sense of surrender and loss of control is startlingly real. Even though they might be two consenting adults, the experience of being owned and controlled is very real.
But unlike the victims of human trafficking or economic exploitation, we have the ability to turn it on and off, by the mere act of our thinking. We can become enslaved or free by the mere act of proclaiming ourselves to be such.
About all we can really agree on is that some people have relationships where one person chooses to be under the control of another. The nature of that bond is as "real" or "unreal" as those people choose to make it.
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