stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: SW London (UK)
Status: offline
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You know you can just as easily say that anyone who is interested in BDSM behaves pretty much the same as a four year old child. Four year old kids 'play', and when they play they play roles, they like to dress up, they like to play with toys, even show off their toys to others with pride, recreate scenes out of books and do naughty, forbidden things to each other. If you don't believe me go take a look on the other side and browse through a few profiles and I can assure you that you won't have to look far to find examples of all of the above.
We use the words 'play', 'role', 'toys' because that is exactly what it is - adults playing with other adults in different ways for different reasons such as emotional fulfillment, for pleasure, for personal and social development, to learn more about interpersonal relationships - exactly the same reasons why children play. However we are not children, but adults, we have different emotional, physical, and psychological needs, a need for intimacy, sexual needs, and to me all BDSM is is nothing more than relating to others to fulfill those needs, irrespective of whether they are socially acceptable or not, through role play, playing, and sharing of different activities.
This desire to 'play' and involve artificially created roles as part of our interpersonal relationships is the only thing which separates us from the rest of wider society or 'vanilla' if you prefer. One of my theories is based on a direct relationship or influence between the way we played as children among other children and how we play as adults in the BDSM community with other adults. The dividing line is of course puberty and becoming emotionally mature adults but deep down we're still pretty much the same personalities as we were as children.
However this basic fact makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable from both within the BDSM community and outside the community. A surprising number of people will get upset and tell you that their relationships are real, which of course they are - real feelings, real emotions, the sexual intercourse is real, but this doesn't change the fact that the roles, the rituals, the activities and the 'play' are all artificially constructed, agreed upon in advance between everyone involved who take part in a dynamic which facilitates the artificial ways of interaction together with the agreed upon activities and limits.
Calling yourself a Master, Mistress, Goddess, slave, submissive, or pet doesn't make you any more real in those roles than Peter Sellers becomes Inspector Clueso. You are merely acting out or performing the role of Master or slave in agreement with your partner. There isn't any magic or secret involved, it's acting, playing a role, just the same as what we all did as kids.
Awareness of this fact doesn't only cause a few people among us to throw an almighty wobbly, the acronym BDSM can cause a lot of people out in wider society to go doolalley as well. Social conditioning tells us that only children play and we almost invariably assume that there must be something wrong with an adult wanting to play with other adults.
This explains the amount of effort and bullshit that goes into defining BDSM in a wide variety of ways simply to deny the fact that we as adults like to play with other adults in adult ways for adult reasons. Some years ago we were mentally ill, many still claim that we are dysfunctional in some way, emotionally disturbed, obsessive, we have 'issues', or conversely that we have a greater awareness of sex, of relationships, of human nature, or indeed we are in some way 'better' or more enlightened than other people in wider society just because we are part of ..... THE LIFESTYLE.
In my opinion it isn't BDSM which messes people up, but the hype which comes with it and on the other side you don't have to browse many profiles to come across people who really and genuinely believe their own publicity together with many more who somehow lose the ability to separate reality from the fantasy. How many times have we heard about 'born slaves', 'true doms', real people, fake people, players, wannabes, etc and so on? People don't need BDSM to mess up their minds, as most are able to do it perfectly well on their own without any help from anyone else.
It's like the rubbish people come out with that being dominant or submissive is a personality trait. Really? So what about all those submissives who manage or lead groups of people effectively in their jobs, or who are bosses? Are they just pretending to be bosses? But you know there's an awful lot of people walking around with the notion that dominants are somehow superior to other people and submissives are all somehow inferior to other people.
BDSM play to me is no different from acting (apart from the fact that usually there's no audience) and therefore BDSM is just a stage and we are all players.
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