|
Awareness -> RE: Tolerance, a buzz word or more? (9/9/2011 3:30:05 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: SuzeCheri
1. Are you really tolerant of the things that gross you out, or are you just faking it? Without wanting to get into a debate over semantics, I need to define tolerance as a simple "live and let live" approach. From that perspective, I tend not to engage with people over such things unless they raise it first and ask my opinion. I'll be tolerant inasmuch as I'm not going to persecute them for their specific kink or value system but if they bring it up with me, then they need to realise they're going to get my unvarnished opinion and it most likely won't be a flattering one.
quote:
2. How do you get around the things that really do gross you out? I tend to raise an eyebrow and move on. For me, it's not so much being grossed out as fitting their desire for certain activities into a psychological context which makes sense. I think it'd be foolish to deny that some aspects of this lifestyle tap into the darkest parts of ourselves and that thinking about whether what we're doing is actually healthy is wise.
Generally speaking I fit their activities into my model of human behaviour somewhere and move on. There's no requirement to find anything that a human being can do to be acceptable. Some of the shit is sick and a warning sign of an unhealthy mind. I'll give you an example:
A young slave I know in the USA told me recently she'd been put on a list without her knowledge. A list for a specific kind of activity - which I'm sure some of you know, but I'm not going to mention it here - let's call it the "D" list. Soon after, she began to receive the most horrifying kinds of emails in which supposed "Doms" would detail the things they'd like to do to her. Without exception, all of these visions were incredibly violent. I think it was the email that said "I want to break all your teeth and force you to swallow them" which really started the alarm bells ringing. Then there was stuff about breaking her limbs and so on. It scared the fuck out of her, and this girl doesn't scare easy.
I am not required to be tolerant of the men and women who want to be on either side of such an exchange. I think the men who wish to do it and the women who wish to have it done to them are fucked up. And I'm not going to bend my perception of the world to accommodate their sickness. I'm simply going to fit their behaviour into my understanding of human beings and move on.
quote:
3. Is it really reasonable to expect kinky people to be any more tolerant than other people? Well for a start, they're not and no, it's not reasonable. In the same way in which minority groups such as gays, lesbians, transgendered, ethnic minorities and so on are not more tolerant, neither is the kink community. Intolerance is simply an aspect of human behaviour. And human behaviour is very often a product of the situational environment. For reference, see the Milgrom experiments, and Jane Elliot's brown eyes/blue eyes experiment.
A note on Jane Elliot. She performed the brown eyes/blue eyes experiment in Australia with adults over 10 years ago. (It's probably available online courtesy of SBS Television). Naturally most of the brown eyed people were Aboriginal, and the blue-eyed people were white. There's something utterly compelling about how she made a group of white anglo-saxon middle class people feel like an absolute heap of shit, simply with the way she treated them which brings a new understanding of the Aboriginal experience to anyone watching. But I digress.....
|
|
|
|
