Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ChatteParfaitt
Not all switches 'switch' with another switch. Many, like me, self label as a switch b/c I am dom to some, sub to some. Neither the dom or sub I am involved with are switches.
Yeah, it always struck me as odd that these two concepts get lumped together under a single name, when there's a huge difference here. In the personals section, for instance, it would be very nice to have distinct terms for this, and I imagine it might make for a more useful division of the forum sections, too (issues like "how do you deal with both parties flipping into the same mode" versus "how do you deal with your sub and your dom participating in the same interaction" probably make sense only to one of the two main switch types).
Since it strikes me as unlikely we will ever see a cumbersome but descriptive alternative, such as "relational switches" vs "modal switches", I would be interested in hearing suggestions people might have to improve the clarity here. Like "switches" and "flippers", though I suppose the latter might be seen as flippant or dismissive, while the latter would end up overlapping ambiguously with the existing, ambiguous terminology.
Switches and toggles? 
quote:
I think very few subs consent each and every time. I would say subs have more veto power in the relationship than do slaves.
Implicit consent is consent. Defaulting to consent is just patternizing of the dynamic.
Personally, I would make the distinction on a conceptual basis (a sub as a partner that does the submitting thing, vs. a slave as property in a conceptual and relational sense), but if one cares to define it in terms of consent, that works, too, pretty much the way she said it: a sub gives consent on an ongoing basis and that's more of a disposition in an otherwise equivocal relationship, while a slave gave consent to a relationship which doesn't feature consent as a property of the interaction.
You could use the case of "I can't take any more" as an example. The sub can say "let's do this, and you don't need to stop when I get to the point where I can't take it", while it defaults to being nominally inappropriate for the dom to continue beyond that point. The slave is in no position to consent- or not- to going beyond that point in the first place, and it's entirely up to the dom whether or not to do so, with the slave only permitted- or not- to request such an interaction or give feedback on his/her condition.
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Your list does not make clear that there are many who are dom/sub yet do not indulge in pain or masochism (though they may get into some sensation play). There are many sadists who will never be dominant, and many masochists who will never be sub.
Also, no distinction between the "sadists" (nothing negative implied by the quotation marks) that like engaging in pain play with people that like being on the receiving end of pain play, the sadists that simply like to inflict pain (but abide by consent, since we're talking about constructive relationships and not criminal activities), and the sadists that like it when people suffer and/or when they cause this (but again with the same caveat).
Similarly, no distinction between masochists that like pain and masochists that like (or at least seek) suffering.
There's plenty of gals who will be dripping wet after a good whipping, but who will go dead cold when you do something that makes them nauseous, for instance. Similarly, the latter may be a turn off for a pain top that does enjoy a lot of screaming, and a turn on for a sadist that enjoys discomfort or suffering in a more general sense (as I commented in another thread, vomiting is like a scream, just a different kind of unpleasantness, with retching being like a whimper in that sense, which lends itself to an interesting comparison to degrees in the pain top, where some get off on a whimper but balk at actual screaming, while others get off when the screaming starts and wouldn't be content with mere whimpers).
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Now that I've muddled things, I'll stop.
Not muddled.
In linguistics, semantic maps (Haspelmath, Croft, et al.) are a useful method. You start out with the ideas, the rich fabric of things, and then factorize this based on meaningful contrasts before you figure out where the lines are drawn in different languages (and, in that field, also organize the factors so that all the entries on the semantic map for all the languages will be contiguous and discrete; this isn't all that applicable to the dom/sub side of things, perhaps, but it is applicable to the sadism/masochism side). This could gainfully be applied to making terminologies in the first place, as well.
Collect the data, organize it, draw up lines to get convenient groupings.
What's muddlesome about that?
IWYW,
— Aswad.
< Message edited by Aswad -- 1/1/2013 7:19:46 AM >
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: The difference between a sub and a slave - 
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