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njlauren -> RE: Have times changed for the better for BDSM? (3/9/2013 11:15:39 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: muhly22222
FR
I would think that the "traditional" gender roles would have made it fairly easy for a dominant man and a submissive woman to find their matches and be in the kind of relationship they desired. Whether that would also have had a kinky twist, there's no way of knowing. I would imagine there were fewer couples who engaged in kink as part of their sex lives, but I really have no data on which to base that idea.
But for both dominant female personalities and submissive male ones, it would have likely been hard to fit into society. You read about strong female personalities in the early 1800s, and the general thought about them with respect to relationships was that they needed to be "tamed" by the one who was to be their man. With that being said, though, I think there would have been a lower incidence of both types at the time, with the way children would have been raised to expect a certain role in their relationships.
And of course, although these don't necessarily fall within BDSM, those interested in non-monogamous and non-hetero relationships are much more welcomed than they would have been then.
To answer the thread's title...I would say yes. Tolerance is pretty generally a good thing (although I can think of a few hypothetical instances where I would find tolerance bad...but maybe I'm intolerant? Hmmm...), and the ability of more people to be happy is generally good, as well.
Thomas Paine once said something I think was profound, that intolerance and tolerance both were equally bad. He said with intolerance, a person took on the right to judge what others were doing, find it lacking, and then decide the right to make their lives a living hell, restrict them and so forth. He said that the tolerant person reserved the right to judge what others were doing, perhaps find it lacking, but decided they didn't have the right to interfere. He said the problem wasn't the action, that it was in the person deciding they had the right to judge where the problem came in, and both were equally guilty. Obviously, it is preferable if you are the one being judged that people be tolerant, but it would be better if people simply respected your right to live as you wish and not judge it.......among other things, tolerant people are not that likely to stand up for the rights of those trampled by those who are intolerant...lots of people claim to be tolerant towards gay people, but a lot of them won't lift a finger to help gays by, for example, voting against a same sex marriage ban, or worse, voting for it while claiming tolerance but saying 'it is wrong'.....
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