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njlauren -> RE: Safe,Sane and Consensual (6/9/2013 8:54:44 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LafayetteLady
quote:
ORIGINAL: MissSarahK
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/29/real_abuse_in_bdsm/ The real truth about the BDSM community
That simply is HER truth. It is not THE truth. But how nice of you to try and present it as such. Incidentally, why is your profile hidden?
I agree. I think the article raises some real issues, but they aren't exactly unknown to anyone who has spent any time in the scene, and this is written by someone who is obviously biased against the scene (the cute little quote about 'he said, she said' is indicative of that, it is written sneeringly to a very real issue true of any sexual assault, that finding the truth can be difficult, and the implication of the way she wrote it is if someone cries sexual abuse, it is real....just ask Oliver Janovich about that one).
The woman claiming that all female subs she knows have been assaulted and claiming this as truth is so far over the edge it is idiotic. Yes, i know of women who have been sexually assaulted (and knowing more then a few gay leather guys, same there), but to make broad claims like this is idiotic.
Among other things, it usually (but not) always seems to happen when someone plays with someone they don't know and play privately, and guess what, this is no different then a vanilla woman meeting some guy at a bar or club and a bad thing happening, and that happens not infrequently....
Likewise, from personal experience, I think there is a reluctance in the community, based on my experience, to acknowledge that a)this goes on and b)act on it, because there is the culture (not wrongly) that it isn't anyone else's job to step in or that everything is okay, we don't have the right to judge and such, and the problem is, there is a very fine line there at times. Someone got their nose bent out of joint when I wrote about a safeword being violated, how I was judging someone else's style of playing, etc, by calling it abuse, and that is a pretty good example of the fine line. If someone has negotiated a safeword where that means stop, period, and the dominant keeps going, it is abuse; if in their relationship, a safeword means I am near the edge, take it easy or move onto something else, it isn't; my point was the first one, which is the most common flavor of the meaning of safeword out there, it is what I usually heard at workshops for beginners, and so forth.
On the other hand, if a sub negotiates a scene and says no sex, and the guy has sex with her when tied up, that is rape, and I have seen real life examples of situations like this where there were excuses for the dominant, that it wasn't really rape because in effect if she consented to play, and he was dominant and therefore had the right to do this, and I was shocked, because that is bullshit. Pure and simple, abuse is when consensuality has been violated, whether it is running through an agreed dead stop safe word or having intercourse, and that binds a dominant and sub equally.
That said, the whole thing about not wanting to be a difficult sub, the culture of not safewording, is the fault of the sub. It is true as a sub (well, at least my experience) that you try not to safeword, you want to keep going, to please the Top/Dominant or to keep up the sensation play, but to do it because of what people with think when you are in distress, well, the only word I can think of is stupid and childish. There is a difference between someone who negotiates a scene and then safewords all over the place (that is someone who shouldn't be playing IMO, means they are ready or their idea of their limits doesn't match reality), but Janet Hardy is right, claiming it is community pressure not to safeword is garbage. I have been around the scene community 30 years, in one way or the other, been around hardcore lifestyle people,leather families, people who were part of the old guard, you name it, and I saw very few people who thought with jaundice towards someone who had used a safeword or when a sub safeworded when it got too much. Sure, there are subs who refuse to safeword, and there are times when a sub is too far gone in subspace to safeword ,it is why I believe a dominant is part of the checks on a scene, to read a sub, but still, it is basically a lie to claim that most subs will not safeword for fear of being called difficult.
The article takes a real issue in the community (which all communities have) and turns it into a generalized denunciation, and my guess is the author is some second wave feminist who thinks BD/SM is nothing more then a cover for abuse of women (course, also leaves out, not surprisingly, that men are abused, too, but I guess in her pointed head, feminist analysis, if a man gets abused, especially by a woman, well, that is no big deal *grrr*).
There are issues with abuse in the community, always have been, Resident Sadist talks about the early days in the gay leather community where 'bad tops' and such were using it as a cover for rape and abuse, so it is nothing new. And yes, there is a reluctance because the community is so much based in what is abuse to me is fun to someone else, to step in, and that can lead to overlooking something bad going on, but it also doesn't mean it is particularly widespread.
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