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njlauren -> RE: Mono vs poly? (8/23/2013 8:53:43 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MarcEsadrian
quote:
ORIGINAL: njlauren
What you leave out is that M/s relationships are negotiated.
I leave that out because what you said above isn't correct. A master-slave relationship is a destination. It doesn't exist within a nexus of broad compromises, hashed out conditions, and careful provisos. What you are describing, instead, is a general prescription for general D/s relationships out of the box. Confusing the two happens, of course, when we start speaking of doms and masters and subs and slaves interchangeably, which is no rare thing, of course.
Consensual slavery is the ultimate terminus of being under the control of another; it is not a state of negotiation, but intimate accord and alignment. It may be entered into fairly quickly and with very little dialog, or quite gradually, as fears and limitations melt away and a mind is brought to more absolute heel. But either way, it is the destination that is of import and, make no mistake about it, that destination is as whole and complete a form of surrender and devotion to another as humanly possible. If you don't have that in your midst, if your "slave" insists on heavy conditions to the arrangement, like something as banal as other women in the circle and will indeed throw in the towel if you decide you want another, you are not in possession of a slave, but what's commonly called a "submissive." And you probably don't even have that.
quote:
ORIGINAL: njlauren
Legal slavery died with the 13th amendment in the US and died in England around the turn of the 19th century.
It would seem, then, that your deeper conviction is slavery doesn't really exist at all! In such case, I'm not certain why I'm even bothering with replying. Nonetheless, you'd be a fool to assume:
a. Legality alone defines a state of slavery, and;
b. That slavery does not still exist today within the very countries you cite.
I didn't say slavery didn't exist, I said legal slavery didn't exist, where people are literally properly. You can have an elaborate contract, you can have all kinds of stuff in it, and it wouldn't mean thing one legally, therefore it isn't legally recognized or real in that context. The reason I brought that up is you are saying that slavery is about absolute control only, that a slave is owned and so forth and anything less than that is not slavery, which besides being semantics, fails on one major attribute, and that is even in a total control relationship, an owned relationship, there is consent to be there.You can't buy someone else, you can't kidnap them and make them your slave, so if someone becomes your slave they agree to your terms, because legally, they can walk away at any point and there isn't anything you or any dominant could do about it, and if you tried you would probably end up in jail for harassment and/or kidnapping, there is a fundamental point of consent there, and if so then arguing that slavery means no consent is crap, because a slave always has the right to walk away. In true slavery a slave owner can force a slave back, in this, there is no such bound, the person is there because they want to be...not to mention that the terms of the slave contract are not determined by you or me, what is slavery and what isn't is up to them. Even in real life slavery of the type they had on ye old plantation days, slaves had varying amounts of freedom in terms of what they could do, it depended on the master and his/her wishes, some slaves had the freedom when their tasks for their master were done to earn money on their own, some had the right to choose their own mates, etc.......so it varied in the real (horrible) version. Slavery is what is in the hearts of the slave and master, and how they come to it, what they have in it, is their business, and you have no more right to label their relationship then I do yours, there are things with absolute slave relationships I find troubling, but I don't say you don't have the right to do it or call it anything different, if that is your slave relationship, so be it.
Again, every type of slave relationship you are talking about has consent in it, both parties consent to enter it, formally or informally, they have different bounds and mechanics, but to the people in it, it is M/s. Claiming true slavery for what you do is puffery, in other words, because there is no such thing if slavery without legal backing doesn't exist, so in the end it is about what the people feel it is and what they do with it.
Actually, from the 'real' world of slavery, i guess you could argue there are multiple models, both of which are forms of slavery but different. There was chattel slavery, where a slave is a possession like a piece of furniture (I shudder to think that religious groups could defend and help support slavery, looked at like this it is nothing more than inhuman cruelty), where basically you only had whatever the owner gave. However, there also was indentured servitude, where someone agreed to the control of another person, but the terms were negotiated (in colonial days, it would be getting your passage to the colonies paid for, and you were theirs for X years). It was slavery with limits, but you were owned by the person and if you ran away, the law would bring you back, and you could be punished by your owner. Typical things in those contracts were that in New England they didn't have to eat lobster more than 3 times a week, or specifying how many hours they had to work and so forth. With a negotiated slavery, maybe it is more akin to indentured servitude...but still, in one form or another, there is always consent, with few or no bounds or some. I don't consider specifying monogamy as being burdensome demands on the dominant, if the M has total control, if he agrees to bounds, limitations, whatever, that is his right, and if he choose not to allow someone to become a sub because they are monogamous, that is his right, too *shrug*
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