I think these are interesting and scary questions. On an individual level, the line seems easy to draw. If you create those experiences within a wanted context, that’s very different than creating them outside of one.

Oh, definitely. But a lot of these feminist discussions become “what do the desires mean?” and I think that’s something of a different question than “when you do it, do you do it consensually and in a way that’s fun and positive?”

I used to think there was no… negative? element to the desires. I still lean that way. But at the same time, I do think that some people’s SM (not everyone’s but yes, I include mine here) is expressly about playing with scary human emotions/the beasts in the psyche, and I think it’s a bit unfair to BDSM’s detractors to pretend we’re all being totally emotionally safe and cute. While I think the BDSM I do is quite different from the activities of a textbook sexual sadist, and anyone who gives some simplistic argument for my beign wrong to say that will get chewed out, and loudly — there’s still a reason the word “sadist” attracts me and my partners, and that it fits.

I think the huge question is less about me (I just explained my take) and more about abusers. What is it they really want? Clearly some kind of control. But why? How? Instability in their own lives? Misogyny? Anger? Fucked up brain wiring? Lack of empathy? Vulnerability? Sexual desires they can’t rein in? There are so many possible reasons people could abuse, and I’ve never been able to make their behavior make sense to me.

So I guess the thing is I don’t even know if I think many abusers are sexually sadistic. I’m sure some are — and it sounds like the case in the OP is one of those, that this got him off. But a lot of the descriptions I hear of DV generally don’t sound like that to me. It sounds more like a desperate need to maintain control than a desperate need to come, *usually*.

And I think there are certain brands of feminism that trace things back to male sexuality (or better phrased, to male sexual dominance as a cultural phenomenon), such that things like BDSM, porn, etc. get brought up as encouraging these bad attitudes. And… personally, I can see where that idea comes from, but I’m not sure it’s really all that directly *sexual* (as in, “it makes men come”) so much as it is fear of losing power, and possibly using sex as a tool to regain the power and respect they think they’ve lost. To me that’s not quite the same as “I’m about to squirt when I hit you,” or the like.

My use of terminology sucks, and I need to go back to the drawing board with some of this. Not necessarily with theories about fear of predatoriness in vanilla relationships being broadcast out at spooky, external BDSM people… but in figuring out how to express and contextualize my response to those men who are aroused by women’s nonconsensual fear and pain.

Some responses to Trin:

I think those sorts of people use just about anything as a beard. Religion is another big one. Many schools. Any group with a “boot camp” approach to discipline. Hell, even feminism of certain stripes can be a beard for some people who think they have the one true theory of patriarchy and how to smash it. I don’t know that BDSM is particularly special in its beardiness for these people. I think they look for any hierarchy.

Good points.

I really think the problem is, in part, that we don’t know what sadism is, or the desire to erotically dominate. Or at least I don’t think I do. I’m not convinced my feelings aren’t similar to this guy’s in some way. We’re both hitting and liking it (sexually), we’re both wielding power and liking it (sexually). But we’re creating two very different sorts of experience, from what I can tell. I’m creating one that’s welcomed and wanted, and expressly wanting that, and he’s creating one that isn’t (or at least seems not to be; Christina is described as suffering and aware of her suffering.)

How different are those experiences? How akin are we? I don’t think we know that yet, and I’m not sure we can know that unless some brain scans happen somewhere.

I think these are interesting and scary questions. On an individual level, the line seems easy to draw. If you create those experiences within a wanted context, that’s very different than creating them outside of one.

On a cultural level, I get very tangled up. To what level is sexuality extricable from culture?

Ugh, I get this way in all the pro-sex/radfem debates. I feel like both sides are saying something important and true, and that they’re related, in the way that you can describe a river on a molecular level and be correct, and also describe it as a system that’s part of the ocean and still be correct, but the two descriptions will not appear to apply to the same object. I feel like if I could just look at it the right way, everything would resolve.

But I can’t get it at a point where I can articulate things.

(And some look for groups that are nominally anti-hierarchy, so that they can claim “I don’t have any power!” when called on their behavior by those they dominate.)

This is profound, and it isn’t just true for sociopaths. It also applies to attention-seekers, power-tripping narcissists and drama-addicts of all types.
Hannah Arendt called this “the authoritarian personality”–and lots of these types of people adopt BDSM as a social pose, or beard, if you will.

Thoughtful post and great comments!

The question of gender roles also comes up for me as a submissive transvestite: to what extent am I inhabiting/reinforcing societal norms that oppress women, to what extent am I calling attention to them?

Y’know, a few months ago I might have thought seriously about this, but now I’m really on Not Care Island about it. I don’t really think someone else’s dressing in feminine clothes I don’t even wear says something about me or my womanhood. And I also think that, well, a lot of crossdressers who are into that for sexual reasons aren’t really mimicking women — most I know wouldn’t, for example, get off on wearing the pants I wear while hiking. It’s not about mimicking women, it’s about playing a role.

And I guess that role can be critiqued for what it “says about women,” what it plays up and what it plays down — but I’m not so sure that people playing games and choosing something cartoonish because it plays up what they like is really high on the list of feminist issues for me any more.

When I say BDSM community, I don’t think I was using the same meaning that you seem to be. For instance, I don’t really hang out with other Jews (at least not around the topic of Judaism), but I’m still part of the international diasporic Jewish community.

I’m not sure you can be a part of a community you’re ignoring. Maybe you can, but something doesn’t ring right about that to me. Especially when you contrast something like BDSM, where there are quite a lot of community aspects to it for a lot of people, with vanilla sexuality, in which the idea of a community aspect to sexuality is not generally thought about at all, much less embraced.

And I think it’s worth fighting for the kind of definition of BDSM that we want — one that excludes abuse.

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, think about the words “rape” and “sex.” We do say, for example, that rape is “nonconsensual sex,” yes, but we also say things like “Rape isn’t sex” — in the former sentence we mean something like “activity involving genitals and/or sex toys” (and for some people, though not most feminists, that’s narrowed down to “penetration”), and in the latter we mean something like “consensual activity involving genitals and/or sex toys” (note: I’m not defending either of these strongly; I don’t mean to get into “is X sex” right now)

I think it’s possible to use the term BDSM in a similar way, such that we can mention, for example, that an abusive relationship included, say, bondage gear and whips, but still not think of that as what comes to mind when BDSM is mentioned, any more than we think about rape as a special little revolting subsection of “sex.”

Once these people have slithered off to their own little slimy enclaves, what obligation does the community have? Should we be trying to expose them? Get their websites shut down? Should we set up rescue missions to try and convince the women that they’re playing with fire?

I really don’t know the answer myself. I know where a few such enclaves are and I spoke out where I could, but few people were interested in giving up their dream of “true” slavery/ownership. They had, like I mentioned, left BDSM’s “mainstream” (or simply avoided it) for exactly this reason.

When I say BDSM community, I don’t think I was using the same meaning that you seem to be. For instance, I don’t really hang out with other Jews (at least not around the topic of Judaism), but I’m still part of the international diasporic Jewish community.

And I think it’s worth fighting for the kind of definition of BDSM that we want — one that excludes abuse. Sure, this doesn’t prevent others from using the terms differently (that’s why they call it a definitional struggle). As the “please note” box here illustrates (”if you don’t think the post author would regard you as feminist …”) well-defined subjective meanings are very useful in their own right.

Consent comes up a lot and I think there are a lot of difficult cases here — and the context of a patriarchal culture (both the income asymmetries and the normalization of traditional gender roles) has to be taken into account. The question of gender roles also comes up for me as a submissive transvestite: to what extent am I inhabiting/reinforcing societal norms that oppress women, to what extent am I calling attention to them?

jon

Once these people have slithered off to their own little slimy enclaves, what obligation does the community have? Should we be trying to expose them? Get their websites shut down? Should we set up rescue missions to try and convince the women that they’re playing with fire?

I really don’t know the answer myself. I know where a few such enclaves are and I spoke out where I could, but few people were interested in giving up their dream of “true” slavery/ownership. They had, like I mentioned, left BDSM’s “mainstream” (or simply avoided it) for exactly this reason.

I think the best we can do is say, there are otherways to do that, if that’s how you want to live your life, go for it, but ummm… we will be over here if you decide it isn’t all it was cracked up to be and want out.

For starters, I identify as dominant now. What feels like ages ago, but is only a couple years, I used to ID as a switch. I ended up in a relationship with an abusive man. Long story short, I ended up being the sub a hell of a lot more than otherwise with him. And being sexually and emotionally abused. Since I left that relationship, I stopped IDing as a switch, as the idea of giving in that way even a little terrifies me. I truly do agree that there are people who use BDSM as a cover for their genuine, sadistic contempt for women. The idea of consent doesn’t even factor in with them.

In my own experience, it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to realise that I had rights when it came to where I directed my affections, and how I was treated, and how I didn’t have to do things for other people that I didn’t want to do. English-speaking society tends to discourage people from being open about their power relationships, and the ones who don’t learn to respect their own feelings (like Christina) can suffer for it very badly.

Although, I would challenge the statement “Limit” = “nothing you don’t obtain enthusiastic consent for.”

Consent can be genuine but reluctant, and the process of finding out exactly what your limits are can be a challenging thing for all parties involved. When the enthusiastic consent becomes reluctant consent, you’ve reached a kind of limit, let’s call it a ’soft limit’. When reluctant consent becomes reluctant refusal, you’ve reached another kind of limit. When reluctant refusal becomes determined refusal, you’ve reached the hard limit.

Up to the soft limit, you don’t really need explicit negotiation, unless you’re misreading signals about someone’s enthusiasm. It’s in the area between the soft and hard limits that things can most easily start to go wrong and become corrosive. ‘Reluctant refusal’ is particularly problematic, because it could be that the person is reluctant to refuse, or it could be that they definitely want to refuse, but are reluctant to express their refusal. Hence the importance of checking and double-checking and re-checking, and of creating an environment where the expression of refusal is encouraged. People don’t like being refused, and very large numbers of them suppress the expression of refusal in others and (perhaps just as destructively) in themselves.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But there is nothing wrong with choosing to challenge yourself, to push your limits (or have them pushed), to confront your demons, right? Those things are integral parts of growth and many people get a lot of respect for them, like athletes who push their physical limits time and again.

So while there are certainly big ways in which BDSM is different from vanilla sex, I still don’t see where the confusion comes in about whether the experience of someone in a BDSM situation is different from the experience in an abuse situation. In one situation, you have two people who want to be there, who have sought out the experience, and who respect one another as sentient beings — much like in totally vanilla, consensual sex situations. In another, you have one person totally disregarding the other and deliberately brutalizing her — much like in a rape situation. Both cases might involve hitting, fear, and the exploration of the darker side of human nature, but the people are having completely different experiences, no? The way that a rapist and I might both have orgasms while engaging in the same sex act, but it’s clearly completely different?

Edited to add: It’s very deliberate that those are questions, because as I said in my first comment, I don’t have any firsthand experience with this. I’ll believe you if you tell me I’m mistaken, that the two cases (of consensual BDSM and abuse) are more similar than I imagine (or anyway that the experiences of the sadists in each case are more similar).

Point taken, and I used to leave it at exactly that. My feeling that maybe there’s more to it, though, stems from my feeling that, well, part of what I do and want to do when doing some BDSM is explore and indulge the darker side of me (with safeguards in place to make sure no one really gets harmed, or at least that those risks are minimized.)

I think it’s worth acknowledging to the people who do fear or even hate BDSM that well, yes, it does often involve people playing with emotional and physical limits, pushing themselves, facing fears, dredging up demons.

Vanilla sex can certainly do this too, and I think it’s warping to act like it doesn’t or can’t — just talk to many survivors for whom opening up to sexual experiences requires a great deal of trust. (Note that I’m not saying every survivor is this way or attempting to encapsulate The Survivor Experience or something.)

bUt BDSM is, or at least is for a lot of people/in a lot of situations, *about* that fear, that power, those “edges”, in a way that vanilla sex isn’t. Vanilla sex isn’t often centered around that, and BDSM often is.

Maybe I am missing something big — this is not an area in which I have any firsthand experience — but it seems to me like you’re really not giving yourself any credit here.

I have sex with women and like it (sexually); many rapists force sex with women and like it (sexually). If the rapist is a woman (as I am), the specific sex acts may be very similar, even in some sense identical. When I have sex with women, however, it is welcomed and wanted and I expressly desire to have sex only in that context. Rapists, on the other hand, don’t.

To use another example, I prefer Ampersand and you to Christina Hoff Summers, but she calls herself a feminist too. I would rather that the term feminism be associated with you, than her, but how can I judge?

Yeah, and I think it really depends on what definition we’re using, and cases could be made for all sorts of definitions, from something as broad as

“someone who works for improvement in women’s lives”

or as liberal as

“someone who seeks to eradicate discriminatory practices affecting women”

to

“someone who believes society to be an oppressive patriarchy, and seeks to dismantle this patriarchy through consciousness-raising and radical social change”

to

“someone who believes there are multiple sites and axes of oppression and commits herself to dismantling each, recognizing that none is more important/profound, but who focuses personally on those affecting women most.”

If you’re following definition 3, that seems to exclude transphobia from feminism. But 1 could be consistent with it, as could 2, depending on how you analyze what patriarchy is and means (and whether transfolk are its agents somehow, as is commonly assumed.)

And yeah, that happens around BDSM too. I really think the problem is, in part, that we don’t know what sadism is, or the desire to erotically dominate. Or at least I don’t think I do. I’m not convinced my feelings aren’t similar to this guy’s in some way. We’re both hitting and liking it (sexually), we’re both wielding power and liking it (sexually). But we’re creating two very different sorts of experience, from what I can tell. I’m creating one that’s welcomed and wanted, and expressly wanting that, and he’s creating one that isn’t (or at least seems not to be; Christina is described as suffering and aware of her suffering.)

How different are those experiences? How akin are we? I don’t think we know that yet, and I’m not sure we can know that unless some brain scans happen somewhere.