The Biology of BSDM

[TheLobster]

Don't worry - I know exactly the word you mean even though I can't seem to pull it from memory either.

I'm actually curious what did AG31 mean. The context makes me think of at least half a dozen of potentially fitting words, including "invasive", "infectious", "territorial", or "exclusionary", but most do not refer to countries invading others.

On the other hand, the words that do -- like "domineering" or "imperious" -- don't seem to fit the context very much.

Oh well, as long as we know what we're talking about...

 

[AG31]

Don't worry - I know exactly the word you mean even though I can't seem to pull it from memory either.

Imperialistic!!!!

The trick now would be to find a better word or phrase. English kinda sucks at that sometimes.

Yes, that is, indeed the trick. Let us know if you come up with one.

An interaction is a much better word there. Thanks!

Thanks from me, too, @Britva415 .

 

[Bramblethorn]

…not forgetting the Literotica community

One big happy family.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's the claim by some that "the BDSM community" has a shared set of norms, things like trust, that I want to say does not always apply. I'm not sure where to draw the line betwee "behaviors" and "values."

Words mean whatever people agree them to mean (again, at a "workable consensus" level, not 100% of the human race) and those meanings tend to be based on concepts that people find useful/important.

There are people in the world who hurt others nonconsensually, or force them into sex. Most people agree that this is bad, at least in principle. (Though it doesn't always stop them from condoning or even encouraging specific instances of that behaviour, because people are complex and inconsistent creatures.)

There are also people who enjoy doing stuff to one another/having stuff done to them that would usually be considered violent/oppressive behaviour, BUT with informed consent and care for one another's well-being. Many of these people think the "with consent" part is important, and something that we really want to stress, given how easy it is for others to mistake that behaviour for malice (and also for malicious people to masquerade as the consensual kind).

So we need a term for "doing stuff that would usually be considered violent/oppressive, but with consent", and "BDSM" has become that term.

Since many of the people who self-describe as "BDSMers" do think consent is very important - and are at risk of grave harm if people and institutions mistake us for abusers - yes, we do get antsy about attempts to de-emphasise those consensual aspects.

You're talking about "imperialism" as if this were some pre-existing term which had been hijacked by the consent-focussed crowd, depriving its original users of that term. But in fact "BDSM" is a very recent coinage - the first recorded usage is this Usenet post from 1991 - and to the best of my knowledge that consent-focussed interpretation has been the prevailing use from the start, or at least from very early on. The person trying to redefine an existing term is...you.

If you want terms that aren't consent-focussed to describe things that you want to talk about, there are quite a few around. If you can't find terms that precisely match what you want to discuss, feel free to coin them and see if other people find them useful enough to pick up. But don't expect the consent-focussed people to pack up and abandon "BDSM".

 

[Britva415]

Why the zeroes?

To indicate that my usage of “not wrong” is ironic.

Saying “relationship” is technically not wrong, but it’s not useful.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'd just like to remind everyone that "the BDSM community," is a relatively recent phenomenon. Not all BDSM involves community and relationships. I wish there were another name for the community version.

Rather than continue on about how 'the BDSM community' is a useful social construct, I guess it might be more interesting to ask what you think the alternative(s) is.

The assumption that doesn't always apply is "two people."

The BDSM community largely focuses on two areas Safety and Trust (okay, and Fun...) and Trust ensures Safety. As I said before, Safety is largely a matter of medical science and of risks and precautions. Assuming you don't want to HURT hurt your sub, the community should be able to agree in principle to safe, dangerous with an inevitable grey area in the middle.

There's a lot of BDSM (well, B and M) you can do on your own and the Safety rules still apply. Three or more people doesn't really change anything about Safety and Trust except that there are more people to both rely on and to be abused by.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

Imperialistic!!!!

Yes, that is, indeed the trick. Let us know if you come up with one.

Thanks from me, too, @Britva415 .

The word that just jumped into my head was colonizer. Kind of in the same vein - going in and taking over a culture that was already there and making it your own instead. @TheLobster I know AG31 has already given their word as well, but I was just so excited that my brain finally generated the word it was trying to get to that I figured I'd share what I meant when I said I thought I knew what he was saying as well. I think we're close enough to each other for the sake of having communicated here.


For the rest - I've intentionally bowed out of the discussion of the BDSM community as I don't know enough of its historical context to engage at the level that folks are right now. I see value in the points being made on both ends here and, in general, lament the lack of precision of language. I suspect this is why Shakespeare just kept making words up.

 

[AG31]

You're talking about "imperialism" as if this were some pre-existing term which had been hijacked by the consent-focussed crowd, depriving its original users of that term. But in fact "BDSM" is a very recent coinage - the first recorded usage is this Usenet post from 1991 - and to the best of my knowledge that consent-focussed interpretation has been the prevailing use from the start, or at least from very early on. The person trying to redefine an existing term is...you.

Not that it matters for this thread, but this is puzzling. No way was I trying to define "imperialistic." I was just using it in its normal meaning.

 

[AG31]

BUT with informed consent and care for one another's well-being.

This would totally de-eroticize a "BDSM" story for me. Granted, IRL, informed consent should be a given. But "care" is the quality that I think applies to a sub-culture, not the whole RL BDSM world.

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.
As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?

 

[yowser]

You're talking about "imperialism" as if this were some pre-existing term which had been hijacked by the consent-focussed crowd, depriving its original users of that term. But in fact "BDSM" is a very recent coinage - the first recorded usage is this Usenet post from 1991 - and to the best of my knowledge that consent-focussed interpretation has been the prevailing use from the start, or at least from very early on. The person trying to redefine an existing term is...you.

There's actually a slightly earlier mention in Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture (the revised edition in 1990, not the earlier one). Interview with Fakir Musafar, who used the term.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

This would totally de-eroticize a "BDSM" story for me. Granted, IRL, informed consent should be a given. But "care" is the quality that I think applies to a sub-culture, not the whole RL BDSM world.

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.
As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?

I'm not certain you would anyway, but just as a warning: Don't read my BDSM stories. They would not be to your taste (which is totally fine, I just figured I'd let you know ahead of time). I wonder if there's a tag for that so that I can warn readers for whom that's not their cup of tea.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Not that it matters for this thread, but this is puzzling. No way was I trying to define "imperialistic." I was just using it in its normal meaning.

"this" = "BDSM" not "imperialism", sorry if that wasn't clear.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Assuming you don't want to HURT hurt your sub,

Some (including me) find "hurt" vs. "harm" useful for this distinction.

the community should be able to agree in principle to safe, dangerous with an inevitable grey area in the middle.

FWIW there are two major schools of thought on this: SSC ("safe, sane, consensual") vs. RACK ("risk-aware consensual kink"). The general idea of the latter is that safety is a sliding scale, not a binary, and just about everything comes with some level of risk but it's up to individuals to decide how much risk they're willing to accept. But it's not a huge schism or anything; everybody agrees that safety is important, just some nuance in how it's managed.

 

[Bramblethorn]

There's actually a slightly earlier mention in Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture (the revised edition in 1990, not the earlier one). Interview with Fakir Musafar, who used the term.

Ooh, thank you! Somebody needs to pass that on to a couple of dictionaries so they can update their earliest-usage info. But still quite a recent term.

 

[Bramblethorn]

This would totally de-eroticize a "BDSM" story for me. Granted, IRL, informed consent should be a given. But "care" is the quality that I think applies to a sub-culture, not the whole RL BDSM world.

From the way you've quoted it, I get the impression you're reacting to the word "care" in isolation. Taken on its own it can mean quite a few different things, including some kind of romantic attachment. There's also "after-care", which comes up a lot in BDSM (but which not everybody wants).

But if you re-read, you'll see that I used it in the phrase "care for one another's well-being". That is, taking [shared] responsibility for one another's physical and psychological safety.

Some examples of that kind of care:

Informing oneself about the risks of various kinds of activities before engaging in them, so that all involved parties can decide whether they want to accept these risks and if so, how they're going to manage them.

Checking that sex toys are clean before use, and disinfecting before doing things like blood play.

Establishing a way for somebody who's gagged to indicate if they're in distress and need to be released in a hurry.

Using adequate lube for butt play, because anal fissures are not remotely sexy.

When tying somebody up, ensuring that one's not cutting off their circulation and that there is a way to get them loose quickly in case of emergency.

When doing BDSM stuff with a new partner, finding out a bit about their previous experience and any medical conditions that might be important to know about (asthma, dicky joints).

I'm not talking about giving them a kiss and a box of chocolates. (Some people are into that, some aren't.)

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.

You are free to have whatever turn-offs you like in erotica, but for people who are actually doing these things IRL as opposed to just fantasising about them, information is important and people who try to be responsible about their partners' safety and well-being aren't going to change the language just because it interferes with your fantasy.

I enjoy watching dramatic car chases and stunts in James Bond movies. I don't go around lamenting that road safety rules IRL are incompatible with that kind of action, because in the real world people can get hurt or die or go to jail when things go wrong. Enjoy the fantasy all you like but don't expect it to take precedence over real people's well-being.

"Informed" is inseparable from "consent". Consent isn't meaningful without defining what one's consenting to. Otherwise we get into the kind of situation where somebody interprets consent to foreplay as consent to penetration, consent to penetration as consent to anal, consent to sex with a member of the football team as consent to sex with the entire team, yada yada.

As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?

No.

With the caveat that it's been a long time since I've read the story and I might've forgotten something, but I don't recall them applying that kind of care.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.

edit: also, "informed" and "pre-planning" are not the same thing, although they can overlap.

 

[SimonDoom]

This would totally de-eroticize a "BDSM" story for me. Granted, IRL, informed consent should be a given. But "care" is the quality that I think applies to a sub-culture, not the whole RL BDSM world.

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.
As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?

I agree somewhat. The problem with these discussions is that people keep getting the rules of fantasy stories confused with the rules of the real world. In the real world, it is very important to abide by basic rules of consent and care to make sure nobody gets hurt and crimes aren't being committed. None of this applies in fantasy BDSM stories. These stories aren't written for a "community" (for the most part) and have no obligation whatsoever to ensure that the characters in them abide by "BDSM community" rules. Most of the readers of these stories know nothing about the community or its rules. They just want to read a fun story that explores bondage/dominance-submission/sadomasochism themes. My guess is that most readers find these stories more appealing without too much attention to BDSM community rules.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Some (including me) find "hurt" vs. "harm" useful for this distinction.

FWIW there are two major schools of thought on this: SSC ("safe, sane, consensual") vs. RACK ("risk-aware consensual kink"). The general idea of the latter is that safety is a sliding scale, not a binary, and just about everything comes with some level of risk but it's up to individuals to decide how much risk they're willing to accept. But it's not a huge schism or anything; everybody agrees that safety is important, just some nuance in how it's managed.

Thanks for this. I dont think I'd ever seen the terms before but had kind of inferred similar ideas about 'acceptable risk' from my general knowledge.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

Edit: No, scratch "informed." Pre-planning is another turn-off for me.

One of @Bramblethorn 's posts made me wonder. Would a limit list, shared in advanced, fall under "pre-planned" for you? One that informs the other participant of what is and is not "in bounds" so to speak and establishes a safe word, but the scene itself, the actual acts are not pre-planned. The submissive party doesn't know what's coming next, is at the mercy of the whims of the dominant party, but can trust that those limits will be respected.

That's what I typically mean when I think of "informed consent" in these situations.

Some (including me) find "hurt" vs. "harm" useful for this distinction.

Very much this. In fact, I include it in my "how to" guide (athough that is focused on 24/7 total power exchange and is definitely relationship based). It's also something I teach. One of the readings suggested on this thread talks, for example, about the DSM and how sadism and masochism have been treated as disordered by their very nature. I've...never done this when I teach and never read it into the current or immediately prior (so DSM-5 or DSM-IV) manual because of an important phrase "clinically significant distress or impairment." Distress is often relationship distress or simply not liking that aspect of your sexual needs (it's only a paraphilia if it is required for full sexual satisfaction, not just one of a multitude of fun things you like to do). That could be distress. And impairment? Well, it could mean it ruins all of your relationships, or for sadism, you've crossed the consent line and/or for masochism you've crossed over from hurt to harm, pain to damage. Humiliation that leaves you a psychological wreck in need of therapy. Loss of life or limb. Use of electric shocks in someone with epilepsy (and therefore risking and likely causing seizure). Where's the exact line? Yea, it's a grey area, drawing those exact lines are art, not science. But they are drawn, and they aren't just "anyone who gets pleasure from pain and/or gets pleasure from inflicting pain is disordered." At least, that's how I was taught (and how I taught). In my experience, it's not the DSM itself that introduced that bias, but the people using it and adding their own moral judgment into their diagnoses (something you're very much supposed to avoid).

And then care, to me, is wanting to stay on the "hurt" side and not enter the "harm" side for all involved parties. Both have a responsibility to use and honor safe words, for example. And YES that means that the submissive party is being trusted to use that safe word if the harm line is being crossed just as the dom is expected to both avoid crossing it and to honor the safe word if used.

Note: I use D/s language here just to make writing easier to distinguish between the person in control and the person who isn't while also noting that SOME people in control may be sadistic and SOME people not in control may be masochists, but this is not required. I could have used Top/bottom or Sadist/Masochist, bound/Free, etc. There are so many ways this can play out in an interaction. I just picked one in the above to make it a bit easier to read and write.

 

[AG31]

One of @Bramblethorn 's posts made me wonder. Would a limit list, shared in advanced, fall under "pre-planned" for you? One that informs the other participant of what is and is not "in bounds" so to speak and establishes a safe word, but the scene itself, the actual acts are not pre-planned. The submissive party doesn't know what's coming next, is at the mercy of the whims of the dominant party, but can trust that those limits will be respected.

That's what I typically mean when I think of "informed consent" in these situations.

My interest in BDSM is strictly confined to my fantasy life, so I don't deal with practical matters. The creation and sharing of a "limit list" would have to have an erotic charge to interest me, and it doesn't. So it's a turn-off. But IRL for sure such things have to exist.

 

[AG31]

edit: also, "informed" and "pre-planning" are not the same thing, although they can overlap.

I was talking in the most general sense.

 

[AG31]

AG31 said:
As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?

No.

With the caveat that it's been a long time since I've read the story and I might've forgotten something, but I don't recall them applying that kind of care.

I was being tongue-in-cheek. The point is that The Story of O is a BDSM classic and there is no care exhibited.

The problem with these discussions is that people keep getting the rules of fantasy stories confused with the rules of the real world.

True, true. We should all note this in any OPs we post touching this subject.

 

[Bramblethorn]

AG31 said:
As for "care," do you mean the kind exhibited by Rene or Sir Stephen in The Story of O?


I was being tongue-in-cheek. The point is that The Story of O is a BDSM classic and there is no care exhibited.

I wouldn't argue with the description as a "BDSM classic" but it does need unpacking.

It's certainly influential on modern BDSM. It contains scenarios that many BDSMers find sexy and inspirational; no doubt a lot of real-life BDSM scenes have been based on ideas from that book, with adaptation to make them reality-friendly. But does it define what "BDSM" means?

Well, no. The term "BDSM" is never even used in the book; Reage/Desclos would not have recognised it. Some of the individual component words do appear - "bonds" and "submission" for instance - but as often happens in language, "BDSM" isn't merely the sum of its parts. (Nobody would consider "Of Human Bondage" to be a "BDSM" novel despite it having "bondage" right there in the title, nor call it "BDSM" when a student submits an assignment.)

If I asked somebody to make a list of classic espionage novels, the James Bond stories would surely appear high on that list. But there are many many things important in RL "espionage" (even in Ian Fleming's day; even in the work he'd have done in his RL espionage career) which get little or no coverage in his books.

If somebody attempted to argue that because Fleming's books are "espionage classics", the term "espionage" is defined by what does and doesn't appear in the Bond books, they would not be taken seriously.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

My interest in BDSM is strictly confined to my fantasy life, so I don't deal with practical matters. The creation and sharing of a "limit list" would have to have an erotic charge to interest me, and it doesn't. So it's a turn-off. But IRL for sure such things have to exist.

@SimonDoom :

@SimonDoom The problem with these discussions is that people keep getting the rules of fantasy stories confused with the rules of the real world.

True, true. We should all note this in any OPs we post touching this subject.

If I asked somebody to make a list of classic espionage novels, the James Bond stories would surely appear high on that list. But there are many many things important in RL "espionage" (even in Ian Fleming's day; even in the work he'd have done in his RL espionage career) which get little or no coverage in his books.

I've compiled the set of quotes, above, that I think help very well to highlight part of the language differential we were discussing needing earlier. There is a distinction between what might be spoken about when speaking about the "BDSM Community" (those who are engaging in BDSM behaviors/activities in real life) versus enjoyers of BDSM fantasy, who may or may not also engage in any non-fantasy BDSM activities. I was using BDSM community to refer to the former, but AG31 seems to be a mamber of the latter if I'm reading this right (please correct me if I'm not).

This seems the same to me as how you may have a "lesbian community" versus "those who enjoy reading/watching lesbian fantasy" who may or may not themselves be lesbians or any other variety of LGBTQIA+. It reminds me of complaints from lesbians I know personally that "girl on girl" action was (at the time at least) nearly always shot in porn in a way that is clearly designed for the male gaze and in non-realistic ways rather than being made for an by lesbians with a greater knowledge of what they would do and/or like. This has improved somewhat and neither is inherently "wrong," but doing one while excluding the other can create conflict, somewhat like has happened here.

 

[SimonDoom]

This seems the same to me as how you may have a "lesbian community" versus "those who enjoy reading/watching lesbian fantasy" who may or may not themselves be lesbians or any other variety of LGBTQIA+. It reminds me of complaints from lesbians I know personally that "girl on girl" action was (at the time at least) nearly always shot in porn in a way that is clearly designed for the male gaze and in non-realistic ways rather than being made for an by lesbians with a greater knowledge of what they would do and/or like. This has improved somewhat and neither is inherently "wrong," but doing one while excluding the other can create conflict, somewhat like has happened here.

I think the crucial point is that at Literotica it doesn't have to be either/or. There's no need to choose. It's perfectly legitimate for authors to tickle a BDSM fantasy or a lesbian fantasy in different ways, to appeal to different groups of readers who want different things.