Story Question

[KarennaC]

Maybe I should ask this somewhere else on the board, but I figured I'd start here and someone can tell me if I need to try elsewhere.

I'm working on a series of stories in which a couple try to spice things up by playing a sexual alphabet game; each week, one of them chooses an activity that begins with a letter of the alphabet, and the other partner has to go along with the activity. Because this is a pretty wide-open concept, the stories will fit into various categories here on Lit.

A couple of the activities include bondage, and for the letter Y, one of the partners has to say "yes" to everything the other tells her to do. My question is, for the purposes of categorizing these stories, would people consider them BDSM-ish, or should stories in the BDSM category be more about people who have PYL/pyl relationships?

Thanks for any help!

 

[graceanne]

Hey! Good idea for a story!

First off, and I'm sorry if I'm going into detail on something you already know, but BDSM stands for several things. Bondage/Discipline, Dominant/Submissive, Sadist/Masochism. It should be BDDSSM, but it was condensed to BDSM. For a story to be BDSM it usually has several (if not all) of those aspects. Just something to keep in mine when you categorize your story. Another place you could possibly put your story in, depending on whether the main character is reluctant to do the things s/he has to say yes to, is the non consent/reluctance category.

 

[KarennaC]

Graceanne, thanks for your help None of the stories will fit in NonCon; this is a committed partnership, and there's a level of trust there that led to the partners agreeing to go along with each other in the "game".

Last year for the Valentine's contest, I wrote a story where a man left custom-made candy hearts for his girlfriend, with instructions that she had to follow in order to be able to eat the hearts. That was categorized as BDSM, which is why I'm a little undecided as to whether those two or three alphabet stories would fit the category.

 

[midwestyankee]

Categorizing these stories might be a tad challenging but I suspect that you might want to think of your larger purpose when you choose your categorization. Do you want all the stories to share the same categorization? This would make them all accessible as a group from a single selection by potential readers. If that's important, then it might make sense to try to get them all categorized in a wide-range category. If this is not important to you, then you may have a few that fit well into the BDSM category and several that will not.

The extent to which your stories involve consensual exchange of power will be part of how they might qualify as BDSM stories in addition to the inclusion of any activities that in and of themselves are usually categorized as BDSM activities (use of pain-inducing devices, overt dominance and submission, for example). If it's absolutely clear in a story that one person has assumed a large degree of actual control over another person and that control leads to an imbalance of power in their sexual relations, then you'll almost certainly have yourself a legitimate BDSM story. But showing a loving couple that decides to try swinging a flogger at one another for a spice-it-up evening in the sack does not a BDSM story make.

 

[Cattypuss]

Sorry, I'm not qualified to advise... but please can someone tell me what "PYL/pyl" means?

 

[graceanne]

Sorry, I'm not qualified to advise... but please can someone tell me what "PYL/pyl" means?

Pick Your Label. Upper case is a dominant/master/top/etc and lower case is a sub/slave/bottom/etc

 

[Cattypuss]

thanks!

 

[KarennaC]

Midwest, I'm deliberately not posting them all under the same category, because even though they're under the "Alpharotica" umbrella they're each separate stories. I see what you mean about the difference between being BDSM and just being "spicy".