Myths, Memes, & Misconstrues in BDSM

If I have learned one thing in all my years of involvement in this subculture, it is that a person needs a wetsuit in order to wade through the phenomenal amount of bullshit it generates. Nothing short of religion can produce the megalithic mounds of manure that BDSM churns out. It is then not surprising that those same practitioners cling to their defecation as though it were holy doctrine handed down by the Great Ass Slapper Above. Theirs is truly a religious zeal; a cultic  reverence that shuns all illumination. Why then should I even bother in casting a light before the blind?

Why indeed? As with every theological debate that I have engaged in, I never delude myself by thinking that I will convert the faithful. I debate for the fence sitters. I debate for the unindoctrinated stragglers who may find their way by chance onto my little sliver of cyberspace before blundering headfirst into the cranial laundromat of the 'wisdom' of the community. But mostly I debate because I take great pleasure in making the stupid look stupid. So for my personal entertainment this evening, I will berate, pummel, spit upon, flail, and generally make mockery of some of the most cherished, beloved, indeed holy of BDSM bullshit.

Submission is a gift (Meme) This little piece of worthless nonsense implies that only one half of the equation, submission, is of noteworthy importance. Ignored is the fairly crucial point that it takes both halves to make either dominance or submission relevant. Also ignored is the word gift, as it is traditionally used in the English language, means a present which is given without any expectation of reciprocation. When you give a friend a birthday present, you do not expect to take that present away should the person stop being your friend. Your friendship is an exchange, a process of reciprocation. The birthday gift is your friend's to keep regardless of what your mutual future may hold. Dominance and submission are an exercise in reciprocation, a mutually valuable exchange of power.

It is entertaining to note that the overwhelming majority of the people that claim submission to be a gift are females, with some few desperate or cuckold undertop men parroting their overbottom superior 'subs'. The Submission is a gift meme lays the psychological foundation for topping from the bottom and removing even the opaque illusion of power exchange that the weekend ass slappers role play at by plastering this pretentious meme on the face of every other blog, forum, and signature line.

Wakey wakey widdle sheeple, submission is no more a gift than choosing a dentist is a gift. You have decided upon a mutual exchange that both parties find beneficial. Nothing more, nothing less.

Aftercare is of the utmost importance (Myth) I believe that the actual quote was “Aftercare is of the uttermost importance.” which can be forgiven in part due to English not being the author of the quotes first language. What was really hilarious about it was that the author, a Fatlife patron, was talking about aftercare after a scene in, get this...Second Life! Yes folks, one of the people that has insisted on this myth is insisting that a virtual flogging is so virtually traumatic that it requires virtual aftercare. As funny as I found the exchange I had with this Dutch douche, he is by no means the only one insisting that aftercare is an absolute necessity. The concept is as prevalent in BDSM as white at a Klan rally.

For those of you fortunate enough to not know what aftercare is, let me edumacate you. You know how you have been trained like an obedient puppy to swaddle your tubby subby in blankets and feed her bon-bons while telling her how much you cherish her gift of submission after you are done with your slap & tickle session? Well, that is aftercare!

Alright, so there is a little more to it than that. There can even be a modicum of truth to some people, at some time, needing aftercare. I will lay out the hypothesis and let you the hopefully not braindead sheeple readers decide.

The need for aftercare stems from something called sub drop. Sub drop almost certainly exists, though there is little to no evidence of it being as severe as some will claim. But in order to determine if aftercare is all that important, we need to first examine what it is supposed to be effective in treating.

So what can happen here? Ok, you have just finished caning someone black and blue. This is blunt physical trauma and the body will often react to such trauma by diverting blood from less necessary areas to more vital areas. In essence, the body draws blood to the torso and places lesser significance on the arms, legs, and to a degree even the head. This is known as shock and can leave the person a little light headed, off balance, and numb. Shock may sound bad, but unless the beating involved considerable blood loss, it is not fatal. The person can reverse the effects relatively quickly by covering up and laying down. The only real necessity here, again assuming no copious bleeding, is to make see that the person doesn't fall down and injure his or herself before they can get comfortable. If you really feel like being nice you can even fetch them a blanket, but even without the blanket or laying down, the person's cardiovascular system will return to normal within a few hours at most. Fall prevention is the only 'aftercare' that really needs to be addressed for this.

So far, so good. We also have to account for the psychochemical reactions. Endorphin's and adrenaline are going to be released due to pain or stress. This is very similar to the runners high that athletes experience, and yet we don't see Erick Silva crying that he needs a hug after a fight. I wonder why that is? Oh, but I am getting distracted. When these chemicals stop flooding the brain, the person can experience a drop and subsequent melancholia or even depression. Guess what? So does a sadist. Get the fuck over it. If you are so mentally unstable that you might injure yourself, you don't need to be in this position to begin with. If you are stable, the feeling will pass as your body self regulates. Pumping feel good treats into the body is only going to continue the see-saw effect of psychochemistry.

What kind of aftercare are you going to give here, Paxil?

Finally in the reality based arguments of sub drop is the proposition that the sub may experience shame or guilt hours or even days after the scene. Yes, this is possible. And again, so does a sadist. Get the fuck over it. You are mentally stable, aren't you? If not, you are putting the dominant/sadist/top/ass slapper at fucking risk by being in contact with your dysfunction. We all have to learn to deal with these things. We have been raised to believe things that we are now seemingly thumbing our noses at. We are finding pleasure and enjoyment from situations that we have been taught to avoid. Of course this is going to cause some cognitive dissonance! Are you so fucking stupid that you didn't realize this before you ever let leather touch skin? Fucking moron!

That covers the reality of aftercare. Now for the mythology. To begin with, it is commonly assumed that the person needs sweets. Through some metaphysical means that flies in the face of medical science, that sound thrashing you gave her supposedly dropped her blood sugar, and now you need to pop chocolates into her porcine face while cradling her blanketed body in your arms and crooning songs about her gift of submission into her ear. Yes, it takes so much energy to drape oneself over a spanking bench! Granted, pain is known to sometimes cause episodes of hyperglycemia, that is elevate blood sugar, but we aren't dealing with anything resembling reality at this point. We are dealing with a pampered porker wanting to be coddled and have double chocolate dipped Twinkies shoveled down her gullet in exchange for her 'gift'. The same goes for their need for hydration. Unless the scene was pony play, the odds are that the top has depleted more salts and fluids through sweating than has the bottom.

Having been to public dungeons enough to have observed that the majority of female submissives ( the ones incidentally who scream the loudest about the importance of aftercare ) are morbidly obese, I can safely say that presenting them with sweets after a scene is not aftercare. If anything it would be considered abuse to push their diabetes through the roof.

Short answer then, aftercare is hardly ever necessary, let alone important. In some few scenarios a minimum of aftercare may be required for the safety of the bottom, but nothing past that is really needed. One thing that aftercare is good for is creating a bond between the players. If you want a bond with the other person this is well and good. For some of us, that bond is not only unnecessary, it is undesirable.

The leather community created BDSM in the 1950's (misconstrue) As completely ridiculous as this claim is, I have heard it proposed by prominent self proclaimed leather historians. One need look no further than the names Donatien Alphonse François de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to dispose of the notion of S&M being a product of gay bikers. The book The Romance of Chastisement written in 1866 might give some indication that sexual discipline was around before the first motorcycle (which was built in Germany in 1885, for the record), and let us not forget the lovely Betty Page with both bondage and discipline elements.

It is quite possible that someone in the leather community did coin the term BDSM, just as I coined the term weekend ass slapper and provided a distinction between M/s and O/p years back when I determined that M/s had became too watered down and needed a term to separate my subculture from M/s. I did not create O/p. O/p has its roots in something remarkably similar to the gay leather community as it arose from the outlaw biker clubs that treated their women as, and sometimes referred to them as property. I took my experience with these clubs and together with other refugees of TSR defined and refined the concept of O/p into something recognizably distinct from M/s. It would be a shameless lie to claim that myself and others created O/p, just as it is a barefaced lie to claim that the leather community created BDSM. Every element was present throughout history, and often in conjunction. The acronym may not have been invented yet, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Safewords are absolutely necessary (Misconstrue) The need for safewords is chanted like a prayer within the world of BDSM, and with the same reverence. It is presented as the end-all, be-all of safety, not to mention it being yet another tool to place all real power into the hands of the rotund subbies, once again turning BDSM into nothing more than a role playing game whose primary focus is on the pleasure of the overbottom (aka submissive) while the undertop (aka dominant) is left to glean whatever satisfaction he can find from the scraps.

While a safeword can detract from the illusion of power exchange, it doesn't have to. My own cynicism aside, the safeword is a noble if misguided concept. In theory at least the bottom will be honorable enough to use one only when necessary, though in practice it is less than subtly offered as a means of topping from the bottom. Few will come right out and say this, but it can be read between the very wide lines.

Even misuse is not enough to cast a safety feature into the garbage heap, but what if the safety feature is in itself misleadingly dangerous? There are several indications that this is exactly the case with a safeword. Thanks to that endorphin rush mentioned earlier, the bottom will often be in a state of euphoria when a safeword might most be needed, her body not interpreting her sensory signals correctly and being unable to identify the need to stop. Likewise, trauma and shock can shut down those sensory inputs. Again making it unlikely that the safeword would be applied when needed.

To make matters worse, many people, at the encouragement of the ever helpful BDSM community none the less, will often chose an obscure and little used word as their safeword. Once the stress and psyhochemicals start to flow, remembering that obscure word can be a not trivial obstacle.

Then again, lots of people include gags in their play. Try stuffing your mouth with a dishrag and saying the word "FLÜGGÅƎNK∂€ČHIŒβØL∫ÊN". C'mon, give it a shot. Because safewords are so very effective, I'm sure you will have no trouble making yourself clear around the gag.

Safewords can be useful when one or both parties are inexperienced, or when they are unfamiliar with playing with the other. Short of that, they offer a false sense of security that is more dangerous than not using a safeword at all and relying on “Oh, fuck! Stop!”

Another use for a safeword is when something might be a 'trigger', causing a panic attack as the mentally unstable bottom revisits a disturbing event, begging again to ask just why the fuck someone that mentally fubared is even here to begin with. If your life is so messed up that the sight of a cane or the word 'cumbucket' cause you to go into mental convulsions, you really need to re-evaluate what you are doing here in this subculture. And if you are stupid enough to play with someone that you know is bipolar, PTSD, or heaven forbid, BPD or MPD (A condition that most psychiatrists say affects less than 200 people worldwide, and oddly enough every one of their dozen personalities engages in BDSM) , well bucko, you deserve what you get. Stupidity should be painful.

Bottom line, a false sense of security should never replace common sense. The top should be intelligent and observant enough to recognise signs of distress, and the bottom should have sense enough to communicate effectively prior to a scene. Safewords are not completely useless in certain situations, but in most cases they are a downright dangerous substitute for common sense.

Safe, Sane, and Consensual (Misconstrued Mythic Meme) This term has become a mantra among BDSMers. It is presented as the ultimate Litmus test, the final word and defining apex of the community. A shame then that the very creator of the term laments that it has been so badly misapplied and abused.

Today SSC is invoked to expel all but the tamest and lamest of weekend ass slappers who will proudly proclaim that actual sadism was never a part of BDSM. They proclaim this outright vulgar lie even in the faces of the very people who built the communities they have now infested like the roaches they resemble. They, the new and diluted community, get to apply their definition of what is safe, sane, and consensual, and anyone that opposes their fluffy slap & tickle cuddlefest are leprous outcasts, branded as 'not real masters'. Fascinating then that the cackling from the subby coop will become a cacophony should someone state that one of their peckish number is not an actual slave as defined by O/p. For some odd, almost discriminatory reason, masters can be defined, but slaves (virtually every self

proclaimed slave protesting critical definition being female for some reason) are subject to only self definition. But this is a matter for another blog.

Back to where I was headed, these new and verminous usurpers, many of whom have come into BDSM because they want a little kink in the bedroom, or just because they think it cool and rebellious, have slithered in after reading fantasy bodice rippers like 50 Shades of Gray, and suffer the delusion that BDSM is nothing more than a pair of furry cuffs and a light flogger that begins and ends in the bedroom. Like a fundamentalist evangelical, it is not enough that they live by their standards, everyone else must as well.

The problem with SSC is in definition. What is safe? There is very little that is actually safe. There are only degrees of safety. Driving a car is not safe. You are hurling several tons of metal and plastic powered by a controlled explosion using volatile substances as fuel at high speed while meeting, passing, and being passed by other masses of wheeled explosions. Who in their right mind would consider that to be safe in any stretch of the word? Taking a shower is not safe. Thousands of people slip and fall while showering every year, and many of those falls result in death. Swallowing food or water is not safe. Choking and strangulation is the third largest cause of household deaths in America. How many people engage in those unsafe activities on a daily basis? Only one of those activities, consumption, is absolutely necessary, and even it could be bypassed if everyone submitted to intravenous feedings.

The point is that we realize that there is a degree of danger involved in these mundane activities, and make an informed decision to write them off as acceptable risks. We make these choices as individuals, and there are some that consider some actions too risky for their own comfort. There are people who are afraid to drive, for example. The difference here is that those individuals are not attempting to force their fears upon us all. They may not be happy when I climb behind a wheel, but they aren't screaming that I am an abusive monster because I take the SUV to the grocery store. Safe is relevant only to the participants. There is no community standard that can dictate what is and is not safe to individuals within BDSM. What is an unacceptable risk to you may be an acceptable one for myself. Similarly experience plays a part that makes a blanket proclamation useless. A cane can be dangerous in the hands of a beginner, and perfectly safe in the hands of someone that has used one for years. Safety is not one size fits all, and cannot be distilled down into a mantra. But since we are on the subject of safety, lets beat the mental illness dead horse again. Just how safe is it to play with someone that claims to have multiple personalities? How safe is it to play with a self proclaimed bipolar or borderline personality? How safe is it to play with anyone claiming two or more of these conditions? If you are really concerned with safety, you might want to look into the astronomical numbers of those online BDSMers claiming one or more of those and ask yourself how safe, or sane, it is to not strongly discourage them from practicing.

Sane is another contestable word. What is sane, and who gets to decide it? If average is sanity, then nobody is sane, because every single person has some distinction in an idea or opinion that rests outside the ill-defined line of sanity. Many atheists consider the religious to be delusional or suffering from mild schizophrenia. Many vanilla's consider anything outside of missionary position hetro intercourse (with the lights out!) to be a sign of mental instability. Some judges have stated that a person willing to be flogged, canned, or whipped is too unstable to give consent. We cannot then use majority or even legal opinion of sanity as any means of determining what we do within the realm of BDSM.

Psychologist Erich Fromm summed it up nicely when he said “It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth... Just as there is a folie a deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

The only real test we can use to determine sanity is rationality, and even that is subject to interpretation, as millions, perhaps billions of people use irrational arguments in order to rationalize inconsistent, irrational, and at times even contradictory beliefs, yet are still considered sane. We can apply sanity only to obvious and dramatic deviations which can and do result in injury or death. We cannot apply it to something which may hypothetically be disastrous unless we can rationally argue how it is statistically likely to be disastrous. And bear in mind that if you fail to rationally argue against it, if you employ emotional appeal or irrational wild speculation as your argument, you are the one that by your own standard is demonstrating a lack of sanity, and you should remove yourself from the area of BDSM immediately. Barring that, at least admit that you are being a hypocritical cunt. We already know this, but admitting it to yourself is the first step to recovery.

Finally we come to consent. This is a topic that deserves a blog of its own, if not a 12 volume treatise. I think every one of us will agree that consent is needed. Where we differ is when and how often consent is required. Some will contend that consent must be given for every single act, and can be retracted even in mid-swing. Sadly, these are the people that are driving the NCSF bus at the moment, and the ones who are willing, even eager, to throw anyone that disagrees under the bus. At the other end of the spectrum are those of us in O/p that subscribe to the concept of initial consent which is non-retractable after the fact. While this may be a radical and extreme position, it is not without precedent. An example of precedence would be gender reassignment surgery. The person initially consents to the surgery, but once the surgery is performed, there is virtually no turning back. These people have consented, willingly and knowingly, to a life changing event in which changing their minds at a later date is basically impossible. Eunuchs would also fall into this category as with the hijra of India. The BDSM world opens its arms to the initial and irrevocable consent of the transgender community, but wishes to regulate that same level of consent among its own practitioners? Interesting. I smell the foul stench of feminism in this, but that again will be another blog.

As with what is safe and sane, consent is a matter to be determined by the person giving consent and agreed upon by the person accepting that consent. No holier than thou self appointed safety police can determine what is acceptable consent for the individual. SSC is a nonsensical meme that is repeated like prayer by the community, it is a myth in that it is too vaporous to be universally defined, and it is misconstrued far beyond what its creator intended it to be used for. It belongs at the bottom of the garbage heap after being doused with gasoline and lit. SSC is the Spanish Inquisition of BDSM. It does no good and causes incredible harm.