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and came to the ending, where Sir Stephen loses interest in O and tells her to kill herself. I can also remember being furious with the way Nine And A Half Weeks (the book, not the movie) ends. The submissive woman has a public breakdown. She begins to cry hysterically, and is abandoned by her master, so that strangers have to obtain help for her. One of the cruelest stereotypes of S/M people is that we don't love each other, that there is something about our sexual style that makes our relationships mutually destructive and predisposes us to suicide.

This quotation came to mind during a conversation I had a few days ago: I was talking to a girl who really likes BDSM sex but referred to non-BDSM sex as "love sex." Because, you know, love is just not an ingredient in BDSM sex. "Everyone knows" that -- the same way "everyone knows" that BDSM always arises from childhood abuse, or dominant sadism is for villains, or everyone who likes BDSM is damaged and miserable and irresponsible, or....

Not to put too fine a point on it: fuck that.

I'm not saying there's no BDSM smut out there with love in it. Anne Rice's Beauty series ends with Beauty riding off into the sunset with her loving sadomasochistic partner (although of course the characters deal with all kinds of uncaring brutality first). But even nuanced BDSM erotica seems to fall into this trap more often than not -- for example, Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, which is so consciously written that it includes safewords, also portrays a main character whose most compelling BDSM relationships are with her enemies and whose love relationship is with a man who can't stand to hurt her. (Carey took a very different tack later in the series, with other characters; I've always wondered whether she did so as a reaction to criticism.)

It's easier to criticize than create. And all my porn critiques could come back and bite me soon, because I plan on releasing my own BDSM smut sometime... and I'm sure that what I produce won't even be close to perfect. Yet one thing I really want to ensure I represent in whatever I write is love. There are plenty of BDSM fantasies that partly operate on the absence of love -- that even demand it, perhaps because the fantasy is all about a vicious and emotionally distant dominant, or because much of the erotic tension is derived from how much the partners hate each other, or for lots of other reasons. And yeah, they're hot in their own way....

But it'd be so great if those weren't the standard.

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This can be found on the Internet at:
http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/02/22/ladypornday-bdsm-can-be-love-sex-too/

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S&M:

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