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body's reaction to certain types of stimulation. Also: sexual desire is not consent. And love isn't consent, either. If I feel sexual desire for my partner, and my body feels good when he touches me, and I love him, yet I make it clear that I don't want to have sex right now... then he's still violating my consent if he has sex with me. (Obviously, if I want to say "no" and mean "yes," then it's my responsibility to negotiate that ahead of time and set a safeword.)

In short: There can be pleasure, desire, and even love existing alongside real abuse. But that doesn't mean it's not abuse. This is as true with S&M as it is with non-S&M sex.

I once spoke to a person who referred to himself as an abuser, who told me that he'd read descriptions of S&M aftercare, and that he saw his own tactics within them. He told me when he thought about it, he had always considered it to be "brainwashing."

And I can see it. That's the scary part. I really can see it. I can believe that when we have powerful S&M experiences, we tap into the same parts of our brains that could otherwise be used for psychological manipulation and destruction. S&M shows us how to create and utilize enormous mental vulnerability through violence... and vulnerability can always be abused. In the literature exploring the cycle of abuse, people often write about the "reconciliation phase," in which the abuser is all sweetness and light to their victim; I can't help but wonder how much of the "reconciliation phase" could be recognized as non-consensual aftercare. How much of an abuser's power over their victim might come from the mental malleability that cautious S&Mers learn to respect?

This does not mean that our bodies are broken. The woman whose words I published at the top of this article called it "the cruelest of design flaws and the worst people understand it and the most compassionate people don't." But we don't have to perceive this as a flaw -- it's not a flaw any more than orgasms are a flaw. Some S&M instructors compare S&M mental states to "altered states," like being drunk; there's nothing wrong with being drunk, but people should be careful with alcohol. Our bodies are instruments with certain powers and vulnerabilities that we must respect.

This power and vulnerability is one of the biggest reasons I do the writing that I do. Because although they're invisible, I do have a sense of the fences that FormerWildChild talked about when she commented at Feministe: the fences that keep S&Mers from falling into the Grand Canyon of abuse. Those invisible fences around the canyon are constructed from self-awareness, self-esteem, respect, and consent.

Building Fences Around The Canyon

How do we build fences around the canyon? We build them by seeking to understand our desires, and talk openly with our partners, and respect our partners' limits. So I write about communication and self-examination and learning to value my boundaries... and I hope it will help people learn what it means to play at the edge, rather than falling into the canyon.

This is scary, loaded, complicated territory. I certainly don't have all the answers. But I have ideas on how we might begin finding answers from here.

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