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ABUSE:

[theory] Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse

I wrote this post in 2011. As I noted in the intro to "The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team," other BDSMers have been writing about this more and more, and the discussion is really heating up right now, in 2012. Thomas MacAulay Millar has a particularly good series of posts on the topic, starting with:
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/

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Thinking More Clearly About BDSM versus Abuse

Years ago, when I first started thinking about BDSM and abuse, I -- like a lot of feminist BDSMers -- was defensive.

We get scared of the accusation that "BDSM is always abuse"... and we're accustomed to accusations from certain feminists such as "those of you who pretend to like BDSM just have Patriarchy Stockholm Syndrome and don't know what you really want"... and often, we're also fighting our own inner BDSM stigma demons. We get angry that our sexual needs are seen as politically problematic, or unimportant.

And so, for a lot of people, our instinctive angle on abuse in the BDSM community is: "Shut up! That's not what's going on!" And that's a problem.

Obviously, I don't think BDSM is inherently abusive! Exploring my personal BDSM desires has given me some extraordinary, consensual, transcendent experiences and connections. I also genuinely believe that BDSM has the potential to control, subvert, and manage power. BDSM can be a place where people learn to understand bad power dynamics in past relationships; it can be a place where people learn to manage or destroy bad power dynamics in their current relationships; it can be a place where people find glory, self-knowledge and freedom by manipulating their own reactions and responses to power. The sex theorist Pepper Mint has a great, complicated essay about this called "Towards a General Theory of BDSM and Power". And here's one of my favorite quotations on the matter, from a submissive and former blogger who went by violetwhite:

It's ironic that the most perverse manipulations of power in my life occurred in a past vanilla relationship, where I tolerated tyranny because the normative structure of our relationship obscured the fact that that is what it was.

Still, I've seen things happen in the BDSM community that turned my stomach. Terrible manipulative behavior exhibited by people who have the greatest reputations. Blaming the victim when they try to speak up. Telling "rumor mongers" to shut up when people are trying to talk openly about problematic community members. The BDSM subculture has its own version of rape culture, where "lying bitch" and "drama queen" and "miscommunication" are used against abuse survivors. Miscommunications do happen... but not everything that could be a miscommunication is actually a miscommunication.

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